They fed the ponies and tethered them in the remains of the corral and the steading forecourt, and cleared the dead out of their way, and huddled close about the small fires that they made, under the charred thatch of hall and byre and barn. Sodden wolfskins steamed in the warmth; and they stripped off rawhide boots and showed their feet and hands as the optios went round inspecting for chaps or chafing or broken chilblains. Maybe another night if the weather hardened, frostbite too; but not that as yet. Anthonius was busy among the wounded again. Men unslung the cooking-pots and began to brew up a mixture of meal and chunks of freshly slaughtered meat in water from the burn – better keep clear of the well – for something warm to stay their clemmed bellies.
Alexios, coming back with one of the optios from a round of the pickets, almost fell over a dead man in a dark corner, and met foraging parties of Frontier Wolves. For himself, he did not much fancy anything from the Rath of Skolawn, but they were still three days from Bremenium, and you couldn’t afford to be squeamish; and the first whiff of the heating broth brought the soft warm water to his mouth as freely as to anyone else’s.
But he had barely entered the half-ruined house-place and was shaking off his wet wolfskin before the fire, where Centenarius Lucius had arrived just ahead of him, when he heard quick voices outside. ‘Is the Commander in there?’ someone was asking.
Alexios swung round. ‘I’m here. What is it?’
‘Sir,’ one of the scouts appeared in the doorway. ‘We’ve found something – someone –’
‘Someone alive? Bring him in here, then.’
‘Better, if you come to him – her – it’s a woman, Sir. We found her hiding among the grain, where the fire didn’t get a hold.’
‘You could still bring her here,’ said Alexios.
‘Not without getting rough with her, Sir. And we are none of us feeling like that, if it can be helped.’ The scout held up a bleeding hand. ‘She has bitten my thumb to the bone, as it is.’
Alexios gave a sound between a curse and a snort of laughter, and flung on his sodden cloak again. ‘I should have thought the Frontier Wolves could be handling a she-wolf! Well enough; I’m coming.’
He went out into the dark again, and followed where the man led.
By the light of a straw-plait torch held by one of the optios, he saw the woman as he ducked in through the low doorway of the store-shed. She was crouching back against the far wall; her teeth were bared as though she were a wolf indeed, and she clutched against her a thing that he thought in the first moment was a bundle of some kind, until as he moved forward he saw that it was a child, horribly dead, and with the broken shaft of a javelin sticking from the midst of it.
She pressed herself still further back against the wall, snatching at her breath as he drew nearer; and he said quickly, ‘Don’t be afraid.’
‘Afraid?’ It was only a whisper, but it could have been a scream, it was so harsh and shrill. ‘Why should I be afraid? What can you do that you have not already done—you or your brothers from the North?’
‘Listen.’ Alexios tried to reach and reassure her, thinking that she was too far out of her wits to know who they were. ‘The Painted People did this thing. We are soldiers of Rome. There is no need for fear.’
She let out a high wailing cry, staring up at him through tangled and bloodstained hair. And he saw that her hair was golden, and that once, no more than a few hours ago, she had been beautiful. ‘Oh kind and gentle soldiers of Rome! The Red Crests killed my man. Last year he went south to the Wall with horses to trade. He struck an officer who called him evil names—from the other horse-traders I heard it—they took and flogged him until he spewed blood and died under the lash. Now the Painted People have killed his son. Which of you then, should I love the most?’ She bent forward, quick as a dagger-thrust, and spat on Alexios’s feet. ‘My heart is glad that there is war between you and the Painted People! Aye, and the White Shields from over the Sunset Sea. I hope you tear each other’s hearts out!’
And she curled herself in over the dead child in her arms, and began to rock herself to and fro, keening to it, seemingly unaware that anyone else was there.
‘What are we to do with her?’ one of the men asked, looking on.
Alexios was silent a moment. They could not leave the woman here, both for her own sake and because it was very clear that if the chance came her way she would put the hunt on their trail. They would have to take her with them, adding one more problem to the more than enough problems that they had already. There was only one alternative, and that was an ugly one.
The optio touched his dagger in a gesture that there was no mistaking. ‘No!’ Alexios said, as though the moment before he had not been thinking the same thing himself. ‘She’ll have to come with us when we march in the morning. Give her some food, if she’ll touch it. Keep her here and set a guard over her.’
‘The bairn?’ said the optio, who had had bairns of his own, once.
‘We shall have to part them when we ride on,’ Alexios said, with the low keening in his ears. ‘Leave her the bairn for tonight.’
And he went back to the fire and the ruined steading.
The night crawled by, the watches changed and changed again with no familiar trumpet call, only the low-muttered word, the brief touch passing between man and man in the darkness. The fires had been deliberately allowed to sink low. Alexios, who had lain awake most of the night, had fallen asleep at last when he was roused by someone pressing just below his left ear; the old hunter’s trick for waking a man quickly and thoroughly, without sound.
‘Sir,’ someone was saying, ‘Sir –’
Alexios rolled over and sat up, ‘Yes? What is it?’
‘The woman. She’s gone. When we changed the Guard –’
Alexios scrambled to his feet and made for the gaping door hole. All around in the dark, men stirred and roused, weary as they were, for the Frontier Wolves had learned over many years of practice to sleep easily but not deep.
Outside the store-shed, the guard lay sprawled full length, and bending over him, Alexios saw by the light of a burning branch that somebody had pulled from the remains of a nearby fire, that he had been stabbed in the right side of the throat by somebody creeping up on him from behind.
Of the woman and the dead child there was no sign.
‘She was not armed,’ the man with the light said.
‘Oh yes she was. She had the spearhead from the child’s body.’ Alexios was silent a moment; they were all silent; looking down at the sprawling body that had bled its life out into the sodden ground, and cursing himself. But it was too late for that now.
‘She couldn’t have got past the pickets; she must be somewhere in the rath, still,’ he said. ‘Turn out the men and make a search.’
But the woman was not still within the rath. ‘She is of my people,’ said Optio Finn, reporting the vain search, when there was nowhere left to look. ‘It would be hard to hold a woman of my people in any place against her will. And this was her rath; she would know the bolt-holes as we cannot know them.’
Alexios looked at him, aware yet again of the griefs of old links and old loyalties that must be among his men. ‘Your people? You are of the Frontier Wolves, you are of the Family,’ he said quietly.
‘Nevertheless, I ran wild through such a rath as this in my cub days, and knew the ways in and out that would not be known to the Frontier Wolves.’
Alexios nodded. ‘See to the ponies, Optio. They should have their nosebags now if we are to be away two hours before daylight. See they are issued with as much extra corn as you think good for them. We can’t carry much away with us, but beasts and men, we can leave this place with a good square meal in our bellies.’ He looked down at the dead man. ‘Get him decently buried. He was of the Dalriads, wasn’t he? Let him lie apart from the rest.’
Inside the Family, the men of the Votadini and Dumnoni, Selgovae and Dalriads lived and fought and drank together, and in death were buried together
, nothing counting but that they were Frontier Wolves. But outside the Family it was another thing altogether. The Dalriads among his men would not take kindly to one of themselves being laid in a common grave with men and women of the Selgovae who made their dance-prayers to gods with different names and different faces.
Once, Alexios would have had to have that explained to him. Now, he knew it without even having to think.
13 Orion’s Sword
WITH TWO HOURS of darkness still left, they rode out from what had once been the Rath of Skolawn, leaving behind them slaughtered cattle and the bodies of men and women and children with the charred thatch pulled down over them to cover their resting place; and one grave by itself. Presently the wolves would come . . .
But now there were other things to think of, and one was the woman who had escaped with her dead child and the knowledge of their whereabouts; and another was the decoy party, who should surely have rejoined them by now.
Alexios spoke his anxiety in a low tone, pushing forward to join Hilarion for a while at the head of the Fore Guard. ‘It’s been a day and two nights, could we have missed them, heading round by the Red Horse Glen instead of holding straight on?’
‘Sir,’ said his Senior Centenarius, mock-serious, ‘You are speaking of the Frontier Wolves, not dull-nosed legionaries. Do you really think that two or three miles’ change in the line of march would lose them our scent?’
‘No. That was stupid of me. I’m short of experience in this kind of game.’ Alexios broke off short, hearing what he had said.
‘Heart up, you’re playing it none so badly, so far,’ the Centenarius told him; and Alexios could hear the lazy half-mocking smile in his tone.
‘Thanks,’ he said tersely, and turning his pony aside, dropped back to take his place at the head of the Main Guard.
And indeed anxiety about the decoy party did not weigh on his shoulders much longer, for with the distant promise of daylight no more than a bar of sodden primrose far down in the south-east, as they came down the flank curve of a lightly wooded valley, they heard the long-drawn cry of a wolf far ahead. For a moment it seemed to Alexios that all the blood in his body kept tingling back to his heart. Then the cry was repeated, and repeated again. And from somewhere in the Fore Guard a she-wolf answered. Alexios felt a warm rush of relief. And a while later the optio of the decoy party appeared through the hazel scrub, with a half-seen flicker of riders behind him.
‘Reporting back for duty, Sir.’
‘How did it go?’ Alexios asked. As though they had been gone an hour, and he had not been sick with anxiety on their account.
‘Well enough.’ Optio Vedrix gave a low grim chuckle; if there had been light enough to see his face it would have been grinning. ‘We left them a trail that wouldn’t have shamed a wounded bull halfway to Trimontium, and then we – confused things somewhat, at the river ford below Battle Rocks, and doubled back a bit and took to the heather.’
Alexios nodded. ‘Leaving no trail at all.’
‘We-ell, it is in my mind that they will be hunting on downstream a good way, thinking that we have taken to the water like a hunted stag. They will pick up our scent again in the end, I think, but not yet.’
‘That was well done,’ said Alexios softly. ‘That was very well done, Optio. You have baited and rested the men and horses?’
‘In a sheltered hollow of the moors over yonder.’
‘So. Then fall back now and join on to the Main Guard.’
They kept well over to the west, holding to the rolling moorlands and the narrow wooded valleys of swift streams, far from the run of the old half-lost roads; and after the forced march of that first night and day, their pace, with the wounded to think of, seemed maddeningly slow. Several times that day they saw the smoke of burning steadings on the skyline; and all day long, whenever the hills opened eastward, Trimontium rose against the sky, its three peaks from that angle almost hidden behind each other, and scarcely seemed to move. And they rode always with ears pricked and eyes straining for any sign of Pictish war-bands or the hunt on their trail.
In his desperate sense of their need for speed, Alexios had never been so aware as he was now, of the shortness of the northern winter days. And when one of the optios dropped back from the Fore Guard with word from Hilarion, ‘Sir, there’s a level space just below the ridge yonder. It would serve well enough for the night,’ he shook his head impatiently.
‘It can’t be much over two hours past noon.’
‘But it will be dusk in little more than another hour, and we’ll need that time to make camp – shan’t be able to show a light to work by after dusk.’
‘Very well; I’ll come forward and take a look at this place.’
So on the level patch of high moor, they made camp, digging the narrow sleeping trenches that were better shelter than nothing, when you had no tents with you, and lining them with last year’s bracken, while the cut clods were stacked into a low protecting wall topped off with thorn bushes. Sixty paces one way, thirty the other; one quarter for the ponies, picketed close, the other three for the sleeping trenches and the general business of the camp. While the daylight lasted, they risked small fires, as smokeless as might be, to make warm stirabout and heat some water for the wounded; and the wounded were tended and the ponies watered and given their meagre rations of corn, as their riders checked again for the condition of feet and hands. And all the while the pickets kept their watch, covering the men as they worked. So much to do, and not much time to do it in, but with every man knowing exactly his own job and getting on with it, somehow all was done before the dusk deepened into the dark and it was time to douse the fires and let the cold and dark and the wind-haunted stillness of the winter night take over.
Lying among his men at the heel of one of the long brackenlined sleeping trenches that even on peace-time patrols had always seemed to him uncomfortably like a grave, Alexios thought that seeing the Frontier Wolves in off-duty hours, drunk and ribald, cock-fighting, wenching, scrapping among themselves, wild and insubordinate, you could easily enough imagine them turning hero against an enemy from outside, standing by each other in the last ditch, but you couldn’t imagine this well-drilled and efficient making of camp in hostile territory. ‘If we don’t get through,’ he thought, ‘if I don’t get them through – if I don’t get out of this – by the Lord of the Legions I’ve known what it is to command men worth the commanding!’
Above him the sky was breaking up, by morning it would be freezing hard; and suddenly Orion swung clear of the drifting cloud into a great lake of clear. He looked up at the three stars of the hunter’s belt and the straight jewelled line of the sword hanging from it. He had never noticed before how bright and beautiful Orion’s sword shone on a winter’s night. He heard the faint stir in the close-packed horse-lines, and the dark soughing of the wind across the dead heather. ‘I have served with men, and I have seen Orion’s sword in the sky,’ he thought with an odd feeling of content; and rolled over in the harsh bedding, pulling his wolfskin closer about him, and fell into a quiet sleep as peacefully as when he was a boy in his familiar sleeping cell at home in the Down Country farm.
Three times in the night he woke at watch changing, and made the round of the sentries on the turf banks and the little out-work that guarded the far corner of the horse-lines; and each time returned briefly to the same quiet sleep.
Again they broke camp in the heel of the night, with two hours of darkness still to run, and headed for the old marching camp at Ravens’ Law. The wind had lessened, and there was ice crackling in the margins of the moorland pools; but the clouds had closed in again, low and leaden, and Optio Vedrix, who could smell the weather as a hound scents game, snuffed the wind and growled, ‘Snow. We shall have snow before the day’s half through.’
But before the snow came, the hunt was upon them.
They had expected it so long, every nerve on the stretch, for the first warning of its coming, that when the low whistling calls
broke out behind them, and then the beat of hooves and the brush of flying shadows through the hazel woods, it was almost a relief.
‘Here they come,’ Alexios said to the optio beside him. There was no need or time for a string of orders; the orders had been given in advance. The gaps between the three Guards were already narrowing, the escort closing up on either side of the wounded and the pack beasts, every archer slipping his bow from behind his shoulder. Better to keep moving; they were trained to shoot from horseback, and the tribesmen, even the Painted People, were not, which gave them an advantage on the move. But each man had only the ten arrows in his quiver, and no more could be issued before there was a halt; and Alexios sent up a prayer to Mithras that they would remember his orders that not an arrow was to be wasted; and then rather grimly laughed at himself. They had been on the Frontier much longer than he had.
And as the men of the Rear Guard turned in the saddle with arrows ready notched to their bowstrings, the first flurry of snow blew out of the darkening north into their faces.
But the attack that could come at any moment did not come.
Hour after long-drawn hour the Frontier Wolves pushed on, the enemy on their rear and flanks loosing a stray arrow into their midst from time to time, filling the woods with the menace of their low whistling call and answer call; while the snow, eddying more thickly as time went by, made the task of their own marksmen the harder.
‘Wolf-pack tactics,’ Alexios thought to himself as time went by and no open attack developed. ‘They know they have today and tomorrow at the least, to get us in, and maybe they haven’t enough men themselves to be sure of an attack; so they’ll try to wear us down, and wait their chance – hang on our flanks like a pack on the flanks of the driven herd, ready to cut off stragglers, harrying our rear until their moment comes.’ And then he thought, ‘Only we aren’t a driven herd, we are another wolf-pack with teeth as sharp as theirs – and they know that too.’