Frontier Wolf

  And with a wide half-mock salute, he went about his own affairs.

  Listening to his long lazy footsteps growing fainter on the pavement of the cross-hall and the forecourt beyond, Alexios wondered whether his Senior Centenarius was a friend or an enemy, or simply a man who cared nothing either way for anything on earth.

  He did not feel in the least as though he were among brothers.

  The days went by. In the crop-lands around the fort and the town the autumn ploughing was finished. The river below the fort no longer ran yellow with birch leaves after frost, for the birch trees upstream were bare. The long eight- or ten-day patrols of summertime that had still been in operation when Alexios first arrived, drew in to the short two- or three-day patrols of winter, save for the Arcani, who came and went like shadows, disappearing for long periods deep into the Pictish lands beyond the Northern Wall. And the wild geese were flighting in from the north, filling the windy autumn nights with their hound-pack music. Everybody who could be spared from patrols or garrison duty went hunting. ‘The corn in the barns and the boar in the forest’; that had always been the way of it on outpost service; and that year there was less corn in the barns than usual, for the harvest had been a poor one. The supply galleys with the winter stores and the pay-chest from Segedunum – in the present state of the roads north of Bremenium, it was easier to supply the fort by sea – were late, and they looked for them anxiously as the days went by.

  They arrived at last in a sleet storm; and an hour later, while the stores were being brought ashore under the Quarttermaster’s keen though bloodshot blue eyes, Alexios was in the Sacellum, confronting the centurion of the marine escort across the open pay-chest.

  ‘It’s all there, Sir,’ the centurion was saying, holding out a pair of tablets. ‘Will you sign for it?’

  ‘I agree that it is all there, as to this half-year’s pay,’ Alexios said, making no move to take the tablets, ‘but there’s still twenty-seven thousand denarii overdue on the last lot.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that, Sir. Here’s this half-year’s pay for the garrison of Castellum. It was the correct amount when it was handed over to me, and it is the correct amount now.’

  The sentry on the doorway was swept aside and the Quartermaster stamped in. ‘Sir – will you look at this.’ And he thrust a handful of raisins under Alexios’s nose.

  ‘Later, Kaeso,’ Alexios said without looking, ‘I have more important matters –’

  ‘Nothing is more important than raisins. These are mildewed and there’s dirt in them. They have sent us up stale stock.’

  He was right, Alexios thought, the ridiculous little man was right. Nothing, well few things, were more important than raisins. Along with cheese and barley-bannock and a few strips of dried meat they formed the staple ration of the patrols.

  He looked down. ‘Yes, they’re mouldy. What in the black name of Ahriman do you suggest that we do about it?’

  ‘Sir, will you sign this,’ the marine centurion said wearily.

  But the Quartermaster was in full spate. ‘. . . some pot-bellied official at the Corstopitum depot! Ever since Constantine went it’s been going from bad to worse, until now. Do you reckon this new young pup Constans has ever heard of Britain? The administration is going to the dogs, and who suffers? The soldiers! Always the soldiers! One of these days he’ll have a revolt on his hands!’

  The marine rounded on him. ‘You’d best write and tell the Emperor that lot!’

  ‘Quartermaster,’ Alexios said in a voice which rather unexpectedly cut his splutterings off short, ‘go and see to the rest of the stores and report their condition to me. I shall most assuredly write – not to the Emperor, but at any rate to the depot.’

  ‘Not that I imagine it will do the least good,’ he added, to the marine, when the angry little officer had departed.

  The marine shrugged. ‘The arrears of pay may be made up later or not, whether you write or not. You’ll not get fresh stores before spring if you send your demands by one of Jove’s thunderbolts. If it is of any interest to you, my pay is in arrears too.’

  Raging inwardly, Alexios signed for the half-year’s pay, and when he had received the Quartermaster’s report, for the supplies also. There did not seem much wrong with anything else, except that some woollen breeks-cloth that Julius Gavros had indented for was of poor quality and had had some of the fuller’s earth left in it to make it seem thicker and heavier than it was. And he wrote his letter to the Chief Quartermaster at Corstopitum well aware that probably it was not the Chief Quartermaster’s fault. But there was no one else that he could write his complaint to; scratching savagely deep into the wax in the tablets, as though he were indeed making his protest to the Emperor himself or to the Senate or to the entire administration of the Provinces of Upper and Lower Britain.

  ‘. . . My men deserve better treatment than this.’

  He broke off and looked at the last few words he had written. Had he really begun to feel like that about the Third Ordo, Frontier Wolves? They still wore their strangers’ faces: he did not feel that he knew them any better than he had done when he rode in through the Praetorian gate for the first time nearly two months ago. Yet it had seemed natural to write ‘My men’, furious on their behalf. So natural that he did not even think about it until he noticed what he had written.

  He finished the letter more deliberately, tied the two wooden leaves of the tablets together and sealed the scarlet thread, and set it aside, the dolphin impress of his signet ring standing out clear and proud on the blob of wax, to be sent off with the returning supply galleys next morning.

  The next event of any importance to take place at Castellum was when Cloe, the half-wild cat whose official duty was to keep down the mice in the granary, had three kittens in the Quartermaster’s bed.

  Kaeso, whose temper had scarcely recovered from the state of the winter stores, flung her out and the kittens after her, and gave orders that they should be drowned. But Cloe was part of the garrison’s life, and anyway, the Dalriads among them claimed that to drown kittens was unlucky. So a warm nest was prepared for them at the back of the harness shed, and they were removed there, the optio in charge of the operation getting severely clawed in the process by the ungrateful Cloe, who promptly carried the kittens back one by one half across the fort and in through a broken window at the rear of the officers’ quarters, to settle them down again in the Quartermaster’s bed. The battle of wills went on for some time, while the garrison laid bets on who would be the victor.

  A few days later, wandering around the armourer’s smithy while a dint was being beaten out of his belt clasp, Alexios came upon Rufus, his junior trumpeter, huddled in a warm corner of the fuel store with something on which he seemed very intent half-hidden under his wolfskin. He looked up as the Commander appeared, and made to scramble to his feet, pushing the thing further out of sight. But not before Alexios had glimpsed a scrap of golden fur, and a cup of milk slopping darkly onto the ground. ‘Bide still,’ he said quickly, ‘you don’t seem to have enough hands for saluting at the moment.’ And as the boy flushed scarlet, ‘How long have you been foster-mother to Cloe’s kittens?’

  ‘Only one of them, Sir. I am thinking she got tired of carrying all three back from the harness shed, or maybe she was losing count, and she abandoned this one. It was lying out half-drowned in last night’s rain.’

  Alexios looked down at the blind scrap of life, and seemed to see it flickering even as he looked. The young soldier scooped up milk in a horn spoon and tried to trickle it inside the tiny sucking mouth, but none of it got in.

  Feeling that he was seeing a side of the Frontier Wolves that was unexpected to say the least of it, Alexios stood and considered the problem.

  ‘It’s too young to lap,’ the boy said frowning. ‘I can’t get it even to take in the spoon.’

  Alexios went on thinking. He was remembering old Vran the shepherd on the south slopes of the downs at home where they had the
lambing pens; Vran dealing with a motherless lamb with a bit of rag wrapped round a scrap of alder pipe and thrust into the neck of a flask. But that would be too big for the kitten. ‘A bit of soft rag,’ he said at last, ‘put it in the cup so that it sops up the milk and get it sucking on the end of that.’ He stooped and touched the small downy head, then strolled back to the front of the smithy, quite unaware that he had gained at any rate one friend among the Frontier Wolves.

  After weeks of gales and sleet and drenching rain, the weather turned clear and frosty; and Midwinter Night was a night of stars, with Orion the Hunter swaggering above the southern ramparts. Ever since dusk, the great fire which the men of the garrison had been stacking for days, had been blazing in the midst of the old waggon park behind the granaries that was now commonly called the Dancing Ground. The cooking pits had been opened and the sizzling baked deermeat brought out, and with the customary extra issue of wine to wash it down, the Frontier Wolves were making merry.

  In the lamplit mess of the officers’ quarters, Alexios, idly playing dice with his Senior Centenarius, could hear them at it; the throbbing of the deerskin drums, the mouth-music and the rhythmic stamping of feet. It had all grown familiar since the first time he had heard it, for the Frontier Wolves made their wild music and the heady rhythms of their war and hunting dances not only for pleasure in off-duty times, but often in place of the foot-drill and weapon-practice of regular units. That had seemed to him strange at first, but it was the accepted custom; even Hilarion and Lucius joined in sometimes, and certainly the whirling and stamping dances made for speed and skill and control both of a man’s self and his weapons as well as any arms drill could do.

  Tonight, out there about their great fire behind the granaries the Frontier Wolves were dancing to bring the reborn sun up out of the darkness for another year; and suddenly, in the act of picking up his wine-cup, Alexios was remembering this night of the year at home when he was a boy. Saturnalia. The laughter and the lights in every window and the present-giving; and the fire burning on the high shoulder of the downs behind the house, where the farm-folk were about their own business of bringing the sun up out of the dark.

  The sharp rattle of the dice brought his wandering thoughts back to the bare Mess room, with supper over, and himself and Hilarion dicing for a fortune in dried beans – by common consent, the Mess never gambled for money; not with pay always in arrears. Gambling debts in such a small community were something that they could well do without. Save for Druim of the Arcani, who was off about some affair of his own in the town, they had a full gathering tonight. Lucius sitting hitched close to the table, where the light of the lamp fell full on the scroll in his careful hands. Lucius and his Georgics! It was the only book he possessed; the only book in Castellum, come to that. He must know it by heart, but when Alexios had once said that to him, he had said in his quiet, rather serious way that he knew the taste of honeycomb by heart, too, but it still tasted sweet on barley-bannock; and he read it against the time when he left the Eagles and took to growing things himself. The Quartermaster and Anthonius the Medic had drawn back from the table and were huddled close over the brazier, having a low-voiced argument with many finger-stabbings. Kaeso was making heroic efforts to keep sober for the ceremony later that night, and keeping sober after supper always made him argumentative.

  They were all waiting, in one way or another, because it was Midwinter Night, just passing the time till midnight. And tomorrow morning Lucius and Anthonius and maybe half-a-dozen of the men would slip away to their own gathering place in the back chamber of the sandal-maker’s shop in the town, to celebrate the birth of their own god in a stable. Alexios might have been one of them. His mother had been eager that he should become a Christian when he joined the Eagles; you did not have to be one, even now that Christianity was the official religion of the Empire, but you stood a better chance of promotion to the top if you were. He wondered why he hadn’t done as she wished; it would have been sensible. But suddenly, looking at Lucius’s face in the lamplight, he knew that he could not feel about Lucius’s Saviour laid in a manger as Lucius felt about him; and he had too much respect for other men’s gods to pretend to worship them because it was sensible. So he had turned to the old soldiers’ Hero-God, to Mithras, the Slayer of the Bull. And soon now, before the Third Watch sounded from the ramparts, he would be gathering up the still heroically sober Quartermaster and two of the optios and another half-dozen men, and heading out through the North gate to the small half-underground temple beyond the bath-house.

  And Hilarion? He would not be with either of them. Probably his place, if he had one at all, was behind the granary.

  ‘And it’s Midwinter Night for all of us,’ Alexios thought. ‘The sun coming up out of the dark . . . How odd.’

  ‘Your throw,’ said Hilarion, in the tone of a man who has said the same thing three times already.

  Alexios took up the dice cup and threw. A three and a one. ‘My luck’s out tonight,’ he said.

  And Hilarion took back the cup and made the last throw of the game. Two sixes spilled out across the wine-stained table. ‘Venus! I win. That’s another twenty beans you owe me.’ But even as he reached out to take the small pile which Alexios pushed over to him, he checked, listening. The rhythm of the deerskin drums had changed, grown more urgent, oddly menacing; a rhythm that was strange to Alexios, but not, it seemed, to the other men in the Mess.

  ‘They’re dancing the Bull Calves,’ said Hilarion.

  And Lucius nodded, carefully letting Virgil on vine culture roll up on itself and slipping it back into its linen case with the air of one getting ready for action.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Alexios swallowed the last mouthful of wine in his cup, and set it down with a small decisive click that unconsciously had the same effect.

  ‘Probably trouble,’ Hilarion said. ‘The Bull Calves has private meanings for the Dalriads and the Votadini. That’s why they keep clear of that particular dance – when they’re sober.’

  ‘They can’t be very drunk on this pale vinegar the army calls wine.’

  ‘They can if they’ve smuggled in heather beer to drink with it. And it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve known that happen. I do think, Sir, that we had better take a stroll.’

  Alexios was already on his feet and reaching for his sword that he had hung across the back of his chair.

  As he did so, the sounds from the old waggon park swelled louder, the complex rhythm of the drums growing ragged, becoming lost in a sudden ugly tangle of sound that had unmistakably the snarl of trouble in it.

  Alexios slipped the sword-strap over his head and settled it across his shoulder, and made for the door, flinging on his cloak as he went; his two centenarii close behind him. After the warm draughty fug of the Mess room with its brazier and faintly smoking lamps, the frosty air was cold and sharp as camphor in his nostrils; and the garboil from the old waggon park grew suddenly louder. They crossed the courtyard, and just as they reached the further colonnade and the street entrance, one of the optios met them, hurrying.

  ‘Sir, there’s trouble on the Dancing Ground.’

  ‘So I should judge.’ Alexios did not slacken his long stride as the man turned back beside him. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘The Dalriads and the Votadini trying to murder each other again, Sir.’

  As they rounded the corner of the Principia, the Dancing Ground came in view; a reeling and swaying turmoil of flame-reddened figures that beat upon the sight as a drum beats upon the hearing; and the tumult rushed to meet them in a savage wave of sound. Alexios had a fairly shrewd suspicion that if Julius Gavros had still been in command at Castellum, the garrison, even drunk, might not have chosen to wake whatever dark magic lay in the dance of the Bull Calves; and that things had only got to this stage because it was not Julius Gavros but a new and untried Commander who would have to deal with it. But however that might be, the flames of the torches and the Midwinter fire were lighting up a
fight that was real enough now; a small but flourishing battle that was already beginning to draw in the onlookers.

  Alexios checked his own hand just in time from an automatic movement to make sure that his sword was sitting loose in its sheath. Leave that alone. To use the edge would mean disaster, and to use the flat of the blade would be an insult that would never be forgiven.

  ‘Find me a trumpeter!’ he shouted to the optio, and then quickly to Lucius and Hilarion as they closed up beside him, ‘No! Bide here and be ready to take over if need be. This is mine!’

  And he walked straight forward into the reeling roaring heart of things.

  He shouted, ‘Break it off! Get back, you fools!’ but he could scarcely hear his own voice, let alone make anyone else in that howling mob hear it.

  Then someone was thrusting in beside him, and a young voice bellowed in his ear, ‘Trumpeter here, Sir.’

  ‘Sound me the Break Off. Stick close to me and keep on sounding it!’ Alexios bellowed back, and ploughed on. About him the press swayed to and fro; he was engulfed in a thrusting turmoil of contorted faces and jabbing fists; the short mulekick blows of close fighting; a fog of anger that seemed almost visible in the flame-light. A grubbed-up cobblestone flew past his ear, and a random fist caught him on the cheekbone, filling one eye with stars brighter than Orion; a glancing blow, but enough to send him reeling sideways. Between the stars he caught the ugly glint of a knife blade. But the young trumpeter was close at his back; and above him, above the vicious tumult of battle rose the quick bright notes of the hunting-horn that among the Frontier Wolves served the purpose of the Buccina among more regular troops, sounding ‘Break off! Break off! Break . . .’ And little by little the familiar sound was taking hold on men trained to obey its orders.