‘One last time,’ she said. And then, once again, she spoke a name, only one this time. ‘Kai,’ she said. And she stirred the horse to a charge.
One rider of the five before them, standing tall in his seat, checked his horse. He seemed to turn away, and Arite thought at first that he meant to flee – perhaps it was that he had no heart to kill a woman and her child. But then the shadow of a blade rising high, and the rider beside him was tumbling from the saddle with a wet, bubbling scream.
No time to think of what had happened, for all she knew now was that they were three against four. Lucius was ahead of her, cutting to the side to draw a rider away from the pack. A sword against a lance seemed a hopeless challenge, but as he drew close Lucius gave his war cry in the tongue of Rome. The rider he faced shied away – either the horse or the man remembered the battle on the ice, and flinched in fear to hear the voice of the Emperor. And Lucius had twisted past the questing spear, and answered with a reverse cut that painted the horse with blood.
Another of the riders turned his horse to face her – that wondrous lightness, then, of those who know they are soon to die, but know that they may accomplish something with the dying. She knew that nothing mattered but the killing of this man.
She twisted in the saddle at the last moment, seeking just a little more reach. She felt a spearhead rip through the fabric of her dress, a line of white fire drawn across her ribs. Her own spear was wrenched from her hands as though by the force of a god, and when she looked back she saw the other man clutching at his thigh, his life pouring from his leg, hands scooping at the blood as though to gather it back into himself, even as he slid from the gore-slicked saddle.
Her horse was gasping, blown, and she had no weapon in her hand. She saw the last two Wolf clansmen fighting each other, trading strokes of sword and axe – one man screaming and sobbing, the other calm, parrying with the head of the axe and an armoured gauntlet and waiting for his chance.
‘Bastard! Traitor!’ yelled the first man, even as his silent companion struck and blinded his horse. It screamed and bucked, threw its rider flat across its neck, a victim on the altar. The axe swung and bit, and the screams fell to silence.
A sudden stillness came over them all. There seemed to be no rush, no hurry to do anything. Arite should have turned and fled, or cut this last man from the saddle. But they were held there, waiting in the darkness.
The rider who had turned on his companions reached up and pushed his helm up onto his forehead. And she knew then, even before she saw the scar. She knew from the smile on his face, the sour, proud smile of Gaevani.
He looked upon the dead around him, clansmen and kinsmen, his cheeks still holding their colour despite the butcher’s work that he had done. After a moment he said: ‘Never much liked them, anyway.’ And then he gave a kingly wave of the hand, directing them away.
‘Get out of here. Ride back east, and stay off the rivers if you can, they shall be hunting along the banks.’
‘Why let us go?’
‘A favour that I owed,’ he said. ‘And you won your wager, that the Roman would last the winter. You have no wine to give me, but you may call it settled, now.’ He grinned at her, his teeth pale and sharp in the moonlight. ‘And now I must get back to killing your clansmen.’
‘Bastard!’
He shrugged. ‘I have no love for it. But my chieftain calls, and I obey.’
‘Why have you done this?’
‘Zanticus shall not crawl to the Romans and beg for the lives of his people.’ He looked back to the camp, and the killing. ‘This is a punishment for cowardice, for the thought of surrender your people gave us. We shall take your clan as slaves, and carry the fight to Rome.’
She looked towards the west – the shadow of the mountains, the imagined land beyond. And Gaevani answered her unspoken thought.
‘It was a fool’s plan,’ he said. ‘Something from another time, a better time.’ Another war cry, loud and close. ‘Go now, or we shall be seen together. They will be firing the rest of the wagons, soon.’
‘There will be a reckoning for this,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said simply. ‘There will not.’
There was no more time then. Away in the darkness, the ground rolling away beneath them, and behind her the fire rising high, the screams settling into silence.
-
Before the Emperor, the barbarian was kneeling. Shins pressed to the stone, palms towards the sky, eyes averted from the god before him.
‘I did not think that you would return,’ said the Emperor. ‘Perhaps it is true what you have said, and you do have an honour of sorts. You came alone?’
‘My companions brought me to the edge of the river, Emperor. I am alone now.’
‘And you say that your people will surrender?’
‘They shall,’ Bahadur answered.
‘They shall give themselves up to slavery, without raising their spears against us?’
‘Their lives are yours.’
Murmuring about the room then. For there were many gathered in the Emperor’s chambers, the Tribunes and the Legate, and they spoke almost with a single voice. That there was to be no trusting a barbarian’s promises. That now was the time to destroy them once and for all.
The Emperor let them speak, let the ritual praise of his wisdom wind down to silence. And he said: ‘Yes, you are quite right. This barbarian lies to me.’
The Emperor knew what the response to this would be, that there was no insult greater amongst the Sarmatians than to be called a liar or a breaker of oaths. And so it was that Bahadur forgot himself, raised his head, and looked upon a god.
A judgement at once, the blows raining down upon him from the hafts of spears and the centurions’ cudgels, the Praetorians offering their rough justice for the affront to their master. A hand thrown up from the Emperor, and the beatings ceased.
‘Word already came,’ the Emperor said, ‘from our scouts across the water. The Sarmatians gather for war, and march to the west, towards the Danubius. But I wanted to see how well he would lie to me.’ A tight little smile – the expression of a man used to being disappointed. ‘He did it well. His promises of honour were empty things, of course.’
A gurgling whisper from the floor, as the broken man tried to speak.
‘Put him with the prisoners,’ the Emperor said. ‘Call the army out.’
Soon, upon the parade ground before the fortress, the Legion gathered in line and column, marked and precise, golden eagles fixed in flight above them. They stood and waited for the words of the Emperor, like children before a patriarch, waiting for judgement and command. And they were sons of a kind to him – for many, he was a better father than those who had raised them.
On the dais, clad in fur and Imperial purple, the Emperor spoke. In simple and plain words he praised the Legion, commended those men who had earned particular honour in battle, gave thanks to the gods. Dry words, but in the space between them each man there could hear what he wanted to hear, listen to the praise most longed for.
Then, he spoke of what was come. It was then that he told them what he wanted them to do. And these words were simple, too, the command one of the oldest that generals had ever given to soldiers, chieftains to tribesmen, in the countless generations that men had fought with one another. With iron sword, and flint arrowheads. With wooden spears, a rock curled into a hand, the bare hand itself. The command to exterminate, to destroy, to leave none alive.