The Palatine Guards nailed the eight bandits upside down like this, one by one, from the creaking, bloodstained branch of the ancient pine. The tortured men groaned, and some of them pleaded, but to no avail. The guards had no time for them, only contempt.
‘Now, now, madam, do stop your whimpering,’ said one of them cheerfully as he banged in another nine-inch nail. ‘You’ll soon be in Hades with a wooden sword up your arse.’
Lucius sat on his horse and looked out across the valley to the south, towards Rome. He knew these scum deserved no better. It was perfectly just punishment for a criminal. But all the same, he didn’t have to enjoy it.
Then they rode back across the plateau and down towards the waiting carriages of the column, leaving the tall tree behind them with its ghastly decorations of living but dying men.
Some of the soldiers had dragged clumps of brushwood from the edge of the forest, and piled them up into a pyre for burning the bodies of the slain. The stench from the battlefield was already terrible: blood and sweat and the contents of ruptured bowels mingled foully on the hot air. The men covered their faces, dragged the bandits’ corpses onto the pyre and set it burning. The bodies burnt slowly, sizzling like roasting meat, a plume of black, oily smoke rising high into the air.
‘A warning signal,’ said Heraclian with approval, ‘to any other robber bands in the area.’
Molten human fat was beginning to run from under the pyre and trickle away into the crevices in the earth. Lucius moved on, ordering the Roman dead to be laid on travoises and taken down into the valley. The ground here was too hard to dig. They would be given a decent burial in the soft earth below, as befitted any who had died in the cause of Rome.
They had lost a quarter of the force. Lucius had made the right decision, to attack when he did. But it had been a victory dearly won.
More soldiers lay injured. Those who could survive were bandaged and dressed by their comrades, and mounted on their horses.
Another lay with an arrow deep in his lungs, bubbling out his lifeblood where he lay. It was Carpicius, the new young recruit. All of eighteen summers. Even Ops’ mulish heroism hadn’t saved him in the end.
Near the boy lay Ops himself. His arm had been badly cut by that spear-thrust through the shield. It had hit an artery, and the burly Egyptian had lost a lot of blood. He clutched his arm across his chest, his other hand a rusty brown where it was encrusted with dried blood. His face was ashen pale, and his breath was shallow and uneven.
‘Come on, soldier, let’s get you fixed up,’ said Lucius.
Ops ignored him. He only gazed at Carpicius.
The lieutenant well knew that they’d been bed-mates as well as messmates. It was common enough. The men might mock a comrade, give him a scornful nickname like Mincius Flabianus if they found him in bed with another, but most of them took a bedmate from time to time. Ops would have died for the boy. Now it looked as if he was going to. And they couldn’t afford to lose such good men. Not now. Lucius turned aside and cursed under his breath. If he didn’t curse, he might weep.
Marco knelt by Carpicius’ side. Why was it always the youngest who copped it first?
‘Sit up now, boy,’ said Marco gently. ‘We’ll have to get your breastplate off to get you bandaged.’
The tenderness with which soldiers cared for each other after a battle. Lucius heard but he couldn’t look.
Seeing great Hector slain, says Homer, even Lord Apollo cried out at his fellow Olympians, ‘Hardhearted you are, O you gods! You live for cruelty!’
And he thought of the words of the ancient song.
For hard is the Gods’ will,
My sorrows but increase,
And I must weep, my lover,
That wars will never cease.
Carpicius gazed up at his centurion with watery, half-closed eyes and shook his head. ‘Wait a bit,’ he whispered, blood bubbling on his lips. ‘Just a bit more.’
Marco waited a bit. The rest of the men stood near with bowed heads. After a few minutes, Marco stood and signalled, and the body of Carpicius was laid gently on another travois along with his fallen comrades.
Riding back down to the column, Lucius looked in at Olympian, who was sweating profusely in the gloom of his ornate carriage.
‘Where the hell’s the boy?’
‘The boy is not my responsibility,’ snapped the eunuch. ‘He’s gone.’
Lucius’ blood froze. ‘Gone?’
‘Here I am!’ called a voice behind him cheerfully. Looking round, Lucius saw Attila slithering down the grassy slope towards the carriage.
‘Where the hell have you been all this time?’ Lucius demanded.
The boy stopped at the carriage door and looked up at Lucius on his big horse, shielding his eyes against the sun.
‘Watching.’ He grinned, wolfishly. ‘Learning.’
Lucius was in no mood for jokes. ‘Get in the carriage,’ he said.
He dug his heels into Tugha Ban’s flanks, and the column rolled on.
They made camp that night down in the valley, after they’d buried their dead. They dug a rough square trench and mound, put up a stockade and set out staves. A defensive camp, in the heart of Italy! But times were strange.
The men were exhausted, and still they had to keep nightwatch, changing every two hours. Lucius and Marco kept the first watch with them, their eyelids almost dropping with weariness. As soon as their watch was relieved, they went down to the river with their men and bathed before they slept.
They washed the encrusted blood from their arms and faces and tunics, then took deep lungfuls of air and sank underwater for as long as they could bear, resurfacing with grateful gasps. None of them spoke in the darkness, as the river flowed coolly round them and cleansed them. They scooped up handfuls of the clear, cold water and poured it over their heads, as if anointing themselves. They prayed to their gods, to Christos, and Mithras, to Mars Ultor, and to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. They raised their eyes to the heavens and saw the wheeling stars: the Dragon coiling about the North Star, the Eagle and the Shield slowly sinking towards the western horizon; the crescent moon on her back, like the crown of Diana the Huntress; and Orion the Hunter, whom she cruelly slew, slowly rising towards dawn.
Lucius thought of his wife, and how she would see the same stars as he. Orion fading from the sky as she went outside to bring in the new-laid eggs in her white apron, and the sun rising in the early morning over that gentle Dumnonian valley. His children, Cadoc and little Ailsa, herding the chickens out into the yard with hazel twigs, their big brown eyes serious and intent, chattering to each other all the time. He smiled in the darkness, felt his beating heart. He saw the clear, trickling stream that ran down to the grey Celtic sea; the hillsides of lush meadows, full of plump white cattle, and the high ridges crested with ancient oakwoods. That country knew nothing of war and killing. His wife and children had never seen so much as a sword drawn in anger, let alone the foul aftermath of battle. It was right that it should be so. But for the future of his country, now, beyond the frontier of an enfeebled Rome, with tales of those brutal Saxon pirates drawing ever closer… He should be there, with them. He feared for everything that was.
Before he had departed from Isca Dumnoniorum to join the waiting ships at anchor in the estuary, with the last few threadbare centuries of the once mighty Legio II ‘Augusta’, he had taken her in his arms and they had sworn that they would look at the moon and the stars every evening and every morning, wherever they were, and their love would fly to each other through the night air, far apart as they were, over whatever endless plains and mountains and deserts might separate them. Whatever lands might lie between them, the same sun and moon shone down on them both. Lucius gazed up at the crescent moon, and prayed his prayer of deepest longing.