He could hear the troopers shouting in the driving rain, and another distant rumble of thunder, and he knew his chance had come. His palms were sweating and his heart was hammering in his skinny chest, but it wasn’t fear. He glanced at Olympian out of the corner of his eye, but the eunuch was oblivious of him, clutching his belly and peering out of the window anxiously. He nearly addressed an apology to the man, but decided that would be dishonest. Instead he got to his feet, seized Olympian’s great bald head and rammed it repeatedly against the wooden wall of the carriage.
Unfortunately for the eunuch, the boy didn’t quite have the strength to knock him out cold. But he felt blood trickling down the back of his neck, and a sick, chilly feeling and his head was spinning and dizzy and green spots danced before his eyes, and all he could rasp was a hoarse and confused ‘Spare my life, I pray you, whoever you are. I will recompense you profusely. The rest of this rabble are nothing to me, nothing but soldiers and slaves, but I am a very wealthy man, ranking high in the courts of Rome…’
He sank back in his seat, gasping for breath. His eyes were closed when he heard the carriage door kicked open, and the sounds of the storm came to his ears more strongly than ever. And then the door was slamming jerkily back and forth on its hinges in the wind, and he knew that the boy was gone.
One of the troopers saw the boy run for the trees, and immediately cried, ‘Man escaped!’
Lucius whipped round and gave a cry of despair. ‘Those slippery. .. OK, Marco, our attackers are cleaned up, pretty well. Keep some of them back for questioning, though. The little prince won’t get far in this weather.’ He wiped the sweat and rain from his forehead. ‘Ride to the front and inform Count Heraclian. Tell him – I mean, suggest to him – that he lead the column on. We’ll catch them up later.’
‘They’ll make good progress, I’m sure,’ said Marco sardonically. ‘The Palatine vanguard didn’t take a single hit.’
Lucius stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t mean anything, sir. Not for a simple, bone-headed soldier like me to offer interpretations of anything. I’m just reporting the facts: strange that not a single arrow went into the Palatine Guard, or Count Heraclian. All reserved for us, sir.’
They eyed each other levelly. There was no man in the world whom Lucius trusted more than his centurion. They had saved each other’s backs more times than he could count.
‘What’s going on, Marco?’ he said. ‘Why are they after us?’
‘Is it us, sir?’ said Marco. ‘Or is it those we’re guarding?’
Lucius frowned and shook his head. ‘Ride forward, Centurion.’
‘Sir.’
The lieutenant arched his arm forward for the squadron of eight to follow him. He expected to be back in a minute or two, with that little bastard bound in ships’ hawsers if need be.
Behind them the column began to roll forward again at its painfully slow walking pace, and the nine horsemen plunged into the inky depths of the pine forest.
The storm was violent and brief, like all summer storms, and its force was already beginning to abate. The sky above was brightening, although in the gloom of the pine forest the troopers still struggled to see their way ahead clearly. The trees dripped with rain, but it was no longer falling from the sky. Every few seconds the troopers stopped to listen, or mark the tracks. The boy’s trail was slight but unmistakable on the damp, needle-covered floor.
‘How’s he going to get away? Climb a tree?’ one of the troopers chuckled.
‘Belt up,’ ordered Lucius. ‘Not a sound.’
They rode on.
After some minutes, the trees began to thin out, and through the gaps between the dark trunks they could see the sunlight breaking through the clouds, and falling on the bare limestone hills ahead.
They emerged from the edge of the forest, and there even those hardened soldiers, who between them had done service from the Wall to the sands of Africa, and from the wild mountains of Spain to the reedy banks of the Euphrates, stopped and stared with something like awe. Below them stretched a beautiful valley, green with vineyards and olive groves. Beyond it rose further ancient limestone hills, grey-gold in the breaking sunlight, dotted with sheep and small farms. Above and beyond them arose still greater peaks, even now capped with snow, and bathed in an extraordinary luminous light as it reflected off the last of the stormclouds and echoed back and forth across the vast expanse of sky. And there arced a great rainbow over the distant hills, set by Father Jove after the Flooding of the World, from which only Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha were saved.
Yet here, in the heart of Italy, it had begun to feel as lawless and dangerous as the wilds beyond the Wall.
The men and horses sat and steamed in the sun. Then one young trooper shot forth his arm and pointed. ‘There he goes.’
Lucius looked witheringly at him. ‘Well done, Salcus. I’ve been watching him for the last five minutes.’
The trooper bowed his head in shame, and the other men guffawed.
‘Game little bugger, all the same,’ said another.
The men harrumphed in grudging acknowledgement.
‘He’d have kept to the forest if he had any sense,’ muttered Salcus.
‘Shows how much you know,’ said another. ‘He’s a Hun. He’s bound to make for open country. Even forests feel like a prison to them.’
‘Then we’ve got him.’
The other nodded. ‘We’ve got him.’
Lucius had been screwing up his eyes, trying to discern the distant figure better. ‘That’s the Hun boy? I thought it was one of the Vandal princes who’d escaped. You mean it’s the one they call Attila?’
The trooper was a little taken aback by the sharpness of his officer’s reaction. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘The one who’s always escaping,’ said another.
The lieutenant’s pale grey eyes gazed out across the valley, his expression inscrutable. Far below, they could see the little figure of the boy, running desperately across the fields and between the rows of vines. Every now and then he looked back towards the troop of nine horsemen sitting up on the hill on the edge of the forest, knowing they had him clear in their sights. They could bide their time; there was no hurry. What chance did a mere boy have against nine cavalrymen?
‘Come on then, you bastards!’ he yelled angrily, bending at the waist and clutching his sides as he gasped for air, his voice high and shrill. ‘Come and get me!’ He stood straight, gave the obscene fig-sign with his forefinger and thumb. ‘What are you waiting for?’
His thin voice carried across the valley to where the troopers sat their horses, and they grinned at each other, despite themselves.
‘You’ve got to hand it to him,’ said one.
Lucius turned to his men. ‘Ride back to the column.’
His second looked puzzled. ‘Sir?’
‘It doesn’t take more than one to bring in a little shrimp like that. Now ride back to the column and inform Count Heraclian that I’m bringing him in.’
A little deflated, the troop wheeled their horses and rode back into the forest, heading north for the track. Lucius kicked his horse forward and rode on down into the rain-washed, sun-bright valley.
Once off the steepest and rockiest slopes, he heeled Tugha Ban into a fierce gallop, down through the rain-wet meadows lush with late summer flowers and ripe for the scythe, and then crashing through the vines to where he had last seen the boy. He glimpsed him up ahead, but by the time he had reached the spot the boy had ducked under the row and was into the next. Infuriated, Lucius had to gallop to the end of the row and up the next one. By which time the boy had ducked under again. The lieutenant reined in his panting horse and reflected. He leant down and plucked a fat, juicy ruby grape. Arcturus was rising, and soon it would be the harvest.
After a few moments of pleasurable munching, he called out in his most languidly authoritative voice, ‘You can’t get away, you know.’