I had thought, naturally, to see no more of the horses or the men who had gone with them, until spring, but in half a month the Eburacum part of the squadron under Corfil, who had stepped into Fercos’s place as Flavian’s second, plodded in on foot, having done the march, so they reported without undue humility, in the exact nine days laid down for the Legions in the days of good roads. And two days after Samhain, as though his arrival was the signal for the white beast to begin his prowling, Flavian himself, with his half squadron behind him, staggered in through the Praetorium Gate in a blinding snowstorm.
“I didn’t think we were going to. make it,” he said, when he came to me in my quarters.
I cursed him where he stood. “You bleeding fool! Didn’t I give the whole lot of you orders to stay south until the spring — and you with a wife and son in Deva!”
He blinked at me in the light of the lantern, the snow on his shoulders melting into dark wetness at the edges, and grinned, weary but unashamed. “It is a different matter for the auxiliaries. We are the Brotherhood, and we have always been an unruly lot. We didn’t like the order, so we took a vote on it and decided to mutiny.“
Earth Mother had spoken truth. By mid-November we were sunk so deep in whiter that we might have been in a world that had never known spring. At first the snow was not deep, save in the hollows and the northward-facing glens, for the first fall had melted, and the stuff that followed it was wet, sleet and half-frozen rain that drove and drenched across the fort before bitter gales from the northeast. Eildon must have sheltered us a little, but I think not much, and the wind howled day after day down through the hazel woods to fling itself like a living enemy upon the old red sandstone fort above the river. The woods boomed and roared like a great sea beating upon a wild coast; and indeed for days at a time, for all that we could see of Eildon and the hills beyond, we might have been perched on some headland high above a raging sea. And then after a month, the wild gales fell still, and out of the stillness came snow, and an ever-increasing cold that made the sword Wit sear the hand, and narrowed the spring under the hazel bushes that had been the gift of the Little Dark People to the merest dribbling thread of water, under a curtain of black ice. And in the long nights the strange, colored fires that Pharic’s people called the “Crown of the North” and Druim’s “The Dancers” played more brightly than ever I had seen them, across the northern sky.
But under the covering of snow, our log and brushwood piles were broad and long, and the peat stacks rose beside the living place doors, the stores were gathered in, and we had even a cartload of sour wine to help out the local heather beer at the times when men need to make merry. And with no need to trouble for the horses’ fodder (but God of gods, how we missed the stamping in the picket lines, and how the loneliness, the sense of being utterly cut off from the world, increased upon us with the horses gone!) we felt that we could outlast the whiter well enough.
That was until Midwinter’s night.
For all of us that night had some meaning. For those of us who were Christians, it had become the custom in our fathers’ fathers’ time to celebrate the birth of the Christos on that night, when the old year goes down into the dark, and out of the dark all things are born anew. To those who followed the Old Faith, it was the night of the Midwinter Fires, when one made all the light and heat one could, to help the sun grow strong again and drive out the darkness and the cold. For the few among us who bore the small telltale brand of Mithras between the brows, it was, just as to the Christians, the Saviour’s birth night. To most of us it was, I suppose, in some sort a mingling of all these things, and to all of us, when the worship was over, it was a night for as much merrymaking as could be crammed into it, and as much heather beer. In an open winter when the hunting was good, we were able to get fresh meat for the Midwinter feast; but this year there had been no hunting for upward of a month, and we should have no release from the tyranny of boiled salt beef and mutton. But there was always the beer. Each year I released three days’ supply of beer to make up for the shortage in other directions. That meant the portion of the garrison who had weaker heads than the rest, or who got more than their fair share, were drunk by midnight, and greeted the next day with aching head and bloodshot eyes and tempers. What would have happened if the fort had ever been attacked at that time, I sweat to think; but I knew the limits of my power with the wild auxiliaries; they were not the Company, and it did not extend to keeping them sober on Midwinter night. Besides, men do not remain at their best, especially cut off in the wilds, if they may not make merry to the full, now and then.
But I, I dreaded Midwinter, and was always devoutly thankful when it was over for another year and the fort not burned down about our ears.
This particular Christ’s Mass night was no worse than its forerunners had been, until one of the mule drivers having (so his mates said afterward) drunk himself into a state of deep suspicion of the world, got the idea that he was somehow being cheated of his fair share, and stealing a half-full beerskin, departed to make merry by himself in a corner of the derelict mill shed which backed onto the main store barn. What happened after that, no one can ever know. In all likelihood he kicked over the lantern he had brought with him and it opened as it fell, the guttering flame caught the dry-bracken fodder stored there, and the wind blowing through the holes in the roof did the rest.
The first that anyone knew of the danger was when one of the guard (we always kept a small and comparatively sober guard, even on Midwinter’s night) saw smoke curling up through the rents in the mill shed roof.
I was with the main uproar in the mess hall when the man came running with his news, and the Companions and most of the auxiliaries gathered there with me; but the baggage train folk had quarters of their own beyond the old parade ground, and there would be small knots making merry all over the camp, many of them half drunk by this time. I got hold of Prosper, who was still smiling somewhat owlishly into the fire while the other men stumbled cursing to their feet all about him, and shook him into awareness. “Get out of here and sound me the alarm, and keep on sounding it!” I told him, and casting a hurried glance around me, saw that most of the Companions, at least, still looked reasonably serviceable.
“They’ll think it’s an attack,” someone objected.
“What in Hell’s name does that matter, if it gets their heads out of the beer jar?” I was already running for the door, Cabal leaping ahead of me in wild excitement. I ran as though for my life across the empty parade ground and down toward the lower camp, most of the Brotherhood pelting at my heels, and behind us, clear and true and rock-steady — it is wonderful what habit will do — I heard the notes of the great aurochs horn sounding the alarm.
By the time we reached the clear space before the mill shed and workshop, there was a crowd that thickened every moment, as men tumbled out from their merrymaking in answer to the urgent summons of the horn and, as word leapt from man to man like heath fire itself, headed down toward the disaster. There could be no doubt now as to where the fire was; flame had followed the smoke; it was already bursting through the rough thatch in a score of places, leaping up into the night, and the flickering glare of it brightened over the gaping faces of the crowd. The wind that had been rising all day was blowing hard from the northeast by that time, driving dark rags of cloud across the frost-fierce stars; driving also the licking flames along the thatch toward the store barn.