Sarapammon must have heard the urgency in the call; I heard his voice at the head of a troop, running, and Aquila’s patrician voice urging them on.
Thinking we were saved, I let down my guard, and only Tears’ speed saved me from the spear that came for my face. He slashed down on the haft with his gladius and the spearhead missed me and skidded instead past my shoulder.
Seeing a gap, I slid my blade up the spear haft to the man at the end of it. He backed away and I might have followed him and been caught behind enemy lines — a fatal mistake and one only made by the very green or the very wild — but that I heard Horgias cry out again behind me, a high, desperate keening that said he had found Proclion and the finding was not good.
I gave one last thrust with the shield and backed away, fast, then spun to my right where I found Horgias and Proclion fighting for their lives against six Parthian cavalrymen, each armed with two curved swords.
Something snapped in me then, some deep final cord that had kept me civilized. Bellowing like a madman, I ran at them, wielding my stolen shield as a club to break their noses, their faces, their heads. I reached Proclion and put my shoulder against his elbow, for he was that much taller than me, and became his shield-man and he, great bear of a man that he was, grinned down at me, as if we were on a routine training run.
‘Never thought I’d hear that kind of noise from you, fox-cub. Shall we kill them, you and I?’
I was dazzled by his praise, for Proclion was a born fighter who had killed his man long before he entered the legions. Moonstruck and battle mad, I threw him a matching grin and took a breath and let out the animal scream building inside and we sprang forward to meet the Parthians.
We were a whirlwind, reaping death around us. We were gods, fighting mortals who stood no chance. We were welded together, two men with one mind, and that mind bent on murder. I remember one slice that cleaved the mail on my shoulder and would have killed me but for the skill of the Damascan armourer, and I remember the return backhanded strike of mine that cut the wrist of my assailant half off and left him bleeding to death — but the rest is a blur of hot blood and savagery that came to rest only when five of the six Parthians were dead; and Tears and Horgias were still alive and Sarapammon had come with thirty men who now surrounded us so that the last of our assailants had no choice but to surrender, or die on his own sword.
So we thought, all of us. We lowered our blades and drew breath and I felt Tears move up behind me and was about toturn to see if he was truly all right when the Parthian threw himself at us.
My shield floated up of its own accord and took his first blow but he was doubly armed and the second was hissing straight at my head. Tears blocked it, I think, but I never saw and never asked for the Parthian had rolled away from both blocks as if we had poured him full of power and in that roll he struck both blades, lightning-fast, at Proclion.
‘No!’ Horgias was on him even as the second blade struck, pounding his own blades into the Parthian’s neck, his head, his throat, his groin. The enemy went down in a heap of macerated flesh, but too late to save our man.
‘Proclion!’ I fell to the turf at his side. He was our giant, our great bear of a brother, and he was not simply wounded: his life blood was spilling from a gaping flap in his belly and a second, sliced cut on his thigh, which might have unmanned him, but in fact had cut the vessel that pumped the blood to his leg, so that it pumped instead over me as I knelt at his side.
‘Proclion?’ I lifted his hand and felt the ridges where the sword had worn into them. His fingers dwarfed mine. He gave a squeeze and squinted to focus on my face.
‘We’ll get help,’ I said. ‘We’ll bind your leg and-’
He gave the faintest shake of his head and forced a smile. ‘You fought well, fox-cub. I’ll wait for you where the warriors go. Don’t grieve for me. You can have…’ He coughed and stopped and his gaze lifted over my shoulder to where Syrion stood. ‘Give the fox-cub the horn. Tell Lupus I said he was worth it.’
It cost him a breath to say that much, his gift to me — to us all — and then his eyes slid off me to Horgias who was kneeling at his other side, in the grip of such grief as I could only imagine, and did not wish to, for by then I knew thatto see Tears dead would have destroyed me, and we were not yet as close as they two had been, nor might ever be after the damage done on Hawk mountain.
There were no words then, just the waiting and the numb beginnings of grief. The men of the VIth walked softly around us, stripping the dead Parthians, binding them up and setting boughs about them for a fire. It’s not the Parthian way, but Aquila planned, he said, to signal to those left alive the magnitude of their defeat. They killed the prisoners.
As they worked, we who were Proclion’s brothers stood vigil for the only man we had lost, at a cost of thirty of theirs, not knowing what to say, or what to do, except that we must not look away while he passed from us.
We watched his last struggle, saw his skin turn white and then grey and then a queer translucent blue, heard him speak Horgias’ name, and the tenderness that was in it, and saw Horgias cease to weep at last, after the final shudder, and rise with Proclion’s bloody blade in his hand.
He turned to look at all of us, and his eyes were not human, nor seeing us, I think. He said, ‘Wherever they are, I will kill them. You will not stop me.’
I would have let him go, let him run into the night to hunt down every Parthian he could find, until he died himself, but Syrion had more experience of this and he had Aquila behind him, watching.
He stood in front of Horgias and gently pushed his blade down and said, ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow you can kill them all. Tonight, we are sworn to deliver the mule train to the city. It’s what he died for. You can’t dishonour him by failing in that. Besides, we must take his body back to the priests. We can’t leave him out here for the wolves, nor throw him on the fire with the rest.’
That was what turned it — tending to Proclion’s body. Horgias would not have stayed with us just to keep the muletrain safe, but it mattered — just — to honour the mortal remains of the one he had loved.
I watched the inner battle and saw the one side win, and by how little, and said to him, ‘We’ll lift him on to his horse. You lead it, it’ll follow you best,’ and it was settled, as much as it could be.
We returned in sombre mood, and saw no more of Monobasus’ men on the way back, so that we were all denied the vengeance we craved.
Once in the city, we left Aquila giving a full briefing to Cadus and Lupus while his men bedded down in a house that had once belonged to a merchant and had more rooms than our barracks back at Raphana. We gave our report as swiftly as we might and then excused ourselves and took Proclion to the temple of Jupiter where we gave him into the care of the priests.
Three old men with moon-silver hair and slow, ponderous movement took him in their arms and laid him on a marble slab and set silver coins on his eyes and swung incense over him, murmuring as priests do to fill what might otherwise be a god-sent silence.
We soon sickened of the noise and the smell, and took Proclion’s horse, his helmet, his sword, almost all that could be carried, and retired with them to our own quarters, a barracks room that had once been a selling hall for corn. There, when we had lit the brazier and broached the ale, I saw a thing happen that I had heard about, but not witnessed, and certainly never been party to.
Syrion set Horgias on a bench with a jug of ale all his own, and bannocks saved from the morning’s bake, then laid out Proclion’s cloak on the ground nearby and set down all of those things that we had brought back from the temple.