I felt my skin break out in goose-flesh at the calmness of his voice. I swallowed hard and fought to keep the loathing out of my voice as I continued speaking. "How could you do that? Physically, I mean? How would it be possible?"
Caspar smiled. "That is our business and you may leave it to us. Our bargain was that you would trade the Hibernian prince for the twelve men and the other hostages, was it not?" I nodded in assent. "Well then, I have merely to return and say I suspect you of planning something to undo our efforts, and to suggest that we separate the hostages, one to each man, except for myself and Memnon. Any one of them, at random, may guard your aunt. Then we will move them into separate rooms for strategic safety. It will be done. They will believe me, since one of them will have the old woman. Once they are...separated, Memnon and I will remove them, one or two at a time.. .Efficiently."
I shuddered in spite of myself and tried to turn it into an angry shrug. "No," I snapped, "I will not allow that. It is too dangerous. My aunt could be killed."
"She will not be harmed, believe me. Memnon and I have means at our disposal for the silent dispersal of death.. .means of which you could never conceive.. .All we require is time. When we are done, we will open the doors again and you can count the bodies as we throw them out. After that, you will release your captive to us and we will send out the hostages."
"No! Hostages first, and then you get the Scot."
"Commander!" Caspar's voice seemed filled with genuine pain. "You must show a little faith. The Scot is our passport home to Lot. The other hostages mean little or nothing to you, you have said as much. We will still have the old woman. What difference can it make at this point?"
I gnawed on my lip, but I was prepared to concede on this point. "Probably none," I admitted finally. "Very well. That's how we'll do it. How long will it take you to get rid of the twelve men?"
"Two hours, perhaps more. It will have to be done cautiously."
"Aye, I believe you. So be it. Get about your work. I have no wish to discuss the how of it with you now or later." I watched him walk away, hearing Donuil's words in my head: "These people deal only in death." A wave of faintness and nausea swept over me and I stood there gritting my teeth until it wore off, after which I signalled a centurion who had been standing behind me, out of earshot, watching everything that went on. He came smartly to my side and I indicated Uric's bowmen who still held their watch in a semicircle around the yard.
"Centurion, I want you to relieve the bowmen here. They've been standing guard for hours. Replace them with our own soldiers. They are to stand watch vigilantly, but make no move towards the house. Inform me immediately if any noise is heard from within. If the silence holds, I expect the doors to be opened again in a matter of hours.
Send runners to find me when that happens. Is that clear?"
"Yes, Commander." He repeated my instructions verbatim and I left him to carry them out as the first drops of rain started falling from the afternoon sky, which had turned leaden without my noticing. I glanced up and saw that the clouds were heavy and unbroken. Rain would provide a mixed benison. It would settle the flying ash and douse the last of the smouldering timbers within the fort, but it would also make life unpleasant for the men on burial duty and for the soldiers working to enlarge the camp on the plain below.
I made another tour of Camulod, this time seeing far more than I had taken in on my previous circuit. The damage did not seem as extensive as I had feared earlier, although it was bad. The Council Hall was completely destroyed, of course, and so was the larger part of the stables. Most of the storage buildings were intact, however, and so were the bath houses, the kitchens and the large dining hall. The officers' quarters and the sick bay had escaped entirely, which I already knew, and the major portion of the common barracks seemed unscathed, although the entire section of buildings against the north wall—mainly barracks, tanneries, and barrel-makers' cooperages—had been gutted. The large building that housed the centurions had been badly damaged—again the northern part, which was the cavalry centurions' quarters. The huddle of buildings in the centre of the fort seemed to have burned in places and survived in others, with no apparent pattern to the damage. The potter's shed and warehouse were untouched, as were the two main forges, but the wheelwright's shop was gone from between the forges and the ale-maker's store behind the potter's warehouse had been burned out.
I saw Popilius by the main gate and crossed to him, and as I did so die heavens opened. The noise of the torrential rain striking my helmet was deafening, and we had to shout into each other's ears to make ourselves heard. He had a final report on the casualties, up to the flight of Lot's army. In all, we had lost close to nine hundred dead. Of that number, two hundred and thirty-nine were colonists and non-belligerents: old men, women and children. Another hundred and ninety- two were cavalry casualties, and the rest, some four hundred and sixty men, were infantry. In addition to these losses, he informed me, we had another hundred or so seriously wounded who were not expected to survive, and there were more than three hundred dead horses on the field below. As soon as I heard this last item, I realized that I had made no provision for the burial of horses, but he had already taken care of the oversight and there were teams hauling them away even now.
The numbers apalled me. Nine hundred dead and another hundred marked to die! That, added to the other casualties we had sustained over the previous few weeks, meant that our overall strength had been severely depleted. I added the numbers quickly in my head: more than fifteen hundred men in all; almost one-third of our total fighting strength gone within a month! Popilius was still shouting in my ear, talking about enemy dead, but I had missed the gist of what he was saying, except for the number. I stopped him and asked him to repeat Lot's total losses. Almost four thousand. Good but not enough.
Suddenly, as quickly as it had begun, the cloudburst died away and the sensation was as though a fog had sundered. I had been staring towards the main entrance gate, seeing nothing through the driving rain for long moments, and then I found myself gaping in almost superstitious awe at the apparition that confronted me in the open gateway. Two gaunt, dark, ravaged figures stood there, leaning on staves, looking like the very harbingers of death, until I recognized the taller of them as the leader of the zealot priests my father had banished from our lands months earlier. As I watched him, still powerless to move or say anything, this priest looked all around the littered yard and raised his staff high in his claw-like hand, pointing it to the sky. His shout broke on my ears like the screech of a rusted hinge.
"This chaos is heaven's judgment on Godless men!" The vigour of his shout stopped all men who were within the sound of his voice. People on all sides stopped whatever they were doing and looked around to see who was making' this disturbance, and die priest knew they were listening and his voice grew even louder. "Look on the power of the Lord of Hosts and be ashamed and walk in terror! They that mock His word will be cast down..."
I heard no more, for I was running, fumbling for the sword beneath my water-sodden cloak. My feet felt like lead and I seemed to be running through high, wet grass that tugged at me and hampered me, slowing me down to a dreamlike, struggling crawl. The priest's companion saw me coming and tried to step between us, his eyes wide with alarm and fright, but I picked him up like a baby and threw him aside as though he were weightless, and then my hands closed around the scrawny throat of the still-screaming zealot. I drove him back, hard, against the wall on one side of the gate and still he shouted and spat, his adam's apple wobbling beneath my thumbs. I smashed my right knee hard into his groin and threw him sideways and he fell and lay face down, buttocks in the air, one hand clutching his testicles, his neck stretched, dirty grey and inviting like a duck's neck on a chopping block. My sword came easily into my hand now and I swung it high and brought it hissing down as someone's shoulder crashed into my ribs and dashed me backwards into darkness.