XLVIII
We started back to camp. That was when the next nightmare began.
Yet again I was out in a wood at dusk with Lentullus. This time it was not the silence that unnerved us. Suddenly we were surrounded by noise-something, or somebody, crashing through the trees in haste. We were already petrified. Then we heard a shout. Foreign voices filled the night. From the start it seemed like pursuit, and from the start we understood that we were their quarry. I forced Lentullus to change direction, hoping to give the rest of our party a chance.
'I'm with you, sir!' he promised.
'That's comforting:'
We had lost our path and were blundering over treacherous ground where branches and deceptive clumps of moss lay in wait to throw us headlong with wrenched limbs. I was trying to think as we dashed onwards through the brushwood. I felt fairly sure no one had seen us leave the grove. Perhaps we had not been seen at all. Somebody out there was looking for something, but perhaps they were hunters trying to fill the pot.
We stopped. We crouched amongst bushes while the sweat careered off us and our noses ran.
Not the pot. Whoever they were, they were making a lot of noise for men trying to lure animals into nets. They were thwacking at the bushes in order to flush out fugitives. Harsh laughter alarmed us. Then we heard dogs. Some sort of great horn boomed. Now the boisterous party was coming straight for us.
They were so close we broke cover. They would have found us anyway. Someone glimpsed us. The shouts renewed.
We set off again as best we could, unable even to glance back to see who our pursuers were. I had lost Lentullus. He had stopped to call the tribune's dog. I kept going. They might miss him; they might miss me; we might even escape.
No chance. I was putting distance between us, but sounds broke out that could only mean one thing: they had caught Lentullus. I had no choice. Groaning, I turned back.
They had to be a band of the Bructeri. They were standing round a deep pit, laughing. Lentullus and Tigris had both fallen into it. Perhaps it was an animal trap, or even one of the pits like larders that their hero Arminius had dug for keeping prisoners fresh. The recruit must be unhurt, for I could hear him shouting with a spirit I was proud of, but the warriors were taunting him by shaking their rough wooden lances. He must have been badly shaken by the fall, and I could hear that he was terrified. One of the Bructeri raised his lance. The threat was clear. I started to yell. I was tearing into the dell when someone big, with a very hard shoulder, sprang out from behind a tree and crashed me to the ground.
Lentullus could not see me, but he must have heard my fall. For some reason my presence seemed to hearten him.
'Sir, how are we going to talk to these men without an interpreter?' That boy was an idiot:
The world stopped spinning. Since my answer might be the only friendly words he ever heard again, I had no heart for rebuking him. 'Speak slowly, and smile a lot, Lentullus:'
He may have had problems deciphering it. It was difficult to sound as clear-witted and self-assured as usual when lying face down on the forest floor with my nostrils pressed into the leaf-mould, while a gigantic, bare-chested warrior, who could not possibly have understood my joke, stood with his foot in the small of my back and laughed heartily at me.
XLIX
Dear gods, I hate large, simple-minded jovial types. You can never tell whether they will simply mock you, or mock you with that jolly guffaw, then swipe off your head with an axe:
My captor in fact hauled me to a more or less standing position, stripped off my sword and dagger, which he sneered at, but kept, then threw me further into the dell where the others were. They then encouraged Lentullus to scramble out of the pit by poking him with their lances. He brought out the dog, who immediately showed his loyalty by running away.
The happy band stood us side by side and assessed their collection like naturalists collating a set of rare beetles. These lads did not look immensely sophisticated. They probably counted creatures' legs and feelers by picking them off. I started twitching nervously in limbs I didn't even own.
They all towered over us. So did the group who soon turned up whooping triumphantly and bringing our friends from the camp. They had our missing Probus and his treasure-hunting companion. They must have discovered them first.
I anxiously looked them over for damage. Helvetius was sporting a black eye and a terminal case of bad language, and some of the recruits had been knocked about a bit. The centurion's servant appeared to have taken the worst of it, but this was not necessarily a sign of cruelty in the Bructeri; he was such a pathetic character, he was crying out to be beaten up. The lads told me afterwards they had let themselves be taken fairly quietly. After all, our journey's motives were supposed to be peaceable. The warriors had turned up suddenly at the tents. Helvetius had properly followed the rules by trying to converse. It was only when our group had started to be manhandled that he had ordered them to reach for arms. By then it was too late. There had never been much we could hope to achieve by fighting, not in such small numbers and so far from home.
The warriors had then scoured the woods for stragglers. With Lentullus and me they clearly felt they had a complete set.
'Sir, what about-'
'Whoever you're about to mention- don't!' Justinus and Orosius were not here. They were our one hope now, though of what I dared not speculate. 'Don't speak of them-don't even think about them, in case the thought shows in your face.'
They might be dead already, as we expected to be soon.
To my intense relief we were not being taken to the grove. At least not yet.
It was now quite dark. They jostled us in a riverward direction, though we never seemed to come to the bank. That was another relief. If they chucked me off a jetty as a morsel for a river-god, I would immediately have to surrender my soul into his webby hands. I couldn't swim my way out of it. I had not much hope for the recruits either; they must have been on the same army water-skills course as me.
We stumbled along, surrounded by tribesmen. They seemed cheerful enough having somebody to jeer at. They offered us no worse harm, though we didn't push our luck by asking who their chieftain was, or when we would be stopping for a snack break.
After what seemed hours we reached a settlement. Rectangular buildings in timber and daub, with steeply pitched roofs which came down almost to the ground. A few pale faces staring at us in the light of smoky torches. A lowing ox.
Our drovers whooped us through a door in an end wall and into a long byre attached at right angles to the largest house or farm. Cattle had lived here very recently; we knew that from the smell. We had tumbled into an area which had a central aisle and stalls separated by posts and hay containers. At the other end there were no stalls, just a bare hearth. We heard a mighty bar closing the door outside. Exploring this squalid guest-suite did not take us long. We just squatted on our haunches and looked round from where we were.
'What happens now, Falco?' We had reached that point of disaster where people have no other option but to turn to me. This was when they were all likely to remind me that the trip to the River Lupia was my idea.
'Have to wait and see.' I sounded moderately confident. 'But I don't think we can expect to be asked which highly articulate defence lawyer we would like to hire from their sophisticated legal pool.'
'How did they know to look for us, sir?'
'My guess is Dubnus alerted them.'
We braced ourselves for a long wait, with not much to hope for at the end of it.