They were draining the last of the Armenian brandy, heavily watered, which Arapovian had managed to conserve through everything, when he heard a footfall nearby. The faintest padding footfall in the dry needles. He raised his forefinger.
Knuckles frowned and shook his head.
Arapovian drew his dagger.
And nonchalantly into the firelight stepped Captain Malchus.
Knuckles growled, ‘How in the name of Cloacina, goddess of Rome’s sacred shit-pipes, did you…?’
Malchus grinned. His face and arms were a terrible mess. He had sewn up his own wounds again with horsehair and a bone needle. They could see the holes, clotted with dried blood.
‘Take more than that to finish me,’ he said. He sat cross-legged by the fire. ‘I’ve been tracking you. Good show when you met the Huns. I saw it all from the clifftop. It was me who set the raven off its ledge. Sorry about that.’
They stared at him a while longer, as if to ensure he was no ghost.
At last Arapovian said, ‘I don’t understand how you survived outside the fort, when the Hun charge ran you down.’
Malchus reflected. ‘Imagine,’ he said. ‘You’re one of two hundred horsemen galloping at a single man. How are you ever going to know which one of you killed him in the rush? If any of you?’
They shook their heads. Tatullus was stirring and awakening again.
‘What you do is, you drop just before they hit you. It’s all in the timing.’
‘And then two hundred horses gallop over you.’
‘That bit is playing with dice, I admit. You do like you’re back in your mother’s womb.’ He mimed a curled foetal position, wincing at his cuts. ‘Plus arms round your head. You know no horse likes to trample a living creature, not even those bullock-headed Hun brutes.’ He grinned again. ‘Well, maybe I was lucky. My legs got a bit bruised, but otherwise – here I am. And look.’ From a leather saddlebag he pulled a decent-sized flagon of looted wine, some very stale but edible bread, and some goat’s cheese wrapped in lime leaves.
‘Christ be thanked,’ growled Knuckles, grabbing for the wine.
Arapovian was faster. He set the flagon by his side. ‘Medical usage first. Those cuts need dousing and re-sewing. ’ He began to strop his dagger-blade, eyeing Malchus’ gruesome wounds.
Malchus looked indignant. ‘What do you mean? They’re fine.’
‘They’re rubbish,’ said Arapovian.
Later Malchus took a long drag on the bottle and passed it to Knuckles, wincing again at his fresh stitches.
‘I thought you took a vow,’ said Tatullus from the shadows where he lay on his side.
‘It got cancelled,’ said Knuckles. ‘By unforeseen circumstances. ’ He took a huge glug.
Arapovian guarded the bread and cheese for the children’s breakfast tomorrow. He eyed Knuckles’ considerable belly. ‘You won’t starve without it.’
They drank more from the welcome flagon.
Knuckles yawned and belched. ‘Name of Light. That wine’s gone straight to my lord and master. Wonder where the nearest whorehouse is?’
‘You’d have to pay a month’s wages for it, you would,’ said Malchus. ‘State of you.’
‘Look at you,’ said Knuckles. ‘While I, on the contrary, left many a broken-hearted lady behind me in Carnuntum, so fond had they grown of me and my hugely proportioned charms.’
Malchus snorted with incredulity. Even Tatullus managed a faint smile.
‘I was, to be honest, a most cock-witted lad in my youth,’ reflected the hulking Rhinelander, taking another huge glug of wine. ‘Give my own granny for a piece of skirt, I would. But with age comes wisdom. Perhaps I will endure tonight with neither fuck nor suck.’
Arapovian looked scornful, banking up the woodfire. ‘Well, you’d better not sleep too near me.’
Knuckles raised his eyebrows. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. My lord and master has some dimscrim… dimscrin…’
‘Discrimination.’
‘Exactly.’
Malchus lay back and stared up at the crescent moon winking fitfully through the dark canopy of the pines. The air smelt beautiful and fresh. His wounds were clean, no infection. The wine warmed his stomach. And they had survived. Life was sweet. Nearby, Tatullus could still barely speak for grief of his legion but, for Malchus, to be alive was victory. There was a tattered veil of cloud drifting across the night sky, luminous in the moonlight. The call of an owl.
‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ he said.
Knuckles belched. ‘Not bad.’
‘Not the wine, you oaf. This.’ He spread his scarred hands wide. ‘The moon, the dark heavens, the summer stars.’
Knuckles turned to Arapovian. ‘The boy waxes lyrical. Is it a fever?’
‘Of sorts. Beyond my cure.’
Malchus continued regardless, his voice a rapturous whisper. ‘This great Hunnic war that has only just begun. The sight of furious, perishing armies. A galloping black horse on a lonely plain. The sunlight glinting on spears. All of it. I love it. “Sequor omina tanta, quisquis in arma vocas”.’ He sighed. ‘There is nothing as beautiful as war.’
He was like a crazed Trojan hero out of Homer, this one. He’d die fighting, a big smile on his handsome face, his raven hair dripping sweat and blood. Then straight to the Elysian Fields.
‘You’re a fucking poet,’ growled Knuckles. ‘You better have some more wine. All poets are drunks.’
‘Don’t you think,’ said Malchus, sitting up again, ‘sometimes, that everything is beautiful just the way it is? With all the beauty and pity and horror mingled, the way the unknown gods have made it? And that really there is no evil – how could it be otherwise? And that even death is beautiful?’
‘You’re pissed,’ said Knuckles.
‘You’re how old?’ That was Arapovian.
‘Twenty-four,’ said Malchus. ‘The youngest cavalry commander on the Danube frontier.’
‘Well,’ said the Armenian, settling down to sleep, ‘there’s still time for you to believe in evil.’
They slept with their crooked arms for pillows and awoke with their cheeks wet with dew. Arapovian bathed in a nearby stream, to Knuckles’ fascination, and cleaned his teeth with a green hazel-wand. Then he shared out the bread and cheese among the people.
Stephanos ate too fast and got hiccups again. ‘Sorry,’ he said, shame-faced.
Arapovian touched him on the head. ‘You can hiccup all you like, boy. The Huns have gone now.’
Some days later, well hidden from the road, they saw passing in the opposite direction a motley family: two girls, a boy, a woman in a grimy red dress, and a man attired in a close-fitting white robe like a priest of the Church, on his chest a wooden chi-rho. All their wordly goods were packed onto a mulish-looking pony, bull-headed, deepchested, like those the Scythians rode.
The refugees came down from the woods and confronted them. The priest had been the Bishop of Margus himself. ‘But Margus is destroyed.’
Arapovian took a deep breath. ‘Viminacium, too, is destroyed. We are the only survivors.’
The man’s wife repeated, faltering, ‘The legionary fortress… destroyed?’
They nodded. She crossed herself. The Bishop muttered of the devil.
‘Where do you go now?’ asked Arapovian.
‘West. To Sirmium, perhaps further.’
‘You must report to the legate there. Your intelligence will be invaluable.’
The priest did not commit himself. He looked over the ragged women and children, the aged couple propping each other up. ‘We will take the people.’
The soldiers considered. It would be safer in the west, for now. The families, dazed and indifferent with tiredness, had no preference. They departed west, with the priest preaching to passers-by on the road of the wrath to come.
The four soldiers went south.
Within a few miles they found themselves some acceptable horses, requisitioned from a party of Illyrian merchants. The merchants didn’t argue. They rode on down the road at a canter. There would be more fighting to be done.