We never did discover what befell Duke Lorco and his three turmae. They simply vanished from the ken of men. Ursus and I searched for them for three entire days, and not once in that time did we find as much as a trace of them, although we might have had cause for thanks in that, since the entire countryside was overrun by the force that Ursus had described, and his estimation of their numbers as being in the thousands turned out to be very conservative. We were surprised, too, to see that they had large numbers of horsemen among them, because Ursus had seen no riders among the troops that moved steadily past him on that first afternoon when he had hidden among the pond reeds, and we were forced to assume that they had ridden separately to join the foot soldiers.
We watched these riders closely, after our initial surprise wore off, and although their mounts were healthy and well equipped, it soon became obvious that the riders themselves had had no intensive training in coordination. They were warriors, but not cavalry troopers. That realization, reinforced by our observations of the casual, informal way the riders moved about the countryside, encouraged us to step out of hiding and venture among them as though we had every right to be there doing what we were doing. We moved openly but took care nonetheless to avoid coming too close to any particular group, and we managed to avoid detection, although there were times during those days when we passed within spitting distance of some of the invaders.
Notwithstanding all our caution, however, we were twice involved in skirmishes with small groups whom we met in places where we had no reason for being present, other than trying to slip past the carefully guarded strong points that had been built on high elevations overlooking those places where enemies like us might be expected to try to pass by undetected. We were fortunate enough on both occasions to see these people before they saw us. There were three foot soldiers in the first group and two horsemen in the second, and I take no shame in saying that it was Ursus who dispatched four of them, including both horsemen, each of them driven off his horse’s back by a single deadly hard shot. I captured the fifth and last of the men by running him down, smashing my horse directly into him and bowling him over, then leaping on him and disarming him before he could regain his breath, after which I held him at the point of my sword until Ursus could tie his arms securely behind his back.
It was in questioning this captive—Ursus, it turned out, could speak a version of his language—that we discovered the enemy were in fact Burgundians from the southwest. A federation of their tribes, our prisoner told us, six in all and numbering close to ten thousand warriors, had left the lands they had settled almost a hundred years earlier and struck east in search of more living space. So far, he said, they had been on the march and victorious on all fronts for half a month. They had encountered no serious opposition and had annexed everything between their home territories and the spot where we had captured him, and it was plain to see from his attitude that even although he, personally, had erred and fallen into our hands, he did not expect to be our prisoner for long. He told us that we would be discovered and killed within the very near future.
Simply by falling into our hands, our prisoner had presented us with a problem, because we could not take him with us when we moved on, and we could not simply set him free. We knew we ought to kill him, but because of the teachings I had absorbed in the Bishop’s School, I was incapable of doing that and equally incapable of permitting Ursus to. “Thou shalt not kill” is an unequivocal Commandment. Not that I would have hesitated to kill the man in the heat of battle—or so I told myself, blithely disregarding the fact that I had never yet come close to contemplating killing any man. I knew well that killing in self-defense is permissible at any time, and that in time of war, when the cause is just, killing as the result of armed aggression is justifiable. Killing in cold blood, however, was murder, unacceptable under any conditions, and so we were trapped, becoming, in effect, prisoners to our prisoner.
Fortunately, he absolved us of our quandary by freeing himself in the middle of the night and then foolishly awakening us with the noise he made in escaping. Ursus felled him with a single arrow from a distance of thirty paces, which, at night and against a running target, was a bowshot verging on the miraculous. We scrambled out to where the fellow lay and dragged him back into the cave where we were sheltering. We left him there in the morning, after we had scouted the area and identified a reasonable opportunity to move out of hiding and escape unobserved.
The decision to abandon the northward search for the Duke was made by Ursus, but I made no objection when he suggested it. As we had moved north during the previous two days, the concentration of Burgundians around us had increased dramatically, and it was obvious that to continue moving as we were, haphazardly and without real objectives, was folly. It was already amazing that we had avoided detection for as long as we had. The single alternative open to us, Ursus decided, was to turn back and head southward, to wait for Lorco and his turmae at some spot where the lie of the land itself would dictate that they must pass close by us. That decision made, and its common sense plain and clear to both of us, we turned back with great feelings of relief and headed south to await Duke Lorco and his troops.
For the next two days we traveled steadily, following or paralleling the easiest and most obvious route to the south and finding ourselves being shepherded gradually but unmistakably in the southeasterly direction dictated by the river as it penetrated a wide, forested valley between two ranges of hills. The route we followed was one that had never seen the construction of a Roman road, yet it was wide and obviously well traveled, and by the time we had gone a score of miles along it, it had become obvious that the Burgundian invaders had no interest in it, because we saw little sign of them. The few isolated groups that we did see were making their way hurriedly and single-mindedly to the north, paying no attention to whatever might be going on around them.
By noon the following day, having spent the entire morning watching for Burgundians and seeing none, we finally accepted that we had left them and their invasion route safely behind us. We made a comfortable camp that night, close by the road but sufficiently far away from it among the trees to be confident that we could safely light a fire without risk of its being seen by any late-night travelers, and then we lay awake for several hours in the firelight, talking about our missing companions, wondering where they might be and when we would encounter them again.
We never did. Nor, to the best of our knowledge, did anyone else. I learned later, after my eventual return to Auxerre, that there had been a deal of speculation in their home region during the months that followed their disappearance, but Phillipus Lorco himself had quickly been replaced by a new governor who was faced with his own priorities, and the disappearance of Lorco and his three turmae had quickly faded into acceptance, its urgency diffused by the other events surrounding the Burgundian invasion that summer.
The most widely accepted version of what might have happened was that Lorco and his party had ridden blindly into a trap and had been wiped out, but there were those who refused to accept such a notion. Those doubters, claiming personal experience, friendship, and long-standing knowledge of Governor Lorco, swore that Lorco would never commit such an elementary error as to ride through unknown and potentially hostile territory without deploying scouts on all sides of his force. Bishop Germanus, having spent years as Lorco’s Legatus in the field, was a voluble proponent of that belief, but when I heard it, I found myself wondering immediately if there might be any truth to the less acceptable version. Thinking back to the dilatory conduct and the unconscionable laziness of Lorco’s lieutenant, Harga, and that man’s failure to take even the simplest of precautions, thus leading us into an entrapment from which Ursus and I should never have escaped, I was forced to wonder about the degree to which Harga’s laziness might have been inspired or encouraged by his own observation of his superiors’ behavior. I felt uncomfortable and disloyal to Duke Lorco for thinking such things, but I could not avoid them. For a period of days I frequently found myself wondering if I had been a fool to give up the honor of winning Cato’s spatha merely to make a son look good to a father who did not merit such an honor. I kept such thoughts to myself, however, knowing they were both unjust and unworthy, and never expressed my own personal doubts or misgivings to anyone. Lorco was dead, whatever his failings might or might not have been, and his son had been my closest friend, killed in front of my eyes. I determined that no hint of criticism that might affect the honor of their name would ever pass my lips.