Solid and arrow-straight, the roadway provided us with significantly greater advantages than it permitted Beddoc and his men. We were heavily cloaked and well protected from the wind and rain, mounted on strong horses that moved swiftly and cared nothing for the driving downpour. Beddoc and his people, on the other hand, were afoot and heavily laden, making heavy going of their forced march, trudging through heavy, unrelenting rain under full military field packs, because when they had crept away from Samson’s camp in the dead of night they had not dared to risk the noise of harnessing and stealing baggage wagons for their gear and equipment. They had left their cumbersome leather legionary tents behind, confident that they were but one night’s sleep beneath the stars away from home, and so each of them lacked that heavy burden, at least. And so they plodded now through the pouring rain, huddled in misery, footsore, aching, and feeling very sorry for themselves, their sodden clothing and ice cold armor chafing painfully wherever they touched skin.
We came closest to them at the point where they had stopped for their last rest of the day. They had been stopping regularly, once every hour, as marching legions always had from the earliest days of Rome’s soldier-citizenry, and at one point Ursus waved to me to slow down and moved out slowly ahead of me, scanning the wet earth along the roadside. Sure enough, we soon found the spot where Beddoc’s men had spilled off the hard top of the road in search of relief from the cobbled surface and whatever shelter they could find beneath the canopy of the trees on either side. We reined in and Ursus swung down from his saddle to search for whatever it was that he expected to find. I sat straight in my saddle and dug my thumbs into the small of my back, under the edge of my cuirass, grimacing as I stretched and flexed my spine and stared ahead, over my horse’s ears, along the tunnel of the road that stretched ahead of us.
Had the terrain here been as flat as the road was straight, we should have been able to see Beddoc and his party long before this, but the ground in this region undulated gently, in long, rolling ripples that stretched east and west, so that the road ahead rose and fell constantly. You might be able to see as far as half a mile ahead at any time, but then the road would crest and fall away into the next gentle valley and be lost to sight. The sight lines here were impaired, too, by the foliage of the trees that had encroached almost to the edges of the road in some spots, so that their lower boughs appeared from a distance to sweep down completely, to brush the surface of the very stones.
That, I knew, was something new, because I also knew that there had once been a time, extending into the boyhood of King Ban’s grandsire, when an entire department of the imperial civil service had existed solely to maintain the roads in central and southern Gaul. Under its supervision the great roads, so long and straight, had been maintained and regularly repaired, and huge swaths of cleared land, fifty paces wide, had been kept free of growth on either side of each one. But after nigh on a hundred years of neglect and untrammeled growth, the protective borders were now choked with all kinds of brushwood, and large, mature trees now towered close beside the roads themselves, close enough, in many cases, for their massive roots to have damaged the edges of the paving, heaving the paved and metalled surface upward and causing cracks and fractures in the very fabric of the road. Those insignificant-seeming invasions of the roadbeds, according to the wisdom of Bishop Germanus, marked the beginnings of a process of disintegration that would eventually and inevitably, with the hungry assistance of time and weather, bring about the ruin and destruction of most of Rome’s wondrous network of roads.
I saw Ursus stoop and pick something up, and then he came back toward me, gazing down at whatever it was he had found, then lobbing it toward me when he was close enough. I caught it and held it up to see it properly. It was the heel of a loaf of bread, just small enough to fill my palm and hard enough that I could clearly see the gnawed marks where someone had tried in vain to bite into it with strong teeth.
“It’s still dry,” Ursus said, standing now by my knee, “in this weather, save on the very outside. That means we can’t be any more than a quarter of an hour behind the man who threw it away. There’s an abandoned mansio about five miles ahead. They’ll stop there for the night. Or at least, they ought to.”
A mansio was an inn—one of the hostelries provided by the Empire for the comfort and convenience of couriers traveling the main roads upon Imperial business. Imperial couriers had seldom been seen in this part of Gaul for nigh on two decades now, however, and most of the old hostelries had been shut down and abandoned long since.
“Why there?”
“No other choice.” He reached up with a bent finger and flicked a drop of rain from the end of his nose. The downpour suddenly intensified, the rain falling harder than ever, and I had to bend down toward him and listen closely to hear his voice above the thunder of it on my helmet, even though he was shouting at me. “They’ve no tents, remember? And it’s too damn wet for them to even try to shelter under the trees.” He moved even closer to me, leaning against my horse’s side, his left hand holding my ankle as he shouted up at me and his face twisted into a rictus that I soon recognized, to my complete astonishment, as a grin. He was absolutely enjoying all of this, the journey, the chase, and the deluge.
He removed his hand from my ankle and raised his voice even louder, wiping at his eyes with a forefinger. “The mansio’s old and it’s been sitting empty for years, long before I was born. It’s got no doors or windows but it’s still standing, thanks to thick stone walls, and it has a roof, or most of a roof, and fireplaces. They’ll be better off there than any other place between Lugdunum and Genava. They might not be completely dry, or completely warm, but they’ll be out of the wind and the worst of the rain and they’ll have firelight and a bit of heat. They could be far worse off.”
“And what about—?” The rain slackened as quickly as it had increased, and I heard myself bellowing. I lowered my voice instantly, glancing about as though to see if anyone else had heard me. “What about us?”
“What about us?” He was standing sideways to me now, his hands on his hips so that his cloak hung tentlike from his extended elbows. “We’ll cut away from the road here, ride around, and get ahead of them. From then on, every mile we gain on them is worth at least six to us, because they’ll be walking to catch up to us and we’ll be flying on horseback. Once past them, we’ll ride for ten more miles, then stop for the night at a place I know, where we’ll be warmer and drier than any of those poor fools.”
“Ten miles, once we’re past them? It will be dark by then, and probably still raining, which means there’ll be no moon to light our way. How will you find this place you speak of? Is it on the road? What kind of place is it, anyway?”
“Nitter natter, Master, so many questions.” Ursus grinned and swung himself up onto his mount, making nothing of the sodden weight of his cloak. “It’s a shepherd’s hut, built of stone, solid as bedrock and strongly thatched, and it is never without a supply of fine, dry firewood. And as for your other question, no, it’s not on the road. It is four hundred paces off the road, as I remember, and I could find it blindfolded if I had to. But I won’t have to. Come, let’s go.” He looked up at the sky, then kicked his horse into motion, angling it away from the road and toward the forest, shouting back over his shoulder as he went. “I would say we have two hours of daylight left to us, perhaps two and a half. That should be more time than we need to reach our spot without riding through darkness. Once past Beddoc’s crew we can really travel quickly, since we won’t have to worry about running into them.” He kicked his horse again, pushing it to a canter, and I followed close behind him, shouting back at him.