Bright sunlight woke him, and he opened his eyes to a clear blue sky. It was soon after dawn, and the lake was ice blue to the black mountains on the far shore. Castus dragged himself to his feet. He felt skinned all over, his bones bruised, his shoulder aching with the welts where the dog had clawed him. Stumbling across the shingle at the edge of the lake, he plunged his face and arms into the cold water.
He rode through the day, hardly daring to stop and rest, keeping well clear of inhabited places. The pony carried him westwards through the hill country, then across into the deep wooded valley of a rushing river. Castus looked down through the trees and saw the white haze of a waterfall, the torrent spray shy;ing between high rocks. He found wild blackberries growing along the valley side, and ate until he was sick of the taste and the sweetness.
Towards evening the valley curved south, and Castus saw the broad silver loops of a wider river, with gulls circling in the last light of the sun. Squinting, he remembered this landscape: in the middle distance was the dark line of the road he had followed with his men on their last march to the Pictish meeting ground. The wall of Antoninus was only a few miles to the south. He slept in the bushes above the muddy riverbank, and at dawn stripped off his clothes and held them bunched above his head as he swam beside the pony, kicking and thrashing across a bend of the river until he staggered up on the far shore.
There were warbands moving on the road. Castus saw one of them as he made his way from the riverbank: twenty or thirty warriors with spears and pack animals. But they were a mile in advance, and did not look back as he rode, crouching low, over the flat ground towards the road.
A mile further across the plain, a vast number of crows were circling over a thicket of woods. Castus dropped down off the pony and secured the reins. He walked, legs numb. As he moved around the edge of the thicket the smell came to him, and his stomach tightened with dread. Dead flesh, old slaughter. Around the last tangled branches of the thicket, he saw the open ground beside the road, and the single stripped tree with its harvest of rotting heads.
He walked closer, feeling his empty guts beginning to heave. The heads were blackened, pecked and gouged by birds. But he made out the face of Culchianus, the features of Timotheus. Then he could look no more, and turned away with a low anguished groan. His shoulder buckled and he pressed his clenched fists to his head. Sickened anger boiled inside him, and a terrible wrenching despair that brought him close to tears. He forced himself to turn and look again, burn the terrible image into his mind. Remember this, he told himself.
Away from the road, he moved up into the reaching moor shy;lands to the west. Across foot-sucking bogs and heather-covered hillsides, rushing streams and spills of dry scree, he traced his way southwards until he made out the overgrown ridge of the old wall of Antoninus. At the mouth of a valley beyond another slow stream, he saw the line of the ridge knot and curl, weathered stone showing through the grass and moss, and rode his pony through a gateway in the long-abandoned fortification.
A little further up the valley he came to a small settlement, just three humped huts with a wicker fence around a yard and some animal pens. The men in the yard did not look like Picts, and Castus kept his spear pointing to the ground as he rode closer.
They gathered at the gate as he approached, and a woman came out of the largest hut behind them. Castus halted, dis shy;mounted. The smell of woodsmoke and cooking food reached him. None of the people were armed, and they watched him warily. He considered how he must look to them: big and bruised, stubble-bearded, with fresh scars on his face and arms. He was riding a Pictish pony, and wearing a Pictish cape. It occurred to him that he could probably walk right in and take whatever he wanted, and they would not try to stop him.
He stuck the spear in the ground, trying to smile without baring his teeth. I don’t want to harm you, he wanted to tell them. I’ve killed about six men in the last few days, but I won’t kill you if you let me. He raised his hand and mimed eating, and the woman backed away and hurried inside the hut. One of the men opened the gate and gestured towards a log, worn by much sitting.
Castus eased himself down onto the log, keeping his eyes on the men until the woman returned with a wooden bowl of barley porridge and a cup of water; then he ate fast, unable to hold himself back. He grinned and nodded, and set the bowl down. Vast contentment washed through him. He heard the sounds of cattle, and for a moment remembered something from his childhood: the dairy behind his father’s workshop, and drinking warm milk from a ladle.
The woman pressed her palms together and laid the side of her head upon them. Sleep. She pointed towards one of the smaller huts with the question in her eyes. Evening was coming on, the light mellow and granular now, but Castus stood up and shook his head. He wished he had something to give in exchange for the food, and thought of Marcellinus’ seal ring, still concealed in the toe of his boot. But that would be worthless to them, and if any Roman ever found it they would suffer. He pressed his palm to his chest, over his heart, and backed away, and all of them smiled.
As he rode away up the valley he wondered who or what they must have taken him for. Doubtless they were glad to see him gone, but in his weakened state their simple frightened charity seemed a gift from the gods.
For another four days he pushed on southwards, taking his directions from the position of the sun, resting in thickets of trees with the spear lying beside him. Sometimes when he slept he dreamed of Cunomagla, and woke to imagine her musky scent around him, caught between angry desire and longing for her. At other times he saw the foul trophy tree in his dreams, and started awake in a sweat of terror.
Twice more he managed to beg food from isolated settle shy;ments; on his third attempt, men came running from the huts, shouting, with bows and javelins in their hands, and he rode clear before they got within range. After that he avoided human habitation. He found an orchard of wild apple trees, and devoured the small tough fruit ravenously.
On the third day he met a broad track that ran straight across the hills and the valleys, and recognised an old Roman road. He followed it on southwards, alert for warbands, and later that day he met the trail of the devastation.
From across the hill he smelled the burning, and rode warily until he could see the blackened walls of a village on the low bluffs above a river. Crows circled, but there was no triumph tree here. Was this a Roman settlement north of the Wall, Castus wondered, or had the inhabitants merely been loyal to Rome? The dead lay where they had fallen, hazed with fat black flies. Castus gazed at the corpses, their wounds black and clotted. Several days had passed since they died. There were no survivors, and the stink gripped him by the throat, and he retreated.
He rode on, more slowly now, expecting to see the warriors ahead of them. There were bodies beside the road in places, cut down in flight, men and horses left to rot. A few of the dead wore the tunics and breeches of Roman soldiers. Once Castus thought he saw a woman’s body with a dead child beside it, a bloodstained blanket thrown over them, but he passed on. A few miles further was the burnt ruin of another village, and he looked away from the charred black corpses strewn among the roofless huts.