One long breath, then he leaped through the doorway and into the sunlight. He spun immediately to face the wall, and the man was there, braced. Castus noticed that he was holding a Roman spatha – battlefield loot. For a heartbeat they stared at each other.
Then the man cried out, feinted to the left and jumped right, flailing his spatha in the air; the long blade was unfamiliar to him, and he did not have the balance of it. He was running, trying to swerve around the limit of Castus’s reach. Castus stamped forward, slashing his sword in a wide low arc and cutting the man on the back of the knee as he ran. The man screamed and fell, hobbled, into the dust.
Two steps, and Castus stood over him. The man rolled onto his side, lips drawn away from his teeth. His weapon had fallen and he lunged for it, fingers scrabbling in the dirt, snarling a curse in his own language. Castus trod on the man’s shoulder and forced him onto his back, reversed his grip on his sword, raised it in both hands and plunged it down.
Marcellina screamed as he stepped back into the bath-house. She was still crouching in the corner with a dirty shawl pulled over her head.
‘I got him, don’t worry. He’s dead now. But there might be others around – we have to leave.’
The girl flinched back as he approached her. She seemed to have forgotten who he was.
‘Juno preserve us,’ Castus muttered. He wiped his sword on a dead man’s tunic, sheathed it, and then came back to kneel beside Marcellina. She was crying, or trying to, just tight little stabs of breath. He slipped his arm beneath her knees and she started to struggle against him, but he held her tight, got his other arm around her shoulders and lifted her. She went limp in his arms, and he realised that she had passed out.
They rode until evening, south-west away from the villa and through the hill country onto the flanks of the high moors, far from marauding bands. Castus had tried to put the girl on one of the native ponies, but she was even less of a rider than he was, and short of tying her to the beast’s back he knew she would never manage the journey. So he carried her before him, perched across the saddle bow with her legs dangling over the horse’s flank, supporting her with his left arm. Not an easy or comfortable ride, and they made slow progress, but at least she had stopped trying to fight him.
There was still light on the western horizon, and Castus could make out the silhouette of a rocky tumulus on the high ground. At first there seemed to be giant carved figures standing on the hilltop, but as he got closer he saw that they were strange formations of rock, towers and piers, and boulders piled into stacks. Once, when he was marching across Asia with the Herculiani, he had seen something similar in Cappadocia; somebody had told him that the shapes were carved by the wind, but Castus could hardly believe that was possible. It was a strange sight, unnerving against the glow of sunset, but he needed a secure refuge, and there was no sign of human habitation up there.
As he rode up off the slopes of the moor, the rock towers rose all around him, with wild grass and heather between them. The wind was strong up here, whining and blustering around the tall stone masses, and Castus steered the horse to a sheltered place in the lee of one great stack, where a hollow at the base created a shallow cave, before dismounting.
‘We’ll stay here tonight,’ he said to the girl, helping her down off the horse. She went at once to the cave and sat inside it with her back pressed to the stone. She had been completely silent since they left the villa. Castus took the saddle from the horse, rubbed the animal down as he had seen the troopers of the Petriana cavalry doing, and then tethered it in a patch of grass between the rocks. When he returned the girl was still sitting as he had left her, with her knees drawn up, staring at nothing.
‘No fire,’ she said suddenly as he started piling sticks and dry bracken. He glanced at her – she was remembering the burning villa, he guessed – then shrugged, kicking the little heap of kindling aside.
‘Fine. We’ll eat cold food then.’ He placed the remaining barley cakes and a canteen of water beside her, then sat chewing at hardtack and dry cheese. Night had fallen between the stones, and the girl was almost invisible in her little cave.
Castus had seen the effects of shock many times before. Most men, after their first experience of battle, had that glazed look, that distracted air. But with Marcellina it went much deeper. Once, in Antioch, Castus had met a Greek doctor who told him that the mind, like the body, can be wounded by violence. Perhaps even destroyed. For Castus himself there had always been the legion, his brothers around him, their common purpose and duty. The shock of combat was a shared thing, easily digested and soon just a part of life. For the girl, though, there was none of that. Everything she had known, all family and sense of the world around her, had been destroyed.
‘Where is my father?’ she said, and her voice echoed slightly off the hollow rock. ‘Why did he not return with you?’
‘Ah,’ Castus said. He had tried several times, in the preceding days, to compose in his mind a suitable speech to explain what had happened. But he had always imagined himself sitting in the villa, with Marcellinus’s wife and daughter before him, both mutely composed, demure, accepting. Now, instead, the villa was burned and the mother butchered, and there was only this dark windy wilderness of rock and heather, this unhinged girl, and he could think of nothing to say.
He took Marcellinus’s heavy gold signet ring from his belt pouch, knelt beside the girl and took her hand. He placed the ring in her palm, closed her fingers over it and sat back again.
Marcellina opened her hand and looked at her father’s ring, rolling it on her palm. She drew a long shuddering breath.
‘I remember you,’ she said, and Castus could make out her raised face in the moonlight. ‘I remember – you’re the centurion. You’re the one who promised… You promised to protect him and bring him home…’ There was a curious wandering note in her voice, as if she was waking from deep sleep. ‘You promised,’ she said again, with more emphasis. ‘You promised!’
She threw the ring violently at Castus, and it hit him hard on the forehead and dropped to roll against the rocks.
‘Why?’ she cried out in a great rush of anguish and realisation. ‘Why are you here? Why did you come back and not him?’
‘I’m sorry, domina. It was his own wish – I…’
‘Quiet! Don’t talk to me! Don’t come near me!’ The girl was on her feet now, crouching back against the curve of the rock wall, gasping back tears. Castus remained seated. Anything he tried to say now would be wrong.
‘You… stupid-headed liar! You bastard! Why did you come back? Why did you break your vow?’
She bent to snatch up a handful of small stones and threw them at Castus. He swatted them away with his forearms, but now she was grabbing larger stones, pelting them at him, spitting breath.
‘I curse you!’ she cried. ‘The gods curse you!’
Castus rolled his back to her, covering his head, feeling the stones cracking off his shoulders. He was about to get up and restrain her when he heard the last stone fall and the girl drop to her knees, sobbing. He turned and watched her; she looked so small in the moonlight, so weak and broken. Wincing, he clambered to his feet.
Standing up straight, hands clasped behind his back, he addressed the girl. ‘Your father and I were taken captive by the Picts after a battle. Your father was injured, and his status placed him in an impossible position. He chose death as the honourable way, and charged me to return here and find you. To tell you what happened.’ He glanced to his left, and saw the gold ring catching the moonlight; he picked it up and put it back in his pouch. ‘I’ll keep this for you,’ he said.