Wulfstan said nothing.
‘I gave you Aluith’s weapons because he would have wanted you to have them. You have done well; very well for your age. Aluith would have been proud. He would have wanted you to carry his tamga, take his place among us.’
Wulfstan did not reply.
The night stilled. The whistling of the marmots and the peeping of the nocturnal bird stopped.
The silver-white wings of a great owl swept over them; silent, spectral.
They watched the darkness into which the hunter had voyaged. After a while, the whistling and peep-peep calls of the less fierce denizens of the night resumed.
Andonnoballus turned to go. ‘You might take that as a sign. Naulobates would have known. When we reach his camp, ask him.’ Andonnoballus walked away.
Wulfstan remained, deep in thought. The poetry of his youth drifted into his mind.
The weary in spirit cannot withstand fate,
And nothing comes of venting spleen:
Wherefore those eager for glory often
Hold some ache imprisoned in their hearts.
Perhaps nothing would come of venting his spleen. He would not change anything. Kill one slaver, another would take his place. He could bind his memories in fetters, confine them in some dark place in his soul. The Heruli offered a new beginning. He could refashion himself into the warrior he would have become if the Langobardi had not come, if they had not sold him to the slavers. No, not quite what he would have become. The slavery, and this murderous, violent journey across this never-ending plain had tempered him into something stronger.
He shivered. The wind was rising, the night getting colder. Up above, thin clouds raced across the eyes of Thiazi, hid the moon from the wolf that pursued him. Hati would not run the moon down and devour him tonight.
Another sound, close by. Wulfstan turned, expecting to see Andonnoballus. It was not Andonnoballus.
The steel shimmered in the weak starlight. It was at Wulfstan’s throat.
‘Why?’ Wulfstan said.
The killer actually smiled. ‘You have an implacable, vengeful daemon.’
‘I can change.’
‘Your daemon will do terrible things — to those around you, to you.’
Desperately, Wulfstan tried to ready himself. The sword at his throat. His own right arm near useless. Next to no chance. But better than dying like a sheep.
‘The young Frisian, your friend Bauto, who drowned — he had a bad daemon too.’
The words checked Wulfstan. He remembered the storm; the year before, out on the Euxine sea. He remembered the rogue triple wave hitting the Armata. The seeming miracle when the trireme righted herself. The half-demented joy, the cheering. Then the shout, ‘Man overboard!’ And there, over the stern of the galley, alone in the wild, pitiless expanse of the sea, the small head of his friend, the Frisian Bauto.
With an inarticulate cry, Wulfstan pushed the sword away with his right arm — pain as the blade cut deep — grabbed for the throat with his left hand. Wulfstan felt a blow like a punch in his stomach. Winded, he looked down. He saw the fist curled around the hilt of the dagger. He saw the blade withdrawn, saw the black blood flow.
XXII
Ballista had been surprised at the reaction of Andonnoballus to the discovery of the body. The young Herul atheling, who had displayed no emotion either when his own men had fallen in battle, or when he had ordered the mass blinding of the Alani and the impaling of their leaders, had been visibly upset. He had not hidden his tears. And he had been angry, at times almost to distraction.
For a day, the horde had remained where it was. Andonnoballus had questioned the sentries. They had seen nothing. A painstaking search of where the body lay revealed nothing; trampled grass, and blood, a lot of blood. Wulfstan had not been mutilated after death — just the blade wiped in his bright hair — but the blows that had killed him had nearly disembowelled him. His killer had to have been soaked in blood. Andonnoballus had ordered a search of the camp. Ballista had thought it most unlikely to discover anything. It found nothing; although one Herul half waking in the night had seen a hooded figure drop what he had taken to be some old rags on one of the campfires. No, he could not say anything about the man; not even if he was Herul, Sarmatian or Roman. Andonnoballus had the ashes sifted. No tell-tale ornament or anything else came to light.
Andonnoballus ordered a pyre built. He had washed and dressed the body with his own hands. He had placed splendid offerings around the dead youth: the weapons of Aluith that Wulfstan had carried, gold and amber ornaments of his own. The other two Heruli who had been with the caravan from the start, Pharas and the ex-slave Datius, added things of their own.
Before he put the first torch to the pyre, Andonnoballus had spoken a eulogy. Wulfstan had been born an Angle, once the enemies of the Heruli. The fates had cruelly taken him from his home, made him eat the bitter bread of exile and hardship. But his own courage had raised him up again, had won his freedom. Before his murder, Wulfstan had asked to ride with the Heruli. Andonnoballus, by the authority granted him by Naulobates, had accepted the young warrior into the brotherhood of the wolves of the north. Let the murderer know, should the gods reveal his identity, Andonnoballus of the Heruli would track him to the ends of the earth to revenge his unjustly and cowardly slain brother.
They had collected the bones the next morning; packed them in a pannier on a packhorse, like the others. The long journey north resumed.
Ballista rode at the head of the horde with Andonnoballus, Pharas and the commander of the relief, Uligagus. They rode in silence. Andonnoballus’s mood did not encourage small talk.
Behind them came three great parallel columns of horsemen. The fourth was further back, out of sight, strung across the Steppe as a rearguard. Each column contained two thousand riders, but many more horses. Each of the Heruli had at least three remounts on a line. They rode at a fast canter.
From the charged silence of the vanguard, Ballista looked back and studied the Heruli. Many banners flew above them, most bearing tamgas, some with wolves and other fierce-seeming but less determinable animals. Travelling at speed, they all kept surprisingly good order. Aureolus, the emperor Gallienus’s own Prefect of Cavalry, would have been impressed. There was nothing of the irrational or the primitive which Romans liked to see in barbarians in this order of march. The scruffy-looking ponies, however, would have been odd to Aureolus’s eyes, as would the complete absence of armour. There was not a helmet or mailshirt among them. Some, presumably the unfree, did not even carry one of their small round shields. Slave or free, they relied on no more than a heavy sheepskin coat for defence. Every Herul had a recurve bow and supply of arrows in a gorytus on one hip and a long cavalry sword on the other. There were spare bowcases on the remounts. Ballista was impressed. These were true light cavalry, but, as he knew, they were prepared to fight hand to hand. They would not be able to stand up to a charge by Roman cataphracti or Persian clibanarii. The big men on big horses, all covered in mail, would ride them down. Yet out here on the Steppe, that eventuality need never arise. In these wide expanses, if the Heruli were well handled, the heavy horse should never catch them.
Ballista’s thoughts wandered. The grey clouds of dust the columns kicked up drifted behind them to the south. Up above, the wind had shifted and was blowing wraith-like clouds in the opposite direction. Under the immense sky, the disjunction was vertiginous. It was always some such immensity philosophers invoked to try to assuage grief. He thought of the works of consolation he had been made to read as part of his education at the imperial court. Compare your grief with something huge, something without end — the gods, the divine spark in man, eternal Rome, or time itself. See how insignificant is your misery. He thought back to the time when he believed his wife and sons were dead. He remembered how his recollections of the philosophers had offered him nothing but specious comparisons with things that did not touch him, infuriating injunctions to self-control, and leaden platitudes. In the face of the ultimate profundity, the great minds of a Plutarch or a Seneca could come up with little better than the banalities of a nursemaid soothing a child: There, there, it will feel better in time. At least in the latter they had been right.