That’s nice, Ferox thought, and a good excuse if anyone was fool enough to swallow it.
‘Follow the raven! Follow the stag! Follow the stallion!’ the tall man called, lifting his arms and no longer caring about quiet.
The shout seemed to echo across the valley and Ferox was sure that the Romans would hear it. Maybe that was what the man wanted.
‘Go my friends, go!’
The two other men slipped away, going towards a darker shade in the night that was a long patch of woodland. Ferox wondered whether to follow and try to catch the southerner, but doubted that it was possible. Instead he let them go and then resumed his snail-paced crawl.
In the end it was easy. The tall man began to chant, dancing round and round in a circle.
‘O Morrigan! O Cernunnos! O Vinotonus!’ he screamed, and drew a long sword, waving it in the air. ‘O Isis! O Hades! O unnamed gods and demons of darkness!’
Ferox was close now, reaching back to pull out his pugio. The man was chanting, calling on gods from many lands, and as he spun again, facing away, the centurion pushed himself up.
‘Barbaso Barbasoch Barbasoch!’ The man turned. Spittle flew into Ferox’s face as his left hand seized the man’s throat, grabbing a heavy torc, and the right hand punched the knife under the man’s ribs. The priest gasped and choked as the centurion drove the dagger further in, twisting the blade, his hand warm with fresh blood.
The night came alive with shrieks from down in the valley and as Ferox held the dying man up he saw a band of warriors charging at the picket outside the camp. He saw them because the men waved torches in the air and in the flickering red light forty or fifty men charged, bare flesh shining and bright weapons in their hands. Trumpets sounded the alarm, but glints along the rampart showed that it was already lined with waiting men.
The tall man struggled violently and then went limp and heavy so that Ferox almost fell over with the corpse as it slumped down. He lowered the body to the ground and crouched beside it. No one was moving nearby or seemed to have noticed what he had done. In the valley there was a confused whirl of fighting around the picket and more of the torch-carrying warriors streaming past at the entrance to the camp. Some of them dropped, hit by javelins he could not see in the darkness. The rest kept going, swinging to the right to go through the gate. More of them fell to missiles, and the score or so of survivors met a line of waiting soldiers, shields raised. Blades glinted in the light of the last few torches.
Ferox could see no sign of other attackers, and there was nothing he could do to help. This looked like a diversion, something to distract the men on the far ramparts before a heavier wave of warriors swarmed out of the night to overwhelm them. Yet there was no sign of anyone approaching from another direction, and what he had heard the dead man and the other warriors say suggested that this was it, and the warriors were being sacrificed in a doomed attack whose only purpose was to kill as many enemies as possible. He looked down at the body and even in this light saw a chest covered in tattoos like ivy on an old stone wall. He pulled back the headdress and there was the mark of the horse. Pressing hard at the torc he prised it open and lifted the man’s head so that he could take it off.
Below him in the valley the fight was dying as swiftly as the attackers. A few of the dropped torches smouldered on the ground, but the only one flung across the rampart had failed to set fire to anything for there was not much in the camp to burn, given that the tents had not been set up. The fallen torches gave a little light to see the heap of naked corpses piled in the entrance. There was still a fierce struggle around the picket, a cluster of Romans standing back to back.
Ferox picked up the man’s sword and ran his finger along the edge, finding it distressingly blunt. No doubt that was fine for a man who liked to stand back and send his warriors off to fight. It was all he had, for the knife was no good for such work, so the centurion raised it and sliced down with all the force he could muster. The blade buried itself in the man’s neck, without severing the bone. It took three more blows, using all his might and grunting with the effort, before the head came off. He drove the blunt-tipped sword as deeply into the earth as he could and balanced the headdress on top of it. It tilted to one side, but would do to mark the corpse of their priest or druid or whatever this man had claimed to be. Ferox took the head, glad that the man had hair because it was hard to carry the head of a bald man, tucked the torc into his belt and jogged at a low crouch towards the nearest gully.
Trumpets sounded and he guessed that horsemen were charging from the entrances not attacked to go to the aid of the picket. Peering over the edge of the gully he saw the pairs of warriors still squatting along the slope and watching the last of their comrades die. He bundled the head up in his cloak, keeping his dagger low in his left hand, and set off towards them, walking down the slope, hoping that with his bare chest they would mistake him for one of their own.
A shriek of pure horror came from behind him. It sounded like a woman and he guessed that she had discovered the headless corpse of their leader. Pale faces turned to look back, hissing questions.
‘I don’t know,’ Ferox called. ‘What’s happening?’
He stopped. The warriors were getting up, coming up the slope.
‘Something is wrong,’ he said as the closest pair came towards him. Ferox dropped the torc, which rolled along the ground. ‘What’s that?’ he asked the nearest man.
The Briton followed the necklace, bending down to pick it up. His companion stared at the centurion.
‘Who are you?’ he asked and Ferox whipped up the knife and slashed across the man’s throat, dark blood jetting out over his pale skin. He swung the bundled head like a weapon on to the back of the bending warrior’s head and knocked him down.
Flavius Ferox ran. The time for hiding and caution was over and he sprinted down the slope towards the camp. Men shouted, but the Britons were still confused. The woman howled again and a man’s voice bellowed in anger, recognising the torc.
Ferox did not look back or slow, but drove himself to flee, wrapped head in one hand and knife in the other. Horsemen appeared ahead of him. ‘I’m Roman,’ he yelled in Latin. ‘I’m Roman!’ One of the riders came at him, raised his spear and threw. Ferox flung himself to the side, hitting the ground hard. ‘I’m a centurion, you stupid mongrel!’
The other rider held the man’s hand as he drew his sword. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘He’s one of us.’ It was Crispinus, and his teeth looked white as he grinned. ‘Although the gods only know what he’s been up to! Deserting, eh?’
‘With all due respect, my lord,’ Ferox said, getting to his feet, ‘you should not be outside the ramparts during an attack. You are the commander of the whole column.’
‘Well, I am sure that is the voice of wisdom,’ he said. ‘The voice of something at any rate. Now would you care to tell the commander of the column just what in the name of all reason you have been doing?’
XI
‘I AM GUESSING that they want to fight this time,’ the tribune said, looking up at the masses of warriors on the spur above them, and the shields lining the rampart of an old fort. Hardly anyone lived up there these days, and the rampart was covered in grass and the ditch half filled with rubbish. Yet several hundred warriors had gathered there and it would not be easy to storm. Many more of the Selgovae formed a rough line across the saddle to the north of the fort, the warriors sitting or standing in loose masses. They had standards topped by bronze figures of gods or animals and men blasting out calls on their tall carnyxes, each trumpet’s mouth shaped like the head of a boar. The sound reminded Ferox of the ambush on the road. A picture of Sulpicia Lepidina came to mind and he shuddered at the thought of what they had planned to do to her.