Black Salamander (7 page)

‘It reports that Libo is dead, sir. Stabbed in the heart.’ There was a pause. ‘And that part of the convoy’s gone missing.’

VI

Violent emotions, like natural phenomena such as tornadoes and tidal waves, cannot sustain the momentum for too long and it was the same with Claudia’s party. The sheer terror they had experienced when the mountaintop slipped into the gorge had passed, and now—unlike nature—something was required to fill the void left behind.

For Hanno, the reality that his grandson lay dead in the foot of the canyon suddenly struck home, and he plodded unseeing down the track shaking his wispy white head from side to side uncomprehendingly as thin tears dribbled down his leathery cheeks, and it was left to Clemens, the stumpy fat priest, to console the old muleteer. ‘Better life…happier…Elysian fields…’ drifted back, but it was doubtful Hanno was even aware of half of what was said.

‘Best see to the horses,’ he muttered. ‘Old Hercules there seems to be limping,’ and off he went, immersing his grief in his work.

For others, especially the women, shock had set in, leaving them shaking and numb and unable to function properly. Their minds were befuddled, their limbs not co-ordinating, and they huddled in the back of their traps, curled into protective balls as the snaking convoy made its way down to the river, where they at least could make camp for the night.

Most of the group, however, found grumbling more worthwhile.

‘What do you mean we’re lost?’ Maria’s shrill voice rang out along the valley. ‘Of course we’re on the right road. We had an escort and you, young man,’ she jabbed Theo in the gap between his scale armour and the red scarf which prevented it chafing his neck, ‘were an integral part of it!’

The fact that Maria was barely five years older than the legionary didn’t seem to penetrate. ‘I’m aware of that, madam.’ He even addressed her as though she were some middle-aged matron. ‘And believe me, no one’s sorrier about this mess than I am.’

I’ll say, thought Claudia, trudging behind. He’ll be mucking out stables for the rest of his career after a monumental blunder like this. Theo, more than anyone, will be keen to get us back on track. He’ll never make centurion otherwise.

‘Then will you kindly explain how it was we managed to depart from the main road?’ Maria demanded.

Theodorus scratched under his bronze cheekpiece. ‘Well…’ He glanced back along the precipitous gorge, to the huge scar left by the landslide. ‘I…’ His fingers slid under his neckguard. ‘To be honest, madam…’

‘You haven’t a clue. Typical.’ Claudia heard Maria sniff loudly. ‘Three of you, and no doubt each imagined the other two knew what they were doing. Tell me, Theodorus, am I close?’

His breastplate seemed to lose some of its gleam. ‘Visibility has been poor—’

Maria snorted, and dropped back to walk alongside Claudia. ‘Men,’ she said. ‘They’re all the same, utterly incompetent, and my husband’s no better, either. Look at him, thirty-four years old and he’s stumping along like an old carthorse, and—oh, for heaven’s sake, do you see who he’s walking with? Dexter,’ she called. ‘I say, Dexter! Come here, will you.’

A skinny individual with protuberant collarbones and lacklustre, floppy brown hair sidled up next to his wife.

‘Dexter, you should not be associating with the likes of that smelly muleteer, not a man of your social standing. The person you ought to—’

‘Hanno said he might have something for my bad knee.’

‘Horse liniment?’ Maria’s voice could have cracked glassware. ‘You’re not rubbing that on your skin. The smell will
never
wash off.’

‘I thought it was your stomach which was giving you gip?’ Claudia said. Anything to muzzle Maria.

‘Oh, it does.’ Dexter seemed to perk up. ‘I’m taking mustard and I drink nettle tea twice a day, then someone said sodium pills should help and that I ought to be able to get some from a man behind the basilica in Vesontio, and also I eat a lot of cucumber and turmeric sauce.’

Small wonder his digestive tract was rebelling.

‘The wet weather’s affecting my chest, too,’ he added cheerfully. ‘For the past three days, I’ve been drinking a horehound infusion before breakfast, which funnily enough seems to be helping my earache.’

You’ve
got earache? Claudia’s mouth turned down at the corners. Jupiter alone knew how many other complaints might be troubling Dexter, but Claudia would have pulled her own teeth out rather than ask.

‘I could have married a merchant, you know,’ Maria said, battening down a wayward hair which had had the temerity to try and escape. ‘In fact, I had my pick of husbands. Auctioneers, barge owners—’

‘Confectioners, dentists.’ Claudia presumed Maria was working her way through the dictionary.

‘—even the son of a senator.’

Claudia had been wrong about the ‘c’. Not confectioners. Cobblers.

‘But you know what it’s like at sixteen. You meet this young bookbinder and think, yes he’s the one for me, and you have glorious visions of a few years down the line when he’s got a shop of his own, men working under him and magistrates climbing over each other to come through the doors, because they wouldn’t trust their vellum to any man but Dexter…’ Maria’s tirade ended in a hawking sound in the back of her throat. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have married beneath me,’ she said.

By the time she’d stopped to evict an imaginary stone from her shoe, Claudia was behind Iliona and Titus’s rig. The Cretan girl’s bangles jangled louder than the harnesses on the two mules and their voices were low, so Claudia couldn’t catch what they were bickering about. Only that, like everyone else, they were less than happy with the situation though whether, as with Maria and Dexter, that encompassed their marital status, who could say?

Peppery smells wafted out of the spice merchant’s cart, cinnamon, cardamom, cumin and mustard, as well as a tantalizing hint of more exotic resins and gums, such as
myrrh and terebinth
and
mastic. Claudia
wondered how
it
was that Iliona managed to override them and retain only the scent of the herb which cascaded down her native Cretan hillsides. When Iliona threw her hands in the air, her bracelets of gold and crystal and glass sent out tunes to rival a troupe of travelling musicians, Claudia smiled to herself. Iliona may have left the island, but the island had never left her.

She wore only shades of lilac, be it from the palest, almost white, to the deepest violet, to remind her of the crocus which grew nowhere else but on Crete and brightened up the winter from November through to when it was time to weed the grain fields. The embroidery on her bodice invariably represented griffins or bulls.

‘Now what, eh?’ Claudia heard the slipper-maker mumble to the glass-blower, when the first of the gaggle reached the bottom of the valley.

Good question. According to Theo, the directions his dead comrade had been given were specific. Zigzag down the gorge and cross at the wooden bridge. Here you’ll find the road turns back on itself and you simply follow the river upstream for five miles, then take the first fork leading right. After that it’s more or less a straight run to Vesontio.

‘So you admit you knew we were separated from the main delegation?’ Maria shot straight for the jugular, and for once Claudia agreed with the old bag. Somewhere along the line, Theo and his fellow legionaries must have become aware that they were the only three soldiers around, which is why they’d had to rely on third-hand information from Helvetians who had no time for Rome.

Claudia shivered, and it was not from the cold (anything but, in this humid ravine.), it was because she had begun to appreciate just how carefully this strategy had been planned.

‘Once the army realizes we took the wrong road,’ Theo assured the worried group, ‘they’ll come after us.’

‘And what happens when they reach the part which has fallen away, eh?’ one of the drivers piped up. ‘By the time they’ve built even the most rudimentary—’

‘Rope bridges will see them across swiftly and safely,’ Theo began, but Maria cut him short.

‘Then why didn’t we make a rope bridge ourselves and go back the way we came in, if it was the wrong road?’

Love her or hate her, thought Claudia, there are no flies on the bookbinder’s wife.

‘Because our ropes went down with the pack mules,’ Theo said miserably, managing to look an appealing thirteen, despite the preponderance of armour, and Claudia was convinced more than ever that the order the procession had travelled in had been carefully contrived. The pack mules going down had been no accident. ‘I propose we make camp here, at this crossing. It’ll be dark in less than three hours, therefore we’ll have to wait until morning before retrieving our dead and, with your help, Clemens, we can give them a decent burial and put our trust in Neptune that the army reaches us the following day. Is everyone in agreement?’ he asked.

‘I think that’s pretty obvious.’ A tall, somewhat cadaverous individual pushed his way to the front. ‘What other option is there? Of course we wait here.’

Beside him, Titus looked short and quite plump, whereas he was of perfectly average height and build. ‘And live off what, Volso? Your astrological scribblings? Can we spit-roast your zodiac bull? Make chops of your zodiac ram?’

‘I wouldn’t mind a shot at his zodiac virgin,’ a voice from the back jeered, and Titus pre-empted any titters with a venomous glare.

‘The point is,’ the spice merchant pressed on, ‘we have no food, no blankets, and most of all, no guarantee the army’ll be here for three or four days while we, in the meantime, sit straddling the border between two warring tribes.’ He shot a sideways glance at Theo. ‘Correct me if my assessment is wrong.’

The legionary coloured. ‘We can eat the horses,’ he said weakly.

‘And you have a better plan, I suppose?’ Volso sneered.

‘Well. Considering this is the route the Sequani use when travelling between Vesontio and Bern,’ Titus reasoned, ‘it strikes me the army are unlikely to be worried once they hear we diverted ourselves off along here, because we’re still headed in the right direction. One or two soldiers will be despatched as scouts,’ his eyes swivelled up to the scar on the landscape, ‘but my guess is that when they realize what’s happened, they’ll just expect us from the south instead of the west.’

‘I get you,’ chipped in the glass-blower. ‘You think the army will come that way,’ he jabbed his finger upstream, ‘to meet up with us.’

‘Exactly,’ Titus said, pursing his lips. ‘Sitting on our arses doing nothing, we might just as well have targets hung on our backs.’

‘I still say we wait,’ said the mournful astrologer. ‘We know we can’t get past that tangle of fallen rocks and trees—’

‘Volso, you’re such a bloody defeatist,’ someone snapped, probably the slipper-maker. ‘We’ll never know till we try, will we?’

‘Be my guest,’ the astrologer said dryly. ‘Just bear in mind what happened to Libo.’

‘Ach, that was Helvetia,’ the glass-blower said. ‘The Sequani are very pro-Roman.’

Beside them, the river thundered through the narrow ravine, white and frothy, fast and furious, jumping over rapids and bouncing round rocks, and as the rain receded so steam began to rise from the thick vegetation—the ferns, the aspens, the alders and willows which grew so lushly along the riverbanks.

‘And you think that by crossing this bridge, you receive automatic protection from Helvetii attacks?’ Volso scoffed. ‘Or that having Roman blood in your veins deters a Sequani head-hunter?’

‘Oh, come on.’ The slipper-maker’s voice, however, had lost much of its stridence. ‘You can’t believe in that crap?’

‘I wouldn’t underestimate the tribesmen living in these remoter regions,’ Theo said sombrely, unbuckling his breastplate. ‘They’re a superstitious lot, the Gauls, especially in the more isolated hamlets. Those who live on the border, particularly, have to put up with the constant threat of invasion—raiding parties, rather than territorial skirmishes, I admit, but none the more reassuring for that. The collecting of skulls equates with strength and cunning to these wretched barbarians. To them, the head is the seat of all power.’

From one of the carts, a woman began to whimper like a wounded kitten.

‘Claptrap,’ Titus jeered. ‘Complete and utter balls.’

‘I agree.’ Theo removed his helmet and puffed up the plumes. ‘That’s why Rome is trying so hard to suppress this barbaric practice, but the fact remains that as long as the group sticks together, we can count ourselves safe. Stay or go, we should vote on it.’

‘Well, I’m for toughing it out,’ Volso said. ‘I have the utmost faith in the Emperor’s legions, I suggest we wait here to be rescued.’

‘Here, here,’ voices cried.

‘Suppose the water level rises further?’ someone asked. ‘It’s such a torrent, if it sweeps down this gorge, it could take the bridge with it…’

‘That’s not helping,’ Titus growled, shooting a glance from under the fringe which fell over one eye. ‘That’s scaremongering, and that’s not why we should push on. In my view, inactivity is not simply a waste of time, I believe it’s bloody dangerous.’

‘Here, here,’ the same voices cried.

‘Oh, for gods’ sake,’ Claudia barked, marching to the front. ‘All this wrangling’s getting us nowhere, and besides, the whole argument’s academic. We have to send out a burial party, and since that can’t be done tonight, you might as well stop squabbling and sleep on it, and I’m sure you chaps are adult enough to discuss it more calmly in the morning. Now why don’t you all get your bloody nags across this rickety thing the Sequani call a bridge and get a fire going? I am starved!’