Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (40 page)

He fell to his knees at my feet and gazed up into my eyes, his face twisted into a mask of consternation and terror as he realized what I had done to him. There was nothing worse than a belly wound, I knew. I had never seen one before, let alone dealt one, but I had heard all about what they meant: a slow, lingering, agonizing death.

"Finish him. You can't leave the poor whoreson like that."

I looked away from my assailant's face to where Ursus stood close by, watching us, an arrow in his bow again, and I knew that even if I could do no more, Ursus would put the fellow out of his misery. But that, again, would be an avoidance that I would find difficult to live with. I looked back at my former opponent, who had fallen forward and now hung head down in front of me and moaning quietly, then I stepped to one side, gripped my spatha firmly in both hands and swung hard at his exposed neck, killing him instantly. Then I turned aside and vomited.

I have no idea how long it took me to recover from the sickness that swept over me, but when it was over and I picked myself up off the ground I found that Ursus had confiscated our assailants' provisions and kindled a fire to cook some bannock to go with the cooked meat he had found in one of their packs. The smells were delicious, and I approached the fire slowly, feeling somewhat shamefaced about my latest pusillanimous behaviour. Ursus, however, said nothing at all and contented himself with serving me some heated meat on a slab of thin, salty, freshly baked bannock. I accepted it gratefully and devoured it without saying a word. Ursus ate his more slowly, and when he was done he licked the blade of his knife carefully and pointed it at me.

"You did well, lad. First kill's never easy to handle. But it'll never be as difficult or as worrisome again, I promise."

"He wasn't the first." I raised my head and looked Ursus directly in the eye. 'The one I shot with your bow was the first."

Ursus twisted his face into the semblance of a half grin. "Nah," he said. "That one didn't count. That was no more than helping a friend in need. If you hadn't taken that one down he would have been on top of me before I could handle his friend, and that might easily have been the end of me. Truth is, lad, your first real kill's always the one whose blood gets on your hands and your clothes— the up-close, frantic one who's trying just as hard to kill you as you are to kill him. He's the one you'll dream about for a while. But you'll get over it, in time. We all do."

He skewered the last piece of meat that lay simmering on the flat iron griddle he had laid on the coals of the fire—he must have found that, too, I realized, in his searching—and dropped it onto the last remaining piece of bannock in his hand, then closed his fist, squeezing the whole thing into a solid cylinder of bread and meat. He held it out to me. "Here, finish this, and then we'll salvage those arrows and drag the bodies out of sight. Can't bury them, but we can't just leave them lying there, either."

A long time later, after it grew dark, he spoke to me again across the dying fire. "Where exactly are you headed? Where are your people from?"

It was the first thing either of us had said for hours and it roused me from my semi-stupor of meditation. I realized that I couldn't answer his question properly, simple though it was. I knew where I was going, but I had no notion of how to get there from where we were.

"Genava," I told him. "It's a lake, far to the southeast, I think, close to the Alps—part of the Frankish kingdom called Benwick. King Ban rules there. He is a Ripuarian Frank and my stepfather, wed to my mother's sister—"

Ursus interrupted me with a scoffing laugh. "A Frank's a Frank, lad, be he from north or south. Leave it at that."

"No, that's not true. The two are very different, no matter that they sound alike. King Ban is a Ripuarian Frank, but I'm not. I'm a Salian Frank, from the north, near the Rhine River. My father's people lived and ruled along the Rhine. Ban rules along the Rhodanus, which is called the Rhone nowadays. Rhine, Rhone, almost the same, one in the north, one in the south. Are they the same river because of that? I think not."

Ursus raised both eyebrows and pursed his lips, then nodded deeply, maintaining his wide-eyed look. "Prettily put," he said. "A point well made, so I will say no more."

I shrugged. "The fact remains, I know where I'm headed, but I don't know how to set about going there from here. I don't know where we are now."

Ursus laughed, a sharp, deep bark. "Is that all? Well, lad, that's easily taken care of since I know exactly where we are, and I also know the route from here to Benwick and Lake Genava."

I blinked at him, astonished. "You do?"

"Of course I do, and you'd better learn to do the same, and the quicker the better." He paused, gazing at me. "Knowing where you are is a matter of simple self-preservation. Look at me, a professional soldier, a mercenary. If I don't know where I am at any time I could be killed, simply for wandering among the wrong people. And so I pay attention to where I go, always. I'm so used to doing it that I never think about it any more, but I always remember where I've been and I know where I am headed next—even if it's only as far as I can see in a strange country."

"So where are we now?"

"Seven days' south of the gorge on the Liger River, headed southeast, this being the seventh day, and I'd say we've been covering less than a score of miles a day because we've been being cautious, moving slow, keeping our heads down, covering our tracks and taking care to stay out of people's way. Seven more days at the same speed should bring us to Lugdunum. The locals call it
Leeyon, but whichever way you say it, it's the military administration's headquarters for south-central Gaul." He paused, waiting for my admiration, and when I admitted it he grinned. "What's important about that, though, from your viewpoint, is that if we swing back to the northeast from there and follow the High Road, we can be bathing in Lake Genava in five more days, providing the water's warm enough."

This was momentous news, and I was pleasantly surprised at how close we were to my family home, for had he told me it would take us three times as long I would have accepted that without demur. I felt my face split into a wide grin.

"Well, whether the lake is cold or not, King Ban's bath houses are fine, I promise you. They were built for a Roman governor long ago and they lack nothing that his wealth could provide. Will you come with me, then, to Benwick?"

"Of course, how could I not? I have to see you safely home. We should find word of Duke Lorco in Lugdunum, but even if we are ahead of him and he hasn't arrived yet, we'll leave word there that I've escorted you home and I'll follow him later to Carcasso. Does that sound like good sense? Course it does, so let's get some sleep and be on the road again early tomorrow morning."

4

The twelve days Ursus had estimated for our journey were more than sufficient. We found ourselves approaching Lugdunum at the end of the fifth of the seven days he had allowed us for that portion, and this was mainly because, within three days of setting out on that last lap, we had found ourselves in a heavily traveled area serviced by one of Rome's great spear-straight roads and hence were able to discard all our former caution and proceed openly at more than twice our previous pace.

Lugdunum was a surprise to me. I knew I must have passed through it years earlier on my way north to Auxerre, but I had absolutely no memory of the place, and I found it to be very different, in almost every way that I could think of, from its counterpart city of Treves in the north. Each had a military fortress, and the imperial legions quartered there were the same in both places.

Apart from that similarity, however, everything else was different from one town to the other, beginning most notably with the food but extending to the local people, the farmers and artisans who lived in the surrounding areas. The climate was warmer here, for one thing, since we were now in southern Gaul, but the very appearance of the local folk was completely dissimilar to that of the people who lived in the Treves region. These people here were darker skinned than their northern brethren, and they seemed plumper, somehow, sleeker, more content and more self-satisfied. "Better fed" was the way Ursus expressed it, and in the utterance he made it sound like some kind of cause for shame.

The wine they drank was better, loo, I learned, and even though I could not have told from tasting it I could see for myself that the white wine of this region was closer to yellow in appearance, so I was prepared to believe that it might be thicker and more fruity with the kinds of sugar that northern wines lacked notably. It was the local red wine that made this region famous, however, according to what Ursus told me, and I saw no reason to doubt him, although I had no desire to taste any of it. I had tasted my first cup of watered wine at twelve years old. Now, almost four years later, the blend of the two liquids I infrequently drank was barely stronger than that first anemic mixture of one part wine to three parts water. I still found the taste of it unpleasant and preferred the honest tastelessness of chilled, clear water.

We found no trace of Lorco's turmae in Lugdunum. No one had heard of him or from him since he and his party passed through on the way north a month earlier. And so Ursus delivered a formal report to the military authorities, describing all that had happened, to the best of our limited knowledge, and left another written missive with the commander of the garrison for delivery to Duke Lorco when he arrived. That done, Ursus and I ale in the garrison refectory that night and slept soundly for eight hours in one of the barracks rooms before striking out again at dawn along the broad, straight highway that followed the Rhone River to the lake called Genava in the ancient territories of Cisalpine Gaul.

We rode with the river on our right, and at first we had no shortage of companions along the route, teamsters with laden wagons and self-sufficient pedestrians and an occasional string of laden mules led by handlers as taciturn as the creatures they led. But as we traveled farther and farther beyond the protection of the military headquarters, our traveling companions reached their various destinations in hamlets and small towns and villa farms and left us to travel on without them, until eventually we were alone again on the open road.

We no longer had any need to hunt for food, which pleased us both, for once Ursus had established his identity and his membership in Duke Lorco's squadrons, he had been able to draw some of his unpaid stipend from the offices of the military paymaster in Lugdunum. With those funds he had immediately gone looking for a commodious tent of hand-sewn leather panels to replace the one he had lost in the ambush by the river. I was most impressed with the workmanship I could see in the tent's finish, but Ursus waved a hand dismissively, saying it was nowhere near as large or as fine as the one he had lost. Then, having bought the tent, he also bought a horse to carry it, for the thing was much too large to carry on the horse he had inherited from Lorco. I watched closely, but said nothing while he negotiated with the horse trader, but I was satisfied that he had acquitted himself well and had bought a fine, strong animal.

From the horse dealer's premises, we next made our way to the armories, where he replenished his supply of arrows and purchased a bow and another quiver full of arrows for me before taking me on an expedition to purchase rations for the ensuing week, and now our saddlebags were filled with provisions: fresh crusty loaves of heavy, rich brown bread; several kinds of dried and salted meat and fish; four rounds of cheese, two soft and new and two hard and dry; a flask of the garlic-enriched fish oil that had been beloved of Roman soldiers for countless hundreds of years, together with a vial of thick, aromatic black vinegar and even two earthen jars of salty, fat green olives preserved in their own oil. We were men of wealth on this portion of our journey, at least when it came to eating.

On the afternoon of our second day out of Lugdunum it threatened to rain heavily on us and we could see no signs of any rift in the thick-piled banks of cloud that had swept in upon us from the north, so we decided we would rather make camp early and sit warm and dry in our new leather tent than press on for no good reason and endure the deluge.

We picked a spot in the open, about a hundred paces from the roadside and close to the river, in the shelter of a huge dead tree that would provide us with all the firewood we might need. It took us almost an hour to pitch the tent to Ursus's liking, since this was the first time we had tried it and every tent ever made has its own quirks and peculiarities. By the time we had it up and ready to use, my hands were sore and bruised from struggling with stiff new, abrasive and unyielding ropes. As soon as that task was done, I went gathering ferns for our bedding, no great hardship compared to pitching the tent because, as close as we were to the water, ferns grew in lush profusion among the trees on the riverbank.

By the time I had brought back four enormous double loads of fresh green bedding, Ursus had built a healthy fire that he felt confident would burn throughout the coming storm, and we settled in to eat and wait for the storm to break. We ate well that night, and the storm held off until we had eaten our fill and seen to our horses' needs for the night. We could hear thunder rolling in the distance and so knew that the storm was out there, but no rain fell for a long lime and we saw no signs of lightning throughout the time the sun set and night fell. I fell asleep almost before it grew completely dark, and Ursus was already snoring by that lime, and I slept soundly through the earliest stages of the breaking storm.

I snapped awake sometime in the middle of the night, my eyes full of the remembered flare of a burst of brilliant light, and my breast shocked near to death with the concussion of a single massive, booming explosion. I sprang upright, leaping from the softness of my bed to land on my feet, glaring blindly about me and trying to tell myself that I was not afraid. I had no memory of drawing the sword that filled my hand and no awareness of where I was or what was happening. All I knew was I was in pitch darkness and something terrifying had happened. But then I heard the solid, steady roar of heavy rain on the leather panels just above my head, and my memory returned.