The War at the Edge of the World (21 page)

‘Don’t worry – he’s a herbalist,’ Marcellinus said quickly. His voice was hardly more than a gasp. ‘I know him – he served Vepogenus well. He needs to look at my leg…’

The little man was peeling away the bandages. The sour smell of mortifying flesh made Castus’s stomach tighten and he looked away. The boy was gazing at the injured man on the floor with a mixture of fascination and repulsion. Something familiar in his face, Castus thought. Something he had seen before.

‘You,’ said Drustagnus suddenly, in Latin. ‘Your name?’ He was sitting on a stool beside the hearth, holding an apple. Castus remembered that the man had learned Latin as a hostage in Eboracum. He and Cunomagla too. He drew himself up straight.

‘Aurelius Castus, Centurion, Third Cohort, Sixth Legion,’ he said, trying to keep his voice level. Trying to keep the murder from his eyes.

Drustagnus smiled, and bit into the apple with his blunt yellow teeth. He spoke again as he chewed. His Latin was heavily accented and barbarous.

‘Soon, I go with my uncle. Talorcagus. Pict King. We make war on Romans. Then I return here. You – brave warrior. You teach me and all warriors skill of Roman fighting. Then, when Rome king come here, we fight. We kill him.’ He made a casual swiping gesture with his hand. ‘Then Talorcagus king all Britannia. And after him –
me
.’

Not a chance
, Castus thought, but said nothing. Marcellinus had already told him of the preparations for war, the Pictish host assembling from all directions. Twenty thousand spears, or so the guards had claimed, and Marcellinus had said this was plausible. Warriors had come from Hibernia across the sea, and from the Attacotti of the far north. Even many of the Votadini and Selgovae tribesmen had thrown off their allegiance to Rome and joined the uprising. In his mind, Castus had seen them scythed down by the legions, falling in screaming waves before the iron storm of the ballistae and the javelins. But then he remembered the triumph tree with its gory harvest of heads, his men lying dead and mutilated on the road…

Drustagnus stood up suddenly, tossing the apple core into the hearth. He swept his fur cape over one shoulder, baring a scarred sword arm, and then snapped out a question to the herbalist. The little man was busy mixing a paste of herbs and fat in a pestle and spreading it on Marcellinus’s leg. He answered, quiet and deferential. Drustagnus nodded, grunted, and strode out of the hut.

‘He says your friend recovers soon.’

Castus blinked, unsure at first who had spoken; then he saw the woman, Cunomagla, looking at him. For the first time he noticed the fine tracery of markings on her skin, her bare upper arms and forehead inscribed with swirling shapes more subtle than those worn by the warriors. She spoke more fluently than Drustagnus, still with an accent, but her voice was low and rich, almost the voice of a man.

‘Thank you,’ Castus said. She looked him in the eye, her expression hard and unmoving. Assessing him. Was she too his enemy?

‘It is dark in the pit,’ the woman said. ‘I send light.’

Then she turned, urging the boy ahead of her, and made for the door. As he left the hut the boy glanced back, from under the hem of his mother’s cloak, and Castus realised where he had seen those features before. An oval face in darkness. Marcellinus’s daughter.

The light was a small oil lamp with a twisting flame that threw their shadows back into the reaching darkness of the chamber. They sat together beneath the wooden grating, so the oil smoke could rise and they could breathe the faint damp freshness of the outside air. It was night – Castus could not judge how long they had spent together locked in the pit. Three days, or four? The herbalist had come and gone several times, applying more of the foul-smelling paste to Marcellinus’s ruined leg. The envoy’s face had a sunken look as he lay back against the wall.

‘The boy, Cunomagla’s son,’ Castus said to him. ‘Yours?’

Marcellinus nodded, and the shadow of his head swept up and down. ‘Yes. You guessed. After my last campaign against these people, when I made the treaty with Vepogenus, it was sealed with a pact. A pact of brotherhood, but also of marriage.’

‘She’s your
wife
?’

‘Not by our terms. Only by native custom. She was fourteen or fifteen then, the king’s niece, a girl of the royal household. I thought little of it at the time, but later she was sent down to Eboracum with the other noble hostages. Drustagnus and some others. It was inconvenient – I had a Roman wife, and a family, of course. But I… well, the child was conceived. And soon afterwards I was accused of treason and imprisoned. You know the rest of that tale.’

Castus nodded, remembering what Strabo had told him, in what seemed a previous life. The escape to Gaul; the return with Constantius.

‘Does the boy know who you are?’ he asked.

Marcellinus just shrugged. ‘Two years had passed by the time I came north again,’ he said. ‘Cunomagla had returned to her people, and been married to her cousin Vendognus, who claimed the child as his own, though all knew otherwise. Perhaps the boy himself knows, perhaps not. She avoided me then. She’s a proud woman, and ambitious. That was the last I saw of either of them, until I returned here with you.’

Castus narrowed his eyes as the lamp-smuts began to smart.

‘I once thought,’ Marcellinus said, ‘that she might have been responsible for the murder of my son, my legitimate son, when he was held as a hostage. She might be capable of that, to revenge herself on me. But I think not. It would not have availed her anything. She was loyal to Vepogenus then. Now, I’m not sure where her allegiances lie…’

‘With Drustagnus, it looks like.’

‘I don’t know. And perhaps I don’t want to know.’ Marcellinus closed his eyes, head back against the stone slab of the wall. ‘You have to escape this place, brother,’ he said quietly.

‘We will. Both of us.’

‘Not me,’ Marcellinus said, smiling grimly. ‘With this leg, I’d just slow you down…’

Castus gripped his shoulder. ‘I’m not leaving without you. I swore an oath to protect you.’

‘An oath to my daughter! Very conscientious of you. She is little more than a child. Do you know, she was betrothed four years ago, to a cousin of her mother’s who lives in the southern province. But the wedding has never been arranged. Why...? My
reputation
. I’m still seen as suspect. And my family suffer for that. Marcellina has lived all her life at my villa – barely even been to Eboracum more than once or twice. What does she know of the world, do you think?’

‘Doesn’t matter. An oath is an oath. I swore to the gods.’

‘Well, then,’ Marcellinus said, almost under his breath, ‘May the gods forgive you.’

He woke suddenly, disorientated. The air was thick and greasy with the smoke of the lamp. Raising his head from the straw mattress, he saw Marcellinus sitting back against the wall of the chamber with the wavering flame before him. He held a wooden bowl between his palms.

‘Sorry to wake you. I have something I need to tell you.’

Castus raised himself on one elbow, blinking in the smoky glow. Marcellinus lay back against the stone slab, smiling, his eyes only half-open.

‘I am leaving you soon,’ the envoy said in a low, quiet tone. He no longer sounded pained or anguished. ‘I release you from your oath.’

‘What do you mean? Leaving how?’

‘This bowl contains a toxin made from the extract of a certain root. The herbalist smuggled it to me, at my request. He will be gone from here before morning, and so will I, by a different route.’

‘No, I can’t allow it…’ Castus stretched forward, still groggy from sleep, but Marcellinus raised a palm in warning. After so many days as an invalid, he had suddenly regained his look of authority. Sitting back against the wall, he was once more a Roman commander, a leader of men.

‘Do not try to stop me, brother. This is my choice. It is the honourable way. I have made too many mistakes in my life, and returning to this country will be the last of them. I will not be a valuable hostage to them any longer.’

‘Then give me the poison too.’

‘I’m sorry, there is only enough for one. Besides, in releasing you from one vow I must ask of you another.
Escape this place
… Return to my family and tell them what happened to me. Tell them that I died by own hand and by my own will. You must do this – it is my last order to you.’

He was speaking slowly, deliberately, and Castus realised with a shock that he had already drunk the poison and the bowl he held was empty. In the lamplight he could see the sweat forming on the envoy’s brow, the twitch in his jaw as his teeth clenched and relaxed.

‘Promise me!’ Marcellinus said. The bowl fell from his hands, and he wrenched a heavy ring from his finger. ‘Take this – my seal. Return it to my wife, and she’ll know that I sent you.’

He tossed the ring, and Castus caught it in his fist. There was nothing he could do to stop this now. Marcellinus’s throat was tightening, his eyes flicking open and closed. Castus moved closer, but once more the man motioned him away.

‘You may not… want to watch this,’ he said, with difficulty. ‘I’ll extinguish the lamp in a moment… Just a little
more light
…’

Hardly able to breathe, Castus lay down again and rolled on his side facing the wall, the ring held tight in his hand. He heard Marcellinus gasp and retch, his foot kick against the wall; the lamp was snuffed out. A long-drawn breath in the darkness, shuddering, then the wet rattle of death.

Castus lay still, waiting, counting his heartbeats. When he reached one hundred he sat up and groped in the dark for the body slumped against the far wall. He found the neck, checked for the pulse and felt nothing. The solid smoke-smelling blackness was all around him and he felt the dread of death crawling across his skin.

He waited as long as he could bear, and then he dragged himself to the grating and started hammering at it, yelling for the guards.

The music was strange, barbaric, unearthly: thudding drums, wailing pipes and voices, rhythmic shouts and screeches. Castus pressed his cheek to the rough wood of the door and squinted through the crack between the boards. Fire­light dazzled his eye; then he saw capering figures in black silhou­ette, reeling shapes against the blaze, sparks shooting into the night sky. He saw manlike figures with the heads of animals and cruel birds, and felt the sweat freeze on his brow.

But these were men. Men wearing bird-headed masks, danc­ing around the fire with crooked steps, hands clasped behind their backs. He shuddered, fearful of the strange noise, the dark alien gods, the breath of magic and superstition. On his hands and knees he backed away from the door into the dank gloom of the hut.

Three days had passed since they had taken him from the pit where Marcellinus had died. He had been brought out by night and seen little of his surroundings, but had noticed the half-moon between the clouds, and realised that it must have been ten days since the battle. Ten days for the Picts to muster their forces – Aurelius Arpagius would not be expecting his delegation to return until the end of the month. Only then would he realise that something was wrong, and by that time the Picts could already be assaulting the Wall. Perhaps, he thought, the barbaric celebration outside marked the beginning of their campaign, a ritual declaration of war against Rome?

He sat on the floor of the hut and fed a few twigs and some dried moss to the meagre fire in the central hearth. This hut was his new prison: a circle of massive stones enclosing a space only five paces across, containing a straw mattress and a central fireplace. The walls rose to waist height, and above them was the sloping conical roof of smoke-blackened timbers and heavy old turf. Castus had already tested the strength of the ceiling – it would be possible for him to break a hole large enough to clamber through, but the noise of the cracking wood would surely alert the guards outside, and they would be waiting for him as soon as he emerged.

Twice a day the guards removed a slat of wood near the bottom of the door and slid a wooden tray of food and a beaker of water through to him. He could hear their voices outside sometimes, but aside from that he was kept in total solitude. Again and again the images of the battle returned to him: the fury of the attack; the faces of his men as they waited at the wall; Timotheus and Culchianus embracing him before he left them… Hunched on the floor, head lowered, he clasped his fists at the nape of his neck, as if he could press the memories from his mind. Then he stretched on his toes until he could grip the topmost roof beam, and began furiously pulling himself upwards, touching the beam with his chin each time, until the muscles of his arms and stomach burned and he felt the sweat tiding down his back, and dropped lightly to the floor again. Other times he ran on the spot, or whirled and dodged around the narrow circuit of the hut, scuffing up dirt, keeping his reflexes sharp, guarding his strength until he had a chance to use it.

The sound of the music died away outside into a vast mut­tering hush, then a last cry sounded and he heard the assembly break up. Crawling to his mattress in the dark, he lay on his back and waited for sleep. Soon, he told himself – soon he would find the chance he was waiting for, and somehow make his escape, or die in the attempt.

Battering at the door woke him, and he sprang up. Daylight showed between the slats, and he pulled on the rough sleeve­less tunic they had given him and stood ready beside the hearth.

The door opened, and the scarred face of the guard appeared as he stooped into the hut, the stiff comb of his hair brushing the low lintel.

‘
Ech! Deugh umlaen!
’

Castus nodded, and paced towards the door. As he stepped outside he met an arc of levelled spears, and stood passively as the guards tied his hands behind his back. Then they prodded him forward.

It was the first time he had properly seen the fort in daylight. Beneath the heavy sky he saw the flat summit of the hill ringed by the crest of a broad stone wall and a waist-high palisade. The ground fell away on all sides, dropping to the lower surrounding compound. Within the upper enclosure were ten or eleven huts, some animal pens, and at the centre the big firepit from the celebration of the night before, still sending up thin grey smoke. As he passed between the huts Castus saw the dark slopes of mountains on either side, and to the north a wide river estuary gleaming dull silver.