The War at the Edge of the World (27 page)

‘I’m searching for a villa near here,’ he said as the slave girl brought food and a cup of beer. ‘It belongs to a Roman named Aelius Marcellinus. Do you know of it?’

The woman frowned, considering, but then shook her head. The slack-mouthed boy came in from the darkness of the yard, and the woman called out a question to him. Her voice was harsh, demanding, and the boy made a strange gesture, half a shrug and an expressive flutter. Then he held up his fingers, counting and pointing. A mute, Castus guessed.

‘Tasca here knows the place you mean. It’s about six miles south and east – but it’ll be dark soon, as I say, and the country isn’t safe. Stay with us tonight and the boy will take you in the morning.’

For a moment Castus wanted to refuse. The thought of further delay now, when he was so close, was almost maddening. But he knew the woman was right: unless he forced the mute boy to guide him at swordpoint, he would soon lose his way and be prey to any danger. Besides, he was tired. Too tired to think properly, or to act effectively.

Once he had eaten he allowed the slave girl to lead him to a dark corner of the room piled with blankets. He lay down, lulled by the hushed voices of the old woman and the twin slaves talking beside the hearth. At the edge of sleep a face appeared to him: Marcellinus’s daughter, speaking silently. Her eyes held the same quiet anguish as the old woman of the house. Another soldier’s daughter, Castus thought as his mind slipped into darkness. Could the girl somehow know that her father was dead?

The sky was light but the sun was still below the trees as Castus prepared to depart. He plunged his head into the horse trough and then flung himself back, spattering water. Wheeling his arms to ease the cramps in his shoulders, he watched the boy saddle the horse and fetch a mule from behind the house. The old woman stood in the doorway with the slave girl.

‘Take this,’ the woman said, passing Castus a bundle wrap­ped in greased rag. ‘Hot barley cakes, for the journey.’

‘Thanks,’ Castus said, and swung himself up, wincing, into the saddle.

‘If you get back to Eboracum, please look for my son. Varialus, remember. Tell him Adiutoris and Jucunda, his mother and father, are safe.’

‘I’ll tell him.’ Castus paused, gave a brief military salute, and then turned his horse.

‘May the gods protect you,’ the woman Jucunda called as he rode away.

The mute boy led at a brisk pace, bouncing along on his mule, and soon the sun was striking down through the trees and lighting the strips of tilled ground beside the path. At times the boy turned and twisted his mouth, gesturing and making sounds that Castus could not interpret. He wanted to tell the boy to go faster – now it was daylight he felt the urgency of the situation more clearly. He hardly dared think what he hoped, or what he feared, to find ahead of him.

They followed the loop of the river, keeping to the high ground above the trees on a dirt trail. A mile more, then two, and as they crossed a broad marshy sward Castus looked up and saw crows wheeling over the trees. Then the boy gave a strangled cry, pointing: a body lay in the grass beside the trail. A young man, wearing the clean white tunic of a house slave. Flies gathered on his lips.

Castus kicked his horse forward, swerving around the boy on the mule and galloping on up the trail. Alone now, he rode on between the trees until they broke. Then he saw the villa before him.

The roof had fallen in, the walls were smudged with black, and a thin mist of smoke still rose from the gaping doors and windows. Castus stared, breathing hard, tasting ash in the back of his throat. For a moment he wanted only to die – the shame of the delay, the failure – but he could see no flames, and he knew that the burning had happened more than a day before.

Slowly now, he nudged the horse forward through the last of the trees and across the open field at the back of the villa enclosure. There was an old rampart, a ditch and a wooden palisade that circled the compound, but the palisade was neg­lected and broken down in places and the ditch overgrown. Scanning the woods, the circuit of the rampart, the ruins, Castus let the horse carry him closer. When he reached the ditch he dismounted and tethered the horse to the broken palisade, then climbed across into the compound with his sword drawn.

Nobody in sight. The scene was almost peaceful, with the slow curls of grey smoke, the sunlight heavy on the grass and the gravel of the forecourt. But the air stank of burnt timber and plaster, and the memory of violence seemed to shimmer in the still air. Castus paced across the herb garden at the back of the house. Tensed, muscles tight, he climbed the steps to the porch. Broken tiles cracked under his boots. The air was charged with soot here, and he pulled up his neckscarf to cover his mouth.

In through the blackened doorway, he clambered over the wrack of charred timbers and tiles from the fallen roof. He could still feel the heat of the fire radiating from the walls. Clambering over collapsed beams, he reached the corridor at the front of the house. Misted fragments of broken glass ground and crunched beneath his feet, and looking down he could make out the pattern of the mosaic floor through the thick coating of burnt debris. He moved to the right, towards the wide doorway of the dining room where, just over a month before, he had eaten dinner with Marcellinus and Strabo.

Sunlight came from the shattered roof, lighting the haze of smoke and soot. Flies were already circling, and a stench caught in his throat and churned his stomach. Castus stood in the doorway, pressing the scarf over his mouth. For a moment he saw only the burnt wreckage. Then what had seemed a charred timber became the stump of a reaching arm. Teeth showed between shrunken black lips.

He stepped back into the corridor. Nothing could have survived here. Any that escaped would have been hunted down, like the dead slave out on the track. Backing away further, scuffing his feet through the debris, Castus emerged into the shadow of the front portico. Pulling the scarf down from his mouth, he took great heaving lungfuls of air. His head was spinning, and his stomach crawled. Marcellinus’s wife and daughter, with their whole household, were as dead as Marcellinus himself, and for all his vows Castus had not been able to protect any of them.

Then, as he stared into the bright daylight of the forecourt, he saw the pony. A native pony, tethered beside the stable block, head down and cropping grass. He stepped quickly behind one of the standing columns of the portico, but before he could look again he heard a sharp cry. He knew it at once: the cry of a man at the point of death.

Flinging himself away from the pillar he jumped down into the yard and sprinted across the gravel with his sword held low. The cry had come from behind the stable block. Breathing hard, Castus threw himself against the wall of the stable and turned, scanning the yard behind him. Empty. He doubled the corner and saw another building before him, a disused bath-house with the door hanging open. The cry had come from there. Warily, he advanced from the stable wall towards the open door, dropping into a fighting crouch as he paced forward. Flies whirled around his head, and he heard birdsong from the trees beyond the boundary fence.

Four paces from the door he paused, squinting into the darkness of the building. A body was lying face down just inside the threshold. A man, in native cloak and tunic, with a bloody wound in the centre of his back. Castus moved closer, breathing slowly, glancing to either side. He reached the doorway and studied the body – quite dead, not a twitch of movement. It looked as though a single blow had felled the man. Castus winged his shoulders, feeling the sweat of his palm as he gripped the sword, then he leaped forward, across the body and through the door.

Sudden movement from his right, and he ducked just in time. The heavy head of a mattock swung across his back and buried itself in the wall beside the door, spraying plaster. Twisting on his toes, Castus came back upright with his sword levelled, elbow drawn back to strike.

For a moment in the thick darkness he could see nothing, just the tool stuck in the wall with the haft jutting out into the sunlight. Then he heard a hiss of breath, and saw the movement of a body shrinking back from the doorway. He growled, edging forward, and at that moment a spear slashed in through the doorway and a man’s body blocked the light.

Castus moved without thinking. He dropped, turned and punched out with the blade in one swift movement. The sword caught the man as he came through the door, stabbing up under his ribs. Castus stepped in close, into the body-smell, the blood-smell, slamming into his attacker and grappling his neck as he drove the sword in up to the hilt. The body slumped against him, twisted and fell, and Castus dragged the blade out of the wound.

Blood was on his face, hot on his right hand and up his arm, and he felt the energy of battle pulsing through him as he turned again to confront the person sheltering inside the door. A lunge and a stab and it would be finished.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw her crouching in the deepest corner of the room. Castus eased down his blade. ‘Marcellina?’ he said.

The mattock fell from the wall and clattered on the tiled floor.

‘It’s me. Aurelius Castus. The centurion who went north with your father. Do you remember?’ It was hard to get the words out. His throat was still tense from the fight.

He laid his sword down, stretched out his hand to her. But his hand was covered in blood; his whole arm was spattered with it. Now he could feel the ringing in his ears, the aftershock of combat. His heart was still beating heavily, and his hand trembled.

‘Look at me,’ he said, trying to soften his voice. ‘Look at me – I’m Roman. I’m a friend… You understand?’

The girl stayed crouched in the corner, drawn tight, shud­dering. She wore a long tunic of fine light-blue wool, a coral necklace and pendant earrings, as if she had just walked out of the house, but her hair was hanging loose. How long had she been hiding like this? And what strength must it have taken her, Castus thought, to swing the heavy mattock hard enough to kill one man, then swing it again as he had stepped through the door himself?

‘I’ll get you water,’ he said. Picking up his sword he backed away from the girl, stepping over the bodies sprawled inside the doorway. The man he had just killed lay on his side, eyes open, with a lake of blood spreading around him. His hair was cropped short with a tuft at the back, and his sparse beard was trimmed around his mouth. Not a Pict, Castus reckoned; the man was from one of the southern tribes perhaps. Votadini or Selgovae. A scavenger dragging through the wreckage of war.

Castus looked up from the corpse, into the sunlight, and stopped still. Two ponies were tethered at the back of the stable.

Two at the back, one at the front.
Three
.

‘There’s another one,’ Castus said quietly. He listened into the silence, hearing the ticking of the roof beams overhead, the trickle of plaster from the wall where the mattock had struck. Then – just at the edge of hearing – the slight shuffle from outside, the rasping intake of breath.

The third man was pressed against the outside wall, edging towards the door.

‘
Stay quiet
,’ Castus whispered to the girl. ‘
Don’t move
.’ He could feel the pool of wet blood spreading around the soles of his boots. No sound from outside; the man was not moving. If he ran now, he could reach the ponies and ride for help before Castus could catch him.

One long breath, then he leaped through the doorway and into the sunlight. He spun immediately to face the wall, and the man was there, braced. Castus noticed that he was holding a Roman spatha – battlefield loot. For a heartbeat they stared at each other.

Then the man cried out, feinted to the left and jumped right, flailing his spatha in the air; the long blade was unfamiliar to him, and he did not have the balance of it. He was running, trying to swerve around the limit of Castus’s reach. Castus stamped forward, slashing his sword in a wide low arc and cutting the man on the back of the knee as he ran. The man screamed and fell, hobbled, into the dust.

Two steps, and Castus stood over him. The man rolled onto his side, lips drawn away from his teeth. His weapon had fallen and he lunged for it, fingers scrabbling in the dirt, snarling a curse in his own language. Castus trod on the man’s shoulder and forced him onto his back, reversed his grip on his sword, raised it in both hands and plunged it down.

Marcellina screamed as he stepped back into the bath-house. She was still crouching in the corner with a dirty shawl pulled over her head.

‘I got him, don’t worry. He’s dead now. But there might be others around – we have to leave.’

The girl flinched back as he approached her. She seemed to have forgotten who he was.

‘Juno preserve us,’ Castus muttered. He wiped his sword on a dead man’s tunic, sheathed it, and then came back to kneel beside Marcellina. She was crying, or trying to, just tight little stabs of breath. He slipped his arm beneath her knees and she started to struggle against him, but he held her tight, got his other arm around her shoulders and lifted her. She went limp in his arms, and he realised that she had passed out.

They rode until evening, south-west away from the villa and through the hill country onto the flanks of the high moors, far from marauding bands. Castus had tried to put the girl on one of the native ponies, but she was even less of a rider than he was, and short of tying her to the beast’s back he knew she would never manage the journey. So he carried her before him, perched across the saddle bow with her legs dangling over the horse’s flank, supporting her with his left arm. Not an easy or comfortable ride, and they made slow progress, but at least she had stopped trying to fight him.

There was still light on the western horizon, and Castus could make out the silhouette of a rocky tumulus on the high ground. At first there seemed to be giant carved figures standing on the hilltop, but as he got closer he saw that they were strange formations of rock, towers and piers, and boulders piled into stacks. Once, when he was marching across Asia with the Herculiani, he had seen something similar in Cappadocia; somebody had told him that the shapes were carved by the wind, but Castus could hardly believe that was possible. It was a strange sight, unnerving against the glow of sunset, but he needed a secure refuge, and there was no sign of human habitation up there.