The Wolves of the North (24 page)

The scrunch as his spade bit into the moist soil was unfeasibly loud. The Alani were but a few hundred paces away; it must carry to them. He tugged aside a reluctant root with his bare hands. Allfather, he was tired.

Something splashed behind him, upriver off to his right. He forced himself to ignore it. Warriors – Angle or Herul – did not jump at the slightest sound. All these Steppe streams were full of fish – chub, gudgeon, pike – then there were all those mouse-like creatures: voles, marmots, all sorts of rodents.

Wulfstan bedded in another stake:
tap-tap-tap
. His hands were coated with dirt. It stung where the thorns had cut him. The wet riparian smell was strong in his nose. He reached for the spray of undergrowth he had already cut. The scratch of it was loud as he dragged it over the fresh-dug hole, arranged it just so.

Again, a splash behind him. This time, there was something more; a sucking sound – the sound of something moving through the water. Something, or someone, was moving downstream towards him.

Wulfstan flattened himself against the bank. He listened as hard
as he could. Nothing, just the river. The hoot of a distant owl. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing made by man.

Wulfstan breathed out; almost a sob. His nerves were cracking like spring ice. He went to move. And there was the sound again. Closer now. Much closer now.

Allfather, Deep Hood, Death-blinder, hold your hands over me.

Wulfstan forced himself to look. A sombre, hooded figure maybe thirty paces away. A man was coming cautiously down the stream towards him.

If he moved, Wulfstan would be seen straightaway. If he did not, the man would stumble across him in no time. Wulfstan’s fingers dug into the earth. He began to pray.

In the milk-white light of the moon, the man came on. Twenty paces, less.

Nerthus, Earth Mother, do not desert your child.

An amorphous shadow detached itself from the bank behind the figure. With no sound, it entered the stream. Only faint ripples on the water’s silver surface betrayed its corporeality.

The hooded man came on. Silently, the shadow closed behind it. Steel glittered in the moonlight. An arm snaked around the hood. The steel flashed, cold and without pity, sawing across a pulled-back throat. Legs thrashed, churning the stream; impossibly loud after the silence.

The shadow lowered the dead man into the water, cleaned the blade on his clothes, pushed him aside into a clump of reeds. All was quiet again.

The shadow removed its muddied headgear. Its long hair shone white in the moon.

‘Come, time to go.’ Ballista held out a hand.

Wulfstan took it, let himself be helped down.

They both looked at the dead man.

Wulfstan gazed up at Ballista, uncomprehending.

Ballista smiled. ‘An old Greek poem. Come, time to go.’

Although he had never been more deeply asleep, Ballista woke easily, without a sound, and was calm feeling the pressure on his neck. He opened his eyes. He saw one of the two men whom he had known he would find looking down at him.

Calgacus removed the fingers he was pressing below and just behind Ballista’s left ear. The northerner smiled. The waking gesture was one of many signs he, Calgacus and Maximus had evolved over the years. Sometimes, he thought these signs amounted almost to a private language. It was something to be used when words would not do: in the din of battle, among the intricacies of a court, or in the dead of night.

Calgacus’s face moved. In the light of the low, central fire, it lost much of its ugliness and assumed a delicacy it lacked by day. It wore a sad, tender expression.

Ballista rolled out of his cloak and painfully levered himself into a sitting position.

‘Maybe half an hour to dawn,’ Calgacus said.

Ballista had slept for a couple of hours. In that time, the wind had dropped altogether, and it had clouded over. The moon was
hidden. The sky now was a uniform blue-black, except for a few rents in the clouds where it was a translucent yellow-tinged blue. With no wind, the Steppe grass had ceased to sing. Other sounds had come to the fore: the lapping chuckle of the stream, a background chirring of insects – it was a warm June night – and the strange whistling of those large mouse- or squirrel-like rodents that seemed to inhabit every hollow in the Steppe. Now and then, a horse stamped or coughed.

With difficulty, Ballista got to his feet. Allfather, he was too old for this. Forty-one winters on Middle Earth; far too many to be sleeping on the ground in a war shirt of mail. He walked, stiff in every joint, to the thorn fence. He pulled up his mail, fumbled with the clothes under it and pissed on the
zereba
.

When finished, he walked back and sat down heavily next to the old Caledonian.

Calgacus passed him a beaker of warmed, watered wine.

‘Thank you.’ The northerner sipped. It was too hot to drink. Calgacus passed him some dry biscuit and a hunk of cold fat bacon. Ballista put the bacon on the leg of his trousers; it was no time to be over-fastidious about grease. He dipped the biscuit in the drink and, as each bit softened, nibbled it.

‘Anything?’ Ballista asked.

‘Horsemen moving from the little camp over the river, about an hour ago.’

‘How many?’

Calgacus shook his head. ‘It had already clouded over, black as Niflheim.’

‘And they were leaving the camp opposite us?’

‘It sounded like they went to the big camp to the south.’

‘Any sign of men withdrawing from there?’ Ballista asked.

‘No.’

They sat in silence. Beyond the wine and the bacon were other
smells. The Alani dead had not started stinking yet. There was the scent of clean water, of leaf mould, of crushed grass. Against the bitter aroma of wormwood were other, sweeter scents of those flowers not yet scorched by the heat of summer. The smells of horse and unwashed humanity may have been there, but Ballista could not tell; he was inured to them. The smell of the bacon was there. It came to dominate. Ballista started to gnaw at it.

The Alani had not asked for a truce to reclaim their dead. That was not good. It meant they were going nowhere. They had moved some horsemen from the camp opposite Ballista to the main one. It might help Ballista’s men, but was not good for those holding the wagons.

Ballista could not see how the main defensive line might be improved. The wagon-laager would be near impossible to move or burn, and it would be slow and difficult to get across. Its real weakness had no remedy: there were too few defenders. In each of the six wagons were a Roman soldier and one of the Sarmatian drivers; except the third from the left, which had two Sarmatians but no soldier. In four of the five fortified gaps between the wagons, one of the Heruli was stationed; two of them, Ochus and Datius, were carrying wounds. In the last gap on the right, the
gudja
had taken post, thus freeing Andonnoballus to move about as the commander.

Andonnoballus had with him the two slaves owned by the soldiers to act as runners. The arrangement was the product of much thought and discussion. It was the best they could do. But it was desperately inadequate. There was no reserve. There were just far too few men.

Behind the clouds, the eastern sky had lightened a little. A lone bird began to sing. Almost inconspicuously, others – dozens, then hundreds, if not thousands – joined, until, before the listeners really noticed it, the air was full of birdsong.

‘Do you think the Sarmatian drivers will fight to the death?’ Calgacus asked. ‘They are kin to the Alani.’

Ballista did not reply at once. He was still listening to the dawn chorus, trying to hear any sounds beyond it that signified danger.

‘The Urugundi have their families. While the
gudja
lives, they must fight.’ Calgacus answered his own question.

‘Even if the Gothic priest falls, and the old witch too, it is too late for the Sarmatians. They have no more freedom in the matter than we do,’ Ballista said.

With the coming day, the wind returned. The rents in the cloud were ripped wider, revealing a sky turned pale, silver-gold. Soon, all that was left of the blanket of the dark were isolated clouds fleeing south, the tattered survivors of some celestial rout.

As the light improved, Ballista, Calgacus and every man in the beleaguered laager peered out across the Steppe. Rather than serried ranks of Alani, their mounts literally champing at the bit, there was nothing to be seen except the quiet, dark shapes of the two nomad camps and the smoke rising above them.

The defenders watched and waited. The Alani presumably took their breakfast. The mingled smells of woodsmoke, dung burnt as fuel, and food drifted over.

‘After yesterday, they are reluctant to attack,’ Wulfstan said. He sounded at once both hopeful and disappointed.

‘It may well be,’ Ballista said. ‘But it also means they think they have plenty of time.’

‘And that means Naulobates’ ugly fucking Heruli were nowhere fucking near by last night,’ Calgacus said.

‘They are nomads; they travel fast. They could outrun the news of their coming.’ Ballista felt he had to say something encouraging.

When Arvak and Alsvid, the horses of the sun, hauled the bright
chariot over the horizon, the Alani stirred. A dozen outriders rode out of the camp in front of Ballista and formed a screen. The rest followed, forming up into a compact body under the
tamga
standard, out of bow shot. There did indeed seem fewer of them than the day before.

The Alani standard bellied out in the north wind. The
tamga
looked a bit like an upside-down Greek
omega
with a stylized bird perched on top. Ballista wondered if it had any meaning beyond signifying this particular nobleman.

A messenger, one of the soldiers’ slaves, ran up and told Ballista that much the same was happening at the other camp. There, the Alani had split into three divisions; one aimed at each end of the wagon-laager, one at the middle. There were fewer riders in the latter group.

Ballista thanked the messenger, told him what little news there was and sent him back to Andonnoballus. The main attacks would come here across the river, and at either end of the line of wagons.

The Alani across the river remained where they were.

Maximus started laughing. ‘Keeping out of harm’s way today,’ he called. Ballista and Wulfstan joined in the laughter.

‘Why are you fuckers giggling like girls?’ To Calgacus’s eyes, the Alani were an undifferentiated blur.

‘The priest or nobleman Ballista shot in the leg yesterday is summoning their gods again,’ Wulfstan said. ‘He is rather further away, and hardly in front of the others at all.’

The deep percussion of the nomad war drum carried across the plain. It reverberated in every man’s chest. High, peeling horns rang out. The enemy trotted forward.

The Alani set to with their customary whooping. The handful of Heruli answered with their high
yipping
sound.

‘Are you ready for war?’ Ballista’s battlefield Latin carried across the martial sounds of the Steppe.

‘Ready!’ The
familia
and the auxiliaries huddled in the wagons shouted back. The voices of the latter were muffled and faint.

‘Are you ready for war?’ Three times the call and response rang out. Yet it was a thin and insubstantial thing against the nomadic uproar. Ballista wondered if the traditional Roman battle call had ever been heard so far out beyond the frontiers. This was not the
imperium
, but another world. This was
barbaricum
, and it demanded something else. His youth in Germania told him a battle can be won or lost in the shouting, before a blow is struck.

‘Out! Out! Out!’ Ballista bellowed the age-old war cry of the Angles. Wulfstan, Calgacus and Maximus picked it up. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ Tarchon shouted something similar. Ballista wondered if the Heruli behind him heard, and if it held any folk memories for them.

The ground rang under the drumming hooves of the Alani ponies. The nomads had accelerated into a fast canter. They were shooting as they came. The arrows whistled full of menace through the air. But the trees on both banks and the reinforced
zereba
rendered them ineffective.

Ballista and his men, steady on their own two feet, and presented with a large, dense target, released fast and accurate. Three, four horses crashed to the ground, riders thrown tumbling into the dirt. When the Alani reached the opposite tree line and reined in, there were five riderless horses turning and boring amongst them, causing confusion.

The majority of the Alani swung down, throwing their reins to the few who remained on horseback. The latter wheeled and kicked back towards their camp, four or five ponies galloping behind each on lead reins.

Ballista kept shooting: pluck arrow from ground, nock, draw, aim, release. Nomads continued to fall. Ballista half noted one staggering with an arrow protruding from his eye.

A shaft ricocheted off the lime next to Ballista’s face. It left a weeping, sappy scar on the bough. Ballista drew and released again. The incoming arrows were getting closer. About half the dismounted Alani had remained on the far bank. Scattered among the trees and undergrowth, they were pouring arrows into the defences.

The other nomads – twenty, twenty-five of them? – were rushing down the bank.

A nomad suddenly collapsed, clutching his leg. Another tripped, tumbling face first down into the water. Further along, off to the left, one seemed to half sink into the earth and screamed a terrible scream as if some chthonic deity were dragging him down to the underworld. Others shied away from those areas of the bank. The pits dug by Hippothous and Wulfstan were channelling the Alani, making them bunch up, making them yet better targets.

‘Shoot the ones in the water.’ Ballista doubted if all would obey his order. It is almost impossible to shoot at someone else and not the men shooting at you. Fighting the urge to target the embroidered coat of a bowman pulling an arrow from his
gorytus
on the bank directly across from him, Ballista closed one eye, allowed for the man’s movement and sent an arrow smack into the chest of a man splashing through the river.