The Wolves of the North (26 page)

‘They are withdrawing.’ A voice could be heard from somewhere. As if in confirmation, there was a diminishing thunder of hooves and a bray of distant horns. It took a moment to realize the war drum was silent.

Calgacus had taken longer than the others to get up on to a wagon. It was not just the splint on his right arm impeding him; when he moved, things deep in his shoulder grated together painfully. None of the demented running, clambering, jumping or fighting had helped. And he had long accepted he was far from young.

Finally achieving a point of vantage, Calgacus peered out across the plain. He was not going to admit either to the pain, or that he could see little apart from a blurred cloud of dust that marked the retreating Alani horsemen.

‘Quite a few of them are carrying wounds,’ Maximus said.

‘But, again, they are leaving their dead,’ Andonnoballus said. ‘They will return.’

As they watched the Alani ride away, Ballista and Andonnoballus discussed what had happened, re-creating in detail the ebb and flow of events.

Calgacus had no patience with such futile endeavours. The face of battle was no stranger to him. Battle was nothing but chaos, every man isolated in his own few yards of fear and
exertion. Every participant saw a different battle. Yet, afterwards, some primal urge forced the survivors to impose a pattern, to tell a clear, linear story. It was as if their own memories lacked the necessary validity unless they could be placed within something generally agreed.

‘Their plan was sound,’ Ballista said. ‘They made two diversions; one across the watercourse, the other some mounted skirmishers looking like they might attack the centre of the wagon line. These tied down some of our men, while their two main assaults came in on foot at either end of the laager.’

Calgacus watched three vultures coast in just outside the laager on their feathery wings. All their grace was lost when they came to earth.

‘And it nearly worked,’ Ballista continued. ‘At the western end they were fighting hand to hand around the wagon of the
gudja
. Here in the east they got inside the defences. If we had not blocked the breach and killed the few already inside, it would have worked.’

‘But it did not work,’ Andonnoballus said. ‘There is nothing nomad horse archers hate more than trying to storm a wagon-laager, even if it is defended by only a few desperate men.’

‘It is not just on the Steppe,’ Ballista said. ‘There is nothing harder in the world than taking any fortification manned by just a handful of brave, well-equipped men who will obey orders and dig in their heels. The casualties of the attackers will always be horrendous.’

The Alani had indeed suffered many casualties. No fewer than thirty-nine nomadic corpses were counted. Luckily for the prospects of the majority of these Alani in the afterlife, the three surviving Heruli were too tired and too busy to scalp and strip the skin from the right arms of more than a couple each.

Only eight of the defenders had fallen: the Heruli Ochus and
Aordus, three soldiers, including the one who had been lying already close to death in their wagon, and three Sarmatians.

For the moment, all the corpses were given the same treatment. Defenders and Alani alike were merely rolled and thrown out beyond the defences. Lack of manpower, time, even energy, precluded anything more elaborate and either denigrating or respectful.

Calgacus felt that at this place – Blood River, as it was in his mind – the spirits of death hovered close. He knew Ballista’s people saw the choosers of the slain as beautiful young women. These white-armed, white-breasted girls would carry the chosen to Valhalla, and there in the golden hall of the Allfather they would serve them mead, maybe take them as lovers. For Hellenes like Hippothous, or Romans like Castricius it was different. For them, two grim-eyed warriors, Sleep and Death, bore them away to the underworld, where all but a tiny few would flit and squeak like bats in the dark and cold for an eternity. Calgacus had no idea of the views on the afterlife of his own native tribes in Caledonia. He had been taken too young. He hoped a lifetime among the Angles and serving one of them in remote places would make him eligible for Valhalla. You had to die in battle. There were worse ways to die. Your passing would be one of pain, but that might seem a low price to enter one of the better afterlives. Although the many willing virgins of Manichaeism – was it seventy or more? – also had a strong appeal. And it might be you did not have to die a violent death to get there. Maybe, if he lived through this, he would find out more about the strange new religion.

At any event, Calgacus hoped the souls of those killed had departed, for there were any number of vultures arrived. Ungainly in their haste and greed, they set up a flapping uproar as they squabbled over this sudden, rich bounty. Things would
get worse later, when the darkness allowed the scavengers of the earth to overcome their fear of living men and slink out to devour the dead.

The majority of those being consumed were Alani. The losses of the defenders had been light, but they could ill afford them. Ballista and Andonnoballus rearranged the defence. The river remained held by Hippothous and Castricius. Each was as skilled a killer of men as the other, Calgacus thought, and each as dangerously insane as the other. They were aided by the interpreter and the soon-to-be-freed slave of the soldiers. A reserve of six was to be held back. It consisted of Ballista, Andonnoballus, Maximus, Tarchon, young Wulfstan, and Calgacus himself. It would be certain to be called upon. The actual wagon line now was held only by the
gudja
, two Heruli, three Roman auxiliaries, four Sarmatians and the other military slave. The latter had also been promised his freedom, conditional on both his martial valour and his survival. The latter seemed the larger impediment to his manumission.

It all looked hopeless. Twenty-one men to hold out against still easily more than ten times their number. The majority of the defenders were carrying some wound or other. Several of these were seriously incapacitated; the Herul Datius, the interpreter, one of the Sarmatians, young Wulfstan, who had picked up a nasty gash to his right arm right at the end of the fighting, and, of course, Calgacus himself.

For certain it was hopeless. They were all doomed. Calgacus wondered if he was afraid to die. Certainly he did not welcome death; neither the probable pain of the thing itself, nor the uncertainty of what might come after. And he wanted to live. He wanted to go back to Sicily. He wanted to marry Rebecca, to look after Simon, to have a son of his own. But if all that was to be denied him, if the
norns
had spun that he was to die out here on the Steppe, then he might as well die bravely. He might as
well die out in the open by the side of Ballista and Maximus. As Ballista often said in Greek – some poem or other – death comes to the coward as well as to the brave. And if, by chance, any of them survived, what a song this doomed last fight would make.

‘Three riders coming from the main Alani camp,’ someone called out.

Wearily, Calgacus dragged himself to his feet, along with everyone else whose station allowed them to see.

‘
Zirin!
Zirin!
’ One of the horsemen had a good, strong carrying voice.

‘The call of an envoy or herald,’ Andonnoballus said. He stood high on a wagon, and waved them to approach.

The three rode abreast, very close together. They rode slowly. The outer two seemed to be supporting the one in the middle. As they got closer, the latter could be seen to be slumped in the saddle.

At about the distance an arrow might still penetrate armour, a bit over one hundred paces, Andonnoballus called that it was close enough.

The three stopped. One of the flanking men slung a leg over the neck of his mount and nimbly dropped to the ground. As if it were a sack, he roughly pulled the one in the middle from the saddle. The man feebly put out an arm but crumpled in a heap. The other hauled him to his feet, hung something around his neck and pushed him in the direction of the wagon-laager.

‘He will give you the message. It is his calling,’ the one on foot shouted in the language of Germania. He vaulted back into the saddle. ‘Let him smell his way to you.’ The Alan and his companion laughed, spun their horses and raced away.

There was something strange about the man. He walked like a man in a thick fog; arms out in front, stepping hesitantly, as if he suspected the ground might betray him. And he was not walking
straight towards the camp but off at an angle that would take him past its southern extremity.

‘By all the graces,’ said a voice in Latin.

‘Gods below,’ said another.

‘Fuck,’ said Maximus.

Calgacus saw the man stumble, almost fall. There was something odd about his arms.

‘Come on,’ Ballista said to Maximus. The two clambered through the protective screens and dropped down outside the laager. Vultures waddled away, loud in their complaints.

Instinctively, Calgacus scanned the plain. He could see the two horsemen. They were more than half a mile away. He could see the smudge of smoke that bannered the big nomad camp in the distance. He could see nothing else. Except along the watercourse, there were no trees. As far as he knew, there were no hidden gullies or deceitful undulations where ambushers might lay hidden.

Ballista and Maximus had reached the man. Solicitously enough, they had removed the thing hung around his neck and taken him by the shoulders. Yet in the act of supporting him they seemed to wish to keep their distance.

‘Infernal gods, it is the herald Regulus,’ someone said.

‘How could they do what they have done?’ another said. ‘What evil daemon could drive anyone to this?’

When they were about as far as a boy can throw a stone, Calgacus saw, and wished he had not. The horror was beyond all bearing.

There was blood all down the face of the
praeco
, all down his soiled tunic. His arms were stumps. They ended at the wrist. There were no bandages. Instead, the wounds appeared to have been cauterized. But there was much worse, a much fouler disfigurement. His eyes were gone. No one, not the most skilled physiognomist, could read his soul in those ruined, bloody sockets.

‘Bear a hand,’ Ballista said. ‘Bear a hand, and haul him up.’

Calgacus swallowed his revulsion, took the herald under a shoulder and, as gently as possible, helped lift him up into the wagon-laager.

‘Get flax and the whites of eggs for his eyes,’ Ballista said.

‘I will take care of him.’ The
gudja
– tall, imperturbable – laid an arm around the shoulders of the
praeco
, and led him away to his wagon as a father might lead a son.

Ballista passed the piece of papyrus taken from the herald’s neck to Andonnoballus. There was Greek script on it. The Herul’s lips moved as he read it, but he made no sound. Finished, he smiled, but with no humour. He held the papyrus up and read aloud. ‘Hand us Andonnoballus and Ballista, and the rest of you can depart unharmed. If not, when you fall into our hands, you will beg for this man’s fate.’

A muttering ran along the wagons, as men repeated it and translated it into various tongues.

Laughter – muted, rueful chuckles at first; no one was sure where it started – spread through the laager.

‘Fuck you!’ Maximus howled. Others joined in: obscenities, curses, vows of revenge, even dark jokes were shouted at the distant Alani camp and at the uncaring vastness of the Steppe.

The
gudja
returned.

‘How is he?’ Ballista asked.

‘At peace,’ the Goth replied.

Ballista looked shocked.

‘It is best,’ the
gudja
said. ‘What life would there be for a man with no eyes to see, no hands to feed himself?’

The others were silent.

‘They had castrated him as well.’ The bones and amulets in the hair of the
gudja
clinked as he turned to go.

‘Sure, it is a kindness,’ Maximus said, ‘but a terrible kindness which will weigh on you.’

The
gudja
walked off without replying.

Calgacus drew a little apart with Ballista and Maximus. They stood in the centre of the laager. ‘Are you certain no one will betray us?’

‘Certain,’ Ballista said. ‘No one could be that big a fool. The Alani have lost too many for clemency. Everyone knows they will kill us all.’

‘The Alani king is not here, and I have not seen the Suanian Saurmag among them, but still they want you badly,’ Maximus said.

‘And Andonnoballus,’ Ballista added. ‘It is interesting they want him, but not the other Heruli.’

‘They are moving.’ The shout from Wulfstan curtailed further speculation.

There were more Alani this time, but they kept further away. Somewhere near extreme bow shot, approaching three hundred paces, thirty or forty Alani swarmed. Many of them got down from their ponies.

Except for those keeping watch over the other approaches, the entire beleaguered garrison crowded to watch. Hippothous came and stood next to Calgacus and the others. The Greek had left Castricius overseeing the river.

The sounds of hammering drifted across, covering the sighing of the grass and the quarrels of the vultures. The hammering stopped. There were wild shouts and mocking laughter. Then there were screams – at first of fear, then of agony, terrible agony.

Hippothous recited the verse well.

‘Sophocles,’ Andonnoballus said.

Hippothous was not the only one to look at the Herul with surprise.

Andonnoballus ignored them.

The Alani mounted up, whirled their horses and, whooping, rode a little further away.

Three stakes were left standing in the Steppe. On each a man was impaled.

‘Who are they?’ Calgacus’s eyes were not near good enough to hope to recognize individuals at that distance.

‘It looks like the rest of the staff,’ Maximus said, ‘Porsenna the
haruspex
, and the other scribe and messenger – the poor bastards.’