The rain had let up, but the forest was still mist-shrouded, full of the smell of wet earth and last year’s leaves. A war spear and a round shield were lashed to the little horse’s saddle along with a bag of silver. The blanket beneath was a native weave, and Faustus’s trousers, loose about the leg in the British fashion, were boldly checked in blue and red. A sword with tribal mountings hung at his belt and the gold torque at his throat and gold armbands befitted a Silure lord, even a disgraced one with a ragged stubble on his upper lip. The tribal pattern on his cheeks was paint but authentic enough in shadow. He would have to hope for shadow. It was likely, as the Ordovice men were keeping to deer trails and hidden tracks far into the trees. Faustus had ridden over the Silure Hills before while hunting and always felt the presence of something else at his elbow, something belonging to the woods and the wet places. The deep green of the forest was studded with patches of bog, bright green moss, and boulders that might have been tumbled from a god’s hand. It was a place that would not surprise him to find the Oldest Ones living.
The handful of border wolves with him included Aurelius Rotri; back in the job he loved and grinning. They were dark men, mounted on native ponies, their luxuriant hair and mustaches and gold ornament proclaiming them lords as well. Yesterday they had sighted the Ordovice party on the trail, with the tribune in their midst, hands tied behind him and bumping unhappily in the saddle. Today they had shed the nondescript clothing that blended with the trees for the bright adornment of the high-born and set a course to intercept them from the south.
The scouts had spotted the envoy from Cadal as he left Porth Cerrig ten days ago and they had let him through to set the thing in motion. All concerned considered it unlikely that the Ordovices would take the tribune clear into Silure country; there would be a handoff somewhere on the border. The Silure party would by now be probably a day’s ride behind, with Septimus and a century of the First Cohort on their tail. If they were lucky, Faustus thought, he and his border wolves would be there first and gone again before the Silures caught up. If not… two more centuries of Faustus’s men trailed them carefully in the distance on the Roman roads, near enough, with luck, to hear a trumpet call.
Faustus thought that Caecilius held little hope of their success, but Faustus would save someone if he could, even if only the tribune, who had a father and wife and small child in Rome, who belonged to someone who would mourn him if he didn’t come home. The rescue party would also kill him if they had to, and Caecilius was aware of that too. If Loarn learned that the West Britain legions were even more undermanned than he had thought, if Cadal learned that, then everything might turn over on that knowledge, even Cadal.
And Silvia. He would not be able to get her out when she changed her mind. If she did. How deeply she hated him and now hated Rome in the incarnation of the legions, he was not certain. It didn’t matter, not to his responsibilities. His job was to look to his legion, but if there was open rebellion, civilians in its path would be caught up in it too. He felt as if they all perched on his head and shoulders, clung to his shirt like starlings fighting for a place in a hawthorn’s branches – the ones he hadn’t saved, the ones he couldn’t save, the ones he might yet save.
Septimus halted his men and squinted through the trees. He could just see the glint of steel, spearpoints catching the afternoon sun. Not many, thirty maybe: the Silures or he was a daffodil.
“We could take them easy, Centurion,” Naso said. They were two to one at least.
Septimus shook his head. “Not unless we have to. We want to give the commander a chance to pull him loose without a fight, nor their knowing it was us.”
“Why that then? Keep the tribune alive, I can see, but why not know it was us, and give the Silure bastards notice we’ll not be having that?”
“Because likely they and Cadal’s men will quarrel with each other over who’s got him, you see? And that’s to our advantage. Our job is to track these and if they get too close to the border with Ordovice lands – that’s where they’ll make the hand-off for the tribune – then we take them out, but not if we don’t have to.” Not if the primus pilus got to the Ordovices first, brought off his impersonation, and didn’t get himself or the tribune killed in the process. Septimus was pessimistic about that outcome, but he had his orders.
A scout materialized between the trees and saluted Septimus. “They’re making camp, sir. I counted thirty-two, a couple that might be council lords and thirty spearmen. All mounted.”
“Is there a spot to halt where they won’t sight our fires?” If they got ahead of the Silures they stood the chance of losing them.
“A ridge north of here and east from them. If we camp on the far side and put a watch up top we’ll be able to see when they break camp – they’ll have to go past us. They’ve been staying to the trees, best luck for us. Horses won’t outpace us through trees.”
Septimus considered the possibilities. They had two days, he thought, before he’d have to take his optio’s advice. They would trail Loarn’s men out of sight, and then they would either get word from the primus pilus that he had the tribune and they were to back away, or they would have to waylay them.
That was confirmed in the night when the scout crept out of camp, lay in the bracken outside the Silure camp with his ears pricked, and came back again to wake Septimus.
“They’re making for Lleu’s Well,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“North two day’s march. Near – under – a hill fortress that’s from before our day. The place has been abandoned for years, centuries maybe, but the hill sticks up on the skyline like a great tit. I’ve been there. There’s a stinking spring that comes out of the rock a few miles away.”
“Stinking springs are holy,” Septimus said. “One way or the other. That will be the spot.”
“I think so. It’s just on the border between the Silures, the Demetae, and the Ordovices and if it’s holy it will help bind any bargain they’ve made.”
Septimus rolled over and tried to sleep, but it didn’t come, and neither did a dispatch rider from Faustus. Two days later in the gray pre-dawn he rose and stood listening to the birdsong that told him that still no rider came. Nor was the Silure camp half a mile away stirring yet. He shook his watch commander awake as a late-homing bat flitted past them.
“Now. We won’t wait any longer. Move them out. Battle order and leave the tents. We’ll catch them in camp and be done with it.”
The Silures had halted in the lee of a stony bluff, studded with wind-bent scrub. The Romans poured from the trees on the other three sides, down bracken-covered slopes and the rocky scree where a shallow stream fed one of the silver rivers that laced the Silure Hills like a fish net. Before they had closed on the camp it was in furious motion. A gray-mustached man in an iron helmet shouted orders, cursing, and a whirr of slingstones flew into the oncoming legionaries as Silure spearmen snatched up weapons and bridled their ponies. Mounted in haste, they bunched together, pushing at the weakest point in the Roman line, trying to shove through before they were trapped. They were outnumbered, but on horseback and spear-armed they held the Romans off at first until the legionaries closed ranks, pushing them back against the bluff. Two went down before slingstones hurled by retreating horsemen trying to scramble up the hillside, and another under the hooves of a rider forcing his pony through the advancing shield wall of the attackers. The pony and its rider were cut down and the shield wall stepped over them.
The Romans went for the horses, smaller than Roman troop horses, and for the riders’ legs, hacking with the sharp, short legionary sword that could either stab or slash. They used their heavy shields to block downward driving spears, duck under, shove at the spearmen, push them off their saddles. The loose horses panicked and scattered, trampling unhorsed Britons. The Romans opened ranks to let them go and closed again.
The gray-mustached man and a second helmeted warrior rallied the spearmen around them, lordly figures in ring mail and gold at the battle’s center, armed with long swords; weapons that like the war spears had been treaty-banned. The Romans pushed harder, trying to close the circle completely, bunch them up until they could no longer fight. The Roman shield ring in places was still only one man deep.
The gray-haired lord swung his sword at Septimus. Septimus pushed his shield into the blow, staggering from the force of it. His watch commander, in the line beside him, took the Briton through the throat with a slash of his short sword that cut through the helmet strap and sent it spinning away. The man fell in a gout of blood that soaked the ground and slicked the rock under their feet until Septimus lost his footing again.
With a bellow of fury, the other lord spun his mount around, put his heels to its flanks, and rode it hard at the shield ring where it was weakest. The pony leapt, higher than Septimus would have thought it could, clearing the heads of legionaries who swung their swords up in haste and tried to gut it as it passed. Then horse and rider were down the other side and gone at a gallop into the trees.
The Ordovices halted at Lleu’s Well, tied the tribune to the ill-gaited pony he had ridden from Bryn Epona, and the pony to a tree while the rest dismounted, stretched, and shared a loaf of bread and skin of mead.
Neither Cadal nor Loarn would come to the exchange that would deliver him to the Silures. Both were too wary and too wily, nor did either expect the other to appear. The matter would be done by proxy between council lords, each bearing their king’s ring in proof of authority.
The tribune’s stomach rumbled. They had not fed him since morning and plainly did not plan to. His escort had amused themselves on the four-day ride by prodding him with their spearpoints when he slumped in the saddle, and decking themselves in his silvered cuirass and greaves, posing and declaring themselves Caesar come to rule West Britain. His threats of crucifixion when he was restored to his office were met with hoots of laughter by those who understood some Latin and translated for the rest, and who held his own sword to his throat and grinned. It was only this morning that he had realized he was not being ransomed back to Rome but was to be given to the Silures. An evil smell rose from the spring that bubbled out of the rocks where they had halted and hung in the air like an emanation from the Underworld. He shivered. The land was hilly, high wild country under a leaden sky and inhabited only by wild things. The night had been shattered by the scream of something in an owl’s talons.
The scent of brimstone in the air suggested to Faustus’s party that they had most likely come to the meeting place. Lleu’s Well was an ancient treaty site. Faustus settled himself in his pony’s saddle, sitting loosely to shed the telltale posture drilled into every soldier since his first march, by centurions with vine staves. Aurelius Rotri drew rein beside him. Rotri had taught Faustus that particular talent in the north. It was an ability that all the border wolves possessed and Rotri inspected them as they readied themselves, checking everything, the false tribal patterns on their faces, the way they held their reins, sat their mounts. The only Roman thing among them was a cavalry horn, its length cut short and hidden in the pack of a border wolf from the auxiliaries at Moridunum.
“Go,” Rotri said, and melted into the trees to wait. If the Ordovices wouldn’t know him, the tribune would, or should, and was too likely to give that away, in Rotri’s estimation.
Faustus and his men made no secret of their presence now, moving through the green tree shadow with a show of grumbling conversation of saddle-weariness and thirst. Faustus snapped at them to be less querulous: “This is a holy place.”
An Ordovice sentry met them before they reached the spring. He stared at Faustus. “What do you want here?”
“I am Rhys,” Faustus said. “Captain to Loarn.”
“You are bare-faced and shorn,” the sentry said.
“Yes. It was punishment. I have no need to speak to you of it. The king has entrusted me with this.” He held out his right hand, a heavy gold ring on the forefinger, red stone carved with a horned moon.
The sentry hesitated. “It may be you bring ill luck.”
“Are you Cadal’s envoy?” Faustus snapped. “If not, that is not for you to decide.”
“Ill luck for the Roman, anyway,” the sentry said. He seemed to decide. “Follow me and remember there are more watching.”
The spring came from a cleft in a tree-covered hillside, thick-shaded by spreading oak, ash, and hazel, the stones moss-covered, the damp ground green with leaves of the little woodland flowers that had bloomed and faded again with summer. Cadal’s envoy, marked by his wealth of gold and lordly air, sat on a fallen log some distance from the spring. Faustus saw the tribune tied to a pony nearby, bruised but apparently otherwise unharmed, and he let out a breath of relief. He halted his horse beside the spring and dismounted while Cadal’s man watched him silently. Faustus took a silver piece from the bag at his belt, touched his forehead in respect, and laid it in the spring water. Only then did he speak to the envoy.
“I am Rhys, king’s captain to Loarn.” He extended his hand to let the Ordovice see the ring.
“I am Ula.” Cadal’s man kept one hand on his belt knife. “Why are you shorn?”
“It is punishment,” Faustus said.
“For what?”
“For matters that are private to me and to my king and to the Druids.” Faustus glared at him.
“The Druids decreed this?” Ula raised his eyebrows. The Druids rarely meddled in personal matters, unless it was one of sacrilege. Still, they had left him alive. “And these men still follow you?” A man that much disgraced was lucky to live much less to command loyalty from others of his tribe.
“Rhys’s fate is not yours to question,” one of the border wolves snapped.
Ula’s men stiffened. They glared at Faustus’s men and the border wolves glared back, lordly-wise themselves, the flowing mustaches and dark hair tied at their necks in stark contrast to their leader’s shorn face and head.
They were a dozen strong, even numbers with the Ordovices. Ula might consider that Loarn’s man would need more than that to get the tribune back through his own lands, if the Romans got wind of it, but that was not his affair. Ula would have no illusions that the Romans were ignorant of who was behind the tribune’s abduction – they had been hunting him since he was taken. They just had no proof and a tenuous treaty they did not want to overset. Loarn would overset it soon enough and the Ordovices would enlarge their borders afterward. Still, Faustus thought Ula might be eager to get the man off his hands.
“How long has it been since you let him off his horse?” Faustus asked when Ula sat unspeaking as his men and Faustus’s eyed each other.
“Since morning,” Ula said.
“He probably needs to piss,” Faustus said. “Take him down now. And his armor and weapons.” He could see a pair of silvered greaves tied behind a saddle.
“Those were not part of the bargain,” Ula told him. He seemed unconcerned about the tribune’s bladder.
“They were,” Faustus said, guessing. “I am not a fool.”
Ula shrugged. “Do you speak for Loarn? Do you have authority to bind him to a treaty?”
“The armor,” Faustus said. He held his hand out again to show the ring. “And take him off the horse.”
“I don’t trust a man with shorn hair.”
“Did Cadal tell you to decide whether you liked Loarn’s envoy? Or did he tell you to give the Roman to us? And where is Cadal’s token that I may know you have not stolen the man from Cadal yourself?”
The day was growing warm. The paint that the border wolves used would stick, Rotri had said, but don’t wipe your face. Faustus resisted the urge to. His neck itched. A cuckoo somewhere in the forest was wooing a wife with its maddening cuck-koo cuck-koo cuck-koo.
Ula seemed to come to a decision. He held out his hand to display a ring set with squares of carnelian and green chalcedony that covered nearly all of his thumb. “Take him down,” he told his men. “And bring his belongings.” To Faustus he said, “The horse is not his.”
Faustus knew that to be true since Terentius’s centurion had ridden back to Deva on it, and this was a native pony. Terentius had had a slave with him, but there was no way to admit knowing that. “Agreed,” he said. He motioned to one of his men who brought up a horse with an empty saddle.
Ula’s men began to untie the tribune. The man was white-faced under the bruises and clothed only in what looked like his undertunic.
“Put his armor on him,” Faustus said with a grin. “Let him wear it one last time. I’ve no mind to encumber my own gear with it.”
Ula’s men brought it out then, laughing, and made the tribune lift his undertunic and piss in front of them if he wanted to – he had to – amid jokes about the size of his balls. Then they pulled his silver-mounted harness tunic over his head, none too gently, and his silvered cuirass over that. Faustus took the tribune’s belt with his dagger and sword and buckled it around his own waist. He pointed at the tribune’s bare feet.
“Did he have boots, then?”
One of Ula’s men scratched his head and laughed. “Must have been lost. We were in a rush, you see.”
Terentius, driven to fury shouted in Latin, “I had boots! They were new. Red boots. He has them.” He pointed to one of Ula’s men, who mimicked looking around him for boots.
“Be quiet and maybe you’ll get to Porth Cerrig with both your ears,” Faustus told Terentius. The threat was clear from his tone and the tribune fell silent. “Tie his hands in front and get him in the saddle,” Faustus told his men. They heaved the tribune onto the pony and tied his wrists again, this time to the saddle horns. One of the wolves took his reins.
“I will agree that boots were not in the bargain,” Faustus told Ula, mounting. The back of his neck itched with the urge to be gone.
The shrill alarm call of a sparrowhawk made him jerk his head up. The cuckoo fell silent. A cloud of rooks flew up from the tree canopy to the south and a magpie’s rattle joined the alarm. Something was coming fast through the trees.
Faustus took the bag of silver off the saddle horns and tossed it at Ula. They had no way to know what Loarn had offered but the amount in the bag was generous. By the time Ula had counted it they had better be gone.
“Ride!” Faustus shouted while Ula and his men were still staring into the forest.
They rode at full gallop through the trees, leading the tribune’s mount and risking the ponies’ legs, not waiting to see what was coming. It would not be anything to favor them. Rotri fell in with them as they went and the cavalry wolf from Moridunum pulled out his horn and put it to his lips. The high-pitched scream of the horn rang in their ears. He blew it as they rode, then blew it again. The Ordovices would hear the horn too, but there was little point in trying to disguise their purpose now.
Ula was in a rage, bellowing orders at his own men, at the Silure rider who had come crashing through the trees, at Faustus’s fleeing riders to halt.
“Romans!” the Silure rider gasped. “Waylaid! Where is the hostage?”
“With your men!” Ula said. “And if not, then they are false or you are.” His men surrounded the rider and pulled him from his horse. Ula took him by the throat. “Now tell me which!”
“Romans!” the rider said again, furious now. He was mud-covered and bloodied, his horse lathered and heaving, head low. “I am Pwyll, envoy of Loarn. Romans waylaid us and I was the only one escaped them. And you have let him go with someone else?”
Now they heard the horn.
“He had Loarn’s ring!” Ula shouted in his face. “What have you?”
Pwyll shook his fist back in Ula’s face, a fist with a red stone carved with a horned moon.
“Ride!” Ula snapped. He looked at Pwyll and snorted. “If you can.” The horn sounded again, and his face grew scarlet with fury.
Faustus’s wolves thundered through the trees, dodging low-hanging branches that threatened to sweep the tribune from his seat. There was no time to stop and cut him loose, to let him have the reins. Terentius was clutching the horns of his saddle, bent over and trying to untie the knots with his teeth.
Faustus shouted, “We are Roman!” at him but the tribune looked uncomprehending. Faustus cursed him, hoping the ties would hold. He and his wolves would likely have to stop and fight, risking that the column was close enough to back them, and Terentius would be a liability.
Faustus listened for the Ordovices behind them now. Whatever had been coming through the trees had most likely eluded Septimus and if so, Ula knew he had been fooled. A slingstone went past his ear to confirm that and he wished desperately for his helmet and lorica. He ducked low over the pony’s neck. The Roman road was two miles east by his estimate, the column somewhere along it and it would have to march cross-country to intercept them. They had not known until today where the meeting place was to be, had had to guess, to let the column trail them far enough away not to be seen by Cadal’s men, close enough to march if need be, a desperate geometry of chance and supposition.
The trees thinned and there was open ground, a small valley, and another of the hundreds of streams that wound through the Silure Hills. Beyond was bog land; he could see the water shining here and there, mirroring the pewter sky. A lot of it would be dangerous. The Ordovices might know the safe paths, but he didn’t. The road would be on the other side. They could follow the river to it maybe.
Faustus swung them down the streambank, keeping to the clear ground where he could, thrusting their way through trees again where they encroached on the water, watching for patches of ‘soft’ masked as shallows. The ponies’ hooves splashed up mud and made squelching noises at each step. The Ordovices were hard behind them. Rotri had taken the tribune’s reins and was shouting at him in Latin. Terentius nodded now, recognizing him and seeming to comprehend, and Rotri gave him his reins, slowing enough to fling the offside rein across the pony’s neck. The tribune clutched them in his bound hands and Rotri pulled his spear and shield free of their bindings.
The cavalry horn sounded again, and Faustus heard an echo returning from the direction of the road.
“Again!” he shouted.
Again the horn wailed, and after it came the reply: two separate tones this time, not an echo but the column taking their direction.
“Keep sounding!”
Another slingstone whirred overhead and thudded into the bare leg of one of the border wolves. He howled but stayed on his horse. His companions began to fire their own stones at the oncoming Ordovices. One pulled an arrow from the quiver on his back and nocked it, turning backward in his saddle. He loosed it at three Ordovice riders grouped together, horses flank to flank, and hit the right hand man in the shoulder.
The stream flowed into a broader one, running in an old channel cut over centuries through rock. It was brown and frothing with runoff from the rain, but the ground along it was drier, tufted with grass, and the ponies’ hoofbeats were solid on it. Faustus wrapped his reins around his saddle horns long enough to unbuckle the tribune’s sword belt. He hung it across the saddle in front of him and shouted to Rotri, “Untie him when you can!”
They would have to turn and fight soon. The ground here was better but likely not to stay that way. The Silure Hills and all of West Britain were woven with bogs, springs, rivers that erupted from the rock and vanished again, marsh, and flood meadow that dried and refilled seasonally. He wouldn’t risk the Ordovices driving them into bog. Whether Ula would risk losing the tribune by doing that would depend on how angry Ula was, and Faustus’s guess was that he was very angry. The Ordovices were stiff-necked and did not take well to insult, as Cadal had proved. And they were very close, their howling war cries coming clear over the drumming hooves. He heard the trumpet from the column again and made up his mind.
“Form up to meet them!” They would have to hold the Ordovices off long enough for the column to catch up, but it was near. The column’s centurion would have had scouts in and out of the land beyond the road; they would know the ground with more accuracy than Faustus could guess at.
They halted on solid ground beyond the stream and made a ring around the tribune. Rotri cut the bindings with his dagger and Faustus handed Terentius his sword belt.
Terentius took it and buckled the belt about his cuirass. His mouth was a tight angry line. Faustus wasn’t sure who he was angry at. Everyone probably.
“Stay behind us and don’t try to fight them unless you have to,” he told Terentius, “and if you have to, it will have gone to Hades so you might as well.”
“Who are you?” Terentius snapped. “I doubt you are senior to my rank!”
“I doubt it too,” Faustus said, “but you will take my orders until we have you clear, or I’ll give you back to the Ordovices.”
There was no more time to argue with him. The Ordovice band fell on Faustus’s men, spears out, shields up, angry at being made fools of. Ula went straight for Faustus and Faustus brought his shield up to drive Ula’s spear sideways and down, thrust with his own at Ula’s face and missed. Rotri was beside him, heaving a broken spear into the Ordovice ranks and drawing his sword.
The Ordovice men were warrior-trained; spear brothers since childhood and veterans of the ceaseless border raids that pitted small bands of similarly armed men against each other. They fanned out around Faustus’s men, angling to come at their rear. The border wolves too were brothers under the skin, even those who had been strangers until now, and more importantly they were Roman soldiers beneath their long hair and insubordinate outlook. They locked their ponies into a defensive line, spears out, a bristling barricade around the tribune. Spear and shield clashed against spear and shield. Two of the border wolves fell, one dead, the other rolling from under his pony’s hooves as he bled from a spear thrust to his collar. Among the Ordovices, three went down, and the loose ponies fled through the battle, breaking lines open, some of them bleeding from wounds, some merely panicked.
Like Faustus’s wolves, the Ordovices wore no armor except for Ula, whose shirt was covered by a coat of ring mail. A slingstone hit Ula in the chest as he shifted his shield arm to strike at Faustus again and he slumped back in the saddle. Ula righted himself, but the force of the stone would have driven mail through his shirt into flesh and he would likely begin to bleed internally. Faustus pressed his advantage while Ula tried to lift his shield. The sentry who had mistrusted his shorn head thrust his spear under Faustus’s shield into his thigh. Faustus slammed the shield edge down on the spearshaft as the man pulled it back. He pressed past the spearpoint to bring the shield up again against the man’s face, dropped his own spear and drew his sword, driving it under the sentry’s guard. The sentry fell and his mount trampled him in panic. Faustus felt blood streaming down his leg. It pooled on the ground, and he swayed in the saddle. Rotri was beside him then, reaching to knot a cloth around his thigh, drawing it tight, grunting with the effort. The blood slowed somewhat. Faustus’s head swam. The trumpet from the column blared.
“Get off before you fall off!” Rotri pulled at his arm. The sun shimmered in his eyes, brighter than it should have been through cloud, limning the steel of the column, the silver standards of two centuries, the sanguine splotches of tunic and helmet crest, redder than the blood.
Rotri caught him as he slid from the saddle. He laid Faustus on the ground and added his belt to the bloody rag around his thigh, pulling it tighter. Faustus tried frantically to see what was happening. The roar of the battle came as if through a layer of wool. He tried to sit up.
“Lie down!” someone snapped – the medic from his own century, easing his trouser leg up past the wound, tightening another tie-off about his thigh, carefully unknotting the first ones. “Be still!” the medic said again. “We’ve got them, but they nearly got you and I need to stop this bleeding. This just missed the big artery and it’s torn a nasty hole coming out. Sir,” he added as an afterthought.
“The tribune,” Faustus said, gritting his teeth.
“He’s here and trying to order our men about but Septimus isn’t having it, so you can relax.”
“Septimus?”
“They caught up to us this morning.” The medic pressed a thick pad to the wound and eased the tie-off from around the leg. Blood soaked the pad, but it was slowing.
The sound of battle faded to angry shouts and the scream of an injured horse. Rotri disappeared and then came back again to report that after one last furious onslaught the Ordovices had fled at the advent of a column nearly three centuries strong. Four were dead and Ula rode slumped in his saddle.
“He’ll not live to tell Cadal the tale,” Rotri said.
“And ours?” Faustus asked him.
“One lost – Natta. Merula took a slingstone to his leg, and it’s probably broken. Nasica got a spear in the shoulder. He’ll be all right if it doesn’t heal twisted.”
“Centurion!” Tribune Terentius stood over Faustus. The feathers cresting his helmet were sodden and he was splattered with mud but uninjured.
“Tribune.” Faustus looked up at him and nodded.
“I must be in Deva as soon as possible. On a decent mount.”
“We are closer to Isca,” Faustus said, trying to fix his focus on him. “I am to report to my legate there and would be ill advised to split my detachment here to send you north.” He paused. “The Ordovices will not be above hunting you north if anyone is foolish enough to give them the chance.”
“And thank you, Centurion, for saving my ass,” Rotri muttered.
Terentius snapped his head around at Rotri.
“Regrettably, you must ride with us until we reach Magnis,” Faustus said. “There will probably be a troop horse available there, and an escort to Deva.”
“You have threatened me and been insubordinate, Centurion.” Terentius’s fingers tried to adjust his sash of office and found it missing.
“Verisimilitude,” Faustus said faintly. The sky kept spinning overhead. The medic was picking threads of cloth from the wound with tweezers.
“You encouraged them to make sport of me.”
Faustus pulled his wits together. “Tribune, you would otherwise be dead, once Loarn had extracted all the information he desired from you. The extraction would have been painful. We have forestalled that. And you are not dead.”
“Information?”
“The fact that half of your legion and its legate are in Eburacum was not something we could allow to be told to Loarn,” Faustus said flatly. “So mull over the ways we could have prevented it.”
Terentius started to bristle, then was silent. His face had gone white again. “You would have killed me?”
“I would.”
“It would have been easy,” Rotri said. “An arrow from the trees and we’re gone. But you’re one of ours, Tribune, so we came after you.”
“I see,” Terentius said. “It would have been simpler to kill me, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, your father wouldn’t have liked it,” Faustus said.
“He wouldn’t. All the same, I’d still be dead. Very well, Centurion, I understand.”
Faustus thought of asking him if he understood that he had now pushed them all into war. Instead, he said, “You had a slave with you.” He wondered if the boy had fought for his master and paid with his life for that.
“The wretched beast asked safe haven of Cadal and he took him into his household,” Terentius said, angry again now.
Faustus grinned, then changed it to a grimace before Terentius saw it.
“I need boots,” Terentius said, remembering that injustice as well.
“Magnis,” Faustus said. He lay back, signaling an end to what he would discuss. Terentius could go and gnaw his helmet feathers.
The medic inspected Faustus’s leg and pressed another wad of wound dressing to it. “You’ll do, sir, if I bandage this tightly. I’d rather you were on a litter though.”
“Carried by these?” Faustus looked at his men, loricas shining, barely bloodied, and jaunty at their rout of the Ordovices. Being carried by them was a last resort. “Even that hill pony has a better gait.” The little horse, placidly cropping grass nearby, snorted at him.
“Very well, sir. As long as we camp here tonight, and you don’t move until morning.”
“I have no intention of it,” Faustus said. He still felt light-headed, as if he was floating on the trampled, bloody grass. The air felt like a warm hand on his skin. He watched a flock of crows settle on the spreading branches of an elm, their bright eyes cocked at the bodies on the ground. “The Ordovices will come back for their dead when we’re gone. But move them away from our camp.”
“Crows will start in first,” Rotri said.
“Crows feed snakes, snakes feed the boar, the boar feeds us, we feed crows,” Faustus said. “But put Natta over a saddle before he stiffens, and get a tent over him.”
Faustus looked up at the sky, brightening from the morning’s pewter to blue strung with cobweb wisps of cloud. Two soaring shapes rode the currents of the air. Buzzards, he thought at first, by the fanned feathers of their wingtips and the blunt wedges of their tails, but they were too large. Eagles. Messenger birds of Jupiter, emblem and personification of the legions. A hunting pair. A red kite sat on the edge of a spinney, watching a patch of grass but when the eagles dropped down into the cover of the trees, it flapped away from them. The larger of the eagles shot from the spinney, rose with nothing but flew on, fast over the grass, driving something. The second circled, dove, came up with the hare in her talons.
We are all birds of prey, Faustus thought foggily. The Britons are like the red kite and hunt what they can, but we are the Empire’s eagles that take what we want.