Fronto ran, the icy sweat pouring from his hairline and into his eyes, blinding him even further in this billowing charnel-stench of a thick mist. The gnarled yew trees that loomed through the fleecy blanket as he fled through white hell looked more and more like grasping, wizened, desiccated hands with each passing moment.
And that was what they were. He could see the fingers and the dirt-filled nails from their ascent to the surface of the turf, many fingers missing where the battlefield scavengers had sawed through muscle and bone to collect rings.
A forest of grasping dead hands - dark, grisly shapes in the mist.
Panic gripped him. Were these his own victims? All the fathers, brothers, sons - and, yes, even womenfolk - he had sent to the otherworld in seven years of butchering his way across Gaul? His feet suddenly ploughed into empty space, the ground falling away beneath him, unseen in the whiteness.
And he was plummeting, rolling and bouncing down a hill that was covered in jagged stones and roots. But they snapped with brittle noises as he tumbled over them, confirming that what appeared to be gnarled roots were protruding bones, the stones a shoulder, a pelvis, a skull.
Finally, the hill of dead things gave way to a carpet of damp turf, churned with muddy boot prints. The fog was now above him, like a white rug a foot or more over his head, roiling and blanking out the sky. But no longer hiding the bodies. The dead jutted like a petrified forest from the grass, mostly buried still to their hips, their hands raised to protect sightless dead faces from unseen blows. Arms stretched in supplication to gods that had abandoned them as the Roman war machine stole their futures.
Fronto felt fear like he’d never experienced. His bladder gave a little, providing the only warmth in this dead, desiccated white-grey world.
He tried not to look at the lifeless, destroyed faces of the hardened bodies as he passed them, aware that something was still chasing him. He’d not been able to see his pursuer beyond being a vague nebulous dark shape in the thick mist and yet, now that he was beneath that endless white blanket and would finally be able to get a good look at what hunted him, he still could not bring himself to turn and face it.
A body he passed was suddenly familiar, and his heart skipped a beat. Was that twisted wreck’s features really little Marcus? His son’s infant face smeared across the cracked skull of a dead Gaul. And Lucius? Was Lucius here too? A victim of his endless career of murder?
His foot caught something and he tumbled again, rolling across the cold, wet grass. When he finally stopped, shuddering, weak and terrified, his leg was submerged. He seemed to have rolled into the edge of a river or a pond. Panic-driven, he turned to rise.
And there was that raw, crimson face with the burning eyes, snarling as it bore down on him with a skinning knife.
Fronto woke with a lurch that almost stopped his heart. The sheets were wet through and freezing cold, rucked up from his night-time thrashing. His eyes failed to accept that the face had gone, echoing that image even superimposed over the dim, darkened wall of their bedroom. He was shaking uncontrollably as his ears finally returned to life.
‘Marcus?’ the voice was panicked. Insistent.
He turned and took long moments to recognise Lucilia, her face a mask of utter concern. Shivering, he shook his head at her with slight movement only and crawled from the edge of the bed, walking shakily across to the twin beds, with their high sides and voluminous covers, which rested by the wall.
Marcus and Lucius dozed happily, the latter turning with a contented murmur. They had changed so much since the last winter. They were babies no longer, but boys with the clear attributes of the Falerii. They were clearly his sons.
And they were alive. Happy. Healthy.
He shuddered again.
‘The same dream?’ Lucilia asked softly, approaching from behind and draping a fresh, warm blanket over his shoulders. Fronto nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
‘Tomorrow we are going to see the herbalists and the priests in town. Someone will know how to stop them. You can’t go on like this, Marcus.’
He nodded again. Still, his voice wouldn’t come. Every night now for weeks. Not more than a few hours’ sleep. It was affecting his waking world, too. Yesterday he’d been to fulfil an order of Formian for one of the city’s council, only to discover he’d ordered and loaded a Caecuban of a far more expensive vintage by mistake, which he’d then been obliged then to let go at the same low price.
The Greeks, even these displaced ones in Massilia, had always held the best reputation for medicine of both body and mind, and it was clearly time to seek help.
How did a man kill the ghosts of his past, though?
His eyes strayed from the sleeping forms of the twins and up to the wall at the far end of the room, where a glittering gladius with an orichalcum hilt hung, delivered against all expectations a month ago by the hand of a veteran centurion from the Tenth heading back to Rome for the winter.
He sighed and suppressed another shudder.
How did one kill the dead?
The end.