The burning flames of the torches looked like glowing rubies set in an ivory crown. The incredulous eyes of the legionaries were barely visible between the visors of their helmets and the folds of the scarves wrapped around their necks and mouths. They had arranged themselves in a semicircle to illuminate the gigantic heap of stones which blocked the way while the Dalmatian speculatores who had stumbled upon the unexpected obstacle watched in silence, hunched over the four-horned saddles of their horses. Behind them, the rest of the long column of men, carts and horses, still awaiting its orders, wound off into the distance like an enormous sinuous snake. A peculiar optical effect meant that its tail seemed to vanish inside the walls of the city of Eporedia, which they had abandoned only a few hours earlier to take the first passable section of the new Via delle Gallie which Augustus had ordered built to provide access to the Alpine passes.
Though accustomed to long marches in prohibitive conditions, the legionaries looked with envy at the mounted Gaul auxiliaries who flanked the expedition. They were the only ones who did not yet have to deal with the unexpected snowstorm that had forced the footsoldiers to advance at a crawl. But all looked with growing nervousness the ghostly landscape that appeared before their eyes. A monotonous palette of grey tones in which sudden patches of white staged a dismal esoteric dance with the few shrivelled trees, crippled by the frost. And in the middle was a fissure that stretched up towards a starless sky, as though Jupiter himself had wanted to prove his strength against the wall of mountains that separated the Italian peninsula from Northern Europe.
“Make way!” someone shouted, and the circle of flaming brands broke to let through a cavalry officer wrapped in a brown bear fur. The only way of telling his rank was from his authoritarian manner and by the crest-free iron helmet that protected from under his hood. Under the hammered bronze visor was the regular profile of a man of just over thirty years of age, softened by an untidy blond beard.
“What’s happening?” said tribune Septimus Vegezius, his breath freezing into crystalline dust as the words came out of his mouth. “Why have we stopped?”
“A landslide, tribune,” explained one of the legionaries. He was almost completely wrapped in wool and fur like his companions, but the helmet with the transverse crest showed his rank of centurion. “Some boulders must have come down from the cliff walls. Pretty big ones too.” A sudden gust of wind almost made him stagger. “They say that it happens a lot around these parts,” he said, pointing to the scouts on horseback. “Especially when there’s a storm raging. Whole ridges suddenly break off and the road becomes impassable.” He approached his superior and lifted the torch to better illuminate his features. “What do you want us to do?”
The extreme slope of the terrain made it difficult to advance and as they approached the highest and most irregular peaks they would suffer a further drop in temperature. The convoy had only been stopped for a few moments but was already covered with the enormous flakes of snow that fell from the sky with the force of projectiles fired from invisible slingshots and, with the assistance of the gusts of freezing wind, stuck to the soldiers’ rough sagum.
The expedition had been on the move since the first light of dawn. It had spent the night safely inside the walls of the last fortified garrison on the slopes of the Alps before facing what, to judge from the maps, would be the most difficult part of the entire journey. A narrow pass, devoid of stationes that snaked its way through the mountains for several miles to the final destination: Augusta Praetoria.
The Roman officer wiped the snow from his face with his forearm. He weighed the centurion’s words and considered the situation. The orders had been clear, and Vegezius remembered them every time his gaze passed over those wagons covered with black canvasses that his men had been instructed to escort.
A few weeks earlier, a tabellarius on horseback had appeared at Burnum, the headquarters of the XIII Gemina Legion with a hand-written message from proconsul Gaius Octavius and destined for the legate of military training. It was rumoured that the messenger had changed horses only once in order to arrive in Illyricum by the date indicated by the signee of the letter. The commander of the garrison had carefully read the document and a few moments later tribune Septimus Vegezius had been dragged out of his camp bed and put on a fresh horse with as his destination the port of Dyrrhachium. There he was awaited by a convoy of an unspecified nature which had arrived by ship from the coasts of Africa Superior. The task of the men placed at his command was to disembark the convoy and escort it, cutting horizontally across the entire northern part of the Italic province up to the fork between the passes of the Alpis Poenina and the Alpis Graia, where he would be met by General Aulus Terentius Varro Murena himself.
Vegezius was not used to asking himself questions about orders he received, but he couldn’t get this one out of his head. If their destination was the pass, why land in Dyrrhachium and not in Massalia or Ostium? He only stopped wondering about it when he thought of Varro Murena, a commander whose name was now wrapped in a mantle of legend and of whom he had heard speak only in the stories that the legionaries on guard duty told of an evening around the fires while they waited for their shift to end. He could not deny how exciting the idea of meeting in person the man who had managed to dedicate a city at six thousand feet of altitude to Augustus was – even if it was only to deliver something to him.
From a quick calculation of distances and considering the possibility of traveling an average of twenty miles a day in optimal conditions, he had realised that he would reach his destination at the worst moment, right as winter was beginning. No soldier in his right mind would have dared tackle an Alpine crossing at that time, but the orders had been clear and brooked no argument: the convoy was to reach its destination, at all costs, by the ides of November. For this reason, he had been assigned a detachment of two complete cohorts, with the right to grant triple daily pay and with the promise that he would find further reinforcements at the last change station before the Illyricum border. In the exact spot marked on the highly detailed itineraries that he had received, he had in fact found awaiting him two squadrons of auxiliary cavalry and a handful of scouts accompanied by half a dozen Abyssinian Molossers – the hunting hounds with massive bodies and fetid breath that it was said Julius Caesar had successfully used for the first time in his campaigns in Britain.
If Vegezius had not been certain that it was an escort mission, with all those men available he might even have imagined that Cleopatra had risen from the grave and that he had been assigned the task of escorting her back there. But wrack his brains as he might, he would never have been able to imagine what actually awaited him.
“So tribune? What are your orders?”
The centurion’s voice roused him from the reverie into which he had sunk. Vegezius looked around him, and was surprised by the many eyes he found staring in his direction. He made to get off his horse and three legionaries rushed over to help him, but he gestured them away with a wave of his hand before they reached his saddle. “Get out of the way.” He jumped down to the ground and sank into the snow up to his calves. A few more moments of immobility and the cold would pierce even the thick leather of his boots. With difficulty, he moved towards the heap of stones. The sweat on his back had begun to turn into thin crusts of frost.
The tribune made his way between the torches. The flames illuminated a sort of rock pyramid that culminated in two points facing the stars. The cumulus spread outwards in all directions in an apparently casual slope. It was big. The men on foot could have gone around it or climbed over it, but it blocked the way for the wagons, and it was they who had to reach their destination.
Septimius Vegezius hissed a curse under his breath.
“How long will it take to get it out of the way?” he said.
The centurion looked once more at the heap of stones, then raised his head as if to read the stars, lowering it again as though searching for his feet hidden in the snow.
“We won’t be able to do it before dawn. The men are very tired, tribune. They’ve been marching all day and…”
The officer raised his hand to stop the rest of the sentence.
“I understand, centurion, I understand. You don’t have to apologise or excuse your soldiers. I am well aware of their merits.” He sighed and put his hands on his hips. “It’s just that… all of this is madness. There’s no good reason on Earth for our being here now. But… by the gods” He gave a gesture with his head that the centurion translated into the only order he had hoped to receive. The soldier sighed, narrowing his eyes as the officer turned around and went back to his horse.
“Camp!” he shouted loud enough for even the tops of the highest mountains to hear him. “Shifts of fifty men clearing the stones for every shift of guards! Agrimensor, to me!”
“Wait.”
The effect of that young female voice in the snowy gorge at almost four thousand feet of altitude was like a hammer hitting a fragile glass dish. There were no voices were heard, nothing moved: the silence became solid and hung in invisible particles along the entire route of the convoy. Septimius Vegezius remained motionless, his hands on the saddle, while the eyes of all the other soldiers turned towards the source of that unexpected cry.
“Just wait a moment.”
Amidst the folds of a palla of coarse ash-coloured wool, a woman’s form could be perceived. She had stopped a few yards from the pile of stones so that the light from the torches did not directly illuminate her. Over the palla was a large mantle of white wolf hair fastened at the throat by a brown bronze fibula. On her head she wore a woollen scarf that was also loosely wrapped around her neck, and a rigid, pointed hood. On her feet were a pair of unusual male perones of which only the lacing to the shins could be seen. She did not stand quite straight, and her shoulders sloped slightly down to the left as though bearing a weight. In this way the folds of the overcoat were even more accentuated and the light of the torches, reflecting eerily off the snow, crept over them like shadows of water snakes.
When the woman stepped into the light, the figure that accompanied her stepped forward too, without abandoning the support offered by its partner’s arm.
“Let us pass,” said the long-limbed figure, a little taller than the other and wrapped in a black sagum that reached down to its feet, in a faint voice. The wolf fur covered its head like a gigantic Egyptian headdress, the grey coat going down to its knees and fastened at the height of the abdomen with leather laces. On its chest, between the sagum and the animal skin, was a Gallic woollen scarf with multicoloured stripes. At its neck shone a bronze band that regulated the opening of the hood, and above, outlined by the edges of the headdress, was a dark abyss inside which two feline ochre-yellow slits, more like knife blades than eyes, could be seen. In its free hand it held a gnarled staff with an arched end.
The two newcomers were part of the convoy they were escorting. Aloof and withdrawn, for the entire first part of the journey they had kept to their side of an invisible furrow that separated them from Septimius Vegezius’s men, and their companions had done the same. All wrapped in long fur-lined mantles, they didn’t talk, ate and drank very little and showed a particular resistance to the elements. Septimius Vegezius was convinced that some of them must be dwarfs or some similar freak of nature, since at least seven or eight of them were not tall enough to reach the mouths of the horses that pulled the carts. Others might be mercenaries, given the sheathed shields from which they refused to be separated even at night. Representing them all was one officer: Victor Julius Felix, a prefect with an obscure curriculum but who had been personally given by the proconsul Octavius the task of bringing them all to their destination no later than the deadline. Felix was an enigmatic character: tall and with Northern features, he instantly inspired awe and respect, but he communicated only through written documents or through the voice of a servant much older than him who dressed like a druid. When he had set foot on the dock of the port of Dyrrhachium, Vegezius had immediately noticed the unusual anatomical cuirass in worked white linen he wore, testimony to a long service in the African territories, and his anachronistic Gallic centurion’s helmet.
It was impossible to determine how many of the mysterious passengers there were and what they carried in their wagons, but curiosity was not something that was required of a good legionnaire. Beyond the customary pleasantries, Septimius Vegezius had therefore carefully avoided asking embarrassing questions. The prefect had also given him a document which indicated that the person in charge of the mission remained the young officer who was accompanying them. The escort cohorts were fully under his command, but no orders could be given to the men who arrived with the prefect. The tribune made no fuss, willingly accepting the situation, but when he saw the members of the expedition walk by as they disembarked from the quinquereme he had not been able to conceal his surprise at some of its more unusual members. Wagons draped with black woollen coverings, horses and wolves walking beside men who wore hoods despite the brutal sun. Military units on foot with their signa and banners camouflaged. Even women and dwarves with their faces hidden. And then that ghost with human features, the last to leave the ship. Emaciated and apparently suffering, even then he had tried to protect his blind, empty eyes from the midday sun.
The tribune turned slowly, leaned back against his horse’s saddle and folded his arms.
“What do you want?” he asked, with barely concealed irritation.
“Nothing,” said the woman. “Just to see.”
“Yes,” the blind man hissed. “To see.”
He took a couple of steps forward, and if his companion had not grabbed him in time he would have fallen to the ground like a ripe pear despite the support of the stick. Some of the legionaries stifled their laughter.
The blind man seemed lost for a moment.
“Come,” the woman said, her voice taking on a gentle, reassuring tone, “lean on me.”