Avenger of Rome

XIV

Valerius could feel their discontent. It simmered in the broiling sun like a gently boiling pot, but it was still only mid-morning on the third day and by the time the sun reached its high point the pot would be ready to boil over. The sailors lay beneath their inadequate shelter like haphazard lumps of black rock. Valerius sat in the paltry shade of Domitia’s pavilion twenty paces away listening to the stricken cavalryman’s harsh, uneven breathing and waiting for him to die. The other mortally injured man had died during the night and lay wrapped in a sailcloth shroud at the top of the beach, but no one was going to dig two graves when one would do. It was incredible how a man’s strength could ebb away in such a short time. He heard a hacking cough. He knew what they were thinking, because it was driving him mad too. About water. Clean, pure, cool water, not stinking blood-hot dregs thick with the saliva of ten other men who had already drunk from the same skin. He had rationed them to a tiny amount each, four times a day, knowing even that would deplete their dwindling supply too quickly. Two swallows. But he had discovered that two swallows was only enough to keep a man on the brink of death, not alive, in this sweltering furnace of a place that leached the fluid from the body like wine from a fractured amphora.

Thirst was the enemy. Thirst was tight-skinned, pinched faces and narrow, red-rimmed eyes filled with hate. Thirst was when your tongue cleaved to the roof of your mouth and your throat felt as if it was scoured with pebbles. Thirst was cracked and bleeding lips so painful you wanted to cut them away with a knife and a head that felt as if your skull was being ripped off. Thirst was always wanting to piss, but never being able to. Thirst was the agony of knowing the next two swallows were four hours away, but they would only increase the torment until the next pointless sip of taunting nectar. Two swallows teased, but didn’t satisfy. It lubricated cracked lips, but barely reached the throat. A momentary glimpse of paradise snatched away before it could be savoured. Like the glorious turquoise sea that lapped at the shore and formed small pools in the sand, so cool and clear and wet, but so deadly. Liquid that tempted and tormented, but could never be drunk because it would multiply a man’s thirst ten times and push him beyond the edge of sanity. He suspected that more than one of the crew had already succumbed to the lure, and, as if the gods wished to confirm his suspicion, a man staggered to his feet among the sailors and stepped into the fierce light of the sun.

Valerius recognized him as one of the steersmen, a man whose skill had saved all their lives in the encounter with the pirates. The seaman croaked something unintelligible from a thirst-scarified throat and wandered aimlessly between the two groups, repeating the word over and over, his face and hands raised to the merciless sun, before falling to his knees and digging frantically in the sand. The sailors knew Valerius had ordered the goatskins to be buried, but not where. Now the sun-crazed steersman scraped and dug ever more desperately until he gave what might have been a howl of triumph and heads rose sharply among his shipmates. Valerius wondered what he’d found. It certainly wasn’t water, which was safe on the far side of the pavilion from the seamen. A second later the sailor dipped his hands into the hole and raised them to his lips. Valerius gagged as he realized what was happening. The demented sailor’s cupped hands were filled not with water, but with sand, and he poured it into his mouth, repeating the gesture again and again until, with a choked groan, he collapsed on his face and lay still.

Someone appeared in the doorway beside him. He knew it was Domitia before he stood up because she smelled different from everyone else. After dark, she bathed in the cool waters of the bay, resisting the temptation to drink that would have destroyed Valerius, and it gave her a salty, wholesome scent. Still, she suffered as much as anyone in the heat, and her face and eyes were puffy and distended as she swayed on her feet.

‘Is he dead?’ The words were slurred by her swollen tongue and saliva as thick as mud.

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

He nodded. One less mouth to drain their precious supply.

‘The trooper, too.’ Valerius noticed for the first time that Ferox, the injured cavalryman, was silent at last. ‘We’ll bury them after dark.’

She nodded, and the movement seemed to use up the last of her strength because she would have fallen if Valerius hadn’t caught her. She slumped in his arms, slim and soft, the curves of her body nestling against him. Something exploded in his head and he was filled with a terrible need. He crushed his face into her dark hair, inhaling a honeysuckle scent that acted like an elixir. She felt it too, because she squirmed against him and her head came up and he felt cracked lips against his. Her cloak dropped away and he could feel her skin through the soft material of her shift. They held each other like that for a few moments before he realized what he was doing. This was madness. He was as crazed as the poor fool lying in the sand not five paces away had been.

‘No.’ He tried to draw away, but her arms held him close and his body wouldn’t obey him anyway.

‘Please.’ Her eyes opened and he saw tiny damp buds in the corners that might have been tears.

He shook his head, and pulled away.

The emotions surged across her ravaged face like storm clouds over a field of wheat: desolation and heartache, pain and rejection, and finally fury. She stepped back and he wondered if she was going to hit him, and what he would do if she did. ‘Coward,’ she hissed, and turned and staggered away through the curtain that separated the two sides of the tent.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. He had been awarded the Gold Crown of Valour for defying fifty thousand of Boudicca’s blood-crazed warriors, yet he had failed every woman he had ever loved. When he opened them again, Serpentius was standing watching him.

‘If Tiberius doesn’t get back soon we’re finished.’

‘Maybe we already are.’

‘It’s time.’

Valerius nodded. ‘Get the water.’

Two and a half water skins a day. They’d started with fifteen. By tonight they would have five left, plus anything Serpentius had kept in reserve. Three days, at most, if he cut the ration, but it was barely enough to keep them alive now.

Where was Tiberius?

It had all seemed so simple. Keep the sea to your right, ride during the night and try to find some precious shade during the heat of the day. Keep going until you win or you die. For Tiberius Claudius Crescens it was the ideal mission. The kind of mission with no complications and no regrets. Win or die.

But he hadn’t reckoned on being killed by his own stupidity.

The landscape he had ridden through was as forbidding as it was intimidatingly beautiful. A landscape that could destroy you just by its very existence. Ahead, the never-ending surf-washed line of the beach, flat as the freshly brushed surface of the Circus Maximus on a race day. To his right, the broad expanse of the ocean, a marker, no more than that. To his left, inland, a treacherous dustbowl and salt flats which turned quickly into an anonymous sea of rolling sand dunes. Tiberius recognized, without any sense of inadequacy, that he was a man of little imagination. It was, after all, a desirable quality in the type of soldier he had chosen to be. But the thought of becoming lost in that great sandy waste made him feel like an ant on a roasting plate: a tiny insignificant creature whose fate was beyond its power to change.

Yet none of it was as great a threat as the challenge which faced him now.

Someone more romantic might have said he appeared to be standing in the centre of a gigantic silver plate, of the kind that graced a senator’s banqueting table. On three sides moonlight glittered across waters as unruffled as the flat sand he had ridden over, always keeping the sea to his right, since he had left Valerius three days earlier. He was so close. He knew he was close because he could see the flickering pinprick of light that identified a home in some Egyptian settlement and smell the smoke of a dung fire in the still air. He looked over his shoulder. The first pale ochre hint of dawn was a ghostly betrayal on the eastern horizon. An hour at most?

Hercules whinnied behind him and nuzzled his back. He had two more leather water skins left of the original — was it six? — and of the four that had been drunk the horse had consumed three. He put a skin to the gelding’s mouth and held it there until it was empty.

His mistake had been not to take a path a little further inland. He realized that now; too late. By staying close to the shore he hadn’t noticed when he strayed from the beach on to the mile-wide spit of sand that had finally narrowed to this thin streak which ended at a channel a few hundred paces wide but the gods only knew how deep. How far had he come? Ten miles? Twenty? He had been riding all night. It was impossible to tell.

He had no choice. Turning the horse the way they’d come he kicked him into a trot, then a canter and finally a full gallop. Speed was his only hope. In the moonlight, the evidence of his pride and his arrogance was clear in the single line of hoofprints that vanished into the distance. He had no choice. He had to make as much ground as he could before daylight. His mind cleared. He felt no fear. It was all simple again. He would die, today or tomorrow; but he would die trying.

The big horse carried him uncomplainingly, mile after mile, hour after hour, through the dark and into the dawn, but daylight mocked him with a flat expanse of blue lagoon to his right, and no end in sight. He had no choice. The gelding’s sweat soaked his legs and he could already feel the sun roasting his neck. Soon it would be so hot it would be like breathing the flames of a furnace. He dug his heels into the horse’s ribs and urged him on harder. Hercules had a huge heart, but even huge hearts have a breaking point. Tiberius felt a surge of hope when he realized the lagoon was finally petering out, but only for a moment. Seconds later the gelding collapsed under him as if he’d been shot in the chest by a ballista bolt. Tiberius hit the ground shoulder first and rolled to a halt in a cloud of sand. By the time he’d rubbed the grit from his eyes Hercules was bravely trying to get back to his feet, but the power had gone from his legs. Pink foam frothed from the horse’s nostrils and mouth and sprayed across the sand as he shook his great head in frustration. As Tiberius watched, the animal’s struggles grew weaker and he rolled on to his side, his gleaming flanks heaving and slick with sweat. To the young tribune, the gelding was nothing more than a mode of transport, to be used and discarded, and, his father would have said, eaten if necessary. He knew horses, admired their strength and stamina, but he felt no affection for them. Still, he respected courage and he placed a hand on the gelding’s forehead and smiled into the trusting eye as he killed Hercules with a single thrust of his sword behind the right ear.

There was no time to rest. He stood up and felt the sun’s heat boring through his dark hair. A few minutes and it would boil his brains and render him senseless. He removed his tunic and fashioned a covering for his head and shoulders. With a last reproachful glance at the sand spit that had killed him he allowed himself a single sip from the final water skin and set off westwards.

At first it was merely a trial. The furnace temperatures made it difficult to breathe and he could feel the skin on his arms melting, but he made reasonable progress. Very soon it became a torment. The relentless heat seemed to suck the strength from his legs. The sand shifted beneath his feet and he found himself fighting for every step. His mouth and nose might as well have been filled with sand. Grit scraped his eyeballs and his vision blurred, making it difficult to keep his course. Water. He must have water. But Tiberius knew that when the water skin was empty he was finished, so he denied himself until he could endure no longer, then denied himself again. What seemed like a mile later, he scrabbled for the water skin and gulped down a single mouthful, though it took all his resolve not to drink more. He risked a look back the way he’d come and let out a tormented groan. A few hundred paces away the dark bulk of Hercules lay in the sand. He had been walking for what seemed like hours and he had travelled only a quarter of a mile. A lesser man might have fallen on his sword in despair, but Tiberius Claudius Crescens was no lesser man. His brutal upbringing had had but a single purpose. To make him hard. Hard as the iron that forged his sword. Hard as the stones he had carried to build his strength. His father had taught him to hate, and to endure. He slung the water skin over his shoulder by its leather strap and began walking again.

The makeshift hood suffocated him, but when he removed it the super-heated air burned his face and throat and the sun seared his scalp like a fish on a griddle. The heat played tricks with his mind. At one point he marched at the centre of a full cohort of legionaries, fully equipped with sword, shield and spear, their helmets glistening and their centurions calling out the marching beat. Every one carried a full water skin that sloshed and gurgled with each step he took, but the moment Tiberius turned to ask for a drink the whole unit vanished. A mile later his father rode past on a pale horse, even though he was long dead, but when Tiberius picked up his pace to ask the questions he’d always wanted to ask, the horse turned into a dog and ran into the desert.

He would have kept the sea to his right, but the sea was long gone. That told him he was lost, but it didn’t matter because when he saw his tracks he realized he had been walking in circles. When he saw the city moving towards him he started laughing. Through his delirium he knew that it was just another joke the gods were playing on him. He only felt threatened when he saw the armoured giants. They shimmered across the flat plain, growing larger with every step and walking three feet above the ground. Well, he would fight them. He drew his sword and it felt good in his hand. But the reality was that he’d thrown the sword away with his empty water skin twenty minutes earlier. When a hand touched his shoulder, he believed he was fighting for his life. He would have killed anyone who said he was pleading for it.