The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Nine

At the mouth of the stockade, crushed tracks sworled amid the night’s fall of virgin snow; a stamp of sandal-prints and hoof-prints and the thick-edged blur of a heavy object, dragged without care.

Behind me, the tents of our century sagged under the new snow, and snow covered the earth rampart we had thrown up around them. Ahead, the stockade we had built to hold the mules had been dismantled piece by careful, silent piece, the stones piled neatly, as if by men at drill practice. And the mules were gone, all twelve of them: one for each of the ten tent-units, plus two for Lupus. Gone, too, was the firewood we had stacked to one side under the frozen oxhide.

I stood still for a moment, stealing the last vestiges of fire-warmth from the depths of my cloak, taking in the magnitude of the disaster.

Somewhere, a songbird hurled notes into the clear and empty sky. For nine days the clouds had hung over us, pressing down on our heads and our moods, but they had emptied all their snow during the night, leaving the sky such a startling blue as to make my eyes ache even when I looked down to thechurned mess at my feet in an effort to discover who it was we must attack to regain what was lost.

‘First century, first cohort of the Fourth. They left their mark on the gatepost. Unless that’s a ruse to make us go the wrong way when we go to get our mules back.’

I wrenched round. Lupus stood behind me, wrapped in a black goat-hair cloak. He wore no helmet, only a heavy felt cap that covered his lead-iron hair and extended down beyond his ears so that he looked even more as if someone had lifted off his head and replaced it with a skull for a joke.

Nobody thought Lupus was a joke, but we were less afraid of him than we had been. He didn’t push us any less hard, nor was he less particular on parade; we still had to present arms in the morning, and march for the duration of the first watch, but the perverse fury that had made breathing a sin one day and forgetting to breathe punishable the next had frozen away in the savage cold.

We were the sharper for it, and had a kind of fragile pride in our new capacity; at the very least, Rufus didn’t play the fool on morning parade, risking a flogging to pull faces at the back of Lupus’ head as he passed, or cocking his leg like a dog marking territory where he had been.

The IVth legion was our enemy now, and Lupus was on our side. But they were stronger than us. The first century of any legion was first in the line of march and full of good men of long standing. Even the IVth had a few good men, and many of them were in its first century.

I saw no point in dwelling on that; in war, too, you cannot always choose your enemy.

‘They’ve taken the firewood.’ I said. ‘If we don’t get it back soon, they’ll slaughter the mules and build fires to smoke the meat so they don’t have to hunt for the rest of the month.’

Lupus stared north, to where they had gone. ‘Who was on watch?’

Of course he would ask that.

I said, ‘Polydeuces. He was on guard duty last night. He’s gone, so they must have taken him too. If Prefect Silvanus finds out, he’ll be flogged.’

And if he’s flogged, he’ll die. I did not say that; there was a limit to my courage, and in any case it was obvious. Out of the ten units in our century, the men in ours had weathered the cold best, except for Polydeuces, who had taken the chill to his lungs in the first night’s watch and was soon coughing up lumps of matter thick enough to mould into bricks.

I thought I saw streaks of blood in it one night, as we crouched round our fire in a circle tight enough for each man to draw in the outbreath of the one opposite. He had tried to hide it with a hank of the straw that he kept up his sleeves to sweep it away, but I saw what he threw on the flames.

In the blistering snow light of morning, I watched Lupus purse his lips a moment, and braced myself to hear him say that it was Polydeuces’ own fault that he’d been captured — which it probably was — and that he’d flog him himself when the order came.

I was dizzy with cold and the sharp, knifing air that stole men’s sanity. I thought of all the small things Polydeuces had done for me: carrying wood when I had bruised my hand trying to take a stone from a mule’s foot; grinding corn when it was my turn but I was out hunting; cooking that same day, because I had caught nothing; grinding a new edge on my dagger when I destroyed it hacking at the frozen rawhide that held a broken tent peg.

He was a friend now, as much as Cadus had been, or my brothers back in Macedonia, in a childhood that seemedever more a dream of someone I once knew in passing. It came to me that when Lupus spoke I might hit him, and that if I did so I would almost certainly die before Polydeuces.

I was braced for violence when I caught Lupus’ gaze. The flat, iron grey was not flat any more, but alive with what in any other man I might have named joy.

‘Silvanus won’t come up the mountain until the full moon,’ he said crisply. ‘That gives us two days to rectify our loss. Summon the others. We’ll get Polydeuces back. Whether we choose to take the mules back is another question. The longer they eat the enemy’s fodder, the less you have to collect and carry up the mountain.’

The prefect had arranged for fodder to be left for us just below the snow line. Gathering it had become one of the most hated chores of our winter in the snow. At that moment, though, feeding the mules was not top of my concerns.

‘Are we all going?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘The entire century?’ Horror must have been written on my face for Lupus looked at me a moment, and his wire-fine brow rose a little higher. I saw his lip curl.

‘That depends on what we learn over the course of today,’ he said. ‘Four units may suffice. It would be unfortunate if this were merely a diversion to pull us out of camp and we were to return and find we had lost everything for the sake of a dozen mules and a sick legionary.’

Not madness, then, but boldness, and forethought. I breathed in the cold air and felt less dizzy. I relaxed my hands, which had been ready for murder, at my sides.

Lupus continued as if I had not moved. ‘On the other hand, however much we despise the Fourth, they are not weak men. If we go undermanned, we’ll set ourselves at a disadvantage from the start. Intelligence is everything. We’ll go at dusk when we’re not so visible, and in the meantime you, Syrionand Horgias will spy ahead, find out what’s in our way and where the ambushes are.’

He tilted his head, looking at me. Fire still burned in the heart of his eyes, and the quirk of his lip was deeper now. ‘There will be ambushes,’ he said. ‘They will be expecting you and they will endeavour to capture you. I think we can consider this a declaration of war. Tell the rest that the morning parade and inspection will go ahead as normal.’

I was walking back through the snow to the tents when I realized that the curl of his lip had been the beginning of a smile.

‘He smiled? Are you sure? Was he foaming at the mouth? Were his eyes rolled back in his head and showing white all across?’

It was Rufus who asked, our wiry, red-haired locksmith who swore he had Gaulish parentage, and it wasn’t his fault he was barely tall enough to top the probationer’s measuring stick and was half Proclion’s width when any self-respecting Gaul would have been twice that size.

He was guarding our tents, and using the time to clean his armour against Lupus’ next inspection; up here, where we could tickle the soles of the gods’ feet did we but stretch our arms above our heads, the water had all frozen out of the air and we saw little rust, but the other side of the coin was that leather cracked easily, with the result that we all reeked of the sheep oil we used to keep it supple, and polished iron was soon coated in a fine film of grease and dirt.

Clad in a spare cloak over his own, with a felt cap hugging his ears, Rufus was seated on a log, warming his lanolin in a bronze mess cup over a fire made entirely of twigs. I crouched at it a moment, and held my hands out to the tiny, stabbing flames. I couldn’t feel the heat through my gloves, except as a lessening of cold.

‘First four units at least to go with Lupus,’ I said. ‘But not until nightfall. There’s parade inspection first for everyone except three of us who are to spy on the Fourth. Where are the others?’

‘Digging.’ He jerked his head over his shoulder towards the area we had set aside for the latrines. ‘Blow the horn; they’ll come fast enough.’

My lips were too cold for that. I cupped my hands to my mouth and gave vent to the long, yelping sound, not unlike a wolf, with which we called each other. The men I shared a tent with ran to me like hounds to the huntsman.

Syrion led; in older times, he would have been an Olympian, running, wrestling, throwing at the games, and feted afterwards for the sculpted muscles of his frame. He had pale hair, the colour of cut wood, with flecks of bronze through it that spoke of more authentic Gaulish blood somewhere in his lineage than did Rufus’ flaring red. Most of all, he was manifestly honest: he had a kind, open face that knew nothing of guile; what he said, he meant, and if you did not like it, still you could trust it.

Next to him was Tears, a hand smaller, a hand slighter, his hair dark, and moulded to his head as if he, too, were a sculpture, but one made for his looks, not the brilliance of his athletic feats. For where Syrion was an Olympian, Tears was his Youth; the perfect beauty, of impeccable Cretan breeding, temperament and looks. He was Syrion’s for the taking, but Syrion didn’t want him. Syrion had women — an uncounted number of women — in the town beyond the camp and Tears was left bereft.

I thought that Proclion might have liked him, but he was too vast for Tears and in any case Proclion had settled on his shield-man, Horgias the Silent, tall and lean and balding early on top, who had caught frostbite in an unfortunate place and let Proclion warm it for him one night and they had slept oneatop the other ever since. We were envious, those of us who merely huddled side by side; they were warmer.

And so now these two were here, and last moon-faced Sarapammon, panting, grey-green about the eyes, who should have been sent to serve on boats, for he had been born on an island with sea all about and water was his love, the deeper the better; here in the high mountains he was as sick as I was on ship in the ocean. He leaned forward with his hands on his knees, fighting to breathe, as I told them that we were to consider ourselves at war with the first century of the first cohort of the IVth legion.

Syrion had already guessed the worst of it; why else was I standing there alone, calling men in? He listened while I sketched the bare bones of our disaster and then said, ‘Four units isn’t enough to take on the first of the Fourth.’ He spun on his heel, looking out across the ruined snow. ‘They were good men before we hit the mountains; they’ll be better now. And they’ll be expecting us.’

‘Lupus knows that. In this, I think we can trust him. He knows we need to get Polydeuces back, but we need to teach them a lesson, too. They’ve been harrying us since we got here. We’ve only a month left. If we don’t do something serious in retaliation, they’ll be back.’

An idea was flowering in my mind as I looked at Syrion and he at me; our thoughts flowed along the same pathways, and we had come to recognize it in each other. He was watching me now, laughing. ‘Demalion the Fox has an idea?’ he asked.

Nobody had called me Fox before; I felt my cheeks burn and dipped my head, to look at the marks my sandals made in the snow. ‘Something I saw in Hyrcania,’ I said. ‘After Vologases returned to the throne, they had games and set us challenges. We were put in small groups and set to raid each other’s wagons; it’s a thing they do to sharpen the men.’

‘Like putting us on the mountain,’ Tears said wryly.

‘Exactly like,’ I said. ‘There’s a thing our leader Pantera did, with a few men against many. If Lupus will allow us, we can try it again.’

‘That’s the catch though, isn’t it?’ Sarapammon said. He was more flesh-hued now, less like a fish long dead from the sea. ‘Will he allow any idea that isn’t his?’

‘At this moment,’ I said, ‘I think you will be surprised at what he will allow. Our centurion has just discovered what he lives for, and it is this.’