The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Twelve

Syrion and I ran back into the maelstrom of the stockade. The smoke was finer here, the fire nearly burned out. A clot of men battled in the left hand corner nearest the gate. Lupus was at their centre alone, set about by a full unit of the IVth. Their backs were to us; we had the advantage of surprise.

I flicked a glance at Syrion, saw him nod and raise his arm, and then, ‘ For the Twelfth! ’

We bellowed it with all the force of a full unit. I ran close by the wall and let my padded blade — the padding was less than it had been, I will own that, now — rattle along the wood so that we sounded like an incoming army.

Syrion simply bunched his Olympian shoulders and hurled himself bodily at the backs of the nearest men. Two went down with him, bowled flat and winded. I picked one and swung the flat of my blade at his back just below the shoulder blades, with a force that would have cut him in half had I used the naked edge.

He dropped as if dead. I did not stop to see if it were true. We were three and they were five and they knew now how few we were. They rallied and came at us shoulder to shoulder, big men with hate in their eyes, weaving their uncovered blades back and forth.

Their leader grinned, showing gaps in his teeth where earlier violence had taken them out. There was blood on his lips. In a moment’s terror, I prayed it was his own, and that he did not feed on other men’s death. He saw me and his grin widened. In northern Latin, with a Germanic taint, he said, ‘Three prisoners for the loss of one. A good bargain.’

Lupus was on my left, Syrion beyond him. I felt him tense. In fast southern Greek, he said, ‘Break to the left of Blood-mouth on my count. Three, two, one, go!’

As if our lives depended on it, we hurled ourselves at the hair’s breadth space Lupus had divined between the blood-mouthed brute and the barely less terrifying man to his left.

I closed my eyes and made a missile of my body. I felt blows rain on my shoulders, my back, my hips as I rolled, but felt no pain. ‘Don’t fight — run!’ How Lupus had breath to shout was beyond me, and in any case I needed no orders. I had seen the flame-lit gap where was the gate and nothing short of death would have stopped me going through it.

We broke out into cold, free air. Syrion was with me, Lupus a little behind, but catching up. I ran until my lungs burned, until I could taste blood in my spit, and still I kept running until the pounding of my blood in my ears began to echo and I listened through the spaces between the beats and heard footsteps, and a name; mine.

Blood-mouth did not know my name. I slowed and turned and felt myself sway with the sudden halt. I bent forward with my palms braced above my knees and dragged in air, hiccoughing and sobbing and swearing until all three came together and I was laughing, loosely, out of control.

Lupus was barely more sane. He crouched down and took a handful of snow and held it to a bruise on his cheek. Under the clean white moonlight, it was a black shape with nocolour, but I could imagine it red-purple with greening edges when the sun fell on it in the morning.

I looked to my other side, where Syrion was standing with his head thrown back, dragging in air as if to suck in the sky. He grinned at me, and made the signal for success that we shared: a clenched fist.

I returned it, but when it was clear that neither of them had called me I walked back down the mule track away from them and the noise of their breathing until — there! — I heard my name called again, faintly, from far off.

I cupped my hands to my mouth and gave the wolf’s call, not as well as Tears had done it on top of the stockade fence, but good enough. I heard a single yelp back, and walked on. The other two caught me up, silent now, and breathing with more care.

We met Horgias less than a spear’s throw up the path that led back to the camp. He was holding his arm at an awkward angle and his face, even in moonlight, was more green than white.

‘Who’s been taken?’ I could feel it, or I read it in his face. And I read the answer the same way, so that I was already reaching for snow to sweep across my face, to snap me to wakefulness.

Through the sudden cold, I heard him say, ‘Tears. They have him in the centurion’s hut. Proclion and Sarapammon have gone ahead for help. I thought you might be still at the compound.’ He gave a kind of loose smile, that spoke as much of exhaustion and pain as of relief at having found us.

‘It will need an exchange,’ Lupus said. His left eye flashed from the centre of the black bruise on his face, wild and still at the same time. He took a long breath. ‘Let’s go back.’

‘Why would they take one of us over him?’ Syrion asked. ‘They’re as likely to take us all captive.’

‘If we offer a centurion for a man, they’ll accept,’ Lupussaid calmly. ‘They’ve seen what we can do; they won’t risk more getting hurt if they can gain me without battle.’

‘But why would you…’

I laid a hand on Syrion’s arm. ‘He led us here,’ I said. ‘If that has caused a man to be captured, he has to do this, or he has to offer. For his honour.’ I let go of Syrion and turned to Lupus. ‘I think you’re right, they would take you. But I think they will be happier if we offer them their Eagle back. And then no one is flogged.’

He looked at me a long time in silence. The white side and the black side of his face were perfectly still as his eyes raked me from crown to toe and back again. ‘You took their Eagle?’ he asked.

‘We did.’

‘Under whose orders?’

‘Mine,’ I said; and then, ‘We’re at war.’ Syrion and I stood silent waiting for the tempest of his fury, and heard instead a strange, uncommon noise, and found it was laughter.

Lupus laughed until he choked, and we had to thump between his shoulders to help him breathe. Presently, when he could speak, ‘Where is it?’ he asked. ‘The Eagle.’

‘I gave it to a man of the sixth unit. He was to take it to Cadus and await us. If we haven’t caught him up by dawn, he is to take it to our camp. If they’re attacked, he’s to throw it over the mountain, where it will not be found.’

His brows rose a fraction more at that, but he nodded. ‘Horgias, go to Centurion Cadus, tell him what’s happened and that he might need to surrender the Eagle to a delegation of the Fourth. Tell him that he is not to let it go unless they ask for it in the name of Jupiter Best and Greatest. If they ask in any other way, he may cast it down the mountain as Demalion suggested. And have his bone-setter take look at your arm. Syrion, Demalion, come.’

We three ran back to the enemy compound. That night, I believe we could have run the length of the empire and not felt it a hardship.

The smell that met us at the corner this time was not the lazy warmth of mules, but the ravages of fire. I ran through the smell of burning logs, of hides and furs, and, somewhere, of flesh.

At the bend in the path, Lupus dropped to a crouch with us at his either side. We were wild men now more than legionaries; any one of us could have been taken for a barbarian. Ahead, the men of the IVth were making a bucket chain, trying to put out the fire in their stockade. The compound that contained the huts was smoking threadily, but we had not fired it as badly as the stockade, and so fewer men were there.

Syrion said, ‘If we walk to the gate, they’ll take us and beat us. We might not have a chance to say why we’ve come.’

‘Demalion?’ Lupus was looking at me. I wondered if he saw the thoughts forming in my mind.

I said, ‘We could try to climb over the wall at the back of the centurion’s hut. We didn’t fire that, so they won’t be watching it.’ I pulled a wry smile. ‘If we don’t have to give the Eagle away…’

‘Lead us.’ Lupus rose, wiping snow from his hand. ‘On condition that if we meet them and there’s any talking to be done, I speak and you remain silent.’

The route round the back took us over the treacherous scree slope, but I found the steps we had missed the first time, and I now knew must be there. I had seen their centurion’s hut now, seen the lengths they went to for comfort and safety, and knew they would never leave their men to flounder on uncertain footing.

High clouds veiled the moon’s face, making it harder to find handholds in the wall, but I had learned as a child that every dry-stone wall has places where a boy may climb, andwhere a boy can go a man may follow, has he but the nerve to go up, and not look down.

Syrion looked down. I was straddling the top when the clouds scurried away from the moon, and in the sudden wash of silvered light he made the mistake of checking that his foothold was secure.

I knew, because I could see by then, that what he saw below his foot was a great, yawning void; we had moved rightwards of the place where we started, and the fall was vertical and long. The ground was down there, somewhere, too far away to matter.

‘Syrion!’ I hissed urgently. ‘Don’t look down! Look up at me. Take my hand.’

There was a risk in that: our hands were not dry, but I could see a wave of weakness take him, and had seen men fall who would have been able to climb had not the height unmanned them.

I leaned over further. ‘Come on, or I’ll fall with you.’ I felt his cold hand, and caught it at the wrist and locked my legs and held still while he used me as his climbing pole to make the top of the wall.

To his left, Lupus was already up, scrambling over the stone like a thief and then down in a long jump to the floor of the compound. I waited a moment, listening, but heard no shouts. I pushed Syrion and waited for his landing before I followed, and then led them out between the huts, through thin, acrid smoke and the reek of wet ash and wetter bedding. I imagined the IVth trying to find comfort in their stone-built luxury at this night’s end, and felt an unkind satisfaction.

‘Shh.’ I put my fingers to my lips. The others stopped where they were, mid-stride. ‘Men ahead, three, perhaps mo-’

And then the night split apart, rent by a man’s high, desperate cry, born of a pain so deep, so terrible, it could bear no real form.

‘ Tears! ’

I ran as I had never yet run, without caution, without forethought, without an eye for the hidden traps, for the dangers, for the reasons why I was being summoned. For I was being summoned. In that cry I heard my name; however inchoate, however unintended, Tears called for me and, as Achilles to Patroclus, I ran.

He was in the centurion’s hut, where the air was still warm, but not hot, and still smelled of cedarwood and incense and wealth, but now it smelled also of pain and blood and violence and Tears was flung on the bed, on fresh hides, naked, bruised, assaulted.

Two men stood over him, aroused and grinning as men stand over the women in a newly taken town. Another was climbing off — the centurion, by his badges — and one of the standing men was lifting the hem of his tunic, working himself to readiness. He was the same Blood-mouth we had faced in the mule stockade.

‘ Tears! ’ Screaming his name as my battle cry, I hurled myself at Blood-mouth with all the force and fury of a bull at a field cur, taking his chest squarely with my shoulder and ramming the hilt end of my gladius up into his solar plexus. As he went down, I jabbed my elbow in under his kidneys. He didn’t even grunt, he had so little air to breathe.

Lupus and Syrion had taken the other standing man, Lupus holding his shoulders, Syrion sweeping his feet out from under him. He fell lengthways, even as I swung myself past, using a set of shelves as a lever. I heard his head hit the stone floor.

The centurion was the last and slowest to respond. He was newly sated, dull-eyed, too fogged in his mind to think clearly. I kicked him in the gut with all the ache of Tears’ cry behind it, and then reached for Tears who had risen and fallen again, or seemed so to have done.

But when I hauled him upright, there was blood on his hands, and a glimmer of iron, and the small, bronze-handled knife with the wren on the hilt was slick with crimson, and the centurion had a wound in his chest, over his heart, barely the width of my thumb. Blood oozed from his mouth. I saw death steal the light from his eyes.

‘Give that to me!’ I grabbed the knife from Tears, spun him away, saw in passing the marks of ropes on his wrists, the welts across his back where they had misused him before the centurion made him his own.

Ungainly, I shoved my friend back against the wall, and set my own naked blade against the centurion’s chest, stripping away the last paltry strands of wool so that when I stood again, and Lupus was there to meet me, I could say, ‘I killed him.’

Lupus said nothing, only pinched the bridge of his nose, and blew out a blood clot, and wiped the mess away with the back of his hand. Absently, he cleaned himself on the centurion’s new bed hides.

Any man who kills another will be flogged until dead. So had said the prefect, who was due to make his visit in a day’s time.

Lupus’ eyes fed on my face, then inched away. I heard Tears draw a breath.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Be silent.’

‘Yes,’ Lupus said, ‘be silent. Both of you.’ He looked down. ‘This man is a prisoner,’ he said. ‘We’ll take him with us. You’ — he pointed to Syrion and me — ‘wrap him tightly and bind him so he can’t escape. You’ — this to Tears — ‘dress fast. We must leave swiftly, before the others regain consciousness.’

We said nothing, any of us, only let our glances slide off each other, so that nothing was spoken between us, even silently. Tears was dressed by the time we had trussed the centurion as if he were, in fact, alive, and able to escape. We bound him in hides and Syrion and I raised him to our shoulders like a battering ram.

‘Follow,’ Lupus said, and led us out of the door.

We did not run from the enemy compound, but we marched faster than I had ever done before and came sooner than I might have wanted to Cadus’ camp. There, we did not pause, but gathered Horgias and Sarapammon and the giant Proclion and poor Polydeuces, who had become ‘the Rabbit’ and already knew he would never lose the name.

‘What will you do with the Eagle?’ Cadus asked it of Lupus, but he was watching my face, trying to read me. I held myself unreadable.

Lupus said, ‘If you could deliver it back to them tomorrow, I would be grateful; we have no need of it now. Tell them if they want their officer before the prefect’s visit, they can bargain for him.’

We left swiftly, Syrion and I still carrying our bundle, which was clearly a man and perhaps not clearly dead.

I remember nothing of the march back. It must have happened, for we reached our own camp just as the first knife’s edge of light cut the night from the eastern sky. I had cramp in my right arm, from holding tight to a dead weight, and I fancied I could feel warm blood on my skin, though it could as easily have been urine, or something more foul.

At the gates to our camp, we halted. Lupus had given no order, but we dared not go in, for fear of what looting might have occurred in our absence.

Nothing had happened — the earlier units had returned as they had been told and held our camp safe; we found that almost immediately. Lupus himself walked forward, and took the salute from the leading man and came out again. We could read him now, in ways we never had before. We saw his relief, his almost-joy, and we cheered him though the soundcame ragged from our throats for it was over a day since we had rested, and we had fought hard in between.

He waited for us to be still. The sun was on him, lighting the bruise that marred half his face. He looked wild, and savage, and a far more genial man than he had been a day before.

He signalled Sarapammon and the Rabbit. ‘Take the men inside. See to the wounded, build fires, cook whatever we have to eat. There is some ale in my tent. Share it out equally.’

‘Where are you going?’ It was a sign of how different we were that Sarapammon dared ask.

‘We’re taking our prisoner somewhere safer,’ Lupus said. ‘The Fourth may launch a counter-attack. I would not want him too easily retaken.’

Nobody argued. As they turned to go in, they, too, were avoiding each other’s glances, preparing what they were going to say.

I still had no idea what I was going to say, except that I killed him, that Tears was not capable of it, that I would kill Tears myself with my bare hands if he tried to take the guilt to himself; better to die fast at the hands of a friend than under the prefect’s bullhide whip.

Tears was not carrying anything, but Lupus made him come with us. We four left the camp and walked west, up into the high peak, towards the goat path that we had followed a day-become-eternity ago, to find where the IVth had set their ambush.

We squeezed through the narrow channel, barely wide enough to fit the centurion’s body, and came out the other side, to the place where the mountain fell away and we could see down on to clouds still sunk in night; dawn had not reached them yet.

‘Untie him.’ Lupus moved away to sit on an outcrop of rock. He didn’t look for it, but sat with familiarity, as if thiswas a place he came often to watch the sun go down, or to count the tiny insects that scratched and sprang along the valley floor, and were, in fact, goats, and antelopes, and the beasts that hunted them.

We untied the centurion and laid him out on the hides that had been his bed. He looked ridiculous in death, with his tunic still bunched above his waist and his member flaccid. His skin was perfectly white, blotched in places where he had lain against us. It was urine that had pooled on my neck. I swept it clear with snow.

Lupus stood and came across and with his own hands lifted the man by his heels and swung him round. It took him perilously close to the edge. Stepping back, he held on to the mountain behind with one hand and placed his sandalled foot against the dead man’s head.

‘ Given of the god,

Given to the god,

Taken by the god in valour, honour and glory.

May you journey safely to your destination.’

It was the prayer spoken over the grave of a fallen soldier. Lupus spoke it like a benediction, as if the man had been his heart’s friend. Then he shoved his foot out, sharply.

The centurion sailed over the edge. He was a log, turning end over end in a waterfall; a tree, falling from a precipice; he was a man, falling so far, bouncing, coming apart on the rocks, an arm ripped off here, a long peel of skin there; the snow was bloody to the snow line, and then the winter-dried earth was bloody beyond it. If he hit the bottom, we could not see it.

‘He tried to retrieve his legion’s Eagle and then escape,’ Lupus said. ‘It was an honourable act, worthy of the officer he was, but sadly he did not know the terrain and so fell. Such will be my report. A man who falls off the mountain is deemed to have killed himself, so nobody bears any guilt, but I will suggest that, because he was our prisoner, we will pay for a tablet to be erected in his name beyond the walls of the camp.’

We stood in a line; me, Tears, Syrion. We two held Tears between us, for I think he might have thrown himself over when the centurion went. Certainly, he was shuddering as a man with fever.

I swallowed. ‘A good report,’ I said. ‘We shall, of course, be your witnesses.’

‘Of course. Now get that man back to the tents and feed him. Parade will be one hour later than usual.’

We were marching away when he called me back.

‘Do you have still the dye with which to turn your tunic red?’

‘The madder? Yes, I do.’

‘Enough of it for a century?’

‘Enough for the entire cohort, if you want it.’

He twitched a smile then; I was coming to know it, and to revel in the sight of it. I was his then, part of the XIIth, and he knew it. ‘Not the entire cohort yet, Demalion. The century will do. Henceforth we are the Bloody First. And I fancy we might have a mule’s tail on our standard. See to it on our return.’