The Wolves of the North

VI

In the morning, there was much fog. It hung a few feet off the water, slowly coiling up through the spars of the ships and the trees. Colour had leached out of the world, and everything was reduced to muted shades of grey. The camp was unnaturally quiet.

‘Where is it?’ Ballista asked as he buckled on his sword belt.

‘Downstream,’ the soldier said.

They set off, two other troopers and Maximus and Wulfstan following, through the tents and shelters. Most of the fires had gone out. Amphorae and wine skins were scattered in the trampled grass. A few revellers lay, insensible, where they had fallen. Apart from the lack of blood and sobbing women, it resembled the aftermath of a sack.

Following the Cilician auxiliary, Ballista concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. The going was uneven. His head hurt, and there was an unease in his stomach. The cold sweat on him was only partly due to the fog. The Goth that told him cannabis left no hangover had been lying. But, he had to admit, he had drunk a fair amount of wine as well.

Beyond the encampment, the grass was longer and very wet. Ballista’s boots were soon sodden, his trousers to the knee no better. The fog seemed denser out here. The far side of the river could not be seen. Only a faint lightening, a hint of warmth, indicated the presence of the risen sun.

Past a stand of tall oaks, the soldier cut off down to the river. They pushed through a bank of reeds and stopped at the edge of the water. A tall elm had been submerged, and the thing was entangled in its stripped, white branches.

‘What were you doing out here?’ Ballista asked.

‘Taking a shit, Dominus.’

‘You went out to it?’

‘Only to pull it in out of the current, so it did not drift downstream.’

Ballista studied the reeds and mud. He was half aware of more men arriving behind him. There was a clear trail where the soldier had waded out and back; no other disturbance. The killing had not been here. The body had floated down the river. There was no way of telling how far. Turning to the other two auxiliaries, he told them to bring it ashore. They looked back at him, crapulous and dubious.

‘That was an order,’ he snapped.

‘We will do what is ordered, and at every command we will be ready,’ they muttered.

The water would be cold, and they were undoubtedly suffering from the night before, but the discipline of the soldiers detached from the first Cilician cohort of mounted archers was poor. Ballista would have to speak to Hordeonius, although he was unsure what good it would do; the centurion was already a martinet.

Reluctance, bordering on dumb insolence, in every movement, the auxiliaries went down the slippery bank and splashed out into the shallows. The water came to their thighs. With high, exaggerated steps, they retrieved the bulky, unpleasant object and manhandled it to the side, dragging it the last part, up to where Ballista waited, backed by the newly formed crowd.

The corpse was naked. Where not streaked with fresh mud, it was pallid from its time in the water. Its extremities had been cut off: feet, hands, penis. Its face was a ruin: ears and nose gone, eyes gouged out. Liquid ran viscous from its orifices and wounds. The eunuch Amantius reeled away and threw up noisily. The rest looked on queasily. Still more men were arriving from the camp, drawn by the macabre news.

Ballista put a reassuring hand on young Wulfstan’s shoulder and asked those around the obvious question: ‘Who is it?’

No one replied. Anyone would be difficult to recognize in such a condition.

Shifting his scabbard to one side, Ballista crouched down and began to scrutinize the mutilated corpse. He remembered examining another cadaver years ago in a tunnel in the city of Arete. He had not been hungover then, and he had been thinking clearly. Today, every little thing would be an effort, let alone something like this.

Irritatingly, some fool in the crowd was intoning an apotropaic prayer in Greek. Too late to avert evil now, Ballista thought.

There were bruises on the neck, punctures and short rips in the skin where fingernails had caught. With a grunt of effort, Ballista half turned the body. Wulfstan bent down to help — the boy had spirit. There were no other obvious killing wounds. The man had been strangled.

They laid the corpse back. The thought struck Ballista that the man might have been alive when he was mutilated. Ballista felt his gorge rise. Do not be ridiculous, he said to himself. Of course he was already dead; he had been strangled.

‘Short hair, and dark — a Greek or Roman, not a Goth.’ The gudja had appeared behind Ballista. As always, the crone formed an unlovely retinue of one.

‘Yes.’ Ballista manipulated an arm. He could not remember how quickly a corpse stiffened after death, nor the time when it relaxed again. Being immersed in cold water probably altered things anyway.

‘I thought nomads like the Alani only scalped or beheaded their victims,’ Hippothous said.

Obviously, he too had noticed the horsemen stalking them for the previous three days. Neither Ballista nor, as far as he knew, Maximus, had mentioned it to anyone. The gudja was unlikely to have spoken. But Hippothous had been a bandit. He must be experienced in the fieldcraft of pursuit and evasion. Still, it was odd he had not reported the followers. Perhaps, like Ballista himself, he had not wished to dishearten the party.

‘No, they always cut off the right hand or arm,’ the interpreter cut in. ‘They make the skin into trappings for their horses.’ Biomasos was warming to his self-appointed role as local expert. ‘They tear out the eyes as well, but usually only of living captives. They blind not only those they keep as slaves but even those they intend to ransom. They are the most barbaric race on earth, except for the Heruli.’

‘And many say we Suanians are savage — next to this we are very gentle people, most eirenaic as could be termed.’ Tarchon spoke in a voice of vindication.

Ballista felt sick again. He had just discovered that the tongue was missing. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth; in through his nose, out through his mouth. Sensing his discomfort, Wulfstan passed him a leather bottle of water.

‘This reminds me of something in poetry,’ Mastabates said. ‘Maybe from an epic.’

Knowing his liking for the genre, Ballista looked up at Castricius. The latter just shrugged, keeping silent.

‘Not epic, but tragedy,’ Biomasos announced. ‘Aeschylus, the Choephoroi.’ The interpreter was rapidly becoming insufferable. ‘After she has got Aegisthus to murder Agamemnon, Clytemnestra mutilates the body of her husband.’

Ballista was sure he was not the only one to be thinking of another wronged woman with murder in her heart. Pythonissa was not far away in Suania, just beyond the Alani; and her brother Saurmag was with the nomads.

‘You will find it is better known from the Electra of Sophocles,’ Mastabates stated. ‘But I still think there is something more pertinent somewhere in epic.’

Ignoring the bookish Hellenes, Ballista concentrated on the mutilations. The cuts and slices were neat, as if done with practice. That was not at all good.

‘Someone must know who he is,’ Maximus said. ‘Who is missing from the Roman party?’

‘My slave was not in the tent just now, when the noise woke me,’ Castricius said. ‘I have not seen him yet.’

‘Is this him?’ Ballista asked.

The short Roman put his sharp, pointed face very close to the ghastly face of the corpse. ‘It could be.’

The fog did not lift that day, nor the next. Under it, the camp was subdued, out of sorts. The clammy entrapment was part of it, but more was down to the after-effects of the debauch. There was much idle speculation, but the death of the slave secretary seemed not to weigh that heavily on most, not even on his owner, Castricius. Urugundi guards were posted, and most felt the death was not their concern. Slaves often died — of disease and deprivation, at the hands of their owners or each other; the free were above such things.

Wulfstan was in attendance on Ballista. Both days, the big warrior mostly remained in his tent, Maximus and old Calgacus with him. As men with hangovers do, they ate and drank vast amounts, shifted about desultorily. Maximus moved on to wine mid-morning of the first day — a hair of the dog, nothing like it to straighten you out; the other two did not join him. Conversation in the tent was disjointed, rambling, but, like a dog returning to its own vomit, always circled back to the killing.

‘It is not the style of the Goths,’ Ballista said. ‘Videric and his Borani would come straight for me. They would think less of themselves if they did not pursue the bloodfeud openly.’

Maximus belched. ‘I am thinking it is more likely the Alani, or that evil Suanian bastard Saurmag, or maybe his poisonous sister. The mutilation would appeal to your girl Pythonissa. As the Greeks said, you could see a woman’s spite there.’

‘Loving a woman is like setting out over ice with a two-year-old colt, restive and unbroken.’ Calgacus was sometimes given to wheeling out the proverbs of the north. ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘it may be nothing of the sort. The slave was in Albania with Castricius, his fate could have followed him from there — it is not that far. Your little Roman has not been the same since. It was after that he started claiming to be Macedonian, and we all know the little shite is from Gaul; and all that bollocks about daemons — the good one that sits on his shoulder, and the spirits of death being shite-scared of him. He is as gone in the head as Hippothous with his physiconom…’

‘Physiognomy.’ Ballista wondered if Calgacus could say the word if he chose. He picked at some chicken. ‘And it could all be something else altogether.’

Wulfstan was up before dawn on the third day. In the night, a north wind had torn the fog away. There were spits of rain in the air. He prodded the fire back to life, cooked breakfast for Ballista and the other two: bacon, lots of it, fresh bread, and thin ale.

When a weak sun came up he went down to the river to wash the mud and blood from Ballista’s clothes. The water was still, like a black, polished stone. A carp flashed out in the stream, the ripples of its passing spreading wide. A big Urugundi warrior on guard watched it in a bored way

This was not the life Wulfstan was born to live. As he pounded a tunic on a stone, poetry of his childhood ran in his mind:

There is no one still living to whom I dare open

The doors of my heart. I have no doubt

That it is a noble habit for a man

To bind fast all his heart’s feelings,

Guard his thoughts, whatever he is thinking.

If the Langobardi slavers had not come, if they had not burnt his village, slaughtered his family, he would have grown to be a warrior, not a drudge. And those dreadful things would not have happened to him.

The weary in spirit cannot withstand fate,

And nothing comes of venting spleen.

Wulfstan was young — just thirteen winters, not yet a man; he did not agree. If he got his freedom, he would vent his spleen on all those who had owned him before Ballista. It should not be impossible to track them down. He had been traded one to another down the great rivers from the Suebian Sea to the imperium and Ephesus. He would retrace his steps; from Ephesus north through the Aegean and across the Kindly Sea, then up the Amber Road. Wulfstan’s return would be charted in blood and burning. The Taifali, a tribe loosely connected to the Goths in the west, were said to do to their own young men the shameful things which had been done to Wulfstan. A Taifali youth washed away the stain on his reputation when he killed a boar or a bear. Wulfstan would find redemption in blood; not in the blood of animals, but of man, and of many more than just one man.

The lowing of beasts, a deep rumbling and the high-pitched squeals of wood broke into Wulfstan’s consciousness. There was a massive cloud of dust approaching from the west.

‘The wagons are here,’ said the Urugundi guard.