The Sacrifice Stone (16 page)

*

I’d decided that the mastermind behind my silent watchers must be Gaius. I don’t know why I was so sure; perhaps it was that the way those heavies moved reminded me of him, although they were twice his size — I didn’t fool myself that I could have felled either of them, even with the best-aimed punch I’d ever thrown.
Anyone
had ever thrown.

I spent an anxious day while Theo was off fishing, imagining those men following him, making off with him, even harming him. They wouldn’t approach him while Julius is with him, I reasoned, they’ve been at pains to keep a low profile and they’d undo all the good work if they reveal themselves to Julius.

Nevertheless, as the long hours wore slowly on I became increasingly uneasy. Eventually, any activity being better than none at all, I got up. Feeling absurdly over-dramatic, I went to my room to fetch my short sword, then I went out, closing the gates firmly behind me.

I went down to the pool in the stream where I guessed Theo and Julius would have gone. There they were, lying on their backs in the shade: I heard the faint murmur of their conversation, and once Theo laughed.

No sign of anyone else about. But then, if the spies were watching, they’d make sure they kept out of sight.

I walked on upstream. Behind me the village was drowsing in the afternoon heat; the only things moving were the fat, lazily circling flies.

Then, rounding a bend and emerging from the shelter of a stretch of tall rushes, I tripped over a stout pair of legs and fell against a supine body.

The two heavies were lying side by side, fishing abandoned for the time being, as relaxed and content as Julius and Theo.

‘I’m sorry!’ I said. ‘Did I hurt you? Either of you?’

They both shook their heads. They looked even more vacant at close quarters, the loose mouths now spreading into wet-lipped smiles. They were so alike that they had to be twins, but the special blessings that Mercury confers on twins didn’t seem to have included much in the way of intelligence.

‘I caught a fish,’ said one.

‘So did I. I caught two!’ replied his brother.

They both giggled, an incongruous sound from two such large men.

I wondered who they were. Distant relatives of some poor soul in the village, who was doing his duty and taking his turn at looking after them? ‘Are you staying nearby?’ I asked, squatting down beside them.

‘We’re living with Uncle Claudius,’ one confided. ‘We have a big bed in the little house where the goats are.’

That accounted for the smell. ‘Very nice,’ I remarked. Uncle Claudius obviously didn’t consider that duty extended to allowing his cumbersome nephews inside his house. More likely — for I knew Claudius — it was his wife Calpurnia who had put her foot down.

One of the twins started humming, and the other joined in. Not only were they simple and smelly, they were also tone-deaf. Wishing them farewell, I got up and left them to it.

*

Unless the cloaked man was about, waiting for his moment to accost Theo, it didn’t seem as if the boy was in any immediate danger. And I might have been wrong about him, too — he might well have had some perfectly innocent reason for hiding under my terrace for hours on end. I was in sore need of some hard exercise, which I always find clears the mind and facilitates sensible thinking, so I branched away from the stream and set off towards the distant hills.

My thoughts were with my god. Having belatedly recognized both my need of him and my failure in regular observance of his rites, I wanted to make immediate amends. It would take too long to go to the temple — I could hardly expect him to rush to help me in my protection of Theo if I was stupid enough to leave the lad alone for all those hours — but I have never considered it necessary to be in the temple to pray.

I thought about him as I walked, of the wonder of his pursuit and capture of the bull, of how the blood from that miraculous slaying gave such gifts to mankind. He had been my guide and friend throughout my days in the Legion, and I didn’t imagine he’d desert me now that I was no longer a soldier. He doesn’t desert his true followers, I know that.

I found a flat rock which looked quite like the sacrifice stone by my temple. Standing in front of it, using it as an aid to my meditation, I closed my eyes and let my thoughts go to the god.

*

When I set off back to the villa, I felt much better. For one thing, I’d had a time of calm, of peaceful solitude, and it had helped me put everything in perspective.

Far more important, the cessation of my wild, jumbled thoughts had allowed the god to speak to me. And, typical of him, what he had to say had the virtue of being both practical and providing me with an outlet for my pent-up energy.

He’d suggested I swapped roles with the cloaked man. That, instead of being the hunted, I became the hunter.

My heart full of thanks, I resolved to do exactly that.

*

I waited until Theo was asleep. Then, securing the villa as best I could, I went out into the night.

I circled the village, gaining a little height so as to afford the best view of any comings and goings. For a long time, nothing happened. In that sleepy, innocent place, everyone was in bed.

Then something moved on the street leading to the villa. Hopping over Claudius’s fence — careful not to go anywhere near his goat shed — I cut off a wide corner and jumped down into the road some thirty paces behind the cloaked man.

He heard me. Hardly surprising — I’d meant him to.

He turned and waited for me.

As I approached, I drew my sword. Not the short stabbing
gladius
that is the primary weapon of the legionary, but a heavy, long-bladed, vicious-looking monster, its hilt decorated with grimacing heads, that I’d taken from the hands of a dying Celtic prince.

The cloaked man stood in a beam of light from a torch set in a wall sconce. I got within three paces of him, then I stopped.

Slowly he pushed back his hood, and the torchlight shone on his face. It wasn’t a hardened ex-legionary, and it wasn’t Gaius — this man wasn’t old enough to be either. It was a young face, smooth-skinned, yet it was full of hate.

It was the face of a man I’d last seen more than twenty years ago, in the bone-biting cold of a dawn up on Hadrian’s Wall.

A matter of moments before he died.

16

It was back in the days when the Emperor Antoninus Pius was struggling to hold the lowlands north of Hadrian’s Wall. In a surge of confidence following the conquest he’d ordered the construction of the northern wall, the one that bears his name, and for a while it had looked as if we were in for an unprecedented spell of peace up in those wild lands.

We should have known better. Certainly, those of us with long experience of the Brigantes shouldn’t have expected they’d meekly accept the spread of Roman dominion, not when it involved Brigantian territory. The only excuse for my lot, working on the refortifications at Coriosopitum, is that we were safe in a small corner of Britannia that had long since come to terms with Roman rule, which meant we had no means of detecting the great unrest amongst the tribesmen. Even the most furious and resentful Brigantian chief wouldn’t have been foolhardy enough to attack Hadrian’s Wall; he might have found quite a few of his own tribesmen defending alongside the Romans. I wasn’t the only legionary with a Brigantian wife, and many of the native men had decided we weren’t such a bad lot, all things considered, and they preferred to side with us than against us.

But we didn’t have to wait for war to come to us: we were ordered out to meet it. In the autumn, I was sent north with a detachment of the Sixth to support the troops fighting in the lowlands.

Don’t go thinking that what happened was because we’d spent so long being builders we’d forgotten how to be soldiers — the Roman army doesn’t work like that. It’s true that, for a while back then, refitting Coriosopitum fort was a priority; it was right on the road north to the new Antonine Wall, a vital supply base for the campaign. Nevertheless, not a day went by that we didn’t engage in some sort of drill, and at regular intervals we were sent out on scouting or foraging parties to keep us sharp and make sure we didn’t get too used to the comforts, such as they were, of life within a fort.

No. What happened was the fault of one man.

Our destination was Trimontium, an outpost fort to the south of the new wall. The fighting on the wall had been brutal, the tribesmen as desperate to take it as our legions were to hold on, but in the end our men had been forced to evacuate the wall forts, putting them to the torch as they fled south. Casualties had been heavy, although just how heavy we didn’t realize until we saw the number of reinforcements subsequently sent from Germania. All the same, we knew well enough things must have been going badly, otherwise we’d still have been digging latrines back at Coriosopitum.

In sound military tradition, the forces had fallen back to a stronghold, in this case the large fort at Trimontium. We arrived to find a Brigantian onslaught in full swing: three of my men were felled before we’d even reached the south gate.

In the fury of battle there’s no time for reaction — you don’t even feel the pain of a wound till afterwards. You hear men howling in fear, screaming in agony, you see such damage inflicted on men’s bodies that they’re scarcely recognizable as human. And these aren’t strangers, they’re men you’ve lived and worked beside, perhaps for years, no few of whom you’ve grown close to. Yet, all the time you’re under attack, your emotions are frozen: you become a machine, your brain issuing orders like a centurion which, unthinkingly, your body obeys.

Reaction comes afterwards.

The burial details were kept busy during those dreadful days. There was no time for individual interments, it was just a matter of digging pits and tipping in the dead, along with their damaged armour and their personal possessions. But we did our best for them: whenever there was a lull, the priests would be hauled out from wherever they’d been hiding and made to gabble through the words of dedication. I hope the gods understood that, although we were pressed for time and our priests almost wetting themselves with terror, our prayers for our dead colleagues were nevertheless sincere.

Those bloody Brigantes never let up. We faced wave after wave of them, screaming, half-naked, hair white with lime and sticking up like metal spikes. They were no match for us when we went out to engage them. We advanced in testudo formation, our shields protecting us like the tortoise’s shell, and hacked them down with our short swords; their great two-handed weapons were all very well for slashing a man in two in the open, but no use at all for close combat. But, every time we beat one lot off, another rank would come pelting down on us.

It seemed sometimes as if the whole of Britannia was out there, lining up waiting for their turn to have a go at the invader.

The air around the fort soon became unhealthy, to say the least. It was a blessing it was autumn, and too cold for the dead flesh to rot and putrefy as quickly as it would have done in summer; the Brigantes were dutiful to their dead, I’ll give them that, and did their best to keep up with disposal. You’ll get an idea of just how huge the task was if I tell you that, even working throughout the long hours of the northern darkness, the enemy’s burial parties couldn’t clear each day’s casualties before the sun came up and we went out to chase them away.

So there we were, just about holding out against each day’s attack, sufficiently well supplied with food, water and troops to keep going for the foreseeable future. But we began to wonder how long that was to be: we seemed to have killed hundreds, maybe even thousands, yet still they came. Unease spread: supposing they just kept coming? For ever?

That sort of superstitious dread is something a commander must stamp out. It’s fatal if it’s allowed to take hold — men have been known to crawl away and give up once they start to believe they’re up against an invincible foe. Our commander was a practical man: seeing that we were starting to have difficulty with the troops, he gave us all something else to think about. Instead of sitting here waiting for them, he announced, we’re going to go out on the offensive. And our aggression was to take two forms: while the enemy’s attention was engaged with strongly armed groups of legionaries openly hunting them down, smaller, discreet sorties would creep out to gain what intelligence they could about how many Brigantes there were and where they were lurking.

His tactics were absolutely right, I accept that. It was just a shame that fate decreed I had to lead the first sortie.

I chose a select group of my men, knowing from long experience which were the quietest and the most capable of moving silently. They didn’t let me down: we had advanced about three or four miles, and had found ourselves a good vantage point, when our luck ran out.

We were on top of a small wooded knoll, and three of us had managed to climb trees so as to improve our view. The rest of the party were on the ground. Up in the trees, we were getting an excellent picture of Brigantian numbers and dispositions, and I was about to suggest we climbed down and all of us set off back for the fort when a tiny movement at the foot of the knoll caught my eye.

I’d never associated the Brigantes with stealth, probably because my only experience of them had been when they were on the attack, when a more raucous lot would be hard to imagine. I shouldn’t have jumped to the conclusion that they didn’t know how to be quiet, though, and I accept that my lack of imagination was partly to blame. But, as yet, all wasn’t lost: the Brigantes clearly knew we were there, so there was no longer any virtue in not advertising our presence. I ordered my signaller to blow a blast on his trumpet. He stared at me as if I’d gone mad.

‘There are Brigantes at the foot of the hill,’ I explained. ‘If you don’t blow soon, they’ll be on us and you’ll have lost the last chance to summon help.’

He closed his mouth abruptly, instantly lifting his trumpet to his lips. He blew the signal for help as if his life depended on it. It did.

Mars was watching over us. One of our attacking parties was close enough to hear the desperate appeal, and we heard the answer. Those sharp notes that announced help was coming were the best sound I’ve ever heard.

We heard crashing in the undergrowth below. The Brigantes, breaking cover, set up that appalling screeching they specialize in, interspersing the screams with long ululations that chilled the blood. We grouped together, adopting the tortoise formation, and waited.

They burst out into the open in ones and twos, at first all from the same quarter. Their lack of organization worked against them, as it so often did: acting as one, we advanced and hacked them down. The next group came from behind us: again, overcoming them was a simple matter. They could have had the better of us already, I remember thinking, if they’d only stop being so pig-headed and independent, if they’d learn to discipline themselves under one man’s control. If they’d closed in on us in an organized way from all directions at once, we’d all be dead by now.

It was beginning to dawn on even their thick heads that they weren’t going to get the better of us by attacking piecemeal. We watched as they dropped back, and, as they put their spiky heads together, we heard them muttering. Further crashings and cursings from below indicated that more of them were approaching: if we waited for them to think it out logically, we’d be lost.

I gave the order to attack.

We had the advantage, at first. We held the higher ground, and our very impetus downhill towards them enabled us to dispatch their front men with no difficulty. They were wild and brutal, but they were untrained, at least in comparison with us: we all knew what to do in answer to most forms of attack, and soon the knoll was heaped with their dead.

But, just like back at Trimontium, they kept on coming. Do you know that story the Greeks like to tell, about their hero Jason facing an endless army that sprang from dragon’s teeth sown in a field? That’s how it felt for us. We’d kill three, four, ten of them, and immediately another ten would leap up, snarling and waving their swords, to take the place of the fallen.

We were beginning to falter. It takes it out of you, killing; you begin to feel your strength wane after a while. One of my men was taken, dragged away from the outside of the formation. Another went, then another. Those of us left tightened ranks and tried to close our ears to the screams of our colleagues: however the Brigantes were killing them, they weren’t doing it quickly.

Over the sounds of their agony and the racket the indefatigable tribesmen were still making rose the sound of a trumpet. It was near at hand. I sent up a prayer of deepest gratitude to my god.

The small group of us left alive were on our knees when the relief column broke out from the trees. The legionaries went instantly on the attack, slaughtering Brigantes with the energy and efficiency of men who’d done nothing more demanding all morning than take a quick trot in the fresh air. Sinking down, exhausted, we pressed together, shields held over us.

Keeping watch, I saw the leader of the group emerge on to the hilltop. I clearly remember thinking, about time! But then I saw who it was.

Quintus Severus and I had been thrown together frequently over the years. I say thrown together because I would never have chosen his company; probably he felt the same about me. We had enlisted in the Legion in the same year, and some of our training had been done side by side. Even then, I didn’t trust him, and nothing had happened subsequently to alter that. There was a time on the Southern Wall when he let me down, an occasion at Coriosopitum when I know he lied to get himself out of trouble (and, incidentally, land me in it), and once I saw him administer a severe punishment to a man whose guilt was in doubt, to say the least.

In that dire position on top of the knoll, surrounded by Brigantes, I would rather have had any man in the entire Roman army as my deliverer than Quintus Severus.

He looked very pale, and his face was sweating. He was wiping something from his mouth — I suspected he’d just been sick, and guessed he’d seen what was left of those of my men the Brigantes had taken away.

He stared around the knoll, at his own men efficiently dispatching tribesmen, at my men and me, huddled under our shields. Maybe what he said later was the truth, maybe he really did think at first that we were all dead.

But he can’t possibly have gone on thinking that, because I sat up and called out to him.

He spun round and stared at me. Right into my eyes.

I shouted, ‘Wait where you are, we’ll fight our way across to you and we’ll try to ...’

He turned and ran. As he disappeared into the trees, I heard him order his men to follow. To emphasize the point, he had his signaller blow the retreat. His men were so busy fighting that they may well not have realized there were soldiers left alive on the hilltop: I’m quite prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt, and in any case they’d just received a direct order. Gods, I’d have retreated if I’d have been in their shoes — no man needs much of an excuse to run away from a group of vengeful Brigantes with their decapitating axes in their hands.

We were down to five: the rest of my men had been dragged away. If we stayed, we’d be taken too, so we made a dash for it. It may have been that the Brigantes were at last running out of men, or possibly they were enjoying themselves too much cutting up my men to bother with any more fighting; whatever the reason, all but one of us made it through their diminishing numbers and down the hillside.

We were intent on getting away, and you’d have thought that would have made us blind to everything else. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Although at the time I’d have said I only paid scant attention to what lay scattered on the track, I discovered that my brain had recorded every last detail, so thoroughly that I’ve never been able to forget. The sights I saw that day still have the power to make me sweat with horror, and I pray for the souls of those poor men whenever I feel I have my god’s attention.