The War at the Edge of the World (19 page)

‘Centurion! Message from the optio – you’d better come quick.’

Castus grunted himself upright, wiped his sword on the hem of his tunic and slammed it back in his scabbard. Then he followed the runner back across the enclosure to the western wall.

‘Looks like another parley,’ Timotheus said. ‘One of their chiefs, I think.’

There were five riders coming up the slope this time. One was Talorcagus, and behind him rode his brute-faced nephew Drustagnus. Castus was pleased to see that both men were bloody – they must have led one of the charges the day before. The third rider carried the swaying green branch, and the fourth was dragging something behind him. Castus stared. At the back of group rode Senomaglus, the old chief of the Votadini. There were two men behind the fourth horse, led by a rope, staggering. Two men stripped to the waist, with sacks over their heads. His breath caught, and he gripped the wall. His leg trembled as he tried to climb.

‘
Gods!
Timotheus, help me up here!’

Leaning on the optio’s arm, lifting his massive frame onto the wall, Castus straightened his back and stood steady, glaring down at the approaching riders. Talorcagus pulled up just outside the range of the darts. Before him, the slope up to the rampart was clotted with his own dead warriors, their corpses flung on the dull red grass.

‘Find the interpreter and bring him here,’ Castus said. He had last seen Caccumattus the night before, down at the south wall, flinging javelins with a look of furious rage on his thin face. Culchianus had sent him back to tend to the wounded. Now the little man, more ragged than ever, came running across the enclosure.

‘Centurio! I here!’

The Pictish chief had already started to bellow out his mes­sage. As he spoke, the two bound captives were marched up the slope and made to kneel. Their captor ripped the sacks from their heads. Marcellinus and Strabo, gasping and blinking in the daylight.

‘He say: Romani fighting well. Too much bravery! His heart wanting for to make deal.’

Castus stared down at the two captives. They knelt in the grass, the corpses spread before them. The man behind them had a short-bladed knife in his hand.

‘He say: Picti let Romani soldiers to go. March with weapons. Picti no to attack – he make promise word. Senomaglus of Votadini go with Romani, guide them to safe country.’

Castus stood on the wall, swaying slightly. His body felt as thin and light as a lath-wood mannequin, but sweat was pouring down his back beneath the hug of his armour. All along the wall behind him he could hear the other soldiers translating for their comrades. A steady stir of whispers. Senomaglus wore a look of humiliation, and did not glance up.

‘What about the prisoners?’

‘He say: If you no say yes to go, he make to kill prisoner mans.’

The guard stepped around behind Strabo, dragging his head up by the hair and placing his blade against the stretched column of his neck. Strabo rolled his eyes, terrified. The cross of hair on his bare chest was slicked with sweat. Marcellinus, kneeling beside him, was saying something…
Accept?
Don’t accept?
Castus could not make out the words.

But now Talorcagus was speaking again, stretching up from his horse and raising his finger. He was pointing straight at Castus.

‘He say: Also
you
must go. Centurio – he say you go to prisoner. Then prisoners live and all others Romani march to home.’

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Timotheus said. He seized Castus’s leg, his fingers tight on the muscle of his thigh.

Promise me you’ll protect him. Swear to me that you’ll look after him
… Castus felt his head empty. The men behind him were silent, watching. How many of them were left now? Something between twenty or thirty still fit to fight. Another attack would break them, and all would die. They, Strabo and Marcellinus too. Already his fingers were unbuckling his belt.

‘What are you doing? Centurion?’

He slung the sword baldric from his shoulder and jumped back off the wall. He passed his sword and belt to Timotheus and his helmet to Culchianus.

‘Keep these safe for me.’

‘No! You can’t do this…’ Timotheus was grey-faced, stam­mering. The other men crowded behind him, some of them reaching out to their centurion, others hanging back, hiding the shame of hope.

‘Get into rank!’ Castus bellowed at them with all the parade-ground brass he could muster. He stooped, shrugging the mail shirt off over his shoulders. The links clashed around his head and then dropped heavily to the ground before him.

‘Take that with you as well… Optio Timotheus, I’m handing command of the century to you. Form up the surviving men with all their kit, and load the wounded who can’t walk onto the mules. You’ll march out of here and keep going till you reach the river. Fill canteens, wash your wounds then keep going. Keep close to Senomaglus and the Votadini, and don’t let your guard down till you reach Bremenium.’

‘Centurion,’ Timotheus said. There were tears in his eyes, and Castus could not bear to look at him.

‘Somebody needs to tell what happened here,’ he said quietly.

‘We’ll come back for you,’ Timotheus said, and then grabbed Castus in a firm embrace. Culchianus stepped up and did the same, other men gripping his shoulders and arms.

‘We’ll come back – and we’ll bring the whole legion with us. We’ll scythe those bastards down – every fucking one of them!’

‘Do that,’ Castus said. With his unbelted tunic hanging below his knees he stepped up onto the wall and jumped down on the far side. Open-handed, he walked steadily down the slope, stepping over the crumpled bodies on the blood-damp grass. Behind him he could hear Timotheus shouting the orders to form the men up.

Twenty paces, then thirty. The Picts gathered on the plain were making a noise now, a rising hiss and then a gathering roar. He kept his breath steady. He kept walking.

It took five of them to wrestle him to the ground and strip him of his tunic, and he fought them all the way. He dropped one with a kick to the groin, head-butted another and broke his nose. Then they began clubbing him with spears and the flats of their swords, until he was kneeling with his arms bound tightly behind his back, and Castus felt them wrench from his neck the gold torque he had won at Oxsa.

This is what surrender feels like, he thought. But he was oblivious to the pain and the humiliation. Slaves have no feel­ings, he told himself.

He was dragged to his feet and made to stumble forward with a spearshaft pressed to the nape of his neck to keep his head down. All he could see was the dirty turf, and the bare feet of his guards scuffing along beside him, kicking him sometimes when he struggled. Then they got into the mass of the Pictish gathering, and there it was worse. Women screamed at him and threw stones and clods of earth: he was the leader of the soldiers that had slaughtered their sons, their brothers, their husbands. He felt their spit flecking over his bare back, until the guards drove the women away from him.

‘Castus!’ He twisted his head against the spearshaft and saw Marcellinus beside him, in the same wretched condition.

‘I’m sorry,’ the envoy gasped, ‘it wasn’t…’ One of the guards struck him with a spear-butt, and Marcellinus was silent.

They passed through the stream, the water splashing up into Castus’s face. Then they were moving up the far slope into the main Pictish encampment. The two prisoners were thrown together onto the dirty straw of a wattle-walled enclosure – a pigsty, Castus guessed, by the smell. He rolled onto his side, then he knelt and flexed his shoulders, trying to break the cords that tied his wrists.

‘Don’t,’ Marcellinus said. ‘They’re damp rawhide – you’ll just pull them tighter.’

The envoy lay on his side, his skin very pale and grey. Castus could see the welts of a beating across his shoulders.

‘What happened?’

‘They took us just as we were going into the council hut,’ Marcellinus told him. ‘We heard shouts from across the camp, then we were surrounded by armed warriors – it must have been planned that way in advance. Then we learned that Ulcagnus and Vendognus had been found dead in their huts by their own men. We were treated well at first, Strabo and I – put in a hut by ourselves, with a guard at the door. Later, I suppose once Talorcagus had taken control and they’d started the attack on your position, they dragged us out and beat us, then tied us with sacks over our heads…’

‘Why did they think you’d done it?’

Marcellinus just grimaced, shaking his head against the dirty straw. The gate was dragged open, and another body was thrown into the pen beside them: Strabo, with a purple bruise across the side of his face.

‘My men,’ Castus said. ‘Have they got away yet? Did either of you see them go?’

Both shook their heads. ‘Senomaglus promised me he’d protect them,’ Marcellinus said. ‘I think I believe him. I hope I believe him. But there was nothing else you could do. You fought well, but it was over.’

Several hours passed before the guards returned. Rain fell, and Castus tipped back his head and opened his mouth and tried to drink it from the air. Then the wattle gate was flung open again and the guards were among them, dragging at their aching arms, threatening them with spears.

Heads down, they were led across the encampment, between low huts and shelters and the walls of other animal pens. Castus fixed his mind on the knot of pain between his shoulders; his hands and arms were numb, and he stumbled as he was dragged along. He heard Marcellinus cry out beside him, and then he was forced down to kneel.

‘No, this is barbaric!’ Marcellinus hissed between his teeth. The envoy was struggling against his guards now, trying to break away.

Castus raised his eyes slowly, wincing against the ache in his neck. Before him was a low mound surrounded by open space, and on the mound was a single tree. The bark had been strip­ped away to the bare white wood, and the branches lop­ped off close to the trunk leaving long spikes sticking up. Marcellinus was shouting in the Pictish tongue, oblivious to the guards around him.

‘It’s a triumph tree,’ he cried out. ‘
Cran na buadag
… Don’t look at it!’

But Castus continued to stare, dazed. Groups of warriors were gathering around the mound and the stripped tree. With a lurch of horror, Castus recognised what they were carrying. Heads – severed human heads, some carried by the hair, others with a thumb hooked inside the jaw. The heads of Roman soldiers.

Beside him, he heard Strabo muttering prayers to his Christian god. He wanted to pray himself, or shout out in rage, but his throat was locked and he could not make a sound. He watched as the warriors climbed up to the tree, some of them clambering on each other’s backs, and one by one stabbed the severed heads onto the spiked branches. Five heads, then ten, then twenty… Castus watched and counted, sickened and dizzy. He saw the face of Vincentius staring back at him. Then Brigonius and his comrades, the three scouts he had sent to summon help from Bremenium. One of the slaves he had armed and offered freedom. Draucus and Jucundus…

No Timotheus, no Culchianus. The heads had been taken from the fallen soldiers left lying in the compound wrapped in their blankets. All of them decapitated after death.

Marcellinus was shaking his head fiercely. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Now the last of the warriors climbed down from the mound, leaving the tree adorned with thirty human heads budding like terrible bulbous fruit from the bare branches. Around the base of the trunk the Picts had stacked the broken shields and shattered weapons gathered from the battle site. The warriors stood in a massed circle around the mound, raised their own weapons in salute and howled out their chant of victory.

Castus had seen many strange and horrific sights in his life, but the stripped tree with its ghastly trophies left him sick and weak. They were his own men, those pale bobbing heads, men he had trained and led in battle. Men who had trusted him to command them.
If they murder me now, I deserve it
.

But the warriors were falling back from the mound, joining the vast throng that filled the open space all around. A line of carts drawn by shaggy ponies turned between them and began to circle the tree. In the lead cart, Talorcagus stood up tall and proud, raising his spear to the shouts of victory.

‘Look at him,’ Marcellinus said. ‘He’s sealed his rule in blood already.’

Behind the new king rode his nephew Drustagnus, then the other chiefs of the Picts. Only the woman, Cunomagla, was not among their number. Castus felt glad of that – he could not bear the idea of seeing her gloat over his slain. The carts drew to a halt, the chiefs dismounting. Now a strange figure was moving between them, an ancient woman dressed in grey tatters, carrying a leather bag.

‘The witch,’ Strabo said, with a hissing intake of breath.

The chiefs and their warriors moved behind the witch as she advanced, shambling, towards the bound prisoners. Beside him, Castus saw Marcellinus give a sudden lunge and try to get up. The guards wrestled him back to his knees.

‘That’s my saddlebag,’ Strabo said quietly, in dawning hor­ror. ‘She’s got my saddlebag…’

The witch halted, throwing the bag down; Castus recognised it now, a square satchel of tooled Roman leather. He had seen Strabo carrying it on his pony. Throwing up her arms, the old woman let out a long keening wail. She reeled in a circle, and then dropped forward to scrabble at the bag. The chiefs and the warriors drew closer around her.

Castus felt the tip of a spear pressing at the hollow of his throat, another at his back. He could not breathe, could not move.

The witch-woman knelt upright with a cry of satisfaction, holding up a small brass bottle with a stopper. The assembled Picts fell back, gasping and shouting.

‘Cough medicine,’ Strabo said, with a despairing grimace. ‘It’s only cough medicine…’

But now Talorcagus stepped to the front of the group and raised his arm, pointing at Strabo. Guards to either side seized the imperial agent by the elbows and started to drag him forward.