The War at the Edge of the World (28 page)

As he rode up off the slopes of the moor, the rock towers rose all around him, with wild grass and heather between them. The wind was strong up here, whining and blustering around the tall stone masses, and Castus steered the horse to a sheltered place in the lee of one great stack, where a hollow at the base created a shallow cave, before dismounting.

‘We’ll stay here tonight,’ he said to the girl, helping her down off the horse. She went at once to the cave and sat inside it with her back pressed to the stone. She had been completely silent since they left the villa. Castus took the saddle from the horse, rubbed the animal down as he had seen the troopers of the Petriana cavalry doing, and then tethered it in a patch of grass between the rocks. When he returned the girl was still sitting as he had left her, with her knees drawn up, staring at nothing.

‘No fire,’ she said suddenly as he started piling sticks and dry bracken. He glanced at her – she was remembering the burning villa, he guessed – then shrugged, kicking the little heap of kindling aside.

‘Fine. We’ll eat cold food then.’ He placed the remaining barley cakes and a canteen of water beside her, then sat chewing at hardtack and dry cheese. Night had fallen between the stones, and the girl was almost invisible in her little cave.

Castus had seen the effects of shock many times before. Most men, after their first experience of battle, had that glazed look, that distracted air. But with Marcellina it went much deeper. Once, in Antioch, Castus had met a Greek doctor who told him that the mind, like the body, can be wounded by violence. Perhaps even destroyed. For Castus himself there had always been the legion, his brothers around him, their common purpose and duty. The shock of combat was a shared thing, easily digested and soon just a part of life. For the girl, though, there was none of that. Everything she had known, all family and sense of the world around her, had been destroyed.

‘Where is my father?’ she said, and her voice echoed slightly off the hollow rock. ‘Why did he not return with you?’

‘Ah,’ Castus said. He had tried several times, in the preceding days, to compose in his mind a suitable speech to explain what had happened. But he had always imagined himself sitting in the villa, with Marcellinus’s wife and daughter before him, both mutely composed, demure, accepting. Now, instead, the villa was burned and the mother butchered, and there was only this dark windy wilderness of rock and heather, this unhinged girl, and he could think of nothing to say.

He took Marcellinus’s heavy gold signet ring from his belt pouch, knelt beside the girl and took her hand. He placed the ring in her palm, closed her fingers over it and sat back again.

Marcellina opened her hand and looked at her father’s ring, rolling it on her palm. She drew a long shuddering breath.

‘I remember you,’ she said, and Castus could make out her raised face in the moonlight. ‘I remember – you’re the centurion. You’re the one who promised… You promised to protect him and bring him home…’ There was a curious wandering note in her voice, as if she was waking from deep sleep. ‘You promised,’ she said again, with more emphasis. ‘You
promised
!’

She threw the ring violently at Castus, and it hit him hard on the forehead and dropped to roll against the rocks.

‘
Why?
’ she cried out in a great rush of anguish and realisation. ‘Why are you here? Why did
you
come back and not
him
?’

‘I’m sorry, domina. It was his own wish – I…’

‘
Quiet!
Don’t talk to me! Don’t come
near
me!’ The girl was on her feet now, crouching back against the curve of the rock wall, gasping back tears. Castus remained seated. Anything he tried to say now would be wrong.

‘You…
stupid-headed liar
! You
bastard
! Why did you come back? Why did you break your vow?’

She bent to snatch up a handful of small stones and threw them at Castus. He swatted them away with his forearms, but now she was grabbing larger stones, pelting them at him, spitting breath.

‘I curse you!’ she cried. ‘The gods curse you!’

Castus rolled his back to her, covering his head, feeling the stones cracking off his shoulders. He was about to get up and restrain her when he heard the last stone fall and the girl drop to her knees, sobbing. He turned and watched her; she looked so small in the moonlight, so weak and broken. Wincing, he clambered to his feet.

Standing up straight, hands clasped behind his back, he addressed the girl. ‘Your father and I were taken captive by the Picts after a battle. Your father was injured, and his status placed him in an impossible position. He chose death as the honourable way, and charged me to return here and find you. To tell you what happened.’ He glanced to his left, and saw the gold ring catching the moonlight; he picked it up and put it back in his pouch. ‘I’ll keep this for you,’ he said.

But the girl was hunched over on the ground and did not look up. Castus unpinned his cloak and draped it over her body.

‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Try and sleep if you can. I’ll be back soon.’

Moving around the flank of the rocks, Castus peered upwards into the darkness and saw a crevice running towards the summit. Grunting, he pulled himself up, his boots grating against the gritty rocks, until he could raise his head over the top of the stack. The western sky behind him was still luminous blue with the afterglow of sunset, and he did not want to present a silhouette to anyone watching from the slopes below, so he pulled himself up over the lip of the rock and crawled forward on his belly until he could lie flat on the warm stone summit, looking eastwards into the night.

The sight took his breath. The dark land spread away for miles to the flat horizon, and all across it there were fires burn­ing. Some of them were little sparks, flickering, but others were great scars and lines of flame traced across the landscape. The Picts were burning the villages and the crops in the fields. The wind was behind him, but even so Castus thought he could smell the distant conflagration.

He lay still, transfixed, until the last light was gone from the western sky, and then sat upright on the smooth stone. Eboracum was out there somewhere in the darkness, over on the furthest edge of the plain. Was that too burning? Had the enemy destroyed everything?

For a long time he sat still, staring. Then he felt the chill of the wind on his back, and the cold in his bones. He rolled off the rock and began slowly edging his way back down.

At first light, Castus collected kindling and lit a fire in a hollow of the rocks out of sight of the cave. He boiled water in his mess pot, and crumbled half of his hardtack into it with some bacon fat and cheese to make a thin savoury gruel. He was cleaning and sharpening his sword when Marcellina found him.

‘I apologise for being impolite to you last night,’ she said. Castus turned and saw her standing by the rocks with his cloak wrapped tightly around her. The girl’s face was very pale, and there was darkness around her eyes. She looked older in the daylight, no longer a child.

‘Impolite?’ he said, and raised an eyebrow.

‘I was… distressed. Please forgive me.’

He sniffed, and lifted the pot of hot food from the fire. She squatted, took a wooden spoon and started to eat, blowing on each spoonful to cool it. When she had finished eating she stood up again, away from the fire.

‘I want you to take me to Eboracum,’ she said, not looking at him. Castus kept working on his sword, drawing the whetstone along the blade. ‘My brother is there… my younger brother. He’s the only family I have left now…’

‘That’s where I’m going,’ Castus said.

‘I’ll… I’ll see to it that you are rewarded for conveying me safely…’ Her voice caught, and when Castus glanced at her he saw tears on her cheeks.

‘I don’t need a reward,’ he said. ‘It’s my duty to protect you.’

He stood up and slipped the sword back into its scabbard. Then he kicked out the fire.

Braced against the charred and sagging thatch of a barn roof, Castus craned his neck upwards and squinted into the level sunlight. The grey horizon was broken by trees and rising trails of smoke, but he could make out the distant smudge of the city in the distance. The barn had been half burned – one end of it was in blackened ruin and the other barely standing – but it was the highest vantage point he could find, and as close to Eboracum itself as he dared to go in daylight. Beneath him the thatch shifted, and he heard wooden laths splitting.

Sliding down the steeply pitched roof, he dropped from the low eaves and landed heavily.

‘What did you see?’ Marcellina said.

‘Not much. Couldn’t get high enough to see over the trees.’

‘I’m lighter than you – help me up and I’ll look.’

All the way down from the moors, Marcellina had ridden behind Castus, sitting across the rump of the horse and grip­ping his belt. Her mood had shifted: from being stunned and subdued that morning she seemed determined, assertive and even reckless. Castus had to remind himself that she was still in shock, the wound in her mind still gaping. They had talked little; they had a shared purpose now. But first they had to be sure that the city still held out.

Castus crouched, and the girl climbed up onto his back. The skirts of her tattered blue gown were pulled up around her hips, and as she clambered up onto the thatch Castus saw her slender legs, long and bare and white. He looked away again quickly.

‘What can you see?’ he called. The girl had climbed right up to the ridge poles and was standing, her hair loose in the breeze, gazing east.

‘I can see the city,’ she cried out. ‘There’s smoke… but it’s only from this side of the river, not the fortress. There’s something against the walls – something wooden, and that’s burning… but there’s no smoke from inside.’

‘You’ve got sharp eyes,’ Castus said.

‘Wait, there’s… There are lots of men, barbarians. All over the country between here and the city.’

Castus nodded. They had seen several small parties of Picts and other barbarians on their ride down from the moors, all intent on plundering, and had managed to avoid them all.

‘They’ve encircled the fortress,’ he said. ‘Otherwise they’d be inside it, not out here… They don’t have the strength or equipment to attack the walls, but if they can keep the remains of the legion trapped inside they can plunder all they want.’

The girl was already sliding back down the roof, kicking burnt chaff over the eaves.

‘Let’s go then,’ she said. She jumped from the roof and Castus caught her. ‘We can ride straight through the enemy and into the city if we’re fast enough…’

‘Not in daylight,’ he said. ‘They’ll have pickets on all the roads stopping anyone going in or out…’

The girl pushed herself away from him. ‘I need to get into the city,’ she said. ‘I need to find my brother, and I don’t want to wait any longer.’

‘Domina!’ Castus called to her. ‘I told you we won’t get through them in daylight. We’ll have to cross the river upstream and circle round from the north-west, but we need darkness for that.’

She turned on him, suddenly furious and petulant. ‘I’m not one of your soldiers!’ she said. ‘You can’t give me orders! I demand we go to the city now!’

Castus pulled himself up onto the horse. He took a drink from the waterskin.

‘I’m not ordering you to do anything,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to protect you. If you want to die, go ahead.’

For a few moments she stood her ground, glaring at him, her shoulders set. Then she exhaled loudly, stepped towards the horse and allowed him to draw her up behind him.

There was thunder that evening, then heavy rain. Castus and Marcellina sat together in a low hut near the river, listening to the water gushing down over the domed reed-thatch of the roof and spattering from the eaves. They had no fire, and the hut had been plundered of whatever poor furniture and utensils it might once have contained. But at least it had not been torched – this damp settlement among the reed beds beside the river was too small and mean to bother burning.

‘How long must we wait here?’ Marcellina asked, squatting against the wall, trembling slightly at the sound of the rain.

‘We’ll cross the river an hour before dawn. The fortress is just over a mile away, so we should try and reach it at first light. Don’t want to try creeping up on a guarded gate in the dark.’

She nodded, preoccupied. They were eating the last of the hardtack and marching rations, although neither felt hungry.

‘Your brother should be in the fortress,’ Castus said. ‘He’ll have been evacuated there with of the rest of the citizens from the town. He’ll be able to look after you, I expect.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Marcellina said bitterly. ‘He’ll look after me. He has to – he’s the head of the family now. Even if he is only thirteen. But now Father’s… gone he’ll have no trouble marrying me off to some cousin or other from the south. He won’t have to give much of a dowry.’

‘Is that what you want?’ Castus asked her.

‘I’m seventeen years old,’ the girl said with a sour irony that startled him. ‘I should have been married years ago. What I want doesn’t matter.’

The rain had eased outside, and Castus got up and crawled towards the low door of the hut. Marcellina grabbed his arm – her touch was unexpected, and shocked him.

‘Where are you going? Don’t leave me!’

‘I need to check on the horse, then do some other things. I’ll be back in an hour or two. Stay here. Don’t go outside.’

‘Take me with you!’

Castus shook his head, tugged his arm away from her and went out into the wet dusk.

It was fully night by the time he returned, and the rain had stopped. He stamped back into the hut and tossed two damp Pictish cloaks down on the floor. One of the cloaks was stained with blood, but he hoped the girl would not notice in the dark.

‘Where did you go?’ she asked quietly.

‘Just along the river. There’s a bend to the north of here where we can cross, but we’ll have to swim with the horse – can you do that? If we wear these cloaks we might pass as Picts till we’re close enough to the walls, then we’ll have to ride hard.’