The War at the Edge of the World (35 page)

‘I wish you well,’ he said.

For another moment there was silence, broken only by the wild, distant cries of the revellers in the street. Marcellina looked at him, as if she were daring herself to do something, or say something more. As if she were waiting for him to act. A moment passed, and then she gathered her dress beneath her and stood up.

‘I should leave you in peace then,’ she said. ‘I too wish the fortune of the gods upon you and your future life.’

She moved towards the door, and Castus followed after her. At the threshold she paused suddenly, hunching her shoulders and shivering.

‘No,’ she said, and turned. ‘I didn’t mean to leave like this.’

Castus moved a step closer. The lamp was behind him, and darkness fell between them. Marcellina took a long breath.

‘Except for my father, you’re the only man I’ve known who’s ever done anything for me,’ she said. ‘The only man I’ve… respected. And you’re not my father.’

‘No, I’m not.’

She moved, stretching quickly up on her toes and sliding her arms around his heavy shoulders. He felt her body pressing against him, then her lips on his. He did not move.

‘May the gods protect you, Aurelius Castus,’ she said as she dropped back.

‘And you,’ he said.

He waited in the doorway as she went out to the vestibule, then he heard the slave opening the door and both of them leaving. The door closed again.

For a few heartbeats more he waited; then he snatched up his cloak and went outside. Just a girl, he thought. And gone now.

He threw the cloak around his shoulders and stalked away between the barrack blocks. The Blue House would be open late tonight. Afrodisia might be there. It had been a long time, but he needed her company now.

Four months later, the full strength of Legion VI Victrix was drawn up on the drill field. A bright spring day, and the new prefect, Rufinius, climbed the tribunal and stood before the standards of the legion. In front of him, four thousand men waited in rank and file, dressed in parade white with their spearshafts and shields freshly painted, their helmets and corselets of mail and scale polished and gleaming. Castus stood with his men in the ranks of the Third Cohort, all of them listening, expectant.

‘Brothers,’ Rufinius cried into the thin cold breeze. ‘Our lord the Augustus Flavius Valerius Constantius has issued his commands for the forthcoming campaign against the barbarian Picts who invaded our province last summer.’

A shuffle ran through the assembled men, a low stir of whispered words. Castus turned to glare back over his shoulder.

‘In ten days’ time, a selected force will march for the north, to take the war to the territories of the enemy, punish them for their acts and demonstrate the power of Rome. Two cohorts of this legion have been designated to join the expedition.’

Once again the lines of the legion rippled, men muttering, others stretching up to catch the prefect’s words. Only two cohorts. Castus set his jaw, gesturing with his staff for the men behind him to be silent.

‘The First and Third Cohorts are to prepare themselves to depart with the field force,’ the prefect cried, raising his voice to compete with the whining breeze. ‘The others will remain here at Eboracum.’

Castus exhaled between his teeth, feeling the relief tiding through him, then the surge of anticipation. The men behind him fell into a hush. They knew, now, that the war would be theirs.

‘Sixth Legion!’ the prefect cried again, cutting off the groans of protest, the sighs of dismay from the other cohorts. ‘Sixth Legion, remember your oath! I order every man of you to maintain wartime discipline, whether you are staying here or going north. The reputation of this proud legion is in the balance, and the emperor’s eye is upon each of us! We must all be ready to serve, whatever our duty demands of us.’

He paused, letting the silence spread once more.

‘Sixth Legion, are you ready for war?’

‘
Ready
,’ the cry came back. Again he shouted, and again the response. By the third cry, every man of the legion gave full voice.

‘Sixth Legion:
dismissed
!’

Castus turned on his heel, nodded to Modestus, and ordered the century into march formation. As they passed him, Castus studied the men’s faces. Six or seven months of training he had given them. Some of them looked glad, others fearful. But most just wore the mask of discipline. Castus hoped that would be enough.

And on the battlefield, he would know for sure.

They were burning the third village along the valley when they found the interpreter. Two soldiers brought him: a filthy hunched figure with a rope around his neck.

‘We found him in a pit behind one of the houses, centur­ion,’ they said. ‘Tied up like an animal. Looks like a slave or something.’

Castus stood in the muddy central clearing of the village. Smoke swirled around him from the burning huts. He could hear pigs squealing, women crying, an old man pleading desperately. He looked down at the twisted figure kneeling before him.

The man had been mutilated, his hands, ears and nose cut off and the wounds seared with fire. Something done to his tongue as well – Castus did not want to look too closely at the ruined mouth, but the man was trying to speak and finding it difficult.

‘Embr me, you ust,’ he said, his head twitching. The two soldiers were gazing at him with expressions of fascinated disgust. ‘Guo you! You’g centoo.’

‘Caccumattus,’ Castus said. ‘That’s his name. Get him water – run!’

He knelt down in the mud. The man stank – festering wounds, urine and shit. When the soldier came back with the waterskin Castus tipped it, holding the man’s head so he could drink.

‘What happened to you?’ he said, low and urgent. ‘What happened to my men?’

‘In’t trees,’ the man said, gasping. He spoke more clearly now, but his tongue was ruined. ‘Votadini all go. Picti come – make fight. No chance, centoo. All killed – c’d’n form lines. Me alone catched. Torture. Like play for them.’

Castus nodded. All this time and he had barely once thought of Caccumattus. In fact, he had assumed the interpreter had run when the century had been attacked by the Picts, or had joined the rebels. The thought shamed him now.

‘Take him back to the tribune,’ he ordered. ‘Give him food if he’ll take it. Not too much, or it’ll kill him. And treat him gently, you bastards! He was an interpreter for the Roman army – allow him some dignity.’

The soldiers took the broken man away, and Castus glared at the village around him. Soldiers were running between the huts with firebrands, torching the thatch. Chickens scattered around them. Castus breathed in the smell of the burning. A dead man lay in the dirt only a few yards from him: no scarred and painted Pictish noble warrior, just a grey-haired villager. Castus thought back to his days as a fugitive, and the people in the hut settlement who had given him food. The innocent always suffered in war. But, no, he thought, somebody in this place had been holding the interpreter captive, even if they were gone now. Somebody here had been involved in the massacre of his men. He remembered what Caccumattus had said.
Torture. Like play to them
.

‘Centurion! What do we do with the prisoners?’

‘Chop off their fucking heads,’ he said.

The soldier saluted and jogged away, drawing his sword.

‘No, wait! Better idea – rope them together in a coffle and take them back to the camp.’ He was forgetting himself. They needed captives to question – and slaves too. Already there were several hundred Picts and other Britons in the slave pens of the marching camp. They were supposed to be a lure, to draw the main Pictish force out to attack them. But so far there had been no sign of any organised enemy at all. Just these squalid little villages, most of them deserted. Old men, children and women in the rest. There was a word for this kind of war:
atrocitas
. It was grim work, but it was the only way to get at the enemy and draw them out to fight. This was the eighth village his cohort alone had destroyed since crossing the Wall, and the strain of it was showing on his men’s faces. They were growing bored and brutal now. More importantly, they were getting careless.

Castus kicked a chicken out of his way, spat against the wall of a burning hut.

‘Hornblower!’ he shouted. ‘Sound the assembly. We’re finished here.’

The sun was low behind them as the cohort made their way back to the camp. They marched in open order, the centuries straggling down the valley following a dirt path that crossed and recrossed a narrow rushing brook. Between them, roped together, they herded their haul of prisoners. It was hot, the valley filled with tiny insects, and all the men were sweating.

‘I had believed, centurion,’ Diogenes said from the line, ‘that this part of Britain was supposed to be perpetually cold and wet.’ A few of the men around him laughed; they were used to the schoolteacher’s curious asides.

‘Whoever told you that?’ Castus said over his shoulder.

‘It’s only what I read in the geographies of the ancients, centurion,’ Diogenes replied. ‘They all agree that in Britain, and especially the northern part, the sun is only seen for two or three hours a day, and the land constantly shrouded in thick mists. Also that the air and sea become thicker and more turgid the further north one goes.’

‘They never came here then.’

‘I suspect not. I am beginning to think that our ancient geographers had a lot of imagination, and not much else besides.’

Castus smiled. The men were not doing too badly after all, even with several days of burning and killing behind them. It had surprised him, in fact, how easily they had taken to the work. But most of them had seen the destruction wrought by the Picts on the land around Eboracum.

Now they climbed up out of the valley and crossed a rise, and the camp was before them. It lay on the level ground above the river; beyond were trees and the open slopes where the Pictish muster had been held the summer before. Somewhere to the right was the ford, and the low knoll with its ring of stone that Castus and his men had tried to defend. He could hardly bear to glance in that direction now. Five days they had been camped here, and he had not been able to steel himself to go and survey the scene of that terrible fight.

Cavalry piquets rode out to meet them, and the tribune at the head of the column called out the watchword. The air above the camp was misted with smoke from cooking fires, soft blue in the low evening light, and the high moors and mountains beyond were lit fiery orange and purple. Castus led his men up to the turf rampart and the palisade, then in through the open gateway. Brown leather tents stretched away in neat regular rows, horses tethered between the cavalry lines, carts and mules drawn up in the wagon park, and at the centre the huge white pavilions of the imperial party.

In the broad lane before the Sixth Legion lines Castus formed up his century and then dismissed them to their tents and cooking fires. Taking off his helmet, he swigged water from a skin, and then poured a little over his head and scrubbed it into his scalp. It was a sight to stir the heart, he thought as he blinked the water from his eyes: a Roman army in the field. Ten thousand men were camped here. Galerius had led more than double that number against the Persians, but Constantius’s force looked more than enough to totally annihilate the Picts.

But Romans had been in this place before: the soldiers’ entrenching mattocks had turned up corroded old coins and hobnails from hundred of years past. How many armies, Castus wondered, had marched into this land hoping to subdue its sav­age people? At least Constantius was not intending to con­quer the place, or try and turn it into a Roman province. This was a punitive campaign, nothing more. A campaign of extermina­tion, if it came to that. But first they had to get the Picts to face them in an open fight.

Forty days had passed since the army had departed Eboracum. They had marched north through Luguvalium, crossed the Wall at the fortress of Petrianis and moved into the territories of the Selgovae. The chiefs of that people had been quick to present themselves, quick to deny any role in the uprising – just a few hotheads among their youth, already punished. Constantius had ordered two thousand of their highest-ranking young men chained and sent back south, to the slave markets of the empire. It had seemed a cursory punishment to Castus, but the emperor hunted larger game.

The Votadini had been dealt with next. The old chief, Senomaglus, had ridden into the Roman camp beneath the Three Mountains, begging his loyalty to Rome, but Constantius had been unmoved. Senomaglus, his entire family and five hundred of his noblemen had been seized and sent to the imperial quarries, to break rocks until they died. Still the army had marched north. And once they had crossed the old grass-grown wall of Antoninus and moved into the lands of Picts, the real work of devastation had begun.

Castus sat by the fire as the evening sank into night, staring into the smoke at the darting insects that hovered around the flames. Being back in this place stirred strange memories and emotions. He remembered the meeting hut on the first night of the Pictish muster: the cup of foul beer they had given him to drink, and the scarred and barbaric chiefs standing up one by one to speak. Where were those chiefs now? Dead on the fields south of Eboracum, or up in the hills to the north with their assembled warriors, waiting to strike? He remembered his first sight of Cunomagla, as she had stood at the back of the gathering, proud and alone. How would she react, he wondered, to the Roman invasion? Would she surrender herself to the mercy of the emperor, like the Votadini chief? Castus knew she would not. The thought that he might have betrayed her trust twisted in his gut, but who would believe him now, a mere centurion, if he tried to claim that she was loyal to Rome? The possibility that she had tricked him, that Nigrinus was right and the uprising had been her doing, was still very real. He should not care about these things – he was back where he ought to be, in command of legionaries, with an army around him and a clear enemy somewhere ahead. But still his mind was shadowed by doubts.