hooves. Valerius knew by the way he vaulted on to the animal’s back that he had made the right choice.
‘Does he have a name?’ Tiberius asked.
‘He’s a soldier’s horse. He doesn’t need one.’
‘Then I’ll call him Hercules.’ Tiberius grinned. ‘We need a hero.’
While they were waiting for the water, Domitia hobbled up with her arm round Suki, the African slave girl. Valerius explained Tiberius’s mission.
‘I pray for Fortuna’s good wishes, and may you travel with the speed of Mercury,’ Domitia said, and Valerius could have sworn Tiberius glowed in the light of her favour.
‘I will not let you down, lady,’ he assured her with a shy smile.
While Serpentius watered Hercules. Valerius gave the younger man some last advice. ‘Take it gently at first. Get used to each other. When night comes make the best speed you can, but don’t push too hard. Don’t kill yourself but, more important, don’t kill the horse. I want him back.’
Tiberius smiled at the poor jest and mounted Hercules, with the water skins draped around him. Before he rode off he leaned from the saddle and took Valerius’s wooden fist in his hand. ‘I promise I will not fail you, my friend.’
Valerius turned to find Domitia staring at him. For a moment he was lost in the dark eyes, before he remembered that she was the general’s daughter. It was the first time in days he’d thought about his original mission. Paulinus’s appearance at the villa seemed a long time ago; Domitia’s father’s guilt or innocence insignificant. Even the thought of the threat to Olivia produced nothing more than a dull ache. These things were beyond his control now. They could be left to the Fates.
His immediate priority was to keep Domitia Longina Corbulo alive, at least until everyone else was dead. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but you couldn’t drink hope. He picked up one of the water skins. It would deprive someone of their share in thirty-six hours or forty-eight, but it might mean she lived for the last hour it took for help to arrive, and that made it right.
He held out the skin. She licked her lips, but shook her head. ‘I will drink when everyone else does.’
Valerius resisted the temptation to insist. Clearly, keeping her alive was going to be more difficult than he had anticipated.
The first sailors returned carrying pieces of the curtained awning and it was the work of a few minutes to erect a tent on the sand. Domitia and her girls retired gratefully away from the worst glare of the sun. He noticed that the sailors were very keen to return to the ship, and also that those he had sent to fetch water still hadn’t returned. That made him wonder, and the suspicion prompted him to order Serpentius to disinter two of the water skins from the pit and conceal them somewhere else. Perhaps he was wrong to put so little faith in the men’s honesty, but he doubted it. The Spaniard laughed and Valerius realized he’d already taken the precaution of laying one or two aside.
The bulk of the men returned thirty minutes later, suspiciously cheerful and a few of them carrying water skins that they dumped in the sand at Valerius’s feet. Still not enough for five days, but an improvement. The haul of other goods was better than he had expected, including a flint and iron from Aurelius’s belongings that would allow them to start a fire if they could find something to fuel it. There were sacks of damp wheatmeal that would only be a little saltier than normal when they turned it into porridge, and sufficient board and sailcloth to make a second shelter and provide a substantial enough partition for Domitia’s pavilion to make it respectable for her guards to sleep there. He waited until they had all returned and Tiberius’s German cavalrymen had deposited their clanking sacks with Serpentius before he gathered the sailors in an untidy mismatched rank to thank them for their efforts. A few just stared at him, but enough of them were hiding grins and shuffling their feet to make him sure he was right.
He smiled at them. ‘I’m only going to ask you once, so let’s be certain. You’ve returned with a fine haul, I can see that. But I’m wondering to myself if you had enough time to make a proper job of searching the Golden Cygnet.’ He looked along the line, meeting the eyes of each man in turn. ‘In the legions, if a man failed in his duty, let’s say by not quite finding all the water on the ship, then it would be up to his tent mates, his contubernium, to punish him.’ He saw them looking at him uncertainly, as if they weren’t sure he was serious. ‘So if I were to send Serpentius here out to the ship, and he were to find more water, it would mean you’d have to choose one of your own,’ he paused, and now they were looking at one another, ‘and I’d have to watch eight of you beating him to death with those wooden staves you’ve so kindly brought back.’
Someone muttered defiantly, but by now Valerius knew the German guard was at his back and most were staring at him with fear in their eyes. They weren’t soldiers but sailors, rough men who liked to fight, and if someone died, too bad, but they weren’t professional killers. Valerius was. ‘So,’ he said, ‘I’m going to give you another chance to get back out to that ship and bring back every drop of fresh water.’
They waited until he nodded, and almost knocked each other over in the rush to reach what remained of the Golden Cygnet. ‘Do you think I can trust them now?’ he asked Serpentius.
The Spaniard shrugged. ‘I’d always trust a terrified man before one who tells me he’s honest.’
Valerius went back to the makeshift pavilion and met Domitia in the doorway. He bowed and waited for her to move either forward or back, but she stood there studying him seriously.
‘Would you have done it?’ There was curiosity in her voice, but no hint of reproach.
‘Without discipline there is only chaos and death.’
‘I’m aware of that, tribune, but I ask you again, would you have ordered those men to kill one of their own?’
He hesitated. Truth or lie? ‘An officer should only ever give an order when he knows it will be obeyed,’ he said. ‘You will not find that in any military manual, but it is the unwritten code. Even with Serpentius at my back I doubt I could have forced them to kill their comrade.’
‘Then they would have won. Without discipline there is only chaos and death.’ She quoted the words back at him without irony.
‘You’re right,’ Valerius conceded. ‘I could not let them win, because then we would all die.’
‘So what would you have done?’
‘I would have chosen one of them myself and I would have cut his throat.’
She tilted her head to look up at him and he became conscious of the intriguing shadows deep in her eyes.
‘You remind me of my father.’
XIV
Valerius could feel their discontent. It simmered in the broiling sun like a gently boiling pot, but it was still only mid-morning on the third day and by the time the sun reached its high point the pot would be ready to boil over. The sailors lay beneath their inadequate shelter like haphazard lumps of black rock. Valerius sat in the paltry shade of Domitia’s pavilion twenty paces away listening to the stricken cavalryman’s harsh, uneven breathing and waiting for him to die. The other mortally injured man had died during the night and lay wrapped in a sailcloth shroud at the top of the beach, but no one was going to dig two graves when one would do. It was incredible how a man’s strength could ebb away in such a short time. He heard a hacking cough. He knew what they were thinking, because it was driving him mad too. About water. Clean, pure, cool water, not stinking blood-hot dregs thick with the saliva of ten other men who had already drunk from the same skin. He had rationed them to a tiny amount each, four times a day, knowing even that would deplete their dwindling supply too quickly. Two swallows. But he had discovered that two swallows was only enough to keep a man on the brink of death, not alive, in this sweltering furnace of a place that leached the fluid from the body like wine from a fractured amphora.
Thirst was the enemy. Thirst was tight-skinned, pinched faces and narrow, red-rimmed eyes filled with hate. Thirst was when your tongue cleaved to the roof of your mouth and your throat felt as if it was scoured with pebbles. Thirst was cracked and bleeding lips so painful you wanted to cut them away with a knife and a head that felt as if your skull was being ripped off. Thirst was always wanting to piss, but never being able to. Thirst was the agony of knowing the next two swallows were four hours away, but they would only increase the torment until the next pointless sip of taunting nectar. Two swallows teased, but didn’t satisfy. It lubricated cracked lips, but barely
