reached the throat. A momentary glimpse of paradise snatched away before it could be savoured. Like the glorious turquoise sea that lapped at the shore and formed small pools in the sand, so cool and clear and wet, but so deadly. Liquid that tempted and tormented, but could never be drunk because it would multiply a man’s thirst ten times and push him beyond the edge of sanity. He suspected that more than one of the crew had already succumbed to the lure, and, as if the gods wished to confirm his suspicion, a man staggered to his feet among the sailors and stepped into the fierce light of the sun.
Valerius recognized him as one of the steersmen, a man whose skill had saved all their lives in the encounter with the pirates. The seaman croaked something unintelligible from a thirst-scarified throat and wandered aimlessly between the two groups, repeating the word over and over, his face and hands raised to the merciless sun, before falling to his knees and digging frantically in the sand. The sailors knew Valerius had ordered the goatskins to be buried, but not where. Now the sun-crazed steersman scraped and dug ever more desperately until he gave what might have been a howl of triumph and heads rose sharply among his shipmates. Valerius wondered what he’d found. It certainly wasn’t water, which was safe on the far side of the pavilion from the seamen. A second later the sailor dipped his hands into the hole and raised them to his lips. Valerius gagged as he realized what was happening. The demented sailor’s cupped hands were filled not with water, but with sand, and he poured it into his mouth, repeating the gesture again and again until, with a choked groan, he collapsed on his face and lay still.
Someone appeared in the doorway beside him. He knew it was Domitia before he stood up because she smelled different from everyone else. After dark, she bathed in the cool waters of the bay, resisting the temptation to drink that would have destroyed Valerius, and it gave her a salty, wholesome scent. Still, she suffered as much as anyone in the heat, and her face and eyes were puffy and distended as she swayed on her feet.
‘Is he dead?’ The words were slurred by her swollen tongue and saliva as thick as mud.
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
He nodded. One less mouth to drain their precious supply.
‘The trooper, too.’ Valerius noticed for the first time that Ferox, the injured cavalryman, was silent at last. ‘We’ll bury them after dark.’
She nodded, and the movement seemed to use up the last of her strength because she would have fallen if Valerius hadn’t caught her. She slumped in his arms, slim and soft, the curves of her body nestling against him. Something exploded in his head and he was filled with a terrible need. He crushed his face into her dark hair, inhaling a honeysuckle scent that acted like an elixir. She felt it too, because she squirmed against him and her head came up and he felt cracked lips against his. Her cloak dropped away and he could feel her skin through the soft material of her shift. They held each other like that for a few moments before he realized what he was doing. This was madness. He was as crazed as the poor fool lying in the sand not five paces away had been.
‘No.’ He tried to draw away, but her arms held him close and his body wouldn’t obey him anyway.
‘Please.’ Her eyes opened and he saw tiny damp buds in the corners that might have been tears.
He shook his head, and pulled away.
The emotions surged across her ravaged face like storm clouds over a field of wheat: desolation and heartache, pain and rejection, and finally fury. She stepped back and he wondered if she was going to hit him, and what he would do if she did. ‘Coward,’ she hissed, and turned and staggered away through the curtain that separated the two sides of the tent.
He closed his eyes and shook his head. He had been awarded the Gold Crown of Valour for defying fifty thousand of Boudicca’s blood-crazed warriors, yet he had failed every woman he had ever loved. When he opened them again, Serpentius was standing watching him.
‘If Tiberius doesn’t get back soon we’re finished.’
‘Maybe we already are.’
‘It’s time.’
Valerius nodded. ‘Get the water.’
Two and a half water skins a day. They’d started with fifteen. By tonight they would have five left, plus anything Serpentius had kept in reserve. Three days, at most, if he cut the ration, but it was barely enough to keep them alive now.
Where was Tiberius?
It had all seemed so simple. Keep the sea to your right, ride during the night and try to find some precious shade during the heat of the day. Keep going until you win or you die. For Tiberius Claudius Crescens it was the ideal mission. The kind of mission with no complications and no regrets. Win or die.
But he hadn’t reckoned on being killed by his own stupidity.
The landscape he had ridden through was as forbidding as it was intimidatingly beautiful. A landscape that could destroy you just by its very existence. Ahead, the never-ending surf-washed line of the beach, flat as the freshly brushed surface of the Circus Maximus on a race day. To his right, the broad expanse of the ocean, a marker, no more than that. To his left, inland, a treacherous dustbowl and salt flats which turned quickly into an anonymous sea of rolling sand dunes. Tiberius recognized, without any sense of inadequacy, that he was a man of little imagination. It was, after all, a desirable quality in the type of soldier he had chosen to be. But the thought of becoming lost in that great sandy waste made him feel like an ant on a roasting plate: a tiny insignificant creature whose fate was beyond its power to change.
Yet none of it was as great a threat as the challenge which faced him now.
Someone more romantic might have said he appeared to be standing in the centre of a gigantic silver plate, of the kind that graced a senator’s banqueting table. On three sides moonlight glittered across waters as unruffled as the flat sand he had ridden over, always keeping the sea to his right, since he had left Valerius three days earlier. He was so close. He knew he was close because he could see the flickering pinprick of light that identified a home in some Egyptian settlement and smell the smoke of a dung fire in the still air. He looked over his shoulder. The first pale ochre hint of dawn was a ghostly betrayal on the eastern horizon. An hour at most?
Hercules whinnied behind him and nuzzled his back. He had two more leather water skins left of the original — was it six? — and of the four that had been drunk the horse had consumed three. He put a skin to the gelding’s mouth and held it there until it was empty.
His mistake had been not to take a path a little further inland. He realized that now; too late. By staying close to the shore he hadn’t noticed when he strayed from the beach on to the mile-wide spit of sand that had finally narrowed to this thin streak which ended at a channel a few hundred paces wide but the gods only knew how deep. How far had he come? Ten miles? Twenty? He had been riding all night. It was impossible to tell.
He had no choice. Turning the horse the way they’d come he kicked him into a trot, then a canter and finally a full gallop. Speed was his only hope. In the moonlight, the evidence of his pride and his arrogance was clear in the single line of hoofprints that vanished into the distance. He had no choice. He had to make as much ground as he could before daylight. His mind cleared. He felt no fear. It was all simple again. He would die, today or tomorrow; but he would die trying.
The big horse carried him uncomplainingly, mile after mile, hour after hour, through the dark and into the dawn, but daylight mocked him with a flat expanse of blue lagoon to his right, and no end in sight. He had no choice. The gelding’s sweat soaked his legs and he could already feel the sun roasting his neck. Soon it would be so hot it would be like breathing the flames of a furnace. He dug his heels into the horse’s ribs and urged him on harder. Hercules had a huge heart, but even huge hearts have a breaking point. Tiberius felt a surge of hope when he realized the lagoon was finally petering out, but only for a moment. Seconds later the gelding collapsed under him as if he’d been shot in the chest by a ballista bolt. Tiberius hit the ground shoulder first and rolled to a halt in a cloud of sand. By the time he’d rubbed the grit from his eyes Hercules was bravely trying to get back to his feet, but the power had gone from his legs. Pink foam frothed from the horse’s nostrils and mouth and sprayed across the sand as he shook his great head in frustration. As Tiberius watched, the animal’s struggles grew weaker and he rolled on to his side, his gleaming flanks heaving and slick with sweat. To the young tribune, the gelding was nothing more than a mode of transport, to be used and discarded, and, his father would have said, eaten if necessary. He knew horses, admired their strength and stamina, but he felt no affection for them. Still, he respected courage and he placed a hand on the gelding’s forehead and smiled into the trusting eye as he killed Hercules with a single thrust of his sword behind the right ear.
There was no time to rest. He stood up and felt the sun’s heat boring through his dark hair. A few minutes and it would boil his brains and render him senseless. He removed his tunic and fashioned a covering for his head
