against the solid comfort of the wood and prayed in his turn for Messor’s easy death. When the smoke began billowing into the chamber and the glow beneath the door resumed he knew beyond a doubt that the gods no longer existed, not for him, not for Messor, not for anyone inside this temple to a false god. That was when they realized that the first screams hadn’t really been screams at all.
In the hours that followed, the walls of the chamber seemed to close in and conditions became even more intolerable. The very air, thick with smoke and the stench of roasting flesh, involuntary shit, days-old sweat, and the unique, rancid scent of human fear, grated on the throat as if it were something solid. The latrine area had long since overflowed and those sunk deepest in the lethargy that accompanies lost hope were content to lie in their own waste with their children sobbing beside them. The certainty of death affected people in different ways. Many simply succumbed to despair, but for others, Valerius among them, it had a curiously liberating effect. Ordinary concerns were no longer of consequence. When he thought of Rome and his father and the cousin who would inherit everything that should be his, it was in the abstract, as if he were a third party looking in on all the pointless drama. Even Maeve had faded to a vague, beautiful memory; a kind of comforting presence who would see him safely to the other side.
Petronius had brought writing materials along with his papers and Valerius spent two hours composing a report of Colonia’s defence and the courage of the city’s militia, of Lunaris’s unflinching bravery, Paulus’s heroics and Messor’s final sacrifice. When he completed the final line, he read it over: We live on in the hope of rescue and in the knowledge that the Temple of Claudius must be defended to the last breath. He shook his head. It hardly captured the moment, but by now the words were blurring together and his exhausted mind demanded only rest. He wrapped the scroll tight around his knife, crawled to the hole in the floor and threw it as far into the recesses as possible. When he’d completed the task he puzzled over the rebel attack on the rear of the compound that had broken the defence. It should have been impossible, but plainly was not. He thought he understood how it happened, but not why. But it didn’t matter now. Nothing did.
Maeve’s face swam into his mind as he slumped into a delirious sleep and he woke trembling, uncertain of the hour or even where he was. Eventually, parched-mouthed and with a pounding head, he roused himself enough to order Lunaris to issue a ration of water, but the legionary shook his head. The last amphora was empty.
Thirst affected the old and the young most of all. For hours, Numidius rocked back and forth on his haunches, moaning pathetically, accompanied by a wailing of babes in arms that cut the air like a knife-edge scraped on a brick. Sometime in the night Corvinus’s wife capitulated to the cumulative torture of her baby’s cries and held him so tight to her breast that the child suffocated. When she discovered the boy was dead she stood in the middle of the room, still holding his lifeless body, and howled like a wolf. Eventually, Corvinus took her gently by the arm and, speaking soothingly to her, ushered her to a dark corner where he cut her throat, then lay down beside the still warm corpses, opened his wrists and slowly bled to death.
Valerius watched the tragic drama unfold and was surprised how little it affected him. Perhaps his mind had been overwhelmed by all that had gone before and all that was undoubtedly to come. Could a man’s stock of emotions be used up in the way he had seen a brave man run out of courage? Corvinus might have been his friend; he remembered how proud the armourer had been of the golden boar amulet he had produced for Maeve, and the good grace with which he gave Lunaris his lesson in humility. He had never truly believed the goldsmith was a coward. Corvinus had betrayed the men he had served with for half a lifetime to protect his wife and child. But did that make him a better man or a worse?
‘Valerius!’ He pushed himself to his feet to answer Lunaris’s call. A large area in the centre of the door glowed bright red in the dark and flames had begun eating through the gap between the two oak panels. The bar which had saved them for so long was charred black. One blow from the ram would clearly smash it in two.
‘Ready yourselves,’ he said solemnly.
Lunaris’s eyes shone from his blackened face like twin beacons, red-rimmed and raw from his constant vigil. But Valerius saw something in them — not a message, not a belief. A quality? — he would never have understood if he didn’t know it was mirrored in his own. The ability to die without regret: to savour those final moments as a warrior, in the knowledge that you were surrounded by other warriors. He remembered a piece of graffiti he’d once seen on the walls of a gladiator school — A sword in my hand and a friend by my side — and for the first time realized its true meaning.
‘It could have been different,’ he said. ‘You could have been a hero on Mona and I could be drinking wine in Rome.’
Lunaris looked into the orange-tainted darkness around him. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
Valerius took a deep breath to stifle the thing welling up inside him and nodded to Lunaris to rouse the surviving legionaries. He stripped off his armour and laid it carefully beside his helmet. The others followed suit. No protection on earth would save them now. They would fight to the end, but better a fatal wound and a quick death than being captured by Boudicca’s rebels. Messor’s screams still rang in their ears and not one among them intended to share his fate. Like them all, Valerius had considered killing himself to ensure it didn’t happen. But he was a soldier, and soldiers didn’t die like sheep, and now, as he stood among them, he knew he had made the right choice. He lined them up in two ranks and made a play of tugging at sword belts and chiding them for their unwashed uniforms. As he did, he took each of them by the hand and their lean, savage faces grinned back at him, teeth shining in the darkness, and he felt the pride well up inside him.
‘It has been an honour to serve with you,’ he said.
They cheered him: a hoarse ‘hurrah’ from throats cracked with thirst that echoed from the walls of the chamber and startled the civilians lying in their subdued huddles. He felt a boiling surge of emotion and he loved them for it. The anticipation of battle beat like a giant drum on his ears. If a man had to die he could not die in better company. A figure stepped to his side and he turned to find Petronius with a naked sword in his hand, the blade bright with blood.
‘I could not let them take her,’ he choked, and Valerius nodded.
The door exploded inward in a shower of sparks and flame followed instantly by a howling wave of warriors. Valerius killed the first man with a single thrust but the sword blades and the spear points were too many to resist and they came at him from every angle in a flurry of bright metal. He heard Petronius’s death cry at his side as a blade hammered his ribs. Roaring with pain and mad with fear and rage he smashed his sword hilt into a screaming, wild-eyed face. The blow left his right side open and, as he backswung in an attempt to parry a blur of metal that hacked at his eyes, he knew he was an instant too slow. A lightning flash of brilliant colours exploded in his head and he felt himself tumbling into the darkness. Death reached out to him and he welcomed it. The last thing he remembered was a face from his worst nightmares.
XXXVIII
The face that greeted him in Elysium was different. He knew it must be Elysium because it existed in a constant haze where pain was only a distant memory and soft hands soothed his brow and washed his body. Elysium came and went, but the face remained. Just occasionally earthly matters invaded the idyll that was the afterlife, a gnawing sense of responsibility or an unaccountable sadness, but they were small intrusions and always the face would be there to make them go away. Time in Elysium was an irrelevance and the body’s needs an illusion. It existed, and Valerius existed within it.
His first indication that Elysium might not be permanent came in a voice from the darkness in a language he knew but didn’t understand. And a name that was his own name. The voice was a rumbling, fractured thing and it was accompanied by a sensation alien to the ‘happy fields’ of the afterlife. Fear. It opened a door through which images marched like the dazzling flashes from the spear points of a distant legion. He saw savage, pitiless faces. A woman crouched and weeping over the body of a dead husband. Swords that rose and fell with merciless precision. And blood. Rivers of blood. Lakes of blood. Blood spattered across a wall, and blood that poured down the steps of a great temple. Screams echoed in his head and though he knew they were his own screams he couldn’t stifle them.
‘Valerius.’ The name again, but this time it was another voice, accompanied by the touch of a gentle hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and for the first time the face appeared in sharp focus. Something metallic was put to his mouth and a pleasant liquid ran down his throat. Just before he lost consciousness he remembered her
