On the rocks beside him a small fire of driftwood burned. Huy had lit it from a smouldering remnant, and in it was heating a broad spear-head with its shaft snapped off short.
‘There is little time. Soon my men will come to find me, and then it will be out of my hands,’ Huy explained reasonably. ‘I have made an oath to my gods, so I cannot give you the punishment which you have earned. Yet I have a duty to my king and my people. I cannot let you carry the sword against us again.
‘The Romans had an answer for this, and though I hate all things of Rome, I must use their methods now.’
Huy stood up, and leaned over Timon.
‘I made a mistake with you. No man can ever tame the wild leopard.’ Huy held the vulture axe in his right hand. ‘You were never Timon, you were always Manatassi. You are as different from me as the colour of my skin is different from yours. There was never a bond between us, it was illusion, for though our mouths speak the same language, our ears hear the sounds differently.
‘Your destiny is to seek the destruction of all that I hold dear, all that my people have built and tended. My destiny is to protect it, with my very life’s blood.’ Huy paused, and there was true regret in his heart as he went on. ‘I cannot kill you, but I must make sure that you never carry the sword again.’
The vulture axe sang, and Timon screamed once, and then whimpered softly as his severed right hand twitched and trembled like a dying animal on the scorched earth of the island.
Huy fetched the heated spear blade from the fire and sealed off the pumping blood vessels of the stump in a hissing puff of stinking smoke. Then he cut the thongs that still bound Timon.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘You must trust yourself to the river now. My men will come to search the island soon.’
Timon dragged himself down the beach, and at the water’s edge be looked back at Huy. His huge black body was scarred and ravaged, and his eyes were terrible.
Slowly he lowered himself into the water, holding the raw stump of his arm across his chest. The current took him, and his head dwindled to a speck upon the wide river, until it was swept beyond the bend below the fort. Huy watched it out of sight, then he stooped and picked up the severed hand from the ground and dropped it onto the fire and piled dry driftwood upon it.
Bakmor had dug his cremation pits along the bank of the river, and he and Huy passed along the ranks of fallen warriors laid upon their last couch of wood. It was the ceremony of farewell, and Huy paused and looked down at old Mago. In death the garrison commander had a dignity which he had lacked in life.
‘How sweet is the taste of glory now, Mago?’ Huy asked him softly, and it seemed that Mago smiled in his sleep.
Huy sang the praise of Baal, and then he lit the funeral fires with his own hand.
Tanith was not upon the walls to welcome him when they marched back to the fortress of Sett, but Huy found her in her own chamber. She had been weeping and her face was pale, with dark blue smears beneath her eyes.
‘I feared for you, my lord. My heart burned within me, but I did not weep. I was very brave through it all. Through all the horror of it. It was only when they told me that you were safe that I cried. Isn’t that silly?’
Holding her close, Huy asked, ‘Was it like the poets sang it? Was it glorious and heroic?’
‘It was horrible,’ Tanith whispered. ‘Horrible beyond my dreams of horror. It was ugly, my lord, ugly enough to make me despair of beauty.’ She was silent then, remembering it all again. ‘You poets never tell of the blood, and the wounded screaming and - all the other things.’
‘No,’ Huy agreed. ‘We never do.’
In the night Huy woke and found that Tanith was sitting beside him on the couch. The night lamp was trimmed low and her eyes were dark pools in her face.
‘What troubles you?’ Huy asked, and she was quiet a few seconds before she spoke.
‘Holy Father, you are so gentle, so kind. How could you do what was done today?’
Huy pondered the reply a moment.
It was my duty,‘ he explained at last.
‘Your duty to slaughter those wretches?’ Tanith asked incredulously.
‘The law is death to rebel slaves.’
‘The law is wrong then,’ Tanith declared hotly.
‘No.’ Huy shook his head. ‘The law is never wrong.’
‘It is!’ Tanith was close to tears again. ‘It is!’
‘The law is all we have that saves us from the void, Tanith. Obey the laws and the gods and you need never fear.’
‘The laws should be changed.’
‘Ah!’ Huy smiled. ‘Change them, by all means, but until they are changed, obey them.’
In the dawn of the next morning Lannon Hycanus arrived at Sett. He arrived at the head of two full legions in battle array, and fifty elephants of war.
‘I fear I have been greedy, sire,’ Huy told him at the gates. I left you not a single one.‘ And Lannon shouted with laughter and embraced Huy, turning to his staff with an arm still about Huy’s shoulders.
‘Which of you was it said that Ben-Amon would not fight?’
That night while he was still sober Huy sang the ballad he had composed to commemorate the Battle of the River of Blood, and Lannon wept at the telling of it, and when it was done he cried out to his own staff.
