The boy ran up through the neighbouring meadow and over the crest of the hill and turned back and waved one last time and was gone.
Lucius walked back to his horse, remounted and rode back towards the forest.
5
‘Well?’ said Marco.
Lucius fell in beside him. ‘He got away.’
Marco nodded. ‘Thought he might.’
‘Get anything out of the captives?’
‘General Heraclian ordered us to let them flee. Said it wasn’t worth risking our necks for.’
‘Did he indeed?’
‘He did. One thing we learnt, though: they spoke good Latin. Fluent, in fact.’
Lucius frowned. ‘Why shouldn’t they?’
‘Well, they were Goths.’
Lucius reined his horse to a halt. ‘They were what?’
‘A Gothic war-band.’
Lucius stared ahead between Tugha Ban’s flicking ears. This was making less than no sense. ‘Where’s Heraclian now?’
Marco harrumphed. ‘He and the Palatine have gone on ahead, along with all the other hostages, mounted up now. In fact, we’ve lost sight of them. For some reason we’re stuck with the carriages.’
‘The fat eunuch?’
‘Gone, too.’
‘What, mounted? How…?’
‘Don’t ask. It wasn’t a pretty sight.’
‘But as far as they know we’ve still got Attila?’
‘As far as they know.’
Lucius kicked his horse forwards again and they rode on in pensive silence for a while.
Then Marco said, ‘Permission to, sir?’
Lucius nodded.
‘Well, sir, do you ever get the feeling somebody doesn’t want us to get to Ravenna?’
Lucius shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I think. I don’t know what the hell’s going on. One thing I do know: I’m glad I’m just a poor, dumb bonehead of a soldier. Not a bloody politician.’
His centurion grinned.
When it became clear to Lucius that they had lost the Palatine Guard for good, he sent two of his men on for reinforcements. They were to ride forward at all speed to the next main road and imperial cursus station, and there send out for more reinforcements. From Ravenna, if need be.
‘You think we’re going to be attacked again?’ asked Marco quietly.
‘I know we are. So do you. In fact,’ said Lucius, looking at his depleted column: forty cavalrymen, a handful of wounded, and two lumbering great Liburnian cars. ‘In fact, we are in serious trouble.’ He turned back to Marco. ‘But keep it under your helmet.’
They had ridden for about a further half an hour when the column shuddered to a halt.
The two troopers hung from a branch across the road. They had been stripped naked and then flayed. One had had his right hand cut off and stuffed in his mouth, his fingers splayed obscenely over his raw and bloody face. The other’s mouth was stuffed with his own genitals.
‘Cut them down,’ ordered Lucius quietly.
They were lowered into blankets and buried at the side of the road.
Lucius addressed his horror-stricken men, trying his best to keep the horror out of his voice and eyes. He told them they were in deep shit. He told them they were up to their eyeballs in the Cloaca Maxima. He told them he didn’t have a clue what was going on, and they might not survive at all, let alone get to Ravenna. But they must keep together, and then they’d have a chance.
‘Don’t start running,’ he said. ‘We’ve been through worse than this before.’
The men knew their lieutenant of old. They set their faces grimly, shouldered their shields, hefted their spears, and with renewed resolve the column moved on.
Attila had already stolen a mule.
He had crept into a little farmyard in late afternoon, and set the ducks quacking furiously at his intrusion. But nobody stirred. An ancient, fly-blown mule was standing sullenly in the shade of a stone barn, tethered to a fence. Attila untied the frayed old rope and began to lead the animal out of the farmyard as silently as he could. The cobbles were thick with straw, so the boy and the mule made little sound.
There was a narrow window at the end of the barn, and he could hear noises inside. Unable to resist the risk, he turned the mule alongside the barn wall and hoisted himself up on its back to peer in through the window. The scene within was lit by a slash of late afternoon sunlight coming in through the open doorway.
An older man was bucking up and down in the hay, naked but for his shirt, while underneath him lay a young girl on her back, similarly undressed. There must have been thirty years between them. Maybe they were father and daughter. Such things were known to be as common as sunshine in these remote rural parts, and the long, lazy hours of summer had to be passed somehow. The girl seemed to be enjoying it well enough, anyway, judging from the urgency of her thrusts beneath him, and from the give-away curling of her toes, and from her sweat-streaked face, and from the little gasps that came from her open mouth. The boy felt the warmth of the mule underneath him and a stir of hot longing in his belly and below, and he slid dry-mouthed and wondering from the ancient and indifferent mule and led it silently out of the farmyard. He draped the frayed rope over its withers for a rein, hauled himself up again, using a fence post for lift, and sat astride its bristly, mud-flecked back and rode away.
He rode on down the valley into a wide champaign country, through tall grasslands and meadows still bright with the last flowers of the year, crown daisies and mayweed, centaury, yarrow and feverfew.
He should have sensed them; or he should have taken note of what his senses told him. But now he was away from the column and free at last, with nothing between him and his far, beloved homeland – so he thought. It made him careless, light-hearted, light-headed. He even whistled as he rode.
He should have noticed his sullen mount’s ears flicking back and forth. He should have heard the muffled sounds of pots and pans clanging, should have smelt the woodsmoke, and the unmistakable smell of a camp of men and horses. But he rode down through the meadow with his legs hanging loose and his hands loose on the rope, whistling like the boy he was. When he rode round the end of the copse he saw before him a camp of some two hundred men. Tents, campfires, horses tethered to stakes. And no more than a hundred yards between them.
One of the men happened to look up from where he was kindling his campfire, and stared. He stood up and stared some more. Then he turned to his comrades lounging near the tent.
‘Well, would you look at that?’ he said.
They looked, and saw at the far edge of the meadow, the tousled-looking boy with the unmistakable slanted eyes and the blue tattooed scars on his cheeks. They scrambled to their feet in an instant.
‘The lamb walks straight into the lion’s jaws,’ said another.
They grinned.
Then they scrambled fast for their horses as they saw the boy wheel his ancient mule round and urge it forward into a trot as hard as he could.
He wouldn’t get far. But they didn’t want to lose him again.
Lucius was becoming more anxious with every mile they covered, though he betrayed nothing to his men. Now the sun was going down, and they still hadn’t struck camp. The terrain was difficult. They had passed through dense woods, and emerged onto a flat but rocky plateau, surrounded on three sides by dark forest and on the fourth by a steep drop into the valley. It was no place for a secure camp, but if they went on they’d be in deep forest
