fluttering pennant just below the spearhead. They carried no shields, but their burnished steel breastplates caught the dying rays of the sun, and their tall, conical helmets with their flowing horsehair plumes made them look still taller.
Both officers thought: against two hundred of them, like that? We’ve got no chance. But both had the tact to keep silent.
The three horsemen rode fearlessly up to the edge of the circle, and the one in the lead nodded to Lucius.
‘This is your command?’
‘It is,’ said Lucius evenly.
Their leader’s horse, a leanly muscled young black gelding, circled skittishly in front of them, mettlesome and full of fire. His gait was high-stepping, free-floating, as if he had Spanish or Berber in his bloodline, though the Goths usually rode the shaggy, enduring horses of the plains.
The warlord spoke again, his Latin excellent. ‘Hand the Hun boy over to us, and the rest of you will go free. Resist, and none of you will live to see tomorrow’s sunset.’
Lucius turned to Marco. Marco summoned Ops, who came shambling over from the fireside.
‘Hear that, Decurion?’
‘I heard.’
‘What do the men say?’
Crates, the wiry little Greek who served as the century’s doctor, sitting cross-legged by the campfire sharpening his dagger on a whetstone, spoke up for all of them. ‘Tell him to go fuck himself,’ he called.
Lucius grinned and turned back to the Gothic horseman. ‘The answer is: go fuck yourselves.’
The horseman was unperturbed. He said quietly, ‘You will regret that.’
Lucius kept his eyes locked onto the eyes of his enemy. ‘Maybe. And maybe not.’
The three tall horsemen wheeled their mounts and rode back into the forest.
Lucius sat with his men. Attila sat close by.
Crates the Greek was gouging at the dust with his knife. He said, his usually sardonic voice softened with puzzlement, ‘Goths don’t skin people alive. Of all the barbarian peoples, they’re the ones with the greatest sense of honour. They don’t raze villages flat, they don’t perform human sacrifices.’ He shook his head.
Lucius glanced at Attila, but he was saying nothing, his gaze inscrutable.
Marco, who had done service on the Danube earlier in his career and knew the Gothic peoples well enough, nodded in silent agreement. ‘One of our blokes, when I was out in Noricum with the Legio X “Gemina”, getting seven different kinds of shit kicked out of us by those tall, gorgeous horsemen with their long blond hair-’
The rest of the men guffawed.
‘Well, one of our blokes there, he got caught by a Gothic war-band, hunting across the river. He came back alive OK. But you know what had happened?’
The men settled back to listen, the threat of tomorrow temporarily forgotten. Marco always told a good tale.
‘This bloke, he was a young optio, not an ounce of common sense in his body. But he’d read a lot of books, and even sitting in camp down by the river he’d be talking poetry and philosophy and suchlike. Rest of the men sitting round stuffing their faces with lentil stew and farting at him from time to time, but he’d chatter on anyhow, regardless. So this one time he goes out hunting on his own – wildfowling – needed some duck, too many lentils playing havoc with his guts – and he gets caught by this Gothic warband. So they form up in a ring around him like they do, spearheads straight at his throat. And he told us he’d read about this Greek philosopher, who’d been threatened with execution by some tyrant – I forget his name. And this Greek philosopher, in true philosophical style, he sneers at the tyrant, “How marvellous it must be for you to have as much power as a poisonous spider.” The tyrant had him executed anyway. But you have to admit, the philosopher went to hell with a certain style.
‘So now this Gothic war-band has our bloke surrounded, not a cat’s bollock of a chance, all on his own out there. And their leader says something about how he has strayed into their kingdom and domain, and the penalty for that must be death. And this young bookworm of an optio sits up proud in his saddle, and comes out with the very same line: “How marvellous it must be for you to have as much power as a poisonous spider.” Straight to their faces. There’s deathly silence as the twenty horsemen goggle at this bit of gross impertinence to their chieftain. And then bugger me if they don’t all fall about laughing. They laugh so much they look like they’re going to fall out of their saddles. Then the leader raises his spear, and the rest do the same, and he rides up and claps our daft young optio on the back, and demands that he comes back to their tents and gets rat-arsed with them on some very dodgy Gothic mead. Which he duly does, not appearing to have much choice in the matter. Next morning he feels like he’s been hammering his head against a wall all night. But he and this Gothic warband are now pretty much blood-brothers for life.’
Marco paused. Then he said more seriously, ‘Point is, that’s the kind of people the Goths are. They’re warriors and they have that old Germanic heroic code. You know? They don’t skin prisoners alive, like the little Greek here says, and they don’t slaughter whole villages of women and children. I’m not saying it’s because they’re tender-hearted, exactly. It’s more because, as warriors, they’ll only draw their swords against a worthy opponent – in other words, another man with a sword in his hand. You’ll never hear about any Gothic atrocities, unlike with some tribes I could mention.’
There was an awkward silence. The soldiers resisted turning to look at Attila. Still he remained impassive, listening to every word as he gazed into the orange firelight.
Lucius stood up. ‘OK, ladies. Enough learned talk for the night. Time to get some kip. It’ll be dawn in a few hours, and tomorrow’s going to be a long, hard day.’
Marco and Lucius stood a while longer on the rough earthen rampart and looked out into the silent darkness.
‘What are our chances do you reckon, Centurion?’
Marco took a deep breath, and when he answered he was uncharacteristically indirect. He said, ‘Another thing I know about the Goths is that when they charge they cry, “Ride to ruin and the world’s end!” So who fights harder, a man with a healthy dread of death or a man with no fear of death at all?’
His lieutenant brooded.
‘I even learnt a bit of Gothic poetry,’ said Marco.
‘You never cease to amaze me, Centurion.’
Marco went over it in his head, and then he said, his voice soft and guttural with the ancient Germanic sounds: ‘“ Hige sceal? e heardra,
Heorte? e cenre,
Mod sceal? e meara, ? e uns mahteig lytla?.”’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning:
“Heart shall be harder,
Will shall be stronger,
Fight shall be fiercer,
As our strength fades.”
‘That’s the old, heroic Gothic soul for you.’
‘Very heroic it is, too.’
Marco straightened. ‘But then, look at us. Look at what we’re facing, now and in the hard years to come. Are you telling me there’s any other way of looking at the world that makes sense? The world being what it is?’
Lucius was silent. After a long time he said, ‘No. It makes sense.’
The two men looked into the implacable darkness and spoke no more. It seemed to them as if all speech and all longing, all love and loyalty, bravery and sacrifice, might vanish and be swallowed up in that profound darkness, and nothing come out of its depths but more darkness yet.
A shiver ran down their spines. A voice began to speak close behind them.
‘“Our mother the earth, there on the birch tree!
Amber-dark butterfly, that gave us birth!
As we go singing over endless plains,
Riding our lives away, shadows on the steppe.
