The Gothic warlord sat mounted and still on his black horse to the far right of his ranks. He surveyed the chaos of the battlefield with apparent serenity.
Lucius looked around. Crates was on his knees in the dust, cradling his stump of an arm. Lucius called out to him, and the lithe, clever little Greek looked up at him very slowly, his mouth hanging open as if he were an idiot, all his sharp, sardonic wit drained from him with his lifeblood. And then, like a moment from a nightmare, his eyes still fixed on his commanding officer, Crates slumped sideways and fell dead into the dust.
Young Salcus lay dead nearby, a spear driven through his skinny ribs and deep into the ground below. And there lay Ops, too, Ops Invictus, Ops the Unvanquished from Caledonia to Egypt, from Syria to the banks of the Danube. But he was vanquished now, at last, in the very heart of Italy, arrows bristling from his great mound of a belly like a porcupine’s quills. Marco sat hunched, tawny with dust from head to foot as if he had been perversely anointed, his hands clutching his side. Surely not Marco, too… In a panic, Lucius called his name. Marco looked up at him and then down again. He said nothing. Slowly and painfully he clambered to his feet, one hand still clutching his side, and came to stand near his commanding officer. Marco wouldn’t be so easily beaten.
They were the only two men still standing. They and the boy. The boy, of course, the cause of all this mayhem, was still standing. Nothing could destroy him. Naked to the waist, sword in hand, top-knot tied and decorated with a plait of horsehair, his whole body thickly pasted with blood and sweat and dust – and none of that blood was his own, Lucius felt sure, not a drop of his own wild blood had been spilt. The boy eyed Lucius evenly across the corpse-strewn arena of the stockade, drew his sword-blade swiftly through the folds of his filthy, ragged tunic, which still hung from his belt, further garlanded with ragged and gory hanks of human scalp. And then he grinned.
The stockade was breached in three places, and the carriages were no more than a heap of ashes. There were three of them left to fight, and a hundred horsemen were about to ride in and slay them. They were finished. And the boy grinned.
Lucius looked at the ranks of standing men across the plateau. ‘You gods,’ he whispered, but with deep and bitter accusation. ‘ You gods.’
The Gothic warlord raised his gauntleted hand for the last time.
Here they came now. The rear, untried ranks of horsemen were mounting up. The walking wounded were retiring to the shade and coolness of the forest edge, but the rest were riding forward. They would fight on horseback now. They would simply ride in and slaughter the last remnants of this troublesome century.
Here they came.
Beside him, Marco looked up. ‘To the otherworld, sir,’ he said.
‘To the otherworld.’
The horsemen did not even break into a gallop. No more than twenty yards from the stockade, the Gothic warlord raised his hand again and they came to a halt.
‘What the hell are they playing at?’ growled Marco. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ he yelled at them. ‘Come on! What are you waiting for?’
The ranks of tall, plumed horsemen sat their horses and didn’t stir.
Then their leader heeled his horse and rode forward, just as he had only yesterday evening, many lives and deaths ago. He stopped near the stockade, turned his long ashen spear deftly in his right hand, and drove the head deep into the ground in front of him. His sword remained in his long scabbard. For a moment he bowed his helmeted head, and when he raised it again, Lucius saw to his astonishment that his eyes were bright with tears.
He spoke quietly, but they heard his every word.
‘The battle is ended. The boy is yours. We will no longer fight against those who fight so bravely. We salute you, our brothers.’
As one, the horsemen raised their right hands, empty now of weapons.
Then they turned and rode away. The dust settled behind their thundering hooves, and the plateau was silent.
In a daze, Lucius wandered out onto the battlefield, Marco close behind him.
After a while Marco called, ‘Man alive here, sir.’
Lucius went over. The warrior was badly wounded, blood bubbling from a hole in his chest. Marco stooped over him and tore off the warrior’s helmet. He had cropped dark hair and, now they looked closely, his eyes…
‘Never saw a Goth with brown eyes before.’
The man begged for water, his voice grating with thirst, but Marco said they had none. Instead he demanded, in the Gothic tongue, ‘ Hva? ata wair? an? ’
The man closed his eyes, ready to die.
‘Get off him,’ Marco growled at his unseen, immortal adversary, gliding over the battlefield in his long black robes. ‘A minute more.’ He shook the dying man roughly, and demanded again, ‘ Hva? ata wair? an? Who are you?’
The man’s eyelids fluttered and he groaned. ‘Don’t understand. Speak Latin.’
His brain reeling, Marco did so.
The soldier gasped, ‘Batavian cavalry, second ala, Roman auxiliaries, the Danube station.’
‘Not Goths?’
The soldier smiled faintly. ‘Not Goths.’ Blood frothed from between his cracked lips.
‘Why? Who sent you?’
‘We were waiting for orders… The boy…’
But the dying soldier’s mind was already dimmed, and his inner eye saw nothing but the light beyond, and the outstretched arms of his wife, standing in the sunlit fields across the wide river.
Then his head fell to one side and his breath died.
Marco laid him gently down. His enemy. His Roman brother-in-arms.
The two officers felt another presence close by, and found the boy standing behind them.
‘They were Romans,’ he said.
Lucius shook his head.
‘They were Romans,’ insisted Attila, ‘sent to kill me.’
‘They were auxiliaries, Batavians,’ muttered Lucius.
‘Same thing.’
‘I knew from how they fought,’ said Marco. ‘None of it was right.’
He looked at his commanding officer. He had never seen him sunk so low. Lucius had seen his entire, loyal, beloved century wiped out in just two bloody hours – and on the obscure and treacherous orders of Rome. The lieutenant’s head sank down upon his chest, as if burdened with a crown of lead.
Marco felt the same. There was nothing left for them here, or anywhere. Nowhere left for them to go. He said, ‘Suggestion, sir: they didn’t expect such a fight, if any. They take the Hun boy here from us. We ride on to Ravenna. We report in all good faith that a Gothic warband has seized the boy. The boy is never seen again.’ Marco looked aside at Attila. ‘Sorry, son, but I don’t think they’d have given you a hot bath and warm blankets to sleep in.’ He resumed to Lucius, struggling to hold on. ‘So word gets back to Uldin that his grandson has been captured, presumed killed, by Gothic raiders. An insult no Hun king would take lying down.’
Lucius was ominously silent.
The boy was eager, though. ‘So he turns on the Gothic army of Alaric?’ he said. ‘Attacking them from behind, as they are attacking Rome?’
Lucius shook his head and gave a deep sigh. ‘Like I’ve said before,’ he said very quietly, ‘I’m glad I’m only a dumb, bone-headed soldier, and not a politician.’
He felt unspeakably weary. And he realised that they shouldn’t be having this conversation in front of the boy.
But the boy had heard and understood it all. His slanted, leonine eyes were already burning from within. ‘I know who ordered it,’ he said softly. ‘I understand.’
Marco tried to straighten up, but instead he gave a weak groan and sank down on his knees again, his hands stretched out in the dirt, clasping at nothing.
Lucius was at his side, urgently. ‘Marco!’
Marco turned stiffly and sat down, his head dropping. He felt he had no strength left in his powerful
