neck.
‘Marco, not you too.’
‘It is time, sir,’ said the centurion. ‘It was time for a lot of us today.’
It was the wound in his side. He had ignored it, as he always ignored his wounds. ‘Either they go away,’ he used to say, ‘or you do.’ Until now, he had always got the better of them. But this one was different. His whole body ran cold, and his limbs trembled.
Lucius cried out his name, and ordered him to stand. ‘On your feet, soldier!’ He could almost have struck him in his sudden rage.
‘Just a few minutes more, officer,’ said Marco. Farewell, warm time. Hail, cold eternity. He could no longer see. ‘May the gods keep you,’ he whispered. ‘It has been good to serve with a man like you.’
Then he rolled onto his side and curled up on the ground, smiling gently to himself. That great muscled, battle-scarred body, curled up like a baby in the womb. As at my beginning, so at my end. He breathed almost silently now, hands clutched to his stomach, blood seeping afresh from under his tunic. Lucius stood over him, utterly at a loss, speechless with anger. Marco stopped breathing. The blood stopped seeping.
Attila turned away, puzzled at himself, unable to watch, unable to listen. He walked away over the battlefield to find his mule.
Lucius sank to his knees with a howl, and dragged at his centurion’s broad shoulders. He raised up his body, cradled his grizzled head in his lap, and wept.
Attila came back a few minutes later, leading his mule by its frayed rope. Lucius was still kneeling in the dust beside his centurion.
The boy stood near him for a while, and then he said quietly, ‘I’m going now.’
Lucius nodded.
The boy hesitated a while longer, then he said, ‘Rome’s all done, like I said before. You should get back to Britain.’
Lucius said nothing. He knew of nothing worth saying. And he suddenly felt that words of Latin, the language of Rome, would stick in his throat like fishbones.
‘Your homeland,’ said the boy with a strange urgency.
Lucius nodded. His homeland. His heartland. Then he said, in the language of his own people, ‘ Mae hiraeth arnath Britan. My heart is longing for Britain.’
The boy knew nothing of the Celtic language, but there was no need. He understood every word from the longing with which the lieutenant spoke.
Still he hesitated. Then he said, ‘I owe you my life. I will not forget.’
At last Lucius turned round. ‘Do not forget,’ he said quietly. ‘In the years to come.’ He watched the boy scramble up onto his mule, without a trace of tiredness, as if the morning’s desperate fighting had been nothing to him but a stroll in the meadows. ‘Ride safely, young one.’
Attila nodded. ‘I’ll survive.’
The ghost of a smile passed over Lucius’ face. ‘I don’t doubt it.’
The boy kicked the mule’s bony flanks and it lurched forwards stiff-legged away over the plateau, northwards and into the trees.
Lucius watched him go for a long time.
7
In the afternoon heat and silence, amid the gluttonous buzzing of the gathering flies, the solitary soldier of Rome hacked brushwood from the surrounding forest and piled it up in the centre of the stockade. He built a great pyre over the brushwood with the uprooted staves of the stockade, and dragged the bodies of his slain men onto it. When he had lifted up the twentieth corpse he knew he could do no more that day, and he slept comatose some distance away without dreaming. The next day, aching in every fibre of his body and his soul, he managed to lay the rest of the bodies on the pyre. Last of all, his centurion.
He fired the brushwood and watched it burn as the sun went down in the west. Over Rome.
He walked away into the forest.
But some unknown god was watching over him. The god who blesses and curses in one breath.
After only a few minutes’ walking he saw something like a white shadow through the trees. He emerged into a glade filled with the last smoky rays of the sun slanting in low between the trees, and there in the beautiful light stood Tugha Ban, cropping the sweet dark grass of the glade. She still wore her saddle, but Lucius’ scalp froze when he saw an arrow buried in it.
He went over and let the wounded horse nuzzle his hand gently. He carefully raised the saddle, and his heart sang. For he saw to his unspeakable relief that the arrowhead had only just passed through the leather and then stopped. Tugha Ban in her innocence wasn’t so much as scratched. And it was only right that it should be so. What had his gentle grey mare to do with the violence and treachery of men?
He laid his arms across her broad, strong back, rested his cheek against the dense leather and gave thanks with an unsteady voice; and then he broke down and wept again. Tugha Ban looked back at his emotional outburst with some surprise, grazing her damp muzzle over his arm. Then she returned to cropping the sweet, cool grass at her feet. It was too good to miss.
After his prayers, Lucius took off her saddle, snapped the arrow off at the head, pulled the wicked iron barb through from the other side, and threw it deep into the undergrowth. He replaced the saddle and tightened the girth, looped the reins back, hauled himself up, patted Tugha Ban’s long grey-dappled neck, and pulled her gently and firmly away from the grass. She harrumphed a little crossly, and he heeled her forwards into a gentle rolling walk.
‘You and me, girl,’ he murmured. ‘Into the sunset.’
Around noon the next day, under a burning sun, he drew his sword one more time.
He rode down a narrow track and round the corner of a grove of stone pines, and there immediately before him stood three men. Momentarily they were as surprised as he was. Then they smiled lazily at each other, and moved out across the path.
‘Nice horse,’ drawled one of them, squinting up at him and grinning.
‘She is,’ said Lucius. ‘And where I go, she goes.’
‘By the giant golden balls of Jupiter, is that a fact?’
‘It is.’
‘Well well.’
‘We don’t have no horses,’ said another, coming in close on Lucius’ far side.
Tugha Ban tossed her long grey mane.
‘So I see,’ said Lucius.
All three men were sunburnt and had terrible teeth. The third one drew a dagger slowly from his belt, and ran it through his long, lank hair, grinning at Lucius all the while.
Lucius looked each one of them in the eye in turn. Then he said, ‘I’m in no mood for it. Now out of my way.’
The second bandit stepped back and also drew a dagger from his tunic.
The nearest one gave an obsequious bob of his head where he stood, not moving. ‘Most certainly we will, your eminence. Just as soon as we’ve relieved you of that nice bronze cuirass you’re wearing. And your helmet, and your sword, and your shield, and your dagger. Oh, and your horse, of course, and all the trappings and accoutrements pertaining thereto.’ He grinned toothlessly, drawing a long sword from the scabbard that hung from his back. ‘Then we’ll be out of your way in a-’
He never finished the sentence. Lucius whipped his cavalry spatha from his scabbard in the blink of an eye, jabbed Tugha Ban forward a couple of paces and slashed the blade through the air, saying with weary irritability, ‘Oh, leave me alone. ’
