general ruins. We turned left into another street – then, finding that also blocked, right into another. This soon twisted round to the right, before coming to a dead end.
What I mean to say is we got lost.
We stumbled for an age in what we thought was a generally straight line, the mist growing thicker and thicker about us. It was accompanied by a light drizzle.
We still weren’t in total darkness, but the light we had was of little use for navigating through a sea of broken walls and fallen masonry. The old suburbs had once been half as big as the City itself. Now, spread around us, were occasional streets running between lines of semi-ruined buildings and otherwise vast expanses of quarried rubble. It was like being by night in one of the less frequented districts of Rome.
We must, I was sure, come eventually to the great clearing that separated the outworks and defensive wall of the city from its old suburbs. But that might easily be long after the sun had burned off both mist and cloud and left us exposed to view like thieves caught in sudden lamplight.
‘I think we should be going that way,’ said Martin, pointing left.
‘On the contrary,’ said Theophanes, pointing right, ‘ I think we should be going that way.’
It didn’t help that I had my own idea of the direction.
We stopped, uncertain.
‘I think’, Theophanes said flatly, ‘we might have passed by this pedestal once already. Those legs, snapped off at the knee, look familiar.’
Possibly they were But one broken statue, in the darkness, is very like another – and they must, in this stretch of the old suburbs, have been as common as drainage grilles in the road.
‘Perhaps’, said Martin, ‘we could go into one of the ruined houses. We can hide there until the barbarians go away.’
‘No,’ said Theophanes. ‘Wherever we hid, they’d have us out come dawn like snails from a shell. With their dead friend Ratburger to answer for, I’d not care to be in their charge again.’
I agreed. The old suburbs were not wholly deserted, but those who lived in them knew exactly how and where to hide when danger threatened. We had no such advantage. We had to keep moving even though we might have been going in a circle. We kept expecting to hear the dreadful clatter of nailed boots on crunchy brick but the only sound was our own soft voices, and the careful picking of our feet through the rubble. So long as we could somehow keep to a straight course, it would be rotten luck if we found our way back to the barbarians. More likely, we’d put a good distance between us and them, and could dodge back to the City when first light showed us where we actually were.
We didn’t need a gate. We needed only to get within a hundred yards of the City walls to be under at least potential cover of the artillery. No one would follow us within that radius.
I stepped forward and let the others follow.
‘Halt! Who goes there?’ a voice called firmly in Germanic.
‘Oh, fuck!’ I said inwardly. What could he be doing this far out? Or were we really so far out?
‘I am Aelric, born in Pavia,’ I replied in Lombardic. I knew I couldn’t manage a conversation in his language, but Lombardic would do for basics. ‘I was told to get these prisoners to the Big Man in the Yellow Camp.’
No such luck.
‘I don’t know any Aelric. there ain’t no Lombards detached with us. So who the fuck are you?’
He went for his sword. In a moment, he’d find enough breath to call out for help.
I was younger and bigger. I could probably have taken him out – but that wasn’t anything like certain with a sword I’d only handled to put into its scabbard. And what if he managed to call for help?
I never had to find out.
How he got round me and behind that man – in perfect silence and in full cover of the mist – I couldn’t at the time imagine. But Theophanes was there. With a single knife-thrust, delivered with tremendous force, straight through a seam in the leather jacket, he had the man in the back.
As the man went down on all fours, gasping with the pain and shock, the sound of blood frothing on his lips, I saw Theophanes emerge through the mist, a pleased smile on his face. For all the difference in expression, he might have been back in that restaurant, about to hug himself after some particularly apt repartee.
The man tried to reach back to get at the knife. It hadn’t by itself been an immediately killing blow, but it gave me the chance for a sword-thrust just below the collar bone.
And that was the end of him.
Theophanes stood forward to admire his work. He leaned over the body, dabbing playfully at the knife hilt. It bobbed around under his hands like a very stiff erection. As he stood back up, I took his hand and embraced him.
Whatever happened next, we’d done well together this night.
When Martin had finished retching the fear out of his guts, we fell to a hurried conference on where we might be. We agreed that the man probably wasn’t part of any search party. He’d been too surprised to come upon me, and then too straightforwardly suspicious of who I was. He must have been on some other mission, and alone.
We decided not to waste any time on hiding the body. Instead, we just recovered the knife – getting it back out, slippery with blood, took all my effort – and helped ourselves to the one from the dead man’s belt. There was no point taking the sword for Martin. Its weight would only slow him down and he might even cut his leg open by tripping over the thing. But he might be some use with a knife. At least, he could turn it on himself if things grew desperate enough.
We pressed on. The buildings now were growing larger and less ruinous. Martin felt sure we were coming out of the old suburbs. The clearance between them and the outer defences couldn’t now be far away. It might even be round the next bend in the overgrown street we’d been following.
Certainly, I had less feeling of confinement. We must be coming out of the old suburbs.
Then, just as we rounded the bend, came another voice, this one in a high, accented Latin:
‘You have taken your time. The Great One doesn’t appreciate delay.’
‘Oh, fuck!’ I thought again.
Looming out of the mist were a good half-dozen of the Yellow Barbarians.
‘You’d better come quickly. The Great One will be impatient.’
26
Of course, having found our way into the old suburbs, we’d somehow managed a quarter-turn in our wanderings and had since been moving away from the City. The clearing I could sense ahead was the outskirts.
It was here that the Yellow Barbarians had pitched their own camp. Either they were uncomfortable with even ruined buildings around them, or they just wanted to be able to make the quickest escape if the City gates opened.
All that mattered to me until then was that we’d lost direction and would be horribly exposed when the Germanics turned up to report the loss of three captives.
It was all so bloody unfair! I hadn’t anticipated having to stumble around half the night in those stinking clothes from one shock to another. The idea, let me repeat, had been a straight dash back to the City, with me in disguise to get us past any tipsy inspectors. Now, if anything, we might be in a worse position here than back with the Germanics.
But there was no escaping. There could be no fighting to get away from these Yellows. I had no choice but to go along for the moment with a pretence the nature of which I couldn’t guess.
The Yellow Camp was disgusting in ways you can’t imagine if you’ve only seen barbarians like the less enlightened cousins of my own people. There was a filthiness that by comparison made common dirt appear clean. Even that guardhouse with the other captives was more salubrious.
To be fair, these people were pure nomads. When you aren’t accustomed to spending more than one night in the same spot, you tend not to observe the usual decencies of life. My assumption of a few dozen was based on those I’d seen on horseback, and then on the small number of Germanics. But this was an entire tribe on the move
