I raised my right hand, and the half-dragons swung out, spreading across the hill to cut off the Picts’ retreat. The drumbeat quickened, sounding sharp and high above the growing thunder of the hooves. The trumpets of the Asturians rang out, and they halted in the middle of the road, their red and white standard waving.
From within Corstopitum, more trumpets answered, faint with distance. The First Thracian Cohort was hurrying to join its unexpected reinforcements.
The Picts began advancing directly up the road toward the Asturians, obviously preferring them to us. The Asturians remained motionless, spears leveled-waiting, as we had agreed. I raised my hand once more, and the drumbeat quickened again: we began to trot down toward the Picts at an angle. The long tail of our standard twisted in the wind behind me, crimson and gold. The beat quickened still more, and the horses broke into a canter, into a gallop. We shouted our own war cry: “Marha! Marha!” with one deep voice, and drew our bows from their cases, setting the arrows to the string.
The Picts knew nothing about mounted archers. When we veered away from them, they began to hoot and jeer in triumph, believing, I suppose, that their numbers and their paint had frightened us off. Then the arrows struck, and the jeers turned abruptly into screams of pain and consternation. We galloped past them on both sides, shooting; some of the Picts hurled javelins back, but at that range these were useless against armored enemies, while our arrows found easy targets in the raiders’ unarmored legs and sides. Their advance foundered, collapsing in a sea of dead and injured men and horses. The trumpets of the Asturians rang out, and they rolled forward. I drew rein and waved the men around, putting away my bow and pulling out and lowering my spear. I felt an unfamiliar dread as its weight came down into my hand. There was no glory in this contest. It was simple slaughter.
The Picts were brave men. They struggled to regroup themselves, to settle their shields on their arms, to gather up the reins, lower the spear, all the while we swept down on them. The same instinct that informed me must have told them that they were facing death-but they faced it with unaltered courage. The Asturians struck them first, but lightly: they clashed, halted, horses rearing, men fighting. Then our charge caught them on both sides, and they went under like a nest of field voles sliced open by the plow. We galloped over them, killing with the lance and the long sword and trampling the corpses underfoot. When we drew rein and turned again on the other side of the field, the remaining Picts flung themselves off their horses and begged for mercy. The First Thracians, hurrying up from the city behind them, were too late to do anything except secure the prisoners and bury the dead.
The aftermath of the battle was unreal. I sat on my horse among the Roman officers and watched as the barbarians were disarmed, bound, and led off. There had been about eighteen hundred of them, of whom half were now dead. My men busily stripped the corpses of valuables and, of course, scalps. I told myself that I was doing nothing more than honoring the bargain my people made at Aquincum, but I was revolted at it and at myself. I had fought in a great many battles, from the first, when I was fourteen and rode with the archers, to the Thundering Defeat, but the battle against the Pictish raiders at Corstopitum was the most pitiful affair I ever took part in. We might have dispensed with the arrows altogether and taken them with the cavalry charge alone. I was accustomed, though, to using a force of mounted archers at least twice as large as my armored troops, and didn’t like the idea of employing no archery at all. Besides, we hadn’t been sure of the enemy’s numbers, and the arrows could have covered a retreat.
The prefect of the First Thracian Cohort of Corstopitum was elated, and told us several times that it was the biggest raid he’d ever seen, and that he hadn’t expected anyone to come help him in time. He thanked the gods that Comittus, Facilis, and Longus hadn’t read the dispatches that ordered them to arrest me and disarm all my men. When I finally got the chance to put a word in, I told him that I wished to go to Condercum and speak to Gatalas’ men. The thought of them, lordless, disarmed, and imprisoned, had been weighing heavy on my mind.
“I’m sure the legate will arrange it as soon as he arrives,” the prefect replied. “We sent him the news by fast courier when the trouble started.” (By “trouble” he meant the mutiny, not the raid: he was being tactful.) “I’m sure he’ll come himself in a few days. I’ll put it to him then, Lord Ariantes.”
“I would like to see them earlier, if that is possible,” I said.
He gave me an unhappy look, and I saw that I wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near Condercum until the legate had arrived with more Roman troops. “I’ll write Condercum about it,” the prefect promised, to pacify me.
The prefect invited us to spend the night in Corstopitum, and was taken aback when Comittus told him that my men wouldn’t sleep in barracks. “The Sarmatians at Condercum do,” he said in surprise. We declined to squeeze in beside his own men, and rode back to Cilurnum. Comittus rode in silence most of the way. When we turned north along the river, I saw that he was crying.
“Had you never seen a battle before?” I asked him quietly. He had been very white and silent since it ended.
He shook his head. “No. Oh gods! Was it that obvious?”
“Not so very much. Nearly all men are nervous beforehand. But if they have seen war before, they are less dismayed afterward.”
He sniffed. “I’d never realized… and… damn it, Ariantes, you know what they’re going to do with the prisoners we took?”
“The arenas?” I asked. That was what the Romans had always done with their Sarmatian prisoners.
He nodded. “Damn it! Poor wretches. I know they started it, but poor, miserable men.” He looked up and met my eyes. “You probably don’t have any idea what it looked like. Gods and goddesses, you were like… like those reaping machines they use in the South. No, like meat grinders. Nothing human, anyway. Sweeping down on those poor miserable savages, chopping them up, and trampling over them while they screamed. It was horrible!”
“Yes. Who were they?”
He rubbed his face. “Mostly Selgovae. I recognized the emblems of a couple of their chiefs. And some Votadini-they were the ones with the hawk emblem painted on their faces. And that’s an odd thing: the southern Votadini don’t usually cooperate with the Selgovae. They’ve fought a lot in the past, and they have so many blood debts back and forth that they can hardly make a truce even when they want to.”
I was silent for a minute. “It was an odd thing in many ways. They must have known that there was… trouble in the Roman camp.”
He gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. “They did know,” he said, after a pause and in a whisper. “I heard them talking about it as the Thracians were tying them up and taking them off. But…” And he lowered his voice still further, so that I had to lean half off my horse and strain my ears to hear it. “But I don’t see how they could have gathered their forces in time, particularly with all those blood feuds to settle-unless they knew about it before it happened.”
“Perhaps there was trouble earlier, which we did not hear about,” I said, after a pause. “As Facilis said, we are the last people who would be informed of trouble in Condercum.”
“By Maponus! That’s true!” exclaimed Comittus, brightening. There had clearly been another possibility that had worried him before. I suspected it myself, but in a vague way, not happy with details. I was quite certain that Gatalas wouldn’t have been able to coordinate his mutiny with an invasion even if he’d wanted to: we were all of us too alien to this world to play its factions. But then, Gatalas’ mutiny didn’t sound planned at all: it had the feel of a desperate gesture undertaken to revenge his honor. Why? What had happened? Plainly he had been forced to bow lower to Roman discipline than I had, if he’d been obliged to use barracks. But that would not have been enough to make him resort to mutiny. He’d swallowed Facilis’ insults all the way from Aquincum and had only threatened to rebel at the ocean crossing because he thought it a death trap. He’d hoped for glory in war, for a battle like the one I’d just fought. And still, he must have had some residual faith in the Romans, or he would not have ordered his men to surrender when he rode out with his bodyguard to die.
Danger from lies, the rods had warned in Bononia. I suspected, though still vaguely, that someone had lied to Gatalas, someone with contacts among the Pictish tribes-and from Comittus’ unhappiness I guessed that the same thought had crossed his mind as well. And without details, without proof, like a man listening to echoes in the darkness, I wondered if the legate would bring his lady with him when he came from Eburacum.
VII
