CHAPTER 5

It was raining, and the mule was stuck.

The beast was young and had never been in a pack train before. Broken to harness at the end of autumn, it had spent the winter in the store paddocks at Camulodunum, knee deep in mud and snow, and fed on musty hay, with no exercise to keep it fit.

The recruits who drove it were every bit as raw and as green and they, too, were on their first campaign. They had no real experience of how to load the packs, and the mule was lame on one hind leg and had open sores along its back where a pad had been badly placed.

To Titus Aelius Ursus, decurion of the second troop, the Fifth Gaulish cavalry wing, assigned to care of the men and their mules for the entirety of their month-long journey west to join the governor’s campaign against Mona, all of these things were regrettable, but inevitable. None of them explained why the beast had planted its feet on the first planks of the bridge and was refusing to move.

“Hit the bloody thing. What are you waiting for?”

Ursus shouted it from half a cohort away, urging his horse past the muttering mass of men spreading out along the riverbank. They were glad of the rest, and had broken formation, dropping their packs without orders. The indiscipline of it was terrifying; they were young and had been recruited straight from the back streets of Rome, which was a relatively safe place to live, and had trained in the east of Britannia, which was almost as safe, and had no notion of what it was to march through land held by unconquered tribes, where the bones of legionary dead lay thick as pebbles among the heather.

A battle-served centurion stood on the far side of the river, marshalling the forty men who had already crossed. Tardily, he put his hand to his mouth and called back to the rest of his century; “Get back in formation! I will personally flog any man who steps out of line!”

Men shuffled and cursed and picked up their packs and were no more ready to meet the enemy than they had been before.

Ursus was tired and saddle sore and thick-headed from lack of wine. He had ridden for thirteen days in the wind and pissing rain, with poor food and his bedding rolls damp through the night and not able to drink into warmth and forgetting because his bastard of a prefect had forbidden them to touch the wine supplies from the moment they rode out of the winter quarters. He wanted either to be in battle or out of it; safe in Camulodunum or committed to the western wars, not babysitting a cohort of helpless, hopeless children, half of whom would be dead by the month’s end.

He reached the bridge and let fly at the nearest of them. “If you don’t get that bloody beast moving, I’ll have you carrying its pack for the rest of the journey west.”

The pink-faced boy who should have been across the bridge and halfway into the valley beyond raised the rod in his hand, and the mule flinched and set its ears back and brayed as it had been doing for far too long, and Ursus finally came close enough to see the welts on its back and haunches where it had been hit often and hard, and so to recognize that hitting it more was not going to make any difference.

Cursing, he threw himself from his horse. “Leave it. There’s no point.” A junior officer stood close by, old enough at least to be shaving. To him, Ursus said, “Has it done this before?”

“Never. We’ve never had any trouble. It’s the bridge; it doesn’t like it.”

Ursus rolled his eyes and sighed, pointedly. “Obviously. They never do. Nobody with any sense walks onto a strip of swaying planks stretched over a twenty-foot drop with rocks and running water below, and mules have their own weight in common sense. That’s why you’re here to—”

He stopped. Sweat pricked sharply along his neck. A horse was coming along the riverbank at speed, from the left. He knew the sound of it as he knew the sound of his own heartbeat.

Without turning, Ursus said stonily, “Stand to attention. That’s the prefect. How he knows we’ve stopped is beyond me but you can pray now to whoever you like that his mood has improved since last night.”

Behind him, the incoming horse drew to a halt, almost within reach. A quiet voice observed, “You’ve stopped.”

Quintus Valerius Corvus, prefect of the Fifth Gaulish cavalry, could cut a man’s soul with the knife of his voice if he chose to do so, and he chose it now. Quietly, with balanced precision, the words were at once a question and an accusation and an assessment of worth, or its lack. Faintly, there was disappointment, which was hardest to bear.

“It’s the mule. It won’t…” Ursus abandoned the sentence, unwilling to state the obvious; that he was in enemy territory with a full cohort of untested legionaries and he had allowed a new-broken mule to halt the progress of his unit. He felt the prickle of sweat run to a scalding flush and hated himself and everyone who saw it, including—particularly—the prefect.

“Yes, I saw.”

Corvus had dismounted and was examining the mule. The godforsaken beast had stopped braying, as if it were indecorous to holler in the prefect’s presence. It stood mutely, watching with everyone else as the company’s most senior officer knelt in the oozing mud at the edge of the bridge and, laying his cheek flat, peered along the planks, then under them. Corvus sat back on his heels, ignoring the filth on his knees, nodded to something unseen in the damp air and then turned to Ursus.

“Find a man with a head for heights and have him look underneath the bridge, about a third of the way along. Keep him well roped. I don’t want to lose anyone now. And get the rest of your men into armed formation. This place is an ambush waiting to happen.”

“Sir.”

When he tried, Ursus could make things happen fast. When his own men, the cavalrymen of the second troop, with whom he shared the shepherding of the legionary recruits, understood that his honour was at stake, they gave him their hearts and were glad of it. It was this that had won him promotion to decurion and might keep him that post now.

Flavius was there, the troop’s standard-bearer, with two other junior officers. They had heard the prefect’s order and knew how to bring their men most swiftly to battle formation. At Ursus’ nod, each gave orders, quietly and crisply. Booted feet rocked the morning. The loose rabble of polished iron and helmet-bronze that had been their cohort became a shining line, not one man out of place.

Abruptly, the rain stopped and it was possible to believe that the gods approved of what had been done. The men certainly thought so; in the stillness of the lines, small handfuls of cornmeal were scattered as offerings to Jupiter, Mars, Mithras and the more minor gods of hearth and home. Murmured sacraments hung like smoke in the air.

The danger of ambush became noticeably less. The three officers conferred and, soon, a dark-skinned lad of seventeen with curled, Hispanic hair and tendons that stood out on his forearms like pulleys had tied a rope round his waist and then pulled himself along under the bridge and back again. Standing to attention in front of Ursus and Corvus, he was white, and not from the height or the officers’ presence.

“Someone’s cut the bindings. The hide holding the planks has frayed almost to nothing. The ones who got across were lucky. If the mule had gone over, it would have fallen to its death and taken anyone else on the bridge with it.”

Corvus had seen it. Ursus should have done. The only grace was that it had been obvious from the moment the prefect spoke and Ursus had already thought through what to do. “I have engineers,” he said. “We can abandon this bridge and build a new one. It will take less than half a day.”

“I know. Thank you. Sadly we don’t have half a day. The governor needs us with all speed for his assault on Mona and we have no remit to repair bridges that have been sabotaged by the enemy.”

Corvus was a compact man, slim and fine-skinned with no spare flesh or hanging jowls and only a salting of white at his temples and along the parting of his hair to show that he had aged since the first years of the occupation. There was an air of difference about him so that even now, under the mud and the stains of travel, with his officer’s cloak hanging wet about his armour and his greaves polished to blind the sun, he did not look fully Roman. His nose was more Greek, or perhaps Alexandrian, and his eyes were wider and could hold the world. For nearly two decades, Ursus had felt himself drown in them daily and, daily, had levered himself out again, cursing.

Ursus was broad and tall and his hair was a very un-Roman pale brown, a legacy from a maternal great-grandfather who had been Batavian and had earned his citizenship fighting under the deified Caesar. He had survived a brief revolt by the Eceni in the east soon after the invasion and twenty years of savage resistance by the tribes of the west and was as good a field commander as any man of his rank. He could take anything the enemy warriors chose to throw at him; it was his prefect’s opinion that made or broke his days.

“What then?” he asked, too shortly.

Corvus smiled and raised a brow. “The next bridge is four miles downstream. It’s intact; my troop and their legionaries are crossing now. Bring your men down and follow us. Keep to the rear; the snake will need teeth in its tail.”

It was an offering, of a sort. Corvus led all his own patrols in person, but he put his second most competent officer at the rear, so that the snake of his line, if cut, might yet strike fast and hard at any enemy coming from behind. It was a place of implicit trust, and assumed the good initiative of the officer placed there, who might well have to act alone. Once, Valerius had been there. It was Valerius who had destroyed whatever little of the prefect’s good humour had survived the winter in Camulodunum. Ursus hated him for both of these, but not enough to reject the gift that was offered.

“Thank you.” He bowed, as if in the governor’s presence. Ahead of him, a horse shifted, restlessly. When he raised his head again, Corvus had already gone.

“Why did he do it?”

The shame of the mule was a passing shadow, almost forgotten in the routines of a nighttime camp. Ursus lay on his back and asked the question of the tent roof above his head. Rain fell steadily, so that the words slipped into the drumming of the goat hide and were lost.

To his left, Flavius, his standard-bearer, shifted a little, making his camp bed creak. He laughed, sourly. “Who, Corvus? Because you’d have lost two days building a bridge fit for the emperor himself and the governor would have flogged you afterwards for bringing his much-needed reserves late to war.”

From the dark, an older, wise voice said, “He’s not asking about that. He’s asking about what happened a half-month back that has left his favourite prefect in a foul temper. He’s asking about Valerius and the procurator. About why we lost half a day on private business that will see us all crucified if the governor ever gets to hear of it. He’s asking why Corvus stopped the emperor’s tax collector from collecting the emperor’s taxes. Actually, if any one of us is honest, he asking why did he commit treason?”

Sabinius, the third of the party, was nearly two decades older than his tentmates. He had been with Corvus from the first days of the Fifth Gauls, and was nearing retirement. His hair was greyer than the prefect’s and his face more lined, but he carried less care. As standard-bearer to the first troop, he was the most senior officer of the wing, under Corvus. He could have slept in a tent of his own with slaves to light the fires and keep his bedding rolls dry. That he preferred the company of his own kind on campaign created a patina of respect amongst the men that drew from them the extra effort required in war.

Sabinius, too, lay on his back with his fingers laced behind his head and his face turned to the rain-sodden hide of the roof. “You’re asking the wrong question,” he said, mildly. “It’s not why did he do it; that’s obvious. What matters is why did we let him? And why did we not and are we not going to report him to the governor?”

There was quiet, and some thinking.

“Are we not?” asked Flavius, thoughtfully. “There’s still time. It might save our lives.”

Ursus said, “We’re not. He’d be given his sword and an eye’s blink to fall on it, and if he paused long enough to commend his spirit to the gods, they’d crucify him in front of the camp as a traitor and a coward.”

With surprising feeling, Flavius said, “Good.”

Ursus snorted. “Are you so tired of life? Corvus is the man who will keep us alive through this misbegotten war against sorcerers and warriors who fight with no fear of death. If he dies, who else is going to get us back east with our skins in one piece? In any case, it wasn’t the wrong question. I still want to know—why did he do it?”

“For Valerius, you fool. Why does he ever do anything?” The other two heard Flavius turn over and rock the pan of hot stones lying in the centre of the tent that drove away the damp for the first part of the night. Temporarily, the air became warmer, and smelled of steam.

From the wet dark, Flavius said harshly, “You were both in the Eceni steading. You saw him as well as I did. Valerius was there, alive, with his bloody killer of a horse and Corvus couldn’t reach him.”

“Would he have wanted to?” Ursus was newer than either of the others. His gut was not yet attuned to the thoughts and senses of his prefect as theirs were.

Flavius snorted, “Of course, you fool. Why do you think he hates so much coming west when the whole winter has been bent towards it? The light of his days begins and ends with Valerius and he thought the man was on Mona, or at least on Hibernia with the rest of the god-drenched dreamers. Now he knows he’s in the east and may die with Corvus not there to help or to hinder or even to speak to him at the end and heal the damage between them first.”

The hot pan rattled a second time, less harshly. Sabinius, older and wiser, said, “Don’t listen to Flavius. He’s bitter because he’s been fifteen years with Corvus and the man has never yet invited him into his inner tent. And he’s jealous of you in the newness and innocence of your love.”

“But is it true?”

“Of course. Everyone knows that Corvus did what he did for Valerius and he would do it again tomorrow, were the cost twice as great. Both of you can smile at your beloved prefect until your jaws cracks and your eyes leak down your face and it won’t make any difference; his heart was long since given to a wild boy of the natives who rode a horse called Death and had the courage to face down the madman Caligula.” The bunk creaked and the voice was directed more at one man than the other. “Are you happier knowing that than you were before?”

The quiet stretched longer this time.

Eventually, Ursus said, “He loved the governor’s son once. Scapula’s eldest. That was after Valerius. I heard about it.”

“That wasn’t love, that was anger and politics and an eye to the future. In any case, Scapula’s son is dead, knifed on Nero’s orders for being too beautiful and too brave and too decorated in battle. Which should be a warning to us all; you can be beautiful and brave or brave and decorated but the gods won’t help you if you are all three. So all we have to do is stay alive and stay ugly and we’re fine. The second is easy. The first will only happen if we get some rest. The dreamers and warriors across the straits on Mona will not give quarter just because you are love-sore and too tired to fight properly. Go to sleep. The world will be the same in the morning.”

A long time later, when the breathing of the others had settled to sleep, Flavius lay on his back, staring up at the sag of the tent roof and the rain. “It still isn’t too late to tell the governor,” he said, into the dark.