B007IIXYQY EBOK (86 page)

His horse’s ears pricked forward.

And he found himself listening to new sounds—fast, furtive rustlings that seemed to draw steadily closer, issuing from the deep pine forest north of the fort.

Multitudes of light, fleet predatory creatures advanced upon the site.

He was jerked from peace into nightmare. The forest was alive with the enemy.

The Chattians had attacked.

He uttered a curse, knowing he was trapped. Then he leapt from his mount, unbridled the beast and struck its haunches, sending it off at a gallop, knowing the horse’s Roman trappings would give his presence away. Then he sprinted to the sentry platform and hastily pulled himself onto the walk, his dagger in his teeth. He lay flat atop it, shielded from view by the palisade on one side and by the sagging grain bin on the other. Through gaps in the hewn wood of the palisade he had a good view of the camp site below and of the pine forest to the east.

The air was ravaged by trilling battle cries. They began at a low pitch, then rose up to elemental strength, fierce as any gale.

From the nearness of the cries he judged the hordes were crowning the ridge, surging through the trees on a broad front. The broken hill fort lay directly in their path.

Far below in the Roman encampment, he heard the sentries on the tower crying the alarm. Instantly the whole of the camp was in ferment. The haycock was lit. The trumpeters blew a series of short, sharp blasts on their coiled instruments to call the men to arms.

It seemed to Julianus that time compacted into one interminable, swaying moment. He was caught in the path of an erupting volcano. The forest about was as disturbed as turbid water. Through the cleft in the wood, he glimpsed warriors by the hundreds flashing with gazelles’ grace through the trees, then spilling down the slope, their garishly painted shields held aloft. Many streamed through the fort, but most flowed around it as a river round an obstruction. All were great in stature, powerfully muscled, with long hair whipping on the wind like war pennants. Their greatest weapon, he knew, was not the crude spears they bore but their avenging rage. Gamely he fought against falling into terror and madness, forcing himself to observe dispassionately all that passed below.

He heard the hoarse shouts of the centurions, sharp with alarm, as they gave orders to the flagbearers to signal battle positions. At first it it seemed the orderly work of an anthill was disrupted by the strike of a foot. Then rank and file rapidly came together, and the Roman forces formed one dark, compacted mass with javelins poised. Parties of men wheeled the small ballistae around on their wagons. Already torch signals were being passed rapidly from one signal tower to the next, summoning auxiliary cavalry from the Eleventh Claudia’s encampment five miles to the west.

He saw then a thing that surely was a trick of the mind. A half-dozen men of the legion’s first rank toppled to the ground. Some heavy missile had torn into the Roman line.

He raised himself up to better see. What madness was this? The Chattian charge swiftly bore down on legionaries, but none of the warriors had yet hurled a spear.

A second missile ripped into the Roman ranks, knocking five more soldiers to their knees. Now the legionaries were disoriented, breaking formation and getting in one another’s way. The mysterious missiles effectively stopped the first flight of Roman javelins.

Then he knew the missiles were catapult bolts fired from the open forest to the north. And so that old tale, close to legend, of a catapult in the hands of the barbarians, proved true after all. He attempted to note its position, its range, still struggling to keep his hold on the rational world. He found himself feeling an errant pride in the Chattians; they had chosen well the place and time to use their long-hoarded weapon.

The barbarian wedge-formation struck the Roman line, and the two forces collided into chaos. Chattian standards bobbed over a confusion of heads, some helmeted, some bare, then pushed past the Romans battle flags as the masses of men intermingled. With great swiftness the tribesmen broke up the Roman forces, forcing a battle on their own terms, giving the legionaries no choice but to fight as the barbarians fought—as individuals, warrior against warrior.

He then witnessed a second unaccountable sight: At the southern extremity of the fighting, where all were packed closely in a dark knot, a group of legionaries dropped their shields and fled, disgracing themselves before their centurions’ eyes. It appeared they fled in the face of something monstrous. But smoke blotted much of the scene, for there were small fires scattered about where the Chattians had set alight the mule-drawn wagons. He peered down into shrouded mystery, wondering what horror could have inspired dozens of men to subject themselves to the army’s brutal punishments for cowardice.

All through the fray the Roman horns brayed, competing with war cries, shrieks of agony, the fierce bell tones of iron striking iron. He judged this smoking cataclysm raged for less than the time of two water clocks, or under an hour, when there came distantly the cry of answering trumpets, and shortly after, the low thunder of hooves from two directions.

Mounted reinforcements closed in at great speed.

Then came the animal plaint of native cattle horns, summoning the Chattian retreat. The tribesmen knew only too well the dangers of tarrying until reinforcements came. Their one advantage lay in surprise and speed of attack; they must now retreat to the wild country, where they knew the perilous trails and the enemy did not. Gradually the Chattians disengaged, then withdrew like a quick-receding tide, leaving the injured and dead heaped on the ground. The warriors stampeded in a wild herd up the slope from which they had come. The few who were mounted set their horses on the same path Julianus had taken, which passed directly through the ruined fort.

Now Julianus saw the grim result of the attack—nearly a thousand Roman casualties lay in the rutted road, and half as many Chattians. Remarkably, the barbarians had given worse than they got. He wondered if anyone would dare accurately report this to Domitian. Erect spears, their heads buried in the earth, were thick as grass blades on the ground. Even from this distance he could hear the piteous cries of the dying.

Now the Auxiliary Cavalry filled the assault road with a storming of hooves, closely followed by a detachment of one hundred Arabian bowmen.

The first of the Chattian warriors burst into the fort, their shouts full of victory; many brandished Roman short swords and legionary helmets. Julianus was tensed and ready, knowing if they saw him they would gleefully slaughter him where he lay.

It was then that he saw, at the rear of the Chattian retreat, the warrior on the gray horse. By what sense he knew it was a woman he could not say; she was still well off from him, seeming almost reluctant to leave the field of battle. She caught his notice because unlike the others she did not simply flee; she seemed to shepherd the warriors like a flock, going back for stragglers and urging them on, shielding them with her horse, staying behind the fleeing horde as though she counted herself responsible for their safety.

It began to unnerve him. Why did she so tempt the Fates? The Arabian bowmen were closing in rapidly, and from her anxious looks in their direction, he realized she knew it.

Then before his disbelieving eyes she dropped from her horse and disappeared into a mass of the stragglers. Moments later she reappeared, struggling with a badly injured man. With a great effort she somehow maneuvered him onto her horse’s back.

The Arabian bowmen now galloped alongside the cleared place around the camp, skirting the trenches, raising an accumulating mountain of dust, bearing down on all those last to retreat. The battle-maid climbed up behind her wounded companion, so she could steady him as she rode. Then she urged the horse to a gallop, but her mount moved slowly under the extra burden and she lagged behind her fellows.

“Nemesis,”
he uttered softly. She would be the first straggler caught and killed.

He was amazed at how swiftly he was pulled in to the drama of her life. There was something so guileless, so elemental in that devotion.

The tales of Rome’s foundation yield up stories of such deeds, he reflected, but who ever witnessed them in these times?

And in the next instant he realized who she must be—the woman Domitian called Aurinia,
whose name his father rendered Auriane—she
lived still and was before him now. That great spirit who long ago lent him strength was as resolute as his father’s records represented her. But this was also the blood-drinking harpie, the sorceress who sowed madness on the battlefield. Surely she was the cause of that hasty desertion he had witnessed earlier. And yet as she came closer he saw nothing fearful in her aspect, nothing—and then he felt a start of excitement. Nothing fearful, yet there
was
something remarkable there. What was it?

As her horse toiled up the slope at a labored canter, Julianus realized with horror that Domitian would have his prize. He knew by the bowmen’s excited shouts that they recognized her. Their mounts galloped low to the ground as the Arabian auxiliaries raced each other in their eagerness to catch her.

I cannot let so gallant a creature fall into his hands.

She ascended by the same path he had taken, for it was the only way clear enough for her horse. Switchbacks in the trail obscured her for a moment. Then suddenly she was so close that he could hear her crying words of encouragement to her mount. The horse seemed to respond, lengthening his heavy canter. The wounded man swayed precariously; his leather tunic was soaked with blood. The bowmen took the same narrow path two at a time, their strong, wiry horses gaining on her steadily. At their present speed he judged they would catch her perhaps two hundred feet past the gate of the fort.

He leapt to his feet, giving little thought to the risk of being seen by the trailing warriors still streaming through the ruined fort. Hastily he gathered up handfuls of the slingstones that littered the sentry platform and began tossing them into the broken grain bin, consumed with a need to preserve her life, forcing aside his fear he would be caught and executed for abetting the enemy.

Her weary mount lumbered through the fort’s narrow gate. He stood braced, ready to throw all his weight against the sagging grain bin, feeling like a beast-fighter awaiting just the right moment to thrust at a lion. Fall out of step with the fatal dance, and die.

When she was not more than a horse’s length from him, he saw her face.

For an instant he forgot entirely what he was about; a collection of slingstones fell from his slack hands as he was startled into haunted quiet. That face tore away all memory, leaving only the question, who are you?

But I
know.
I expected you, even counted on your coming. And what are these mad words?

It was difficult for him to understand later the witchery worked by that face, seen in so brief a moment. It was more than its maidenly bloom, its
wise warmth, its look of one who scoured for meaning behind meaning. Here was the old-young
genius loci
of the wood, the fierce-gentle face of nature herself. Long after he would ponder what it was that so snared him and pulled him so immediately close. It might have been that look of hope vaulting out of charnel hopelessness. It was his own.

She looked steadily toward the wild country that was her destination, and he saw much in that spirited innocence—her refusal to acknowledge the nearness of destruction, how she seemed to expect no help. She galloped past him and still he stood immobilized, aware distantly she uncovered a gaping need in him he scarcely knew existed.

How can the countenance of a doomed woman so intoxicate me with hope?
Her noisy pursuers filled the path, whipping their horses, jostling each other and cursing. He roused himself to action, pushing hard on the grain bin.

The half-burnt structure was immovable as a standing stone. Swift panic came.

It must move.
Sylvanus, Pan, great Rhea and Diana, I call on all nature’s deities—give me strength
!

He threw his weight against it, trying to shock it into motion. The wood creaked. Something snapped within. Rotted oak timbers were giving way. Gradually it acquiesced to his will, moving sulkily at first, then in a rush, crashing into the opening of the gate, choking it with splintered wood and a small mountain of grain. Slingstones shot out into the path of the pursuing horses.

The Arabian bowmen’s mounts collected swiftly behind the barrier. He heard the scuffling of hooves as the horses stumbled on slingstones. The flurry of foreign curses was like the screaming of jays. He moved to a gap in the palisade and saw a confusion of brightly robed, long-bearded riders angrily gesturing, their sun-baked faces stiff with rage.

One raised his bow and took aim at Auriane. Simultaneously, without thought, Julianus shot up behind the palisade, grasped his dagger by the blade and prepared to throw, aiming for the bowman’s throat.

But their white-bearded commander rode up to Auriane’s would-be slayer and angrily pulled down his arm.

Julianus supposed then that Domitian had given orders the woman was to be taken alive.

Startled, he realized he had been prepared to slay that bowman and reveal himself, had it been necessary to save Auriane’s life. He knew then how profoundly she had bound him to her.