Camulod Chronicles Book 8 - Clothar the Frank (38 page)

Notwithstanding all our caution, however, we were twice involved in skirmishes with small groups whom we met in places where we had no reason for being present, other than trying to slip past the carefully guarded strong points that had been built on high elevations overlooking those places where enemies like us might be expected to try to pass by undetected. We were fortunate enough on both occasions to see these people before they saw us. There were three foot soldiers in the first group and two horsemen in the second, and I take no shame in saying that it was Ursus who dispatched four of them, including both horsemen, each of them driven off his horse's back by a single deadly hard shot. I captured the fifth and last of the men by running him down, smashing my horse directly into him and bowling him over, then leaping on him and disarming him before he could regain his breath, after which I held him at the point of my sword until Ursus could tie his arms securely behind his back.

It was in questioning this captive—Ursus, it turned out, could speak a version of his language—that we discovered the enemy were in fact Burgundians from the southwest. A federation of their tribes, our prisoner told us, six in all and numbering close to ten thousand warriors, had left the lands they had settled almost a hundred years earlier and struck east in search of more living space. So far, he said, they had been on the march and victorious on all fronts for half a month. They had encountered no serious opposition and had annexed everything between their home territories and the spot where we had captured him, and it was plain to see from his attitude that even although he, personally, had erred and fallen into our hands, he did not expect to be our prisoner for long. He told us that we would be discovered and killed within the very near future.

Simply by falling into our hands, our prisoner had presented us with a problem, because we could not take him with us when we moved on, and we could not simply set him free. We knew we ought to kill him, but because of the teachings I had absorbed in the Bishop's School, I was incapable of doing that and equally incapable of permitting Ursus to. "Thou shalt not kill" is an unequivocal Commandment. Not that I would have hesitated to kill the man in the heat of battle—or so I told myself, blithely disregarding the fact that I had never yet come close to contemplating killing any man. I knew well that killing in self-defense is permissible at any time, and that in time of war, when the cause is just, killing as the result of armed aggression is justifiable. Killing in cold blood, however, was murder, unacceptable under any conditions, and so we were trapped, becoming, in effect, prisoners to our prisoner.

Fortunately, he absolved us of our quandary by freeing himself in the middle of the night and then foolishly awakening us with the noise he made in escaping. Ursus felled him with a single arrow from a distance of thirty paces, which, at night and against a running target, was a bowshot verging on the miraculous. We scrambled out to where the fellow lay and dragged him back into the cave where we were sheltering. We left him there in the morning, after we had scouted the area and identified a reasonable opportunity to move out of hiding and escape unobserved.

The decision to abandon the northward search for the Duke was made by Ursus, but I made no objection when he suggested it. As we had moved north during the previous two days, the concentration of Burgundians around us had increased dramatically, and it was obvious that to continue moving as we were, haphazardly and without real objectives, was folly. It was already amazing that we had avoided detection for as long as we had. The single alternative open to us, Ursus decided, was to turn back and head southward, to wait for Lorco and his turmae at some spot where the lie of the land itself would dictate that they must pass close by us. That decision made, and its common sense plain and clear to both of us, we turned back with great feelings of relief and headed south to await Duke Lorco and his troops.

For the next two days we traveled steadily, following or paralleling the easiest and most obvious route to the south and finding ourselves being shepherded gradually but unmistakably in the south-easterly direction dictated by the river as it penetrated a wide, forested valley between two ranges of hills. The route we followed was one that had never seen the construction of a Roman road, yet it was wide and obviously well traveled, and by the time we had gone a score of miles along it, it had become obvious that the Burgundian invaders had no interest in it, because we saw little sign of them. The few isolated groups that we did see were making their way hurriedly and single-mindedly to the north, paying no attention to whatever might be going on around them.

By noon the following day, having spent the entire morning watching for Burgundians and seeing none, we finally accepted that we had left them and their invasion route safely behind us. We made a comfortable camp that night, close by the road but sufficiently far away from it among the trees to be confident that we could safely light a fire without risk of its being seen by any late-night travelers, and then we lay awake for several hours in the firelight, talking about our missing companions, wondering where they might be and when we would encounter them again.

We never did. Nor, to the best of our knowledge, did anyone else. I learned later, after my eventual return to Auxerre, that there had been a deal of speculation in their home region during the months that followed their disappearance, but Phillipus Lorco himself had quickly been replaced by a new governor who was faced with his own priorities, and the disappearance of Lorco and his three turmae had quickly faded into acceptance, its urgency diffused by the other events surrounding the Burgundian invasion that summer.

The most widely accepted version of what might have happened was that Lorco and his party had ridden blindly into a trap and been wiped out, but there were those who refused to accept such a notion. Those doubters, claiming personal experience, friendship and longstanding knowledge of Governor Lorco, swore that he would never commit such an elementary error as to ride through unknown and potentially hostile territory without deploying scouts on all sides of his force. Bishop Germanus, having spent years as Lorco's legatus in the field, was a voluble proponent of that belief, but when I heard it, I found myself wondering immediately if there might be some truth to the less acceptable version.

Thinking back to the dilatory conduct and the unconscionable laziness of Lorco's lieutenant, Harga, and that man's failure to take even the simplest of precautions, thus leading us into an entrapment from which Ursus and I should never have escaped, I was forced to wonder about the degree to which Harga's laziness might have been inspired or encouraged by his own superiors' behaviour. I felt disloyal to Duke Lorco for thinking such things, but I could not avoid them. I kept them to myself, however, and never expressed my own personal doubts or misgivings to anyone. Lorco was dead and his son had been my closest friend, killed in front of my eyes. I determined that no hint of criticism that might affect the honour of their name would ever pass my lips.

On the afternoon of our third day's journey south we came to a spot where the valley narrowed to the width of a narrow gorge through which the river poured, changing from a broad, placid, meandering stream to a raging torrent within the space of half a mile. Here, Ursus said, was the spot where we would wait for Duke Lorco. He remembered passing through the narrow passage on their way north, and told me that Lorco himself had said that if anything untoward occurred later in their journey and anyone found himself cut off, they should head for this place and wait for the remainder of the group to come back. We searched the narrow riverbank for evidence of the cavalry's passage but we found none and so were able to settle in to wait, confident in the knowledge that the main group was still behind us.

We set up camp, dangerously and precariously, on the steep side of the cliff that formed the left side of the gorge, and we took time to ensure that it was the best site we could find, secure from casual detection from beneath yet affording us an unimpeded view of everything that happened in the gorge itself, on both sides of the river. And there we remained for days, watching and waiting. Several groups of travelers passed by us, going in both directions, some of them strongly armed and alert for interference, others less so. None of them suspected our presence and none of them bore any resemblance to our missing Duke or to any of his people.

After four days our concern had grown too great to ignore. We could not go back, and we could no longer afford to remain where we were. Ursus had shot a deer on the second morning of our stay and we had been eating that ever since, but we had no other provisions. I had found some wild onions and garlic growing along the riverbank, and Ursus had found some succulent mushrooms, so we had been able to augment the taste of the deer meat, if only slightly. But we had no salt and no flour, nor had we anything in the way of dried fruit, roasted grain or nuts. It had become clear to us by then that one of two things, each equally unlikely and unwelcome, had occurred: either Lorco and his party had encountered a strong Burgundian force and been captured or defeated, or they had decided, for reasons unknown to us, to make their way home by an alternative route. Whichever was true, it was clearly futile for us to remain where we were. So once again we headed south.

Ursus had only nine arrows left by that time, and now, accepting that we would not be rejoining Lorco's cavalry and were in fact to be solely reliant on our own resources, those nine missiles took on a greater significance than they had ever held before. They were our sole means of dealing death at anything greater than arm's length, and in consequence we were loath to take aim with them at anything that offered us even the slightest threat of losing another.

Fortunately, Ursus was an excellent fisherman and he also knew how to construct a snare for catching hares and even ground birds like grouse and partridge. He would rummage carefully among a patch of underbrush until he detected the narrow pathways—sometimes more akin to tunnels—along which the small animals and birds made their way, and then he would fashion a noose from an old bow string and anchor it with a solidly driven tent peg before carefully suspending it close to the ground and disguising its outline with cunningly blended grasses. We would then withdraw and leave the noose to do its work, and it seldom failed. We took partridge and grouse and, twice, badgers, neither of which submitted to the noose, far less succumbed to it. Each of them completely destroyed the trap into which it had blundered, and made off with the invaluable bow string, presumably still wrapped about its neck.

We traveled south-eastward from the river gorge for six days without incident, avoiding all human contact, proceeding with the utmost caution and moving stealthily at all times, checking lines of sight and being careful never to move into any position from which we might become visible to anyone else.

Within those short days, however, I learned much about woodcraft and the lore of tracking from my companion, who turned out to be far more pleasant company than I had been given to expect. He showed me, expending great patience and tolerance, how to watch for, and detect, the tiny, telltale signs that marked the passage taken by an animal on its way through the undergrowth, emphasizing that once I knew how to see the signs of passing animals I could not fail to see the damage done by humans in their passage. These were signs that I would never have seen had he not been there to point them out, and I knew well that he had spent the better part of his lifetime absorbing the lessons that enabled him to see them—a bent-back twig; a wrongly turned leaf that caught the light when none of its fellows did; a clump of hair caught on the thorns of a wild rose bush; a curled-up leaf that had filled with seepage after being crushed in the center and formed into a cup by a deer's cloven hoof.

We were in a place that had been burned out in a massive fire, probably seven to ten years earlier, Ursus estimated. We had been afoot for some time after breaking camp before dawn and had made good headway until we reached this stretch of forest and were forced to dismount. The brush had quite suddenly become impenetrable, I remember—saplings and bushes that were simply too thickly packed to accord access to a mounted man—and neither of us had spoken for some time, our attention focused intently, for more than a mile, it seemed, upon finding the easiest possible route through a wilderness of springy, immature growth that had not yet begun to assert any order upon itself. We had just fought our way through what we hoped had been the very thickest growth and encountered the first signs that the brush was thinning—everything seemed much lighter and brighter ahead of us—and when I heard water running on my right, I felt a sharp stirring in my bowels that I knew I could not ignore. I muttered to Ursus and handed him my reins, telling him I would catch up to him, and he merely nodded and kept going, paying me no further attention as I made my way towards the sound of the running water to relieve myself in private.

When I had finished and cleansed myself, I made my way back to rejoin Ursus in no particular haste, following the signs of his passage easily beyond the spot where we had parted company. The growth around me was thinning with almost every step I took, and the oppressive feeling I had experienced earlier amid the thickets gave way to one of light-heartedness. There were birds singing everywhere, exulting in the perfection of a magnificent summer morning, and I responded to the music, forgetting for the first time in days to wonder what had happened to Duke Lorco and his party. I stepped around the bole of a respectably sized tree at one point and realized that not only was this the first mature, unburned tree I had seen in a long time but also that I was almost in open ground, standing upon a path of some kind, a game trail that ran straight ahead of me, unrestricted by undergrowth, so that had I so wished I could have spread my arms wide and spun around without hitting a single obstruction.