Eagle in the Snow (3 page)

He looked at me, anger and despair on his face. “I should have had your command,” he said. “It was my right. I had looked forward to it all those years. And you took it from me—a man half my age.”

“Kill her,” I said. “And I will forget the rest.”

He shook his head. In his own way he was a brave man.

“I love her too much,” he said.

I nodded to Vitalius and he moved and struck awkwardly so that the point went in against the breast bone, slid off with a terrible grating noise, and then broke. Gaius screamed and went down onto his knees like a praying christian, the blade clutched in his hands. Vitalius pushed the sword home then and Gaius fell sideways to the floor.

I turned to the woman. “He sent you,” I said. “I might have known it. He knew I cared for women like you; women with dark hair and a white skin. And if I had not already been married it would have been me and not Gaius you would have worked upon. Is it not so?”

She stood up and smiled. “Yes,” she said. “He came to my people, and I took him into my house, and we planned it together. He is a warrior among warriors. He has the power. It is a great gift to make others see what you wish them to see, to make others believe what you wish them to believe. I know, I can feel his power flowing into me when I touch his hands. My people know that he is descended from the Old Ones. That is why they believe him to be a god.”

I stared at her. I did not understand.

“He is only a man,” I said.

“You are wrong. He is not like other men. Who but he could have done what he has done? He has united the three peoples and together they will destroy this Rome of yours. He will become the God-King and I, who have served him with my body, shall be his Queen.”

“What three peoples?”

“The Picts and the Scotti and the Saxons are at one in this thing. Though you know all now, it is still too late to stop him. You of the Roman kind are all doomed. The Eagles will die. He has said so.”

I hesitated. She was so very beautiful. She had spirit and courage and she had great intelligence. I hesitated again and she saw me hesitate, and laughed. “I shall wait for him,” she said. “If need be I shall wait for him until he joins me. We are of the same web, he and I.”

I remembered Julian. He had loved this woman and had hated Rome. I did not hate Rome. I was a soldier and I loved Rome—that city I had never seen. So I killed her.

Though it was against the law we buried them secretly beneath the house and told no-one. I hoped that the mystery of their disappearance would puzzle the disaffected and perhaps make them hesitate. Whether I succeeded or not, I do not know. It made no difference in the end.

Just before sunrise I issued my orders to those I could trust. Quintus, who had ridden over at my request, was in attendance.

“They won’t attack the Wall itself,” I said. “The north face is too steep, too rocky. They’ll infiltrate by the Burn Gate and the two flanking mile castles. The Arcani will let them through.”

Saturninus said, “The settlement is the danger. Its buildings provide cover up the southern slope and all the way to the fort.”

“Evacuate it at dusk and then burn it.”

He said, “We are very short of missiles. The mule train is late as usual.”

“The drivers are probably sleeping it off in a ditch,” said Quintus, drily.

“Use the stones we quarried to build that new granary. They only need breaking up a little. Quintus, I must leave it to you to warn Eburacum. Say a prayer to Epona that your horsemen get through.”

Saturninus said, “I have a married sister at Aesica. We must warn the other forts, sir.”

“Not until dark. We cannot spare the men.”

He nodded in silence. “And the pay chests, sir?”

“Oh, block up the strong room, of course. If anything goes wrong the money will still be there for our successors. They won’t want to use their own burial fund on us.”

Quintus looked at the sky. “It will be a fine day. We shall not have to shiver for long.”

Later that morning I altered the dispositions of my troops and sent the suspected ones out of camp upon patrols. In the afternoon I began to block up the south portal of the east gate; and all the while the air was thick with a great rasping buzz as the centuries sharpened their swords on the iron rim of the stone tank by the north gate. Then, as night fell, I paraded my few men and we stood to arms along the Wall. I lit the signal fires and they flared up into the night, but no answering flare came from the mile castles to our right and left. Then a glow-worm shone faintly in the west, and I knew that Vindolanda had caught our message; but from the east came no answering signal. The Arcani, faithful in their treachery, waited in silence for their friends.

“At ease,” I said softly, and the men leaned against the parapet and rubbed their hands gently against the hafts of their spears. We had done all that we could. There was nothing left to do now except wait, and the waiting was not for long.

They came at dawn, and the scarlet disc of the rising sun was an omen that foretold the deaths of those who stood against them. The savage violence of their first silent rush carried the defences at many points. Mile castle after mile castle opened its gates and they streamed through to burn huts, destroy the young and old, and make slaves of the women who did not die beneath the violence of their lust. Then they moved on to crush the few forts and towers that dared to stand against them. Their ships came in from the sea like hungry wolves, Scotti on the east coast and Saxons on the west. They outflanked the forts who resisted and their men poured ashore like a spring tide and overwhelmed them. The wounded and the dying, the living and the dead; all were flung contemptuouly from the walls. Their bodies choked every ditch and every well, and there was blood and smoke and fire through the whole land.

We held our fort for two long days of continual fighting, till we were cut off and surrounded by the very men who had once called themselves my soldiers; men whom I had liked and trusted and helped; men whose griefs I had shared and whose happiness had meant the world to me. The fort was a shambles, and somewhere beneath the floor of a gutted hut in the settlement outside lay a woman who had smiled even as I killed her.

Twice I heard his voice outside the walls, crying hoarsely to his men, though I never saw him—this man who had become a god. He cried for our destruction but I was too exhausted to feel hate, too angry to feel pity. Vitalius was gone and Saturninus wounded. The tribesmen were even now burning brushwood against the oak doors of the fort, the granaries had been set on fire and the north wall had been abandoned to the enemy and our crumpled dead. Suddenly I could stand it no longer. I had no stomach to fight for a lost cause, a general who was dead (they showed us his head upon a pole) and a wall that had been betrayed. With the remnants of my men, Saturninus and I cut our way out through the smoke and set off for Eburacum.

The road to the south told its own story. It was lined with bodies, little groups of men who had held on, as we had, and then retreated stubbornly, still fighting until they were overwhelmed. At Bravoniacum we found the supply fort gutted and the remnants of the Ala Petriana, our finest cavalry, among the blackened bodies. It was there that Quintus joined us, riding a tired horse. He was quite alone. At Maglona we made contact with the Second Ala of Astures. They had suffered few casualties and so we marched the rest of the way to Eburacum under their protection.

There we learned that a Saxon fleet had landed in the southeast; the great sea forts that Quintus knew so well had been silenced; betrayed by treachery from within, overcome by violence from without. And somewhere among the broken catapults, Nectaridus, Count of the Saxon Shore, lay silent in the company of his men. In answer to Fullofaudes’ summons the Second Augusta, at Isca, was already marching across Britannia but, harassed by raids and ambushes, their progress was slow. A grey-faced decurion who had pushed on ahead alone told us bluntly that they would never reach us in time. His worst news he kept to the last. The Attacotti, a confederacy of tribes from Hibernia, had landed at Mona, and they were even now pouring through the mountain passes into the undefended centre of the island. The Twentieth, cut to pieces, had fallen back on Viroconium, and behind them Deva, unguarded save for a handful of veterans, was already a wrecked and smoking ruin.

Fullofaudes said, “If they destroy us, then they will destroy the Second also. We stand or fall alone. Go back to your legate and tell him to hold Ratae and to keep contact with the Twentieth until he hears my news. If it is good I will send fresh instructions. If it is bad he must make his own.”

We went out against them the next day, and the enemy so out-numbered us that we could not count the odds. All day we fought and twice I saw a painted man on a white pony whom I knew, but I never had the chance to find out if indeed he had become a god. By nightfall we were beaten, Fullofaudes was dead with all his staff and the barbarians were in the streets of Eburacum. Our officers were dead too, so I took command and withdrew the Sixth down the road to Londinium, while Quintus screened us with the remnants of the cavalry. There we stayed, penned in like sheep behind the walls, and hoped that Rome would remember us.

All that autumn they ravaged the land. The Second fell back and held fast to Corinium, while the villas were sacked and the harvest rotted in the fields for lack of men to gather it. They took the grain from the barns and all the food that people had stored against the bad days. They took the cattle and the ponies as plunder and drove them north. Houses were stripped of their valuables and they killed all who protested at the theft. The roads were empty of traffic; there was no trade; and the towns, shut in upon themselves, began quietly to starve. And as always it was the women who suffered most. In the spring we had news that the barbarians were splitting up, that the war-bands were getting smaller and that many were beginning to move north again. The Picts began to quarrel with the Scotti and both, in turn, began to quarrel with the Saxons. When I heard that news I began, as out of a long darkness, to see a faint pin-prick of light that was the dawn of hope. They had made him a god but he had failed after all in his great purpose. The barbarian conspiracy was near its end.

And then, on a cold wet day when our food was nearly gone, we heard the news. The Count Theodosius had arrived. He had sailed with a fleet and an army all the way from Augusta Treverorum in Gaul. All the way down the Rhenus and across that cold sea they had rowed upon an emperor’s orders and made landfall at Rutupiae. We knew then that we were saved.

III

I
HAD THOUGHT
Aelia dead, but I wished to make certain. In the end I found her in a mean village outside Eburacum. She was very ill and they told me that she had been so for months. Her hair was streaked with grey and she looked thin and wasted. Her eyes reminded me of another’s. They were without hope. She would not speak to me; she turned her face to the wall and she cried. For three days it was like that, and then they told me what had been done to her, and I—I understood at last. When I came to her next and She turned away, I pulled her to me and I said those things that a man says to a woman whom he loves.

She wept. “I am ashamed,” she said. “I am so ashamed.” And then she added, wildly, “It is a punishment for all my sins.”

I did not feel like laughing. I said, “You are my wife, Aelia, and there is only shame if you do not live to keep me company.”

From that moment she began to get better. Later, because I was so thankful to have her back I made an offering to my God, and I sent for a vase of coloured glass from Colonia where they specialised in such things. It cost me a great deal of money, but she liked pretty things and was pleased with it when it came.

After Theodosius had settled the north and made terms with the Picts I went back to Borcovicum. Now there were great changes made. The administration was impoverished and our auxiliaries could not be paid. So Theodosius gave them land instead. Each man had his own patch and became a farmer, and lived with his family inside the camp; and the civilian settlements along the Vallum were abandoned. The Arcani were disbanded, and the long work of restoring our broken defences began. Quintus Veronius was made Praefectus of the Ala Petriana. He deserved the command (it had once been the post for the senior officer on the Wall) and it was his ambition to have a regiment of cavalry. But we both missed him for there were few enough people to talk to in our small world. Yet we had peace in the heather, and so the years went by.

One evening a lone horseman from Corstopitum rode up the track. It was Quintus Veronius. I was glad to see him but Aelia, whose face had shone like a candle when I cried his name, stopped smiling when she saw his face. He looked tired, strained and angry. “I have come from Eburacum,” he said. I am no longer in cimmand of the Ala Petriana. I dared to complain to Magnus Maximus, our beloved chief of staff, about the corruption of quartermasters and illegal profiteering in high places. So here I am, back at Vindolanda in disgrace.”

“And what else?” I asked.

He said, bleakly, “Our iron soldiers are made of iron no longer.”

When he had finished talking everyone was silent, for there was nothing to say. There had been a great battle between the Army of the East and those of the Goths who had settled on the west bank of the Danubius. It had been fought at a place called Adrianopolis, of which I had never heard, and the whole of the Roman army had been engaged—and beaten. The barbarian hordes on their ponies had cut the legions into pieces, and the most disciplined and best equipped army in the world had been destroyed by a rabble of horsemen from the Steppes. The Emperor Valens, his generals, Trajan and Sebastianus, together with thirty-five tribunes, the prefects of a dozen regiments, the Master of Horse, the High Steward, and the entire staff—all lay dead on the field of battle; and with them two-thirds of the entire army.

Forty thousand men had been killed in an afternoon.