William Napier: The Judgement

Sabinus had not.

‘But it moves awfully slow, ’cos of all the water, so I banged and banged and banged him into that bloody great oak pier I don’t know how many times until finally after many a hefty bang he stopped hangin’ onto me and I let him go and he sank back very gentle like, and I presume went on down to the bottom to be a dinnertime treat for the fishes. I didn’t hang around to see, to be honest, as I was very nearly drowned myself by this time, so I made for the sunlight and got my lungful after all. Back on the bridge it was a massacre so I let myself be carried downriver and on down here, and if that counts as desertion, well…’

‘It does,’ said Tatullus.

‘The rest of the guard were all killed?’ said Sabinus.

‘All of ’em. The officer’s head, sir, Pamphilus, stuck on the bridgepost at the end as I swam off. And he wasn’t a bad sort.’

‘Then you came downriver?’

‘Yes, sir, by way of a horse.’

‘Don’t bullshit me, man.’

‘Which is to say a dead horse, sir. Dead some three days or more, I reckon, and givin’ off a perfectly horrible smell, though to be honest with you, sir, I’ve known worse in an eight-man mess tent on campaign. Or there was that tavern we used to frequent in Carnuntum, sir, with a lady upstairs, getting on in years though very accommodating in her way-’

‘Less detail, soldier, more pace.’

‘Well, so I hung on to this dead horse, its back legs all slimy and bits slidin’ off in me hands, and its belly all bloated and givin’ off gas like you wouldn’t believe, must have been dead a few days, as I say, and not just killed in the scrap, but it made a good enough float, like an army-issue bladder, and so I came floating on downriver to the fort, sir. Because I thought it was time I got myself behind some decent walls. You know those Huns.’

Sabinus brooded for a moment. Then he told his optio to get the man a cup of wine.

Tatullus started. ‘Sir…’

The legate turned on him. ‘Have a care, Centurion. I’m no spoilt young puppy from some rich senatorial family in Ravenna or Rome. And I don’t need you to question my orders.’

Tatullus’ thin lips were clenched almost to invisibility. After a moment’s pause he said again, very low and soft, ‘Sir.’

Knuckles held up a huge paw.

‘No, sir, anyway, thanking you kindly. No wine for me. Never since that incident in Carnuntum with the fishmonger’s daughter, and my unfortunate accident.’

Sabinus raised his eyebrows. ‘Frontier intelligence never reported that particular incident.’

‘I’m relieved to hear it, sir. An unedifying business altogether. But I’m sworn right off the wine now until the joyous hereafter.’

‘Very well.’ Sabinus looked away and rested his hand on the low walls of the tower. ‘You may be a better storyteller than a soldier, I don’t know. But from now on, you’re in my close guard.’

‘How much is that worth a month, then?’

‘Enough for a water-drinker.’ Then Sabinus turned his attention to the other man, keeping silent at the back, and summoned him forward.

A magnificent fellow, olive-skinned, tall and lean, his erect bearing emphasising his height. An easterner, surely. A long-sword in a damascene scabbard at his side, his fine black moustache immaculately oiled and combed around his mouth, his face smooth, his nose hawklike, his whole bearing supremely aristocratic.

‘And you are?’

‘Count Grigorius Khachadour Arapovian,’ replied the newcomer.

Behind him, Knuckles snorted.

‘Shut it, soldier,’ growled Sabinus. He regarded the newcomer again. ‘Armenian?’

‘Armenia was the land of my birth and sixty generations of my forefathers since the days of Adam. But now I have no country. She has auctioned off her soul to the highest bidder. Now I fight only for Christ, my Lord.’

‘Jesus,’ breathed Sabinus.

‘The same,’ said the Armenian gravely.

‘Right,’ said Sabinus, ‘you’re on the roll. We need every man we can get. For now you’re paired with him on supply, on the south wall. Get to it.’

Arapovian did not glance back at Knuckles, but said simply, ‘I will not keep company with that belching ox. He sickens my senses.’

‘You know each other?’ Sabinus guffawed. ‘Let me guess, you smuggled wine together? You were business partners?’

‘The sons of Arapovian have not soiled their hands with trade in sixty generations,’ said the Armenian crisply. ‘This oaf was merely giving me transport. I had known him for but half a night before we separated again. Yet long enough to wish we might never meet further.’

‘What’s the problem?’

The Armenian curled his thin lips. ‘He is an ape.’

Sabinus glanced at Knuckles. ‘You flatter him.’

Arapovian did not smile. He looked genuinely pained.

But Sabinus was grinning broadly now. ‘That’s it. You’re a pair. Now get to it.’

Slowly, with injured dignity, Arapovian turned and made his way back down the steps. Knuckles lumbered after him.

‘That was no deserter,’ Sabinus said over his shoulder to Tatullus. ‘You know what real desertion looks like. That was retreat.’

The centurion remained steely. ‘No order of retreat was given.’

‘Because there was nowhere to retreat to. Just like now.’

Knuckles and the Armenian lugged hundred-pound rocks up the narrow steps to the top of the south gate-tower. The latter stopped at the top when they set down their load and wiped the sweat from his long arched eyebrows. He gazed out towards the hills, ghostly under the rising summer moon.

‘That I, Grigorius Khachadour Arapovian, the son of Grigorius Nubar Arapovian, the son of Grigorius Ardzruni Arapovian, should be found carrying rocks like a convict. Teamed with a boor who does not even know who his father was.’

But insulting Knuckles was like insulting a stone statue. ‘True enough,’ he rumbled, wiping his face dry in his own armpit. ‘But I know that my mother was a whore. The daughter of a whore, descended from a long line of the most highly regarded Rhenish whores for sixty generations.’ He belched and grinned.

Arapovian did not smile.

Sabinus paced the twilit battlements of the fort, staring out uneasily into the thickening dusk. Just over the horizon Margus burned on, flames rising and smoke spiralling, the molten orange firelight in a murderous melding with the last glow of the setting sun. In that orange light, the severed heads of his own men, of that good centurion Pamphilus, decorating the wooden posts on the old town bridge.

Damn them.

Different reports, and he’d have despatched his two heavily-armoured cavalry alae, his fearsome cataphracts, to slice through the enemy, save the town and hang the barbarians’ corpses from its walls. But he sensed otherwise this time. It had been a nasty business, the trans-Danube expedition by that self-same cavalry, though orders were orders, and peace might have come of it. But it hadn’t. That clumsy, ill-advised needling of a once-powerful, still troublesome tribe had only brought the Huns back on the crimson path of vengeance.

It wasn’t the numbers that unsettled him, it was the planning. ‘Organised’, that hulking Rhineland brute Knuckles had reported, and Sabinus trusted his judgement. Margus had been assaulted and sacked with great stealth, with judgement and control. Now the enemy held back, not riding on, howling, towards the next town full of vainglory. They were awaiting the right moment, planning. But planning was supposed to be for Romans, not barbarians.

‘So,’ he resumed. ‘Nothing from the hill-stations? Nothing from the signal posts upriver? Nothing from intelligence?’