Адриан Голдсуорти - The Encircling Sea

The victor stood, face expressionless, and he lifted the severed head in his left hand, holding his sword up in his right. He glanced down at the rest of the body and spat. A shout of joy came from the top of the tower, and Ferox guessed that it was the Red Cat.

‘Come on, man!’ he shouted.

Segovax turned his back on the enemy and walked slowly along the causeway. One of the pirates was pushing himself up, moaning, and the northerner almost absent-mindedly jabbed down into his neck. Blood jetted across his leg. An arrow whisked through the air, missing him by feet, and he turned and spat his contempt at the enemy.

The second arrow hit him on the calf of his good leg, spitting it so that the iron head and an inch or two of shaft came out the other side. He staggered, and another arrow struck his left hand, making him drop the head. Ferox ran out, shield ready, and Vindex came with him. Segovax shook him off when he offered to help, so the two men used their shields to cover him as he made his way back. Arrows banged into their shields, but the bowmen no longer seemed quite so accurate and they all made it back without injury. Ferox turned and looked at the wreckage on the causeway, the dead and dying pirates, the big stones and the broken shields and dropped weapons.

‘We’re still alive, then,’ Vindex said.

‘Who threw the oil?’

‘The queen,’ Longinus said. ‘She climbed up on top of the tunnel. ‘The lady heated it up for her, and one of my lads lifted it up. There wasn’t much. Helped, though, didn’t it.’ The one-eyed warrior grinned. ‘Just as well most women don’t fight. Reckon they’d be too good at it for the rest of us. She’s gone inside,’ he added, ‘so you’ll have to thank her later. She was complaining that it was the only oil we had.’

Neither of Segovax’s wounds were too serious, but he would struggle to walk quickly or do much with his left hand. ‘Was he the one who took your family?’ Ferox asked the Red Cat when the thief came down to see his brother.

‘One of them. We will find the others as well.’ Segovax said nothing, but the fierce determination in his eyes spoke as loudly as his brother’s words. The Red Cat had cuts on his fingers, while his hands and face were heavy with a grey-brown dust.

‘They want you on the top,’ the thief added. ‘The boy thinks he has seen something. I have not, but he swears that he has.’

‘Thank you for your help,’ Ferox said, and once he was sure that everything was in place in case the enemy attacked again, he made his way up to the roof. Probus was there, along with Bran and an ebullient Ovidius. All three were covered in dust. Ferox pulled himself up onto the thatch. A large section of the surrounding wall was gone, and he realised that they had pulled it apart to use as missiles. He looked over the edge. It was a good ten feet or so to the mouth of the entrance below, and some of the shaped stones had gone further than that.

‘I did worry that we might touch a capstone or something like that,’ the old poet said. His eyes were bright, and he was struggling to stop from grinning. ‘Thought we might pull out a single piece and have the whole tower fall down around our ears.’

‘That would have been unfortunate, my lord,’ Ferox agreed.

‘I rather fear I was not strong enough to do more than give orders, which the others were courteous enough to follow. I threw one and it struck the roof.’

‘It nearly hit me.’

‘Sorry. I almost hit that fiery Hibernian queen as well, as she hauled herself up onto the roof.’ Ovidius pointed down to one of the half-ruined houses alongside the winding entrance tunnel. ‘Oh dear, that’s a long way up,’ he said, looking nauseous. ‘I really do not care for heights. When something is happening it is fine, but now…’ He trailed off.

‘It is like that. Sometimes you are too busy to be afraid.’

‘That must be so.’ Ovidius was puzzled and intrigued, and Ferox sensed an approaching discussion. He turned to Probus.

‘You did the throwing? That’s a hell of a long way.’

‘I was a slave once, and a soldier,’ the merchant said. ‘These days I’m rich, but a man should still do some of his own work. The other lad is smaller than me and lobbed them just as far.’ He meant the Red Cat. ‘The boy reckons he’s seen something.’

‘I kept a lookout while they were fighting.’ Bran’s face showed resentment at not being able to hurl big rocks as far as an adult. ‘And I saw them. Three sails, maybe four.’

Ferox went to the other side of the tower and looked out to sea. The weather was closing in again, clouds sweeping over the waves so that he could not see much more than half a mile out across the water.

‘Anyone else see anything?’ There was silence. ‘What about the Red Cat?’

‘He was busy,’ Bran insisted. ‘And by the time the fight was over, it was harder to see. He reckoned he saw something, but was not sure and he said that he would go and get you.’

Ferox peered out, shading his eyes as if somehow that would let him penetrate the grey veil. ‘What makes you sure?’

‘The shape. Only your army ships have sails like that.’

‘Good lad.’ He leaned on one arm as he made his way around the conical thatched roof. There was not much high ground on the island, apart from to the north east and that was furthest away from the ships – if that was what the boy had really seen. An idea was forming in his mind, a wild, foolish idea, and he was not sure whether he should say something to Ovidius. For all his vagueness, the old man was a noble and had the ear of the legate.

An arrow struck the wall in front of him and bounced off the stone.

‘Keep down, everyone. No sense in getting killed now that help is on the way.’

‘You really reckon they’re coming?’ Probus asked the question that he sensed Ovidius was also itching to raise.

‘They’re coming,’ he said, and saw Bran swell up with pride. ‘What we have to do now is work out how we can help them.’

‘IT’S USUALLY better to attack if you can.’ Longinus spoke the words cautiously, as if weighing up each one. ‘Defence is all very well, but if the bastards won’t go away then you’ll lose in the end. I did.’

Ferox had taken Vindex and the veteran to the room with the cow and its calf, and once he had got there said that he needed the advice of Julius Civilis. His mind was made up, but he wanted to see if the men he trusted the most could make him change it or would prove that he was right.

‘There are ten of us left who can fight,’ Vindex said. ‘Eleven if you count Segovax.’ The northerner was insisting that he was not slowed down by his wounds enough to matter. ‘He probably can fight on if we stay here, and he doesn’t need to move about much.’

‘There are three wounded who cannot go anywhere,’ Longinus, or Civilis, equestrian, prefect of a cohort and leader of the Batavian rebels, pointed out. ‘And you cannot expect the old man to survive long out in the open. Or the lady, spirited and tough though she is. And that boy of yours is raw.

‘Much depends on whether the child really did see warships on their way. If he did and the weather holds, then they may be here tomorrow, or even tonight. They will not know where we are or even whether we are still alive.’

‘We could signal,’ Vindex suggested. ‘If we lit the thatch the fire ought to go up and the stone cannot burn. We may have to come down from the upper floor, but we should be safe enough.’

‘It’s raining hard,’ Ferox said, ‘even if it was safe.’

Longinus nuzzled the cow, which started to lick his fingers. ‘Assuming that help is on its way, what will Cniva do?’