Tim Leach - A Winter War

He hoped against hope to see Gaevani’s wound break open like a riverbank in flood, for the lifeblood to pour swift and hot upon the snow. But it ebbed slowly, as slowly as Kai went to one knee, his wounded leg unable to take his weight any longer.

They stared at one another, heavy breath frosting the air.

‘Will you yield?’

Kai started at the voice. It seemed that they had fought for so long that they had gone to a place beyond words, regressed to creatures who had lost their language. He had forgotten that they were still men who might speak to one another.

‘Yield,’ Gaevani said, ‘and swear an oath upon my sword, to ride at my command. And you shall live.’

Kai looked to the men in the circle, though he knew he would find no assistance there. It might have been a trick of the firelight, but he thought he could see sadness on their faces, and a silent pleading. They had wanted him to win. Now they wanted him to live.

Then his eyes fell upon his sister.

She lay beside the fire, still in the way that the dead are still. But her eyes were open – little slits that shone in the firelight, closed over briefly, and opened once more. No lifeless stare, but one of the living as she watched him to see what he would do.

‘What of my sister?’ Kai said.

‘She cannot ride, and we cannot wait for her.’ A muttering then, from the men in the circle. Gaevani tossed his head and spoke louder, speaking to them. ‘We must ride south tomorrow, before the Romans close the way.’ He hesitated. ‘If the gods mean for her to live, then she shall live.’

Kai shook his head. ‘Then no. I do not yield.’

‘You will not save her by dying.’

‘I know.’ He got to his feet, one hand pressed to the flowing wound, balanced on his good leg.

Gaevani’s lips parted – there was more he wished to say. And a face which had been like stone softened a little, and Kai thought that he saw a sadness there. No killer’s pleasure, but the call of the iron had been too strong. Gaevani offered a warrior’s salute with the axe, and Kai answered it. What he would have given to know that man in a different time.

They were treading the familiar steps now, enacting the weary ritual that had come to pass countless times before. The end of a duel that can have only one outcome. Gaevani circling around him, Kai turning with little hops of his good leg, the blood trailing on the ground. Kai swinging freely, off balance, the other man shifting away and waiting for an opening.

Kai’s sight was trimmed with black at the edges, the snowplain swimming before him as though it were a rolling sea. He could see nothing of the circle of men, the fire beyond. It was Gaevani and him. The last two men left in the world, or so it seemed.

It was time then for the last chance, the reckless thrust that every man gives at the final moment. Gaevani knew it would come, and was ready. He batted it aside, hooked and looped the axehead about the blade and sent it spinning from Kai’s grasp.

But from somewhere close, the rattle and scrape of armour, and Gaevani did not move forward for the killing blow. He froze still where he was, looking beyond. And when Kai risked a glance himself, he saw his sister standing at the edge of the circle.

She was leaning against the horse that stood beside her, for it seemed that she did not have the strength to stand alone. Her wounded arm hanging useless at her side, the other now clutching the horn of the saddle. Wordless, her bloody jaw slack, she stared at them both with grey, murderous eyes.

A moment where all was still. Kai drew out a dagger, though he barely had the strength to lift it. Gaevani was backing away across the snow and watching both of them. A murmur from the circle, uncertain what to do. For this was beyond the warrior’s code.

Laimei took her hand from the saddle and levelled a finger at Gaevani. A wordless curse, it seemed. The mark the dead may give to the living, a last defiance.

Then her horse began to move.

It did not canter or trot. It walked forward as Laimei sank back to the snow behind it. Calm, almost careless, except for the one eye that it fixed upon Gaevani.

That man backed away, looked set to run. But even at a walk the horse had closed the distance and now loomed above him, the murderous beast that seemed to kill for pleasure, that had left a trail of the dead behind it on every battlefield it walked upon.

He called at it to stop, a crack in his voice, but the horse only had ears for one master. Gaevani drew the axe back, but the horse was too fast for him. It danced up onto its hind legs, sent a flickering touch forward, too fast to be seen in the light of the fire. A snap like dry wood breaking, and the axe was in the snow. Another hoof drove into his belly, folding him over. A third blow struck his head and sent him to the ground, blood washing across the snow.

The horse dropped back down, half raised a foreleg again as it watched to see if the man would rise once more. Then, seeming satisfied, it dropped the hoof to the ground, turned a half circle and walked away, returning to Laimei’s side.

She remained on her knees, reaching up to stroke the horse’s face as it came to her. She watched Kai – they were all looking at him now, it seemed, the men and women of the circle. None spoke.

The blood still pulsed against Kai’s hand, but his sight was clear. He limped forward, but in a moment an arm was circling about his waist – the fair-haired woman, Tamura, helping to take his weight. Others were at his side, offering him a captain’s escort. They had come back to life, brothers to him once more now that the duel was over.

Almost over. For when they came to where Gaevani lay upon the ground, he yet lived. Part of his scalp torn and hanging over his face like a cap, his eyes like beads of glass as he looked up at them, waiting for death.

Kai extended his sword towards him, the jagged tip steady.

‘Swear on it,’ said Kai. ‘Follow me to the east, to Iolas. And you shall live.’

A guttural sound behind him from Laimei. He ignored her, and did not take his gaze from the man at his feet.

Gaevani did not hesitate. His fingers trembling like an old man’s, he laid them to the blade and spoke the words that would save his life.

Deep within the fortress at Aquincum, the fires burned brightly in a stone chamber, hot air shimmering above the braziers. Yet the man inside still hunched and shivered with the cold as he sat behind the carved wooden table. A glimpse of a cloak, dyed in Imperial purple, was visible for a moment, before he pulled the furs tighter over it and returned to his work.

Silver marked his hair and beard, and his left hand rubbed at his side, an aching illness or an old wound that he worried and nursed incessantly. The right hand shifted between a map, unfurled and marked with tokens of wood and brass, and a sheaf of papers. A great curving line cut across the centre of the map – the Danubius, the great river that marked the edge of the Empire. On one side of that river, precise markers denoting Legions and Auxilia, the comforting linear paths of the roads that led to the west, the forts and towns that guarded the border. Aquincum itself, tucked up against a turning of the Danubius – the last outpost at the end of the world. Beyond the river, great swathes of uncharted land, a scattering of known settlements. The names of barbarian tribes – the Quadi, the Marcomanni, the Sarmatians. Tokens that marked armies across the water, their numbers more a matter for folklore than fact.

From time to time, a finger extended to push and pull those tokens before returning them to their original positions, to trace the lines of rivers and roads, tap at the bridges and fords. Then the hand would move, curl about a metal pen, dip it into an inkwell, and slowly scratch at the papyrus, each stroke of the pen an act of stillness as much as of movement, pausing halfway through the scribing of each letter to be certain it was as he intended.