Tim Leach - A Winter War

‘Bastard!’

He shrugged. ‘I have no love for it. But my chieftain calls, and I obey.’

‘Why have you done this?’

‘Zanticus shall not crawl to the Romans and beg for the lives of his people.’ He looked back to the camp, and the killing. ‘This is a punishment for cowardice, for the thought of surrender your people gave us. We shall take your clan as slaves, and carry the fight to Rome.’

She looked towards the west – the shadow of the mountains, the imagined land beyond. And Gaevani answered her unspoken thought.

‘It was a fool’s plan,’ he said. ‘Something from another time, a better time.’ Another war cry, loud and close. ‘Go now, or we shall be seen together. They will be firing the rest of the wagons, soon.’

‘There will be a reckoning for this,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said simply. ‘There will not.’

There was no more time then. Away in the darkness, the ground rolling away beneath them, and behind her the fire rising high, the screams settling into silence.

Before the Emperor, the barbarian was kneeling. Shins pressed to the stone, palms towards the sky, eyes averted from the god before him.

‘I did not think that you would return,’ said the Emperor. ‘Perhaps it is true what you have said, and you do have an honour of sorts. You came alone?’

‘My companions brought me to the edge of the river, Emperor. I am alone now.’

‘And you say that your people will surrender?’

‘They shall,’ Bahadur answered.

‘They shall give themselves up to slavery, without raising their spears against us?’

‘Their lives are yours.’

Murmuring about the room then. For there were many gathered in the Emperor’s chambers, the Tribunes and the Legate, and they spoke almost with a single voice. That there was to be no trusting a barbarian’s promises. That now was the time to destroy them once and for all.

The Emperor let them speak, let the ritual praise of his wisdom wind down to silence. And he said: ‘Yes, you are quite right. This barbarian lies to me.’

The Emperor knew what the response to this would be, that there was no insult greater amongst the Sarmatians than to be called a liar or a breaker of oaths. And so it was that Bahadur forgot himself, raised his head, and looked upon a god.

A judgement at once, the blows raining down upon him from the hafts of spears and the centurions’ cudgels, the Praetorians offering their rough justice for the affront to their master. A hand thrown up from the Emperor, and the beatings ceased.

‘Word already came,’ the Emperor said, ‘from our scouts across the water. The Sarmatians gather for war, and march to the west, towards the Danubius. But I wanted to see how well he would lie to me.’ A tight little smile – the expression of a man used to being disappointed. ‘He did it well. His promises of honour were empty things, of course.’

A gurgling whisper from the floor, as the broken man tried to speak.

‘Put him with the prisoners,’ the Emperor said. ‘Call the army out.’

Soon, upon the parade ground before the fortress, the Legion gathered in line and column, marked and precise, golden eagles fixed in flight above them. They stood and waited for the words of the Emperor, like children before a patriarch, waiting for judgement and command. And they were sons of a kind to him – for many, he was a better father than those who had raised them.

On the dais, clad in fur and Imperial purple, the Emperor spoke. In simple and plain words he praised the Legion, commended those men who had earned particular honour in battle, gave thanks to the gods. Dry words, but in the space between them each man there could hear what he wanted to hear, listen to the praise most longed for.

Then, he spoke of what was come. It was then that he told them what he wanted them to do. And these words were simple, too, the command one of the oldest that generals had ever given to soldiers, chieftains to tribesmen, in the countless generations that men had fought with one another. With iron sword, and flint arrowheads. With wooden spears, a rock curled into a hand, the bare hand itself. The command to exterminate, to destroy, to leave none alive.

There was a moment’s silence, after the words he had spoken. And then they answered him – no wild cheer or animal cry, for even in fervour they kept their discipline. A single roar, a single word sounded out together.

The sound carried deep into the fort. Cutting over the pounding of the blacksmith’s hammer, past the broiling cookfires, passing deep down stairwell and wooden door, to the place where the prisoners were kept. Bound in chains of iron that would have been a fortune out upon the plains, there were fewer now than had been paraded before the Emperor. They had died the way a wild animal will when it is confined. Fed and watered, wanting for nothing, and still they will lie down to die.

A few lifted their heads – there were many who had not the strength or the will to even manage that – but most of those that did gave no sign of understanding the significance of that sound. There was only one amongst them, his body marked with bruises and thin trails of blood, who seemed to understand. For even though they were too far to hear what was chanted, though the distance had rendered it a wordless sound like the calving of ice or the roar of a rockfall on a mountain, it seemed that he knew what it meant.

And Bahadur put his head in his hands, and he wept.

Twilight on the steppe, as Kai returned to the remnants of the winter campground, the place the Five Clans had made their home and their peace for a single season. The earth marked and scored by wheel ruts and footfalls, scratched and scarred like the etchings of a giant upon the ground. Or a city of ghosts, for it was said that there were places in the world where one could see the workings of invisible cities – the grass parting beneath unseen footfalls, squares of scored earth that sprang up overnight, marking some new building of light and air that housed another ghost.

He had pushed harder than he should have that day, leaving his horse filmed with grey sweat and a rattling breathing that he did not like the sound of. But he was too afraid to spend another night alone upon the plains. There was a madness in solitude that every Sarmatian knew of – the herdsman who wandered too far in search of a lost foal, the scout separated from his companions before the cattle raid, the exiled man riding alone across the plain to beg a place from another clan. Whispers in the darkness that could break a mind.

And so he took his place amongst the traces of his people: the footprint of a child in soft ground, the mottled earth where a herd had moved together, the old firepits and the marks of the wagons. In the morning he would follow those trails, try to pick out his clan from the five that drifted back across the steppe. He would have to remember everything he knew of his people, to read the patterns in the earth that only he might know. The wagons driven a careful distance apart between two brothers who had feuded over a woman for three winters past. That cluster of young companions who always travelled together, a sworn brotherhood of seven children who had not yet had their fellowship broken by age. The way Arite always drove her wagon hard and a little apart from the rest of the clan, taking her place on the sunward edge. It would be a hard enough task for a good tracker, and he had never had that gift. Fortune had carried him so far – it would have to carry him a little further now.