Jack Whyte - The Saxon Shore

Ambrose was looking at me, smiling, his outstretched hand held upwards to the caressing snowflakes, which landed on his palm and disappeared. "Well, Brother, what think you? An omen?"

I attempted to catch some of the falling flakes in my right hand. "Perhaps," I said. "We will know tomorrow, if it snows all night. But I feel sorry for the outgoing troops. They'll not be too happy, slogging their way through this to the cold outposts. When do they leave?"

He threw his arm across my shoulders. "Within the hour. They'll reach the first line camps by dark and stay there overnight. In the morning, those who have to go to the outlying posts will make their way there, regardless of the weather, but the quartermasters have already issued winter gear. They won't be cold . . . or not too cold."

Because of the extraordinary numbers gathered for the parade, the Council Chamber had been allotted to the garrison officers for the remainder of that day and night, and I joined Ambrose and the others there for a celebration the like of which had never been known within the fortress. By the time I left to seek my cot, the entire courtyard was covered by a thick carpet of snow so that, on an impulse, I walked as far as the main gates and stepped out onto the bare hillside at the top of the hill road. The silence was absolute, and the falling snow seemed like a living thing. I went back in, bidding the guard a good night, and went to sleep. Ambrose, it seemed, might see his wish come true if the snow persisted for another day. It was still cold, and I threw my cloak on top of my blanket before I climbed into bed.

XXIII

It snowed for seven days without respite, with intermittent, ferocious windstorms blowing and piling the drifting snow to incredible heights, death-filled depths and fantastical shapes. The eighth day dawned upon a motionless, utterly silent, white-shrouded emptiness beneath a solid mass of heavy, uniformly grey cloud. The snow had stopped and people began to emerge into daylight again, peering around them in stupefaction at the manner in which their universe had been altered. Before noon, the snow began to fall again, in a different form this time, the flakes much smaller now, and dense, like tiny chips of ice. In mid-afternoon the temperature plummeted within an hour, and remained at its lowest for nine more days and nights, immersing us in a frigid chaos of misery the like of which no one could remember. Exposed fingers, noses, ears and chins would freeze within moments, even out of the bitter wind. This cold was such that bare skin would adhere to metal, if one were foolish enough to permit such contact, and in the first few days many of us were.

No one had ever known such brutal cold, and soon it became lethal. Entire families living beyond the fortress wall, thinking the worst was over when the first snowfall ended, chose to remain in their homes rather than run the risk of attempting to make their way to safety in the fort, and froze to death when their supplies of fuel ran out during the days and nights that followed; many others, particularly the aged and infirm, starved to death, for neither fuel nor food could be obtained while the storm was raging, and both young and old, who went out into the storm to search for one or the other, lost their way in a trackless wilderness where only days before there had been pathways and clear landmarks to guide their steps. And as the cold killed people, so too it killed our stock; cattle and goats, swine and sheep and horses. Only those animals safely lodged and warm under roofs survived in any numbers. Most of our cavalry mounts remained safe. Of the remaining beasts, penned or abandoned under the skies without food, one in every three perished, a grim reminder of my own hubris in claiming, only months earlier, that we were rich enough, in the event of a poor harvest, to survive the winter months on meat alone.

Not until the first, most frightful phase had passed and life began to regain a form of normalcy did we in Camulod itself learn of the horrors that had stricken others less fortunate and more isolated than were we. We should have known, should have anticipated chaos. That was an opinion voiced by many who, armed with hindsight, could foretell that nothing so awful would ever occur again, were the matter left to them . . .

When first it broke upon us, that cataclysmic winter was a nightmare alien to everyone's experience. The oldest living in our lands, people like my own great-aunt and the Legates Flavius and Titus, each of whom had outlived seventy winters, had never known such weather, nor could they recall anyone from their early lives ever having spoken of such cold and ferocity. How, then, could any of the Council have been prepared for such a catastrophe, or anticipated the broad swathe of death those bleak November days would usher in?

December was nine days old by the time the vicious, killing cold abated the first time, although the snow had ceased to fall some days before. In Camulod, and in the camp beneath, we had been fortunate beyond our awareness, in that the mountainous supplies of firewood assembled for the convocation day had not all been consumed as intended because of the onset of the storm. By the latter days, however, all of it had gone, and even valuable, seasoned wood from the carpenters' stores had been exhausted. Large foraging parties were sent out to gather fuel as soon as the snow stopped, and they had painful, heavy, back-breaking work to find it and bring it back. Wheeled vehicles were useless, so our carpenters removed the wheels and fashioned skids and bound them to the axles of the wagons. Even so, the snow was too deep for the horses to plough through, and so our soldiers had to clear a path ahead of each team. Not since the days of the Emperor Claudius, more than four hundred years before, had soldiers worked so hard at building roads in Britain.

As they made their way through the wilderness, the forage parties began to find the dead. When the first news of such a discovery came back to Camulod, it was greeted with appalled anguish. Within the week, however, such grisly findings were all but commonplace and we had become inured to the new way of things. Many had died: the old, the weak and the unfortunate. Many more, however, had survived frightful deprivation under frequently incredible conditions. One family of seven had fed themselves for seven days on the body of an injured wolf that had died outside their hut. The father had fallen over it, hidden beneath the snow, as he ran out into the storm, in the vain, desperate hope of finding assistance for his starving children. They had boiled it, piece by piece, with melted snow to make a stew, and only the head was left when the soldiers came to rescue them.

It was inevitable that, having found the dead, we had no way of burying them. The frozen ground beneath its waistdeep robe of snow was impervious to mattock, pick or shovel. All we could do, it appeared, was store the bodies of our dead to await the thaw, and I awoke one night in a heavy sweat from a vivid dream of things to come. I had foreseen the thaw: the melting snow and dripping icicles; the warming air and the piles of stacked up corpses; and the still-frozen earth, yielding its hardness only with painful slowness to the mild air above. I was unable to sleep again that night and sat huddled by a tiny fire in the Armoury, shuddering anew from time to time as the memory of the stink of the rotting carcasses of more than one hundred friends and neighbours came back to me.

Even now, from the distance of decades and destinies, I have difficulty in writing of that time and that awful night, for foremost in that dreadful dream had been the rotting face of my beloved Aunt Luceiia. Luceiia Britannicus Varrus died on the last night of the Great Storm, as it came to be known. She was unaffected by either cold or hunger. She died only because it was her allotted time, and she died as she had lived, with tranquillity and dignity, slipping away peacefully in her sleep to join her husband Publius Varrus who, I had no doubt, stood waiting for her with her brother Caius, each of them leaning forward, stretching out a hand to help her from this sad world to their much brighter one. I was there, sitting by her bedside at the time, accompanied by Ambrose, Lucanus, Ludmilla and Shelagh, whom the old woman had grown to love as quickly as she had my wife Cassandra, my Deirdre of the Violet Eyes. One other had been present, a man called Enos, the last in the long progression of itinerant bishops who had been ever welcome in my great-aunt's home. Enos, who had arrived some days before the storm, had perforce remained for its duration. He had been praying constantly beside her bed for three entire days, unweakened in his vigil by any need for rest, it seemed to me—although perhaps he slept when I was absent—and consecrating bread and wine each day for her consumption in total certainty of her salvation. Ever a pragmatist, Auntie had known it was her time and was prepared. She had said all her farewells the previous day, and Lucanus had warned us that we should not expect her to survive another night. We sat grouped around her, watching her closely, and so gentle was her passing that none of us saw her final breath. There came a moment when I looked at Ambrose, questioning, and Lucanus stooped to touch her, and she had already gone.