Jack Whyte: The Singing Sword

The tribune took his time in answering, but when he did speak, he pitched his voice so that the men standing silently at attention could all hear him.

"Am I in debt to anyone for bounty on those wolves?"

Several of the men shook their heads along with their centurion. The wolves had all escaped. The tribune looked all around the clearing, tacitly inviting his men to do the same.

"I have no idea, at this stage, what happened here," he said next, "although any man with a brain could probably make an accurate assessment simply by looking around him. The man with no clothes obviously escaped from bondage beneath the big tree, there. You can see the scabs on his wrists, and the ropes and tackle they bound him with, and the trampled area where he was confined. You can also see from the piles of human dung that, whoever these other people were, they showed him no humanity. It seems evident that he loosed himself — broke free, somehow — snatched a sword and managed to kill two of his captors before being killed himself. Whoever these abductors of his were, they allowed themselves to grow fatally careless."

"Your pardon, Tribune!" The centurion, whose gaze had drifted to the naked corpse, was frowning and now moved quickly to kneel by the body. Narrow-eyed, he slipped his fingers underneath the chin, pressing gently with finger and thumb beneath the points of the jaw where, against all reasonable expectation, he discovered a very faint but quite regular pulse. The man was alive. The wide-eyed centurion informed the tribune, who frowned as he heard the words.

"Alive? He can't be! Are you sure?" He swung towards his troops and pointed at two of them. "You two, use your spears and tents to make a litter, quickly!"

As the soldiers scrambled to their work, he turned back to the centurion.

"I shall answer your impertinent question this time, simply to discourage any others. It is not for such as you to be curious about diplomatic matters, Centurion, but I suppose, under the circumstances, it is understandable enough. The answer is no. We were called out to search for the Procurator of South Britain, but these abductors were apparently as stupid as they were careless. This man is not the missing Procurator. He is not Claudius Seneca — doesn't even resemble him, apart from the broken nose. I look more like Claudius Seneca than this man does, which is only natural, I suppose, since Claudius Seneca is my father's brother. Mistaken identity. Stupid, as I said. They took the wrong man."

He turned back to where the two soldiers were constructing a serviceable stretcher. "I don't know who he is, but I want you to take the utmost care of this man. Carry him gently, one man to each arm of the litter, and I'll flog any man who bumps him. He deserves to live, if only because of the fight he put up." He looked at the rest of his men, silently gauging their response to his words. Apart from the sullenness caused by his threat, their expressions were disinterested. They had accepted his assertion completely and without curiosity.

"All right, then," he snapped. "Let's get this man to a military sick bay as quickly as we can. But I want these other two bodies brought in, too, for identification. Let's move!"

By the time the litter was ready for the injured man and the procession had set out on its journey back to the barracks at Aquae Sulis, the spa town the local Celts called Bath, no one in the party even remembered that the Tribune had been reading a parchment when they'd reached the clearing.

BOOK ONE – Colonists

I

A broken shutter banged somewhere. I could hear it clearly over the howling wind and the hissing roar of the driven rain. It was almost dark. I could barely make out the shapes of the two men flattened against the wall on either side of the door of the one-room stone hut across the narrow street from me. To my left, two more men flanked the door of the hut I was leaning against, and there were twelve more men similarly placed at the other six buildings that lined the narrow street. My reserve of thirty-four men was split into two groups, one at either end of the village.

At forty-eight, I was far too old for this kind of nonsense.

I stood with my shoulders pressed against the wall, my sodden tunic clammy cold against my back. I raised my hand in a useless attempt to clear streaming rain-water from my eyes, and my waterlogged cape was a dead weight dragging at my arm. I cursed quietly.

A dim yellow glow appeared as somebody lit a lamp in the hut across the way, and then a quavering, moaning scream rose above the wind. I gave the signal — one blast on my horn — and my men went in, bursting through the doors, their swords and daggers drawn. House-cleaning can be brutal, dirty work.

I looked down at the dead man at my feet. The rain had washed most of the blood away, but he still looked bad. I guessed an axe had killed him. His open eyes were glazed in the fading light.

One of my men reappeared, silhouetted against the light in the doorway opposite me, wiping his sword on a rag. He leaned out into the street, and though I heard nothing, I saw him tense and open his mouth in a shout. Then he was running up the narrow street. I cursed my age and my bad leg and thrust myself away from the wall, forcing myself into a lumbering run, only now aware of the fight going on in the street about thirty paces from me. The weight of my cloak was awful. I fumbled at the clasp and felt the burden fall away, and then I was in the middle of the fight.

I remember little of the tussle itself, but with me, that is a far from unusual state of affairs. Images are all that remain in my memory: a bare neck with a prominent Adam's apple, and then blood spouting as I jerk my sword point out of it — no memory of the stab; the feeling of a living body under my feet and then my braced arm, up to the wrist in mud because my crippled leg has let me down again and I've fallen; the crotch of a man whose sheepskin-wrapped legs are criss-crossed with cloth bindings, and my blade again, taking away his manhood; and a face, wide-mouthed and staring-eyed, and hands with no strength clutching at my sword, trying to pull it out of their owner's breast. All this I recall in silence. There is no noise, no screaming — no sound of any kind.

When it was over, I was badly winded, puffing for breath like an old man. I leaned over, hands on my knees, and hung my head, sobbing to clear my chest.

"Commander Varrus? Are you all right?"

I knew the voice; it belonged to young Kyril, one of my lieutenants. I nodded my head as clearly as I could in that position and he left me, moving on to check the others. Gradually I became aware of my hands, gripping my knees. Neither held a weapon. I had no sword, and no memory of dropping it. I blinked my eyes clear of rainwater and saw, by the darkness of blood on my right wrist and hand, that I was wounded. I straightened up, feeling no pain, and touched my right hand with my left. My hand responded, but strangely. My whole arm felt numb. I moved my left hand up along my arm, and I felt the cut — just above the elbow, and bleeding fast. My stomach lurched and I puked — my normal reaction after a battle, and one that usually left me feeling better. But this time, as I straightened up from retching, it seemed to me I saw a light, somewhere ahead of me, spinning in the strangest fashion and coming towards me at a roaring speed. And that was all I saw.

They picked me up out of the mud in the roadway and carried me to one of the huts, and I was out of my mind for more than a week.

My wound, on its own, was not too serious, although there is no such thing as a dismissible battle wound. Some whoreson had swiped me with an axe that had no edge. The weight alone had dug what little edge the thing had into the flesh and had broken my upper arm in what the medics call a twig-fracture. At my age, it's a wonder the whole bone didn't shatter. At least, that's what I thought then. Now I know that I was just mellowing into my prime in those days. But I bled a lot, they told me later: a sullen, angry bleeding that worried them because it would not stop. And on top of that, I'd caught pneumonia from the soaking. For a while my men thought they were going to lose me.