‘What’s happened?’ Cato demanded. ‘I ordered Themistocles to stay clear of any fight.’
‘The decurion’s dead,’ the man responded, breathing hard as his horse snorted. ‘We kept ’em in sight and then they hit us from three sides. Lost several men before we even knew what had happened.’ He glanced back over his shoulder in alarm. More riders were emerging from the gloom, and Cato ordered them to form up behind Thraxis.
He turned back to the wounded man. ‘How many of them?’
‘I- I don’t know, sir. A hundred. Maybe more.’
‘Right, get to the rear!’
Cato returned to his position in the centre of the line and waited until it seemed that the last of the riders had rejoined the cohort, then he craned his neck forward and squinted until he saw the enemy, scattered figures on foot charging forward wildly. If they reached the fires, the ruse would be spotted at once. If they could be checked violently now, and driven off, then it might delay any pursuit until after first light. He drew his sword and swept it forward.
‘Blood Crows! Advance!’
He urged his horse into a walk and then at once increased the pace to a trot, then a canter. The distance between the riders and the oncoming natives decreased rapidly. At the very last moment, no more than thirty feet from the nearest of the enemy, Cato bellowed the order to charge, and the Blood Crows roared an inchoate war cry as they spurred their mounts on and lowered the tips of their spears. Snowflakes pattered into Cato’s face and he had to blink them from his eyes as he braced himself in the saddle and held his sword out high and to the side ready to strike. The natives had been triumphantly pursuing a broken enemy but were now on the receiving end, and their cheers died in their throats as the Blood Crows charged at them. Cato saw several men in a loose cluster directly ahead of him and steered straight at them.
The natives scattered, hurling themselves aside into the snow. One, slower than his companions, went down directly beneath the horse, his cry cut off as the weight of the beast crushed his chest. Cato slashed his sword at the last man in his path, and the blade cut into his back and shoulder and drove the native down on to his knees. Then he wheeled round and turned on those who had avoided his charge. Two men kept low and ran crouching from his path. The last braced himself as he wielded an axe. Cato swerved to take the blow on his shield and then twisted in his saddle to make a cut at the man’s head. His opponent had swift reactions and blocked with his shield in turn, then backed off. His attention fixed on the Roman officer, he never saw the Thracian coming up behind him, spear lowered, and he lurched forward, off his feet, as the bloodied point burst out of his throat.
Cato saw that the charge had completely crushed the enemy, who were now streaming back in the direction they had come, some abandoning their weapons as they sought to escape the Blood Crows. Thraxis and the trumpeter were close by, and Cato turned to them.
‘Sound the recall!’
The shrill note rose above the wind and the scattered sounds of combat, and the officers bellowed to their men to return to their standards. Some took more persuading than others until threatened with punishment. But soon the last of the enemy had disappeared, save those who had been cut down in the charge, and the Blood Crows re-formed into their squadrons. Themistocles and several of his men were missing, and Cato took personal command of the survivors. When the men were all in place, he turned his mount towards the coast and waved them forward.
Already he could see further into the distance and make out more detail, and he realised that dawn was not far off. He glanced back towards the fires and the still forms of the dead and prayed to Fortuna that the enemy would take some time to recover following the charge, and would be held up further by the sight of the Roman soldiers still in place. Long enough for the Blood Crows to steal a sufficient advance before they were cut off by the enemy making the crossing from Mona.
As the sky brightened, so the snow began to abate, until only light flakes, like dust, were carried on the breeze. Cato and his men hunched their heads down into the folds of their hooded cloaks. To their left loomed the vast outline of the army’s camp, sprawling over the uneven ground. There, too, fires had been lit, stoked up and left to burn, their smoke rising at an angle, giving the appearance that the Romans were still there. Along the palisade and in the towers stood the distant figures of more of the army’s dead. The effect was quite convincing, Cato thought, and it should fool the enemy for a while yet.
He led his men in the direction of the sea, grey and ruffled with streaks of spray as it rolled in and dashed itself against the rocky coast in a dull rhythmic roar. They happened upon the route taken by the rest of the army almost by accident. Snow had covered the tracks of thousands of boots, hooves and wagon wheels, but the uneven surface was just visible, and Cato was able to follow it easily enough as he turned the column and increased the pace of the Blood Crows to a steady trot. The snow kicked up by the hooves was like a swirling cloud along the ground, and the absence of the usual drumming thunder of horsemen on the move added to the sense of unreality that Cato was experiencing. Despite the grave danger faced by him and his comrades, and the soul-numbing cold, his thoughts inevitably returned to Julia.
That she could be dead still seemed impossible. She had been blessed with a divine spark of vivacity that had struck him from the very first. Self-assured, she had taken on every challenge they had faced together with all the courage and endurance of a seasoned veteran. From the siege at Palmyra, the shipwreck off Crete and her subsequent capture and humiliation at the hands of Ajax and his rebel slaves. For a moment, as he sat swaying gently in his saddle, Cato recalled her face. The slightly squared jaw, small nose, grey eyes and dark eyebrows that occasionally rose archly when she was gently mocking him. And then the dark hair sweeping out from her widow’s peak to flow down to her shoulders. He realized how much he missed her, physically just as much as he did emotionally. She was slim, with breasts that he could easily cup, and a flat stomach that gave way to the soft dark tuft of her pubic hair – the sight of which always sparked a fire in his loins. The gentle curves of her buttocks were smooth and flawless. Her legs had been short in proportion to her back, another small deviation from the ideal, one of many, that had defined her perfection to Cato. His heart ached unbearably at the knowledge that she breathed no more. That he would never feel her warmth beside him ever again. She was like the others, those who had been left to the enemy, dead and cold. But where they would be abandoned to the forces of steady corruption, at least Julia would have been spared that when her body was cremated. The brief thought of her beauty being reduced to withered skin stretched over bone and shrunken muscle and organs made Cato feel sick.
He opened his eyes with a start and was furious to see that he had wandered a few paces off the faint path left in the snow. A twitch of his reins brought his mount back on course and he told himself firmly that he must accept the fact of Julia’s death. He knew that she would want him to live on and try to be happy. But Cato knew, as surely as the sun rose with the dawn, that he would forever look back to the time he had shared with Julia, and the present and all prospect of the future would be haunted by her memory. Every spring day, every budding flower, the jade gleam of young leaves and the heady scent of new life would never refresh his soul as they once did. For him, it would be a perpetual winter of the soul, all life shrunk beneath a mantle as white as bone, cold as ice and swept over by a wind filled with the sighs of every lost joy now denied him. And nothing would ever change that.