The river was screened by mist, the water invisible, and there was something uncanny and forbidding in the pressure of the air. Despite the warmth, Castus could hear the teeth of some of the younger recruits tapping together. They were right to be nervous. The river before them was like a living presence, a black god, freighted with slow doom. And on the far side, somewhere in that motionless darkness, was the enemy.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said to the young soldier beside him, ‘it’s only a boat trip and a walk in the woods.’ He sensed the man’s nod.
Now the mist shifted, and the boats came into view, scores of them nestled together like rafts amid the reeds. Castus remembered his orders: fifteen men should board each boat. He would lead the first party, Modestus the second, the standard-bearer Flaccus would go in the third boat and Diogenes in the fourth. There would be a steersman and a pilot – local people who knew the river and its currents – to guide them across. They had practised boarding, but what had been a simple operation on dry ground beside the tent lines now seemed a daunting prospect. Castus had imagined that the boats would be bigger, like the barges used in the pontoon bridge, or the cutters used by the river flotillas. He tried to conceal his shock as he made out the shapes of the craft that awaited them in the reeds: slender canoes, only a few feet wide, each made of a hollowed log. He felt his skin chill; surely it was the wildest folly to trust his life and the lives of his men to these flimsy sticks, out on the wide, deep expanse of the great river?
Quelling his nerves, he motioned his men to their feet and led them down through the reeds. Watery mud rose around his boots, and when he breathed he felt the mist filling his lungs, the scent of rotting vegetation and the heavy drag of the river in the air.
At the bows of the nearest boat was a small figure – a boy of about thirteen, straggle-haired and almost naked, squatting over the water. The boy gestured down the length of the boat. ‘Quickly! Quickly!’ Was this the pilot?
Castus climbed in over the stern, and felt the narrow boards pitch and rock beneath him. As he moved forward he noticed a second figure, waist deep in the shallows among the reeds. An old man this time, the boy’s father perhaps. He spoke with a strong Germanic accent. ‘Get aboard, dominus. Fast and quiet!’
Muffled noise from the riverbank, men’s boots sliding in the mud, shields and spears clattering together, voices cursing and hissing. Bent double, stepping high over the thin rowing benches, Castus scrambled along the length of the boat and lowered himself to sit behind the boy at the bows. Other men were boarding behind him: the narrow log canoe rolled precariously, water slopping along the low sides. Shields bumped; boots scraped. Somebody let out a sharp gasp.
‘Quiet!’ Castus whispered into the hissing of half a dozen men.
As soon as all were aboard and seated, the old man leaped up onto the stern, grabbed a pole and began heaving the laden boat out from the bank. The mist thinned and parted briefly, and when Castus looked to his left he could see dozens of other boats, each packed with men, shoving out from the reeds and into the current of the river. He saw a nearby canoe ghosting out silently from the shore, paddles beginning to dip and splash. Above the huddled figures and the row of blank-faced oval shields rose the bristle of spearpoints and javelins, strange in the misty dark. In the prow, Valens’s rangy grey dog sat up erect, its muzzle raised.
Valens, his face pale beneath his hood, lifted his javelin in salute, and Castus caught his whispered words clearly across the water. ‘Good hunting!’
Now they felt the motion of the river beneath them, the heavy stir of the water turning the shallow craft. The boy at the bows was muttering, then holding up a twist of leaves and scattering them on the water. A prayer to the spirit of the river, to carry them safely across. A hushed word to the men behind him, a collective movement, and the paddles began to strike down at the surface of the water.
The mist closed around them once more, and they were alone.
Up above, Castus could make out a few stars bright through the haze, but the moon was lost behind cloud. The black water was very close – he could touch the surface with his hand – and, with every dip of the paddles, spray spattered back over the sides of the boat. The men were so quiet it seemed as if all were holding their breath; the river defied sound, seemed almost to defy life. With a shudder of unease, Castus thought of the stories of the afterworld, the black river and the silent boat that carried the souls of the dead across to Hades. He had never believed in such things – there was nothing after death but emptiness and darkness, unknowing sleep for eternity… The thought did nothing to reassure him.
A sudden cry came across the water, impossibly loud and sharp. The men tensed, and the boat rocked wildly. An owl, somebody said, and a muffled ripple of laughter passed through them, quickly hushed. Once more the paddles rose and fell.
For all the warmth of the night, it felt cold out on the river. A chill breath came up from the water, through the boards of the boat, and they all felt it. Castus stared hard into the bank of mist ahead, straining his eyes to try and make out the shape of the far bank. But there was nothing – just water and night and the hanging mist only faintly illuminated by the stars.
Then the boy made a sound between his teeth, fanning with his hand. He was gazing down into the depths of the water ahead.
‘What is it?’ Castus whispered. The paddles fell silent; the boat swung with the current.
The boy called out something to the old man with the steering oar at the stern. Castus heard the man exhale as he heaved the oar against the flow of the current, and the canoe swung again. Some of the men began to shift at their benches, and the boat rolled, water slapping at the sides.
‘Stay still!’ Castus hissed, gripping the sides in fear of being pitched out into the river.
Suddenly a scream came from somewhere out in the darkness; no bird call this time, but a man in agony. Then another cry, and the sound of a body hitting the water. All along the boat men tensed and hunched. Castus could make out another sound, a staccato lisping hiss that seemed to rise from the surface of the water.
The arrow appeared suddenly, punching into the side of the boat only inches from his hand. Another skimmed past his head.
‘Shields up!’ he cried, forgetting caution now. ‘Those with paddles, heads down and keep working!’
The zip and hiss of arrows all around them, in the air and cutting the surface of the water. A man in the centre of the boat screamed as he was hit; he lurched up, then toppled sideways into the water. Another arrow slammed into Castus’s shield.
‘Quiet!’ the boy said from the bows. ‘They shoot at noise! Cannot see!’
But the men in the boat were panicking now, half of them trying to crouch down inside, the rest trying to lift their shields against the invisible stinging arrows. With the paddles neglected, the boat swung round into the current, then gave a lurch and a thud.
‘Sandbank!’ the old man called from the stern. ‘Everyone move back…’
Another cry as another arrow found its mark. With one fluid motion, the boy at the bows stood up and dived, arcing into the black water and vanishing with barely a splash. The whole boat tipped as the soldiers scrambled to one side, then yawed back the other way, but it was too late to right it. Castus felt the flood of cold river water soaking his knees, then the rolling lurch as the water rushed in over the side and the boat capsized.
Head first he plunged into the river, and the blackness rushed up and punched the breath out of him. For a moment there was only a strange muffled silence. He was aware of his own heartbeat pressing in his ears, a curious gulping sensation in his throat, and he felt the weight of his body, the heaviness of his limbs. He opened his mouth and felt the black torrent fill his lungs.