Horgias crouched, to shelter better against the wind, and said, ‘There’s a full tent-unit of eight men watching the mule route, and an enemy encampment nested in the trees below. The mule tracks go on past.’
‘The prefect said we couldn’t combine our centuries to attack men of the other legion,’ Syrion said.
‘But I bet the men in the enemy camp know about the ambush,’ I said sourly. ‘If we were driven into it by men from up here, they might find it in themselves to take us prisoner. That wouldn’t be against the rules.’
Horgias nodded, his lips drawn back in a smile that was a wolf’s snarl. ‘They want us all flogged. Why us?’
‘Lupus,’ Syrion said. ‘The other centurions hate him, even among the Fourth. He’s too distant. He doesn’t drink with them or whore with them. They don’t know who he is, and so they hate him.’
‘He loves war,’ I said, who had seen the ice melt from his eyes, and the fire behind it, and these two made sense to me now. I felt the truth in my marrow, and it warmed me. ‘He’s bored with camp life. The Fourth are making a huge mistake giving him a reason to fight them.’
Syrion thought that through, in the serious way he did, and nodded. ‘Let’s go on a little way along the ridge,’ he said. ‘They know Lupus well enough to know he’s ruthless first and cautious second. They’ll want to keep enough men in their camp at the mountain’s end to hold us all off. A month’spay says they won’t have left more than two other units in an ambush like this one.’
‘Done,’ Horgias said. ‘If the next two enemy camps have a unit in ambush above them, and the one after doesn’t, we’ll know you were right.’
Syrion was right: there were only two more units waiting in ambush on the ridge, one above each of the next two blue camps.
Sometime shortly after noon, therefore, we three turned round and made our way back along the goat path. The wind turned with us, and came from the west, pushing us to the mountain, gluing us to safe rock, away from the precipitous fall.
It felt like a good omen, and I told Lupus of it when I returned. I had never spoken to him of omens before. In a day of strangeness, that was just another new thing. He liked it and told the men, so that by the time the light was failing they all knew that the gods were with us in our battle against the IVth.
With our intelligence to guide him, Lupus had wrought a plan that was breathtaking in its beauty; elegant enough to be daring, but simple enough to work. We had used the remaining three hours until we were due to leave teasing it over, looking for gaps, and finding ways to plug them.
It was the first time we had truly worked together as a century. By the time we left, we were all that much closer to each other, all learning to trust each other’s judgement, and all stirring to the first thrills of war. I, who had never killed before, nor even borne my sword in true action, found myself traipsing to the latrines eight, nine, ten times before we left, and still sick at the end of it.
Chapter Eleven
To take three men along the narrow goat path at the back of the mountain had been difficult, but not impossible. To take an entire century along there would have been impossible and we didn’t try.
Lupus led the main party along the broad trail that linked all the century camps. The crushed snow was blue now in the late afternoon shadows, and freezing to ruts that made walking hard. He had us group into our tent-units and run at a jog-trot, with a distance of no more than twenty paces between each group.
In full armour, carrying our supplies of food and water, our mattocks, our mess kit — everything — we could walk twenty miles a day, forty if we were forced to double time. That evening, we wore our armour, but no helmets; carried no shields, but only our swords and daggers, wound around with fleece. We wound more wool on our forearms to act as shields, and kept our heads warm with the felt caps we had made in the harshest of the weather. Travelling light like this, even in the dark, I had no doubt that we could march the eight miles to the enemy camp before midnight; certainly that was our goal.
Syrion and I ran with Lupus at the head of the main group because we knew where the enemy units were waiting in ambush. Horgias, setting off earlier, had taken the other four men of our unit along the goat track, promising to reach the ambush places ahead of us.
We reached the first of their camps around time for the evening meal. It was nestled in trees, lower down towards the snow line than I think was legal, but they’d been there for over two months and Silvanus had not made them move it.
Their tents were set tight together in a square with branches across them to keep the snow off. A large fire was kept lit in the centre, and the men bunched around it, lightly armoured as we were, but with helmets on. They were still, silent, waiting. The fire’s light blinded them to movement in the shadows as we backed away thirty feet.
There, I knelt in the snow beneath the first rank of trees and gave the call of the owl which was our signal for every man to halt where he stood. We waited a moment and heard Horgias call back, except that his call was not so much an owl as a man trying to sound like a wolf, and failing.
The men around the fire were expecting some such. Hearing it, they jeered amongst themselves and, gathering their weapons, rushed up towards the place where Horgias had seen eight men lying in ambush.
What they would have found there, if all had gone according to plan, was eight men bound and gagged, each one with the sign of the wolf carved on to the leather of his armour straps as a reminder of who had taken them.
We didn’t stay to find out, but passed their camp at a dead run, and all were safely beyond it long before the main mass of the enemy returned carrying their newly freed comrades to the fire to warm away their frostbite.
They didn’t send anybody after us. I don’t know whatHorgias whispered in the ears of the fallen IVth as he tied the rawhide knots, but it was enough to frighten them into stillness, at least for the first part of the night.
We continued on, running into the changing light. To our left, the sun slid down until it pierced itself on the mountain’s highest spikes, spilling bloody light down the snow and leaving a long purple bruise along the ridge.
At the same time, the moon rose on our right, one day off full. It cast silver across the snow and ice, almost as bright as day, so that we could see our way as well as before.
The first century of the IVth had come this same route on a night of no moon, when the clouds sat on the ground and spilled snow waist deep in places. My respect for them grew greater, not less, as we travelled along the same path, even when Horgias and Tears and the other men tied the third enemy unit and whooped their wolf call high above the mountain as they carried on ahead of us.
Cadus was waiting for us on the path as we approached the last camp before our target, dressed in mountain clothes with none of the regalia of the parade ground, except that he carried his helmet under his arm, the plume crisping in the night air.
Under the moon’s light, his hair seemed paler than I remembered it, strung through with silver, and his skin had the tight translucence we had shared in Hyrcania, when the cold pulled our flesh hard about our bones.
Lupus ordered a halt in good order ten paces away and went forward to greet him. After three paces, he said, ‘Demalion. Follow,’ and walked on.
‘You brought all your men,’ Cadus said, as we approached. No greeting, no clashing salute, no officers’ exchange of gossip. ‘None left to guard your camp.’
Lupus lifted one shoulder in a shrug. ‘We disabled three units on the way. Our entire century therefore faces sevenunits of the best men in the Fourth legion. I decided it was worth the risk.’
‘All or nothing.’
‘I didn’t come here to fail.’