Lupus was barely more sane. He crouched down and took a handful of snow and held it to a bruise on his cheek. Under the clean white moonlight, it was a black shape with nocolour, but I could imagine it red-purple with greening edges when the sun fell on it in the morning.
I looked to my other side, where Syrion was standing with his head thrown back, dragging in air as if to suck in the sky. He grinned at me, and made the signal for success that we shared: a clenched fist.
I returned it, but when it was clear that neither of them had called me I walked back down the mule track away from them and the noise of their breathing until — there! — I heard my name called again, faintly, from far off.
I cupped my hands to my mouth and gave the wolf’s call, not as well as Tears had done it on top of the stockade fence, but good enough. I heard a single yelp back, and walked on. The other two caught me up, silent now, and breathing with more care.
We met Horgias less than a spear’s throw up the path that led back to the camp. He was holding his arm at an awkward angle and his face, even in moonlight, was more green than white.
‘Who’s been taken?’ I could feel it, or I read it in his face. And I read the answer the same way, so that I was already reaching for snow to sweep across my face, to snap me to wakefulness.
Through the sudden cold, I heard him say, ‘Tears. They have him in the centurion’s hut. Proclion and Sarapammon have gone ahead for help. I thought you might be still at the compound.’ He gave a kind of loose smile, that spoke as much of exhaustion and pain as of relief at having found us.
‘It will need an exchange,’ Lupus said. His left eye flashed from the centre of the black bruise on his face, wild and still at the same time. He took a long breath. ‘Let’s go back.’
‘Why would they take one of us over him?’ Syrion asked. ‘They’re as likely to take us all captive.’
‘If we offer a centurion for a man, they’ll accept,’ Lupussaid calmly. ‘They’ve seen what we can do; they won’t risk more getting hurt if they can gain me without battle.’
‘But why would you…’
I laid a hand on Syrion’s arm. ‘He led us here,’ I said. ‘If that has caused a man to be captured, he has to do this, or he has to offer. For his honour.’ I let go of Syrion and turned to Lupus. ‘I think you’re right, they would take you. But I think they will be happier if we offer them their Eagle back. And then no one is flogged.’
He looked at me a long time in silence. The white side and the black side of his face were perfectly still as his eyes raked me from crown to toe and back again. ‘You took their Eagle?’ he asked.
‘We did.’
‘Under whose orders?’
‘Mine,’ I said; and then, ‘We’re at war.’ Syrion and I stood silent waiting for the tempest of his fury, and heard instead a strange, uncommon noise, and found it was laughter.
Lupus laughed until he choked, and we had to thump between his shoulders to help him breathe. Presently, when he could speak, ‘Where is it?’ he asked. ‘The Eagle.’
‘I gave it to a man of the sixth unit. He was to take it to Cadus and await us. If we haven’t caught him up by dawn, he is to take it to our camp. If they’re attacked, he’s to throw it over the mountain, where it will not be found.’
His brows rose a fraction more at that, but he nodded. ‘Horgias, go to Centurion Cadus, tell him what’s happened and that he might need to surrender the Eagle to a delegation of the Fourth. Tell him that he is not to let it go unless they ask for it in the name of Jupiter Best and Greatest. If they ask in any other way, he may cast it down the mountain as Demalion suggested. And have his bone-setter take look at your arm. Syrion, Demalion, come.’
We three ran back to the enemy compound. That night, I believe we could have run the length of the empire and not felt it a hardship.
The smell that met us at the corner this time was not the lazy warmth of mules, but the ravages of fire. I ran through the smell of burning logs, of hides and furs, and, somewhere, of flesh.
At the bend in the path, Lupus dropped to a crouch with us at his either side. We were wild men now more than legionaries; any one of us could have been taken for a barbarian. Ahead, the men of the IVth were making a bucket chain, trying to put out the fire in their stockade. The compound that contained the huts was smoking threadily, but we had not fired it as badly as the stockade, and so fewer men were there.
Syrion said, ‘If we walk to the gate, they’ll take us and beat us. We might not have a chance to say why we’ve come.’
‘Demalion?’ Lupus was looking at me. I wondered if he saw the thoughts forming in my mind.
I said, ‘We could try to climb over the wall at the back of the centurion’s hut. We didn’t fire that, so they won’t be watching it.’ I pulled a wry smile. ‘If we don’t have to give the Eagle away…’
‘Lead us.’ Lupus rose, wiping snow from his hand. ‘On condition that if we meet them and there’s any talking to be done, I speak and you remain silent.’
The route round the back took us over the treacherous scree slope, but I found the steps we had missed the first time, and I now knew must be there. I had seen their centurion’s hut now, seen the lengths they went to for comfort and safety, and knew they would never leave their men to flounder on uncertain footing.
High clouds veiled the moon’s face, making it harder to find handholds in the wall, but I had learned as a child that every dry-stone wall has places where a boy may climb, andwhere a boy can go a man may follow, has he but the nerve to go up, and not look down.
Syrion looked down. I was straddling the top when the clouds scurried away from the moon, and in the sudden wash of silvered light he made the mistake of checking that his foothold was secure.
I knew, because I could see by then, that what he saw below his foot was a great, yawning void; we had moved rightwards of the place where we started, and the fall was vertical and long. The ground was down there, somewhere, too far away to matter.
‘Syrion!’ I hissed urgently. ‘Don’t look down! Look up at me. Take my hand.’
There was a risk in that: our hands were not dry, but I could see a wave of weakness take him, and had seen men fall who would have been able to climb had not the height unmanned them.
I leaned over further. ‘Come on, or I’ll fall with you.’ I felt his cold hand, and caught it at the wrist and locked my legs and held still while he used me as his climbing pole to make the top of the wall.
To his left, Lupus was already up, scrambling over the stone like a thief and then down in a long jump to the floor of the compound. I waited a moment, listening, but heard no shouts. I pushed Syrion and waited for his landing before I followed, and then led them out between the huts, through thin, acrid smoke and the reek of wet ash and wetter bedding. I imagined the IVth trying to find comfort in their stone-built luxury at this night’s end, and felt an unkind satisfaction.
‘Shh.’ I put my fingers to my lips. The others stopped where they were, mid-stride. ‘Men ahead, three, perhaps mo-’
And then the night split apart, rent by a man’s high, desperate cry, born of a pain so deep, so terrible, it could bear no real form.
‘ Tears! ’
I ran as I had never yet run, without caution, without forethought, without an eye for the hidden traps, for the dangers, for the reasons why I was being summoned. For I was being summoned. In that cry I heard my name; however inchoate, however unintended, Tears called for me and, as Achilles to Patroclus, I ran.
He was in the centurion’s hut, where the air was still warm, but not hot, and still smelled of cedarwood and incense and wealth, but now it smelled also of pain and blood and violence and Tears was flung on the bed, on fresh hides, naked, bruised, assaulted.