‘Thank you,’ Ballista said.
‘Think nothing of it,’ Andonnoballus said. ‘And thank you for coming.’
Maximus had killed his man. Calgacus shuffled over and finished the second Ballista had felled. The four men stood, panting.
‘They are withdrawing.’ A voice could be heard from somewhere. As if in confirmation, there was a diminishing thunder of hooves and a bray of distant horns. It took a moment to realize the war drum was silent.
XX
Calgacus had taken longer than the others to get up on to a wagon. It was not just the splint on his right arm impeding him; when he moved, things deep in his shoulder grated together painfully. None of the demented running, clambering, jumping or fighting had helped. And he had long accepted he was far from young.
Finally achieving a point of vantage, Calgacus peered out across the plain. He was not going to admit either to the pain, or that he could see little apart from a blurred cloud of dust that marked the retreating Alani horsemen.
‘Quite a few of them are carrying wounds,’ Maximus said.
‘But, again, they are leaving their dead,’ Andonnoballus said. ‘They will return.’
As they watched the Alani ride away, Ballista and Andonnoballus discussed what had happened, re-creating in detail the ebb and flow of events.
Calgacus had no patience with such futile endeavours. The face of battle was no stranger to him. Battle was nothing but chaos, every man isolated in his own few yards of fear and exertion. Every participant saw a different battle. Yet, afterwards, some primal urge forced the survivors to impose a pattern, to tell a clear, linear story. It was as if their own memories lacked the necessary validity unless they could be placed within something generally agreed.
‘Their plan was sound,’ Ballista said. ‘They made two diversions; one across the watercourse, the other some mounted skirmishers looking like they might attack the centre of the wagon line. These tied down some of our men, while their two main assaults came in on foot at either end of the laager.’
Calgacus watched three vultures coast in just outside the laager on their feathery wings. All their grace was lost when they came to earth.
‘And it nearly worked,’ Ballista continued. ‘At the western end they were fighting hand to hand around the wagon of the gudja. Here in the east they got inside the defences. If we had not blocked the breach and killed the few already inside, it would have worked.’
‘But it did not work,’ Andonnoballus said. ‘There is nothing nomad horse archers hate more than trying to storm a wagon-laager, even if it is defended by only a few desperate men.’
‘It is not just on the Steppe,’ Ballista said. ‘There is nothing harder in the world than taking any fortification manned by just a handful of brave, well-equipped men who will obey orders and dig in their heels. The casualties of the attackers will always be horrendous.’
The Alani had indeed suffered many casualties. No fewer than thirty-nine nomadic corpses were counted. Luckily for the prospects of the majority of these Alani in the afterlife, the three surviving Heruli were too tired and too busy to scalp and strip the skin from the right arms of more than a couple each.
Only eight of the defenders had fallen: the Heruli Ochus and Aordus, three soldiers, including the one who had been lying already close to death in their wagon, and three Sarmatians.
For the moment, all the corpses were given the same treatment. Defenders and Alani alike were merely rolled and thrown out beyond the defences. Lack of manpower, time, even energy, precluded anything more elaborate and either denigrating or respectful.
Calgacus felt that at this place — Blood River, as it was in his mind — the spirits of death hovered close. He knew Ballista’s people saw the choosers of the slain as beautiful young women. These white-armed, white-breasted girls would carry the chosen to Valhalla, and there in the golden hall of the Allfather they would serve them mead, maybe take them as lovers. For Hellenes like Hippothous, or Romans like Castricius it was different. For them, two grim-eyed warriors, Sleep and Death, bore them away to the underworld, where all but a tiny few would flit and squeak like bats in the dark and cold for an eternity. Calgacus had no idea of the views on the afterlife of his own native tribes in Caledonia. He had been taken too young. He hoped a lifetime among the Angles and serving one of them in remote places would make him eligible for Valhalla. You had to die in battle. There were worse ways to die. Your passing would be one of pain, but that might seem a low price to enter one of the better afterlives. Although the many willing virgins of Manichaeism — was it seventy or more? — also had a strong appeal. And it might be you did not have to die a violent death to get there. Maybe, if he lived through this, he would find out more about the strange new religion.
At any event, Calgacus hoped the souls of those killed had departed, for there were any number of vultures arrived. Ungainly in their haste and greed, they set up a flapping uproar as they squabbled over this sudden, rich bounty. Things would get worse later, when the darkness allowed the scavengers of the earth to overcome their fear of living men and slink out to devour the dead.
The majority of those being consumed were Alani. The losses of the defenders had been light, but they could ill afford them. Ballista and Andonnoballus rearranged the defence. The river remained held by Hippothous and Castricius. Each was as skilled a killer of men as the other, Calgacus thought, and each as dangerously insane as the other. They were aided by the interpreter and the soon-to-be-freed slave of the soldiers. A reserve of six was to be held back. It consisted of Ballista, Andonnoballus, Maximus, Tarchon, young Wulfstan, and Calgacus himself. It would be certain to be called upon. The actual wagon line now was held only by the gudja, two Heruli, three Roman auxiliaries, four Sarmatians and the other military slave. The latter had also been promised his freedom, conditional on both his martial valour and his survival. The latter seemed the larger impediment to his manumission.
It all looked hopeless. Twenty-one men to hold out against still easily more than ten times their number. The majority of the defenders were carrying some wound or other. Several of these were seriously incapacitated; the Herul Datius, the interpreter, one of the Sarmatians, young Wulfstan, who had picked up a nasty gash to his right arm right at the end of the fighting, and, of course, Calgacus himself.
For certain it was hopeless. They were all doomed. Calgacus wondered if he was afraid to die. Certainly he did not welcome death; neither the probable pain of the thing itself, nor the uncertainty of what might come after. And he wanted to live. He wanted to go back to Sicily. He wanted to marry Rebecca, to look after Simon, to have a son of his own. But if all that was to be denied him, if the norns had spun that he was to die out here on the Steppe, then he might as well die bravely. He might as well die out in the open by the side of Ballista and Maximus. As Ballista often said in Greek — some poem or other — death comes to the coward as well as to the brave. And if, by chance, any of them survived, what a song this doomed last fight would make.
‘Three riders coming from the main Alani camp,’ someone called out.
Wearily, Calgacus dragged himself to his feet, along with everyone else whose station allowed them to see.
‘ Zirin! Zirin! ’ One of the horsemen had a good, strong carrying voice.
‘The call of an envoy or herald,’ Andonnoballus said. He stood high on a wagon, and waved them to approach.