The three rode abreast, very close together. They rode slowly. The outer two seemed to be supporting the one in the middle. As they got closer, the latter could be seen to be slumped in the saddle.
At about the distance an arrow might still penetrate armour, a bit over one hundred paces, Andonnoballus called that it was close enough.
The three stopped. One of the flanking men slung a leg over the neck of his mount and nimbly dropped to the ground. As if it were a sack, he roughly pulled the one in the middle from the saddle. The man feebly put out an arm but crumpled in a heap. The other hauled him to his feet, hung something around his neck and pushed him in the direction of the wagon-laager.
‘He will give you the message. It is his calling,’ the one on foot shouted in the language of Germania. He vaulted back into the saddle. ‘Let him smell his way to you.’ The Alan and his companion laughed, spun their horses and raced away.
There was something strange about the man. He walked like a man in a thick fog; arms out in front, stepping hesitantly, as if he suspected the ground might betray him. And he was not walking straight towards the camp but off at an angle that would take him past its southern extremity.
‘By all the graces,’ said a voice in Latin.
‘Gods below,’ said another.
‘Fuck,’ said Maximus.
Calgacus saw the man stumble, almost fall. There was something odd about his arms.
‘Come on,’ Ballista said to Maximus. The two clambered through the protective screens and dropped down outside the laager. Vultures waddled away, loud in their complaints.
Instinctively, Calgacus scanned the plain. He could see the two horsemen. They were more than half a mile away. He could see the smudge of smoke that bannered the big nomad camp in the distance. He could see nothing else. Except along the watercourse, there were no trees. As far as he knew, there were no hidden gullies or deceitful undulations where ambushers might lay hidden.
Ballista and Maximus had reached the man. Solicitously enough, they had removed the thing hung around his neck and taken him by the shoulders. Yet in the act of supporting him they seemed to wish to keep their distance.
‘Infernal gods, it is the herald Regulus,’ someone said.
‘How could they do what they have done?’ another said. ‘What evil daemon could drive anyone to this?’
When they were about as far as a boy can throw a stone, Calgacus saw, and wished he had not. The horror was beyond all bearing.
There was blood all down the face of the praeco, all down his soiled tunic. His arms were stumps. They ended at the wrist. There were no bandages. Instead, the wounds appeared to have been cauterized. But there was much worse, a much fouler disfigurement. His eyes were gone. No one, not the most skilled physiognomist, could read his soul in those ruined, bloody sockets.
‘Bear a hand,’ Ballista said. ‘Bear a hand, and haul him up.’
Calgacus swallowed his revulsion, took the herald under a shoulder and, as gently as possible, helped lift him up into the wagon-laager.
‘Get flax and the whites of eggs for his eyes,’ Ballista said.
‘I will take care of him.’ The gudja — tall, imperturbable — laid an arm around the shoulders of the praeco, and led him away to his wagon as a father might lead a son.
Ballista passed the piece of papyrus taken from the herald’s neck to Andonnoballus. There was Greek script on it. The Herul’s lips moved as he read it, but he made no sound. Finished, he smiled, but with no humour. He held the papyrus up and read aloud. ‘Hand us Andonnoballus and Ballista, and the rest of you can depart unharmed. If not, when you fall into our hands, you will beg for this man’s fate.’
A muttering ran along the wagons, as men repeated it and translated it into various tongues.
Laughter — muted, rueful chuckles at first; no one was sure where it started — spread through the laager.
‘Fuck you!’ Maximus howled. Others joined in: obscenities, curses, vows of revenge, even dark jokes were shouted at the distant Alani camp and at the uncaring vastness of the Steppe.
The gudja returned.
‘How is he?’ Ballista asked.
‘At peace,’ the Goth replied.
Ballista looked shocked.
‘It is best,’ the gudja said. ‘What life would there be for a man with no eyes to see, no hands to feed himself?’
The others were silent.
‘They had castrated him as well.’ The bones and amulets in the hair of the gudja clinked as he turned to go.
‘Sure, it is a kindness,’ Maximus said, ‘but a terrible kindness which will weigh on you.’
The gudja walked off without replying.
Calgacus drew a little apart with Ballista and Maximus. They stood in the centre of the laager. ‘Are you certain no one will betray us?’
‘Certain,’ Ballista said. ‘No one could be that big a fool. The Alani have lost too many for clemency. Everyone knows they will kill us all.’
‘The Alani king is not here, and I have not seen the Suanian Saurmag among them, but still they want you badly,’ Maximus said.
‘And Andonnoballus,’ Ballista added. ‘It is interesting they want him, but not the other Heruli.’
‘They are moving.’ The shout from Wulfstan curtailed further speculation.
There were more Alani this time, but they kept further away. Somewhere near extreme bow shot, approaching three hundred paces, thirty or forty Alani swarmed. Many of them got down from their ponies.
Except for those keeping watch over the other approaches, the entire beleaguered garrison crowded to watch. Hippothous came and stood next to Calgacus and the others. The Greek had left Castricius overseeing the river.
The sounds of hammering drifted across, covering the sighing of the grass and the quarrels of the vultures. The hammering stopped. There were wild shouts and mocking laughter. Then there were screams — at first of fear, then of agony, terrible agony.
I dare not see, I am hiding
My eyes, I cannot bear
What most I long to see;
And what I long to hear,
That most I dread.
Hippothous recited the verse well.
‘Sophocles,’ Andonnoballus said.
Hippothous was not the only one to look at the Herul with surprise.
Andonnoballus ignored them.
The Alani mounted up, whirled their horses and, whooping, rode a little further away.
Three stakes were left standing in the Steppe. On each a man was impaled.
‘Who are they?’ Calgacus’s eyes were not near good enough to hope to recognize individuals at that distance.
‘It looks like the rest of the staff,’ Maximus said, ‘Porsenna the haruspex, and the other scribe and messenger — the poor bastards.’
‘Poor bastards,’ Calgacus agreed.
‘I suppose sending the herald to us was irony,’ Ballista said.
A chilling scream cut across the plain.
‘At least one is alive, then,’ said Hippothous.
‘They will all be alive,’ Andonnoballus said. ‘If he can take the pain and not move, it can take a man hours, sometimes a day or more to die. It all depends how you insert the stake up his arse.’
‘You know this?’ Ballista said.
‘I know this,’ Andonnoballus said.
‘Alani indeed is the most cruel of savages,’ Tarchon said. ‘And most terrible ones for thieving. When they cross the Croucasis so their ponies can eat the sweet meadow grasses of Suania, always they are stealing; apples, pears, small children, all manner of things.’
‘They have put them out there to dishearten us,’ Ballista said. ‘If any of us go out to help them, we will be ridden down.’
Another ghastly scream echoed across the Steppe.
‘We have to do something,’ Maximus said.
‘Wax,’ Tarchon said. ‘Beeswax best in the ears. Next to no sound gets through.’
‘Something for them.’
‘Oh, in that case, we must shoot them.’
‘The Suanian is right,’ Andonnoballus said.
‘It is a long, difficult shot,’ judged Ballista.