The Silver Branch [book II] (11 page)

The thing was done so easily that Justin, his ears full of his own voice talking somewhat at random about the wolf-skin, could have laughed aloud in sheer relief.

The quarrels were sorting themselves out, and another cock had been brought in and set opposite to the red, as he turned back to the Arena. This time the fight was long drawn and uncertain, and before the end of it, both cocks were showing signs of distress: the open beak, the wing dragging on the blood-stained matting. Only one thing seemed quite unquenched in them, their desire to kill one another. That, and their courage. They were very like human gladiators, Justin thought, and suddenly he sickened, and did not want to see any more. The thing that he had come to do was done, and Evicatos of the Spear, when he looked for him, was already gone. He slipped away too, and made his way back to the fort.

But as he went, Centurion Posides, on the far side of the ring, looked after him with an odd gleam in his eyes. ‘Now I wonder,’ murmured Centurion Posides, ‘I wonder, my very ill-at-ease young friend, if it really
was
only the wolf-skin? With your previous record, I think that we will take no chances,’ and he rose and slipped off also, but not in the direction of the fort.

T
WO evenings later, Justin was making ready to leave the hospital block after late rounds, when Manlius appeared in the surgery doorway with a bloody rag twisted round one hand. ‘Sorry to trouble you, sir, but I hoped I might find you here. I’ve chopped my thumb and I can’t stop it bleeding.’

Justin was about to call the orderly who was cleansing instruments nearby and bid him deal with it, when he caught the urgent message in the Legionary’s eyes, and changed his mind. ‘Come over to the lamp,’ he said. ‘What has happened this time? Another Catapult on top of you?’

‘No, sir, I’ve been chopping wood for my woman. I was off duty—and I chopped it.’

The man moved after him, pulling off the crimson rag; and Justin saw a small but deepish gash in the base of his thumb from which the blood welled up as fast as he wiped it away. ‘Orderly—a bowl of water and some bandage linen.’

The man dropped what he was doing and brought the water. ‘Shall I take over, sir?’

‘No, c-carry on cleaning those tools.’

And Justin set about bathing and dressing the cut, while Manlius stood staring woodenly into space. In a little, the orderly took the burnished instruments into an inner room, and instantly Manlius’s eyes flew to the door after him, then back to Justin’s face, and he muttered, ‘Where’s the Commander, sir?’

‘The Commander? In the P-Praetorium, I imagine. Why?’ Instinctively Justin kept his own voice down.

‘Get him. Get all the money you have, anything of value, and go both of you to my woman’s bothie in the town. It is the last bothie in the street of the Golden Grasshopper. Don’t let any see you enter.’

‘Why?’ Justin whispered. ‘You must tell me what you mean; I—’

‘Don’t ask questions, sir; do as I tell you, and in Mithras’s name do it at once, or I’ve gashed my thumb to no purpose.’

Justin hesitated an instant longer. Then with the footsteps of the returning orderly already at the door, he nodded. ‘Very well, I’ll trust you.’

He finished his task, tied off the bandage, and with a casual ‘Goodnight’ to both men, strolled out into the autumn dusk, picking up in passing the slim, tube-shaped case that held his own instruments from the table on which it lay.

A few moments later he was closing the door of Flavius’s office behind him. Flavius looked up from the table at which he was working late on the week’s duty roster. ‘Justin? You look very solemn.’

‘I feel very solemn,’ Justin said, and told him what had happened.

Flavius gave a soundless whistle when he had finished. ‘One of the bothies of the town, and take all the money we have. What do you suppose lies behind this, brother?’

‘I don’t know,’ Justin said. ‘I’m horribly afraid it has to do with Evicatos. But I’d trust Manlius to the world’s end.’

‘Or
at
the world’s end. Yes, so would I.’ Flavius was on his feet as he spoke. He began to move quickly about the room, clearing the tablets and papyrus rolls from the table and laying them away in orderly fashion in the record chest. He locked the chest with the key which never left its chain about his neck, then turned to the small inner room that was his sleeping-cell.

Justin was already next door in his own cell, delving under the few garments in his clothes-chest for the leather bag containing most of his last month’s pay. He hadn’t anything else of value except his instrument case. He picked that up again, stowed the small leather bag in his belt, and returned to the office just as Flavius came out from the inner room flinging on his cloak.

‘Got your money?’ Flavius said, stabbing home the brooch at his shoulder.

Justin nodded. ‘In my belt.’

Flavius cast a look round to see that all was in order, and caught up his helmet. ‘Come on, then,’ he said.

They went down through the fort in the darkness and the mist that was creeping in from the high moors; and with a casual word to the sentries at the gate, passed through into the town.

The town that, though its name changed with every fort along its length—Vindobala, Aesica, Chilurnium—was in truth one town eighty miles long, strung out along the Wall and the coast-to-coast legionary road behind it. One long, teeming, stinking maze of wine-shops and baths and gaming-houses, stables and granaries, women’s huts and small dirty temples to British and Egyptian, Greek and Gaulish gods.

The last bothie in the narrow, winding alley-way that took its name from the Golden Grasshopper wine-shop at the corner was in darkness as they drew near. A little squat black shape with the autumn mists creeping about the doorway. Almost as they reached it, the door opened silently into deeper blackness within, and the pale blur of a face showed in the opening. ‘Who comes?’ a woman’s voice demanded softly.

‘The two you wait for,’ Flavius murmured back.

‘Come, then.’ She drew them into the houseplace, where the red embers of a fire shone like a scatter of rubies on the hearth but left the room in wolf darkness, and instantly closed the door behind them. ‘There will be light in a moment. This way. Come.’

For the one moment it seemed very like a trap, and Justin’s heart did undignified things in his throat. Then, as he moved forward after Flavius, the woman pulled aside a blanket over an inner doorway, and the faint gleam of a tallow dip came to meet them. Then they were in an inner room where the one tiny window-hole under the thatch had been shuttered close against prying eyes; and a man who had been sitting on the piled skins and native rugs of the bed-place against the far wall raised his head as they entered.

The woman let the heavy curtain fall again behind them, as Flavius whispered ‘Evicatos! Ye gods, man! What does this mean?’

Evicatos’s face was grey and haggard in the uncertain light, and the purple smudge of a great broken bruise showed on one temple. ‘They caught and searched me,’ he said.

‘They found the letter?’

‘They found the letter.’

‘Then how do you come to be here?’

‘I contrived to break free,’ Evicatos said in a swift undertone. ‘I laid them a trail that might serve—for a little—to make them think that I was still heading south. Then I doubled back to Magnis and slipped in at twilight, but I dared not come up to the fort after you, for all our sakes.’

‘So he came here.’ The woman took up the tale. ‘Knowing Manlius was one he could trust, and I was Manlius’s woman. And the gods so willed it that Manlius was at home—and the rest you know, or you would not be here.’

Justin and Flavius looked at each other in an utter silence that seemed to clamp down on the little back room. Then Flavius said, ‘Well, the Cohort records are in good order for whoever takes them over.’

Justin nodded. There was only one thing to be done now. ‘We must get to Carausius ourselves, and quickly.’

‘It is going to be a race against time—and against Allectus—with the hunt up for the three of us,’ Flavius said. ‘Stirring days we live in.’ His voice was hard, and his eyes very bright, and he was slipping free the great brooch at his shoulder as he spoke. He shook off the heavy folds of his military cloak, and stood forth in the bronze and leather of a Cohort commander. ‘Manlius’s wife, can you find us a couple of rough tunics, or cloaks to cover our own?’

‘Surely,’ the woman said. ‘Food also you will need. Wait, and you shall have both.’

Evicatos rose from the bed-place. ‘You have brought your money?’

‘All that we had about us.’

‘
Sa
. Money is good on a journey, especially if one would travel swiftly … I go now to fetch the ponies.’

‘You ride with us?’ Flavius said, as Justin took his sword from him and set it beside the crested helmet on the bed-place.

‘Surely. Is not this my trail also?’ Evicatos checked with a hand on the blanket over the door. ‘When you leave this place, go out past the temple of Serapis, and make for the place of three standing stones, up the Red Burn. You know the spot. Wait for me there.’ And he was gone.

The woman came back almost at the same instant, carrying a bundle of clothes, which she set down on the bed-place. ‘See, here are two tunics of my man’s, and one of them is his festival best, and rawhide shoes for the Commander—those mailed sandals will betray you a mile off; your dagger also, therefore I bring you a hunting-knife in its place. There is but one cloak, and the moth in the hood of that one; but take this rug from the bed; it is thick and warm, and will serve well enough with your brooch to hold it. Change quickly while I get the food.’

When she returned again, Justin was securing the chequered native rug at his shoulder with his own brooch; and Flavius, standing ready in the cloak with its moth-eaten hood pulled forward on his face, was thrusting the long hunting-knife into his belt. His military harness lay stacked on the bed-place, and he jerked his head toward it as she appeared. ‘What of these? They must not be found in your keeping.’

‘They will not be,’ she said. ‘They will be found—presently—in the Vallum ditch. Many things are found, and lost, in the Vallum ditch.’

‘Be careful,’ Flavius said. ‘Don’t bring yourself or Manlius to grief for our sakes. Tell us what we owe you for the clothes and food.’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

Flavius looked at her for a moment as though he were not sure whether to press the matter. Then he said, a little stiffly because he was very much in earnest, ‘Then we can only thank you, both on our own behalf, and on behalf of the Emperor.’

‘Emperor? What do we care for Emperors?’ the woman said, with soft scornful laughter. ‘
Na na
, you saved my man in the spring, and we remember, he and I. Go now, quickly. Save this Emperor of yours if you can, and take care.’ Suddenly she was almost crying as she pushed Flavius past her into the dark outer room. ‘You’re only boys, after all.’

Justin caught up the food bundle, and turned to follow him, but checked at the last moment on the edge of the dark, smitten with his usual inability to find the words he wanted when he wanted them badly. ‘The gods be kind to you, Manlius’s wife. Tell Manlius to k-keep his thumb clean,’ he managed, and was gone.

A long while later—it seemed a long while later—they were squatting huddled together for warmth, with their backs against the tallest of the three standing stones by the Red Burn. Just before they reached it, Flavius had taken the key of the record chest from about his neck, and dropped it into the pool where the burn grew still and deep under the alders. ‘They can get another key made when there is another Commander at Magnis,’ he had said. And to Justin it seemed that the tiny splash, small as the sound of a fish leaping, was the most terribly final sound he had ever heard.

Up till now there had been no time for thinking; but now, crouching here in the solitude of the high moors with the mist thickening about them, the smell of it cold as death in their nostrils, and the slow moments dragging by without bringing Evicatos, there was too much time. Time to realize just how big and how bad the things that had happened were; and Justin was cold to the pit of his stomach and the depth of his soul. It was like the mist, he thought, the creeping, treacherous mist that made everything strange, so that you could not be sure of anything or anybody, so that you could not go to the Commander of the Wall and say ‘It is thus and it is thus. Now therefore give me leave to go south with all speed.’ Because the Commander himself might be one of Them.

The mist was creeping closer, wreathing like smoke through the sodden heather and around the standing stones. He shivered, stirred abruptly to cover it, and so felt the thing that he had carried out of Magnis along with the food-bundle under his cloak. His instrument-case. He had scarcely been aware of bringing it away with him, it was so much a part of himself; but here it was, and it belonged to the good things of life, the clean and the kindly things—something constant and unchanging to hold on to. He lifted the slim tube of metal and laid it across his knee.

Flavius glanced round. ‘What is it?’

‘Only my instrument-case,’ Justin said, and then as the other gave a sudden splutter of laughter, ‘Why is that funny?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Here we are on the run, with the hunt up behind us and the world falling into shards around our ears, and you bring your instrument-case away with you.’

‘I am still a surgeon, you see,’ Justin said.

There was a moment’s pause, and then Flavius said, ‘Of course. That was stupid of me.’

Even as he spoke, from far down the burn came the unmistakable jink of a bridle bit, and as they listened with suddenly strained attention, it was followed by a high shaken whistle that might well have been the call of some night bird.

‘It is Evicatos!’ Justin said, with a quick surge of relief, and threw up his head and whistled back.

The jinking came again, and with it the soft beat and brush of horses coming up through the heather; nearer and nearer yet, until a solid knot of darkness loomed suddenly through the mist, and Flavius and Justin rose to their feet as Evicatos rode up past the lowest of the standing stones, with the two led ponies behind him.