Dreaming the Eagle (42 page)

Ban caught up with him round the side at the entrance to the hypocaust where Iccius was kneeling at the opening. Ban put himself in the way.

You can’t send him under the floor. It’s not safe.’

‘It’s safe enough.’

‘At least let him go in with a rope round his waist so he can follow it out if he gets lost.’

That had been the source of the worst of Iccius’ nightmares: the time spent worming his way round in absolute darkness, unable to find the way out. Later, they learned that Braxus had closed the opening for a while and the boy had almost certainly passed it in his frantic search for air.

‘And let him wind the rope round the columns and bring the whole floor down on his head? I don’t think so. Amminios would be sorry to lose so willing a slave.’ His words were acid, designed to wound. Whatever Iccius had done, or not done, for Braxus, it still festered between them. The man was the soul of malice and the boy’s shell of obstinacy perilously thin. Ban opened his mouth to offer another alternative - any other alternative - and shut it again when Iccius reached up to touch his arm.

‘Don’t. It’s not worth it. I’ll go in.’ He spoke in Gaulish, because Braxus was there and it was forbidden to do otherwise. Still, as he bent down and squirmed in through the gap, he said, ‘Pray for me,’ and that was in Eceni. Ban did so, in Eceni, silently. Braxus sneered and ordered him back to the horses.

The morning passed slowly. The rain eased and stopped and was replaced by a south-easterly wind. In the barn, the horses were fed and groomed. The first batch of two-year-olds arrived from the north in the charge of the small, wiry Dacian slave with the unpronounceable name who was in charge of the horses on Amminios’ third and biggest farm, based in the south, near Augustobona, the heart of his mother’s lands. Early on, Ban had named the man Fox, for the colour of his hair. Not long after that, Fox, in his broken Gaulish, had begun to refer to Ban as his son.

They greeted each other warmly and shared news of the stud. The new horses were inspected for soundness, wind-tested and sent on their way to the temporary corrals that had been set up around the auction ring on the outskirts of the town. The eighty horses Ban had selected as fit for sale were similarly inspected, haltered and sent on.

The mares with foals were in the lower paddocks. Fox leaned on a fence and watched them graze. ‘Yon chestnut colt will be a bastard.’ He said it with relish, as if he were looking forward to the fight.

‘He already kicks at Milo when he’s leading them in.’

‘Good. Intelligent as well.’ Fox hated Milo with a passion and made no effort to hide it.

They watched the colt a moment longer and then Fox pushed away from the fence. ‘Where’s the grey stud horse? The new one from Parthia that we bought last-What was that?’

It was the sound Ban had been waiting for all morning - the crack of falling masonry and the cry of a boy in terror and pain. ‘The baths.’ He was already running. ‘It’s Iccius at the baths.’

It was worse than last time. No-one was waiting at the entrance to the hypocaust. He shoved his head and shoulders into the gap and shouted into the stinking, fire-baked darkness. He smelled brick dust over the soot and ash and knew the worst. ‘Iccius! Iccius, it’s me! Are you all right?’ His voice echoed over his head and back but there was no answer. Fox tapped his shoulder.

‘They’re inside. The floor’s gone in the steam room.’

He ran for the entrance and through to the caldarium. A knot of men had gathered in the south-western corner. Godomo stood, white-faced, on the margins. In all ways, the baths were his responsibility. Freedman or not, if Amminios came home to a broken building and no hot water, there would be hell to pay and Godomo the debtor. When Braxus waved at him, shouting, ‘Get the builder, you fool. Now!’ the lizard-man thrust past Ban and out into the courtyard, shouting orders to the others to make themselves useful. The cluster of onlookers wavered and dispersed until only Braxus was left.

The builder was a good man, but he would have to be a god to mend this in the time allowed. The hole in the floor was bigger than it had been in the summer and that had taken half a month to mend. A crack ran up one wall and a slab of marble had fallen from it, shattering the floor tiles and itself on impact. Braxus stood at the edge of the void, peering in. Ban crashed down on his knees at his side.

‘Where is Iccius? Is he all right?’

The Thracian sucked on a back tooth. His face was oddly still. He nodded downwards. ‘There.’

Iccius lay on one side, his head cradled in a nest of broken tiles, one arm bent out at his side like a peeled and folded stick. The greater bulk of his body, such as it was, lay under one half of another marble slab that had plunged through the cavity and smashed onto the floor of the hypocaust below. It was not as thick as it should have been to face the wall, but it was enough to crush the bones and flesh of a slight, unmuscled boy.

‘Iccius!’

‘Don’t waste your breath. He’s dead.’

‘No!’

‘No.’ The word rose up on a fine column of dust. Iccius opened an eye. In the dusted gloom of the hypocaust, the blue flashed dimly, like unwashed glass. He had been weeping before; clean tracks scored down the grime of his face, but he was not weeping now. Seeing Ban, he smiled, crookedly, with the half of his face that was uppermost. In Eceni, he whispered, ‘Now you can kill Amminios.’

‘No.’ Ban clutched at the edge of the gap. ‘Iccius, don’t say that. You’re not going to die.’

‘Yes I am. You can’t … No, Ban, don’t …’

The floor was not safe. He brought more of it down as he swung over the edge. Above, Braxus cursed him for a fool and promised a flogging, but did nothing to haul him out. Ban crouched in the rubble. Fractured slivers of tiling sliced into the bare soles of his feet. The columns on either side leaned in at dangerous angles. He knelt, ignoring the cuts to his knees. Iccius rolled his head towards him. His face was alabaster white as it had been in the morning. Even the hollows beneath his eyes had lost their colour. Ban kissed a cheek and then the cold, bruised lips. He was weeping. His tears scalded them both. ‘Don’t move. I’ll get you out. Iccius, listen to me. You are not going to die.’

‘I am … just waited for you …’ It was less than a whisper - a barely heard breath. The great blue eyes lost their focus, swimmingly. When the boy smiled again, it was at shadows seen in the dank dark of the hypocaust and Ban had no share in what he saw there. Pain racked his heart. He lifted the broken head and cradled it to his chest and felt the shuddering of a soul holding on to life. He kissed him as he had never done, a lover’s kiss, passionate with desperation.

‘Iccius, don’t. I love you. You can’t die. You mustn’t.’

The boy smiled. His breathing rasped. Fresh blood and a clear, straw-coloured fluid leaked from one ear. He frowned, struggling to speak again.

‘Iccius, don’t. It takes too much from you.’

‘No. Listen …’ Ban bent low to hear and felt the spider’s touch of a kiss on his ear, then a single phrase stored and given up with all the breath that was left. ‘Promise me you won’t die for nothing.’ He sighed once, softly, and was gone.

It was harder to climb out than it had been to jump in. Braxus stood watching and did not offer help. Ban emerged, scraped and grazed, and felt none of it. Black rage ate at his heart. He stood before the overseer on legs that shook.

‘You saw the crack in the floor. You knew it wasn’t safe. You killed him.’

The Thracian smiled, colourlessly. ‘He was a slave. It was a quick death. You could pray for the same.’ He could have been discussing a deer caught hunting, or a sow freshly slaughtered. ‘His blood will seal the floor. Perhaps next time it will hold the columns.’ He turned away, chewing on his lip, and began to pick his way over the debris. ‘It is fortunate that Amminios has been called back to his father’s court. The child was to have been offered to the visiting prefect at dinner after the sales. It would have been difficult to find another so well trained at such short notice’

Ban aimed the blow from behind - a coward’s strike that gave no chance for defence. His father would have disapproved of it. Iccius, who had never been a warrior, would not. He used a fragment of marble as big as both his fists and sharp at one end and he drove it with a strength that surprised him. The spike broke through the Thracian’s skull as through an eggshell and buried itself deep in the soft matter within. Braxus dropped without a sound. The slap of his body echoed off the walls and raised more dust from the cavity in the floor. His head dangled over the edge of the broken tiles, dripping gobbets of blood and brain onto the marble below. He twitched once. There was no chance that he was alive but none the less Ban knelt and jerked the man’s knife free from his belt and grabbed his hair, pulling his head back to bare his throat for the cut.

‘Don’t.’ The voice came like a snapping branch. Ban rose to a warrior’s crouch, the knife weaving in front of him ready to kill. Iccius’ words wove round his heart. Braxus was nothing. Amminios was not here and not coming. If he were going to die now, he would have to take Godomo with him at least to make it count and it was not Godomo who had spoken.

‘Stop. It is me. Father to the son.’ Fox stood in the doorway, part hidden beneath the fall of the curtain. It was possible he had been there all along. ‘The boy, your brother, is dead?’ he asked. His Gaulish had never been fluent. His accent was more pronounced now than ever.

‘Yes.’

‘Then leave this one. He is dead also. You should not have his blood on you when you run.’

Ban stared at him. Thinking was impossible. He wanted to kill and go on killing and then to die.

The Fox took a step forward, his hands loose at his sides, his eyes steady. ‘Go out to the yard. The four-year-olds are being saddled up ready to leave for the sale. Take Sentios’ horse, the big bay. Tell him I said so. Ride for town with the others and leave them when you reach the market. By the time this one is found, you will be gone.’

‘What about you? They will know you were here.’

‘No. I am with the horses. Everyone knows that. Of you, they will believe only that you were with the boy. Run now. It is your only chance.’

In two years of friendship and teaching, it was the best advice the Fox had ever offered. Ban hurled the block of marble through the hole in the floor and ran.

XVII.

THE LIVESTOCK MARKET PLACE WAS A SOLID BUT TEMPORARY structure, erected at the beginning of summer and taken down again at the end of autumn. The horse sale was the last event and the one with highest prestige. Breeders, farmers, gamblers and racing men came from the three parts of Gaul, Belgica and the two German provinces to trade horses at the Durocortorum autumn sale. Rumour said that some of those trading each year came from the free Germanic tribes from the eastern side of the Rhine but it was impossible to know the truth of that.

Ban hid beneath the stands. They were of oak and ash, cut by carpenters of the Parisi who knew each tree and spoke its language. Every spring, they built an arena and five tiers of seating that would have lasted decades and every autumn they pulled it down and distributed the weathered planks as firewood. The space beneath was used to store fodder and grain for the horses, stacked back as far as the third tier. Behind that, the space was too low for ease and a gap was left, narrowing down so that the space beneath the lowest tier was less than the height of a man’s forearm. There was less fodder now, at the end of the season, than there had been in spring. Ban forced his way past old hay and sacks of barley and crawled forward into the dark, oak-scented cavity beneath the lowest seats.

It was dark and airless and the noise made him ill with terror. The boards above his head made a sounding-box so that the skittering cries of the rats were as loud as the booted feet running on the stairs between the rows of seating and the voices of the crowd came up at him from the beaten earth even as the infinitesimal creaks of his moving cracked like thunder so that he must be heard.

He edged forward, a hand’s breadth at a time. Every scrape of his tunic against the unplaned wood above him rasped like a saw on oak knots and he stopped, trembling, his palms drenched, his mind trapped in a white cataract of fear, waiting for the legionaries, or the town magistrate, or - worst - Godomo, to find him.

It was impossible to think or to plan. A part of him needed to kill again, many times; to hear the crack of broken bone and see blood running free as men died to avenge Iccius and Eburovic and all the others of his dead. The remaining part, nearer the surface, wanted very badly to die. Death was a place of no pain and many friends and in this place, in the humid, rat-ridden bowels of the stands, his friends had abandoned him. He was as close to fever as he had been since the branding and the visions did not come, even when he pleaded with them to show their faces. All he could see was Iccius, white with pain and lost blood, and all he could hear was the whisper, Promise me you won’t die for nothing.

The crowd was reaching capacity. The front rank of seats had been filled not long after dawn. By now, those at the back were filling with those who paid for the cheapest seats and drank the cheapest wine and so felt entitled to make most noise. At the entrance to the arena, a drum padded out a two-time rhythm. In moments, the sound of it was drowned out by the beat of trotting horses. Even those in the rearmost seats hushed and sat at quiet attention.

Ban pressed himself to the boards at the front of the stands. Shrinkage and knot gaps let in cracks of light and some of them were wide enough to make good viewing ports. He pressed his eye to one and then drew back a little, fearful that the shine of it would be seen and give him away.

The four-year-olds were first - those fully trained for war and transport. They came in squadrons of twenty, crossing the arena forward and back, with mounted grooms dressed as auxiliary cavalry, showing off their weapons training and steadiness under attack. They ran sorties, one group on another, throwing bluntpointed wooden spears and catching them on padded shields. The men were performing as much as the horses; a good many of them were freemen hired for the season and if the visiting prefect really was recruiting local tribesmen for a new cohort of auxiliaries they would do well to catch his eye. Knowing this, Ban looked for the area of the stands before which the best performances took place and so found where the Roman officer sat in the second row of the crowd with half a dozen of his guard around him. He wore minimal armour and no toga and avoided the private seats of the magistrate. Braxus would have known the politics of that, or would have made it his business to find out. But Braxus was dead, and when they found him his murderer would die as slowly as they knew how to make it happen. Amminios would see to it, or Godomo in his absence.