Death of an Empire (25 page)

But Myrddion wasn’t yet ready to permit the matter to rest. ‘Roman honour means nothing if a helpless peasant woman can be hamstrung or brutalised on the orders of a general. She is not a slave, but these are punishments meted out to slaves. She is not a thief, but her treatment would be a thief’s just deserts. She is only a woman who wiped away the shit, piss and blood of Roman soldiers. She helped them to drink water when they thirsted and she cleaned the pus from their wounds. She is only a
Celtic woman – but she is free and honest and gives comfort to the dying. Because of Roman anger and pride, she will now be unable to walk unaided for the rest of her life. She deserves reparation.’

Aetius had calmed, and was now steely in his disdain, but Cleoxenes was a different man entirely. For the first time, he demonstrated that he followed the Christos by making the sign of the cross on his breast.

‘I am of Roman stock – almost pure, although my name speaks of my Greek lineage. I will pay red gold so that this widow shall not suffer hardship because of her incapacity, for my lord Jesus would expect me to succour those who are heavy laden or bowed down with suffering. Should General Aetius wish to contribute, his gold will be added to mine.’

Cleoxenes pushed Myrddion forward, for the younger man was confused by the whole charged conversation between the two Romans. He was out of his depth and he knew it. ‘You will now beg General Aetius’s pardon, healer, for you had no right to raise your hand in anger against your master, regardless of your feelings of compassion towards your servant woman. Do it!’ the envoy ordered, when Myrddion was slow to respond, and, hesitantly, the healer found the words to offer a grudging apology.

‘I will see this young fool on his way,’ Cleoxenes murmured to Aetius. ‘Wait for me, general, for my business with him will not take long.’

Outside the tent, away from the two guards, Cleoxenes shook Myrddion as a fox shakes a rabbit.

‘The general will ensure that you have an accident unless you leave immediately. Do not fret for your patients, for I will see that they are returned to Châlons. You must go south as quickly as your wagons can travel. Aetius won’t try to stop you – not openly. Are you listening?’

‘Aye,’ Myrddion answered. ‘But where do I go? And why should you bother to help me?’

‘After Châlons, continue south until you reach the mountainous headwaters of the Sequana river. Cross the river and travel further south until you reach Alesia. From there, you will see a narrow valley between low mountains that will lead you to the Rhodamis river. Lugdunum is the first great city you will reach. Follow the Rhodamis in a southerly direction till you reach Arelate and then follow the coast to the port of Massilia. Once you reach the sea, do not take ship. Hear me, Myrddion? Do not take ship! Flavius Aetius will expect you to go to Rome by the speediest possible route and his spies will soon find you and arrange your assassination. Instead, follow the coastal strip until you reach Italy, and then head south once more. All roads lead to Rome, but you would do well to avoid Ravenna at the moment.’

‘Why should I run like a frightened dog?’ Myrddion’s voice was sulky, and achingly young.

‘Aetius is aggrieved and will seek revenge on you and your party. Of course he gave the order that your woman should be hamstrung, although I acquit him of complicity in her rape. As far as Aetius is concerned, Bridie isn’t real. She’s just a small piece of ivory in a board game. Believe it or not, he did it to annoy and frighten you. I doubt he expected your reaction, but if I hadn’t been dining with him he’d have had you killed immediately to remove that nasty itch at the back of his brain. That’s all you are – an itch! And Bridie matters even less. When his plans reach fruition, as they probably will, he’ll forget you if you’re not under his feet.’

Myrddion said nothing. In the face of the envoy’s lucid assessment of his situation, there was nothing he could say.

‘You must trust me to enact some justice on your behalf. I’ll make it plain to Aetius that, for the sake of appearances and the
maintenance of discipline, the guilty guardsmen must be publicly flogged. Will that satisfy you?’

‘I suppose I must accept.’

‘You must. As for reparation, I will handle those details. I will catch up with you on the road and see to the future of your widow. Do not fail me in this matter, Myrddion Emrys, for I have plans for your future.’

‘Why are you helping me?’ Myrddion repeated. ‘What have you to gain by saving our lives?’

Cleoxenes laughed quietly. ‘I’m damned if I know. Something tells me that if I keep you alive, then I am doing the work of both my master and my God. Consider the possibility that my God speaks to me the way yours does to you. But, for the sake of your dependants, you must learn diplomacy, young man. Sadly, many Romans are worse, much worse, than Flavius Aetius. In his way, he is noble, and almost impossibly brave. The empires depend on him.’

Myrddion looked at the sky, where the stars seemed more distant than ever. His hare-brained scheme to find his father while dragging his faithful servants to this alien land had brought them nothing but trouble. And now Bridie had paid for his reluctance to face up to Aetius man to man.

‘I should have presented that letter to the general in person,’ he whispered softly. ‘Bridie is crippled because of my cowardice.’

Cleoxenes heard a world of regret in that simple sentence, and he responded by slapping Myrddion’s face. But the blow was gentle, almost like the caress of a lover.

‘You would be dead if you had delivered that letter in person, so you should learn from Bridie’s pain. The Lord Jesus has some reason to test you, but don’t look to me for answers. I’m too old to be certain of anything.’

‘But I have no allegiance to your Jesus. I am sworn to the Mother and Lady Ceridwen, my ancestor.’

‘Sometimes the Lord has need of us whether we are pagan or Christian,’ Cleoxenes said. ‘I would be a saint if I fully understood the ways of my God, but, as you know, I’m not a saint. Time will reveal the purpose that heaven has laid out for us all. But walk carefully, boy, for not all great men possess Merovech’s joy in living or Theodoric’s love for his people. Kings are only men, as fallible as you or I.’

Myrddion walked away, his shoulders slumped in despair, and Cleoxenes sighed with irritation. He would need to speak to Flavius Aetius and warn him that he would suffer great loss if he raised his hand against the healer and his party. Threats might not work, so the envoy was already seeking out the honeyed words of warning that a sophisticated strategist such as Flavius Aetius would recognise. If all else failed, Cleoxenes was prepared to be blunt and give Aetius an unvarnished assessment of the situation. The chicken and peppers he had consumed with such gusto only an hour earlier were churning in his gut with the promise of a hot, salty attack of vomiting. All his life, Cleoxenes had managed to straddle spear-points with a certain natural elan, but his stomach pained him often and fierce stress headaches sometimes confined him to his bed.

The envoy sighed again as the smell of burning bodies wafted to him on a wind change, and caused his nose to twitch with a sharp, gut-wrenching smell of pork. ‘Oh, to be among civilised company in a place as far away from here as I can travel,’ he whispered in Greek, trusting that no one would understand his words if eavesdroppers were spying on him. Aetius was capable of almost any treason, even the accidental death of an envoy, no matter how nobly born.

‘And now to frighten the old fox,’ he muttered. ‘If all else fails, I’ll remind the old devil that I remember how he lived with the Hun for years, ostensibly as a hostage, but ultimately as a friend.
Yes, Aetius, I remember the days when you held up the Hun as a people to be admired. Are you playing both sides against the middle, as usual? Or are you simply making a last grab for power before it’s too late? Be damned to you, you turncoat. Even in Greek, your actions sound despicable.’

Then Cleoxenes swept into Aetius’s disordered tent with the assumed confidence of a king.

MYRDDION’S CHART OF THE JOURNEY FROM CHÂLONS TO MASSILIA

CHAPTER IX

THE ENDLESS ROAD

Urgency spurred Myrddion into action.

True to his agreement with Cleoxenes, he ordered Finn Truthteller, Rhedyn and Brangaine to begin packing up the larger of the tents and prepare for an immediate night departure. As Cadoc had finished stitching Bridie’s leg and covered the wound with radish paste and salve to prevent infection, he enlisted his long-suffering apprentice’s help in moving the last of the patients out of the smaller tent.

Although the night was well advanced, humidity rendered the air thick and muggy, and Myrddion and his companions sweated in the sullen heat. Somewhere far away, a distant rumble of thunder spoke of approaching storms. The healer watched moths flutter towards the oil lamp, drawn by the flame, until their wings caught alight and they perished in sudden little flashes of golden light.

‘We must be gone before dawn or we will all be dead. I wish we’d never left Britain.’

Cadoc, returning from some errand of his own in time to hear the heartfelt murmur, longed to reply with the trite response of ‘I told you so’, but a hint of unshed tears in Myrddion’s voice stilled his tongue. The boy was exhausted and carried loads far heavier than someone his age should be forced to bear.

‘Well, we did leave, master, so let’s shake the dust of this cursed place off our clothes and our feet as quickly as possible.’ He picked up a basket of bandages and clean rags. ‘Where are we going?’

Myrddion was busy putting bunches of drying herbs into a rush container. In his haste and upset, he jammed the woven lid into place with more force than was necessary, and Cadoc heard several of the dried rush stems snap.

‘To Rome. We’ll travel by way of Gaul and much of Italia.’

‘But that’ll take months. Or even a year, if the weather’s bad,’ Cadoc protested. ‘Why not head back north where life is safer?’

‘Gaul virtually belongs to Aetius and no part of it, especially the north, is free of the weight of his hand. The general would catch us and have us killed long before we reached Parigi. No, Lord Cleoxenes is right. We must head south, and away from Aetius’s influence, at best speed. No doubt he will want to reach Ravenna without delay, but with luck his treasure will slow him down and give us time to escape.’

A glow of light flashed along the ridgeline, and Myrddion registered that a storm was coming closer, although there was still a short interval between the lightning and the roll of thunder. The smothering heat seemed to increase, as the eerie silence that heralds a storm enfolded the plain in a thick, dry blanket.

‘Please, master, promise me we won’t be using a ship to take us to this Italia. I couldn’t stand another long sea voyage.’

‘You’re in luck, Cadoc. Lord Cleoxenes has insisted we travel the whole way by wagon. Perhaps we can purloin some extra horses. Heaven knows there are many abandoned beasts running wild at the moment.’

Cadoc grinned in the darkness. ‘I’ll steal as many horses as we need, as long as we can stay away from the sea. Another team would speed our journey, especially if we men find mounts to ride. Less weight to pull.’

‘Then hop to it, Cadoc. But don’t get caught . . . please? I doubt the Romans will even realise that half a dozen beasts are missing. If you want saddles, steal some from Attila’s infernal tower.’

Cadoc almost cackled with glee. The possibility of stealing from the Romans was a bonus, especially in conjunction with his relief at leaving the plain and removing from the stink and the danger of the field hospital. The gods would forgive any theft in these circumstances. With no hope of any payment for their services and with the general’s pointed enmity, escape from the plain and its environs couldn’t come soon enough for him.

‘I’ll fetch Finn so we can get started on our little expedition at once,’ he said, a smile animating his face. ‘Can you finish here once the tent is packed? I’ve procured some smaller tents used by the soldiers for our patients, few as they are, and there are about a dozen women who have agreed to care for them until Cleoxenes repatriates them to Châlons.’

‘I know we must take to our heels and run, but it seems wrong to leave sick men behind,’ Myrddion said.

‘Please, master? Cleoxenes has organised it all. Where do you think I obtained the tents?’

Myrddion shot his apprentice a look of friendly scorn, then sighed with relief as Cadoc set about dismantling the leather tent into a series of folded sections that he unlaced as he went. In a trice, the tent posts were taken to pieces and packed into the supply wagon, quickly followed by the sections of the larger tent, rolled into manageable packs and lashed together with straps constructed for the purpose. Then, with a spring in his step and a wide grin on his scarred face, Cadoc waylaid Finn as he was packing a box of ointments and whispered to the other apprentice with much gesticulation before both men slipped away into the darkness.

Myrddion, Rhedyn and Brangaine settled the few remaining patients into their new quarters with a smooth economy of
movement, assuring them that they would be looked after until they were well again. When their task was almost completed, Myrddion asked the two widows to make Bridie comfortable in the second wagon with little Willa nestled beside her.