Frontier Wolf Read online

  ‘I suppose the whole fort knows,’ Alexios said, miserably.

  ‘Considering the detailed knowledge of their officers’ most private affairs possessed by all self-respecting troops, there can be no doubt of that,’ Gavros nodded. ‘That is why we are having a full-dress take-over parade tomorrow morning, and you are going to walk up and down the ranks with me and look every one of them straight in the eye as though you didn’t give a broken sandal strap.’

  Alexios looked back into the face of the older man. It was a face that had been used hard by life and wild weather; and there was wisdom in it.

  ‘The Tribes, too?’ He wanted to know to the full what he had to handle.

  ‘Not from the troops, anyway. The Frontier Wolves deal with their own affairs. They may give you a hard time of it themselves, until and unless you earn in their eyes the right to command them – that is the lot of every new Commander. But they’ll not let outsiders in on the game.’

  And he was gone into the inner sleeping chamber, the heavy curtain swinging across behind him.

  Left alone, Alexios pulled his leather tunic over his head, then sat down on the makeshift sleeping bench to untie the cross-gartering of his breeks. But after a few moments he let his hands fall idle across his knees, and sat staring at the opposite wall.

  ‘They may make some kind of man of you – if they don’t arrange for you to have a fatal accident instead,’ said Uncle Marius’s voice in his memory. It would be humiliating, the last failure, to be murdered by one’s own men. Otherwise, he thought, he did not much care. Not as much as he cared about and dreaded what he was going to have to face in the morning anyway.

  But in the morning, he walked beside Ducenarius Gavros up and down the ranks of the Third Ordo, Frontier Wolves, drawn up with their mounts on the practice ground outside the fort, and looked every man of them straight in the eye as though he didn’t give a broken sandal strap.

  He had seen the gate guard and a few of them scattered about the fort when he rode in the evening before. But he never forgot the first full sight of his new command. The British Auxiliaries at Abusina had been a fairly shaggy lot, but they had borne some sort of resemblance to Roman soldiers. These, each standing with an arm through the bridle of his rough-coated pony, seemed to belong to another world. Looking along the lines, Alexios saw men, long and rangy for the most part, clad in greasy and weatherworn leather tunics and cross-gartered breeks, even their iron-bound caps three-parts hidden under the snarling head of the wolfskin cloak each man wore pulled forward over it. Nothing to suggest the Eagles about them at all, save the straightness of the lines themselves, and here and there a belt buckle or a long-service bracelet.

  They stood easily, feet a little apart, and looked back at him out of hard-bitten wind-burned faces, rogues’ faces, some of them, cautious or reckless, cunning or blank, all of them careful to give nothing away. But in them all, binding them together, something that was different from the oneness of other army units. Maybe it was the oneness of the wolf-pack. Alexios did not know. He only knew that he was shut out from it, and that he felt curiously naked to the thin salt-scented wind off the Bodotria Estuary that set the red woollen fly-whisks swinging from the ponies’ bridles and parted their manes and tails and the harsh grey hairs of the wolfskin cloaks, and lifted out the thin vivid sleeve of emerald silk that formed the body of the Ordo’s dragon standard.

  He gave his shoulders that small betraying jerk, and walked on, up one line and down the next, taking that first long steady look at his new command; while at the same time from behind their carefully unbetraying faces, the Third Ordo, Frontier Scouts, took their first long steady look at their new Commander.

  They saw a dark slight young man, with thick black brows that almost met across an arrogant nose, and just above their meeting place faintly raised on the olive skin, the brand of the Raven Degree of Mithras; a grey, haughty stare, a boy’s mouth that had not yet firmed into a man’s. The Dux’s cub. They knew – their old Commander had been right – how and why he came to be there; and what they saw did not look to them promising. But more than one of them had murky patches on their own past records, and for the present they were prepared to withhold judgement . . .

  It was over at last. The horse-holders brought up the two waiting ponies; and when, following Ducenarius Gavros, Alexios had swung into the saddle, he heard the barked orders of the centenarii, and watched the single well-trained movement as two hundred men set their hands on their ponies’ withers and made their own steed-leap. Another order, and they moved off at a hand-canter towards the Praetorian gate. At their head, the standard-bearer raised high the Ordo Dragon on its lance-shaft, and the wind of their going, flowing in through the snarling fantastic mask of bronze and silver wires that fomed the head, filled the vivid silken sleeve so that it streamed out behind like an emerald flame, the one point of brilliant colour in all that scene of dark moorland hues.

  The practice ground emptied like a cup, left to the thin salt-scented wind and the gulls crying over the shining mud flats left by the ebbtide.

  ‘That was well done,’ said Julius Gavros quietly, beside him, as they heeled their own mounts into a walk and headed back the same way.

  3 The Hall of Ferradach Dhu

  ALEXIOS HAD VAGUELY expected that the rest of the day would be taken up with the office work of the hand-over. But ‘First things first,’ said Julius Gavros. ‘This morning I have shown you and the Ordo to each other, now you come with me to make your salute to Ferradach Dhu.’

  ‘Ferradach Dhu?’

  ‘Clan Chieftain of the Votadini in these parts.’

  ‘In the town here?’ Alexios had glimpsed straight streets and stone walls as he rode in; the corner of a colonnade, a memorial arch rising above the warm huddle of bracken-thatched roofs; enough to suggest more than the turf-walled chaos of tradesmen’s booths and wine-shops and the bothies where the garrison kept their women and their hunting dogs, that always sprang up in the lee of any strong-post of Rome.

  ‘Not Ferradach Dhu. The old Eagle holds to his own eyrie.’

  ‘Ah – over that way.’ Alexios jerked a thumb eastward in the direction of the vast wave-break of rock maybe an hour’s march away that he had seen yesterday from the road. Certainly it had the look of an eagle’s eyrie, brooding there above the moors.

  Gavros shook his head, rubbing up the buckle of his sword-belt. ‘That’s the old strong-point of the High King. The War-Capital. There’s no one there in time of peace, and the High King rules the Clans of the Votadini from Traprain Law, far over to the south-east.’

  So just short of noon, with a small escort riding behind them, they clattered out through the West gate, the Dextra gate, and took the steep track plunging to the river that came down from the high moors to join the Bodotria just below the fort.

  The wind funnelling up the river gorge made bluish zigzag partings in the wolfskin cloak which Julius Gavros wore, like his men, with its snarling prick-eared head pulled forward over his war-cap. And looking, Alexios saw that it was mounted on the regulation dark green military cloak such as he himself was wearing. Was that one of the things one did? One of the things that made one a Frontier Wolf, officers and men alike?

  Gavros glanced round and caught him looking. ‘There’s good sense in it,’ he said, as though Alexios had spoken aloud. ‘Good against the north wind; and the head over one’s own war-cap helps to break up the outline against a hillside.’

  ‘But for all that, I take it it’s not army issue,’ Alexios said.

  ‘The hide of our brothers? No. Every man of the Numerus kills his own wolf – with spear or dagger of course, not the bow. Just the one wolf, and never another except in self defence or dire need of a new cloak. Boar or stag or bear are for hunting, yes, but not our four-footed brothers. It’s the custom of the Pack.’ Gavros’s leathery face cracked into a grin. ‘The Frontier Scouts may be something short on spit and polish, but they have as many customs as the Praetorians, and al
l of them just as jealously guarded.’

  Just where the track dipped to the paved ford below the ponies’ watering pool, a tall stone stood up, leaning a little, in the wayside grass. Dark, smooth, with somehow the look about it of having passed through fire; the look too of being very old, older than anything else in that countryside. As they trotted by, Gavros leaned from his saddle and lightly touched the smooth worn crest in passing. And Alexios, glancing round for another view of the thing, saw the leader of the escort echo the gesture, and the man behind him . . .

  He looked again at Gavros, but the Ducenarius was staring straight between his pony’s ears. Another custom of the Pack, he supposed, and clearly one that you did not ask about. Ah well, there’d be time for finding out about such things later – too much time, maybe. So much time that childish things became important because they helped to fill it up a little. A small cold shiver took him between the shoulders; the kind of shiver out of nowhere that makes men laugh and say that a grey goose is flying over their graves.

  They splashed across the ford, and climbed up through the alder and hazel scrub that furred the far side of the river gorge, and headed westward. On their left for a while there was more crop-land, fallow and stubble flickered over by clouds of green plover; on their right the grey waters of the estuary, narrowing as they went, and the sullen darkness of the Caledonian hills beyond; wild country, barbarian country, beyond all frontiers.

  Gavros pointed along the track. ‘This is the road to Credigone – what remains of it; and over beyond, what remains of the old Northern Wall.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem as though it sees much traffic,’ Alexios said, looking down at the rutted track and the hill turf that had spread half across the way.

  ‘The Frontier Wolves have not much use for roads.’ Gavros said, ‘and the Credigone garrison moved out when the world was young. Nothing but foxes to lair up there now; and the Wall is not much more than a mark on men’s minds. It is still a kind of frontier, but for long stretches you would never know it was there at all save for an outcropping bank here and there, with a tangle of hawthorn and bramble in the ditch below it.’

  In a short while they left the road and turned away south-westward leaving the Bodotria behind them; leaving also, all traces of farmed land. Soon the track they followed dwindled to no more than the faint trace left by feet and hooves following by custom the same line from one point to another. They climbed steadily, the faint track dipping from time to time into small deep valleys choked up with hazel woods, but always lifting again towards the high moors. The black tide of last summer’s heather and the white tufted bog-grass brushed about the ponies’ legs. Once, three ravens flapped up, laden, from the carcass of a foundered deer, as they passed by. Once, two horsemen showed up for a moment on the crest of a nearby ridge, then dropped out of sight below the skyline. Otherwise nothing moved in the emptiness save for the grey drift of cloud that trailed its own shadows and stray rags of sunshine across the hills. And always, Alexios thought, the desolation breathing between one’s shoulder-blades. Even more than at his first sight of the German forests, he felt that here indeed he had come to the uttermost end of the earth. But maybe that was because the German forests had not been without a glimmer of hope between the trees.

  ‘Of course you will understand,’ said Ducenarius Gavros after a while, ‘that when on patrol, we do not in the general way of things head straight across country getting ourselves skylined on the crest of every ridge.’

  Alexios came back to himself. ‘I imagine it’s a question of good manners. This is a courtesy visit.’

  Gavros looked round at him. ‘I begin to have hopes of you.’

  ‘My thanks,’ Alexios said gravely. ‘Why especially Ferradach Dhu? There must be many clan chieftains of the Votadini.’

  ‘There are. And you’ll meet most of the nearer ones, in one way or another, as time goes by. Ferradach Dhu because Castellum stands on his Clan Territory which runs almost to the foot of the Fortress Rock. It is good to be on friendly terms with the man in whose hunting runs one eats and sleeps.’

  They rode on some way in silence; and then Alexios asked, ‘How friendly are the tribes – ah, I know that at one time all this was a full-blown Roman province, but now –’ he glanced round him at the desolation, ‘one wonders?’

  ‘The Votadini? How long is a length of picket rope?’ Gavros had opened up a little gap between themselves and the following escort, and it came to Alexios that probably this was the kind of talk that passed between incoming and outgoing commanders of irregular troops the length and breadth of the Empire.

  ‘We live very close to the Tribes,’ Gavros was saying. ‘It has been like that for more than a hundred years up here. We’re bound together by the threat of the Caledoni – the Picts, the Painted People from the North. It’s chiefly to keep them from jumping the Old Wall that the Frontier Scouts are here; and to keep an eye open for the Attacotti sea-raiders from Hibernia. And for most of that time the friendship has held well enough, save for the odd cattle raid and a bit of unrest after a bad harvest. There’s kinship between us, of course; half our men are locally recruited – younger sons for the most part – and the rest are mostly Dalriads from the north-west over beyond the Wall, close kin to the Attacotti. Odd, that, when you come to think of it.’

  ‘Dangerous too, surely, if ever there was trouble,’ said Alexios. ‘Wasn’t that why we never used to have auxiliaries serving in their own province?’

  ‘Divided loyalties? The Frontier Wolves bring their loyalties with them, and once they have joined the Family, that’s it, and if need be they’ll fight to the death against their own blood kin. And yet the kinship does remain. Of friendship, I’m not so sure. Friendship doesn’t always come into it with brothers. Love or hate, yes, sometimes both together; not always friendship. Do you know?’

  ‘I have no brothers,’ Alexios said.

  ‘You’ll learn, as time goes on. But don’t be in a hurry to think you know it all. The Frontier Wolves are not the Third Britannica that you knew at Abusina, and they aren’t the Emperor’s bodyguard. They take a good deal of knowing. But they’re worth it.’

  ‘You must hate handing them over to me,’ Alexios said.

  ‘I’d hate handing them over to anyone. The Lord Mithras knows, I’ve waited long enough for promotion, but now it has come . . . Ah well, it’s only one step up, from the Third Ordo to the Second; from Castellum to Habitancum. Once I hoped for a bigger step up. I was young then. Now I’m glad I shall still be with the Numerus. Once a Frontier Wolf, always a Frontier Wolf, I reckon.’

  He turned the subject, which Alexios guessed had got too near to the quick. ‘The Arcani, now they’re a different sheaf of arrows. They’re much the same blood as the rest, but they have their own native officers. Druim is the son of a chieftain of the Damnoni, further to the west. They are the eyes and ears of the frontier forces; I expect you’ve heard that. Not a leaf falls for three days north of the Old Wall, or a man for that matter, that they don’t know about it. But sometimes I think that they ride too much alone, and listen to too many strange stories, and dream strange dreams. Dreams are generally dangerous.’

  As they crested the next ridge, he turned a little in the saddle and pointed. ‘We arrive.’

  Before them opened a shallow moorland valley, through which a small swift-running burn looped its way among birch and rowan to the dim blueness of far-off lowlands. And on the steep out-thrust shoulder of the opposite hillside, Alexios saw a huddle of turf-roofed and heather-thatched bothies huddled companionably within a thorn hedge, much like other villages that he had seen on his way north. And in the midst of it, the whale-backed shape that he guessed must be the Chieftain’s Hall, rearing itself above the rest; the faint blue waft of hearth-smoke trailing southward over all.

  They splashed through the ford, and headed up towards the village. Cattle and brood-mares with their foals still at heel were grazing on the cleared hillsides, and turned their head
s to watch them pass, then went on grazing. Within the thorn hedge, women spinning in bothy doorways or grinding the next day’s corn, glanced up as they rode by. Here and there a man was going about his own affairs, a bridle in his hand or a riding-rug on his shoulder. From the smithy came the bright ring of hammer on anvil. Ducks and piglets scattered quacking and squealing from under the ponies’ hooves, and a handful of children ran in their wake. It seemed a friendly enough place, this Rath of Ferradach Dhu. Also it seemed to be expecting them. Alexios remembered the two horsemen on the ridge. Seemingly the tribes also had their eyes-and-ears.

  They dismounted in the Chieftain’s forecourt, and leaving their horses to two of the escort, turned to the firelit shadows beyond the entrance of the Hall, which stood open for all comers according to the custom of wild places.

  A young warrior sitting cross-legged on the threshold with his spear across his knees, got up and stood aside, and they went in under the heather-thatch and the blue and saffron painted lintel beam.

  Ferradach Dhu sat beside the fire on the central hearth, also with a spear across his knees; a beautiful spear with a blade as long and fluidly shaped as a flame, which he was burnishing as man may fondle the head of a favourite hound. A huge man, he must have been once, Alexios thought. The wreck of a huge man now, the skin hanging dry and loose over the big gaunt bones, the crow-black hair that must have given him his name, showing now only a dark streak here and there among the grey, though he was no more than middling old. And he sat sunk in his chair, huddled deep in his magnificent deerskin robe, as though the blazing logs had no power to warm him from the autumn chill. But the eyes sunk far into his gaunt face were full and darkly brilliant as a falcon’s and the traces of old fierce laughter still clung about the corners of his mouth.

  He sat and watched them a moment in the doorway – then raised a huge bony hand from his spear. ‘Let you come in to the fire. The sun fades, and the wind strikes colder every fall-of-the-leaf since I took that boar tusk in my flank.’