Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby
***
They didn't get to Clevsin the next day. Ridiculous, Master thought; such a short distance a day of forced march would have got them there, without horses, but the Vipienas were tired and weak, and he daren't push them; and they'd wasted time taking smaller tracks, and once or twice getting lost among stunted trees. They'd got into rough country where every valley turned into a ravine, where ravines led them up to nearly impassable walls of rock, where Velzna's immense rock seemed to have been swallowed up in the wallowing humps of the landscape, and haze obscured the distance, and at times only the sun kept them heading northwards.
It wasn't hard country – the hills were low, the woods scanty – but the valleys twisted and turned and betrayed your sense of orientation, and streambeds cut sharply into the earth and had to be climbed down into and scrambled up from. While if you looked down from a hill you'd have thought it a fine and easy land, green and good to look on, when you were actually down there in the middle of it, tree roots tripped you, sudden rocky spurs cut you off from the next valley, marshy bottoms proved impassable (though you didn't find out till you'd already nearly gone too far, and got wet up to the waist by falling in one of the mud wallows or hidden sinkholes).
Camitlnas was still whingeing about the food. A handful of fried grain, again – and now it was soggier than ever, almost disintegrating into rancid mush.
"It keeps," Larth Ulthes said. "Raw grain doesn't. Shut up and eat it, or go hungry; I don't care which, but just shut up."
If they'd had more time they might have got pemmican, or fruit leathers full of honey; bu as it was, Larth had grabbed whatever he could in short order, and this was it.
Towards noon they heard horses coming towards them. A dozen or so, from the sound.
"That'll be a border patrol from Clevsin," Larth said, and was all for spurring on to meet them; but Caile frowned.
"How do we know?" he said; and Master ordered the men away from the track, down a ravine that twisted as it descended, so that they were hidden from view.
"Unsaddle the horses," he said, "and let them loose."
Avle and Camitlnas glared at him, but no one disputed the order; they couldn't afford a horse's restless whinny to attract attention, and bring the riders down upon them.
"Camitlnas: you go and talk to them. You have the local accent."
"Bit rusty."
"Any of us, they'll know exactly where we're from. You might get away with it. Find out what you can. Call us out if it's safe; if not, keep going down the track. Don't come back to us."
Camitlnas nodded. For all his complaints he knew how to obey orders when he had to.
"What about the horses?"
"We must be close to Clevsin. We don't need them. The worst that can happen is we lose the horses. Keep them, we might lose our lives. Easy choice."
Camitlnas took a roundabout route to the track, climbing to the top of the ravine and skirting it through woods, to come out on the track a little further down. That was the good thing about working with soldiers who'd known you for decades, Master thought; you didn't have to tell them things like that. They knew their fieldcraft; not to leave tracks, not to lead a possible enemy to theircomrades. It was one reason he put up with Camitlnas' griping. (The pity was that over the years, so many of those trustworthy soldiers died – sometimes in action, sometimes from the blind malignancy of fate or malaria; and then you had to train new ones, so you were always behind, always trying to replace the irreplaceable.)
They waited. Once the rustle and crackle of Camitlnas' progress through the brush had died away, there was no sound but the wind in the trees and, from time to time, the groan of a great tree's trunk bending under its own weight. No birdsong, which Master realised was a sure sign of their presence; he hoped the riders on the road would not be acute enough to notice that absence. No call from Camitlnas.
"Fuck this," Master muttered after a while. "He's been gone too long."
"You think they've got him?"
"We'd have heard something. I want to know what's going on."
Then they did hear something; the track was closer than they'd thought – the turn in the ravine was a sharp one. Or perhaps it was a trick of the land, an echo of the rock face, like the strange property of some caves, where you could whisper in one corner and someone at the other end of the cave would hear you as clearly as if you were declaiming to a packed theatre. (And if it was a trick of the land, would their own voices echo as clearly to the riders on the track?)
"Clevsin's over the next rise," a voice was saying. "It's an easy track. How could you get lost?"
"Horses ran away." That was Camitlnas, his diction thickened just a little, so that he sounded both local, and a bit slow. It was a clever lie – if any of the horses made their way back to the track, he could claim them as his own.
"You didn't hobble them?"
"Must have tied it wrong, I reckon," said one of the others. "He looks stupid enough to."
"I know that accent," Caile whispered.
"Fuck," said Larth. "I'm going to sneeze."
"You're not," muttered Servius, covering Larth's nose and mouth with the palm of one hand. "I'll kill you if I have to."
"Don't you hear that nasal note?"
Servius felt Larth's jaws moving as if to bite him; he clamped his hand down hard, crushing Larth's lips into his teeth.
"Latin. Definitely a latin."
"Shit."
Larth was going limp; he hadn't sneezed, hadn't breathed, either. Master relaxed his grip a little; felt Larth's shoulders twitch, as if a sneeze was coming, and clamped down again, and as he did so, heard the sudden clatter of hooves on the track. They were riding off, whoever they were, making enough noise that they'd hear nothing else. Master unclamped his hand; and Larth finally, noisily, violently, sneezed.
And the horsemen were riding south, away from Clevsin; towards Rome.
"That's a fly in the winecup," Caile said. "You think they got to Clevsin before us? Or just a coincidence?"
There was no way to tell.