skin, scored with the black lines and dots of tattoos. Ten of them carried spears; the others bore the heavy war-axes that had so efficiently shattered the Devetians’ wooden shields that morning. Some hundred yards downhill they paused to argue among themselves, pushing each other in their eagerness to be the first to attack.
‘Gallo, run!’ Rhodorix snarled. ‘Get out of here now!’
‘I won’t.’ The young priest stepped forward and raised his staff to the sky. ‘I’ll beg Bel’s help and try to curse them.’
‘A load of horseshit would do us more good than that.’
Galerinos ignored him and took another step forward. He stared straight at the enemy and began to chant, a low rumble of sound at first, then louder and louder. His words came punctuated with deep breaths, and every breath seemed to draw power from the very air around him. Each curse vibrated like a swarm of angry wasps as it streamed toward the enemy below. Rhodorix had never heard such a sound out of any man’s mouth. He felt himself turn cold as the chant rose and fell. More to the point, their enemies seemed as transfixed as he. They stood and listened, weapons slack in their hands as Galerinos cursed them, their women, their offspring, their clans, their future offspring, their crops, their herds, and anything else they might touch or cherish.
With one last bellow of sound, Galerinos cried out, ‘Begone!’ and swung his staff down to point straight at them. All of the ill luck of the curse sprang out at them – and a good deal more. With a hiss and crackle like lightning from a clear sky, blue fire leapt from the staff in a long sizzling bolt and struck among them. They screamed, began to back away, screamed again as a further shower of blue flames burst out of the staff and struck. One man fell backward, writhing and foaming at the mouth. Two others grabbed him, but he continued to twitch and foam. All at once the enemy band broke. They ran this way and that, for a brief moment hysterical and leaderless, then turned and began to race downhill, howling as they ran. A last bolt of blue fire followed them.
Galerinos stood staring, his mouth half-open, his eyes stunned.
‘What did you do?’ Rhodorix grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘How did you do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What – you have to know!’
‘The curse never worked like that before! Back in the homeland, I mean.’ Galerinos paused to gasp for breath. ‘You heard me. I asked the god to send ill-luck down upon them, and from the look of things, I’d say he did.’
Laughter sounded behind them, an odd laugh, more like the plucking of a cithara’s strings than a sound made by a throat. Rhodorix spun around. The strangest man he’d ever seen stood leaning against a tree trunk and smiling at them. A slender fellow, he had yellow hair as bright as the paint on a Rhwmani standard, and his lips were a paint-pot red as well, while his eyes gleamed sky blue. His ears, however, were the strangest feature of all, long and furled like lily buds.
‘I doubt if your god had anything to do with those bolts of fire,’ the fellow said. ‘You know sorcery, don’t you?’
‘What?’ Gallo gaped at him like a dolt. ‘But that’s unclean!’
‘Sorcery such as my friend Caswallinos studies is not unclean.’ He pried himself off the tree trunk and walked over. ‘My name, by the by, is Evandar.’
Rhodorix dropped to his knees. ‘Forgive my brother, Mighty One,’ he said. ‘He can’t kneel before you. He’s badly hurt.’
‘So I see,’ Evandar said to him, then turned back to Galerinos. ‘Your master, in fact, that very same Caswallinos, asked if I might find you for him. Come walk with me.’
Galerinos obeyed, striding uphill to join the being that everyone in the migration of the Devetii assumed was a god. Together they moved a few paces off. As Rhodorix got up to keep a watch downhill, he felt the air turn cool around him. He glanced up and saw a mist forming in the sky, a strange opalescent cloud shot through with pale lavender gleams and glints. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.
‘Ye gods!’ Gerontos said abruptly. ‘They’re gone!’
Rhodorix spun around to look where his brother pointed. Sure enough, Evandar and Galerinos both had vanished. As he watched, the cloud of peculiar mist began to shrink into a swirl of grey and lavender. In a heartbeat it had disappeared as well. Rhodorix tried to speak, then merely shook his head in bafflement.
‘Do you think Gallo will bring us back some aid?’ Gerontos said.
‘I hope so,’ Rhodorix said. ‘I’d think so.’ Yet he felt that he lied. Why would the clan care about two shamed men such as themselves? Especially me, he thought, I’m the one who led us right into the trap.
With a curse and a groan of pain, Gerontos let himself slide down against the boulder until he sat upon the ground. Rhodorix sat down next to him and prayed that the gods would allow his clan to take mercy on his brother.
To Galerinos it seemed as if he and Evandar had walked but a few feet away. The god, as he thought of the being next to him, paused and turned to face him.
‘Your master worried when you lads didn’t come back,’ Evandar said. ‘He and some of the other men found that battlefield, if you can call it that. A slaughter yard, more like.’
‘So it was,’ Galerinos said. ‘I’m surprised that any of us got away.’
‘They assumed you’d been taken prisoner, so I said I’d fetch you back.’
‘You have my humble thanks.’ Galerinos glanced around and saw nothing but mist all around them. ‘Where are the other two?’
‘Back where I left them. I told Casso that I’d bring you back. He said naught about your friends.’
‘I can’t desert them!’
‘You already have.’ Evandar grinned with the wide-eyed innocence of a small child and pointed off in the distance.
Galerinos spun around to look downhill. The mist was lifting, revealing a clear view of the camp, only some five hundred yards away. Horses, wagons, people – they spread out in a dusty spiral on the plain, desolate except for grass, crisping in the autumn heat, and a few straggly trees. A faint umbrella of brown dust hung in the air above the conjoint tribes of the Devetii, refugees from the Rhwmani wars.
Out in the open grass stood Caswallinos, his hands on his hips, his staff caught between his side and the crook of his left elbow. For someone so blessed by divine power, he was an unprepossessing fellow, almost as skinny as his staff and bald except for a fuzz of grey stubble round the back of his skull. As they hurried down to join him, Galerinos was expecting his master to kneel before the god. Instead, the old man merely smiled and bobbed his head in Evandar’s direction.
‘My humble thanks for returning this stray colt to me,’ Caswallinos said. ‘I take it the other lads are all dead.’
‘Two were still alive last I saw them,’ Evandar said.
‘Then where are they?’
‘Still up on the mountain. They were wearing iron, and so I left them there.’
Caswallinos sighed and ran a hand over his face as if he were profoundly
