Gaius’s arm began to shake as muscles that had never quite recovered from the old wound where the boar stake had gone into his shoulder began to give way. Panic tapped his last reserves of energy, and his fingers closed on the other man’s throat. For a moment they heaved, the dagger digging uselessly into his armor. Then all the fight went out of the other man and he lay still.
Shaking, Gaius pulled himself upright and plucked the weapon from his enemy’s nerveless fingers. He bent over to finish the job he had begun and found himself staring into Cynric’s dazed eyes.
“Don’t move!” he said in British, and the other stilled. Gaius looked quickly around him. “I can save you — they’re beginning to take hostages. Will you surrender to me now?”
“Roman.” Cynric spat, but weakly. “I should have left you in the boar pit!” It was then that Gaius realized the other man had recognized him as well. “Better for me . . .and for Eilan!”
“You have as much Roman blood as I do!” Guilt added venom to Gaius’s reply.
“Your mother sold her honor! Mine died!”
Gaius found himself pushing down on the blade, and at the last moment realized that was what Cynric wanted him to do.
“You saved my life once. Now I give you yours, and Hades take your damned British pride! Surrender, and another day you can fight me.” He knew this was foolish; even lying in his blood Cynric looked dangerous. But saving him was the only thing he could do for Eilan.
“You win . . .” Cynric’s head fell back in exhaustion, and Gaius saw new blood seeping from the gashes on his arms and thighs, “. . . today . . .” Their eyes met, and Gaius saw the hatred still burning in his eyes. “But one day you will pay . . .” He fell silent as the wagon that was picking up the wounded creaked towards them.
Gaius watched two battered legionaries load him in with the others, his satisfaction in the Roman victory dissipating as he realized that he had lost his friend as surely as if he had seen Cynric die before his own eyes.
With darkness Agricola called off the pursuit, not wishing to risk his men on unfamiliar ground. But for the Caledonians who survived it was not yet over. Far into the night the Romans could hear women calling as they searched the battlefield. Over the next few days returning scouts reported an ever-widening circle of devastation. The land that had once supported a thriving people was now a silent world in which the bodies of women and children killed by their own men to save them from slavery gazed blankly at the heavens, and the smoke of burned housesteads darkened the weeping sky.
When the numbers were finally tallied it was estimated that wounds or battle had accounted for ten thousand of the enemy; while only three hundred and sixty Romans died.
As Gaius rode along the column of men marching south to winter quarters, he remembered the words of Calgacus: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles they call Empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
Certainly the North was peaceful now, the last hopes for British freedom as dead as the men who had defended it. It was this, more than the fact that the despatches he carried included a very flattering description of his own conduct on the battlefield, that made Gaius realize that he must become entirely a Roman now
Nineteen
Despite Agricola’s hopes, the pacification of the North was not to be neatly accomplished with a single battle. And though the people of Rome danced in the streets when the triumphant account of Mons Graupius was proclaimed, a great deal remained to be done to secure the victory. The despatches that Gaius bore southward included an order for him to return as soon as his wounds were healed, for the Governor was not inclined to let so useful a young man go to waste in Londinium.
One of Gaius’s assignments was to visit the compound where they were keeping the more important prisoners. Cynric was still there, scarred and embittered, but alive, and grimly triumphant that Calgacus had not been captured to grace Agricola’s triumph in Rome. Indeed, no one seemed to know what had happened to the British leader. There were rumors that the Druid Bendeigid was hiding out in the hills.