It was around this time that Arian began to fade. She ate like a sparrow, and the weight dropped from her. Even Bane could no longer make her smile.
Bane pulled his blanket around him and rolled to his side, resting his head on his saddle. He heard Banouin’s soft footfalls as he entered the cave, but kept his eyes closed.
I will see you safely to Stone, he thought, and when the walls of the city are in sight I will say farewell.
The wagon trundled on through the driving rain, the two weary horses moving slowly, heads down against the wind. The driver sat huddled below the canvas canopy, his right hand holding the reins, his left arm round the shoulders of the teenage girl beside him.
Despite the canopy the rain had soaked them both, and the girl shivered. ‘How long, Father?’ she asked.
‘According to the map we’re about a mile from the bridge,’ the old man told her. ‘After that maybe five miles. We should be there before dusk.’
He smiled as he said it. The sky was so dark now it already felt like night. Appius lifted his whip and cracked it over the heads of the team. They surged into the traces and the wagon picked up speed. His daughter snuggled in close. He patted her back and, reaching over, tugged her hood forward to try to protect her from the rain. The hood was already drenched. She looked up at him and smiled. His heart leapt. So like her mother, he thought. So beautiful.
Appius looked back at what the map indicated was a road. The thought made him shake his head in frustration. Road? It was a wide, muddy track, pitted and irregular, and his wagon was trundling along in the deep grooves made by other lumbering vehicles. Only an idiot or a barbarian could call this a road. Back in Stone there were roads! Roads of well-laid stone over gravel and sand.
He sighed. Back in Stone there were also the Crimson Priests, the Blood Trials, the burnings. The wind died down, and the rain began to ease. No longer did it lash into their faces, but now pattered against the canopy above their heads. To the west the sun broke through the clouds. Appius pushed back his hood, exposing his close-cropped white hair.
Lia looked up at him and smiled. ‘Everything looks so wonderful when the sun shines,’ she said.
‘What would look wonderful right now is a bathhouse, with steam rising from perfumed water,’ he said. ‘And then a massage, and a long sleep.’
‘Barus said the town was quite civilized. There should be a bathhouse.’
‘Just so long as there’s no temple,’ he said, his good humour fading.
‘The priests have not crossed the water,’ she said. ‘But they will.’ Lia leaned back and stretched, removing her hooded cloak and shaking the water from it. He glanced at her and felt immediately renewed and revived. Her dark hair was cut short, after the latest fashion in Stone, and it emphasized the extraordinary beauty of her features, her large, dark eyes, and the radiance of her smile. He wondered if he was merely seeing her with a father’s eye, but then recalled the effect she had on his young officers. Most were struck dumb in her presence. Maybe here, he thought, at this arse end of the empire, she will put aside the stupidities her mother instilled in her. Then, after a reasonable period, they could return to Stone and take up their positions in respectable society. Lia could marry a man she loved and know true happiness. And he could sit in the sunshine and watch his grandchildren grow.
I should live so long, he thought miserably. His back ached, and he could feel his knee joints swelling with the wet and the cold. Fifty years a soldier, marching in all weathers, sleeping on cold ground. It is a marvel I can walk at all, he thought.
But never in his worst nightmares did he expect to end his days across the water, in the very land that had seen the destruction of a Stone army. He shivered at the memory. Of all the participants in that reckless exercise Appius alone had emerged with credit, organizing his Panther into a fighting retreat to the safety of the previous night’s fortified camp. Even then he had lost half his men.