Votan and Other Novels (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) by John James Page B

again. So he told you Scapellus was coming back … Funny thing, though …’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Old Occa had it from a friend in the Legion headquarters, he wouldn’t tell Aristarchos, you know how these legionaries like to spite the cavalry. Scapellus
was
coming back at dawn, after all. I wonder if Aristarchos got up in time. I think it’s dawn now. What about breakfast? I think we’ve got plenty of bacon.’
    That day we took it in turns to sit on the kit-bags outside the hut, while turn and turn about we dug a hole in the hut floor, four feet deep, with our knives and our bleeding fingers. There we buried the silver-bags. We stacked our firewood in the hut too. We already had our plan, though we didn’t think there would be any need for it for days, if at all. But the other Cat men must have come up sooner than they were expected, because that evening, while Donar was going down to the stream to get some water, they rushed me.
    I looked up from where I was sitting, and there they were, a dozen of them, coming at me from the edge of the woods. I knew what to do. I picked a brand from our fire and threw it into the hut, and I shouted:
    ‘Run, Donar, run, hide!’ as loudly as I could.
    Then one of them came at me with a spear, and I got my sword out, it always would stick and need a tug when I tried it, but that evening it came clean out like a flash. The man with the spear must have met swordsmen before, and when I parried he slipped through my parry, and though he didn’t spit me the spear went through my tunic and tore my side. While I was trying not to scream and struggling to get back into the on guard position, someone else must have knocked me on the head. Down I went.
    When I knew about things again I just lay still with my eyesshut. After a bit I could open my eyes without moving. That wasn’t caution. After you’ve been knocked out you don’t want to do anything but lie still for a long time. And you feel so sick. There was a lot of noise. They were arguing over where the silver had gone. They couldn’t look in the hut till the fire died down, and anyway, simple men that they were, they couldn’t believe that we’d burn the hut with silver inside. I could see a pair of puttees and very worn shoes near my face. This man was talking.
    ‘We’ve only got one of them. If we wait around here too long we’ll have Occa and half his clan here after us—’
    ‘We’ve got his sword,’ said somebody.
    ‘Aye, good sword that.’
    ‘The King will want that.’
    The first man managed to make himself heard again.
    ‘We’ll wake this one up and make him tell us where the silver is.’
    ‘Wake him? Make him? How do you do that?’
    ‘How do you think? A bit of fun, that’ll be.’
    ‘A bit of fun, and them two listening out there?’
    ‘It’ll bring them back.’
    ‘Them, and who else with them? We’re not risking that.’
    There seemed to be, to say the least, a division of authority in this band.
    Someone new put in, the intellectual of the group obviously, with a compromise.
    ‘Take him somewhere else and have your fun there. Don’t do it where we can hear it.’
    They brought a horse up, and somebody picked me up bodily, grey cloak and all, and slung me across the crupper in front of the rider.
    ‘D’you want his spear?’
    ‘Of course. I stuck him with it, didn’t I?’
    ‘They say Donar put his name on it. Stands to reason, don’t it, if your name’s on it, it’ll get you.’
    ‘I’ll have his bag, too. The brown one, that’s what he was carrying.’
    The horse laboured under the load. My wound had begun to clot, but heaving me on to the animal’s back had opened it again.The horse smelt the blood and jibbed, and the jerking about made the wound hurt more, and my head throbbed. As the pain tightened, I went out again.
    I opened my eyes on the pale light of dawn. Everything was pain – my head, my side. I saw life through a mist of pain. Carefully through my pain I felt myself