Chapter 13 The Pursuit

The riders came up the ash river before dawn, in the grey hour when the dead light makes distance lie, and Maro read them from the ridge at the moment the sky began to turn. He came down the temple steps at a run that belonged to a man half his years, and he put his hand on Corvinus's shoulder without ceremony. "Riders," Maro said. "No banner, but they ride the track like they know it. Twenty, thirty. Mounted men and a spare led horse." He looked back up the valley. "They passed the watercourse an hour ago. They will be at the foot of the ridge by the time the light is full." Corvinus had chosen the ground the night before, lying awake on the temple steps with the plan in his head. The way up to the ridge was a defile, a cut in the old rock where the first builders had taken their stone and left a corridor wide enough for a cart and not much more, roofed in places by overhang and floored with years of ash that had packed to a frank grey. Horses could come up it two abreast at most, and a horse in a defile full of ash was a liability before the first spear was thrown. "We hold the defile," Corvinus said. "We are not going to give them the temple door, and we are not going to give them the column." He looked at the handful of men who had come up the steps behind Maro: Lysander, Publius, Sextus, the two soldiers of the garrison who had fought on the arena sand with the gladiator and learned to read a fight. "There are more riders than there are of us, and they have horses and they have daylight. So we do not fight them the way they are expecting to be fought." Demetrios had come up last, leaning on a pike he had carried out of the buried town because it was the only weapon left in the quartermaster's stores that answered to his name. The Greek had pitched his merchant's voice low and his eyes to the defile, and he said, "Tar. The stores have the jar we waterproofed the skins with. Ash and tar, laid in a band across the floor of the cut, where the overhang roofs it." He looked at Corvinus. "They will be smelling of the pit a heartbeat before they see the flame, and a horse will kill its own rider to climb out of the ash it sees burning at its feet. It is not a soldier's trick, Tribune. It is a merchant's trick. The mountain taught it to me, hauling wine through the ash country, and it never once failed to ruin a lazy mule." Corvinus looked at the defile and the overhang and the packed grey floor, and he nodded. It was not a soldier's trick. It was the kind of trick that won the ground when the soldiers were outnumbered and outclocked. They laid the band in the half-dark, threading the tar in the ash with a scoop and pressing it in with the flats of their hands until the floor of the cut drank it grey. Demetrios rolled the jar away downhill into the spoil with the stopper in. The three bows that the garrison possessed were posted on the heights above the cut, with the good arrows in the hands of the two men who could shoot. The rest went down into the defile behind the roof of the overhang, where the ash floor would take their weight and the roar would not give them away. The riders came up the cut at the full light of the morning, unhurried, in the manner of men who had ridden the pursuit of a garrison of clerks and expected a gallop at the tail of it. Corvinus watched them from the shadow of the overhang as the first pair of picked men came past his shoulder on the packed floor. A centurion of the household rode among them, in the armor of a man who had spent his life in the provinces, and at his belt hung a tablet that Corvinus had no need to read. Nothing happened for a long moment. Then the first horse stepped onto the band, and the animal's head came up, and a man of the garrison threw a spent torch from the foot of the wall, and the ash floor of the cut went up the way the Greek had said it would, in a single sliding sheet of pale flame that did not burn so much as it rose and clung, and the horses of the lead riders broke in that blind, white panic that a working animal finds in its mother's blood. The skirmishers came down out of the heights at the sound of it, the two bowmen holding the curve of the cut and the others with javelins and the flat of their swords, and Corvinus came through the smoke from the side and took the household centurion by the wrist before the man had cleared his own sword from the saddle. The centurion was a heavier man and a younger one, and he twisted for the fight the way a soldier twists, and Corvinus, who had fought the better swordsmen of this province in the mountains of the east and had lived because the better swordsman had been younger and the younger one had been careful, put the point of his plain sword through the man's throat and left him sitting in the ash with his tablet at his belt. The fight lasted the length of the defile and not much longer. The riders behind the lead broke against the smoke and the burning floor and the javelins from the heights, and the ones who came through came one and two at a time, and the men of Petra took them one and two at a time in the mouth of the cut, working in pairs the way the gladiator had taught them on the practice ground of the arena. It was not a battle. It was the settlement of an account, and it was settled inside the space a torch takes to burn down. Demetrios was down at the far end of the cut, where the flank of the defile stepped up to the open slope, holding the pike against the three riders who had come around the spoil in the last of it, and he took the javelin in the side standing up and finished the work of the pike before he sat down in the ash, which was the difference between a merchant and a soldier and the reason the men who walked out of Petra did not walk out alone. The riders broke. The Greek sat with the pike across his knees and the javelin in his side, and he looked at the smoke settling on the floor of the cut like a man checking the tally of a day's trade. They carried him up to the temple. The column had come out of the chambers at the sound, and the wounded were laid in the outer chamber, and Corvinus came to kneel at Demetrios's shoulder on the worn stone of the floor where the fire bowl had stood. "The mountain kept better books than I did, in the end," the Greek said. His voice was quiet and clear. "Tell the priestess the accounts are square." He was dead before the light passed out of his eyes, and Corvinus covered him with the cloak of a dead man of the garrison, because the dead do not need names at the hour, only cover from the cold. They buried him on the ridge with the morning and the smoke of the defile below them, in the ash of the mountain's own casting, with stones of the temple's outer work laid over him and the pike set upright at his head. Corvinus read no words over him, because the Greek had had no words read over him in life that he had not earned, and the garrison, which had been a jail and a purgatory and a grave for three years, stood at the burial of a man who had chosen its side in the last hour, and found its own accounting in the choosing. From the ridge they watched the road. The smoke of the defile had drawn them nothing but silence. But where the ash river met the first green of the coastal slope, a longer dust had begun to move against the current, and behind it the glint of steel in numbers too many for a second glance. "A column of foot," Maro said. "Five banners, and the dust of more behind them." He looked at the temple door, at the column settling inside it, at the mountain standing over them in the grey sky. "They will be at the foot of the ridge inside a day. We have the god's house and the deep chambers and the second mouth to seal, and we have one question to answer for all of it." "What question?" Sextus said. He had a cut on his arm from the defile and the grin that had been in the jail with him. "Whether we can finish the work before the road fills with steel," Maro said. Corvinus looked down at the dust of the approaching column, and up at the mountain that had sheltered them, and at the closed door of the god's temple where the second mouth breathed, and he went inside to begin the work that the first builders had left waiting a thousand years.