Eagle in the Snow: A Novel of General Maximus and Rome's Last Stand

I turned round. “Aquila.” He nodded and went to the door and shouted. There was a pause and the aquilifer entered, carrying the Eagle. It was of bronze, clean and shining and worn smooth with much polishing; now it had been freshly gilded and it glowed in the lamplight. I said, “A soldier can commit only two sins: desertion and cowardice. Those I have never tolerated, nor will I now. Any one who wishes to be released from his oath must ask to be released now or not at all.” I smiled as no one moved. I said, “I am not an emperor, nor shall ever be one. I am content to command the Twentieth. I make no promises; I tell no lies.” I held up my hand. “But, before the Eagle, there is only death or victory. In this matter we are at one with the gladiators in the arena, and I am glad that it shall be so.”

They saluted the Eagle and they saluted me. And then they left. I poured myself a cup of wine and put it carefully on the table before me. Then I sat down heavily upon a stool and put my head in my hands. I felt very old and very tired.

That night it snowed again.

It was December now and each morning the birds gathered about the cook-houses, hoping for scraps of food. The wolves howled in the forest at night and the foxes, desperate with hunger, broke through the village palisades in their search for prey. The blue smoke from the enemy camp hung thick and heavy in the cold air and the black sludge on the dark, moving water turned to thin delicate circles of ice. The galleys moved slowly up and down the main channel and the sentries shivered in their watch-towers and cleared the ballistae of snow each morning. Many men went sick; some with sores, others with fever, and those who remained on duty looked thin and pinched with the effort of fighting the intense cold. Others tried to fish, hoping to eke out their diet with fresh food, but few caught anything. Fabianus, who knew about these things, told them that it was a waste of time. “It is no good,” he said. “In such conditions the fish only bury themselves in the mud.”

The circles of ice began to join together and formed what we called black ice. Floes from higher up came floating down, some to break through the black ice and be carried on to Bingium, others to remain, jammed against the banks or caught and held by the thinner ice. Each day at set times we fired missiles from the ballistae into the water. At the beginning this was successful. The sixty-pound balls of iron broke the ice with ease so that it was carried away by the moving current; but each day there seemed to be more ice on the move than there had been the day before, and it grew more and more difficult. The galleys smashed at the ice with their oars and the water level, which should have been dropping, remained constant. Each day the sun rose, a pale disc in a grey sky, and the rooks, black and hard of eye, sat on the walls, cawing dismally, and watched us at our work. In the evenings now, wolves could be seen. They moved about the edges of the clearings, sometimes snarling and fighting amongst themselves, but more often simply just standing and waiting as though they knew that we must come to them in the end. They were like the Vandals and they got on our nerves with their terrible, controlled patience. And at night the moon rose to light a land that was white and dead and silent, save for the hooting of the owls that lived on the islands and which were better sentries than the iron helmeted legionaries who stood there, numb and still, staring with strained eyes across the water and quivering gently with the cold. The ice floes changed colour in the shifting light; sometimes they were blue, sometimes green and sometimes black. Only at the end did they stay white. Each morning the galleys found it more difficult to weigh anchor and cut their way out into the stream. The bows would press against the ice and a thin black line, or a series of lines perhaps, would streak out suddenly, like ropes laid across the frozen water, and there would be a great booming noise as the ice cracked and then a harsh grinding that went on and on as the smashed floes jostled against each other and the galleys forced them apart.

Quintus said, “It will not be much longer now.”

“No, not much longer. We have been a long time waiting.”

The ice began to thicken along the banks and the ice field spread outwards until there was only a narrow stream, a hundred yards wide, down the centre, through which the water coiled and writhed like a gigantic snake. The ice was thin still and, as Gallus said, would break up under pressure, but each night it froze again and the work of the day was undone in a few hours.