After a grueling day Stirling hoped never to repeat in his life, the rain clouds finally broke up and let the sky show through, pale as ice and just as cold. The chilly sun dropped gradually behind the hills and left them riding into the faces of long, purple shadows. The sky blazed with the colors of blood and flame and faerie gold. Night slipped over them on silent cat's feet once more, toying with the vanishing sun until the fiery plaything fell over the edge of the world and left them riding by starlight. The heavens were far from dark, however. Stirling's first glance up left his mouth hanging open in astonishment. Stars blazed in such brilliant profusion, scattered like a carelessly overturned saltshaker on a velvet tablecloth, Stirling's breath caught.
He had never, not even during desert training, seen a night sky to equal it. The heavens were so thickly populated, it took him long moments just to spot familiar constellations and several moments more to understand why they were slightly skewed from true in their not-quite-changeless march across the night skies. Gooseflesh prickled beneath armor and sodden wool. Little wonder the ancients had revered the night sky as sacred, filled with the shining souls of departed heroes. Every man, woman, and child on Earth ought to see a sky like this at least once. The experience might instill perspective on the insignificance of squabbles like Belfast's, when weighed against the infinite reaches of the heavens.
Stirling held back a tired sigh.
The column entered the upper reaches of a land Stirling heard referred to as Caer-Guendoleu, passing a stone post which marked the border. Ganhumara, having ridden in silence for hours, beckoned to the nearest of Artorius' cataphracti, an officer if Stirling judged correctly the quality of his arms and the deference of the men who rode with him. The man reined closer to the queen's lighter mount.
"My lady?"
"Bear a message to my legate at fortress Caer-Guendoleu. Bid him sharpen my late father's sword."
The ominous words chilled Stirling, heavy reminder of the dead they'd already left behind, who were themselves mere tokens—or so Ancelotis feared—compared with those slated to die if this challenge weren't stopped in some bloodless and apparently impossible fashion. The officer bowed stiffly at the waist and reined around—but not to depart, as Stirling expected. He requested permission to leave the column from his commanding officer. A moment later, he vanished into the darkness with a muted drumming of hooves against wet earth.
Stirling watched him go, brows twitching in impressed surprise. Clearly, not even a royal command superseded military discipline. Artorius commanded well. Of course, he must command well, given the odds he fought against and his track record of victories. It occurred to Stirling for the first time that he could learn a thing or two about soldiering from the Dux Bellorum. The observation wrung another derisive snort from Ancelotis. Stirling sighed. He was not making a particularly good impression on his host.
It was well past midnight, with the constellations wheeling silently overhead in a bitterly cold sky and Stirling reeling in the saddle, when the bulky shadow of the Sixth Legion's stronghold appeared at last. An immense fortress of classic Roman design, it towered above the final stretch of road. The grey shadow of Hadrian's Wall, shocking Stirling with its height—a good five meters of it, when the only surviving remnants in the twenty-first century stood barely a meter high—vanished into the darkness on either side of the fortress, marching toward the sea in both directions. The moonlit waters of Solway Firth glittered in the distance, silver where an onshore wind pushed ripples across the black stretch of water. The estuary's farthest reaches vanished into the blackness of sky at the horizon line.
Torches burned at the entrance to the great Roman fortification. A sizable civilian settlement—which Ancelotis referred to by its Latin military term, the canabae of Caerleul fortress—had grown up around the Legion's winter camp. Houses and shops were an odd mixture of wattle-and-daub hovels, stave houses built of planked timber with twig-thatched roofs, and stone structures resembling miniature Roman villas, many of the latter in poor repair. No lights showed in the few windows Stirling could see, although a glance over his shoulder revealed sleepy inhabitants peering nervously from darkened doorways, roused by the thunder of Artorius' return to Carlisle.
The fortress, in sharp contrast to the canabae, had been maintained in excellent repair. Or, at least, had been repaired excellently. The circumvallation's outer layer consisted of a latticework of pits and potholes and trenches into which sharpened stakes had been sunk, pointed outward, with raised berms on either side of the trenches. Inside this defensive ring lay a series of five narrow trenches like the rings of a bull's-eye, filled with the bristling nastiness of thorny shrubbery, hawthorn boughs, from the looks of it. A good twenty-seven feet wide, when measured together as one massive unit, each of the five rings boasted a ramped earthen face, up which an attacker would have to toil before attempting to cross the thorns.
Inside the prickly circles lay two ditches, both of them nine feet wide and seven feet deep. And finally, the immense stretch of the fortress wall itself, made of blood-red sandstone which rose twelve feet above the bottom of the innermost ditch. More thorny branches had been embedded in the wall, which was topped by a tall stone palisade with twenty-foot stone towers every few yards. Each tower stood three stories high and provided three fighting platforms. The place had been built to last, since this fortress had been designed to serve as winter camp to the entire Sixth Legion.
Tired as he was and dark as the night was, Stirling still pinpointed the locations of a full guard contingent along those palisades. If he'd been an invader, he'd have thought twice—three times—before putting this fortress' defenses to the test. Maybe the Saxons counted on drawing Artorius' army into the open by laying waste to the dozens of little villages scattered throughout the region? It was the only sane tactic Stirling could see, without access to black powder and cannons, at the very least. Doubtless, the Saxons had already thought of it—or would very soon after Cutha's arrival. Artorius would have considered that, as well, if he was half the commander Stirling already suspected he was.
What Stirling hadn't expected was the prickle of awe which ran up his spine as they slowed to a walk and filed through the narrow, guarded entrance of Artorius' military stronghold. Stirling was, after all, accustomed to living and even shopping in buildings hundreds of years old. And he'd seen Stonehenge, which was considerably older than these fortifications—by several millennia, in fact. But he couldn't help feeling the strange, hushed wonderment that comes from entering a place of great antiquity, any more than he could help searching out what details he could see.
They entered by way of a traverse outside the fortress gate, a short arc of wall surmounted by an armed guard, which forced them to ride parallel to the fortress wall for a long way before entering the actual gate—then they had to ride back along the return of the long, S-shaped curve past an inner arc of traverse wall, doubling the distance and time a defender could shoot at them. It was nearly as effective as a medieval castle's murder room, which served the same purpose, come to think of it, allowing archers, javelin—or, in the Romans' case, pilum—throwers, or pikemen ample opportunity to wreak their lethal havoc.
Once through the convolutions of the gate, Stirling's gaze came to rest on a veritable small town of red sandstone barracks, stables, buildings for which he couldn't even hazard a guess as to their functions, tired as he was. A broad avenue at least a hundred and twenty feet wide ran along the inside perimeter, with stair-stepped terraces making access to the palisades and towers quick and easy. They followed this road to the left, riding nearly four hundred yards before reaching the corner—whereupon Stirling discovered that they'd entered through the narrow end of the fortress. The length of wall stretching out before Stirling's bleary eyes was half again longer than the length of the wall behind them.