Emperor Read Online Free PDF Page B

if he had been awake all the time after all.
    Cunedda asked nervously, ‘You think they are pirates?’
    Agrippina said, ‘Who else makes landfall in the dark?’
    Nectovelin grunted softly. ‘Who indeed?’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    Cunedda said, ‘Whoever it is, we don’t want them to know we’re here. We should douse the fire.’
    ‘Already done,’ Nectovelin said. ‘But they’ll smell the smoke—’
    ‘Hello!’ The small voice came drifting up from the beach. It was Mandubracius, of course. He was carrying a torch, and as he walked down to the sea he was suspended in a bubble of flickering light, a slight, spectral figure.
    For a moment there was utter silence from the water. But now came a reply. ‘ Hello? ’ A man’s voice, heavily accented.
    Nectovelin cursed colourfully. ‘I thought he was still sleeping. My fault, my fault.’
    Cunedda tried to rise. ‘We should stop him.’
    ‘No.’ Nectovelin held his arm. ‘They may just let him go. Better to risk it than to reveal ourselves now.’
    Agrippina felt as if a leather rope attached her heart to the little boy walking down the beach. ‘He’s only a child. He’s curious, that’s all.’
    ‘Hush,’ said Nectovelin, not harshly.
    Mandubracius reached the edge of the water. Now, indistinctly, by the flickering light of his torch, Agrippina made out the boat that had landed. It was bigger than she had imagined, flat-bottomed, evidently for ease of landing on the beach. She saw men aboard, faces shining like coins in the torch’s dim glow. One of them stepped into the water and spoke to Mandubracius. Gruff laughter rippled around the landing craft. Mandubracius seemed to take fright. He threw down the torch and turned to run.
    But the man standing in the water drew a short, blunt sword, and with it he cut down Mandubracius.
    Immediately Nectovelin’s hand clamped over Agrippina’s mouth. There was a sharp word from the boat, perhaps of reprimand. Agrippina thought she heard a name: Marcus Allius . And then the light died at last.
    All this in a heartbeat.
    ‘Listen to me,’ Nectovelin said, and Agrippina could hear the grief in his own whisper. ‘There must be fifty of them in that boat alone, and there will be more boats, hundreds perhaps, landing all around this harbour. If we try to take them on we will die too. Instead we must stay alive, and tell what we saw.’ Still Agrippina struggled, but Nectovelin’s grip tightened. ‘Believe me, I feel as you do. Worse. I am responsible . And I won’t rest until I have avenged his death–or given up my life for his. But not now, not tonight.’
    Gradually he loosened his grip and uncovered her mouth.
    Breathing hard, the sand harsh on her skin, she whispered, ‘Very well.’
    Cunedda was panting too, eyes wide. He nodded.
    ‘Follow me, then,’ Nectovelin said. ‘Keep low. Try to leave no track. We’ll get the horses, and then–well, we’ll see. Come now.’
    He began to pick his way across the dune. Agrippina followed, and Cunedda brought up the rear.
    Aware of the intense danger they were all in, Agrippina concentrated on following Nectovelin’s instructions, trying not to disturb so much as a blade of dry dune grass. But she couldn’t rid her head of the images of those few moments when the torch had fallen to the water: the armour that had glistened on the chest of the man with the sword, the helmets of the men arrayed in the boat–and the eagle standard held aloft.

V
    From his bench in the rear of the landing craft, Narcissus was able to see the first wave of boats driving onto the beach. Under the stars, there was nothing to be seen of the darkened land beyond, nothing but the swell of a dune or two–that, and what might have been the embers of a solitary fire on the beach.
    Around Narcissus the legionaries, stinking of sweat, leather and horses, worked their oars under a centurion’s softly spoken commands. The rowers held the boat in its place against the tide, for