Two Halves

"A secret kept for twenty years does not die when it is found. It simply changes hands, and begins to bleed."

They had to pull him off the body.

Afterward he was told this by Varro, who had run the whole distance from the Roman line with his armour clattering and his face the colour of tallow, and who said it with a stiff, sideways, painful tact, looking at the ground. It had taken three men. The general had knelt in the dust for what the signal-sergeant, a careful man, put at the better part of a quarter of an hour, holding the dead king in his arms with his head bowed and his cloak soaked black to the elbows, and no one had dared to approach. The trumpeters were waiting for an order. The tribunes were waiting for an order. Twenty-two thousand men stood in the glare of the afternoon, rigid, silent, listening to the great wailing of the enemy across the plain, and not one of them knew whether he should cheer. In the end the old legate had gone out alone, and knelt, and put a hand on his shoulder, and said, very low, Sir. It is done. Let him go. And Cassian had looked up at him with a face so naked, so young, so utterly without a thought in it, that Varro, who had killed more men in thirty-one years than he could count, told his wife that night he had been afraid.

He remembered none of it. He remembered only the order he gave, afterward, standing, with the blood drying stiff on his hands and the world a long way off, as though seen through the wrong end of a glass.

"No pursuit," he said.

"Sir?" The tribune beside him looked at him, bewildered. "The enemy are in disorder. The king is dead. If we send the cavalry now—"

"No pursuit." His voice was flat and level, and it startled him a little. "Not a man. Not a horse. They will go home. Let them go."

"The Lady Claudia—"

"I will speak to the Lady Claudia myself."

He turned his back on them, and walked a few paces off across the bare ground, and stood looking at nothing.

…

Across the plain the Kavanu did not fight.

He had braced for it. For half an hour after the king fell he had stood with his sword drawn and his eyes on the southern ridge, waiting for the wave that must come, the screaming charge of a hundred thousand spears for the vengeance of their god. It did not come. They stood where they were, in their long white ranks, and the sound that rose from them was not a war-cry. It was a sound he had not heard on any battlefield. It was a deep, low, rolling lamentation, thousands of voices lifted together on one sustained rising note, and it hung in the air like smoke. Some of them knelt. Some tore their cloaks. Some simply sat down in the sand with their spears across their knees and covered their faces, and the sunlight lay on them like a hand.

They looked, he thought, like children who have been left in a house.

Presently a figure detached itself from the near end of the line and came across the plain towards him on foot. It was an old man. He came slowly, stiffly, with a limp, and he was unarmed, and the Roman pickets stirred and levelled their spears and then, one by one, lowered them again as he came on. He was large and heavy, with a grey beard and a long scar running from the corner of the lip to the jaw, and his eyes were red-rimmed and perfectly steady. He walked straight past the line of tribunes without looking at them and stopped before Cassian, a pace away, and stood there looking down at the body.

It lay where it had been laid, on its back, on a cloak, under the white canopy. Someone had closed the eyes. Someone had folded the big hands on the chest. The tunic had been drawn up to hide the wound, but the stain had gone through it, and spread, a dark irregular flower on the linen, and the grey beard was combed straight on the breast. The face was peaceful. It looked, Cassian thought with a sort of dull astonishment, like the face of a man who has come to the end of a long journey and been told that he may sleep.

"I have come for the king," the old man said.

His Latin was heavy and slow. Cassian looked at him.

"He is yours." He heard himself say it. "Take him."

"I thank you, Dux."

"There was to be no treachery." He did not know why he was saying it. It seemed important, suddenly, that someone should hear. "He asked for the parley. My mother said he would try to harm me. He came close. He lifted his hands—"

"He opened his arms."

The old man did not raise his voice. He said it quite gently, still looking at the face on the cloak, and for a moment Cassian did not take in the words. Then he did. They struck him in the stomach like a fist.

"I saw it," said the old man. "I was at the edge of the line with my glass. I told him it was a trap, and he said he was going to meet his son, and he took off his sword." The deep lines of his face worked. "And I saw him walk across the plain. And I saw him open his arms to you."

"He…" Cassian's throat closed. "He was armed. He must have been. He—"

"He had a wooden comb in his belt," said the old man. "I gave it to him myself."

There was a silence.

Cassian looked down at the body, and at the folded hands, and at the plain linen tunic, torn at the breast. He looked at the wooden comb, which someone had laid on the dead man's chest, a small humble thing of olive-wood, with a few grey hairs caught in the teeth. He thought of the dagger in his hand. He thought of the soft heavy resistance, and then no resistance at all.

"I'm sorry," he said. It came out in a whisper, hoarse and meaningless, as a child's apology comes out.

The old man looked at him then, for the first time. It was a long look. There was nothing in it of hatred. There was only an immense grave weariness, and under that, buried deep, a kind of terrible compassion, which was worse. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and shut it. Then he bent, slowly, with a grunt, and gathered the body up in his arms, and carried it away across the plain, like a tired father carrying a sleeping child, and the whole host of the Kavanu stood aside to let him through.

He had not looked back.

Cassian watched him go. He watched until the white ranks closed around him. He found that he was shaking, a fine continuous tremor that began in the hands and ran up the arms and into the jaw, so that his teeth chattered, and he put his hands behind his back to hide them, and Varro, tactfully, said nothing.

…

It was not until the evening, in his own tent, that he found it.

He had come in alone, and refused the surgeons, and sent away the slave who came to take off his armour. He had stood a long time in the middle of the floor with the lamp unlit and the sounds of the camp coming faintly through the canvas: the clink of the picket-lines, the monotonous voice of a sergeant reading the watch, a long way off a man singing in some outland tongue. Then, mechanically, because it was what one did, he began to undo the buckles of the cuirass with his bloody fingers. They would not work. He worked at them a long time. At last the straps gave, and the bronze came away with a clash, and he flung it on the bed, and stood there in his stained tunic, breathing hard, with a smear of dark red across the cloth where the dead man's head had lain.

And something swung against his chest.

It was a small thing. He would not have noticed it, but for the way it moved. It hung on its cord under his tunic, as it had hung every day since he was a child, and it swung with the movement of the breath, and he felt it, a small hard weight, warm from his skin, knocking gently against the bone. He had stopped feeling it years ago. It was a part of him, like his hand. It had been with him through the barracks, the legions, the long hard years of his boyhood in the practice yard at Capua, when the other boys had mocked it and he had broken the nose of the one who tried to take it. Rufus had told him it was a lucky charm. The Lady Claudia, when he asked on the night he arrived, had said it was most likely all that was left of the father he had never known.

He lifted it out. He held it on his palm.

It was a half-disc of ebony, black and smooth and warm as a horse's flank, about the width of his hand. The curved edge was bound with a thin rim of copper, worn dull. A sun was carved into the surface: a small round face, with eyes, and a mouth, and a ring of thin straight rays going out from it on every side. Half of that face was gone. The break ran through the middle in a series of jagged zigzags, deep teeth, like the jaw of a saw, and from the heart of the break, where the nose of the sun should have been, a small copper pin stood out, a tiny stub of green metal, sheared flat.

He had always wondered about that pin.

Come, said a voice in his mind, very quietly. It was a girl's voice, high and clear and sleepy, the voice of a child of eight in a candle-lit nursery. We should find the other half.

He stood quite still.

Livia had said it. His wife. It had been the first month of their marriage, when she was lying in the great bed with her cheek on his arm and he had told her, laughing, the story of the lucky charm. It is half, she had said, turning it in her fingers, with the grave interest of a girl who has been told nothing in her life that was not kind. Look. It has been broken. Somebody must have the other half. And he had said, Then they will have to bring it to me. And she had said, with the serene certainty of the very young: We should go and find it.

She was laughing, he thought stupidly. She said we should go and find it.

He could not complete the thought. It stood at the edge of his mind like a figure in a doorway, and he turned his face away from it.

He walked to the entrance of the tent and pulled the flap aside. The sun had gone. A great red sky stood over the western desert, and the plain, which had been so white at noon, lay dim and purple and strewn with dark scattered shapes. They were still carrying away the dead. Torches moved among them, and the sound of picks. The Roman dead were few. The Kavanu dead, from the long skirmishing of the morning, were many, and they lay where they had fallen, among the thorn and the stones. And among them, near the edge of the field, beside the white canopy that no one had yet taken down, lay a small dark stain on the earth, the colour of wine, which the wind was already beginning to cover with dust.

He went down to it. He did not decide to. He found himself walking, in the dusk, with the torchlight swimming on the ground, and his feet carried him across the broken stubble to the place where the canopy stood, snapping softly in the evening wind. The table was still there. The two chairs. The jug. Nobody had touched them. There was a lump of something pale in the dust beside the nearer chair, and he bent and picked it up, and it was the dead man's comb.

He turned it over. On the back, scratched very small, with a knife, was a sign: a winding line, with three short strokes through it, like teeth.

…

The river, thought Cassian.

He sat down in the dust.

It was extremely quiet. A wind was getting up from the west, and the canopy flapped and rustled over his head with a sound like the turning of a page. He sat with the comb in one hand and the ebony disc in the other, and looked at the sign on the wood, and then at the break in the disc, and then at the sign again, and felt very slowly, as one feels the first cold of the sea, the whole of his life begin to shift.

He had never wondered why the dead man knew his name.

He had never wondered why the dead man had said you have my father's brow in the voice of a man giving an inheritance. He had not wondered why the barbarian, who was the greatest soldier of his age, had come to a parley without a weapon. He had not wondered why Kavanu soldiers, at the end of the fourth battle, had stood their ground when they might have run, and fought on with a strange tenderness, as though they could not bring themselves to kill him. He had not wondered why a man who had never seen him fought like his mirror. He had not wondered, in three years, why the Lady's eyes went so often to the south, nor why, when he asked her about his father, she had said, He was a centurion, he died in the north, in a voice that never wavered, and had turned her face to the window.

He had not wondered. It had not occurred to him to wonder.

A wooden comb, he thought. A cord. A river with three marks.

The sun was down. The darkness had come on quickly, as it does in the desert, a deep blue dark pricked with stars, and the torches of the burial parties went to and fro across the plain like fireflies. He thought he heard, a long way off, from the Kavanu lines, the beating of a single drum.

He took a breath. His hand shook. It was an odd thing, to see how it shook, as if it belonged to someone else. He held it out in front of him, the right hand, the one that had held the knife, and in the last light he saw there was still blood in the creases of the knuckles.

And then he did what he had known he was going to do since he left the tent.

He walked back to the place where the king had died. He knelt in the dust. The Kavanu had taken the body and the cloak, but they had left the one thing they could not carry: a thin dark cord, lying in the dried blood by the chair, snapped at the nape where the fallen man's hand had wrenched it in his last extremity. It had been torn away. The braided leather was frayed and soft with age, knotted at a hundred places, a cord that had been broken and mended and broken again over many years, and hanging from the end of it, black and smooth and slick with red, was a half-disc of ebony.

He lifted it carefully from the earth.

It was larger than his own. It was the upper half, the half that bore the sun's brow and the first ring of rays. The copper rim was dull, and one of the teeth was chipped. It lay on his palm, heavy and cold, and the blood on it was still tacky, and he did not wipe it away. He knelt there in the starlight with the cord trailing over his wrist. Then, slowly, with a hand that he could not hold steady, he drew out his own half and laid it alongside.

They did not fit at first. He had to turn the lower disc a little, rotating it through the dark, until the jagged teeth found one another. There was a moment, a tiny moment, in which the two broken edges rested against each other uncertainly, like the lips of an old wound. Then something clicked, very softly, and the teeth slid together, one by one, tooth into tooth, and the copper pin, which stood out from the top half in a stub, slid into a hole in the lower that he had never known was there; and the black wood met the black wood without a seam; and the face of the sun looked up at him from his open palm, whole, with its eyes and its mouth and its ring of rays.

It was smiling.

He stood in the middle of the battlefield, among the dead, in the red light of the burial torches, with the whole vast sky wheeling slowly overhead and the sound of the Kavanu lament coming to him thin and far across the sand. He did not move. He did not breathe. He stood quite still with his arm stretched out and his hand open and the two halves of a single sun, one warm from his own skin and the other cold and slick with his father's blood, shaking together on his trembling palm.