Operation Read All the Sutcliff: Frontier Wolf
I love this book. You know how sometimes you think you will never find a book that is new to you that you love as much as the books you loved when you were, oh, fourteen, because now you are a cynical bitter adult and you just cannot love another book as much as everything you loved that has all that nostalgia bound into it?
I read this book a year and a half ago. I love this book that much.
(Or maybe the rest of you aren't hardened embittered cynics now, in which case carry on.)
In addition to massive Frontier Wolf spoilers (and large quoted passages), this post also contains spoilers for Diane Duane's Deep Wizardry, a couple other Duaneverse books, and the middle of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, because I like to play compare and contrast with books I loved when I was fourteen. (Actually, I wasn't reading Vorkosigan until at least sixteen. But whatever.)
Helpful tip, if you have not read this book before: if you are reading and enjoying it in the beginning, make sure you have nothing else to do when you have reached about halfway through (when the Praepositus shows up at Castellum). If you like it, you won't want to stop.
Let me begin by explaining a particular kink I have in fiction. Take a smart, competent protagonist. And make them fuck up. Make them fuck up so incredibly badly that they have ruined their life, the lives of others, and possibly (depending on genre) the space-time continuum. Now -- and here's the key -- let them fix it. Do not let them slide on by without paying for their mistakes. It's rough, sure, and they're going to be a different person by the end of the end of the story, because a lot of the time their lives are different, but they'll have learned something.
For example: The Vorkosigan Saga. Memory is, hands-down, my favorite book in the series. Those of you who have read the series and have followed the above description can figure out exactly why. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the basic idea of the series up to that point is that Lord Miles Vorkosigan has, up until this point, been leading a rather charmed double life as Admiral Miles Naismith, commanding a mercenary fleet mostly by (a) sheer force of personality, (b) his amazing intellect and (c) a lot of lying. A lot of lying. So a lot of the series up to this point has been fun space opera, shenanigans as Naismith, wheeee. Memory is the book when Miles' lies finally catch up with him, he screws up, and he is basically deemed unfit for combat, and therefore unfit to be Naismith, whom he has been for a while now. He has to figure out how to be someone else, and the whole thing (combined with the other plot, the plot about Illyan's memory chip) is heartbreaking. I was crying the first time I read this book. Let me put it this way: in the previous book the author killed Miles and that wasn't the worst thing she could do to him. This was.
So, yeah, it's a thing.
I will exemplify, again, with Diane Duane's Deep Wizardry, which is a YA fantasy novel published, hmmm, five years after Frontier Wolf was. It's the second in the Young Wizards series, concerning, as the name suggests, a bunch of teenage wizards and their continuing fight to save the planet, and it's also one of my favorite books, the sort of favorite where I am terrified to reread it lest it has started to suck in the meantime. Anyway. Nita, our heroine, is on vacation on the beaches of Long Island with her wizarding partner Kit and her family, who currently do not know she is a wizard. They're swimming about in the ocean when they discover a dolphin, and then a whale wizard in trouble, and attempt to help. (Wizardry crosses species boundaries. In a big way.) It turns out the problem is even bigger than they suspected -- there are hideous seafloor seismic problems, ones that can only be solved with more magic. Basically, a bunch of wizard whales (and dolphins, sharks, what have you) need to ritually reenact a magic drama... thing... called the Song of the Twelve, which culminates in whoever's playing the Silent One reenacting ritually sacrificing themselves and keeping the ocean at peace again.
So Nita volunteers to play the Silent One, because she wants to help! It'll be like a play! No big deal! (Extreme earnestness and an overwhelming desire to Help All The Beings are pretty much the prereqs for being tapped as a wizard in the YW verse.) Everyone is really touched and honestly surprised that she is volunteering and Nita herself is very, very surprised when she finds out that she has actually signed herself up for actual ritual sacrifice. The kind where a shark eats you.
And when she goes to the authority figures, the adult wizards, the people she is expecting are going to get her out of this, their advice is basically: go die.
Carl let out a long breath. "I don't know what to tell you," he said.
This was not the most encouraging thing Nita had ever heard. A Senior Wizard always knew what to tell you. "Carl," she said, tears still thick in her voice, "what can I do? I can't--I can't just die!"
It was the first time she had actually said the word out loud. It left her shaking all over like the aftermath of a particularly large wizardry, and the tears started coming again.
Carl was quiet. "Well, yeah, you can," he said at last, gently. "People do it all the time--sometimes for much less cause."
"But there must be something I could do!"
Carl looked down at the sand. "What did you say you were going to do?"
When I was reading this book for the first time, I was maybe fourteen. And that scene has stayed with me all these years. I was shocked. I was amazed. I didn't know fantasy books could do this! I knew how all these YA fantasy stories worked! You made a mistake! The mentors were supposed to get you out of it! But they don't. Deal.
So... Nita goes to die. Well, she's fully prepared to, anyway, because she was the one who agreed to it, and she had to do it, so she tells her family about everything, and about wizardry (the scene on the moon is still one of my favorite things ever ever ever), and--
This is a post about Frontier Wolf. I'm getting there.
The thing is, Duane pulls her punches. Her writing -- and it's one of the things I love about her writing -- is very life-affirming. Good battles entropy. Good wins. And that means that pretty much every character who sacrifices themselves for their cause gets to live through it. K't'lk lives. Sunspark lives. Nita lives. Nita doesn't have to die; someone else does, though. The only other characters I can think of who actually get to die their noble death are My Enemy, My Ally's Tafv (who was, technically, the villain) and that ensign on Bloodwing in The Romulan Way (whose death was very weirdly handled anyway). But basically, yeah, they all live.
Rosemary Sutcliff does not pull her punches.
Almost everyone we come to care about in Frontier Wolf ends up dead. Lucius. Kaeso the quartermaster. Rufus the trumpeter and even Typhon the kitten. Bericus, the emperor's hard bargain. And, of course, Cunorix and Connla, who at least get the most epic deaths of the bunch. (Lucius' death is a distant third on the Scale of Epic.) Pretty much the only people who make it out alive are Alexios and Hilarion, and the first time through I was terrified that Hilarion was going to die too. (And yet I would still call this a happy book. It is my fandom happy place!)
These are not, of course, the only people who die in the novel. Because, if you will remember, Alexios fucked up. He made a decision, and it was the wrong one. But he did it, and a bunch of people died, and he has to live with it. And it is that exact agonizing point where Frontier Wolf actually begins:
The orderly set down the platter of cold meat and bread and the cup of wine on the end of the clothes chest, cast one half-contemptuous, half-sympathetic glance at the slight dark young man who sat hunched on the edge of the narrow cot with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and went out, shutting the door behind him.
He was glad he was not Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila.
And Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila went on sitting with his head in his hands, staring at the floor but not seeing it. He felt dazed, as though he had taken a blow between the eyes; as though the past few days were all part of some monstrous nightmare from which he might wake up if only he knew how, to find himself back in his own quarters at Abusina. But the nightmare went on and on, and there was no waking up from it.
This is the story of how Alexios learns to live with himself, own his mistakes, become a better commander, and deal when everything goes to hell. And the best thing, the very best thing, is that he has to make exactly the same decision that was the wrong one before. (The second best thing is Hilarion, but that's just me. Also I have a thing for the Roman army.)
I was going to attempt to recap this one without rereading it (because, uh, I definitely can by now), but why deprive myself of the fun of a reread?
Anyway. Frontier Wolf, taking place in 343 AD as per the introduction, is a later addition (in terms of date written) coming right in the middle of what generally gets published as the Roman Britain trilogy (The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers). I think in the intervening years Sutcliff had time to polish her writing (by writing eight billion more books), because this is so tightly written and plotted compared at least to the first two. Everything just works so perfectly and fits together, with nothing wasted, and yet there is still room for glorious nature porn. And friendship! And snark! And epic! And soldiers! And wolves! And horses! (Wolves and horses are, in fact, critical.)
The weird thing about the timeline, though, is that the plot bears what seems to me to be a more-than-coincidental resemblance to the Great Conspiracy -- the Arcani/areani (hooray for a hapax legomenon) rebel, letting the Picts and Attacotti and a bunch of other people in to sack the Wall and points north -- except that the Great Conspiracy happened 25 years later. It's strange. (Also then Rome did actually go back north and quell the revolting and create Valentia, apparently. So this is not the final retreat of civilization or anything, despite Alexios' "Rome would not come back" when they pull out of Castellum. Unless they're supposed to be further north than Valentia? I don't know; I hate maps.)
So, this is how the story goes, because apparently I enjoy writing summaries:
We begin with the paragraphs quoted above, our introduction to Alexios Flavius Aquila. He is currently very upset, because he has made a colossally bad decision. The rest of chapter one is devoted to explaining his bad decision, in detail. I will explain it here, because it is exceedingly relevant to the rest of the book. You see, he was a regular old centurion, serving at Abusina, in Germania, and due to personnel being shuffled around he is temporarily second-in-command of the fort. This, of course, is when the Marcomanni decide to attack, and the guy who was in command is killed, meaning that Alexios, who is maybe 23 and with virtually no command experience, suddenly is in charge of the place. And the barbarians are still attacking. Standing orders in this situation -- as his much more experienced subordinates try to tell him -- are to stay put and wait for reinforcements. He sends out for reinforcements, but the Marcomanni send back the bloody heads of his messengers. (This is about when I started wondering how in the world this was children's literature. Later on there's drinking and wenching!) So naturally poor Alexios thinks no one's coming for him, and against orders and all advice, he orders a retreat. The retreat is pretty fucked-up as these things go, and a lot of people die, and eventually they run into their rescuers -- it seems the message made it through after all, and he should have stayed put. Back in his cell, Alexios awaits the board of inquiry and angsts more and offers to fall on his sword. Because he is angsty like that. It gets me. *sniff*
For further fun with flashbacks, chapter two skips us ahead to putting Alexios on the road to his new posting, where we are flashing back to the board of inquiry, and then Alexios' family, whom he visits on the farm on the Downs (he is an Aquila, after all). His mother is so upset with him, you guys. But it seems his maternal uncle is the Dux Britanniarum, so he gets to stay in the army. He even gets a promotion! Except not really:
"Command of the Frontier Scouts up at Castellum," his uncle had said. "Command of an Ordo--two Centuries in place of the one that you have commanded until now--and of the fort itself. Promotion to the rank of Ducenarius. It sounds like advancement, doesn't it? Make no mistake, it's not. You're an incompetent soldier, unfit to serve in a decent auxiliary cohort, so--it's the Frontier Wolves for you. And don't ask me how they came by their fond-name, you'll find out soon enough. They may make some kind of man of you, if they don't arrange for you to have a fatal accident instead. I believe that has happened before now."
Alexios had tried desperately to keep a grip on things, himself included. "Sir, I do not need to be told what I have done, nor what I deserve; I am only too well aware of both, and too bitterly sorry. I can but thank you for all that you have done for me in the past, and for this chance to redeem myself. I will do all that I may to deserve it."
"I suppose your mother told you to apologize and say thank you, like a good boy," Uncle Marius said, not bothering to keep the scorn out of his voice.
Alexios, feeling like a whipped cur, had still hung on to himself. "I hope I should have done both, without her prompting."
"And I suppose she thinks I did it all for her sake, eh?"
"She is your sister, Sir. The whole army knows it."
"Half-sister," Uncle Marius said with asperity. "Ah well, even a weeping half-sister is easier to yield to than to withstand. But she is mistaken; the whole army is mistaken. All that I have done for you was done for your father's sake, not hers. He was the best friend I ever had, I never had a son of my own, and I wanted his son to do well. I see now that I was mistaken in my dealings with you, all along. I hope to God I'm not mistaken now. Get out!"
And Alexios had got out, horrified to find himself shaking from head to foot and on the edge of laughter, with most assuredly nothing to laugh about. He must stop it, or he would end in the ultimate shame of tears here in the open forecourt. He had managed to straighten up and get as far as his sleeping quarters. Then he had kicked the door shut and flung himself down on the narrow cot with his head in his arms.
You see what I mean about how if you have a kink for YOU'RE A FUCK-UP, PROTAGONIST, this will hit it? Yeah. Then we come out of flashback and Alexios angsts about how he is a failure in the eyes of the previous ring-owners, just to establish that he has the ring, I guess.
He gets to Castellum and meets Gavros, the old commander getting promoted, and his officers: Hilarion and Lucius the centenarii, Kaeso the quartermaster, Anthonius the medic, and Druim, leader of the Arcani, the native scouts. Hilarion, because he is a snarky bastard, mocks him over dinner, so really things start out just great. The next day is infodump exposition day, where we meet the Frontier Wolves, learn about their customs (every man kills a wolf and makes it into a wolfskin cloak and never kills a wolf again! everyone is a mounted archer! everyone does awesome tribal dances! also there is a sacred black stone they touch! also beware the Arcani, but everyone else is ridiculously loyal to the Wolves even if sometimes they are from rival tribes that hate each other!) and we head to the territory of the Votadini to meet the chieftain, Ferradach Dhu. Alexios knows British and is very well-mannered. He meets the guy's sons, Cunorix (the heir!) and Connla (troublemaker extraordinaire!), who when we meet them are actually arguing about how badly Connla treats horses, which is Total Foreshadowing. Alexios promptly develops an ~Intense Crush~ on him in that Sutcliffian way where he imagines having him at his shield-shoulder. They agree to go wolf-hunting later. Also there is an Evil Druid who is probably the least-well-done element of the plot; if you cannot tell he is evil I will be forced to assume you have never heard a story before.
Alexios slowly starts to settle into life at the fort, hampered by Hilarion being as snarky as fuck about Alexios' past ("We're the scum and scrapings of the Empire [...] You're among brothers.") But gradually he does things like, you know, care when they get bad supplies. Also there are adorable kittens. Then comes Saturnalia, and he's dicing with Hilarion and Lucius is reading the Georgics and outside the Dalriads and the Votadini among the soldiers are drumming and dancing the Bull Calves, which is an excuse to try to kill each other. Alexios breaks it up. See, he is becoming a good commander! And then he asks them to teach him their awesome dancing.
He has to wait until spring before he gets to go wolf-hunting with Cunorix, and he has a great friendly bonding time (he is really into Cunorix) and there is Nature Porn and he has his wolfskin and the men accept him and now he touches the sacred black stone like everyone else does. Yay. Then some more seasons happen, Alexios learns scouting and hangs with Cunorix, and it's while he's hanging out with Cunorix that Connla comes to tell him their father's dead and he (Cunorix) is chief now. So then the plot basically pauses for a couple chapters while Alexios goes to the ceremony where Cunorix is made chieftain. There is more Nature Porn, Cunorix' son is born, and Alexios and Connla play an exciting game of polo with a cow's head. Toward the end of it, the plot gets going again as a visiting harper tells Alexios that the Attacotti and the Picts are forming alliances. Alexios starts to get the sense something awful's going to happen, especially since the harper turns up dead shortly thereafter.
Then the plot actually gets going, as Praepositus Montanus, Alexios' superior, shows up to inspect the fort. For some reason Alexios thinks it would be a great idea if he held a Getting To Know You dinner with the praepositus and the Votadini, except it turns out that the praepositus doesn't like the Votadini, he doesn't like the Wolves' trick riding and fancy dancing (especially when Alexios joins in), he doesn't think they should be touching their black stone, and basically he is the enemy of fun. He probably even hates the kittens! He also owns A REALLY PRETTY STALLION. Cunorix asks him if he can borrow the horse to breed him to his favorite mare and the praepositus is basically EWWW NO BARBARIAN.
And then it happens. It could have been anything, but from the way it was going, something was going to happen eventually, but: Connla steals the horse. In what I think is possibly the weirdest plotting decision in the book, this doesn't actually kick off the fight, because they all know it's him and everyone does a good job face-saving with HUH, FUNNY YOUR HORSE HAS WANDERED ALL THE WAY OVER HERE. No, it all happens because, after that, Connla steals the horse again. The narrative explicitly blames this on Teleri the swordsmith's daughter (who never shows up before or since) laughing at him when he has to give the horse back, and the book says that if not for her the whole thing wouldn't have happened. Which, okay, I'm sorry, but that's pretty rotten, Sutcliff. Stealing the horse is the fault of the horse-thief.
So he steals the horse again, except now the Frontier Wolves actually have to chase him down. Connla falls, the horse falls, they capture him, and they have to put the poor horse down anyway. Broken legs. Also two of the Frontier Wolves die. Naturally, Montanus is furious. He wants Connla executed, brutally -- the light is going and he wants a bunch of people throwing javelins at him, which is not really going to be the most compassionate method of execution. So Alexios protests, but they make ready for the execution, at which point Alexios steps up, gives him a much cleaner, easier death ("two inches in the right place"), and then resigns. Montanus has him confined to quarters. Then, apparently, the Arcani betray everyone and go running, and the Picts, Attacotti, and Votadini together all attack -- the Votadini, led by Cunorix, of course are avenging Connla as well. Alexios only finds this out a bit later, when his men come give him his command back because the praepositus is dead.
So now, for Alexios, it's uncomfortably like Abusina all over again, in that he is now, once again, in command of a fort under attack. And he knows they can't hold out -- for one thing, the enemy took one of their wells and they don't have enough water. So he has to make the exact same decision against regs that got him sent to the Wolves in the first place. (Only, see, he's a better commander now, all his subordinates support him, and also it turns out to be the right decision because by the time they actually run into a relief force it is almost too late. And it will have turned out that they were ordered to retreat anyway.) So once again he burns all the papers and Lucius' Georgics (Lucius is, um, not making it out of this book alive), actually takes the time to make a decent plan involving decoys, and they run for it. Did I mention it's winter and the weather is miserable? But they're going to go to Bremenium, where they will be safe!
To leave, they have to pass through a sacred Votadini place (it's another round of Scary Bogs, because we all enjoyed that in The Eagle of the Ninth, right?), and the men are surprisingly calm about this and sure that the passage will demand a life. Turns out to be Kaeso the quartermaster. And then they end up sheltering in a ruined village and wounded dying men that no one can help are crying out for water, and it's getting kind of grim.
Hiding out in the village, they also find: a woman. (She doesn't get a name, of course not. This is Sutcliff.) Apparently the invading barbarian group killed her son, but Romans killed her husband, and she's kind of crazy and hates everyone. In the middle of the night she stabs a soldier and leaves. This ends up being her only appearance, but she is mentioned later: when Cunorix shows up for the endgame, he mentions that they found her and she hated them too and she was being all crazy and spooking the horses, so they killed her. I have no idea what this is supposed to indicate. Maybe that we are supposed to favor the Romans for not murdering her.
Alexios and Hilarion (who by the way likes Alexios a whole lot better, by now; it has happened gradually but as this is not My Alexios/Hilarion Manifesto I'll leave it at that) and Lucius continue in command and on the way, and they get their decoy party back (and nothing bad has happened to them!) and everyone's pitching camp, and it's almost Midwinter Night. In the scene that I would really consider the heart of the novel, Alexios is lying there staring up at Orion, realizing it has been almost a year since that time the Dalriads and the Votadini were beating the crap out of each other, and realizing that by now he is a good commander with an awesome command (even if clearly the rest of Rome doesn't think so):
Lying among his men at the heel of one of the long bracken-lined sleeping trenches that even on peace-time patrols had always seemed to him uncomfortably like a grave, Alexios thought that seeing the Frontier Wolves in off-duty hours, drunk and ribald, cock-fighting, wenching, scrapping among themselves, wild and insubordinate, you could easily enough imagine them turning hero against an enemy from outside, standing by each other in the last ditch, but you couldn't imagine this well-drilled and efficient making of camp in hostile territory. "If we don't get through," he thought, "if I don't get them through--if I don't get out of this-- by the Lord of the Legions I've known what it is to command men worth the commanding!"
Above him the sky was breaking up, by morning it would be freezing hard; and suddenly Orion swung clear of the drifting cloud into a great lake of clear. He looked up at the three stars of the hunter's belt and the straight jewelled line of the sword hanging from it. He had never noticed before how bright and beautiful Orion's sword shone on a winter's night. He heard the faint stir in the close-packed horse-lines, and the dark soughing of the wind across the dead heather. "I have served with men, and I have seen Orion's sword in the sky," he thought with an odd feeling of content; and rolled over in the harsh bedding, pulling his wolfskin closer about him, and fell into a quiet sleep as peacefully as when he was a boy in his familiar sleeping cell at home in the Down Country farm.
And then they're running more (the second half of this book is pretty much one big flight) and they run into an ambush that everyone knows is an ambush, but hey, what else are you going to do? And it's snowing, and they struggle through, and Alexios gives everyone an inspiring speech:
Alexios, moving among the dark humped shapes, his own bit of bannock in his hand, sensed another kind of darkness lying heavy in the hearts of his men, and said to the nearest group of shadows, "Only twelve more miles to do; not even a full day's march; and tomorrow night we shall sleep warm and full-bellied in Bremenium."
"And what makes him so sure of that, I'm wondering?" muttered a voice behind him as he moved on.
Alexios checked, and swung back towards the speaker. "I will tell you. I am sure because we have made well over three-fourths of the way already, and sent the men who thought we would be an easy kill off to lick their wounds. Because we are disciplined troops of Rome, which gives us the pull over any tribal war-mob, however valiant; and because of all the troops of Rome, we are the Frontier Wolves!"
Someone gave a small crow of laughter, half breath in his throat. "We are the Frontier Wolves, and let nobody forget it!"
And it seemed to Alexios that the darkness-of-the-heart lifted just a little. But whether they would indeed sleep warm and full-fed at Headquarters tomorrow night, or cold somewhere on the high moors with the snow unmelting on their breasts, that was another matter.
It's only a bridge between there and Bremenium, and they make it, but the Votadini are on their tail, and they have to hack the bridge out as they go. (Yes, it is very exciting.) Lucius dies nobly in Alexios' arms, and they bring his body to bury at Bremenium and keep running.
Then they finally, finally get to Bremenium and... it's a wreck. Which was a complete surprise to me the first time I read this, because I kept thinking, well, okay, they'll get there and they'll finally, finally be safe. Everyone is dead, except for the one guy who lives long enough to tell him that the Arcani betrayed them all and opened the gates. And also the pony they're going to eat because they have no food. They set about burying Lucius... and then the Votadini show up. There's no way they can hold them off, because they're starving and exhausted and going to die. Luckily, it's almost nighttime, and apparently for religious reasons the Votadini won't fight at night, so if Alexios can just delay them long enough it'll be okay.
The solution he picks, of course, is challenging Cunorix in a one-on-one duel to the death (and it has to be Alexios, of course; he killed Connla). The terms are that if Alexios wins, the Votadini will clear out, of course. They both seem pretty okay with this being the way it has to be ("The thing is done. There is blood between us."), because Epic. Sad, but Epic.
So they fight, and it is extremely Epic, and Alexios gets wounded in his shield-arm before killing Cunorix. It is sad. And it turns out it didn't buy them any time at all because then the Evil Druid (remember him?) comes up with the brilliant idea that everyone should keep fighting in the dark.
But luckily -- things are kind of turning around -- someone kills the Evil Druid and the Votadini kind of lose interest, and more Frontier Wolves show up to help them. They tell us that everything's kind of a big mess right now and they're all on the way to Habitancum, which is still under Roman control. Alexios is also kind of a mess and the wound in his arm is still open and he's refusing assistance, because, yeah. Kind of a mess. When they get to Habitancum, hey, it's Gavros! He's in command and Alexios tells him the whole story. But they can't rest now, because everyone's heading further south! To Onnum! At which point Alexios is not really functional due to previously mentioned wounds, identifies the arriving emperor as a guy he thinks he's seen somewhere on a coin once (he's really out of it, okay?), and faints at Onnum while dismounting. Whoops. (Also Sutcliff is spelling Habitancum as "Habitancium." Not just an e-book typo; I checked it against my paper copy.)
Then follows the awesome h/c of awesome (my personal favorite) where Alexios spends a while drifting around in a haze and being sad. When he wakes up, he finds he's convalescing in Onnum and Hilarion comes into the room and helps feed him his soup and tells him about everything that's happened while he was out (basically, more fighting, and yes, Alexios, that was emperor Constans). There is cuddling. ♥ ♥
Right. Actual plot. When Alexios is healed up enough, he gets to go meet the emperor, who thanks him for being so awesome and offers him three options: promotion to tribune, promotion to the emperor's bodyguard, or promotion to Belgica where he would take a bunch of surrendered Attacotti captives and make them into shiny new Frontier Wolves. Alexios goes with Door Number Three. His uncle the Dux (remember, the guy who hated him at the beginning?) is proud of him again.
So he's standing there, admiring the scenery porn, thinking sad thoughts about all the sad things that have happened and how now he'll have to go somewhere else, and then we get this for an ending, which I love so much I am just going to paste here in its entirety:
Footsteps came along the rampart walk, and he glanced round to see Hilarion strolling towards him.
"It's just as I always said," Hilarion draped himself against the parapet at his side. "No sooner do we get a Commander comfortably broken in to our ways than the higher command send him off somewhere else, and we have to start on some new cub, all over again."
"I was just discovering that it comes a bit hard on the Commander, too," Alexios said, not knowing it until the words were spoken.
"Well, you'll leave them in good hands, now that Gavros has the Numerus."
Looking out along the road again, Alexios said, "I'm thinking you'll get Number Three Ordo in my place."
The silence beside him made him look round, and he saw with surprise that for the first time since they had known each other, Hilarion was looking not completely sure of himself. "As a matter of fact," said Hilarion after a moment, "I was thinking of trying for an Ordo in another Numerus--the old Third will be split up and re-made, anyhow."
"You mean--?" Alexios said slowly.
"You'll need a couple of good experienced Ordo officers," his centenarius told him, "and the gods know what you'll get if you leave it to the authorities. Up here we break in our own officers as we go along, but now it won't be so simple; and this new lot of yours--they're not even from inside the Empire, they're barbarians from beyond the pale. We shall have to do all the training."
"We?" said Alexios.
"We," said Hilarion.
There was a sudden warmth in Alexios. The tall mocking man beside him would never fill the place that Cunorix had left empty and aching, but the startled warmth felt good, all the same. "Hilarion, do you want to come with me?"
"Well if I don't, I really can't think what this conversation is all about," said the centenarius.
"Then go you and put in your application, and I'll back it."
His slow lazy smile drifted over Hilarion's freckled face. "I already have," he said.
They looked at each other a long moment, and then laughter took them both.
From below came a ragged tramping and a snatch of wild and mournful song. And still laughing, the two young men on the rampart turned, each with a hand on the other's shoulder, and stood looking down. The last slate grey of the daylight was fading, blending away into the red-flaked smoke of unseen fires where they were burning rubbish down beyond the horse-lines, and along the open space below the Wall, the men of the First Attacotti Frontier Scouts were being marched back to barracks for the night.
Alexios wondered how often, round how many camp fires in Belgica, he would hear that wild lament out of Hibernia when the native beer went round and it had long since ceased to be truly a lament and become something that one sang for the memory of old griefs and old longings and the pleasure of twisting one's own heartstrings.
"There goes your new command," said Hilarion, "and to think there are rising four hundred more of them at Cilurnum! Mother of Mares, what a pack! What a rabble! I wish us joy of them!"
"I wish us joy of them!" said Alexios Flavius Aquila, their new Commanding Officer.
So, um. Yeah. That's the book. In case you ever want to know what happens, in great detail.
Questions I still have:
(1) How did people like Lucius and Anthonius come to the Frontier Wolves? How did Gavros? It appears to be punishment for anyone who is actually posted there rather than recruited locally (I am assuming the officers were posted) -- it sure is for Alexios. Kaeso is a habitual drunk. Hilarion is a snarky annoying bastard (possibly literally a bastard), and while he actually happens to be a competent officer you'd have to put up with him first, and I can imagine a lot of people not wanting to. But Lucius? Anthonius? We know pretty much nothing about them except that they're both Christians and Lucius likes his Georgics. But liking the Georgics is not grounds for punishment, and, from Alexios' description, being a Christian is an asset, actually. So what happened? (And what about Gavros?)
(2) Hey, what about those fatal accidents the Frontier Wolves supposedly arrange? I know it was just supposed to make them sound more menacing, but then it was totally dropped. Who did they kill? (Fic, please?)
(3) What the hell happened with the Arcani? Specifically, Druim. The last time we see Druim is when his scout comes staggering in, dying, to report the attack, and he and the scout both seem loyal. Then Hilarion visits Alexios in custody to tell him that the Arcani have all deserted, and they agree that that must have been a shock for Druim (implying that Druim actually was loyal). And then Druim, who last we heard was still at Castellum with them, is never mentioned again. Did he go with them? Did he desert? What?
I was briefly confused about why Alexios decided to lodge a formal protest about Connla's execution rather than refusing and resigning then, but I guess it was because Connla was doomed either way and this way Alexios had the opportunity to give him a better death. (I am kind of weirdly touched that Hilarion offers to take his place, both for killing Connla and for Cunorix; I would totally read an AU where he did.) Basically, this is a book about being forced to make really hideous decisions. Like killing your friends and abandoning your forts. But it's a really good book.
Once again, Frontier Wolf does very poorly with female characters, of which there are very, very few. There's Cunorix's wife Shula. There's the old woman who presents Cunorix's son to him (you can tell I'm really reaching). There's the woman they find in the ruined village. There's Alexios' mother, who has no name (this in a canon where Alexios' horse and Cunorix's hunting hounds are named), and who Alexios doesn't appear to care about when at the end he is glad to have won back his uncle's respect. And there's Teleri the swordsmith's daughter, who has a name, a description, a line of dialogue... and who, according to Sutcliff, is ultimately responsible for everything awful that happens in the second half of the book, because she laughed at Connla. Gee, thanks.
Similar to the portrayal of Placidus in The Eagle of the Ninth we are also dissing the smooth "lily boys of the Governor's staff" whom Ferradach Dhu thinks Alexios resembles, when he meets him. Yeah. So that's not great either, but, on the other hand, hating on effeminacy is probably at least in character for the characters, whereas shafting the female characters again is the fault of the story.
I am not sure what else I can say about this book that I haven't said before somewhere else at great length already, but it feels like there must be more to say. Because, man, I love this book. Alexios! Alexios and his mistakes and his amazing personal journey! War! Loyalty! Horses! Wolves! Cultural differences! Hilarion and all his snark! All the hard choices! It is awesome.
It is bitterly unfair that this book is out of print, that used paper copies are becoming expensive (mine was a bargain at $20, and that was last month), and that the e-book is no longer available. Because you all need to read this one.
Up next: The Lantern Bearers.
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I read this book a year and a half ago. I love this book that much.
(Or maybe the rest of you aren't hardened embittered cynics now, in which case carry on.)
In addition to massive Frontier Wolf spoilers (and large quoted passages), this post also contains spoilers for Diane Duane's Deep Wizardry, a couple other Duaneverse books, and the middle of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, because I like to play compare and contrast with books I loved when I was fourteen. (Actually, I wasn't reading Vorkosigan until at least sixteen. But whatever.)
Helpful tip, if you have not read this book before: if you are reading and enjoying it in the beginning, make sure you have nothing else to do when you have reached about halfway through (when the Praepositus shows up at Castellum). If you like it, you won't want to stop.
Let me begin by explaining a particular kink I have in fiction. Take a smart, competent protagonist. And make them fuck up. Make them fuck up so incredibly badly that they have ruined their life, the lives of others, and possibly (depending on genre) the space-time continuum. Now -- and here's the key -- let them fix it. Do not let them slide on by without paying for their mistakes. It's rough, sure, and they're going to be a different person by the end of the end of the story, because a lot of the time their lives are different, but they'll have learned something.
For example: The Vorkosigan Saga. Memory is, hands-down, my favorite book in the series. Those of you who have read the series and have followed the above description can figure out exactly why. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the basic idea of the series up to that point is that Lord Miles Vorkosigan has, up until this point, been leading a rather charmed double life as Admiral Miles Naismith, commanding a mercenary fleet mostly by (a) sheer force of personality, (b) his amazing intellect and (c) a lot of lying. A lot of lying. So a lot of the series up to this point has been fun space opera, shenanigans as Naismith, wheeee. Memory is the book when Miles' lies finally catch up with him, he screws up, and he is basically deemed unfit for combat, and therefore unfit to be Naismith, whom he has been for a while now. He has to figure out how to be someone else, and the whole thing (combined with the other plot, the plot about Illyan's memory chip) is heartbreaking. I was crying the first time I read this book. Let me put it this way: in the previous book the author killed Miles and that wasn't the worst thing she could do to him. This was.
So, yeah, it's a thing.
I will exemplify, again, with Diane Duane's Deep Wizardry, which is a YA fantasy novel published, hmmm, five years after Frontier Wolf was. It's the second in the Young Wizards series, concerning, as the name suggests, a bunch of teenage wizards and their continuing fight to save the planet, and it's also one of my favorite books, the sort of favorite where I am terrified to reread it lest it has started to suck in the meantime. Anyway. Nita, our heroine, is on vacation on the beaches of Long Island with her wizarding partner Kit and her family, who currently do not know she is a wizard. They're swimming about in the ocean when they discover a dolphin, and then a whale wizard in trouble, and attempt to help. (Wizardry crosses species boundaries. In a big way.) It turns out the problem is even bigger than they suspected -- there are hideous seafloor seismic problems, ones that can only be solved with more magic. Basically, a bunch of wizard whales (and dolphins, sharks, what have you) need to ritually reenact a magic drama... thing... called the Song of the Twelve, which culminates in whoever's playing the Silent One reenacting ritually sacrificing themselves and keeping the ocean at peace again.
So Nita volunteers to play the Silent One, because she wants to help! It'll be like a play! No big deal! (Extreme earnestness and an overwhelming desire to Help All The Beings are pretty much the prereqs for being tapped as a wizard in the YW verse.) Everyone is really touched and honestly surprised that she is volunteering and Nita herself is very, very surprised when she finds out that she has actually signed herself up for actual ritual sacrifice. The kind where a shark eats you.
And when she goes to the authority figures, the adult wizards, the people she is expecting are going to get her out of this, their advice is basically: go die.
Carl let out a long breath. "I don't know what to tell you," he said.
This was not the most encouraging thing Nita had ever heard. A Senior Wizard always knew what to tell you. "Carl," she said, tears still thick in her voice, "what can I do? I can't--I can't just die!"
It was the first time she had actually said the word out loud. It left her shaking all over like the aftermath of a particularly large wizardry, and the tears started coming again.
Carl was quiet. "Well, yeah, you can," he said at last, gently. "People do it all the time--sometimes for much less cause."
"But there must be something I could do!"
Carl looked down at the sand. "What did you say you were going to do?"
When I was reading this book for the first time, I was maybe fourteen. And that scene has stayed with me all these years. I was shocked. I was amazed. I didn't know fantasy books could do this! I knew how all these YA fantasy stories worked! You made a mistake! The mentors were supposed to get you out of it! But they don't. Deal.
So... Nita goes to die. Well, she's fully prepared to, anyway, because she was the one who agreed to it, and she had to do it, so she tells her family about everything, and about wizardry (the scene on the moon is still one of my favorite things ever ever ever), and--
This is a post about Frontier Wolf. I'm getting there.
The thing is, Duane pulls her punches. Her writing -- and it's one of the things I love about her writing -- is very life-affirming. Good battles entropy. Good wins. And that means that pretty much every character who sacrifices themselves for their cause gets to live through it. K't'lk lives. Sunspark lives. Nita lives. Nita doesn't have to die; someone else does, though. The only other characters I can think of who actually get to die their noble death are My Enemy, My Ally's Tafv (who was, technically, the villain) and that ensign on Bloodwing in The Romulan Way (whose death was very weirdly handled anyway). But basically, yeah, they all live.
Rosemary Sutcliff does not pull her punches.
Almost everyone we come to care about in Frontier Wolf ends up dead. Lucius. Kaeso the quartermaster. Rufus the trumpeter and even Typhon the kitten. Bericus, the emperor's hard bargain. And, of course, Cunorix and Connla, who at least get the most epic deaths of the bunch. (Lucius' death is a distant third on the Scale of Epic.) Pretty much the only people who make it out alive are Alexios and Hilarion, and the first time through I was terrified that Hilarion was going to die too. (And yet I would still call this a happy book. It is my fandom happy place!)
These are not, of course, the only people who die in the novel. Because, if you will remember, Alexios fucked up. He made a decision, and it was the wrong one. But he did it, and a bunch of people died, and he has to live with it. And it is that exact agonizing point where Frontier Wolf actually begins:
The orderly set down the platter of cold meat and bread and the cup of wine on the end of the clothes chest, cast one half-contemptuous, half-sympathetic glance at the slight dark young man who sat hunched on the edge of the narrow cot with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and went out, shutting the door behind him.
He was glad he was not Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila.
And Centurion Alexios Flavius Aquila went on sitting with his head in his hands, staring at the floor but not seeing it. He felt dazed, as though he had taken a blow between the eyes; as though the past few days were all part of some monstrous nightmare from which he might wake up if only he knew how, to find himself back in his own quarters at Abusina. But the nightmare went on and on, and there was no waking up from it.
This is the story of how Alexios learns to live with himself, own his mistakes, become a better commander, and deal when everything goes to hell. And the best thing, the very best thing, is that he has to make exactly the same decision that was the wrong one before. (The second best thing is Hilarion, but that's just me. Also I have a thing for the Roman army.)
I was going to attempt to recap this one without rereading it (because, uh, I definitely can by now), but why deprive myself of the fun of a reread?
Anyway. Frontier Wolf, taking place in 343 AD as per the introduction, is a later addition (in terms of date written) coming right in the middle of what generally gets published as the Roman Britain trilogy (The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch, The Lantern Bearers). I think in the intervening years Sutcliff had time to polish her writing (by writing eight billion more books), because this is so tightly written and plotted compared at least to the first two. Everything just works so perfectly and fits together, with nothing wasted, and yet there is still room for glorious nature porn. And friendship! And snark! And epic! And soldiers! And wolves! And horses! (Wolves and horses are, in fact, critical.)
The weird thing about the timeline, though, is that the plot bears what seems to me to be a more-than-coincidental resemblance to the Great Conspiracy -- the Arcani/areani (hooray for a hapax legomenon) rebel, letting the Picts and Attacotti and a bunch of other people in to sack the Wall and points north -- except that the Great Conspiracy happened 25 years later. It's strange. (Also then Rome did actually go back north and quell the revolting and create Valentia, apparently. So this is not the final retreat of civilization or anything, despite Alexios' "Rome would not come back" when they pull out of Castellum. Unless they're supposed to be further north than Valentia? I don't know; I hate maps.)
So, this is how the story goes, because apparently I enjoy writing summaries:
We begin with the paragraphs quoted above, our introduction to Alexios Flavius Aquila. He is currently very upset, because he has made a colossally bad decision. The rest of chapter one is devoted to explaining his bad decision, in detail. I will explain it here, because it is exceedingly relevant to the rest of the book. You see, he was a regular old centurion, serving at Abusina, in Germania, and due to personnel being shuffled around he is temporarily second-in-command of the fort. This, of course, is when the Marcomanni decide to attack, and the guy who was in command is killed, meaning that Alexios, who is maybe 23 and with virtually no command experience, suddenly is in charge of the place. And the barbarians are still attacking. Standing orders in this situation -- as his much more experienced subordinates try to tell him -- are to stay put and wait for reinforcements. He sends out for reinforcements, but the Marcomanni send back the bloody heads of his messengers. (This is about when I started wondering how in the world this was children's literature. Later on there's drinking and wenching!) So naturally poor Alexios thinks no one's coming for him, and against orders and all advice, he orders a retreat. The retreat is pretty fucked-up as these things go, and a lot of people die, and eventually they run into their rescuers -- it seems the message made it through after all, and he should have stayed put. Back in his cell, Alexios awaits the board of inquiry and angsts more and offers to fall on his sword. Because he is angsty like that. It gets me. *sniff*
For further fun with flashbacks, chapter two skips us ahead to putting Alexios on the road to his new posting, where we are flashing back to the board of inquiry, and then Alexios' family, whom he visits on the farm on the Downs (he is an Aquila, after all). His mother is so upset with him, you guys. But it seems his maternal uncle is the Dux Britanniarum, so he gets to stay in the army. He even gets a promotion! Except not really:
"Command of the Frontier Scouts up at Castellum," his uncle had said. "Command of an Ordo--two Centuries in place of the one that you have commanded until now--and of the fort itself. Promotion to the rank of Ducenarius. It sounds like advancement, doesn't it? Make no mistake, it's not. You're an incompetent soldier, unfit to serve in a decent auxiliary cohort, so--it's the Frontier Wolves for you. And don't ask me how they came by their fond-name, you'll find out soon enough. They may make some kind of man of you, if they don't arrange for you to have a fatal accident instead. I believe that has happened before now."
Alexios had tried desperately to keep a grip on things, himself included. "Sir, I do not need to be told what I have done, nor what I deserve; I am only too well aware of both, and too bitterly sorry. I can but thank you for all that you have done for me in the past, and for this chance to redeem myself. I will do all that I may to deserve it."
"I suppose your mother told you to apologize and say thank you, like a good boy," Uncle Marius said, not bothering to keep the scorn out of his voice.
Alexios, feeling like a whipped cur, had still hung on to himself. "I hope I should have done both, without her prompting."
"And I suppose she thinks I did it all for her sake, eh?"
"She is your sister, Sir. The whole army knows it."
"Half-sister," Uncle Marius said with asperity. "Ah well, even a weeping half-sister is easier to yield to than to withstand. But she is mistaken; the whole army is mistaken. All that I have done for you was done for your father's sake, not hers. He was the best friend I ever had, I never had a son of my own, and I wanted his son to do well. I see now that I was mistaken in my dealings with you, all along. I hope to God I'm not mistaken now. Get out!"
And Alexios had got out, horrified to find himself shaking from head to foot and on the edge of laughter, with most assuredly nothing to laugh about. He must stop it, or he would end in the ultimate shame of tears here in the open forecourt. He had managed to straighten up and get as far as his sleeping quarters. Then he had kicked the door shut and flung himself down on the narrow cot with his head in his arms.
You see what I mean about how if you have a kink for YOU'RE A FUCK-UP, PROTAGONIST, this will hit it? Yeah. Then we come out of flashback and Alexios angsts about how he is a failure in the eyes of the previous ring-owners, just to establish that he has the ring, I guess.
He gets to Castellum and meets Gavros, the old commander getting promoted, and his officers: Hilarion and Lucius the centenarii, Kaeso the quartermaster, Anthonius the medic, and Druim, leader of the Arcani, the native scouts. Hilarion, because he is a snarky bastard, mocks him over dinner, so really things start out just great. The next day is infodump exposition day, where we meet the Frontier Wolves, learn about their customs (every man kills a wolf and makes it into a wolfskin cloak and never kills a wolf again! everyone is a mounted archer! everyone does awesome tribal dances! also there is a sacred black stone they touch! also beware the Arcani, but everyone else is ridiculously loyal to the Wolves even if sometimes they are from rival tribes that hate each other!) and we head to the territory of the Votadini to meet the chieftain, Ferradach Dhu. Alexios knows British and is very well-mannered. He meets the guy's sons, Cunorix (the heir!) and Connla (troublemaker extraordinaire!), who when we meet them are actually arguing about how badly Connla treats horses, which is Total Foreshadowing. Alexios promptly develops an ~Intense Crush~ on him in that Sutcliffian way where he imagines having him at his shield-shoulder. They agree to go wolf-hunting later. Also there is an Evil Druid who is probably the least-well-done element of the plot; if you cannot tell he is evil I will be forced to assume you have never heard a story before.
Alexios slowly starts to settle into life at the fort, hampered by Hilarion being as snarky as fuck about Alexios' past ("We're the scum and scrapings of the Empire [...] You're among brothers.") But gradually he does things like, you know, care when they get bad supplies. Also there are adorable kittens. Then comes Saturnalia, and he's dicing with Hilarion and Lucius is reading the Georgics and outside the Dalriads and the Votadini among the soldiers are drumming and dancing the Bull Calves, which is an excuse to try to kill each other. Alexios breaks it up. See, he is becoming a good commander! And then he asks them to teach him their awesome dancing.
He has to wait until spring before he gets to go wolf-hunting with Cunorix, and he has a great friendly bonding time (he is really into Cunorix) and there is Nature Porn and he has his wolfskin and the men accept him and now he touches the sacred black stone like everyone else does. Yay. Then some more seasons happen, Alexios learns scouting and hangs with Cunorix, and it's while he's hanging out with Cunorix that Connla comes to tell him their father's dead and he (Cunorix) is chief now. So then the plot basically pauses for a couple chapters while Alexios goes to the ceremony where Cunorix is made chieftain. There is more Nature Porn, Cunorix' son is born, and Alexios and Connla play an exciting game of polo with a cow's head. Toward the end of it, the plot gets going again as a visiting harper tells Alexios that the Attacotti and the Picts are forming alliances. Alexios starts to get the sense something awful's going to happen, especially since the harper turns up dead shortly thereafter.
Then the plot actually gets going, as Praepositus Montanus, Alexios' superior, shows up to inspect the fort. For some reason Alexios thinks it would be a great idea if he held a Getting To Know You dinner with the praepositus and the Votadini, except it turns out that the praepositus doesn't like the Votadini, he doesn't like the Wolves' trick riding and fancy dancing (especially when Alexios joins in), he doesn't think they should be touching their black stone, and basically he is the enemy of fun. He probably even hates the kittens! He also owns A REALLY PRETTY STALLION. Cunorix asks him if he can borrow the horse to breed him to his favorite mare and the praepositus is basically EWWW NO BARBARIAN.
And then it happens. It could have been anything, but from the way it was going, something was going to happen eventually, but: Connla steals the horse. In what I think is possibly the weirdest plotting decision in the book, this doesn't actually kick off the fight, because they all know it's him and everyone does a good job face-saving with HUH, FUNNY YOUR HORSE HAS WANDERED ALL THE WAY OVER HERE. No, it all happens because, after that, Connla steals the horse again. The narrative explicitly blames this on Teleri the swordsmith's daughter (who never shows up before or since) laughing at him when he has to give the horse back, and the book says that if not for her the whole thing wouldn't have happened. Which, okay, I'm sorry, but that's pretty rotten, Sutcliff. Stealing the horse is the fault of the horse-thief.
So he steals the horse again, except now the Frontier Wolves actually have to chase him down. Connla falls, the horse falls, they capture him, and they have to put the poor horse down anyway. Broken legs. Also two of the Frontier Wolves die. Naturally, Montanus is furious. He wants Connla executed, brutally -- the light is going and he wants a bunch of people throwing javelins at him, which is not really going to be the most compassionate method of execution. So Alexios protests, but they make ready for the execution, at which point Alexios steps up, gives him a much cleaner, easier death ("two inches in the right place"), and then resigns. Montanus has him confined to quarters. Then, apparently, the Arcani betray everyone and go running, and the Picts, Attacotti, and Votadini together all attack -- the Votadini, led by Cunorix, of course are avenging Connla as well. Alexios only finds this out a bit later, when his men come give him his command back because the praepositus is dead.
So now, for Alexios, it's uncomfortably like Abusina all over again, in that he is now, once again, in command of a fort under attack. And he knows they can't hold out -- for one thing, the enemy took one of their wells and they don't have enough water. So he has to make the exact same decision against regs that got him sent to the Wolves in the first place. (Only, see, he's a better commander now, all his subordinates support him, and also it turns out to be the right decision because by the time they actually run into a relief force it is almost too late. And it will have turned out that they were ordered to retreat anyway.) So once again he burns all the papers and Lucius' Georgics (Lucius is, um, not making it out of this book alive), actually takes the time to make a decent plan involving decoys, and they run for it. Did I mention it's winter and the weather is miserable? But they're going to go to Bremenium, where they will be safe!
To leave, they have to pass through a sacred Votadini place (it's another round of Scary Bogs, because we all enjoyed that in The Eagle of the Ninth, right?), and the men are surprisingly calm about this and sure that the passage will demand a life. Turns out to be Kaeso the quartermaster. And then they end up sheltering in a ruined village and wounded dying men that no one can help are crying out for water, and it's getting kind of grim.
Hiding out in the village, they also find: a woman. (She doesn't get a name, of course not. This is Sutcliff.) Apparently the invading barbarian group killed her son, but Romans killed her husband, and she's kind of crazy and hates everyone. In the middle of the night she stabs a soldier and leaves. This ends up being her only appearance, but she is mentioned later: when Cunorix shows up for the endgame, he mentions that they found her and she hated them too and she was being all crazy and spooking the horses, so they killed her. I have no idea what this is supposed to indicate. Maybe that we are supposed to favor the Romans for not murdering her.
Alexios and Hilarion (who by the way likes Alexios a whole lot better, by now; it has happened gradually but as this is not My Alexios/Hilarion Manifesto I'll leave it at that) and Lucius continue in command and on the way, and they get their decoy party back (and nothing bad has happened to them!) and everyone's pitching camp, and it's almost Midwinter Night. In the scene that I would really consider the heart of the novel, Alexios is lying there staring up at Orion, realizing it has been almost a year since that time the Dalriads and the Votadini were beating the crap out of each other, and realizing that by now he is a good commander with an awesome command (even if clearly the rest of Rome doesn't think so):
Lying among his men at the heel of one of the long bracken-lined sleeping trenches that even on peace-time patrols had always seemed to him uncomfortably like a grave, Alexios thought that seeing the Frontier Wolves in off-duty hours, drunk and ribald, cock-fighting, wenching, scrapping among themselves, wild and insubordinate, you could easily enough imagine them turning hero against an enemy from outside, standing by each other in the last ditch, but you couldn't imagine this well-drilled and efficient making of camp in hostile territory. "If we don't get through," he thought, "if I don't get them through--if I don't get out of this-- by the Lord of the Legions I've known what it is to command men worth the commanding!"
Above him the sky was breaking up, by morning it would be freezing hard; and suddenly Orion swung clear of the drifting cloud into a great lake of clear. He looked up at the three stars of the hunter's belt and the straight jewelled line of the sword hanging from it. He had never noticed before how bright and beautiful Orion's sword shone on a winter's night. He heard the faint stir in the close-packed horse-lines, and the dark soughing of the wind across the dead heather. "I have served with men, and I have seen Orion's sword in the sky," he thought with an odd feeling of content; and rolled over in the harsh bedding, pulling his wolfskin closer about him, and fell into a quiet sleep as peacefully as when he was a boy in his familiar sleeping cell at home in the Down Country farm.
And then they're running more (the second half of this book is pretty much one big flight) and they run into an ambush that everyone knows is an ambush, but hey, what else are you going to do? And it's snowing, and they struggle through, and Alexios gives everyone an inspiring speech:
Alexios, moving among the dark humped shapes, his own bit of bannock in his hand, sensed another kind of darkness lying heavy in the hearts of his men, and said to the nearest group of shadows, "Only twelve more miles to do; not even a full day's march; and tomorrow night we shall sleep warm and full-bellied in Bremenium."
"And what makes him so sure of that, I'm wondering?" muttered a voice behind him as he moved on.
Alexios checked, and swung back towards the speaker. "I will tell you. I am sure because we have made well over three-fourths of the way already, and sent the men who thought we would be an easy kill off to lick their wounds. Because we are disciplined troops of Rome, which gives us the pull over any tribal war-mob, however valiant; and because of all the troops of Rome, we are the Frontier Wolves!"
Someone gave a small crow of laughter, half breath in his throat. "We are the Frontier Wolves, and let nobody forget it!"
And it seemed to Alexios that the darkness-of-the-heart lifted just a little. But whether they would indeed sleep warm and full-fed at Headquarters tomorrow night, or cold somewhere on the high moors with the snow unmelting on their breasts, that was another matter.
It's only a bridge between there and Bremenium, and they make it, but the Votadini are on their tail, and they have to hack the bridge out as they go. (Yes, it is very exciting.) Lucius dies nobly in Alexios' arms, and they bring his body to bury at Bremenium and keep running.
Then they finally, finally get to Bremenium and... it's a wreck. Which was a complete surprise to me the first time I read this, because I kept thinking, well, okay, they'll get there and they'll finally, finally be safe. Everyone is dead, except for the one guy who lives long enough to tell him that the Arcani betrayed them all and opened the gates. And also the pony they're going to eat because they have no food. They set about burying Lucius... and then the Votadini show up. There's no way they can hold them off, because they're starving and exhausted and going to die. Luckily, it's almost nighttime, and apparently for religious reasons the Votadini won't fight at night, so if Alexios can just delay them long enough it'll be okay.
The solution he picks, of course, is challenging Cunorix in a one-on-one duel to the death (and it has to be Alexios, of course; he killed Connla). The terms are that if Alexios wins, the Votadini will clear out, of course. They both seem pretty okay with this being the way it has to be ("The thing is done. There is blood between us."), because Epic. Sad, but Epic.
So they fight, and it is extremely Epic, and Alexios gets wounded in his shield-arm before killing Cunorix. It is sad. And it turns out it didn't buy them any time at all because then the Evil Druid (remember him?) comes up with the brilliant idea that everyone should keep fighting in the dark.
But luckily -- things are kind of turning around -- someone kills the Evil Druid and the Votadini kind of lose interest, and more Frontier Wolves show up to help them. They tell us that everything's kind of a big mess right now and they're all on the way to Habitancum, which is still under Roman control. Alexios is also kind of a mess and the wound in his arm is still open and he's refusing assistance, because, yeah. Kind of a mess. When they get to Habitancum, hey, it's Gavros! He's in command and Alexios tells him the whole story. But they can't rest now, because everyone's heading further south! To Onnum! At which point Alexios is not really functional due to previously mentioned wounds, identifies the arriving emperor as a guy he thinks he's seen somewhere on a coin once (he's really out of it, okay?), and faints at Onnum while dismounting. Whoops. (Also Sutcliff is spelling Habitancum as "Habitancium." Not just an e-book typo; I checked it against my paper copy.)
Then follows the awesome h/c of awesome (my personal favorite) where Alexios spends a while drifting around in a haze and being sad. When he wakes up, he finds he's convalescing in Onnum and Hilarion comes into the room and helps feed him his soup and tells him about everything that's happened while he was out (basically, more fighting, and yes, Alexios, that was emperor Constans). There is cuddling. ♥ ♥
Right. Actual plot. When Alexios is healed up enough, he gets to go meet the emperor, who thanks him for being so awesome and offers him three options: promotion to tribune, promotion to the emperor's bodyguard, or promotion to Belgica where he would take a bunch of surrendered Attacotti captives and make them into shiny new Frontier Wolves. Alexios goes with Door Number Three. His uncle the Dux (remember, the guy who hated him at the beginning?) is proud of him again.
So he's standing there, admiring the scenery porn, thinking sad thoughts about all the sad things that have happened and how now he'll have to go somewhere else, and then we get this for an ending, which I love so much I am just going to paste here in its entirety:
Footsteps came along the rampart walk, and he glanced round to see Hilarion strolling towards him.
"It's just as I always said," Hilarion draped himself against the parapet at his side. "No sooner do we get a Commander comfortably broken in to our ways than the higher command send him off somewhere else, and we have to start on some new cub, all over again."
"I was just discovering that it comes a bit hard on the Commander, too," Alexios said, not knowing it until the words were spoken.
"Well, you'll leave them in good hands, now that Gavros has the Numerus."
Looking out along the road again, Alexios said, "I'm thinking you'll get Number Three Ordo in my place."
The silence beside him made him look round, and he saw with surprise that for the first time since they had known each other, Hilarion was looking not completely sure of himself. "As a matter of fact," said Hilarion after a moment, "I was thinking of trying for an Ordo in another Numerus--the old Third will be split up and re-made, anyhow."
"You mean--?" Alexios said slowly.
"You'll need a couple of good experienced Ordo officers," his centenarius told him, "and the gods know what you'll get if you leave it to the authorities. Up here we break in our own officers as we go along, but now it won't be so simple; and this new lot of yours--they're not even from inside the Empire, they're barbarians from beyond the pale. We shall have to do all the training."
"We?" said Alexios.
"We," said Hilarion.
There was a sudden warmth in Alexios. The tall mocking man beside him would never fill the place that Cunorix had left empty and aching, but the startled warmth felt good, all the same. "Hilarion, do you want to come with me?"
"Well if I don't, I really can't think what this conversation is all about," said the centenarius.
"Then go you and put in your application, and I'll back it."
His slow lazy smile drifted over Hilarion's freckled face. "I already have," he said.
They looked at each other a long moment, and then laughter took them both.
From below came a ragged tramping and a snatch of wild and mournful song. And still laughing, the two young men on the rampart turned, each with a hand on the other's shoulder, and stood looking down. The last slate grey of the daylight was fading, blending away into the red-flaked smoke of unseen fires where they were burning rubbish down beyond the horse-lines, and along the open space below the Wall, the men of the First Attacotti Frontier Scouts were being marched back to barracks for the night.
Alexios wondered how often, round how many camp fires in Belgica, he would hear that wild lament out of Hibernia when the native beer went round and it had long since ceased to be truly a lament and become something that one sang for the memory of old griefs and old longings and the pleasure of twisting one's own heartstrings.
"There goes your new command," said Hilarion, "and to think there are rising four hundred more of them at Cilurnum! Mother of Mares, what a pack! What a rabble! I wish us joy of them!"
"I wish us joy of them!" said Alexios Flavius Aquila, their new Commanding Officer.
So, um. Yeah. That's the book. In case you ever want to know what happens, in great detail.
Questions I still have:
(1) How did people like Lucius and Anthonius come to the Frontier Wolves? How did Gavros? It appears to be punishment for anyone who is actually posted there rather than recruited locally (I am assuming the officers were posted) -- it sure is for Alexios. Kaeso is a habitual drunk. Hilarion is a snarky annoying bastard (possibly literally a bastard), and while he actually happens to be a competent officer you'd have to put up with him first, and I can imagine a lot of people not wanting to. But Lucius? Anthonius? We know pretty much nothing about them except that they're both Christians and Lucius likes his Georgics. But liking the Georgics is not grounds for punishment, and, from Alexios' description, being a Christian is an asset, actually. So what happened? (And what about Gavros?)
(2) Hey, what about those fatal accidents the Frontier Wolves supposedly arrange? I know it was just supposed to make them sound more menacing, but then it was totally dropped. Who did they kill? (Fic, please?)
(3) What the hell happened with the Arcani? Specifically, Druim. The last time we see Druim is when his scout comes staggering in, dying, to report the attack, and he and the scout both seem loyal. Then Hilarion visits Alexios in custody to tell him that the Arcani have all deserted, and they agree that that must have been a shock for Druim (implying that Druim actually was loyal). And then Druim, who last we heard was still at Castellum with them, is never mentioned again. Did he go with them? Did he desert? What?
I was briefly confused about why Alexios decided to lodge a formal protest about Connla's execution rather than refusing and resigning then, but I guess it was because Connla was doomed either way and this way Alexios had the opportunity to give him a better death. (I am kind of weirdly touched that Hilarion offers to take his place, both for killing Connla and for Cunorix; I would totally read an AU where he did.) Basically, this is a book about being forced to make really hideous decisions. Like killing your friends and abandoning your forts. But it's a really good book.
Once again, Frontier Wolf does very poorly with female characters, of which there are very, very few. There's Cunorix's wife Shula. There's the old woman who presents Cunorix's son to him (you can tell I'm really reaching). There's the woman they find in the ruined village. There's Alexios' mother, who has no name (this in a canon where Alexios' horse and Cunorix's hunting hounds are named), and who Alexios doesn't appear to care about when at the end he is glad to have won back his uncle's respect. And there's Teleri the swordsmith's daughter, who has a name, a description, a line of dialogue... and who, according to Sutcliff, is ultimately responsible for everything awful that happens in the second half of the book, because she laughed at Connla. Gee, thanks.
Similar to the portrayal of Placidus in The Eagle of the Ninth we are also dissing the smooth "lily boys of the Governor's staff" whom Ferradach Dhu thinks Alexios resembles, when he meets him. Yeah. So that's not great either, but, on the other hand, hating on effeminacy is probably at least in character for the characters, whereas shafting the female characters again is the fault of the story.
I am not sure what else I can say about this book that I haven't said before somewhere else at great length already, but it feels like there must be more to say. Because, man, I love this book. Alexios! Alexios and his mistakes and his amazing personal journey! War! Loyalty! Horses! Wolves! Cultural differences! Hilarion and all his snark! All the hard choices! It is awesome.
It is bitterly unfair that this book is out of print, that used paper copies are becoming expensive (mine was a bargain at $20, and that was last month), and that the e-book is no longer available. Because you all need to read this one.
Up next: The Lantern Bearers.
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