Not everyone felt oppressed by the conditions. The irrepressible Laslav and another of Dasius’s hardy Thracians, Yoni, began a playful snow fight to warm themselves up, cackling noisily. Valtir hissed a warning.
‘He says we should not disturb the gods of this place.’ Dasius frowned and made the sign against evil. ‘We are close to their home and he is fearful of their anger.’
‘Then let us hope we are welcome.’ Valerius kept his voice light, but his hand instinctively reached for the golden amulet at his neck.
They were nearing the head of the pass when a sharp crack split the cocooned silence, as if someone had snapped a rotten tree branch. Valerius exchanged a puzzled glance with Dasius, but Valtir was already on the move, kicking his pony violently into motion. A desperate cry echoed from Serpentius at the rear of the column.
‘Ride! Leave the pack horses and ride for your life!’
Valerius hesitated and Dasius looked to where his troopers milled in confusion. Serpentius urged his horse past them, grabbing Valerius’s reins as he went by.
‘Ride, you idiot! Avalanche!’
Valerius dropped the rope to his pack horse and dug his heels into his mount’s ribs. His eyes searched the hills above for some hint of the danger that had sparked such fear in Serpentius, but he could see nothing. Was it possible that the Spaniard and Valtir were starting at shadows? Even as the thought formed, his mind was struggling to evaluate the impossible change happening before his eyes. The entire mountain top seemed to slip towards him in a single graceful movement, transforming in moments to a twenty-foot wall of snow the size of a legionary parade ground. It began slowly, so slowly that it didn’t seem to pose any threat. Surely they could outride the danger? But, as he watched, the great snow bank began to break up and increase in speed, pushing a blizzard of particles before it. Its advance was accompanied by the surging roar of an approaching thunderstorm, but Valerius’s eyes and ears seemed out of time, as if the sound was trying to catch up with what he was seeing. Now he needed no urging and he screamed at his horse for more speed, lashing its flanks in a desperate effort to gain ground. He braved a glance back to see Dasius and his cavalrymen on the move at last, although Yoni stubbornly refused to abandon his pack horse and was already ten or fifteen paces behind. Another crack froze the blood in his veins and he realized that a second piece of the snow shelf had broken free. A despairing look told him it was twice as large as the first, which already powered towards him like a grasping hand, fingers of thundering white powder extending from the main break as if a river had broken its banks and created separate streams. With each passing second the streams grew in power and speed, demolishing everything before them and snapping mature trees as if they were reeds. He heard a sharp cry and looked back to see the man with the pack horse go down in a flurry of white. Now the thunder was so deafening he thought his ears must explode and he dared not look up for fear of what he would see. It was only when his world turned to white shards of ice and something enormous kicked him out of the saddle that he knew they were all dead men anyway.
A moment when time stood still. Darkness. The thunder of his heart and the sound of harsh breathing. Something moved against his chest and he opened his eyes to a world of glacial blue and glaring white. He tried to move his right arm to push the snow from his face, but it was frozen in position. The left too. Gradually it came to him. He twisted and struggled with every ounce of energy he possessed. Kicked out with his legs. He could not move a single inch. He was buried alive. Somewhere close by, another poor soul was mewing pathetically like a newborn child and it took a moment to realize it was the sound of his own terror. The movement on his chest again. Something large smashed into his jaw and pushed his head back. Pain blinded him, but the disturbance had created a small air pocket that allowed him to breathe more easily. He realized that his horse had fallen beside him when the avalanche struck, and was equally trapped, with its head across his body. He willed himself to stay calm. How long would the air last? He wondered idly if he would suffocate or freeze to death, and which was the easier. The horse wriggled again, creating more space, and he realized that their combined heat was melting the snow. That thought gave him the strength to attempt another movement, but the result was the same as before. He was not only entombed, but encased. This time there was no escape.
XXIX
Muffled voices. Fingers hauling at his left hand, which he realized belatedly must be stretched out towards the surface of the snow. Was he hallucinating? No, he could hear the sound of frantically scrambling hands clawing through the snow. The mare shifted against him with a ‘harrumph’ from her nostrils. He whispered to calm her, but the closer the sounds came the more agitated she grew. She shook her head desperately and the heavy skull smashed against him. He cried out as a flare of agony stabbed through his chest, and slipped into a dead faint. When he woke again the trapped air was stale and thick, hardly air at all. The snow holding him in its grip was hard packed, set solid and thick with earth and stones. How much was above him? He felt himself fading and it was a few seconds before he remembered the earlier digging sounds. The scrabbling had stopped. His rescuers must be resting. But time passed and through the fog that threatened to envelop him he was aware of disappointment. They had given up. He tried to move his right arm again, but with as little success as before. His mind conjured up an image of a fly trapped in amber and he laughed aloud, the sound shrill and almost hysterical in his ears. So this was what it felt like. Death. His mind drifted. He had done what he could; no point in wasting his strength fighting it. Life and death would for ever be at the whim of the gods. No regrets. But was that true? He remembered Domitia and the day they had watched the dolphins from the deck of the bireme carrying her to her father in Antioch. What if Poseidon were to grant you the ability to choose, this very moment, to turn into a dolphin and swim away with me, to spend our lives roaming the oceans together? Would you accept or would you stand here and watch me swim away alone? Even as the thought formed, the wall of ice blue in front of his eyes turned into an explosion of blinding white and he gasped as a rush of cold air reached him. A face appeared in the opening.