Beasts From the Dark

by Beasts from the Dark (retail) (epub)

  Culleo and Sow looked on, squatting and sweating and uneasy. Angry, too.

  ‘She’s dead,’ Culleo said harshly, and Ugo kicked him hard enough to set him rolling, but he climbed to his feet and glared against a backdrop of burning and black smoke.

  ‘If they took her at all and she’s not still lying dead in the grass,’ he persisted, ‘then she is dead now. They will slit her throat—’

  ‘These are not your beast men of the Dark,’ Kisa argued hotly. ‘These are Romans.’

  ‘Where’s Manius?’ Drust demanded, and Kisa jerked round to look at him, blinking sweat from his eyes.

  ‘He went to look for signs,’ he said. ‘Do not listen to this one – we searched all around and did not find her. They took her, and if so, they meant it, so she lives. These are Romans.’

  ‘Romans,’ Sow declared and nodded grudgingly. ‘Perhaps – but I am betting sure everyone here has seen what Romans can do with a woman in a war.’

  ‘They meant it,’ Kisa persisted, scowling. ‘They came for her.’

  ‘They came to snatch a woman?’ Culleo countered incredulously.

  ‘To take one of us prisoner,’ Kisa corrected. ‘And so alive, or why bother at all?’

  ‘Why would they do that?’ Quintus asked, but no one had an answer to it, even though Drust used the conundrum of it to whirl the gears in his head and stop them telling his legs to run. Then Manius came back, sweat-gleamed and dark as smoke.

  ‘Four heading north,’ he said. ‘No mark I can recognise as Praeclarum, but they may be carrying her – the ground is not soft enough to tell her foot from another. There is blood, all the same, so someone is leaking.’

  ‘Told you,’ Culleo said and then scrabbled backwards as Ugo took a step.

  ‘Lead the way,’ Drust said, letting a little of his rage out as he rose. Culleo gave a growl and stood up.

  ‘You want to follow these? Further into the Dark? The way to safety lies westward…’

  ‘Then take it. We go north,’ Kag spat and Culleo flung down his helmet.

  ‘Hammer lies a little way off with a hole through him you couldn’t block with your ink-marked fist, but no one here cares a fuck for that. Oh, no – we are all to charge off in pursuit of one of your own, the doxy of your leader—’

  Ugo sprang surprisingly quickly for a big man and Culleo had no chance other than to yelp before he was hauled up into the squinting grimace that was Ugo’s face.

  ‘I will crush your skull until the inside pops out,’ he rumbled and then stopped because a blade was at his neck. When he followed it, he found a determined Sow at the other end.

  ‘Let him down, giant. Too many of the Batavii have died on this enterprise.’

  ‘Do it,’ Drust ordered, feeling the angry burn at this delay. ‘Kag – give them water and bread enough to get them on their way.’

  ‘Alone?’ Sow demanded.

  ‘Your choice,’ Kag answered. ‘We go north.’

  Sow sheathed the sword and blew out his cheeks, then looked at Culleo. ‘Not much choice, is there? Die west or die north.’

  ‘I am working on a new way,’ Culleo answered, massaging where Ugo had gripped him, the sweat-spikes of his hair ragged as his scowl. ‘Called not dying at all.’

  Ugo wiped his palms down his tunic and nodded admiringly at Sow. ‘You have large bags, little man – but if you point that sticker at me again I will take it from you and use it to remove those large bags.’

  ‘Well, you have to get a pair from somewhere,’ Sow answered, staring back.

  Kag thrust out his hand, knuckles up and fingers splayed. One by one, the others who knew of this added their hands until, finally, Kag looked at Sow and Culleo.

  ‘You have your own marks somewhere – the idiot ones you Army farts always get. SPQR on a shoulder blade, where an optio can’t see it on parade. Roma Invicta across the belly – which is fine when you have one flat and hard, a lot less so when it swells with retirement. No matter – you are no different from us.’

  ‘Former slaves?’ Culleo spat, his face a bag of blood. ‘Gladiators? I never was a slave – and I am a soldier of Rome, not some fancy-dancing Greek poncing around in an amphitheatre.’

  ‘You were once Helvetii,’ Drust answered harshly, ‘and now deny them. Your father’s father and beyond belonged to a Roman, for sure, until one of your breed worked out what a spoon was for, crawled up a notch and made himself free. Now you have taken that inheritance, marked yourself with the insignia of the Rome you have enslaved yourself to, and deny you were ever anything else.’

  He thrust out his own hand, the letters seemingly more stark than usual. ‘This is how a slave is made – not birth, not breeding, not any whim of Mars Ultor or the carved gods of this blood wood. A pound of Egyptian pinewood bark, two ounces of corroded bronze, two ounces of gall, an ounce of vitriol. Add anger and pain and humiliation as you will. Mix well and sift, wash knuckles with leek juice, prick in the design with pointed needles until blood is drawn. Then rub in the ink.’

  He looked at them all, one face at a time. ‘You either show them or hide them.’

  ‘Brothers of the Sand,’ Dog said, ‘forged in a ring.’

  One by one the others repeated it while Culleo and Sow looked on, wondering why the heat had gone out of the day and their skin crawled as if under a chilled wind.

  * * *

  They made plans between kisses. About coming out of Subura and living as husband and wife in the light, so it was right that they ended up strolling like they were ordinary people and planning the wedding under the Colossus Solis.

  Drust liked the shade of old Nero’s narcissism. Vespasianus Augustus had sensibly added a rayed crown to the head and renamed the giant affair Colossus Solis, but it was still old Nero, naked and as tall as twenty men, leaning on a pedestal and holding a rudder piercing a globe, though few people knew why.

  Praeclarum was fretted by the Vestal whose fate was about to be sealed in a tomb, the proper punishment for having betrayed your vows. She thought the Vestal had been punished enough and did not like the idea of their own future paid for by the price of bringing the woman, once an Empress, back to Rome to die.

  Two boys fell past Drust, pushing and shoving one another, laughing. An elegance of perfume and kohl swayed on her way, heading for the fetid dim of the Flavian’s pillars. Hucksters selling seats for twice the price, thieves, sausage sellers – all human life was there, and some that didn’t look as if it was. They poured in from the suburbs and outlying farms to make money or lose it but determined to enjoy themselves. For a moment he felt at one with it, a glorious commune with what it meant to live in the whole of the City instead of the lowest, darkest part of it. He was them and they were him…

  Except for the grim men who came from four points round Drust. He knew them at once – hired men, hard men. It did not matter why, for there were too many who held grudges or wanted vengeance. You could not leave Subura because no matter where you went, you dragged it with you.

  The four thugs closing in on them was the truth, all of it, right there, and they stood, sucked dry of dreams and fumbling for weapons they did not have.

  There was a flurry and one of the men went down, people ebbing away from the affair like ripples from a thrown stone. Ugo, grinning, kicked the downed man in the head while his mates turned to stare. Another went down and Kag was there with a wooden cudgel. A third yelped and fell when Quintus cracked both sides of his knees with an expert wrist flick and a wooden training sword.

  ‘Move,’ said Dog, grinning at them both as the last man fled from his unveiled face. ‘I hear there is a wedding and Great Solis’s shadow has brought your family to celebrate.’

  He woke into twilight, had a moment of confusion about bulk and shadow until he sorted it out – the bulk was a fallen tree and the shadows were using it for shelter and concealment, a cold camp of whispers and little movement.

  Manius had found it when the light grew too bad to track further and
Drust had looked at the big tree, an oak which had finally given up the fight against wind and age. The roots had been ripped out of the ground, clutching desperately at earth and stones, and now showed the bones of the ground-world. How deep do roots go in this forest? He laid his cheek against the loam and the cool moss, felt the deep, searing panic of her loss, of where she was, how she was…

  Owls and the moon paired up in the killing of voles and shrews, the unseen birds sounding their flute-notes, such a soothing thing for a murder. Somewhere a fox screamed and something small and in terror shrieked; this whole forest was a slaughter.

  He rose and made himself move from shape to shape, sometimes speaking a word or two, mostly just letting his own shadow fall on them, let them know he was there. He got responses, from a grunt to a querulous note from Kisa.

  ‘Problem?’

  The man was hesitant and wanted to say something; Drust felt a barbed hook of unease.

  ‘Praeclarum,’ he said, and Drust felt the hook twist.

  ‘What woman calls herself “Remarkable”?’ Culleo’s sullen voice was too loud and Dog made him aware of it by thrusting his horror of a face out of the shadows; Culleo shrank and muttered.

  ‘She is called that because she is that,’ Dog growled, and Drust blinked once or twice, frankly amazed. Dog had always been the one who spat and clawed and fought any of Drust’s attempts to make them finer than they had started out. He had wanted to be leader at one time – Drust was not sure that ambition was cold or still smouldered.

  ‘They are all like that,’ Sow added, laying a hand on Culleo’s shoulder. ‘Dog here is a man who had his face ink-marked in pursuit of a woman, I heard. Quintus and Kag and Manius and Ugo are all long-time harena fighters – you know how the Legion changes you, Culleo? The amphitheatre is the same, I suspect.’

  ‘Never saw a woman fight in it,’ Culleo said. ‘Don’t seem right.’

  ‘Isn’t now,’ Ugo said, coming up on the talk as if it was a fire. ‘Old Severus Augustus put a stop to it and not before time – women weren’t trained right, didn’t fight right. Slaughtered tiro dwarves or the unarmed condemned. Got put in naked mostly, so the sweaties in the crowd could see tits and cunt.’

  He leaned forward a little, his face seeming to shine like a small moon. ‘But she is better now. A proper woman, married and everything. Done right – we were all there. We are all better because of it…’

  He tailed off because that was as much as he could manage about how he felt. Kag laid a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Is anyone on watch?’ Drust asked drily, but he was filled with the glow of them, as if he sat at a fire.

  * * *

  Birds stopped them midway through the next morning, just as they filed out in a half-crouch of sweating anxiety, clenched as curls, into where the trees thinned and the ground dipped. The birds wheeled in easy spirals, swooping down suddenly then soaring up again. Higher still were lazier shapes against the sun-dazzled sky, looking like black crosses endlessly falling.

  There was a long slide of open land, a clearing maybe used as grazing once but now overrun with a choke of shrubs, old stumps sprouting new saplings. They squatted and tallied it up, each man making his point based on what he saw.

  ‘Ravine,’ said Kag, ‘where that line of green is. Land runs down to it from here and it is tight-fitted with trees, which means water.’

  ‘Maybe this is where the river narrows,’ Kisa offered, but Quintus looked at the sun and then the slope and shook his head.

  ‘Unlikely – we are strayed too far north now. This is a feeder stream.’ He added a grin to sugar the disappointment. ‘We could follow it, find the main river and a way across.’

  ‘Birds is on something dead,’ Ugo added, and Manius wiped his dark, greased face and agreed.

  ‘Maybe a dead deer,’ he said, ‘maybe not. But they made us find them, and if we can…’

  Then others can too, Drust finished to himself. He looked at the shape of the land, the thickness of the trees all around and in the ravine, worked out how long it would take to traverse it and how best to do it. All the time a part of him was shrieking at what they might find there.

  Loving her had been fiery and full and I should have been well happy, Drust thought, with her and me both. Instead, I was fretted by the idea that the gods laughed at what the pair of us imagined would be our life together. There was something about it all made my heart thunder, he thought, and it wasn’t joy, it was fear. Our lives trembled, always at the edge of something terrible.

  The ravine was gentle, the moss and rocks of it embedded to make descent and climb-out easy; the riverbed was dry, rotted with fallen trees and choked with thorn which they had to hack through. The depth of it held the heat, sultry and thick with dead air, where insects seemed barely able to fly.

  Up on the far lip of it, they emerged sweating and gasping into a copse of birch and a clotted undergrowth of tangled branches and roots which seemed to claw upwards like dead fingers. The birds flapped off, all of them crows and rooks and black kites, voicing harsh displeasure.

  The body was easy to find, shrouded by a veil of clouded insects which broke and scattered reluctantly in angry humming; Manius bent to it, though people wondered at how he suffered the stink. Drust did too, but no one wondered at that and they all held their breath for that reason as much as the smell and the flies.

  Not her. The relief of it almost made Drust keel over, but he managed to fight the swimming in his head and stood up.

  It was a man in a linen tunic and trousers gathered at the ankles, yet he wore Army boots. The shoulders and back of the tunic were thick with black runnels of old blood and what had been done to him after that was by beak and talon.

  He had nothing else on him, but the ruined face had a clear line across the forehead, so far ignored by the birds when they went for his eyes, which marked where sun and weather had not reached because of his helmet.

  ‘They took helmet and weapons and anything else he carried,’ Manius confirmed, waving away flies. He spat one out. ‘Left his signaculum. Lucius Claudius Silanus, five feet seven, Ala II Flavia pia fidelis milliaria.’

  He rooted around in the leather pouch and produced a fold of papyrus, handed it to Drust.

  It was decent stuff, not the coarse fibres for everyday, and had been much folded so that it was cracked along the creases and the already faded words were even harder to read. In the end, Drust passed it to Kisa.

  ‘That’s a good cut,’ Ugo said almost mournfully as he peered at the corpse. ‘That’s the slice of a gladius.’

  ‘Praeclarum was fighting,’ Kag replied. ‘The lad did well to keep moving this far then, giant of the Germanies.’

  Culleo went to the body and everyone assumed he was looking for loot, but he didn’t stay long and came back flapping flies from around his head and spitting.

  ‘I remember him,’ he said. ‘One of those fancy boys who rode out with our rogue general.’

  Drust and Kag exchanged glances which said the same – why are men of this Roman renegade going to the trouble of lifting a woman from them, like she was a prized mare?

  ‘This is a letter from a sweetheart,’ Kisa said sadly, carefully refolding it. ‘Lucia wonders why she hasn’t heard from her darling and is worried because his last letter was so strange.’

  She would wonder and worry for only a little longer, Drust thought, and for a brief moment shared the grief of her loss before throwing it savagely from him. Praeclarum is not dead, he raged to himself – quando tu Gaius, ego Gaia. Where you are Gaius, there am I Gaia – her traditional vow at the wedding, with her fake pearled teeth making her smile brilliant and her wreath of flowers making her chap-cheeked face a glory to him.

  ‘This is not the right man,’ Manius said, his voice dull as old pewter; he wiped his face with a swift gesture, shaking his head. ‘They left this one because he slowed them down – there is another, wounded but not badly enough to stop them moving. This one has been dead fo
r an hour, no more.’

  ‘How can you tell that?’ Culleo scoffed, and Manius favoured him with his black-eyed stare.

  ‘The birds have not had time to do more damage and they would not come until he was dead and alone. His colleagues stayed until he died, then stripped the body and went on. Left his signaculum so those who found him and could read would know he was Roman and a soldier. They are an hour away.’

  Culleo had nothing left to say, but Drust looked hard at Manius. ‘Can you follow the right trail?’

  Manius looked uneasy, on the verge of a lie. Then he nodded. ‘I still have the Colour.’ He uncoiled and loped off, looking for tracks.

  Sow wiped his streaming face and looked at the sky through the thinned branches to the clouds building up to hide the sun.

  ‘Getting cooler too,’ he offered. ‘So it’s all good.’

  Ugo patted him like a wayward hound. ‘Praise day at evening, a weapon when tried, a maid when married, ice when it has been crossed, and wine when it has been drunk.’

  It was a rutted old saying he trotted out now and then, claiming it to be part of his Frisian past, and they all knew it well. Well enough for Drust to appreciate that Ugo had been quick-witted enough to miss out the part of it which said, ‘a wife when dead’.

  Chapter Four

  The blessing of cloud, like all god-gifts, quickly became a curse. It grew dark and even more sultry, until suddenly a wind rushed in without warning, storming through the trees with a sound like surf. Then the air trembled with the deep drum of thunder, and Ugo looked up, spread his arms wide, each with a dolabra at the end, and called out ‘Wōðanaz’.

  Culleo and Sow edged away from him, and when the first dazzling blast lit the world into stark relief, they edged even further. Drust was blinking – they all were, for the light had seared through the eyelids.