There was a moth-flutter of indrawn breath at this.
That was it, Drust thought. The end of all their lives here. He was aware of all the eyes swinging to the stricken men, wondering and waiting gleefully for what might be done to them now. Ugo rumbled in the deep of his throat while Kag wryly offered his cup in toast to Lentulus, who was struggling to stand and making poor work of it.
‘Enough,’ Antyllus said and Lentulus gave up. Marcellus, on the other hand, was a little dagger of vicious spite.
‘Of course,’ he said silkily, ‘it would not do for such an insult to go unanswered.’
‘Marcellus,’ Antyllus said warningly. Lentulus looked like a confused horse feeling four hands on the reins and Marcellus shrugged idly.
‘I thought only of the cauldron. The loser begs forgiveness. On his knees.’
The cauldron. It went round the hall like a rustle of sour wind. They set up a thumping chant and others just demanded it, out loud and drunken. Lentulus looked sick; Marcellus grinned ferally at Drust.
‘Let the pair lift the cauldron then…’
‘Neither of them can manage that,’ Antyllus answered sharply, and Marcellus shrugged.
‘Let them choose champions then – that big fellow looks capable. Match him with Mus.’
The others caught the name and started to bang the table and shout it out like a chant – ‘Mus, Mus, Mus…’
He was no mouse when he finally ducked into the feral reek of the longhouse, a giant in a sweat-stained tunic. He was bigger and wider than Ugo, who looked round at Drust, then grinned and shrugged.
It was then that the others caught the gleam in Drust’s sideways flick of an eye, a glint of anger and cunning. Like seeing a bear come out of the cave you had just wandered up to, Ugo told everyone afterwards.
‘I need no champion,’ Drust said, and that silenced the howlers for a long minute. Then he grinned at them.
‘Five denarii on the Son of Mars,’ yelled someone, and there was howling and betting in equal measure. A small Roman dinner, Drust thought scornfully.
He stepped up to the cauldron and saw that once it had been burnished and might have looked like gold, but it wasn’t even bronze but gilded iron, worn to the truth in the inside by the stirring of the ladle. The beer sloshed in it, heady with the reek of fermented wheat.
The important – the vital – part of it was that it weighed enough for two men to have to carry it when it was empty. When it was made into a swimming pool of wheat beer it couldn’t be moved at all save by four, so stewards or slaves took folk’s cups and filled them using a heavy iron ladle that had come with it.
‘Mus isn’t strong enough…’
They took serious bets on it now and the shouts went back and forth, the odds flying with them. Few were for Drust, even from those who had enjoyed the wit about being a ‘Son of Mars’ – every soldier in the Army was a Son of Mars.
Mus, on the other hand, flexed biceps to the roars of the crowd; the cauldron sat like a dark doom, sweated with slopping beer, sour with possibility.
‘He should never have been in the cavalry,’ Ugo growled. ‘Look at him. His legs would dig troughs in the ground and the pony he rides would sag in the middle.’
‘He rode no horse,’ Kisa agreed. ‘He has comrades here of the same stripe. Look at them – every one is a grumbler, a misfit, and they are not all cavalrymen. I say “stripe” advisedly – look at their legs.’
They saw it, the weals and slashes made from the vine sticks of centurions and delivered to the greybacks, the foot soldiers of the Army, as casual punishments for not doing their perceived duty. These were the ones who thought themselves badly handled.
‘Remind me of the rules?’ Drust demanded, slashing through the calls. He sounded desperate and Lentulus, his eyes piggy and his face red as a smacked arse, laughed aloud.
‘Rules?’ he blurted out. ‘You lift, you carry, and whoever carries it further wins.’
‘So,’ Drust said, frowning as if he was having trouble with it, ‘if your big Mouse there doesn’t carry it further than I can, I win?’
One or two laughed. Lentulus blinked, frowned and nodded; Drust saw Antyllus’s eyes narrow and wondered if he had worked it out – but he stayed silent, stroking his chin.
The odds changed and flew like birds; Lentulus leered and Marcellus watched with a fixed stare, his face dark and eager. Antyllus was trying for stoical calm but fell short of it; he did not like matters getting away from him as badly as they had. Get used to it, Drust thought savagely, for you believe you are leading these Sons of Mars, but they are leading you. That purple cloak they will eventually throw over your shoulders may seem like a vindication of greatness, but you will find the weight is crushing.
‘You first,’ he said, looking thoughtfully at Mus and the cauldron. ‘I may need a little time to work up to it. You may spill a little too, and make it lighter for me.’
Mus had a chin like a reef and a grin that showed too many bad teeth. He bent his knees and hugged the cauldron. ‘I won’t spill any,’ he said, and Drust nodded, looked mournful. Kag and the others watched, bemused; they knew Drust would never lift the affair at all and even Kag could not work out what he had in mind.
Mus was into the task and already straining while the crowd roared him on, faces gleaming with sweat and the lust of the moment. Kag and the others watched Drust step forward and take the ladle out; the lightly frosted curls of his clenched hair fluttered in the heat from the torches.
‘Just to make it a little lighter,’ he said, waving the ladle. Mus could only manage a grunt but people laughed and shouted more encouragement. ‘Go on,’ they shouted – all the ones with bets on him. ‘Lift it, shift it…’
Mus growled and strained, the muscles bunching on him like something alive fighting to get out of his body. When he got the cauldron off the floor he would try and shuffle a few steps with it, and Kag saw Drust cock his head to one side, as if appreciating the grunting effort. He looked like a curious bird from the dark of the forest.
He let Mus get the bite of it. Let him get it a finger-length up off the floor and into the urgent shouts of his supporters in the crowd.
Then he drew back and hit him in the forehead with the ladle.
Mus gave a grunt and fell like a sacrificed sheep; the cauldron clanged heavily to the flags, teetered and slopped, and people ebbed away from it. Then it rocked itself steady on its tripod legs and Drust carefully put the ladle back. He looked at Mus, who was struggling like a stricken beetle on the floor, his eyes crossed slightly and a red mark on his forehead. Everyone else gawped, equally stunned; the silence fell like a black mantle.
‘No rules,’ Drust called out, and looked down again at the glazed Mus. ‘You have carried it no further than I could.’ He smiled like a drawn dagger at the green-tinged Lentulus. ‘I win. I will wait until the wine returns your wits before I hear your apology. Tomorrow will do.’
Ugo stepped down and held out one hand, which the dazed Mus took; it was a strain on them both to get him back to his feet and he was weaving after he had done it.
‘If you sit, someone will bring you beer and a cool cloth,’ Ugo said. ‘You use one on your belly and the other on your head – I will help if you have trouble getting it the right way round.’
There was a pause while folk worked out what had happened and why and then got the sheer jest in it. They howled and beat the table and laughed; Mus, dazed, nodded and wavered off to sit down, head hanging.
Kag saw Lentulus’s face – and then felt Antyllus’s eyes rest on him like blowflies; they flitted from one to the other out of a face like a stone idol and Kag did not like it. Drust, smiling stiffly, dipped the ladle in the cauldron beer and called out: ‘A toast to General Marcus Antonius Antyllus – three times long life.’
There was nothing the hall could do but echo him – Vivat. Vivat. Vivat.
Dog tugged at Drust’s hem until he pulled him back to the bench.
‘Well, y
ou sent him a message, for sure, but I do not think we should stay here long,’ he said. ‘We should get our weapons, find a way into the tower, get Praeclarum and run for that bridge.’
‘Or cut our fucking throats here,’ Culleo growled blearily, swallowing more beer and belching the fumes in both their faces. ‘Save all that effort and thinking, because we will be just as dead at the end of it. Us and your precious bloody wife.’
* * *
Antyllus was as good as his word, which surprised everyone; as soon as the desperate dinner party lurched to a close, two soldiers led Drust through the dim, rutted streets with their looming ruined shadows to the fortress.
It was a drop gate, he noted as he passed under, spiked and solid, but only part of him registered it, while his heart was beating at its cage like a mad bird. They led him up the stair of the tower into a room flickering with lurid torchlight, and turned him over to more guards, dicing at a wooden table.
Up another wind of steps the air grew fetid and Drust knew the fevered stink of it well, wafted with memories of the dying in the undercrofts of amphitheatres up and down the Empire; the maddened bird threatened to try and escape out of his throat.
She lay on stained straw but at least they had given her blankets and a cup with, when he tasted it, water with a little vinegary wine in it – posca, the Army’s favourite marching drink.
She stirred when she felt the rim of it on her lips, flicking open her eyes with a moment of panic which subsided to softness when she recognised it.
‘Easy,’ she said in a voice husky with fever, ‘I still have a few teeth left.’
‘I have seen them. Antyllus has them in a sleeve of his toga, but we will get them back.’
‘I was taken so easily,’ she murmured bitterly. ‘I let them take me so easily…’
‘We let them take you,’ he said, ‘and you did not make it easy – one died and another will remember the day every time he limps.’
‘They beat me,’ she said and the memory of the pain was thick in her voice, so that Drust almost crushed the cup with his anger. Instead, he smoothed the sweat-greased brow and she smiled.
‘If I had hair it would look like Medusa. There are still blessings to be had, it seems.’
‘The posca is nice and cool.’
‘Lovely,’ she said.
‘We will get you out of here,’ he said. ‘And go home. Everything will be as before.’
She stirred and he saw a gleam where her eyes were. Realised it was light on tears.
‘The baby,’ she said.
‘Kisa told me.’
‘The trouble with Kisa is that he lacks the power of conversation but retains the power of speech.’
‘He is young enough to know everything,’ he countered, and heard her chuckle, then cough. The sound was wet and alarmed him.
‘I think I lost it,’ she said simply, and the knell of it fell on them both, so that he bowed his head and tried to keep the tears from crushing out of his eyes like pips from an apple.
He heard the guards clumping up and knew their time was nearly gone.
‘I love you,’ he said desperately.
‘Tscha,’ she said scornfully. ‘Marry me, you said, and you will never look at another horse.’
‘I feel so miserable without you,’ he countered, grinning. ‘It’s almost like having you there.’
The guards arrived, twin shadows looming like temple columns. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘I will get you out of here,’ he said to her, ‘no matter what.’
Antyllus was there when Drust came out of the tower into the courtyard; a rain had started, soft as tears.
‘You have seen her,’ he said. ‘Now it is time to fulfil your bargain.’
‘She is sick,’ Drust declared. ‘She may have lost our child.’
‘Not the case,’ Antyllus answered firmly. ‘My medicus assures me and is making offerings to Asclepius to avoid such a terrible fate.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I did not know she was with child when I arranged for her to be… intercepted.’
‘Would it have mattered?’
Antyllus said nothing and Drust leaped on that. ‘Then let her go. Let us take her – we will do as you ask.’
Antyllus shook his head. ‘Of those sent to fetch her, one is dead and one is crippled. What would they – and their comrades – think if I reduced their efforts and sacrifice to nothing?’
Drust nodded; he had known that before he asked, but he’d had to ask. The anger burned in him, the way ice felt sometimes in the coldest winters. He said nothing but promised much to the gods who would save her.
* * *
The others did the same when he reported it all, but they also said nothing within earshot of the hundred or so men who took them a day south, to the river. It had run out of dance and spray, spilling wearily into a gentle slide through a meadowed plain, but it was deep and black and cold. The bridge was small and wooden with an abandoned watchtower.
‘You won’t get a cart or an ox or any pack animal across that, right enough,’ Kag said, watching Antyllus’s men watching them.
‘Which is why no one cares for it and so it is still intact,’ Culleo said, grinning. ‘We can be across and back to a decent bath and a cup or two of wine.’
‘If we don’t walk into some of the plunderers going home,’ Sow answered, and Culleo spat sullenly.
‘Hist on that, lest a god who hates us hears it.’
‘The only god who doesn’t hate you is Bacchus,’ Dog answered, and walked across the bridge followed by the others. Once there, he turned and raised one hand in farewell to the watching men.
After they had plodded down the trail and round a bend out of sight, Drust stopped and turned to them. They knew what he was about before he spoke.
‘I can’t ask it of you, but I am going back once those escorts have left off watching for it. She will not last without help, so I plan to sneak back and find a way to get her out. You should go on and tell Peperna everything – make sure he knows none of you will open any gates.’
Dog and Kag looked at one another, and Dog shifted from one foot to the other and looked from Kag to Drust, then round at the others.
‘I will come,’ he said. Kag laughed, shaking his head mockingly. Quintus just grinned his huge wide grin.
‘There’s noble,’ he declared, and Dog scowled at him.
‘I am not noble, nor ever have been. But you will want to know why, Drust, given what I have said before.’
He took a breath and glared round at them all before shrugging. ‘I look like Death and now I feel it as well. My bones ache in winter and I have to roll out of a sleep to take a piss. I don’t like folk much and they feel the same.’
He stopped, looked at the ground, then defiantly up. ‘I was born with nothing and still have much of it left. I have no blood relatives, no loves old or new, and I mostly know a few bar owners I can spend an evening with. Kisa was right – you are the only ones I can be with and who will be with me, which is a sad statement to make on a life. You are the closest I have to a family and Drust made that possible – you all know it. So I will follow and save his woman.’
‘Well said, Pluto,’ Ugo declared, beaming. ‘For my part there was never any doubt.’
‘Nor mine,’ Quintus added, and Kag merely nodded. Culleo spat sideways and ran off, scurrying down the track. No one was surprised – but they were when Sow stood his ground.
‘Don’t ask,’ he said wearily. ‘I could not tell you. Perhaps because everyone in my unit is dead save that running rat. Perhaps because I like your woman, Drust, and really don’t like this overblown senator.’ He stopped and shrugged. ‘Perhaps I don’t know myself.’
Ugo clapped him on one shoulder and laughed. ‘Perhaps you will change your mind when you see where we have to go.’
Drust looked at him; sometimes you forget that the big Frisian is not the ox he appears, he thought. He looked around them, this family, these Brothers of the Sand.
Then he nodded and led them back across the bridge and into the Dark.
Chapter Seven
They moved south, swiftly at first, gliding through the scrub and sparse saplings to where the trees began to crowd. As the sun lowered, the shadows thickened and then, as if a blanket had been thrown on them, they were in the Dark.
The last light of day speared through the canopy in glorious golden shafts, one by one winking out until there was only shadow and fear. They came to a halt, not because they were weary, but because it seemed they were pushing against the blackness, as if the very ground under their feet might be solid or a chasm.
Eventually they hunkered, pretending to gnaw hard bread and swill thin wine round their mouths to soften it enough to chew.
‘What will Culleo do?’ Kisa asked Sow, who shrugged.
‘Blame us. Make himself look like a hero and us like tools of this Antyllus. He will betray everyone.’
‘Ratfuck,’ Quintus said, then gleamed his grin from the shadows. ‘He and I will have a reckoning this day or the next.’
‘Join the line,’ Dog muttered, then lifted his head at a bird call.
‘Blackbird,’ Kisa declared, and Dog snorted.
‘It’s an ouzel.’
‘Blackbird.’
‘Do either sing at night?’ Kag flung in and that silenced everyone.
Then there was a sound that hackled up the hair on their neck and arms, sent cold running up and down them. Low and mournful and distant, immediately repeated somewhere behind them.
‘Wolves?’ Kisa asked tremulously.
‘Thought we had rid these woods of them all,’ Kag said.
‘All space gets filled,’ Sow said.
‘Wolf calls don’t echo,’ Ugo said suddenly. Dog shook his head in mock amazement.
‘All sound echoes if the place allows it.’
‘This isn’t the place.’
He was right, Drust thought. There’s no echo and perhaps no wolves – he told them to check weapons and be ready.
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