Beasts From the Dark

by Beasts from the Dark (retail) (epub)

  ‘Unhappy lot,’ Quintus growled. ‘Proof that you can only survive when great men hate you if you are so little you can easily hide. Like us.’

  ‘Senator Marcus Ulpius Ralla,’ Caepio confirmed, and finally rolled the wheel and axle to one side, straightening and rubbing his back. ‘Latest in that sorry line and crawling up the arse of the current Emperor – and elsewhere on the Empress, if you believe rumours – by sponsoring a day’s racing here and the gladiator bouts between them.’

  ‘What the fuck has he to do with Lentulus?’ Dog demanded, scowling with frustration.

  ‘Ask him,’ Caepio said and grinned gum at them. ‘He’s trackside, mooning over Murena. He volunteered to be Murena’s sparsore – it will get him killed this month or the next.’

  Murena – the Eel – was one of the Greens’ rising stars, a wasp-waisted, wide-shouldered youth from Cyprus where, so the story went, as a boy he had leaped bulls for a living until rich Greeks stuck him in a chariot.

  Caepio took them down through the crowd of grim-faced guards, gladiators and wrestlers there to make sure neither horses, drivers nor carts were tampered with, and the betting touts kept their distance. There was no barrier, it seemed, to the gushing girls – and boys – in green who clamoured for the attention of the charioteers.

  ‘That’s Murena,’ Caepio said, indicating an olive-skinned youth with short curls of blue-black hair. He was ignoring the fawning, jostling girls trying to get close, attract his attention and leap the last barrier; any who tried it found themselves in the embrace of a bear-like guard and put back struggling and kicking where they had started.

  Murena never even glanced up. He had his racing leathers on, was inspecting a wheel on the chariot and, evidently satisfied, stepped into the affair and wrapped the reins around his waist, lashing them tight in a complex weave. Attendants started to lead the horses to the stalls and he finally deigned to wave to the adoring fans. His name was the same for a woman and a man and that was all part of it, why the boys were here as well as the girls.

  ‘There’s Lentulus,’ Kag said suddenly, and they all saw the man helping lead Murena’s team to the starting stalls. Nearby, three other teams were being led in, the animals gleaming and restless, but amid the hiss and spit of men at work, the mutter and growl and occasional squeals, the horses were surprisingly silent.

  ‘Two to one on Murena,’ Quintus said, smiling. Caepio stroked his stubble.

  ‘I’d take that if you were serious,’ he said, ‘because the Eel won’t slip past today. He has rigged his team Roman-style with a twist – usually the strongest horses are in the central paired yoke, with the steady ones on loose traces on each outside line. But he has put one of the strongest pullers on the inside trace and put a drifting wheel on the right side – see it?’

  They saw it, a wheel with a thick rim and a smaller radius, which made the cart look lopsided.

  ‘It is smaller, thicker, and has an iron rim to take the stress of drifting round the top end of the spina,’ Caepio pointed out, ‘which makes it slower – Murena is trying out an inside hauler to see if that will compensate.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  Caepio shrugged. ‘Seen all the combinations. The driver makes the difference and it means Murena has to put his balls out to make it work. High risk, that. Lad won’t make old bones at this rate.’

  He nodded to another chariot with yet another frighteningly young driver wrapping reins around his gleaming black waist. ‘That’s Scipio the Blemmye. They call him Scipio Africanus as a joke, but he’s not a funny man to get in front of. Ruthless, that one, and few like him – he’ll never make it to twenty either, but it will be the knife in the alley that takes him to Dis Pater.’

  He pointed again. ‘See? He has his cart rigged Greek-style – strong ones on the traces, steadies in the yoke. The outside horse is called Hieron and is worth more than the rest of the team put together.’

  They were only practising but, as Caepio said, there was a good-going rivalry within the Greens – and all the other factions – to make it a decent show for those who had inveigled themselves into the stands.

  ‘No shipwrecks,’ Caepio said, ‘but the racing is fierce.’

  Out on the track, slaves raked the sand, fine, white and imported at vast cost. Horns blared and the Eel made a show of selecting a whip; barely able to work up a face fuzz, Drust thought, and winner of one hundred and twenty-two races.

  The girls shrieked; someone had chalked up ‘Vincas, non vincas, te amamus Murena’ on a piece of board and was waving it like a flag – ‘Win or lose, we love you, Murena’.

  Four chariots burst from the stall and raced for the rope stretched hoof-high across from the spina to the stands at the start of the first turn. If there was a bad start, a shipwreck straight out of the stalls, the judge would not drop the rope and the race would be deemed not to have started at all.

  The problem was that you made the choice to go balls-out for the rope, or to hang back and risk being accused of being in league with a bribed judge who would not drop the rope in time, entangling the leading chariot horses.

  But that was on race days. On practice days, the rope dropped and the chariots, like missiles fired from some giant ballistae, vanished into dust and faint screams; on race days you would not hear yourself breathing for the sheer level of noise.

  ‘Did you see?’ Caepio announced triumphantly. ‘The Eel didn’t get the inside line, for all his rig. The Blemmye has it…’

  Drust searched for Lentulus, saw the man scuttle to the right side of the track, swathed in a haze of dust and carrying a gape-mouthed leather bucket. He jostled with others all doing the same; on race days, it would be rival factions, the Red and White and Blue, trying to shove you from a prime point – even into the path of the chariots.

  They came round the bottom turn, the horses at full extension, necks stretched, manes bobbed and ribboned in green. Behind came the chariot, not rolling but leaping through the dust. It would be like riding a plunging dolphin, standing on its back… Sib had done this.

  ‘Sib did this,’ Drust managed aloud, and Caepio turned and nodded sadly.

  ‘Good driver. Not in the class of these, mind, but a good one. Sorry to hear he died – on the track, was it?’

  ‘A shipwreck with horses,’ Drust replied tersely, and the old slave wisely did not push further. Instead, he pointed out Lentulus, dashing forward with his bucket and flinging water in the faces of Murena’s speeding horses. It was a blur of movement and, for a sickening moment, Drust thought Lentulus had been struck and gone under the wheels.

  Then the dust, swirling in strange swoops and curls in the aftermath of the quadrigae, cleared to reveal him, hands in the air and the bucket still held, but upside down to show he had been successful. He was grinning.

  ‘Jupiter,’ Kag muttered. ‘Our barber has more balls than I allowed him.’

  ‘Let’s see what he has to say – Ugo, see if you can cut him off.’

  They moved through the throng. Slaves waited to dart out to rake the sand smooth and scoop up the debris thrown from the stands – bits of bread and fruit hurled down in fury. Even in a practice, fans would try and pelt their favourites’ rivals; on race days, every rival faction would try to put off the opposition, and the Urban Cohorts was there to make sure it was nothing heavier than an apple core.

  The water-throwers were refilling, talking animatedly about how close they had come, the chariot-builders and horse carers were already working on the next four quadrigae that would run, as Drust and the others closed in on Lentulus.

  They were balked by lictores, big men with a bundle of rods and an axe-head making sure their master was not impeded. The master was a patrician, still young but galloping towards corpulence, moving like a whale and flanked by the pilot fish of equestrians. He was certainly rich and he was probably a curule aedile – they were permitted two lictores – an office rapidly disappearing. The curule aedile stopped in front of old Caepio th
e slave and smiled with a look Drust knew well.

  Here was a man responsible for regulating public entertainments among other obsolete functions, but who had probably only accepted the unloved role because of his undying passionate absorption with horses and chariots, the driving force of his life, far more important than regulating baths and brothels or registering prostitutes.

  ‘Well, Caepio – what’s your reckoning?’

  There was no sense that he spoke to a slave; his tone, in fact, was deferential, for Caepio was the master here.

  ‘Murena is running well, but he’ll have to stick his neck out to make his rig work,’ Caepio explained. ‘Scipio Africanus is flying.’

  Lentulus had seen Drust and his mouth was open, his face drained of colour. Drust cursed and started to move, only to be blocked by one of the lictores.

  ‘It’s him I want,’ Drust said into the stony face.

  ‘Don’t care. Go round.’

  The lictores were all hired men and stolid as pillars when on duty; Drust cursed and went sideways, seeing Ugo had already manoeuvred into position and was closing in.

  Then the racers came round the bottom bend and a great roar went up from everyone, a surge forward that almost flung Drust to the ground – Murena had somehow got a nose in front and was skid-turning in a shower of dust and fine sand like a storm in a desert.

  There was a moment when everything was just a golden haze of choke and splutter, where shadows flitted; then the swirling vortices the chariots had created dragged it all away, leaving Drust looking at the engorged, excited face of one of the grooms, eyes pink-rimmed from too much exposure to sand and dust.

  Lentulus was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Where could he have gone?’ Kag demanded, but there was no reasonable answer to that other than the stables and workshops under the Circus and reached by ramps from where they stood. But even Caepio wasn’t about to get them down there.

  They milled moodily around under the grim, tight gaze of the lictores, but there was no getting round them or the Urbans at the entrance to the Circus under-gallery.

  ‘We’ve lost him,’ Quintus admitted eventually, and Dog growled moodily.

  ‘What now?’ demanded Ugo, and Drust tried to think, but it was Kisa who spoke, his voice quiet and soft so that only they could hear.

  ‘Brasus the Dacian,’ he said, as the chariots slid round the bottom bend for the second time; there was a great cry of Prasina, Prasina – ‘Greens, Greens’ – and an even bigger one for Scipio, who had managed to cut Murena on the top turn.

  This was no major race and neither man was about to force the issue, so they started to haul up and would trot the last circuit to wind the horses down; they were nodding and shouting back and forth to each other, grinning and acknowledging the hoots and squeals from the stands with waves.

  ‘Like to see what they’d do one-on-one with a gladius and a crowd that wants to see their guts,’ Kag growled moodily.

  ‘Let’s find out about Brasus and this Ludus Ulpius Ralla,’ Drust said, his mind starting to work, oiled by the grease of fear of what Verus might do. He no longer felt safe out in the streets of Rome and he did not like the feeling.

  ‘Quintus – stay here with Caepio. See if you can get to talk with Murena and find out where Lentulus might be. At worst, you might get a message to Lentulus, telling him we mean him no harm.’

  Kag looked sharply sideways at Drust. ‘That true?’

  ‘I want to know what the fuck is going on and how to come out of it alive,’ Drust answered, equally edged. Kag acknowledged it with a nod.

  ‘Well,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘Let’s head for the baths and wait – this is the first day of the Flavian, so everyone will troop in after dark for a splash and a shave and a gossip. Trying to get to anyone we know now will be futile.’

  It was good advice; the Baths of Titus sat not far from the amphitheatre, under the Esquiline Hill and huddled in the shadow of the much more extensive baths built by Trajan. Consequently, they were a little run-down and not much used – perfect for the filthy spill of gladiators, beast handlers and worse from the Flavian.

  They went off, pushed by the cries and shrieks of the Greens. Kag looked back briefly, then at Drust, and did not have to say anything about Quintus being on his own. Drust tapped Dog on the shoulder and jerked his head; the man looped up his hood, grinned death at them and trotted off to find Quintus.

  That’s the measure of things now, Drust thought. We dare not walk alone in the City we once strode in like kings, for fear of the beast from the Dark…

  Chapter Fourteen

  The baths generally opened around lunchtime and stayed that way until dusk. The Baths of Titus lit copious oil lamps when the shadows started to crowd in, because they knew when the custom from the harena would arrive. Decent customers would stay away, since they’d have to share with the gladiators and other scum.

  Kisa had his hot soak and splash and then wanted to return to The Place, so Drust sent Ugo with him. That left Kag to sit with Drust, waiting while the insects killed themselves in sizzling ecstasy.

  The customers arrived slowly in knots. The gladiators swaggered in – they had survived the first day of the Games and were pumped by the feeling, talking loudly, making big splashes when they dived in, though no one spent any time reliving their contests; they had come here to do the opposite, before trooping back to their lonely cells to wait for the following day.

  Drust and Kag watched and listened for a while, then moved in and asked questions of those they knew, however slightly. They bought wine and sweet cakes, were flattered by those who remembered their names – but got no information on Brasus; none of the rest of the School he belonged to were here, but expected any moment.

  When the breakthrough happened it came quickly. One minute Kag and Drust were sitting wincing at the newly arrived venatores vying with one another as to who could take the scorch of the laconica, the dry-heat room. The gladiators, as ever, made scathing comments at these animal handlers and hunters, who responded with pig noises, an old insult. It was because gladiators ate a porridge gruel as standard fare when in training – the same stuff venatores claimed farmers fed to their pigs.

  It was good-natured enough, unlikely to spill over to anything worse; both sides had had enough of blood for one day and even the arguments about racing factions were tepid.

  Then, suddenly, Drust looked up into a face from memory. It was a ploughed field of old ruts, with brows that threatened to throw long hairs into his wet eyes, and the old lanista stood there hipshot in a bland tunic, his legs gnarled and twisted with veins.

  ‘I heard someone was looking for one of my lads,’ Curtius growled.

  Drust recovered enough to find a voice. ‘I thought you’d be dead.’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ Curtius answered, levering himself down on the seat next to them. ‘I have discovered you are alive.’

  ‘One of your lads?’ Kag asked and the lanista cocked his head at him.

  ‘You have grown older and skilled in venality. I hear you have taken over The Place from the arse who sat in it. That was well done. I miss Servillius Structus and the old Ludus Ferrata.’

  ‘You weren’t in the cells of it,’ Kag responded, then smiled. ‘Good to see you are still alive.’

  ‘Uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari,’ Curtius replied laconically.

  I will endure, to be burned, to be bound, to be beaten, and to be slain. It was the oath every gladiator swore – and the one the Brothers had tossed aside when they’d been freed, determined never to say it again. They had their own oath now.

  ‘Last time I saw you lads,’ Curtius said slowly, looking from one to the other, ‘you were bound for the harena to die like Christians. I heard you escaped, were run down and killed. I also heard you threw a future Emperor into the Tiber.’

  Macrinus. Drust remembered the man, then a Praetorian officer, pinwheeling off the aqueduct. Should have thrown him off over land,
not the water, he thought.

  ‘As you see,’ Kag replied and smiled. ‘Now you are lanista for this Ludus Ulpius affair.’

  ‘Summa rudis,’ Curtius corrected. ‘One must eat, even with few teeth. For instance, I hear Cascus Minicius Audens sent you north to fetch back a white bear.’

  Drust felt unaccountably pleased that old Curtius had been made a summa rudis, a freedman referee of the contests. He had been around when they were slave gladiators – even if he had scowled at Servillius Structus freeing them. He never thought we deserved it, Drust thought. Perhaps he was right.

  ‘So he said,’ Drust agreed. ‘We found no white bear but enough beasts to make us bloody. Not all of them were tree-fucking barbarians either.’

  ‘Why do you want Brasus the Dacian?’ Curtius demanded.

  ‘He’s looking for someone we are also seeking,’ Drust replied, and Curtius rasped calloused fingers over his stubble and cocked his head enquiringly. Drust told him.

  ‘I never liked the task he was set,’ Curtius growled. ‘Stank like a bad privy.’

  ‘What task was that?’ Drust asked, and the old lanista hesitated a moment, then called for Brasus.

  He was big, fattened on gruels of grain and leeks, but with shoulders like a meat carcass heaver and hair all shaved off save for a dark-red pad on the top of his head. He had startling blue eyes and the expression of a child; he could not have been more than twenty.

  ‘Tell these men why you are looking for Lentulus.’

  Brasus’s brows made a V and he looked at Curtius. ‘All of it?’

  ‘This is Drust and Kag,’ Curtius said easily. ‘The ones who escaped the Flavian.’

  Brasus’s eyes widened and he grinned and stuck out a hand to clasp them, one by one, by the wrist. Drust felt awkward and flushed; he’d had no idea they had forged a legend.

  ‘Fama,’ Kag muttered sullenly.

  ‘Not a goddess,’ Drust responded.

  ‘A literary conceit,’ Kag finished, and they both laughed. Brasus looked at them, bewildered.