He yelled out, tried to scrabble away, kicked with his free foot and felt the calloused sole of his naked foot slam something soft, heard a grunt; the grip did not slacken. Drust hauled and screamed for help, panicked beyond reason at the thought of this spiderous killer working his way up from ankle to knee, to thigh, knife ready for the killing blow…
The grip slackened and Drust started to scuttle away, hit the wall of the tunnel and used it to lever himself up. Verus, knife out, closed with a triumphant snarl – only to fly sideways and slam into the far wall.
‘Now, now,’ said a reasonable, smiling voice and, blinking with surprise, Drust saw a huge man in a sweat-darkened tunic. He had the fleshy good looks of a Greek – tight-curled black hair, big olive eyes with large lashes, a sculpted nose, a richness of lips and a solid chin.
Verus got to his feet and Drust wanted to call out a warning to the Greek, but someone beat him to it. ‘Tiridates – watch, he has a knife.’
Tiridates leaned left and let the knife hiss pass him, then reared back as it came at him again; Drust saw he was surprised by the speed of it, that he had a new calculating look on his face. Drust didn’t wait to find out more – he was away like a rat down a pipe, turned left and half staggered through the throng.
The barrel-arched tunnel, wider and less thinly populated, let him scuttle round one bend, round another – choice of three ways there, perhaps Verus would be fooled – and follow a wafting balm of cool, wet air.
It grew stronger as he reached the vaulted entrance where water splashed and gurgled, a garden of cool which every slave contrived to visit on some pretended task, if only to keep from fainting. There were no flowers or perfumed fountains here, all the same – it stank of rank farts and richer shit, a product of the elephants whose cages were dragged in for transport up into the harena.
You could not work that sort of weight and bulk with men trudging round a windlass, so they had worked out how to use water – the giant paddle wheels ground and squealed when the overseer bawled for release, and the water outflowed down over them in a spray and was carried away by channels beneath.
The chains tensioned, the cage creaked up, and Drust took a moment to scoop up some of the water and dash it over his sweat-streaked face and hair.
It was a mistake to have paused; even as his vision cleared to blurry he saw the pale shape arrive at the door, pause to stare round, whipping his white head like a questing hound. He had lost the cloak and his tunic was stained with darkness, from sweat or worse – he looked to have fallen more than once in the spoliarium and Drust felt a savage triumph at that. He wondered what had happened with Tiridates.
Verus spotted Drust as Drust spotted him, moved forward as Drust backed off. Others shifted away and those who had no business here made for the door; a slave called out and the overseer turned and scowled.
‘Give me what I want,’ Verus said hoarsely, and Drust tried to grin at him, but his top lip stuck to his teeth, the only dry thing on his whole body.
‘You need me alive,’ Drust taunted, ‘so what will you do?’
Verus lunged, Drust parried and the blades rang – but Drust was still recovering when the knife sliced his forearm; the sight of the blood made him yelp.
‘I need a throat and a tongue and a mouth,’ Verus spat back. ‘I do not need eyes, or ears, or fingers or toes… tell me what I need to know and save them all.’
‘Take this elsewhere,’ the overseer declared. He was a big man, porridge-fed, with a face like a badly made dumpling and some extensive man breasts sweating onto an impressive belly. He was used to being obeyed, but Verus gave him a scowl and a snarl and told him to fuck off.
‘Fetch the Urbans,’ the overseer ordered a slave. Join the pack who have already done just that, Drust thought bitterly. Do I see any? No, I do not…
Verus took a step to the right, into the path of the hurrying slave, who sensibly veered off and cowered. It was all Drust needed; he stuck the gladius between his teeth and sprang for the bottom of the vanishing elephant cage, clawed round the small grill holes and clutched, hoping the beast would not move a foot and crush his fingers.
He looked down and grinned at Verus’s face. It would have been a perfect moment had he not nicked the corners of his mouth on the sharp blade; by the time he managed a swing onto the next level up, leaving the elephant to rumble on up to the light and the sand, the sweat was stinging those little cuts worse than the slash on his forearm.
There was a slave on the walkway – it’s what the narrow ledges were for. Each cage needed a slave to ride on the outside, hanging onto the chains and the lifting hook. The slave was needed to open the cage door to let the beast out – and to open the trap that let the ramp spill the beast up and into the amphitheatre. Then he had to close them all again, jerk the rope to signify it was done, and the cage would be lowered back to the loading level. Rinse and repeat – on days like these, Drust knew, there was sweat-oiled labour and everyone was a greased cog in an old machine.
He nodded to the slave as if they both had every right to be there, one with a naked sword in one hand, then teetered his way round the loading shaft on the walkway. It led to the next loading shaft, a smaller one that took the cages for the bears and the tigers, the lions and whatever else would fit easily in them. There were a score of such shafts, circling right round the centre of the amphitheatre; if the overseers got it right they could introduce a swarm of tigers and lions and wolves all at the same time, hauled up by muscled slaves working a windlass.
He heard the ratcheting of a cage coming up, just as he heard the slave he’d left behind squeal, a fading, falling note; he was chilled to the marrow at the sound and all the sweat sluiced like ice water on him.
Verus loomed into sight, panting and black with sweat and dirt. He had swarmed up the chains and ropes like some scuttling spider and now he was sliding inexorably towards Drust, who could only poise on the narrow walkway and wait for him; there was nowhere else to go.
The snow head was stained with black streaks of grease, but Verus seemed unperturbed by a feat which could have got him crushed in a dozen different and painful ways; Drust cursed Fortuna for not having done it. That bitch goddess hates me…
Verus closed in, struck hard with the dagger, a blow designed to spear Drust’s sword arm and numb it enough for the gladius to fall. Drust parried it, knowing the man was fast; he just managed to block the second strike, failed on the third, but did enough for the knife to pink him and draw blood, no more.
‘Give it up,’ Verus snarled, panting; he dashed sweat from his eyes with his free hand. Drust saw the cage come up, looked into the bewildered face of a slave riding on top. Then, just as the green-eyed mask of a tiger came level, he hurled the gladius at Verus and sprang onto the cage.
It rocked furiously and the slave yelled out; the tiger was already scared and flattened itself to the floor of the cage, squirted out some rank piss and yowled. Drust was exultant, turned to look in triumph at Verus and saw the man leap like one of the jumping spiders.
Verus caught the bottom of the cage with one hand, swung up the other and had to drop the knife to get a grip. The slave was yelling at Drust and Verus in equal measure; below, Drust knew, sweating men at the windlass cogs would be straining to turn and raise the extra weight.
They got it up to the ramp level and Drust heard them locking it off; their angry queries echoed up the shaft but were drowned out in the background drone of all the other shouts and yells and roars. Verus scrabbled from hanging to clinging onto the side wall of the cage and the tiger slunk round, snarling at him. The cages were thickly barred and the spaces too small for fangs or talons, let alone paws; no sense in having luckless slaves mauled every other day.
‘What the fuck is this?’ the slave demanded, raising up his goad, and Drust lunged at him, grabbed him by the front of the tunic.
‘Run,’ he said. ‘The man coming up is a maniac, a killer. He will snap your neck like your ma does a chicken.
’
The slave didn’t like the look of Drust, but the man with the strange lashless, browless face streaked with grease and sweat looked like he matched that description.
‘I will get whipped if the job isn’t done,’ he bleated.
‘You’ll die if you stay,’ Drust replied and plucked the goad from his nerveless fingers.
The slave leaped onto the narrow walkway and slithered expertly down it, looking backwards. When he judged himself far enough away, he spat a foul curse at Drust and went off to the next shaft, screaming for help at the top of his voice. Drust turned to Verus, busy working his way along the far side of the cage.
‘Watch for the cat,’ he warned viciously, then poked the goad through the bars. The tiger, starved and angry and already petrified, felt the sharp prick of it and yowled, went into a frenzy of snarl and slash. Verus, already clinging on, lost one handhold and hung for a moment, a long, glorious moment where Drust offered unfeasible reward to any god who would make him fall the forty feet to the floor.
It didn’t happen. Verus got his hand back, then went down the side of the cage and back to hanging underneath, where the goad couldn’t reach him. He worked his way, hand by hand, along the bottom of the cage to the front, then flipped himself onto the wooden ramp. He stood, bent over and panting, looked up and pointed.
‘I will nail you up like I did your spy,’ he said between gasps. ‘The mavro who thought himself a silent killer. I showed him the truth of that.’
‘You have no knife,’ Drust said as he stepped off the cage onto the walkway and took two steps to the lever on the wall. Verus watched warily, more concerned with the goad which was as good as a spear. He wants me to throw it, Drust saw. Perhaps he has the skill to snatch it out of the air and then turn it back on me.
He had no need to do that, would not be parting with the goad anytime soon. If Verus wanted to get to him, he’d have to leap back onto the top of the cage and come at him from there. It could be done from the ramp and Verus had seen that. There was much he had missed, all the same.
This is my place, Drust thought savagely. This is my Dark and I know how the beasts in it all work…
He pulled the lever and there was a dull clunk of sound which made Verus crouch and spin. The double doors above his head spread upwards like wings, showering loose sand, bringing the hot blast of the harena and the deafening, howling roar of the amphitheatre. The tiger spun and yowled, frantic and afraid, and the shadow of Drust arriving back on the top of the cage made it crouch flat and look up.
‘Say farewell, Verus,’ Drust yelled over the din. Then he hauled up the cage door.
There was a moment when the scared tiger and Verus looked one another in the eye. The former didn’t want to leave the cage – but Verus didn’t know that. He knew nothing. He ran.
He managed to reach the lip of the ramp, managed to get right into the brassy glare and blaring crowds all round him, where he stood blinking. Then the tiger reacted to running prey and the last punch of the goad; Verus was poised on the lip of the trap, pale eyes seared by the transition to the blinding light, when a black and yellow shape, moving like a hurled spear, slammed into him, yowling, ripping and biting.
They vanished out of sight in a roll of snarling, shrieking sand. The crowd went wild and even through the closing trapdoor Drust could hear how they appreciated the moment. He could hear it after the trapdoors had shut and he had given the signal for the cage to go back down.
He heard it for a long way down the shaft.
Chapter Seventeen
They were too late for the Forum parade, but managed to attend the cena libera, the formal dinner put on by the sponsor of the Games. Since this was the Emperor, it was lavish with whole suckling pig, rabbit and hare, fowl and fish – though the boy himself was not present. Ugo would not eat hare, which he considered sacred, but he liked the red mullet because it changed colour on dying.
No one ate or drank much all the same, just went through the motions of it while the great and good admired them, assessed them and made bets. There hadn’t been a perfidiae harenam for years and no one, not even the fighters themselves, knew what to expect.
‘No referee, no reprieve,’ Curtius said between chews. ‘It’s a brawl – don’t listen to the arse-sponges who threaten you with the goad if you stay with your back to the harena wall. They just want you to get out where the audience can see. Cover your arses, lads.’
‘Good advice,’ said a sonorous voice and they looked to the owner of it, who was sipping from a silver goblet. It was the Greek from the tunnel, Drust saw – Tiridates – who looked Drust up and down with an amused smile on his fleshy lips.
‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘You scuttled off like a rat down a pipe with that white-haired madman in pursuit. A pity – I would have snapped his neck in another eyeblink.’
Drust doubted it but said nothing. Tiridates laughed and he did it like Quintus would, a genuine toss of the head laugh, straight out of an amused core through an open throat. He offered the cup and Drust took it, managing not to hesitate; it was a gladiator concoction, one of those they swore by, a distillation of bone ash in thin wine which was supposedly a tonic. Drust did not want to dwell on where the bone came from.
‘I hear he is dead,’ Tiridates said, taking back the cup – it had his own face on it, Drust saw, embossed cleverly in silver.
‘Every bit of him,’ Curtius agreed. ‘Seven pieces, not counting an eye which is still out there, staring at the sand.’
‘What happened to the tiger?’ Quintus demanded, and Tiridates looked at him with that smile which was starting to irritate Drust.
‘Got speared in the end by Camillus,’ Curtius answered. ‘The venator who calls himself Hermes.’
‘Pity,’ Quintus growled back, ‘I’d like to have offered it a treat.’
Tiridates saluted him, then looked round them one by one with that superior smirk. Behind him, his pair-partner, Alafai, was looming over a senator’s wife and making her sweat.
‘A strange affair,’ he said, stroking his fleshy, freshly shaved chin. ‘I don’t know the why of it, nor much care to – but I liked what it revealed.’
He flung one arm around Alafai’s neck and tucked the cup inside his snowy tunic. Something fluttered and he made a swift, easy gesture which almost hid the skill, plucked it from the air, crushed it in his fist and let it fall on the table. ‘Until tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I do not think I will have much trouble.’
‘Arrogant cock,’ Curtius mumbled, watching the pair move off. The brilliant moth, wings crushed to powder, turned frantic circles on the table, dying in a pool of wine.
Curtius sighed and looked at them one after another. ‘He’s right, though. Twenty-five contests, no losses, and only three of the men he fought got a let-off. There are others out there tomorrow who are not as good, but a lot better than either of you ever were. You should give this up – Verus is dead and there must be another way to get to the Emperor.’
‘Verus is dead,’ Drust agreed, ‘but you should not assume that the threat dies with him. Julius Yahya may have others – and he is growing more panicked hour by hour. If there is another way, we have no time left to find it.’
He looked at Ugo. ‘I would not eat or drink anything here, giant of the Germanies.’
Ugo looked stricken and blinked, then squinted accusingly. ‘You drank.’
‘After Tiridates and from his cup.’
Ugo shook his head sorrowfully, even as he realised Drust was joking. ‘This is not what the harena used to be like. There is little gravitas and less honour these days.’
It was exactly what the harena had always been, Drust thought, but kept it to himself. It was an entertainment of blood and sand for the howlers of Rome, regardless of status or riches. It was dressed up with ritual and pomp, but in the end that’s all it was.
All they had to do was survive until the end of the next day. The trick in that was to want to.
* * *
The next day dawned sultry and grey-pink over the Capitoline, where there was not one procession at the start, but two – one for the Emperor, the other for his mother. Both of them had their own musicians, and at least, Drust thought, they are blaring and thumping the same tune, though it was almost drowned out by a madness of cheering.
It was the first day of the races and the Forum Romanum was filled with howlers in tunics the colour of their favourite faction – the Mother of the Empire, in her quadriga, veered off once she was through the Forum Romanum and Sacred Way, then headed through the Forum Boarium, trailing all the garish roarers behind her and heading for the carceres, the starting gates of the Circus Maximus nearby. She looked magnificent, balanced upright in a racing chariot driven by a lithe youth, both of them diplomatically wearing eye-wateringly expensive cloth of gold.
Not once, as far as Drust could tell, did she look at her son, who rode alongside her in another quadriga, a heavier one more suited to his appearance as a triumphant general.
Those who followed him were in their best tunics or dresses – some even braved the heat and stubbornly wore a toga – carrying cushions and baskets and wineskins. Behind came the editor presiding over the games, who followed the Emperor with a group of priests, their ritualistic displays escorting carts with statues of Jupiter Maximus, Mars Ultor and others.
They processed into the ring and round it twice while the crowd cheered and howled at what was about to happen. Then they stood in the heat while the priests allowed the gods their moment, and finally were allowed into the undercroft shade while the front seats sorted out their cushions and cool drinks.
The show would begin with a series of sham combats with blunt weapons. Then there would be a few novelty acts, beast hunts and the like, which would at midday be replaced by the noxii, those criminals marked for slaughter by beasts and blades. In the afternoon, when the heat had died a little, would come the main event.
Beasts From the Dark Page 26
