by Gemma Files
“Down where?”
The girl gave him a grin—bloody lip-twist, complete with rim of broken teeth. All at once, Arcturus wanted to shove his tongue between them and let her bite down, abrade him with every (currently) hidden part of her filthy body. Watched as she reached up under her sodden twill skirt and rummaged, then drew her hand out and sketched a spiral in her opposite palm: Wet red, dark against her dirty grey-white skin. Juice of her split fruit, her open wound.
He knew it should have repulsed him; knew it didn’t. And tried, with all his strength—
(faintest of all faint hopes)
—never to allow himself to wonder, explicitly . . . why.
“Sent down,” she repeated. “Where was, is, will be. She sends she. Shows she.”
“And then you show me.”
“A-true, Roman.”
“Arcturus. My name, girl: Say it.” She looked at him. “Say it.”
“A . . . rrr . . . ”
(a ha, you savage bitch)
“ . . . rrrRoman.”
He took her again that very night, as they’d both known he would, for all he’d sworn not to. Lucian kept guard, stirring the fire; the others watched hungrily, from a discreet distance. Arcturus and his nameless seer lay together in the shadow of a chalk-cliff, meanwhile—under the empty skeletal gaze of some flat, long-jawed, long-dead beast-fish: A shark from ancient times, doomed to forever swim the dead sea of this rock’s rain-slimed face. Sharp grin agape, ribs scattered and splayed, spine unstrung like a harlot’s snapped necklace . . .
She tried to slip away from him in the midst of it, to send herself down that wet red spiral, but he kept her anchored with his prick—dug deep enough to force her back, and clutched her to him as they arrived together. When they finally severed, he glanced down to see himself painted similarly red from glans to thatch, dripping; blood sleeked the insides of her thighs like open wings, a bird crushed in mid-flight. Lips, widespread, on a second, deeper mouth.
And oh, but this was an awful place he’d come to at the end of all his ambitions, full of cold and dread. A place where the gods were bloody as Tarsan Diana, secret as Mithras, strange as Isis and unknowable—in the end—as the Jew heretics’ one-god. A place where the land melted and fell away to mist, where people melted and fell away with it. Where a blue-cheeked girl had only to cast him one glance under her too-pale lashes for him to feel himself surge like the sea against his leather kilt, like rot in an unclean wound.
Dragging him down into herself, part by part: The soles of her bare feet, rinded with callus. Her cracked, black-rimmed nails. Her sly, colorless eyes, washed empty with strange gods’ thoughts. Her bloody, red-lipped core.
Witchery. Necromancy. The road to Hades, or whatever name this girl—and Lucian—had for their particular version of Hell eternal.
This much Arcturus still knew: In Greece, in Roma—here, even—the dead drank blood, always. No matter where you called them from.
* * *
A week earlier, then, back at the Wall: Arcturus and his Tribune, immersed to their waists in the mineral-green, stone-warmed main tank of their home-fort’s cramped lavarium. A reward for good service, supposedly—though far less so in practice than in theory, what with extended field duty amongst barbarians seemingly having left Arcturus rendered permanently uncomfortable even in the midst of most “civilized” comforts. Still, the bath’s waters did hide most of his worst scars, aside from those which swam pale and knotted as mating sea-snakes just beneath the surface.
“If the Tribune might care to bring such a tedious matter back to mind, momentarily,” Arcturus had begun, eking his words out between grit teeth, “the fact does remain, however annoying and irrelevant—”
“—that ‘your’ numeri still haven’t been paid.” The Tribune barely bothered to meet Arcturus’ eyes, gesturing instead at the nearest slave, who came running with scraper at the ready. “Yes, Centurion, I do recall it. But really: What would they do with good Roman coin, those savages? They barter with each other for everything they need. A pig here, a woman there . . . ”
“Then buy them something to barter with, if you don’t want them thinking they’re Citizens anymore. Or would you prefer to prove the Empire only honors its promises when it stands to gain something by doing so?”
Brave words, albeit foolish. To which the Tribune merely gave a dry smile, replying:
“But it’s that very lesson they must learn sometime, Arcturus. Is it not?”
Especially now.
“Your feeling for them does you credit. Still, facts must be faced—where Caesar speaks, we answer. And Caesar wants us gone from here, at least for the moment.”
“Do they know that?”
“Not unless you tell them. Which I . . . of course . . . order you not to.”
(Typical.)
Arcturus strove to keep his disgust well-hid, though probably not as much so as might have been best to his advantage; the Tribune’s shrewd glance seemed to grow ever-colder as the bath progressed through its ritual phases: Soaking, slathering, scraping—steamed and salted like vegetables for the cooking, in this hubristic cocoon of pseudo-Mediterranean heat. By the time Arcturus stepped back out into the usual Northumbrian light drizzle of oncreeping dusk, an artificially hot fog rose from his pores to greet the night; the joints of his carapace, smoking like an ill-banked fire wherever his wolf-skins didn’t quite reach.
Lucian fell into lock-step beside him as he broached the hill, glancing down at the freshly-polished Medusa-head on his commanding officer’s breastplate. Venturing, at last: “Some rare thing, she, wi’ such teeth and snakes. Thy guardian, is’t?”
“Guardian?”
“Ay, magistere—a spirit set to help an’ hold thee, wherever men-place and gods-place cross over. Same as I was sent t’find, up hill wi’ no food ‘till I come back calling on animal-brother as my own guardian, when first I grew a man.”
“And did you?”
A gap-toothed grin. “As all did, sure. Had to, we wanted ever shuck of our milk-names.”
“Romans don’t believe in spirits.”
“What, then?”
“Ancestors. Familial duty, fides. Household lares and penates.” Arcturus touched the Medusa’s fierce grimace with two equally hilt-callused fingers, lightly. “She’s a monster, no Goddess—her eyes turn men to stone. A nightmare, to strike fear in our enemies’ hearts.”
“Ah. Lore-ful too, that.”
Lucian sounded approving; the corners of his pale eyes seemed to have lifted slightly, though Arcturus most-times found it almost impossible to tell what his mouth might or might not actually be doing, under that drooping moustache. It reminded him, all at once, of a passage from Diodorus Siculus concerning the Gauls: Their savage impenetrability, slaughtering both themselves and everyone else they came across in the pious service of gods so anathemic-sacred their names were considered better forgotten than prayed to.
“When their enemies fall,” Siculus had written, “they cut off their heads and fasten them about the necks of their horses; and turning over to their attendants the arms of their opponents, all covered with blood, they carry the heads off as booty, singing a paean over them and striking up a song of victory, and these first-fruits of victory they fasten by nails upon their houses, just as men do, in certain kinds of hunting, with the heads of wild beasts they have mastered.
“The heads of the most distinguished enemies they embalm in cedar-oil and carefully preserve in a chest, and these they exhibit to strangers, gravely maintaining that in exchange for this head some one of their ancestors, or their father, or the man himself, refused the offer of a great sum of money. And some men among them, we are told, boast that they have not accepted an equal weight of gold for the head they show, displaying a barbarous sort of greatness of soul; for not to sell that which constitutes a witness and proof of one’s
valor is a noble thing . . . ”
Arcturus wondered how many heads Lucian’s father might have had, in his press—whether he would have wanted Arcturus’ head there, or turned down good money for it, if asked. Not to mention how many Lucian would like to have kept in his own, were the rules of conduct for a soldier of the Empire only lax enough to allow him such trophies.
By the fire, his cohort sat swapping food and stories: Roast dog, rambling tales of dead men boiled back to life in gigantic silver cauldrons and hags riding sleepers like horses, sucking the breath from their mouths along with their dreams. Arcturus hovered nearby, impatient, while Lucian hunkered down calm as ever by his feet, cleaning his weapons; the talk ebbed back and forth, only half in Latin. The rest was that same impenetrable language of shrrs and clicks Arcturus had long since ceased striving to decipher, a bird-speech of near-whispers and mournful, sussurant, desolate cries—hungry as the sounds the dead must make, when you cut them a ditch for the requisite sacrifice’s honey-laced blood to pour into.
I will never truly understand them, he found himself thinking, hardly for the first time. But the plain fact of it suddenly seemed to rattle inside his ribcage like a thrown stone under his armor, gallingly unsought: Alien now and always, no matter how he might damage his career by fighting for their best interests, his complicit Roman flesh forever marked by the thumbprints of their mutual oppressors. Doomed to remain nothing more or less than one more nameless grey shade on Pluto’s riverbank, stranded ‘till time’s end just outside the circle of light and safety and acceptance . . .
But: Two of them were arguing about something, their raised voices once more abruptly comprehensible; Arcturus turned slightly, listening.
“ . . . something as them will die for, thus well worth the taking: Cairn-gorms, might be, we follow pass-road under Wall back where it take us . . . ”
“Nay, fool. Art cairn-stones they horde only, they up there; one for each corpse, fast as those kill each other.”
To Lucian, under his breath: “Cairn-gorms?”
Lucian didn’t look up. “White water-clear stones, magistere, the kind Tribune pays best for. Same’s we find in the fay-hills sometimes, in graves of them come before—’fore Roma, ‘fore us’n. Those as dyed their bones red wi’ clay, so dead wouldn’t come seeking blood from they still left alive.”
“Diamonds?” No, for those came from Africa—white quartz, perhaps; equally precious, in some quarters. “The sort of treasure they’d kill to protect, in any event.”
“Like as be.” Another circuit of the gladius’ blade, salve-skin in hand. “Or not.”
Well.
(That’d be a fine bonus indeed to go with their marching orders, now Roma stood officially poised—sooner or later, but certainly, and without much regret—to toss all Britain aside like some worn-through sandal.)
“And who do they discuss, here—what tribe, exactly?” He asked Lucian, as casually as possible. “The Ericii?”
Without even a shred or irony: “Nay, magistere. Those as they have no Roman names, to speak of.”
Nor need of any, Arcturus didn’t doubt, since Roma’s influence had ebbed so low. Once tribes had flocked to be re-titled, but some . . . like these . . . had never even seen a Roman, in the true flesh. Which left them unprepared against Roma-trained attackers, in their blissful pagan ignorance—and none too likely to complain of ill-treatment at the local garrison afterwards, either.
If Roma abandons us, he found himself thinking—such heresy! And yet the sky did not crack nor lightning fall, amongst the constant fine grey spray of mist—we’ll just have to look out for ourselves.
The idea, however comfortless, was also oddly freeing: An uncharted road, leading nowhere in particular. Anywhere.
Everywhere.
“With no Roman ties, we’d be a mystery to them,” he mused, aloud.
Lucian nodded, slightly. “Aye, magistere. Those are full of mysteries, they.”
* * *
Loyalties and betrayals; they shifted without warning like Etna’s sides during an eruption, like his family villa’s garden tiles during an earthquake. To the Britons, Arcturus knew, abandoning or denying one’s god was an offense worthy of triple death, burial at bog, being sunk nude and nameless beneath the peat’s watery surface—and Caesar, living Roman godhead, had long been his primary deity of choice. But the world was changing, packed full of fresh new gods to choose from: Even crucified criminals might be worshipped, if only their adherents claimed miracles performed in their name. Executed proselytes-turned-terrorists, discredited philosophers and politicians, martyrs and dupes of all stripes or principles; oh, and monsters too, without question. For one man’s monster is always another’s god, and vice versa . . . in the very oldest, truest sense of that old, true, quintessentially Roman phrase.
Meanwhile, the cohort kept on moving upwards, always upwards—past lakes and bracken, past more chalk-faced cliffs, past inscriptions on water-slicked rocks which meant nothing to Arcturus, but mimicked perfectly the ones on his captive seer-girl’s skin: Faint with age, cut aeons ago and faded abrasion-shallow. She made sure to point them out to anyone who’d look, smiling sly and silent, while the numeri around her blanched.
The fog kept on increasing, and the birds—ravens, particularly—seemed to watch them from a safe distance. None of the remaining cohort bothered to speak Latin anymore, and their barbarian words piled on top of Arcturus like stones; he pored over the lilt and hiss of them in his head, at nights, whenever the girl went slack beneath him again. But study brought no relief: Every morning, they woke to find yet more men fled in the night, blending back into the hills—some taking the heads of their more Romanized companions with them, when they went. As though they needed gifts to placate their nameless Goddess, to show they understood the true depth of their own former faithlessness.
According to Lucian, the Celts thought in threes, not twos: Black, white and grey. Always an overlap where rules reversed themselves, or ceased to apply.
“It’s good, then.”
“Ofttimes. But na always.”
“Then it’s bad.”
“Na always, magistere.”
Neither wholly good nor bad, but never neutral. Energy, forth and back, circular and widdershins. The Old Sow, birthing her farrow to eat them and throw them up again anew, irrigating the world with their blood . . . and her shit.
It simply IS.
These gods of theirs: Lucian’s, the seer-girl’s, the rest of the cohort’s. Old and cold as these mud-glistening hills, their faces always hidden, names never spoken aloud—as much Mysteries as those played out in the same cthonic caves Arcturus’ mater had frequented yearly, baring her throat and arse before Dionysian Bacchus in Ariadne-Semele’s guise. Half-remembered smells from such revels still overtook him easily, even now; the drunken retch of fermented honey under cleaner tang of crushed grape-leaves, the stink-hot gush of warm sacrificial entrails into a sunken stone eschaton where some more recent child-initiate waited, shivering, to be reborn into a fresh new world of divine provenance and ecstasy.
Symbols and patterns repeated everywhere, like dross from the same common mold. Mithras killed the bull, too, as Arcturus learned when he joined the Legion’s ranks. Isis wore a cow’s head. Zeus turned poor Io into a heifer and let Hera chase her across whole continents, all to preserve his godly reputation from (verifiable) charges of philandering. The tribes of Judah killed bulls, Baal’s emblem, to praise their One-God for wresting the land they squatted on from the Rain-bringer’s descendants.
And Roma scooped the whole horde up, meanwhile—sat them alongside each other and warned them to behave themselves, if they didn’t want to be forgotten. Offered worshippers for support, a fair enough bargain, especially in the face of looming extinction. Romans saw, and treated, “the gods” as mere constructs, political concepts discarded when no longer useful: I acknowledge
your gods, therefore you acknowledge my gods, and thus we forge an agreement from which we may both benefit and build on. Simple, logical. Simply logic.
But the seer-girl’s absent, silent She, capital S to her far more humble version—
(an aspect, at least, of the same Goddess whose title Lucian feared to speak aloud? Perhaps. Very much perhaps)
—was far too alien to be bargained with in this manner.
In the village, mid-raid—and dragging the girl stiff-legged behind him all the way, with one hand knit deep in the dirt-dreaded quills of her pale hair—Arcturus had dropped his crested helmet in the very heart of a set hut-fire before moving on, nodding at those numeri who noticed to do the same; his plan, as he well knew, had no hope of working unless those crouching safe back at the Wall truly considered the entire cohort lost like one of Hadrian’s Pict-bound legions. Yet it had seemed predestined for success, if the ease of that first engagement was anything to reckon by: Every step of it marked off, without even the slightest variance. Lay a trail and secure a guide, someone young or weak enough to be biddable, though rich in all the “lore” Lucian and his brothers judged necessary for such a journey . . .
Then he’d dodged around the slump and crumble of her former home, only to be confronted with a double arm-span’s-width spiral carved through the turf behind it, right down to the chalk below—white furred with grey-green, touched here and there with red: Ochre, old blood. Both.
From behind him, an unplanned gladial side-swipe rang the bell of Arcturus’ greave as the nearest numericus stopped dead, gasping, at the very sight of it.
“She!”
Arcturus stared, frowned. “Who?”
“She, magistere!”
“Give over, fool: There’s no one here, soldier . . . ”
But: “She-only, Roman,” the girl had murmured, her warm breath puffing the clammy skin of his wrist; none but she herself grinning up at him, ragged teeth like chips of dirty ice, for which he’d split her lip with a single back-hand—too late to snap the stricken numericus from his stupor, as it turned out. For that, that exact, drawn-breath moment, had been when the fog came rolling down, at last.
