The other slaves came running. None of them were quicker than the kitchen girl, who squealed in dismay at the sight of the headless body and the great wound of the member of her household. She would have sought to attend to the wounded one, but I held her back with one arm.
“Leave him!” I ordered. “Do not touch him.”
Rufus and his wife, coming up behind, heard this and hissed at me.
“That is my man, Dux,” Rufus growled, in a tone far more dangerous than one who has given up his only sword should have contemplated using. “If we do not aid him, he will surely die.”
“Wait!” I shouted. And then, more softly: “A moment.”
I struggled to think, as the wounded slave continued to whimper and his masters fretted, and the smell of blood rose in the air. I did not understand how the curse could have raised Pacilus against us. Had some miasma[85] from the foul creatures around us seized the tribune, and subjected him to the curse? Or had his wound, slight as it had looked, weakened and killed him, and allowed the lemures to seize his corpse and use it against us, as they had seized the others? I had conceded that the spirits called by the old man had raised his dead fellow-rebels to wage war on us again, but I had not guessed that they could draft into their legion any man who fell before them. The implications of that were not pleasant. If this curse could spread like dysentery at a barbarian war-camp, it could sweep the countryside.
And then there was the wounded slave, whose blood still ran away and whose death came closer with every moment while I mused like Varro.[86]
I made my decision.
“Radamyntos,” I said calmly, and pointed to the slave. “Take his head.”
The decurion stepped forward, without the slightest question; I do not know if this was mere discipline, or whether he had been able to roughly reason his way to the same conclusion as I. The slave, not yet too weak to struggle to keep his life, groveled and rolled on the floor, begging me for mercy and his master for aid.
“No, no!” Rufus shouted. The other slaves scattered down the corridor. The wife of Rufus, showing more bravery than sense, moved towards the slave, as if to succor or protect him. I stood in her way and raised my own sword, very slightly, but enough for notice and for the greatest possible offense.[87]
The slave, pathetically, attempted to use his hands to shield himself. The blow, when it came, rained fingers onto the floor before slicing through the fellow’s jaw and snapping his spine.
“No!” Rufus shouted again. “Murderers! A despicable tyrant and his barbarian lackey! Woe to my house!”
The eyes of Radamyntos asked if I wanted to silence our host and be free of his insults. I gestured to him to remain still.
“Calm yourself, sir,” I instructed Rufus. “Think! Are you blind? Have you seen nothing here?” I pointed to the headless body of Pacilus. “It should be clear now that the curse that has brought the dead upon us can use any of the dead to its purposes. Once the blood of your man had run away into the tiles, he would have joined their number and turned upon us. I did only what was necessary.”
The anger of Rufus was not soothed, and he regarded me with complete disdain. “Necessary? It was assuredly not necessary.” He knelt on the floor and took the bloody hand of the dead slave in his own. “The slaves of this house have shared the blood of the Christ. No curse out of the forgotten years of Gaul could give them over to be the tool of the shada that took your friend. Any daimon[88] that tried, we would cast out.”
I shook my head. Radamyntos sneered bitterly, and I knew he could read my thoughts. The dead walked, and this fool wanted to face them with nothing more than Jewish sorcery.
“Your god has not come yet,” Radamyntos scoffed. “And you have called him enough, and more than enough. He certainly did not thunder down from the skies with a flaming sword to aid the dead one, here.”
Rufus raised his fists, and for a moment it seemed – incredibly – that he would strike at us, bare hands against swords. His wife calmed him. She held his shoulder, and drew him off, whispering into his ear.
This left us alone with the shattered bodies of the tribune and the slave. I shuddered for Pacilus, and the dark and ill-omened end to which he had come. The lemures had seized him here, far from his home, where no honest legionary pyre or any servant of Venus Libitina[89] could ease his way into the next world. There seemed to be no point to hoping for a good fate for him in the next world now; the dark lemures of the druid had been there to catch his last breath, and no son or brother.[90]
“Our host bears watching,” Radamyntos said, and brought me out of my thoughts. “He doesn’t know who to hate more, now – the dead, or us.”
“Let him rail against us all he wants,” I replied, dismissively. “As he thinks it through, he’ll realize we were right.”
I rallied the scattered slaves from their hiding places in the various rooms and to their guard-posts once again. Rufus avoided me, hustling into the kitchen with his wife and her girl. In his absence I made it clear to the slaves that I expected them to refrain from further pointless wailing and oath-taking, and to stand fast before the doors. I sought out the German, who I judged to be less of a fool than the others.
“Your master is not well,” I told him. “At some point I may call upon you to restrain him, for his own good. Be assured that no punishment will come upon you if you do so. I will make sure of that, even if I must appeal to the governor himself.”
The slave looked doubtful, and I could not blame him. Assuming we survived this night, I would leave with the army, which moved quickly through the lives of simple folk like a passing thunderstorm, full of noise and light but gone by evening. His master, on the other hand, would always be there. Knowing this as he must, he might not be of much use, in the event.
As it developed, we did not have to wait long to find out.
Waving her arms over her head and shouting in distress, the slave girl burst out of the kitchen and into the corridor. In her alarm she abandoned her humility and reserve and grabbed our arms and shook them wildly.
“Lords!” she gasped. “They…they would go out…”
She dragged us forward into the kitchen, and what we saw there could not be countenanced. The shutters were no longer wedged shut, but stood opened wide to the night. Several amphorae[91] had been dragged into the ash-trench[92] beneath the open shutters. We came through the door just in time to see the mistress of the house as she finished clambering up this improvised platform and squeezed out the open window. Rufus himself was nowhere to be seen, and had clearly gone out the window ahead of his wife.
“Fools,” Radamyntos muttered disgustedly beside me.
As I moved to the window, I could see that they had stopped just a few yards outside the window, and stood looking about themselves uncertainly. It was as if they were not quite sure how to proceed. The dead, however, suffered no such confusion. They abandoned their feeble efforts at the grilled windows and staggered after our foolish hosts.
“Are you mad?” I called after them. There was still time for them to return to the safety of the house if they moved quickly. The kitchen girl and the German cried out pitifully to their masters as well, and pleaded with them to come back.
“Florus! Florus!” Rufus cried out to the many walking dead –
And at once I understood. Observing the fate of Pacilus, they reasoned that the slave Florus would have fallen under the power of the curse after being taken by the creatures on the road. They no doubt purposed to employ their sorcery, and counted on the intercession of their god to restore Florus to them. I was torn between horror at their folly, and a sudden wild hope that perhaps they would succeed in turning back our adversaries by their piety. But as that hope was no basis for inaction, I sheathed my sword and pulled myself into the empty window-space. “Follow me,” I urged my companions, as calmly as I could.
My head spun a little as I clambered to my feet in the yard outside the window. Denied as I now was of the protection of the close
d space of the villa, I was dazzled by the open air, and by the stars ringing high above me. I stood exposed to the night.
There was a loud crash and the sound of shattering pottery. I stole a glance back at the window from which I had just come, and saw Radamyntos flailing about. Hampered by his long shirt of mail, he had fallen while attempting to come after me, and had knocked down the stacked amphorae. He swore with rage atop a pile of shards of terra cotta.
I turned back towards Rufus and his wife in some alarm. The lemures were nearly upon them – and nearly upon me as well – and I doubted if alone I could force them both back inside, even if I had recourse to threats. Before I could worry this question long, however, the German appeared beside me; he was unencumbered by arms other than the falx, and could easily manage the window that had for the moment defeated the decurion.
“We must get your masters inside before we are all lost,” I told him, and he nodded.
Three strides sufficed to place me next to the German’s mistress, and I seized her shoulders. Even given the madness of the moment, this impropriety shocked Rufus and staggered him; he left off his shouting and gesturing, and stared at me open-mouthed. His surprise grew even greater when the German grabbed him about the chest and lifted him bodily into the air. We brought them back to the window with some rough handling, and had nearly reached safety just as the nearest of the creatures drew close enough to be clearly seen.
With a loud squawk, my captive squirmed free of my grasp. The shoulder of her stola[93] tore under my fingers, and she broke away. “Florus!” she cried out once more, and I saw that the nearest of the creatures was none other than the slave-boy we had abandoned on the road. How she recognized him, I cannot say; the flesh of his face was torn and gnawed nearly down to the skull and jawbone, and the skin of his face that had not been eaten away hung down in tatters. She reached out to him with kind words, and with wasted and pathetic pleading, but the creature did not hesitate; it grappled with her, and bore her to the ground, and tore at her breast with its fleshless jaw and its blood-stained hands. None of this was hidden from Rufus, who bellowed like a dying bull as he struggled to escape the German and return to help his wife.
Even though I knew I was already too late, I could not restrain the impulse to come to the aid of a matron placed at the mercy of such a horror. I drew my sword with one hand, and tried to pull the corpse of Florus away from its prey with the other.
It was foolish of me not to give her up and get back inside as quickly as I could, as was shown when another pair of the creatures reached the scene of our struggle. In what felt like a blink of the eye, they bore me down to the ground. I was sure I was lost. Through a spinning jumble of the limbs and the rasping faces of the dead, I saw Rufus, now free, run by me and throw himself upon the dead Florus, no longer calling out for his god but delivering a stream of curses and abuse instead. Then I saw the falx sweep by above my face, two, three, four times, and before the creatures could bite or claw at me they fell down all around like wheat cut down by a scythe.
The smiling face of the German appeared upside-down above me, looking amazed and proud at his own action. He had let Rufus go, it was plain, in order to be able to assist me. He helped me to my feet.
Rufus had not succeeded in freeing his wife, who was beyond help now in any event. The dead could not be separated from the living with anything other than a blade; the fists and feet of Rufus were not up to the task. As he desperately pulled at the arms of the dead Florus, he too was set upon by more of the creatures.
The German gestured, as if to ask what we should do. I shook my head. We ran back to the window as quickly as we could. That was quite quickly indeed.
“Madmen,” Radamyntos reproached us, as he helped pull us inside. “I’m stuck here with madmen. Inside and outside.”
I was acutely aware of the open window, and considered that a more important topic than these complaints. “Shut up and help me close this up!” I demanded.
My heart thundered in my chest as we fumbled at closing the shutters and jamming them home once more. I could hear the shallow, rapid breaths of the German beside me as he hurried to drive home the faggots that would wedge them shut. Like me, he no doubt feared that the creatures would force their way through the open window before we could secure it. But we had time enough and then some; engaged as they were in feasting upon the owners of the villa, the nearest creatures did not immediately move to approach us.
When the task was done, I turned to the German. I had to address the fact that he had saved my life. “If we survive this night,” I said to him, “I will see to it that your name is added to the census.”[94]
He bowed his great head and nodded.
“If we survive this night,” I repeated, and the shutters began to rattle as the dead reached them at last and sought to break through.
SEVEN
For an interminable and excruciating time, there were nearly no further sounds but the moans and rattles of the corpse-dolls and the mutterings and sighs of the slaves. Unwilling to risk further defections or suicidal escapes, I ordered Radamyntos to shepherd the surviving slaves into the smallest cubiculum, which had a narrow doorway and a window so small that the iron grille that covered it was not much larger than the palm of a man’s hand. I was willing to abandon active defense of the outer doors and the other windows in order to keep the slaves under my eye. From this protected position, we prepared once more to attempt to wait out the night.
At first when the wick of a lamp would crackle, we would jump or start; when the sound of the shaking of the doors and shutters would wax louder, we would hold our breaths. But as the hours passed and our adversaries failed to force entrance and no further disturbances arose among the inmates of the house, our concern grew less and we grew more and more confident of our security. When the sky at last – at last – began to glow in the east as the banquet ended and the chariot prepared to return[95], we faced the dawn with something that came close to good cheer.
As the light grew from grey to bronze, I weighed in my mind the questions that would come with the morning. The deaths of Rufus and his wife had, at least, simplified my command situation. Had they lived, I would have been forced to make provision for their safety; after having sheltered here, I could not have simply abandoned citizens of their class. My return to the encampment would have been complicated by the need to escort them as they moved in the open. It was very likely that they would have insisted on moving the surviving members of their household as well. Their deaths meant that I could leave the household behind – other than the German, who I was now determined to extract – and this gained us an important tactical advantage: we could travel across open country, which I judged to be safer than the road. As far as we had seen, these creatures found their victims by sight and sound, like beasts of prey; we could better conceal ourselves at need in open country than exposed on the roadway. Leaving the remaining slaves to their fate meant that they would almost certainly be overcome and slain, and would swell the ranks of the walking dead, but I judged that a rapid return to the base was a priority next to which a few more or less of the creatures was no matter. If the curse were to fail with the full rising of the sun, or if the power of the druid was limited to the span of the festival first mentioned to me by Rufus, all of these questions would of course be rendered moot; but I was not counting on deliverance by the calendar or by a deus ex machina[96] – not after all that I had seen.
I decided to reveal my plans to the slaves, to allow them to become accustomed to the idea before it was thrust upon them. I advised them to remain behind the barricades after our departure. “Fortune may call the cursed ones to follow us, to try to bring us down under their jaws, and thus leave you in safety. If not, I would counsel you to stay within the house for as long as you can. We will clear the district[97] of these scum soon enough.”
Their faces fell, and they trembled as they considered our prospects once they departed. But they had no desire to dispu
te the issue with us. They had seen how poorly willfulness had served their masters.
All at once the continual rattling at the door stopped. It had filled our ears for so many hours that we had ceased to be aware of it, but this sudden absence was a bracing shock. It hit us like a bucket of cold waste cast from the upper storey of an insula.[98]
I wondered if my hope that the curse might fail with the arrival of the morning had come to pass, or if some new horror was upon us. I motioned to the others to keep still, and with some hesitation and uncertainly I approached the door. As I drew near to the doorway, I heard the ring of steel from the other side, and was sure I heard the voices of men – true speech and shouts, and not the base rasps and moans of the dead. At once, I turned back the bolts and threw open the door, knowing what I would see on the other side.
Through the open door streamed bright and cheerful morning sunlight. The villa farm, so narrow and forbidding through the long night, spread out before me, its autumn fields open and easily mastered. I saw the reason that the fruitless and interminable assault on the door had been abandoned on the track between the villa and the road. Dismounted horsemen, armed in the Sarmatian manner, advanced down the lane at a walk, cutting the creatures down as they approached. I stepped outside the door, and laughed triumphantly at this unlooked-for relief.
Radamyntos burst out the door and strode by me, shaking his fist at his countrymen. “Right, you bastards!” he yelled. “That’s the way to do it!”
I urged him back behind me, into the space between the door and myself. With rescue so close, I did not want him to rush forward heedlessly, and expose himself to attack in isolation. “Watch,” I told him, as the Iazyges arranged themselves into a square, and took their ease while the creatures struggled up to them piecemeal. “See anything that looks familiar?”
De Bello Lemures, Or The Roman War Against the Zombies of Armorica Page 4
