The Red Serpent

by Robert Low

  ‘This place is forsaken by every god known to man,’ he growled and the others agreed – all save Kag, who passed a skin of water along the line of them.

  ‘These dust trolls we have killed are the ones forsaken,’ he pointed out, and they looked at the scatter of bodies, stripped clean of their robes, lolling naked and gutted – in case they had swallowed their wealth – and empty of everything of value. Darab, who liked to call himself a captain, was organising the caravan guards away from plundering and trying to distance himself from Stercorinus, who was praying to his driven sword.

  Drust looked at the empty drifts of sand, the bare, dry stretches of scrub and wind-blasted terraces that marked the riverbed. Fourteen dead men littered it, waiting for the long slow spiral of the carrion-eating birds; it was no place to have died in, Drust was thinking. At least none were known to him.

  Died for what – a long skein of ugly camels? Packed with… what? Even Drust did not know; the only man who knew was Kisa, who came up beaming and trailing the herders with more waterskins in his wake. He stepped with disgust through the clotted sand, waving at men to pass out the skins.

  Darab looked biliously at him. ‘Those beasts will think twice about coming down this far now. Fourteen of them slain – a great victory.’

  ‘More could have been killed,’ Drust pointed out laconically, ‘if you and your men had spent less time worrying about those hump-backed cows you are driving. None of us are killed or badly hurt – my thanks for asking.’

  Darab hauled off his helmet and scowled. ‘We are paid to protect those hump-backed cows – and none of your men died. Two of mine did.’

  Kag clapped him on the shoulder, hard enough to throw up dust. ‘They are not your men – but my sorrow for your loss.’

  Drust gave him a warning look that turned him away from further quarrel. ‘We will make camp up ahead – in a few more days we reach a caravanserai. Water and food and probably women.’

  Darab slouched off, calling for men to carry the bodies of his dead, and Drust watched their faces; most were lifted by the thought of water, food, women and drink, but when they grew tired of that it would all change and Drust was already looking for signs. Kag, it seemed, had found them.

  ‘These folk are poor warriors,’ he said, falling into step, and Drust had no quarrel with him on that – the ones who lay dead all around had been feared here. Brigands from further north who had grown bold, Drust was told, to have come down so far – but they had paid the price for it and Darab was right; the thieves and murderers would not be so eager from now on.

  They had thought themselves no end of fine warriors, these brigands – until they had collided with real ones and tried to flee like chickens. Drust had to swallow the memory of them, just one more little horror among the many. They’d known the terror at once, like dogs who had pounced on some moving tail in the grass only to find out they had chewed down on a dragon. They ran screaming and were cut down with sixing strokes from behind by merciless men. Yet they had contrived to kill two of Darab’s men with arrows and that bore scrutiny.

  ‘You see this one?’ Kag said, shifting a body with his foot; it lolled over, loose as a half empty grain sack. It seemed like any other, a bloodied corpse with a surprised look. When the man had risen that day, shaken the sand from his stained robes and battered boots and bagged trousers, he had not expected to die, but he looked like any other they had killed and Drust said so.

  Kag tutted, which let Drust know he had missed something – then Kag pointed it out. Under the white over-robes was a tunic embroidered at collar and cuff, fastened with a blue cloth belt. Both were faded and the tunic patched, but this was not the usual undyed wool of the nomads.

  ‘Loot?’ Drust wondered and Kag waved Kisa over to see.

  ‘Daylami,’ Kisa said almost at once. ‘They are the people of these mountains and allies of the Persians.’

  ‘Which side?’ Drust asked and Kisa’s look told them why that did not matter; they left the body and moved on, thinking, until Kisa stopped and jerked his chin at the figure of Stercorinus. He was still kneeling before his sword, which had been thrust in the dirt, praying in that strange tongue no one knew.

  ‘Something should be done,’ Kisa muttered and Kag was forced to agree.

  ‘He is scaring the camel-herders,’ he admitted and Kisa scowled.

  ‘He is scaring the camels.’

  Drust moved up to where Stercorinus knelt and droned; it sounded like bees in a hive.

  ‘To whom do you pray?’ he asked and the droning stopped. Stercorinus opened one eye and squinted through the tangle of his greasy hair.

  ‘God.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The god.’

  ‘From Palmyra,’ Drust persisted, squatting next to him and feeling the twinge in his ribs, the last nip of his injury, or so he hoped. ‘The temple there – weren’t you a foundling?’

  Stercorinus shifted a little, out of his kneeling and into an easier pose. He drew out the sword, then thrust it back in once or twice to clean the blood off in the sand, then fell to wiping it with the hem of his robe. Drust winced; it had taken a lot of stern to make Stercorinus wear the robe, partly to make him look a little better, mostly because he was scorching in the sun, but it was clear there was no fastidiousness in the man.

  ‘I was a foundling,’ Stercorinus said eventually, ‘in the temple of Ba’al Šamem.’

  Drust said nothing and, though this was not new, he anticipated revelation, so he waited.

  ‘Jupiter of the Romans, Zeus of the Greeks, Mazda of the Persians and Amon of the Egyptians,’ Stercorinus added. ‘God of eagles and lightnings.’

  He looked at Drust to make sure he had understood.

  ‘I was named Stercorinus and became a slave. I served in the temple learning the work I would do forever.’

  ‘Which was?’ Drust prompted and Stercorinus stood up and cradled the curved blade.

  ‘Blood,’ Stercorinus said flatly. ‘Every god needs blood.’

  This was not news to Drust. ‘Is that what you do now, provide blood for your god? If so, you need to provide less – people are afraid.’

  Stercorinus gave a short laugh, a strange sound Drust was sure he had never heard before.

  ‘The god who speaks to me now asks no blood – that comes when you fight. I have a destiny and if war is in it, then so be it.’

  ‘You cut heads,’ Drust pointed out.

  ‘I was trained so. Bulls, rams and people. One strike. I was good at it. They gave me this sword.’

  Drust levered himself up; he was no stranger to such deaths, in and out of the harena, but the way Stercorinus spoke made his flesh ruche as if a cold wind blew.

  ‘What destiny is this?’ Drust demanded and Stercorinus shook his shaggy head.

  ‘It is no threat to you – just the opposite. And I fight the way I do because I know the mark and place of my death.’

  Now Drust was chilled and annoyed at being so. ‘You need to clean yourself up,’ he said brusquely. ‘Get the blood off and keep it off. Stop chanting. People are made uneasy by it. Otherwise you may go your own way and find destiny.’

  The black eyes gleamed behind the tangled undergrowth of his hair, but Stercorinus nodded.

  ‘Are you not concerned by what people think of you?’ Drust demanded and Stercorinus shifted one hand away from the sword long enough to self-consciously part the tangle over his face. His eyes, Drust saw, were genuinely concerned.

  ‘Would it help?’

  Drust sighed, then made one last attempt.

  ‘Your name,’ he said desperately. ‘Do you have another? We can’t keep calling you Little Shit.’

  The man shook his head. ‘If I had such a thing, it was before I understood. I have been called Stercorinus for as long as my years – it is what they give to foundlings.’

  Drust knew that already and gave up. The caravan groaned and grumbled back into staggered life and shuffled on up the trail, leaving the
ragged, plundered bags that had once been men behind.

  * * *

  The camp that night was the same as they had made for far too many nights, each one carrying them further from what they knew – which was a problem.

  ‘Darab has seen the sun,’ Kag said and Drust nodded – the captain had spotted that they were headed more north than east and he did not like not having been consulted. When he and his men found out they were being paid off on the shores of the Hyrcanian Ocean, camels and goods all sold, there would be trouble. The herders would be easier to manage – money would salt that – but Darab and his men had expected to go all the way to Hyrcania and back and would think they were being done out of a share of the riches promised them.

  ‘Is he speaking of it?’ Drust asked and Kag nodded.

  ‘Here and there. You wait – he and his men will draw apart from now, make a new fire.’

  The land had turned from green to brown and worse, while the heat was bad during the day and the cold sharp when darkness fell; it never rained. The land was rising and falling too, undulating like a stormed sea, and ahead lay Arbela, which the Persians called Irbil; Darab would know it at once and know where he was.

  They ate lamb cooked slowly in a sandpit, using flat stones as platters, but only after the camel-drovers had unloaded and taken care of their charges, tethered in two facing rows of rheumy gurgles and fitted with bags over their faces so they could eat. The cargo was laid carefully out and covered, fastened with ropes and staked to the earth.

  The meal only began when Kisa had satisfied himself that all had been done properly and came up to the fires carrying the train bell.

  Camels, most of the Brothers agreed, were vicious jests of creatures, who spat at you from either end and could not be ridden properly because of the hump. They had been working with camels for years and yet never took to them as they did to mules or horses; they spoke of them in the same way they spoke of the desert goat-fuckers who kept them.

  As the men ate and talked quietly into the flaring sparks from the fires, Drust saw that Darab and his men had built their own and were sitting round it – he did not need Kag’s knowing, mirthless grin to draw attention to it. He wondered what he would do when Darab worked out where they were.

  He wondered what he was doing now, had half formed clouds in his head, swirling and shifting – sometimes it was clear what had to be done. Find Manius and Dog. Find what they wanted, what was so important that they’d summoned them halfway across the desert.

  Other times it was simply the journey, the endless movement that they had been doing most of their lives, as if stopping would make the whole edifice of their existence start to creak and collapse. Drust could not summon up what he would do when he stared Dog in the face; they had been Brothers and enemies, and now he was not sure what they were, one to the other.

  Then there was the promise of riches, faint as old dreams. Kag and Ugo and the others always looked at that sideways, with a raised, scathing eyebrow; they had never been rich and never thought to be, for all they chased it. Yet that was also in their quest to find Dog and Manius.

  The thought of riches was what kept most of Darab’s men moving and, somehow, Drust would have to salt them with silver.

  That night the sky died hard in blood and morning rose in flames from the east as they moved on up the mountains, wary as cats. Sib flogged a camel out ahead at first light, while Quintus nudged Drust to notice Darab staring and frowning at the rising sun.

  It was, in the end, all about Dog and Manius; the thought of them burned behind their eyes, night and day, awake or dreaming, left them grit-eyed and edgy as they hauled away towards the shore of the Hyrcanian Ocean.

  Of course, the others had talked round it, as they always did, but it didn’t matter much to Drust. Kag knew that turning north was not following the plan everyone else knew; they were leaving tracks, but anyone who followed would have a long ride in the wrong direction first.

  ‘Why would anyone follow from Narseh-dux?’ Quintus demanded. ‘Why would he want to interfere with this enterprise?’

  ‘A man will tell all when hot blades touch the skin,’ Ugo replied with the air of someone who knew, from both sides of the blade. That made people frown and think and come up with any number of candidates hunting them down. Drust had them spread it among the herders and packers, and for a few days there was no grumbling about how hard and fast they moved, though the guards would not look them in the eye; Darab was barely civil.

  On the day they came upon Arbela, it all came to a pus-filled head and it started with Praeclarum.

  She had been distant and moody, saying little and eating less. Quintus had knowingly winked and hinted at women’s troubles, but Sib got to it in the end.

  ‘She has a bad tooth,’ he said, coming up quietly to Drust as the train sorted itself out in the caravanserai compound. ‘A real bad one. Bad as Martius – remember him?’

  They all did – a willowy cart-driver like Sib, some Armenian blood mixed with the mongrel of the City and the whipcord skill all charioteers had – you did not speed-slide four powerful horses round a turn by strength.

  None of it was of any use when his mouth ballooned and his breath stank. A doctor probed his mouth and they’d knocked him out with some potion or other, but when the offending tooth was pulled there was no end to the infection. Martius died a week later, what little flesh he had boiling off his bones, his muscle gone to string.

  They came to her and told her she needed to have it seen to and she bridled, voice muffled with swelling as she told them to fuck off.

  They went and huddled.

  ‘We could thump her out,’ Quintus suggested and Kag snorted.

  ‘That how you woo your women?’

  Quintus merely grinned his big grin and his own white teeth only added irony to the moment. ‘It is not, as well you know. But if you think you can hold her down and keep her head still while someone probes her mouth, go ahead.’

  Everyone thought of the wildcat that was Praeclarum and no one volunteered.

  ‘I have tinsmith pincers,’ Kag offered, ‘but we will need to feed her some concoction to make her sleep.’

  ‘Do we have some?’ demanded Drust and it was clear they did not, nor knew anyone who did, though Sib slid off into the shadows between the flickering fires to see if there were others who might. He came back shaking his head.

  ‘None of these have anything. Now if it were Manius…’

  ‘What now?’ Quintus demanded and it was clear he was one of the most concerned, possibly, because he had bought and freed her in the first place.

  ‘I could thump her,’ Ugo offered uneasily and Kag grunted scornfully.

  ‘You will break her head open.’

  ‘Perhaps we should ask Praeclarum,’ Drust said finally, as they sat in gloomy silence in the small room which had been allotted to them as owners of the train.

  ‘Ask her what?’ Sib demanded. ‘If she wants us to knock her out and rummage in her mouth?’

  Said like that it did not sound much, but Stercorinus shifted in the dim, leaning forward a little to make his point and causing the sconce flames to make uncomfortable shadows on his face.

  ‘Find a woman here,’ he said.

  ‘A woman?’ Kag demanded, but Quintus was grinning and nodding as he rose to his feet.

  ‘What does a woman have to do with this?’ Sib demanded. ‘Will Praeclarum permit a female to knock her out and rummage in her mouth?’

  In a little while Quintus came back, grinning and presenting a square of linen cloth. ‘Get some wine, spice it a little, soak this in it, and when Praeclarum comes in from sentry, get her to drink.’

  ‘What is it?’ Sib asked, sniffing it suspiciously; Quintus slapped him away.

  ‘What women use,’ he said and now Drust knew. Papaver-soaked cloths for their time of the month, to take the edge off cramp and all that went with it.

  When Praeclarum sloped in, shrugging out of her leathers and
helmet, she saw the sea of faces looking up and scowled back. It was worse, she thought, when they all started to smile at the same time.

  ‘Here,’ Drust said, offering her the cup. ‘Take the chill off.’

  ‘It is still hot enough to bake on the bare earth,’ she countered.

  ‘Well, I will fetch some bread,’ Sib said, moving away and aware that Praeclarum was staring suspiciously. She drank all the same, while Quintus asked her about Darab and the guards. They were on duty as normal, it appeared, but she was sure something was happening. It did reach the part where she told them her suspicions all the same and, when she slumped silent, Kag let out his breath and brought out the snips.

  ‘Fetch me some light. I don’t want to pull the wrong tooth.’

  Then he looked in her mouth and grimaced. ‘I could pull any of these and it would help.’

  ‘Pull them all,’ Ugo suggested. ‘She cannot use them anyway.’

  ‘It would be good if we found the one which actually pains her most,’ Drust pointed out and Quintus said that she held the right side of her jaw when she thought no one could see.

  In the end it was a messy business of black stumps and blue splintered remnants. When it was done, Kag blew out his cheeks with relief, not only because Praeclarum had stayed unconscious throughout.

  ‘I have seen less blood in an animal hunt,’ Ugo said. ‘She is not a big girl to have lost so much.’

  ‘She is fine,’ Kag said. ‘No pus and the blood is all clean red, so if she keeps the wounds washed all will be well.’

  He gathered up the ruins of teeth and buried them in a corner, offering a prayer to Asclepius, as was proper. Sib came back with bread and olives, all that was available because no one was cooking; he said the entire caravanserai was strangely quiet, everyone huddled in their own area. They ate and talked of nothing much, in low tones, all of them trying not to be seen watching the sleeping form.

  She came awake like a whale breaching from a cold depth, whooping upright, wide-eyed and snarling out of dreams she had not wanted and did not care for. It took everyone by surprise, for they were half dozing, but it was Drust who spoke soothingly and Ugo who wrapped her until her weak struggles stopped.