The Red Serpent

by Robert Low

  ‘Look,’ he would say. ‘Look where he sits. Look at his head.’

  The pugilist sat on a stone, a man running hard into his middle years with a thick beard and a full head of curly hair. He had a broken nose and flattened gristle ears, the slanted, drooping brows that told of too many blows and a forehead furrowed with scars more than age.

  He had big shoulders and Ugo pointed out the rest – his chest is thick and flat, without the bulging pectorals of those gymnasium lifters. His back and abdominal muscles are highly pronounced and he has, Ugo added admiringly, that greatest asset of all – good legs.

  The man who sculpted it knew the subject well. The arms are large, particularly the forearms, which are reinforced with the leather wrappings of the caestus. He has the oxys, those bands criss-crossing his forearms to give support to heavy blows. At the top is a band of fleece for wiping sweat and blood from his eyes.

  All lovingly rendered in bronze, save the blood, which is copper. He sits on a rock with his forearms balanced on his thighs and his head turned as if he were looking over his shoulder – as if someone had just whispered something to him.

  Quintus knew better and pointed out the look on the bronze face – there is no trace of fear in the battered, broken-nosed, bloody stare. He looks ready to go, anxious not to cause a delay, to get on with it, even though he is weary to the bone and resigned to this time being the last. This time is the one he loses and gets beaten to bloody pulp.

  This is no hero of the pankration. Would he want to be behind the ox-plough, an obscure, reeking peasant? A slave cleaning the latrines? Would that be better?

  People come to meditate on the great, battered Theogenes – the ruler they ignore. Kag knows better. It is allegory, he declares, a work made by Greeks about Greeks. This is not Theogenes, it is one of the first boxers of them all, the ones great Theseus created to sit opposite one another on stones and fight with their fists until one fell off or died or both. His head is tilted because he hears his opponent arriving and the other statue, the unknown ruler, is brave Theseus of the supposedly civilised Greeks, who invented this bloody sport, and waits to watch.

  We come here to polish his caestus-wrapped fingers, for we are him and he is us.

  * * *

  He launched from it, flailing. Hands found him, hauled him up. A dripping face like a wet mule shoved itself into his vision and grinned; the clap on his shoulder felt like being hit by a shield.

  ‘You got out of that – well, all’s good,’ said Ugo and then waved to where Sib sat, hunched and hugging himself, his face a long, wet misery. ‘So did he, though no one expected it.’

  ‘Why is he yelling about Theogenes?’

  Praeclarum’s face was concerned, but she had no answer from those who saw no need to say.

  ‘Jupiter’s hairy balls, that was a moment,’ Kag went on, beaming. ‘I do not wish to go off a cliff ever again – but we have the riches and all are rescued. Well, save for one of the crew who clearly fucked off Fortuna. She tripped him on the steps down and he beat everyone to the foot. They found him at the bottom with his head cracked.’

  Quintus grinned even more widely than usual. ‘So you see, it was safer jumping – that is a good trick.’

  ‘We have the stones,’ Atakan boomed, while Drust struggled up, still wavering in a strange dreamlike mist where the weary beaten face of the boxer drifted. He is us and we are him, Drust thought, and struggled up onto uneasy feet.

  The pinprick lights on the cliff – men with torches, coming down those steps – slapped the mist from his head. Drust looked around at the faces, all busy doing nothing at all.

  ‘Why are we not sailing?’

  ‘No wind worth a fart,’ Stercorinus declared flatly. ‘If it comes round a notch or two and starts blowing us west we may shift this fat sow of a ship, but not before.’

  ‘Is this not a concern?’ Drust spat back into his mildness and Stercorinus lifted his eyebrows slightly.

  ‘Would it help?’

  ‘Ha,’ said Atakan, ‘it does not matter. These fire trolls are not inclined to swim to us, are they?’

  That much was true and Kag had organised folk to keep watch, so Drust lay back and tried not to be sick for a time, tried to order the wildness in his head. Praeclarum came with a cool, soaked cloth which she laid on his forehead.

  ‘You knocked your wits about,’ she said and he agreed.

  ‘Who is Theogenes?’ she asked again, and Drust waved a dismissive hand, closing his eyes.

  ‘An old boxer,’ Kag said. ‘A Greek.’

  It left her no wiser, but she dismissed all thought of it when one of Atakan’s crew yelled out in his own tongue, bringing heads up. Under the moonlight, the dark water danced and black shapes slid.

  ‘What is that there?’ demanded Sib and Ugo got to it first, hawked and spat bitterly.

  ‘The gods above and below are in a vicious mood this night. Those fire-staring little men have boats.’

  There was a long moment of squint and point, then Atakan appeared, chivvying his own men back from the thwarts and into some work.

  ‘Ha – they only have small boats and not many of them. They are no threat.’

  The stone whicked out of the shadows and bounced off the freeboard, making everyone duck; an arrow clattered over the side, spun off a timber and vanished into the darkness.

  ‘Shields up,’ Quintus roared and Atakan began bellowing at his men to scoop up bilge water and soak the sail in the hope of getting wind to stick to it.

  Drust sat while the harena dance foamed around him, thinking about little boats and not many of them. He felt as if his old helmet was back on his head, could feel the rim of it all round and the battered bit on one side which had never quite fitted properly. Left in Dura with everything else and, like the boxer on the Quirinal, he sat with his head tilted to one side, waiting for yet another opponent.

  A chill kissed him on the cheek as the wind changed; there were cheers when the clumsy sow of a ship shifted and started to slide forward. More stones and arrows showered down and a crewman yelped. Another, halfway up the mast to soak the sail, seemed to jerk and then fell to the deck with a sickening crack – in the end, they had to put him overboard, for his head was broken open like a dropped egg.

  There were faint cheers when the enemy saw this, darting about like shoals of small fish in narrow boats that seemed to glow out of the dark, then vanish. No more than a handful of oars and eight or ten men in them, Kag reported eventually, but with slings and bows.

  ‘And we do not have Manius and his bow any longer,’ Sib mourned.

  ‘They will not dare come aboard to attack us,’ Atakan soothed. ‘And if we are careful, their stones and arrows will run out soon enough, together with their strength. They will give up and go away.’

  ‘You wish it,’ Drust said, staring at him. He blanched and Drust knew he had him on the mark.

  ‘You knew these fire-starers had boats,’ he went on and no one missed the tone of his voice. Kag looked warily at where the crew were and Quintus fell into a fighting crouch at his back, pairing as they did so often in the harena.

  ‘You knew they had no weapons to speak of and only little boats and believed they could do you no harm – yet still you were afraid, for your men were not fighters. You knew all this because you had seen these fire-watchers before – and they know you, Atakan Fat-Liar, rich farmer of the seas.’

  Kag growled and others, seeing the way of it, added low rumbles of their own.

  ‘You traded for salt with them,’ Drust went on, patching the cloak of it as he spoke. ‘Always on the far side of that little ridge, coming ashore to make fires and leave… what? Food and drink, which they would need in a barren place like they have? Then you collect the cheap salt and everyone goes away content.’

  Drust was prowling upright now and folk scattered away from Atakan, who began to swell up like a toad and opened his mouth to bluster. But the sight of all the other swords let it hiss out of him l
ike air from a dead goat.

  ‘Not you, though,’ Drust said, stalking in a half-crouch like some beast. ‘Not you, who sailed away fretting about blue eyes of stone and wanting them – until you found us, the poor idiot men you thought would gain you the riches. What was our reward after this, you fat lump of dung? Were you to fall on us in the dark, tip us over into the Black Lake or the Hyrcanian Ocean?

  ‘No, no,’ Atakan began, waving his hands in frantic dismissal. ‘Two-fifths, as was said…’ He looked desperately round at his own crew for help; Drust saw it and snarled like a wolf.

  ‘No help from these,’ he said. ‘These are ship-handlers and haulers. Poor dogs who will not stand up to fire-starers, let alone fighting brothers like the ones at my back. Slit throats in the dark is their style – is that what you had planned? If you have not heard before how we are gladiators of Rome, fighters of beasts and men, then you have now.’

  The men growled at that. Atakan scrambled back to the thwarts, felt the dig of them in the small of his back and wailed. For an eyeblink Drust thought he would find the courage of the trapped and launch himself – but there was a thump and a crack.

  Atakan jerked forward, stumbled a few steps as if he charged at Drust – then he fell like a broken mast, crashing to the planks with blood spilling from the two arrows and the stone which had felled him. There was a moment of whirling-dog panic, but it did not last – there were no fighters in Atakan’s crew and they cowered away while Kag sprang to the steering-oar.

  ‘Work the ship,’ Drust snarled at Atakan’s men, ‘if you want to live.’

  There was a pause, then Ugo bellowed, incoherent and loud enough to buzz heads; they sprang to obey.

  Stercorinus and Praeclarum pitched Atakan overboard and Stercorinus moaned out of the dark about how he would now never discover who had done the marvellous skin-marks.

  ‘If they were for protection from his gods,’ Ugo roared ‘then you did not want them.’

  All of Drust’s focus was on the sound of the unseen boat enemy, cheering.

  He had thought they might give up when they found Atakan rolling dead in the dark water, but he was wrong – when the first light crawled up over the horizon, the little stick boats were there, still rowing like frantic water beetles.

  ‘They are tougher than those Greeks who fought in the Flavian,’ Sib pointed out admiringly. ‘Remember those? They stuck to their hoplite formation all day, like the Spartans at the Hot Gates. These Persians have rowed all night.’

  They rowed most of that day too, while the wind held and drove the ship onward. They had, it seemed, run out of stones and arrows, but continued to keep pace. Still they wouldn’t come close enough to be struck, which was frustrating to everyone.

  ‘Water bugs,’ Ugo scorned and spat, then stuck his neck out and howled across the water at them. ‘Come ahead, you little dog-holes. I have an edge here for you.’

  He waved his axe with frustration until Stercorinus, of all people, put a quietening hand on his massive forearm and brought him to silence. He seemed the only one not flustered by an enemy who did not want to fight but would not leave them alone. He should be mouth-frothing, Drust thought, or at least concerned, but he did not ask for he knew the answer he would get. Would it help?

  ‘Why don’t they shit or climb off the privy?’ Quintus demanded of no one in particular.

  They would not do either, Drust was thinking, and Kag agreed. They kept sailing until the little streak of black on the horizon grew into the ridge, and the ship faltered a little under the current flowing towards it from the inrush of the Hyrcanian Ocean. This, they all knew, was what the fire temple warriors had waited for.

  They turned, heading to the narrow part where they had left the rolling logs, but Drust knew what they would find when they got there, was made certain of it by the smudge of smoke.

  ‘They have made fires of our rolling logs,’ Kag muttered, and the ship’s crew began to argue and wail until snarled to silence. Drust plunged off the aft deck into the well of the hold, where there were bits of cargo that Atakan had found room for. No salt, but some hides and something Drust had spotted earlier when they were dragging out the body of the crewman who fell off the mast.

  Hoes and mattocks, bound in bundles of ten. He grinned and told the others, who got the idea at once, though one of the crewmen stepped forward, scowling.

  ‘That is valuable cargo,’ he said in Greek. ‘What will we live on if you destroy it?’

  Drust looked him up and down, from his bare, calloused feet to the thatch of unruly black hair and beard. His name was Kalistokos, Kisa declared, and he was the mate of the vessel – captain now that Atakan was dead, he supposed.

  ‘You will not live at all unless we escape,’ Drust pointed out. ‘Besides – two-fifths of this is ours, under the deal we made with Atakan. Be assured of three-fifths and work to earn it.’

  Kalistokos spoke to the others – in some local form of Persian, Kisa reported later – and clearly did not know Kisa understood, since he used terms Kisa would not repeat regarding Drust and the others. But it seemed they would obey, though they did not like it.

  The ship nudged up to the narrow part, sliding into the shingle until it ground to a halt, and robed men fled, leaving the smouldering remains of the timbers. Drust ordered them dirt-smothered, to see if any could be rescued. Then he put men on either side, shields up, while the others began the laborious task of pitching out the cargo to lighten the load and started hauling the vessel up and over to the sea on the far side.

  At which point they all found out that the timber fires had not been lit just to burn the hauling logs. And that the fire-starers had not run out of arrows.

  The boats slid in like skimming insects and a shower of fireflies, bright even in the morning sun, showered down like hot rain. One slapped the timbers of the ship and Kag, roaring annoyance, tried to pull it out, snapped it, and then found sense and smothered it with his ripped and stained red cloak.

  ‘Fuck you all,’ he roared, beating the sparks out of his cloak and glaring like a routed boar. Men laughed, but there was little humour in it, and Praeclarum was set to scoop water and watch for more such arrows.

  The hauling took time. Arrows flew – two good shots landed in the flaked sail and Praeclarum had a hard task putting the flames out. ‘God-cursed little fire fucks,’ Sib rasped, the sweat rolling off him. ‘Don’t they ever give up?’

  Drust eyed the man in the boat offshore, the one wearing some necklace that sparkled and flashed. That and the hand-waving, points and shouts marked him as leader, and if these fire-starers had been on land, he’d have been the one they rushed. Kill him and all is done, Drust thought, but no one’s god was Poseidon or Neptune or anything like it, so running on water was out. Neither did they have a bow, nor even a decent throwing javelin.

  The leader sent men to pluck stones from the ridgeline and now the slingers got back to work – one of the ship’s crew went down like a felled ox when one hit him low on the back of the neck. When he came round, he could not use his right arm and Kalistokos cursed at the loss of one more crewman. Later, a burning arrow killed him.

  Then the boat stuck on the downward path, sliding off the unwieldy rollers and burying its fat nose in rocks and crushed shells. Men groaned and cowered as arrows flew, for it would be a hard struggle to get it back on the wooden road to the sea, even without folk throwing fire and missiles at them.

  ‘Wait until night,’ Kag advised. ‘It will be cooler and they won’t be able to see.’

  Drust looked at the high sun and then at the determined heat-wavering figures. They had hauled their own little boats across and were now on the far side, on the Ocean; he knew they were not about to give up, even after the ship had been put back in the water. They would chase us all the way to Hades, he growled to Kag, who hawked and spat and scrubbed his head furiously – but could only agree.

  ‘Give them back,’ Praeclarum said, and there was a moment when everyone want
ed to roar at her. Instead they fell silent.

  Drust thought about it for a moment, sighed, straightened and held out a fist to Kag, who knew what had to be done but scowled and growled as he handed over the bag.

  Holding both hands high, one empty, one with the bag, Drust sucked in a scorch of breath and stepped out, away from the whale of a ship and his men, out onto the ridge towards the man with the glittering necklace, who sat offshore in his boat.

  Drust stood for a long moment, arms out where they could be seen; the world held its breath and every part of him shrieked and cringed from what it expected to be struck with.

  Then he tipped the bag up and the blue stones tumbled to the ground, sparkling and glowing in the noon sun. He turned and walked back, feeling his spine itch and crawl at the expected shower of unseen arrows.

  There was a long moment, then a shout from the leader of the fire-starers; a boat scudded in and men scampered along the shore. They reached the eyes and gathered them up; there was a strange series of yipping cries and then the men scampered away again.

  In less than an hour, there was not a boat to be seen, and eventually Quintus straightened and grunted as his knees cracked.

  He glowered round at everyone. Then at Drust.

  ‘This has been a bad day for the Brothers of the Sands,’ he declared. ‘This is what happens when you defy the gods, even those of others. We have been beaten by a ragged-arse bunch of inbred goat-fuckers and no treasure is ours.’

  He stuck out one hand, palm down. One by one the others came, Praeclarum and Stercorinus no longer embarrassed that they had no knuckle tattoos to show their old slavery; they had the marks on them, all the same. The ship’s crew watched, sullen and anxious at what would happen now with these strange Romans; they knew they were locked in a wooden cage with wolves.

  Kag, with one last glare in the direction of the folk who had just forced riches from his fist, turned a baleful eye on the canted ship.

  ‘Fortuna, loveliest of ladies,’ he declared, spitting on his palms, ‘help us get this log in the water.’