Just when Mastabates had begun to relax, one of the Heruli had jumped up and grabbed his ears hard, tugging vigorously at them. Thinking he was being attacked, he had scrambled backwards to his feet, making ineffectual slapping gestures of defence. This had provoked uncontrolled mirth. His assailant had begun to clap his hands and dance. Ballista had come over, slapped Mastabates on the shoulder and explained that the Herul was doing him honour, was inviting him to drink with him.
Prodigious quantities of food consumed, they had split up and gone to the cannabis tents, taking many skins of alcohol with them. Mastabates was in a shelter with Ballista, Maximus and old Calgacus. The gudja was there; inscrutable as ever. Andonnoballus and another three Heruli crowded in with them.
One of the Heruli started to play a martial air on the lyre. As he began to sing, Ballista and Calgacus stopped laughing. Maximus’s hand went to his hilt. At a sharp word from Andonnoballus the singer stopped. He smiled, obviously apologized, and his plectrum picked out a different tune. Although unable to understand a word, Mastabates could tell this new song was a sentimental love ballad. He found himself giggling – as the singer was a Herul, most likely it was addressed to a donkey.
As the lyre player drifted into a lengthy instrumental passage, men began to talk again. The conversation, like the songs, was in the northern tongue.
The Herul to Mastabates’ left – the sickly-looking one, Philemuth – spoke some Greek. He exhaled and smiled sadly. ‘King Cannabas that guides our King Naulobates.’
Unable to think of any response, Mastabates asked him about the anarieis. The men who took a woman’s part, were there many of them, and were they really regarded with reverence in Scythia? It soon became apparent the Herul had no idea what he was talking about, and seemed set to take offence.
‘How did you learn Greek?’ Mastabates changed the subject. At the imperial court, you failed to learn tact at your peril.
Philemuth brightened. ‘I went’ – he used a barbaric word – ‘into the Kingdom of the Romans with the Borani and Urugundi. We were at Trapezus. There were many Roman soldiers. They were drunk, lazy. They had no courage. We placed tree trunks against the walls. The Romans fled. We sacked the town. It was good; much gold and silver, much wine, and women, many women. I took many slaves home.’
Unsure how to respond, Mastabates made a noncommittal noise.
‘One girl – a Greek, her name is Olympias – very beautiful.’ Philemuth coughed. The old Herul looked sad. ‘I took her as my fourth wife. She gave much pleasure; to me, to my brothers. But now I am ill. If I need to die, it will not be good for her.’ The Herul began to weep; openly, without shame.
The tent suddenly seemed very small to Mastabates. The fumes were suffocating. The elongated skulls of the Heruli were becoming ever more daemonic. Calgacus’s misshapen head was no better. The taste of almonds was cloying. Mastabates felt his gorge rising. He had to get out.
Stumbling over legs, muttering apologies, he crawled to the opening. He heard laughter; assumed it was mocking.
Outside, the air was cool. He could breathe. He gulped down big lungfuls. He steadied himself against a guy rope. It was a still, cloudless night. Overhead, the panoply of stars wheeled.
‘Too much mare’s milk?’ The voice was inebriated, but kindly. Mastabates had not noticed anyone approach.
‘Here’ – the man passed an amphora – ‘this will take the taste away, cleanse your palate. It is Arsyene. Not a noble wine, but light and clean.’
Mastabates drank. He felt better. He was surprised at the consideration shown him.
‘Thank you.’
‘Think nothing of it.’ The other took back the wine, took a long swig. He swayed slightly. ‘A beautiful night.’
‘It is.’
‘A night of endless possibilities, a night for wild feasting. Come, walk with me.’
As if in a dream, Mastabates fell into step beside him. They had a torch to light the way.
‘One of the kurgans has been opened – tomb robbers, I suppose. Let us go and see if it is true that the ancient chiefs feast by night.’
‘No, I am not sure …’ Mastabates had no wish to do such a thing.
‘Afraid?’ The other grinned, his teeth very white. ‘Me too. Come, unless you are not man enough?’
Again, Mastabates walked with him. There was something strangely attractive about his companion, as there often was with rough men.
Away from the camp, it was dark beyond the light of the torch. The mound loomed, massive and rounded. At its side was a black opening, like a door to Hades.
Mastabates followed him inside. A passage sloped down. After a while – twenty, thirty paces? – it opened into a hollowed-out circular chamber. They stepped over the worm-eaten remains of a wooden cart.
Inside, the chamber was large; twenty paces across. It was empty, except for some scattered bones and a large leather bag. Everything of value had been looted. The place smelt of earth and old decay.
Mastabates regarded the bones. There were a lot of them – at least fifteen skulls; a couple were horses’, the rest human.
‘They killed many of the chief’s servants to accompany him to the underworld,’ Mastabates said.
‘Maybe, but one of the Heruli told me these kurgans are often reused.’ He held up the torch, and Mastabates saw two entrances other than that by which they had entered. One was blocked, one open. ‘Sometimes there is more than one chamber. Robbers often dig more than one tunnel.’
‘What about their daemons?’ Mastabates asked.
The man took another drink. He seemed more sober now. ‘Not all daemons are bad. Anyway, only the ghosts of those unjustly slain harm the living. The gods let them walk to punish those who robbed them of the divine gift of life. It was the Scythians’ custom to sacrifice the servants, so they were killed justly.’ He passed the amphora to Mastabates. ‘Is it hard being what you are?’
Mastabates drank, trying to arrange his alcohol- and narcotic-fuddled thoughts. ‘Yes, it is not easy. Men – normal men, whole men – see us as things of ill omen: like eastern priests, cripples, like monkeys. They turn away if they meet us. No, it is not easy to be thought of as a monkey.’
The man considered this. ‘I went to a dream diviner once – probably a charlatan. He told me the kinds of men one should never believe if they spoke to you in a dream: actors, sophists, priests of Cybele, the poor and eunuchs. They all raise false expectations.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’
‘Nor should you trust Pythagoreans, or prophets who divine from dice, from palms, from sieves, or from cheese. But the dead are always worthy of credence.’ He put out a hand and touched Mastabates’ face.
‘I thought you were one of those who saw my kind as ill omened. I thought you did not care for my company,’ Mastabates said.
‘My likes and dislikes are of no importance. It is the will of the gods.’ He trailed the back of his fingers down Mastabates’ cheek as if measuring him. ‘Do you know what you are?’
Mastabates stepped back. The man’s eyes were odd. This was all becoming strange beyond measure.
‘I think you really do not know.’ The man’s eyes were flecked red in the torchlight. He stood between Mastabates and both the unblocked tunnels.
‘We should go.’ Mastabates heard the anxiety in his own voice. He had been a fool; a drunken, womanish fool.
The man drew his sword. In the flickering light, the steel seemed to ripple.
Mastabates took another step backwards, panic rising in his throat.
The other watched him.
‘You killed the slave in the river,’ Mastabates said.
‘And many others.’
Mastabates went to draw his own blade. He had forgotten the amphora. It slipped from his grip and shattered loudly. Wine splashed on to his boots.
The man made no move.
Mastabates fumbled his short sword clear of its scabbard. No need to abandon all attempts at manly virtue,
he thought. A eunuch can still be a man.
The other flexed his sword arm.
‘Why?’ Mastabates said.
The man paused, as if he had been waiting for the question, had been asked it before under like circumstances. ‘For your own good, and the benefit of others. Because the gods …’
Mastabates thrust forward, sword aimed at the body.
Caught unaware, the man was late blocking. Mastabates’ blade was only a hand’s breadth away when a clash of metal deflected it. The eunuch’s momentum carried him. He crashed into the man, who staggered backwards.
Mastabates was clear. He was past the killer, was at the entrance tunnel. He went to hurdle the remains of the cart. A bone turned under his foot and his ankle twisted. He went down, crashing among the papery, dry baulks of timber. His sword slipped from his grasp.
The wind was knocked out of him, and his ankle hurt abominably, but Mastabates was up in a moment. He scrabbled on his hands and knees, groping in the dirt for his sword. Noises behind him. His fingers closed on the hilt. He rolled over, bringing the blade up.
A flash of burning light, a jarring impact, and Mastabates’ sword was smashed from his hand. The steel went spinning, skittering across the floor of the tomb to its dark further reaches.
The killer stood over him. He held the torch in one hand, his long sword in the other. The sword was pointed at Mastabates’ throat.
No, not disgrace myself. No, not beg, Mastabates thought. Be a man.
He was panting. So was the killer. Apart from their breathing, all that could be heard was the hiss of the torch.
Be a … The sword thrust down. Pain like nothing Mastabates had known. His body arched. He could not scream; could not breathe. He was choking on his own blood. Dimly, he noticed his own legs drumming on the ground. Blackness in all the corners of his vision. Horribly swiftly, the dark edged in, and closed over him.
IX
‘The same killer,’ Ballista said.
None of the men contradicted him. There were eight of them in the tomb: five Romans, Castricius, Maximus, Hippothous, the centurion Hordeonius and Ballista himself, the Gothic gudja, and two Heruli, Andonnoballus and Philemuth. There had been many more, a packed crowd, gawping. Ballista curtly had told Calgacus to herd them out. Ballista knew his temper was short, and he knew why: thousands of tons of earth poised above his head, and the only ways out two long and narrow, obviously unsafe tunnels dug by robbers. He would have given a lot to be able just to leave.
The scene in the chamber did not help. It was infinitely macabre. The freshly mutilated corpse lay among the bones of ancient violence. In the torchlight, the shadows of the living shifted on the rough walls as if souls already halfway to flitting like bats in Hades. All too easy to imagine being trapped here for eternity.
‘Why stuff the body parts under his armpits?’ Maximus asked.
‘Offerings to the infernal gods,’ Hordeonius replied. ‘As we offer the heart, liver and organs of a sacrificial beast. The murderer turns his victim into a sacrifice; turns away the anger of the gods, buys their protection.’
‘Or something more practical,’ Ballista said. ‘A daemon cannot accuse you with no tongue, cannot harm you with no hands.’
‘And cannot fuck you with no cock,’ Maximus added. ‘Although that might not be too much of a problem with a eunuch.’
‘The murderer will kill more than just slaves,’ Ballista said.
‘Possibly not – the eunuch was a freedman,’ the centurion said. ‘Once a slave, always a slave. You can always tell. I remember being in the baths at Byzantium. It was in the apodyterium, I was just putting my clothes in a locker.’
Ballista let Hordeonius run on. The fumes of cannabis and alcohol were still in his head. It was easier to think without having to talk. Both bodies had been found outside the camp. The first could have been killed anywhere. It had drifted down the Tanais. The blood showed that this one had been killed in the corridor of the tomb. Mastabates was unlikely to have ventured outside the camp on his own. He had to have been lured out.
‘The man barged past me, almost knocked me over. Not a word of apology.’
Mastabates would not have left the camp with a stranger, certainly not to this ghastly place. The killer had to be travelling with them. But who?
‘So I punched him to the ground. His slave came at me, so I knocked him down too. Beat them both like dogs; used my fists, feet, a wooden clog.’
And why?
‘You see into a man’s soul when you beat him.’
Of course, the killer might be in the pay of an outsider. Not the Borani. Somehow, it was not the way of the Goths, not the northern way of doing things. It could be Safrax, the King of the Alani. Certainly, he would hold a grudge from his defeat at the Caspian Gates. But, on such grounds, it was much more likely either Saurmag or Pythonissa; a prince denied a throne, and a woman scorned. The Suanian royal family were brought up in a world where murder was common currency. They prided themselves on their ingenuity in killing: poison, steel, drowning, suffocation. And Pythonissa had cursed him with that terrible curse.
‘He was nothing but a dirty little freedman from Lycia who had made some money.’
Yet the killer’s motives might have nothing to do with the outside. Like his person, they could be contained inside this strange caravan plodding across the Steppe.
‘Even naked, as we all were, I could tell what he really was.’
Ballista thought of his own slave, Polybius. Had he run back in Panticapaeum, or had something worse happened? If the latter, the killer had been with them from the beginning.
‘It is just a eunuch,’ Andonnoballus said. ‘Easy to replace.’
‘He was a brave …’ Somehow, Ballista could not say ‘man’. ‘He did not lack courage. Last year, when our ship was being chased by pirates on the Euxine, he stepped up to fight. He did not deserve to die like this. No one does.’
‘You do not like them any more than anyone else,’ Maximus said. ‘The other year in Cilicia, when we captured the Sassanid king’s harem, you killed two of Shapur’s eunuchs out of hand, just because they were crying and it annoyed you. What was it you said? Something like, We never cared for their sort in the north.’
Ballista suppressed a flash of anger. He had been out of his mind then, maddened with grief. He had been convinced his wife and sons were dead. But he was not going to voice that excuse; did not want to be reminded of that time at all. Fuck Maximus for bringing it up.
‘Look at the eunuch’s head; the killer cleaned his blade on his hair,’ the gudja said in heavily accented Greek.
It was true. There was much blood from the wound at Mastabates’ throat and the various mutilations, but none of it seemed to account for the clotted hair. From his youth at the imperial court, half-remembered lines of poetry came into Ballista’s mind. He recited hesitantly; losing the metre, missing words altogether.
Think … is it likely the dead in the tomb will take these honours well, who mercilessly slew him … armpitted him, and for ablution wiped off the bloodstains on his head …
‘What is that?’ Maximus asked.
‘Lines from Sophocles’ Electra. Clytemnestra tried to avoid the blood guilt of killing her husband, Agamemnon, by wiping the murder weapon in his hair. On his own head be it. It was his fault for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia. Mastabates mentioned the lines when we were looking at the body of Castricius’s slave. Now, Mastabates is the dead one.’
Ballista paused, thinking.
No one else spoke.
‘Mastabates said he was sure there was something more about mutilation, not in tragedy but in epic.’ Ballista looked at Castricius and Hippothous.
Neither the enthusiast for epic poetry nor the self-styled man of Hellenic high culture reacted.
Suddenly, the weight of the earth above was very heavy on Ballista. He was tired, hung over, oppressed. He had to get out of this tomb. Abruptly, he turned to Hordeonius. ‘Organize the buria
l,’ he said.
As he neared the surface, Ballista could hear the wailing of the other eunuch, Amantius.
The tunnel was almost pitch dark. Men were screaming. The sounds of fighting were coming nearer. The flickering of distant torches gave it the look of Hell.
Mamurra was down, wounded. He was shouting something. Ballista could not hear. He felt the crushing weight of the earth above them. It was hard to breathe. He was choking. Far away behind him was the faint light of the outside world, the light of safety.
Mamurra shouted again. His hand reached out to Ballista. The Persians were getting closer. Earth drifted down on to Ballista’s head, like flour on a sacrificial animal. He felt as much as heard the thunk, thunk of axes biting into the pit props. He had to get out. He took a last look at Mamurra. His friend’s eyes were wild. Ballista turned and ran.
He stumbled out into the light …
The dream scrambled and retreated.
Ballista lay in the darkness. Poor old Mamurra. Poor square-headed old bastard. A man you could trust. A man who had trusted him.
Ballista had not been in the tunnel at Arete. But he had given the order. What in Hell else could he have done? Spare one and let the others die? He had given the order, and left his friend entombed in the dark for ever.
The Steppe was like nothing Calgacus had ever seen. It was another world. The ox-wagons had rumbled east for four days since the discovery of Mastabates’ corpse. They must have covered forty miles. But it could have been four hundred, or no distance at all. The Steppe gave no indication of having any beginning or end.
Many found it monotonous. But Calgacus was comfortable with the sameness. Although there were occasional bursts of rain – it was still May – most of the time, the sun shone. Calgacus enjoyed each day’s travel. The plain spread flat in all directions. There were spring flowers in the grasses: blue, lilac and yellow. There were milkwort and wild hemp, and tall candelabras of mullein flowers. And everywhere was grey wormwood; everywhere the bitter aroma of wormwood.
The Wolves of the North Page 8
