Anno Mortis

by Rebecca Levene

  They were behind her now. She could smell the death-stench of them and hear the rustle of their bandages as they ran. Petronius stumbled on the uneven floor, falling to his knees, and she had to waste precious seconds hauling him to his feet. She felt the brush of skeletal fingers against her back, and despite herself she cried out in fear, a base animal reaction to a thing that should not be.

  The creature behind her answered, its voice a dry rattle. She heard its teeth snapping together, the clash of bone on bone, and she knew that if Petronius fell she wouldn't stop for him again.

  But the boy kept his feet and fear drove them both through the tunnel and into the cavern beyond. Petronius was chanting a Latin prayer between desperate pants of breath. She realised she was doing the same, begging Tiu to spare her this death - to grant her any death but this.

  When they reached the ladder and began a desperate climb, she looked down at their pursuers for the first time. The bandages had begun to loosen in the flight through the tunnel. She could see skin beneath at shoulder and waist and hip, grey-green and rotting. A hand reached up to grab her ankle, putrid flesh falling away as it grasped to reveal the white bone beneath.

  She kicked out. The toe of her sandal caught the thing beneath its chin and the head snapped back, spewing corpse fluid through its jagged teeth. Another kick and it fell back the twenty feet to the floor below, leaving its hand still clamped to her leg.

  The hand twitched and started to inch its way up her calf, and this time Boda couldn't control the scream that bubbled out of her throat. She scraped her other foot along her leg, peeling skin and not caring because a second kick dislodged the hand to fall and shatter on the rock below. Droplets of blood from the raw scrape on her leg splattered on top of it, falling faster as she pulled herself up the ladder, sending the blood racing through her veins.

  And then, finally, she was at the top, pressed against Petronius as he shoved at the trapdoor. One of the walking dead was only eight rungs below and closing fast. The rest clustered at the foot of the ladder. When the corpse that was pursuing them pulled them down, the others would be waiting. She couldn't see their eyes beneath the bandages, just the blank white of their faces as they looked up. And still Petronius was pushing against the closed door.

  "Hurry!" she shouted.

  "I'm trying!" he gasped. But then he gave one final shove and the trapdoor swung open with a hollow thud.

  She lifted her arms from the ladder to push him through, ignoring his grunt of protest. Her own feet wobbled and slipped on the slick wood of the rungs and for a terrible moment she thought she was going to fall, into the waiting arms of the dead below. Then Petronius's hand reached through, grasping her wrist and jerking up hard enough to tear the ligaments in her shoulder.

  She stifled the cry of pain and used the last of her strength to leap up, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the marble floor around the trapdoor. They slipped, slipped again, and then held in a crack between slabs. And finally she was able to lever herself up and through and she didn't even pause for breath, just slammed the trapdoor shut behind her.

  A second later the door bounced on its hinges as the thing below pushed up with inhuman strength. Petronius flung himself on it, an act of bravery that seemed to take him by surprise. His eyes widened in horror as he realised what he'd done.

  And it wasn't enough. A decaying hand crept round the edge of the wood to fumble at his arm. He shuddered and drew back.

  Boda stepped over him, ignoring his yelp of pain as his fingers were caught beneath the heel of her sandal. The shelves were even heavier than she remembered and she was at the last of her strength. One tug, two, and they remained stubbornly in place. Then another body was pressed up behind her, two big male hands over her own, and finally the shelves were moving, grating over the stone floor with a nerve-jangling screech.

  Boda had one last, brief glimpse of the undead creature. The bandage had ripped from half its face and she could see the flesh beneath, hanging in decaying strips from the hinge of its jaw. Its eyes, the milky-white of blindness, glared malevolently at her. Then the weight of the shelves slammed the trapdoor shut.

  Claudius tried not to worry. He knew that his nephew could read every emotion on his face. The more concerned he seemed for Narcissus, the more Caligula would torment him.

  But he'd been down to the records room twice now, and there was no sign of the young man. The other slave there, the head-touched one whom Caligula had maimed, claimed that Narcissus had been sent on an errand and would be back any minute. Claudius had been prepared to believe that the first time. Now... He pictured Narcissus's thin, not-quite handsome face, his cautious smile, and his stomach clenched.

  "You look troubled, uncle," Caligula said.

  Claudius's head jerked to the doorway, sending a fine spray of spittle from his open mouth. He'd thought the Emperor would be kept busy entertaining himself with his latest lover, the sixteen-year-old wife of Senator Flavius. He thought he'd have longer.

  "No t-t-trouble," Claudius said. "Merely moved by the t-t-travails of Troy." He set aside the scroll of the Iliad he'd been trying to read to distract himself from his fears.

  The light had fled the atrium this late in the day, and his nephew's face was in shadows. A lone sparrow twittered in the silence, the water of the fountain behind it wetting its drab wings.

  "Well," Caligula said. "I must say, your man Narcissus is proving a disappointment. You always spoke so highly of him, but I set him a task and he's shirking already. You don't happen to know where's he's hidden himself, do you?"

  The Emperor's expression was bland, but Claudius had long practise at reading the malice lurking in the depths of his light eyes.

  He nodded. "I sent him to the market, nephew. W-w-was that wrong?" He kept his face open and guileless as Caligula studied it and, after a second, the other man let out an annoyed huff of breath and turned away.

  "He's my slave now, uncle - mine! In future, you must ask my permission to use him."

  "Of course." Claudius bowed his head in submission, and when he looked up again, his nephew had gone. But the lie would only satisfy him for an hour or so. If Narcissus didn't return before the sun set, there would be nothing Claudius could do to protect him.

  Petronius and Boda didn't stop running until they reached the Forum. Lost in the crowd there, and in the fading light of day, they finally felt something like safety.

  Petronius leaned against a marble wall, beside a red-and-blue-painted statue of Minerva, and gasped for breath. Beside the goddess, someone had set the stuffed body of a snowy owl. A faint smell of badly preserved flesh drifted from the offering, and he had to swallow hard to keep the contents of his stomach down.

  He could hear Boda's ragged breathing beside him, keeping pace with his own. When he turned to look at her, he realised that she was laughing. A part of him wanted to join in, a desperate release of tension, but he was very much afraid that what started as laughter might dissolve into tears.

  "So," she said. "We can at least be certain that something is going on."

  "That was..." Petronius didn't know how to complete the sentence. Terrifying? Impossible?

  "Raising the dead is forbidden among my people. Is it different here?"

  Petronius did laugh at that, a jagged bark quickly cut off. "Of course it's forbidden here. It doesn't happen here! That must have been... I've heard about these cults, the shows they put on to impress initiates. It's all smoke and mirrors - a con trick!"

  "A con trick?" She stared at him incredulously.

  He nodded, convincing himself as he failed to convince her. "Yes - of course. Keep the light low, dress up a few followers in bandages and there you have it. Something to scare the plebs."

  "And us," she said dryly. "This was no trick. The things that attacked us were the bodies of the slain. I saw the flesh falling from their bones!"

  "No," he said. "No. The peasants still believe that sort of superstitious nonsense. But we're educated peopl
e, or at least I am. I've found out Seneca's secret, and it's nothing that matters. The mystery cults have never been banned. If he wants to take part in their theatrics, it's his business. I had no right to follow him, and I won't do it again."

  Now she simply looked disgusted. Petronius started to turn away from the contempt in her blue eyes.

  She didn't let him, grabbing his chin and forcing him to face her. It was a whipping offence for a slave to treat a citizen that way, but he didn't say anything. A twist of her wrist would snap his neck like kindling. He'd seen it happen in the Arena often enough.

  She must have read something in his face, because she abruptly released him. "That's not good enough. The man outside the door, the one who gave us the key, he told me that slaves disappear in those caves. They go in but they don't come out. Don't you wonder what happens to them?"

  Petronius shrugged, drawing a deep breath to steady his voice. "They're just slaves."

  He had a minute of long cold silence to regret saying it. Then she nodded. "Of course. Roman, I understand." She looked at him a moment longer, then spun on her heel and stalked into the crowd.

  Petronius watched her go, her blonde hair a beacon that drew his eyes as she moved away. He thought about chasing after her, but he knew that he wouldn't. She was beautiful but dangerous, and the world was full of men and women who were only the former. And in the end she was just a barbarian and a slave. Her problems weren't his, and he'd be a fool to make them so.

  Narcissus didn't know how long they lay inside the crate. Long enough for the arm trapped beneath him to go entirely numb, and for the pervasive smell of olive oil to transmute from pleasant to unbearable. At one point, he felt the crate being shifted, rattling the jars together and pushing his face so hard against the wood it left the imprint of the grain on his cheek.

  His heart clenched tight in his chest, but the lid never lifted and as the rattling went on and on, he realised that the crate was being moved, not searched. Five more minutes and it was set down again, somewhere so dark that not even a sliver of light penetrated between the wooden slats.

  He was painfully aware of the second body pressed up against his, an elbow in his ribs and a knee digging into the soft flesh of his thigh. He could hear the other man's breathing, slow and steady, but he didn't say a word and Narcissus didn't either. He pictured the Egyptian guards in their white kilts, standing by the crates and waiting for them to give themselves away.

  Time lost all meaning in the darkness. A day could have passed or only an hour, but the waiting finally became too much, and the risk of getting caught here less than the risk of being found missing from the Palace. He didn't give himself time to worry about it, just braced his feet against the slick glass of the bottles and pushed up.

  The lid instantly lifted, far faster than he'd anticipated. He made a desperate grab for the wood before it could fall. His fingers clutched and missed but the lid stopped anyway and he saw that another hand, paler and finer than his own, was slowly easing it to the ground.

  Vali smiled at him, a wide grin under his sharp nose.

  "Where are we?" Narcissus whispered. The room they were in looked like part of a warehouse, with wooden walls and a sawdust-covered floor stacked with similar crates, but it wasn't the same one they'd entered. Had the crate been shifted to another part of the docks?

  "Listen," Vali said.

  Narcissus tilted his head, straining for the sound of pursuit. Nothing at first, and then footsteps, coming from above. "Do they know we're here?" he mouthed.

  Vali shook his head. "Listen," he said again.

  The feet were still pacing, more than one pair of them, but Narcissus tried to hear beyond them. Nothing. It was quiet here, no voices, only the soft sound of the wind, rising and falling outside the walls. Except, no, there was something too regular about that noise, a push and pull that the wind never had. And something else, too, a gentle slapping that sounded like water.

  And as soon as he became aware of that, he became aware of the motion too. The floor, the whole building, was swaying from side to side. He'd only failed to notice it because it had been going on so long - since the crates had been moved.

  It took him five minutes of frantic searching to find a knothole in the wall big enough to see through. He pressed his eye to it, blinking against the stinging salt spray.

  The horizon was miles distant, a dividing line between blues, one dark and troubled, the other light and clear. The ship was already a long way out to sea, not a speck of land in sight.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When Quintus told Boda she was to fight in the Arena that day, she knew he'd seen her in the Cult's hideaway. She could read it in his face, the calculating look in his watery eyes. And she knew it because she wasn't supposed to be fighting. No gladiator was expected to do battle on two consecutive days. There could be only one reason he was sending her out there. This time he meant for her to die.

  Her shoulder still pained her from when Petronius had yanked her to safety. The tendon was inflamed and she barely had the strength to lift a sword. Not that that would matter. She wasn't to use a sword this time - Quintus had decreed that she was to fight as a Retiarii, with trident and net.

  She'd never practised with those weapons. Quintus knew it, and so did the other gladiators. She saw them watching her as she stretched her muscles in the training ground. There was no warmth in their eyes and she knew that they'd give her no quarter. Quintus had whispered to them too, no doubt giving them permission to go for the killing stroke. He needn't have bothered. They hadn't forgiven her for Josephus's death, and this was their chance for revenge.

  When she stepped into the Arena the sun was at its peak and the same crowd thronged the stands. Boda hated them even more, because they'd come to watch her die, and she was afraid that today they'd get their wish. The ache in her shoulder throbbed in time with her strides, and the trident felt clumsy and too heavy in her hands.

  The gladiators weren't the first spectacle that day. A group of prisoners from Gaul had been set against a pride of lions, and the carnage of that unequal battle lay all around: a severed hand already black with flies, gobs of blood and torn hair. Boda remembered Josephus's body, torn open on a slab, and wondered if hers would end the same way.

  The crowd roared when their fight began. She'd been paired against Adam ben Meir, a close friend of Josephus's and the most skilled of them with a sword. He swung it now, too swift to parry with the longer trident, and it cut across her ribs. She saw the blood a moment before she felt the pain. Another slash of his sword and a line of fire opened high on her chest.

  If she let him rule the fight, she was finished. Though it pulled agonisingly at her torn shoulder, she flung the net low at his feet, as she'd seen the other gladiators do.

  He was already moving, leaping over the net and inside the reach of her trident. She used it as a stave instead, knocking aside his sword arm when he drove it towards her leg. In the second it bought her she rolled out and away. But her feet tangled in her own net, and when she regained them she'd lost her hold on it. Now she had nothing but the trident to defend herself with.

  There was a shriek from the crowd, half fear, half pleasure. They knew that she was finished. She knew it too, but she refused to give in. This time she would face her death with honour.

  Another slash of Adam's sword, and this time her forearm took the blow. The flesh parted in a neat line, exposing the thin yellow layer of fat beneath before blood bloomed red and covered it all.

  It was her weapon hand. Her trident drooped and nearly dropped and she shifted it to the other hand. But this arm was weaker still and she could do little more than jab and retreat, never hoping to strike a killing blow.

  Adam knew that he had her. The crowd groaned as he toyed with her, driving her first right, then left, knowing he could finish it at any time. A few more contemptuous strokes of his sword, and cuts opened on her thighs and stomach. His eyes glared into hers, with battle-rage and someth
ing else, something more personal. He wanted her to suffer before she died.

  She knew that in a minute more she'd be too weak to fight, her wounds leaking her life away drop by drop. There was only one chance. She darted forward with the trident, a reckless but unexpected move that forced Adam back. In the second it bought her she retreated herself, ten places clear of him and maybe far enough for what she intended. Her shoulder screamed in agony as she drew her arm back, but the heat of battle overcame the pain.

  Adam knew what she was doing. He charged forward, snarling. No more games - he meant to kill her now. And then her arm moved forward and she threw the trident as hard as her abused body would allow.

  For just a second, she thought she'd succeeded. Adam's eyes widened in shock, and the trident caught his sword on the down-slash and knocked it aside. Then it was through his guard and the metal tines were heading for his chest. And in an acrobatic move she wouldn't have expected from a man so large he twisted to the side, and the trident passed beneath his arm and behind him.

  He smiled as he raised his sword and walked slowly towards her. Boda raised her head. It was over now, and in a way that was a relief. If death was inevitable, then fear became pointless.

  "This is for Josephus," he hissed when he stood in front of her.

  She nodded, accepting that, then bared her throat to him.

  Narcissus sat on a crate, head cradled between his hands. This was worse than he could have imagined. Caligula must know he was gone by now, and if he didn't he soon would. Even if the ship turned straight round, he'd never get back to the palace in time. And if he simply left the ship at the end of its journey, kept on travelling, he'd be condemning himself to spend the rest of his life on the run. Crucifixion was the punishment for runaway slaves.