Anno Mortis

by Rebecca Levene

  That should keep them quiet. And most of them did look cowed. Except that man there, Trajan. He had his face lowered, but Caligula caught a glint of his eyes glaring with hatred from beneath thick black brows. "Him too," he told the soldier. "And her - to the left there. Her nose has been distracting me since she got here. It's enormous."

  The soldier's face was pale, but he didn't look for confirmation from Marcus before obeying this time. Trajan glared at him defiantly as the blade slid through his heart. The woman tried to flee, feet hopelessly tangling in the cushions. She held out her hands in mute pleading to the soldier, and Caligula saw him turn his face away as he killed her too.

  He thought that would be an end of it, but now there was shouting all around the table. Some of the other guests were standing up, and one of them was waving a belt knife around. He didn't even have to tell the soldiers to finish that one off.

  But as the chaos grew rather than abated, Caligula realised with a quiver of fear what he'd done wrong. He shouldn't have ordered that woman killed, even though she did have a quite absurdly large nose. Her killing had been too random - not the obvious result of questioning their Emperor - and now they all felt threatened. And they outnumbered the Praetorian Guard four to one.

  Drusilla knew it too. Her strange new face was pale and when Nerva touched her arm she shook him off impatiently. "Do something!" she said to Caligula. "This is all your fault!"

  The room was in uproar. Only Sopdet and Seneca were still sitting in place, and the youth Petronius. "You!" Caligula said to him. "How do I stop this?"

  The boy looked round at the near riot, the soldiers in danger of being overwhelmed by the frantic guests. A huge, black, over-muscled man who had once been a gladiator appeared to be their ringleader. He'd managed to overpower one of the guards and take his sword, and was now laying about him with frightening efficiency. Caligula had a bad feeling he was the husband of the woman with the huge nose.

  "Well!" Caligula snapped. "What can I do?"

  "Not start this in the first place?" Petronius suggested. His eyes were wild, and Caligula realised he was close to hysterics.

  Drusilla reached across to slap Petronius's face. "Don't be a fool! They saw my brother seat you at his right hand. Do you think you'll be spared if they win?"

  The youth seemed to pull himself together a little. The hand rubbing his cheek shook as he nodded. "Let them go, then."

  "They're traitors!" Caligula hissed. "They need to die."

  "But we need to live!" Petronius shouted. "Didn't Julius himself say that you should never leave an enemy without an escape route? No one wants to fight a man with nothing to lose."

  "He's right," Drusilla said, and smiled at Petronius with far too much warmth.

  Caligula wanted to ignore his advice just for that, but then he saw the black ex-gladiator gut a soldier with his own sword. "Marcus!" he shouted. "Let them out!"

  The guests heard. Some of them looked like they wanted to continue fighting. They knew they had the upper hand. But enough of them were soft and frightened and they stampeded for the door as soon as the guards moved aside from it.

  For one terrifying instant, the Nubian gladiator stood in front of Caligula, sword raised for a killing blow. His mouth opened in a roar of rage - and instead of words, a torrent of blood poured out of it. Marcus had skewered him through his undefended back.

  After that, the remaining guests turned tail and fled. They left behind a room littered with corpses. Some had fallen onto the table, heads buried in bowls of syllabub or resting on raspberry flans. The smell of fruit and cream and cinnamon almost overwhelmed the stench of blood. Four of the Praetorian Guard were dead, too, and several more injured.

  Claudius, with his usual genius for ill-timing, chose that moment to finally join them. His eyes scanned the destruction with horror, lingering over the mutilated body of a fourteen-year-old girl. When they looked at Caligula, horror had been replaced with accusation. "What h-h-happened here, nephew?"

  Caligula shrugged but couldn't meet his gaze. "There was a rebellion. They disobeyed me."

  Some of the soldiers shuffled, and he heard a cough as if someone was about to speak, but nobody did.

  Claudius leaned down to close the young woman's staring eyes. "A rebellion?"

  "A very entertaining one," Sopdet said. She'd remained seated throughout the whole thing, untouched by any of the combatants. Now she rose gracefully to her feet. "I thank you for your hospitality, Caesar, but myself and Seneca have other things to attend to."

  Caligula scowled. "You think you're going to leave? You're the one who caused all this!"

  "I think you'll find," Seneca said, "that it was your own inability to control your temper which sparked it off. It really is quite extraordinary - the mightiest Empire in the world ruled by a man with the self-control of a three-year-old."

  Caligula was shocked into temporary silence. No one had ever spoken to him in that way. Even the people he had ordered put to the sword were too afraid for the families they left behind. "How dare you?" he finally said, voice trembling with rage. "You'll die for this."

  Sopdet rested a hand on Seneca's shoulder as she stood beside him. "Really? Do you really think creating more corpses is a good idea?"

  "Why not?" Caligula raged. "You're all ingrates - treacherous scum. Why shouldn't I kill you all?"

  "Because," Sopdet said, "you're simply adding to the forces on my side."

  Caligula stared uncomprehendingly at her as she snapped her fingers. But when the beetles flew through the doorway in answer to her summons, he knew exactly what it meant.

  "Stop them!" he yelled.

  The soldiers leapt to obey, swords flailing uselessly at the tiny, flying targets. Untroubled, the beetles buzzed past the metal and settled on the corpses.

  Caligula dived at the nearest one, trying to brush the insect away from the dead gladiator's mouth. But he couldn't get a purchase on its slick carapace and then it was in the man's mouth and burrowing through to his brain. A moment later, the corpse's eyes opened, staring straight into Caligula's.

  He screamed and jumped back, pressing himself against Drusilla. She whimpered and buried her face in his shoulder as all around the room the corpses of the recently dead woke.

  The Praetorian Guard moved, ready to attack - and their own dead rose to face them. The soldiers' faces drained of colour and their swords drooped in their arms as they looked into their comrades' dead white faces.

  "Your rule is over, Caesar," Sopdet said. "Soon there will be no one left alive within the Servian walls. And then the armies of the dead will march from Rome, until this whole world is a second kingdom of death."

  They were almost within arm's reach of safety when the horse attacked. At first Boda thought it was a stray, panicked by the fighting around it. Then, as it turned to face her, she saw the red gleam in its eye. Its hoof pawed the ground and its lips pulled back, baring yellow teeth. She saw that the flesh of its belly had fallen away, leaving the white arch of its ribs exposed as its entrails dangled in the dirt below.

  The little boy on Boda's shoulders yelled and the horse reared, hooves lashing out towards Vali as flecks of spittle flew from its mouth.

  Vali crouched, shielding his head. But the move was pure instinct, an animal reflex that didn't take account of the little girl sitting on his shoulders. The horse's kick caught her head straight on, stoving in her skull in one blow. She didn't even have time to scream, just slumped lifeless on Vali's shoulders.

  Boda saw the moment Vali realised what had happened, as the little girl's blood trickled through his hair and into his eyes. He shuddered convulsively, even as his hands still clung tight to the dead girl's legs, holding her above him as the rest of her blood drained out of her.

  The horse reared again, directly above Vali's crouched body. Boda couldn't reach the creature's neck, stretched taught with strain above her. Instead she swung her sword at the legs themselves, putting every atom of her remaining strength in
to the blow.

  Her sword swept clean through the joint above the hoof and out, first the right leg then the left. The horse screamed and began to fall, all its weight plummeting towards Vali's head.

  Vali didn't move. His face was blank, no fear in it, no expression at all. Boda's heart raced. She'd seen this before - battle shock. It had paralysed him. The horse's legs were inches from his face now, and its balance was gone. Its whole body would fall on him.

  She didn't think, just flung herself at Vali, knocking him to the side as she clung on desperately to her own small human burden.

  The horse fell to one side of them, landing on the stumps of its forelegs. It screamed its frustration, but without its hooves it couldn't move and though its mouth foamed and snapped at them, they were out of its reach.

  They lay, dazed, in a disorderly heap, Vali at the bottom, Boda on him and the little boy resting on her back, gabbling nonsense words that might have been his idea of a prayer. The dead girl's corpse was beneath them all. Boda could see the sloppy mush of flesh and bone that the fall had made of her little body.

  When Vali realised what he was lying on, it seemed to snap him out of his stupor. He let out a cry of revulsion and rolled to one side, pulling Boda and the small boy with him. The girl's mangled body lay motionless where it had fallen. Vali couldn't seem to take his eyes off it. He wasn't weeping, but his silent grief and horror were harder to bear.

  Then, as they watched, a beetle landed on the girl's lips. By the time Boda realised what it was, it had crawled inside her mouth and out of sight.

  Vali whispered something, a wordless denial, but it was already too late. The light which had so recently gone out in the girl's eyes sparked back into life. Her knees were bent at the wrong angle, her chest squashed almost flat, her intestines oozing from its sides, but somehow she stumbled to her feet. And then, teeth bared, she came towards them.

  Boda had to force herself to keep her eyes open as her sword separated the girl's head from her neck. Beside her, Vali fell to his knees and was copiously sick.

  It was the little boy who pulled them out of their shock. Boda was horrified to realise that she'd forgotten him - forgotten to shield his eyes from what she'd done to his friend. But he wasn't looking at her. He pointed over Boda's shoulder. "Soldiers," he said.

  He was right. In the minutes their fight had taken, the group of the living they'd been trying to join had changed their course to envelop them. There were no words exchanged. Boda didn't think she had any words left. But she, Vali and the little boy were absorbed into the centre of the shielded ring as, step by painful step, it edged its way nearer to the safety of Rome's walls.

  Boda wanted to join the outer perimeter, the ones defending against the dead. But the leader of the group - Silvius, a former tribunus in the seventh legion - took one look at her bloody-face and stumbling steps and told her she was too weak to fight, a danger to those around her. She didn't argue, just passed her sword to a man better able to use it. She knew he was right. Her sword arm was burning with pain and she barely had the energy to lift her head, let alone her sword.

  Besides, she wanted to keep an eye on Vali. She'd known men choose death rather than live with the pain that lined his face. She'd tried to talk to him but he shrugged her off and so, on an impulse she didn't fully understand, she passed him the young boy to hold.

  Vali rested his head against the child's. She wasn't sure which of them took comfort from it, but there was nothing more she could do. They marched on, one painful step at a time, until finally they stood before the gates of Rome.

  The city wall was patrolled by archers and javelins prickled along its length. The gate itself was barred. Silvius pushed through to the front of the formation, and the others cleared a space around him so the centurion guarding the gate could see that he spoke for the group.

  "Open the gates!" Silvius shouted.

  The soldiers' faces on the battlements above remained grim and ungiving.

  "Open the damned gates!" Silvius screamed. "For the love of Jupiter - there are women and children here!"

  "I'm sorry," the centurion said. "It's too dangerous to let you pass." Then he signalled to his soldiers and, as Boda watched in horror, the gates of Rome were barred against them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The dead stood in a ring around them. But Petronius saw that some of them were swaying on their feet, while others stumbled to their knees when they tried to walk. He remembered how Drusilla had seemed to take a few minutes to gain full control of Publia's body, and he knew that right now was their only chance to escape.

  "Be ready!" he shouted.

  He couldn't see the remnants of the Praetorian Guard. If they were alive, they were outside the ring of undead. Caligula and Drusilla were still clinging and cowering together. Only Claudius looked up, face still clawed by grief. But the old man nodded and Petronius guessed that was as much encouragement as he was going to get.

  In the wreckage of the dinner party, one item had survived unscathed - the huge, brown-crusted pie no one had dared cut into. Petronius launched himself across the table towards it, scooping up a knife along the way. The undead reacted but, just as he'd hoped, were too slow and uncoordinated to stop him. His knife bit through the crust, the pastry crumbled - and the terrified flock of living birds baked inside burst free.

  For one moment, there was pandemonium. The living screamed. The dead flinched back. And even Sopdet crouched, covering her face, while Seneca turned tail and fled.

  It was almost impossible to see through the flutter of wings and the flurry of loose feathers. The sparrows squawked and shat as they flung themselves against walls and windows. Petronius had been terrified of birds since he was a little boy and his aunt and uncle's geese had attacked him on their farm in the country. His flesh cringed at the light touch of wings or the sharp scratch of claws but he made himself ignore it, running straight for Claudius and grabbing his arm.

  Caligula turned fearful, panicked eyes towards him. Petronius wasted a precious second in indecision. But then he took the Emperor's arm too. Caligula still ruled the city, and once they were outside the palace they might need his powers to command.

  The Emperor in turn seized Drusilla's hand.

  "Leave her - she's one of them!" Petronius yelled.

  Caligula's expression was mulish as he held on tighter and Petronius couldn't waste the time arguing. The flock of birds was thinning as they stunned themselves to insensibility against the walls, and the dead were beginning to master their new bodies.

  Petronius ran for the door, pulling the line of other survivors with him. The dead tried to stop them. Some of them had swords and when one swung for Petronius's head he thought he was finished. But then another blade clashed with it, thrusting it aside. And he realised that the Praetorian Guard had gathered, the few that remained, ringing them as they headed to the door.

  He saw a guard go down as three of the dead flung themselves on him. One of them had been a soldier himself, only the jagged, bloody hole in his leather tunic distinguishing him from his living comrade. Petronius thought the living soldier might have fought back if it hadn't been for that. Instead he screamed and shuddered as a blade pierced his own heart - only to rise a few seconds later, a new spirit lighting his eyes.

  Another one took a knife to the face, cutting his cheek to the bone. But he managed to keep his feet, only hissing at the pain, and then they were at the door and the dead were penned inside the room.

  There was a pause as both sides faced off against each other. For a moment, Sopdet's expression was a study in pure rage. Her eyes burned with it and her cheeks flamed redder than the cloaks of the undead guards around her.

  "You bitch!" Caligula said. "You foreign whore! I should never have trusted you!"

  Petronius bit his lip very hard to stop himself pointing out this was precisely what he'd tried to warn the Emperor.

  Sopdet just smiled, as if Caligula's ranting had strengthened her.
<
br />   "Laugh, will you?" Caligula hissed. "I've beaten you! You tried to kill me and you've failed!"

  "It's true," she said, "that I can't prevent you leaving. But what difference does it make to me, if you're among the first in Rome to die, or the last? For, in time, die you will - every last one of you."

  Boda saw the hope drain out of the eyes around her. She understood. Their fight through the horror around them had been sustained by the prospect of an escape from it. Now that had been taken from them, they were close to giving up. Already the dead were throwing themselves against the outer perimeter of the living, and she didn't think it would be long before that cracked like the shell of a nut, and the dead could rip through the soft flesh within.

  She reached out to take the little boy from Vali. Vali was slow to release him, and the child wriggled and fussed, but eventually she had him cradled in her arms. She carried him forward to stand beside Silvius, facing the captain of the gate.

  "You have to let us in," she said. "If you don't, you're condemning this child to die."

  The captain's face reddened with shame. "I'm sorry. But until we know what they are... How can we know that you're not with them?"

  "Because they're killing us!" Silvius snapped. "Can't you see?"

  As if to underline his words there was a desperate scream behind them as another of the defenders fell, gored by the rotting remains of a black boar.

  "But they're... they're dead," the captain said. "How can we stop them? If we open the gates they'll break through and the whole city will be doomed."

  The small boy grizzled in Boda's arm and she rocked him, but he didn't take any comfort from it. She couldn't blame him. "Exactly," she said. "The city will be doomed with no warriors to defend it. There are nearly a hundred of them here. Can you afford to do without us?"