Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  ‘You with the Army?’

  Drust shook his head. The man got to work, seeing he shouldn’t push more, and Drust was pleased with that for it meant the man wasn’t greedy. Knowledge was valuable in these parts and he had no doubt Ander would pass on what he knew, for favours mainly and to anyone.

  ‘Makes you wonder,’ Ugo growled, working a finger into his mouth in a vain attempt to dislodge some of his last meal. He spoke Latin but Drust knew Ander understood that well enough and he let Ugo know it with a slight movement and a warning flick of his eyes.

  ‘What?’ he demanded.

  ‘This place. Why it’s worth all the trouble?’

  Sib laughed. ‘Because emperors want it is all.’

  ‘We are all slaves,’ Ander said suddenly – in Latin – raking the flames until they turned yellow and blue. When he became aware of the stares, he looked up, half defiant, then shrugged.

  ‘What? True. Even emperors. Held slave to wanting what they don’t have.’

  ‘You’ve got some Greek in you,’ Manius declared, approaching in time to hear this. He was long and lean and good-looking in a hawk-like way, in the way a well-made knife was. Had to be treated the same way, too.

  ‘What’s Greek, da?’ the boy asked, holding the mule’s head for his da to measure shoe to hoof.

  ‘Folk from far away,’ Drust answered, ‘who think too much about all sorts. Who commands in the tower?’

  Ander bent and fitted while his son held the nose of the mule and soothed it. There was the smell of burning hair, a plume of reek.

  ‘Tullius.’

  ‘Good sort, is he? Friendly?’

  Ander worked the shoe back into the coals and pumped until the flame turned blue-green.

  ‘New,’ he said eventually, having weighed the worth of the information and decided free was best with men such as these. ‘Aulius went north with the army.’

  Drust let him work, turning away to stare at the rain-darkened wall, the whisper of mirr and the faint shape of the tower. Behind him was a mile fort. Beyond the tower, exactly a mile, would be another. Beyond that the Wall leaped the river on a three-arched bridge.

  Ander had confirmed what he had expected: the original Wall garrison had been scooped up by the emperors and pushed north, to the old Vallum and beyond it – old Severus wanted some last hoorah for his old age, though most of the talk was of how he thought the Army and his sons were idle and spoiled and needed some campaign discomfort to sort them out. Everyone else in the court, forced to move to this cold, wet place, thought he had been here too long.

  So a new lot garrisoned the Wall of Hadrianius. Well, made no difference – Drust had a carefully wrapped answer to all officious questions.

  The shoe went on in a hiss and another cloud of blue reek. Manius watched and the others milled and idled. Kag followed Drust’s gaze to the Wall.

  ‘Lot of trouble for a place like this,’ he said. ‘What’s it got that everyone wants? Rain and a too-big sky, far as I can see. How is that worth dying for?’

  Drust looked sideways at him and smiled. Ander had finished and the mule was lifting and stamping, favouring the new shoe.

  ‘Who’d have thought,’ Drust said pointedly, ‘that water can drive men mad?’

  Kag remembered and laughed. ‘Pay the man,’ he said, nodding to the smith.

  Chapter Two

  Tullius was tall and thin with an undershot jaw that pushed his bottom teeth over his top lip. Kag was sure the man suffered from dental aches and that that was what made him morose and miserable. ‘If he was a horse,’ he managed to whisper to Drust, ‘I’d have put him down.’

  Drust was sure teeth contributed, but he was also certain Tullius was on edge mainly because of the silent, sullen people clustered in the rain round his little tower. They were the families of legionaries uprooted and sent off north with the Army and also those of the men who replaced them. No doubt Tullius’s own family was among them.

  Tullius did not want more problems, so he scowled and used his fearsome face like a stick. It no doubt worked well on recruits, but it broke on the marble of Drust and the others. Tullius saw it and was made wary.

  ‘Felix Tullius,’ he said eventually. ‘Decanus, 5th Gallica.’

  A Decanus commanded eight men. The 5th Gallica was an auxiliary cohort which had been in the north for years – any Gauls left in it had long since lost accent or contact with the place they had been raised in.

  ‘I have business north,’ Drust said and Tullius snorted.

  ‘You and half the world,’ he answered. Yet he saw they were neatly cropped. He favoured a barbered beard himself, in the hope of hiding his affliction, but you might as well have tried to smuggle an elephant behind a hedge, as Sib said in his mavro tongue.

  The laugh that followed, the language he did not understand and the general, casual air of being unimpressed made Tullius more uneasy still; he fell back on truculence.

  ‘No one goes through without a permit,’ he growled. Drust eyed the plodding trail of people north of the Wall, heading into the rain mist in search of their menfolk. He knew about half of them had permits, if that. He knew that Tullius was awash with livestock, small coin and the favours of women desperate to rejoin their husbands, where the shelter and food and coin was.

  ‘The Emperor should never have let us marry,’ Tullius growled. Drust had sympathy; since Severus had signed the decree, legionaries had formalised the informal – but that meant the Army now had to cater for wives and children; neat, traditional camps were now leprous with a barnacle cluster of huts to accommodate them. And they had to move with their menfolk.

  ‘I have a permit,’ Drust said and took Tullius by one arm, steering him to where there was shelter from the rain. It was an act so shocking, so singular, that Tullius was at first too stunned to resist and, by the time he thought of it, he was released and staring at a scroll. He did the only thing he could: he read it and Drust saw the flesh ruche on him when he saw the seal. He knew the feeling from the first time he had laid eyes on it too.

  ‘North?’ Tullius managed. ‘To the Northern Vallum? Beyond it?’

  ‘That’s what it says.’

  Tullius rolled the scroll and handed it back as if it burned. He wanted to ask what they were going to do and who they were but now did not dare. The scroll’s seal and the revelations combined to push him beyond wariness; he found he was afraid, did not know why and was afraid of that too.

  ‘There are beasts beyond the Wall,’ he managed.

  ‘No one up there is a friend,’ Ugo called out, marshalling mules towards the tower gate.

  ‘No. Really. Beasts. Strange, horrible creatures. Men are dying… the Army…’

  Tullius stopped, clapped his lip shut so that his bottom teeth almost touched his nose. Drust knew the man was afraid he had said too much to people who had the ear of those in power, those who could use such a seal on a scroll.

  They had all been hearing of the casualties all the way from Eboracum and even south of it. Hundreds. Thousands, since the emperors had tramped over the Northern Vallum to bring the Caledonii to heel. Thirty thousand at least, the rumours said; the Army was bleeding to death.

  But now there was peace and the Army was trailing thankfully into winter quarters. The beasts beyond the Wall were sleeping sullenly again.

  Drust watched Tullius, measuring him for what he knew now and what he might have known before. They’d come up through Gaul and Inferior and met with Kalutis, their contact in Eboracum. He was a ptolemy and Drust had wondered how he suffered the cold and damp, but the Egyptian didn’t offer more than a shrug when asked.

  He told them he had spread the word of their arrival far and wide, which made Drust stiffen.

  ‘Hide in plain sight,’ Kalutis said cheerfully. ‘Six gladiators sent from a ludus in Rome all the way to give demonstrations – now no one will question your travelling about.’

  ‘Do they have a fucking amphitheatre in this pest-ridden country?’ Sib
demanded.

  ‘Isca Ausgusta,’ Kalutis replied mildly. ‘Calleva, Moridunum, Deva Victrix and here in Eboracum, to mention but a few. But you lads are more used to sparring in forums, so I hear.’

  Quintus laughed at the Egyptian’s barb, but Sib bridled and said: ‘Fuck you.’

  Kalutis had ignored it all, then told them to bring the woman and child back to him. Drust saw the truth in his face – the Egyptian had no idea who would call for them after that and made it clear that Drust and the others were done with the business after delivery.

  It had worked out as Kalutis planned; they went from point to point and no one bothered much – but this was a long way past the lie of giving fighting entertainments and Drust watched Tullius closely and learned nothing. It was clear that news of the presence of gladiators all the way from Rome had not filtered this far north.

  Tullius turned away and started shouting for men to clear the cluster of people away from the gate and make way. The displaced stood with blank stares and the detritus of their lives dripping in the rain while six men and eight mules splashed past them and out the northern gate.

  In half an hour the tower was lost behind a fold of hill and the last of the plodding hopefuls with them vanished into darkening rain mist, heading up the eastern road with its handy, neatly placed marching camps and garrisons and road gangs. Drust called a halt and they made shelters and fire. After they had eaten, Sib and Ugo stood first watch while the others clustered round the spitting fire, shelter cloths looped round their heads.

  ‘He speaks well,’ Kag said.

  Manius offered Drust one of his leaf-wraps, knowing it would never be accepted; he was chewing already and his teeth were either bloody with that or firelight. You could track Manius by the little pools of seeming blood which were his spit from such chewing; it came, harmlessly, from some crushed nut in the mix.

  ‘Who does?’ Drust demanded.

  ‘Julius Yahya,’ Quintus said and grinned. ‘That’s because he can speak philosopher, or so Drust tells me.’

  ‘He speaks softly,’ Drust interrupted, ‘but I am sure the club he has is solid and large.’

  ‘Verus-shaped,’ Kag agreed. ‘But you are right – a soft voice turneth away wrath, or so it is written.’

  ‘Once wrath has his back to you,’ Quintus answered, ‘you stab the fucker in the neck.’

  There was only silence on this truth of this and Drust, when he looked at Kag, knew he was going back over the details. Dog. A woman and her child.

  ‘Is it his child, d’you think?’ Kag asked, not for the first time, but that had all been talked to the bone before and no one was wiser.

  ‘This mysterious patron really loves this woman, then,’ Sib said. In the dark, his ebony face was all shining planes of firelight. He put another half-dried log on the fire and raised his head, nostrils flaring slightly as he smelled the fog.

  ‘Strange,’ Quintus said, grinning his wide, firelight-bloody smile, ‘what a man will do for a woman.’

  ‘In your case, what he will do to her,’ Ugo corrected, then frowned. ‘But it is strange. Who is this woman? The wife of a senator perhaps? Or the Caledonian king? Who is the boy – Dog’s son, or just a bit of baggage he has to take to get the woman?’

  ‘Money,’ Quintus said laconically. ‘It will be about money.’

  Manius snorted, looking up from where he was softly, gently, whetting. Iron sharpens iron, in men and blades he would say if asked. Few asked, preferring to keep distance from a man putting a meaningful edge on a blade.

  ‘It was not money. He has not asked for any and has fled back to his homeland.’

  He paused and looked sideways at Drust. ‘Your homeland, too. I am thinking this is why you were chosen by this Julius Yahya.’

  ‘Then he chose badly. I was a child when taken from here. Dog is also from the dark north, but he is nothing to do with me. Whoever thought of it should have chosen someone else.’

  ‘Whoever he is. Whoever chose Julius Yahya to choose us,’ Sib said and Manius grunted and whetted his daggers.

  ‘There is no mystery there,’ Quintus said. No one answered him; no one wanted to voice it. No one wanted to think about the Palatine and the plots.

  ‘This is not helping,’ Ugo growled. ‘It will be about loans. These Epidi owe money. An emperor is no different from Servilius Structus when all is said and done.’

  ‘No matter who wants it, or what this woman and her kid have to do with it, the problem is simple and no different from others we have solved,’ Quintus added. ‘We have runaway slaves and we have to get them back. We go, we kick in the door, kill everything that is not her or the child and get them back. Then we take the reward and spend it.’

  No one laughed. It was about as much tactics as they had ever used and always worked in the end.

  But the nag of high-born plots was on everyone, especially Drust. He remembered that night in Rome, when he had kicked Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Caesar in the balls. Hard enough to make his eyes pop, he had said to Kag later, when they were alone and touching heads in the dark.

  ‘Had they even dropped?’ Kag had answered, the grin in his voice.

  ‘On the floor of a wine shop, for sure.’

  They had laughed, drunk with wine and having got away with thumping a brat emperor, but it was not so amusing now, Drust thought. Has he found me – us? Is this revenge? Yet The Hood had legions at his call – why would he need to be so convoluted?

  ‘Kidnapping,’ he said later in the quiet, head to head with Kag, who met his gaze briefly, shrugged and looked away.

  ‘Not Dog’s style,’ Drust persisted. ‘He steals a woman who may or may not belong to some purple-born. He takes her and a boy, presumably her son, all the way beyond the Empire, all the way back to a home he hasn’t seen in…’

  He stopped. Almost long as me, he suddenly realised. No one would know him there, same as no one will know me, nor I them. He had a momentary flash, of warmth and a smile, the touch of a hand on his face and her voice, sad with longing: ‘Be safe’. His mother.

  He looked at the ground, seeing nothing. Be safe. She had died when he was too young to know it properly and Servilius Structus knew more about it, though he had not said, and Drust, though he had burned to know, had dared not ask. In the end it had faded like the brand of his slavery; he looked at the backs of his hands, as if insight was inked there.

  ‘Should have slit Dog’s throat when you had the chance,’ Manius said. Drust shrugged and Sib laughed with no mirth; they had all been there, so they knew why he had not. Drust still saw Dog’s cruel little eyes, fever-bright with anger and… desperation, the sweat-dried black spikes of his hair defying gravity and caked with his own blood.

  ‘Better get some sleep,’ Kag advised. ‘It is almost light and as soon as it is, we’re up.’

  Ugo nodded and simply rolled into his big cloak. He slept with the innocence of a child – they all did, not because they were morally pure but simply because of the way they spent their lives. The gladiator way. There was no room in any of them for the stupidity of weighing one man’s skill against another’s on a bigot scale – it was measured on who lived and who died.

  That’s why no one had liked Dog, Drust remembered. He had always been too good at the business of fighting and killing and sneered at those he left behind in the provincial arenas as he and Calvinus the Gaul had become the pair to watch. All the way to the Flavian in Rome, where Drust had seen the price of such fame in the games to celebrate the elevation of Antoninus to the purple. Matched pairs, to fight sine missione – no possibility of reprieve to the loser.

  It had been Dog and Calvinus, of course. The crowd loved them, bayed for them – and Antoninus, ten years old and already homicidal, but not yet The Hood of Rome’s dark streets, had set them at each other in the end, despite the boos of the crowd. A marker, Drust thought, for how he was going to be.

  Dog killed Calvinus and walked out while the slave dressed as Dis Pater, god of the
Underworld, was still smacking the corpse with a hammer. He had a face on him, Drust saw, like weeping granite and one hand clutched the amulet he always wore – Sol Invictus – so that the rays of bronze needled blood between his fingers.

  Servilius Structus had realised that something had broken inside Dog and had spoken to Drust about giving him the rudis, making him a trainer, but never quite got round to it, though it was said Dog had chosen a Roman name in expectation of his manumission.

  Servilius Structus had put him with the Procuratores, but Dog had been too wayward for that and still a slave besides; it irritated him that everyone else was a freedman. He had never quite been one of the Brothers of the Sands and Drust had not been surprised when he turned rogue and bandit, only at the seeming reason for it. A woman? A son?

  Maybe it was the same woman. Maybe another, but whoever it was she was the belonging of someone else, perhaps not any of the high-born but some speculator with clout and gold who wanted his slave or hostage back.

  Perhaps Dog had thought to steal her and the boy for ransom, then realised what he had done and simply ran, all the way out of the Empire in the hope that would keep him safe. If he had to do that, Drust thought, feeling the chill of it, the patron had a powerful long reach.

  If so, he reckoned both woman and boy were dead long since and they were on a fool’s errand – but for a great deal of reward. It still made no sense he could see and he nagged himself with the wondering at some sort of revenge by The Hood. But the man was an emperor. He led the Army because his father was laid up in Eboracum. Here was a man who openly declared his hatred for his own brother, Geta. Who had drawn a sword at his father’s back during a peace meeting with the tribes beyond the Wall – he had no need to be coy about revenge on the likes of the Brothers of the Sands, a band of sometime gladiators who had never been of the first rank when they had been in their prime.

  Whatever happened, Drust had realised when Servilius Structus had said his farewell, this was the end of the Procuratores; he had an idea they all had realised that.