Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  Drust lay back and listened to them breathe and stir. They were all the same, yet not the same – none of them fought in the same style in the harena and so were allowed to form friendships, since fighters of the same style were never matched one to the other; it was dangerous to make a friend you might have to kill one day.

  Yet they shared the fear and the stink, jokingly called themselves the Brothers of the Sand in that fatalistic, wry way you do when Dis, ruler of the dark Underworld, walks at your elbow. Yet it had stuck, grown, become more. As a result, they lived with people, not beside them, and when they formed, they formed against all wind and tide, so that anyone who failed that test was never looked on the same.

  These had looked on one another at one time, at the worst time, and they had made their decision for this time based on that. It was all you could do.

  Drust smelled the wet-dog tang of himself, heard the mules shuffle and grunt. He wondered what he would do when they went their separate ways. He slid off into the little death of sleep.

  * * *

  In the morning, Drust spoke with Kag about Dog and the woman and child, gnawing it as if it was a morning meal while he fought with the mule pack lashings, crossing this rope, holding that one tense while Kag made some knots look easy and secured the packs.

  ‘Euclid of Alexandria invented this,’ Kag said, seeing Drust’s scowl. ‘Look – it is shaped like a diamond and if you get the angles right…’

  They secured the pack, then Kag slapped the mule with satisfaction.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘To Dog? After we broke stuff on him. I thought Servilius Structus would kill him or give him the rudis but he did neither.’

  ‘I think Servilius Structus favoured the latter,’ Drust said. ‘But Dog was mad by then.’

  ‘He did have some abnormal eye contact,’ Kag admitted and they laughed.

  ‘Abnormal eye contact,’ Sib repeated, coming up in time to catch the conversation. ‘Things you say, Kag – Dog was crazed as a basket of burning frogs. Should have been put down long before. They did it to Felix Spurius for less.’

  Kag checked Sib’s work, leaning back to put some serious tight on a rope. ‘To be fair, Spurius did kill the woman.’

  ‘Accident,’ Sib said, cocking his head to one side a little. ‘So I heard.’

  ‘The boy he killed was an accident,’ Kag corrected. ‘The woman might have been – but since it came two days later, even Servilius Structus couldn’t ignore it.’

  Drust thought about it while they walked into the dawn light, aware now that they were completely alone in a rolling landscape of forest and scrub-covered hills. Beyond the Wall…

  Felix Spurius had been the bastard by-blow of a tanner, taken in by Servilius Structus for no good reason Drust could see. But, then, none of the ones taken in had immediately discernible talents and only time told what they were and if they were useful. Servilius Structus had a weakness, a pride in his uncanny ability to spot special people with talents that could be nurtured in his service – but Felix Spurius turned out to be something darker, a lusus naturae with sinister tastes.

  He had been sentry on the wagons coming up from Ostia with the Egyptian grain, bound for the Temple of Ceres to be distributed as dole. Servilius Structus had bribed his own wagons in with the State ones, an old trick. It was dark, because wheeled traffic was only permitted after sunset and the area round the temple was thronged with the desperate, bobbing shadows spattered by bloody torchlight.

  The boy came out of the dark, Felix Spurius explained, and he thought he was coming at him with a knife, but it turned out to be a brass pot, his only possession. He was eight, maybe nine – hard to tell with the starving – and dying to be first in the queue. Literally. Picked the wrong one.

  The Vigiles accepted it, Servilius Structus accepted it, but no one else did; the boy had sixteen wounds, which was a little overkill for self-defence. Two nights later the same thing happened to a woman trying to feed her destitute family. This time her nose had been cut off, real slow, real savoured.

  The Vigiles arrived and the law served Felix Spurius up, babbling and screaming his innocence, to the equally starving animals at the lunchtime show at the Flavian Amphitheatre.

  ‘Can’t say Rome hasn’t a sense of justice and humour,’ Dog had said at the time, but he wasn’t smiling by then. He’d watched his paired mate dragged off out across the same sand not long before while the ten-year-old boy who had ordered it nodded and smiled. In a week, Dog vanished to join Bulla and a month after that Drust and the others were sent to find him and show how long and determined was the arm of Servilius Structus.

  Now that same Servilius Structus had felt such an arm, stronger and longer than his own. And so, Drust thought bitterly, we are served up. Well done is ill paid…

  They led the mules out just before dawn and moved until it grew to full light, then stopped, unpacked and laired up for an hour or two, then moved on. Kag rode, but the others were used to feet and unused to riding.

  ‘I won’t get blisters on my soles,’ Quintus said, grinning the white frets into his tan, ‘but I surely will get them on my ass.’

  They laughed at his bad pun, moved steadily, a line of men and mules twisting through the sullen green, where the devil witches swirled leaves up and raced gleefully across the land and the cold seeped in, despite the warm work they were doing.

  Everyone was dressed the same – nondescript breeches, tunics, cloaks and the wrap-round hoods the locals wore against the cold. They had started to grow out their hair and suffered the itch of untended beards. Drust knew it wouldn’t fool anyone into thinking they were locals and it wasn’t meant to – but they carried no visible weapons and the most revealing things about them were the mules and the packs. Just one more band of ragged hopefuls – either lost haulers for the Army or adventurous traders.

  They came upon the scarred trenches of fields which had been tended by the villagers before they fled. The round houses were cracked open like eggs, the roof thatch burned off and some of the beams collapsed to char; the stones were blackened and the ruins had all been abandoned long enough for weeds to have colonised the rafters. Raiders might have done it. Or the Army. It made little difference to those who had lived there.

  The winter sun died like a trembling blood-egg. The men crouched in a broken hut whose walls would hide the firelight and ate hot for once, grain porridge with salted meat in it. Afterwards, they buried all the remnants after they had shit on it; they did not want any other visitors seeing who had been there and the shit left a lingering smell of man that would keep the foxes from digging it up.

  Drust went over the notes scraped in a tablet, squinting in the poor firelight, trying to work out distances and matching it to food and water. The mules took most of the food and, though they could forage, that meant wasting precious hours of daylight while the animals cropped and chewed. In the end, fodder would give out and not all of the mules would make it; Kag had tallied that in, so that on the return journey – with at least one mount for the lady and the boy – they would be lighter. The boy, they had been told, was six. Or eight. Old enough to ride if put to it, and he would need to be, for they would be moving fast, running for their lives.

  The others listened closely, for everyone would have to know in case they got separated – or was the only survivor. They had been on many other trips and knew how things stood.

  ‘What did Julius Yahya say about this contact?’ Sib asked. He had asked before and been told but gnawed at the bone of it because he was an uneasy hound. Drust told him – there was a man, a tribal of sorts, called Flaccus in Roman lands but whose true name was Brigus. He was the one who kept Julius Yahya’s patron informed of matters in the Land of Darkness far to the north and he was the one who knew where this woman and child lay. More to the point, he was the one who knew what she looked like and what her name was.

  Sib sat, nodding and saying nothing. Quintus voiced it this time.

  ‘Does
n’t get better with the telling. No one knows what she looks like? Or her name? I hope we can trust him or we will be Greek-arsed.’

  ‘I don’t like informants,’ Manius said in his soft-voiced way. ‘Especially locals. Better to scout on our own.’

  ‘I think he is a frumentarius,’ Quintus offered, and there was silence for a time as everyone turned that over and over. It was likely, Drust thought – the frumentarii were part of the Army and yet no part of it, folk who went out searching for grain supplies in the area of operations. They had long since branched off into looking for everything else, too – the Army’s spies.

  ‘Two hundred armed men,’ Drust pointed out. ‘That’s what Julius Yahya was told stand in our way. We need to know more about them before we make a move – and we will get one throw at it. Knowing is key – and all we have is this man, this Brigus. It’s not that no-one else knows what she looks like or what she is called – it’s that they don’t want us knowing until we are there. Until it is too late for us to go asking questions.’

  ‘Questions that would make us run from this,’ Manius answered bitterly.

  ‘No one runs from the amount of money on offer,’ Quintus countered, grinning.

  ‘If we fail, we are all marked as “6”,’ Kag pointed out. ‘So let’s get the dance of it sorted before we leap into the harena.’

  There was no answer to the logic, which was colder than the night, so they wrapped up and sat close together for the warmth, trying to imagine a bigger fire. Two voles came out, attracted by the warmth of the firestones and popping out of holes almost in the embers; Drust watched Manius feed them little bits of hard cheese – these bold little pirates had grown used to fires and humans when this place had been full of talk and people and lives.

  Drust felt Kag’s heat as the man sidled closer, felt the breath on his ear.

  ‘Who is this woman?’ he asked. Another question asked many times on the journey, so that it had become a game. A stolen queen. A hostage princess. The best whore the world has ever seen. The Emperor’s mistress… it went round and round and foundered, every time, on the rock of Dog.

  What had Dog to do with her? Why had he stolen her and fled to the beasts beyond the Wall, as if that would keep him safe? What did he want for her? For the boy?

  The talk flowed, soft and low, fired in short bursts so that Drust caught only the odd mumble of it like a distant wind: ‘I prefer a straight blade…’ ‘I shot three…’ ‘who was that woman…? ‘remember Paegniara?’

  That last was Quintus, talking to Manius about a mavro they’d known who had been one of their desert informants. He was putting soothe out at Manius over this Brigus, but wrapping everyone else in it too, telling the story to people who already knew it but liked to hear it again anyway.

  ‘Remember him, Sib? Best translator we had,’ Quintus said. ‘Always told it true…’

  ‘Not like the others,’ Sib admitted. ‘Not like Juba.’

  Everyone had known Juba at some time or other, the moon-faced translator who wore Roman tunic and military boots and really wanted to be in auxiliary armour, that ring-linked coat which marked you as Army. That and a longsword for fighting from horseback – all the toys. No one would give him it, all the same, because he was a rag-arse mavro and nothing to do with the Army and not one of the Procuratores either.

  Juba wanted all that gear because he feared his own kind and what they might do to him, even though they weren’t the enemy, just people in the path of their journey – or greedy raiders out of the desert looking for water. Always water.

  The desert tribes bought and sold everything, especially information, so Drust and the others pounced on a few now and then as they moved about with their mules and goats and camels and herds of women and children. They were hawk-nosed and blank-faced, but the eyes followed you, Drust remembered, even when you couldn’t see them; even other mavro were afraid of the deep desert tribes.

  Juba feared them most of all. Called them ‘goat-fuckers’ in his broken Latin, a patois of so many dialects from the people he had worked with, spattered with bits of Army slang to add to his swagger. Even his name was false; it had belonged to some Numidian king.

  Malik the camel-handler put Drust right on Juba the day he turned up to brokenly ask for permission to include some purchases of his own with their cargo; it was fair, for everyone had a little personal trade and it was right of him to ask rather than try and smuggle it. He was neat and polite but was always frowning when he listened to Juba beat on one of the desert tribesmen, with slaps and a harsh language.

  ‘This one is rag-arse spy, for sure,’ Juba would announce and Drust would ask him to ask the tribesman if he had seen any raiding parties. Then, one day, Drust turned and asked Malik.

  ‘You heard Juba. What did he say?’

  Malik made a little head-bobbing movement, a tribal gesture which was part apology, part negative. ‘It is not for me to say, I think.’

  ‘Is he translating truthfully?’ Drust demanded, staring hard at him and holding up a copper chit that would allow him a certain weight of trade goods. Malik reached and took it, not in that snatching way that others did, like the voles taking crumbs from Manius, but slowly, between finger and thumb, showing he was unafraid and that this was not him accepting a bribe.

  ‘He translated it more or less true, but he added threats you did not make. He always does, to show that he is beloved of the Romans and their Army. He said to the tribesmen that you instructed him to tell this worthless dog that he was to be blessed into your pantheon and from henceforth should call himself Unbeliever Redeemed by the Gods.’

  That day, Drust kicked Juba out. Malik worked for them from then on and the others called him ‘Paegniara’, the name for the fake fighters who did comedy turns during the lunchtime shows in the harena. It was a scathe but meant kindly enough; they had foul names for everyone, including themselves and, after all, Malik was just another robe in bad sandals.

  Yet it was he who revealed the true nature of Dog.

  Chapter Three

  ‘They are careless,’ Sib said, hunkered down by the blackened ring of stones. ‘I do not know this land well, so can’t say who they are. Four, maybe five, with a pony or a mule. The leader wears Army boots. This is a week old.’

  He sat back on his heels and wiped wet soot from his hands down his tunic, then looked up at the horizon, a gesture Drust knew was nothing to do with threat – he had seen him do it once or twice before and thought the scout had spotted the flicker of a reflection of sun on metal. Not that there was much sun, Drust said, and Sib, half ashamed of this tic, said it was nothing, that he had just been looking at the sky.

  Quintus laughed, but gently, and Drust thought he knew what Sib meant; that great, free dome, stuttered with little dark clouds, washed grey and sodden. The wind that hissed out of it made the grass ripple and the forests growl like beasts.

  Beasts beyond the Wall…

  The commander at the Western Fort had muttered that after studying the scroll and the seal on it. That was after looking Drust up and down, then sideways at the others. He clearly did not know what to make of it, all these men who were trying to look like traders but handled weapons with easy familiarity – but he had other problems to deal with and he was only an optio.

  The Western Fort was the last one at that end of the Northern Vallum. There was what had once been a good road leading to it, following the line of the river the locals called the Cleansing One, but that road wasn’t on the line of march the Army had taken. They had gone up the east side and the road there had had all the work put in to make it less of an overgrown nightmare, the old forts refurbished into marching camps.

  On this side, the road was weed-choked in most places and the forts, all wood and turf, showed a decade of neglect and pilfering; most looked like raddled harridans after a fight in the street.

  The Western Fort housed most of the Petriana, auxiliaries of a mixed unit, horse and foot. They’d had a bad time of i
t during the summer and were glad to be in winter quarters. The optio, a short, squat Illyrian, was worried about supplies, fretting about losses and frantic about rumours of the Caledonii to the north having come out of their holes, winter or not, which would force everyone back into the field. He was equally afraid that the Maetae to the south would do the same and cut him off. He and his men had tramped into the mists of a place the maps marked as the ‘Land of Darkness’ and were glad to be out of it, even if where they were was only a little less bleak.

  ‘Fucking beasts,’ he kept muttering. He did not understand why Drust and the others were leaving the fort and heading out into the winter and the Land of Darkness. Nor why ex-gladiators should be here at all and this last he said with a lip that curled out all the disdain he and everyone else had for such fighters. The fact that they were ex-slaves only added to his dislike.

  When it came to it, Drust had realised long since, we are gladiators – then, now and always. We belong in the harena, the sand. Not out here.

  Manius voiced it, defiant and embarrassed at his own horizon-staring. ‘This country is too much skyline. It goes on and on,’ he said, ‘until the world’s candle burns out, like my life. You can travel on and on to it, but you never reach it – like my life. I tried to leave my life once, find another one in the world. But, well, you know…’

  Drust knew. They all knew. They had sat in tabernae and listened and watched people, normal people, unchanged and unchanging it seemed. Bakers, dock workers, family men with children. Normal people, who loved their family and didn’t kick their dogs, who honoured their household gods and treated their slaves well enough – and who went to every games at the Flavian or the Circus and howled for the blood of people like Drust.

  They made gods out of us, Drust thought. There was Pacuvius, a bent-nosed, broken-eared thug Thracian, ugly as a burned boot, who had his name on the walls – suspirium puellarum, Pacuvius Thraex.

  Yet the fathers of those swooning girls sat apart and made it clear they did not want to breathe the same air; the only people worse than us, Drust thought, were the female fighters, novelties with names like Achillia or Amazona who fought dwarves or the condemned – but old Severus had finally banned them from fighting.