Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  Now all the odium fell on the play gladiators, the young and free who went into the harena to show off, or who voluntarily bonded themselves to a scholae because they needed the money. Even if you were the son of a senator you got curled lips at making yourself a slave – but once vainglorious nobiles such as these had been lauded and the act of leaping in to fight had been widespread, so much so that the Divine Claudius, in between drooling, had been forced to try and stop it.

  Still, even emperors could not stop joining in now and then – Commodus had strutted round wearing a lion skin and thinking he looked like Heracles, when most people were outraged and scathing, saying he looked like a slave or a whore, or both. The actual fighters stayed tight-lipped on it, but everyone knew he had never won a single bout that hadn’t been fixed.

  Yet the women who adored Pacuvius were the same ones who declared their love for any heart-throb fighter. These amorates could lose their minds over them sometimes – tales abounded of senators’ wives running off with bent-nosed growlers; the Procuratores shared those tales back and forth now round the fire, laughing at memories but no longer amazed at what folk were capable of.

  These bakers and shoemakers, these butchers and wheelwrights and those who did nothing but live on State dole, drank and argued about fights and fighters knowledgeably, complained about techniques, about who had fought well or badly, about odds. They knew the price of a gladiator and nothing about the cost. Drust had once thought he could slip unseen into their midst, forget the world he had been in and embrace theirs. Until he found he had nothing in common with them – he had the wooden sword, but the ring barrier of the space he had occupied separated him from them forever.

  Even though he wasn’t of the top rank, Drust was an exotic perversion to the women there, so that walking off with a heavy-breasted daughter of the nobiles had been no chore. They took the front-row seats and howled and clutched themselves – even wet themselves – then came down to the festering underworld of reeking dim afterwards.

  He had slipped into the wet of more than one and they had collected what they had really come for – the sweat off his balls, or the discharge from their love to mix into a potion to make husbands hard or wombs fertile. Once or twice Drust took an old, rusting dagger – they had a score or more for just such an event – and gave it to the woman, if she warranted it by skill or enthusiasm. Or paid solid coin.

  A rusting dagger stained with the blood of a slain gladiator was used to part the hair of a rich bride on her wedding day, an old tradition that gave a wedding that final touch. Drust wondered if the proud husbands ever considered how the bride had gained such a prize.

  The blood, of course, belonged to whatever beasts or noxii – the criminals – had been slain in the lunchtime show that day; the Ludus Ferrata of Servilius Structus seldom lost a man, and if they did would not sully his last by selling even the least part of him to some high-born whore.

  For a week after he had the rudis, Drust had walked around with people who were unarmed, their lives filled with the ability to go anywhere without censure, to eat what they liked, to never see a heavy wooden practice sword or shield. To not know what it was like to wake in a pen, waiting for someone to unlock the door, to wonder if this was the day, the one where a slip, a stumble or the whim of some no-chin with more money than sense made it the last one.

  On the last day of the week, Drust went back to Servilius Structus, who merely smiled knowingly out of the venal pouch of his face, nodded, bonded him with contract and money and made him leader of the Procuratores.

  ‘Caledonii,’ Quintus said, jerking Drust back to the present, the misted wet hills, the little circle of old black in a slight depression, where the red bloom of the fire would have been hidden. There was a rotten-tooth ruin of an old hut, smoke-blackened turf walls crumbled. ‘That optio said the Caledonii were out. The beasts beyond the Wall.’

  ‘Pony,’ Manius said, uncoiling from studying the tracks. ‘Or ass. A single one. They are no raiding party, they are scavengers looking for blown-out homes like this one. Or the dead of both sides, left behind. They were headed south and spotted us, I think. Took off east to try and avoid us.’

  Kag squinted at the hoof marks. ‘Not ass or mule. Pony. One of those tribal ones without shoes. Can live for a week on what grows here and a lick of tarn water.’

  ‘Scouts,’ he added. ‘From them Caledonii.’

  Sib grunted dissent.

  ‘Scouts would have a pony each. Or none at all – you need to travel fast, not plod along dragging a laden mount. At least, they do everywhere else I have been. Drust – you know these people? Is that how they work here?’

  Drust had been in his mother’s arms when he’d been taken from here. He had told them that so often there was a groove worn in his tongue, but some things he knew, such as how the Caledonii were not one people but lots of little tribes: the Stone River Tribe, the Fox Clan, the People of the Wolf, the Skin-Marked. He did not know who these people were and that was all he knew – that and the language, though he was not sure how much of that he could remember from his mother’s teachings.

  ‘Scavengers,’ Sib said, then rolled spit round and let it go, as expressive a gesture in wasted moisture as you could get from a man of the desert.

  They all looked, one to the other, and did not need to voice it. Dog had been a scav, one of the worst they had seen – was he out there now, watching and waiting with his woman and child and 200 men?

  Drust stared at the horizon you could never reach; somewhere beyond it, he thought, a handful of men slithered through the land, either scouting for some clan or other, or looting and stealing. He said as much, trying to shred the image of Dog.

  ‘It does not matter,’ Manius growled. ‘They have seen six men and eight mules who are nothing to do with the people of the Caledonii. Scouts for Dog will ride to him at once with the news. Scavs will come on us, looking for profit.’

  * * *

  Scavengers. Out in the sun-drenched hills north of the City, silently cursing Dog for having driven them out here, Drust and the others had encountered scavs.

  Drust and the others came out of the last raddled streets of some blackened village into fields of fig trees, half trampled by studded army boots. The Heavies, the iron-clad legionaries, had gone through here some time before, slamming it with fire and sword as if it was the barbarian hovels of the north and not the civilised farms and villas of Italia.

  But when war got in the hand and head, nothing and no one was safe, as Ugo growled when they prowled up to it. Drust was just glad the Army was with them, in the shape of a Ses and a unit of Batavians, all nervously moving their horses through lands rumoured to be thick with the men of Bulla Felix.

  No one knew much about Bulla Felix. Even the name simply meant ‘Lucky Charm’, the amulet you give as a birth-gift to new child of Rome. Folk who swore they knew said Bulla was honest and upright, cunning and unable to be caught. That he had 600 men only, same number as the Senate. That he never killed anyone if he could help it. A new Spartacus, they said. They also said he was dead.

  ‘Let’s hope that’s true,’ Quintus said fervently, but no one thought it likely.

  The Sesquiplicaius was called Pacula and he had been running the remnants of his turmae up and down the Italian hills for weeks. He had half of the twenty-something men he’d started with, the others mostly sent back because their horses had foundered, or they’d become sick, or just malingered. They were a millaria, a big unit of Batavians, but soft after some time in Italia. The Decurion had sprained an ankle, the Duplicarius had been trampled by his own horse in the night camp, which left Ses Pacula in command. It was a weight too heavy for him and he was cracking under it.

  His eyes were dim as he scooched over to Drust and the others and squatted, back to a gnarled fig tree in a parody of everyone else, who did the same with a friend, swaying until the weight of their bodies found a balance. They were in armour, stiff leather that didn’t let you sit we
ll and still spring up to fight, so pair-squatting like this took some of the weight off. Drust felt sorry for the Ses, the young-old man who had no one to lean against. His men didn’t even call him Ses, just Pacula, and that lack of respect ate him.

  He seemed to feel it that day, too, giving out with a short sigh and rubbing the rash at the side of his mouth, a strawberry-coloured affair of spreading oval that seemed to creep inexorably even as Drust looked, following the curve of his cheek.

  He was a lonely person by inclination anyway, the Ses. He didn’t socialise – certainly not with the ex-slave gladiators who had turned up on some crazed hunt for one of Bulla’s band calling himself Dog – but it wasn’t elitism, he just seemed not to be quite there, like a drifting cloud Drust felt only as a chill presence now and then.

  He was chill now, telling Drust that his gladiators should push on up the furrows through the thick fig trees which might hide any number of desperate men. Bulla Felix was taken, or so rumour had it. Or dead. Or escaped. No matter the truth, his band was splintered and fleeing, but still dangerous and particularly in closed terrain where they could leap out on horsemen. The Ses suddenly looked at the smoke smudges from the burning buildings and frowned; there were faraway screams, shrill as bird calls.

  ‘How long has that been going?’ he asked.

  ‘Couple of hours,’ Kag said and the Ses nodded, looked nervous and passed a hand across his face, as if some cobweb had fallen on it.

  ‘Not right,’ he muttered. ‘These are not bandits here. There will be trouble over it.’

  He stopped, looked at Drust and blinked. ‘Where was I?’

  Then he lowered his head a little and shook it wearily. ‘Fuck,’ he added, levered himself up and shuffled back to where his men sat their horses, patiently waiting for the disdained gladiators to do their job for them.

  The smudged smoke spilled out, seemed to sprout up from a hundred different sources and blacken the sky. They sorted out gear, got ready to move on and Paegniara came up.

  There wasn’t any need for him to be here; he had come back with them on the grain ships, which was better than leaving him behind to be picked off by the desert raiders, who hated him. Besides, the Procuratores liked him – he could easily have stayed in Rome with Servilius Structus, but he came out with them to hunt down Dog. Now his face was sheened with sweat and creased in a frown.

  ‘Tell me who these are, please,’ he said, and they loped after him, wary and watchful as cats. Four hundred yards away, in a square that passed for a forum in the village, lay a scattering of naked bodies. Six in all, looking strange, eldritch, until Drust realised they had no heads. He looked at Kag, who sent men left and right in a wary prowl of scouting.

  ‘Are they the enemy here?’ Paegniara asked. ‘I know we hunt bandits and they are the same everywhere, but these are beheaded. I do not know the way of matters here and perhaps the Army does that in their own lands – in my country it is what you do to hated people you have captured. Yet, if they are not the enemy, I am also puzzled. I had heard this bandit chieftain did not commit atrocities such as this.’

  ‘Scavs,’ said Kag grimly. ‘The tribune in charge pays for heads of bandits brought in as proof they are dead. These are not Army.’

  ‘This one is a woman,’ Manius declared. Quintus grinned like a rictus and shrugged.

  ‘This one is a child,’ he pointed out, toeing the limp bloody little body with a gentle foot.

  ‘These also can be bandits,’ Sib pointed out and then spat sideways, ‘to a tribune who does not care much.’

  The Ses sighed when they told him, then did what he had to do and sent men to search. They finally found the heads, stacked in a neat pyramid near a fountain. In the drying foreheads, above the astonished, agonised blind stares and the blood raggles of the necks, were the crude carved letters, turning black in the heat and clearly put to mark who had taken them, so he could claim them later.

  Cns.

  Dog.

  * * *

  Drust ordered a camp made in the soot-blackened hovel. It was a bad place, with no defence to it at all. He sent Kag ahead on a mule, because he could ride best and he wasn’t Sib, who could move like a silent snake. His task was simple – don’t move like a silent snake. Look like a tiro. Track them and be careless, get spotted for it and then run, as if in panic.

  ‘If they are scavs and not scouts for Dog, we need to know. Bring them to us if they are scavs,’ Drust told him, ‘else we’ll be crawling all over these hills with them itching our backs until Dis floods.’

  They made quick, expert preparations among mud-brick ruins, the roof fallen in and the old outbuildings sagging and leaning and sorry. It had never been a grand affair and was solitary, as if the folk who’d lived in it had chosen the joy of having no one to bother them. The price for it, Drust thought, was that you had no one to band with when blades came at you.

  They hunkered down and waited. The rain sifted, fine as baby hair and doubly soaking as a result; there was almost no shelter in the ruined hovel.

  ‘Dog and you come from the same place?’ Ugo asked, squatting against Drust’s back in that comfortable pair-bond that let them sit and keep off the wet ground.

  ‘The Land of Darkness,’ Drust said back over his shoulder and waved an encompassing arm. ‘My mother told me I came from the Red Hawk Clan, up in the Village of the Narrows, under the shadow of Mount Malicious.’

  Ugo grunted. ‘Not friendly names, none of them. What about Dog?’

  ‘From the Red Hills, far to the north,’ Drust said, remembering what Dog had told him once. Remembering also the bitterness there.

  ‘He was from the Blue Face People,’ Drust added.

  ‘His face is the same colour as everyone else’s,’ Ugo pointed out, then Drust felt his shoulders move in a shrug. ‘Except when he gets angry. Then it turns the colour of a baby’s slapped arse.’

  The Blue Face People made stained skin marks on the faces of their warriors, tokens of deeds done, enemies killed, all of that. Dog’s bitterness came from the fact that he had none – he was taken as a toddling boy in a raid by a rival tribe, the Black Wolf Clan, and then he and his mother sold on, ever further south, until he ended up in Inferior, then Superior and Gaul and so on, right to Rome itself. That was what we had in common, Drust told them.

  ‘That’s what made him vicious,’ Manius said, coming quietly up in time to hear this. ‘Made him the fighter he was. A decent crupellarius who might have gone far if…’

  He stopped. They remembered the ‘if’ being dragged off through the Dead Gate of the Flavian while the new Emperor Antoninus accepted the plaudits of the crowd. Ten years old and the same rank as his da, yet too young to wear a proper man’s toga. He was older now…

  ‘No one cares for the crupellarius,’ Ugo growled. ‘Wears too much iron. They liked Calvinus best.’

  Dog had been a fighter they called ‘the oven wearer’ because of the amount of armour he had – so much that, if you weren’t limber and strong, you couldn’t get up if you fell. He carried a huge shield and a little pugio dagger, a ridiculous weapon for such an armoured man, but that was the jest in it – big man with a little weapon. It let the crowd hurl suitable insults.

  Calvinus was a dimaechaerus, who wore nothing more than a loincloth, but had two longswords. Few fought in that role and only the best and fastest. He and Dog were meant to complement one another as a pairing, and when they went at it, fast and furious and meticulously rehearsed, they looked magnificent.

  In a straight real fight, one against the other, it was no contest, and Calvinus had known that from the moment they’d turned to face one another, condemned by contract and the viciousness of a man-brat in purple. He had tried his best and, when it came to taking the iron, he had knelt submissively, looked up once and spoke to Dog, then bowed his head. No one knew what he’d said but Dog and he never told anyone.

  ‘Time,’ Sib said and Drust looked up to see Kag loping back in with a loose-kneed, g
round-eating stride. He felt as if he had woken from a long nap, disoriented and unable to remember any of what had gone before he’d stopped talking. The world had continued uninterrupted while he left it.

  Like death. The world would go on and the only difference would be that he wouldn’t be in it. The first sign of cracking was the drawing away from people, from the world, Drust had long ago realised. You reconciled it with not wanting them to suffer when you inevitably got unlucky and died and, sometimes, half admitted that you didn’t want to feel the same. Gladiators had no real friends in the harena and nothing they could not leave simply by shutting a door. Dog had learned that.

  Yet, in the end, it was just the mind trying to scab over. Drust had thought himself gone from all that. Thought he could handle this little, last piece of it, just this once for the life-changing reward; now he was not so sure.

  Manius had found a little snake, courtesy of the snorting mules, and cut it in half with a swift, economical slice of a long knife.

  ‘Is it poisonous?’ Sib asked, alarmed and looking round at where he squatted. Manius said all snakes were poisonous, which was a sensible approach. His people also believed you had to cut them in half and throw the halves far away on opposite sides, otherwise they would slither back and join up to make a whole, live snake again.

  Ugo and Quintus were up in the rocks, hidden and saying nothing, while the rest went about the business of looking innocent, unarmed and carelessly foolish. ‘An hour,’ Kag said laconically, wiping sweat from his face and hunkering down under what shelter there was.

  Sib held up a shell, squinting at it. He had dug it out while making the fire pit and was in wonder about it.