‘Look,’ he said, waving it. ‘All this was a sea once. Or a lake. Water everywhere – just everywhere. Now look at it. This is how the world will end.’
‘It’s probably what they had in a stew,’ Manius said, laughing. He spat his bloody concoction onto the fire pit. ‘Brought from the sea, you arse.’
Sib scowled, knowing he was probably right but not wanting to let go the wonder he had felt with his idea. Besides, he said, he was sure it had come from inside a stone cracked in half by the heat of an old fire. Put there by Vulcan, perhaps. Or Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
They argued, soft as the rain, and Drust looked at them, these men he knew just well enough to trust. He studied the camp like it was a theatre. The ones on show were innocuous as Vestals, with sodden hats and hoods, baggy breeks and no sign of a weapon anywhere. They looked like big southerners, thinking to make their fortune with a little risk and a lot of luck, arrogant in that way such men are, full of the belief that they were superior to everything and everyone, even the gods. Thinking the Caledonii were subdued and looking to profit from it.
‘How many?’ Drust asked Kag.
‘Five. One donkey,’ he said, then looked at Manius, who laughed softly and spread his hands in acceptance of the win.
‘One wearing Army boots,’ Manius went on. ‘He is not Army and never has been, all the same. They all have short throwing spears, but I think they will hide them, come up as friends to get close.’
‘Fighters?’ Ugo asked.
‘From what I saw,’ Kag said, rocking on his heels, ‘the donkey is probably their best one. They can’t throw better than a Greek girl.’
Drust gave him a look; he hadn’t wanted him close enough to get javelins thrown at him, but Kag saw it and shrugged.
‘I got them mad and following. They are not Dog’s scouts after all.’
He levered himself up, wiped his hands down his front and grinned. ‘Same old same old,’ he said.
That’s what it was. Drust could see it played out in his head like a rustic farce – the men would lead their donkey up, reassured that they were dealing with careless southerners who had no idea that staying secret was the only way of avoiding trouble.
They would see three men and a string of hobbled mules packed with equipment. There was no sign of the one they had followed, but if any of them had suspicions, greed would swamp them. The three men would rise up with surprise and some anxiety, all empty hands and uneasy smiles.
The one with Army boots would be a reasonable man, raising an arm in greeting and the others would be keeping their battered, scarred weapons hidden, but accessible. If they were truly what they claimed, they’d come up in single file, donkey-man last. If they planned murder and greed, they’d fan out and come up in a vee, so that every weapon could be deployed at once.
The one with boots, the status of a leader, would talk constantly, calling greetings, asking where they were bound, asking if they were scavenging, asking if they’d had any luck… until the moment he made the signal.
It would be a drop of a hand to one side or the other, as if weary. Or a drag across a rain-wet forehead, or the casual removal of his headgear. Something banal that would be full of moment.
The men came up with their donkey and there was mock surprise; one of them shouted and held up his hand in greeting; his voice piped like a bird, the words falling out dead and dull into the sullen air.
They came up and slowly fanned out.
Drust felt the familiar little ruche up his spine, the sick slide of stomach as they did that, the leader – the one with boots – at their head. His boots were battered leather caligulae, the symbol of his status above the barefooted or badly shoed and no doubt looted from some forgotten legionary rotting in the bracken. He had no seeming weapon at all, just the familiar mud-coloured tunic and bag trousers gathered at the ankles with worn bindings, a hooded short cloak, one end dangling across his front, on the arm that didn’t wield a weapon in a fight. He had no hat and the dags of his hair dripped on his mad beard.
The others were the same, shuffling closer, the faces coloured by weather and fire reek and venality, but all of them with the same look in the eyes, whether their faces were thin or fat – even the donkey-hauler, who was no more than fifteen, had greed and cruelty etched in a round face whose camel-lashed dark eyes, like those of a girl, assessed them all at the low value they put on everyone.
The leader’s eyes fretted up as he smiled the sweet milk of human kindness at Drust, who wondered what he saw. A man no taller than he, no more muscled, with no better clothing but decent sandals and sodden socks with no toes. A broad face with a broken nose, full-lipped and laced with a dark beard growing out from a neat Army-style crop. Hair likewise, slightly curling from under a broad-brimmed hat with rain running pearls round the rim. Eyes, Drust remembered from the last time he had seen himself in a mirror, that would give him away to the discerning. Slightly liquid, a little popped, with that fret at the corners which the sensible did not dismiss.
The man was not sensible. His voice was a high pitched and rasping lie of concern and warmth in Local, the trade tongue folk used here.
‘Friends – good day to you in the name of Ogma and Scathach and all the gods. Well met. This is a dangerous place to be.’
‘Good day to you also in the name of the gods,’ Drust answered in the same language and there was a slight stir at that; they did not like such expertise, for it made them wonder what else these strangers were expert at. Yet they saw no weapons, only mules and laden packs and gear littered everywhere. Packs that reeked of riches.
‘Why is it so dangerous?’ Drust added and the leader smiled.
‘There are bad people here. Look at your fine mules – the size of that one there, the big dun! If he could breed, you’d have giants off him. And all these packs – what have you got in them, friends? Gold? Silver, perhaps.’
‘Fodder enough for those mules,’ Drust replied easily. ‘But for thirsty travellers in the name of no evil, something might be found to put warmth in the mouth this day.’
‘Drops from your tap,’ the leader said, and now his eyes were hardening. ‘It won’t empty any of those containers – but bad men will.’ He raised his voice and tilted his head slightly, but his eyes never turned from Drust. ‘We cannot let that happen, can we, my brothers?’
They all agreed and the teenager snickered.
‘That’s kind of you,’ Drust answered and the leader grinned; he put one hand behind his back, as if to ease the strain in it.
‘Weapon!’
Quintus called it a second before he popped up from behind one of the rocks and let loose the bow. Ugo, who had been standing like an ox waiting for the trace, suddenly changed as if throwing off a cloak. His foot moved and, as if by magic, a long-shafted axe was toe-flicked up out of the bracken where it had been hidden. It came up in a shower of diamond droplets and when it was waist height his big hands closed on it and he roared his way towards one of the astounded men.
The leader reeled with the shock of it. The arrow took him in the chest and bowled him backwards. Sib came screaming up over the rocks and the house walls, springing high with his curved little knife and gutted a russet-haired man before he could do much more than flap his hands.
Ugo whirled the axe in a mesmer of hissing circles, slammed the butt into the face of his target, booted him in the cods and then stood over him. He turned to Drust and grinned out of the thicket of his face.
‘Pugnare ad dignitum,’ he said, stating that he had fought the man to the point where he had raised as finger in submission. It irritated Drust that he did this, as if Drust was the munerarius of some spectacle who could order life or death for the man. The fighting was not all done, so he made the slice sign and Ugo stepped back from the struggling man.
‘Recipere ferrum,’ he intoned – prepare to take the iron. Drust did not wait to see if the man moaning on the ground would actually get on his knees and bare his neck; he strode for
ward with his own pugio and daggered the man in the throat.
‘Find your fucking head,’ he snarled at Ugo, ‘and pull it out of your arsehole. This is no provincial contest here.’
Ugo looked like a slapped six-year-old, but he went looking for another kill, though it was too late; the shrieking was done and only the mules honked and brayed, tugging and frantic at the violence and the blood; the donkey bolted, dragging the teenager across the ground until the reins slipped off his wrist.
The blood-stink washed out. The others came down and Manius rose up, blew out through his nose and then went to the ragged, bloody shreds of what had once been bad men. He sliced every throat, just to be sure, while Drust watched the leader’s Army boots tremble and kick him out of the world; most of the studs were missing on both and there was a hole in the left sole. It must have hurt, that boot, on every stone on the rugged path he took, but he would not give up on the symbol of his rank any more than he would have given up the dagger he had sheathed and hidden in the small of his back.
Kag went after the donkey and brought it in, soothing it with soft words and a hatful of precious grain. Ugo, trying to make up for his silliness, made a bloody fretwork of the boy’s face, even though he was already dead.
The donkey’s pack was stuffed with tunics and spearheads, belts and bundles of discarded Army gear, stained rust-red with old bloodstains. Drust recalled the stories from the forts; tens of thousands, they had said bitterly, killed by the beasts beyond the Wall. Somewhere out under that vast sky there were dead men festering to blue-black marble and stripped and forgotten. Men whose letters pleading for socks or a little money or telling how they had finally achieved relief from fatigues would be being read by mothers who did not know the writers were already dead.
Manius killed the donkey because Kag couldn’t bring himself to do it; he hated harming horses or mules or any kin of them. They broke out two shovels and scooped out holes, burying all the men and the dead animal, but it was necessity not kindness. They buried all their gear, too, piled rocks on them to make it harder for the scavengers to scavenge the scavengers.
In time the wolves and foxes would dig them up and then the carrion birds would give away what had happened but they hoped to be long gone by then, unnoticed towards their meeting with the man called Brigus.
They moved out, the rock mounds losing shape and shadow in the growing dim, becoming lost amid the scree and at least spared the mockery of some sort of service to honour Ogma and Scathach and all the gods.
Chapter Four
Kag had rules he swore by. Sometimes he swore at them, too, and anyone who pointed out that he did not always abide by Kag’s tenets. That’s when he would give them number twenty-three: mockery and derision have their place. Usually under a big tomb on the Appian.
Amid other philosophical insights such as ‘if you can see the whites of their eyes, somebody’s done something wrong’ and ‘if the damage you do can be repaired, you didn’t do enough damage’, there was one he trotted out frequently and often.
‘If you’re leaving tracks, you’re being followed,’ he said, studying the sky and the hills. It was colder than before and the rain had a sleety feel to it; winter was settling on the Land of Darkness like a hen on eggs.
They’d had about eighteen hours without another encounter with bad men, which was better than Drust had thought and he said so. Mockery and derision looked up from round the fantasy of a campfire and then went back to talking and trying to pretend there were flames and heat. They talked about what they always talked about – what they knew and had shared in common, be it war or women. Mockery and derision was always woven into it; you couldn’t separate it from the talk of men fuelled on unwatered wine and fear, for all Kag’s tenet.
Time mellowed it. What drink and punishment you could take at twenty with steel stomach muscles made you sick up a dog ten years down the line, while all muscle became stringy – unless you went back to the world, where it became fat.
They talked about women and fighting, which is what they knew. Kag was obsessing about the enemy on their trail – he could feel them, he claimed. Sib, who had the sort of desert magic that probably let him feel them, was unconcerned, but wondering if this woman they chased was perhaps a fighter, one Dog had met in the ludus. He did not consider it likely, but fell to wondering why women became fighters, put themselves into the spectacula.
Quintus, his hair growing bushy and his smile bright out of the scrub of beard, put him right on it.
‘I have known many of them,’ he said, grinning knowingly. ‘I worked with a dog-lady once, name of Patrocla. The lady, not the dog. It had a name but I never knew it. A right snarler – the dog, not the lady.’
‘Where was that?’ Sib wanted to know and Quintus frowned, thought hard, then shrugged.
‘Dyrrachium,’ he ventured. ‘Or the Flavia Solva – can’t remember. She and about twenty others formed a dog pack for the ludus of Tacferinas – you remember him? A ptolemy from around those pyramid tombs who shared our training grounds. It was a good idea, that dog pack. Fighting them was like eating soup with a knife. Nothing solid in it – the girls just unleashed the bloody dogs and it became chaos. They ran almost naked into the middle of it with knives – the crowds loved it.’
He shook his head. ‘Should never have women in a world like ours. No wonder they call it infamia.’
‘That’s because you got beaten, seems to me,’ Sib answered. ‘So old Severus did you a favour by banning them.’
‘That’s where you’d be wrong,’ Quintus answered without a smile. ‘Never fought them. Never saw a woman who actually fought anything other than poor noxii armed with clubs, or stunted short-arses. Never fucked one of them neither. That’s the attitude, see? Not fighters or friends, but women in a ludus. At some point, we’d all have made a move – in the name of all the gods, you remember how we were? Barley-fed, trained to fitness? Full of fighting fury and scared – and she’s no different by then. We’d make a move and either get lucky or get rebuffed. Get lucky and everyone wants the same and then you don’t have a female fighter, you have a pack whore. If she says no and someone actually listens without having to be stabbed, you have a resentment which leaves her out in the cold, on her own. If she says yes to one, we all hate them both and he gets like a ram in a field, seeing the least smile as a threat.’
‘Gods above and below,’ said Ugo, ‘you thought about this, didn’t you?’
Quintus nodded, the grin back, bright and wide. ‘No place for women with the likes of us, not even as wives.’
‘You knew one, then?’ Kag said quietly and Quintus paused. Shrugged.
‘Well enough. The dog-lady. The dog got killed and she was never the same. When Severus kicked the feet out from under fighting women, she got sold on and left with no word. Just as well.’
Drust remembered a female fighter in Scythopolis, a dusty shithole of a place which had brought in a band of women warriors, claiming they were the famed Amazons in an attempt to spice up an important munus. Good fighter, her cotton loincloth round one ankle, giving birth in the fetid dim. Birth, we called it, Drust remembered but it was practically an abortion. Born too early, the medicus said, brought on by the fear and the exertion, the potions taken too late to prevent such a thing and the others to boost speed, or for the promise of invulnerability.
It was a wonder she had found the privacy, never mind the man to do it with, the medicus said, elbow deep in her gore. How she had hidden it for so long was a bigger mystery than Mithras. Someone had tupped her when she was vulnerable and lost, Drust offered. Even then, the medicus said, the chances of it fruiting into a life couldn’t have been worked out by a pantheon of gods and an abacus – and if it got this far…
It got no further, that life, despite the best efforts of everyone. It expired in a bloody slither of half-form on the floor of a grit-rubbled undercroft of a provincial area, where the dust greedily sucked up the juice of it. The medicus wasn’t consoled
by saving the woman.
‘Mother,’ he corrected bitterly. ‘Of a child she never saw and never will. No career now either, because she’s a slave and the owner will not be pleased. He’ll sell her on. If she’s lucky.’
Voided everything into the blown sand…
Drust blinked back, flushing with that old cold sweat. Ugo was telling anyone who would listen about the way to perfectly judge the height of a long-hafted axe. Manius was putting an edge on Ugo’s axe blade, because he had seen the big German hack the donkey-boy and said it was more like watching a nailed club than a cutting implement.
‘How are we faring?’ Kag asked, the first time he had spoken that stop. Drust looked at the tablet of scratchings, squinting hard – he was not as good at the business as Kag and it was slow work for them both.
‘On track,’ he said.
And who knew what lay ahead – or what was behind, as Kag feared. Enemies all round like dog packs. Like eating soup with a knife.
Drust wondered what would happen if six men disappeared into the Land of Darkness, this sullen wasteland. Would Julius Yahya search for them? Would his mysterious patron – or even Servilius Structus?
‘Time,’ Kag said, as if reading Drust’s mind.
They moved eighteen-and-a-bit miles and would have made more save that a mule slipped, cracked a hoof open and had to be unloaded and then killed; Manius did it with a surprisingly gentle gesture, a swift and sure strike into one ear that hit something vital and dropped it with hardly a grunt.
They repacked and went on, reached the edge of a forest, one of those dark northern forests that chill you, Sib said, even when you stand at the edge. Ugo laughed; this was home to him. Two hours before night they went dipping down a valley to a place with a huge sculpture of swooping rocks looking vaguely like a pod of dolphins leaping across their path, all scalloped backs and wind-etched fins delicate even in granite. The wind was up and hissing; it had a bad winter in it, Ugo said, and no one scoffed.
Sib scouted out the best place to lay up, finding a deep hollow that had once been a riverbed, the stones still smoothed but by the sifting hiss of rain-wind. A twist of trees clung here, woody and gnarled as claws, and they arranged a shelter as best they could.
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