Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  ‘This is the last,’ he said. ‘I was saving it for the moment we had to rescue the prize, but this seems like a good time.’

  He stuck it in a corner of his jaw, nodded once and loped away, back along their scuffed trail. He spat once, leaving a bright bloody bead on the snow. Drust watched him for a long minute, then turned away and slapped the sweated arse of a mule.

  ‘Run,’ he said.

  They stumbled and slipped and cursed the mules all the way up the snow-crusted slope, tearing through sere bracken and up to where the snow lay in deeper drifts. A mule floundered and they all gasped to a halt, their breath mingling with the steam from the beasts.

  ‘Push,’ Sib panted, and Kag, his shoulder to the rump of the struggling mule, his legs up to the knees in snow, gave him a glare; he had no breath for words.

  Drust looked back, thought he heard a dull sound like the exhaled breath of some great bull. He made a warding sign, then lent his shoulder to the mule.

  They freed it. Six steps further on, another sank to the belly and started plunging in a panic, spilling the pack.

  ‘Juno’s tits,’ Kag swore, but he had no lungs left for more. Sib put up both hands to blinker his eyes, dropped them and announced he could see riders.

  ‘Cut the fucking mules free,’ Drust declared, and the others stared at him. He stared back, feeling the dull ache of the cold in his chest. If they kept running, sucking in the freezing air, it would burst them; they’d vomit blood, fall down and die.

  ‘All our food…’ Ugo said plaintively.

  ‘My pots,’ Quintus warned.

  ‘There’s a rider out in front,’ Sib said and lowered his hands again to show his stricken, cold-pinched face. ‘I think it might be Manius on a native pony.’

  Everyone else squinted.

  ‘Or an eager rider on a fresh mount,’ Kag growled, ‘new from gutting Manius with his own arrowhead.’

  ‘Gods forgive you,’ Ugo said sternly and made a swift sign, some Frisian affair of his own. Kag snarled back and turned to Drust.

  ‘Well? Run or fight?’

  The other waited while the mules wheezed and stood with their heads down; they didn’t even try to hoof up the snow to get at what they thought might be underneath, which was a measure of their exhaustion. Sib saw Drust’s look.

  ‘They are too blown to go on,’ he said.

  ‘We all are,’ Drust said, and Ugo unshipped his axe and blew hot life into his frozen fingers. Quintus offered a shit-eating grin from the snow-clot of his beard.

  ‘I am tired of running. The harena does not teach that – after all, you only end up back where you started.’

  They laughed more than it was worth, throwing their heads back with the humour of wolves. Drust waited until the echoes had died, then turned to Quintus.

  ‘Fetch out what’s left of your pots. We get to use them now.’

  Quintus nodded, started to move, then hesitated and turned to face them all. ‘Now look,’ he said, ‘you should handle these with care. Throw them to break on something – or someone – otherwise they will just plop into snow and be useless. And don’t throw them close, or Minerva save us all, drop one on a stone.’

  ‘You see any stones?’ Kag demanded.

  ‘The one that makes your head,’ Quintus replied, moving off to the mules. ‘The one that concerns me most is the one hidden under the snow at your feet.’

  ‘We stand here,’ Drust went on, while Kag frowned and scuffed the snow for hidden stones, ignoring Quintus and his grin. ‘Let them come up through the deep snow. They don’t fight on horses, which is a shame because that would make them easy to kill.’

  ‘Manius,’ Ugo said, and everyone saw the leading rider’s horse stumble, recover, then stumble again and keel over; the rider rolled and got up onto his hands and knees. Behind him, the pursuers closed in, flogging their ponies hard.

  ‘If we wait, he will die,’ Ugo added pointedly.

  ‘Call foul and send in the summa rudis,’ Sib intoned savagely and Ugo rounded on him, snarling. Then he hefted the axe and started to slog out of the deep snow, downhill.

  ‘Juno’s tits,’ Kag said wearily. ‘Why does he always seem so angry?’

  ‘He has been disappointed often,’ Quintus said, returning with a wooden box which he placed carefully at their feet. ‘It is likely to continue – we are all very disappointing men here.’

  He prised open the box; downslope, Manius was struggling forward and the pursuers were flinging themselves off their horses, frustrated by their foundering. Ugo strode downhill like he was Colossus come to life.

  ‘Well, are we to stand here and let him die?’ demanded Kag.

  ‘For the best,’ Sib muttered. ‘He is jnoun…’

  ‘You have stood here long enough to change your breeches twice,’ Quintus pointed out with his big grin. ‘Here – take a pot or two and get ready.’

  ‘Not something I would think on doing,’ Kag growled back.

  ‘Taking a pot?’ Drust asked, bemused, and Kag looked sorrowfully at him.

  ‘Changing your breeches.’

  Sib took a pot, holding it as if it was boiling. Kag and Quintus and the others started off down the hill, loosening up weapons and getting ready.

  ‘I truly wish that old woman in the hut had been right,’ Sib said.

  ‘Verrecunda,’ Drust and Kag said together, and then laughed at it; Quintus waved a hand.

  ‘As you say. Still – I would like to have died a prince.’

  They moved on through the bracken and the half-frozen mulch-mud – no good footing here, Drust thought. Still, it’s the same for them as us. Just that there are more of them than us.

  At least twenty, they all saw. Ugo was starting to dodge arrows now and had stopped; he waved his arms and roared at Manius to move but the man had given up struggling forward and had his bow out. The tribesmen started howling and closing in.

  Ugo spread his arms wide as if about to embrace all his enemies. ‘Uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari,’ he bellowed.

  Sib stepped up, ran three paces and hurled his pot.

  ‘Pull,’ he screamed.

  * * *

  It wasn’t true, as the others disparagingly pointed out constantly, that three of their number had been in the Flavian and survived. The implication of that included actual fighting and only Dog had done that – the others had been show fights and Sib and Manius’s perambulation during the Lemurian games .

  Organised by the Pontifex Maximus, which is to say the Emperor, the Lemurian were on three days when Rome appeased the spirits of its dead – the ninth, eleventh and thirteenth of May. People flooded into the amphitheatre after they had unknotted everything including their shoes, walked round in bare feet with a mouthful of black beans and spat them out, mumbling: These I cast; with these beans, I redeem me and mine.

  Once you had lumbered through all that and made the ‘mano fica’ to ward off evil, you needed the diversion of an entertainment which did nothing more than add to the panoply of dead.

  Sib and Manius had walked the perimeter of the Flavian in the lunchtime pause between the slaves clearing the condemned dead away and the start of the dwarves versus women, or the blind-helmeted pairs bashing furiously at air. Two slaves went with them, heaving big baskets filled with woven straw balls which were packed with favours.

  There were sweetmeats, cakes, coin and lead-stamped ingots which could be redeemed for a cockerel, a horse, a slave or even an entire chestnut farm in Abruzzo if you were lucky.

  So, while the audience stuffed their faces with hot sausage and boiled chickpeas and free bread, guzzling cheap wine to wash it down, Manius would stalk the circle while Sib took a ball from the basket and lobbed it well over the heads of the crowd. Manius would crack them open with every shot. Never missed. He had arrows with blunt tips and fat flights so that, when they fell on the crowd they did no more damage than cause a yelp and a bruise – which, if it came with a free gift, was no hardship.

&n
bsp; The trick in it was that the balls wobbled, being packed loosely, and Sib did it from behind Manius, so he did not know where the ball came from and only saw it at the last. He had a split-second to react and shoot and never missed. Not once.

  All Sib had to say was: ‘Pull…’

  * * *

  Pull.

  Drust heard it and knew what was about to happen, saw it with the sickening certainty of horror unborn. He was opening his mouth to scream at everyone, but what he planned to say would never be heard and later he could not even remember what that was.

  The pot arced up over the heads of the warriors, struggling sweatily forward from their horses with shields and spears, lumbering in furs and bits of filched armour. Ugo was standing with his arms wide, roaring challenge to them.

  The arrow flew, straight and true. There was a dull thump and a blast of heat and light that ripped the warning from Drust and threw him backwards – then the sky rained fire.

  It came down in fat gobbets. Men screamed and died. A man came lumbering out of the rain with one leg on fire and beat it desperately with both hands; they went alight and melted like candle wax. Another effigy reeled in circles, his head a single flame and his arms waving wildly, his hands on fire where he had tried to beat out his own face. One or two hurled themselves into the snow, but that did no good; they burned on.

  ‘Back, back,’ yelled Kag.

  ‘Throw,’ Quintus screamed and showed them how by lobbing a pot at a burning man. It hit, broke and there was another dull whoof as flame consumed the man, all but his screams. The others threw the pots they had, as much in a desperate attempt to be rid of them as to burn their enemies; the world growled with fire and melted.

  The heat drove them back, sweating and panting, to where they could turn and stand, weapons up and ready for any survivors who came crashing through.

  There were none. There weren’t even screams, but the snow burned and black smoke rose up in greasy plumes, each one marking a dead man or pony; there were distant squeals that grated on Kag, who knew the sound of horses in agony.

  Ugo half crawled back up the slope and stood, weaving. Half his beard was gone on one side and his face looked like it had been slapped back and forth a hundred times and then drenched in soot. He turned to look back down the hill, hanging on to his axe to stay upright.

  ‘Manius,’ he said.

  ‘Sixed,’ Sib said flatly and the big German rounded savagely on him, looking like some wild troll.

  ‘You did that on purpose,’ he spat.

  ‘There is little point in doing it any other way,’ Sib answered.

  ‘You knew he would die,’ Ugo persisted.

  ‘We all die,’ Kag interrupted wearily and took the German by the arm, leading him away. Quintus slogged after them and Drust stared at Sib for a long moment. He wanted to say that he would go down and find Manius, but the truth was that he did not want to go near that burning, smouldering carnage; there was a sharp reek from it that caught his throat.

  ‘I said we should never have let him loose on the world,’ Sib said softly, so that only Drust could hear him. ‘Jnoun, I said. Now you see. He could burn the world.’

  Drust turned away and followed the others up the slope. When he got to the crest, the others were standing there watching wordlessly, and Drust joined them, staring at what they saw.

  There was a long spill of frost-crusted bracken and twisted trees in a patched spread. Beyond it was an irregular shadow of rampart and roofs where the smoke of cooking fires threaded a sullen sky.

  In between stood a forest of spears and the grim growlers who held them.

  ‘Fuck,’ Kag said bitterly.

  They waited.

  ‘Are we supposed to fight then?’ Ugo demanded, and Quintus laid a gentling hand on the big Frisian’s shoulder.

  ‘We are supposed to die, big man,’ he said.

  Drust saw a huddle of men detach from the pack and come towards them. Sib went into a crouch and Kag slapped him on the side of the head.

  ‘Stop that. You will encourage them and you are no fighter at all but a cart driver.’

  ‘Fuck you…’

  Closer, the figures stopped and one stepped a little way forward. Drust thought the man was veiled with some spider-silk stuff from Parthia but it was Kag who got to it first, a second before the truth of that face sucked the air from Drust.

  ‘Gods above and below, Dog,’ Kag said loudly. ‘Your face is inside out.’

  Dog stepped forward and slapped them all with it, as if it had been a club. Colm Deathface they called him and it was all the truth – Necthan had been an artist in his way and had taken Dog’s skull and put it on the outside. Now it grinned at them, even though Dog’s lips were a tight stitch.

  ‘No evil,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘In the name of all the gods. Just lower your weapons and follow – you’ve been expected for some time. I would do it swiftly because the ones behind you are sorting themselves out from their scorching.’

  What could they do, Drust thought?

  ‘Lead on,’ said Kag.

  Chapter Nine

  The village had a stockade, but round huts had spilled beyond it in some places and the entire settlement was spread out on flat land beside the river. There were no ordered streets, just rutted walkways, timbered here and there, between huts clustered like barnacles. There were people and animals and none of them looked friendly; it reeked.

  On higher ground at one end was a circle of stone and turf twice the height of a man, and roofed. The palace of Talorc son of Aniel, son of Tolorg son of Mordeleg, Drust was told by Dog. Talorc was not king or warlord or anything like it, just the mouthpiece for all the warriors who thought they had a say in things. Which is what happens when there is no clear ruler and so no firm hand, he added scornfully.

  Still, the grain grew and was ground, the flax got harvested, fish traps and spinning and herbs and vegetables all still appeared; people went on with their lives and would work during daylight, barter and swap and share the benefits. In summer, Drust thought – if this land had such a thing – this would be a pleasant place. Only the warlords thought warlords were needed here.

  Drust learned this as they half stumbled towards the place, hemmed in by big men with big spears and big scowls. Dog spoke as if he had personally done most if not all of it.

  ‘Who is the woman?’ Drust demanded, cutting through Dog’s pride. ‘And the child? Why did you run to this place with them?’

  They came up on the stockade gates, which screeched open; behind, Drust heard shouts and the men surrounding him looked wary and anxious.

  ‘In good time,’ Dog said and grinned, which did nothing for his face at all. Kag looked as if he would say something but the way ahead beckoned and the way behind was fenced with spears, so he kept quiet.

  ‘Where is Manius?’ Dog asked, looking round.

  ‘Sixed,’ Sib said. Dog looked at Drust, then turned wordlessly away; for a moment Drust was sure he had seen something under that death face. Not sorrow.

  Relief.

  They walked the length of the main, rutted, snow-patched street, fringed with a sullen hatred of faces. Kag stared defiantly back, but most, including Drust, knew better. By the time they reached the gates of the turf and stone palace, they were steaming off their fear-sweat in the cold.

  Inside was shadow with smells – wood smoke, meat, fetid bodies, skins in need of airing. There was a pit fire spilling fire glow and they moved towards it, sucking greedily at the heat. Dog moved off before Drust could speak to him and other figures moved in the shadows with soft rustlings, making everyone slide closer together.

  ‘What now, lads?’ Quintus demanded, looking round warily. ‘Is this the lunchtime show? Dwarves and women and crucifixions?’

  There was a loud noise beyond the fire, a crashing of solid on wood. Men appeared, all iron and grim helmets – the one who led them was taller by a head and shoulders. After him came others, not armoured, but armed wit
h sheathed blades and knives.

  The tall one stood for a moment, then called out and Dog appeared, dressed in a fine shirt and leather breeks; the old Sol Invictus amulet swung on his chest and gave Drust a moment of poignancy.

  ‘This is Talorc,’ Dog said, indicating the tall man. ‘He speaks for the council.’

  ‘Council?’

  Dog shrugged. ‘Like the Senate. A bit. There is no war chief here, just a man who has been made mouthpiece for a time. For now it is Talorc.’

  Drust remembered what Verrecunda had said about men only ruling through women here, but any thoughts he had on it were driven from him when the woman appeared. She was like a blast of light and heat and Drust heard the rustle, the sigh of indrawn breath.

  She had blonde hair – true blonde, Drust was sure, not some wig of sheared hair from German slaves which was so popular in Rome. She was middling height, middling age, curved and making the most of them in a Roman dress that clung and draped; the cold must be slicing her, Drust thought, but it did things to her breasts. Behind her was a boy, swaddled in white fur that must have been a prize, even for a tribe who had such furs to spare. He was buried in them so deep Drust could not see him clearly.

  ‘We have found Dog’s bitch,’ Kag said in Latin, watching Dog to judge the reaction.

  ‘Be careful, gladiator,’ the woman said in perfect Latin. ‘This bitch can bite.’

  Quintus laughed at Kag’s discomfited face and the fact that Dog showed nothing on his at all, but since the man always seemed to be grinning it was hard to tell. That skull face was a hard matter to get round.

  Talorc spoke for a time and the rest of the big room seemed to enjoy it; Drust saw that they were mostly men and all armed. The retinue, he thought, but had that thought driven from him by the sudden realisation that the woman and the boy were chained at the hands to each other. They had shackles on their ankles, too.

  He tried to catch Dog’s eye but failed. Then Dog told them that they were all welcome and a place would be made at the feasting table.