Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  ‘He also said, or so I hear, omnes ad stercus,’ Drust spat back. ‘It’s all gone to shit. Did he write that on a latrine wall? That’s where I spotted it.’

  ‘The Bull on the island,’ Ugo mused as the hall shifted to murmurs and growls and cooking smells. ‘That does not have a friendly sound to it. There are tales I could tell of my own land…’

  Then he brightened. ‘At least we are back to rescuing women and not abducting them. And Dog’s sister, too. So it’s not all bad.’

  Kag scowled. Sib groaned.

  ‘Shut your fly-hole you flap-shoed Stupidus,’ Quintus spat, then turned his anger on Drust. ‘You trust Dog? A man with – what was it Kag said? Abnormal eye contact?’

  ‘Mad as a basket of burning frogs,’ Kag agreed.

  ‘Now with a face put on inside out,’ Quintus added vehemently. ‘If anything gave you a clue that would be it. He organised us here, to save this sister of his – if it is his sister – and any talk of reward is just that. Where would Dog get silver enough to pay us for this? Mark me well – it is a trap to lure all those who broke him on orders once before.’

  ‘His patron could afford it,’ Kag mused. ‘Those folk in Emesa are richer than gods and that part of his tale is true enough – he is a believer, it seems. Besides – if he simply wanted us all dead in the worst possible way, we would be neck deep in shit. Upside down.’

  ‘And there’s the other worrying matter,’ Sib said. ‘Dog and his amulet and this Sun God. I know of this one. Two lives a day that temple claims for their god – not Sol Invictus or Helios, but Elagabalus. That’s not a patron you want to fool with.’

  ‘What patron?’ demanded Quintus. ‘This senator husband who sent them away in the first place and now wants them back?’

  Drust sighed. ‘We can talk round this for hours, but Dog is right. What choice have we? If we refuse I do not think we will be escorted within range of the Wall forts and waved farewell.’

  ‘I do not think we will be offered this woman and child once Dog’s sister is rescued,’ Kag said.

  ‘A stream to jump when we reach it,’ Ugo declared and beamed at Quintus. ‘So says the flap-shoed Stupidus, who will slap Dis into you if you speak such to me again.’

  There was short, mirthless laughter at Quintus’s face, but it rang like a bad mint of coin.

  ‘I wish we could be sure who we are working for,’ Drust muttered to Kag as they went about sorting gear out. ‘Dog says it is this woman’s husband, but a senator on his own does not command the likes of Julius Yahya.’

  ‘Dog will tell us,’ Kag said grimly and did not need to add more. Drust fell silent, but he gnawed on the bone that most bothered him – who wanted to bring harm to the woman and her child? The idea that it was the Empress and her sister was astonishing, but it bothered Drust that he did not – could not – dismiss it.

  Kag worked some new grease-rich fleece down into his empty scabbard, frowning at the loss of steel.

  ‘Omne quod non reveletur, as the poet said.’

  All was revealed the very next day.

  It started with Dog, loping up to them, all tail-wag and sharp grin that put Quintus to shame. No one shared it.

  ‘We move out tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Why not now?’ Kag asked.

  Dog made a grimace and the skull twisted in a strange rictus. ‘We must chase off the last of the warriors who attacked you.’

  ‘They were attacking you,’ Drust pointed out. ‘Because you attacked them – why was that? It’s the middle of winter and even Romans know that’s not the time to raid.’

  Dog nodded soberly. ‘It was decided to fetch some virgins, in case our efforts fail. Maybe the Bull People can be persuaded by quantity.’

  ‘Virgins?’ Sib scathed. ‘Are there any among these skin-wearing dogs?’

  Dog’s look was colder than the frost leaking through the hall. ‘Children are.’

  Then he looked at them and jerked his skull-head. ‘If you want some fresher air, come with me.’

  They followed, noting the warriors who fell in around them, all big lads bulked out in fur and war gear. Dog saw their looks.

  ‘For your protection,’ he said, and smiled at the disbelief. ‘Seriously. No one cares for Romans and not the ones I have described. Half the people who see you will be afraid. The other half – young warriors mainly – will want to challenge you, just to see if you live up to the tales.’

  ‘Thanks, Dog,’ Kag growled.

  Outside the streets were hard with ruts and patched with dirty white; snow drifted and people moved away from them or stood and sullenly stared. Dog is not taking us for a walk, Drust thought as they followed him towards a large, round timber building, seemingly built in three tiers, each one smaller than the one it stood on.

  Ugo made a sign and looked at the others. ‘Temple,’ he said.

  A blind man could have told that, Drust thought. There was a wooden statue, blocky and rough-hewn, but clearly a warrior-god with a spear and a bird on one shoulder. There were people, all men, just inside the entrance, in the shelter of a little portico; Drust saw that some were skin-markers and some their victims; they stopped their needlework to stare, then continued on.

  ‘Cúchulainn,’ Dog explained, nodding to the statue. ‘With Morrigan on his shoulder.’

  ‘Now I know that, I know less than before,’ Sib muttered.

  Inside was the smell of must and old blood, cold stone and ancient wood. Torches sputtered in metal-backed holders from the wooden pillars and a pit fire glowed embers enough to throw dancing shadows. There were a lot of dancing shadows, Drust saw.

  ‘The Senate,’ Dog declared wryly.

  It was the warrior elite of the tribe, wearing ring mail coats and bronzed war hats, scarred hands resting on the hilts of swords – some of them Roman, Drust saw – or long spears. Talorc stood head and shoulders above them all, but in no more command than any half his size; he wore a thin circlet of gold round his neck, smothered by a beard braided with silver wires. He had a white tunic under a big rough-coated fur and trousers checked in blue and green. He had no sword or spear or shield, but he radiated menace just the same – yet he was one voice in the guttural spit of their talk.

  None of this was what silenced Drust and the others. All of that moment belonged to the woman and boy.

  The woman was as he remembered her from the last time – white-blonde with bare arms that gleamed nearly as white as her hair, and Drust knew that, for all her life in the scorch of Syria, she had taken care to keep in the shade.

  She sat beyond the pit fire, in a large chair, almost like a throne, in a pillow of expensive, soft furs that she could have drawn round her against the cold had she wished it. She knew the value of a thin dress and the cold on her nipples. Drust knew her at once – Julia Soaemias, daughter of the Empress’s sister and mother to the boy who sat at her feet.

  He was still, like no boy his age should be, staring straight ahead with his lips moving silently. Now and then he would make a gesture, eloquently elegant. He wore the most of a bear pelt but was bareheaded, so that his golden curls waved softly in the rogue heat waves from the pit fire.

  He turned and looked at them. Looked, it seemed, at Drust, straight at him, straight through him to his very soul, smiling, confident. Drust sucked in his breath, felt the stun of it all the way from crown to heel and back again, so powerful he grunted. He heard Dog’s soft laugh and wrenched his eyes from the boy to him.

  ‘Yes,’ Dog said, nodding.

  ‘Caracalla,’ Drust said, and Dog nodded. It was The Hood, at the age before suspicion and venality had started to debauch the looks. At the age, Drust recalled, when he had forced Dog to kill his sword-brother in the arena.

  ‘His boy, so they say,’ Dog added softly. ‘They do not say it to his face or that of his mother all the same.’

  ‘It’s his spit,’ Kag muttered. ‘Fuck, Dog, what have you dragged us into?’

  ‘Riches and glory.’

/>   Chapter Ten

  There were oaks and sycamores, twisted claws clutching precarious drifts of snow. The forest floor was clotted with it, ankle deep and covering the treacherous snaking roots, gullies and ditches. The silence was cloying – the slightest crack of a hoof on a rock or a foot on a twig slammed out like a hammer on a door.

  ‘Watch your flanks,’ Drust warned. ‘Try to move quietly.’

  Sib, struggling with snow, turned his black, sweat-gleamed scowl on him. ‘We are still in the land of Dog’s folk,’ he spat, and waved a hand at the big, grunting pack of warriors hauling ponies and mules behind them. ‘Is there a word for “quietly” in the spit-tongue these forest dogs speak?’

  Drust said nothing; Sib had a point. The warriors had been sent by Talorc to escort them to the boundary stone marking the territory between this land and that of the Bull People, although Drust was sure it had more to do with making sure they all did as they were supposed to, Dog included.

  They had been given their mules and gear and a little man called Cruithne, face wizened as a walnut and stunted like some furze root. He was a great honour, according to Dog, because he was known as the Wanderer, a man who knew every stone and tree in the lands of the Bull People and here.

  ‘Looks more like a back-knifer,’ Kag growled in Drust’s ear, ‘sent here to make sure Dog never comes back with his sister. If I was Talorc, I’d make sure of that.’

  ‘Dog would have to marry his own sister to take over from Talorc,’ Drust told him. Even as he said it he could not be sure it was not part of Dog’s plan – yet he was also sure Dog was blinded by the boy, Varius, and his equally golden mother.

  One of the warriors, who had been trading growls back and forth, looked over at Sib and spat out something which didn’t need translating into insult. Sib scowled back.

  ‘What was that?’ Kag demanded.

  ‘Not something from Ovid,’ Drust replied tersely.

  ‘You never read same,’ Kag scoffed.

  ‘His epic work “Julia Domna sucks fat cock for a denarius” is on the wall outside the west entrance to the Flavian,’ Drust fired back. Quintus laughed.

  ‘He is called Conall,’ said a voice and they turned into the wizened face of the Wanderer. His hair and beard were braided and the same colour as the snow and he spoke Latin with a thick rheum to it. ‘He thinks your man there is several days dead, since he has only seen men that colour who were.’

  ‘He wants to be polite when he says so,’ Sib grunted and the Wanderer shrugged. The fact that he spoke decent Latin had not gone unnoticed.

  ‘Conall is a little chief who wants to be bigger. He thinks Colm Deathface is dangerous because he saw him fight Oengus when he first arrived. You, on the other hand, are all just tales and he does not see greatness in you, for all Colm’s strong words on your behalf.’

  Drust looked at Dog, who finally forced his eyes away from pointlessly fiddling with leather.

  ‘What?’ he demanded. ‘I fought someone. It was inevitable – I arrived here with two Romans and the face marks of greatness, claiming to be a member of the tribe.’

  ‘What happened?’ Ugo asked and Dog shrugged.

  ‘I won.’

  ‘He killed Oengus in less time than it takes to say his name three times three,’ the Wanderer said flatly. ‘Oengus was a better fighter than Conall.’

  ‘Necessary,’ Dog said and turned away.

  ‘For your precious boy,’ Quintus offered. ‘The sun shines out of his nethers, it seems.’

  They squatted in the dim of looming trees, chewing bread and hard salted cheese. In another half-day they would reach the boundary stones but Drust had already decided that they were not going there, but north, running parallel to the invisible line.

  ‘They will have eyes on that stone,’ he said and everyone saw the sense in that save Conall and the other huddle of warriors, who wanted done with escorting Romans.

  Thereafter the plan was simple – reach the shores of the loch, find a small fishing village the Wanderer knew and take their skin boats across to the island, find the spot where offerings were tied up for whatever monster lurked there and hide, waiting for the arrival of men with Dog’s sister.

  ‘We have two days,’ Dog said when explaining all this, ‘so more than enough time. But we have to be quick and quiet.’

  ‘What then?’ Kag demanded scornfully. ‘Kill this Bull-monster and the warriors?’

  Dog shook his head. ‘They will tether her and leave – no man wants to be around the Bull’s sacrifice. We need only dart in, untie her and leave the way we came. But if we must fight, we will.’

  Drust and the others looked from face to face, every man with the same thought – no man wants to be around the Bull’s sacrifice.

  ‘What is it like, this creature?’ Ugo asked, frowning.

  ‘Depends who you listen to,’ Dog replied, chewing. ‘South of the Wall, if they have heard of it at all, it is taller than a temple, has the teeth of a wolf and breathes fire. If you listen north of the Wall, it is a giant bull, big as the world. If you listen to Talorc and the like it is half bull, half man and walks upright carrying a whole tree as a club.’

  ‘I have heard of such,’ Ugo said thoughtfully. ‘Creatures of the dark forest.’

  ‘We are in a dark forest,’ Sib reminded him mournfully and Ugo grinned happily.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ he beamed.

  ‘What do you say, Wanderer?’ demanded Drust. ‘You know all of these lands, so you claim – have you seen it?’

  The man’s walnut face grew some more frown lines and he shook his head. ‘Heard it, all the same. Bellowing. Distant, like – which is where I wanted to keep it.’

  ‘Urus,’ Kag said firmly with a slight dismissive flick of one hand. ‘We’ve all seen urus in the harena – hump-backed bastards the size of a decent elephant and a spread of horn a man could lie between if he was Stupidus enough to try.’

  No one spoke, remembering the great horned bulls hunted as part of the show – fewer these days because they were harder and harder to find.

  ‘If the ones here have sharp teeth and breathe fire,’ Quintus said, ‘then we have found a seam, lads. They’d pay a fortune for one of those running in the Flavian.’

  ‘You can throw the net,’ Sib answered and the others laughed.

  ‘A decent venator can six one of those big cows with a couple of arrows and a spear,’ Kag declared, and Dog looked scornfully at him.

  ‘There are no decent venators these days,’ he growled. ‘Not since Carpophorus. Just butchers of hares and burning foxes.’

  ‘Didn’t Carpophorus kill two such urus?’ Ugo queried. ‘At the inauguration games for the Flavian?’

  ‘He killed one of every beast in the world if you listen to the tales,’ Sib answered, but Drust saw he was watching the group of warriors and Conall. There will be trouble, he thought…

  ‘The plan you have is bold,’ Quintus said to Dog, ‘but risky. I think you have been blinded by the light shining from your sun-boy’s arse.’

  Dog scowled back and his hackles went up. In the end, as it always did, it came back to Drust.

  ‘What say you?’ Kag demanded.

  What say I? I say we cut and run from here, Drust thought. The chances of escaping and then surviving after that were about the same. Especially if they arrived back in civilisation without the woman and her child.

  Yet he saw their faces, grim and badger-arse rough, waiting for him to show them the way, as he had always done because he was the one they looked to, for all Manius spat and Dog growled.

  The woman had been polite at that meeting in the temple of Cúchulainn and Morrigan. There had been a huge cauldron affair, a great lump of bronze turned black and green by neglect, but you could still see the maenad processing round the side, naked and ecstatic. It looked to have been Greek but probably wasn’t, was more likely a bad Roman copy for those with new money and no taste who decorated their dining rooms with it, then wondered why
the old money sneered – and still accepted the invitation to dine.

  ‘A little touch of home,’ Drust had offered weakly, nodding to it. She’d smiled, even though the affair frothed with the scum of barley beer and not wine.

  ‘A beautiful piece to find here, in this place. An ornament to any home.’

  It was said for the benefit of all the torc-wearing growlers when the translation was rolled out, but Kag had no finer feeling of diplomacy.

  ‘So says the one who never has to clean it.’

  It had rattled out like a clatter of dull pewter on a stone floor, but Julia Soaemias had smiled blandly.

  ‘You are slaves?’

  ‘Freedmen,’ Drust had answered.

  ‘Double welcome then, since Crixus Servilius tells me you have to come to save us all.’

  It was a long, long moment of fish-mouthed gaping before they’d all realised that Crixus Servilius was Dog. No one had known he’d had a Roman name – nor that he had chosen the most infamous gladiator after Spartacus to take as a freedman name. Kag laughed aloud, not least because Dog had never been freed.

  ‘I believe he is called Colm Deathface here,’ Drust had said and the woman had smiled. The boy stopped muttering to himself and looked up.

  ‘Have they come to fight to the honour of Helios?’ he had asked in a beautiful, fluted little voice. ‘Order them to fight, Mother.’

  ‘They have not come to fight in that way,’ she had answered, softly patient. ‘And you do not order free men – we have spoken of this before, Varius. Talk to Elagabalus, see if you cannot persuade the god to shine his munificence on us all.’

  ‘The god does not like this land,’ the boy had replied sulkily. ‘Nor the people in it.’

  ‘You should be polite to those for whom you are a guest. We have spoken of this before, too.’

  Drust blinked back to the moment and the snow dropping from overloaded branches, the softly murmured plots of Conall and his crew, the expectant faces of his own. The woman’s conversation had been stilted and the shackles were clearly on her tongue as much as her wrists and ankles, but her eyes, blue-green as gemstones, had been hot with promise and fears.