Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  The tension uncoiled slowly. ‘We send the Wanderer, and Julia Soaemias and her son are brought. We make the exchange…’

  ‘They will be on us like a pack of wolves directly afterwards,’ Drust said. ‘Best we let her loose when we are within sight of Roman walls.’

  ‘They might not agree to that,’ the Wanderer said uncomfortably, and Drust scoured him with a look.

  ‘Make them. What do we need some cow-feeding tribal Druid for?’

  ‘Druids are all men,’ Ugo pointed out, lumbering up with the mules. ‘In fact, they are—’

  ‘Move out,’ Kag said, slapping him on an arm. The big German scowled and started lashing the mule packs tighter; Drust saw him wince.

  Dog blew out his cheeks and tugged the leash. ‘Now comes the hard part.’

  ‘The dark is coming,’ Sib said. ‘We should wait for light.’

  ‘They will be on us before that,’ Kag answered, but Sib was right and everyone knew it. The day was sliding into black with lowering cloud; the white was changing to grey, but the snow still whirled and blew off mounds in spumes.

  ‘I will not stay here, in this place,’ Ugo said, his face etched with pain and old terrors. The wind moaned agreement.

  ‘We won’t get far in this, at night,’ Quintus said, but Drust looked at Dog.

  ‘We won’t have to. Dog has picked a place and it cannot be far from here.’

  Dog nodded and Kag squinted at Drust. ‘They will be on us, those Bull People. We have stolen their queen and all but killed their god-beast – why would they not? We can’t stay here.’

  Drust thought about it. No one had survived, either here or back where they had taken the queen, so the Bull People would not react until it became clear something was wrong and it could be well dark by then – with luck this blizzard would still be on, too. Warriors would go out in it, but it would not be a happy experience; Drust was sure there were spare boats at the far landing stage and they’d go fearfully to the island, find the bodies – the dark and snow would confuse the signs and the beast-crushed bodies would make them wonder. Maybe the creature was still rampaging and bellowing in pain.

  ‘They may work out that their queen is not among the dead,’ he told them. ‘I do not think anyone will want to stay on that island for long at night, so they will come back to this side, maybe start working their way up the banks. They will come here because this is a place they know and, besides, the poor sods sent out to search will look for an excuse to get in the warm.’

  ‘So? All the more reason for moving,’ Dog growled. ‘The place I have in mind is half a day from here.’

  Drust shook his head. ‘Too far in this and in the dark. We could wander in a half-circle, like we did once in the desert when a storm hid the stars. We need shelter and warmth at least for a time and we need daylight to see at least a patch of sky where your Sun God might be. We can light fires here, too, because those who come will expect it.’

  ‘I will not stay in that stilt house,’ Quintus muttered. No one disagreed with him, but it wasn’t necessary. All they had to do was hunker down in outbuildings and make it look as if the place had warmth and light, food and shelter; the ones stumbling out of the dark would die half frozen and dull with cold.

  ‘When we can see,’ Drust added, ‘we will move quickly.’

  The woman spat something at Dog, who grinned and translated.

  ‘She says we are all dead unless we set her free. There is more, but mostly the same.’

  ‘She may be right,’ Ugo grunted and moved off, tugging the mules back into shelter. He would keep them packed, though, for a swift move in the morning.

  Quintus sidled up to Drust’s ear. ‘He’s hurt, the big man. Bad. He won’t admit it but something is broken in him – that horn hit him hard, I heard it. He spits blood when he thinks no one is looking.’

  Drust looked at Dog, who had overheard.

  ‘I hope this,’ he said, indicating the woman with a scornful flap of one hand, ‘is worth it.’

  ‘She is worth not one as to me,’ Dog answered, ‘but Talorc values her, and so I will get what I want.’

  ‘The Sun Goddess and her boy,’ Quintus growled. ‘What then, Dog? What do you do then?’

  ‘We,’ Dog said, stressing the word, ‘take them to Eboracum and claim reward.’

  ‘Who wants them, Dog?’ Drust demanded. ‘Who wants them dead and who wants them saved?’

  Dog shrugged. ‘I want them saved. That’s all you need to know.’

  He moved off into shelter and the rest followed, though Kag paused and caught Drust’s arm.

  ‘He will betray us in Eboracum, I think. He needs us now to get his charges there. Omnes ad stercus. Drust. What does the likes of Dog have to do with a Roman priestess of the sun and a boy in the mould of The Hood? And to do that to your face for it? Is he mad?’

  ‘You have to ask?’

  They leaned into the snow and sought shelter and fire. The heat was a blossom of bliss from the gods above and below and Sib started a pot, loading it with savoury and pinches of spices from shadowed areas of his clothing, where his body heat kept them dry.

  They spooned it up in the flickering dim, where the animals shifted and ate fodder that would condemn the other beasts to death once they had gone. Now and then Quintus would cock his head and look out into the shadows, out to where the stilt house mouldered in frozen blood; Drust knew he was hearing a baby cry, for he thought he heard it himself.

  The woman sat impassive and refused food and Dog shrugged at the sight. ‘She won’t be with us long enough to starve to death,’ he said. ‘Afterwards is Talorc’s problem.’

  The Wanderer stood watch with Kag while Ugo got prone and leaned on one elbow because lying down seemed to cause him pain and discomfort. He waved it off as well as his sudden long silences.

  ‘I mourn,’ he said, ‘for my axe.’

  No one was fooled, not even the woman; when the Wanderer came back she spoke to him in flat tones, cold as Drust’s back.

  ‘She says the big one will die,’ the Wanderer translated. ‘She says the Father of the Forest has claimed him.’

  ‘If I were her,’ Drust answered savagely, ‘I would worry about the Father of the Forest, who has the bitt of a great axe sticking out of his head.’

  He had the satisfaction of seeing the woman flinch, but it felt cheap as old pewter in the next second. She said something else and then folded her hands in her lap and stared off into the dark. The Wanderer stroked his beard braids and translated.

  ‘You will never find Mag Mell. You are condemned to wander in eternity.’

  Mag Mell was a name that hurt. His mother had told him of it in those stolen moments in the soft dark and Drust had not realised then that she was preparing him for her passing. ‘Mag Mell,’ she would whisper. ‘The Plain of Delight.’ There were other names, too – the Land of Apples, The Silver-Cloud Plain, the Place of Youth – but it all meant the same. Escape from slavery.

  Drust looked at the woman and saw something of what he remembered of his mother there, felt the pain of old loss.

  ‘Gag her,’ he told the Wanderer, ‘lest she call out when others come.’

  He went back to the fire, where his front toasted and his back chilled. Kag and Dog were there and Kag asked what the woman had said, so Drust told him. Kag grunted.

  ‘Stopping her mouth was a good thought.’

  They sat and stared at pictures in the flames. ‘Do you think there is such a thing?’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Eternity. I mean – when does Cronos claim you, as opposed to Dis Pater or Pluto?’

  Dog growled out something like a laugh. ‘You can ask this? This proves you are now uncoupled from being a harena warrior and that you never were a true one to start with.’

  ‘Fuck you, Dog,’ Kag spat back. ‘You think because you had a fight to the death once makes you special? Everyone who stepped on the sand put their life on the line, every time.’

&nb
sp; ‘What do your philosophers say?’ Drust demanded, not wanting a fight at this good fire. Kag subsided slowly and thought.

  ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,’ he said eventually. ‘Thus said Heraclitus.’

  ‘Greek,’ Dog declared dismissively.

  ‘Most of the good ones are – but here’s Cicero for you. The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.’

  ‘So there is no such thing as eternity? And I am to accept this from someone calling himself Chickpea?’

  Kag shrugged. ‘Are you so hagged by that skin-wearing queen’s words, then?’

  ‘I have seen people be born and seen them live for a time, then die,’ Dog said, staring at the flames and so astonishing the others that they gawped. ‘That is a constant experience I can see for myself. No one has ever come back from beyond the curtain of death, but I know that curtain is a thin veil. It can be torn in an eye-blink by death, which can come in an instant – one moment here, next moment… somewhere else.’

  They stared at him while the flames dyed his death face bloody. He raised it and looked at them.

  ‘All we have is our faith in the gods, and faith is not knowledge. Who can say they know the truth if the truth never lets itself be known?’

  ‘Yet you believe in that golden boy,’ Kag managed hoarsely. ‘All this for him. Does he hold the secret of eternity for you, then?’

  Dog broke his eyes from them and stared blindly at the fire.

  ‘He might. And if prayers teach you anything it is this – nothing ever comes if nothing is ever offered.’

  In an hour they offered what the gods appear to like best, no matter on which side of the Wall they dwell.

  Blood.

  * * *

  They came when it was light enough to see at least something, but they were numbed and stumbling, six men swathed with wool and fur, hands chapped red and not able to even feel the shafts of spears or the shield-grip.

  Gwynn Ap Nudd, Drust thought. He remembered the god’s name from when his mother had taught him it and others, trying to keep the flame of his heritage alive. Poor ma, he thought sadly. My heritage was not in the blood but in the upbringing. It is less in knowing Gwynn Ap Nudd, God of the Dark than in knowing which areas of Rome are watered by the truly foul Alsietinian aqueduct which usually serves the fullers and waters gardens. Or every street in Cispius and Fagutal and Oppian and how to get from the slums at the bottom of the Esquiline to the purples at the top without being seen by the Watch.

  It did not matter, then, that he knew the god fears of these six, who had preferred to shiver than move in the night. It mattered only that they were dead men walking, even as they moved like moths to the light and the fire.

  There was a flurry, a swift moment of snarls and wet, sick sounds. Someone managed a sharp despairing cry, but that was all. Dog came up to where Drust stood, breathing hard and wiping his blade on a greasy fur cap.

  ‘Where were you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Watching the woman,’ he said. ‘She can’t speak, but you did not fasten her ankles.’

  Dog was embarrassed at the oversight, so he merely growled while the iron stink of blood washed briefly out, then moved to the woman and tore the gag free. She worked wet into her mouth and spat on him. Drust laughed.

  The reek went quickly because the cold seeped away the heat from the new blood. They moved off, leaving six more ragged, sad little corpses. Sib looked back now and then as they plodded out, wondering if their jnoun wafted like invisible smoke, bewildered at where they were and angry. He shivered and it was not all cold.

  He looked at Dog, who had done most of the killing, swift and frenzied as a desert fox. He did not like Dog’s face now, with its skin markings, the jedwel. Such markings were known to him – most woman of his tribe had them, the siyala on the chin, the ghemazza between the eyes which, when extended to the forehead, becomes el-ayach. They were all khamsa, protection from the evil spirits, the jnoun, and placed at vulnerable entrances to the body: eyes, nose, mouth, navel and vagina.

  But Dog’s face markings were the opposite. They attracted jnoun, and Sib feared that more than one was in him now. Manius had been bad enough, with no jedwel protection at all – but he was dead and gone and Dog was not.

  The snow had stopped falling, but lay thickly, frozen to a crust that cracked open and dropped man and beast to the fetlock. Bracken spears snapped and Kag turned once or twice to look back; Drust knew that he was thinking about the long, beaten trail of scarred snow. If you leave tracks…

  It took them most of the rest of that short day to reach Dog’s hideaway and they only recognised it by the strange copse of sharpened trees angling up. It took all of them – save Dog – a few moments to realise they were the remains of old stakes. Then came the ditch, which they had to slog round to find a way through – if they’d tried to cross it otherwise, they’d have floundered in deep snow and suffered the agonies of lily-pit stakes.

  ‘A fort,’ Kag muttered between smoking breaths. ‘An Army fort? This is your hideout?’

  ‘Good defences,’ Dog said, ‘and close enough that Talorc can reach it before the Bull People get here.’

  It was thirty paces long and twenty-five paces wide – a cohort-sized detachment had built it and the inscription revealed all when Ugo rubbed the snow off the burned wood.

  ‘You can read,’ he growled to Drust. ‘What’s it say?’

  Imp L. S. Severus Aug

  p p vex leg

  VI V fec p

  For the Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus Augustus, father of his country, a detachment of the Sixth Legion Victrix built this

  ‘A newish one, then,’ Quintus said, grinning. ‘A year old. Or two. Perhaps the oven is still workable and we can make bread.’

  Despite himself, Drust’s tart reply got lost in a rush of saliva at the idea of fresh bread; he saw the others were similarly entranced.

  ‘Two years ago,’ Dog agreed. ‘Marching camp. Or maybe just one of those outposts to shout out that the Army was back.’

  ‘Before the skin-wearing beasts got brave,’ Kag grunted. ‘There’s nothing here but ruin and fresh snow.’

  Dog shrugged, then flapped a hand at the Wanderer, who nodded and went out, moving fast.

  ‘Light a fire with what we have, thaw out some timbers for firewood,’ Drust said, and Kag went to it. Ugo, holding himself on one side, took Sib and saw to the mules and eventually Quintus came back, wide grin still in place.

  ‘The oven is there, cracked a bit but useable. No buildings, of course – they tented it and they are all gone, but they made a couple of withy shelters for mules and we can use them.’

  ‘We need to make sure we have at least three mules alive,’ Dog said. ‘We will take the Bull queen with us when we go and won’t let her go until we see the smoke from Wall fires.’

  ‘Even then,’ Quintus said pointedly.

  ‘Then we run.’

  Drust looked at the woman, who sat on a mule-pack saddle violet-eyed and pinched. She was trying to hold herself together but it had been a long, hard time of refused food and defiance and the cracks were showing. Her bottom lip trembled now and then and she bit it so it wouldn’t show.

  ‘How long before Talorc gets here with the Roman woman and her son?’ Drust demanded, and Dog stopped sorting out his pack to look up, squinting with thought.

  ‘A day, no more. He will move on horses and he does not have many of those. He will have twenty, perhaps thirty, with him and they will all be chosen men and the chiefs they serve, for none of those will let him do this on his own.’

  ‘Some of us may be dead in a day,’ Drust answered, looking pointedly at the woman. Dog straightened, wiping his hands down his front.

  ‘I am sure Ugo will be first. I will give you good odds.’

  Drust stared into those dark pits set in the skull and only knew Dog’s eyes were open by the feral gleam in them. Abnormal eye conta
ct, he remembered Kag saying.

  He turned away and tried not to shiver.

  Chapter Twelve

  The snow stopped falling, but the wind was a sibilant sneer that sifted what lay into drifts, then moved it on for no other reason than cold spite. In the old fort, the men huddled round a fire made from old abandoned stakes and stayed silent, as if even opening their mouths let too much freeze in.

  Drust found Quintus, who spat the words out in quick, smoking bursts. The fodder was almost gone. The food was almost gone. The water was all gone and they were melting snow because mules were too foolish to eat it to quench their thirst. The mules were almost gone.

  ‘Keep them alive,’ Drust said. ‘We will need them for the woman and the boy.’

  He moved on to Ugo, who was sitting lopsided by the fire, looking like a half-empty bag of grain.

  ‘How goes it?’ Drust asked, and was startled at the etched lines on the face that looked back at him; even under the tangle of beard and the brow braids you could see how it was.

  ‘I defeated the god of the woods,’ Ugo said and held up the splintered haft. Then he sighed. ‘I fear it has sixed me though.’

  Drust felt his insides lurch at this admission, for he knew it wasn’t lightly given. He clapped the big man’s shoulder. He saw the woman look at them and she said something, slow and awkward – it took Drust a moment to work out that she laboured her way in the Local tongue, the trade tongue.

  ‘He may die. I fix.’

  Dog tugged the leash, jerking the woman towards him and away from Drust. ‘What’s this? She speaks to you now?’

  ‘It would seem so,’ Drust answered levelly. ‘Badly, but good enough to say she can do something to help Ugo.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have ways,’ the woman said, and went to the belt round her middle – Dog jerked her leashed hands away, scowling with suspicion.

  ‘Let her,’ Drust said sharply, then looked Dog in his skull eyes. ‘You searched her for weapons, did you not?’

  Dog had but was starting to wonder. Drust reached, unlooped and unfastened the belt, noting that the body he touched now and then was firm and ripe underneath. He tried not to think of it, squinting at the belt in the firelight.