Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  ‘It will hold,’ he said. ‘Longer than the other, for sure.’

  ‘I am guessing sometime around dawn,’ Dog declared, his face a sweat-gleamed nightmare in the guttering dim. ‘Then we’ll have to fight them in the doorway.’

  Rogatus shook his head. ‘Not there – a few steps back.’

  ‘You will let them in?’ Sib declared anxiously, and Rogatus looked scathingly at him.

  ‘Trust me, mavro, I know how to fight skin-wearing arse-fuckers – apologies, Domina.’

  ‘We are gladiators,’ Quintus pointed out, ‘and we know a bit.’

  ‘Not about this,’ Rogatus said, ‘though you will be useful, trust me. This is the Army here and we have been doing this for some time. I have four men left with me – Shambles and Mule, you will stand with me in the front. Ditch the pilae and spatha, use your pugio dagger which is best for close work like this. Keep it low. Stick and block as you have been trained, four paces back from the door. Falco, you are second rank, and if a couple of you gladiators could grab the shields off Lentulus and Caius, you can join him.’

  He looked at Drust and Dog. ‘Pick your two best men – you’ll find some decent shields in a corner and they’ll serve you better than those silly square tribal affairs. You never heard me say this but I envy you the old gladius you have – nice and short and sharp for in here. You will take up the corners, on either side of the door.’

  Drust saw what the optio intended – the warriors would cram in, no more than two abreast at best, then have to fight front and flank. The spatha was longer than the gladius and that was an advantage for front men in a ranked wall – but not in this tight space. Here, the little sword was emperor.

  ‘Good plan,’ he said, and Rogatus offered a wan smile.

  ‘Told you. We have done this before. I know you lot like to leap and twirl and have a referee to prevent serious damage, but you’ll have to do it Army style here.’

  Dog laughed mirthlessly. ‘You did not go on the death days, then. Else you’d have seen how men fight for their lives.’

  Rogatus looked at him. ‘I never saw a fight but once, on leave in Eboracum. I would truly like to see one in the Flavian.’

  Kag clapped his shoulder and laughed. ‘I can get you tickets to the good seats.’

  ‘I will borrow a sword from this man,’ said Julia Soaemias, indicating the lolling figure whose helmet was now off; it had made little different to the dent, which was now in his skull.

  ‘Well, Lentulus won’t need it, for sure,’ Rogatus said, ‘but I am not sure about giving it to… a Domina.’

  ‘I will take it,’ the boy said, tilting his chin back. His mother put a hand on his cheek.

  ‘Very brave and correct – but I know how to use it and you do not.’

  The boy frowned. ‘I will summon Helios to burn them up,’ he said.

  ‘Good work,’ Drust agreed. Rogatus looked at Drust and back to the lady, then thought better of anything he had to say and went off to help with the timber shoring. Drust took the legionary’s sword and handed it to her, saying nothing. She was not fooled.

  ‘You want to know how I can use a sword such as this,’ she said and Drust gave in and squatted beside her. She laid the blade aside with a soft tink and instructed her son to soak another cloth, which she laid on Lentulus’s head. Drust did not think the effort was worth it; if he had been in the harena they’d have sixed him with the hammer of Dis Pater by now.

  ‘I know many things it is not considered ladylike to know,’ she said. ‘But that is the nature of life in Rome.’

  ‘Down our end, perhaps,’ Drust said. ‘You learn blade work at the breast down below the Palatine.’

  She smiled. ‘How do you think matters are ordered on the Hill? Want to prevent the election of an aedile? Embarrass him with some clapped-out whore paid to complain about him in public all over the City. You can find one in the Basilica with all the rich crooks – or go to the Tuscan quarter and do a proper job with a male prostitute. If you want a perjurer, try the Comitium or head for the Lacus Curtius and find a whole flock of spite willing to spread nasty rumours for money.’

  Drust whistled his amazed admiration. ‘You know as much about my world as I do. I know nothing of yours.’

  ‘Know only that I am no naïf,’ she answered, and laid a hand on his cheek. It was cool and yet sent a thrill straight through him. Her eyes as she spoke seemed to burn him with green fire.

  ‘You are a handsome one,’ she said, and lust ripped through him; she saw it and laughed huskily, then patted the cheek. There is nothing so stimulating to a woman as seeing how her beauty works, Drust thought.

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said, coming closer to him so that he smelled the unwashed sweat of her and was aroused by it as by no other perfume. ‘I am in no danger of death from those who seek me and my son. You need not fret about that. No one wishes me physical harm in this.’

  Drust, bewildered, scrubbed the tangle of his beard, aware of his own stink suddenly.

  ‘Then what was all this about? The running and hiding. Dog—’

  ‘Power,’ she said. ‘That is what it is always about.’

  Drust knew there was something there but not what. Power he had seen, down in the Wolf’s Den where folk scrabbled and lied, cheated and fought and the most cunning – like Servilius Structus – claimed a corner and defended it. He had never considered that the Hill folk lived the same way.

  He was distracted by a clattering from above that froze everyone just as the boom of the ram on the door stopped. Everyone stared at the hatch, waiting, sweating… but there were only more clatters and once a loud yelp. Rogatus got to it first and went to the gate, placing his palm on it.

  ‘They took the signal fire timbers off and piled them at the gate. Trying to burn it down.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  Rogatus thought a bit, then shook his head. ‘They might char it a bit, weaken it even more for the ram. The signal fire’s been alight for a while now, so most of it will have been burned through. No spare timber for it that won’t have to be unfrozen before it can be burned. Most of the pyre wood is green anyway.’

  ‘Green?’

  ‘Makes smoke,’ said the legionary called Mule. ‘So it can be seen during the day. At night we stick a bucket of that on it.’

  He waved to the corner where they had dumped the ladder and Dog took a look, then a closer one.

  ‘Makes the flame bright and hot,’ Mule added helpfully.

  ‘Powder for pouring stone,’ Dog said. ‘Burned limestone. Mix it with water and you get slaked lime – add a little sand or rubble and you get pouring stone.’

  ‘We were rebuilding the Northern Wall in stone,’ Rogatus said. ‘Had lots of it outside, but they took it away to the north. Keep some in here for the signal fire.’

  ‘Quicklime,’ Quintus said, and smiled his big shit-eating grin. ‘Have to work carefully with that stuff – ask the harena slaves.’

  Drust did not need to ask, for he remembered all too well.

  * * *

  The fifth visit to the underbelly of the Flavian – or perhaps the sixth. No matter, it is fetid and dim as it always is, thick with air so foul it is like breathing through wool.

  Gennadios is showing the boy, yet again, where the heart in the throat is when Charon looms out of the shadows like a bad omen.

  ‘Make way – stand clear!’

  His slaves follow him, wearing leather gauntlets halfway up their arms, faces veiled with wraps that go all the way round their heads. They carry one of their own, who writhes and screams.

  ‘Can you fix him?’ Charon asks from under his mask. Gennadios looks. Drust looks. The writhing man has a face that seems to bubble and his eyes weep onto his cheeks – or what had been his eyes and what had been his cheeks.

  ‘Lime?’ demands Gennadios. Charon nods.

  ‘Bugger slipped and went face first into it.’

  ‘Nothing I can do. Gods could not fix him. Eyes is bur
ned from his head. Probably got in his chest, too, by the way he is frothing blood out.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Charon says sorrowfully. Up goes the hammer, down it comes. Crunch. The writhing man stops weeping and screaming.

  ‘Lime?’ the boy manages to ask and Charon’s blank mask turns to him.

  ‘For the corpses, lad. How else do you think you get rid of a dead elephant and the like down here?’

  He goes off laughing, leaves Drust to watch him and his slaves drag one of their own back to the pit he fell in.

  * * *

  ‘Are you thinking what I am thinking?’ Quintus asked, and Drust shook himself back to the now. Not likely, he thought – but he knew what Quintus had worked out.

  ‘We need to take back the roof,’ he said, and Ugo struggled up.

  ‘I will go. I can do it.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ the woman said, and looked at Drust, who nodded. ‘You can gather the lime, though. Be careful with it.’

  Ugo nodded meekly and did as he was bid. Drust and Kag fetched out the ladder and Dog huffed and puffed his cheeks out a few times, then went up it, unlatched the hatch, paused and threw it up, hurling himself out. Like a dark flash, Manius leaped up the ladder after him.

  Drust helped pass up three covered wooden kits, then took the last one up himself, in time to see Manius duck behind the stone rampart, leaning his back to it and blowing out his cheeks; stones rattled and zipped.

  ‘Bastards is laying down some fire,’ Dog declared, near prone in the scattered ashes of the ravaged pyre. He beat out a smoulder on his tunic and took up a charred length of timber, using it to lever away a ladder. They were made from a frozen timber with short crosspieces lashed to them and Drust marvelled at how determined you’d have to be to risk climbing on that.

  Not all, he revised when he went to the south rampart and looked out at where the legionary buildings and what had passed as a mean little vicus burned. There were warriors milling in no order at all and Drust knew these were the ones who had not grasped what the war chief wanted or did not care; they were out for plunder and a handful had found legionary pack mules which they would use to gallop off in pursuit of more.

  Those that stayed, Drust had no doubt, had worked out that if you wanted to get your stolen beef, ale kegs, bales and boxes back to the hold you couldn’t manhandle mules over the Wall and back down the ditch. They were willing to capture the tower and free the gate.

  Only a handful knew what the war chief really wanted. They were the ones standing in a group directing others, the ones Manius was trying to aim at, rising swiftly and shooting in a fluid movement that let him duck before the stones showered.

  ‘Too far,’ he said, and Drust saw him count arrows and frown.

  ‘Save them,’ Drust advised, ‘for when they decide to try their luck with the ladders again. Keep them off the roof.’

  From below, Drust heard the voice of the legionary Falco telling them that was all the lime buckets they had.

  ‘There’s a ladle about somewhere,’ added Shambles helpfully, and Falco snorted derision.

  ‘They ain’t going to spoon it down on them, you arse.’

  Shambles finally got it and went to sit sullenly against a far wall as Drust and Dog clattered back down the ladder, almost into the arms of Julia Soaemias. She looked at Dog and smiled.

  ‘Now you look almost acceptable. Filthy, but acceptable.’

  Drust realised Dog’s face was covered in charcoal where he had wiped his sweat with a blackened hand; his death face was veiled under it. Not the nature behind it all the same, he thought. Not that.

  There was water in a butt, rain run-off from the roof. There was a foul bucket in a corner which Rogatus, half embarrassed, offered to curtain ‘for the Domina’s needs’. She merely smiled and said she had used worse – and the boy revelled in trying to emulate Shambles and hit it from a distance until Rogatus, inflamed, told Shambles to put his cock away in front of the Domina.

  They ate bread and hard, salted cheese while the warriors growled and prowled. Now and then one would hammer on the southern gate and the crowd he was with would laugh. It grew dark and Rogatus had torches lit; the air became even thicker.

  ‘Taking their time, these lads of yours,’ Sib muttered, and Rogatus glanced scathingly at him.

  ‘Coming in force, mavro, which takes time to organise properly. On foot, too. Heavies, not your silly little dog-riders with their little throwing sticks and spotted pelts. They will get here and then these skin-wearing sheep fucks are dead.’

  ‘Let’s hope they get here before the gate goes rather than after,’ Quintus answered.

  ‘Hist on that,’ Rogatus said, ‘don’t alarm the Domina.’

  Drust doubted the Domina could be alarmed by a closing circle of wolves, but he said nothing and they sat, listening to the torches fight them for the air; the shadows caused by their guttering danced madly on the walls and if the roof hatch had not been open, they’d have suffocated.

  Towards dawn, Drust and Dog went back to the roof, revelling in the crisp coldness. The air seemed pure and precious with every suck, heady as wine.

  The boy had been busy, too, as Dog pointed out. He had, at one point during the night, suddenly declared that Helios had had enough of this Land of Darkness. Soon it would bow to him, but it had refused and now he would turn his divine back on the denizens of this place until such time as they bowed to the Unconquered Sun. Drust had wanted to ask what the god meant by ‘denizens’ and if it included unwilling visitors, but he saw Dog’s raptured face and stayed silent.

  Now Dog looked at the puling sky, face upturned to a mirr of rain.

  ‘Helios has turned his back,’ he said. ‘Now these fuckers will feel the coldness of his wrath.’

  Drust thought this land had been feeling the wrath of coldness for long enough not be bothered by a little more, but the rain was fine by him; it would dampen the fire at the gate. Another idea occurred to him and he took the lid off one of the wooden kits. The others saw it at once and all the lids came off. Manius went to the hatch and called to Shambles for the ladle.

  ‘See!’ the legionary declared triumphantly, handing it up. Drust stirred the grue that was forming and warned the others to keep clear, bind their nose and mouth and not to let the fumes near their eyes. It helped that a cold rain wind swept icily over now and then.

  In the end it looked disturbingly like most of the stuff they’d eaten as gladiators being fattened for the fight; if he squinted, Drust could almost swear he saw leeks.

  ‘Will it work like this?’ Manius asked, peering cautiously.

  ‘Slaked lime,’ said Dog, licking satisfied lips as if he was about to spoon it up. ‘Ask Manius. It was part of what was in those fire pots we had.’

  Manius had taken off his head square and bound it round his nose and mouth and Drust now saw the still-weeping burn sores from Quintus’s fire pots. He did not say anything.

  The warriors worked out what rain would do to their fire and sent out the ram to hasten the collapse of the gate; Manius saw them coming, loping over the dark bracken, flitting like shadows over the revealing trampled snow.

  ‘Well,’ said Dog, ‘we have had the dancing dogs and the drumming bears – now comes the scheduled matches.’

  He grinned out of a horror of a black, streaked skull face.

  ‘Uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  They came two on two with the ram and one or two looked up, raised shields and expected arrows, for they had seen the archer. The slingers let loose and volleys of stones rattled and cracked against the ramparts to keep heads down. It worked.

  ‘Watch your hats,’ Dog advised, as Drust and Manius took one of the wooden kits; Drust swore he could hear it hiss and sizzle but that might have been the rain. He was more worried about his hands and face and eyes than his skull.

  They got it on the edge and tipped it, just as the ram hit the door with the sound of a dull bell – the
white paste poured down and there was a moment just after the splashing stopped when there were only shouts of outrage at having the stuff emptied on them.

  Then they started screaming and running. Drust risked a look, saw warriors hopping and sprinting everywhere, running half-circles, running full circles and slamming one into the other, shaking their heads, waving their arms, rubbing their melting eyes out of their sockets.

  The war chief shouted and waved; more ran up and the second kit went over. More men screamed and died, blood pouring out of seared mouths, eyes blinded and burning.

  ‘Now they will come for the tower again,’ Drust said, keeping low. No one doubted it, and when the first of the pole ladders clattered between the crenellations, the last kit went out and down and sent the climbers falling and writhing and shrieking.

  There were other ladders, though. Dog forced one off with his timber balk. Manius shot the first man up another one, taking him in the throat and sending him backwards with his arms spread wide as if he could fly. He couldn’t, and two more below him helped him fall.

  ‘Time,’ Drust called and Manius nodded, then slithered down the ladder into the shelter of the tower. Drust followed, half dragging Dog by the hem of his stained tunic, because he couldn’t be sure the man would leave the roof.

  They slammed the hatchway shut and dogged it, then took down the ladder and flung it in a corner. For a moment there was no sound but their own ragged breathing – then the boom of the ram on the door started up and, from above, another on the hatchway.

  ‘They will prise it up in the end,’ Rogatus said dully, but Quintus slapped his armoured back.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ he said with his big wide, white grin. ‘The door will have been put in by then so it won’t matter.’

  Rogatus favoured him with a sullen scowl, then lifted his big shield. ‘Form!’ he bawled out, so loud that it rang the ears. In a moment there was a short little line drawn up across the doorway, two or three steps back. Drust pushed himself into one corner beyond it, Kag into the other; they nodded at each other across the divide.