Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  Later…

  Matemas

  Somewhere in Africa, south of the Imperium

  Gorlades was late, but he had been late the year before and the one before that. Since the people he visited were going nowhere, he wasn’t concerned – but he knew they wanted what he brought, be it fish sauce, decent wine, the smell of Rome – and news.

  He came to fetch the animals these people trapped, filling in requests for the exotic from Servilius Structus, who had them from the curator of the Flavian, or the Faleria, or the Capua or a score of other venues. Last year it had been cameleopards. This year it was river lizard. Did not matter much, since they all ended up dead.

  He was greeted and looked at, as he did with them – they looked leaner, darker and more feral than ever but there were a handful of them and they had somehow made the surrounding tribals work for them. Gorlades knew the surrounding tribals as naked ebonies wearing beads, most of them sweat. They ate one another…

  He settled himself, they dealt with the ladings and the payments and then fell on the olives he brought, moaning with ecstasy. Finally, he told them that this might well be the last trip he made.

  The heads came up; the olives lost their attraction.

  ‘Servilius Structus has gone to his gods. Peacefully.’

  ‘He was old,’ Kag admitted bleakly. ‘Still…’

  ‘So we have to leave here?’ Drust demanded, more harshly than he had intended. It seemed inconceivable that Servilius Structus had died, just like an ordinary man. He felt cheated and bereft at the same time – he’d had questions he had always wanted to put to him and now never would.

  Gorlades indicated it was true with a delicate wave of one thin-wristed hand. His long spider fingers plucked another olive. ‘His business affairs are being wound up. I do not know who owns what now – but beasts for the harena is not an enterprise that is profitable.’

  They sat in silence, working the news around, each trying to feel something more than a wonder at what happened now. He’d been their master and patron, a facet of their lives for so long – they’d been relatively safe, relatively comfortable here because he had cared enough to work at making it so.

  Yet no one could mourn him like a lost father, even though they had his name.

  ‘Of course,’ Gorlades said suddenly. ‘I leave the juiciest news until last – there is a new Emperor.’

  ‘Again? There was a new one when last we met,’ Quintus said, and Gorlades acknowledged it. The name of that one had astounded them at the time, Drust recalled – Macrinus. Kag had looked at them all and said slyly: ‘I win my bet – he could swim after all.’

  ‘Alas, yes,’ Gorlades explained, ‘Macrinus has succumbed to the disease of all Roman emperors, it appears – he has become a god.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Fled from a battle with the forces of the new Emperor. Made it as far as Chalcedon, I am hearing, before he was killed. His son is also dead.’

  ‘Fuck him up the arse, then,’ Ugo declared. ‘Fortuna shows some style for that one. The Hood was a rancid cunny but he didn’t deserve to be sixed by that treacherous bastard while taking a piss in the desert. That was a bad death.’

  ‘There are few good ones,’ Kag growled back.

  ‘New Emperor?’ Drust interrupted.

  ‘Yes,’ Gorlades said, ‘Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus. They say he is the risen image. The son.’

  ‘Of Marcus Aurelius?’ Drust demanded, bewildered. Gorlades laughed.

  ‘No, no. Of the late Divinity Antoninus, known better as Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus. Better known as…’

  ‘The Hood,’ Kag finished. ‘What son? Drust kicked…’

  Quintus saw it and laughed, cutting Kag off and making him scowl.

  ‘The boy,’ Quintus explained. ‘The golden boy? Dog’s little Sun God is now an emperor. Gods above and below – he really was The Hood’s son after all.’

  ‘You think Dog is now a senator?’ Sib asked, and they laughed; Dog had left for Emesa long since but he could just as easily be dead as a senator. Yet the thought of that skull face swinging round all the old serious pomposities on the floor of the chamber, lecturing them on this or that – well, it reduced Quintus to a ruin of laughing and his infection spread to the others.

  ‘I have not heard of one with a face you described,’ Gorlades said, and then waved his flywhisk at Sib. ‘Nor the mavro with smoke in his eyes, Sib – I must say you fellows are as colourful as ever…’

  ‘Well,’ Quintus said when he had recovered, his grin as wide as the Tiber. ‘You know what this means, lads?’

  They stopped laughing and stared at him as he spread his hands into their dullness.

  ‘We can go back to Rome. It’s safe now.’

  ‘We can claim favour,’ Sib said, seeing it suddenly. ‘That boy loved us, remember?’

  Drust saw men struggling with the cameleopard, others loading a lion in a cage onto a two-wheeled cart. We can go home with this last load, he thought, and eventually said it aloud. It was Kag who found the truth of it, his grin a twist of bitterness.

  ‘Just one more pack of beasts from beyond the Wall.’

  Notes

  This novel is based on certain historical events. In AD 208, the Emperor Severus had ruled the Empire for fifteen years. He was now advanced in years, but had two sons, Antoninus and Geta. Antoninus was the elder and had been made co-emperor when he was young, which only added to his general level of brat. The teenage Antoninus ran the streets with a crowd of his peers, beating up anyone they met and wearing masks or cloaks with hoods – he had his nickname, Caracalla, after the same hooded cloak, though few if any used it to his face.

  In a last attempt at glory – and to instil some discipline and cooperation in his sons – Severus decided to bring all of Britannia into the Empire. In 208 he moved massive Roman forces and the entire imperial court to Eboracum (York), where it remained for three years. In a last-ditch attempt to force his sons to cooperate, he made Geta a co-emperor, which only split them into two rival camps of plot and counter-plot.

  Part of this festering court were the ‘Julias’: the Empress Julia, her sister Julia Maesa and Julia Maesa’s daughter, Julia Soaemias, as well as Julia Soaemias’s son, Sextus Varius. While Severus was North African and frequently trumpeted as the ‘first black emperor of Rome’, the actual impact of his skin colour probably had less to do with his strangeness to Romans than the fact that he came from outside the European heartland of Empire. His wife and all her relatives, who were essentially Syrian and priestesses of a strange Eastern cult of the Sun, only added to the unease.

  In AD 211, with Severus failing in health and Caracalla fretting that his father wasn’t failing half fast enough, the imperial court at Eboracum was ripe with plots and counter-plots, with brother against brother and followers of both in between.

  That year, Severus returned from an attempt to take command of the army which proved too much for his health. There is an account of him being made anxious by some encounter on the road into Eboracum and subsequently dying, possibly of a heart attack or a stroke, the same evening.

  Thereafter, the two brothers jointly ruled the Empire – until Caracalla, in front of his mother, knifed Geta to death and assumed sole control in AD 212. By AD 217 Caracalla was attempting a military victory against Parthia and was in Edessa when he stopped for a ‘rest break’. It was there that he was stabbed, possibly not by Macrinus, by then the Praetorian Prefect – though he quickly took advantage of it and made himself Emperor.

  Not long afterwards, the legions, whipped up by the formidable Julia Maesa and her relatives, were persuaded that young Varius, the image of Caracalla, was that dead Emperor’s son. Since Macrinus was making a mess of things, they quickly announced their support for the boy and, not long afterwards, Macrinus fled from a losing battle, was run down and killed.

  The boy-Emperor then decided on the title of Heliogabalus, or Elagabalus. He subsequently became one of the wo
rst emperors Rome had – Gibbon, for example, writes that Elagabalus ‘abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures and ungoverned fury’. Much of his bad reputation, apart from the usual debauchery you might expect from an ungoverned, overprivileged youth, was his disregard for Roman religious traditions and sexual taboos.

  Five years after his formidable grandmother, Julia Maesa, installed him as emperor she devised his assassination and replacement by his cousin, Severus Alexander.

  This, then, is the background. The foreground belongs to Hadrian and Antonine – the Walls of Britannia. There is, of course, no historical record of Julia Soaemias or her son being north of the Antonine Wall – or, indeed, being in Britain at all. However, since the Empire was ruled from York for almost three years, the court was there and anyone who was anyone in the imperial family would have been there, too.

  The ‘heroes’ of this tale are a band of amphitheatre performers, sometime gladiators, horse handlers and charioteers. These are not the sort of crowd pleasers who ended up on commemorative cups or had their names slathered all over Rome’s walls, and are far removed from Maximus or Spartacus. They are seedy, slightly desperate men out to try and raise themselves from the stigma of being former slaves and socially disgusting gladiators. Worse still, in their own eyes, they are dirt poor. Nor are these fighters the heroic legionaries who have made modern Roman tales so popular. Their stories are far removed from the works which climb inside the heads of Nero, or Trajan, or Marcus Aurelius, or any of the other emperors with a bit of documented history to them.

  They once blazed bright colours under a hot Roman sky – and should be remembered for it.

  Glossary

  Auctoratio

  Most gladiators were slaves but some were volunteers. The auctoratio was the swearing of a legal agreement by free men who joined a school for whatever reason and for a contracted period, by which they handed themselves over as slaves to their master and trainer, agreeing to submit to beating, burning, and death by the sword if they did not perform as required. Gladiators were expected to accept death. The familiar ‘we who are about to die salute you’ was used once only by gladiators forced to fight in a naval battle on a lake in armour and who expected that even if they won they’d drown. It was shouted as an ironic protest to Emperor Claudius, whose less well-known response was simply: ‘or not, as the case may be’.

  Dis Manibus

  A standard phrase of dedication to the ‘Manes’, the spirits of the dead. Effectively they are being warned that there’s another one on the way. In the gladiatorial amphitheatre it was an actual person, also known as Charun, the Roman form of Charon, the Greek demi-god who ferried the dead across ther Styx. Pluto, the Roman fgod of the underworld was also used. A man traditionally masked as someone from the underworld, accompanied by other masked helpers would stab the fallen to make sure they were dead and, if not, use a traditional hammer to make sure of it. Then others would hook the body by the heels and drag if off through the Gate of Death. Those who had survived left they way they had entered, through the Gate of Life.

  The Morning Shows

  Starting early, the arena served as a place of dramatic public execution, including damnatio ad bestias or obiectio feris (throwing people to the beasts). The victims were noxii, criminals, deserters, rebels, traitors, runaway slaves, and those guilty of various sorts of antisocial behaviour. In the 3rd century, few if any Christians were persecuted in Rome itself – but the provinces threw them to the lions in droves.

  The Ludi

  Games in general, and festivals involving games. Games could be private, public, or extraordinary – since gladiators were so expensive to train and keep they fought three or four times a year and, unless the giver of the games – the editor – paid for it, there was no fight to the death. Contests were, in fact, one-on-one and regulated by a referee, usually a former gladiator. Criminals and prisoners could be damned to fight in the arena, with the hope of a reprieve if they survived a certain number of years. These men were trained in a specialized form of combat. Others, untrained, were expected to die within a short time. There were also volunteer gladiators, ones who either enlisted voluntarily as free or freed men, or who reenlisted after winning their freedom. Even equites and, more rarely, senators sometimes enlisted. The word ‘gladiator’ simply means ‘swordsman’.

  Ludus

  The gladiator ‘school’. It’s estimated that there were more than 100 gladiator schools throughout the empire. New gladiators were formed into troupes called familia gladiatorium which were under the overall control of a manager (lanista) who recruited, arranged for training and made the decisions of where and when the gladiators fought.. There were gladiator schools near all the major cities around Rome and one of the ones which has stayed in history is that of Batiatus in Capua where Spartacus was trained. But the most famous gladiator schools of all were those in Rome: The Great Gladiatorial Training School (Ludus Magnus), which was actually connected to the Flavian Ampitheatre by a tunnel, The Bestiaries School (Ludus matutinus) which specialised in training those who fought, handled and trained the exotic wild beasts, The Gallic School (Ludus Gallicus), smallest of the schools which specialised in training heavily-armoured fighters and The Dacian School (Ludus Dacicus), which trained lightly-armoured fighters in the use of the sicari sword, a short curved weapon about 16 inches long.

  Ludum venatorium (venatio)

  The animal hunts - venatores were skilled men usually pitted against carnivorous beasts; bestiarii were animal-handlers and killers of less skill and finesse. Literary accounts and inscriptions often stress the numbers of animals killed. As in gladiatorial combat, men condemned to fight or perform in such games could sometimes win their freedom. By now, the 3rd century, the games had degenerated into vicious spectacle, with such crowd-pleasers as children hung up by the heels to see which of the starving dogs could leap high enough to get a bite, foxes let loose with their tails on fire and worse.

  Flavian

  Now better known as the Coliseum, it was, originally known as the Flavian Amphitheatre because of the Flavian family of emperors involved in it. Commisioned in AD 72 by Emperor Vespasian, completed by his son, Titus, in AD80, with later improvements by Domitian. Located just east of the Forum, it was built to a practical design, with its 80 arched entrances allowing easy access to 55,000 spectators, who were seated according to rank. The Coliseum is huge, an ellipse 188m long and 156 wide. Originally 240 masts were attached to stone corbels on the 4th level to provide shade on hot days. It was called the Coliseum because of a massive statue of Nero which stood nearby – later remodeled into the god Helios or Sol and sometimes the heads of succeeding emperors.

  Harena

  Literally – ‘sand’. Possibly Etruscan, which was believed to be the origin of gladiatorial contests.

  Missio

  A gladiator who acknowledged defeat could request the munerarius to stop the fight and send him alive (missus) from the arena. If he had not fallen he could be ‘sent away standing’ (stans missus). The editor took the crowd’s response into consideration in deciding whether to let the loser live or order the victor to kill him.

  Munus (pl. munera)

  The show (the term has a connotation of ‘duty’). It usually lasted for three or more days and, under special circumstances, for weeks or months. Provincial games rarely lasted more than two days, but Titus’s games in Rome for the inauguration of the completed Flavian in.AD80 lasted 100 days. The classic Italian munus plena included venations in the morning, various noontime activities (meridiani), and gladiatorial duels in the afternoon.

  Munerarius (Editor)

  The giver of the games. It could be a member of the nobler orders of Rome who put on the show privately (a rarity post-Republic) or in his official capacity as a magistrate or priest, or it was more likely the State, putting on Games whose dates and functions were set in the Roman calendar. Outside Rome, munerarii were generally municipal and provincial priests of the imperial cult, or
local governors.

  Omnes ad stercus

  Not strictly a gladiatorial term, but certainly used by them and liberally scrawled on walls all over Rome. Best translation is: ‘it’s all shit’, but ‘we’re in the shit’ can also be used depending on context. It is not, as internet translations coyly have it ‘get lost’ or ‘go to hell’.

  Pompa

  The parade that signaled the start of a gladiatorial munus; it included the munerarius, usually in some outlandish costume and carriage, the gladiators, musicians, a palm-bearer, and various other officials and personnel, such as a sign-bearer whose placard gave the crowd information about events, participants, and other matters, including the emperor’s response to petitions.

  Pollice verso

  ‘With thumb turned.’ Much debated signal, though most assume the thumb is turned down if a gladiator is to die. There are accounts of it being passed across the throat, turned to the heart etc etc.

  Pugnare ad digitum

  ‘To fight to the finger.’ Combat took place until the referee stopped the fight or the defeated gladiator raised his finger (or his hand or whole arm) to signal the munerarius to stop the fight.

  Recipere ferrum

  To receive the iron. A defeated gladiator who was refused missio was expected to kneel and courageously accept death. His victorious opponent would stab him or cut his throat. The referee made sure it was done properly and swiftly.

  Signum pugnae

  The signal given by the munerarius for combat to begin. It is not always clear what form this took, and it may have varied.

  Sine missione

  ‘Without missio:’ a fight with no possibility of a reprieve for the loser. Rare.

  Six

  Number tagged against a fighter’s name in the Ludus he was part of when he had died. Origin unknown – but to be ‘sixed’ means you are a dead man.

  Stantes missi

  A draw, with both ‘sent away standing’. Both gladiators walked away neither having won or lost.