They ate goat and flatbread, dozed a little until the heat left the day, then Drust stirred Kag and Kisa – and Praeclarum. Kisa did not like a woman coming with them and said so.
‘It is not a good matter. These Persians and Arabs have a different way of thinking about women, which does not include them as warriors or in the conversations of men.’
‘Then tell them not to fight or talk to her,’ Kag said.
Drust was surprised that Kag had no objections and seemed to be making a case for Praeclarum to come along. He did not say a word on it, just indicated for Kisa to lead the way. Praeclarum stayed silent too, but for all his attempts, Drust could not keep from at least one look and, when he did, he saw her smiling back.
Dura-Europos, though it sat at the fat end of a rich trade trail, was firstly a soldier’s town, and the legionaries with permissions were out looking for drink or whores, or stuff from the bazaar that would make their lot a little better. They also promenaded, because the fact of them being out with only legionary tunics and boots and a cloak against the night chill meant they were favoured, not because they were best, but because they were cunning and tough, which is what the army wanted.
They were mostly vexallations, detachments of legionaries who were five years into their twenty; and those five years had taught them a lot, Drust knew. Exercises after muster and paired boxing after that, to keep everyone on their toes. Breakfast out in the desert was always suci – last night’s stale bread soaked in posca laced with the many spices you could buy here. It came in a pail and was scooped up with the rutabulo, the ladle which hung on a hook above a bunk. They sucked it down quickly while making a packet of bedclothes and tunics and equipment into a just-so neatness that kept the Seniors happy and let you know where everything was, even in the dark.
They had learned to love eating puls, so virulently green with leeks it looked dangerous. They had learned marching, for marching was the legion. Long trudges with heavy yokes of equipment and, at the end of it, hurling javelins with a steady, unerring hand. Digging roads, making bricks, carpentering, all for a laughable pay before deductions.
Drust could have commiserated with any one of them on their lot because it was little different from what his own had been as a gladiator and a slave. Yet they would sneer at him and consider themselves several cuts above, those young-old men with rank still to gain.
Drust was now the wrong side of their age, still lean and hard though bits ached in the night chill. When he looked in any reflective surface he was no longer shocked at the lines and the furrows and the silvered fret around the slightly popped eyes, hardly ever experienced that pang when he remembered how the fan-girls had called him ‘handsome’ and how most of that had been replaced by a raw, scraped chisel to the jaw and cheekbone.
Kag had the same look, but his was sauced with the desert stare, a hooded and dark way of looking; folk didn’t like him because he looked sly, but most of that was sun and wind and a natural caution about what walked on their trail. If you are leaving tracks, Kag said, you are being followed. That was one of his many bits of lore…
Yet he was, in the very essence of himself, exactly the same as all the other Brothers of the Sand, even the newest, such as Stercorinus and Praeclarum. They had already shared their privations and the nag when their poverty permitted them to think on something other than survival. They did not often think of anything other than survival and now was no exception.
‘You think this Shayk Amjot will help us?’ Kag asked quietly, looking round as they moved, always watching, watching. ‘We have to get decorated.’
He had no argument from Drust; getting ‘decorated’ was an Army term they’d picked up, used for a fine art comprising work, cunning and theft. Do anything to make sure of a swallow of wine, a few coins and a complete kit; such theft was ignored by Seniors until someone was caught, and the punishment was equally ignored by the Tribunes. The Seniors staked the offender out on the mess table with a crucifixion nail through each palm. Then they took the bloody-palmed victim to the infirmary – and put him on punishment for being ‘culpably physically unfit’.
Shayk Amjot was, on the face of it, not the man for decorating two Roman men, especially rough-arsed ex-gladiators and former slaves. He was head of the Ouled Janir, one of the most bloodthirty of the tribes, had once led ghazzu – raids – of thousands against rivals, explored far to the east, forged surrounding tribes to his will by force or alliance, and even cowed the desert raiders who operated a protection racket over caravan traffic out along the Silk.
He had decided, when age crept on him, that he was safer with the Romans than anyone else and so had come to settle in this fortress city, where he made himself invaluable to the smooth running of a place whose walls were scrawled with obscenities in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Hatrian, Palmyrene, Parthian, Safaitic and Parsik.
He was now, as Kag growled, a bigger rogue than Kisa Shem-Tov – but he was a Roman-friendly rogue along the disputed Euphrates. Still, he added, soft and morose, Shayk Amjot is not the man to decorate us lightly. Nor was Dura-Europos the place for it, but it was all they had.
The locals treated the Army with fear, contempt and scorn, yet their miserable town had grown up because of the Army. There were fashionable streets – or ones that tried to be – but they were not for the likes of the Army. There were other, much less fashionable streets and they were assuredly not a place for legionaries, even less so for strangers trying not to look like them.
Kisa wisely stuck them to the labyrinth of small courts and streets where the Jews and Arabs lived. They went through dark and treacherous alleys of hovels, pooled with weak lights from shops offering Sweat, a drink made from dates, or where the wine was ludicrously cheap and made from grapes which had already been pressed two or three times.
They slid into these dark places, wrapping it round them like a warm keffiyeh, the desert scarf they wore looped round their necks – or, in Praeclarum’s case, round her face to hide that she was a woman.
In a place of planes and shadows, at a table pooled in a feeble spotlight, they stopped to waste some time, not planning to be too early. They ate tough pancakes with honey while Kisa got his bearings. Drust had an idea the little man wanted to make an excuse to slide off on his own, but made it clear he wouldn’t permit that.
The taberna, though it barely warranted the name, looked on eating-knives as accursed implements of the demons of the desert or the Romans, so they ate with fingers. The old man who served them still recognised them as Romans.
Kag laughed, but Drust was affronted; they wore tan robes and the baggy Persian trousers with once-white linen over-robes. They had curved knives shoved in their belts and Drust thought they looked like fierce camel-bothering desert pirates and should have been as anonymous as dust in that place.
‘You can’t fool an old stager like that,’ Kag said. ‘He has seen too many of us. Besides – if you add a throwing stick or two and a red cloak, we look like those dromedarii lads.’
It was true enough, but there was no balm on Drust, who drank the bad wine with pointed disgust until the lanterns were refilled to make the flame higher, allowing the insects to sizzle and the stolid-faced grizzlers to continue playing some game involving slapping counters hard on the board and yelling.
Then Kisa said it was the hour appointed and they got up and clattered the last of their few coins on the table; the old man appeared like a jnoun to sweep them up.
‘The house of Shayk Amjot,’ Drust said in Arabic and the old man squinted up at him and sucked missing teeth. Kisa scowled because he knew Drust was checking to see they were close to it, as Kisa claimed, and had not been led up some dark alley full of blades.
‘I would not go there. Your disguise is good, but perhaps not that good, authentēs. That is not a quarter for folk such as you.’
‘There are such places in every town,’ Drust answered sourly. ‘This holds nothing we do not already know about.’
The old man shrugged, rolling his head in that ambiguous gesture everyone knew meant anything from compliment and agreement to insult.
‘As you say, authentēs, you are the boldest of warriors and will not be put off even with a woman at your side. So follow this street to the end, turn left, then right, then left.’
They went, nodding polite bows to him, hands on breast and then, almost without thinking, resting one on the hilts of their daggers. This quarter, Kisa said, was the home of every disease, every vice, every crime, pitch-dark and full of lurking shadows. He warned them to pick a careful way around the holes and the clotted rubbish and everyone knew he was doing it to ingratiate himself after being so doubted.
One or two streets were lit with wan fish-lamps from square windows, but so narrow Drust could have stretched his arms and touched either side with his fingertips. He would have found miserable, low houses, half in ruins, a dim tunnel garlanded with shrieks and songs, wails and laughter.
Braziers glowed like rat’s eyes and women crouched round them against a chill night. A negress, glowing like ebony and almost totally naked, lay on a blanket beside a firepan and, almost wearily, waved at them to come into the hut behind her.
There were others – a woman with a face furrowed with the ruin of her life called out to them in Arabic, and a girl, who might still have been a child, spat scorn at her and shook thin arms with copper bracelets that rang like a dull alarm-iron.
Through it all slid dark shapes. In daylight they would be the Jewish traders in their blue robes, or the ragged mavro who carried burdens mules would balk at, or the Persian stone-breakers or brick-makers. At night they were hunters.
There were shifts in the shadows, but Drust knew those who sidled and watched had weighed up the group, seen the dress, the daggers and the numbers and slid back into the dark to look for easier prey.
There was a glow and then a sudden bright flare of light which left an after-image on Drust’s closed eyelids. The smell of hot iron reached each nose as they shouldered through the dark and the crowding shadows, the tang of it catching Drust’s throat and banging memories into him with every blow of the hammer on the anvil.
The forge was a fat brick cone where a big man pounded red iron and idlers watched his skill, blood-dyed by fire; folk liked to see such hardness shaped into something new and different, even if the magic here only made nails and hinge brackets.
‘The Street of Cheap Iron,’ Kag said pointedly and Kisa beamed. He nudged Drust and pointed to where they should go. They came to a wall of ornate mud brick and crenellations and followed it to where the light pooled in front of a solid door. Kisa rapped on it and a shutter opened.
‘Shayk Amjot,’ Kisa said, and Drust expected an argument about what he wanted at this hour and who he was. Instead, the shutter snapped closed and the big, heavy door opened on to a lit courtyard; a huge silhouette filled the entrance, as effective as the closed door had been.
Then it stepped to one side and Drust ducked under the shadow of it, glancing sideways to see a striped robe, a pair of arms crossed on a massive chest, like two piglets suckling at a sow. The face above it was broad, black and gleaming, like a version of Ugo carved in jet.
He found himself in the courtyard of a neat Persian house, where dark shapes in white robes crouched on the ground offering nods and smiles.
The giant Nubian closed the door, the falling bar on it sounding sinister as a knell. Drust looked at Kag, who merely raised an eyebrow; Praeclarum kept the face-veil in place and Kisa looked like he had watery bowels and couldn’t hold it in much longer. Then the Nubian led the way into a cloistered room where a brazier glowed. On the far side was a huge cloth hung from the wall, a great fantasy of gold embroidery on red and yellow in loops and swirls.
Men sat on mats, lounging in cushioned comfort, and the giant indicated for them all to sit – folk made room for them, shifting away with wary scorn. They were tribals, Drust saw, and armed to the teeth – which was fine if they kept to the house or the night. If they stepped outside in daylight with such weapons brazenly revealed they’d have the army to deal with, and he grinned ferally back into their fierce stares, letting them know how much he considered them wolves with drawn fangs here.
Yet there were a lot of them, and both men perched, aware that they were vulnerable as a clay cup under an elephant’s foot.
‘They are Tayy,’ Kisa said quietly. ‘The ones who attacked at the oasis.’
It might have been correct, but all Drust saw were hard-eyed, hook-nosed men with curved knives and blank stares.
They waited. At a respectful distance girls stood draped in veils and countless copper ornaments which rang when they moved. They sipped sharbat with elegant dignity out of tiny cups, which made Drust smile at the thought of them, like Roman matrons enjoying wine and gossip. Then he heard, with a shock like iced water, a soft chant:
‘Sleep and dream while the Lares watch over you…’
It was in Latin, a soft, dreamy line from a lullaby, and when Drust turned he saw the folds of a cloak and the half-shrouded face of a woman with dark hair, skin like milk and eyes that were misted and blue. She had been beautiful once, he saw, but her life had wrecked it, and she sang with the happy smile of someone who was elsewhere, nodding like a sleeper and singing the same line over and over. Half remembered from a childhood long gone, Drust thought numbly and watched her as she squatted and drew the words in the thin dust of the floor. She can write, he realised dully. A slave who can read and write and speak Latin…
‘Papaver,’ Praeclarum whispered. Drust thought it probable – poppy seeds had always been popular and easy to get among slaves, and Manius had used a quid of some African leaves and worse when he could get it. Anything to ease the harshness of life as a slave. Or even just life… Drust wondered where Manius was now and if he had his leaf.
There was a sudden peremptory command in a tongue even Drust found hard to follow, a dialect so guttural it sounded like throat-clearing. The woman stopped crooning and scribbling and stood up at once; a silence fell so that they heard only the rasp of their own breathing and a soft shush as the woman let the thin cloak slide from her head, then all the way down to her hips.
A flute and a drum started, insidious as serpent coils. The chimes when she moved seemed like a carillon – she wore a collar of bells at her ankles and wrists and the same dreamlike expression as she raised her hands over her head then proudly threw it back. She was alabaster and still shapely; for all her face showed her age, her breasts and hips did not and she moved in bright colours and sweet, heady smells.
She swung and circled and posed, then suddenly seized the offered torch from an offered hand and swung it round her head in broad circles, the flames lighting her with a bloody glow so that, for a moment, the hissing torch and the swaying veil seemed interchanged; Drust held his breath, expecting a disaster of fire.
It did not come. She swung the torch free, sank to a panting heap and stubbed it out with a final hiss on the tiled floor. A low murmur of applause rolled out from the watching tribals and then a soft tinkling rain of silver coins. Drust’s admiration changed to concern when he saw her try to get up and stagger; he moved swiftly and caught her arm before she fell.
‘Steady, girl,’ he said and she looked at him; just for a moment, the eyes cleared and she saw him – then Drust felt himself wrenched round by a powerful hand and stared into the twisted face of one of the tribals.
The man was squat, bent-nosed, pig-eyed with fury, and stank. He said something which Drust did not quite understand, though there was enough in it to make him break out in an angry flush, but it was the spit that did it and when it hit Drust’s chin he did not think twice about the reply.
He drew back like a strutting cock and drove his forehead into the bent nose, which promptly exploded with scarlet as the man reeled back, bellowing. He caught a heel and went flying, legs waving like an upturned beetle. Kag laughed.
Then there was uproar, shouts and roars and the hiss of knives coming out of scabbards. The three of them fell into a familiar stance, shoulder to shoulder and backing up to find the nearest wall, while Kisa whimpered and tried to make a ball on the floor; a table went over with a clatter and smash. Praeclarum tore the veil from her face and, for the first time, the locals saw it was a woman; the cries got louder and uglier.
Then a voice cut through it like a whiplash and Drust saw the Nubian stride in to dominate the floor. There was a descent to muttering until even that ended and only the man with the bloody face kept on, cursing and snorting breath in through the blood. Kisa, who had recovered, was translating as fast as he could because it kept him from shrieking and running.
Bloody Nose was bellowing about how the Roman had insulted the Tormentor and Shayk Amjot since she was his woman. Kisa waited, hissing the Nubian’s reply; since it was delivered in slow, insidious coils he had time.
‘Is Shayk Amjot’s voice raised?’ the giant asked silkily. ‘Is she his woman or yours? Is it his honour or yours? Are these his guests or yours?’
Bloody Nose had no answers save sullen anger and dabbing.
‘What are you, then?’ the giant demanded and he looked round them all when he said it. There was foot-shuffling now.
‘You are beetles,’ he answered the silence. ‘You are the desert wind, which has no voice save sighs. You are nothing until Shayk Amjot tells you what you are.’
Drust saw that it did not sit well with these men and privately thought any one of them would cheerfully cut Shayk Amjot’s throat – yet they were leashed, and he wondered what bound them, but the giant did not permit him to dwell on it. He held out an imperious curl of hand and said, ‘Come.’
They went and, as they passed her, Drust saw the woman had been ripped out of her dreams with the shock; her O of a mouth and wide almond-shaped eyes, kohled and painted as they were, looked like a lost child.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered in heavily accented Latin as he passed, and he half turned in time to see the glass shutters come down behind her eyes and then, plaintive as whimpers: ‘Sleep and dream while the Lares watch over you. I’ll hold your hand, so when you wake in the morning I’ll still be here.’
It tore him – them all, Drust saw, even Kisa, who knew the tune if not the words – with memories sharp as daggers. Drust doubted there was a child who had not heard that lullaby, which had been around since first there were Roman mothers.
The room beyond was dimly lit by ornate lanterns, pierced to allow soft shafts. There was a low table and cushions scattered round it; the man perched on one indicated for them to be seated and they folded into a worn familiarity.
A slipper of servants brought sharbat, and wine, cool and sharp; the brazier coals glowed and Drust saw the man – Shayk Amjot, he presumed – when he leaned across to peer myopically at them. He saw a wizened face whose grizzled, hennaed hair sprang out from under a round cap and whose beard was bright orange with it. There was dark skin, a withered neck, and a face slashed with age and venal cunning. Shayk Amjot had no marks about him that hinted at destiny or greatness – save for the eyes. They held a studied, controlled violence.
‘You sent me a message, Shayk Amjot.’
Drust deliberately called him by name, omitting the many polite honorifics, and it did not go unnoticed; the little man shifted on his cushions and then made a gesture that caused the shadows to shift. They coalesced into a new shape and both men looked at it.
A man in knee-length breeks and a simple tunic, the collar wrecked by sweat – an Army tunic, belted and with a dangling knife scabbard, Drust noted. He wore nothing else but solid Army boots and his face was round and bland, the colour of old olives and split across the middle by a waxed line of moustache that crept into a neck beard; it served to highlight a mouth whose lips were thin and unsmiling. He had eyes like goat droppings on a dune and smelled of nard, the perfumed oil legionaries preferred.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he said in Latin, which threw Drust, but Kag had got to it at once.
‘Uranius,’ he said and the man inclined his head. Shayk Amjot laughed, a high cackling sound, and Uranius managed a thin smile.
‘My apologies for the subterfuge,’ Uranius said, ‘but you have seen how my commander behaves. He does not trust me.’
He saw them looking round and smiled. ‘Do not concern yourself looking for the doors. If murder was in this it would be done before now.’
‘Explain,’ Drust said simply and Uranius took a breath.
‘I was not always as you see,’ he began bitterly. ‘Once, I was commander of the guards of the Emperor.’
‘Which one?’ Kag demanded and Shayk Amjot cackled again – it was as good a warning as any that he spoke Latin well enough and Drust hoped everyone had noted it.
‘Antoninus,’ Uranius answered, then waved a hand as if swatting a fly. ‘Elagabalus as was.’
‘You were purged,’ Kag interrupted, grinning with a complete lack of sympathy. It was Kag’s belief that if you fastened yourself to any star you only had yourself to blame when it hit the ground.
‘We all were,’ Uranius answered. ‘Some more than others – I was blessed by Fortuna to only end up here, staring at the arses of camels.’
‘Nothing wrong with camels,’ Praeclarum said. ‘In the desert.’
The Shayk leaned forward the better to look at her. ‘What is her name?’
Drust told him, not liking the new steer of this conversation; the Shayk clasped his gnarled hands together and grinned. Then he repeated her name in his own tongue. ‘Remarkable’, Kisa translated, which was close enough.
‘What do you want for this woman called Remarkable?’
Kag laughed and Drust thought it at least polite to tell him a sale was not offered and the woman was not a slave. The Shayk subsided sullenly, and Uranius looked at him then back to Drust.
‘The Shayk collects exotica,’ he said smoothly. ‘You may have seen one outside.’
‘The dancer,’ Drust said and Uranius nodded.
‘That was the spur for your being here,’ Uranius went on. ‘The message you have was carried by this woman – she is called Diwan.’
The Shayk chuckled. Drust knew diwan to be the name for a kilne, a Roman couch, but he said nothing; it was Praeclarum who said it, flat and blank.
‘A piece of furniture you lie on.’
‘Just so,’ Uranius said warningly. ‘However, that name is not the one she was born with. She knows Latin well enough to sing a lullaby – and write it down.’
‘Meaning what?’ Kag demanded.
Uranius shrugged, but Drust saw the man’s eyes hood like a gloved hawk.
‘Meaning Dog and Manius, who cannot read nor write, got her to pen their message and carry it a long way.’
No one answered, for it begged more answers, and they did what they always did and waited.
‘There is a new dynasty, from the House of Sasan,’ Uranius went on. ‘When the camel-herders who have nibbled off pieces of the old Parthian kingdoms are dealt with, the Sasan will be a new power in the East. For now, Rome has respite. This will help us.’
Drust saw Shayk Amjot’s narrow-eyed squint and thought that more of a true feeling for Rome than any of his bland smiles.
‘Us?’ Drust asked. Uranius nodded.
‘You are Drust – Servillius Drusus. The one with you who looks as if he would bite is called Kag. I do not know the woman, but Kisa Shem-Tov is known to me.’
Kisa had no graces left, not even one which permitted him to look embarrassed or ashamed.
‘You are sometime gladiators, though freedmen and citizens, I understand,’ Uranius went on. ‘The others of your little familia are Quintus, the mavro Sib, and the northerner, a barbarian from the Germanies called Ugo.’
‘Kisa is indeed known far and wide,’ Kag said, grinning viciously at the little man, who widened his eyes and spread his hands.
‘I learned this not from Kisa but in conversations with others – mainly the one you know as Dog, though he was Crixus to me. He went around veiled, which was wise, for his face is a horror.’
This was so we know he has seen Dog, Drust thought. The clever ink marks of a skull had been worked onto his face so that it looked like his head was inside out. Once seen, never forgotten. His heart was pounding with this confirmation that both of them were alive, but he tried to show nothing.
‘So you know Dog. And Manius?’
‘Manius is tall, with part of his face and an ear melted. No hair grows on that side.’
Drust nodded. That’s what Roman Fire does if you get too close, he thought, but mostly he was filled with the savage exultation that both of them were still in the world. Take that up the arse, Dis Pater…
‘Shayk Amjot informed me,’ Uranius went on, ‘that the woman came down from the north with a party of traders – the Silk Road is not one trail but many. She came from the place your friends went to, bringing their message for the Shayk – and, ultimately, you.’
Drust stirred. ‘Then we must speak with her…’
‘Her mind is gone,’ Uranius replied and then looked bitterly at Shayk Amjot. ‘She is now dependent on the mercy of the Shayk.’
‘If she has knowledge of Dog,’ Kag said viciously, ‘it might be better if the Shayk gave her to us.’
Uranius scowled. ‘Dog and Manius are as dependent on the Shayk. Some time before, a caravan came down the same route, from Hyrcania they claimed. They dealt in beasts and had one in a cage – a huge cat with fangs and claws.’
‘Tiger,’ Kag said with awe. ‘A Hyrcanian tiger.’
‘They are long gone,’ Kisa declared loftily and Drust laughed him into frowns.
‘The Shayk bought the beast,’ Uranius said. ‘We both saw the worth in it and so did the Emperor Antoninus – Elagabalus – when he came here from Emesa. The Shayk gifted it, but the Emperor asked me to organise a caravan to go and find more of them. That was the year before…’
‘Before Elagabalus was ousted in favour of his cousin,’ Shayk Amjot interjected in a high, slightly cracked flute of a voice, the Latin only slightly accented. Drust and the others could only stare until Praeclarum cleared her throat.
‘Why would you want strange cats?’
There was a moment of bewilderment, then the Shayk cackled and Uranius smiled thinly.
‘I want this woman,’ the Shayk said. ‘She is delicious.’
‘Touch one of your little rat claws on me,’ Praeclarum declared firmly, ‘and I will gut you like a fish.’
There was a moment of shocked silence and then the Shayk laughed and clapped his hands with delight. Uranius stepped into the coiling tension.
‘Such a beast is a rarity,’ he began, but Kag growled across him.
‘Such a cat is much more than that. It is a prize worth its own weight in gold – and it weighs a great deal.’
Praeclarum radiated a flush of embarrassment. ‘Does it have six legs? Wings?’
‘Stripes,’ Drust told her, watching Kag’s glaucous eyes, glazed with all the possibilities. ‘Size of a small horse and thought to have been hunted out of the world.’
He fell silent, for he had seen one only in his lifetime and was glad he did not have to face such a thing in the harena. Even dead it had been a fearsome engine of muscle and claw and fang that sent a chill through him.
Uranius saw that he knew the beast and nodded. ‘The Hyrcanian tiger has been hard to find for years – some said that there were no more, that the harena had devoured them all.’
‘I saw one when I was a boy,’ Drust answered dully. ‘Never since.’
‘The Shayk gifted this one to the Emperor Antoninus in honour of his name as the Sun God, Elagabalus, but in the way Syrians have it – Ilāh hag-Gabal, God of the Mountain. It died gloriously in the Flavian and the Emperor wanted more.’
Nicely fawned, Drust thought, flicking a glance at the impassive old man. Kag was less admiring.
‘So now the new boy-emperor Alexander wants the same,’ he said flatly and Uranius nodded.
‘He wanted a new caravan to follow the old across the Wall of Alexander and into the lands of Hyrcania,’ he said.
‘You sent an expedition there. You sent Manius and Dog.’
Uranius nodded. ‘Yes. Dog led it. Several score camels, packers, drivers, scouts, guards.’
Kag laughed aloud.
‘You gave Dog a caravan,’ Drust said dully. ‘And sent them off. And are surprised you never heard from them again.’
‘They probably went straight back to Antiochus and are now somewhere in Subura, enjoying the money they made from selling camels,’ Kag added.
Shayk Amjot slapped his knee and cackled out his laugh, nodding appreciatively. ‘So I said, so I said.’
That was when Drust looked sideways to catch Kag’s eye; this old pirate would not have trusted Dog and Manius with such a camel train unless he was not the one ultimately paying for it. Someone else had stood surety, someone powerful enough for Shayk Amjot to obey.
It would take no less than an Emperor, Drust thought.
The Shayk leaned forward. ‘We thought them dead and gone,’ he said. ‘Until the woman came with a message and we knew they were alive.’
Drust’s ears roared for a moment and his vision blurred. When it cleared he found himself looking at Kisa Shem-Tov’s hesitant smile.
‘You knew. You had it sent on to us.’
‘It was meant for you,’ Uranius corrected. ‘We made sure it reached you.’
Drust looked at Kisa Shem-Tov, who had stayed silent and shadowed and now blenched under the cold eyes. His smile was wavering thin.
‘So,’ Drust said, more to the Shayk than Uranius. ‘Now you know why we are here. Why are you?’
‘One camel for one man,’ the Shayk said suddenly, and Uranius blinked, taken off balance. Kag, on the other hand, merely grinned back.
‘Each one carries water in two amphora quadrantal – which should be covered – and as many congius waterskin as you can pile on it. They will always leak.’
‘We took four hundred men and six hundred camels down from Alexandria into the lands of the Himyar and Saba,’ he added. ‘Half the camels died, killed by the goat-fuckers of the desert tribes, and the rest of starvation and thirst – never let it be said that camels don’t need water. They need it to eat and if they don’t eat and are worked on long marches, they die like flies.’
Uranius was stunned to silence, but Shayk Amjot chuckled and nodded, satisfied.
‘These will do well, Uranius. You have told me true about them all save this Remarkable.’
Uranius shifted slightly. ‘I do not know much of her, save that she was purchased as a slave following the death of the wife of a lanista.’
Even Drust had not known this and could see that Kag was wide-eyed with wanting to know more. He did not have to wait long.
‘Something about a toothstick,’ he added, puzzled. There was silence and then the Shayk’s slightly amused voice cut it.
‘You killed a woman over a toothstick?’
‘Not mine,’ Praeclarum answered flatly and now it was the Shayk’s turn to be surprised; everyone else too – Drust and Kag stared open-mouthed, and Kisa crouched, his eyes glittering as he sucked in this new knowledge.
‘She did not like me using her toothstick,’ Praeclarum went on, trying to keep her voice level and seemingly unconcerned. She even spread her hands. ‘Some women are strange about such matters, it seems. We had shared intimacies in the times she demanded liaison – our mouths were on parts that… well, I need not become gross.’
Everyone stared; the Shayk licked his withered lips and Praeclarum smiled.
‘Yet she objected to my using her toothstick and grew angry when I pointed out how ludicrous that was. Grew angrier still when I asked if she shared one with her husband. Grew unreasonable when I said I was more at risk than her, given the poor state of his teeth.’
She stopped and frowned. ‘In retrospect, that was perhaps unwise. But I was angry.’
‘You killed this… woman… over a toothstick?’ Kag repeated disbelievingly.
Praeclarum spread apologetic arms. ‘Not “this woman”. Wife of the lanista – well, you are a slave, so you do as ordered. I did not kill her. She came at me with a silly little paring knife and I believe there was stored resentment regarding interests from certain other quarters – not encouraged by me, you understand – and this lanista’s wife did not care for it. Besides, it was the hot season, you understand, which makes everyone a little mad. I stepped aside and she went out the shutters, over the balcony, and fell into the street. Naked. Broke her neck. The lanista did not want to admit what had been going on, so it was hushed up as an accident – besides, female fighters were no longer of value, so I was put up for sale, to be bought by Quintus on behalf of this…’
She stopped, not knowing exactly what the group was, but it let Drust find some words.
‘School,’ he said dully. ‘We are a School. Of gladiators.’
Shayk Amjot smiled his knowing smile, which Drust was growing to hate. ‘Uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque necari. I will endure, to be burned, to be bound, to be beaten, and to be killed by the sword,’ he said, but now no one was surprised by what this Persian knew.
‘They are perfect,’ he added to Uranius then turned to Drust. ‘It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience, as your Caesar once said.’
Kag smiled, though it was cold. ‘Best of all to find those who can do both – but the Divine Julius was never one to endure pain, for all his bold words. He had folk to put up his tent on campaign after all. The only pain he suffered was a dozen daggers in the bowel and it did not last long.’
The Shayk beamed, wisely not showing his gums, and it annoyed Drust on a visceral level that a raised-up desert-walker should be applauding their education in philosophy.
‘You want us to go after this lost caravan,’ he said brusquely, ‘which seems to me to be pouring good money after bad. Besides, you have the Army here. Uranius has the best camels around – send him.’
Shayk Amjot nodded slowly, then laced his furze-root fingers as far as they would go and leaned forward a little.
‘Two desert legions exist in Rome,’ he said in his soft, high, accented Latin. ‘One is the lie of bold fighting men and the women who flutter at the feet of these dashing, romantic warriors of the sands. The other is the truth – that they are the scum of the world, controlled only by the vine stick.’
Drust heard Uranius clear his throat meaningfully, but Kag laughed.
‘No argument from us,’ he answered as languidly as he could. ‘Only the goat-fucking mavro of the desert are a match for their thieving and murder – and exceed all in treachery.’
Shayk Amjot growled and the room seemed to grow dark, as if the air had sucked the lamps low. Uranius cleared his throat warningly.
‘I was the one who organised and financed the original caravan,’ the Shayk declared, and Drust looked at Uranius then, saw in those eyes the lie of that.
‘I am willing to do so again for these beasts are worth four times their weight – more – in gold,’ the Shayk went on, and this time Uranius had veiled his stare so Drust could not be sure – but he smelled the lie in that too.
The Shayk suddenly paused and hauled out a coin, which he spun through the air. If he was hoping for them to fumble it to ring on the floor, he was disappointed – Drust flicked a hand and snatched it, then turned it over in his fingers.
It was an aureus, a new mint – not pure, because no coin was these days – but with a high enough gold content to be worth what it claimed. It had the Emperor’s portrait on one side and the Flavian amphitheatre on the other.
‘You see what it says?’ Shayk Amjot demanded.
‘P M TR P II COS PP,’ Drust intoned. ‘Pontifex Maximus Tribunicia Potestatis Bis Consul Pater Patriae. A list of titles.’
‘Priest of Rome, Consul of the People and the State,’ the Shayk corrected, and Kag grunted assent.
‘I hope for its brothers and in quantity,’ he growled. The Shayk seemed to agree with a flap of one hand.
‘You see the image of the Flavian?’ he said and now he was talking to Drust, who nodded. ‘What does it mean?’
‘The Emperor likes his games,’ he answered and the Shayk nodded.
‘You only put images on coins which make a statement to the people who will see and use them,’ he declared. ‘This is a new coin, minted by a new Emperor. Young Alexander Severus has, rightly, put his portrait on the front, so he becomes known while his coins are used more and more because they are trusted. Thus, he is trusted – you see?’
Drust did, though he did not like to be lectured on the Imperium Romanum by a camel-herder, however rich. For all that, he was curious. ‘And the Flavian?’ he asked.
‘Because that place has now become the focus of politics in Rome,’ the Shayk answered simply. ‘And thus the wider Empire. Feed the Flavian, you feed the people of the Empire with what they need, you feed the middle class and they feed the ones on the Palatine.’
‘The Flavian was damaged by the whim of Vulcanus,’ Uranius added meaningfully and Drust nodded; they’d all known of the fabric cracks that had closed the entire edifice down after the earth had shifted. It had reopened but had been littered with builder’s mess for a long time after.
‘Five years it took to repair,’ Uranius confirmed flatly. ‘Young Alexander Severus, all of fourteen in the year the Flavian was declared repaired, decided he needed that glory, being newly elevated over the bleeding body of his cousin. Or rather, his mother did. The growlers of the Army are paid in silver – but the important ones are paid in gold. So he has stamped his credentials all over the Flavian with this – look at me, who provides your entertainments.’
No one spoke for a moment, then Praeclarum cleared her throat.
‘So the Emperor, this little boy, wants a fancy beast to show off in the Flavian he now claims as under his own special protection?’
‘Get enough of them for one brilliant show,’ Kag growled, ‘and it will make his name ring. Hyrcanian tigers are the least of what the Flavian would eat – especially if it was a delicacy not seen for a generation.’
‘We go all that way for beasts that will be slaughtered?’ Praeclarum exclaimed. Now it was the turn of Kag and Drust to stare at her scornfully, these men who had scoured the lands for every exotic animal to feed the devourer that was the Flavian amphitheatre in Rome. What did it matter if you could no longer find Nubian lions or the Duba of Nandi? There were always new beasts… anyone in any village would confidently tell you about dog-headed people two hills over.
‘These tigers are giants,’ the Shayk said. ‘Noted for their viciousness and the length of their claws.’
‘Which brings us to the meat,’ Uranius went on, sharp and bitter now. ‘We were told Manius and Dog were dead – until now.’
Drust looked from Uranius to the blandly smiling, sly Shayk. There was a conflict here, he saw, which made the entire scheme even less attractive – they had had enough of such, and the last time they had accepted one it had driven them like a nail into bigger plots.
‘We offer you a share in the wealth of whatever beasts you recover,’ the Shayk added smoothly. ‘Not to mention the opportunity to save your lost friends, so clearly alive and in need of rescue.’