The harshest truth of the moment was Sib. They brought him down to the scooped-out grave in the first stars of dark. Drust saw Kag’s face and it came to him that he had shrunk and that they all were empty as withered wineskins.
Kag and Quintus lowered Sib as gently as they could into the shadow beside a gathered pile of stone that they would tomb up round him. The others seemed reluctant to either come or go, Drust was thinking, and not just the strangers, the ones who had come with Manius and Dog. Ugo and Praeclarum and himself stood around for a moment and gradually, one by one, those who had meant something to Sib moved closer to the body. Not so much to look, Drust saw, as to say something final, to him and to themselves.
Dog, his face made into a bloody parody of death by torchlight, lifted one hand, as if waving farewell, then let it fall limply to his side.
‘Gods curse it,’ he said, looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left.
Then Manius came up and looked down into the dead Sib’s face, left unwrapped. He spoke directly to him, as though he were alive.
‘May the gods above and below watch over you.’
Praeclarum squatted down and reached and took out Sib’s hand, sat there for a long time holding the dead hand in her own and looking intently into the dead face, and she never uttered a sound all the time she sat there.
Finally, she put the hand down, reached up and gently folded the last of the cloth over the face. And then she got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.
Kisa crouched and threw a handful of dust into the grave, a little hissing rattle of sound that seemed, somehow, louder than a drumbeat. The others, the strangers to them, stood politely and one or two helped stack the stones. Finally, Quintus placed the one with the flat side and an inscription that said Sib’s name and then ‘VI’. Those who knew that was the term for a fighter who had lost and died would know a gladiator lay there.
They sacrificed a horse, the one Ugo had mouth-smacked which made it easy to catch, and Drust tried to find Mars Ultor or Jupiter in the blood smell, but saw nothing to suggest any god watched. Saw nothing at all, heard only the anguish in men’s voices, tasted only the stink of death. Ugo wailed, Stercorinus mumbled prayers, Praeclarum sobbed quietly where she thought no one would hear and yet, when Drust wept, it was not for Sib.
Later, in the firelit dark, Drust and Kag met Manius and Dog, though it was not anything like the way Drust had envisaged it.
‘We arrived too late,’ Dog admitted.
‘Timely enough,’ Kag replied, picking his teeth; they had eaten fried goat and greens, the sort of food they had not seen in a while. Grief made it taste of ashes, but they were gladiators and ate what they could when they could get it. There was wine, thin and harsh but still wine, a fire and a surround of more men than they felt comfortable with. The men Dog led, it turned out, were not his but caravan guards for a man called Yalgoz Bashto, or so it seemed when Manius said it.
‘You will meet him tomorrow,’ Dog added. Drust looked at him, trying to see past the ink-marked death to the face beneath and realising it was no less a mask. Dog’s eyes, all the same, held something rarely seen, though Drust knew it – fear. He has walked into deeper water than he can handle, he thought, for all his bravado.
‘Is this Bashto the reason we are here?’ Kag demanded.
Dog made an ambivalent gesture and Kag spat in the fire. ‘Do not start with us, Dog. Sib is under the ground and we have all had a hard time reaching here, all because of a message you sent by some madwoman. I will not suffer more of your lies.’
‘Madwoman?’ Manius interrupted, leaning forward. ‘What happened to her? Is she alive?’
‘Last we saw,’ Drust answered, ‘she dances for Shayk Amjot and eats poppy.’
Manius growled in the back of his throat. ‘He was supposed to care better for her than that. She is Roman. She has a name…’
‘If it is Julia you can sod off over there,’ Kag growled. ‘When you reach it, sod off further…’
Drust laid a quietening hand on Kag’s arm, looking at Manius and seeing lines and frets that hadn’t been there before. There was a scar too, which added nothing to the side with crumpled flesh and no ear. Manius saw him look and touched the place briefly, then managed a wan smile.
‘Overseer whip,’ he said, and now Kag saw what Drust was seeing.
‘What happened?’ he asked. Manius shook his head.
‘Mines. I survived,’ he answered and Dog cleared his throat and then spat it out.
‘Her name was not Julia, it was Luculla. She was a slave but one who could read and write.’
‘So we guessed,’ Kag replied, still looking at Manius, who would not look back. ‘We found a grave, too, of a woman. It had a Roman inscription on a stone which is why we dug it up. That and we thought it might be one of you.’
Manius wiped his face. ‘You must show me that by and by. There were two Roman slaves, Luculla and Macra, and we sent them out – the one who made it must have stayed long enough to bury the other. That was brave. That was the dancer who eats poppy, though she was more than that once.’
‘More than a clever slave who dances,’ Drust said levelly. ‘What would that be?’
‘Handmaiden to a high-born of Rome,’ Dog answered. ‘A dresser of hair, applier of make-up…’
‘Do not tell me this is all about women,’ Kag said warningly. ‘Not again, Dog. I knew it was not about tigers – but women?’
There was silence and then Dog laughed, though it had no mirth in it. ‘Talking of women,’ he said, ‘I see the Brothers have a sister. She is no looker and I saw her fight, so I am supposing she was once of the harena.’
‘We were all of the harena once,’ Drust replied flatly. ‘They call her Praeclarum.’
Dog’s head tilted a little, playing shadows over the horror of it, making the skull grin. It was clear he had heard something extra in Drust’s voice and Drust was angry that he had revealed it.
‘Remarkable,’ Dog said, rolling the name in his mouth. ‘Now there is a name – what is the other one called? The lean one who looks like a desert pole-sitter who fell off his perch?’
Kag told him and both Dog and Manius chuckled. ‘I would not say Little Shit to his face,’ Manius added, ‘when I am within the arc of that blade he carries.’
‘There is also the Jew,’ Drust pointed out. ‘His name is…’
‘Kisa Shem-Tov,’ Dog finished. ‘Yes, we know him. Surprised to see him here, all the same. I did not think he had that much sand in him.’
‘I kicked him into it,’ Drust said blankly. ‘He works for Uranius – but I am guessing you knew that, and that you are not thinking you are here for what Shayk Amjot seeks. Enough of trying to put this talk on another path – what are we doing here?’
Dog agreed. ‘We have some new faces too,’ he added. ‘You will meet them by and by. But I am heart-sorry for the loss of Sib. Do you remember the time he drove that donkey cart round the forum, made it seem like a four-in-hand in the Maximus?’
‘Or the time he beat that big warrior beyond the Wall, using only saplings? Like a whip. Beat him bloody.’
Manius laughed softly at the memory.
‘Or the time he and you walked round the harena in the lunchtime heat,’ Kag said to Manius, soft as venom, ‘and he threw little balls with tokens in them into the air for you to shoot open over the crowd?’
No one spoke while the air coiled; a rogue breeze flattened then fanned the fire.
‘Used that to good effect with those naptha pots north of the Britannia Wall,’ Kag went on, silken vicious, ‘though he mistimed it.’
They saw Manius lift one hand to the shiny scars plating one side of his face, to the ear that was a lump of wasted gristle. Those clay pots of fire, even a cat-lick of it, were terrible.
‘There was always the idea that he had timed it perfectly for what he intended,’ Kag added.
‘There was no proof of that,’ Dog interrupted sharply. ‘Manius bore him no malice. And speak no ill of a dead Brother, Kag.’
Manius uncoiled and moved softly off into the shadows. Silence fell, the ice of it seeming to dim the fire to dying embers. Eventually Dog shifted and spoke.
‘They dragged him out of the undercroft of the Flavian,’ he said flatly. ‘You remember? He shoved Sib to safety and put himself in danger.’
‘We thought him dead,’ Kag muttered. Dog laughed. They all sat and remembered The Hood, Caracalla, Emperor of Rome and if you are measured by the stature of your enemies, Drust thought bitterly, then we were ranked indeed.
‘The Hood was never going to make such an easy exit for one of us,’ Dog went on. ‘He sent Manius to the mines, all the way back to Britannia, to the gold mines at Luentinum, a wild place where all those Druids once came from. When Elagabalus took the purple I found Manius again and got him out – didn’t expect him to be alive let alone fit. Seems he found a talent for repairing the hydraulic machines, which saved him from dying of the wet cough or under a pile of roof-rubble.
‘Seven years he spent there. Never ask him about it,’ he added, putting his hands on his knees and levering himself up. He wore good boots, Persian trousers, a decorated tunic and over-robe, a linen head-cover that reached to his shoulders, a fancy curved knife thrust into a cloth waistband.
He and Manius had done well, Drust thought, and said as much to Kag when they had walked alone into the shadows.
‘So it would seem,’ Kag answered. ‘Manius deserves it, for sure. Seven years – longer by far for a man used to the open desert and the big night sky.’
He stopped and shook his head, half admiringly. ‘And they still have told us nothing about why we are here.’
Drust had realised it long since, but he was dull with unease, with the nag of something that finally could not be contained. He vomited it up while Kag listened.
‘The arrow, the one in the face; it came from behind me, over my shoulder, close enough to feel the wind.’
Kag blinked. ‘He had two in him.’
‘The one in his face, the one that…’ Drust stopped, unable to go on.
Kag hawked and spat in the fire. ‘He had one in his chest that was not likely to be removed without killing him. What are you saying?’
‘That it came over my shoulder, from behind.’
‘There was fighting everywhere.’
‘Perhaps,’ Drust echoed dully, then locked eyes with Kag. ‘Or perhaps Manius had spent a long time brooding in the dark hours spent in that mine, or the time since. We left him behind in the undercroft of the Flavian, remember, and it cost him seven years in a dark hole.’
‘He left himself behind,’ Kag said sharply. ‘It was bravely done and we all thought him dead at the time.’
‘Better, perhaps, if he had been,’ Drust said softly. ‘Sib always said so. Said he should never be allowed into the world because he was a demon.’
‘Sib was many good things, but he was hagged by gods and demons both,’ Kag replied.
‘He tried to kill Manius that day out beyond the Wall. Tried to kill him in a rain of fire…’
‘No one knows that for sure,’ Kag fired back. ‘Only Sib and now no one at all.’
‘Manius does,’ Drust said, ‘and now he has answered it.’
‘No one knows that either,’ Kag hissed, looking right and left as if someone might be listening. ‘Gods above and below, Drust – do you hear what you are saying?’
‘I hear it,’ Drust said sharply, then sighed, feeling a crush on him, like he was buried under stones. Like he was Sib.
His mood was no better the next day and everyone saw it, was wary of it and left him alone, though Praeclarum kept shooting him assessing looks as they moved up the river. They had camels now, which made most of them groan, but Dog was anxious to put distance between themselves and the fight.
They followed a track slender as an old thread and strewn with grit until the night closed in, when they moved back to the river. The banks here were less steep, had more trees, and the river was narrower and musical over the stones. They hobbled and unpacked and lit fires.
‘Ahead lies a small place called Umut,’ Manius said and widened the grin. ‘It means “hope”, because that is all the folk there have to live on. Beyond that way is the caravanserai, which is seasonal.’
A brace of shadows closed in on the fire, one of them eating, tearing hunks from a loaf. Dog looked up at them and grinned.
‘The big one is called Mouse. That is how his name sounds to us, because he comes from well up the Silk Road, east. He was also a fighter, a wrestler. He speaks decent Latin and better Greek, but cannot read nor write in any tongue. He eats everything, all the time.’
Mouse was as big as Ugo, who appraised him professionally, but a wrestler who was well out of training. He had a belly, decent breasts, big shoulders and arms with strength in them, enough to let Drust know he would have been formidable when at peak. His face, though, was all of the moment, for it was the Quirinal boxer in the flesh.
‘I do not eat all the time,’ he said in a slightly lilting voice, pitched too high for a man that size. ‘I eat when hungry.’
‘Which is all the time,’ the other man said. ‘Except when sleeping.’
This one was introduced as Mule, which was Army, because they carried so much on a march. Drust was certain that the man carried a signaculum in a leather pouch under the neck of his stained tunic and remembered the big Thracian commander, Maximinus, saying how that mark of a legionary was what deserters discarded only at the last. Under his Persian trousers, Drust was sure he would see legs scarred from a centurion’s vine staff, but now the man had hair done in the Persian style, little braids fastened with beads and trinkets.
‘So,’ Dog said, ‘you will be wanting to know why you are here.’
‘You think?’ Kag answered, scowling. ‘What gave it away – all the questions about why the fuck we are here, perhaps?’
‘Be nice to know what Sib got sixed for,’ Ugo rumbled as Mouse squatted beside him and indicated the uneaten portion of his bowl.
‘You want that?’
‘It concerns the secret of Rome,’ Dog said, and Drust looked meaningfully at Mouse and Mule and then Kisa. Dog smiled.
‘All Brothers here,’ he said and Drust acknowledged it.
‘The secret of Rome?’ Kag prompted.
‘Where to get a decent hot pie at midnight,’ Manius growled.
‘Or a clean whore under the Flavian during Ludus,’ Quintus added, grinning like a roasting grill.
‘Or how to sit on the Hill and keep your laurels on your head and your head on your neck,’ Drust offered. Dog smacked his palms and pointed at Drust as if he had made a killer point in a Senate debate.
‘Close – you have not thrown the Dog.’
That had a few laughs, but mostly folk waited.
‘It involves a woman,’ Dog went on, and Kag flung up his hands with an expression of disgust.
‘I fucking knew it. Gods above and below, Dis fuck me in the arse sideways with his hammer – a woman. It is always some woman with you – you are worse for it than Quintus and at least he fucks them, not sticks them on a pillar and bows.’
‘Are you finished?’ Dog asked mildly.
‘Not hardly. I thought since the last one you worshipped got sixed along with her marvellous boy you’d have learned a lesson. It seems…’
Drust leaned forward, laid a hand on his forearm. He felt the tremble there and saw the anguish and rage in Kag’s face. It wasn’t about women, or Dog or Rome’s secrets, he realised. It was about Sib and, perhaps, Manius.
Praeclarum appeared, scowling, and dumped her pack.
‘They say these sand roaches have a thousand names for camels,’ she spat. ‘I hope none of them is “cunt” because I have decided that is the name of the one I am riding.’
‘They do,’ Mule answered sagely, pouring wine into a bowl and offering it to her. ‘One for a beast which drinks once a day, another for one which drinks twice a day, and yet another for…’
‘… one which drinks three times a day,’ Kisa finished with a snort. ‘I see where this camel is going.’
Mule shook his head with sorrow.
‘You do not,’ he answered. ‘No camel drinks three times a day – but the best ones drink once every three days and there is a name for them.’
He stopped, frowning. ‘I know them all, but there is no point in telling you – it would be like pouring into an overfull cup.’
Kisa scowled but it was only for show. Mouse chuckled and called Mule a useless fart but Drust saw that it was a worn rut of old friendship and heard Sib and himself – and others – echoing such scathe from the dark of the past. He felt tired and old.
‘Is there a name for the man-beast that humps camels?’ Praeclarum snarled. ‘Is it the same as for the Army runaway who cared for them once, I wonder? Did you run off from that Palmyran lot in Dura?’
Quintus and Kag and Mouse made awed sounds of admiration, while Mule managed a grin and acknowledged the stroke from Praeclarum. Kag had had time to recover and Manius had seen it.
‘Tomorrow you will meet Bashto,’ he said. ‘He is a good trader and most of the men here are his – the camels too. He is the one who knows Shayk Amjot and got us all in this.’
‘In what?’ Drust demanded. ‘What is the secret of Rome?’
‘The true name of the City,’ Dog put in. ‘Some say it is Hirpa. Some Evouia or Valentia, but they are all wrong. I have said those names and I am still alive, unlike Soranus, who died for violating the prohibition for saying it aloud in public.’
‘Soranus?’ demanded Drust.
‘Quintus Valerius,’ Kag put in, which made Kisa blink a little; but Kag knew some scholarly matters, courtesy of having been bodyguard to a young squit of the nobility and making sure he went to lessons. Kag had learned more.
‘A poet in the time of Sulla,’ Kisa interrupted and Kag nodded agreement.
‘More to the point – a tribune of the people. They crucified him in Sicily, but I heard it was politics that got him nailed up. I always thought it was his bad verse.’
‘The City’s true name exists,’ Dog said. ‘Armed with it, enemies can capture it, or so it is believed.’
‘The City has been captured before – did those sheep-shagging Gauls have the name, then?’
Quintus was grinning with his mouth only, but Dog merely tilted his head a little, unconcerned.
‘Gauls sacked the City, all but the Hill, and then those defending the Capitoline came out from behind the walls and kicked their arse,’ Kag said thoughtfully. ‘So they did not conquer the City.’
It does not matter what we think, Drust saw. Such a belief would be a powerful tool for anyone looking to send men against the Empire, and he said as much.
‘Uranius found this out and now wants us to rescue the word and return it to safety,’ he added.
‘Rescue the word? Is it imprisoned, then? Shackled in a grammarian, perhaps?’
Quintus laughed at his own joke, but no one followed, too fascinated by what Dog was about to say.
‘The woman,’ Kag said suddenly, and heads turned to him. Dog nodded admiringly.
‘The very same. Empress of Rome is more proper, though.’
‘Oh Bel-Shamun, you show me the way of it. I stand ready.’
He did not say much, but when he did it was always a show-stopper and all the heads turned to where Stercorinus stood like a stele at the edge of the fire. No one laughed and he said nothing else, so Dog told them the rest of it – the woman who knew the secret name of the City had been wife to Elagabalus. Twice. And her name was Julia.
When he said this, everyone who remembered the Severan Julias groaned. There had been a gaggle of them, all relatives of the Sun God boy Elagabalus, all priestesses of the religion in Emesa, and all deadly. Mother, aunts, grandmother – they were all regal and beautiful and poisonous. Now the one who was mother to the current Emperor Alexander was the most deadly of them all.
Kag said as much, almost desperately, but Dog just spread his hands.
‘It’s a name, that’s all.’
‘So is the secret one for the City,’ Drust spat back. ‘Yet here we are because of it – and one Brother less.’
He fell silent after that, feeling ruffled as a cat in a storm. He knew of this new Julia – Julia Aquilia Severa, daughter of Quintus Aquilius who had been twice consul under Caracalla; the ‘Severa’ praenomen had been given to her when she married Elagabalus. He had divorced his first wife to do it.
It was just one of Elagabalus’s scandals – Julia Aquilia was a Vestal and, by tradition, should have been buried alive for breaking her vows of chastity and virginity. Worse than that, the boy-emperor symbolically married Vesta the goddess at the same time; he was full of shit like that, Drust remembered, even when he was nine and being rescued by us from the Land of Darkness beyond the Walls of the north.
In the end, his grandmother Julia Maesa, the one who had engineered him into the purple cloak, got it all revoked and made him marry a sensible choice. Not long after, he divorced that wife and went back to living with Julia the Vestal, presumably no longer virgin.
‘The grandmother got rid of her at the same time she got her grandson and his mother assassinated,’ Dog ended and Kag blew out through pursed lips.
‘Then your sometime Empress would be dead too. They wouldn’t have missed her.’
‘I was her guard,’ Dog said simply and Quintus flung back his head and laughed like a howl of a wolf.
‘You let her live.’
‘I did as I was told – it is the worst curse of the gods to kill a Vestal save by burying her alive in the Temple, and that would have taken too long for grandma, who feared people might agitate over it. She arranged for the Vestal Empress to go to Emesa and be sold as a slave.’
‘So where is she now?’ Drust asked, feeling a sick slide of apprehension even as he said it.
‘The city – well, that’s what they call it here – of Asaak. A good camel ride from the caravanserai we will reach tomorrow.’
‘She is a slave?’ Praeclarum asked and Dog looked at her; Drust was pleased to see she didn’t wince under that Dis gaze.
‘She is no slave in Asaak,’ he said, ‘but our new Emperor Alexander wants her back.’
‘Is he next one up on the mare?’ Ugo growled. Dog spat warningly in the fire.
‘She is an Empress and a Vestal. All of those daughters of Vesta know the secret name of the City – but they stay cloistered, so it is never a problem.’
‘Now it is? What does our boy-emperor fear? The Parthians are beaten into the ground.’
Dog shook his head sombrely. ‘They are fighting each other – but the old king is dead and this new one, the Sasan, calls himself shahanshah, King of Kings, in the old way of the Persians. When he finishes cleaning out the house, he will turn on Rome.’
‘So young Alexander sent Uranius and Uranius sent you,’ Drust said.
‘More or less. Uranius can’t trust anyone out East, but the Emperor trusts me. I helped kill his rival, after all.’
Drust stared. The boy Dog had gone wide-eyed years before over the golden priest of the Sun God – and his mother Julia Soaemias. They had all spent a long, hard time rescuing that pair because of Dog, and Drust remembered the mother, an elegant sway of perfume and sharp intelligence. She had not deserved to be dragged by the heels through a Praetorian camp – but he had not known Dog had been involved.
Neither had anyone else from the old Brothers; Kag just stared and shook his head, Quintus spat in the fire. Ugo lifted his hands up and then let them fall as if they weighed too much.
‘So you have tracked her down. You have the men – why are we here?’
‘We had the men,’ Dog admitted, ‘but they ran off. Camels died. Raiders. Sickness.’
‘So you called us.’
‘We met this Bashto before we were too weak to be unimpressive. He knows we want a captive Roman woman, but not why, and he wants the head of the ruler of that city. Seems the ruler taxed too heavily, Bashto argued and now his trains are banned from trading. We tried once but only managed to release two of Julia Severa’s slaves – the one in the grave and the one Shayk Amjot treats so badly. It was them we sent with the message.’
‘Jupiter’s cock, Dog,’ Kag said wearily. ‘You are tiresome in the way you arrange your life.’
Dog spread his hands in supplication. ‘I need you because you are unknown – all Bashto’s men are known, as is Mule, Mouse and others. My face is… obvious. But you can get in and out with the Empress and the head of Farnah-vant.’
‘It means “full of splendour” in the Persian tongue,’ Kisa said softly.
‘Don’t give a fuck for it,’ Kag snarled. ‘Don’t want any part of it. What’s in it for us, Dog? You are always doing this – we got nothing from the last Atellan farce you put us through. Unless you count exile as a gift.’
‘You got citizenship,’ Dog fired back. ‘A copper plate to say so.’
‘You sold all of our copper plates for a horse,’ Ugo pointed out. ‘Besides – everyone got made a citizen not long afterwards, by decree of Caracalla.’
Drust held up a hand and waited for the quiet. ‘We are here. One of us lies in a tomb. If we rescue this Empress and get her to safety, then riches will follow, sure as rain follows cloud.’
‘Exactly,’ Dog beamed.
‘As ever with these affairs,’ Stercorinus said into the silence that followed, ‘it’s how the stroke is done, not the death that follows.’