Simple enough. Fetch back a woman and child captured by bandits. ‘The Epidi,’ Julius Yahya had added, rolling the words round as if it was a fine wine. ‘They are all bandits. A certain woman must be returned; she has a child and will be made biddable by threat to it, so you should bring it too. A boy. Both are slaves – do not listen to anything to the contrary, for the mother will say anything, of course. You will bring them back to one Kalutis in Eboracum, which I believe is what passes for a city in Britannia Inferior – the whole Empire is now ruled from it until the Emperor is done with the skin-wearers. Verus will also be there and will take charge of the woman and child and pay you all. You are then advised to enjoy the sights of the Empire, anywhere but Rome.’
Bandits. What a fine word that was, Drust thought, summoning up a rough romantic lot, all swagger and bravado. The Epidi were far from that. They did not exist, of course, save as a name Romans had given to the Blue River People, the Stone Clan, the True People of the Black Bear and all the others, far up to the northern forests. Drust’s people once, though they were worse than strangers now – he had been in his mother’s arms when taken. He did not think this was why he had been chosen.
The Army was there already, suffering and tramping miserably round bogs and marshes and dark forests, trailing a snail slime of blood and bodies. Still, there were a lot of them and some brave and skilled men could surely be found for an enterprise like this, but it seemed the matter had to remain among as few people as possible.
‘Then pay the ransom,’ Kag had said. ‘There is always the chance these bandits will honour it and release this woman alive. Political, was she? A chief’s daughter held hostage to fortune?’
‘The man who took her has dared to say “no” to ransom,’ Julius Yahya had replied, which made Kag and Drust look at each other.
Love or politics then, Drust thought. Or both, and involving the purple-born of the Palatine. Either way he did not want it, did not like it, was afraid of it, as if some shadows from Dis had lurched out of the Underworld and snagged him, dragging him straight to the very place he did not want to be. He had left the proximity of the Palatine Hill, fled south to evade the vengeance of an imperial brat with sore balls – and here he was being bribed to march back there. It was a trap. Nothing would make him walk into it…
Julius Yahya had looked at him, the way you do when you have snagged your trout.
‘The man who took this woman and child was called Colm. I believe you know him.’
Drust knew him. All the Brothers of the Sands knew him as Dog, but when Drust thought of him he saw a face twisted and raving, hands clawing at the air and held by chains. Begging Drust to come back to him, to come back and die for what he had condemned his woman to.
Drust didn’t know his woman, but Dog had always had one somewhere, so it was no surprise. The surprise was what he had done for this one – joined Bulla, the bandit chief. Six hundred men ravaged up and down Italia while Severus was conquering new territories. It took the Senate two years to catch Bulla, but eventually offers of gold got the bandit chief betrayed and then the whole band fell apart. Dog, with his usual luck, had joined too late to profit and almost left it too late to escape.
Was the child she had Dog’s, Drust wondered? If Dog had waited, Servilius Structus would have manumitted him, too. Instead, when he heard Dog was off with bandits he sent out his Procuratores.
‘I don’t want him dead,’ he said, ‘I just want him to wish he was.’
They spent a long time hunting him after Bulla’s band fell apart and, in the end, had to trail back to the City, disgruntled and empty-handed. Yet Dog couldn’t stay away from Rome, and when he came back, it was inevitable he’d be found; mercifully, there was no woman or child with him, because Ugo beat him until his piss bled, then they left him chained up in the cellar of one of the slums he was hiding in.
Dog begged and ranted about how they should just let him loose, that he had been punished enough; Drust heard later he was to meet this woman again and that she was depending on him, but he never would have made it anyway, since they broke his leg.
Drust thought about this a long time – then scratched his name on the contract and looked at Kag, who blew out his cheeks and did the same.
Neither of them could explain why, but all the others had made their marks when they learned that Dog was involved and yet none would admit that he was the prime reason; they pretended it was money, or the chance to be a citizen.
Drust stuffed it in the back of his mind, along with everything else he didn’t want to think about, and filled the space with all the problems of shifting north as quietly as they could.
The boy saw them first, coming up west along the southern line of the Wall. Short Hairs, but they had the reek of Long Hairs and the same worn, nub-end look, save for their weapons. The boy had a corner of his cloak – a rough-weave affair, but still a cloak – up over his head against the rain and the bottom was shielding his find of sticks. Good sticks – straight and with no knots – make good mattock shafts, he thought.
He moved slowly but determinedly to find his da. Strangers were always worth a warning, even now when there were a lot more of them than the boy had ever known.
His da wasn’t listening at first, too busy working out the best way to bottom-haft a mattock. Top-hafting was easier but made a bad mattock – a couple of dozen pulls would slide the metal collar off and the annoyed owner would bring it back. Since half the owners were the Army, it didn’t do to sell them top-hafters.
Bottom-hafters were harder, of course. The mattock blade collar was already forged and so the shaft had to fit in it, which meant shaving a bit here and there, working it up the shaft until it bit hard enough to dig up wood. You could cut the spare off the top but it was a skill, judging the length and thickness of a good stave so you had a fair shaft of mattock…
‘Strangers, da. New ones.’
‘No old ones, son. All strangers is new.’
The boy was right, all the same. These were new strangers, for sure. There had been a few sights of late, now that the army was back – three emperors, too, if all the tales had it true. The north was in turmoil again and the rumour was that the three emperors – father and two sons – had moved beyond the Wall of Hadrianius back to the Northern Vallum. That had been built years before, then abandoned and unmanned for long enough for the Wall of Hadrianius to be refurbished – the boy’s da remembered that as a young man working for his own da. Mattocks and pickaxes in big demand – the north-facing gates had been taken out as not needed and the Army lads now had to scramble to put everything back, dig out the ditches, replace the stakes.
Now it was all change again with the Emperor and his sons. The Wall of Hadrianius didn’t know where it was – the chief of the tower’s eight men had set them working to make it look like his part of the Wall was defended and ready but the Empire seemed to have washed on beyond it and he was scratching his head with confusion because he didn’t know if his tower would even be needed now. Didn’t know if he needed mattocks or hammers. Didn’t know if he was on his arse or his elbow.
And there were strange sights. Men on little horses wearing the pelts of yellow, spotted beasts, carrying little throwing spears. They had hair like matted birds’ nests hung about with silver and bone, but the strangest sight about them was that they were burned black as the forge charcoal. They came riding along the Wall from the west and spoke no language anyone but themselves understood, yet they were Army. They’d laughed when he’d seen their unshod horses and offered to shoe them for a price; they’d made it clear none of their mounts wore iron shoes nor ever would. They let the boy touch their skin to see if it smudged on his fingers, watered their dog-sized horses and rode on.
One of these latest strangers was burned the same way, which was what had reminded the forge-man. These latest weren’t quite as strange, the boy’s da thought, but more like to give you chills, way they looked at you. Cropped chins and cropped hair, Roman-style, but it was growing out while the flat, hard-eyed gaze was the same as those of the beasts beyond the Wall…
Drust led the way to the man and boy, knowing them for what they were. Scraping a living in the shadow of the Wall of Hadrianius, called Votadini or Brigantes by Romans who liked to label such things neatly even if they had no true idea of who these people were; if they still remembered it, the man and boy would know themselves as something different. The man worked a forge, made nails and tools, and the boy would follow him one day, living in the same round, thatched mud hut until he died on the same packed-earth floor.
The man’s name was Ander, the boy Young Ander. Kag gave Drust a look and shook his head, smiling. Too poor to even afford names was what he didn’t say aloud. Which was rich, Drust thought, coming from a man who used only one and that as short as he could make it.
‘I need a shoe done,’ Drust said once the greetings were over. ‘Can you handle it?’
He spoke Local, that mix of bad Latin, worse Gaul and whatever the tribes spoke here, and saw Ander’s eyes widen a little. The smith wiped his hands on a handful of wet leaves and nodded, looked at his staring son and half smiled apologetically.
‘Wants to touch your burned man there,’ he said in the same language. ‘Stop gawping, lad,’ he added to the boy.
Sib came out from under his leather hood, his face gleaming with rain slick and his teeth startlingly white. He reached out one hand, fingers splayed, as if to wipe his stain down the boy, who backed off. The boy stared, fascinated, at the fat, brown-pink callous of his palms. Sib laughed.
‘You from around here?’ Ander asked, fetching his tools. He nudged the boy to start the bellows going; the forge growled.
‘North of here once,’ Drust replied. Quintus brought up the mule, smiling his big shit-eating smile; Anders merely glanced at him, then Sib, then the others. He can see we are not all from round here or anywhere close, Drust thought.
‘You with the Army?’
Drust shook his head. The man got to work, seeing he shouldn’t push more, and Drust was pleased with that for it meant the man wasn’t greedy. Knowledge was valuable in these parts and he had no doubt Ander would pass on what he knew, for favours mainly and to anyone.
‘Makes you wonder,’ Ugo growled, working a finger into his mouth in a vain attempt to dislodge some of his last meal. He spoke Latin but Drust knew Ander understood that well enough and he let Ugo know it with a slight movement and a warning flick of his eyes.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘This place. Why it’s worth all the trouble?’
Sib laughed. ‘Because emperors want it is all.’
‘We are all slaves,’ Ander said suddenly – in Latin – raking the flames until they turned yellow and blue. When he became aware of the stares, he looked up, half defiant, then shrugged.
‘What? True. Even emperors. Held slave to wanting what they don’t have.’
‘You’ve got some Greek in you,’ Manius declared, approaching in time to hear this. He was long and lean and good-looking in a hawk-like way, in the way a well-made knife was. Had to be treated the same way, too.
‘What’s Greek, da?’ the boy asked, holding the mule’s head for his da to measure shoe to hoof.
‘Folk from far away,’ Drust answered, ‘who think too much about all sorts. Who commands in the tower?’
Ander bent and fitted while his son held the nose of the mule and soothed it. There was the smell of burning hair, a plume of reek.
‘Tullius.’
‘Good sort, is he? Friendly?’
Ander worked the shoe back into the coals and pumped until the flame turned blue-green.
‘New,’ he said eventually, having weighed the worth of the information and decided free was best with men such as these. ‘Aulius went north with the army.’
Drust let him work, turning away to stare at the rain-darkened wall, the whisper of mirr and the faint shape of the tower. Behind him was a mile fort. Beyond the tower, exactly a mile, would be another. Beyond that the Wall leaped the river on a three-arched bridge.
Ander had confirmed what he had expected: the original Wall garrison had been scooped up by the emperors and pushed north, to the old Vallum and beyond it – old Severus wanted some last hoorah for his old age, though most of the talk was of how he thought the Army and his sons were idle and spoiled and needed some campaign discomfort to sort them out. Everyone else in the court, forced to move to this cold, wet place, thought he had been here too long.
So a new lot garrisoned the Wall of Hadrianius. Well, made no difference – Drust had a carefully wrapped answer to all officious questions.
The shoe went on in a hiss and another cloud of blue reek. Manius watched and the others milled and idled. Kag followed Drust’s gaze to the Wall.
‘Lot of trouble for a place like this,’ he said. ‘What’s it got that everyone wants? Rain and a too-big sky, far as I can see. How is that worth dying for?’
Drust looked sideways at him and smiled. Ander had finished and the mule was lifting and stamping, favouring the new shoe.
‘Who’d have thought,’ Drust said pointedly, ‘that water can drive men mad?’
Kag remembered and laughed. ‘Pay the man,’ he said, nodding to the smith.