Tullius was tall and thin with an undershot jaw that pushed his bottom teeth over his top lip. Kag was sure the man suffered from dental aches and that that was what made him morose and miserable. ‘If he was a horse,’ he managed to whisper to Drust, ‘I’d have put him down.’
Drust was sure teeth contributed, but he was also certain Tullius was on edge mainly because of the silent, sullen people clustered in the rain round his little tower. They were the families of legionaries uprooted and sent off north with the Army and also those of the men who replaced them. No doubt Tullius’s own family was among them.
Tullius did not want more problems, so he scowled and used his fearsome face like a stick. It no doubt worked well on recruits, but it broke on the marble of Drust and the others. Tullius saw it and was made wary.
‘Felix Tullius,’ he said eventually. ‘Decanus, 5th Gallica.’
A Decanus commanded eight men. The 5th Gallica was an auxiliary cohort which had been in the north for years – any Gauls left in it had long since lost accent or contact with the place they had been raised in.
‘I have business north,’ Drust said and Tullius snorted.
‘You and half the world,’ he answered. Yet he saw they were neatly cropped. He favoured a barbered beard himself, in the hope of hiding his affliction, but you might as well have tried to smuggle an elephant behind a hedge, as Sib said in his mavro tongue.
The laugh that followed, the language he did not understand and the general, casual air of being unimpressed made Tullius more uneasy still; he fell back on truculence.
‘No one goes through without a permit,’ he growled. Drust eyed the plodding trail of people north of the Wall, heading into the rain mist in search of their menfolk. He knew about half of them had permits, if that. He knew that Tullius was awash with livestock, small coin and the favours of women desperate to rejoin their husbands, where the shelter and food and coin was.
‘The Emperor should never have let us marry,’ Tullius growled. Drust had sympathy; since Severus had signed the decree, legionaries had formalised the informal – but that meant the Army now had to cater for wives and children; neat, traditional camps were now leprous with a barnacle cluster of huts to accommodate them. And they had to move with their menfolk.
‘I have a permit,’ Drust said and took Tullius by one arm, steering him to where there was shelter from the rain. It was an act so shocking, so singular, that Tullius was at first too stunned to resist and, by the time he thought of it, he was released and staring at a scroll. He did the only thing he could: he read it and Drust saw the flesh ruche on him when he saw the seal. He knew the feeling from the first time he had laid eyes on it too.
‘North?’ Tullius managed. ‘To the Northern Vallum? Beyond it?’
‘That’s what it says.’
Tullius rolled the scroll and handed it back as if it burned. He wanted to ask what they were going to do and who they were but now did not dare. The scroll’s seal and the revelations combined to push him beyond wariness; he found he was afraid, did not know why and was afraid of that too.
‘There are beasts beyond the Wall,’ he managed.
‘No one up there is a friend,’ Ugo called out, marshalling mules towards the tower gate.
‘No. Really. Beasts. Strange, horrible creatures. Men are dying… the Army…’
Tullius stopped, clapped his lip shut so that his bottom teeth almost touched his nose. Drust knew the man was afraid he had said too much to people who had the ear of those in power, those who could use such a seal on a scroll.
They had all been hearing of the casualties all the way from Eboracum and even south of it. Hundreds. Thousands, since the emperors had tramped over the Northern Vallum to bring the Caledonii to heel. Thirty thousand at least, the rumours said; the Army was bleeding to death.
But now there was peace and the Army was trailing thankfully into winter quarters. The beasts beyond the Wall were sleeping sullenly again.
Drust watched Tullius, measuring him for what he knew now and what he might have known before. They’d come up through Gaul and Inferior and met with Kalutis, their contact in Eboracum. He was a ptolemy and Drust had wondered how he suffered the cold and damp, but the Egyptian didn’t offer more than a shrug when asked.
He told them he had spread the word of their arrival far and wide, which made Drust stiffen.
‘Hide in plain sight,’ Kalutis said cheerfully. ‘Six gladiators sent from a ludus in Rome all the way to give demonstrations – now no one will question your travelling about.’
‘Do they have a fucking amphitheatre in this pest-ridden country?’ Sib demanded.
‘Isca Ausgusta,’ Kalutis replied mildly. ‘Calleva, Moridunum, Deva Victrix and here in Eboracum, to mention but a few. But you lads are more used to sparring in forums, so I hear.’
Quintus laughed at the Egyptian’s barb, but Sib bridled and said: ‘Fuck you.’
Kalutis had ignored it all, then told them to bring the woman and child back to him. Drust saw the truth in his face – the Egyptian had no idea who would call for them after that and made it clear that Drust and the others were done with the business after delivery.
It had worked out as Kalutis planned; they went from point to point and no one bothered much – but this was a long way past the lie of giving fighting entertainments and Drust watched Tullius closely and learned nothing. It was clear that news of the presence of gladiators all the way from Rome had not filtered this far north.
Tullius turned away and started shouting for men to clear the cluster of people away from the gate and make way. The displaced stood with blank stares and the detritus of their lives dripping in the rain while six men and eight mules splashed past them and out the northern gate.
In half an hour the tower was lost behind a fold of hill and the last of the plodding hopefuls with them vanished into darkening rain mist, heading up the eastern road with its handy, neatly placed marching camps and garrisons and road gangs. Drust called a halt and they made shelters and fire. After they had eaten, Sib and Ugo stood first watch while the others clustered round the spitting fire, shelter cloths looped round their heads.
‘He speaks well,’ Kag said.
Manius offered Drust one of his leaf-wraps, knowing it would never be accepted; he was chewing already and his teeth were either bloody with that or firelight. You could track Manius by the little pools of seeming blood which were his spit from such chewing; it came, harmlessly, from some crushed nut in the mix.
‘Who does?’ Drust demanded.
‘Julius Yahya,’ Quintus said and grinned. ‘That’s because he can speak philosopher, or so Drust tells me.’
‘He speaks softly,’ Drust interrupted, ‘but I am sure the club he has is solid and large.’
‘Verus-shaped,’ Kag agreed. ‘But you are right – a soft voice turneth away wrath, or so it is written.’
‘Once wrath has his back to you,’ Quintus answered, ‘you stab the fucker in the neck.’
There was only silence on this truth of this and Drust, when he looked at Kag, knew he was going back over the details. Dog. A woman and her child.
‘Is it his child, d’you think?’ Kag asked, not for the first time, but that had all been talked to the bone before and no one was wiser.
‘This mysterious patron really loves this woman, then,’ Sib said. In the dark, his ebony face was all shining planes of firelight. He put another half-dried log on the fire and raised his head, nostrils flaring slightly as he smelled the fog.
‘Strange,’ Quintus said, grinning his wide, firelight-bloody smile, ‘what a man will do for a woman.’
‘In your case, what he will do to her,’ Ugo corrected, then frowned. ‘But it is strange. Who is this woman? The wife of a senator perhaps? Or the Caledonian king? Who is the boy – Dog’s son, or just a bit of baggage he has to take to get the woman?’
‘Money,’ Quintus said laconically. ‘It will be about money.’
Manius snorted, looking up from where he was softly, gently, whetting. Iron sharpens iron, in men and blades he would say if asked. Few asked, preferring to keep distance from a man putting a meaningful edge on a blade.
‘It was not money. He has not asked for any and has fled back to his homeland.’
He paused and looked sideways at Drust. ‘Your homeland, too. I am thinking this is why you were chosen by this Julius Yahya.’
‘Then he chose badly. I was a child when taken from here. Dog is also from the dark north, but he is nothing to do with me. Whoever thought of it should have chosen someone else.’
‘Whoever he is. Whoever chose Julius Yahya to choose us,’ Sib said and Manius grunted and whetted his daggers.
‘There is no mystery there,’ Quintus said. No one answered him; no one wanted to voice it. No one wanted to think about the Palatine and the plots.
‘This is not helping,’ Ugo growled. ‘It will be about loans. These Epidi owe money. An emperor is no different from Servilius Structus when all is said and done.’
‘No matter who wants it, or what this woman and her kid have to do with it, the problem is simple and no different from others we have solved,’ Quintus added. ‘We have runaway slaves and we have to get them back. We go, we kick in the door, kill everything that is not her or the child and get them back. Then we take the reward and spend it.’
No one laughed. It was about as much tactics as they had ever used and always worked in the end.
But the nag of high-born plots was on everyone, especially Drust. He remembered that night in Rome, when he had kicked Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Caesar in the balls. Hard enough to make his eyes pop, he had said to Kag later, when they were alone and touching heads in the dark.
‘Had they even dropped?’ Kag had answered, the grin in his voice.
‘On the floor of a wine shop, for sure.’
They had laughed, drunk with wine and having got away with thumping a brat emperor, but it was not so amusing now, Drust thought. Has he found me – us? Is this revenge? Yet The Hood had legions at his call – why would he need to be so convoluted?
‘Kidnapping,’ he said later in the quiet, head to head with Kag, who met his gaze briefly, shrugged and looked away.
‘Not Dog’s style,’ Drust persisted. ‘He steals a woman who may or may not belong to some purple-born. He takes her and a boy, presumably her son, all the way beyond the Empire, all the way back to a home he hasn’t seen in…’
He stopped. Almost long as me, he suddenly realised. No one would know him there, same as no one will know me, nor I them. He had a momentary flash, of warmth and a smile, the touch of a hand on his face and her voice, sad with longing: ‘Be safe’. His mother.
He looked at the ground, seeing nothing. Be safe. She had died when he was too young to know it properly and Servilius Structus knew more about it, though he had not said, and Drust, though he had burned to know, had dared not ask. In the end it had faded like the brand of his slavery; he looked at the backs of his hands, as if insight was inked there.
‘Should have slit Dog’s throat when you had the chance,’ Manius said. Drust shrugged and Sib laughed with no mirth; they had all been there, so they knew why he had not. Drust still saw Dog’s cruel little eyes, fever-bright with anger and… desperation, the sweat-dried black spikes of his hair defying gravity and caked with his own blood.
‘Better get some sleep,’ Kag advised. ‘It is almost light and as soon as it is, we’re up.’
Ugo nodded and simply rolled into his big cloak. He slept with the innocence of a child – they all did, not because they were morally pure but simply because of the way they spent their lives. The gladiator way. There was no room in any of them for the stupidity of weighing one man’s skill against another’s on a bigot scale – it was measured on who lived and who died.
That’s why no one had liked Dog, Drust remembered. He had always been too good at the business of fighting and killing and sneered at those he left behind in the provincial arenas as he and Calvinus the Gaul had become the pair to watch. All the way to the Flavian in Rome, where Drust had seen the price of such fame in the games to celebrate the elevation of Antoninus to the purple. Matched pairs, to fight sine missione – no possibility of reprieve to the loser.
It had been Dog and Calvinus, of course. The crowd loved them, bayed for them – and Antoninus, ten years old and already homicidal, but not yet The Hood of Rome’s dark streets, had set them at each other in the end, despite the boos of the crowd. A marker, Drust thought, for how he was going to be.
Dog killed Calvinus and walked out while the slave dressed as Dis Pater, god of the Underworld, was still smacking the corpse with a hammer. He had a face on him, Drust saw, like weeping granite and one hand clutched the amulet he always wore – Sol Invictus – so that the rays of bronze needled blood between his fingers.
Servilius Structus had realised that something had broken inside Dog and had spoken to Drust about giving him the rudis, making him a trainer, but never quite got round to it, though it was said Dog had chosen a Roman name in expectation of his manumission.
Servilius Structus had put him with the Procuratores, but Dog had been too wayward for that and still a slave besides; it irritated him that everyone else was a freedman. He had never quite been one of the Brothers of the Sands and Drust had not been surprised when he turned rogue and bandit, only at the seeming reason for it. A woman? A son?
Maybe it was the same woman. Maybe another, but whoever it was she was the belonging of someone else, perhaps not any of the high-born but some speculator with clout and gold who wanted his slave or hostage back.
Perhaps Dog had thought to steal her and the boy for ransom, then realised what he had done and simply ran, all the way out of the Empire in the hope that would keep him safe. If he had to do that, Drust thought, feeling the chill of it, the patron had a powerful long reach.
If so, he reckoned both woman and boy were dead long since and they were on a fool’s errand – but for a great deal of reward. It still made no sense he could see and he nagged himself with the wondering at some sort of revenge by The Hood. But the man was an emperor. He led the Army because his father was laid up in Eboracum. Here was a man who openly declared his hatred for his own brother, Geta. Who had drawn a sword at his father’s back during a peace meeting with the tribes beyond the Wall – he had no need to be coy about revenge on the likes of the Brothers of the Sands, a band of sometime gladiators who had never been of the first rank when they had been in their prime.
Whatever happened, Drust had realised when Servilius Structus had said his farewell, this was the end of the Procuratores; he had an idea they all had realised that.
Drust lay back and listened to them breathe and stir. They were all the same, yet not the same – none of them fought in the same style in the harena and so were allowed to form friendships, since fighters of the same style were never matched one to the other; it was dangerous to make a friend you might have to kill one day.
Yet they shared the fear and the stink, jokingly called themselves the Brothers of the Sand in that fatalistic, wry way you do when Dis, ruler of the dark Underworld, walks at your elbow. Yet it had stuck, grown, become more. As a result, they lived with people, not beside them, and when they formed, they formed against all wind and tide, so that anyone who failed that test was never looked on the same.
These had looked on one another at one time, at the worst time, and they had made their decision for this time based on that. It was all you could do.
Drust smelled the wet-dog tang of himself, heard the mules shuffle and grunt. He wondered what he would do when they went their separate ways. He slid off into the little death of sleep.
In the morning, Drust spoke with Kag about Dog and the woman and child, gnawing it as if it was a morning meal while he fought with the mule pack lashings, crossing this rope, holding that one tense while Kag made some knots look easy and secured the packs.
‘Euclid of Alexandria invented this,’ Kag said, seeing Drust’s scowl. ‘Look – it is shaped like a diamond and if you get the angles right…’
They secured the pack, then Kag slapped the mule with satisfaction.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘To Dog? After we broke stuff on him. I thought Servilius Structus would kill him or give him the rudis but he did neither.’
‘I think Servilius Structus favoured the latter,’ Drust said. ‘But Dog was mad by then.’
‘He did have some abnormal eye contact,’ Kag admitted and they laughed.
‘Abnormal eye contact,’ Sib repeated, coming up in time to catch the conversation. ‘Things you say, Kag – Dog was crazed as a basket of burning frogs. Should have been put down long before. They did it to Felix Spurius for less.’
Kag checked Sib’s work, leaning back to put some serious tight on a rope. ‘To be fair, Spurius did kill the woman.’
‘Accident,’ Sib said, cocking his head to one side a little. ‘So I heard.’
‘The boy he killed was an accident,’ Kag corrected. ‘The woman might have been – but since it came two days later, even Servilius Structus couldn’t ignore it.’
Drust thought about it while they walked into the dawn light, aware now that they were completely alone in a rolling landscape of forest and scrub-covered hills. Beyond the Wall…
Felix Spurius had been the bastard by-blow of a tanner, taken in by Servilius Structus for no good reason Drust could see. But, then, none of the ones taken in had immediately discernible talents and only time told what they were and if they were useful. Servilius Structus had a weakness, a pride in his uncanny ability to spot special people with talents that could be nurtured in his service – but Felix Spurius turned out to be something darker, a lusus naturae with sinister tastes.
He had been sentry on the wagons coming up from Ostia with the Egyptian grain, bound for the Temple of Ceres to be distributed as dole. Servilius Structus had bribed his own wagons in with the State ones, an old trick. It was dark, because wheeled traffic was only permitted after sunset and the area round the temple was thronged with the desperate, bobbing shadows spattered by bloody torchlight.
The boy came out of the dark, Felix Spurius explained, and he thought he was coming at him with a knife, but it turned out to be a brass pot, his only possession. He was eight, maybe nine – hard to tell with the starving – and dying to be first in the queue. Literally. Picked the wrong one.
The Vigiles accepted it, Servilius Structus accepted it, but no one else did; the boy had sixteen wounds, which was a little overkill for self-defence. Two nights later the same thing happened to a woman trying to feed her destitute family. This time her nose had been cut off, real slow, real savoured.
The Vigiles arrived and the law served Felix Spurius up, babbling and screaming his innocence, to the equally starving animals at the lunchtime show at the Flavian Amphitheatre.
‘Can’t say Rome hasn’t a sense of justice and humour,’ Dog had said at the time, but he wasn’t smiling by then. He’d watched his paired mate dragged off out across the same sand not long before while the ten-year-old boy who had ordered it nodded and smiled. In a week, Dog vanished to join Bulla and a month after that Drust and the others were sent to find him and show how long and determined was the arm of Servilius Structus.
Now that same Servilius Structus had felt such an arm, stronger and longer than his own. And so, Drust thought bitterly, we are served up. Well done is ill paid…
They led the mules out just before dawn and moved until it grew to full light, then stopped, unpacked and laired up for an hour or two, then moved on. Kag rode, but the others were used to feet and unused to riding.
‘I won’t get blisters on my soles,’ Quintus said, grinning the white frets into his tan, ‘but I surely will get them on my ass.’
They laughed at his bad pun, moved steadily, a line of men and mules twisting through the sullen green, where the devil witches swirled leaves up and raced gleefully across the land and the cold seeped in, despite the warm work they were doing.
Everyone was dressed the same – nondescript breeches, tunics, cloaks and the wrap-round hoods the locals wore against the cold. They had started to grow out their hair and suffered the itch of untended beards. Drust knew it wouldn’t fool anyone into thinking they were locals and it wasn’t meant to – but they carried no visible weapons and the most revealing things about them were the mules and the packs. Just one more band of ragged hopefuls – either lost haulers for the Army or adventurous traders.
They came upon the scarred trenches of fields which had been tended by the villagers before they fled. The round houses were cracked open like eggs, the roof thatch burned off and some of the beams collapsed to char; the stones were blackened and the ruins had all been abandoned long enough for weeds to have colonised the rafters. Raiders might have done it. Or the Army. It made little difference to those who had lived there.
The winter sun died like a trembling blood-egg. The men crouched in a broken hut whose walls would hide the firelight and ate hot for once, grain porridge with salted meat in it. Afterwards, they buried all the remnants after they had shit on it; they did not want any other visitors seeing who had been there and the shit left a lingering smell of man that would keep the foxes from digging it up.
Drust went over the notes scraped in a tablet, squinting in the poor firelight, trying to work out distances and matching it to food and water. The mules took most of the food and, though they could forage, that meant wasting precious hours of daylight while the animals cropped and chewed. In the end, fodder would give out and not all of the mules would make it; Kag had tallied that in, so that on the return journey – with at least one mount for the lady and the boy – they would be lighter. The boy, they had been told, was six. Or eight. Old enough to ride if put to it, and he would need to be, for they would be moving fast, running for their lives.
The others listened closely, for everyone would have to know in case they got separated – or was the only survivor. They had been on many other trips and knew how things stood.
‘What did Julius Yahya say about this contact?’ Sib asked. He had asked before and been told but gnawed at the bone of it because he was an uneasy hound. Drust told him – there was a man, a tribal of sorts, called Flaccus in Roman lands but whose true name was Brigus. He was the one who kept Julius Yahya’s patron informed of matters in the Land of Darkness far to the north and he was the one who knew where this woman and child lay. More to the point, he was the one who knew what she looked like and what her name was.
Sib sat, nodding and saying nothing. Quintus voiced it this time.
‘Doesn’t get better with the telling. No one knows what she looks like? Or her name? I hope we can trust him or we will be Greek-arsed.’
‘I don’t like informants,’ Manius said in his soft-voiced way. ‘Especially locals. Better to scout on our own.’
‘I think he is a frumentarius,’ Quintus offered, and there was silence for a time as everyone turned that over and over. It was likely, Drust thought – the frumentarii were part of the Army and yet no part of it, folk who went out searching for grain supplies in the area of operations. They had long since branched off into looking for everything else, too – the Army’s spies.
‘Two hundred armed men,’ Drust pointed out. ‘That’s what Julius Yahya was told stand in our way. We need to know more about them before we make a move – and we will get one throw at it. Knowing is key – and all we have is this man, this Brigus. It’s not that no-one else knows what she looks like or what she is called – it’s that they don’t want us knowing until we are there. Until it is too late for us to go asking questions.’
‘Questions that would make us run from this,’ Manius answered bitterly.
‘No one runs from the amount of money on offer,’ Quintus countered, grinning.
‘If we fail, we are all marked as “6”,’ Kag pointed out. ‘So let’s get the dance of it sorted before we leap into the harena.’
There was no answer to the logic, which was colder than the night, so they wrapped up and sat close together for the warmth, trying to imagine a bigger fire. Two voles came out, attracted by the warmth of the firestones and popping out of holes almost in the embers; Drust watched Manius feed them little bits of hard cheese – these bold little pirates had grown used to fires and humans when this place had been full of talk and people and lives.
Drust felt Kag’s heat as the man sidled closer, felt the breath on his ear.
‘Who is this woman?’ he asked. Another question asked many times on the journey, so that it had become a game. A stolen queen. A hostage princess. The best whore the world has ever seen. The Emperor’s mistress… it went round and round and foundered, every time, on the rock of Dog.
What had Dog to do with her? Why had he stolen her and fled to the beasts beyond the Wall, as if that would keep him safe? What did he want for her? For the boy?
The talk flowed, soft and low, fired in short bursts so that Drust caught only the odd mumble of it like a distant wind: ‘I prefer a straight blade…’ ‘I shot three…’ ‘who was that woman…? ‘remember Paegniara?’
That last was Quintus, talking to Manius about a mavro they’d known who had been one of their desert informants. He was putting soothe out at Manius over this Brigus, but wrapping everyone else in it too, telling the story to people who already knew it but liked to hear it again anyway.
‘Remember him, Sib? Best translator we had,’ Quintus said. ‘Always told it true…’
‘Not like the others,’ Sib admitted. ‘Not like Juba.’
Everyone had known Juba at some time or other, the moon-faced translator who wore Roman tunic and military boots and really wanted to be in auxiliary armour, that ring-linked coat which marked you as Army. That and a longsword for fighting from horseback – all the toys. No one would give him it, all the same, because he was a rag-arse mavro and nothing to do with the Army and not one of the Procuratores either.
Juba wanted all that gear because he feared his own kind and what they might do to him, even though they weren’t the enemy, just people in the path of their journey – or greedy raiders out of the desert looking for water. Always water.
The desert tribes bought and sold everything, especially information, so Drust and the others pounced on a few now and then as they moved about with their mules and goats and camels and herds of women and children. They were hawk-nosed and blank-faced, but the eyes followed you, Drust remembered, even when you couldn’t see them; even other mavro were afraid of the deep desert tribes.
Juba feared them most of all. Called them ‘goat-fuckers’ in his broken Latin, a patois of so many dialects from the people he had worked with, spattered with bits of Army slang to add to his swagger. Even his name was false; it had belonged to some Numidian king.
Malik the camel-handler put Drust right on Juba the day he turned up to brokenly ask for permission to include some purchases of his own with their cargo; it was fair, for everyone had a little personal trade and it was right of him to ask rather than try and smuggle it. He was neat and polite but was always frowning when he listened to Juba beat on one of the desert tribesmen, with slaps and a harsh language.
‘This one is rag-arse spy, for sure,’ Juba would announce and Drust would ask him to ask the tribesman if he had seen any raiding parties. Then, one day, Drust turned and asked Malik.
‘You heard Juba. What did he say?’
Malik made a little head-bobbing movement, a tribal gesture which was part apology, part negative. ‘It is not for me to say, I think.’
‘Is he translating truthfully?’ Drust demanded, staring hard at him and holding up a copper chit that would allow him a certain weight of trade goods. Malik reached and took it, not in that snatching way that others did, like the voles taking crumbs from Manius, but slowly, between finger and thumb, showing he was unafraid and that this was not him accepting a bribe.
‘He translated it more or less true, but he added threats you did not make. He always does, to show that he is beloved of the Romans and their Army. He said to the tribesmen that you instructed him to tell this worthless dog that he was to be blessed into your pantheon and from henceforth should call himself Unbeliever Redeemed by the Gods.’
That day, Drust kicked Juba out. Malik worked for them from then on and the others called him ‘Paegniara’, the name for the fake fighters who did comedy turns during the lunchtime shows in the harena. It was a scathe but meant kindly enough; they had foul names for everyone, including themselves and, after all, Malik was just another robe in bad sandals.
Yet it was he who revealed the true nature of Dog.