Kag had rules he swore by. Sometimes he swore at them, too, and anyone who pointed out that he did not always abide by Kag’s tenets. That’s when he would give them number twenty-three: mockery and derision have their place. Usually under a big tomb on the Appian.
Amid other philosophical insights such as ‘if you can see the whites of their eyes, somebody’s done something wrong’ and ‘if the damage you do can be repaired, you didn’t do enough damage’, there was one he trotted out frequently and often.
‘If you’re leaving tracks, you’re being followed,’ he said, studying the sky and the hills. It was colder than before and the rain had a sleety feel to it; winter was settling on the Land of Darkness like a hen on eggs.
They’d had about eighteen hours without another encounter with bad men, which was better than Drust had thought and he said so. Mockery and derision looked up from round the fantasy of a campfire and then went back to talking and trying to pretend there were flames and heat. They talked about what they always talked about – what they knew and had shared in common, be it war or women. Mockery and derision was always woven into it; you couldn’t separate it from the talk of men fuelled on unwatered wine and fear, for all Kag’s tenet.
Time mellowed it. What drink and punishment you could take at twenty with steel stomach muscles made you sick up a dog ten years down the line, while all muscle became stringy – unless you went back to the world, where it became fat.
They talked about women and fighting, which is what they knew. Kag was obsessing about the enemy on their trail – he could feel them, he claimed. Sib, who had the sort of desert magic that probably let him feel them, was unconcerned, but wondering if this woman they chased was perhaps a fighter, one Dog had met in the ludus. He did not consider it likely, but fell to wondering why women became fighters, put themselves into the spectacula.
Quintus, his hair growing bushy and his smile bright out of the scrub of beard, put him right on it.
‘I have known many of them,’ he said, grinning knowingly. ‘I worked with a dog-lady once, name of Patrocla. The lady, not the dog. It had a name but I never knew it. A right snarler – the dog, not the lady.’
‘Where was that?’ Sib wanted to know and Quintus frowned, thought hard, then shrugged.
‘Dyrrachium,’ he ventured. ‘Or the Flavia Solva – can’t remember. She and about twenty others formed a dog pack for the ludus of Tacferinas – you remember him? A ptolemy from around those pyramid tombs who shared our training grounds. It was a good idea, that dog pack. Fighting them was like eating soup with a knife. Nothing solid in it – the girls just unleashed the bloody dogs and it became chaos. They ran almost naked into the middle of it with knives – the crowds loved it.’
He shook his head. ‘Should never have women in a world like ours. No wonder they call it infamia.’
‘That’s because you got beaten, seems to me,’ Sib answered. ‘So old Severus did you a favour by banning them.’
‘That’s where you’d be wrong,’ Quintus answered without a smile. ‘Never fought them. Never saw a woman who actually fought anything other than poor noxii armed with clubs, or stunted short-arses. Never fucked one of them neither. That’s the attitude, see? Not fighters or friends, but women in a ludus. At some point, we’d all have made a move – in the name of all the gods, you remember how we were? Barley-fed, trained to fitness? Full of fighting fury and scared – and she’s no different by then. We’d make a move and either get lucky or get rebuffed. Get lucky and everyone wants the same and then you don’t have a female fighter, you have a pack whore. If she says no and someone actually listens without having to be stabbed, you have a resentment which leaves her out in the cold, on her own. If she says yes to one, we all hate them both and he gets like a ram in a field, seeing the least smile as a threat.’
‘Gods above and below,’ said Ugo, ‘you thought about this, didn’t you?’
Quintus nodded, the grin back, bright and wide. ‘No place for women with the likes of us, not even as wives.’
‘You knew one, then?’ Kag said quietly and Quintus paused. Shrugged.
‘Well enough. The dog-lady. The dog got killed and she was never the same. When Severus kicked the feet out from under fighting women, she got sold on and left with no word. Just as well.’
Drust remembered a female fighter in Scythopolis, a dusty shithole of a place which had brought in a band of women warriors, claiming they were the famed Amazons in an attempt to spice up an important munus. Good fighter, her cotton loincloth round one ankle, giving birth in the fetid dim. Birth, we called it, Drust remembered but it was practically an abortion. Born too early, the medicus said, brought on by the fear and the exertion, the potions taken too late to prevent such a thing and the others to boost speed, or for the promise of invulnerability.
It was a wonder she had found the privacy, never mind the man to do it with, the medicus said, elbow deep in her gore. How she had hidden it for so long was a bigger mystery than Mithras. Someone had tupped her when she was vulnerable and lost, Drust offered. Even then, the medicus said, the chances of it fruiting into a life couldn’t have been worked out by a pantheon of gods and an abacus – and if it got this far…
It got no further, that life, despite the best efforts of everyone. It expired in a bloody slither of half-form on the floor of a grit-rubbled undercroft of a provincial area, where the dust greedily sucked up the juice of it. The medicus wasn’t consoled by saving the woman.
‘Mother,’ he corrected bitterly. ‘Of a child she never saw and never will. No career now either, because she’s a slave and the owner will not be pleased. He’ll sell her on. If she’s lucky.’
Voided everything into the blown sand…
Drust blinked back, flushing with that old cold sweat. Ugo was telling anyone who would listen about the way to perfectly judge the height of a long-hafted axe. Manius was putting an edge on Ugo’s axe blade, because he had seen the big German hack the donkey-boy and said it was more like watching a nailed club than a cutting implement.
‘How are we faring?’ Kag asked, the first time he had spoken that stop. Drust looked at the tablet of scratchings, squinting hard – he was not as good at the business as Kag and it was slow work for them both.
‘On track,’ he said.
And who knew what lay ahead – or what was behind, as Kag feared. Enemies all round like dog packs. Like eating soup with a knife.
Drust wondered what would happen if six men disappeared into the Land of Darkness, this sullen wasteland. Would Julius Yahya search for them? Would his mysterious patron – or even Servilius Structus?
‘Time,’ Kag said, as if reading Drust’s mind.
They moved eighteen-and-a-bit miles and would have made more save that a mule slipped, cracked a hoof open and had to be unloaded and then killed; Manius did it with a surprisingly gentle gesture, a swift and sure strike into one ear that hit something vital and dropped it with hardly a grunt.
They repacked and went on, reached the edge of a forest, one of those dark northern forests that chill you, Sib said, even when you stand at the edge. Ugo laughed; this was home to him. Two hours before night they went dipping down a valley to a place with a huge sculpture of swooping rocks looking vaguely like a pod of dolphins leaping across their path, all scalloped backs and wind-etched fins delicate even in granite. The wind was up and hissing; it had a bad winter in it, Ugo said, and no one scoffed.
Sib scouted out the best place to lay up, finding a deep hollow that had once been a riverbed, the stones still smoothed but by the sifting hiss of rain-wind. A twist of trees clung here, woody and gnarled as claws, and they arranged a shelter as best they could.
‘Weather is coming,’ Ugo said, sniffing the air, his beard pearled with wetness. Well, Drust thought, it didn’t take a sage to work that one out, nor even a dark giant from the Germanies. Ugo wanted to go out and scout, but Drust said no. He had half an idea Ugo only wanted to go off into the deep dark of the forest and offer something to one of his many gods and wouldn’t have minded it save for the danger. But Ugo was no scout and could not move quietly if he chose.
‘We fight together, to the finger.’
Ugo nodded at the sense of it. The pack was everything and Ugo knew it; Drust watched him settle like a hound, circling once or twice, then curling into a spot. He remembered the day Ugo and he had met, had ended up closer than lovers.
It was the first time he had killed for Servilius Structus outside the harena, on a night when the City growled and roared like a beast. All the hauliers brought in their carts at night, forbidden during the hours of daylight, and the night workers thronged into the fetid, clogged streets and alleys. The tabernae opened to catch the trade, the Vigiles strutted to make it seem as if they kept order and the toga owners shuttled back and forth in litters, making sure their cargo was safe.
‘Drusus Servilius,’ Kag had said, grinning. ‘Are you ready for this?’
Kag nudged him and Drust moved forward like a blind man. It seemed to him that the world was a whirl of noise and people whose faces were filled with black hollows where the mouth and eyes should be. Someone shrieked.
Clodius Flaminius was a big man with a shock of white hair and still with the muscles hauling carts and horses and cargo had given him in youth. He dropped off the cart while his sons worked the team out of the traces, tilting the pole up.
He was standing, looking up to where one of his crew was gathering up the reins to throw to the sons. Never saw Drust. Never saw the knife.
All the times he had practised this, been shown the heart in the throat, shown how to use the blade like the quick flick of an adder’s tongue. The knife had gone deep into Clodius’s neck – but it was a short blade, the better to keep hidden, and Drust had trembled at the last, as he had so many times under the tutelage of the tutting Greek; it missed the vital part, the heart in the throat that would have spilled blood like water from a burst pipe and dropped the carter like a puppet with cut strings.
Instead, Clodius had jerked away from it, clapped a hand and must have felt the hot flood of his own blood because Drust had watched his eyes widen in disbelief.
‘From Servilius Structus,’ he had said as he had been instructed. ‘Taking his due for all you have skimmed.’
Clodius had staggered sideways. The man up on the cart gave a yelp and the sons shouted. Clodius should have hit the ground and died, but he didn’t; he started to faint with the shock and slid reluctantly, fighting with all the carter’s strength and grabbing Drust’s hem as he did.
The pair of them had fallen. The horse team, unnerved by the noises and the blood smell, had milled and squealed; the frantic sons lost their grip on them and the reins looped round the raised trace and jerked it down.
It had crashed on Drust and Clodius – there was a moment, he remembered, when the world was blasted with pain and light. The cart, unbraked, had jerked as the horse tore the traces free, then it started to roll, iron-shod wheels grinding slowly.
Drust remembered it, the huge bulk of it crushing towards him like an avalanche. Clodius was on the ground, gasping, staring up at the night sky.
Someone came out of the dark shadows and Drust felt himself wrapped in iron bands, saw the cart move away from him then realised it was the other way around. The cart rolled on, one iron wheel crunched through Clodius’s skull and his sons screeched. A man turned away, vomiting.
In an alley, Drust had been dumped on his arse in the wet. When he’d blinked back to pain and shapes, Kag had been grinning at him.
‘Bit flashy, but it will do,’ he had said, then clapped the dark shadow beside him on the shoulder.
‘Thank the man,’ he said. ‘If it hadn’t been for him you would have a head in two parts, like Clodius.’
Drust had looked blearily at the dark man, who shoved forward into the poor light. A big face, nose like a fat bag, a badly cropped beard just growing out from the raw scrape of a slave, a shock of wild hair wanting to be braids. A ham hand came out, the knuckles skin-marked like his own and took Drust’s limp arm, hauling him up closer, to where the teeth and eyes beamed.
‘Ugo,’ the apparition had said.
Ugo and me have fought side by side since, Drust thought. Him and the others, sent out with Servilius Structus’s stud horses and stud fighters for spectacula all over the Empire, especially Creta and Cyrene, Aegyptus, Numidia. There was something, Manius said, of the Punic about Servilius Structus, who bribed the State grain ship captains to take his horses and fighters out in their big empty vessels and allowed him cargo for his private grain on the way back. Or sand for the Flavian, which was more important and more expensive.
There had been others like Clodius Flaminius, people who made the mistake of thinking Servilius Structus was an ex-slave too fat to leave Subura save for the odd litter ride to the ludus to personally judge his livestock, or the annual visit to the Flavian dinner. We worked with him all out lives, Drust suddenly thought. Long years, each one another inch from the slave pens of the ludus.
Long enough, Drust thought, to trust these men as they did him. All of them were the same, curled like dogs, whimpering in their chilled sleep.
The long night slid away to a milk-fed dawn; the watches changed and cold chewed. They fed and watered the mules and sipped their own mouthfuls in a dark that ate stars, then went on, plodding over the brackened hills, avoiding the thick forests, hearing only their own muted talk and the harshing of crows.
At the end of one bad day under a sky gone to pewter tinged with russet, they reached the lee of a gaunt hill where the bones of the earth thrust up. The rocks spilled left and right for a long way, towering and grim and broken only by a cleft, as if cut by some giant axe.
‘One of your gods,’ Sib growled to Ugo when Kag offered that up. ‘With your axe.’
‘When did you start using that engine?’ Manius demanded. ‘I never knew you to fight with it in a munus. You were a hoplomachus.’
‘You can take the warrior out of the Germanies,’ Quintus said, and everyone laughed softly at the bit unsaid; Ugo acknowledged it with a flap of one hand.
There was unease, for all the quiet laughter. Drust knew they hadn’t made as much distance as they should have and time was slipping away like sand; Kag was still watching the back trail and frowning. Everyone was still churning with the mystery that was Dog and the woman and child.
Sib looked at the strange mackerel sky and remarked on it. No one knew what it meant, save that it was no good like it was, so Drust had the packs staked to form a semicircular break against the curve of rocks, and while they did it the wind grew from hiss to moan and then started in to calling like the lost souls of children; they huddled in their fort, swathed in cloaks and trying to soothe the mules. They swaddled themselves to the eyes and still shivered.
‘How long will it last?’ Quintus called out to Ugo, who shrugged and shouted back, his words whipped away almost as they fell from his mouth.
‘Three hours. Three days…’
More lost time. Drust did not say it, just saved himself for breathing the frozen air through the sieve of his veil. The wind was an untuned horn that drove freezing rain down their necks, rammed it between teeth onto tongues. It shrieked out a promise to blow forever, but it was gone to gasp and puff in an hour and they heaved up out of a crust of snow; a mule had torn free and run for it.
‘Leave it,’ Manius said, but Quintus put them straight.
‘That’s Tauratus,’ he said meaningfully. It was named after the ugliest, most insolent and blood-crazed fighter who had ever disgraced a munera. The mule was the biggest and strongest and carried the pack with some of Quintus’s strange-brew pots. It would not die easily in such a puff of storm, so Drust swore up a storm of his own, then sent Sib to track it, bring it back if he could and, if not, make sure it was dead and hidden, not lurching around looking for people to feed it, people who might see it for what it was.
They sorted out the mess, burying the discards of what they could no longer pack – they’d dumped fodder for the mules and food for themselves to accommodate Quintus’s pack; no one quibbled.
Quintus looked at Drust, then at the cleft. ‘If we come back this way,’ he said, ‘moving fast and with folk on our trail…’
Drust nodded. Quintus unpacked a box, cracked it open and revealed little pots, nested in straw like eggs. The others looked once or twice and moved away, trying not to show it; Quintus grinned his big wide grin and dandled a little pot in one hand.
‘What?’ he asked, spreading his hands. Then he flipped the pot from one to the other along the length of his arms; Drust held his breath and Kag made a sound in the back of his throat.
Quintus placed the pot carefully back in the box, then hefted it up and swaggered away towards the deep of the cleft. He was grinning and there no sweat on him.
There was on everyone else.
By the time he swaggered back, Sib was in. He was almost on them before they realised and he moved as if he did not want to push any destiny into the sluttish ground, as if making a mark was an affront to the gods.
Quintus came up and carefully placed the box down. Then he explained what he had done, so everyone would know what to avoid – and what to do if they were the only one left. By the time he had finished, Sib was taking water and making a face at the way it hurt his teeth. He soaked some of their hard bread and sucked on it.
‘Dead?’ Kag asked. Sib nodded.
‘Fell or was blown over. Cracked a shin. I cut its throat and put as many stones on it as I could.’
‘Did you bring my box?’ Quintus demanded and Sib seared him with a look. Quintus just laughed.
Sib was all defiance, but rasped by the fear he had of the box and its contents. He’d wanted to bring it, but was too afraid even to bury the mule properly; it made him angry at himself and he turned it outwards.
‘That mule won’t be the only one of us to have to take iron. And for what? A woman and Dog’s by-blow?’
‘For a suck at the tits of Fortuna,’ Quintus threw back, grinning like a dead fox. Sib scowled.
Ugo and Quintus handled the mules with Kag, while Manius took the rear and Sib went out ahead, just out of sight and scouting. Ugo and Drust walked at the spear tip and moved out of the cleft, onto a rolling, rock-studded plain which rose up to the distant hump of forested hills.
That night they huddled up with the mules, fireless yet again and leaching what warmth they could. They all knew it couldn’t go on like this much longer, but no one voiced it. When they did, it would be far down the line of things, close to the part where they were finished and knew it.
When dawn came, Manius was missing and Drust felt a moment of panic, but they were laired up and he counted up how far they had come – enough, he thought. Sib looked at him pointedly and Drust was about to send him out to look for Manius when the man himself shimmered in.
He was breathing hard and sweating, accepted a precious lick of unwatered wine with silent thanks and, when he had drunk, told them what he had done.
‘Crossed their trail. Eight men in smooth-soled boots, no heels, one has a tear on the left. No mules, one pony, unshod. One man is walking heavy, so he has a weight to carry. Where he set it down tells me it is a scutum. That shield is slowing them, but he won’t give it up so I am figuring he is the leader and thinks it must be worth it.’
Drust sat and thought about it. Legionary shield. Looted – or were they deserters? Either of those was likely. So was Kag’s voiced thought.
‘You think Dog knows we are coming?’
They were two days away from Brigus, the informer. If Dog already knew that these were men sent to find him, he was waiting to see where they would go, to find the man who was betraying him. This band was watching, no more.
‘If it is Dog at all,’ Quintus pointed out. ‘Might be just another bunch of tribals, like the ones we killed. This time the leader has a big heavy shield instead of big heavy boots to mark him as top wolf.’
Drust tried for a reassuring grin but didn’t have Quintus’s teeth or confidence. Truth was, we don’t know, he thought. Truth was that if Dog knew, then the woman and boy might be dead already according to Julius Yahya. The only way to find out was to wait and ambush them, which was what Kag eventually voiced.
Drust told him why it was a bad idea – there were no concealing rocks, just bare hills and scrub and stones.
‘There is forest,’ Ugo said, pointing. Half a day away if we push it, Drust thought. He quelled a ruche of shivers; he did not like the dark forests here, the ones that sucked sound.
‘This is my place,’ Ugo said, grinning. ‘My gods will protect us all.’
‘Steel will protect us all,’ Manius said and looked at Drust, smiling his soft smile; as he went to his pack, Drust felt the same unease he’d had when first they had met.
He walked as if he owned the earth. Came right up to Drust and nodded.
‘Manius,’ he said. ‘Kag said to report to you.’
Drust didn’t like the idea that this Manius had evaded the two men on guard, simply passed them as if they hadn’t been there. He considered that they had been asleep, but one was Sib and Drust was sure of him; when he mentioned it later, Sib swore had seen and heard nothing at all.
‘Kag sent you?’
‘He did. I am a fighter. Like you.’
He had the mark of a slave to prove it, still raw round the knuckle for he was so new he had never been to the Ludus Ferrata in Rome; he was one of the provincials just purchased. Might never get to Rome at all if the desert dogs besieging them had their way and worked up enough courage to rush the mud-walled compound in a shit-stained outpost called Mascula. That happened a few nights later, when the garrison commander went mad and had to be tied down, raving. That was when they lay in shrouds of dust, listening to blood-soaked howls, hearing the crack-snap of sling stones, seeing the puffs close enough to throw grit. Then the goat-fuckers, little vermin that they were, decided they’d waited long enough, had enough crude ladders and a ram for the gate.
So Drust hacked and slashed and staggered about until he found himself gasping, half on his knees staring at a dropped bow and the dead owner he had killed in a flurry of bloody blows.
‘Mind if I take that?’ said a voice and Manius scooped up the bow. He was loping, slightly crouched and uncaring of the chaos and fire. He looked as incongruous as an eight-legged horse. Then he was gone.
That night he was missing. All night. The mavros had pulled back over the wall and the night was quiet, as if both sides were stunned by what had happened and unsure who had won or lost. Drust thought Manius had died in the dark and he was dog-weary – they all were, having had to drag bodies up and push them out of the compound before the next day’s heat started them to stink. Drust grabbed a little sleep and was woken just before dawn by Kag.
Even in the dark his eyes were red rimmed and puffed with lack of sleep. He said ‘your turn’ and was snoring even before his head hit the ground.
Drust took up sentry as the morning crept up, eerily silent, as if the mavros had lost their enthusiasm for those ululating howls. In the morning, despite his best efforts, Drust didn’t hear Manius until the man was almost on top of him, loping out of the red dawn, dragging up one of the crude ladders to the wall and over it, kicking it off when he was at the top. He had a bow in one hand and no arrows left.
‘Where have you been?’ Drust wanted to know, waspish and worn and more afraid than he liked to admit. Manius smiled softly.
‘Down in Dis’ he answered, passing like a wraith, ‘killing demons’.
Manius had it still, that demon-killing bow, an elegant, deadly recurve of flawless beauty and power. He drew out the arrows for it, barbed and wicked. Licked the flights, squinted down the shafts while the others watched him, silent, wordless.
That bow reminded everyone of that last night in Mascula, the mavros forced to silently cower in their own shelters, discovering that they no longer ruled the dark and that the Romans were not trapped by them.
They were trapped with Manius.