by Camilla Monk
I stared down, my neck bowing from the deeply rooted instinct to cower, but in truth, I could feel that familiar anger boiling again in my stomach. Like when I’d hit Servilius; like when I’d cut Arun’s fingers. Victrix and the others had taken what was mine. I wanted to hurt them. I forced my head up high and looked him in the eye, my nostrils flaring from the thunder rumbling threateningly inside me.
The corner of his lips tugged down. “We’ll see if you can keep your chin up once you’re in the pit. If not, that’ll just make another mollis to fuck.”
Mollis? I had no idea what he meant about the pit, but I knew that other word, sometimes uttered with a disdainful glare or a conniving smile by Servilius and my stepbrothers. Men who slept with other men, who consented to be used like women. There were, of course, no molles in my village, and being called one in public warranted at the very least a swift punch to restore your honor, and sometimes a punitive expedition to demand a couple of ibexes in reparation for the insult. A mollis was no better than a girl: as the bald man shoved me forward and they took me down this unknown trail, I decided I would be neither.
The other voices I’d heard grew nearer. Another half dozen men appeared through the crisscross of the trees, riding horses. We had a few of those in the village, but they were sturdy beasts meant to help plow the fields. These were taller, with lithe and long limbs, cut for speed. And I’d never ridden either kind. Victrix jumped on a brown mare with ease and made a sign with his head to the giant boy, who took my arm and pulled me toward the horse.
Up close, it suddenly looked huge. At least sixteen, or maybe even seventeen hands. I froze.
Victrix glared down at me. “Ride or die here.”
I remained frozen in place. How was I expected to even climb on that monster with my hands tied behind my back? That, at least, was answered when the giant boy placed his hands around my waist. I stiffened but kept still as he lifted me in the air effortlessly, helping me onto the horse’s back. Its tail thrashed irritably in response, and it tried to sidle away, only to be quieted by Victrix’s sharp tug on the reins. I tightened my legs around the horse’s warm flanks, now sitting behind this stranger who reeked of sweat and iron.
There were four leather horns on the saddle, two at the front and two at the back on each side of the cantle. I leaned back into the back horns while Victrix locked his thighs under the front horns. Gripping the cantle with my bound hands, I remembered his command. Ride or die here. When the horse moved, I held on for dear life, and by the time it picked up speed and trotted along the forest trail with its peers, every muscle in my legs and arms was an aching cord. My head bobbed up and down like a piri on its branch when one shakes the tree, and I could feel yesterday’s roasted hare push at the back of my throat, soaked in bile. I clenched my teeth and swallowed repeatedly, praying the ride would end soon.
How do you measure a league? By how much your backside hurt? How long the sun bakes the bridge of your nose? Or maybe by how much the giant boy riding at your side sweats under his leather cuirass? We rode for hours past trees and clearings, until I could no longer see the lakeshore and no longer feel my buttocks. My riding skills hardly improved as the day wore on: I nearly fell off the horse twice when Victrix heeled it to a lazy gallop along a dusty road. None of my captors cared to comment—or even noticed—save for the giant boy, who kept throwing me anxious sidelong glances. I avoided his questing eyes, too consumed by thirst, hunger, and the burn of the rope gnawing at my wrists.
Last night’s fear had been thunder in my veins. In my despair, I had grown fangs, claws, and wings to escape Arun and the others… All of which had now evaporated in the light of dawn. Now I was just trapped and scared. I breathed slowly and tried to be a limp, unfeeling body, just a load for the horse. I tried not to think about my sword dangling at Victrix’s side. I stared down at my lap so I wouldn’t see the grimy skin of his neck and the edge of the tattoo his tunic concealed almost entirely: spikes and swirls, a design of leaves maybe. He must have done terrible things, for only the infamous wore tattoos. They were meant to mark slaves, criminals—and I’d heard of foreign lands, too, where people were covered in those. In any case, an honest citizen would never want any ink on their skin.
After what felt like an eternity or two, I started to notice that the terrain was becoming uneven. The horses’ hooves clattered on large, flat stones as we went down the side of a hill. Sunlight barely reached through the thick vegetation and dripped between boughs and onto our shoulders like honey. I had to lean backward into the saddle horns once more to keep my balance as the horse lumbered down a sinewy path. I made a few attempts to bend to my side and catch a glimpse of whatever hell lay ahead at the end of the road, but all I could make out was a smudge of changing light beyond the trees, a clearing, maybe. The breeze stirring the canopy carried a distant murmur our way, that grew into a growing clamor as we reached the edge of the woods.
I had spent my entire life in a place where fifteen was a crowd; I wasn’t prepared for the spectacle that greeted my eyes. There was no clearing but the steep side of what must have once been a stone hill, carved, devoured until all there was left was a wall of wounded rock. Bustling at the feet of this ragged edifice, the men were… everywhere. Like the green ant colony Lar and I had once found in a ditch near the farm, they swarmed and yelled, hurried among carts and tents. Their heads peeked from holes in the jagged cliff, as if those were windows. Some sang, others were fighting—training, I figured, when I noticed their swords were made of wood.
We trotted toward the largest opening in the hill, a massive arch as tall as several houses. I stared up, my eyes nearly rolling at the back of my head from going too wide. The giant boy spoke, in a gentle voice. “It used to be a mine, but they closed it a long time ago. My name’s Thurias, by the way.”
I wasn’t sure how to take his initiative. Was he trying to be friendly? Or just to inform me? “But now,” I mumbled, “what is this place?”
It was the bald nutsack who had stolen my money who gave me the answer, in a raucous cheer that was soon echoed by the horsemen around me. “It belongs to Clearchos’s Legion!”
I glanced at Thurias, searching his dull brown eyes for confirmation. These men didn’t look like legionaries at all. No one wore the soldiers’ typical indigo tunic and bronze-plated lorica—I didn’t dare point it out, though. We stopped near a rickety horse pen where a toothless old man seemed to await our arrival. Victrix dismounted and Thurias helped me down from the horse. Once I was back on solid ground, I tried to turn my wrists to ease some of the rope’s chafing, but it was too tight to allow for any relief.
Victrix grabbed my arm to drag me away. I stumbled and nearly fell face-first, but I caught myself and followed him, blinking frantic eyes at the agitation around us as we entered a soaring hall dug by long-gone miners. Eaten from all sides, the hill must have partially collapsed at some point: light poured through a large well in the ceiling. Thick ropes of hederia dangled from the mossy edges of the opening, their purple leaves carpeting the ground. The air was cooler inside but reeked of unwashed men and cheap wine, laced with a strong whiff of buck. Back at the farm, we kept ours apart from the rest of herd so their stench wouldn’t taint the milk when they were in rut. Someone needed to teach these men about ibexes. I held on to that thought, something to anchor me and keep the chill of fear at bay.
Many a pair of eyes followed us on our way through the camp. At first, I thought everybody was staring at me, and the idea made my skin crawl, but I soon understood that the soldiers’ attention was directed to Victrix. They’d nod as he walked past them; some raised a hand in the semblance of a wave, or even smiled through missing teeth. I figured he was an important character around here.
I wasn’t. That much became obvious when we reached a wooden cage standing in a secluded corner of the mine, where three boys around my age sat on a bed of straw. The bald man undid the rope securing my wrists and shoved me forward while the fa
t boy opened the door. I staggered back instinctively, but Victrix shoved me inside. I landed on my ass and bit back a girlish yelp. Huddled in a corner of the cage, the other prisoners watched my arrival with tired, wary eyes. I noted that one of them wore a nice blue-green tunic. There must have been money in his family; that kind of silk was expensive.
The cage’s door slammed shut, splinters flying from the dry wood.
Victrix threw one last glance my way. “Enjoy our hospitality. Either way, you won’t be in here very long.”
I was never very good at catching innuendos, but this I understood: either I’d find my way out of this cage somehow, or I would die. As he turned on his heels and left, I noticed a wooden bowl with water in it near the bars; I licked my parched lips. Paying little attention to the fishy smell wafting to my nostrils, I extended greedy fingers to the bowl. My hand froze when warm drops pattered from above, splashing in the water and on my skin. I looked up. Deep-down, I knew should be frightened, or even disgusted by the length of limp and brownish flesh hanging from the bald guy’s trousers, but I just stared past him, at the many shades of dark green and purple of the hederia running up the mine’s walls. He had pissed in our water; it was on my hand too, and all I felt was a sort of cold anger weighing in my stomach.
I wiped my hand in the straw, shutting out his laugh in my ears. He tucked his pride back where it belonged and strolled away with a satisfied grin that pulled the skin tight on his hollow cheekbones. I caught Thurias’s gaze on us, but when our eyes met, he looked away. I was starting to understand he was good at ignoring whatever went on around him.
“They call him Fishtail because his cock smells diseased,” a youthful voice informed me.
I turned around. It was the boy with the expensive silk tunic speaking. He must have been fourteen. He didn’t seem very strong, probably shorter than me. His hair was lighter and cleaner than mine, and his hands looked soft. There was a spark in his green eyes—something I’d have recognized as intelligence had I been smarter myself. The other two had grimy nails and a mulish air about them that felt comforting; I could tell they’d been raised on a farm like me.
“I’m Nerie,” the smart boy said. “This is Felus.” He pointed to the bigger of our two jail mates. “And he’s Leis,” he concluded, introducing a stout boy with big ears—I remembered my father telling me that the bigger your ears, the better you heard. I stared at those grimy dishes, wondering if it was true.
The one named Nerie considered me, visibly waiting for something. I thought he might see through my disguise with his cunning emerald eyes, and a cold sweat soaked my back in response. But the truth was simpler. As he tilted his head, it dawned on me that all he wanted was a name for his new companion of infortune. “I’m Constanter,” I said, the name rolling off of my tongue more easily this time. “Do you know why they took us?”
Nerie straightened up and crossed his legs. He rested his palms on his bruised knees and gave me a conspiring look. “Here’s what I know.”
7
“So, they’re not a real legion?” I scooted closer to Nerie as he shared his extensive knowledge of the mine’s inner workings.
He shook his head. “No, just mercenaries. And it’s more like a few cohorts. A full legion is five thousand men. I don’t think there’s more than two thousand here.”
I looked around, incapable of assessing their number. Plenty, in any case. To me, two thousand sounded like an abstract number, just as overwhelming as five or even ten thousand.
“But why did they take us?” I asked. The memory of Victrix threatening to use me as a mollis lingered at the back of my mind, like shards of ice prickling down my nape.
“Clearchos needs more men,” Nerie explained. “He’s fighting for Manicus, but the legions are stuck in Nyos. They need to take the city to progress east to Loria.”
Much like Felus and Leis, my mouth hung open in a mixture of shock and confusion. Here, sitting in straw and some amount of piss, I felt like I’d suddenly been thrust into a net of political intrigue—Manicus, emperor of the West, whose long nose I had only ever seen on the soldier’s silver sigli! And this Clearchos man served him, with his own legion—which happened to be a cohort—full of mercenaries. My village by the lake suddenly seemed very far away.
“Victrix said I’d fight for the One God.”
We all looked at Felus’s sullen expression. Those were the first words I had heard from him, chewed through a row of teeth that looked like they’d been tossed into his mouth as an afterthought.
“Who’s that? Is he your village’s god?” I asked.
Nerie gave an eyeroll, to which Felus responded with a defiant glare before he added, “He’s Aus. He’s the One God. The others were just made up, or they’re demons; I don’t know. In my family, we pray to Aus; we don’t sacrifice to the other gods.”
“Aus protects everybody, but it’s forbidden to pray to him in the East,” Leis confirmed in a soft voice. Maybe he was younger than I thought.
“They burned my uncle’s farm,” Felus muttered.
I looked back and forth between them, lost. “Who burned the farm?”
Nerie thankfully stepped in. He parted the straw, tracing a line that revealed the dirty ground underneath. “So, the old empire was divided; you know that, right?”
I nodded, picturing the only map I had ever seen, engraved in the walls of Picumnus’s shrine in our village—like a reminder that we were, after all, more than just a bunch of isolated bumpkins. We were part of a great civilization that defied time, or something to that effect. I scraped my brain for a clear memory of the tortured shape of our empire, a land emerged from the waters, a continent crumbling into thousands of islands, eaten by lakes, and in its center, a large blueish mass—the Inland Sea.
“In the West you have Manicus,” Nerie began. “And that’s where they pray to the One God, and if they catch you sacrificing to the old gods, you’d better run fast. The emperor converted, and now the Overseer is the second most important man in the Western Empire after him.”
He was making my head spin… “Who’s the Overseer?”
“The high priest of the One God.”
I nodded. “We didn’t have any of that in my village; we still prayed to Picumnus, the king of satyrs.”
“Where are you from?” Nerie asked.
“Culisiakkos.”
His and Felus’s lips quirked, while Leis erupted in chortles. “The lake’s ass…”
“Well, we’re at the end of Bride’s Lake,” I whispered defensively.
“Anyway,” Nerie went on. “In the East, in Loria, they still pray to the old gods.”
“And they burn your house down if you pray to the One God,” I completed, looking at Felus as this new knowledge took root in my mind. The East, the West: they couldn’t agree on a border, and even if they did, anyone could wind up on the wrong side of it depending on who they prayed to. I scratched my hair. “And so Clearchos fights for Manicus, because he worships the One God?”
Nerie’s mouth twisted sideways. “I don’t think he cares about that. I’ve heard my father say that Manicus gave Clearchos 200,000 sigli to raise his own army and fight the Lorian legions. He mostly recruits in villages and small towns. He tosses a few coins to idiots, so they’ll follow him.” Felus’s eyes became angry slits, but Nerie ignored the unspoken threat and pointed at him. “He trusted Victrix and now he’s here. As for Leis, he was snatched, like you. I guess they need fresh meat.”
“What about you?” I asked him.
He looked down at his lap, the light in his eyes suddenly dim. “My father sold Clearchos bad steel, too brittle. He paid the money back, but Clearchos came to our house with his men and said he’d take one of his sons, and he asked him to choose.” Nerie’s eyes were glistening, but he looked straight ahead, past me, his jaw clenched obstinately. He shrugged. “My brothers are older. They’re more useful.”
His was a different story than min
e, but inside my chest I felt a tendril of compassion, something that would have wanted to reach out to him. “I ran away from my stepfather’s farm,” I admitted, “because…” My voice caught in my throat. I steadied it, like a boy’s ought to be. “I caused some trouble. Victrix and the others found me in the woods. They robbed me, and they brought me here.”
Leis’s mouth opened to say something, but it closed just as fast. My companions all went silent as well, their expressions suddenly somber and guarded. I followed their gaze to the cage’s door, on the other of which a slim figure stood. My eyes went wide as moons: it was a girl. She looked a little older than me, blonde, with a ratty stola that barely hung onto one of her shoulders and bared a small breast, as if she didn’t mind that someone might see it—that every single one of us was seeing it! My cheeks turned a hot crimson, like those of my cellmates, but for an entirely different reason. She was studying me through lifeless brown eyes, and I thought she’d guess for sure. A girl would recognize another girl, no doubt.
But her face reflected nothing but exhaustion, no sign that she cared even a little. She held a leather gourd that she slipped through the cage’s bars. Nerie took it hungrily before I could react. After she was done, the girl glanced behind her. Standing near a tent, Thurias the giant boy was watching us. She nodded to him and scuttled away, her head buried in her shoulders.
My eyes never left him as I accepted the gourd from Nerie after he’d passed it around. The water was warm and tasted faintly of the wine that must have previously been contained in the gourd. I didn’t mind. Thurias’s kindness and Nerie’s clever mind were all I had to hold on to in my prison.
•♦•
How Leis could sleep through the tumult of the camp, through the hunger and the fear of the unknown, I would never know. But he did. Sprawled in the straw, he’d sometimes stir and roll around, letting out small grunts—not unlike a piglet. Gathered at the opposite end of the cage, the rest of us made every effort to ignore him. The air had noticeably cooled, and the sunlight pouring from the ceiling had died, replaced by the flickering of campfires and torches. Night had fallen. The men were eating, and the smell of roasted meat and bread made my mouth water. Nerie swallowed, similarly tormented. We watched, spell-bound until they were done sucking the bones and tossed them into the fire.