Beasts From the Dark

by Beasts from the Dark (retail) (epub)

  Not long after, the rain started but not as sheets. It came down in a shroud of grey-white, a soaking mist that cut vision down to vague shapes, even when the sky flashed.

  Manius lost the trail, confessing that the rain and the dark and the mist had made it impossible. Movement was also impossible, so they hunkered down, close together for the warmth, and waited it out, panting and whimpering like a pack of wild dogs. In the end they could not tell whether it was day or night.

  After too long a time, the mist sank to snake coils in and out of the trees and that let them see through the murk of what was, they realised, a dying day. Manius moved off again, the milk-mist swirling as he passed; the thunder still growled, but the flashing had died.

  ‘I wish the sodding rain would,’ Kag muttered when Ugo mentioned the latter as a gift from Wōðanaz, and the big man nodded drips off his shaggy eyebrows, frowning.

  ‘He will make it by and by – you should be patient. And more appreciative.’

  Kag smacked him on the arm, raising splashes from the sodden cloth. ‘You need to remember you spent almost all your life in a slave cell or Subura. You have been getting far too friendly with the tree gods up here, giant of the Germanies. Next thing you will be wearing a necklace of skulls and dancing round bloody altars.’

  ‘You are thinking of the harena,’ Ugo responded, scowling. ‘The only Germans you saw there were big men wearing such silly danglers as skulls on chains and blond wigs. Most of them were not German at all but Gauls pretending to be what the Flavian fondly believes are Germans. Most of the real Germans never made it as far as the harena; they were strangled in Triumphs for generals.’

  Quintus gave a mock moan at the memory. ‘This must be the time of the Victoriae Caesaris,’ he said. ‘We always had a good time around then.’

  ‘You forget much,’ Dog spat back. ‘Does “good time” include the undercroft of the Flavian, waiting to fight? Watching friends die?’

  Quintus realised the marsh he had walked into and fell silent. Octavian’s Games in Honour of Caesar’s Victory had become an annual event, with a festival to honour Venus Genetrix, Caesar’s patron deity and divine matriarch of the Julian family. The festival, with food and wine and access to women, was what Quintus had remembered – but it was those Games, Drust recalled, that had seen too many of their brothers dragged off by the heels through the Gate of Death. The Emperor was rich enough to pay for deaths.

  Manius came back, sliding in through the mist which came up to his waist and swirled round him like a cloak, so that Drust had a moment of cold chill at the sight of him, eldritch as a wraith. He told of old walls and a tower and led them to it while the rain sifted down, soft as baby hair.

  Drust felt eyes and he was not alone in that; they were all scratched by them and even the sudden soft wind that blew away insects and offered the balm of the rain failed to make them easier. They stopped, keeping shields and weapons up as they turned their ravaged faces to the wet and grinned. The fortress loomed like a black scowl, but there was nothing watching them save a frown of hunched-up crows.

  The fortlet was small, no more than four walls and a high tower, but it was stone and so the fires that had been made in it had eaten the wood and only blackened the rest. It was not the first time this had been done, for the walls had collapsed in old ruins in places, replaced by earthworks topped with pointed stakes, so old they now had moss.

  The main gates were gone and there had been stables inside and probably a bakehouse and cookhouse, but they were tumbled into the courtyard they had once surrounded – a chestnut tree had grown up to twice the height of a man and torn apart the stones.

  The roof of what had probably been a main hall had collapsed when its timber frame burned away, but the tower had arched stone supports on its six floors and was all intact, save for the doors. There was a faded inscription above one, a dedication – To Mars Victor the First Cohort of Breucorum under the command of Titus Caninius a.u.c. 874.

  ‘This place is a hundred years old and more,’ Kisa said in a low breath, as if he feared to move even the air. Drust was not surprised – the whole place stank of musty stone and old death.

  ‘Those Breucorum lads were up on the Wall in Britannia,’ Dog pointed out, running his calloused fingers along the inscription after tearing free the moss and vines. ‘Didn’t get much relief when they moved from here.’

  No one laughed, because they were now here and looked like staying. ‘Now I am sleeping in a charcoal pit,’ Culleo spat moodily.

  ‘It is not a good place,’ Sow agreed, hugging his drenched cloak as he turned this way and that. ‘The dead are here.’

  Drust had no time for any of them now and was flustered and frustrated by the collapse of their attempt to close in on Praeclarum’s kidnappers – an hour, by the gods. Just an hour away from them…

  ‘The dead are here,’ Ugo echoed, looking around and up, and that finally sparked Drust.

  ‘Good,’ he snarled. ‘Go find them and ask them something useful – call on Woden-arse if all else fails.’

  It was harsh – more than he had intended. Ugo looked steadily back at him with the agate eyes of a dog kicked once too often until they were hard to meet.

  Kag said, ‘Come, giant of the Germanies – let’s see if we can find a part of this ruin with enough roof for shelter.’ Ugo nodded, hefted his twin dolabrae to rest on each shoulder and moved off. It was only when he was twenty paces away that Drust let his breath out.

  I have seven men, Drust thought, and a woman who belongs with us. They were grim and strong, but like a team of mules who had to be cajoled, forced or lured into moving in the same direction on the one purpose.

  We’ve been lucky, Drust thought. A crew who’d come out of the ring alive, even if they had never been in the top rankings – probably because of it, since that was where the deaths were most paid for. Surviving being taken by Rome as mewling babes had been a gift from the gods, surviving the childhood that followed had been a dice game, and even when freed, their life afterwards had been a stumble from one miracle to another.

  On the surface, they had always looked like oak-hard dirty swords, which hid almost all of the finer truth beneath. But now even the surface was melting into grey streaks and lines and muscle gone stringy. He watched them moving purposefully, sorting gear, making a camp – all the worn business that they could do and still keep the edges of their eyes on the forest and what might come out of it. They were all ripped and decayed under layers of dull mud, all that old dust turning to silt rivulets, leather bleached out.

  ‘You feeling fine?’

  Kag was trying to be offhand, but the concern showed like blue veins and Drust could see why; here I am, the man they have followed for years, the one they’ve relied on to get them out of this shit, and I am standing like an ox in a slaughterhouse, staring into the misted wood with eyes like peeled eggs.

  He grinned and lied, but he was not feeling fine. I will never be feeling fine again, he thought, even when Praeclarum is back with me, because the feeling of her loss will always be there and will colour me for the rest of my days. He would not put her at risk again – yet what else could he and she and the others do to make a life?

  Drust had nowhere to go and was just realising it.

  They found a dry spot and made a fire, for they were all sure that they were watched, and so warmth, hot food and a dry place to sleep was a blessed luxury from Fortuna. What the watchers would do was what occupied them as they huddled round the fire, hoping their own watchers were better.

  ‘Well,’ said Kag, ‘they have her secure now, for sure. I cannot see them coming down on us for slaughter – else why run off with Praeclarum at all? She was a target.’

  ‘Why?’ Ugo asked, fretting his brows. ‘It makes no sense. Romans took her – I cannot see what for.’

  ‘Sacrifice,’ Culleo said flatly, and Kag nudged him hard.

  ‘Spare no feelings, why don’t you? We are all stones here.’


  ‘Not sacrifice,’ Kisa added scornfully. ‘Even the barbarians would not bother with that. Oh, they would nail all our heads to a tree once they had beaten us in a fight. But swooping in and running off with a woman? Not sacrifice.’

  ‘What else?’ demanded Sow. ‘Though I agree with the little Jew.’

  ‘Trade,’ Kisa said, looking at Drust and shifting uneasily. ‘Perhaps this Dragon wants to get us to go home and leave him alone.’

  Quintus grinned his steel-trap grin. ‘He does not need Praeclarum to do that. He has a great many men. He could swat us like flies. Besides, he must have seen that we were going south before he rushed us.’

  ‘Then he wants something else,’ Drust said, staring at the fire, his eyes blinded by flames. We are traders and no matter what we carry, what we deal in, it is always about desire…

  They talked round it for a long time while the guards changed, but no one could work out what it was. All that was decided before sleep took them was that they would stay here; sooner or later the Dragon would let them know.

  Drust sat for a long time while the fire sank to embers. He stared at the dark now, thinking of her out there, and only broke his stare from it when a shadow shifted to join him. To his surprise, he saw it was Kisa.

  ‘She will be unarmed. Angry, but unhurt,’ Kisa said. Drust agreed – he did not think she would be cold or wet, but she was alone.

  There was a heartbeat and an intake of breath from Kisa that made Drust’s heart flip; he looked at the shadowed face, saw the eyes fretted with concern and… secrets.

  ‘She is not alone,’ Kisa said.

  She is not alone. Kisa had used the traditional phrase – ‘I am not alone’ – that Roman wives used to announce a pregnancy to their husbands, and Drust was stunned by it, the whole idea of it, so much so that he forgot entirely that Kisa must have known this for a long time and said nothing. When he exploded with it, everyone else came up, concerned and wary.

  ‘It was not my place to say,’ Kisa argued, spreading his hands, his face miserable. ‘It was for Praeclarum. She spoke to me only because she thought I had some way of telling if it was male or female.’

  ‘So she could announce you were to have a son,’ Ugo added, seeing it at once. ‘A very great matter.’

  Jewish magic, Drust thought wildly. He looked at Kisa. ‘Did you?’ he asked and his voice sounded hoarse and somehow not his own. A kidnapped Praeclarum was one thing. A kidnapped Praeclarum with child – my child, he thought, was entirely another. Kisa shook his head and shrugged.

  Dog stood stolid as a post, but Drust could see his scathe even from deep in the pits of those skull eyes. Dog did not have to say a thing and Drust would have had no reply to it if he had.

  He set them to clear the courtyard, helped cut small trees to make a good log barrier at the gate and another for the tower, which is where they would all lair.

  All the time he was remembering long ago, remembering the fighter from the group calling themselves Amazon, the dark dusty ruin she had lain in, whimpering and writhing as she spilled her half-made babe into the dust. While the medicus went to his elbows in her gore trying to save her, he marvelled at how a slave gladiatrix had managed to conceive at all, let alone carry it this far.

  Yet Praeclarum wasn’t a slave and she was longer in the harena, Drust thought, so there is a chance she will be a mother. And I will be a father.

  The revelation washed over them all, left them all changed. Dog sat silent in his disapproval, saying nothing but making it clear he thought it a clear vindication of all the warnings about gladiators and women.

  ‘You drank a bucket of Falernian at the wedding,’ Quintus pointed out, suddenly and with no seeming reason, but no one needed context.

  ‘An excuse to drink a bucket of Falernian,’ Dog replied sourly. ‘Any will do.’

  ‘You kissed her,’ Kag added with a wry twist of smile, ‘and she let you, which was good of her, given the face that loomed too close. You wished her well, long life and happiness.’

  ‘Convention,’ Dog muttered. Then he realised Drust was listening and looked like Death ashamed. ‘I do not mean you ill, Drust, but a mind is distracted when you have someone else you care for more than yourself. You get dangerous. You take risks – witness this, where we have charged after a pack of wolves, right to where they want us to be.’

  ‘A killing ground,’ Manius said blackly from the shadows. Ugo growled at him.

  ‘Why go to all this trouble and then kill us all? They could have done that anywhere.’

  ‘They knew our mission,’ Kisa said suddenly, and glanced meaningfully at Culleo and Sow. ‘Someone informed.’

  ‘You, being the prince of informers, would know all about it,’ Culleo spat back. ‘Frumentarius.’

  ‘The entire castra leaks like a rotten aqueduct,’ Kag answered soothingly. ‘Besides – if you believe Culleo did it, ask yourself why he is here, in the cold and wet and danger with everyone else.’

  There was silence, then Quintus said, ‘What do you think, Drust?’

  Drust felt as if he was someone else, floating above his own body listening to the owls call.

  ‘I think I will be a father,’ he said in a slow, blissed grin of a voice. He turned to Kisa. ‘If your Jewish magic worked, never tell me what she carries.’

  ‘We will find out soon enough,’ Kag echoed grimly. ‘When we get her back.’

  They ate around fires made with wood that barely smoked, but no one thought it much mattered now. They wanted to be found, they wanted Praeclarum back and they had chased the men who took her to here.

  Sow sat with a knife he had put a better edge on and shaved his head until he looked like a thumb from the back, while Culleo watched, trembling now and then with the lack of decent drink. Drust liked Sow with his new-shaved head and quiet calm. He was considered to be more of a local than Roman back in the castra, but he was no woodsman at all; as Kag said, he’d get lost crossing the forum of any Roman town.

  Now he looked as grim and blood-dyed as the rest of us, Drust thought, but everyone knew he slept badly, had heard his dreams of the forest dead crawling up to him with eye-gouging knives. Manius had some of that, but his worst fear was being woken up in a hurry and slashing a friend to ruin with one of the knives he always had in his fist while he slept. He was also drifting off, or so Kag said, and Drust knew what he meant. Still alert as a wind-chime, Manius would spit blood from his chewing leaf, look at you with eyes like holes in darkness and tell you how he was far away. Manius could smell the enemy and went scouting because of it; so far, the talent had not let him down, but even he knew that it would, this day or the next.

  Quintus was still a tall man, still with the grace of a long-legged spider soft-stepping through the woods, and age had not wrecked all of that yet, nor stopped his grin.

  There were the others – Kag with his dark, wet, nervous eyes, always looking for a way out, a way round, an angle. Kisa, who trembled at the idea of anything to do with fighting, who gave every sign of being the rankest coward – yet he had followed them in and out of every terror.

  He was like all of us, Drust thought, the Brothers whose footprints were filled with blood. A man can walk this life and laugh through chattering teeth, but if he has any sense at all, he knows fortune cannot last and only the gods will help them in the end.

  He wondered where Praeclarum was and how she fared and offered impossible promises to any god who would keep her safe.

  Chapter Five

  The forest beyond their ruined walls was a brooding of shade and morning dapple. It was more of the Dark, the trees like pillars in a temple, the bird calls sinister, even the fluting of woodpigeon seemed mournful. When they stopped, however, everyone gripped weapons and watched, crouched and curled behind shields.

  A slap of wings brought down leaves and the pigeon that made it fled from the new moving shapes filtering in knots and clumps through the trees until they were a good bowshot away. There they stopped, a man
-length apart, shields up and weapons ready. They had good helmets and ring-coats, spears and swords; the shields, Drust saw, were battered and needed the green and gold laurels touched up, but it was the design the Ala II Flavia pia fidelis milliaria had always used.

  ‘No horses,’ Ugo said, a statement of the glaringly obvious that made everyone look at him and Dog snort with derision.

  ‘Well spotted,’ he said and Quintus turned to him, grinning.

  ‘Look – all neat in their ranks, like they would if they did have horses.’

  Drust saw it was true – they had spaced themselves to allow for the horse. Kag laughed and shook his head.

  ‘Well, we have them where we want them. Now their horses have gone, who will do the thinking for them?’

  Kag simply crouched, hands on his knees, and sang softly in Greek. No one else understood much of it save the refrain, which was ‘erreto, erreto, erreto.’ Kag had told them it meant ‘let it go to Hades’ and the song was about some contrite Greek warrior from long ago who had left his shield with his courage and legged it during a battle; now he mourned the loss of both.

  ‘Erreto to all of them,’ Dog muttered.

  ‘They look fierce enough,’ Sow agreed, scrubbing his lengthening stubble with worry. To everyone’s surprise, Culleo hawked up a greasy gob and spat it sideways.

  ‘I have chewed tougher mutton than these.’

  It made them laugh, a sound as feral as slavering wolves, but Drust watched as a bigger knot of men stepped closer, to where a decent shout would drift to them. They surrounded a man in bronzed ring mail and a helmet with two large yellow plumes and a face mask, a bronzed, shiny likeness of a smooth-cheeked youth. He was draped in a cloak the colour of old wine – all scrollwork and plumes – and beside him walked a standard-bearer holding a pole with a long draco of green metal lappets and silk. It would have been more impressive, Drust thought, if they’d been riding hard enough to make a wind catch it and make it dance.