by Manda Scott
The Thracian smiled, colourlessly. “He was a slave. It was a quick death. You could pray for the same.” He could have been discussing a deer caught hunting, or a sow freshly slaughtered. “His blood will seal the floor. Perhaps next time it will hold the columns.” He turned away, chewing on his lip, and began to pick his way over the debris. “It is fortunate that Amminios has been called back to his father’s court. The child was to have been offered to the visiting prefect at dinner after the sales. It would have been difficult to find another so well trained at such short notice—”
Bán aimed the blow from behind—a coward’s strike that gave no chance for defence. His father would have disapproved of it. Iccius, who had never been a warrior, would not. He used a fragment of marble as big as both his fists and sharp at one end and he drove it with a strength that surprised him. The spike broke through the Thracian’s skull as through an eggshell and buried itself deep in the soft matter within. Braxus dropped without a sound. The slap of his body echoed off the walls and raised more dust from the cavity in the floor. His head dangled over the edge of the broken tiles, dripping gobbets of blood and brain onto the marble below. He twitched once. There was no chance that he was alive but none the less Bán knelt and jerked the man’s knife free from his belt and grabbed his hair, pulling his head back to bare his throat for the cut.
“Don’t.” The voice came like a snapping branch. Bán rose to a warrior’s crouch, the knife weaving in front of him ready to kill. Iccius’s words wove round his heart. Braxus was nothing. Amminios was not here and not coming. If he was going to die now, he would have to take Godomo with him at least to make it count and it was not Godomo who had spoken.
“Stop. It is me. Father to the son.” Fox stood in the doorway, part hidden beneath the fall of the curtain. It was possible he had been there all along. “The boy, your brother, is dead?” he asked. His Gaulish had never been fluent. His accent was more pronounced now than ever.
“Yes.”
“Then leave this one. He is dead also. You should not have his blood on you when you run.”
Bán stared at him. Thinking was impossible. He wanted to kill and go on killing and then to die.
The Fox took a step forward, his hands loose at his sides, his eyes steady. “Go out to the yard. The four-year-olds are being saddled up ready to leave for the sale. Take Sentios’s horse, the big bay. Tell him I said so. Ride for town with the others and leave them when you reach the market. By the time this one is found, you will be gone.”
“What about you? They will know you were here.”
“No. I am with the horses. Everyone knows that. Of you, they will believe only that you were with the boy. Run now. It is your only chance.”
In two years of friendship and teaching, it was the best advice the Fox had ever offered. Bán hurled the block of marble through the hole in the floor and ran.
CHAPTER 17
The livestock marketplace was a solid but temporary structure, erected at the beginning of summer and taken down again at the end of autumn. The horse sale was the last event and the one with highest prestige. Breeders, farmers, gamblers and racing men came from the three parts of Gaul, Belgica and the two German provinces to trade horses at the Durocortorum autumn sale. Rumour said that some of those trading each year came from the free Germanic tribes from the eastern side of the Rhine, but it was impossible to know the truth of that.
Bán hid beneath the stands. They were of oak and ash, cut by carpenters of the Parisi who knew each tree and spoke its language. Every spring, they built an arena and five tiers of seating that would have lasted decades and every autumn they pulled it down and distributed the weathered planks as firewood. The space beneath was used to store fodder and grain for the horses, stacked back as far as the third tier. Behind that, the space was too low for ease and a gap was left, narrowing down so that the space beneath the lowest tier was less than the height of a man’s forearm. There was less fodder now, at the end of the season, than there had been in spring. Bán forced his way past old hay and sacks of barley and crawled forward into the dark, oak-scented cavity beneath the lowest seats.
It was dark and airless and the noise made him ill with terror. The boards above his head made a sounding-box so that the skittering cries of the rats were as loud as the booted feet running on the stairs between the rows of seating, and the voices of the crowd came up at him from the beaten earth even as the infinitesimal creaks of his moving cracked like thunder so that he must be heard.
He edged forward, a hand’s breadth at a time. Every scrape of his tunic against the unplaned wood above him rasped like a saw on oak knots and he stopped, trembling, his palms drenched, his mind trapped in a white cataract of fear, waiting for the legionaries, or the town magistrate, or—worst—Godomo, to find him.
It was impossible to think or to plan. A part of him needed to kill again, many times—to hear the crack of broken bone and see blood running free as men died to avenge Iccius and Eburovic and all the others of his dead. The remaining part, nearer the surface, wanted very badly to die. Death was a place of no pain and many friends and in this place, in the humid, rat-ridden bowels of the stands, his friends had abandoned him. He was as close to fever as he had been since the branding and the visions did not come, even when he pleaded with them to show their faces. All he could see was Iccius, white with pain and lost blood, and all he could hear was the whisper Promise me you won’t die for nothing.
The crowd was reaching capacity. The front rank of seats had been filled not long after dawn. By now, those at the back were filling with those who paid for the cheapest seats and drank the cheapest wine and so felt entitled to make most noise. At the entrance to the arena, a drum padded out a two-time rhythm. In moments, the sound of it was drowned out by the beat of trotting horses. Even those in the rearmost seats hushed and sat at quiet attention.
Bán pressed himself to the boards at the front of the stands. Shrinkage and knot gaps let in cracks of light and some of them were wide enough to make good viewing ports. He pressed his eye to one and then drew back a little, fearful that the shine of it would be seen and give him away.
The four-year-olds were first—those fully trained for war and transport. They came in squadrons of twenty, crossing the arena forward and back, with mounted grooms dressed as auxiliary cavalry, showing off their weapons training and steadiness under attack. They ran sorties, one group on another, throwing blunt-pointed wooden spears and catching them on padded shields. The men were performing as much as the horses; a good many of them were freemen hired for the season, and if the visiting prefect really was recruiting local tribesmen for a new cohort of auxiliaries they would do well to catch his eye. Knowing this, Bán looked for the area of the stands before which the best performances took place and so found where the Roman officer sat in the second row of the crowd with half a dozen of his guard around him. He wore minimal armour and no toga and avoided the private seats of the magistrate. Braxus would have known the politics of that, or would have made it his business to find out. But Braxus was dead, and when they found him his murderer would die as slowly as they knew how to make it happen. Amminios would see to it, or Godomo in his absence.
Bán’s bowels cramped in terror. In the first months of his slavery he had been forced to watch a crucifixion and the memory of it had woken him for nights afterwards, dry-mouthed and retching. With the passing months, his mind had healed over the horror, in the way the body scabs over a wound, giving him false courage. Now the absolute reality swamped his mind and paralysed his limbs. With no effort at all, he could feel the nails scrape between the bones of his arms and the days and nights of screaming agony that followed as his body succumbed to the drag of its own weight. Pressing his brow against the boards in front of him, he breathed, whistling, through a windpipe tight as a straw. The world flashed scarlet and black behind the seal of his eyes.
The four-year-olds were leaving the arena by the time he could breathe freely again. Th
e drumroll sounded for the three-year-olds. In another time and a different world, he would have been riding the good solid bay with four white socks that was the best horse from his own group. He made himself peer again through the crack; it was better to make the world normal, to think about the mounts and how they were turned out, than to let his mind run free.
He heard the horses before he saw them and knew from the jagged rhythm that something was wrong. The first rank was perfect: four greys turned out in black leather harness with riders in black and polished bronze. The crowd gasped its appreciation. The second rank were chestnut and the third bay, and every one of them was perfect. The problem lay in the fourth rank, the second from last. The colours were mixed—a patchwork of piebalds and skewbalds, none of them from his farm. The black and white horse at the far end of the line was fighting its rider, had been doing so since before they ever entered the arena and continued as the squadron wheeled to the right, to face Bán and the magistrate, and halted. The rider of the pied horse was not one that Bán knew. From a distance, he looked Batavian, one of the hired mercenaries from the tribes on the western, imperial side of the Rhine. He should have been a good horse-man—Batavians were amongst the best—but this mount had the better of him and anyone watching could see it.
Bán knew the opening drill well enough that he could do it—had once done it—blindfolded. In theory, the riders saluted and moved immediately into a canter, riding straight for the wall beneath the magistrate’s box. Less than a horse’s length from the boards, they split down the centre and wheeled hard, half left and half right, making two long columns that raced the length of the arena parallel to the stands. Four phalanxes of four-year-olds—eighty horses in all—had done it perfectly. The lead group of three-year-olds managed for four strides before the fractious piebald colt exploded beyond all control.
The result was chaos. Horses from the front two ranks crashed into the boarding that protected the side of the arena. Others shied, bucked or wheeled to be clear of the danger. Bigger horses barged into smaller ones and knocked them from their feet. A young chestnut filly with thin legs fell to the ground, screaming. Bán saw her rider struggle to throw himself clear of the saddle horns before his leg was crushed beneath her. A short while later they both rose, unharmed, but no-one was watching them by then. The crowd’s attention—and Bán’s—was focused on the centre of the arena where a pied colt with a hide like milk-streaked jet fought a blond giant with hard hands, a harder bit and a cutting whip, and it was clear to anyone who knew anything that the horse would die fighting before it gave in.
The crowd loved the scent of blood. The magistrate, who had been to Rome and seen the games, felt the mood change and sent swift orders. Slaves and freedmen ran from the box and messages were shouted ahead to the other riders. Some of them, those who had fought in battle and could think, had already ridden close with ropes to restrain the colt and were waved back. The remaining three-year-olds were cleared from the arena, leaving the colt and the man alone on the sands. Above him in the tiers of seating, Bán heard men and women begin to wager on the winner and how long it would take and whether it would be allowed to go all the way until the horse killed the man or if the magistrate would stop them first and have the beast slaughtered.
Bán heard only snatches of the betting. He squirmed his way back under the tiers of seats and out through the grain store far more fluidly than he had entered. The fear of earlier vanished like dew under a hot sun. He knew how Iccius had felt each time he walked back into the dormitory after a night with Braxus; the worst had happened and nothing else could touch him. Better than that, he was free to die, if it could be done with honour, and he thought now that it could. He crawled out into daylight, crouched for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the flood of light and colour and ran for the arena.
Nobody stopped him. The noise of the stands receded, as if his ears had been plugged with loose wool. The world stood on the other side of a gauze curtain through which air and light filtered slowly, deadening sight and sound, except in that one place, in the centre of the sands, where a colt he had known was fighting to the death, and would take him with it. A dun filly cantered on the edge of his vision, dead a long time since and newly present amongst the ghosts as a promise of what was to come.
He reached the front of the stands. Still nobody saw him or tried to hold him back. He was invisible, wrapped in the care of the gods. He remembered a conversation on a hillside in another life. Is this how it feels before battle? Yes, but in battle one has choice. He had not known, then, what it was to choose death over life, or how it freed one from care. He vaulted over the oak palisade and landed lightly on the sand.
He was three strides out into the arena when the first of the magistrate’s servants saw him. The man carried a hornhandled knife at his belt—and then didn’t. Bán crouched, carving the air in front of him, as he had done in the bathhouse. The blade was sharp on both edges and honed to a fine point.
“You can die if you want. It makes no difference to me.”
It was the truth, spoken without bravado and recognizable as such. The man weighed the cost of a possible flogging against the certainty of a knife in his chest and made the wise choice. Bán grinned at him. “In war you can choose.” He said it aloud in Eceni, because that, too, was possible now. The man backed away, holding his hands before him, his eyes showing white at the rims. No-one else took his place.
In the centre of the arena, the Batavian was in trouble. He was trapped in a saddle designed for cavalry riders in war. Every part of it had been adapted over the years to hold a rider in place without need for hands in the face of an enemy whose main task was to unseat his opponent. Padded horns at front and back bent inwards and pressed down on his thighs, holding him in place as the colt threw itself into a series of spine-jarring bucks. To dismount with any grace at all, he would need the beast to stop and it was not going to stop.
Faced with death or dishonour, the man chose to fight and, because he had no other weapons, he was using the bit and the whip without recourse to reason. The bit must have been Milo’s doing. It was a harder one than Fox would ever have countenanced, with a high port that could pierce the hard palate and sharp edges that had already lacerated gums and lips so that red foam splattered back over the shining white-on-black hide. The whip was thin and left long, lacerated cuts and the horse took as much notice of them as he would of a mosquito. There is a staging post in rage which no amount of pain will extinguish. Bán had experienced it once, flogged by Braxus, and had never forgotten. The colt had been angry before it entered the arena; with calm handling it might have been settled but the Batavian had thrown calm handling to the gods; he was as angry as the colt and every cut and jab and backbreaking buck spun them both deeper into a mindless, lethal frenzy.
Blood spattered freely on the sand. The smell of it, briefly, was the smell of the hypocaust, until a wall of horse- and man-sweat flooded everything else. Bán stood very still. His heart swelled. The overwhelming power of the colt filled him with pride and awe. He remembered an old tale of the ancestors who had sacrificed horses to the gods before they had come to know that horses were the gods walking on earth and that to kill them was sacrilege. He could believe of this horse that it was a god, or a gift of the gods. The Batavian on top was a mortal man who could see his own death approaching.
Bán raised his arm. In the neutral Gaulish of the region he called out, “Do you know the cavalry dismount?”
The colt reared from the sound of the new voice. The man threw himself forward, hugging the neck. Every rider’s fear is the horse that throws itself backwards. Without a chance to dismount, the rider dies, crushed beneath a writhing mass of horseflesh. For a heartbeat, the pair hung high in the air, the horse and his clinging parasite, and death hung with them.
The crowd cheered, distantly. The spectacle was perfect. The man had been picked for his colouring as much as his skill as a rider; his hair was white blond, paler even than Icci
us’s, and it flowed like a flag over his black leather corselet. The horse was bridled in black with a halter beneath of bleached white rope. Its hide was night black with streaks of poured milk. From a distance, the sweat gave a polished shine to them both and the freckles of blood were not visible.
The colt teetered on the brink and came down again, forefeet smashing the sand into dust. Bán skidded sideways to avoid a striking hoof. Over the bruising hammer of a standing buck, he shouted, “They will not stop this. The magistrate himself has bet two thousand denarii on your death. Can you do the dismount?”
“Yes.” The word was thrown over his shoulder, lost in the churning spray of a turn.
“Good. I will throw sand in his face. He will stop when it hits him, then flinch, as if from the wind. Do it then.”
It was a trick Fox had taught him to get the better of the big chestnut studhorse with the foul temper. Then Bán had not had to mount after, only catch a halter rope. He prayed and felt the gods at his side and knew that he could not fail. At worst, the colt would kill him; at best, he would kill himself. He had yet to decide whether to kill the colt. It, too, deserved release from slavery.
He stooped and caught a fistful of sand. The colt reared again, screaming. Heartbeats passed with it high in the air. As it came down, Bán moved round to one shoulder and, as the forefeet hammered into sand, he threw.
All things happened at once. The crowd rose to its feet, sensing a climax. The colt, following the instinct of a thousand generations, propped and spun away from a desert wind that did not exist. The Batavian, to his credit, executed a perfect cavalry dismount. All he needed was a horse that stayed level for more than one stride and he was up and off, tucking his shoulder in and rolling on the sand to come up on his feet. That half of the crowd that had bet on his survival cheered. The rest booed. The magistrate signalled his servants, who began to run onto the sand. The colt, freed of its burden, looked around for an exit and saw it, an open gap in the distance with none but a skinny boy in the space between. Scenting freedom, it sprang from a standing start to a full gallop. At the second stride, its shoulder brushed the boy. Bán gripped his stolen knife in his teeth, reached up with both hands for the curved horns of the saddle, kicked up, once, twice, and was on.