The land near the road was heavily wooded, with the forests broken only intermittently by clearings for the small tenant farms. Rufus did not directly work his land with the large slave gangs common in areas of heavier settlement, and he did not have more than a modest villa rustica.[33] There were many more of the clearings on the south side of the road, where the land sloped down to the river, than on the north, where the land was waste. Rufus surprised me by riding with us; I did not expect that of one as unmilitary as he.[34]
The villa was not a large one for such a substantial landowner, nor was it very sumptuous. It was only a few stadia[35] from the road, on top of a low rise. The river below came into view as we climbed; a dark vein in the grey twilight. As we approached the door, I saw that Rufus had no janitor[36] and kept his own key. The house was very simple: it had no atrium, but had a single corridor that ran from the front door to the back, lined with doors that led to the bedrooms, kitchen, and study. It was the kind of sturdy, unpretentious farmhouse one can find throughout the hinterland of Britannia and Gaul.[37] Servants greeted the master of the house when we entered, but no great number of them; this, perhaps, explained why Rufus did not travel by bearer.
I wondered if Rufus was something of a miser. Although only marginally prosperous, the area had several estates more luxurious than his, and many men owned large numbers of agricultural slaves. For one of the major landowners of the region to live so humbly, and to refrain from using slaves to increase the yield of his estate, was incongruous.
In the triclinium[38] after we had doffed our cloaks and washed our hands an aged and lame slave served us bread and soft cheese from the estate, along with some eggs and greens, and wine without too much water. Had I known how my night was to proceed, I would have eaten more and drunk less.
As we dined, Rufus made general conversation about the local hardships brought on by the late disturbances, and made polite inquiries about the conditions on the frontiers in Germania and Britannia. I possess no great facility for dinner-chatter, but Pacilus deserved his reputation; he was favored by an urbane polish that his time on the frontiers had not yet worn away. I let the tribune satisfy our host’s curiosity in the main. As I idled on the lectus[39], half listening and half absorbed in my own thoughts, I noticed an oddity: the floor mosaic - a depiction of the abduction of Europa by Zeus in the guise of a white bull, which was quite fine, compared to the rest of the dwelling – was largely covered over by rushes. Had the rushes been fresh and full, and not dried to a thin brown by the heat passed to the floor by the hypocaust[40], the mosaic might have been totally obscured.
When I asked Rufus for the purpose of the rushes, imagining it to be some custom of Armorica, he informed me that he found the mosaic disturbing; but that he did not have the heart to remove it, as it had been a favorite of his father. I let the strangeness of this pass without comment; I am fortunate enough that I become more courteous, and not less, with wine.
Pacilus would have lingered after the apples[41], but I was in no mood for comissatio[42]. The road and the campaign had set an ache in my bones, and Rufus did not strike me as the right host for such an event in any case. Instead, I called for my sandals[43] and gave our host the type of gracious but impersonal thanks one gives to a provincial one will likely never see again.
The darkness was advanced when we departed, as it was now several hours after sun-down and there was only the merest sliver of new moon. Rufus lent us one of his farm-boys to carry torches to help lead us back to the road. The night had cooled rapidly, as it will in the northern autumn, and the Archer hung over us in a cloudless and clear sky. The torches lit the breath of our mounts, as we carefully walked them back to the road, but not much else.
Pacilus walked near me, and we talked in low tones. He voiced the opinion that our recent host was a follower of Christus. This suspicion, he related, had grown all through our supper, and he had concealed it from all present only with difficulty. He gave as his evidence the disquiet the man had shown at the crucifixion of the rebels. The Christians, he explained, identify the cross with their god, and are jealous of its application to mere criminals. This also accounted for the rushes that obscured the mosaic; since the Christians were a type of Jew, Pacilus explained, they disdained and hated all gods other than their own, to the point of despising their images, even in art. The tribune thought that we should consider questioning Rufus on this further or making inquiry in the neighborhood, to make sure nothing improper was afoot.
This argument did not persuade me. The behavior of our host at the execution was explained easily enough by the peaceful conditions of life this far from the frontier; a country squire who stayed away from the games at Lugdunum might be expected to blanch at the sight of so many condemned men receiving their punishment. And the Christians were said to be fanatics, who engaged in many strange practices; a fanatic would tear up a mosaic, and not make a half-hearted effort at covering it over. Either way, as far as I was concerned, Pacilus was devoting too much thought to a matter of no import. If some backwoods landowner wanted to dabble in loathsome Eastern mysteries, as long as he was discreet enough to keep it secret it was all the same to me.[44]
The forest drew close to the road as we left the cleared ground of the estate behind. Wood sounds surrounded us, and just outside the bobbing circle of torchlight there was a rustling as of deer through the undergrowth. The figures of fellow travelers on the road became dimly visible, as shapes in the blackness ahead. I called out to them, and they did not reply – but neither did they turn or leave the road, as bandits might have done.
We halted for a few moments, to see if they would hail us as they came closer. They did not. A shift in the wind carried to us a weak and thin sound of voices in distress – the sort of low, moaning hum mixed with unintelligible and garbled whispery cries that can come off a fresh battlefield at night.
We drew together, and stood to support the farm-boy, who had taken fright at the sounds and quailed and shook. Radamyntos handed me the reins of his mount, and took one of the torches from the sputtering boy. He strode forward several paces and repeated my road-greeting, insistently and in a great voice. Again there was no reply. Our horses grew nervous and stamped in place; my mount pulled hard at its bridle, and I only held on to the lead with effort.
The figures closed upon us, and in a few more moments came near enough to become just barely visible in the torchlight. At first I took them for lunatics: three men, dressed in torn and filthy tunics, smeared with mud and blood and feces, stumbled on the road. They were more disheveled than any decent beggar, with clods of dirt stuck to their skin and hair. Their jaws worked spastically and groans no more sensible than those of wild beasts came from their mouths.
“To the crepido[45], beggars!” I bellowed, annoyed at being startled at night by such scum.
Then I noticed that one of them had an arm severed below the elbow, with flesh and skin dangling loosely from the cut.
“You!” Radamyntos cried in recognition at the largest of the figures.
What he meant by this I did not get to ask, because at that moment we were taken in flank. The rustling among the trees had not been deer after all, but more of these madmen. While we had concentrated our attention on the road, they had crept out of the forest and come up on our right, and slightly behind. There were three of them, possibly even filthier than the ones on the road. Two bore obvious wounds: one had a sword-cut to the face, from which half of his cheek hung down as if on a hinge, and one looked to have taken a contus in the chest, which had torn away both the lower half of his tunic and part of his ribcage. These great wounds did not prevent them from falling upon the farm-boy, who dropped his torch and screamed. The third madman, less obviously wounded than the others, grappled with Pacilus before he could come to the boy’s aid.
Radamyntos dropped his torch as well, and let out the war cry of his tribe. With both torches rolling on the crown-stones of the road, but neither yet extinguished, the light was m
uch diminished but we could still see. Shadows danced and spun on the road as the madmen in front came forward.
Crazed now by the horrible groans and cries, the horses finally became uncontrollable and fled. Beasts reliable even on the battlefield could not stand before the strangeness on that road. I did not dwell on the loss of the horses long; I could not have kept hold of the bridle and handled my weapon in any event.
I drew my pugio[46] and rolled it in my right hand. The sword of Radamyntos – a cavalryman’s broadsword, double-edged and with a diamond-section blade – swept into the air, as the decurion prepared the sort of slashing attack he might have employed while mounted. The one-armed madman reached us first, and Radamyntos slashed downward, and the great sword cut through his enemy’s collarbone and exited down near the lungs. This was a killing stroke; if not instantly fatal, the recipient of it should at least have fallen to the ground in shock – but still the madman came on, grasping at Radamyntos’ mailed arm and snarling over his gauntlet.
To our right the screams of the farm-boy rose in pitch with his terror. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that the madmen had dragged him to the ground, and were biting at his face and neck, as though they were wolves or lions and not men at all. The last of them had fixed his jaws on the arm of Pacilus. The tribune had his gladius[47] out, and stabbed his opponent in the belly with it again and again, trying to free himself; to little effect.
If men armed with swords could not lay these monsters[48] low, I doubted I could do much good with my dagger. I gave the one nearest to me a good shove instead, pushing it backwards as it reached out to pin down an arm of Radamyntos. The cavalryman shook free of his opponent, and lifting his sword high again this time struck for the neck. The blow did not quite decapitate, but came near enough to finally stop the monster’s advance.
“Come on then!” Radamyntos shouted at the large one he had earlier seemed to recognize. The recognition was not returned. The monster hissed and moaned and continued its attack, but its eyes showed no awareness. Radamyntos cleaved its skull in two from right to left. This was as effective as a stopping blow as the neck-strike had been. The momentum of the sword-cut carried him forward just enough to cause him to stumble, though, and the last of the monsters to our front clambered on to his back. I brought the pommel of my pugio, which ended in a thick ring, down upon the back of its head with all my weight, and shattered its skull with a loud and painful crack.
Pacilus had seen enough of what Radamyntos had done to change his tactics as a result, and brought down the beast that had seized him with a series of hacks to the throat that finally severed its spine.
Even though all their fellows had been dispatched, the remaining monsters continued to rend the poor farm-boy’s flesh. Had we been prepared to leave them to it, they would have taken no notice of us at all. The three of us freed the boy with a flurry of angry cuts, but it was too late; the life had gone out of him, there on the road, and his face and neck now resembled a gnawed carcass from a carrion field.
The quiet of the night came back like a cold wind. Pacilus shook his head to clear it, and gestured about us while he declaimed: “He grows a wolf; his hoariness remains – and the same rage in other members reigns.”[49]
With this Pacilus was revealed to be a man who could quote poetry moments after facing such terrors as we had just seen. I did not know whether to be impressed, or appalled. I had not known he had it in him, and would have leaned on him more and reached out to him in greater friendship these last months had I known. His quip brought a laugh to my lips; from I know not what reserves of dark amusement.
“Did you know these madmen?” I asked Radamyntos, remembering how he had spoken to the one.
“Aye,” he answered, and pointed. “The fat one…I killed him yesterday.” He stopped to remove first his helmet, and then one gauntlet, and wiped the sweat from his face with his bared hand. “As we rode up to the villa, he was one of those who stood to face us, to buy time as their friends tried to fly to the wood. I cut him down as he tried to pull me from the saddle.”
Radamyntos had good camp-Latin, but still spoke like a barbarian at times. Perhaps he had mistaken what he meant to say. “Surely you did not kill him?” I asked, although I could feel the answer like an icy stone in the pit of my gut. “For here he is.”
“No.” He was calmly certain. “When I kill a man, I remember him. Believe me.”
“I believe you,” Pacilus interjected.
“I killed him, and I saw him on the field when his gear was stripped, and I saw him again when the prisoners threw his body with the others in the trash-pit.” He shrugged. “He decided he wanted to die again. It is no matter. Let him come a third time, it will be the same.”
I gathered up the torches, which remarkably had stayed lit throughout. “We should see to the horses.”
Radamyntos shook his head. “Not easy, in this dark.”
“We won’t have time,” Pacilus said, wincing. “Listen. Between the gusts.”
I held my head up into the wind and closed my eyes. Just at the edge of hearing, the low, moaning hum of voices was still there – but somehow layered, as if there were many more of the creatures, scattered at varying distances.
“Forget the horses,” I said, though it stuck in my throat to say it. “We have to go back to the villa. It’s the only way.”
“What about the boy?” Radamyntos asked.
“Leave him.” I was blunt about it. “There’s no time. And he can’t be helped now.”
Pacilus was aghast. “They…gnawed upon him.” He winced again, both from disgust and from the bite wound in his arm. “We can’t leave him in the open.” Radamyntos nodded to reinforce the tribune’s point; he was equally hesitant to leave.
I was not about to risk a tribune and a decurion to salvage the corpse of a farm slave, and I told them so in no uncertain terms. Despite having the right of it, I had to be quite severe. They both grumbled, but finally each took a torch from me and we reluctantly started to retrace our way. Angry, horror-struck, reason nearly overthrown by prodigy and omen, we staggered back down the road in the dark.
FOUR
I made a vow to Diana Trivia[50] when we came again to the track that led from the road to the villa. Often enough I had doubted the use of such vows in the past, but in that cold-bitten dark I thought no appeal for aid to be not worth the attempt.
As we found our way back over our steps the cries in the distance waxed and waned in number, and were now closer, now farther. Every spot of ground where two black and bare trees came together to our eyes loomed in the dark as a potential site for an ambuscade. The ditches and hedges marking off the fields made a veritable clades Variana.[51] The cries of the sows from the large pigsty maintained by Rufus disturbed us so much that we dithered long before it and had to force ourselves to walk on.
When we reached the villa at last, I surveyed the building with an eye for its defensive value. It was good, solid stone and mortar, and not just pounded and plastered earth and timber like many houses in the north. Several of the windows were covered by iron grilles, but some of them had only jointed wooden shutters.
We pounded on the door for some time before the servants appeared, followed by a mystified master of the house. The commotion created by our return was such that I had to shout for silence to still it. We pushed our way into the corridor and barred the door behind us.
“We were waylaid on the road,” I said, not immediately knowing what else I should or could say, or how to explain what we had lately seen.
“Where is Florus?” our host asked.
“Dead,” I replied. I had not known his name.
“Was it the rebels?” Rufus choked. It was clear that he had felt affection for this servant and met our news with grief. Even by the flickering light of a single wick[52], I could read the anguish in his face.
Pacilus laughed bitterly at this question. “You might say that,” he replied.
I glared at him.
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“We don’t know who or what we met on the road,” I declared firmly. Now that we had the security of walls about us, I regretted my earlier fear. I did not want to make any demonstration of panic that could be used to reproach us later.
Pacilus and Radamyntos would have none of it.
“Aye, it was the rebels,” Radamyntos puffed. “Their corpses,[53] anyway. Stalking the road and the wood in the night.”
“Miastores,”[54] Pacilus interceded emphatically. He was not going to be cautious in his claims, either. “Wreaking their vengeance. Like Medea’s children.”[55]
With this the household was swept into commotion once again. The wife of Rufus, a thin and desiccated woman who had kept herself hidden until now[56], appeared and began to howl angrily at her husband and remonstrate with him about the fate of the boy Florus. The servants rushed to and fro in a frenzy. I had to shout for silence once more.
“I do not know…” I averred, “…if we were the victim of some trick or foul stratagem to play off the terror of the night, or whether the lemures[57] have learned how to seize the bodies of the slain to use as murderous puppets.[58] All I know is that, whoever or whatever our enemies on the road may have been, we need to be ready to face them here. And soon.”
“No foul creature of the night will dare to enter this house,” Rufus swore. “Would that Florus had not left it. Would that I had not sent him from it.”
“You confidence is welcome,” I replied. “More welcome still would be more lamps. Can we set the servants to it?”
Radamyntos stalked down the hallway. “I will see to the posticum.”[59]
Pacilus began a survey of the rooms, concerned about the windows. In this he repeated my own thoughts. In any town a sensible house would have presented nothing but a blank stone face to the street, but we were not so fortunate here. Country ways and the needs of country households were different.
De Bello Lemures, Or The Roman War Against the Zombies of Armorica Page 2