De Bello Lemures, Or The Roman War Against the Zombies of Armorica

by Lucius Artorius Castus

  I questioned Rufus about the assets of the estate. “We were not challenged by any dog on either occasion when we approached your door. Do you not keep any?”

  “I keep two white Molossians[60], but they are with my shepherds in their hut, in the autumn pasture; and that is a mile and more from here.”

  This displeased me. Dogs would have provided ample warning of any lemures or men that approached us. It helped us not at all for the shepherds to have a warning. I sighed, and considered the next possibility. “This may alarm you, but we will need to arm your slaves.”

  Rufus accepted this news with equanimity. He spread his hands wide and shrugged. “Arm them however you like, but no slave of this house will draw the blood of any man.”

  “That’s quite all right,” Pacilus said to him, returning with some of those slaves at his back. “Since we face prostropaioi[61], and not men.” He turned to me. “The windows are reasonably secure. Only three of them have junctae[62] rather than grills, and we have wedged those shut with kindling from the hearth.”

  “How many male slaves are there?” I asked.

  “The three here in the house, and four more who sleep in the sheds,” Rufus replied. “And my wife has a girl in the kitchen.”

  Radamyntos came up, looking gruffly satisfied. “The posticum is well-barred, and as strong as you could want.”

  “Good.” I acknowledged his report. “Take these slaves here, and send them out to summon their fellows inside from the out-buildings and to gather those farm implements that might be useful as weapons,” I told him. “Do not go out of the house yourself. Watch them from the doorway and bar the door when they return.” He left again to do as I had instructed.

  I turned back to Rufus. “I did not see any arms displayed as we dined.[63] Are there any in the house?”

  This question made him uncomfortable, and he squirmed and grimaced as he answered it. “My father kept a set of arms. They are in the arca.”[64]

  I had him lead me to the tablinum[65] so he could show them to me. There was a sword, but I groaned to see that it was in a sheath.

  “No, no,” Rufus exclaimed at my reaction. “I am not such a fool as to let my father’s sword rust.[66] It has been regularly waxed, despite my lack of a use for it.” There was also a shirt of lorica squamata[67], which looked large enough for me, but no shield.

  “Sir,” I said to Rufus with as much courtesy as I could manage, “…if I am to defend you in this house I have to beg you for the use of these heirlooms.”

  He assented to this. I knelt in the corridor and Pacilus and the last remaining slave assisted me in bringing the shirt over my head.[68] Even though the lemures had not come upon us armed, it was reassuring to have the weight of armor across my shoulders.

  Radamyntos presently returned once more, trailed by a column of irregularly armed slaves.

  “It will have to do,” he said, a bit contemptuously, nodding at those who trailed him. Three of them carried the falx[69], and they were the luckiest of the lot. One had an axe of the Belgae[70], and another a mattock; the remainder carried wooden clubs. “Company’s coming.”

  “What did you see?”

  “See? Nothing but the black, and you can barely see that. But the animals are mad with fear, and even above their lowing you can hear the cries of the dead in the air.”

  The kitchen girl had brought forth a large bowl of posca[71]. Radamyntos took a goblet from her and swept out a large draught. “Salve[72], dux,” he toasted with cold irony.

  “We’ll see about that,” Pacilus joked, wanly. The strain of the night’s events plainly wore upon him, despite his wry and witty manner. A severe pallor had crept across his face and his wound, though minor, appeared to pain him.

  “We will indeed.” I strode to the barred door and shook it, testing the bolts. “Then again, perhaps our adversaries will choose to haunt the night clear through, and not seek to trouble us.”

  My fellows shrugged. I held out no great hope that we would be left alone, either.

  Standing by the door, I saw what was spelled out by the wall mosaic there and I laughed darkly:

  Nihil intret mali.[73]

  I slapped the letters of the motto lightly with my fingertips. “We’ll soon see if Janus[74] smiles upon this house,” I said, and there was little else to say.

  FIVE

  I have stood many watches on ill-omened nights without fear, and have waited calmly in the dark before a battle many times as well. I have listened to the waters of the Danuvius[75] running unseen over the stones on the riverside under a cloud-filled and starless sky, while great tribes milled on the opposite bank. I have peered over the wall[76] that forms our northern border and barrier and strained to hear distant hoof-beats through the thick night-mist. But never has any watch made my heart tremble as did the one we stood that night in the villa of Rufus.

  With my face pressed to the window grille in one of the cubicula[77], I listened to the cries of the lemures in the distance. They first seemed to come closer, and then draw away, before coming closer once more; almost as though they did not move across the land with any purpose, but simply wandered. At times their cries became almost intelligible, and I strained to pick out words; but whether these words were the horrible curses leveled by the dead upon the world, or the exclamations of other travelers upon the road as they were waylaid as we had been, I could not say.

  Rufus and Pacilus stayed with me in a room facing north towards the road, while Radamyntos kept his own watch from a room with a window on the south wall. The slaves waited in two groups by the doors; those entrances were barred well enough that they could be trusted with their defense. Pacilus reviewed the sequence of the road attack with me again as we waited, and speculated at some length on the nature of our attackers.

  He saw little doubt that, by some magic or by the intervention of some god, the old man’s curse had been effectuated and the rebels we had slain had risen to slay us in turn. The testimony of Radamyntos sufficed, in his view, to establish this. Had this not been enough, the terrible wounds their bodies had been able to endure and ignore served to prove that we were not facing living men. They could walk and grasp and bite without blood or breath, supported only by the curse or the god; though why the spell should be made to fail by a cut or blow to the head or neck, he could not say.

  As he spoke and as we waited, Pacilus slowly looked more and more ill. His pallor grew, and he started to shiver slightly, as if a fever was growing in his flesh. I thought then that perhaps his wound was more severe than we had at first known, or that as sometimes happens the cooling of his blood in the interval since the fight on the road had brought the full effect of the wound out. I encouraged him to try to rest.

  Rufus, for his part, disdained Pacilus’ explanation of events, but he scowled when I questioned him and declined to offer any explanation of his own. Although he had been able to translate the curse of the old man – the druid? – for us, he denied having any additional knowledge of the local cult to impart. I did not believe that he shared all his thoughts with us, but I chose not to press him.

  “Oh ho!” Radamyntos called out in a low voice, across the corridor. “Who comes calling?”

  “Stay here,” I directed Pacilus. “Be alert.” I hurried through the house to guard-spot of Radamyntos, bringing Rufus with me. As I crossed the corridor in haste, the slaves cried out in fear.

  “What do you see?” I asked, as I joined Radamyntos in the south window. Rufus, coming up behind, peered through the window between us as best he could.

  “Walking in the kitchen garden,” he hissed. “One of our handsome friends.”

  One of the filthy corpse-puppets stiffly made its way through the scraggly herbs and dead plants. This one was totally without clothes, and lacked even the torn and bloody tunic the others had possessed. It had a broad cut across its belly, and trailed strings of its entrails behind it; I wondered how it could cross a field or a wood in such a state. It stumbled awkwardl
y towards the farm-house.

  Rufus gasped; his mouth worked, but such was his surprise that he could not speak.

  “You had not believed us, then?” I asked him. He nodded. I couldn’t blame him; not fairly. I would have doubted such a tale from anyone else.

  “Shada![78]” he finally managed to fiercely whisper. “A shada has come to test us!”

  “What?” I asked him, but got no reply. He dashed out of the room, and called his wife forth from the hiding-place she had sought out in the kitchen. “Shada!” he repeated, over and over, although what this barbaric term might signify he did not indicate. His wife began to keen with fear.

  He dragged her by the arm into the corridor and pushed her bodily down on to her knees on the floor, and then bent down himself. The nearby slaves at that end of the house hastened to kneel as well in imitation of their example. Once so positioned on the floor, they began to loudly and fervently implore Christus to come to their aid. This certainly settled the evening’s earlier argument in the favor of Pacilus. It also demonstrated just how much fear was in the air; our hosts were so desperate for the intercession of their god that they were willing to allow their membership in the foul cult to be exposed to me.[79]

  Radamyntos called me back. “Two more,” he said. “Beyond the garden, on the edge of the fields.” I could only see one, but the decurion’s eyes were sharper than mine. “They hear the matron squealing, I think,” he went on. “They are coming to the house with a purpose, now.”

  Indeed, the monsters I could see, while they did not seem any more sensible, did appear to be drawn in a straight path towards the noise that passed from the corridor and out the window. “Hag,” I muttered.

  Radamyntos moved to the door. “Keep silent!” he hissed – to only slight effect.

  Pacilus darted into the corridor as well, his face as white as chalk in the half-light of the lamps. “Another comes from the north,” he informed me. “Should we sortie, and strike them down before they can gather?”

  “That has never been my intention,” I replied. “Not with our position here so well secured. We will wait until dawn. I want to see if these curse-driven ones are as terrible in the sunlight as they are now.” Pacilus doubted this course, and his face fell as he shuffled back to his post at the window.

  We did not have to wait long to see how well the house defenses would withstand the creatures. The three that crossed the garden bunched up by the window from which we had regarded them. They clawed helplessly at the grille that barred it, and scraped their nails across the iron. There was no chance of their making it inside that way; they may as well have been small birds clutching at the grille-work with weak and insignificant talons. The one that approached from the north did no better at the window guarded by Pacilus. None of them had tried forcing any of the shuttered windows yet; they may have lacked the wit needed to distinguish a shutter from the wall.

  We called to the creatures through the grilles and tried, and failed, to engage them in speech. They would answer no question, and were insensitive to any insult or command. We ended by spitting at them, and splashing them with the contents of a chamber pot; they ignored that as well.

  I was able to examine these monsters more closely, now that they were held before us at the windows. Although they could obviously see – for how else could they know how to pry at the window covering? – their eyes were utterly blank, without even the discernment of a cow or rabbit within them. The odor that rose from them was even greater than what I would have expected from a day-old corpse. It was as if the curse that brought them to us had filled them with some powerful corruption, or as if the lemures had brought back with them from the underworld some part of the foul airs that dominate deep below the earth.

  “You see?” I chided Pacilus, when I had a moment to check up on his position. A second creature had joined the first one at his window, but they were just as helpless to enter as the others. “There is no need to sortie. These scum have no arms or implements and no mind to wield them.”

  “You were right,” he said, smiling wanly. “They may have crossed the Styx, but a bolted door is too much for them, it seems.”

  His fever and weakness had continued to get worse, and his eyelids fluttered with exhaustion as we spoke. I posted a slave with him to keep up the watch on that window, and ordered him to try to sleep. There was no need for him to fight to stay awake to guard a barrier that our foes had no way to cross.

  After settling Pacilus I inspected the two doors again. There was rattling at each of them; additional lemures had no doubt staggered up to the house from angles that could not be seen from any of the guarded windows. Rufus and his wife and the slaves with them had redoubled their pleas to Christus, as if to drown out the unnerving sound of the rattling bolts thereby. Rufus interspersed his vows with threats and imprecations against the creatures, shifting back and forth between decent speech and some barbaric Eastern tongue. “They will not enter this house!” he again declared to me, when he saw me draw close.

  “Not if the locks here hold, which looks certain,” I replied – but I had misunderstood him.

  “It is not a matter of locks and bolts,” he said, shaking his head. “They have no power that any in my household need fear!” he averred.

  I took this to mean that he was confident that his god would protect them. I myself put more confidence in the stone of the walls and the thick wood of the doors. Then again, after seeing the efficaciousness of the old man’s curse and considering our current predicament, I had to allow that perhaps Rufus was in the right. If a god could raise such terrors against us, another god could certainly strike them down again.

  The slaves posted at the opposite door had not offered to join their master and mistress in their kneeling and clothes-rending and invocations of the god, and Rufus had not dared to test me by summoning them away from where I had posted them. I spoke briefly to one of them, a great yellow German, as I satisfied myself that his door was secure. It is always impolitic to ply the slave of another man with questions designed to probe for secrets of the house, but I could not resist asking the German if he too expected Christus to protect him. Try as he might, he could not conceal his expression of doubt and equivocation. It was clear he did not share his master’s certainty about the prospects for divine intervention.

  “The domina[80] has us pray[81] to the Father[82], and that is only right,” he said, diplomatically. “But if I had any beans, I would offer them.”[83]

  For my part, if I could have laid my hands on any beans, I would have done the same.

  Having satisfied myself that all was in order and that our defenses were proof against the lemures as long as they kept hold of their puppets, I returned to the watch-post of Radamyntos. He had moved away from the window, to avoid the foul odor and grasping fingers there, and knelt on one knee on a pallet he had moved into place to help support him.[84] It was hard to be sure without drawing closer to the window than was wise, but the number of creatures that struggled there appeared to have grown to four or five.

  “It’s all well?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “As fine as we can expect.”

  “Except the noise.” He shook his head and gestured towards the wailers in the corridor. “I’d rather listen to the singing from outside than Rufus and his shrieking. Should we shut them up?” He drew one finger across his throat.

  “Leave the civilians alone,” I scolded. I then lectured him for a while on the courtesy due to country gentry who had done us no harm and committed no political offense, and urged him not to treat loyal citizens as he would the targets of a punitive expedition over the line. When I was satisfied that he had heard enough, I arranged myself as well as I could on the pallet to join in the watch, and grit my teeth to wait for the dawn.

  SIX

  Screams – terrible, strangled screams – caught me with my eyelids hanging heavy, some time later. No finger of dawn yet extended over the horizon. We were not to be allowed t
o wait the night out after all.

  I was startled and confused, but I sprang to my feet. “Is that inside or outside?” I called to Radamyntos.

  He was already moving through the doorway. “Inside!” he called back.

  I stumbled into the corridor, just behind him. My steps were halted by what I saw there; a black, cold stone in my belly held me rooted to one spot. The screams came from a slave – the slave I had left with Pacilus. The slave was dragging himself down the corridor with Pacilus clinging to his back. Pacilus was biting and gouging at the side of the slave’s neck. There was much blood, and the veins and tendons of the slave’s throat were exposed to the air, where they were not caught up in his attacker’s clutching fingers.

  “Tribune!” I tried to bellow in a tone of command, but all that I could muster was a high-pitched squawk. “Stop this madness!” I cried, although I already knew he could not hear me.

  Radamyntos hesitated in confusion. It is likely he was unwilling to strike an officer without my direct order to do so. The cold stone in my belly broke apart a bit, and I strode past the decurion with bile on my lips and the sword of the house of Rufus in my hand.

  I struck at Pacilus’ right forearm. The stroke did not sever, but I heard the bones crack, and the slave was able to struggle free. He rolled clear on the floor, still screaming, and ineffectively trying to use his fingers to hold back the rush of blood from the wound at his neck. Pacilus turned to face me, instead. There was no light in his eyes, and he had not the mind left to either know me or care. With a rolling and gasping growl, he reached for me with his remaining useful arm.

  Radamyntos, encouraged by my own attack, stepped forward and pushed the corpse of Pacilus back, to create some dead space between it and ourselves; he used that opening to make a striding strike at the tribune’s neck. The head and body fell separately to the floor.