by Robert Low
They were mostly vexallations, detachments of legionaries who were five years into their twenty; and those five years had taught them a lot, Drust knew. Exercises after muster and paired boxing after that, to keep everyone on their toes. Breakfast out in the desert was always suci – last night’s stale bread soaked in posca laced with the many spices you could buy here. It came in a pail and was scooped up with the rutabulo, the ladle which hung on a hook above a bunk. They sucked it down quickly while making a packet of bedclothes and tunics and equipment into a just-so neatness that kept the Seniors happy and let you know where everything was, even in the dark.
They had learned to love eating puls, so virulently green with leeks it looked dangerous. They had learned marching, for marching was the legion. Long trudges with heavy yokes of equipment and, at the end of it, hurling javelins with a steady, unerring hand. Digging roads, making bricks, carpentering, all for a laughable pay before deductions.
Drust could have commiserated with any one of them on their lot because it was little different from what his own had been as a gladiator and a slave. Yet they would sneer at him and consider themselves several cuts above, those young-old men with rank still to gain.
Drust was now the wrong side of their age, still lean and hard though bits ached in the night chill. When he looked in any reflective surface he was no longer shocked at the lines and the furrows and the silvered fret around the slightly popped eyes, hardly ever experienced that pang when he remembered how the fan-girls had called him ‘handsome’ and how most of that had been replaced by a raw, scraped chisel to the jaw and cheekbone.
Kag had the same look, but his was sauced with the desert stare, a hooded and dark way of looking; folk didn’t like him because he looked sly, but most of that was sun and wind and a natural caution about what walked on their trail. If you are leaving tracks, Kag said, you are being followed. That was one of his many bits of lore…
Yet he was, in the very essence of himself, exactly the same as all the other Brothers of the Sand, even the newest, such as Stercorinus and Praeclarum. They had already shared their privations and the nag when their poverty permitted them to think on something other than survival. They did not often think of anything other than survival and now was no exception.
‘You think this Shayk Amjot will help us?’ Kag asked quietly, looking round as they moved, always watching, watching. ‘We have to get decorated.’
He had no argument from Drust; getting ‘decorated’ was an Army term they’d picked up, used for a fine art comprising work, cunning and theft. Do anything to make sure of a swallow of wine, a few coins and a complete kit; such theft was ignored by Seniors until someone was caught, and the punishment was equally ignored by the Tribunes. The Seniors staked the offender out on the mess table with a crucifixion nail through each palm. Then they took the bloody-palmed victim to the infirmary – and put him on punishment for being ‘culpably physically unfit’.
Shayk Amjot was, on the face of it, not the man for decorating two Roman men, especially rough-arsed ex-gladiators and former slaves. He was head of the Ouled Janir, one of the most bloodthirty of the tribes, had once led ghazzu – raids – of thousands against rivals, explored far to the east, forged surrounding tribes to his will by force or alliance, and even cowed the desert raiders who operated a protection racket over caravan traffic out along the Silk.
He had decided, when age crept on him, that he was safer with the Romans than anyone else and so had come to settle in this fortress city, where he made himself invaluable to the smooth running of a place whose walls were scrawled with obscenities in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Hatrian, Palmyrene, Parthian, Safaitic and Parsik.
He was now, as Kag growled, a bigger rogue than Kisa Shem-Tov – but he was a Roman-friendly rogue along the disputed Euphrates. Still, he added, soft and morose, Shayk Amjot is not the man to decorate us lightly. Nor was Dura-Europos the place for it, but it was all they had.
The locals treated the Army with fear, contempt and scorn, yet their miserable town had grown up because of the Army. There were fashionable streets – or ones that tried to be – but they were not for the likes of the Army. There were other, much less fashionable streets and they were assuredly not a place for legionaries, even less so for strangers trying not to look like them.
Kisa wisely stuck them to the labyrinth of small courts and streets where the Jews and Arabs lived. They went through dark and treacherous alleys of hovels, pooled with weak lights from shops offering Sweat, a drink made from dates, or where the wine was ludicrously cheap and made from grapes which had already been pressed two or three times.
They slid into these dark places, wrapping it round them like a warm keffiyeh, the desert scarf they wore looped round their necks – or, in Praeclarum’s case, round her face to hide that she was a woman.
In a place of planes and shadows, at a table pooled in a feeble spotlight, they stopped to waste some time, not planning to be too early. They ate tough pancakes with honey while Kisa got his bearings. Drust had an idea the little man wanted to make an excuse to slide off on his own, but made it clear he wouldn’t permit that.
The taberna, though it barely warranted the name, looked on eating-knives as accursed implements of the demons of the desert or the Romans, so they ate with fingers. The old man who served them still recognised them as Romans.
Kag laughed, but Drust was affronted; they wore tan robes and the baggy Persian trousers with once-white linen over-robes. They had curved knives shoved in their belts and Drust thought they looked like fierce camel-bothering desert pirates and should have been as anonymous as dust in that place.
‘You can’t fool an old stager like that,’ Kag said. ‘He has seen too many of us. Besides – if you add a throwing stick or two and a red cloak, we look like those dromedarii lads.’
It was true enough, but there was no balm on Drust, who drank the bad wine with pointed disgust until the lanterns were refilled to make the flame higher, allowing the insects to sizzle and the stolid-faced grizzlers to continue playing some game involving slapping counters hard on the board and yelling.
Then Kisa said it was the hour appointed and they got up and clattered the last of their few coins on the table; the old man appeared like a jnoun to sweep them up.
‘The house of Shayk Amjot,’ Drust said in Arabic and the old man squinted up at him and sucked missing teeth. Kisa scowled because he knew Drust was checking to see they were close to it, as Kisa claimed, and had not been led up some dark alley full of blades.
‘I would not go there. Your disguise is good, but perhaps not that good, authentēs. That is not a quarter for folk such as you.’
‘There are such places in every town,’ Drust answered sourly. ‘This holds nothing we do not already know about.’
The old man shrugged, rolling his head in that ambiguous gesture everyone knew meant anything from compliment and agreement to insult.
‘As you say, authentēs, you are the boldest of warriors and will not be put off even with a woman at your side. So follow this street to the end, turn left, then right, then left.’
They went, nodding polite bows to him, hands on breast and then, almost without thinking, resting one on the hilts of their daggers. This quarter, Kisa said, was the home of every disease, every vice, every crime, pitch-dark and full of lurking shadows. He warned them to pick a careful way around the holes and the clotted rubbish and everyone knew he was doing it to ingratiate himself after being so doubted.
One or two streets were lit with wan fish-lamps from square windows, but so narrow Drust could have stretched his arms and touched either side with his fingertips. He would have found miserable, low houses, half in ruins, a dim tunnel garlanded with shrieks and songs, wails and laughter.
Braziers glowed like rat’s eyes and women crouched round them against a chill night. A negress, glowing like ebony and almost totally naked, lay on a blanket beside a firepan and, almost wearily, waved at them to come into
the hut behind her.
There were others – a woman with a face furrowed with the ruin of her life called out to them in Arabic, and a girl, who might still have been a child, spat scorn at her and shook thin arms with copper bracelets that rang like a dull alarm-iron.
Through it all slid dark shapes. In daylight they would be the Jewish traders in their blue robes, or the ragged mavro who carried burdens mules would balk at, or the Persian stone-breakers or brick-makers. At night they were hunters.
There were shifts in the shadows, but Drust knew those who sidled and watched had weighed up the group, seen the dress, the daggers and the numbers and slid back into the dark to look for easier prey.
There was a glow and then a sudden bright flare of light which left an after-image on Drust’s closed eyelids. The smell of hot iron reached each nose as they shouldered through the dark and the crowding shadows, the tang of it catching Drust’s throat and banging memories into him with every blow of the hammer on the anvil.
The forge was a fat brick cone where a big man pounded red iron and idlers watched his skill, blood-dyed by fire; folk liked to see such hardness shaped into something new and different, even if the magic here only made nails and hinge brackets.
‘The Street of Cheap Iron,’ Kag said pointedly and Kisa beamed. He nudged Drust and pointed to where they should go. They came to a wall of ornate mud brick and crenellations and followed it to where the light pooled in front of a solid door. Kisa rapped on it and a shutter opened.
‘Shayk Amjot,’ Kisa said, and Drust expected an argument about what he wanted at this hour and who he was. Instead, the shutter snapped closed and the big, heavy door opened on to a lit courtyard; a huge silhouette filled the entrance, as effective as the closed door had been.
Then it stepped to one side and Drust ducked under the shadow of it, glancing sideways to see a striped robe, a pair of arms crossed on a massive chest, like two piglets suckling at a sow. The face above it was broad, black and gleaming, like a version of Ugo carved in jet.
He found himself in the courtyard of a neat Persian house, where dark shapes in white robes crouched on the ground offering nods and smiles.
The giant Nubian closed the door, the falling bar on it sounding sinister as a knell. Drust looked at Kag, who merely raised an eyebrow; Praeclarum kept the face-veil in place and Kisa looked like he had watery bowels and couldn’t hold it in much longer. Then the Nubian led the way into a cloistered room where a brazier glowed. On the far side was a huge cloth hung from the wall, a great fantasy of gold embroidery on red and yellow in loops and swirls.
Men sat on mats, lounging in cushioned comfort, and the giant indicated for them all to sit – folk made room for them, shifting away with wary scorn. They were tribals, Drust saw, and armed to the teeth – which was fine if they kept to the house or the night. If they stepped outside in daylight with such weapons brazenly revealed they’d have the army to deal with, and he grinned ferally back into their fierce stares, letting them know how much he considered them wolves with drawn fangs here.
Yet there were a lot of them, and both men perched, aware that they were vulnerable as a clay cup under an elephant’s foot.
‘They are Tayy,’ Kisa said quietly. ‘The ones who attacked at the oasis.’
It might have been correct, but all Drust saw were hard-eyed, hook-nosed men with curved knives and blank stares.
They waited. At a respectful distance girls stood draped in veils and countless copper ornaments which rang when they moved. They sipped sharbat with elegant dignity out of tiny cups, which made Drust smile at the thought of them, like Roman matrons enjoying wine and gossip. Then he heard, with a shock like iced water, a soft chant:
‘Sleep and dream while the Lares watch over you…’
It was in Latin, a soft, dreamy line from a lullaby, and when Drust turned he saw the folds of a cloak and the half-shrouded face of a woman with dark hair, skin like milk and eyes that were misted and blue. She had been beautiful once, he saw, but her life had wrecked it, and she sang with the happy smile of someone who was elsewhere, nodding like a sleeper and singing the same line over and over. Half remembered from a childhood long gone, Drust thought numbly and watched her as she squatted and drew the words in the thin dust of the floor. She can write, he realised dully. A slave who can read and write and speak Latin…
‘Papaver,’ Praeclarum whispered. Drust thought it probable – poppy seeds had always been popular and easy to get among slaves, and Manius had used a quid of some African leaves and worse when he could get it. Anything to ease the harshness of life as a slave. Or even just life… Drust wondered where Manius was now and if he had his leaf.
There was a sudden peremptory command in a tongue even Drust found hard to follow, a dialect so guttural it sounded like throat-clearing. The woman stopped crooning and scribbling and stood up at once; a silence fell so that they heard only the rasp of their own breathing and a soft shush as the woman let the thin cloak slide from her head, then all the way down to her hips.
A flute and a drum started, insidious as serpent coils. The chimes when she moved seemed like a carillon – she wore a collar of bells at her ankles and wrists and the same dreamlike expression as she raised her hands over her head then proudly threw it back. She was alabaster and still shapely; for all her face showed her age, her breasts and hips did not and she moved in bright colours and sweet, heady smells.
She swung and circled and posed, then suddenly seized the offered torch from an offered hand and swung it round her head in broad circles, the flames lighting her with a bloody glow so that, for a moment, the hissing torch and the swaying veil seemed interchanged; Drust held his breath, expecting a disaster of fire.
It did not come. She swung the torch free, sank to a panting heap and stubbed it out with a final hiss on the tiled floor. A low murmur of applause rolled out from the watching tribals and then a soft tinkling rain of silver coins. Drust’s admiration changed to concern when he saw her try to get up and stagger; he moved swiftly and caught her arm before she fell.
‘Steady, girl,’ he said and she looked at him; just for a moment, the eyes cleared and she saw him – then Drust felt himself wrenched round by a powerful hand and stared into the twisted face of one of the tribals.
The man was squat, bent-nosed, pig-eyed with fury, and stank. He said something which Drust did not quite understand, though there was enough in it to make him break out in an angry flush, but it was the spit that did it and when it hit Drust’s chin he did not think twice about the reply.
He drew back like a strutting cock and drove his forehead into the bent nose, which promptly exploded with scarlet as the man reeled back, bellowing. He caught a heel and went flying, legs waving like an upturned beetle. Kag laughed.
Then there was uproar, shouts and roars and the hiss of knives coming out of scabbards. The three of them fell into a familiar stance, shoulder to shoulder and backing up to find the nearest wall, while Kisa whimpered and tried to make a ball on the floor; a table went over with a clatter and smash. Praeclarum tore the veil from her face and, for the first time, the locals saw it was a woman; the cries got louder and uglier.
Then a voice cut through it like a whiplash and Drust saw the Nubian stride in to dominate the floor. There was a descent to muttering until even that ended and only the man with the bloody face kept on, cursing and snorting breath in through the blood. Kisa, who had recovered, was translating as fast as he could because it kept him from shrieking and running.
Bloody Nose was bellowing about how the Roman had insulted the Tormentor and Shayk Amjot since she was his woman. Kisa waited, hissing the Nubian’s reply; since it was delivered in slow, insidious coils he had time.
‘Is Shayk Amjot’s voice raised?’ the giant asked silkily. ‘Is she his woman or yours? Is it his honour or yours? Are these his guests or yours?’
Bloody Nose had no answers save sullen anger and dabbing.
‘What are you, then?’ the giant deman
ded and he looked round them all when he said it. There was foot-shuffling now.
‘You are beetles,’ he answered the silence. ‘You are the desert wind, which has no voice save sighs. You are nothing until Shayk Amjot tells you what you are.’
Drust saw that it did not sit well with these men and privately thought any one of them would cheerfully cut Shayk Amjot’s throat – yet they were leashed, and he wondered what bound them, but the giant did not permit him to dwell on it. He held out an imperious curl of hand and said, ‘Come.’
They went and, as they passed her, Drust saw the woman had been ripped out of her dreams with the shock; her O of a mouth and wide almond-shaped eyes, kohled and painted as they were, looked like a lost child.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered in heavily accented Latin as he passed, and he half turned in time to see the glass shutters come down behind her eyes and then, plaintive as whimpers: ‘Sleep and dream while the Lares watch over you. I’ll hold your hand, so when you wake in the morning I’ll still be here.’
It tore him – them all, Drust saw, even Kisa, who knew the tune if not the words – with memories sharp as daggers. Drust doubted there was a child who had not heard that lullaby, which had been around since first there were Roman mothers.
The room beyond was dimly lit by ornate lanterns, pierced to allow soft shafts. There was a low table and cushions scattered round it; the man perched on one indicated for them to be seated and they folded into a worn familiarity.
A slipper of servants brought sharbat, and wine, cool and sharp; the brazier coals glowed and Drust saw the man – Shayk Amjot, he presumed – when he leaned across to peer myopically at them. He saw a wizened face whose grizzled, hennaed hair sprang out from under a round cap and whose beard was bright orange with it. There was dark skin, a withered neck, and a face slashed with age and venal cunning. Shayk Amjot had no marks about him that hinted at destiny or greatness – save for the eyes. They held a studied, controlled violence.