The Red Serpent

by Robert Low

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No more than usual,’ he answered, trying to be light.

  ‘You were muttering,’ she said, and Drust was appalled at the idea of speaking aloud with no control over what he said. He did not dare ask, but she provided the answer.

  ‘Manius, you said. And Dog. You have told me about them and I am here chasing them, but I am no closer to realising why you do it. What makes these two worth all this effort?’

  Drust hesitated and she thought it was reluctance but it wasn’t. She was here, after all, and deserved at least to have an idea of why they were seeking two lost comrades.

  ‘Manius is a mavro from the far desert south of Lepcis Magna,’ he said. ‘He is… strange. His face is partly burned from another time, when we used Quintus’s carefully gathered naphtha balls to defeat an enemy. Sib did that to Manius and no one was sure then that he had not done so deliberately – he believed Manius was some sort of dark demon from the desert. In the end, though, Manius saved us all and Sib has been trying to atone since. I would not mention any of this to him, all the same.’

  Praeclarum was silent.

  ‘Manius is tall, dark, lean and an expert with a bow,’ Drust went on and she knew he was speaking to himself almost as much as her. ‘He was taken when we were escaping from under the Flavian and we thought him dead – but he got sent to the mines, the gods know where. Dog got him freed when Elagabalus became Emperor – Dog worshipped that boy and the Sun God he claimed to be. He got favoured and became a priest.’

  ‘Manius?’

  ‘Dog.’ Drust shifted, looked at her and smiled, the last blood of the dying sun staining his face. ‘I never thought Dog believed in anything, but he and that boy dragged us into trouble once before – and here we are again. Kag is right, all the same.’

  He told her what he remembered of Kag’s philosophy on why they persisted in this enterprise.

  ‘You are closer to Kag than the others,’ she said and he jerked at her insight, knowing it was true. ‘His father was a legionary, he says – didn’t that make him a citizen?’

  ‘In those days such marriages were not official,’ Drust answered. ‘He might have ended up a decent auxiliary given time – but the Red Flux took both ma and pa and that was it for him. He was taken as a slave.’

  He looked at her. ‘Never ask him.’

  She nodded, changed the subject.

  ‘What is Dog like?’ she asked. ‘Everything I know comes down to a man with a face like Charon, who is sought by everyone here and cursed for it.’

  What is he like, Drust wondered. A savage killer, ravaged by old grief and resentments. A man who could skin-mark his face with a skull in order to try and save the boy who would become Elagabalus the Emperor and his mother. A man whose leg Drust had once broken and everyone else kicked to ruin because he had crossed their master, Servillius Structus. A man who could take heads, children among them, because the Army paid bounty on them. A man who had saved Drust’s life at least once.

  She waited. He answered, ‘He is as mad as a helmet of boiling frogs.’

  He was surprised when she laughed. ‘He will fit in well with this life we have, then.’

  She was right, he thought. There is life here among us, charged with the stink and sound of death, carried like a strain of plague, a life lived in a ring of sand, on long camel trains and wagon convoys, on brief, bloody spasms of fights for water or shelter or just to keep what they owned, or even just for the delight of those who would pay to see it. It was a life that fed on itself, raped the ground it travelled and sat apart from the rest of the world, which needed it and despised it in equal measure.

  They sat. She leaned a little and he felt the heat and fell towards it like a man putting hands out to a fire. They sat shoulder to shoulder until it grew cold, but neither of them noticed anything but the warmth they leached, one from the other. It was all that Drust needed and so much more.

  * * *

  They found the grave the next day, nestled under the twisted trees of a feeder stream which came down through the flat plain, flowing faster as it neared the main river it was joining. It was steep-banked and choked with green, so crossing it was awkward and dangerous.

  Sib found the easiest way and everyone noted how churned it was by unshod horses. On both sides were the marks of old fires, the withered detritus of past gatherings.

  ‘The folk who came here did so to make noise and drink,’ Ugo said, looking round.

  ‘Worship,’ Stercorinus added, pointing to where offerings hung on the short, gnarled trees – a faded strip of coloured cloth, an amulet on a leather thong made brittle by age and heat. They made it safely across but the only joy in it was the moment they could splash water on their faces. Then, sorting themselves out on the other side, Kag found the grave.

  It was a pile of stones lifted from the river and laid over a shallow scoop; they found this because they dug it up, no one wanting to admit that they feared the worst.

  ‘It’s been made like this because they had no good tools for digging with,’ Kag pointed out, rolling a stone away and wiping his forehead with a sleeve. ‘People in a hurry, perhaps. Hiding, too.’

  ‘We should move away from here,’ Stercorinus said, cradling his sword and looking one way, then the other.

  ‘Is there no mark for it?’ Praeclarum asked and this made them look, squinting at the stones until they found one with a flattened side. D.M. Vix ann XXII. Latin – Drust’s heart lurched and he could see it was the same for the others, but the epitaph gave nothing much away – a dedication to the Manes, the fact that whoever was in it had lived twenty-two years. But it was in Latin, by someone who could write.

  ‘Too young to be Manius or Dog, and if they buried it they were not the ones who marked it,’ Quintus said as they finally rolled the stones and shifted the dirt clear to reveal a skeletal figure, dead for some time by anyone’s reckoning.

  ‘Roman, that is clear,’ Stercorinus said, squatting with the inscribed stone, turning it over and over in his hands.

  ‘Romans made the stone,’ Kag corrected. ‘They came when the riders who are normally here had left. It seems to me they recovered this body from what had been done to it. Might be anyone in the grave.’

  ‘Might be Dog,’ Quintus mused. ‘It was always hard to tell how old he was, what with having no head hair and that face.’

  ‘Well, it looks like Dog’s face,’ Ugo said and that made folk laugh. Then Sib appeared from where he had been scouting, limping a little from old wounds that had started to nag anew. He glanced in the grave and gave a grunt of relief while he wiped his sweat-streamed face.

  ‘Not Dog or Manius, then.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Looks like Dog,’ Ugo repeated, but no one laughed this time and Sib glanced from face to face with an expression of quizzical amusement.

  ‘Because it is a woman,’ he declared and pointed. ‘Look at the pelvis.’

  They looked but no one was sure, not even Praeclarum, and Kag clapped Quintus on one shoulder.

  ‘Thought you might have known that, at least.’

  ‘Not my type,’ Quintus fired back. ‘Too skinny.’

  Sib was ferreting in the pack he had left behind and came up with a pot, smearing the contents on the back of one hand and an elbow.

  ‘Hornets,’ he explained. ‘There’s a nest further up, in a tree. Got too close. Bastards sting like spearmen.’

  Kag took over scouting while Sib ate and everyone poked about the grave, eventually coming up with a necklace of blue stones. Quintus held it up.

  ‘This some of those fire-starer stones?’ he asked. ‘Like whores wear?’

  Ugo spat. ‘They are not, but do not remind me of that. My knees will never be the same from those stairs.’

  ‘You should have saved them and joined us jumping off the cliff,’ Drust pointed out bitterly.

  The best explanation they came up with for the dead woman was that she was some whore o
r a slave, taken by raiders and badly used.

  ‘A Roman woman,’ Praeclarum growled, ‘used for some foul rite.’

  Who had buried her was most of the mystery and eventually they settled on it being traders. This was one of the many Silk Road ways, so it was possible – and the only explanation of how a Roman woman came to be buried with a Roman epitaph, however brief.

  They gathered themselves, getting ready to move out again away from the stream a little way to where the scrub was less dense and allowed easier walking. They kept the river on their right like a smoke of green and would dip into it when night came.

  Then Kag came up, loping fast, kicking up dust spurts. He pointed behind him as he slid to a stop, panting from the run – everyone saw the dust cloud.

  ‘Storm?’ Praeclarum suggested, but Kag shook his head, getting his breath back. Then they heard the howls and yips; Drust’s flesh crawled.

  ‘Wolves?’ Kag demanded. ‘Some size of pack to make that much dust.’

  ‘This is the land of wolves,’ Stercorinus reminded them and Ugo hefted his axe.

  ‘Not wolves. I know wolves.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Kag finally managed. ‘Riders. Maybe twenty or so.’

  ‘Make for the trees,’ Drust ordered at once. ‘Stay quiet and hidden.’

  They filtered down the gorge and crouched by the river, listening to it slide among the stones. It was wide and slow this close to the ocean, which let them move out into the quiet eddies. After a while, Sib slithered down to join them.

  ‘They are making fires,’ he reported, which made every heart fall. ‘About twenty of them. Dressed like every goat-fucker you have ever seen – robes, Persian trousers, boots, bows, swords, little shields. Not our silver-faced pursuers, though – these look like bags of dung from the north, on ponies the size of dogs.’

  ‘They will be in for the night,’ Kag growled, wiping his face and flicking away a black ball of sweat-grease and insects. ‘By which time we will be stripped to the bone and every insect won’t have to eat again for a year.’

  ‘Can we fight them?’ demanded Stercorinus and Praeclarum looked sourly at him.

  ‘I take it your god did not report this as the place you would die. If you want, charge up the bank and take them on – I will be interested to see if your god is as fickle as all the others I have made offerings to.’

  Stercorinus merely cradled his sword, smiled mildly and wiped insects from around his eyes, trailing his fingers in the water to clean them.

  ‘They may come down for water,’ Kisa said fearfully, but Sib gave him a scathing look.

  ‘They have the smaller stream,’ he pointed out.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ Quintus declared after a moment or two longer.

  ‘If we move, they will see us,’ Kag said. ‘If that happens they can shoot us down, in or out of this gorge.’ He wiped his mouth and added bitterly, ‘Besides – we have left tracks all over the place up there. And if you leave tracks…’

  They might just leave offerings, drink their drink and leave, Drust thought.

  ‘Go and see if they unsaddle the horses,’ he told Sib, spitting out something that had crawled onto his lips. Sib looked dark, like a dog just kicked, but he went. He was not away long.

  ‘They have tethered the horses, but the saddles are on.’

  That left their bows cased, together with the arrow quivers, on tethered mounts. In case they had to move off in a running hurry, he thought, so they were not masters of this place, only bold.

  He sat back on his heels. ‘Well – we can try and move off, quiet as you like, and hope we are not heard. Or that in the daylight they don’t see the marks we left all over the same place and send scouts out to find us.’

  ‘Or we can fight.’

  ‘Never run in the ring,’ Quintus said, grinning, but Kag was scowling.

  ‘They have bows and will shoot us down.’

  ‘If they didn’t have bows,’ Drust said thoughtfully, ‘it would be more of a fight in our favour.’ He looked at Ugo.

  ‘You remember that tale of your old granda?’ he asked and Ugo frowned, then brightened and nodded. He unfastened his faded red dromedarii cloak, inspected it with deft fingers, then did the same with Kag and then Praeclarum. Hers he beamed at.

  ‘You are a lesson in neat,’ he said and she scowled, seeing her cloak vanish. It was because it had the tears and frayed holes repaired when no one else had bothered, but the price of that was Ugo spreading it out and fetching a head-sized stone from the stream. Then he punched slits in the ends and wove in a piece of leather thonging from Kisa’s sandal.

  ‘Lead me to it,’ he said to Sib and the pair of them slid out. Praeclarum looked from face to face until Quintus grinned, spat insects away, and said simply: ‘Hornets.’

  Kag made more of it. ‘Ugo’s granda fought Romans once and broke up a whole unit by throwing bees at them. Or so Ugo says.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have lived long to enjoy the honey of that moment,’ Kisa added and Quintus agreed, smiling.

  ‘Lived long enough to tell Ugo of it before our giant of the Germanies got snatched as a slave.’

  ‘Get ready,’ Drust said, trying to see how it would unfold. Sib would lead Ugo to the hornet nest and the big Frisian would fold it into the cloak, weighted with a stone because the nest was made of some papyrus-like substance and too light to throw.

  Then he would creep as close as he dared, whirl it once or twice like a sling and let the whole cloak fly. Hundreds of angry, stinging hornets the length of a finger-joint would burst out among the horses, who would be driven mad and tear free of tethers – even hobbles would not stop them. Their riders would be hard put to do anything to control or soothe them, for they’d be too busy running from hornets themselves. And all the bows and arrows were on the mounts.

  ‘Then we move out. East, along the river. Keep below the lip of the bank and we can sneak away,’ Drust told everyone. And they waited for Sib and Ugo, who came back in a sweating, panting rush. Sib ran straight out, fell over a rock and came up blowing water. Ugo flailed his arms round his head, trotted out as far as his waist, then sank his length.

  ‘Done and done,’ he declared, surfacing and blowing like a whale. Drust flapped at an angry hornet and everyone began to move off, splashing as fast as they dared through the uneven shallows, ducking the angry buzzing.

  It is working, Drust thought, and then the horse burst over the lip of the bank, driven mad and bucking, running blind and heading for the smell of water, which was always a refuge from stinging insects; Drust cursed, because he had overlooked that.

  A leg snapped with a loud crack on the first plunge and it went rump over mane, crashing and squealing until the loud thumps of its head hitting rocks stopped its squealing and the great fountain splash of it hitting the river drowned all else. It kicked in spasms and moaned.

  Kag hated to see horses hurt and was turning back to it when Sib moved, oil and silk. He had less emotion for horses, having had to clear up the wreck and ruin of race days, when mounts speared with chariot poles was the least of it.

  ‘Horses is not idiots,’ he would say morosely. ‘Most of the cavalry’s thinking is done by the horses, but they is idiot loyal and will do things they would not if left to their own. Like us,’ he would add and grin.

  Now he did a thing he would not normally do, just for the horse. He sloshed back to where it kicked weakly and opened the heart in its throat; the blood skeined away in swirls.

  ‘Leave it,’ Kag shouted. Sib left the dead beast, sloshing through the stained water just as another mount careered over the bank further down. Then the man arrived.

  He was running and flailing and yelling with a seared breath, but the ground vanished from under his feet and crashed him down, rolling him over and over and into the water almost at Sib’s feet. Sib paused, turned and knifed the man in the throat, though it was likely he never felt it; hornets droned and zipped.

  ‘Leave it!’
/>   It was good, screamed advice but too late. A second man staggered to the lip, teetered and slid down, waving at hornets – but he had seen the men and the dead horse and his dead mate. He skidded to the edge of the water and his sword came out. Sib floundered away from it and Drust cursed – another horse crashed over in a shrieking flail of hooves. More men appeared, some falling, some drawing swords.

  Drust unshipped the shield from his back and drew out the gladius, obsessively sharpened down the final third to the point; the rasp had once grated on nerves, but now no one noticed it round the fire.

  Sib had his own sword out, the dagger in his other hand, but he wore a head-covering and no helmet, had tunic, robes and trousers, all soaked and dragging – he was a dancer and a mover and he could not work that here, shackled to the knees by the drag of sodden trousers and over-robe.

  Stercorinus lunged forward, leaped out of the water with a high shriek that stunned the man who had just arrived over the bank and down to the shallows. The curved blade sheared through the man’s sword-arm just below the elbow and, even as the blood spurted, the back-blow scattered teeth and took the jaw off.

  Sib parried and fell under the weight of the blow while his opponent sloshed towards him, as water-sodden to the knees as Sib himself. Drust arrived just as the desert warrior was raising the long, straight sword for a downward blow, and he struck, a flick like an adder tongue. He felt the tug of it, no more than that, but the man’s throat spat a gout of blood and he shrieked and fell away.

  Drust made for the shallows, anxious to find better footing; he heard Sib follow and by the time they got there Ugo was at the top of the bank, the great axe hissing. It had little edge left, was simply a great hammer that smacked a man in the side of the head, slamming a dent into the helmet and making his eyes bleed. ‘Rome is Mother to us all,’ he roared and plunged away out of sight.

  Arse, Drust thought savagely. Who does he think he is – a centurion of Heavies? Then he realised that Ugo was trying to make it sound as if that was what was here, out of sight but arriving fast.

  He slogged up the bank to the lip of the bank, saw Quintus and Kag moving like a cunning toy, sliding this way and that, perfect and deadly. They had done this before in the harena and the ones who ran at them had no chance.