The Red Serpent

by Robert Low

  ‘You think?’ Kag answered, scowling. ‘What gave it away – all the questions about why the fuck we are here, perhaps?’

  ‘Be nice to know what Sib got sixed for,’ Ugo rumbled as Mouse squatted beside him and indicated the uneaten portion of his bowl.

  ‘You want that?’

  ‘It concerns the secret of Rome,’ Dog said, and Drust looked meaningfully at Mouse and Mule and then Kisa. Dog smiled.

  ‘All Brothers here,’ he said and Drust acknowledged it.

  ‘The secret of Rome?’ Kag prompted.

  ‘Where to get a decent hot pie at midnight,’ Manius growled.

  ‘Or a clean whore under the Flavian during Ludus,’ Quintus added, grinning like a roasting grill.

  ‘Or how to sit on the Hill and keep your laurels on your head and your head on your neck,’ Drust offered. Dog smacked his palms and pointed at Drust as if he had made a killer point in a Senate debate.

  ‘Close – you have not thrown the Dog.’

  That had a few laughs, but mostly folk waited.

  ‘It involves a woman,’ Dog went on, and Kag flung up his hands with an expression of disgust.

  ‘I fucking knew it. Gods above and below, Dis fuck me in the arse sideways with his hammer – a woman. It is always some woman with you – you are worse for it than Quintus and at least he fucks them, not sticks them on a pillar and bows.’

  ‘Are you finished?’ Dog asked mildly.

  ‘Not hardly. I thought since the last one you worshipped got sixed along with her marvellous boy you’d have learned a lesson. It seems…’

  Drust leaned forward, laid a hand on his forearm. He felt the tremble there and saw the anguish and rage in Kag’s face. It wasn’t about women, or Dog or Rome’s secrets, he realised. It was about Sib and, perhaps, Manius.

  Praeclarum appeared, scowling, and dumped her pack.

  ‘They say these sand roaches have a thousand names for camels,’ she spat. ‘I hope none of them is “cunt” because I have decided that is the name of the one I am riding.’

  ‘They do,’ Mule answered sagely, pouring wine into a bowl and offering it to her. ‘One for a beast which drinks once a day, another for one which drinks twice a day, and yet another for…’

  ‘… one which drinks three times a day,’ Kisa finished with a snort. ‘I see where this camel is going.’

  Mule shook his head with sorrow.

  ‘You do not,’ he answered. ‘No camel drinks three times a day – but the best ones drink once every three days and there is a name for them.’

  He stopped, frowning. ‘I know them all, but there is no point in telling you – it would be like pouring into an overfull cup.’

  Kisa scowled but it was only for show. Mouse chuckled and called Mule a useless fart but Drust saw that it was a worn rut of old friendship and heard Sib and himself – and others – echoing such scathe from the dark of the past. He felt tired and old.

  ‘Is there a name for the man-beast that humps camels?’ Praeclarum snarled. ‘Is it the same as for the Army runaway who cared for them once, I wonder? Did you run off from that Palmyran lot in Dura?’

  Quintus and Kag and Mouse made awed sounds of admiration, while Mule managed a grin and acknowledged the stroke from Praeclarum. Kag had had time to recover and Manius had seen it.

  ‘Tomorrow you will meet Bashto,’ he said. ‘He is a good trader and most of the men here are his – the camels too. He is the one who knows Shayk Amjot and got us all in this.’

  ‘In what?’ Drust demanded. ‘What is the secret of Rome?’

  ‘The true name of the City,’ Dog put in. ‘Some say it is Hirpa. Some Evouia or Valentia, but they are all wrong. I have said those names and I am still alive, unlike Soranus, who died for violating the prohibition for saying it aloud in public.’

  ‘Soranus?’ demanded Drust.

  ‘Quintus Valerius,’ Kag put in, which made Kisa blink a little; but Kag knew some scholarly matters, courtesy of having been bodyguard to a young squit of the nobility and making sure he went to lessons. Kag had learned more.

  ‘A poet in the time of Sulla,’ Kisa interrupted and Kag nodded agreement.

  ‘More to the point – a tribune of the people. They crucified him in Sicily, but I heard it was politics that got him nailed up. I always thought it was his bad verse.’

  ‘The City’s true name exists,’ Dog said. ‘Armed with it, enemies can capture it, or so it is believed.’

  ‘The City has been captured before – did those sheep-shagging Gauls have the name, then?’

  Quintus was grinning with his mouth only, but Dog merely tilted his head a little, unconcerned.

  ‘Gauls sacked the City, all but the Hill, and then those defending the Capitoline came out from behind the walls and kicked their arse,’ Kag said thoughtfully. ‘So they did not conquer the City.’

  It does not matter what we think, Drust saw. Such a belief would be a powerful tool for anyone looking to send men against the Empire, and he said as much.

  ‘Uranius found this out and now wants us to rescue the word and return it to safety,’ he added.

  ‘Rescue the word? Is it imprisoned, then? Shackled in a grammarian, perhaps?’

  Quintus laughed at his own joke, but no one followed, too fascinated by what Dog was about to say.

  ‘The woman,’ Kag said suddenly, and heads turned to him. Dog nodded admiringly.

  ‘The very same. Empress of Rome is more proper, though.’

  ‘Oh Bel-Shamun, you show me the way of it. I stand ready.’

  He did not say much, but when he did it was always a show-stopper and all the heads turned to where Stercorinus stood like a stele at the edge of the fire. No one laughed and he said nothing else, so Dog told them the rest of it – the woman who knew the secret name of the City had been wife to Elagabalus. Twice. And her name was Julia.

  When he said this, everyone who remembered the Severan Julias groaned. There had been a gaggle of them, all relatives of the Sun God boy Elagabalus, all priestesses of the religion in Emesa, and all deadly. Mother, aunts, grandmother – they were all regal and beautiful and poisonous. Now the one who was mother to the current Emperor Alexander was the most deadly of them all.

  Kag said as much, almost desperately, but Dog just spread his hands.

  ‘It’s a name, that’s all.’

  ‘So is the secret one for the City,’ Drust spat back. ‘Yet here we are because of it – and one Brother less.’

  He fell silent after that, feeling ruffled as a cat in a storm. He knew of this new Julia – Julia Aquilia Severa, daughter of Quintus Aquilius who had been twice consul under Caracalla; the ‘Severa’ praenomen had been given to her when she married Elagabalus. He had divorced his first wife to do it.

  It was just one of Elagabalus’s scandals – Julia Aquilia was a Vestal and, by tradition, should have been buried alive for breaking her vows of chastity and virginity. Worse than that, the boy-emperor symbolically married Vesta the goddess at the same time; he was full of shit like that, Drust remembered, even when he was nine and being rescued by us from the Land of Darkness beyond the Walls of the north.

  In the end, his grandmother Julia Maesa, the one who had engineered him into the purple cloak, got it all revoked and made him marry a sensible choice. Not long after, he divorced that wife and went back to living with Julia the Vestal, presumably no longer virgin.

  ‘The grandmother got rid of her at the same time she got her grandson and his mother assassinated,’ Dog ended and Kag blew out through pursed lips.

  ‘Then your sometime Empress would be dead too. They wouldn’t have missed her.’

  ‘I was her guard,’ Dog said simply and Quintus flung back his head and laughed like a howl of a wolf.

  ‘You let her live.’

  ‘I did as I was told – it is the worst curse of the gods to kill a Vestal save by burying her alive in the Temple, and that would have taken too long for grandma, who feared people might agitate over it. She
arranged for the Vestal Empress to go to Emesa and be sold as a slave.’

  ‘So where is she now?’ Drust asked, feeling a sick slide of apprehension even as he said it.

  ‘The city – well, that’s what they call it here – of Asaak. A good camel ride from the caravanserai we will reach tomorrow.’

  ‘She is a slave?’ Praeclarum asked and Dog looked at her; Drust was pleased to see she didn’t wince under that Dis gaze.

  ‘She is no slave in Asaak,’ he said, ‘but our new Emperor Alexander wants her back.’

  ‘Is he next one up on the mare?’ Ugo growled. Dog spat warningly in the fire.

  ‘She is an Empress and a Vestal. All of those daughters of Vesta know the secret name of the City – but they stay cloistered, so it is never a problem.’

  ‘Now it is? What does our boy-emperor fear? The Parthians are beaten into the ground.’

  Dog shook his head sombrely. ‘They are fighting each other – but the old king is dead and this new one, the Sasan, calls himself shahanshah, King of Kings, in the old way of the Persians. When he finishes cleaning out the house, he will turn on Rome.’

  ‘So young Alexander sent Uranius and Uranius sent you,’ Drust said.

  ‘More or less. Uranius can’t trust anyone out East, but the Emperor trusts me. I helped kill his rival, after all.’

  Drust stared. The boy Dog had gone wide-eyed years before over the golden priest of the Sun God – and his mother Julia Soaemias. They had all spent a long, hard time rescuing that pair because of Dog, and Drust remembered the mother, an elegant sway of perfume and sharp intelligence. She had not deserved to be dragged by the heels through a Praetorian camp – but he had not known Dog had been involved.

  Neither had anyone else from the old Brothers; Kag just stared and shook his head, Quintus spat in the fire. Ugo lifted his hands up and then let them fall as if they weighed too much.

  ‘So you have tracked her down. You have the men – why are we here?’

  ‘We had the men,’ Dog admitted, ‘but they ran off. Camels died. Raiders. Sickness.’

  ‘So you called us.’

  ‘We met this Bashto before we were too weak to be unimpressive. He knows we want a captive Roman woman, but not why, and he wants the head of the ruler of that city. Seems the ruler taxed too heavily, Bashto argued and now his trains are banned from trading. We tried once but only managed to release two of Julia Severa’s slaves – the one in the grave and the one Shayk Amjot treats so badly. It was them we sent with the message.’

  ‘Jupiter’s cock, Dog,’ Kag said wearily. ‘You are tiresome in the way you arrange your life.’

  Dog spread his hands in supplication. ‘I need you because you are unknown – all Bashto’s men are known, as is Mule, Mouse and others. My face is… obvious. But you can get in and out with the Empress and the head of Farnah-vant.’

  ‘It means “full of splendour” in the Persian tongue,’ Kisa said softly.

  ‘Don’t give a fuck for it,’ Kag snarled. ‘Don’t want any part of it. What’s in it for us, Dog? You are always doing this – we got nothing from the last Atellan farce you put us through. Unless you count exile as a gift.’

  ‘You got citizenship,’ Dog fired back. ‘A copper plate to say so.’

  ‘You sold all of our copper plates for a horse,’ Ugo pointed out. ‘Besides – everyone got made a citizen not long afterwards, by decree of Caracalla.’

  Drust held up a hand and waited for the quiet. ‘We are here. One of us lies in a tomb. If we rescue this Empress and get her to safety, then riches will follow, sure as rain follows cloud.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Dog beamed.

  ‘As ever with these affairs,’ Stercorinus said into the silence that followed, ‘it’s how the stroke is done, not the death that follows.’

  Chapter Ten

  They bumped darkly up to what Manius announced would be Umut and on the way the Brothers variously conspired to walk with Drust for a while. They got little out of it, for Drust had no more insights than they already had.

  Stercorinus was not one who made his way to Drust; instead, he rode his camel like he walked – upright and cradling his sword, staring at nothing. Praeclarum, the only one Drust welcomed when he walked, pointed out how the Little Shit had changed.

  ‘He is like a dark pool now,’ she said. ‘You cannot see into it and hesitate at the edge, wondering what lurks there. I think he heard his god speak.’

  Drust was forced to agree, but he was more concerned about her, for she had been struck hard by Sib’s death. Now she dismissed it with a slight wave and a lying shrug.

  ‘I am well enough. I have no teeth, my hair is a mess and I do not know whether to grow it or shave it back. It needs washing, either way. And I feel hollow, nothing more.’

  He did not know why he did it, but Drust laid a hand on her shoulder and when he looked at her, eye to eye, he saw them widen, felt… something. Looked away. They walked, hardly daring to breathe, feeling trembled and lifted and strange, and would not have wanted to be anywhere else at that moment.

  It was not a mood destined to last; it vanished an hour later, shredded away by the familiar stink on the wind and the raucous quarrelling of carrion birds. Drust did not need to utter a word to get the Brothers falling into a half-crouched huddle, weapons up and shields ready. Dog’s own borrowed men did the same.

  They waited and watched, while Mule hissed orders to shepherd the groaning camels safely into the lee of the warriors; slow as prowling cats they came up to where the dust swirled in hissing little circles round the strewn dead. The ugly-necked buzzards spat at each other and tore red gobbets.

  Drust looked at Dog and was pleased to see that he knew, at once, what was signalled with just eyes; not all of it is worn out, he thought. He took Manius and Ugo and six or seven others and started to move towards the weathered mud-walled buildings. Drust found himself shoulder to shoulder with Kag on one side and Mule on the other, with Praeclarum not far off. He could not see Stercorinus nor Kisa.

  ‘Move out a way,’ Kag said to Mule. ‘This is not the Army. We need fighting space.’

  Mule grinned savagely back at him and nodded so his hair-trinkets rattled – Drust had learned that they were fingerbones from the ones he had killed, or so he had claimed to anyone who would listen.

  ‘Is there a name for a camel that drinks less than once a day?’ Praeclarum called out, and Drust knew she did it to throw dust on the fire forming between Mule and Kag. Ahead, a buzzard flapped off a corpse and hopped lethargically, too gorged to fly.

  ‘No,’ Mule said eventually, moving away from Drust and Kag, ‘but there is one for a camel that drinks only a little water at a time. And one for a female camel which smells water but will not drink it.’

  ‘So there are different words for a female camel that drinks once a day and a male camel that drinks once a day?’ demanded Praeclarum. Drust saw Dog kneel by the corpse, examine it and move on, stepping cat-light and swinging from side to side. The day sweated.

  ‘Including one for a female camel alone in a herd of males,’ Mule replied, cheerful now.

  ‘You have not told us any of these words for camels,’ Stercorinus growled out, appearing suddenly on the other side of Drust and walking casually, as if he was strolling. Mule admitted this was true, for he had forgotten most of them.

  ‘I do not know much,’ Stercorinus snarled, while Drust wondered where the anger came from, ‘but I know the name for one who talks always about camels. No Teeth, he is called, for it seems to me the likely outcome of annoying many folk with his camel-talk.’

  ‘Ho – hold your lip on the jests about teeth,’ Praeclarum added, which made everyone laugh and then unstick their top lips from their own teeth, trying not to show their nervousness to anyone else.

  Drust moved forward to where Dog stood while men lashed out and kicked carrion birds off the dead. There was a good score of them, women and children among them.

  ‘What happened here?’ he
asked. Manius rinsed his mouth with some hard-won spit and gobbed it into the dust, then read the marks of it as if tracing letters on papyrus.

  ‘They were slaughtered like hogs,’ he answered and jerked his beard at the one who lay at their feet. ‘This oldster was stabbed lying down. Several times – he held up his hands to ward off the blows, for you can see a spear went through the palm of one. He was spear-hit in the neck, chest and the groin about three or four hours ago and he has not improved since.’

  Mule came up blinking sweat and sorrow from his eyes, for he knew the man and most of the others. All villagers, he told them, rounded up and killed.

  ‘The caravanserai is just beyond here,’ he added bitterly, ‘but no one came to their aid. Bashto would have heard the screams, but he did not send help.’

  * * *

  There had never been a chance of Bashto risking anything for the people of a mean place called Hope, as Drust saw later, when he was ushered into the dim of the fat tent he occupied. It was sparse and cool and the usual reek of a compound of men and camels had been chased off with a fragrance, hot and strange.

  Men moved with a purpose over a coloured weave of square carpets laid on the ground, round a pile of cushions on which sat a man in loose trousers, red slippers and patterned, coloured robes. There was a great fat winding of linen round his head, with a fan of it sticking out of the top; a blissful smile wreathed out of black beard streaked with silver.

  The smile was because of the cup he held under his nose, whose fragrance filled the room and which he inhaled. He looked up as Drust came in with Kag and Dog.

  ‘This is Lotus Blossom chay,’ the turbaned man said with relish in good Greek. ‘Brought all the way from the lands of the Wei.’

  He held up one hand and between thumb and forefinger was a small, round ball of what seemed to Drust to be dried grass. He had seen stranger, more innocent sights that turned out to be able to spin you through Elysium once you had swallowed them.

  ‘Chay,’ the man declaimed. ‘Lotus Blossom. I have Jade Ball and Black Ring as well and each one is worth a fortune. It is this, as well as riso and silk that Farnah-vant wants to strip me of. May the Holy Fire scorch his fetid balls.’