by Robert Low
‘This is the last of it,’ he said and popped it in his mouth. The others tightened straps and sorted buckles; Ugo started to put an edge on his axe, a sour grate of rhythmic sound.
They sat, saying nothing, while the wind hissed and curled, cold and yet with no promise of rain in it.
The calm, Drust thought, before men murder one another.
‘The Gate of Life is open,’ he said and they moved off into the mourning wind, leaving beast and blood and all the lives that once had been.
* * *
An arrow slapped the air over their heads and Manius leaped sideways, drew and shot, then nocked another. Drust hefted his shield and crouched, but Dog lumbered past, his filched armour making a rhythmic shush.
‘Don’t stop,’ he said, muffled under the mask, ‘or they will shoot us down. Make a fist of it.’
He was right and Drust resented him for it – but he made the fist, a five-knuckle wedge of men. Kag and Ugo, who carried armour they could not wear, threw the coats to one side while Manius nocked and shot.
Arrows flew back. Drust saw Praeclarum, frighteningly naked it seemed to him, bound after Dog with Mule at her back, then remembered the prize they had. He turned, found Kisa and the Empress.
‘Watch her,’ he ordered, and the little Jew nodded so furiously it seemed his head would come off, relieved that he did not have to go further.
Drust took a breath, then another. He saw Manius shoot his last arrow, lay the bow carefully down and haul out two sicarii, the curved daggers he preferred. He grinned at Drust, his teeth bloody from his chewing-drug and his eyes glittering.
‘I did not kill Sib,’ he said, his voice trailing after him like a dark cloud as he leaped forward. Drust heard the clatters and shouts, cursed the whole business and ran in to find Praeclarum, which seemed the only important part of the entire affair. Yet he also cursed her fearlessness, pulled down the silver mask on his face and followed her.
The enemy, who were leaderless since the attack by the tiger, were now being attacked by horrors out of the mountain who seemed to have command of the great white beast. They had seen their commander’s head torn off, had witnessed their comrades clawed and chewed. There was nothing left but the desperation of rats with nowhere left to go.
The man was just opening his mouth to scream when Drust rammed the gladius through the side of his cheek, then wrenched it free in a spume of blood in time to block a blow from a longsword; the bell-ring of it seemed to buzz his head under his helmet.
The second blow he ducked, shrugging so that it screeched off the scale armour, harmlessly vanishing over his shoulder. Someone grabbed at him and Drust smashed the man’s nose with the pommel of the sword, rammed it into the blood-soaked beard, then stuck the point into his throat. Did it again. And again…
They were everywhere, flitting like shrieking shadows back and forth across the holes of his face mask. His world was lurching figures and flashing blades, screams and bellows that drowned his ears. He blocked and chopped and staggered and had no idea whether he was effective or flailing like a tiro. He saw shards of it – a blow which stripped little armoured leaves off like a blizzard of dull-iron snow. Another which spurted up dust from in between the scales, as if he was beating a carpet.
A blow made his helmet ring, dropped him to his knees. Another slammed into the face mask and skewed it off the hinge, so that he could see nothing at all. In desperation he wrenched it up, gasping at the sudden flood of noise and light.
The man who had smacked him had a young face, streaked with blood and sweat and burning with feverish fear. He had his longsword up for a third blow when he arched, screamed so loud Drust thought his head would burst; Manius tore both daggers from the man’s neck and kicked him sideways, grinning with his mouth all wet and his eyes black as pits.
Praeclarum appeared, flitting like a wraith, slipping one way, dropping a shoulder to let a sword hiss with frustration over it. She stabbed and cut and vanished into the shroud of dust and misted blood.
Drust got to his feet, lurched forward a step or two, then tried to haul the lopsided ruin of face mask off the helmet, but couldn’t do it. He fumbled at the buckle under his chin, almost cutting his nose off with his own sword, then gave up when he saw men come at him again.
It became a charnel house of hacking, stabbing, screaming. This is what we are, Drust thought dully with the part of him still outside the cave of his head. This is everything we are, for all we try and pretend to be more, to be better.
He lost the gladius in a face – always the face, the armour won’t let you shove a point in – when the owner of it jerked and writhed, tearing the hilt from Drust’s fist. He looked like Kag, and for a moment Drust stopped in his tracks, panicked that he had killed his best friend. Then he pounced on a discarded longsword, broken off a third of the way along and now a shard of steel with a vicious needle point.
There was a horse. Suddenly, out of the confused morass, there was a horse. They are trying to escape, Drust thought – he may even have yelled it – but the idea of that roared through him like a fire. No one gets away. If they do, we will have them back at us again and again and again…
The horseman was in his element. This is what they were, these silly silver-masked fighters. They shot arrows until men fled, then rode them down, slicing them from the saddle with their longswords. They only ever put those masks down over their faces when they have no fighting to do, he thought…
The horse itself was a weapon – Manius was caught by the spinning hind end and sent flying. Mule tried to dart in and was caught by a rearing hoof, a smack right in the face; Drust saw him go down and then lost sight of him.
‘Kill it,’ someone yelled, and Ugo stepped up and axed the horse in the neck, chopping part-way through so that it squealed once and the head flopped. The man riding it had a face like something from an Atellan farce as the beast collapsed under him; he shrieked as it ground his leg in a spasm of dying, then Ugo carefully avoided the flailing hooves and brought the axe down on his middle.
There were no figures left. Drust looked, head swinging like a tired bull, but all he saw was Brothers – Dog, moving like a vengeance of steel from body to moaning crawler, his swords rising and stabbing. Kag and Quintus were bent, hands on knees, gasping for breath. Manius was moving in unsteady circles, seemed to be laughing maniacally – then he found his bow and took it up as if it was a child.
Praeclarum loomed. She was bloody and holding herself tilted, so that Drust’s heart leaped like a trapped bird at the frightening possibilities.
‘Cut my chest,’ she said and showed him where the leather was neatly slashed and bloodied. ‘Not that I had much to begin with, so that was rude.’
Dog laughed, hearing this. They all did. Laughed like wolves howl, for the kills, for having survived it and, in the end, for having recovered horses and supplies and even gold.
‘They got paid in advance for capturing an Empress and killing us,’ Kag declared, holding up a purse. ‘I don’t mind kissing the head of this new Sasan king.’
He did so, then flung the coin away from him, which astonished everyone else. ‘To Fortuna,’ he declared, and Dog, follower of the Sun God, paused from looting a corpse.
‘Every whore needs paying,’ he said boldly – but Drust saw him touch his Sun God amulet.
‘Mule will be delighted,’ Quintus said, then realised why he wasn’t.
Fortuna had taken her price already. It lay in a heap with its head smashed in by a steel-shod hoof. Mule’s mother would not know him, Drust thought, but he said nothing.
No one was untouched and they spent a long while binding and stitching before they even got down to dragging Mule into a shallow scoop of grave, piling rocks over him.
They stood for a moment, a small ragged band, bruised and bloodied and still with a long way to go. No one now had doubts they would make it, all the same.
Kisa came up, helping the stumbling Empress, who squatted like some pleb in a
hut when she stopped moving. Kisa looked round at the carnage, at the grave, and then at everyone else until he had worked out who had died. He nodded, as if it had fulfilled some prophecy only he had known about.
‘Where were you?’ Dog demanded harshly. Kisa blinked back at him, then looked at Drust.
‘I was told to guard the woman. With my life.’
Dog laughed. Drust laid a hand on Kisa’s shoulder, but was looking at Dog when he spoke.
‘So you did. Look at the prize, brothers. This is what we came all this way for – well, this and Manius and Dog, who begged for help.’
Dog dropped his eyes and then acknowledged the truth with a flap of one hand. Drust felt through his very pores the shifting change of the moment. When Praeclarum came and leaned against him, so that he put one arm round her, no one sniggered or made a ribald comment.
They had faced down the possibility of the last taste of wine, the last feeling of blood surging in their veins, and remembered the strength of it and that it was in the others, which made their own strength greater still.
They knew each other and the last days had been an urgency, like lust, to know each other as they had before; it was impossible but they had managed it and nothing would be the same ever again because of it.
‘That’s the way,’ Drust said, pointing to the far horizon. They climbed on their plundered horses and rode away from the Red Serpent.
Rome – Six Months Later
The wedding party came down from the High Footpath on the Quirinal, a trail of well-dressed, happy people that those watching smiled at – briefly. Then they realised that they were all bruisers, men nicked and pocked and blotched – one had his face covered and even the most charitable of the passers-by muttered about leprosy.
The others in the wedding party were clearly gladiators, but it was hard to tell who was slave and who master. The groom, they decided, because he was the least offensive, but his wife had a simply stunning smile under her demure head-covering – until people realised it was false, a cunning contrivance made from pearls. Expensive, certainly, but still…
‘So that’s where your money went,’ Quintus joked when they’d met at the feast. Praeclarum, beaming, had told him she could not eat with it, but it improved her bridal looks no end and everyone agreed with that. The Vestal Empress had been a richer prize than anyone had realised, but no one knew who had done the paying – the boy-emperor, her family, the College of Pontiffs? Perhaps even the Vestal priestesses themselves – Drust would not discount that one.
Dog kept his face covered, no one got so drunk they couldn’t climb up the Quirinal to rub the fingers of old Theogenes, and most of them still retained a semblance of the decent clothes they had bought to make them presentable in Rome.
‘What next, now that you are a married man?’ Kag asked tentatively as they made their way back down into the Wolf’s Den, where a clothing slip that revealed they carried lethal hidden blades would not bring a wrath of Vigiles. ‘Chestnut farm in Abruzzo? Freight hauling for Papus the potter?’
‘Can you see Praeclarum picking chestnuts?’
Kag laughed, then stroked his neatly trimmed beard. ‘Well, the money we got for an Empress won’t last much longer.’
Drust did not want to think of it, not because of the money but because of the Empress who had earned it for them. She had been in Rome for twenty-one days, with no word on her fate.
‘I had Kisa set up a meeting with Audens,’ Drust said quietly.
‘At the Ludus Magnus? Is he still alive?’
Drust nodded. Not only was Cascus Minicius Audens alive, but he was looking for experienced beast-hunters to go north, up to the border walls in Raetia and Pannonia and beyond.
‘In search of what?’
‘Wolves, bears, anything we can get for the Flavian,’ Drust retorted blankly. ‘Death goes on…’
He turned as Praeclarum came up; she had lost her smile and he knew she had overheard.
‘I meant to tell you…’ he began, but she waved it away.
‘Oh, I know of that – Kisa told me long since. Good idea.’
‘Then why do you have your teeth in a pouch?’ Kag asked. ‘I like it when you smile.’
She looked out towards the roofs and the buildings, as if she could pierce the walls with her eyes.
‘They blew horns on the Campus Sceleratus an hour ago,’ Praeclarum said and turned blank eyes on him. ‘Just as we said our vows.’
The Campus Sceleratus – the Evil Field – had a pit with a ladder down into it. The Empress would have been led down then left with some water and a loaf; the horn sounded when she was sealed in.
Now life would go on above as if she still lived. Her family could claim she had last been seen alive and with food and water. No blood was spilled, but the goddess was appeased and justice done, while the State had sealed the lips of a traitoress.
Kag muttered a prayer and Praeclarum held Drust by the hand as they turned into the dim tunnel of ramshackle tenements that was the Wolf’s Den, where Dog unpeeled his head-covering and made sure the hilt of his gladius was now clearly seen.
They swaggered into the smoked, noisy dim, fearing nothing but the memory of a ravaged blind woman sitting in the dark waiting to die.
It would follow them like a silent, white wraith, padding all the way to the dark forests of Rhaetia and beyond the Wall.
Author’s Note
In AD 224, the year this novel is set, the Emperor Alexander Severus (or Severus Alexander, depending on your historical preference) was seventeen years old and into his second year as sole ruler of the largest empire on the planet at the time. He was the heir to his cousin, the nineteen-year-old Emperor Elagabalus, who had been murdered along with his mother Julia Soaemias by his own guards.
Elagabalus and his cousin Alexander were both grandsons of the influential and powerful Julia Maesa, one of the coterie of Julias surrounding the throne. Julia Maesa had arranged for Alexander to claim the throne and made sure Elagabalus and his mother died.
Two years later, Alexander’s reign seemed prosperous – the Roman successes against the Parthians had weakened their old adversaries to the point where civil war had broken out and this very year the House of Sasan inflicted a crushing defeat on the Parthian king, killing him in the field. But Ardashir still had a great deal to do before the rule of the House of Sasan was secure and the Sasanian dynasty took over the old Parthian Empire. It was time the Romans could use to their advantage.
Except they didn’t. The Roman military was becoming increasingly undisciplined – desertions were rising, dissent and revolts growing. There were clashes between the people of Rome and the Praetorian Guard, leading to the death of two commanders, Julius Flavianus and Gerinius Chrestus – both killed on the orders of the Praetorian Prefect, Ulpian. The Praetorian Guard reacted, pursuing and killing Ulpian – who was a lawyer, not a soldier – in the imperial palace, in front of the boy-emperor. His assassin, Marcus Aurelius Epagothus, was ‘rewarded’ with the governorship of Egypt (Alexander and his mother were ‘persuaded’ to make the appointment), but he too would later be assassinated.
It is into this feverish hotbed that Drust and company arrive, looking – at first sight – to rescue two of their own from beyond the Red Serpent, a huge defensive wall across a geographic narrowing between the Caspian Sea and the mountains of north-eastern Iran.
It is one of the most ambitious and sophisticated frontier walls ever built and archaeologists and historians are still arguing as to whether it was constructed by the Achmaenid Persians, Alexander the Great or the Sasanids. The truth is probably all three, though the last rebuilt and re-faced a lot of it using thousands and thousands of locally made bricks, whose firing turned them the colour of old blood – hence its name, the Red Serpent. It is 195 km (121 miles) long and 6 - 10 m (20 - 33 ft) wide, with more than 30 forts spaced at intervals of between 10 and 50 km (6.2 and 31.1 miles). It is surpassed only by the Great Wall of China as the longest defensiv
e wall in existence.
Elagabalus, that ill-fated boy rumoured to be the son of the equally ill-fated Caracalla, really did marry a Vestal – and, after being forced to divorce her, went back to living with her once he had been ‘properly’ remarried. This was one of the many scandals which astounded conventional Rome – some historians want us to believe that Rome was outraged by the fact that the Severan dynasty was darker-skinned than any previous and would like us to believe in a Roman racism. Too many histories make mention of ‘the first black Emperor of Rome’.
The truth is more that the Severans came from North Africa, bringing that slightly exotic lick of Africa that had little to do with skin colour and everything to do with culture. That was coupled with Severan marriage into the Bassiani family from Emesa, Syria, an even more exotic family of eastern priests of the Temple of the Sun.
There is no record of what happened to Julia Aquilia (later Severa), the Vestal virgin who became an Empress. Some sources state that she was forced into the marriage. It is claimed by some historians, however, that many stories about Elagabalus have been exaggerated by his enemies, and so there is no certainty about what actually happened. Elagabalus also had relationships with men, and the historian Cassius Dio claims that Elagabalus had a more stable relationship with his chariot driver Hierocles than with any of his wives.
There really is a secret name for Rome – legend has it that Romulus shrouded the true name of the city he founded in mystery so that its enemies would be unable to bring curses upon it, and ‘Roma’ is simply a construction to enable public discourse. Consequently, it is a great sacrilege to speak the real name of Rome – and, yes, Valerius Soranus was crucified in Sicily allegedly for blabbing it. I have no idea if the Vestals knew the secret name, but the Pontifex Maximus, the Chief Priest of Rome, reportedly did.