Manius gave him a stare like a steel wind.
‘Never give a name,’ he said softly, ‘to something you might have to feed iron to.’
* * *
‘What are they doing now?’
Sib was shivering, his words coming out bitten in two. They all lay at the fringe of a line of trees, some like skeletal hands clawing up from the wet mulch, most of them green with needles already clotting with snow. It had been snowing for two hours.
Below them, the scurrying pack of Blue Faces were kicking people away from them. The discards stumbled free, falling down or simply sitting where they were. Once, Drust saw a grey-haired woman dragged out by a warrior, who slashed at her legs until she fell, whimpering; there were faint cries elsewhere, too.
The pack moved on, leaving a scatter of crawling, limping bodies behind; one or two fell and stayed still.
‘Those ones are slowing them down,’ Manius said.
‘At least they did not kill them,’ Quintus said and Manius did not even spare him a look, but all the scorn was in his voice.
‘Why would they? The ones coming after them are here to rescue as much as exact vengeance. They will gather them up and now they will be the ones slowed. They hamstring them.’
‘Let’s not wait to see,’ Drust said. ‘The Blue Faces in their stronghold will know an enemy is near and that will make them all look in that direction. It lets us move unseen, but we must not lose sight of the Blue Faces. They are our guides after all.’
‘You will not need to hurry,’ Manius said, brushing snow off his bow. ‘The chasers will guide us – and they only need follow the trail of throwaways. We will stay here and try and get warm.’
‘Who made you leader?’ Kag demanded. Manius shrugged, looked at him and then pointedly at Drust.
‘I was taken when I had sixteen seasons on me. I had already been a raider out of the desert for seven seasons before that. I know more than anyone here about what people such as these do, whether they do it on sand or snow.’
‘I was also a raider at that age,’ Sib hissed. ‘Your people did not raid. They slaughtered. Jnoun. Lemur…’
‘Ho, ho,’ Kag protested, but Drust held up a hand and stared at Manius.
‘I lead the Procuratores. That’s always been the way of it and nothing has happened to change it. You will follow my lead?’ he asked. ‘If not, fare you well. We fight together here.’
‘We have the same name,’ Manius replied coldly, ‘but that does not make us brothers. I will stay for my share – money is the mortar that has bound us all.’
He went off. Sib spat and Ugo grunted, then shook snow off his head.
‘That shows he is no harena,’ he said. ‘What binds us is blood and sand, not gold.’
There were grunts of approval, but Drust doubted Ugo’s ideals – on the harena you had no friends and the Procuratores had been tied by poverty and debt to Servilius Structus. Manius was the first crack in what had been coming since the day they made their mark on the contract for this – after it they would go their own ways.
Drust just did not want it to be before they had done what they came to do. He did not want it at all, for he had come to realise an uneasy truth – these, the Brothers of the Sand, were the only semblance of family he had and probably the only one he’d ever have.
When it was gone – what then? It was a matter he did not want to confront.
* * *
Moving out, they followed the ones following the Blue Faces. Twice they came on graves of hasty scrapes and piled stones; one was a small affair and the amulet wrapped round a stone was big enough only for a child’s neck.
‘They take time to tomb them up,’ Manius said flatly, ‘and fall further behind.’
‘They keep going all the same,’ Kag pointed out.
They dipped into low country where the forests frowned down on them, dripping green and gold and white; the snow drifted like goose feathers and the cold sliced them. Drust watched Sib shiver more and more and knew that they had failed to outrun the weather. Winter had come early, keen and cold.
They came on the first steading not long afterwards, stone and turf huddled low to the ground near the spill of the river they had been following – the Smoothing Stone, Drust thought. It frothed like water from a burst pipe mostly, but now and then swelled and contracted like something giving birth. This was a wide, calm stretch, the water shallow so that in summer you could see the bottom and the fish; now it was fringed with ice that would creep out, bit by bit, as winter went on.
The steading was cold, the marks of the chasers clear in the scuffed snow. The drift of flakes had stopped but the cold wet of it flushed out on their bellies as they lay on the lip of the stream’s high bank. Behind, the stream slid like a black ribbon, shallow enough to already dream of being ice; it had already forgotten the men and mules who had shivered their way across it.
Drust peered through the stiff reeds, not wanting to move them because they were cold and dry and would clack like bird beaks. Beyond was the smokeless steading, a felled trunk abandoned on trestles, the adze-axe left wedged under a shaved curl of bark; beyond that was the biggest of the steading buildings, crouched to the ground like a whipped dog so that the wattle and daub and turf and stone of it seemed part of the landscape.
It was as empty as sightless eyes. Around it, the other steading buildings, for beast and fodder, were equally cold and dead; the garth was scuffed and littered with a scatter of discarded plunder, barely shrouded in the snow.
Two humps lay in the middle of it and Drust knew those shapes well enough, even if the blued feet sticking out from under the snow had not been there.
‘Not hard to follow,’ Kag whispered, his lips close enough to make his beard tickle Drust’s ear. ‘The pursuers are taking revenge on the land of the Blue Faces now – wonder is that they left the buildings unburned.’
Because some were still there; Kag hadn’t considered it and it drew his mouth into a thin line as Drust went crab-walking down the line of them, hissing out this revelation.
Drust was trying hard not to think about how recently he had been in the warm, in streets that were cobbled, among houses with atriums and bathhouses and a decent inn. Seemed a long way gone, swallowed by mornings waking stiff with cold and staring into a future gaping like a pit. Staring at the rolling tawny and needle-green, the harsh crags and rocks that looked like sheep and sheep that looked like rocks.
Somewhere ahead was a new tomorrow, but while he grinned at the gold of it, his blackened past was creeping up from the cold earth and trying to steal his life.
The bodies lay in a vegetable patch, part grubbed up by the ravagers – that meant they were short enough on food to consider winter roots a prize – and when Drust and the others cat-crouched their way up, wary and watchful, they saw a man’s face, then a woman’s, both slack with old death. The woman’s neck gaped in a savage purpled second grin, and her lined face, like a chewed-leather pouch, was clotted with tendrils of her grey-bloody hair.
There was a burst of laughter from the house, wolf-savage and sauced with a whimpering scream; Drust had an idea why some of the ravagers had stayed behind. He made signals that sent Manius and Sib on a wide circling sweep to scout out if there were others, Quintus and Ugo to find another way in and out – though he doubted there was one. Then he looked at Kag, took a breath and nodded.
Kag went in first and when Drust ducked after him, he found the usual narrow and low dugout. There was a pit fire of embers, a heavy table of split logs, a few stools and a bed. A rangy man was in the act of standing up from one of the stools; he had a worn-out look to him, a shock of red hair frosted with grey and worked up into two horns with feathers bound in.
Behind him, two men struggled with a woman who had just about given up, with no strength left to even scream. Drust thought she must have been wife to the dead man outside, for she wasn’t young and her face was deep-lined enough to be used as a rack for bowls. If they hadn’t been
looted out and scattered along with everything else.
The man in between her spread legs had an armless sheep fleece for a coat and had undone the belt that cinched it, the better to get himself into the struggling woman. He had one leg by the ankles and the other hand on her throat, while his breeks were at his boots.
The last one was another redhead, twitchy looking and young. He had both hands on the woman’s other leg, keeping her from scissoring them shut because he wanted Sheep-Fleece to get done with it and let him take over.
All of them froze as if time had stopped. The redhead with feathers stood and stared, even when Kag strode across the dim, littered floor and hammered him twice in the ribs with his pugio. Then he gave a whimpering yelp and scrambled backwards, hit the tripod of the pit fire and fell in the embered ashes; his foot flew up under the stool he had been sitting on and whipped it into Kag’s face.
There’s always that moment, that act of Fortuna that will crack your carefully rehearsed fight out from underneath you. The goddess smiles her vicious smile and makes that unarmed felon suddenly lash out and fell you to the harena just as the audience is baying for you to give him iron and let them see his face while you do.
Kag went down like a windblown tree. The wounded man rolled round the fire, screaming; his clothes caught alight. The twitchy youngster let go of his assigned leg and sprang away, yelping and hauling out a long knife; Drust saw all their serious weapons and armour were off and stacked – these were not the sharpest spears in the vengeful army.
The one in between the woman’s legs hauled himself away from her, gawping at Drust, then at the man rolling and shrieking in the pit fire; utensils clattered and clacked and ash billowed in a choking cloud that misted everywhere.
Drust watched Kag roll over onto his knees and spit blood from where the stool had smacked him in the mouth. The two remaining men were recovering, getting lost in the ash mist, but what struck Drust was how ordinary they were. Here were the beasts beyond the Wall, three stumbling fumblers with big hair and beards – but they had stumbled and fumbled their way through this steading, crashing into the life of a couple who thought themselves inured to hard times and now the detritus of their old lives lay around her, the sole survivor with a patched dress rucked up over her sagging breasts and skinny thighs.
Drust thought of his mother, set his jaw to clench and shifted to where he had last seen the youngest of them, the one who had recoiled, trying to drag out a weapon. The ash mist stung his eyes and clogged his breathing, but he saw the shape through it and struck, felt the jar up his arm, heard the scream and whimper.
He lost the shape. Something loomed out of the mist like a charging bull and he went down on one knee, struck out with a legionary jab, one of those hard thrusts that would take a gladius into the guts of a shrieking warrior.
He hit nothing, but the shape hit him, gave a sharp cry and went over him; the pair of them tumbled and rolled. Drust hit his head on something that blew in white light and a shock of pain while it blew out all sense.
There was a curse, a series of scrabbles and then the redhead who had been between the woman’s legs reeled out of the settling ash, his face stricken with disbelief. He maybe even tried to tell Drust how unfair it all was, but all that came out of his mouth was black blood, heart blood that meant he was a dead man standing.
Then he stopped standing; when he fell clear, Drust saw the woman, vengeful as a harpy, her face twisted with it, her dress stained and bloody and the big fish-gutting knife clotted. Drust scrabbled backwards, fearful that he might be next.
The man who had fallen over Drust was wobbling to his feet and starting to snarl when the faint light from the door, shafting in through the clearing ash, was suddenly blocked and the dark that came with it made Drust lose sight of everything.
There was a chill wind, a hissing sound, a meaty thump – the woman went sideways with no more than a little squeal. Drust got his hands and knees, then got upright; the ash drifted down like a last shroud, just in time to reveal Ugo and the young redhead, still dazed from falling over Drust. There was time to take in the frantic stare, the futile raised hand, then Ugo’s axe came hissing round and slammed into the man, driving him backwards in a gout of blood and a loud cracking of tortured ribs. The axe went deep, so deep it came out the other side of him and slammed into the table edge; the young redhead hung on it, coughing and waving his arms and legs.
The last redhead had crawled out of the fire and beaten out most of the smoulder, but it did no good; Kag, spitting blood and curses, pounced on him, dragged his head back by his red hair and sawed the pugio through his throat. It was not a good weapon for that, having no edge to speak of – a stabbing weapon, not even used much these days and then only by officers in the Army.
As Kag had said, often: ‘It was good enough for the Divine Julius to acquire several of them, so it is good enough for me.’
It reduced him to a butcher here, and when he had done there was only heavy breathing and the reek of blood and ash. Ugo started to grunt the axe out of the table, but he was having trouble with it. Drust saw the woman huddled like a pile of bloody rags in a corner of the littered hut and Ugo saw him looking.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought she was enemy.’
Kag levered himself to his feet. His eyes were red and teared and he spoke with a slur.
‘How could you mistake that for an enemy?’ he demanded savagely. Ugo tore the axe free; blood sprayed and the man fell off the table.
‘Was a shape. Back to me. Fucking big knife in one hand heading for Drust.’
Kag said nothing but he spat into his hand, then held up the result.
‘Tooth,’ he said bitterly. ‘I have lost a tooth. Juno’s tits, this is a bad day.’
‘Will get worse,’ said a voice from outside, and when Drust and Kag ducked out, blinking, Sib looked at them grimly.
‘You will want to see this.’
He led them across the rutted garth to another round building, a byre before what few kine had been here were taken by the raiders. Now new occupants huddled for heat and shelter, a dozen of them looking up with pale faces and the pinched look of those thinking ‘not again’. They were the captives ‘rescued’ by their tribesfolk, but too far gone to keep up. The fear rose up with the fetid smell of wounds gone bad.
Kag ducked back outside and breathed in cold, clear air. Drust and Sib followed.
‘They left them because they were being slowed down,’ Sib said.
‘Which means they will be back for them once they have run the Blue Faces to a lair they cannot assault. I am thinking they may themselves then be pursued.’
‘We should move from here,’ Drust said, ‘without further linger.’
They went back, found Manius and Quintus already assembling mules and three ponies left by the dead men. Busy with packs and saddlery, they worked steadily for several minutes until Kag looked round.
‘Where is Ugo?’
Ugo was coming out of the roundhouse when they went in search of him. He held a torch and, just as they came up, he threw it back into the entrance.
‘To the Genius of the Land of Darkness, to Ricagambeda and Vradecthis,’ he said, arms spread wide, head back to stare sightlessly at the sky. There was a dull hoom of sound from inside the roundhouse.
‘To Mars Ultor, Minerva, Epona and Victory, Ugos Servilius of the Axe dedicates this in sorrow and begging forgiveness.’
The oil-fired flames licked briefly out the door; black greasy smoke started leaking from the roof.
‘Jupiter’s hairy cock,’ Kag spat, staring in horror. ‘What have you done, you crazed German?’
Ugo turned, his eyes miserable pools. ‘I did not see her. I did not see her clearly…’
‘You see nothing clearly,’ Drust snarled and waved a hand at the smoke and the licking flames. ‘Now you have sent a beacon that says to those who care that this place is burning. The place they left their recently freed relations, thinking them safe.
’
‘You have shit for thinking with,’ Kag added bitterly. Ugo stood like a slaughter ox until Drust slammed a fist into his shoulder.
‘Move. Our only hope is to shift away from here in a running hurry.’
Chapter Eight
They did not run so much as shuffle across a patched land of white and tawny and wet green. A mule gave a final, fretful, accusing grunt and fell over, all the pack on it rattling and crashing, splintering free.
‘Keep moving,’ Drust yelled and pointed. ‘Make for the high ground on that ridge. The one with the woods on it. We can at least fight with advantage.’
‘My pots…’ Quintus yelled and Sib snarled at him to get out of the way as he tugged and cursed the mules to move faster. Quintus hesitated, dancing on the moment, but it was clear no one was stopping to unload his precious pots. In the end, he loped after the others, yelling out as he went. It was only when they were too far to turn back that they realised what he had been trying to tell them. Sib was bawling at him about how there was more of his foul brew on another mule when the true import hit him, clicking his teeth together with the shock. He sweated and shivered in equal measure and he had company in it.
‘If they get their hands on it,’ Quintus shouted to Drust, and did not need to say more. Everyone’s face grew pinched and round and Kag yelled out that they were pelt-wearers and would probably try and drink the stuff, not throw it.
‘When his head explodes,’ Quintus bawled back, ‘the others will know it is not just strong drink.’
Manius blew out his cheeks and hefted his bow. ‘I will go,’ he said. ‘If I break a pot it will crack all the others.’
‘You will be too close to get away from those left,’ Drust answered.
‘Then I had better leave none,’ Manius answered, then held up a small green triangle of wrapped leaves with a flourish and gave a lopsided grin.
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