Beasts Beyond the Wall

by Beasts Beyond the Wall (retail) (epub)

  ‘Made the pipe work too narrow,’ Plancus added as they descended stairs into a fetid darkness, pausing only to get six or seven torches. They lit three after Plancus had spent an age sniffing.

  ‘Fumes,’ he explained. ‘They can collect, and if you smell rotten eggs, don’t light up or else – boom.’

  ‘Gods above and below,’ Ugo muttered, looking round. ‘This is a fearful place.’

  ‘This is Dis,’ Sib answered, rolling his eyes.

  ‘Does it go a long way, this sewer system? Kag asked innocently, and Plancus stopped, turned and eyed him up and down, then shook his head.

  ‘You think you are being clever. Don’t blame you, mind – I see that you are condemned, for Sophon would never have sent real fighters on a task like this.’

  ‘Fuck you, too,’ Manius said flatly and Drust saw the two boys get better grips on the hafts of their picks. Plancus raised a placating hand.

  ‘Mean nothing by it but the truth,’ he said. ‘So I don’t blame you for thinking you can escape down here.’

  Kag scrubbed his beard, which he did when he had been fairly caught or was bewildered at what to say or do next.

  ‘Not much chance of it,’ Plancus went on, shuffling ahead into the dark. ‘I mean, there are all sort of tabernae tales about it – I enjoy them meself after a few. Hero has to escape prison, gets into the sewers, battles giant rats and emerges with laurels to claim the lady.’

  He sighed. ‘Bollocks, of course. I mean – this lad manages to negotiate his way in the dark, while the truth is you need these…’

  He paused and waved the torch so that Kag had to step back in case his hair caught. Plancus laughed.

  ‘You need lots of ’em, for if you don’t have light you are well fucked. Not that it matters, because our hero lad also manages to get through without getting much of his feet wet. Somehow, all his sewers are built wide and arched, with walkways along one or both sides.’

  He stopped, held up the torch so that the brick arches were clearly seen. There was a final flight of stairs leading down to a round, black hole they’d have to crouch to get in and would be ankle deep in a filth of scummy water.

  ‘There’s the truth of it,’ Plancus said. ‘Why the fuck would you bother making a fucking great basilica just to carry shit? No, you have this – a hole you have to go through bent. If our hero had to do that, he’d never be able to make the beast with two backs afterwards. He wouldn’t have one back to do it with.’

  He laughed, coughed and spat into the water.

  ‘But he won’t have to. He will have to transform himself into a rat-sized rat, for this is just the entrance pipe. A few hundred paces on you get to ones only a rat can go down or up – and somewhere in there is a great backed-up pile of shit preventing the outflow from dropping. That’s what we have to bucket out.’

  Kag looked sick and Quintus laughed at his face.

  ‘There’s no strolling out of the Maxima smelling of heroics – fucking Cloaca Maxima is a drain, not a sewer. There’s a difference. No, your hero lad will come out crippled, tiny and smelling like a turd,’ Plancus finished. ‘Find me the woman who will want that.’

  ‘Your fucking wife,’ Ugo growled, and even as their hackles came up, the sight of the big man kept Plancus and sons from doing something foolish.

  They started down the steps, then Drust stopped, held his torch up and squinted at the opposite wall.

  ‘Drains,’ Caius said helpfully. ‘Old ones.’

  ‘Why block them off?’ Drust asked, seeing the brickwork was a different colour even under a patina of scum.

  ‘Dunno,’ Plancus said, and there was something about the way he said it that made Drust look again at him. He saw nothing.

  ‘Not sewers, mind,’ Plancus went on, slowly and deliberately. ‘Drainage. Got blocked off years back. Found a better way, no doubt – but should have used it, I say. Drains is always bigger and wider than sewers.’

  He led the way, crouching into the dark hole. Marcus sidled up to Drust and whispered.

  ‘Da knows everything about sewers and drains,’ he said. ‘That bricked-up bit is where the drainage was for the naumachae.’

  The naumachae, the naval displays, had been a feature of the Flavian for a while. The sands were drowned in water, ships launched and battles fought – then the whole affair was drained off, fresh sand put down and the fighters brought back for the evening. Domitian had ordered the network of rooms and machinery and cages under the amphitheatre which made it more useful for gladiators of all sorts – and the builders used the drainage tunnels where they could. The ones not of use had been blocked off. No more naumachae in the Flavian.

  It was said they could fill and drain the Flavian in an hour or less, Drust remembered, and Marcus nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Knowed how to do it in them days. Pumps and pipes, that’s what it takes. Forty-two inlet pipes, four big outflows – Da told me that. He knows it well.’

  ‘Come on, boy, don’t dawdle.’

  Marcus leaped to obey and Drust followed thoughtfully.

  * * *

  Later, in the fetid dark, feral with hidden scutterings, Drust and Kag talked from their separate cells. They had done it before and, as Kag said when it was easier to speak, they had Polybius to thank for it.

  ‘Jupiter’s hairy balls,’ Quintus had moaned, ‘not you and your girl Greeks again. Boring lot, looking down their noses and droning about their… ideas. We gave them an idea – it was called fighting, and they didn’t care for it.’

  ‘Dogs’ Heads,’ Manius had added, referring to the battle which ended the glories of Alexander at the place of that name – the Cynoscephalae hills.

  Polybius did not fight. He played games with numbers and letters and, though no one knew that when they’d learned it, Drust and the others played it nightly, taught it by others who had been taught it before. Tap-tapping, soft as mice feet, they spoke where no speaking was allowed.

  ‘Thinks there’s a way out?’ Kag asked. Tap-tap, tap-tap.

  ‘Yes. Need to find out more. Water drains. Flavian.’

  There was a long pause, for it took a deal of tapping just to spell ‘water’ – five taps, pause, two taps. Then one-one, four-four, one-five, four-two.

  In the end, Drust heard: four-one, four-three, two-two, shut his eyes and visualised the board.

  Dog.

  It was the ever-present thought in everyone’s mind, voiced only at this, the last hour of the night, like a prayer – some whispered sacrament to the one who had got away.

  Dog.

  Drust tapped it back, heard the faint echoes of it passing up and down the line of them. Privately, he thought Dog was long gone but could not – still – believe that he was dead.

  But unless they found a way and soon, he and the rest of them would be.

  * * *

  ‘Drusus,’ he said, and the boy looked at him and smiled. He liked the big man, even if he was the master and his mother had always told him to watch him, be polite and do what he was told round him. Call him ‘your honour’ or ‘master’ but not his name – Servilius Structus was not something for the mouths of slaves.

  ‘Master?

  ‘I have bad news,’ Servilius said, and to the astonishment of everyone, not least the boy, he levered himself painfully down on one knee, to be closer to the boy’s level.

  ‘Your ma is no longer with us.’

  The boy blinked. His mother had said this might happen and not to worry because she would find a way to see him, no matter what. But slaves were sold all the time and the boy knew that already.

  ‘Yes, Master,’ he said. Servilius Structus looked relieved and then had to wave to Curtius to help him up. He nodded to the boy, patted him on the head and turned to Curtius.

  ‘Put him with Gennadios, for the learning in it. Let him take the boy under the Flavian and teach him the basics. When you are ready to go, take him with you this trip. Show him the way of it. Bring him back safe.’


  Curtius knew better than to argue. Servilius Structus waddled off into the dark and Curtius turned and looked down at the boy.

  ‘Drust, ain’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Master.’

  ‘Curtius will do. How old are you?’

  The boy didn’t know, but Curtius went and fished out a tablet from one of the many slots.

  ‘Nine summers. You’d best come with me now, kid, and stick close. We are off to a far land, across the sea. That will be an adventure, with some sweetmeats and then home. How does that sound?’

  ‘Will I see my mother then?’ the boy asked. Curtius frowned, then saw the way of it and shook his head, eyes sorrowful as a whipped hound.

  ‘Boy, you ma ain’t sold on. She’s dead. Died trying to bring a sister into the world for you. Babe died too.’

  The boy heard the words tumbling like spilled bricks. They seemed to clatter after him for a long time until they hit him, one by one, after Curtius had shown him to a straw pallet and blown out the lamp.

  Then the pain ripped him and squeezed up his face until tears popped like pips from a crushed apple.

  * * *

  It was seeing Curtius again that had brought this, a strange gift from Morpheus. The revelation in it as he woke to his cell, weeping, was that Servilius Structus had probably fathered the child who had killed his mother, and he had always avoided the memory, shoving it deep in the sewer at the back of his head.

  Not that any of it mattered, not now. If there were gods above and below then perhaps, if they saw fit to favour him, he’d be able to ask her in a day or two. Yet he wondered at Curtius, who was still the tool of Servilius Structus.

  Sophon came for them, as usual, unlocked the cells and looked them over. He wore the same tunic as he had the day before and the day before that, but if there was a fresh stain anywhere on it, it was hard to find among the older ones; he smelled of fava bean farts and stale wine.

  ‘Come on, then. There’s bread if you want it.’

  They all ate, though when they’d been fighting they never did until evening; lots of fighters thought a full belly meant death if you got sliced there. Most fighters knew a slit stomach meant death whether it was full or not.

  The day was warm, the sun hazed and, as they filed through the riot of the ludus, they saw the sailors arriving, a new batch looking all round and gaping. They were the ones who would work the Flavian awnings when the crowd needed some shade, scampering up and down the ratlines as if they were aboard their ships.

  Drust saw men of the Ludus Ferrata just as they came out of the tunnel into the undercroft; above was the blare and pomp of that day’s opening ceremony and the early risers had claimed their seats for the first of the day’s sport – the crucifixions.

  Sophon saw their faces and grinned his ruined grin. ‘Not that for you lot, not today. Now I have to sit with you sorry fucks all through the rest of the day…’

  The last of his words was driven from him in an explosion of lost breath; Drust saw Curtius standing while a big hoplomachus, all fat and lazy amble, massaged the elbow which had driven into Sophon’s side.

  ‘You should watch where you walk here,’ Curtius said. ‘And talk.’

  Sophon wanted to explode at them so badly Drust could even taste it; the man was a lanista, after all, but he had nothing to do with the Ferrata or any other school now, and all of those gladiators were moving past him with stone stares, oiled muscles and old grievances.

  They sat in the undercroft all the morning, listening to the beasts die; the blood and heat rose until, suddenly, there was the faint scent of roses where slaves had started damping the harena with perfumed water, pumping out sprays of it.

  They sat all through lunch and had only water while men wearing the skins of wild beasts raped young girls; the children of noxii who had not been put to the beasts in the morning show were hung from poles by their legs. The crowd made bets on which wild dog could jump highest to drag down a meal while they munched chickpeas and bread.

  Then, just after the start of the afternoon’s real entertainments, they all saw a crowd of fighters, sweated and gleaming, coming up through the crowded dark, carrying one of their own.

  Drust didn’t see it at first because the body was splatted with gore and crusted with sand, but Curtius wiped the face clean while others shrieked for the medicus; a masked Charon and his slaves came rolling up, the Charon hauling off the mask.

  ‘You should have left him to me, you slave fucks. To me.’

  They wanted to save him, but it was way too late and everyone knew it. He was young, barely out of tiro and lay writhing and clutching the sides of a vicious belly wound as if squeezing would somehow make it whole again.

  * * *

  ‘Sniff his belly,’ Gennadios orders, and the boy blinks a bit and hesitates.

  ‘Get to it. Tell me what you smell.’

  The man is a venator caught by a frightened, enraged leopard and raked by the back claws. He gasps and moves his head and whimpers, but his eyes are glazed, halfway into the Other while the sweat and blood rolls off him like a sluice. He is bandaged and strapped, but the blood seeps through; the boy grits his teeth and bends to it, sniffing.

  There is the iron stink of blood, the smell of shit where the man has shamed himself, the warm hot fetid smell where he has just staled. And onions and garlic.

  He tells this to Gennadios, who sighs. ‘Soup wound,’ he says, and signals to a slave to call for someone who can give the man the release of iron.

  ‘Fed him onion and garlic soup an hour ago,’ Gennadios says. ‘Now it has seeped out of the bowel. So he is dead – we cannot repair that organ and it will fester if left. Best he dies now than a few days from now, stinking and in pain.’

  The boy watches the medicus watching the man while an assistant finds the heart in the throat which pulses like a trapped bird until the thin, steel blade releases it in a weak gush of blood. Gennadios watches and watches intently, but in the end, as always, what he seeks at the man’s moment of death eludes him again.

  * * *

  Drust shook the memory away, feeling shivered and strange, like some beast on the point of running.

  ‘They have paid for a lot of deaths,’ Sib said, and Kag slapped him, a loud wet sound that made Sib scowl and rub his shoulder.

  ‘Do not speak of deaths,’ he said and made a warding sign with his fingers.

  ‘No matter,’ Curtius said, coming up and sitting. He had the eyes of a dead fish and the air of a man unable to walk a single step more – and he had not been fighting. He had been watching friends die.

  ‘Four so far these games,’ he said and shook his head. ‘I had thought the Ferrata would get off lightly today, but those bastards out there are taking their lead from the fucker in the good seat. No one gets a missio granted today.’

  He levered himself slowly up and took a step, then stopped, shook his head and looked at Drust. Behind him, they all saw Sophon lumbering up and their hearts stuttered.

  ‘Forgot,’ Curtius said. ‘Had a message from Servilius Structus. Says to tell you to hold fast and bet on the dog.’

  Sophon wanted to make it seem that he had come for them, wanted to twist the knife, but thought better of it when he saw Curtius. Instead, he waved a hand as if to flap Curtius out of the way, then stood with his hands on his hips.

  ‘You won’t be dying today,’ he said, and then indicated a group of sweat-patched men behind him, mostly slaves with picks and shovels, their faces and heads wrapped as protection for where they had been. Lime, Drust thought.

  One was Plancus, both sons on either shoulder. He waved at them and Sophon smirked his straked grin.

  ‘Make yourself useful, the aedile says – so you lads can grab some tools and follow old Plancus here. There’s work for you. Make sure you wash before you come back near me.’

  He stood aside, chuckling. Plancus spread his hands apologetically.

  ‘Sorry, but it’s going to need a lot of men. The flow isn’t
clearing out the stuff they are throwing down the pit. It’s a fucking mess down there and getting worse.’

  He led them far into the deep recesses of the undercroft, but Drust knew where they were going, had been here before and felt his belly clench. When Marcus handed out long poles with hooks he suspected the worst, and when he handed them squares of cloth, he knew it.

  ‘Bind your heads and faces with this,’ Marcus said. ‘Watch out for your eyes.’

  ‘Omnes ad stercus,’ Quintus declared viciously. ‘The lime pits.’

  ‘Better in the harena than this,’ Ugo muttered.

  ‘You lot – with me,’ said a voice, and they followed the man, his face swathed in cloth-backed leather; Drust saw that this one had dark glass lenses set in a leather rig that let him fasten them round his face, protecting his eyes.

  ‘Any more of those?’ Kag asked hopefully, but had no reply. They started to smell the choke of it, the reeking stench of old meat and blood and acrid lime. The man led them down to where the water turned milky and Drust balked.

  ‘Fuck that,’ Manius agreed. ‘It will burn my feet to stumps.’

  The man didn’t answer, but hopped in with a splash and then, bewilderingly, turned away from the worst of the reek, where they could hear others cursing and struggling, the splash of them disgorging lumps of blockage.

  Kag and Drust shared a look, then they all looked at one another. Ugo shrugged and stepped in the water while the man with the dark lenses turned and waved them on. No one had any idea why they were moving away from the worst of the work but didn’t argue with the ethos of it.

  When they reached a low pipe, the man crouched and crab-walked into it. With only a slight hesitation, Drust followed and the rest filed after. The pipe was short, then opened up into a shaft which left them blinking at a distant, faint light and sunlight fell in small spears through a metalled grille. There was the sound of the harena.

  The man with the lenses looked up, then down at the nearby wall, spat on his hands and swung his pick at the bricks. The others stared in confusion.