Beasts Beyond the Wall Read online

  Beasts Beyond The Wall

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Rome

  Regio Tripolitania

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Later…

  Notes

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Rome

  In the tenth year of Lucius Septimius Severus Augustus, Father of His Country, Conqueror of Parthia in Arabia and Assyria, Pontifex Maximus

  The man ran at Drust, screaming, fat wooden cudgel held high; behind him came others, yelling and shouting. One was laughing, but Drust paid him no more than an eye-blink.

  He dropped a shoulder, moved slightly, slammed a fist into the belly of the screamer and then half spun while the air whoofed out of the man and he blundered on in staggering baby steps. He fell and clattered into big Pacuvius, who looked down at him with a mixture of disgust and astonishment, then smashed him with a downward hammer of fist.

  ‘Get them. Get the fat man.’

  Drust saw the one roaring this out, the same one who had been laughing. He wore a bucco mask, the grotesque features made more lurid in the mad leaping flames of discarded torches; the giant shadows capered on the walls.

  Pacuvius started kicking the downed man, whose mask flew off – Pappus, the old fool, Drust saw. They were all fabula attellana, the characters of crude theatrical farce.

  ‘On your right.’

  Kag was blocking wild swings from another masked man. It was no great trouble, since the swings were tiro. Beyond Pacuvius, Tarquinus had been taken by surprise and was down, bleeding from the head while two more masked men rained cudgel blows on him. The torch-bearers had fled, the litter-carriers were wavering and the front of the litter had dipped where two of them were starting to drop it.

  Drust spun to the new threat, blocked the blow, turned his wrist, moved his leg and sprawled the man on his back; the mask of Dossenus the Hunchback flew off and the wild-eyed youth shrieked as Drust raised the cudgel.

  A boy. Barely into his teens. Drust hesitated, cudgel in the air; these were the night-stalkers, the well-born arseholes who ran the streets of Rome in the dark, terrorising the luckless. Probably he had done this before, the masks and the shrieks and the surprise being enough to send torch-boys and litter-carriers running.

  ‘Six him,’ Kag growled, coming up like a cold wind; his man-boy was down, writhing and clutching his groin.

  ‘It’s a child,’ Drust said.

  ‘Give him iron,’ Kag called over his shoulder and headed for the Bucco. The boy on the ground scrabbled backwards, reached for his cudgel and started back to his feet. Drust cursed, shook his head and slammed two blows into the boy’s kidneys. He arched and shrieked, fell down and started weeping.

  He would piss blood for a month, Drust thought, and a flicker out of one eye made him half turn and block. Two more were headed for the litter; Bucco was trading blows with Kag while Pacuvius was trying to help Sophon; the lanista was hurt but the worst part of that was his pride as a trainer of gladiators. Quintus and Ugo were nowhere to be seen, the litter had been dropped, the bearers gone. It hadn’t tilted and was still curtained, but the two who had rushed it were tearing them aside.

  There was only Drust.

  ‘Oi,’ he called out and one turned. He had the face of Manducus the Glutton and was no boy. No tiro either – here was a cuckoo in the mix. When the other turned, growling from under Maccus the Clown, Drust knew he had a paired set of ludus fighters and they had training swords, twice as heavy as the real thing and heavier than cudgels; they would crack a skull open.

  He managed four glissading parries against the pair before one slapped him in the ribs, making him reel and gasp. The other aimed for the head and there was no pull in the blow; it was an egg-breaker, designed to make sure Drust ended up as just a name marked with ‘6’ – killed. Drust wasn’t the best, even he acknowledged that – but he wasn’t a tiro either; he managed to slip most of the blow, taking the main force on the top of his shoulder, which had the padding of his cloak.

  His arm went numb and he lost the cudgel. He staggered back and weaved and dodged as the pair closed in.

  There was a sudden joyous barking sound and Maccus the Clown turned in time to see Quintus roar out of a side alley, his grin big and wide as the Circus. Maccus had time to see it – the full, white-toothed force of it – then Quintus shoulder-slammed him to the ground and rammed the blunt end of the cudgel straight in the man’s open-mouthed mask. Teeth and blood flew out with the screams and bloodied wood splinters.

  ‘Get the leader,’ a voice called from inside the litter. ‘The Bucco.’

  Drust turned. Quintus and the Glutton were dancing. The rest were down or crawling off.

  ‘Get Bucco,’ the voice called again and then Servilius Structus stuck his pig-angry face out of the torn curtains. ‘Get him. Little fuck…’

  Kag was down on one knee but blocking a rain of blows from Bucco. Drust arrived, trying not to wince at the pain in his ribs and hoping he could fight left-handed. Bucco backed off, pointing the cudgel at Kag and Drust; he was laughing.

  ‘Ankle,’ Kag said bitterly. Drust nodded, took a breath to see how badly it pained him and flexed the fingers of his fighting hand; the pin-sharp prickles told him feeling was returning.

  ‘Get him,’ urged the hog-voice from the litter and Drust cursed it, then followed the fleeing Bucco up the side alley of the Street of Sandal Makers.

  They went up through the fetid, clogged alley, leaping half-seen objects, getting yelled at from windows. In the end, Bucco hit a dead end, leaped for the wall, missed and slithered down. Drust stopped, half bent and gasping. The Bucco gave a short laugh, more tense now, but he clearly fancied he had the upper hand and sprang forward. He is no older than the one I felled, Drust thought – but a cudgel is a cudgel.

  He blocked it, felt the difference, heard the shunk of edge on wood. Watched the tip shear off his baton. Bucco snarled from under the mask and the naked steel gleamed.

  ‘Not so cocky now, damnatus, eh?’

  He knew a thing or two, Drust thought. Enough to call Drust a slave condemned to the arena. Enough to know Drust was not so cocky at all when faced with a bloody sharp gladius and was looking for a way out. There was a doorway, curtained with beaded strands, and Drust ducked into it. He heard Bucco stamp after him.

  The room was small and grubby, the side door of a wine shop. There was a man in a leather apron shaking a sizzling pan over a stove; he looked up with astonishment as Drust came in. Beyond him and the amphora counter were a few crude tables whose patrons looked up from their dice game. Blue reek and rich cooking meat smells choked the air.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ demanded the cook.

  ‘Dead man is who he is.’

  Bucco came through the doorway and the cook yelped at the sight of the steel. Drust leaped the bar and the patrons scattered; they were Vigiles, he saw. Rome’s night-watch. Saved…

  Bucco rushed to the counter and started over it. Drust feinted running, darted back, grabbed the nearest pot and slammed it into Bucco’s masked face. There was a gurgling shout as the man-boy wen
t backwards towards the floor and the cook yelled again and backed away from the mayhem.

  Drust leaped back over the counter, gasping and hurting and angry at this delinquent youth for putting him through all this. He swooped up the dropped sword and ripped off the boy’s mask. To his surprise, the face grinned up at him. Young, sweat-sheened, wild curls of hair, the eyes glazed a little with pain above a white tunic. A fringe of pathetic beard fuzz – he was just old enough to wear a toga, yet his look was all sly and venal.

  ‘Missio,’ he said, holding up a finger and grinning at this, the gladiator’s plea for mercy.

  ‘Recipere ferrum,’ Drust growled back – prepare to receive the iron. He meant it; the youth saw it and lost his grin.

  ‘Ho,’ he said. ‘Just a bit of fun…’

  ‘Get off your Imperator.’

  The Vigile who growled it out was grim as old cliff and had his iron-tipped stave up like a spear. Drust stared, confused, and the boy grinned as the slow, sickening realisation spread on Drust’s face.

  Caracalla. The Hood. Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Augustus, son of the Emperor and Emperor in his own right – Drust remembered him on the day he had celebrated his elevation, standing with his arms wide, condemning Dog to kill his friend. He had been ten years old then and too far away for Drust to have recognised him now. A thought struck as the other Vigiles approached, starting to climb the counter and put a cordon around the youth.

  ‘Well, I know who you are,’ Drust declared. ‘Do you know who I am?’

  The boy looked puzzled. The Vigiles scowled.

  ‘No,’ the boy-Emperor said.

  ‘Good,’ Drust declared and slapped a hand down on the handle of the sizzling pan. Like a launching siege engine it catapulted into the air and everyone yelled as hot oil and terrible food rained on the Vigiles.

  Drust booted the Emperor of Rome in the groin and fled.

  Regio Tripolitania

  Five years later

  ‘Who’d have thought,’ Kag said, as if there was still mystery left in it, ‘water could make men mad.’

  Drust thought most men had been mad long before they started fighting over water. They fought over who spoke more clearly to the gods. And land. And gold. Once, he knew, the Greeks had fought over a woman. Sometimes people fought for all these things at the same time and sometimes they fought for the entertainment of others.

  They sat in front of the Golden Sweat, which is what the name translated to and made it sound like an emporium of extreme perversions, though it wasn’t. It was what passed for a taberna here – the ‘sweat’ was the Latin translation of the local name for a brand of alcohol made from dates.

  Kag perched on sacks just unloaded from the back of a cart. Drust sat next to him and both watched the crowds moving through the blood-haze of a dying day.

  ‘I mean,’ Kag said reflectively, ‘look at them.’

  They were motley, Drust had to admit. Billowing robes, white and brown, wrap-round rags, turbans, veils, straw hats, sandals and bare feet – there were all sorts here, every one a hopeful. They came with a handful of greed, a rickle of goats or dates or weave because there was the promise of riches to be made selling to the truly desperate, the ones with spade and mattock and the knowledge that there was an aquifer somewhere, waiting to be tapped. They would wander into the desert and dig until they died, looking for that clear, liquid gold.

  ‘Mad,’ Kag repeated. He also said that they should have gone home and were clearly madder than anyone, sitting out in a desert as the water table shrank, waiting for some patron of their patron to show up.

  Not mad enough to go home, Drust thought. Not when a co-emperor nursed his sore balls and a deal of resentment for it. He hoped that Caracalla, his brother and the whole festering pack of them were all with pa, the Emperor Lucius Septimius Severus Augustus. That would mean they were far away in the north, at a place called Eboracum, so that old Severus could show his sons how empires are made by conquering the last little bit of this one.

  Rome might be empty and the Empire ruled from some shithole in Britannia for now, Drust thought, but he was still not mad enough to go anywhere near the Palatine.

  The day died and a dark shape shuffled around with a sibilant slap-slap of bare feet, lighting lamps. They sat in a room of planes and shadows, at a table pooled in wan light. The dark shape coalesced its shadows into an old man who brought olives then wraithed away while the heat died just a little.

  Then the old man was back. ‘He comes,’ he said, and new shadows appeared; Drust felt rather than saw one behind another. In the soft glow, the old man presented a large bowl with a small flask in it and some cups – Kag and Drust exchanged glances; the cold came off the bowl and it sweated. It was full of crushed ice.

  The old man poured while one of the shapes slid into a seat opposite. Drust tried to look at Kag, but his upper half – and that of the shape – was lost in the shadows, but Drust heard Kag grunt as the old man poured. They both tasted and tried to be nonchalant, but it was hard. It was nectar.

  The old man slipped off into the shadows and Drust saw the shape in full when it leaned across into the light and became a man, which was a disappointment; Drust had half expected something Sybilline maybe with Medusa locks or eyes of fire. Instead he got a leathery face, darkened with heritage. It was hard to judge his height while he sat, but the man still had muscle which age hadn’t turned stringy, though it was chewing on it. His face was ordinary, had no marks about it that hinted at destiny or greatness – save for the eyes, which held a controlled violence.

  Servilius Structus had made much of Julius Yahya, given him a lion’s fangs and roar, a tiger’s claws, the omnipotent powers of some ancient hero. A creature spawned by gods, who owned great houses, with a calloused thumb that pressed on the rich and famous. Yet a slave. Not an ex, but still a slave to the Severan family here in Lepcis Magna, their home city. Birthplace of the Emperor.

  Servilius Structus was a clever man – a fat, venal, vicious man who had worked up a little empire of his own operating out of the Roman slums of Subura. He traded in grain, sand for the harena, slaves, exotic beasts, exotic perversions and occasional pain; Drust and Kag and the others – his Procuratores – had been instruments of all that and so they knew his powers.

  Yet Servilius Structus had put the name of Julius Yahya in his mouth as if it was the sweetest of poisons that he was forced to swallow. Emperors and generals hang on his every pronouncement, he said. The world is in his palm, he said – so it seemed to Drust just plain wrong that such a Hercules sat here, casting an actual shadow like a mortal. Showing mottled hands and smelling faintly of salt-sweat and expensive perfumed oils, and a strange tang Drust thought might be the smell of success or strength or fear. Or all of them.

  Drust didn’t look at Kag, though he knew he was thinking something the same. Servilius Structus had sent them all here, ostensibly to get them away from Rome, but there had been something in the way he had done it, in the way he had clearly not expected to see them again, which had made Drust uneasy even then.

  Now he was wondering why this man, so rich, so powerful, had come such a long way and at such discomfort to meet with them, who had come at Servilius’s request and in secret and at night. And what he had to do with Servilius Structus, who was clearly afraid of him.

  Faced with such a mystery, Drust thought, what can you do? You can ask.

  ‘What do you want from us?’

  ‘My thanks for coming,’ Julius Yahya said, which threw them both. Then he turned to the shadow of the old man and smiled. ‘Abu – sharbat for me.’

  The old man must have anticipated this, for the cold-sweated cup arrived quickly, the faint smell of it a moment of saliva-releasing joy. It was unreal, all this liquid, Drust thought. This place, lit by soft flickering light, with a bowl of crushed ice cooling them – unimaginable luxury in the middle of crushing poverty, like a heap of gold thrown on a dungheap.

  ‘Thank you, Abu. Drusus, K
agiza – once again, thank you for your attendance here.’

  It was his way, Drust realised. He tipped you off balance with this blandness, moved sideways like some snake wriggling for advantage. Julius Yahya turned to the shadow behind him.

  ‘Do you wish wine?’

  The man behind him moved only a hand, dark and elegant with economy, as if he was coiled and did not want to break the tension. Julius Yahya took the silent refusal as if he had known all along, turned back to look at Drust and Kag; he held up the cup, little runnels tracing the embossed maenads and grape bunches.

  ‘Thirty years ago, it took 132 gallons of water to make a fat amphora of this,’ he said. ‘Today we’ve managed to half it. That wine you are drinking only took about 20 gallons to make and almost all of it was in the growing, not the final fermentation. You still need 5,000 gallons of water every day to grow a day’s food for a family of four in countries like this, where the sand eats the water, this day or the next. Even with decent aqueducts and pipes.’

  Drust said nothing, but Kag stirred in his chair, then saluted him with the cup.

  ‘Thanks for the drink,’ he said. ‘Like the dole queues of Subura, I take the gossip with the bread.’

  Julius Yahya did not show any annoyance – rather the opposite; he nodded soberly.

  ‘I realise you believe it to be a lecture on the cost of water,’ he said, ‘and that you think you know all about such things already because it is a commodity to be traded and you and Drust here are part of the hard edge, watching the blood price being paid for successful trade day by day.’

  He paused, sipped.

  ‘You are wrong. You have no idea of the cost of anything. Not many people do, and if they think about it at all it is to complain about it. Of course, the Empire thrives on trade and relies on returns from investments.’

  No one spoke into the silence that followed; it didn’t last long.

  ‘The greatest commodity of all is not grain, or gold,’ he went on. ‘Or even water in such a place as this. It is trust. The belief that people will honour their commitments. That’s what fuels investments and trade, that’s what provides profit.’