Beasts Beyond the Wall Read online

  ‘So far,’ Drust offered, ‘this is not news. Any hand-spitting hawker in any city of the Empire knows this. Doesn’t tell us what you want from us.’

  ‘Patience, patience,’ Julius Yahya said and smiled. Drust was starting not to like him now.

  ‘I tell you this because, if you maintain the narrow field of view you have as regards trade, you may have reached the conclusion that it is immutable – that whatever happens, people will buy and sell.’

  He sipped, pushed the cup away.

  ‘It is not. Someone says “no”, a simple statement, and the machine grinds to a halt like one of those magnificent water-lifters on the aqueducts with a stick thrown in the wheels. Like them, if the cogs grind to a halt, the effect spreads, terrible and destructive.’

  He spread his hands. ‘That’s the battle I have,’ he said, ‘year in and year out, to manage, optimise and secure trust on behalf of my… patron. Trust can be assured, assurance comes in many forms and one of them is threat – that’s where you come in.’

  ‘I wondered about that,’ Kag said. ‘Where we came in.’

  He had finished the wine and was sitting with a half-smile Drust knew well; it was a warning, that little grin.

  ‘My patron owns an asset,’ Julius Yahya went on. ‘On this asset depends the assured trust of an entire people. This asset must be found and returned.’

  Drust didn’t look at Kag and hoped he’d stay quiet. He didn’t.

  ‘Patron,’ he said, rolling the name round in his mouth like he had the crushed ice. ‘You mean master.’

  It slapped out on the table like a thrown turd; Drust felt the shadow at Julius Yahya’s back shift a little in anticipation of something and tensed. Kag lounged and smiled. Julius Yahya, a slave with more spears at his disposal than a decent-sized country, looked at Kag, the freedman with a glazed clay cup and a smile. Their eyes locked like antlers.

  ‘Patron or master,’ Julius Yahya said slowly, ‘the term is of no account to you. Neither does it matter who he is. It suffices that he has your patron in his fist and your patron holds you in his. So the world turns.’

  Drust went chill from his neck to the base of his arse, tried not to look at Kag and failed. Kag felt it, turned slightly and shrugged.

  If what Julius Yahya said was so, then whoever this powerful slave bowed to was a true arbiter of ruling. Servilius Structus bowed to few, and if he got down on his knees to this slave because of who this slave represented, then the power was tangible.

  This city, Lepcis Magna, was the birthplace of the Emperor, Drust recalled. He felt the chill of the crushed ice bowl even more intensely than before, put that fact in the counting frame and tallied it up, sending it to Kag with his eyes. Kag nodded slightly.

  Julius Yahya was satisfied with the impression he had made and held out one hand, the signal for the shadowed man behind him to step into the light. He wore a conservatively cut tunic, belted at the waist. His head was long and narrow, had strange-lobed ears and was bone white. He wore an amulet, which surprised Drust; he’d had the impression, from the mere presence of the shadow, that this was a man who did not fear or woo gods. In the unforgiving spotlight, all the planes and shadows were like rubbed ivory, the backs of his hands, when he handed a batch of wax tablets to his boss, were pale – but the palms were darker and, Drust saw, not soft at all.

  Here was a man who couldn’t take sun, not even for five minutes, Drust thought. He would blister and not tan or weather with it, but just scorch and die. He must feel like a turtle in the desert, waiting to be flipped by the sportive cruel – yet Drust did not think he would wait or allow such a thing. And in the shadows he would be deadly as a snake.

  ‘Thank you, Verus,’ Julius Yahya said and unfastened one of the tablets.

  ‘The Brothers of the Sands,’ he read and looked up with a nasty lip-twist of smile. ‘How terribly colourful. Are you truly like brothers? I had heard gladiators had no friends and were allowed to make none.’

  ‘When you are a slave,’ Kag corrected flatly. ‘Slaves have no friends.’

  Julius Yahya did not blink or acknowledge this, simply sat with the tablet in his spatulate fingers and read.

  ‘Six of you, I believe. Former gladiators, former slaves, employees of Servilius Structus in varying capacities.’

  ‘Kagiza,’ he said, and then looked up at Kag. ‘Is that actually all the name you have? A slave name – it says here you are a freedman.’

  He didn’t wait for an answer, which was as well because Kag wasn’t about to give one, just a cold, flat stare. He had a second name but thought that more of a slave chain than his real one. Julius Yahya went back to the tablet.

  ‘From Thracia, in the south of that land. Father a citizen and Roman legionary in the 13th, died of fever together with your mother – a bad year, it seems. Taken as a criminal – stealing food, which is understandable but still a crime. Sentenced to the galleys or the arena. Lunchtime show.’

  When Julius Yahya had started reading, Drust had thought this would be the sort of stuff Romans always recorded, the sort of stuff that was marked up as you fell into the torchlight of the State, but this was a different assessment entirely. This was the sort of stuff Servilius Structus knew, and he would have given it up only under duress or the lure of a lot of money. Or an obligation he could not refuse – Drust began to sweat and it was a cold trickle on his skin.

  ‘Sentence commuted,’ Julius Yahya said and stared thoughtfully across at Kag. ‘Servilius Structus saw something in you and since you went to work with his stud horses as one of the aurigatores, I am assuming you impressed him. What was it?’

  Kag didn’t answer and Drust realised it was because he knew Julius Yahya already had the details and wasn’t about to play the game. Julius Yahya showed no signs of disappointment – rather the opposite by his smile.

  ‘Expert with horses, good with weapons. Sent to the ludus, fought fifteen times, won a dozen. Lost but let off on two – well, the missus is better than death, after all. Studied philosophy and learned to read, but only because your master hired you out to the House of Acilia to bodyguard young Marcus Acilius Glabrio, I believe.

  ‘You had to make sure the young squit went to his lessons and stayed there. However, it is clear you learned more than he did.’

  He looked up and smiled. ‘Not much to do but learn, sitting there watching the boy waste his chance. The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.’

  Drust reckoned someone famous had said that last part. Kag knew, as Julius Yahya had known he would; he nocked and shot back.

  ‘Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the least reward.’

  ‘I am called a dog because I fawn on those who give me anything,’ Julius Yahya intoned. ‘I yelp at those who refuse and set my teeth at rascals.’

  ‘In a rich man’s house,’ Kag said softly, ‘there is no place to spit but in his face.’

  Julius Yahya laughed easily, his teeth white in the dim. ‘Diogenese of Sinope,’ he explained to Drust, with the air of someone educating a child.

  ‘You mistake me for someone who gives a fuck,’ Drust answered.

  For the first time Julius Yahya frowned.

  ‘Drusus Servilius, known as Drust. One of the Caledonii, taken in a raid thirty years ago – a baby, clearly. Unusual to have lived long enough to be bought by Servilius Structus, so you are marked by the gods right there. Mother died when you were nine. You worked with the grain shipments of Servilius Structus and were placed in the ludus when you were old enough. Fought eight times – lost six, won two.’

  He paused. ‘Not of the first rank, nor even the second. Provincial arenas and touring groups. Forum fights, probably, in poor little towns with no amphitheatre. Nevertheless, you should be dead from a record like that. I am told you were let off each time because you acted well.’

  People, Drust knew, had the wrong idea about gladiators, thought they all ended up dead unless they won. Since they cost a fortune to
keep and train and fought maybe three or four times in a year, the only way they died was by accident, if the patron of the games paid to have the death – or if they put up a poor performance and lost.

  Drust never put up a poor performance and fought only in provincial arenas, or even dusty forums where the games patrons were always town councillors who were anxious to spend as little money as possible and couldn’t afford death. He acted a great heroic role in carefully staged fights and got away with it for four years.

  He did not say any of it, simply shrugged. ‘We are not all Spartacus.’

  Julius Yahya paused. ‘You saved the life of your lanista one night while escorting him through the streets of the City. Fought off a dozen thugs. Killed one with only a wooden cudgel.’

  ‘If you hit the right spot,’ Drust answered levelly, ‘you can kill with a spoon. You shoot badly from your little tablet and have missed most of the marks. It wasn’t me who killed him, nor was he a thug, but a fighter from another ludus hired for the assault. And it wasn’t a dozen, only a handful. Wasn’t the lanista either, it was Servilius Structus, who was the owner. The lanista is the trainer and ours was a fuckster called Sophon. I wouldn’t have pissed on Sophon had he been burning.’

  He remembered the grinning face of the boy-Emperor, his finger raised, his laughing call of ‘missio’ a minute after he had been manically trying to kill Drust with a naked blade. Caracalla had known it was Servilius Structus, had included a couple of decent fighters in the mix to make sure the fat man suffered. The why of that remained a mystery, but there needed to be no reason for it other than a brat youth’s overprivileged desire to hurt someone.

  Servilius Structus had shrugged at all Drust’s questions, though he was pale and sheened when he did it. Said it was an old affair and not to worry. Said it would be best, all the same, if Drust stayed out of Rome for a time.

  It was a shock to Drust, almost as much as when the fat old man had pushed the rudis at him, wrapped up in his manumission. The sight of that simple, engraved wooden blade was a shock, like falling in an icy ocean, that left Drust gasping; in a moment, no more than an eye-blink, he had gone from slave to free man.

  Freedom had been a bitter fruit, he remembered. A slave who fights in the harena has four meals a day, his accommodation paid for, his medical ailments tended and, if he is a gladiator, all the sex he can stand from whores provided by Servilius Structus to the perverted attentions of high-born who should know better.

  The new freedman Drusus Servilius needed to provide all of that for himself, and the only way to do that was to continue working for Servilius Structus for the sort of money which guaranteed bonded slavery anyway. The only difference, Drust soon realised, was that he was out of the sandpit and trusted now to escort the more valuable trade cargo as far from Rome and the attentions of an annoyed boy-Emperor as possible. Chariots and horses and second-rate fighters to provincial spectacula; studs to Africa; grain and special white sand for the Flavian back to Rome – it took Drust and the others far out of the City for extended periods. When he came back, he and the others were called on to provide other services, involving pain and blood and pleading from the victim.

  The other thing he learned as a free man was that ex-slaves are scum. He’d learned that long since about gladiators, who ranked one step below whores. Which was just about right, Drust thought. One makes a living by being stuck, the other gets life by avoiding it. Same coin, different sides. He had thought that leaving the life, becoming a freedman, would elevate him. It didn’t; people knew, and hiding his branded hands in his tunic, even on the hottest days, simply marked him out more.

  ‘Now you are head of these co-called Brothers of the Sands,’ Julius Yahya went on, ‘which includes our philosopher stable hand here. As Heraclitus says: “Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.”’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Kag answered amiably. Drust saw the man behind Julius Yahya seem to shrink a little, as if collecting all his tensile strength. He wanted to say something, lay a hand on Kag’s arm, but did not move nor speak.

  ‘We are Pocuratores, after the procuratores dromii,’ Kag added.

  There was a pause, then Julius Yahya chuckled and nodded. The procuratores dromii were the ones who moved out into the middle of chariot races, scooping up the wreckage, the spilled bodies, dragging out the dead and screaming, the broken horses, scattering fresh sand to soak up the blood and raking the rest smooth, all so the entertainment could go on. It was dangerous work, unsung and poorly paid – Servilius Structus had called them that for a joke. Amongst themselves, they were the Brothers of the Sands.

  ‘Sibanus Servilius,’ Julius Yahya went on. ‘Strange name, but he is a Garamentes, a mavro. Your former master took him on as a charioteer – I see here he raced thirty-six times, won nineteen, came second twelve, unplaced the rest. He also seems to be a scout of some sort for your little group.’

  Drust simply stared. Mavro – charred – was the what Romans sneeringly called anyone with too dark a skin, though that was muted these days, since the Emperor was more dark than fair and his sons only a little lighter. Sib was lithe and invisible in the night unless he smiled. He did not often smile – and he was not Garamentes, but from somewhere even further south in the far deserts.

  ‘A desert raider originally,’ Julius Yahya confirmed and sighed. ‘Throw a stone from here in any direction and you will hit half a dozen like him. It was by the saving grace of the gods that he was captured and swept into the arms of Servilius Structus, who seems to have an eye for talent. Otherwise he would have been one more wasted young life.’

  ‘Now, of course,’ Kag said quietly, ‘he bleeds for the Empire.’

  ‘The Empire saved his life,’ Julius Yahya answered with no seeming malice. ‘Swept him up when the garrison of Tingis would have crucified him – they don’t have games there, as you know, so their entertainments are more crude and final.’

  They did know. Same as they knew the others on his list. Manius Servilius, a man with the seeming benevolence of a priest of Ceres welcoming the faithful to a harvest festival, with his crinkle-eyed smile and even teeth, slightly yellowed from some Eastern concoction he chewed when he could get it.

  He might shake you with one firm, strong hand, but the other would be spinning a sicarii dagger, that curved sliver of deadly Judean knife that was like a fang to the snake. He could move silently and kill with no scruple at all. He was a bad man to find looking at you down the length of a barbed arrow nocked in a drawn bow.

  He was from somewhere in the desert, too, but Sib was wary of him, saw darkness and demons there; Manius did not care. He had ended up in the Ludus Ferrata, the Iron School of Servilius Structus – fought sixteen times and won them all, but he earned his freedom working with Drust on the less savoury tasks Servilius Structus had on offer.

  Ugo was a short-coupled flaxen-haired expert with a long axe – from Germania according to the books, but he was really a Frisian. None of those names meant much to him or the tribe he came from and neither did the weapons he fought with on the sands – he’d been a big, armoured ring-fighter, the hoplomachus – but the axe was part of what he was. He was grizzled, venal and a chief in his own lands, or so he claimed. He could take orders, think for himself and was always coinless.

  Quintus Servilius was made from bold strokes and unshaded colours, from his long legs through his lean body to his vagabond smile. He had been everywhere, done everything and had a sense of humour stropped by experience into a sharp edge that appreciated folly but extended a surprising gentleness to fools. He had fought as a retarius, with net and trident, a role that required speed and cunning and timing; he had been good at it for a dozen appearances in the provinces, but crowds hated the retarius for fighting almost naked, which was too Greek, and him in particular for not dying; the retarius wore an open-faced helmet and the crowd loved to see one killed, see his face as he died.

  Drust remembered him in the street fias
co, coming out of the alley like a roaring wind. He had been laughing then, as he had on all the other occasions he had fought as a paired team with Supremus, the Gaul. When Supremus took the hook through his heels and was dragged off to be knocked kindly on the head to make sure he was truly dead, it was Quintus who claimed the body, made sure it was cleaned up to be properly buried. He had laid his knuckle-marked hand on it, having nothing else. He had been the only one who bothered.

  All of this was known only to the Brothers and Servilius Structus and it bothered Drust that this Julius Yahya, a slave smelling faintly of cinnamon and roses, should know it too. It was as if they were stripped bare and on the selling block.

  These were the Procuratores, the Brothers of the Sands, men who knew Drust and each other, bound by memories of sweating fear in the dim undercrofts of shabby amphitheatres, of frying goat in strange desert holy places, men who fought back to back and side by side. They had walked with the dead and been splashed with the commingled blood of them and cowards, total bastards and ugly souls of all stripes, colour and creed. Their ears had shared the last words of the dying and the gasp, however fake, of lusted love.

  They had, one glorious year when they had been forced to travel with the Army, enjoyed the role of liberators, marching into villages and towns with the metalled men of the 3rd Augusta putting down some rag-robed rebellion that had no part of Servilius Structus, who only wanted his massive carts rolling safely to Rome. The Army all thought the carts held grain for the dole, but it turned out to be sand, fine white sand for the Flavian; Drust and the others had almost died for it.

  They had let all the prisoners free in their liberated town, Drust recalled, stolen anything of worth not nailed down and handed the power to local leaders – then watched as they hanged all ‘collaborators’ from the lintels of their own homes, so that they looked like strange gourds.

  They had watched people they knew die less than gloriously, people whose last words weren’t to their emperor, or their country, but usually just ‘Oh, fuck’ or ‘Don’t let my ma know I shit myself’. Some they had killed, standing above them as they knelt, waiting for the iron as the crowd howled.