Beasts From the Dark Read online

  Beasts From The Dark

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  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

  Historical Note

  Glossary

  Brothers Of The Sands

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Province of Rhaetia, late summer, regnal year three of Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander Augustus

  You can find such a place anywhere and, when you do, you are free to come and go to it as often as you choose afterwards. It is yours alone, no matter how many others may walk there, where you can find gods in the unseen wind that drags fingers through trees, or in the sun dancing on shiny water.

  Drust and the Brothers had made shrines and obeisance from one end of the Empire to the other, put one stone on top of another, spilled wine, left food and asked for forgiveness, favour or just to live through one more harena fight. They knew you did not need stone pillars or altars or priests – yet this was Rhaetia, whose woods were scattered with such sacred places, lurking in the Dark, a place of trees black with old blood and swirling with old gods who breathed the mists and the sigh of wind in it.

  Ugo honoured them with head bowed and mumbled abject chants because some of his gods were here, while the rest of them offered no more than a grudging nod or two and a dash of salt in the sweat they flicked off their faces – but they walked soft, as suspicious of these shaggy deities as the deities were of them.

  It was a temple with columns but they were all knotted boles and trunks leaning one way, away from the north wind – even old King Oak, who seldom bends to anything. There was water here too, leaping down a long stretch of deep cut; in winter it would freeze to a curtain of jewels, Drust thought. It looked like the right place, the place Headman Erco had told them of, but he could not believe it had been this easy…

  Here even Jupiter walked quietly, politely asking permission of the old gods of this land, which knew Rome only slightly. And here all the Brothers stood, turning reverentially slowly, feeling cloistered by the heavy cylinders of the ten trees sacred to these wood folk – the alder, the apple, the ash, the beech, the crab, the elm, the hazel, the thorn, the yew and the willow.

  And over them all, the eleventh tree, the one whose roots sucked love, family, life, everything…

  The Blood Oak.

  When the beasts of the wood came howling out around them, no one was surprised, and all of them turned, falling into the familiar gladiatorial stance, as worn as a whetted blade. Drust wanted to run, wanted to weep, and wasn’t sure if he was doing the latter anyway – he took a swift look sideways at where Praeclarum stood, grinning her toothless grin, blade up and savage as fangs. Then the fire smothered all tears and fears in him and he crouched by the shoulder of his woman. His wife.

  He moved to meet the beast who came at him, something with a twisted snarl in his boar’s head, naked from the waist and wearing checked trousers whose colour was faded and stained. He had a spear and a shield like the lid of a wooden tomb.

  Drust had no shield, but he had two vicious slices of gladius, the short sword the Army had once won an Empire with. And when the beast came at him, all foot-stamp and flurry of little stabs, he batted the spear sideways with one of them, rolled up the shaft and flung a fistful of steel into the man’s face.

  It hit the cheek-piece and grated sideways, caught the beast mask and wrenched it half off; blinded, the half-man shrieked and dropped the spear, clawing out a knife. For a moment he and Drust locked like stags; there was a glimpse of snarling, a flurry of wild stabs, growls and spits.

  Then a blade burst from the man’s neck, appeared and vanished, while the half a face Drust could see turned, astounded, until it fell away sideways, trailing rubies from the gaping wound. Praeclarum, her sword dripping, slapped Drust’s shoulder.

  ‘Out,’ she yelled. ‘We need to get out—’

  Drust had no argument – he bawled it so loudly his head thundered – but he saw Asellio scowling back at him, standing over a writhing enemy. Drust thought it was to do with rank and fleetingly thought Asellio an arse for bothering with it at such a time – then he saw that he was wrong and Asellio was fuming at the fleeing backs of two men.

  ‘I’ve got it, I’ve got it…’

  He did. His name was Crispus and he had it in one blood-slippery hand, stumbling towards Drust with a big grin and the curly head that gave him his name stiff with blood. He held it up so that the tail of the draco standard fluttered – then he seemed to jerk forward and stop, staring at the bloody point which had splintered out of his chest. It vanished like some gory trick; when Crispus fell forward onto his face, the owner of the spear shook the blood off it like a derisive spit, and he might have been snarling or laughing, it was hard to tell under the bland boy-face of the Roman parade helmet he wore.

  They saw him crouch to grab the standard and Drust heard Kag yelling for someone to get it. The warrior had to drop his spear to pick it up, then brandished the standard over the heel-kicking body of Crispus. He might have bellowed triumph but the shrieks and screams of the struggling and bloody were loud and everywhere.

  Drust saw Praeclarum leap forward and followed, cursing her even as he burned with admiration. He was panicked she would get sideswiped by some blade, hit by a spear flying out of nowhere – there were enough of them.

  Instead, he saw the boy-mask of the helmet, leprous with lost gilding and splashed gore, suddenly cave in under the massive blow of a pickaxe. The entire side of the copper facemask seemed to crumple round the vicious point; Ugo followed it up with a savage kick that sent the body lurching away, helping him drag the weapon out.

  He had a dolabra in either hand, two ugly mattock adzeheads backed by a sharp pick, the Army’s favourite tool. He had long since lost his once-favoured long axe, but now the artist had found a new instrument…

  Quintus appeared like a swirl of wind, plucked the draco from where it lay, then zephyred out, grinning.

  ‘Away,’ bawled Kag, and Dog, his terror of a face splashed with fresh blood, ducked and spun and ran towards them.

  They fled like squirrels.

  ‘Is he dead, then? Did we get the Dragon?’

  Ugo was sure of it but had no breath to tell Kag that. They all stood, bent and panting, but Asellio eventually shook his head.

  ‘Got the pole, but not the man.’

  ‘I hit him in the face mask,’ Ugo argued. ‘He wore that fancy parade helmet from the cavalry, like we were told. I caved his fucking face in.’

  ‘Not him,’ Kisa said. ‘Someone else.’

  ‘Someone else,’ Quintus echoed scathingly. ‘You think? The Dragon’s men are Romans who are said to have fallen far, but even so – that lot looked like tribal sister-fuckers to me, not Romans or anything that had once been so.’

  Ugo chipped up the forest floor with a frustrated swipe of his pick and Kag patted his massive shoulder soothingly.

  ‘We got the draco standard back, at least.’

  ‘Not the right one,’ Kisa pointed out, lifting the limp rag of the dragon’s tail. ‘This is old and rotted – look, the head gilding is all but worn off and the metal lappets—’

  ‘Cost two men,’ muttered the one they called Culleo,
slumping down with a grimace.

  ‘Four,’ Asellio muttered, and everyone knew he was bitter that the other two were the ones who had fled, one of them his second in command. Drust said nothing, while men prowled about the wood and thatch of the huts – looking to see if any people were left, they would say, but looting was more truthful.

  Quintus gave Kisa a harsh glance, picked up the standard and pitched it back towards the abandoned village. ‘Should have known,’ he said. ‘Erco lied and Fortuna fucked us all yet again.’

  None of the villagers had stayed to argue the point; the people of Lupinus had long since packed up their lives and trundled off south to the protection of the limes. Lupinus – Made of Wolfskin – was what the garrison and everyone else north of the limes called the place, but the score of tribals who had lived here had a different name for it, Drust was sure. He had never bothered to find out in all the times he had visited in the last few weeks; his only interest in the place was with the headman, Erco, and the hunters and trackers who provided wolf and bear pelts for the Army.

  The true worth of Erco to Drust was that he knew a man who knew a man further north who knew where there was a white bear Drust had to take back to feed the amphitheatre in time for the Ludus Magnus.

  It was that white bear which got them into this mess, he thought grimly.

  Men came back from the huts, Culleo shaking his head. ‘They have all pissed off,’ he said. ‘Back to the bridge probably.’

  He spat. ‘They are People of the Moss,’ he added derisively, and Drust remembered that Culleo was from Rhaetia, practically a local, though from the Roman side. He was Helvetii and hated Tigurini, which was the Roman name for a clutch of tribes, among them the People of the Moss. They were tribals from north of the limes who clung close to it for profit and did not trust their own kind to be reasonable about that – but whoever they were in a village they called Lupinus, they had gathered up everything and run off.

  ‘For the bridge,’ Asellio pointed out, then gathered up his vine staff and clanked off determinedly. ‘To the bridge, followed by those two runaway arse-sponges…’

  It hit them all at the same moment and shredded all weariness. There were curses and a mad scrabble up the rutted track, stumbling over the frantic discards of the villagers – shards of broken pots, a spilled grain sack, even a whole cart whose wheel had buckled. They hadn’t even stopped to fully empty it of stuff valuable and vital to them. Everyone who followed that trail knew what they’d find, even as they gasped for the gods to intercede.

  The bridge was gone. On the far side, the engineers were gone, their oxen and chains and shovels and axes. All gone. Nothing remained but the wooden piles on one side and their counterparts on the other; the river below frothed and the balks spilled down into it were long sailed.

  Asellio ripped off his helmet and flung it at the ground, cursing Stolo and Tubulus and the optio who had commanded the engineers.

  ‘He should have known better, the shit trumpet,’ he raged, but Drust had some sympathy – two of the numeroi of the Batavian came running up, screaming about being attacked, about beast men in the blood woods. And after them came a horde…

  ‘They let the horde across,’ Kag pointed out bitterly, and Drust had no argument for that. The optio had recognised the villagers and once the last gasper had staggered to the far side, he had whipped up his oxen and the chained supports, partly cut, had been torn up and allowed to fall. Drust knew it was because Stolo and Tubulus had told him everyone else was dead.

  ‘They will wish for it to be true,’ Asellio growled murderously, then wiped his face with a trembling hand that everyone noticed.

  ‘What now?’ demanded Scrofus, the thin, whining Pannonian and everyone looked at Asellio, because he was the commander of them all, even the Brothers. But Kag looked sideways at Drust, as if to say ‘we should fuck them all and go our own way’.

  Asellio found and picked up his helmet, absently wiping off the dirt. ‘West,’ he said. ‘There is another bridge about a day and a half from here.’

  ‘That will also be down,’ Ugo grunted and Asellio scowled at him. Ugo spread his arms in apology and fell silent.

  ‘We need food and water,’ Drust pointed out, and Quintus grinned, looking at the sky.

  ‘We have the river if we can get down to it and, besides, it will rain soon.’

  ‘Give us less of your cheer, why don’t you?’ Asellio snapped, then seemed to lift himself a little. ‘Culleo, take Tuditanus and watch our back trail – those inbred tree-lurkers are coming for us, I can feel it. I am going to check the watchtower – maybe there’s something in it we can use.’

  ‘We can’t stay here long,’ Scrofus whined. ‘They will come here soon.’

  ‘Then start running,’ Manius offered and stared blackly. Scrofus moved away from him.

  Kag and the rest of the Brothers moved to Drust, a pointed gesture not lost on the others. There were now only three of them – the thin Pannonian called Scrofus, which meant ‘sow’, Tuditanus, who was a local and named ‘hammer’ because he carried the communal tent and peg-hammer, and another local, Culleo. His name meant a wineskin, and his face showed how he had got it.

  They were the lees of the Army, the lumber no one else wanted, their legs and backs marked by beatings from vine sticks, and so low they no longer even had real names. As a last resort they’d been shoved into the exploratores, the scouts of the numeroi of the Batavian Cohort. It meant they wore what they liked and got sent out to skulk, shirk and steal, commanded by one regular Army man – a decanus called Scaevola, nicknamed Asellio. It was a mark of his fallen status that the nickname had been given to him by his scornful peers – it meant ‘donkey keeper’.

  Drust knew these men were afraid now, because two of them were dead and two more had fled, leaving them outnumbered among the Brothers of the Sand, who were ex-gladiators and ex-slaves. Even to the likes of Culleo, slovenly drunk that he was, the seven Brothers and the woman with them were no better than shit on his shoe.

  But Culleo also knew better than to voice it – these shits were hard-faced men with clear weapon skills. One of them, called Dog, had a horror of a face, skin-marked to look like a skull, and the grizzled stubble he had grown only added to the terror when he looked at you. It seemed to Culleo and Sow that Dog had climbed out of his own grave only yesterday after having been dead for a year.

  Manius was a mavro, a swarthy streak of sneaking from the deserts far to the south of the Africas across the Middle Sea; Kag was a Thracian, wiry and deadly; Quintus was tall and lanky and never stopped smiling, even when cutting throats. Culleo said especially when cutting throats, but he said it quietly and only to Sow. Ugo, the giant Frisian, carried two dolabrae and knew what to do with them.

  Then there was also one called Kisa – a Jew – and no one liked them, especially this one who knew everything about everything, never shut up about it and seemed inclined not to fight. He was also, Culleo and Sow thought, a frumentarius, a state spy, and they liked them even less.

  But the ones that really made them outraged and uneasy began with the leader, Drust, who was nothing special to look at and yet somehow made even the mad Dog take orders – it unnerved them all when Asellio barked commands and all these so-called Brothers of the Sand turned and looked at Drust for confirmation. Then there was his wife, who was called ‘Remarkable’. A woman gladiator. In the Army. Truly this was the end of days.

  Kag saw them look and smiled back, which made them turn away and find something to do. ‘We should get away from this lot,’ he added quietly to Drust. ‘They are the scum of the Army.’

  ‘We are the scum of the Army,’ Dog corrected, scratching his beard.

  ‘We are not in the Army,’ Kisa corrected pedantically. ‘Technically. We are numeroi…’

  Drust wasn’t listening; he was squinting to see if Asellio was coming back, for they had a limited time here before the tree-fuckers came howling after them. Asellio was nominally in command and
Drust hoped there would not come a point where that had to stop.

  For now he sat on a stone listening to the river dance in the gorge, looking at the gap. Forty feet between the remains of timbers and it might as well have been forty miles – they weren’t crossing to the safe south at this point.

  He wondered whether Erco had fled with his flock of villagers, the smiling little traitor. He might lurk in the shadow of the Empire, trade with them, run to them when the rest of his warrior people ran amok, but Drust was sure the little man called Hercules had deliberately led them right into an ambush. He will have gone off with them, he thought. He’ll be wearing a beast mask and dancing round Crispus’s smouldering remains.

  He felt sick at it all, looked over to Praeclarum for the comfort of her in his eyes; she smiled back, not showing her lack of teeth. It was scarcely six months since their wedding and he remembered the day, the joy. How had they ended up here?

  He looked up at the watchtower, willing Asellio to hurry. The tower was a narrow, three-storey affair, the bottom made of stone, the rest timber and wooden shingle. The entrance was up a length of stone steps into a door on the middle floor, which made it defendable, but it was no more than a shelter for the luckless men who’d had to monitor the bridge beyond the Wall.

  Asellio burst from the door cursing angrily and Drust saw his hands were empty – so nothing useful up there after all. He sighed, was turning back to the muttered argument when he saw Asellio fall. His worn regulation boot studs hit the top step and shot out from underneath him, and he crashed down onto the stairs, bounced down two and then rolled off the unbalustraded side and fell a dozen feet. In his banded armour he made an ugly sound, like tin pots clattering.

  Ugo howled with laughter, bent over and slapping his thighs. They all did, until it became clear the decanus wasn’t getting up in any hurry; then they ran over to him.

  ‘Come on, come on – this is no time to snooze,’ Kag said and took Asellio by the front to haul him up; it took all his strength because the decanus was cased in armour. The head lolled back and blood trickled out of his mouth; it was then Drust saw the back of his skull was all blood and mostly caved in from the half-buried stone it had landed on.