Beasts From the Dark Read online

  The arrow that hit him drove the word ‘forest’ out of him in a high, plaintive squeal, then slammed him face first into the rocks he so hated. Drust was glad he had taken a shield and now slid it off his shoulder.

  ‘Form, form,’ Drust yelled and they turned, shields up. Sow and Hammer were dancing in little panicked baby steps, hovering on the edge of bolting.

  ‘Should we stay here?’ Hammer yelled in panic as another arrow whicked through the air and splintered on the rocks.

  ‘Let’s,’ Ugo grunted scathingly, working his shoulders. ‘We can plant flowers.’

  They looked sideways at him, a big man with two mattock picks and no shield, scowling from out of a beard and hair whose braids seemed welded together. They might have streaks of grey in them, as if some bird had shit from the nest of his head, but those shoulders were massive and his roar was a blast of sound they could feel.

  ‘Come on, you arse-sponges. Come and die.’

  They came, but the first two seemed to trip and fall over, tipped off-balance by the sudden sprout of saplings from their chests – Manius nocked a third arrow and spitted one more before they closed on Drust and the others.

  Drust dropped a shoulder and let the spear snick threads from his tunic, struck back but was too far for more than a pink of the point, enough to make the warrior rear back, his mouth an O under hair that looked dipped in frost, spiked with icicles of lime.

  Kag bumped his shoulder – there is no room to move here, Drust thought. Not the way we fight.

  Something slammed his shield, he saw a foot and slashed it with the gladius, honed to shaving sharp; the owner yelped and spun away, hopping. Drust turned a little when the corner of his eye flickered, blocked the solid thump of spear with his scarred egg of a shield, backhanded the gladius across the spearman’s throat; the man gurgled, dropped the spear and clapped his hand against the spurt, as if he could shut the gape.

  An arrow whicked so close to Drust’s head that he felt the rasp of wind from the fletchings – the man he hadn’t seen took it full in the face, just below the nose, and did not make a sound as his head snapped all the way back and his last thoughts burst bloodily from the great scab of scalp and skull that blew out down his back.

  Manius, Drust thought, doing what he does best, though I wish he would do it a little further from me…

  Ugo finished it, carving them with axe and pick, protected by Quintus from those he did not see and would not have cared about if he had. He blocked and stabbed and slashed to keep blade and point away from the big man, while the twin dolabrae sliced blood into the sour light of a dying day. The warriors realised, like dogs chasing a feral bull, just what they had sunk their teeth into; they let go and fled. None of them made more than a dozen steps.

  There was a moment when no one spoke, just stood bent over and rasping for breath. Somewhere a man grunted and groaned. Behind Drust, Kisa told Culleo he hadn’t been skewered, just had the breath knocked out of him by an arrow which had hit his slung forage bag and ring mail.

  ‘They have no bows worth the name,’ Manius added scornfully and brandished the Persian one he owned, a poem of curve in bone and wood. ‘Silly little sticks they shoot are badly made and have no power.’

  ‘At least one of them shut him up,’ Dog said, glancing at the ashen Culleo briefly as he stepped over the sprawled dead, squinting down at them. ‘These are not any kind of Romans. These are local woodlice – wouldn’t you say, lads?’

  He turned, innocent as a Vestal veil, to stare his horror face at Sow and Hammer, who were still half crouched, shields up. Sow licked his lips at the Rhaetian insults and looked as if he would tell Dog to fuck off, but Drust saw that resolve drain from him at the last.

  ‘They never sat a horse,’ Quintus confirmed. ‘Same as the ones in that forest altar. No Romans of the Dragon here.’

  ‘We were sold a three-legged horse by that headman,’ Praeclarum confirmed. ‘But the ones he sent word to still think us worth the effort.’

  ‘Well, we stole a prize from their altar,’ Kag growled. ‘Killed a few, including one of their leaders if he wore a cavalry face mask. If they can replace it with some of our heads on a pole, I am thinking they will count that a trade.’

  ‘We never should have come this way,’ Culleo said hoarsely, levering himself up and rubbing where the arrow had smacked him. ‘Look – the path has run out. Where do we go now?’

  ‘Not back, as you have been whining on about for too long,’ Dog fired at him. Drust looked round.

  ‘Up,’ he said, and everyone groaned. Culleo looked stricken.

  ‘We’ll never make it.’

  ‘Shed your iron,’ Drust said and Culleo’s eyes threatened to pop; he was fresh from realising how that ring-coat had stopped him from being skewered.

  ‘How will we protect ourselves in a fight?’

  ‘Fight better,’ Kag growled and dipped low to one of the corpses. Drust thought he was scavenging but the little Thracian turned.

  ‘This one is alive.’

  ‘Then change that state,’ Dog answered. Drust ignored him, moved to the man and knelt. Kag was right – the man was alive, and under the desiccated muzzle of the wolf mask was a big warrior with a shock of tow-coloured hair and a beard done in two impressive braids, banded with tarnished silver rings.

  He had a tunic coloured faintly blue, but mainly by mud and blood, trousers patterned in red and green squares, thonged from below the knee to where his torn leather shoes began. Manius had hit him with an arrow, but it had gone in low, just above the hip. Praeclarum arrived, looked, snapped the shaft and drew both ends out.

  ‘He will live,’ she said, rooting in her bag for packing and binding. ‘Won’t walk far, though.’

  Manius appeared at her side and carefully took the broken shaft with the point still attached. He looked at her with dark, blank eyes and said: ‘He will die. In a day, perhaps less.’

  She looked at the barbed arrow, then back into the abyss eyes. ‘You poison the points?’

  ‘Not for anything I might eat,’ he answered, and there was no laugh in his voice.

  ‘Why would we care about whether he can walk?’ demanded Ugo suspiciously. He had shaken a corpse free of most of its tunic and was using it to wipe the clots from his dolabrae.

  ‘Because we cannot question him here and we need information,’ Drust answered, straightening and wiping his palms clean on his tunic front. ‘We will need all we can get but it won’t come from this one, as I had hoped.’

  He looked hard at Manius. ‘One of your shafts almost kissed my cheek. I do not want such a lover, particularly one with venomous lips. If Praeclarum had cut herself taking it out…’

  Manius acknowledged it with a nod and loped off. Quintus followed him with silent eyes and no grin, then shook his head.

  ‘Sib was right. He should never have been allowed out of the desert.’

  Sib was dead, Drust wanted to point out, and though Manius swore it was not his arrow, no one could be sure. But then Sib might have tried to kill Manius earlier, believing he was some demon from the desert; their relationship, Drust recalled, had been complicated, even for Brothers.

  ‘Pack up,’ he said brusquely, then knelt and drew his knife, felt for the heart in the throat and thrust once. The warrior gugged and gurgled, then all Praeclarum’s skill was wasted and only his heels worked, drumming furiously for a brief spasm before slumping to silence.

  All that time in the undercroft of the Flavian, Drust thought wryly, learning from the Greek medicus how to do this. The Greek would be pleased that his voice still echoes in my ears… perhaps this is the true secret of immortality.

  Quintus turned to Culleo and the other two. His grin was warm and wide and white, vicious as a feeding shark.

  ‘Rid yourselves of all that useless metal, lads, or you will never make the climb. I’d throw away the tent too – not going to be of much use.’

  ‘If I have to help carry any of you,’ Dog added, ‘I ma
y have something to say on it.’

  Culleo stood, working his mouth, and Drust knew the man wanted drink more than anything right then; he wondered if this was the moment the man would do something truly idiotic. Then Sow broke the knots of it with a resigned grunt, pitching the eight-man tent into the gorge.

  ‘Let’s get to it. Fastest way back to the castra.’

  Kag nodded. ‘Good move. That way you can get that rash on your balls treated.’

  ‘You’d better tell your ma,’ Sow shot back. ‘That’s where I got it.’

  Kag and Quintus laughed and Ugo slapped Sow on the back hard enough to make him stumble and cough, but he was smiling when he got enough breath back to wriggle out of the ring-metal tunic.

  * * *

  They climbed for an hour, up the strewn rocks and loose scree to finally pop out on a boulder-studded escarpment studded with bushes that spewed down to a forest, ringing them on all sides.

  ‘We have lost them,’ Kag declared, wiping his greased face and flapping a hand at insects. ‘Unless they come up through the forest.’

  ‘What about it, you lads?’ Quintus demanded, staring at Culleo, Sow and Hammer. ‘You’re from around here – Helvetii, right? Will they come up through the forest?’

  Culleo spat, which Quintus did not like. ‘Helvetii. What do you think that is? You are Roman in the same way – from the City? Apulia? Gaul?’

  ‘He is trying to say,’ Hammer interrupted, ‘that he does not know any more than you. No one likes the Dark.’

  ‘The Dark?’

  ‘The forests round here are old as the first gods,’ Hammer answered, his voice low, his eyes darting around. ‘You step lightly here.’

  Sow was hunkered, resting, but in a way that would let him spring up. ‘You saw the sacred place where we stole that standard.’ He paused and looked bitterly at Drust. ‘Only to throw it away as if it was of no account.’

  ‘It was as old as Varus,’ Kag pointed out harshly. ‘Rome has long forgotten it.’

  ‘Not the tribe that took it, no matter when,’ Culleo spat back. ‘They are the ones who hunt us now.’

  ‘Blame Erco for that,’ Ugo rumbled. ‘Little fuck lied, led us into an ambush. Thought we would all be killed and told that to the bridge engineers. Your tent-mates running up, screaming about hordes and blood and beast men didn’t help, for sure.’

  Culleo and the others fell silent, because there was no arguing with the truth. Praeclarum looked at Drust and he thought she looked pale and washed-out.

  ‘We need a place to rest and hide,’ she said. Drust nodded to Manius, who sucked in a deep breath which everyone noted, then loped out.

  He does not like those forests any more than we do, Drust thought. Skilled tracker, silent killer – yet he is a desert man. Trees unnerve him. Only Ugo does not seem to care – he looked at the big Frisian and saw that he was wrong, that Ugo stood like an uneasy bull, shaggy head swinging this way and that, trying to use the corners of his eyes to spot the enemies sneaking up on them.

  Manius was back not long after they had moved off, westward to the trees, which seemed to come at them too fast. He had found a place, an overhang that wasn’t quite a cave, though everyone eyed it apprehensively. Drust saw that it would let them light a fire unseen, allow them warmth and hot food, but he did not like the fact that they crouched under a single balanced slab of rock the size of a palace on the Hill.

  ‘What if it falls?’ Ugo asked, and Dog laughed as he squatted and began the makings of a fire.

  ‘Then we are squashed,’ he said, ‘unless you are truly Hercules and can hold it up while we all escape.’

  ‘Do not mention Hercules,’ Kag put in, scowling. ‘That Erco will suffer when I meet him.’

  ‘Perhaps he did not run off to the safety of the castra with the rest of his village,’ Kisa put in. ‘Seems to me that he is more likely to join the howlers and screamers.’

  ‘What say you?’ Ugo demanded, looking at Culleo, who looked back at him, his pouched eyes black.

  ‘I say you should stop asking me. I am Helvetii – which is the Roman word for it – the same way you are Frisii. If one of them walked up and offered his wrist to clasp, you would not know why.’

  ‘Fair point,’ Manius answered, laughing. ‘Besides – you all look the same to me.’

  He had set snares when he was out and went to check on them. The fire flourished, making them gather round it, hugging the warmth like a mother’s embrace, and the talk was low and head to head.

  ‘Julius Yahya,’ Kag said wearily and Drust nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. Julius Yahya had been a slave when he had persuaded Drust and the others to go north of the Walls in Britannia to fetch back a Roman woman and her child – but he was a slave with the powers of a senator and more. The Roman woman and her son turned out to be more than that, Drust recalled. He was probably the one behind them all ending up in the desert pursuing yet another high-born Roman woman, a Vestal no less.

  ‘At least this time it is not a woman,’ Kag muttered.

  ‘That we know of,’ Drust replied thoughtfully. ‘Last time it was supposedly about Hyrcanian tigers and rescuing Dog and Manius.’

  As if summoned, Manius loped in with a fistful of little squirrels which he started to gut and spit.

  ‘You think that’s it? Some woman?’

  Drust sighed and looked wearily at Kag, while the sudden waft of cooking meat raked him with hunger pangs. ‘How do I know? I know only that each time we succeed makes it certain Julius fucking Yahya will get us on another of his plots.’

  He did not add what he suspected, that the woman in it was the Mother of Empire pulling her strings from the Palatine Hill.

  ‘When I get back,’ Dog said, shifting up to examine the squirrels with a ravenous eye, ‘I will have words with Julius Yahya.’

  ‘Get in the line,’ Kag answered. They sat, smelling the squirrels and sorting out ways to eat them. In the end, they did what they always did – sauced their porridge with little bits of meat and wilted greens. They had wine, they had evaded their enemies and they were alive. It was enough for now.

  ‘How far to the next bridge?’ Kisa asked, and there was silence until Culleo realised everyone was looking at him.

  He shrugged, picking at the scab on his purple nose. ‘A day. Maybe more. Never travelled to it this way. Don’t you know? You’re the frumentarius.’

  ‘Was,’ Kisa pointed out flatly. ‘Not now. Got too involved with this lot to be trusted as a State spy. Not that it was well paid, mind…’

  ‘That bridge will be down too,’ Sow offered. ‘If they have pulled this one to pieces.’

  ‘There has to be a crossing somewhere,’ Quintus growled. ‘All these limeheads seem to be flooding south easily enough. Got across the bloody Wall too.’

  ‘They move light and can climb and swim,’ Kag answered, then looked at Drust. ‘There was no Spartacus mentioned,’ he added thoughtfully.

  ‘Gladiator?’ Sow said scornfully. ‘Not likely.’

  ‘No big named leader that men will follow,’ Drust explained. ‘That means there is no conquest here, just a lot of little limeheads stirred up to go plundering. They will start south with what they have looted if it seems like they might have a serious fight on their hands.’

  No one spoke for a long while; they had seen the Army here and it didn’t seem any of them were up for a serious fight except with each other, over pay arrears or rations or privilege. Commanders were more concerned about not having their men try and make them Emperors than with leading them to fight raiders. When Drust said as much, Sow looked up sharply.

  ‘Don’t you worry, gladiator. The Army will sort them out.’

  Dog laughed nastily, but Drust raised a hand as a warning; Culleo, Sow and Hammer were the lumber of the land, so bad they could not fit in the last century of the last cohort of a Legion, but had been consigned to the numeroi, so far removed that they might just as well not have enlisted. Yet they still had pride.r />
  They were, Drust thought, no different from the laticlavius they had been sent to find, this senatorial-ranked renegade. When the others had set themselves as sentry or rolled themselves up for sleep, Drust moved to Kisa with a lit torch and got him to move with him, away from the others.

  ‘What of this senatorial general?’ he asked, and Kisa, yawning, hauled out the scrolls he had been given, squinting blearily at them, though it was clear to Drust that he had consigned most of it to memory.

  ‘Marcus Antonius Antyllus,’ he recited. ‘As we were told – a descendant of the great Anthony himself and so a member of one of the most powerful families in Rome. Did the usual career, appointed quaestor, praetor and the like. Tribune of the Fifteenth Apollonaris in Cappadocia, then the Second Adiutrix in Pannonia – this is where it began to change from the usual. Seems he muddied the floor of every principia he was sent to – got debts for gambling, arguing for a change of tactics, for more discipline, for more senators appointed to legion commands rather than equites. Made himself a nuisance to the Hill and was removed as legate of the Third Italica here in Rhaetia – either that or removed himself, the record is unclear. Became commander of the Flavia horse, which is a big step down for such a man – but he had ideas that the horse were of no account in the likes of Rhaetia and Pannonia and should be retrained as fast, light infantry. Actually, that is quite a sound idea given the mountains and forests—’

  ‘Interesting but unimportant,’ Drust growled, and Kag cleared his throat.

  ‘Six months ago he led the better part of the Second Flavia horse out north, ostensibly as a show of force and against the wishes of the governor and the legate, who did not want the tribes north of the Wall stirred up – but he is a senator, so they couldn’t do much other than complain to the Hill. Again.’

  ‘He never came back?’

  Kisa shook his head. ‘According to the report here, he sent messages saying he was retraining his men, but some of them were nothing to do with the Flavia – legionaries and auxiliaries with grievances. That worried the generals and governor, as did the reports – second- and third-hand from the locals – that some strange Romans had sacrificed their horses or eaten them or both. Then they heard that this unit was raiding, waging war on the tribals north of the Wall, living off the land because the castra cut off supplies to try and force them to return. Led by someone called the Dragon, who wore ornate armour and a helmet with a face on it. That’s cavalry parade armour, for sure. He had a draco standard, presumably of the Second Flavia.’