Beasts From the Dark Read online

  ‘Which is where we came in,’ said a voice and Praeclarum slid out of the shadows, her smile warm in the torchlight. ‘Are you even considering this still?’

  Drust was not. All he wanted was to get back to the right side of the Wall and he said so. Kisa breathed out with relief and Praeclarum smiled more broadly, showing her gap and gums; her expensive pearl teeth were in a soft pouch round her neck.

  ‘Make an inventory,’ Drust said to her, ‘of what supplies we have. Put Sow in charge of them – tell him he is quartermaster, which will get him to do it.’

  ‘What of the other two?’ Kisa asked softly. ‘They are none of them to be trusted.’

  ‘Culleo is cheating crucifixion by a ball-hair,’ Praeclarum offered bleakly. ‘Hammer is a looter and a brawler – lift his tunic and you will see the flog marks. Sow is not much better – the only fighting any of them has done is over a whore or a meat pie.’

  ‘Keep a watch on them is all we can do,’ Drust replied. ‘Make it clear we are dependent one on the other, especially where we are going.’

  ‘The Dark,’ Kisa said mournfully.

  The light faltered and sank to the earth. Shadow and fear slouched in, chasing sense and reason; the hiss of a leaf in the fetid wind made heads turn and hearts break into a ragged trot. The blackness was everywhere, it left nowhere to run, and everything became memory.

  Chapter Two

  Drust woke like a man falling upwards. I shouldn’t have slept, he thought. Shouldn’t have. But that’s where dreams are and I find a lot in them. Dreams – they are who I am when I’m too tired to be me.

  In the sullen overhang of rock, they moved quietly and with purpose, checking that blade, fixing this strap. Praeclarum came to him, squatted and offered him a thin wineskin; the liquid was resined but he drank it anyway.

  ‘Those three are hoarding,’ she said, and Drust levered himself to his feet. He didn’t question her on it.

  ‘Where are they?’

  She jerked her head and he followed her out to where Culleo was fiddling with a bootstrap, Sow was arguing with Hammer over how best to fasten the neck of the bag they had made for the provisions. They’d used the waxed leather one Hammer had carried tent mallet and pegs in. All of them looked up guiltily as the pair came up.

  ‘Empty your packs and pouches,’ Drust said, and they looked calculatingly at one another while Praeclarum rested one hand on a hilt. Then their eyes drifted to somewhere behind Drust, who resisted the nag to turn; he’d had that one pulled on him before.

  ‘Empty,’ said the tomb-voice of Dog, and the three men looked sullen, then resentful, then resigned. Finally they began to pick stuff out of their packs until Dog walked forward, wrenched packs and pouches and began strewing stuff on the ground.

  Four portions of twice-bake, the Army bread, and a ham bone with meat still on it. Drust jerked his head at Sow, who loaded it into the provisions sack and looked embarrassed about it.

  ‘If you were back at the castra, you’d get beaten by clubs for this,’ Drust pointed out. He looked at Culleo, whose pack was still intact. ‘What else have you got?’

  Culleo looked murderous for a moment, then reached in and drew out a wineskin, small but still fat. He raised it to his lips and began sucking until Drust tore it from him, the ruby drops flying like blood. Drust tasted it after pointedly wiping the neck with one hand, then handed it to Dog, who drank.

  ‘Decent,’ he said. ‘Better than anyone else is drinking now.’

  Drust looked at the three men. ‘You can go your own way, you sorry sacks of shit. If you get back to the Wall I will make sure you clean the latrines forever using your own arse-sponges. I don’t think you will get back on your own, so what I offer now is your last chance. Stay or go?’

  They were silent for a second or two, then Sow stuffed the wineskin in the provisions bag and glared at Culleo. He looked ashamed.

  ‘I’ll stay. Hammer too, because he is an idiot on his own. Neither of us will make it, for sure, if left to ourselves.’ He turned to Hammer. ‘It’s true, you know it.’

  Drust and Culleo locked eyes. He was a raw-boned gangling man, Drust saw, spare and beaten by weather and drink until his face looked like a broken-veined cliff with eyes. Finally he nodded.

  ‘Join the others,’ he said. As they lumbered off, Dog watched them go until he knew they could not hear.

  ‘Cut their throats now,’ he said mildly. ‘It will save time later.’

  ‘Three more fists with steel,’ Drust pointed out, and Dog grudgingly admitted the worth of that with a curt nod.

  They moved off until the scrub grew taller, became saplings. The sprawling forest of the Germanies wasn’t all one, Drust knew, but lots of them linked by open areas, sometimes carved out for cultivation, sometimes just by the gods. The woods themselves were… different.

  They swaggered in, as they would down any dark alley in Subura, shit-eating grins on their faces, shoulders moving in challenge, goading any watchers to make a move. In a dozen steps they had shrunk like emptying wineskins, started to crouch and walk soft; all talk became whispered or disappeared entirely, like the sun.

  Under the shadows and canopy one tree followed another, one space succeeded another, without difference or progression. They walked through a place of eternal sameness, a hall of endless reflections, with neither direction nor distance, their footsteps reduced to soft hushes. The wind whispered messages to the trees, who passed it on with rustling lisps; somewhere a woodpecker drummed echoes and that made Kag blow out his lips and smile.

  Drust knew why. The woodpecker was sacred to Mars, and while the she-wolf had nursed the Twins, the woodpecker had brought them food. It was a good sign.

  They moved through a colonnaded temple of tall wooden pillars draped and smothered with hanging moss. It rained, sudden and fierce, but they only heard it at first, a snake-hiss in the canopy; later, it filtered through and sifted down on them. The heat sank on them like a blanket; insects pinged and whined, and there was no sun, just a haze of wet heat.

  They stopped when Drust thought it might be noon, but Kag was sure he was late by an hour. Not that it mattered, for time itself seemed to creep like the tendrils of steam-mist rising up from the ground; they picked a fallen tree and the stump to perch on, eating twice-baked soaked in the thin wine to make it chewable, then passed round Culleo’s hoarded wineskin of good stuff. Drust watched the man lick his lips and scowl; there would come a time, he thought.

  ‘Poor feed this,’ Sow growled.

  ‘Go and hunt meat then,’ Culleo spat back.

  ‘The mavro has a bow – let him do it.’

  ‘He only hunts men,’ Dog said, grinning. The truth, Drust knew, was more to do with the dark wood than Manius’s choice of victims. It was too enclosed for him, with too much underfoot to let him move quietly; he was a long-shooter from the desert, but here the prey could see and hear him long before he spotted them.

  Still, he was adjusting and said so. He would find the Colour here, he said, and when he did – whatever it was - he would merge with the land, become one. Be far away and yet right here. Disappear. Quintus laughed and the rest of the Brothers joined in, making out that this was Manius just putting the frighteners on Culleo and Sow and Hammer. It was short and weak at best; they remembered Sib and how he had called Manius jnoun, a desert word for something dark out of Hades. They saw the lean, black-eyed dark man in the shadows and could believe it.

  Manius fished in a pouch and came up with a small parcel of leaf made into a neat triangle shaped like a tiny pillow. He held it up and popped it into the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Two left,’ he said. No one answered, or looked at him, especially his eyes, which went strange and glassy and darker than ever, so that it was hard to tell where the pupil began. It was a mix that came from his own lands, deep in the desert south of Lepcis, and no one but him knew what was in it, only that the spit from it left a mark like blood.

  ‘How long until we are out o
f this place?’ Hammer wanted to know, his neck sunk down into his shoulders, peering up and round at the trees.

  ‘When we get to the last trees, there we will be,’ Ugo offered. ‘I thought you were local lads – why so feared of this wood?’

  Hammer gave him a sour look. ‘They call you German, but I know you are Frisian. They have clumps of trees there but nothing like this. Swamps with small woods is what they have there, I have heard. I was born and raised far to the east of here and right on the edge of a place like this – which is really the same one, stretched out and up and down the mountains and valleys.’

  He leaned forward. ‘No one went more than a few paces inside, or stayed for long, or went anywhere near it at night. My village built a stockade against what might come out of it. And made offerings to the gods when they cut it back to make more room for crops.’

  ‘Cernunnos, stag-horned hunter, watch over us,’ Sow whispered, and Culleo banged a fist on his shoulder.

  ‘Hist on that, clod.’

  ‘Cernunnos,’ Ugo echoed suddenly, a bass rumble that tightened everyone’s flesh. ‘Spine of the Middleworld. Send Blackbird, Keeper of the Gate; Stag of the Seven Tines, Master of Time; Ancient Owl, Crone of the Night; Eagle, Lord of the Air, Eye of the Sun; and Salmon, Oldest of the Old, Wisest of the Wise, leaping from the juncture of the Five Springs. Watch over us.’

  He spilled the good wine and not even Culleo made protest against it; a breeze shifted leaves and hissed whispers and no one dared move or breathe. When a bird churred from the depths, Sow whimpered.

  Eventually, Kisa blew out his cheeks. ‘Well – follow the wind and birds, like your god says.’

  He got up and moved, muttering his own prayers, and Dog nodded admiringly at his back.

  ‘Say what you like about that little Jew, he has Jupiter’s own balls when he needs them.’

  Kag and Praeclarum fell into step with Drust, and he knew they had things to say, so he waited.

  ‘We might be in trouble when we get back,’ Kag said eventually, and Drust said nothing. ‘We have failed to find this Dragon, failed to recover the standard and lost Asellio and most of his men. It will only take those three to say it was all our fault and then…’

  ‘Why would they?’ Praeclarum demanded.

  ‘Save their own hide,’ Kag pointed out. ‘Officially, Culleo is in charge and he will bring that grievance out from where he has stuffed it for now; he will claim we took over, which is not exactly wrong. He will do it because the Army will blame him otherwise.’

  ‘So?’ Praeclarum demanded and Kag spat meaningfully. ‘So we kill the three of them before we get back,’ she persisted.

  Drust thought she was heat-struck a little, for the tone was fiery and she was beaded with sweat; he felt alarm at the idea of her having sucked in a vaporous fever from this dark wood.

  ‘Ho – did I say that?’ Kag protested and Praeclarum threw her hands in the air; since one of them held a naked gladius, it made the others rear back from the winking edge.

  ‘Steady,’ Drust said, and saw her blink and shake drops from her face. She looked pale and violet-eyed.

  ‘I meant,’ Kag said soothingly, ‘that we might consider going after this Dragon. Talk with him. So we could say we did that, at least.’

  ‘Are you sick?’ Drust asked outright, and Praeclarum blew out her cheeks and then gave a short, nervous laugh.

  ‘This place… the heat.’

  Drust touched her face, felt the heat and the slick of her. ‘We will be out of it soon.’

  He turned to Kag. ‘We won’t be going after any fucking senator who eats his horse and has suborned most of his command into rebellion.’

  * * *

  They moved in snake-spurts, single files that shunted one another like a long train of camels and mules when the lead man stopped to take stock of something he didn’t like. Then they’d start off, stretching out like ribbon, getting into a space, then shunting to a halt, moving like a slow caterpillar.

  It was weary and hot and sweat-drenched. Drust called a halt after two hours and they sank where they were. Manius came up, his teeth etched in scarlet when he grinned; his mouth looked like an old battlefield.

  The sun slumped and the land began to lose colour, the virulent greens and stark browns and yellows bleeding out, the shadows creeping like assassins. They squatted, watching the draped moss turn to witch hair, listening to the night and trying to get some rest and food without the betrayal of a fire. Kag and Manius stood watch while the others chewed soaked bread. We will need to get food soon, Drust thought, feeling crushed by the whole affair. Or find a way across the river and avoid all the killers who prowled.

  Praeclarum came to him in the cool night and they sat, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the creaks and the wind hiss in the canopy. No one spoke even if they had something to say; a whisper was a scream in this place.

  In the velvet black, something small died with big shrieks and owls sang songs of mourning to the blood.

  On watch, Drust’s eyes felt gritted and he blinked for moisture, not wanting to shake his head, not wanting even that little movement to break him from cover, like a dappled deer moving in a glade. He squatted, alert, sweeping eyes in slow arcs, cutting the dark shadows of trees into sections like a pie, hearing the sound of his own heartbeat, the blood shushing.

  He felt a moment of panic, of being watched, and turned his head slowly to it until he finally made out the outline of a vixen, staring hard and motionless like himself. She sat back, fixed her mask with delicate paws like a woman at a mirror, then vanished with a flick of tail. Drust breathed out while his stomach stopped flipping.

  This is not our place, Drust thought. This was the Dark, which even the locals shunned save for the blood worshippers who moved boldly here, along trails used and reused and which we can’t even find. There are no wolf cries, Drust suddenly realised. Probably no snuffling bears either – they have been hunted out of these woods and most of them are hanging from the shoulders of standard-bearers and horn-blowers of the Army in these parts. Perhaps the wood gods who lurk here will take revenge for that, he thought – and savagely quelled that idea with a fervent prayer to Fortuna.

  The others slept, the ones Drust knew well – Ugo and Kag and Dog, his wife, and Manius, the dark-eyed killer. Even Kisa the Jew, who had never been a slave or a gladiator, who had never known what it was to wait in the dark for the cell door to be opened, to not go anywhere you were not ordered, to walk from the dim of the arena undercroft through the Gate of Life into the dazzle of what might be your last day in the world.

  What a choice there was, Drust thought. What a sheer cornucopia of things to be afraid of – once he had thought that you would lose your anxiety when you realised how much of it there was, how expensive the worry was on your everyday life. He thought he had succeeded and preened to Kag about the knowledge, the new philosophy – anxiety was a luxury and you couldn’t afford luxuries. It was a sad jest at best – the single mutilation, the worst wound any man wanted to avoid was losing their balls. They’d pray for it – ‘Fortuna, hear me, take my eyes, my legs, my hands – take my fucking life, great goddess. But spare those. Spare those…’

  Once you get past fearing that…

  Kag put me right, Drust remembered, because he knew real philosophy, courtesy of having to sit in class with a high-born squit he was bodyguarding. The squit learned nothing much, but Kag did, for all he could not read nor write.

  You are only dealing with things that can kill or maim, he told Drust. What of the rest? You hold yourself responsible for all of us, the Brothers of the Sand, for bringing us safe out of every enterprise. That is the fear you can’t kill…

  We should be out, Drust thought. We should have pulled out as soon as the decision had been made to close the castra gates. Ducked out somehow, left everything and run for the passes back to Italia and fuck the white bear. That nagged him like a hangnail when he had time – like now – to brood on it.
/>   Instead they were here looking for a ford or a bridge or a god who would get them across a river barrier to safety. And Kag wanted to go after this renegade – who was probably dead and certainly mad. Drust sat and felt his hand tremble for a bit, a new affair that he hid from everyone. He wondered if it was now fixed, a part of him, or would stop trembling when he reached true safety. More likely, he thought, years from now I’ll be dining with friends, perhaps even family, and suddenly my hand will start to shake, all that old arena muscle remembering what it once was, but only enough to spill wine all over me while the ghosts of the people I failed to bring back looked on, but didn’t laugh…

  If I have years from now, that is.

  There was a movement and a darker shadow rustled up to him, making Drust lurch with sudden panic until he realised it was Manius, come to stand his turn on watch.

  ‘Omnes ad stercus,’ Manius said, which was the password for the night; his teeth were still blood-lined white in the dim shadows.

  ‘Sodales, avete,’ Drust responded viciously. ‘I almost fucking killed you.’

  Manius ignored it, sank down, and even so close he simply seemed to vanish. ‘I have found the Colour, I am not here,’ said a dreaming voice. ‘I’m somewhere else.’

  ‘I know you are,’ Drust said, hoping his voice sounded level. ‘Keep watch anyway.’

  * * *

  Drust was awake to see the sun lance up into dawn through a canopy thick enough to deflect ballista bolts but which could only splinter the light to dapple. He lay, listening to the sleeping Praeclarum puffing through her soft lips, watched the red glow of the sun hit the bark of a tree, sliding slowly up the coarse trunk like an embered fire burned down to a bright crimson wrapped in a yellow glow. It briefly caught a squirrel, changed it to red-gold before the animal flicked off back into the shadows. He listened to a rasping sound, a slight pattering, on edge and wondering until Sow rustled up beside him and sat for a moment, head cocked.