The Red Serpent Read online

  The Red Serpent

  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

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rome – Six Months Later

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  The Gladiators

  The Gear

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  The Oasis of Al-Bardi, south-west of Dura-Europos

  In the second year of Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander Augustus

  His chest was tight, his mouth was dry and that was all irony because his bowels were loose as water and everywhere else was slick with sweat. Inside, panic built like a fire and drove sick up into Drust’s throat.

  Not for the first time, he cursed the place, the goddess Fortuna and the assurances he’d been given that the Parthians were all done with, falling apart with every robed turban-head fighting with his neighbour.

  It will be easy, he had been told, to get to Dura-Europos these days along a solid, dependable caravan route leading to the western end of the Silk Road.

  Across from him, Drust saw Quintus like a comforter, a solid, warming sight with the sour-milk light falling on his dirt-etched face. He still wore his thick cloak, draped against the night chill – but the night was going and the rising heat, added to the danger, made faces wet-slick with sweat.

  Dying for a drink. It was such a trite phrase, dropped in so frequently to every conversation that it had long since lost meaning – save for here and now. They crouched behind rough stone walls no higher than their knees if they had been standing, but if they had been standing, Jabal Tayy slingers, out there in the yellow gritted dunes, would have smacked them down.

  The tribesmen had enough ammunition to do it, Drust knew, and the only mercy in them was that they had left the camels alone – they wanted them alive and only people needed to die; more than a few were now stink and flies.

  There was another low wall ahead and to the left and a crouch of sweated men behind it, head-coverings gone, faces grim and set; they were luminous in the bad dawn light, even allowing for the blood and filth on their white robes. Not a star shone and the palms round the oasis stood like wild-haired harridan shadows against the black vault of the night – then something cracked like a whip near Drust’s head.

  A figure slithered in with a shower of grit, making Drust curse and choke.

  ‘If Manius were here with his bow,’ Sib said, breathing heavily, ‘those stone-hurlers would be screaming.’

  Manius wasn’t here. Manius had supposedly been dead for years but Sib had never believed it, the same sure way he had once believed Manius to be a jnoun, some sort of demon. For six years since they had come back from exile in the far south of Africa, Drust and the Brothers had filtered slowly up and down the desert lands, from Tingis to Alexandria, dealing in grain and animals and sand for the amphitheatres. They had word that Manius had been sent to the mines and that Dog had freed him because he was in favour, his golden boy Elagabalus now Emperor and his golden ma equally raised.

  Then had come the fall of them both, two years ago, and the rise of their cousin Alexander. Drust was sure Dog and Manius were dead – he had heard of them both being killed in the purges and the Brothers had had a mourn, spilled salt and wine to their memories.

  It had come as a stun, like a sharp blow to the temple, when Drust had the message, sent from deep in the heart of Parthian darkness. Manius and Dog were alive and in need of help.

  Kag called out, almost sounding cheerful. He was laying out his gladius and a curved knife, but they were for the final moments, when the tribesmen rushed in with their own blades. For now the surrounding goat-fuckers skulked and shot – Drust could see them, leaping up, whirling their slings, then dropping down again. Not that they were in any danger – no one in the caravan had anything to return fire with.

  He worked his sweaty fist on the hilt of the sword, an old friend from the harena, worn dangerously smooth in the grip; stone splinters flew up near Kag’s head and Drust wanted to call out for him to watch it before he realised what a stupid shout that was. Gripping the sword, he squinted into the harsh dawn glare and heard someone shifting closer to him; there was a sound like wet mud thrown against a wall, a sharp grunt, and a body crashed down behind him.

  ‘Hard to see the little bastards, ain’t it?’

  The voice was surprisingly gentle and Drust knew it at once, half turned to see Praeclarum crawling over the fallen corpse of one of the camel-herders. It was still twitching, but she noticed only long enough to confirm that he was not going to recover.

  ‘Time those bastards from the fort got here,’ Drust said and Praeclarum admitted she had considered the possibility they might not.

  ‘They are all around, these rag-arses,’ she pointed out. ‘When they think we are weakened enough, they will rush us. The fort might not get here before that.’

  ‘No, listen, be pragmatic,’ Drust said witheringly. ‘Don’t try and offer cheer, or the love of Fortuna.’

  She made a moue. ‘Well, we could make a run for it, but they will wait for us to pass where they lie among the scrub. Then it’s a knife in the back and left for the women. Even I don’t want that and I have no fruits for them to cut off.’

  Drust made a small shivery noise in his throat, then scrambled round in panic as a dark shape slid up to them.

  ‘Authentēs,’ said a familiar voice and Drust’s hoarse voice cursed him.

  ‘I almost gave you iron,’ he said bitterly and Kisa’s eyes gleamed in the sheen of his dark face.

  ‘That would be a hard thing for us both, I am thinking.’

  ‘One less idiot mavro in the world,’ Praeclarum said moodily, turning back to peer out.

  Kisa Shem-Tov made a non-committal head bob. ‘The honourable lady knows best,’ he answered, with a smile like the delivery of venom.

  ‘Can you get us out, Kisa? Possible, d’you think?’

  The man sucked his teeth as he thought. Then he nodded brightly to Drust. ‘No.’

  Praeclarum laughed, soft as rotten aloes. Kisa scuttled into cover while the dawn flickered over the oasis. A little way to the north of it, Drust knew, was Dura-Europos where the fort was. He had sent Stercorinus two days ago, before the Jabal Tayy had fully closed in, but he wasn’t sure if the man had got clear. Wasn’t sure, if he was honest, if the man was reliable. Stercorinus was a whip-thin length of leg and arm the colour of baked mud and naked save for a loincloth and a double-handed curved blade used by Palmyrans. He claimed to be Palmyran but Drust was sure that was a lie. Most of Stercorinus was a lie.

  ‘You put too much faith in that goat-fucker,’ Praeclarum grumbled and Drust did not know whether she spoke of Kisa Shem-Tov or Stercorinus. Not that it mattered, he thought. They’d got Stercorinus a few months back, from a School in Antioch which was falling apart and selling off stock – he had been cheap, even as a ‘bonded harena fighter’ because, the lanista reliably informed everyone, he was as shrieking mad as a bag of burning harpies.

  Kisa Shem-Tov was a Jew, a freedman from some mountain sect round the Dark Sea and an expert with camels, thievery and procuring. Just what this band needed, as Kag had said at the time. He ha
d come to them with the message, sent by some tribal leader, a friend of Rome in Dura.

  Praeclarum was once billed as the Queen of the Amazons and had fought in the harena with a curved knife and a lasso. When old Emperor Septimius Servillius had banned women from being gladiators, she had been sold on and on and on, too homely to be a whore, too unlearned to be a house slave and too snarling to be trusted. She had run at least once and had the neck-brand that told of it – Quintus, smiling like a curve of the Euphrates, had bought her for ‘nothing’ in Emesa two months before and if he’d had designs there, quickly revised them and pretended otherwise.

  Now they were all Brothers of the Sand even if one was a sister. Procuratores, a wry name for a collective of people who said little but thought rich – the term applied properly to the procuratores dromii, those luckless who had to dart out into the crashed wreckage of splintered chariots and ruin to clean up the mess before the next circuit of the Circus. They had cleaned up the mess of their patron, Servillius Structus, for years until his death.

  The shadows slanted and the sky lightened; the shooting slackened but no one was eager to move. Drust had discarded his head-covering, which had protected his neck and had a veil to draw over the face. He was sorry he had now and was looking round for it when he heard the li-li-li-li-li from out beyond the drift of dunes, a high, shrill call that chilled the sweat to cold soup. For a moment the fetid air hung, panic weighing duty, fear battling the code that said gladiators never run. Why? Because the harena is a circle – what’s the point? You only die tired and back where you began.

  Others heard it too and dealt with the fear in their own way – a voice bawled out: ‘Who are we?’

  ‘Fortuna’s fucked,’ a voice roared back. ‘The sand is our country.’

  Drust blessed Quintus – and Ugo, who was clearly starting to snort and work his shoulders round his big axe. Drust wiped his lips with the sweated back of his sword-hand, tasting the salt. Praeclarum turned her chap-cheeked face and grinned at him; she had a mouth of teeth that made it look as if she was trying to eat cobbed corn through a fence.

  ‘That skinny rat Stercorinus might have footed it to the dunes he came from,’ she said. ‘He can pass for one of them better than any of us save the Jew, or maybe Sib. Shouldn’t be surprised if he is out there with a knife of his own and looking to commit unspeakables.’

  Drust did not want to think that of Stercorinus but the Palmyran was wily and had some unshakeable belief that he knew when he would die, come to him in a vision from Bel-Shamun, the god of the Palmyrans. He never said what it was and Drust wondered if the prophecy involved a desert oasis and screaming tribals.

  Yet they were all bound together by the sand and the blood.

  ‘They are coming,’ Drust said dully, though it was hardly necessary – the tide of tribesmen, turbaned and robed, washed up over the sand with their chilling, high-pitched li-li-li-li-li cries.

  He heard Kag roaring his way to his feet and then a man came at him, a snarl with a beard and a curved dagger raised above his head, so that Drust had to meet him on the rise with the gladius. Watched the dagger hit and slide sideways along the sword, and when the tribal, unable to stop moving, lumbered past, Drust back-stroked him. Felt the jar, heard the crack of his backbone and the scream, but didn’t turn to look because there were more.

  The grip jolted in his fist, his head buzzed with his own roaring and he heard Ugo bawling and cursing somewhere close. Quintus flickered at the edge of his vision, dancing and weaving and slicing.

  The man in front of him dropped a spear, clutched his flushed-red robes round his belly as if to seal the lipless wound, to stop his insides spilling out. Wouldn’t work, Drust thought dully as he elbowed the man to one side and took another.

  Too many. It was shriek and ringing metal, blood, sand, drool, and no more planning, just wild panic, stumbling from one fight to another, working on old, ingrained training and desperate reactions.

  A man loomed up, curved knife and snarl, same as all the others. Drust was too late to duck or dive, or do anything other than go over backwards when the man collided with him. They rolled in a whirl of blinding, gritty sand and when Drust tried to spring back up he found he’d made it only to his hands and knees. The warrior, his veil flapping loose, showed bad teeth in a worse grin; the knife went up and Drust tried to move, tried to blink the sand away, spit it out of a sered mouth and knelt like a sacrifice-ox waiting for the priest.

  The knife-man suddenly flew backwards as if he had been dragged; the weight of his body knocked Drust over and he rolled on his back, staring up in bewilderment at a man on a camel. How had he got here?

  The man wore a keffiyeh round his face and helmet, white as driven snow. Beneath it was a dusty white tunic that showed he had another beneath it, this one of metal lappets. He had a cloak, bright as fresh blood, and his legs were a flutter of Parthian trousers touching the sides of a great, dust-coloured grumble of camel. He pulled a fresh throwing spear from a quiver behind his right leg while the knife-man curled and writhed round the first one he had thrown.

  ‘Dromedarii!’

  Someone bellowed it out with delight, a roar of relief.

  The blood-cloaked men loped their beasts round the little fortress of low walls while the tribesmen fled screaming, showered with javelins, skewered with arrows. Ugo, his hair and beard matted with sweat and dust, raised his terrifying axe in the air and gave a shout of recognition which all the others picked up, herders, loaders, watermen, everyone. The water in the oasis flushed pink.

  And while they did it, Stercorinus acknowledged it as if it was for him alone, perched on his own camel, grinning his gaps and gums and waving, while a shrill voice called out who had saved them.

  ‘The Red Men.’

  Drust crawled wearily to his knees until his eyeline found a hand; when he looked up he saw Quintus’s lopsided grin.

  ‘Tell me again why we are here?’

  ‘Because of fucking Dog and fucking Manius,’ Kag growled, overhearing this. He wanted to spit but had no water left in his mouth. ‘I don’t know why we bother – the pair of them are dead. I know – I offered a spill of good drink to the gods in their memory.’

  Because they were also Brothers of the Sand, Drust thought. Because of a message, which said to speak to Uranius of the 20th in Dura. Drust had no idea who Uranius was and he would have ignored the message entirely save for two reasons. One was that it was written in Latin, on decent paper with good ink and not just a scratched tablet. The other was that it came from men who could neither read nor write even when they had been alive.

  * * *

  Dura-Europos was a grimace on the lip of the world. Hard, like someone facing a relentless wind, smart-mouthing sideways and unable to shut up even at the edge of the grave. If it could speak, it would talk in an accent you could use to build its many towers, and it lolled along a bluff above the Euphrates like a drunken whore on a dais.

  It was veiled with the tattered remnants of faded Parthian finery, Jewish geegaws, Roman pomposity and even Christian icons – the walls had been built so long ago no one remembered and it had been held by the Trousered, the Persians, for years, until Rome finally wrenched it from them in the time of the Divine Aurelius. Rome had held it ever since, studding it with towers and citadels.

  It was important for only two reasons, as the military commander explained to Drust and Kag and the others – as a standard to wave at the Parthians and to control the western end of a rich trade route that ran east to the gods knew where.

  The military commander was Virius Genadius Attalus, a laticlavius, a vir militaris and Lord of the River, all titles he smacked Drust and Kag with when they stood on his tessellated floor, looking out of the arches to a terrace through which a soft breeze blew, bringing the scent of river mud, sewage rot and the sweet headiness of roses. A boat glided gently. There were tamarisks and palms.

  ‘What brought you here?’ Attalus, the vir miliaris, eques, laticlav
ius, wanted to know.

  ‘A long dusty road,’ Drust said.

  ‘Camels,’ Kag added.

  Attalus scowled. He had a full beard, carefully curled because it was the fashion, and he endured the hot itch that went with it because of that. He wore his broad-striped tunic and toga, the full fig, because – like with the titles – he was trying to beat these new upstarts into submission.

  ‘Do not fuck with me,’ he said and the crudeness of that from the mouth of the nobleman of the Palatine Hill almost made Drust smile. Almost.

  ‘You came here for what purpose?’

  ‘Trade. This is the hub of it, after all. We bring barley, full-grown pigs, suckling pigs, decent wine, dates, oil, garum.’

  All things soldiers would buy and carefully chosen for that reason even if Drust had wished the pigs and their offspring a rapid and broiling death on more than one occasion.

  ‘And ourselves,’ he finished, which made Attalus stare, wondering if he was being given more impudence.

  ‘We are of the harena,’ Kag added swiftly, before the matter boiled up. ‘Formerly of a School in Rome until given the wooden sword. Now we are freedmen and citizens but offer exhibition bouts for the discerning.’

  ‘Gladiators?’ Attalus asked incredulously. ‘Former slaves?”

  No one answered him and he paced, stopped and stared at them with disbelief.

  ‘You took a caravan all the dangerous way here for fish sauce and barley and some gladiator contests?’

  ‘And pigs,’ Kag offered mildly. ‘Don’t forget the pigs.’

  Attalus scowled. ‘I have never met them, yet I feel sorry for the beasts already, having to travel in your company, you scoundrels.’

  He was looking them up and down and Drust knew what he saw – tough, lean men burned by sun and strange winds, a long way from the flush of youth but not yet into the final frosts. We are on the cusp of our lives, Drust thought, have seen and done a great deal – but we do not look like fighters of the harena, I will grant him that. We were never much when in our prime…

  ‘We were told the way was clear,’ Kag said, spreading his hands apologetically. ‘The Parthians are too busy fighting themselves, it was said.’