Harry Sidebottom - The Wolves of the North

The man considered this. ‘I went to a dream diviner once — probably a charlatan. He told me the kinds of men one should never believe if they spoke to you in a dream: actors, sophists, priests of Cybele, the poor and eunuchs. They all raise false expectations.’

‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘Nor should you trust Pythagoreans, or prophets who divine from dice, from palms, from sieves, or from cheese. But the dead are always worthy of credence.’ He put out a hand and touched Mastabates’ face.

‘I thought you were one of those who saw my kind as ill omened. I thought you did not care for my company,’ Mastabates said.

‘My likes and dislikes are of no importance. It is the will of the gods.’ He trailed the back of his fingers down Mastabates’ cheek as if measuring him. ‘Do you know what you are?’

Mastabates stepped back. The man’s eyes were odd. This was all becoming strange beyond measure.

‘I think you really do not know.’ The man’s eyes were flecked red in the torchlight. He stood between Mastabates and both the unblocked tunnels.

‘We should go.’ Mastabates heard the anxiety in his own voice. He had been a fool; a drunken, womanish fool.

The man drew his sword. In the flickering light, the steel seemed to ripple.

Mastabates took another step backwards, panic rising in his throat.

The other watched him.

‘You killed the slave in the river,’ Mastabates said.

‘And many others.’

Mastabates went to draw his own blade. He had forgotten the amphora. It slipped from his grip and shattered loudly. Wine splashed on to his boots.

The man made no move.

Mastabates fumbled his short sword clear of its scabbard. No need to abandon all attempts at manly virtue, he thought. A eunuch can still be a man.

The other flexed his sword arm.

‘Why?’ Mastabates said.

The man paused, as if he had been waiting for the question, had been asked it before under like circumstances. ‘For your own good, and the benefit of others. Because the gods…’

Mastabates thrust forward, sword aimed at the body.

Caught unaware, the man was late blocking. Mastabates’ blade was only a hand’s breadth away when a clash of metal deflected it. The eunuch’s momentum carried him. He crashed into the man, who staggered backwards.

Mastabates was clear. He was past the killer, was at the entrance tunnel. He went to hurdle the remains of the cart. A bone turned under his foot and his ankle twisted. He went down, crashing among the papery, dry baulks of timber. His sword slipped from his grasp.

The wind was knocked out of him, and his ankle hurt abominably, but Mastabates was up in a moment. He scrabbled on his hands and knees, groping in the dirt for his sword. Noises behind him. His fingers closed on the hilt. He rolled over, bringing the blade up.

A flash of burning light, a jarring impact, and Mastabates’ sword was smashed from his hand. The steel went spinning, skittering across the floor of the tomb to its dark further reaches.

The killer stood over him. He held the torch in one hand, his long sword in the other. The sword was pointed at Mastabates’ throat.

No, not disgrace myself. No, not beg, Mastabates thought. Be a man.

He was panting. So was the killer. Apart from their breathing, all that could be heard was the hiss of the torch.

Be a… The sword thrust down. Pain like nothing Mastabates had known. His body arched. He could not scream; could not breathe. He was choking on his own blood. Dimly, he noticed his own legs drumming on the ground. Blackness in all the corners of his vision. Horribly swiftly, the dark edged in, and closed over him.

‘The same killer,’ Ballista said.

None of the men contradicted him. There were eight of them in the tomb: five Romans, Castricius, Maximus, Hippothous, the centurion Hordeonius and Ballista himself, the Gothic gudja, and two Heruli, Andonnoballus and Philemuth. There had been many more, a packed crowd, gawping. Ballista curtly had told Calgacus to herd them out. Ballista knew his temper was short, and he knew why: thousands of tons of earth poised above his head, and the only ways out two long and narrow, obviously unsafe tunnels dug by robbers. He would have given a lot to be able just to leave.

The scene in the chamber did not help. It was infinitely macabre. The freshly mutilated corpse lay among the bones of ancient violence. In the torchlight, the shadows of the living shifted on the rough walls as if souls already halfway to flitting like bats in Hades. All too easy to imagine being trapped here for eternity.

‘Why stuff the body parts under his armpits?’ Maximus asked.

‘Offerings to the infernal gods,’ Hordeonius replied. ‘As we offer the heart, liver and organs of a sacrificial beast. The murderer turns his victim into a sacrifice; turns away the anger of the gods, buys their protection.’

‘Or something more practical,’ Ballista said. ‘A daemon cannot accuse you with no tongue, cannot harm you with no hands.’

‘And cannot fuck you with no cock,’ Maximus added. ‘Although that might not be too much of a problem with a eunuch.’

‘The murderer will kill more than just slaves,’ Ballista said.

‘Possibly not — the eunuch was a freedman,’ the centurion said. ‘Once a slave, always a slave. You can always tell. I remember being in the baths at Byzantium. It was in the apodyterium, I was just putting my clothes in a locker.’

Ballista let Hordeonius run on. The fumes of cannabis and alcohol were still in his head. It was easier to think without having to talk. Both bodies had been found outside the camp. The first could have been killed anywhere. It had drifted down the Tanais. The blood showed that this one had been killed in the corridor of the tomb. Mastabates was unlikely to have ventured outside the camp on his own. He had to have been lured out.

‘The man barged past me, almost knocked me over. Not a word of apology.’

Mastabates would not have left the camp with a stranger, certainly not to this ghastly place. The killer had to be travelling with them. But who?

‘So I punched him to the ground. His slave came at me, so I knocked him down too. Beat them both like dogs; used my fists, feet, a wooden clog.’

And why?

‘You see into a man’s soul when you beat him.’

Of course, the killer might be in the pay of an outsider. Not the Borani. Somehow, it was not the way of the Goths, not the northern way of doing things. It could be Safrax, the King of the Alani. Certainly, he would hold a grudge from his defeat at the Caspian Gates. But, on such grounds, it was much more likely either Saurmag or Pythonissa; a prince denied a throne, and a woman scorned. The Suanian royal family were brought up in a world where murder was common currency. They prided themselves on their ingenuity in killing: poison, steel, drowning, suffocation. And Pythonissa had cursed him with that terrible curse.

‘He was nothing but a dirty little freedman from Lycia who had made some money.’

Yet the killer’s motives might have nothing to do with the outside. Like his person, they could be contained inside this strange caravan plodding across the Steppe.

‘Even naked, as we all were, I could tell what he really was.’

Ballista thought of his own slave, Polybius. Had he run back in Panticapaeum, or had something worse happened? If the latter, the killer had been with them from the beginning.

‘It is just a eunuch,’ Andonnoballus said. ‘Easy to replace.’

‘He was a brave…’ Somehow, Ballista could not say ‘man’. ‘He did not lack courage. Last year, when our ship was being chased by pirates on the Euxine, he stepped up to fight. He did not deserve to die like this. No one does.’