Harry Sidebottom - The Wolves of the North

Ballista had had just sixteen winters when he had killed the emperor at the siege of Aquileia. Maximinus Thrax had been a tyrant, a savage tyrant. But Ballista had sworn the military oath to him. He had broken his sacramentum. The other mutineers had decapitated the emperor’s corpse. Since then the daemon of that terrible man had pursued Ballista. The appearances were infrequent, but utterly petrifying. Ballista’s wife said it was nothing but bad dreams brought on by exhaustion or stress. It was easy for Julia. She was an Epicurean. Ballista was not. But he wished she was right.

Suddenly, like a dam giving way, the dream came back to him, bizarre in its clarity. Poor, poor Mamurra. Ballista had left his friend to die alone in the dark.

The boats did not come the next morning. The familia and the rest ate lunch together in the hall.

‘Why did Hisarna call the Heruli long-headed?’ Ballista asked.

‘Skull-binding,’ said Hippothous. ‘They are the Macrophali of whom Hippocrates wrote. They tie tight bandages around the soft skulls of infants, before they are properly formed. Their heads grow long, pointed, hugely deformed. After a generation or two, nature begins to collaborate with custom. If bald parents often have bald children, grey-eyed parents grey-eyed children, if squinting parents have squinting children, why should long-headed parents not have long-headed children?’

‘That is a grand idea,’ Maximus said. ‘If your nomads turn their enemies’ skulls into drinking cups, the bigger the skull the more drink in your cup.’

‘You should not joke,’ the eunuch Mastabates said, speaking in public for the first time since they had arrived in the town of Tanais. ‘They are like no other people. They sacrifice prisoners to their god of war. The first captive in a hundred, they pour wine over his head, cut his throat, catch the blood in a jar, tip some over their swords, and drink the rest. They cut off the right arms of the others and behead them. They skin the arms and use the skins as covers for their quivers. With the heads they make a circular cut at the level of the ears, shake the scalp away, scrape it clean with a cow’s rib, sew them together to make patchwork coats. The skull is lined with gold inside and leather outside. When they have important visitors to impress, they bring out these grisly cups and tell their story. They call this courage. The grasslands are a terrible place, inhabited by terrible people.’

Hippothous laughed. ‘It should suit you well, eunuch. Hippocrates wrote that because of their moist, womanish constitution, and the softness and coldness of their bellies, nomad men lack sexual desire. They are worn out by riding all the time, so are weak in the act of sex. Rich nomads are the worst. The first time or two they go to their women and it does not work, they do not despair. But when it never works, they renounce manhood, take up the tasks of women, begin to talk like them. They have a special name for them, the anarieis. You will fit in well with them.’

Ballista looked up, chewing on a mutton bone. ‘They only kill one in a hundred? In the north, when the Angles and Saxons go sea raiding, we sacrifice to the sea one in ten of the captured.’

‘No, Kyrios,’ Mastabates said. ‘They drink the blood of one in a hundred, but they kill and decapitate them all.’

‘Takes away the point in raiding.’ Castricius grinned wolfishly.

‘That strange-looking gudja is here again,’ Calgacus said.

Charms and bones clinking, the tall priest entered; as ever, the old hag scuttled behind him. ‘The boats will be here tomorrow. It is the will of my King Hisarna that I accompany you upriver.’

Everyone knew that if an unjustified, unpurified murderer set foot in a sacred place, madness or disease would descend on them. The gods could not be deceived. Nevertheless, the figure standing in the temple of Hecate thought it should be safe.

The small temple was in the north of Tanais. The harbour, the road up from it, the agora and the handful of streets leading to the few areas of reoccupied housing might have been cleared, but the majority of the town, including the northern quarter, remained deserted. The sack ten years before by the combined warriors of the Urugundi and the Heruli had been savage and thorough. The homes of mortals had been ransacked and burnt; their occupants enslaved. The homes of the gods had been partially spared. While their contents — statues and offerings, both precious and otherwise — had been looted or smashed, the structures had not been fired.

The figure looked around the dusty bareness of the temple. It was dark, suitably Stygian. The only light was from a small, unshuttered window high at the rear and what leaked around the slightly ajar door. Two columns stood two thirds of the way down the space. Beyond them there was nothing to see except the pitiful remains of some broken terracotta figures. These had been of no value to anyone except the devotees whose piety and trust had been so cruelly disabused.

A squeal of rusted hinges, and another figure slipped through the door. He had come.

‘Did you get it?’

The newcomer jumped at the question, his eyes flicking this way and that as he tried to locate the speaker in the gloom.

‘Back here.’

Locating the voice, the new arrival stepped forward. In those moments his face was bland and trusting, unburdened by anything except a childish avarice. He smiled placatingly, and hurried to unwrap the parcel in his hands. What else could you expect from a true slave? By nature untrustworthy, they were utter rubbish by definition.

Blue and dark-red stones caught, refracted and seemed to amplify the dim light. The slave handed across the small, heavy object. The other took it, pretended to examine it.

‘You said…’ The slave’s voice trailed off.

‘Yes, I did.’ Tucking the jewelled thing into a belt, the speaker passed over a purse, heavy and loud with the desired chink. The slave loosed the drawstring, tipped the contents in his palm. In the untrusting, unseemly way of his kind, he began counting the coins openly, his mouth moving.

The killer turned away, and drew a sword. The blade came free with a whisper. Lost in who could know what sordid material ambitions, the slave noticed nothing.

In one fluid motion, the killer spun around and swung. As the steel hummed through the still air, startled, the slave looked up. He had time to open his mouth to scream. The blade cut heavy and deep into his left thigh. He screamed now, and fell away like some toppled statuette. He rebounded from one of the columns. The wounded leg dragging, he began to flounder towards the door; blood sluicing out on to the dusty floor.

Two quick steps and the killer slashed the sword into the slave’s right leg. He went down. On all fours, leaking blood like a pig at a sacrifice, he crawled forward. The other kept pace; treading carefully, boots avoiding the bloody paste created by the slave’s agonized passage.

The slave was pleading, begging, promising anything and everything, things that should not be promised. The Hound of the Gods gazed down dispassionately, rejoicing in the rightness of it. Again, there had been no mistake.

Enough evidence forthcoming for the moral faultlessness of the deed, the Scourge of Evil brought down the sword in a flurry of short, chopping killing blows to the back of the head.

Leaving the body, the killer stepped outside. All was quiet, as expected. Back in the temple, the killer went to the leather bag previously stowed behind one of the columns, and took out a length of string and the favoured implements. What had to be done next were the hard, terrible things. The killer briefly wondered about their necessity. The justly killed leave no visitant against anybody; their daemon does not revenge. But a mistake had once been made. The killer knew the ghastly consequences. Far better to be doubly safe.