Harry Sidebottom - The Caspian Gates

The sharp ring of metal on metal snapped the man’s eyes open. He held his breath, listening. Nothing. Slowly, he turned his head from side to side, eyes wide. Nothing. He knew he had not imagined it. Up above, the top branches were stirring with sluggish menace. The storm would get here soon.

His arm hurt like a Christian on the pyre. He tried to push the red-hot ember back into the fennel stalk. Careful not to make a sound, he wriggled his toes, with his good hand massaged his thighs, tried to get feeling back into his legs.

Another sound. Off to his right, a careless footfall. In the gloom, the man grinned. He had always been good on the hill. Yet another sound. There was his brother’s creature, not above twenty paces away. Alternately, the hunter bent to peer at the ground, following the trail, and stood scanning ahead. He had a bow in his hands, arrow notched, half drawn. His jerky movements betrayed his nerves.

You are right to be nervous, thought the man. If I had two good arms and a bow, you would already be dead, shot as easily as a sitting pheasant. Even with one arm, I have marked you out for Hecate.

The hunter stopped at the edge of the glade, just as the man had hoped a pursuer would. The open ground was an obvious place for an ambush. Anyone would fear that, as you stepped into the clearing, an arrow might whistle out from the tree line ahead. Only the deepest thinking would suspect anything from behind.

The man eased himself to his feet. Oddly, his left arm, though still incapacitated, had ceased to hurt. He studied the way first he then the hunter had come. The wind hissed through the branches. Nothing else: no human movement or sound.

The man glided forward, feet placed carefully, the lariat in his right hand. The gathering storm covered his approach.

The hunter still hesitated. The man closed behind him. An innate intimation of danger; the hunter began to turn. Too late. With fluid movements, the man slipped the noose of bowstring over the hunter’s head, yanked the slip knot tight around his neck, pulled as hard as he could.

Instinctively, the hunter’s fingers scrabbled at the cord biting deep into his throat. There was no purchase to be had. Blood ran down his neck.

The man, left shoulder braced between the hunter’s shoulderblades, exerted all his strength. Boots slipped and stamped on the forest floor. The man’s breath came in harsh, animal pants. The hunter’s was a death rattle. Convulsions, then a heavy stillness. A foul smell of voided bladder and bowels. The man continued to choke the lifeless corpse.

‘Impressive, brother, you have killed him five times over.’

The man’s youngest brother emerged from the shadows of the wood. Above him, branches whipped this way and that. The tails of his long native coat were thrown back, the sleeves hung empty. In his unencumbered hands was a drawn bow.

The man turned, dragging the body round to act as a shield. ‘This will not look like an accident.’ He spoke to buy time, to distract. Slipping his injured arm from the sling, despite the pain, he took the weight of the dead man with it. Out of sight, his right hand drew the dagger from his belt.

‘Indeed not, brother. It is no accident. You were waylaid by a band of Alani. A tragedy.’

Fifteen or so paces on either side of the speaker, two more hunters materialized up the hill out of the darkening wood, hoods up, menacing, like creatures from Hades. The three bowmen were well spaced. Grudgingly, the man recognized good tactics.

‘Who can say what happened?’ his brother continued. ‘Everyone knows those nomadic barbarians are irrational, bloodthirsty – eaters of flesh. Robbery, ransom – who knows what they were after? Perhaps you resisted: you always were the brave warrior, our father’s favourite. Whatever happened, they killed you. Shot you down like a deer.’ He smiled, gloating. ‘Have you noticed that the arrow in your arm was made by the Alani?’

The man did not answer the rhetorical question. While his body was perfectly still, his eyes flicked this way and that, measuring, estimating. He did not intend to die here, not at the hands of his brother.

‘We have more than enough Alanic arrows. Do you not admire my foresight? You were always the brave one. I was always the one with foresight. Do you remember how our old tutor always admired my disquisitions on the quality of pronoia? Odd how the old Greek’s philosophical idea seems so much more real here than it ever did in the classroom.’

The first snowflakes were falling, twisting and turning in the gusting wind.

The man grimaced through the pain in his arm. ‘And did the philosopher’s lessons in ethics not do you any good? Who should you love if not your brother?’

‘Oh, but I do, brother, I do. Both love and admire.’ The voice was unctuous. ‘Because I admire you, I think it certain you will follow the heroes to the Islands of the Blessed. And because I love you, I will send you there forthwith.’

‘My death will do you no good.’ The man’s thoughts were racing. The dialogue had to continue, had to win him time. ‘Our father will not name you his heir. If I am dead, he will turn to one of our brothers. Failing that, old Hamazasp of Iberia or whoever our sister marries. The council of three hundred would be happier with any of them than with you. The members of the synedrion will never willingly accept you.’

The darkness was gathering. Straight ahead, thought the man. Throw the dagger; kill or wound my brother. Run straight ahead. The bowmen on either side should be reluctant to shoot and risk hitting my brother or each other. Prometheus, Hecate, hold your hands over me.

‘Enough talk.’ A new voice: female. Out of the gathering storm walked their sister. Her face was very pale, her lips a deep red in the half-light. She too held a drawn bow.

The man knew then that it was all over.

‘Enough philosophizing.’ She addressed herself to the younger brother. ‘You are not now the least of four boys sat at a teacher’s feet. Stop your ears to clever words and remorse. Show yourself a man.’

It was all over with him, but the man was not going to go quietly, not like a sacrificial animal. In one move, he let go of the corpse, threw the dagger and launched forward. The dagger spun through the falling snow. The younger brother twisted his head. The dagger caught him in the face; opened up his cheek. He dropped his weapon, reeled away, howling.

The man had made three steps when the first arrow hit in the thigh. He managed another two steps before his leg gave way. The late-autumn grass rising up, bruising his face. The thump and searing pain as another arrow found its mark in his back. Fingers clawing in the turf, pulling him forward. Prometheus, Hecate… The pain of another arrow, and another, and another. The fingers stopped working. The darkness surged up.

The snow was falling heavily in the glade. It was settling in the sightless eyes of the corpse. The living siblings of the dead man stood close together, right hands clasped. One of the two hunters had tied their thumbs together. The brother had a knife in his left hand. Deftly he cut the tips of their thumbs.

‘Neither with steel nor poison,’ he said. Leaning forward, he licked the blood from his thumb then that of his sister. ‘Sealed and countersealed in blood.’

The girl repeated the words. She dipped her head, her red lips parted and her tongue curled around his thumb.

The Humane Land

(Ionia and the West, Spring AD262)

‘A snake,’ said Maximus. ‘A fucking big snake.’

Everyone looked to where the alarmed Hibernian pointed, out into the atrium.

It was a fucking big snake all right: long, scaly, brown. And – if you knew snakes at all – completely harmless. But it was agitated, obviously disturbed, twisting and writhing here and there in the lamplight that illuminated the big open space at the centre of the big house in Ephesus.

Ballista asked Hippothous to get rid of it. Seeing the reluctance on his secretary’s face, Ballista remembered that many Greeks and Romans kept the creatures as pets. Possibly, he suggested, the accensus might just put it out of the house. Certainly get it away from Maximus. Hippothous went off to find a slave or two to actually catch the thing.

Ballista sat down, and called for his new body-servant Constans to shave him.

It was odd, the attitude to snakes of these Mediterranean types. On their account, the creatures had a bad parentage, born from the blood of the Titans, enemies of the gods. And they kept bad company: the hair of the petrifying Gorgons was alive with them. And then there was unhappy Philoctetes, bitten by a snake on the island of Lemnos, the smell of the suppurating wound so bad the other heroes abandoned him there when they sailed on for Troy. Yet despite all that, often Greeks and Romans would feed the scaly things by hand, offer them cakes, twine them fondly around their necks and set them up as guardians of houses, tombs, springs and altars. The fools.

The perspective of a man such as Ballista, born beyond the northern frontiers of the imperium in the misty forests and fens of Germania, was much more straightforward. There was not a snake in Middle Earth that did not share the old, cold malevolence of Jormungand, the world serpent who lay coiled in the icy darkness of the ocean waiting for Ragnarok, for the day when it was fated the serpent could return to dry land and the gods would die.