The Red Serpent by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788635035
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The harshest truth of the moment was Sib. They brought him down to the scooped-out grave in the first stars of dark. Drust saw Kag’s face and it came to him that he had shrunk and that they all were empty as withered wineskins.

Kag and Quintus lowered Sib as gently as they could into the shadow beside a gathered pile of stone that they would tomb up round him. The others seemed reluctant to either come or go, Drust was thinking, and not just the strangers, the ones who had come with Manius and Dog. Ugo and Praeclarum and himself stood around for a moment and gradually, one by one, those who had meant something to Sib moved closer to the body. Not so much to look, Drust saw, as to say something final, to him and to themselves.

Dog, his face made into a bloody parody of death by torchlight, lifted one hand, as if waving farewell, then let it fall limply to his side.

‘Gods curse it,’ he said, looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left.

Then Manius came up and looked down into the dead Sib’s face, left unwrapped. He spoke directly to him, as though he were alive.

‘May the gods above and below watch over you.’

Praeclarum squatted down and reached and took out Sib’s hand, sat there for a long time holding the dead hand in her own and looking intently into the dead face, and she never uttered a sound all the time she sat there.

Finally, she put the hand down, reached up and gently folded the last of the cloth over the face. And then she got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

Kisa crouched and threw a handful of dust into the grave, a little hissing rattle of sound that seemed, somehow, louder than a drumbeat. The others, the strangers to them, stood politely and one or two helped stack the stones. Finally, Quintus placed the one with the flat side and an inscription that said Sib’s name and then ‘VI’. Those who knew that was the term for a fighter who had lost and died would know a gladiator lay there.

They sacrificed a horse, the one Ugo had mouth-smacked which made it easy to catch, and Drust tried to find Mars Ultor or Jupiter in the blood smell, but saw nothing to suggest any god watched. Saw nothing at all, heard only the anguish in men’s voices, tasted only the stink of death. Ugo wailed, Stercorinus mumbled prayers, Praeclarum sobbed quietly where she thought no one would hear and yet, when Drust wept, it was not for Sib.

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