Matthew Funk

Reaver Excerpt

A modern perspective on the mad mind of an ancient hero follows history’s most controversial protagonist as he struggles against Roman conquerors, a provocative love triangle and his own humanity to reach the Biblical paradise on Earth. Myths have never been more real.

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Preface: Darkness

In the darkness under the earth, the infant starved.

He was starved of memory: No mother’s touch; only the mean blanket of the cave’s humidity.  No milk or meals; only the fungus, smelled but unseen, he gorged his blind hunger on.  No words of affection; only the echo of his cries answered by lightless silence.

No name.

The child starved, abandoned by parents and reasons he could not even wonder at.

He wept.  He waited.   He ate fistfuls of mushrooms and of dumb, crawling things.  He drank from hot springs.  He listened, deaf to the passage of months, hearing only the loudness of hunger.

Then his touch found a secret.  The child felt something:

On the stone of the cave, a pattern – a lattice of lines arranged in some holy certainty.

The child stroked it, again and again.  It was something other than silence. 

It meant something.  It was a reason.   His reason.  His purpose.  His answer to the hunger.

The child now fed in earnest and in darkness. 

The child grew, bound to the secret purpose cut in stone.

The child hungered with an unbound appetite, knowing one hunger above all else:

He would find out the meaning of the pattern, find his purpose, and put all the darkness and hunger of his world to peace.

BOOK I. CHAPTER I.

67 BC

“What is it that you seek?” Asked the Dark Captain of his First Mate.

Together by the helm of the black ship, they watched the whole horizon burn. 

The Dark Captain stood, as he always seemed to, behind his First Mate’s great right shoulder.  Ahead of them, the burning backs of forty ships of the Roman legate turned the great waterway of the Bosporus into a gate of flame.  And as their pirate crew marched spoils of the battle onto the docks of Byzantium they had claimed by their victory, the Dark Captain and his First Mate scanned the fire as if to glean some refined answer from its fury.

“I seek paradise.” The Reaver declared.

The gaping Bosporus, its throat choked with red light, burned on. 

Its light was the light of red lamps at dusk.  Its macabre and ruthless hue was matched by the eyes of the Reaver. 

The Reaver was a man monstrous in his aspect, glorious in his build.  Limbs as long and roughly strong as the weathered timber of the ship were set in a bestial poise of looming readiness.  The ursine bulk they supported was host to an archive of scars, latticed testimony to his unstoppable survival.  Over a torso like a bear’s poured matted black hair, cloaking a head set at a height of nearly seven feet.   Always that head seemed to lean forward with animal intent, hungry and fierce.  The face was as alertly brilliant as it was brutal.  A world of barely mended wounds was written on handsome features that seemed hacked from raw stone.  But of all his qualities, the Reaver’s eyes were most terrible, most awesome – pits of red, the red of blood in the dirt, the red of coals burning forever in the guts of dusk. 

Within their primordial depths shone a ferocious intelligence that now slashed the carnage of the west as if feasting on it.  They ate at the horizon; their teeth were deep in its belly.  The Dark Captain knew this look well. 

In the eight years of murder and pillage and rapine the two men had torn from the flesh of civilization, that look of starved meditation had never diminished in its intensity.  Never once had the Dark Captain seen satiety in those eyes.  Even a rogue wolf had moments when its body was full and rest overtook it.  Not so with the First Mate of the Dark Captain.  Even with the day-long battle done, and pirate corpses and Roman corpses alike lying where exhaustion had killed them with its gray hand, the warrior – his First Mate, his worst monster; the Reaver – was livid with hunger for more.

The Dark Captain’s voice was a blade on the back of his favored beast.  “You know I am your guide along that path.  Your sole guide.”  His lean frame put the strength of slave pits into his tone.  Whole armies of hard men had felt their backs bend to hear that voice, the lightless voice of Mammon Graves.  The Dark Captain now hoped, demanded, that the Reaver’s enormous frame show some sign of bending as well, even as he knew he would not.  He showed no more submission than would a mountain.  Mammon’s fine, dark fingers clenched beneath his dark cloak as if trying to snatch back his words to hide the vulnerability at their core.

The gory tapestry of the day’s victory was mask enough, surely, Mammon thought.  His uncanny familiarity with eerie auguries had led his fleet of sixteen ships from prize to plundered prize, and to this lurking place within the burnished bay of Byzantium’s Golden Horn. Under his ruthless command, they had ambushed a Roman fleet over twice their size.  His leadership in the battle had added the butchery of the Romans to a dripping red lexicon of thousands.

Mammon had nothing to fear.  He was fear itself.

Yet the Reaver gave no reply one way or the other.  He continued to watch the work of the pirates in Mammon’s motley fleet as they covered the corpse-choked stone docks of Byzantium in their frenzy to trade plunder for provisions.

Byzantium, strong right arm of the kingdom of Thrace, was now, in the year 67 BC, the home of some of the finest mercenaries in the world.  It was the way of the Thracians to gird their boys in armor as soon as they left the cradle.  Their lives would be short and vicious stories of battle, a life lived in leather and fresh blood.  The Empires of the world came to Thrace to strengthen their armies’ ranks with the maniacal killers that thrived or died on the hard slate hills, and to Byzantium in particular to buy the services of the most elite of those murderers.  But days before, Mammon Graves’ gang of black ships had come to trade captive Syrian flesh for Thracian steel and had lingered, inexplicably to the restless men of his crew. 

They had lodged in bitter winter aboard ship, hidden behind the shoreline of the Golden horn.  They had locked complaint behind chattering teeth and let wonder breed in silence. And Mammon schemed the coming ambush in mystical lines only he could see.

And the Romans had come – nearly a full cohort scouting the narrow strait – and slipped their necks into that ambush’s snare.

Now that fragment of a legion was only meat for sharks and fuel for the rank fires by which the pirates traded, labored and debauched.  Now Byzantium teemed with the smoke of the forty Roman warships that perished on the brink of the gates to the west, and even the Thracian cohorts remained shuttered behind the irons of Byzantium’s walls as its merchants did a trade in human life and plunder.  Now the chief architects of that massacre stood together – a lean, dark rook behind the mountain of a man – and one of them, despite himself, felt fear.

Mammon Graves raised his head and lowered his sepulchral tone.   “Tomorrow, Reaver, we must seek escape.”

The Reaver grunted.  Mammon’s ears dissected the sound.  He could understand the music of every language in the world; it was thought that even the speech of birds and tides was simple speech to him.  But now he could not carve out the meaning of the warrior’s noise.  Did he hear agreement there?  Dismay?  Or, as he feared, dissent?  A moment of silence passed, as tense as a leash about to snap.

Reaver spoke.  “Escape.”  The tone was one of disgust.  “Is that why she’s going to the slave market instead of to your table?”  The ogrish jut of his jaw nodded towards a team of pirates carrying a cage from Mammon’s quarters. 

Mammon did not look to what Reaver nodded to.  He knew what he would see, and could not bear to watch.  He feared his black soul would buckle under the light weight confined within the cage’s bars.

Within the cage was a girl.  Her arms and legs were folded beechwood around a body stripped bare.  A month of long nights before, that body had worn the glittering lapis and opal of a Syrian noble; gowns that still smelled of the cypress crowning the hill on which her marble house stood high.  Mammon’s own hand had torn those gowns from her.  And what had been cast bare before him, supplicant to him, had given pause to a soul that had razed whole cities without thought of mercy.  He had looked away.  His hands and words had not touched her but to seal her in his cage.  He would not look now.

Reaver stared as the girl drew in on herself like a fresh blossom in the hand of a night that came too soon.  She shrank from the screams and roars of the slave market the heavy tread of the pirates bore her towards.  And as she was taken from the ship, her eyes, raw and wet with crying, gave a glance back – back to the black decks and black rooms of the Tartaros, as if seeing the last of her dreams shut away.

Mammon found himself reflecting on the torn gossamer of those dreams, trying to feel their fabric in the grip of his meditation.  He thrust the thought away.  He should care nothing for the dreams of others.  The cares of his men were only puppet strings for him to pull.  Mammon served no one, not even the Rogue King – Rome’s greatest enemy, Mithridates – who had bought off every rebel, pirate and terrorist in the known world, from Spartacus to Severus; every one but the crew of Mammon Graves.

The value of coin and glory was minted in the dreams of men, but they were as ash to Mammon.  His dark dreams were his own; only they led him.  As for the rest of the world, he would be its nightmare.

Mammon stared at Reaver.  His voice had the smoke of a new and hateful fire lit within him.

“Does that opinion come from the men?” He asked.  “Or just from you?”

Another grunt.

Reaver watched on as the form of the cage vanished into the crowd.   The sight of the girl’s nudity shivering desperately vanished with it.  Red eyes narrowed, slicing the last glimpse of brown limbs flavored with fear sweat before Byzantium’s turmoil consumed it.  Mammon’s eyes narrowed as well.

Mammon’s stare, by contrast, had no bright hunger to them.  They were black hollows, the black of the kohl that limned the eyes of magicians and of whores.  Their black was the black of mysteries.  And along with the wicked array of blades that clustered on his many bandoliers and the cloak that made them seem to arrive from nowhere to his enemies, Mammon wore mystery as part of his arsenal.   In Minos, Crete, where he was worshipped by some as a God, the bearded mystics filled caverns at midnight with talk of the strange and awful beasts he could summon to his command from thin air.  The salty fens of the Sea of Azov had boatmen who whispered stories of how he would stalk moonless nights, walking on open water, conversing with the souls of drowned dead to gain their unwholesome secrets.  Even the shining halls of great Rome’s forums heard low talk of how Captain Mammon Graves’ flesh proved but a shadow to any blade or arrow that touched it.  But most terrible of all were the legends the warrior referred to in his brazen growl. 

For it was said that Mammon Graves lived a life measured in vile centuries, extended by vile means.  To Persian mystics and Visigoth shamans and to his own crew, Mammon was known as the Eater of Maidens.  Rough initiates to his gore-slickened decks would learn in whispers that yearly he took a virgin into his private galley who would not return.  Even these savage men could only feel their insides go to ice under the awful power of that mystery.  Only his monstrous First Mate, who churned the stew pot and laid the table for that yearly ceremony, knew the truth.

Now Mammon’s stare gouged at the scarred features of his First Mate, seeking sign of the truth he needed to know – the truth as to whether his monster was now spreading mutinous talk of weakness among his men.  Was Reaver saying, as he feared, that the Eater of Maidens had become sickened with affection for the Syrian girl?  That he had shown mercy and become infected with it?  Was he giving voice to Mammon’s own fears – fears he had thought dead and buried under countless years of cold murder? 

A crooked grin was the Reaver’s only answer.  That grin’s cruel hook, all-wise and all-hungry, had once been counted among Mammon’s many weapons.  Now he was not sure whether it was the rest of world that squirmed on its point or he himself. 

The Dark Captain’s countenance darkened further under its cowl.

“We seek escape because as strong as the Romans were in this fight, they will be tenfold strong if we remain in place.” Mammon explained in measured tones.  “This was only a patrol in force, intended to find us and fix us.  What will follow will be the full force of Pompey’s fleet. 

“Rather than speculate on my personal affairs,” he reproached, fingers curling again, “you would do best to find us a course heading that gets us into the Mediterranean without coming in sight of Roman outposts and Roman scout ships.”

Still Reaver did not move.  He remained a hunched bear, looming over the mania of Byzantium’s market.   Mammon looked away from him. 

He watched the scene at the market.  Byzantium’s stone stalls were lit with the sallow, sticky light of oil lamps, and shone like the leeched skeleton of a coral reef.  Brisk business was being done, with the pirate crews piling iron, treasure and shuddering slaves before the merchants.  It was the business of midnight, the battle’s end having sundered sleep and driven those who sought profit at any cost to verminous enterprise. 

Mammon watched as children wailed in chains, their faces bright as brands as they were hauled away from mothers who would soon populate the rank rooms of Thrace’s brothels.  He watched as whips bit soft backs not yet sturdy enough to pull a plow, as pirates grabbed and fondled and laughed, providing the only music fit for such a scene – the drunken laughter of low men. 

It was a scene he had watched countless times before, but never yet with worry.  Now he worried.   His thoughts turned first to the ripped standards of Roman red that his men’s crumbling boots tread over.  Mammon wondered how many, many more standards awaited them in the ranks Rome had, for the first time in history, arrayed in a resolute effort to crush piracy.   His thoughts then wandered to reflect on those of his own ranks who lay with glassy eyes in lifeless meat among the ripped standards, losses he could ill afford. 

And then his thoughts were drawn with terrifying gravity to the lodestone of beechwood limbs and a bare princess’ body, curled in fear, so similar in aspect to the pose of supplication she had shown him.  His thoughts fixed on her.  They fixed on whether she wished for his cold presence, on whether she craved his silence over the roaring noise of the slave market; on whether his hand would fit about her neck better than a Thracian collar.  They fixed on her bent form.  They cared.  And as caring worked its hot poison through Mammon Graves’ cool remove, he grimaced to feel how close a thing caring was to cruelty. 

Caring meant something mattered — something other than the occult quests and rapine profit he had crafted the mechanics of his life towards.  And if something mattered, perhaps it all mattered.  Perhaps the worth of lives and things was more than what he could tear from them.

And perhaps he had something to lose.

He did not know.  He did not want to know.  Those thoughts had been maimed and left for dead with the unspeakable years of his childhood, buried under the chill weight of what had come since – let them stay there.  He knew only that he wanted Reaver out of his sight.  That crooked grin, those hunger-crazed eyes – let them be gone.  Gone and set to a task of Mammon’s design.

“Go below,” Mammon told Reaver. “Interrogate the captive centurion with your usual methods.  Find us what Pompey is thinking.  Find us an escape so that we can make to Minos, gather forces, and know how to strike from surprise.”

Mammon braced himself for what was to come next.  The Reaver turned from staring at the docks to face him.  He set the full and bloody bore of his stare on Mammon.  Only the Dark Captain could meet those eyes without showing at least a shard of apprehension.  On any other night, he would have done so without effort.  But this night his ineffable calm was strained, pulled to the maelstrom of Byzantium market, pulled and cracked by the weight of the girl in the cage.

The Dark Captain met Reaver’s eyes and felt that red stare enter those cracks.  He hid the rising smoke of hate well beneath his cowl.  The Reaver did not hide the chuckle in his reply.

“What’ll be left of ‘em won’t be enough to sell.”   Hands wide enough to swallow a shield clenched their sharkskin surface into fists.  Greasy gore, spattered from the eyes of a young soldier that Reaver had burst when wrenching his face from the bone during the battle, squeezed in milky runnels through his fingers.   Mammon wondered if those brutal hands now dreamt of his own neck.

“From now on we show no quarter to Romans.” Mammon replied.   “Just do your work.”

As Reaver turned his giant form to stomp into the darkness of the hold below decks, Mammon halted him. “And as you work, remember, I have led you this far on your quest.  You came to me with talent and I have worked that talent into skill.  What you know of the divine mysteries has been craft by my hand.  What steps you’ve taken toward the gates of paradise on earth have been made in my tread. 

“My eyes alone have looked into Eden’s garden, where the eternal peace grows from blue crystal.”

Mammon put the snap of the whip into his tone. “Remember that, Reaver.”

Great back unbent, the Reaver entered the darkness to win secrets with raw and ruthless deeds.

All contents copyright © Matthew Funk 2008, all rights reserved.