by Albert Noyer
“We still have supplies to take below. And that Oriental’s small crates.”
“What’s inside them?” Claudia demanded. “Something more we can sell in Egypt? Pry one open.”
“Later, Claudia. We have to—”
“Open one now!” she screamed.
Adonis slipped the padded quilting off the closest box and levered the top pegs out with his knife. After lifting the cover, he saw tightly packed dark granules. “It looks like only charcoal,” he said, sifting black powder through his fingers.
“Charcoal? What good is that?” Claudia scowled. “Gaius, take the crates to that cook. He’s having trouble lighting his kindling. I want to leave now, Adonis.”
“We need to finish—”
“You st…stop ordering me a…around!” Claudia screamed, stuttering. “Get th…the men to the oars!” Agitated and trembling, she pointed at Getorius. “Surgeon, p…pull that rope off th…the mooring dog.” When he hesitated, she threatened, “You’ll c…cast us off if you want me t…to send your wife b…back to you alive from Alexandria.”
Getorius knew that would never happen once the galley had left the harbor, much less if it reached Egypt. Yet Malarich might slit Arcadia’s throat now, if he did not do what Claudia ordered. And the girl was deranged enough not to make many more rational choices. With numb movements he loosened the knot on the hawser, let it go, and heard the coil splash into the water.
“Sigeric, we’ve been through a lot together,” Virilo shouted up to the helmsman. “Why in Neptune’s name are you going with them? How much are they paying you to betray me?”
Sigeric looked away and spat on the Cybele’s deck without answering.
Four oars poked through thole pins, and the crews’ strokes began to back the vessel away from the wharf. As Getorius, helpless, watched the helmsman’s deck move further away from him with Arcadia on it, he saw Malarich relax his hold on her and lower the knife. The threat to her is lessened, but that’s small consolation if the galley makes it out of port.
The Cybele came to a slow stop as the backstroking of the four crewmen prepared to turn the galley about and row across the harbor toward the open sea.
As the galley paused, Malarich stepped back and began to sheath his knife. In that same instant, Getorius saw a small, irregularly shaped object arcing through the air. The shiny missile struck Malarich in the temple, on the right side of his head, with a sickening crunch of skull bone. The man dropped his blade with a stare of disbelief, made a reflexive grab for his face, then toppled back off the helmsman’s platform. His body slid down to wedge in the curve of the sternpost.
Dumbfounded, Getorius looked around for the deadly projectile’s source. A one-armed man and a blonde woman were standing in a skiff about twenty paces from the galley.
“T…Tigris?” he blurted. “Giamona?”
She glanced at him, but turned back and shouted, “Arcadia! Dive overboard!”
Getorius saw the curve of his wife’s body arc over the edge of the stern platform and deck strake rails. As Arcadia slid into the water and began to swim, Giamona poled the skiff toward her.
Claudia, who had been intent on watching the wharf recede, heard the splash. She turned her head, saw Arcadia in the water, then gazed back at Malarich’s body with a vacant, uncomprehending stare.
“Adonis, w…what happened?” she mumbled. “What happened?”
“I…I’m not sure. I wasn’t looking.”
Claudia stood a moment longer, then collapsed onto the deck and began to cry.
Lucullus had been observing from the warehouse and ordered his men out. A few threw lances at the retreating galley, but the arcing shafts fell into the water, well short of the stern deck.
As Giamona neared the dock with Arcadia, Getorius ran to meet them.
“The harbor chain!” Arcadia shouted to him, pushing wet hair away from her face and pointing across the harbor. “Raise the chain to stop them!”
“Of course…Leudovald!” Getorius yelled. “Have some of Lucullus’s men alert the harbormaster. He can raise the chain barrier to block the Cybele.”
“If there are slaves on duty today—”
“There’s a signal pennant flying. Hades, man, send the furcing guards! They could do it!” Getorius took a scarlet cape from one of the men to put around Arcadia. As he helped his wife out of the skiff and onto the wharf, Giamona frowned up at him.
“Surgeon, you owe me the cost of a silver hand,” she remarked dryly.
“Sil…silver hand? Is that what hit the crewman?”
Giamona broke into a grin. “I’m glad I took your advice back at the camp, about a cedar arm after the amputation. Right, Tigris?”
The gladiator nodded and gave Getorius a slight smile.
“Not half as glad as I am. Tigris, you saved my wife’s life.” Getorius noticed that salt water had started the nick in Arcadia’s throat bleeding again. He dabbed at the spot with the sleeve of his tunic, then held tightly onto her.
She shook loose. “Husband, I’m all right. We’ve got to stop the Cybele.”
They were watching the galley, and the men running to the twin breakwater moles, when Publius Maximin’s black carriage clattered onto the wharf.
“I was told Zhang Chen stole my crates and left the villa,” he shouted to Getorius. “Do you know where they are? Or where he is?”
How could Maximin know that? One of his guards must have gone to Arminum and reported the incident. “Chen is dead, Senator,” Getorius replied “Your property is on the Cybele, headed for Alexandria.”
“Egypt? Egypt?” Maximin sputtered. “Leudovald. Do something to stop that galley.”
Leudovald glanced at him with little emotion. “Senator, Tribune Lucullus here ordered most of his men around to try and raise the harbor chain before the Cybele can reach the open Adriatic.”
“Tribune, they’d better get there in time,” Maximin threatened, “or the least of their punishments will be reassignment to some god-forsaken Danubian garrison.”
On the galley, Adonis glanced at Claudia, who was still hunched on the deck, sobbing. He had seen her milder attacks lapse into listlessness, or unexplained laughing and crying.
This seemed to be the case now, but he had problems other than trying to comfort her. The galley had hove about and was on course for the harbor mouth, in a direct line ahead, but several anchored fishing boats bobbed in her path. He could not waste time maneuvering around them.
“Bear straight on, helmsman,” Adonis shouted.
“We’ll ram those boats,” Sigeric protested.
“You’re being well paid to follow orders,” Adonis yelled back. “If we don’t make the open sea, a magistrate will make sure your mutinous head…and those of your crew…decorate the Ravenna lighthouse up ahead.”
Adonis watched over the bow as the first boat was crunched to bright-colored shards of floating wood. The rowing crew stopped to glance over the side at the sound of an impact that had barely shaken the galley. Maranatha looked up from trying to light damp moss.
“Don’t break rhythm!” Adonis shouted to the four oarsmen, “we’re making headway. We’ll unfurl the mainsail once clear of the harbor.” He looked toward the righthand breakwater mole. Guards armed with spears had run along this shorter side and reached the end of the mole. Other men, on the harbor’s longer north side, were less than halfway to the harbormaster’s building. Adonis chuckled. “Fools. Do they think their lances will stop us?”
He had turned back and knelt down to soothe Claudia, when the rasping sound of winches being turned sounded from ahead.
Sigeric called down to him, “They’re raising th’ chain barrier!”
Adonis looked ahead from the bow. In the distance, a swirl of muddy water rose from the right side of the harbor entrance, where guards had reached the chain winch mechanism. Long strands of seaweed floated up with it, but no iron links were visible yet beneath the surface.
“Row harder, y’ bilge scum,”
Sigeric yelled to the oarsmen. “If that chain gate catches us, it’ll rip into our hull like…like a knife slicin’ through goat cheese!”
Now Adonis saw the rusty top links of the barrier rising at an angle on the lighthouse side. The men at the longer north mole had not yet reached the winch, so the chain was being lifted unevenly. “Bear to port!” he yelled across the deck to Sigeric. “They haven’t had time to get to the handspikes on that side.”
The deadly chain was about fifty feet ahead. Adonis knew it would be close, but was confident the galley would pass over it before the winch could be tightened another turn, and the barrier raised further. “A scraping of the hull planks at worst, helmsman, but Cybele can survive that.”
“Haul in starside oars!” Sigeric yelled, realizing the iron links could snap off the long shafts like so many dowel rods.
Gaius and Victor pulled in the dripping blades, but the uneven thrust from the two port oarsmen propelled the galley back toward the chain. Still, Sigeric knew it would be a light blow and braced himself. Glancing at the bow, where the impact would be, he saw that Maranatha had coaxed the moss into smoky flame. Part of the charcoal glowed a reddish-orange as he lifted up one of the open padded boxes with both hands.
The crew felt a slight jolt as Cybele’s hull glanced off the iron links. Sigeric raised his steering oars to not damage the blades. Maranatha spread his feet wider apart to steady himself, and readied to shake powdered charcoal from the box onto the red coals. As Claudia had suggested, it would intensify the weak glow of the coals.
Getorius hugged Arcadia, both mesmerized as they watched the galley outracing the chain barrier that was being raised to sink her.
The Cybele had veered to starside, and then yawed slightly away as she struck the chain, when suddenly there was an intensely bright flash and a cloud of black smoke engulfed her. Even before a sound louder than an overhead thunderclap reached the wharf, three more brilliant flashes erupted, followed by deafening roars. A hot, acrid wind, smelling of rotten eggs, rolled across the harbor. The wind’s force capsized fishing boats out in the harbor, then struck the dock with such an impact that it sent bales of wool tumbling across the warehouse floor.
Getorius instinctively turned his back to the harbor and shielded Arcadia. A few spectators, who had arrived soon after Maximin, crouched down, or stood in open-mouthed stupor.
After a moment the clink of metal was heard. A shower of scorched bronze discs, some bent, pelted the dock. A few struck the onlookers, who, despite their fright, recovered and scrambled for the coins.
Getorius picked one up, looked at the inscription, and handed it to Arcadia. “One of the counterfeit ‘Valentinians,’” he said, his voice still trembling from shock. “Not quite the gold that Jupiter showered on Danae, but this should exonerate you.”
She tightened her hand around the coin then turned to look at where the Cybele had been. Sulfurous smoke engulfed the lighthouse. Some of the uppermost stones were dislodged and others badly scorched. On the opposite mole, corner bricks had been torn out of the harbormaster’s office, and all the windows in his observation area were shattered.
Lucullus’s men had been swept off the breakwater, most of them dead from the impact. A few survivors were sinking in the harbor, frantically trying to strip off boots and clothing to enable them to swim away from the scene of devastation.
The Cybele, with her crew and cargo, was gone. The orange flame had left only shattered pieces of charred brown and green wood, lengths of rope, and splinters of mast drifting toward the open sea. Small scorched bits of a dull tan material, which had not burned inside the remnants of the galley’s hull, speckled the azure water.
Getorius recalled a passage from the Revelation of John, which described a fallen star. The force of the fall had opened a pit in the abyss and caused smoke to rise, as if from a great furnace, which darkened the sun and air around it.
Arcadia recovered enough to murmur a quote from part of a letter of Peter that the bishop recently had read at Mass. “…The heavens will be destroyed in flames, and the elements will melt away in a blaze.”
Chapter twenty-one
The thunderous sound and sulfurous wind had been heard and smelled by some of the people living in the apartments and houses behind the warehouses. Now they came to peer out of windows, or ran outside to the wharf to ask about what had happened. Lucullus and the four guards he had ordered to stay behind had dropped their weapons and covered their ears against the sound. They lowered their hands and joined in gawking at the harbor entrance, where the Cybele had last been seen.
“My cargo,” Maximin moaned, the first to speak after the cataclysm. “Everything I owned is lost.”
“Cargo?” Virilo repeated numbly. “M…my daughter was on the galley.”
Getorius recovered from his astonishment and turned to Leudovald. “Order those four guards into the skiff—see if they can rescue any survivors.”
Only two of the men overcame their fear and agreed to take the boat out to inspect the floating wreckage.
Getorius led his wife over to the gladiator. “Tigris, Arcadia owes you her life. How were you were able to throw so accurately…and from a boat?”
Giamona replied for him, “One of our games at the camp is to throw a leather ball through a line of hoops. And, fortunately, the harbor water was calm.”
“I…I’m grateful to both of you,” Arcadia said. “Tigris, that silversmith must still have the mould pattern he used in casting your hand. We’ll commission a replacement.”
“Fine,” Giamona said, “but we need to get back to camp.”
“What made you come to the harbor?” Getorius asked.
“When we went to pick up Tigris’s hand, we noticed the night activity at Virilo’s and saw your wife. We followed them. Our…profession…has taught us to hone our instincts.”
“To save your own lives, and this time, my wife’s.”
“Let’s go, Tigris. You’ve repaid the surgeon.”
As Getorius and Arcadia watched, Giamona led her companion toward an enclosed wagon waiting at the far end of the warehouses.
Leudovald came up to them. “Strange friends you have, Surgeon. What is this profession the woman mentioned?”
“Tigris was a patient of mine,” Getorius replied with a straight face. “It’s confidential…I can’t tell you.”
“Leudovald,” Arcadia said, “Galla Placidia should be informed immediately about what just happened.”
Maximin overheard. “It…it’s Sunendag, the Lord’s Day,” he objected. “The Empress Mother will be attending Mass in the palace chapel. We…we should not disturb her devotions.”
Getorius glanced at the senator. That fox! He wants to wait and tell her what happened himself, only mentioning what he thinks she should know. “You’re right, Arcadia, Placidia should be told, but you’ve been through an ordeal. And you’re soaking wet. Go home to change clothes…rest until I get back. Virilo, you can explain about Diotar and—”
“A moment, Surgeon,” Leudovald interposed, clearly annoyed at being left out of the discussion. “Tribune, arrest the galleymaster.”
“Arrest?” Virilo protested. “I was nearly killed, and those mutineers destroyed my…my life. My daughter—”
“Galleymaster”—Leudovald cut him short—“you have much to explain to me. Why the surgeon’s wife was abducted and the Phrygian priest murdered in that temple on your property is only one part of the mystery.”
“Diotar is…is dead?” Maximin genuinely seemed stunned. “How…when?”
“That information should stay inside the palace,” Getorius murmured to Leudovald, indicating the bystanders with a nod of his head. “Bring Virilo with us to talk to Galla Placidia.”
He grunted assent. “Lucullus, report to the Scholarian prefect. Have him send a guard detachment to block the Via Porti and the Longa. I want curious citizens kept away from these docks while we’re at the chapel.”
“Leudovald, let me info
rm the Empress Mother,” Maximin insisted again. “No need for this many of us to upset her.”
“We shall all go, Senator, including the surgeon’s wife. This matter cannot wait.”
Maximin gave Leudovald an angry scowl, but assented. “Very well, get in my carriage.” He signed to Mutus, who clambered down. “Take the reins, Surgeon.”
Heraclius, the emperor’s steward, was outside the palace chapel, sunning himself on the front stairs. When he saw Leudovald and the others approaching, the eunuch got up and stood in front of the door to block it.
“The Augustus’s worship cannot be disturbed,” he said, holding up pale smooth hands to block the entrance.
Maximin pushed him aside. “Out of my way, you half-man.” As the five entered, a deacon looked up from reading a passage from the Revelation of John. Galla Placidia turned, along with her son and daughter-in-law, to see what had interrupted him.
“Senator Maximin?” she asked, standing up. “Leudovald? What are you doing here?”
“I tried to stop them,” Heraclius whined.
Optila, Valentinian’s bodyguard, drew his sword and started forward.
“Put that weapon away, man,” Maximin ordered. “Empress, didn’t you notice those loud sounds a short while ago?”
“We did hear roars, much like thunder. Were they a reason to interrupt this service? Surgeon, why are you here with your wife? What is going on, Senator?”
“Empress, th…this is not a good place to…to explain,” Maximin stammered. “I tried to tell Leudovald.”
“The house of God? You shall explain here. Deacon, we will continue later. Placidus, take Eudoxia…and your Hun…out into the garden.”
Valentinian glowered at his mother’s order, but motioned his wife and the guard to the front entrance.
After the door was closed, Maximin went to one of the chairs that had been brought in for the service. “Empress, if I might sit? I’ve just come from Arminum.”