Decius inclined his head in return. “Then let us begin. With Affron.”
Liber stared at him. “What about Affron?”
“Did you know him at the schola?”
“Of course I knew him.”
Decius tried to ask the question—the one question to which he needed an answer. But the question was hard to put into words. “Why…what can you tell me about him?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Why is he different? Why did so many priests want him to be the next pontifex?”
Liber shrugged. “Why does this matter? Affron is not the Gallians’ problem, unless he’s still alive.”
It was time to explain, Decius decided. “I met Affron this summer,” he said. “And he did something to me. I do not understand what happened. It made me think that he was the most powerful man on Terra. It made me think it would be easy for him to defeat Tirelius. After this meeting we reached an agreement in which I was to help him become pontifex. But instead he disappeared. I would like to know why. I would like to know where he is. I would like to understand his power.”
Liber poured himself more water, and then put the cup down without drinking it. “Affron did something, you say. Did what?”
Decius gazed at him and made a judgment. “I think you know,” he said.
“I do not,” Liber replied. “How would I?” And then he closed his eyes. “I know that I am very tired and still not very sober. Can we continue this conversation in the morning?”
Decius considered, and then shrugged. “Corscius!” he called out. His aide appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Tell Barascus to make our guest comfortable for the night. In the morning, bathe him, feed him, and find him a new robe. Then bring him back to me.”
Corscius bowed to Decius and shook Liber by the shoulder. Liber got to his feet, bowed, and followed Corscius out of the room.
Decius leaned back in his chair. His mind returned to that brutally hot day in a cramped room in the bowels of the Circus Maximus. A couple of his soldiers had captured Affron and Valleia and their servant boy, and he was there to decide what to do with them. Turn them over to the priests? He had taken their magical weapon from them; he assumed he had them in his power. But then Affron had looked at him, and…
Decius shuddered. What had happened? He had experienced a moment of pure terror. No, not terror…the word wasn’t sufficient. He had been floating, alone, in an immensity of nothingness. And he knew he had always been alone, and nothing mattered, nothing could possibly matter. There was no beauty, no love, no meaning, only a swirling emptiness, but it was the swirling emptiness of all that was and could ever be. But that made no sense. Nothing made sense. And all he wanted to do was die. But he couldn’t die, he would never die…
And then he had opened his eyes. He was lying on the floor, and the boy was looking down at him. His face was wet; the boy had poured a bucket of water onto him.
It was over; ordinary life had begun again.
But life would never be quite ordinary after that experience. It lingered at the edges of his mind. He worried that it would return—while he slept, in a meeting, sitting alone at night. Right now.
How had Affron done that? What had he done? Decius had looked into Liber’s eyes, and thought the man could tell him.
Was he wrong? He didn’t think so.
Would this knowledge help the Gallians? Not likely.
But Decius thought this knowledge might keep him from going mad.
He rose from his chair. The room was getting cold. In the morning he would find out what the man knew. And then he would decide what to do with him—throw him away, or bring him to Urbis.
It was unlikely Decius could save the Gallians, but he had to try.
Three
Flendys
The three strangers rode into town on the King’s Road, which led up along the coast from the south and then disappeared inland into the highlands of northern Scotia. The road is mainly used by soldiers and tax collectors; these three were neither. All wore thick cloaks to protect them from the howling wind and blowing snow, but even with the cloaks it was easy to tell they were different. For one thing, one of them was a girl.
And, of course, eventually they spoke. And what they spoke was Latin.
They rode into our town, Flendys as we call it, and we watched them from behind our curtains and shutters, hoping they would ride on. There was nothing for them here, unless they wanted passage on a ship headed to somewhere else. But this they did not want.
They dismounted in front of Grillich’s tavern and went in. Grillich speaks no Latin, of course; he barely speaks Erse. It turned out that the girl could speak a little Erse. This did not astonish Grillich—nothing astonishes him—but it astonished the rest of us. It shouldn’t have. After all, the woman who had preceded them here had picked up the language quickly, even though most Romans find it unintelligible.
The three travelers asked for food, a place to stable their horses, somewhere to spend the night. And some information. Grillich could provide food; as for the rest, he pointed them to Arva Senth; which was the right thing to do. It’s not Grillich’s place to tell outsiders our business. But he fed them well—roasted chicken and fresh-baked bread—and they paid him more than it was worth.
The man was dark-haired and handsome. The girl was blonde and pretty, with pleasing gray eyes; young, but of an age to wed. The boy was about the girl’s age, perhaps a little younger. He was taller than the girl, with long brown hair and green eyes; he looked tired and worried. He said nothing.
They were all cold. They sat close to the fire and kept their cloaks wrapped about them. They ate the chicken and bread greedily. They refused beer, and Grillich had no wine to offer them.
Eventually they left the tavern and walked their horses to Arva Senth’s store. Grillich had had sense enough to send the kitchen boy ahead to tell him they were coming, so Arva was ready.
Arva spent years on merchant ships trading with the Gallians and the Spaniards and the Romans. He has been to Galicia and Anatolia and Dalmatia and any number of places that the rest of us have never even heard of. They say he speaks Latin better than a native. But, more important, he understands these people. Not just the merchants who come on the ships, or the sailors who man the ships—we all understand merchants and sailors. But the people who live in these far-off places, with their different religions and different clothes and different foods. They mean nothing to us.
But Arva’s knowledge didn’t help him with these three, as it hadn’t helped him with the other three—the ones these three were clearly here to find. There was something different about them, something strange and a little frightening; not that they looked so very different from the people he had met in his travels in the empire. To begin with, the strange and frightening thing was simply that they were here. They had no business being in Flendys, like the other three. And the girl had no business understanding Erse.
They were polite enough. They all bowed to Arva, and Arva bowed back. The man did most of the talking, now that they were speaking to someone who knew Latin. The man spoke Latin with a cultured Roman accent and asked again for a place to spend the night and stable their horses. They had been on the road since daybreak. The weather was bad, and likely to get worse. They could pay well.
Arva could think of no reason to refuse their request. We are not known as a sociable people, but we extend great courtesy to anyone who needs our help. So he gave them directions to the Widow Lochen’s house. And then he waited for what the man would ask next. He knew what it would be, but still, it was up to the man to ask.
“We are looking for some people,” the man said.
Arva continued to wait.
“Three people,” the man went on. “Two men and a woman. We are told that they sailed here from Britannia in late summer. But we do not know if they are still here.”
“They are not,” Arva replied. “They left two months ago. After the harvest, before
the winter storms.”
“Do you know where they went?” the man asked.
Arva shook his head. “They took the King’s Road north. That is all I know.” And then he added, “The woman was with child. Perhaps they needed to reach their destination before her time to deliver.”
Arva was not sure why he offered that information—hospitality surely did not require that he do so. It seemed to surprise his three guests. “With child,” the man repeated.
“Yes. I can’t imagine that she spoke of it to anyone, but the women at the market knew. They always know such things. She was showing a little, perhaps, by the time she left with the others.”
“Would anyone know where they were headed—besides ‘north’?” the man asked. “The women at the market, perhaps?”
“It is possible,” Arva admitted. “But this is a small town. If anyone knew such a thing, I would know. Everyone would know.”
The man seemed to accept this. But then the boy spoke up. “Where did they stay while they were here?” he asked.
Arva contemplated the boy. His accent was not Roman. It did not sound like any accent Arva had encountered in his travels. The boy was not the man’s son, Arva decided. So who was he? A servant? But he had not asked that question as if he were a servant. And the man was not looking at him as if he were a servant. The man, it seemed, was interested in what the boy had to say.
“They lived in a house not far from town,” Arva responded.
“We would like to see that house. Would this be possible?”
Why did they want to see the house? Arva shrugged. “They left nothing behind, if that is what you’re hoping. I am the owner, it happens. They left the place as they found it—except cleaner and in better repair. For which I am grateful.”
“Is anyone living in it now?”
Arva shook his head. “Not often that I can rent it,” he said. “Especially at this time of year.”
“Can we see it, then?” the boy persisted.
“As you wish,” Arva replied. “Tomorrow, though. It is already late.”
“Tomorrow,” the boy repeated, as if to ensure that Arva would remember.
Then they spoke of the harsh weather, and the food at Grillich’s tavern, and Arva asked them about the tumult taking place in the empire—a tumult that we had reason to worry about, even here in one of the lands that the Romans refer to as Barbarica. But they had little to say about it. The Gallians are in charge now, they said. Who knows how long this will last?
“Are you perhaps fleeing from the Gallians?” Arva asked. It was not a question you should ask strangers, but he went on: “We do not see many people from the empire except those who want to trade with us. Especially nowadays. You are welcome here, but we worry. Our town is small. We have little.”
“You do not have to worry about us, certainly,” the man replied. “We will be gone tomorrow.” But that was all he said. And soon they departed for the widow’s house.
Arva pondered what this could all mean, but he could make no sense of it. All would be well, he decided…so long as the strangers left, and no more came.
At the Widow Lochen’s house, they were quiet and pleasant. The girl dealt with Corin the stable boy about the horses; Corin promptly fell in love with her and offered to teach her as much Erse as she desired. She politely declined. As at the tavern, they paid more than they needed to.
It was Corin who noticed the weapon. He did not know it was a weapon, of course. The girl had loosened her cloak in the warm stable, and Corin stared at her more closely than he should have. He spotted the outline of something in a pocket of her loose black pants. He imagined it to be a tool of some sort, but he could not think what kind of tool it was, or why the girl would possess such a thing. He mentioned this to the kitchen boy from Grillich’s tavern, and Grillich sent the boy back to Arva with the information.
And the information troubled Arva greatly. This was no tool in her pocket; he was sure of that. The story of what the Gallians had done in Urbis had reached us, and it was their magical weapons that worried Arva. It was known that the priests had such things, but they had only used them when threatened by King Harald and his Gallian army. Now the Gallians had the weapons. And what did that mean for an out-of-the-way place like Flendys, a small town in an out-of-the-way kingdom like Scotia? Nothing good, Arva surmised.
But the girl wasn’t a Gallian; Arva was sure of that. So, did she really have one of those weapons? If so, how had she gotten it? He had no idea. He had no idea about anything. These three made him feel stupid and provincial. He loved our town and wanted to live out his days in it. But great things were happening in the outside world, and they frightened him.
In the morning, the three strangers returned to his shop, and he had to take them to the old house off the King’s Road where the other three had lived. The wind off the sea was cold and biting once again, and Arva had little desire to be outdoors. But still, he led them there, as he had promised.
They walked—it wasn’t far enough to bother saddling up the horses. The house had once belonged to old Drophus, who kept to himself and came to town only when he needed to get drunk. Two winters past, he stopped coming to town. His daughter found him by the tool shed, stone dead in the snow. It was a blessing the wolves had not found him first. The daughter had no use for the place so she sold it to Arva, who was occasionally able to rent it to a merchant desiring more space and privacy than he could find in a room in the Widow Lochen’s house. It had been empty for months before the other three had arrived; it had been empty since they left.
And now Arva was standing inside it with the man, the boy, and the girl, trying to suppress his shivering, watching them look around at the simple furniture, the fireplace, the worn rug. What did they expect to see, to find, to understand, in the place?
He saw that the man and the girl were glancing at the boy, who shook his head finally. “Is there somewhere else?” he asked Arva.
And what did that mean? “I do not understand,” Arva replied impatiently. “As I said: this is where they lived while they were here.”
The boy didn’t reply. He went out of the house and motioned to the shed. “What’s in there?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Tools, perhaps. An axe for chopping wood. A hoe for raking in the garden, come spring. Logs for the fireplace.”
The boy went over to the shed. Arva followed. The boy stopped in front and then walked around it. But there was nothing to see from the outside—just a small, windowless wooden building, barely more than a man’s height. He raised the latch on the door and went inside. Arva followed once again, although there was barely room inside for the two of them.
The place was dark and musty. It contained a few tools, as Arva had guessed. No logs, but some boards, and a couple of old chairs stacked in the corner. And one chair set down in the middle of the wooden floor. The boy sat in the chair. Why? He stayed there for a while, and then he got out of the chair and knelt on the floor and put his hands out in front of him. For some reason Arva started to become very nervous. What was the boy doing?
And then, just for a moment, Arva felt something else. He felt as if he were falling, falling, in emptiness that went on forever, that multiplied endlessly around him. And he too seemed to multiply, and every self was falling, and he knew he would fall forever.
It was the most awful thing he had ever felt.
And in an instant it passed. The boy was looking at him. “Me paenitet,” he murmured. I’m sorry. But then he turned away and seemed to stare off into nothingness. And then Arva seemed to see the nothingness—just there, above the wooden floor. And how could that be true?
Arva backed out of the shed. He wanted no part of this boy, or whatever he was staring at in the shed. He wanted to run away. But he forced himself to stay. He was not a child; he was not a girl. He had travelled across the world. He would not be afraid of emptiness, of nothingness. Of falling.
He noticed that the man and the girl were standi
ng behind him, their cloaks wrapped tightly around their bodies. They, too, were waiting for the boy.
Eventually he came out of the shed.
“Well?” the man asked.
“Affron was here,” the boy replied.
“We knew this,” the girl said.
The boy shook his head. “It’s different.”
“How?”
The boy didn’t answer her question. “We should go,” he said. “He’s waiting for me.”
“Where?”
“North, I suppose.” He gestured at Arva, as if to say: We can trust what this man told us.
They walked back to town. Arva left them at the stable. They politely thanked him for the trouble he had taken. He said it was no trouble; he was delighted to help.
He watched them head off north on the King’s Road. When they were out of sight he went directly to Grillich’s tavern and ordered a cup of whiskey, even though it was still morning. He drank it down and sat shivering by the fire.
He was not shivering from the cold.
And as he stared at the fire he found himself praying to the gods, for the first time in many years. Even though he had no idea what he was praying for.
The last person to see the three strangers was Corin the stable boy. He followed behind them as they rode, hoping for one last glimpse of the girl with the blonde hair and gray eyes. And yes, finally she turned and smiled and gave him a little half-wave before turning back to the road and her journey.
And that was enough to keep him warm for the rest of the long, lonely winter in our small town.
Four
Liber
Liber woke up sober and clear-headed, as he always did.
What was unusual was where he woke up—in a comfortable bed, in a warm room. He could not complain. Life was suddenly dangerous, but it was also suddenly interesting; life had not been interesting for a long time.
He rose and went looking for someone. A bored guard was standing by his door; the guard summoned a fat flunky named Barascus. And so the day began.
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