“Yes, my lady.” Bathanala started to curtsey, then corrected herself and instead bowed deeply. “Thank you, my lady.”
Gretyx waved her out of the room. She sat back in her chair and closed her eyes. It was so hot, even with a breeze wafting in through the open window. Summer here was vile. How did the Romans stand it? Most of them had no choice, of course.
Twenty-two executed in the Forum today, she had been told. It was a start. The crowds had loved it, apparently. Of course, there would be those who wouldn’t love these executions—those who would be terrified by them, and those who would be outraged, smart enough to understand that these people were innocent, the cases against them fabricated. But terror was acceptable to Gretyx, as long as it produced obedience. And as for those who were outraged—she would find them, and they would become the next victims.
Like Decius. She should not have waited to kill Decius. Now he had disappeared, and who knew what mischief he would foment?
The danger—always the danger—was losing one’s nerve. Carolus was one of those who was terrified, and Feslund—he simply wanted to be loved. He thought that he should be loved. He needed to understand that he could not be loved by everyone; with love came hatred. You had to accept the hatred if you wanted the love. Both her husband and her son would likely crumble without her. They would let themselves be overwhelmed by details, by scruples, by the truth. Real leaders made their own truth.
She slapped a mosquito that had landed on her neck. Such an awful place. She was tired. She was worried. But she couldn’t wait for tomorrow, in the Circus Maximus.
Feslund
Feslund sat on the grass outside the armamentarium, drinking wine with some of his mates—Mellor, Cymbian, Escondo. They had been with him on the journey from Gallia to Urbis. They had fought the guards in this armamentarium. They had freed the gants and used them to kill the soldiers in Urbis, to capture Tirelius, to claim the temple of Via, to defeat the priests and avenge King Harald. They were still with him. And tonight they were getting drunk and reminiscing.
“Do you remember the shock on the faces of those guards in there?” Escondo asked, laughing and waving at the armamentarium. “The last thing they expected was a bunch of soggy Gallians rushing in on them in the middle of the night.”
“True,” Mellor replied. “But they fought well enough, once they woke up.”
“It was a good fight,” Cymbian said. “A real fight. Once we got those gants, though…”
Feslund sighed and poured himself more wine. His soldiers had never liked the gants. Soldiers liked to win, but they liked to win because they were smarter and stronger than their opponent, better trained and better led, better with their horses and better with their swords—not because they possessed magical weapons and the other side didn’t. “We took the risk and it paid off,” he said, somewhat defensively. The others muttered their agreement. There were times when they could have turned back, when perhaps they should have turned back. After the storm on the great sea, especially, when one of their ships had been lost and half their soldiers had drowned. Including Arminius, his closest friend, his wisest comrade. “I miss Arminius,” he said.
Muttered agreement again. “There was no one like Arminius,” Mellor said. “Best soldier I ever met.”
“He would have helped afterward,” Escondo pointed out.
If he were alive, we wouldn’t be in this mess was what Escondo meant. Feslund felt a surge of anger. The men had always thought better of Arminius than they had of him. Feslund was the prince, but Arminius was the one they looked up to.
Still, he did miss Arminius. Arminius never gave him bad advice, and was never afraid to say what he thought. Could he have stood up to Gretyx? Probably not; no one could stand up to his mother, once she felt strongly about something. But perhaps he’d have had ideas about how to work with her, soften her….
Avenging King Harald had been the easy part, it turned out. What came after was the hard part.
Oh, it didn’t matter. Arminius was at the bottom of the great sea. And today the executions had started.
“You know who I miss?” Cymbian asked. “The boy and the girl.”
“The boy couldn’t ride a horse,” Mellor pointed out. “The girl was a natural, though.”
Yes, the boy and the girl. Larry and Palta. Feslund hadn’t thought of them in a while. “Palta knew how to get us in to Urbis,” he said. “She found that postern. And she could speak Gallic, a little.”
“And she knew the route to the armamentarium,” Escondo added. “Plus, she figured out where the key was to the room with the gants. She was a smart one. The boy wasn’t much.”
“Where did they go?” Cymbian asked. “They were supposed to be guarding the temple for us.”
“Must’ve walked into Via, is what I think,” Escondo said. “Pass me the wine, will you?”
Feslund handed him the jug. “You walk into Via, you don’t come back out,” he said. “Unless you know what you’re doing.”
“Via scares me,” Cymbian said. “Nothing else in this world scares me, but Via does. Why would anyone just walk into it?”
“They were different from us, Larry and Palta,” Mellor said. “I liked them. Without them, we wouldn’t be here.”
At that, the soldiers fell silent. They didn’t want to be here. They wanted to be home in Gallia. Feslund knew that. Some of them had asked him already if they could leave—maybe all of them had asked. He couldn’t remember. They wanted to be with their families, be with their own kind. They would be heroes in Gallia.
But he couldn’t stand to let them go. He couldn’t stand to be here alone. Or worse, with his bride.
“We’re introducing Bathanala at the Circus Maximus tomorrow,” he said. “The wedding will be sometime in the fall.”
The soldiers stayed silent.
And that made Feslund angry again. “What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Don’t you approve of her? She’s a princess! She’s better than the lot of you!”
“Don’t really know her, my lord,” Escondo replied mildly.
“Seems very pleasant,” Cymbian added.
Feslund grabbed the jug back and took another long swallow. “She’s stupid,” he said abruptly.
At that, the soldiers burst into laughter. Feslund laughed too.
“But at least she’s beautiful,” Mellor replied.
The soldiers laughed some more.
“Well, at least her name is beautiful,” Cymbian said. “Babanana.”
“No, no,” Escondo said. “Balabala.”
Feslund smiled. “I just call her ‘Bath’ for short,” he said. “But I think she’ll answer to anything.”
“She’ll answer to anything your mother calls her, anyway,” Cymbian said.
Feslund lunged at Cymbian then, grabbing his throat and pushing him back onto the ground. Went too far. The fool. The idiot. “Do not insult my mother!” he shouted. He could feel hands on him, trying to pull him away. Finally he loosened his grip on Cymbian and let the others drag him back.
“Sorry, my lord,” Cymbian croaked. “Wasn’t meant to be an insult. Just fooling about.” But Feslund looked into his eyes and saw something different: rage, perhaps. Or, worse, contempt.
He struggled to stand up. By the time he was on his feet he couldn’t remember why he’d been angry. His head spun from all the wine. He suddenly felt sick. He needed to go to bed. But which way was he supposed to go?
“We can take you home if you like, my lord,” one of the soldiers said. Feslund couldn’t tell which.
“You should get some rest, my lord,” another one said.
“Tomorrow is an important day, my lord,” a third said. “You must be ready for it.”
He felt their hands supporting him, leading him. He let himself be led. They were good lads, even if they went too far sometimes, overstepped boundaries. They were his mates. A man needs his mates.
And tomorrow he had to walk into the Circus Maximus and, before a hundred
thousand people, take out a gant and execute Tirelius.
Cymbian
Cymbian stayed outside as his mates staggered into the barracks. He too should get some rest; they would all need to be sober in the morning. But he didn’t feel like sleeping.
He was not especially upset that Feslund had attacked him. They all knew how Feslund got when he was drunk. It was the other things that upset him—the executions in the Forum, for example. It was obvious that none of those people were guilty, that the story about the priests stealing the grain was a lie. Was he the only one bothered by this? He had tried talking about it with Escondo and Mellor, and they had just shrugged it off. It wasn’t their job to bother themselves with such matters, they said. Princes rule; soldiers obey.
Fair enough; but it didn’t seem right somehow.
He looked up at the temple of Via. Ah, things had been easier when there was just a battle to be fought. Now the world had changed, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
Arminius would have known.
Cymbian sighed. Perhaps someday he would be as wise as Arminius.
Liber
Liber waited till late at night to go to the palatium. The night was warm and muggy. Urbis was quiet except for the trilling of insects; the forum was deserted, the palatium was dark. He carried a torch and nodded to the guards as he went inside the building. He was the governor of Roma now, not the chief minister, but still they seemed to accept his right to be here. With some difficulty he found the staircase that brought him down to the prison.
It was a tiny place, of course, just a narrow hallway of cells guarded by a couple of sleepy soldiers. The only excitement here had been when Affron and Valleia had managed to escape from their cells on the night before they were to be executed.
Liber had not been in Urbis then, but he had thought about that escape a lot.
The guards stood at attention when he entered. They looked a bit confused. “I wish to speak to the prisoner Tirelius,” he said.
“Yes, my lord. Do you want him brought to you?”
“Yes. I’ll be in the room where we met before.”
“Do you wish food and drink, my lord? We can perhaps—”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Liber found the room and put his torch in a bracket on the wall. Then he sat and waited until one of the guards produced the pontifex.
Tirelius looked worse than he had at their previous meeting—a shriveled, gaunt figure with a single wisp of white hair on his head. He was wearing a thin, dingy white robe. His eyes were bloodshot; his hands trembled.
The guard lowered him into a chair opposite Liber. “Shall I stay, my lord?” he asked.
Liber waved him away.
He stared at Tirelius in the flickering torchlight. Tirelius met his gaze for a moment, and then his eyes slid away, uninterested. “Do you know what is going to happen tomorrow?” Liber asked him.
Tirelius did not respond.
“You will be brought to the Circus Maximus. After the chariot race, you will be led out to the platform where Prince Feslund just crowned the victor. You will then be found guilty of committing numerous crimes against the people of the empire. You will have committed few if any of these crimes, but that doesn’t matter. Prince Feslund will then pronounce sentence upon you, and the sentence of course will be death. He will then raise a gant, aim it at you, and, in front of the screaming mob whose thirst for blood has not been sated by the race, he will obliterate you.
“None of them will have seen such a thing before. When it happens, they will go mad with excitement. But of course you will not experience any of this excitement, because your life will be over.”
Liber fell silent. Tirelius said nothing.
“But there is an alternative,” Liber said finally. “Come with me. Now. We go upstairs, out of the palatium, then across the forum to the temple. I tell the temple guards that I am granting your last wish, which is to visit Via one final time. They let us inside. But we do not simply stare at Via; we enter it. You take us both to another world. A world where the Gallians cannot follow us, cannot find us. A world where you can live out your life in peace and comfort.”
This time Tirelius responded. His voice was a hollow croak. “The last time we spoke you had other ideas,” he pointed out.
“Ideas that you rejected,” Liber replied. “You wouldn’t help the Gallians, so I could do nothing for you. And here we are.”
“I wouldn’t help, so now you are putting me to death?”
“It isn’t me,” Liber said. “Our rulers have decided that you are of most use to them if you are executed.”
“And you don’t agree?”
“I don’t care. At this point I simply want to survive. I fear that survival is going to be increasingly difficult in the empire.”
“Why don’t you leave the empire yourself? Why take me?”
“Because I am not a viator. I only know how to get to one other world. It is cold and alien, and I don’t know how to survive in it. Also, I have had to show the Gallians how to get there, so they might be able to track me down if they wanted to. You and I could go to another Roma—a place we both understand—only without the Gallians. Surely you know how to reach such a world.”
“Of course I do,” Tirelius replied.
“So, you can go to that world and live, or you can stay here and die. Which is it?”
Liber watched Tirelius ponder the choice. He didn’t ponder very long. “I will die in any case,” the pontifex said. “And I prefer to die here.”
“To die tomorrow,” Liber said.
Tirelius shrugged. “Dying will be a blessing. You might consider it yourself,” he added.
“I am trying to help you,” Liber insisted.
“I do not wish to be helped,” Tirelius replied. “I wish to die. The Gallians have granted that wish. I am grateful to them for their kindness. Please take me back to my cell, so I can prepare for my death.”
I should have known better, Liber thought. The man would give him nothing. He summoned the guards and watched them escort Tirelius back to his cell. Then he left the palatium and looked across the forum at the temple in which Via hovered, its magic forever unattainable to him.
Like Tirelius, he was doomed to die on Terra.
Twenty-Seven
Carolus
This will not end well, King Carolus thought. What had they achieved, after all? Revenge? Fine, fine, his grandfather had been avenged. At the cost of Carolus’s daughter. But now what? After revenge has been satisfied, life must go on. And did they really want this life, in Roma, struggling to hold on to an empire they had no clue how to rule?
His wife did.
Gretyx thought she knew how to rule it: with terror. And perhaps she was right. Perhaps she would succeed. But ah, wouldn’t it be better to be back in their palace in Gallia? Under the thumb of the priests, yes, but that was not so bad…life went on pleasantly enough. There were no executions, no heads spitted on poles.
Now they were headed to the Circus Maximus, and more horrors. He sat in the open carriage next to his wife and opposite Feslund, Bathanala, and Bathanala’s father. The women held parasols to block out the blazing afternoon sun. Feslund’s eyes were bloodshot; he’d been out drinking last night, of course. Bathanala looked frightened, as usual. She was pale but pretty, and she had seemed pleasant enough, the couple of times he had spoken to her. He had tried to reassure her that everything would be all right. But she didn’t believe him, he was sure; he didn’t believe himself.
Gretyx herself had once been such a bride, given to Carolus when she was seventeen by a nobleman eager to please Carolus’s father. She’d had no choice in the matter; neither had he. But she had been dazzling: beautiful and intelligent and totally sure of herself.
He thought sometimes that he had been afraid of her since the day they met.
Now they were traveling through Roma, and crowds lined the streets. Many of the people were cheering; not all. “They lo
ve us,” Gretyx remarked with satisfaction, waving to the crowd.
Did she really believe that? She had spent countless denarii to buy their love—money she had gotten from Bathanala’s father for the privilege of having her marry Feslund. But perhaps she was right. The executions had gone well, he’d heard. Some of the people, at least, were convinced that the Gallians were protecting them from the evil priests. But in truth the only priest the Gallians were protecting them from was a shriveled little man who had been locked away for months and probably wanted only to die.
“It’s too hot,” Feslund muttered. “I can’t believe how hot this city is.”
“Don’t complain,” Gretyx ordered. “Never complain.”
Feslund fell silent.
The carriage came to a stop in a plaza outside the Circus Maximus, and they all got out. The heat seemed even fiercer here. Flags hung limply from poles. Soldiers held back the crowds, who shouted and waved. Liber rushed up to meet the carriage, bowing deeply and explaining what was going to happen. Liber was not the worst of the Romans who worked for them. He looked haggard and beset today. He led them past the crowd and into a dark passageway inside the Circus; it was blessedly cool there. “That’s better,” Feslund muttered.
Bathanala looked as if she were about to faint.
It was only going to get worse for her, Carolus knew. First the chariot race, and then the execution. Perhaps Bathanala liked chariot races; many people did, even young women. Carolus found them dreary and artificial. He, and most other Gallians, preferred the excitement of the hunt. When you were hunting, it was your own body that was at risk, not a stranger’s; it was your achievement, your glory when you killed the beast.
Perhaps Bathanala liked public executions as well as chariot races; he didn’t think so.
No one asked him if he’d wanted to come to the Circus Maximus, of course. No one asked if he liked chariot races and public executions. It had been assumed; it was his duty. It was Bathanala’s duty, as well.
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