The Emperor's Games

by The Emperor's Games (retail) (epub)

  When Ranvig had finished, the harp came around to Correus, and they looked at him expectantly, their faces curious. The Roman might be too proud to play, their expressions said. Correus thought, fingering the harp. The songs the legions marched to were out if he was to maintain his disguise, and he didn’t know much else. He had thought of Homer, parts of which he knew by heart, or Vergil. Suddenly he grinned. Theophanes might as well have a history lesson.

  “Don’t sing very well,” he said. He flicked a finger across the harp strings. “I can whistle,” he added, “but that’s not much of an entertainment. So you’ll have to settle for a story.” An evil grin crossed his face. “Little something to give you nice dreams. This is about Julius Caesar – I expect you’ve heard of him? – and the pirates of Cilicia.”

  They looked up expectantly, and Correus smiled again, not particularly sweetly. “These pirates, you see, had begun to overreach themselves. Interfering with shipping, making themselves a menace, abducting respectable ladies. They even got up the nerve to come into Ostia Harbor and wreck a consul’s fleet. It’s always a bad idea to annoy a consul, but this one must not have been very tough because he let it go by, and so the pirates decided that they must be invincible. That’s when they took a ship and abducted a young passenger on his way to Rhodes to study law.”

  “Gonna take ’em to court, was he?” someone shouted. “And have the magistrate give ’em a nice fine?”

  “Not exactly.” Ennius, who must have heard the story, glared at him, but Correus went on cheerfully, in the voice of a man telling a nursery tale. They settled in to listen, suspicious but interested. “Well, these pirates hadn’t much imagination – they thought they’d ask twenty talents for him. Figured someone would want him back that bad. Caesar thought that was insulting. Early on he had a pretty good idea of his own worth. Thought it was embarrassing to have his price set at twenty and told them he was worth fifty, at the minimum. They laughed a lot, but they asked fifty. They figured he ought to know, and if he wanted to make them a present of thirty talents, they weren’t going to argue with him. The only trouble was, a man worth fifty talents was a little frightening. When he wanted to sleep they kept quiet, and when he wanted an audience to practice his speech-making on (speech-making is very important to lawyers) they all came round and listened. But pirates not being very bright” – Cerdic bristled, but Correus went on as if unaware of having insulted them – “they didn’t listen when he told them he’d see them again. See them crucified was what he said, actually.”

  “Anyone ever pay the ransom?” old Commius yelled. “I wouldn’t ’ave wanted him back!”

  “There were a few who thought later it would have been as well if they’d left him,” Correus said. “But someone paid the ransom, and as soon as they turned him loose, he got to Miletus, which wasn’t too far away, and raised a fleet and sailed right back to make good on his promise.” Theophanes looked as if he were laughing, and Ranvig had a thoughtful expression on his face.

  “What happened?” a tall, balding man called out. A good story was almost better than a song. A man could save it and retell it next winter, even if he couldn’t carry a tune.

  “Oh, he caught most of them,” Correus said, as if that should be self-evident. “But they’d treated him pretty well, so he wasn’t ungrateful.”

  “He let ’em go?” Commius asked.

  “No. But he cut their throats before he crucified them.”

  There was a short silence while Correus wondered if he hadn’t rather overdone it, and then they burst into laughter. “It’s a good thing you ain’t a Caesar!” Commius shouted.

  They were still laughing when the picket came in, dripping wet as usual – it rained almost continually now that autumn had begun. He leaned down and said something quietly to Theophanes. Theophanes looked at Correus and Eumenes.

  “Go back and sleep.” Theophanes stood up, and the rest followed, pushing purposefully out through the door. Cerdic stayed behind and motioned to Correus and Eumenes to follow him.

  Ranvig raised his eyebrows. “I also, I suppose?”

  Cerdic swung around. “Yes.”

  They followed him out into the rain and the gray half-light of a full moon. The gates stood open, and Correus could see the shaggy shapes of ponies in the misty light. Already the men were loading bales onto their backs. Transport, Correus thought.

  “Move it!” Cerdic said.

  They stepped up their pace, Eumenes craning his neck curiously back to watch the ponies. Ranvig paced along beside them with apparent unconcern, his head turned away from the ponies and their drivers. Correus remained thoughtful. There was no particular reason why he and Eumenes should be hustled off so quickly. It was as if Theophanes was afraid that they might know the men who came so quietly in the night to take away the booty stored in the outer sheds. But they didn’t, and there was no reason to think they might. And if they didn’t, who did? Ranvig?

  V Veii Market

  Emer pushed the barn door open and held up her lamp to peer inside. Forst was there. He had come here again to sit in the dark and brood over Nyall Sigmundson, she thought, exasperated. “Forst. If you don’t come to bed, you will catch cold out here. You are not a horse.” She pleaded with him from the doorway, shivering in her night shift, her red hair hanging in braids over the cloak that she had put on wrong side out. She was barefoot and shifted from foot to foot, wiggling her toes on the cold stone.

  Forst looked up. “You will get a worse one. Where are your shoes?”

  “I couldn’t find them,” she said impatiently. “I woke up, and you were gone again. This is the third night in a row.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” He was sitting on an upturned feed bucket. He had a twist of straw in his hand and was tying knots in it. The horses in the loose boxes on either side watched him, puzzled.

  “What do you do out here?” Emer’s face was bewildered, and Forst shrugged his shoulders. “You will make yourself sick if you do this any longer.”

  He pitched the knotted straw into the dung channel that ran past the stalls and looked around on the stone floor for another.

  “Forst!”

  “I sit here and wonder what would have happened if I had stayed away from Nyall,” Forst said tiredly. “If I had been Nyall, I would not have wanted to see anyone from the old days, either. I am a fool.”

  “You talk like one,” Emer said tartly. “If I understand you – and I am not sure that anyone could just now – you think that it is your fault that Nyall Sigmundson has cut his throat. You are very conceited.”

  Forst found another straw and began to knot it. It snapped, and he flicked it into the dung channel with the other.

  “You have told me about Nyall before,” Emer said. “How could a man like that live the way he was living?”

  “Or with what he had become,” Forst said bitterly. “But I—I showed him what that was, I think. I held a mirror under his nose, and I shamed him.”

  “You provoked what would have happened anyway,” Emer said flatly. “A man like Nyall Sigmundson does not ‘adapt’ to being maimed. Not when it loses him the chieftainship after he has already lost a war and the man who was closest to him – and his wife, too, because I think I know how he reacted to her when it happened.”

  “Nyall wasn’t like that.”

  “Men are fools,” Emer snapped, “and your Nyall was a fool, too! Men like that cannot adjust when they lose something, and so they die of it! How much longer do you really think it would have been before he slit his throat without your help?”

  “Go to bed!”

  “The more fool I for showing him to you,” Emer said. “And what do you think you can do to atone for it all? Sit on a feed bucket all night?” She turned on her heel and stamped out, letting the double doors swing shut and slam behind her.

  Forst sat looking into the dirty water in the dung channel. Emer wasn’t going to understand, not ever. It wasn’t because she was a woman, for all her furious re
marks about men. It was because she had not been born free. Or maybe simply that she had not been born German. The Free Lands were as alien to Emer as were the slopes of Olympus. There was no way to explain to Emer what the Free Lands had been, what Nyall had been before Rome, because for Emer there had never been a before.

  And what did it matter whether or not Emer understood? What was he going to do that would require that she understand? After all his thinking, Forst still didn’t know. Nervously he got up and took his lantern from its hook on the wall. Forst couldn’t shake the feeling that he owed Nyall a debt – and that somehow he was going to have to pay it.

  * * *

  Ygerna looked over the rooftop balcony into the sunlit garden. Felix had disappeared. One minute ago he had been patiently doing his lesson with Nurse in the next room – or, rather, Nurse had been doing the lesson and Felix had been looking at the green-and-gold lotus flowers painted on the walls and wanting to know why there were no frogs on them, and if there were frogs, what would they eat. The next minute he had simply been gone; “slipped through my fingers,” Nurse said.

  Helva was in the garden, sitting under the trellis, her beautiful white face further shaded from the sun by a parasol. She was dressed in trailing layers of butter-yellow silk, her gold hair pulled into a knot of ringlets on her head with a big amber pin. She was wearing an amber necklace and four bracelets, and there were amber drops in her ears. She was not, so far as Ygerna could tell, doing anything, although a spindle trailed from one hand for effect. Lady Antonia, who was herself busy from morning to sunset, overseeing the multitude of slaves belonging to the estate, had never yet succeeded in getting any work out of Helva and had long ago given up trying. Ygerna never ceased to wonder that anyone as restful as Helva should have produced a child with the nervous energy that Correus possessed. Correus was almost entirely his father’s son. Except for a slight advantage in height and his hair, which was brown and waving rather than dark and curling, it was hard to tell him from Flavius. The long aquiline face, the strong bones, the sharp-angled brows, all belonged to Appius. There must be something of Helva in him somewhere, Ygerna thought, but she hadn’t been able to find it, except perhaps for his almost intuitive understanding of what made a Celtic mind tick. Helva was a Gaul, born of one of the hundreds of tribes that had spread over Europe and Britain before the Romans came and who had all been kin to each other once. Helva had no such intuition for her own people or any other, although she had learned over the years, for self-preservation, to handle Appius as well as anyone did. This trick did not extend to Appius’s offspring, Ygerna had discovered. Correus listened to his mother patiently or irritably, according to his mood, and then went and did what he wanted to. Julia loathed Helva, and Flavius was alternately bored and amused, although Ygerna suspected that Flavius was not immune to Helva’s overpowering physical appeal; no man could have been. It just would never have occurred to him to have a try at his father’s mistress.

  Ygerna leaned farther over the balcony. She was willing to bet that Felix was in the garden somewhere, probably trying to get to the gate into the kitchen gardens and go unnoticed down to the hay fields. Felix had most of his grandfather’s slaves firmly under his small thumb. He could generally find someone willing to abet him in his flight from Nurse and lessons.

  The doors from the atrium onto the colonnade opened, and Ygerna craned her neck to see. Julia and her mother strolled out into the rose garden, with baskets and clippers in hand to prune the late roses, and Ygerna swore as she saw Felix dart out after them. Now she was going to have to cross Julia’s path. It was really too much to ask Nurse to beard that lion in her den.

  “I’ll get him, Nurse. He’s gone into the garden.” Ygerna walked carefully down the stairs to the colonnade that ran outside the ground floor, bordering the garden. It was beginning to get chilly, and a flurry of leaves from the fruit trees trained against the rose brick wall blew around her ankles. Felix was sitting with his feet among the water lilies in the fish pond.

  “Felix, that will ruin your sandals. And Nurse wasn’t through with you, you know.”

  Felix looked up from the pond. “There’s a new fish,” he said. “Lots of new fish.” Little specks of gold skittered about among the larger ones.

  “There will still be new fish after your lesson,” Ygerna said firmly. She pulled him to his feet.

  “Oh, Felix, you haven’t run away from Nurse again?’ Julia put her basket down and came over to kneel beside him.

  “I was through,” he assured her.

  “You may have been through,” Ygerna chuckled. “Nurse assures me she was not.” She occasionally thought Felix must be some goblin’s changeling, but she couldn’t help liking him. No one could.

  “You never did this before,” Julia said. She put her hands on either side of his head, which was the only way to get Felix’s undivided attention. “Look at me, Felix. What is the matter?”

  Felix shuffled his feet uncomfortably, scuffing his sandals on the edge of the pool. He ran away from Nurse all the time, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to say so.

  “Julia,” Antonia said. She handed her daughter her basket. “I think that Ygerna can deal with Felix.”

  Julia sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t visit when he’s having his lesson,” she said sadly. “Then he won’t be tempted to run away to me.”

  Ygerna gritted her teeth. “I don’t think you should worry about that. I imagine Felix was on his way to some other hideout when he met you.”

  Felix looked from one to the other. This was what his father had meant, maybe. Whatever he said, it was going to make someone upset. “I think I’ll go back to Nurse now,” he said unhappily.

  Watching his small form trudge away through the roses, most of which were taller than he was, was more than Julia could bear. “He’s afraid of you!” she said tearfully.

  “I am not a beast with three heads!” Ygerna snapped. She could feel her emotions about to boil over. “He likes me well enough until you start prodding him! Now he’s crying because he loves you, and his father has told him not to be rude to me.” She felt like crying herself.

  “Of course he loves me!” Julia said. Her jaw was set, and there were tense lines around her mouth. “I’m the only mother he’s ever had! How can you yank him away from that to live with a – a stranger!”

  “How can you try to make him think I am one? He’s Correus’s child! He belongs with us!”

  “I don’t notice Correus here to raise him!” Julia said.

  “Julia.” Antonia’s voice had a touch of iron in it. “You are being unreasonable. And unpardonably rude.”

  “I don’t care!” Julia said. “He’s my baby, Mother. You know he is!”

  “I’m sure the poor little thing thinks he is. It’s all been very hard on him.” Helva fluttered over to put her oar in, her lovely face smiling sweetly.

  Suddenly the garden was full of screaming women. Appius laid his quill down on the desk in his private office and looked out. Julia was weeping, and Ygerna practically spat flames. Appius had not been in Pompeii when Vesuvius exploded, but his sons had. He thought he was getting a better idea of the force of the volcano from his daughter-in-law than from all of Correus’s and Flavius’s descriptions. Beside her, Appius was startled to see his normally calm and intelligent daughter crying furiously like a child who knows she is being bad but can’t seem to stop. Every so often she would stop crying to snarl at Ygerna or her mother.

  Antonia, whom very few things unnerved, had simply waded into the fray and told Julia to behave herself. But then Helva drifted over to participate and something in Antonia seemed to snap. When Appius looked out, Antonia, her handsome patrician face set in an expression that would have done a Fury proud, was screaming at Helva all the things she had wanted to say for the last twenty-seven years. Helva stood there with her blue eyes wide open and her commentary on matters silenced for once, but Appius thought she looked just a trifle amused.

  As
he watched, the doors from the atrium in the central core of the house swung open again, and Flavius and Aemelia appeared on the threshold. Flavius took one look at the scene in the garden and dived back into the house, but Aemelia scurried solicitously over to Julia.

  Appius’s normal reaction when his wife and his mistress butted heads was to duck, but this was getting out of hand.

  “Juno help me.” He went out into the garden. As he approached, they all stopped screaming and looked at him. There was something to being the head of the household, he thought. Julia was hiccuping uncontrollably, and her father glared at her mottled face.

  “This is disgraceful.”

  “I know.” Julia hiccuped again.

  “Stop that.”

  “I c-can’t!”

  “No, I suppose you can’t,” Appius admitted. “You ought to be glad Lucius isn’t here. He’d ask for a divorce on the spot – I never heard such a racket. I thought it was a cat fight.”

  “It was,” Antonia said with a touch of humor. She seemed to have got a grip on things again and was her usual unruffled self except for the bright spots of color on her cheeks and the dangerous look in her eye.

  “Talking of that,” Helva said brightly, “did you hear that Pausanias has made his son divorce that unsuitable girl he married? So sensible, I think.”

  “Helva!”

  Helva smiled at him.

  “Be quiet. And go somewhere else. This doesn’t concern you.”

  “Felix is my grandson,” Helva pointed out.

  “Then confine your remarks to Felix.”

  Helva looked as if she might be about to draw a connection between Felix, Correus, Ygerna, and the benefits of divorce, when Ygerna said through gritted teeth, “That is enough!” Her hands were clenched into fists at her side, and Appius wondered if she wanted to punch Julia or Helva or possibly Aemelia, who was fluttering about Julia, trying to pat her on the shoulder and keep up a running twitter of dismay.