The Emperor's Games

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

  It was a girl, and since Correus hadn’t been there to object, Ygerna had named her Eilenn, which was a British name and made Antonia raise her eyebrows. Then they had officially named her Flavia Agricolina, like Ygerna, and all raised their eyebrows again when Ygerna, clutching the baby to her and glowering, had made them send the wet nurse away.

  It was considered an unusual virtue in a Roman lady to nurse her own children, and while Antonia had approved in principle, she had been dubious.

  “My dear, you are very small, and you’ve had a hard time. There may not be enough milk. And don’t you think you should rest?”

  “My mother was small. She fed me.” Ygerna put the baby to her breast, and old Thais, who had somehow designated herself in charge, said tartly that that was quite right. To Ygerna, it was one more perplexity of the Romans that they should think that having gone through so much to get this baby, she would now wish to give it to another woman.

  Ygerna simply didn’t want to think of the baby’s birth. If she did, she might not be willing to do it again. The child had finally come, after two days’ labor, on the night of the winter solstice, while the rest of the household was celebrating the Saturnalia. Shrieks of laughter and the high voices of Felix and Julia’s and Aemelia’s children came through the open windows with the moonlight.

  The next morning Felix came and peered expectantly into the basket at his half sister. He would have preferred a boy, but you could play with a girl if you had to.

  “Would she like my old top? Grandfather gave me a new one.” Felix was prepared to do the noble thing.

  “It’s going to be a while before she’s big enough for tops,” Ygerna said. Children always seemed to think that babies were born two years old.

  Felix studied the baby, red in the face, sleeping, and no bigger than Ygerna’s cat. “Then what good is she?” he asked finally.

  “Shame on you!” Thais said, but Ygerna was laughing.

  “At the moment, not much, but she’ll improve, I promise you.”

  Thais bustled Felix off to his own nurse and his lesson, and Ygerna sank back into the pillows, grateful for the old woman’s brisk efficiency. Baucis the cat yawned and stretched on the coverlet beside her. Baucis liked nothing better than to have someone take to bed in the daytime.

  Eilenn still wasn’t up to Felix’s standards, but she was big enough to be taken out, and Ygerna gratefully resumed her visits to Berenice, sub rosa as before. Antonia would have been shocked, Appius would have disapproved, and Flavius would have forbidden it. But Berenice fascinated her, with her worldly air and her tales of Judaea and Jerusalem and the exotic Eastern kingdoms where she had reigned. Ygerna still hadn’t asked her why she never went back. She thought she knew.

  Julius drove her on these excursions when he had finished with the ponies, and Cottia accompanied her. Ygerna had told them both that if they ever told anyone her trips were not to shop in the Veii market, she would make a magic they wouldn’t like. Cottia believed her, and Julius was happiest when outsmarting someone, which was just as well.

  She thought that maybe Berenice, who had lived among the Romans for so long, could explain things. “I thought I understood them,” Ygerna said, “but then Flavius tells me what is happening, and I remember that when I was thirteen I thought that maybe Romans weren’t men at all. I do not understand the way they rule themselves. The emperor has more power than a king, but if he called himself a king, they would depose him, and he always pretends that he is only doing what the Senate tells him to. Now he has a man who is committing treason, and he won’t have him killed because he promised the Senate he wouldn’t without evidence. What is evidence that he hasn’t got now? Why does he care what the Senate says when he is emperor?”

  “The Senate has more power than you would think,” Berenice said, “but it’s a quiet sort of power. An emperor who is wise will listen.”

  “Also,” Ygerna said, “they will sit about like old harpers telling stories of the old days and complain that Rome should be a republic again, but they will let any man with enough soldiers take the throne and think themselves lucky if he is not as evil or as crazy as the last one.”

  “Soldiers are very hard to argue with,” Berenice said. “That is the problem. Rome needs soldiers to contain all her provinces, but that gives too much power to the generals, so the generals make themselves emperors. Without the army, Rome could be a republic again.”

  “Without the army, Rome could be gone,” Ygerna said. She thought of Governor Frontinus stitching a line of forts and roads back and forth across her homeland in the Silure hills until there was no corner to hide in that wasn’t under Rome’s eye. “Correus says that the army is the empire.”

  “That is the trouble. The only answer is to find an emperor who is strong enough to hold the other generals back. Vespasian was a man like that. Your father-in-law might have been too, if he had wanted to fight Vespasian for it. Titus is one.” Berenice sighed. “But it is the same with any power. It comes to rule you in the end, if you are going to hold onto it.”

  “And the emperor’s brother?”

  Berenice’s dark eyes were serious under the emerald paint on the lids. “Domitian wants the power, but he isn’t willing to sacrifice his pleasures for it. It makes him vulnerable. He lets jackals trot after him if it will pay him to. Marius Vettius is one of the ones who are yipping at his heels at the moment. Don’t fall foul of him. Or of Domitian.”

  Ygerna shrugged. “No one is interested in me.”

  Berenice shook her head, and the pearl drops that hung from the fillet in her hair danced gently. “In the palace everyone is interested in everyone. And Vettius is dangerous.” She sighed again. “I agree, the emperor should kill him and have done with it, but he won’t. And you are married to a man who is brother to the man who is making himself a nuisance to Vettius. If I were any one of your family, I would go carefully.”

  I will tell that to Correus, Ygerna thought solemnly. If he isn’t killed trying to trap this Vettius’s tame pirates.

  * * *

  “It seems you’ve a mommy who loves you, after all.” Theophanes was smiling, a dark, unamused smile behind his badger-striped beard. His smile stretched the sickle-shaped scar on his cheek into a longer curve.

  “You mean they paid?” Correus sat up, not even bothering to take offense at the pirate’s tone, and shook Eumenes awake.

  Eumenes came up with a start and a hand where his knife would be if the pirates had let him have one.

  “Home! Eumenes, we’re going home!”

  Home as far as fleet headquarters on the Rhenus, Eumenes thought. And then out on a ship again. He fought down a cold flash of panic. He hadn’t realized how deep was the fear that had come with him out of the emperor’s lake until he was actually on board the merchantman with Correus and it was too late to run. I could run now, he thought. I doubt he’d chase me. He thought of Correus shaking the water out of him and changed his mind. Eumenes was a man who held his gratitude longer than most.

  “We’ll take you inland past the fens,” Theophanes said, “with your trunks and enough coin to get you home. You’ve been a damned nuisance and ill luck, I’m thinking.” He went off moodily.

  “We can hope so,” Eumenes muttered.

  The pirates had found their pickings thin of late. The information continued to come, but the whole Rhenus coast was alive with Roman warships. The Romans had pulled them out of the Rhenus patrol fleet, and they would have to go back eventually or leave too much barbarian coast unguarded at their backs, but in the meantime Theophanes was in a foul temper. They couldn’t catch him, and they couldn’t find his camp, but they could convoy his prizes safely out of reach for as long as they could spare the ships. It was a waste of his time and theirs in the long run, from his viewpoint.

  With the coast awash in Roman warships, Theophanes put Correus and Eumenes on ponies at night and sent old Commius and two others to guide them as far as the first road past the fens. They ha
lf expected blindfolds, but Commius just laughed and said that anyone who wanted to try coming back through the fens could come with his blessing. “There’s more bodies than gray Wulf’s in that bog.”

  The ground heaved underfoot with thick, sucking noises and the faint phosphorescence of decay danced just above the surface. Commius followed no visible trail as far as Correus could tell. Correus prayed fervently that Theophanes hadn’t found the reason to blame them for the warships that were hugging the coast. It would be easy enough to slide him and Eumenes under that shaking, gray-green slime and let them lie forever.

  At dawn they halted where Commius’s trail came out of the bog onto a dirt road running south across a flat meadow. The grass was wet and still calf-high in mist. Commius repossessed the ponies, left their trunks by the side of the track, and waved a cheerful good-bye.

  “Damn you!” Correus shouted. “How am I going to carry these?”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think they’ll be stolen before you can fetch a wagon for them,” Commius said.

  “I’ll fetch an army and crucify every one of you!” Correus said furiously.

  “Just like Julius Caesar.” Commius laughed uproariously. “I’m thinking Julius Caesar must have known which end of a spear was up. Better go back to Rome, lad. It’s too rough in the wilds of Germany for you!” He departed chortling.

  “What are we going to do with these?” Eumenes asked.

  “Leave them. I don’t want them bad enough to haul two trunks down this goat track. Let the wood elves have them.” Wood elves were what took spare pilum points and blankets from the quartermaster’s stores in frontier posts.

  Eumenes shrugged. It was a waste, but he wasn’t a donkey. They set out in the growing light along the track. It was rutted with cart wheels, and only a few green sprigs of battered grass grew up between them, so it would come to a village eventually, he supposed.

  * * *

  The Lower Rhenus Fleet had gone back where it belonged, to its home base at Colonia Agrippinensis, and only the usual patrols plied the foggy coastal waters. And the information introduced into the Shipping Offices in Rome at the start of spring followed its accustomed path.

  “Are they going to swallow that?” Eumenes was dressed in a good tunic and silver armband as befitted the servant of the fleet prefect. He looked dubiously at the paint-and-canvas superstructure that the seamen swarming all over the trireme Justitia were lashing to her sides. “It looks like a stage set to me. I keep expecting some fool in a blond wig to come on as Helen.”

  “It’s only to alter the outline,” Correus said in the voice of a man who has explained this to six ship’s captains already. “When they get close enough to see clearly, we’ll have dumped it, anyway. Watch those lashings,” he added to Justitia’s captain. “I don’t want to lose time hacking about trying to get rid of the thing so we can maneuver. They’ve got to come apart fast.”

  Beside Justitia, three more triremes and two big quinquiremes from the British Channel Fleet at Gesoriacum were being similarly outfitted. In the lower docks, a covey of lightweight Rhenus patrol craft were getting a new paint job in sandy tan, and the smell of the hot wax that was the medium for the pigment mingled with the usual shipyard smells of pitch and new rope and the crisp, cold scent of the Rhenus itself. Colonia Agrippinerisis was governmental headquarters for the province of Lower Germany, and although the legions that had once garrisoned it had been moved to other forts along the Rhenus, the fleet had kept its headquarters there, at the naval station to the south of the city. The fleet prefect was accorded luxurious quarters in the governor’s palace in Colonia. So far Correus had used them only for a few hours of exhausted sleep, which, by the time he and Eumenes had ridden into Colonia with a cavalry escort from Aduatuca, he could probably have achieved on a bed of rocks. Theophanes’s men had left them fifteen miles from the nearest village, and close to a hundred from any town large enough to have a military post. His feet and legs ached, and the cavalry nag he had ridden from Aduatuca was a far cry from his own horse, Antaeus, who had spent the winter fattening his gold hide in the governmental stables in Colonia. And that, Correus thought, was another point added to his score with Theophanes – that and the fact that no man likes to play the fool for another. It would be a pleasure now to revise Theophanes’s opinion of him.

  The only bright point had been a letter from Ygerna, waiting for him at headquarters in Colonia, to tell him that he had a daughter, and when could they join him, please? It would be nice to have Ygerna to curl up with again after a winter of Eumenes’s company and a six-foot cubicle laid with straw. Eumenes apparently felt the same. He disappeared every evening into a whorehouse on the edge of the glassworkers’ quarter in Colonia, and unless Correus sent another slave to find him, he stayed there until morning. He was saving up, he told Correus, in case Theophanes didn’t buy it and he ended up in a bog with gray Wulf.

  Now he stood with Correus on the dock, watching the wicker frames being lashed to a quinquireme’s hull and the canvas stretched over them. A trio of sailors with paint buckets were adding artistic touches to the canvas, and Correus shouted at them to just paint the damned thing – if the pirates got close enough to see painted boards and oarlocks, the artists had better start saying prayers. Eumenes had a light tick beside his left eye that flickered while he watched them. He’s afraid of water, Correus thought, and wondered what other nightmares Eumenes had carried away with him from that lake. He had considered leaving Eumenes behind in Colonia when that had dawned on him, but Eumenes just gritted his teeth and shook his head.

  “Likely they’ll send you back to the army sooner or later,” he said. “I’ll stick it till then.”

  * * *

  Six silhouettes showed over the horizon, fat and low in the water, with a full cargo, sails spread, working past the Rhenus delta to Gesoriacum on the Gaulish coast.

  There was a stiff breeze, but it was in the wrong quarter and the merchantmen tacked laboriously. Theophanes grinned behind his beard. “Slaves, and the winter tribute from the

  Rhenus tribes. That should make up for our losses and give Rome a sting in the tail to boot. Our luck’s on the turn.” Luck mattered. Too long a stretch with no booty, and the pirates would start thinking of another leader.

  Cerdic nodded. He had no particular liking for Rome, and there was a slave brand on his arm to prove it. It would be pleasant to spend Caesar’s tribute for him.

  “Fast stroke!” Theophanes shouted, and the oars that had been moving gently to hold the liburnian in her hiding place picked up the stroke and cut the water with a splash. She shot out from behind an outer bank of dunes, and Cerdic hoisted a signal flag above the bow. Other ships glided into place behind her. Across the water, the merchant convoy saw them and scrambled frantically to come about. Theophanes chuckled. There was no sign of the watchdog galleys that had plagued him the past months. And even if they’d had the wind, a loaded merchantman couldn’t outrun his faster craft. It looked like they were going to try, though. He nodded to Cerdic, and the hammer stroke picked up to top speed.

  * * *

  “Here they come,” Justitia’s captain said softly.

  “Let them come a little closer,” Correus said.

  “We’ll need time to get clear of the mess and come about again,” the captain said. A dozen sailors were crouched like monkeys along the false sides, their knives out.

  “You’re the judge of that,” Correus said, “but leave it as long as you can.”

  “Right.” They had made an attempt to run, from the look of it, but the pirate ships were closing fast. “Now! Drop them!”

  The wicker and canvas slid into the water with a splash, and sailors in the stern took poles and poked the discarded superstructures clear of the oarlocks.

  “Out oars!”

  The trireme swung around and pointed her lead-sheathed ram at Theophanes’s ships.

  “Typhon take his soul!” Theophanes saw the wicker frames drop and knew that his i
nformer in Rome had sold him to save his own skin. The Roman decks bristled with men, and he could see the sunlight flash off armor and metal shield bosses.

  “Do we fight?” Cerdic stood at his shoulder again, his legs braced against the roll of the ship, watching the galleys boiling across the open water toward them, red oars swinging.

  Theophanes thought. They ran from galleys as a matter of course. It wasn’t worth a fight to take a warship, and they might not win. But he had gotten too close to these.

  Cerdic shouted an order, and the oars backed in the water as the overseer on the rowing decks ordered the liburnian brought around before they were rammed. A catapult bolt whistled overhead, and the helmsman swore and flattened himself on the deck, the tiller swinging wildly. Theophanes grabbed it and kicked the helmsman up. The helmsman, praying and gibbering, flattened himself again as another bolt went by his ear, and Theophanes shouted for Cerdic. Lifting the helmsman by the arms, they flung him into the ship’s wake, and Cerdic leaned hard on the tiller against the weight of the heavy steering oar. Theophanes, narrowing his eyes, watched the hunting pack of galleys bear down on them. His liburnian, Ennius’s, and a few other of the fastest of his ships could outrun the Romans, he thought. With luck they could dive into the maze of the Rhenus delta and be gone before the Romans had fought their way through the slower pirate craft. Or they could engage with the Romans – but the Romans had six ships full of soldiers.

  “Do we fight?” Cerdic asked again.

  Theophanes shook his head. “No. We run.”

  * * *

  “They’re turning, sir!”