by David Drake
"I told the boys to play outside so they wouldn't disturb you," Zoe said, keeping her eyes on the baby. "But Perses came in saying he was hungry, and I thought I'd better feed them. It's midday."
Lycon yawned and caressed her generous hips. Zoe had put on more weight than he had during their fifteen years of marriage—but by Herakles, she still was the stuff of his dreams on nights when he slept in the mud of another continent, and if he had some rival here in Rome for her love, he would soon learn his name—and then there would be no rival.
"No, no," Lycon told her. "I could have got up any time. It just felt so good to lie in for a change. No responsibilities. No beasts stalking me in turn. It's good to be home."
Home was Zoe and their children. It pleased Lycon that he could afford an apartment—quite a nice apartment, too: spacious and only one flight up. Vonones might have far more wealth, but Vonones had neither wife nor acknowledged children, and Lycon sensed that his friend envied him for this. As consciousness cut through Lycon's hangover, he decided he was a fool to suspect Zoe of infidelity. True, he might not be the best of husbands and fathers, but Zoe had known that before they were married.
Zoe rocked the baby back and forth as though the motion would settle the correct words onto her own tongue. "Perhaps you'd like something to eat now, also. Just a second and I'll bring some bread . . ."
Lycon's arm anchored her as effortlessly as he would have immobilized a gazelle while it was being trussed—though there was little enough of the gazelle in Zoe's figure these days. "Here, just sit by me a minute, Zoe," he said mildly. "I'll be going to the bath in a little while, I suppose, and I may get something to eat there."
He paused, thinking over what Zoe had said a moment before and correlating that with dimly remembered scraps of conversation he had overheard while he dozed. "Alexandros isn't at school, then, today?"
Zoe turned her body away from her husband, placing Glauce against her other breast. "Well, Alexandros hasn't been going to school for some time now—for twenty days." Zoe spoke into the infant's fluffy hair. "There was trouble. You know, the whippings they get if Sempronianus doesn't like their recitations?"
"Alexandros is going to need an education, if we're going to get him into the Civil Service, Zoe," Lycon said—almost gladly. It was a relief to understand now the reason for his wife's unease. Nothing here a good belting couldn't solve.
"I know, Lycon, I . . ."
"Or maybe you'd like me to start taking him with me on hunting trips, is that it?" Lycon went on, knowing that Zoe loathed that idea. She had already lost too many children—and most of her life with her husband. "I'd thought that, hadn't I? But no, it would be too dangerous. We owed him something better."
The beastcatcher swung himself off the bed. Despite his words, he had not raised his voice. A long-cherished dream was now unexpectedly within his reach; Lycon was already envisioning Alexandros at his side, watching lions group about their watering hole.
He pressed home his next point, already only for rhetoric. "Do you think cadging a ticket for the dole and picking up what he can in the way of petty theft is a better way of life?"
"I said," Zoe continued firmly, "that when you got home we'd find him another schoolmaster. I . . ."
"And just what is wrong with Sempronianus?" Lycon demanded in triumph. "He's the best I could afford."
Lycon continued to fume in Zoe's silence. "All right, he caned the boys—but none of the masters are going to suffer fools gladly. It's a tough world out there, Zoe, just as tough in the offices on the Palatine as it is for some unlettered dolt like me—beating through the reeds on the Nile. We won't do the boy any favors to teach him that if he whines, he won't have to do anything he doesn't want to do. I wish you'd waited for me to get back."
Zoe swallowed and sat up to face him. "Do you remember Rachel—on the fourth floor? Their Moises goes to Sempronianus too. Rachel, she . . . Moises told her that sometimes there are boys who are being caned for mistakes every day, every time they recite, no matter how well they do. And then Sempronianus takes them alone into one of the massage cubicles—the class meets in the Baths of Naevius. Afterward . . . that boy doesn't have trouble with his recitations for a week or so."
Lycon's lips were dry. They would not form the words. He dampened them very carefully with the tip of his tongue. His tongue seemed dry as well. "Go on," he said without emotion, as he reached for his boots.
"Alexandros won't go to class anymore. And I won't make him go."
"Well, well," murmured Lycon, as he laced onto his feet the army pattern footgear he had worn in from the field. Normally he switched to lighter sandals whenever he was going to spend any length of time in a civilized area. "Who's the slave you were sending to school with Alexandros? Geta? I'll want him along."
"Lycon," Zoe began, "I just thought it might be better if we found Alexandros another schoolmaster."
Lycon stamped his foot and enjoyed the sound. Hobnails were a detriment to a man walking on slimy pavement. The iron skidded instead of biting as it did in soil—or in flesh.
"Zoe," the beastcatcher said, in a voice as hard as the iron he had just ground against the floor, "I've just decided that Alexandros will be better off with me in the field than he will be here in Rome learning to recite Homer. I think I'm going to discuss that with Master Sempronianus. I'm certain he will agree."
"Lycon!" Zoe pleaded, as she rose and stepped toward him with her free hand outstretched. "You mustn't do anything hasty!"
"I'm not going to do anything hasty," Lycon promised, his tone a confirmation of her worst fears.
Perses stared open-mouthed as his father strode out of the bedchamber. Lycon's household was small; the four slaves were barely the minimum staff that respectability demanded for a man at his level of success. The slaves had ducked out of sight in healthy fear of meeting their master in his present state of mind. Perses' nurse reached out toward the three-year-old boy, bleated when she saw Lycon coming from the bedroom, and bolted back into the kitchen without her charge.
Lycon's walking staff was iron-shod hickory, and as big around as the beastcatcher's own powerful wrists. He snatched it with one hand, while he jerked open the door to the stairwell with the other. The family's doorkeeper was cowering in his alcove.
Vonones stood on the landing with his hand raised to knock. He looked terrified. The two men blocking the stairs behind him were soldiers.
"Lycon, thank the Light I've caught you at home," the dealer gasped.
"Whatever it is, it can wait!" snapped Lycon as he started to push past. Zoe and one of the female servants were in the main room, wailing like mourners.
"It can't wait," Vonones said.
Chapter Seven
The barge was drawn up in normal fashion in one of the stone slips beneath the Portico of Aemilius, headquarters for the city's grain supply.
"Had to tow it like that the last three miles," said the foreman of the teamsters glumly. "Me on the steering oar, too, because the boys said Master could crucify them before they'd get aboard that barge. And you couldn't tell how bad it was, not really, till the sun come up after we'd docked."
The foreman was an Egyptian, but he spoke a dialect of common Greek that Lycon had no difficulty in understanding. The beastcatcher had no difficulty in understanding the teamster's fears, either.
There were now almost a hundred men standing on the levee, looking down on the barge slips in the Tiber. The numbers were nothing unusual for that was ordinarily the busiest part of the city—the lifeline by which was imported virtually all the food for a populace of uncertain hundreds of thousands. Slave gangs paced up and down the ramps from the levee to the slips. Each man carried a narrow pottery jar of wheat up to the measuring stations in front of the portico, then returned to the barges for another load.
The difference at this particular station was that the men were motionless and almost silent. The stevedores who would normally have been working the slips squatted on their haunch
es instead—naked except for loin cloths and, in rare instances, chain hobbles that permitted them to walk but not run. The heavily-armed Germans who glowered at the slaves and the surroundings in general might have dampened the normal enthusiasm of men released unexpectedly from work, but perhaps more of the reason lay in the closed palanquin that the Germans guarded. Lady Fortune, the only deity to whom Lycon still sacrificed, knew that the palanquin and the man it contained inspired such fear with good reason. The life of any or everyone here balanced upon the uncertain whim of lord and god Domitian.
Nonetheless, the men watching on the levee were in no way as silent as those sprawled upon the barge below.
"Let's go on down," Lycon said. "Yes, you too, dammit!" he added to the foreman, who had tried to edge away.
The barge had loaded grain at Portus from a North African freighter far too large to navigate the Tiber itself. The freighter would be refitting for several weeks, so a dozen of its crewmen had hitched a ride into Rome on the barge.
A yoke of oxen under the foreman and two subordinates drew the barge along the fifteen-mile towpath, while a helmsman guided it from the stern. Night had already fallen, but the process of feeding the city could not be interrupted by the cycles of the sun. One of the teamsters walked ahead with a rushlight—another firefly in the continuous chain of barges plodding toward Rome to be unloaded and then to drift back to Portus on sweeps and the current.
"They were singing," the foreman said. "The sailors were. There'd been some wine in the manifest too, you know." He glanced from Lycon to Vonones as they walked down the ramp to either side of him. The beastcatcher's face was impassive, the merchant's screwed up in an expression between distaste and nausea. Neither offered much sympathy for what the teamster thought of as his personal ordeal.
"Well, that stopped, the singing did, after a while, but that didn't mean much," the foreman continued. They were approaching the barge itself, and he had to keep talking to remind himself that it was daylight and he was alive.
"It looks easy enough," the foreman babbled on, "but it's a damned long trip, as you'd know if you ever followed a team of oxen. Usually some of the folks we give a lift to, they'll walk along part of the way and talk to us. Well, this lot didn't, but we had the escaped tiger and that African lizard-ape to talk about, me and the boys."
"Where did you hear about that?" snapped Vonones, who now understood how the authorities had known whose door to come knocking on.
"Why, wasn't it all over the towpath?" the teamster foreman replied in injured amazement. "There was a caravan of beasts pulled up not a quarter mile from the river, and the drivers with nothing else to do but come talk to us on the path. And don't you know how slow an ox walks, especially when one of the yoke's got a sore on his shoulder for that lazy bastard Nearchos in the stables not doing his job?"
Vonones swore. So much for loyalty—and the sanctity of a bribe. When he found out who had talked. . . . But first Vonones knew he would have to survive this day. He didn't like to think about the odds.
Lycon jumped onto the barge, balancing for a moment on the thick gunwale that acted as a fender while the vessel was being towed.
The foreman turned away. "We'd been talking, me and the boys," he went on, in a voice an octave higher than that of a moment before, "about what might have happened if they hadn't killed that tiger, and if it had gone for our team, you know? And what the Master'd do to us, no matter it wasn't any fault of ours, dear gods."
"You say there were a dozen sailors aboard when you left Portus?" Lycon interrupted.
"Something like that," the foreman agreed. He faced around again slowly, but he kept his eyes on Lycon's face rather than on the interior of the barge. "Can't really swear to it, you know. And there was Ursus on the steering oar."
"Can't really swear to it now," said Lycon grimly, as he walked along the gunwale.
There was no question in his mind as to what had caused the carnage. Nothing else could possibly have been quick enough. There were approximately six bodies in the bow, forward of the upright ranks of jars. Lycon was not sure that he could have duplicated their wounds with two hours and an axe, but these men had been killed before any of them could shout and alert the teamsters on the towpath. One man's chest had been hollowed out like a milkweed pod at summer's end. Another torso was untouched except for splashes of blood, but the head and all four limbs had been excised from it. The skin of the chest was smooth and an even tan—that of a healthy boy, perhaps no older than Alexandros.
For an instant, the thought of his son drove immediate concerns from Lycon's mind. Then the hunter glanced up toward the levee and the closed palanquin and the glowering guards. No, this couldn't wait.
The remains of three sailors lay amidships, sprawled over the upright grain jars. The ten-gallon containers were made as cheaply as possible, meant to be opened after their single use by having their necks struck off. Blood had soaked deeply into their unglazed surfaces, giving accents of darker color to the pinkish clay. One of the men looked completely uninjured, even peaceful. The body had stiffened, but when Lycon lifted it to search for a wound, the sailor's back and thighs showed only the usual post mortem extravasation.
"His ear," called Vonones unexpectedly from the slip where he stood. "The right ear. Those long claws. . . ."
Impassively Lycon shifted the body back. There was a trail of blackened blood from the ear canal, matting the hair on the sailor's temple. "It must see better in the dark," Lycon said, as he laid the corpse onto the jars again. "Better than they did, certainly. It must have taken part of them at a time, caught its breath, and—got some more."
He walked toward the stern, stepping again from the stoppered jars to the gunwale. The barge shifted a little under his weight, first fetched up by the stern line, and then quivering against the slip under the sluggish impetus of the Tiber's current. Lycon did not notice the motion in his preoccupied state. He had crossed gorges bridged by vines, more concerned for the load of brilliant, valuable birds he carried than he was for his own safety. After all, the real danger in this situation waited on the levee in a guarded palanquin.
The melange in the stern-hollow looked even more like meat for the stewpot than that in the bow had done. One of the things ripped during the night had been a skin of wine. Its contents had thinned and kept liquid the blood that pooled beneath the corpses.
"You!" Lycon called as he squinted down at the carnage. The stern wales were curved upward sharply. The hunter touched the steering oar with his left hand to steady himself. "Teamster! Come over here and tell me all you know about this."
Vonones gripped the teamster foreman by the elbow and thrust him toward Lycon. "Go on," he urged ungently. "Do you want to get us all crucified?"
"I called to Ursus," the foreman said, as if only by talking could he bring himself to step closer to the barge again. "I said, 'Give us another squeeze of wine,' you know, because we were out and I figured they had some aboard. And he didn't answer, so I got pissed off. I mean, he was senior man, but he could still be out stumbling along with the torch if I said so, Dis take him."
Lycon and Vonones were watching the foreman carefully. He kept his eyes fixed on the sternpost, as if oblivious both of his audience and of the present condition of the barge. "So I let the stern come abreast of me," the teamster continued, "and I shouted again. And I should've been able to see him at the tiller—there wasn't any moon what with the clouds, but still against the water beyond—and he wasn't there at the oar. Nobody was. And just then the barge ground hard against the bank—hard—and so I go and jump aboard . . ."
"Which one of these is Ursus?" Lycon interrupted. He gestured toward the heaped bodies.
The foreman did not lower his eyes. "He was about my height," he said to the sternpost. "He never wore sandals, in the boat, said he couldn't get a grip with . . ."
"Look at them, damn you, and tell me which one is the helmsman!" Lycon shouted.
"He had a beard!" the teamster s
houted back. Tears were dripping from the man's eyes, and the veins on his neck stood out. "He wore a beard because of the scars on his chin from when a cable parted and slapped him when he was a lad!"
Lycon stepped into the barge, ignoring the sound his boots made. He began picking through the tumbled corpses. He'd seen worse. He'd done worse—across the Rhine, driving a village of Boii in panic through the woods at dawn. He didn't have enough troops to have surrounded the Germans or even to have beaten them had they stood and fought. But he could frighten them like deer into a pit trap, a covered trench filled with sharpened stakes, because the cohort commander wanted to show results without risking too many men in hostile territory.
Results that time had meant wagonloads of right hands. And the results had pleased the Governor and won praise for the cohort commander.
"I don't see anybody here with a beard," Lycon said, as he straightened and turned again to the teamster.
It didn't mean he enjoyed it, Lycon told himself; it meant that he did what he had to do. No matter what. "Are you sure," Lycon continued impassively, "that the barge was proceeding normally until just before you boarded her yourself?"
"It was," the foreman agreed quickly, bobbing his chin upward in a gesture of assent. "And I had to bring it in to dock then myself, even with all this here, because we couldn't block the towpath." He turned his back. The teamster had thrown away his sandals and washed his feet compulsively when dawn emphasized what the rushlight had only suggested. Seeing the state of Lycon's boots when the hunter stepped out of the barge recalled to the foreman what he prayed to forget.
"Then," Lycon said wearily, "I think we're ready to report. I suppose that's what he wants from us?" He raised an eyebrow, as much a gesture as he dared to indicate the Emperor's palanquin above.