by David Drake
“I thought of dragging Lady Alphena out by the ear,” Hedia said in a low but conversational tone.
Syra’s eyes were open again; the words made her blink. “The young lady is very athletic,” the maid said carefully. She obviously wasn’t sure whether her mistress was joking. “She practices in the gymnasium almost daily.”
Hedia let her smile spread slightly. “I wasn’t proposing to put on armor and duel her,” she said. “If you haven’t had it happen to you, Syra, you can’t imagine how painful it is to have someone twisting your ear. You’ll walk along with them rather than do anything that pulls harder on it.”
She mused on the Black-and-Gold Hall. It wasn’t anything to do with Alphena which had stopped Hedia from acting on her first impulse; rather, it was the embarrassment the scene would have caused Varus.
He wasn’t the kind of man—boy—that Hedia would ordinarily have paid any attention to. He was a quiet little fellow, bookish and above all earnest. Sometimes that was a pose: Hedia had let one of her first husband’s philosophical friends grope her beneath a bust of Zeno in his library because the split between appearance and reality amused her.
In Varus’s case, it was poetry rather than philosophy—they were much of a sameness, of course, just words either one—but Varus couldn’t have been more serious about His Art. Hedia took her duties as mother seriously. She wouldn’t think of turning the boy’s first public recital into a farce.
She listened critically a little while longer. Varus seemed to be doing quite well at creating a farce on his own. Perhaps tomorrow she could take him aside and discuss with him more suitable ways for a young man of his station to become part of public life. Misery might have made him malleable.
Her lips tightened. Syra noticed the minute change in expression and winced, so Hedia forced herself to smile again. If I move quickly enough, I can marry Alphena off and save her from her father’s ruin.
There was nothing she could do for Saxa’s son, though. Varus was doomed even if Hedia encouraged him to go to the right sort of drinking parties and perhaps introduced him to women who would like to polish the education of a boy who seemed younger than his years.
Hedia didn’t care about Varus, but she cared quite a lot about Saxa. If there’d been a way to snatch her husband’s male issue from the disaster, she would have done so.
Saxa was a bit of a mystic and a bit of a fool. The best Hedia could say for his physical approaches to her was that they were well intentioned and perhaps not the clumsiest of her considerable experience. But he was kind, a genuinely decent man, and one who could see the real heart of things more clearly than anyone else she knew.
Saxa’s offer of marriage close on the heels of the death of his cousin, Calpurnius Latus, had been as surprising as it was welcome. Hedia hadn’t murdered Latus—indeed, it was likely enough that fever, not poison by his hand or that of another, had carried her husband off. It wouldn’t have been hard to suggest otherwise, however, and Latus’s well-connected family had a considerable legacy to gain if the widow was executed for his murder.
All the whispers had stopped when Saxa married the widow. A cynic might suspect that he had simply scooped the legacy from the other relatives. Nobody who knew Saxa would believe that, however: he was not only staggeringly rich, he was as little interested in money for its own sake as any man in the Senate.
Perhaps Saxa had seen an excitement in Hedia which his life had lacked to that time. As for Hedia herself—
She paused, thinking. Saxa had given her safety, a debt which she would repay to the best of her ability. But he unexpectedly had brought her a kind of sweetness which she hadn’t to that point imagined.
Saxa was a silly old buffer, but she loved him. Which was something else she hadn’t imagined would ever happen.
There were voices at the front door; the German accent of the handsome new doorman was unmistakable. Immediately servants appeared from nooks and crannies. This sometimes made Hedia think of the way roaches scrambled if you walked into the pantry at night with a lamp.
She stepped into the reception hall. A pair of the attendants who’d left with Saxa in the morning were jabbering directions to Agrippinus. The majordomo must have been in the office … though how he’d gotten there without Hedia seeing him pass completely escaped her.
“Mistress,” he said with a bow. “Our lord the Senator has requested that a lighted brazier be placed in the back garden for him and a companion. They will be arriving shortly.”
“Then you had better do it,” said Hedia, dismissing him with a crisp nod.
The two messengers started off with Agrippinus. “Not you, Bellatus,” Hedia snapped to the one whose name she remembered.
Bellatus froze as though he had taken an arrow through the spine. “Mistress?” he quavered.
“Will my lord’s companion be Nemastes the Foreigner?” she asked.
“I, ah, believe he might be, noble mistress,” the servant said. He knelt, more to hide his face than to honor her, she thought.
“You may go,” Hedia said, her tone mild and ironic.
Bellatus scampered away. That’s just as well, thought Hedia with a faint smile. If he’d stayed a moment or two longer, I’d have slashed him across the face with my fan.
Clicking the ivory slats open and closed, Hedia took her position in front of the tiled pond in the entranceway. The edges of the fan had been painted while it was slightly ajar, then closed and gilded. If you ruffled the slats just right, you saw a nude girl on one side and a simply charming youth on the other.
Hedia continued to smile as she watched through the open outside door at the end of the hall. The messengers couldn’t have been very far ahead of Saxa and the Hyperborean.
The servants had vanished again, all but Syra, who was looking determinedly toward the garden instead of out into the street. The maid couldn’t flee, but she could pretend she was somewhere else.
There was a bustle outside. The doorman stepped into the street and bellowed, “All hail our noble master Gaius Alphenus Saxa, twice consul and senator!”
That was what Flavus meant to say, at any rate. Between his poor grasp of Latin and a German accent that made everything sound as though he had a mouthful of pork, you had to know what the words should be to understand him.
The crowd of clients bowed and saluted in the street. There were forty and more of them on a normal day, men who either owed Saxa service or hoped for a favor. Favors could range from occasional dinners and a small basket of coins during the Saturnalia, to support in an election or during a court proceeding. The Senator would never have to face the dangers of the streets alone.
Indeed, for poor men out at night a rich man’s entourage was one of the greater risks. A band of enthusiastic clients would beat a tipsy countryman with the same enthusiasm that they would lavish on a real footpad. More, in fact, because the robber would probably be armed and dangerous to tackle.
Saxa entered, his head cocked over his shoulder to talk with the man behind him. He didn’t notice his wife for a moment. When he did, he stopped, looking startled and embarrassed.
“Good evening, dear,” he said. “I, ah … I’m afraid I don’t have time to chat just now.”
Saxa was fifty-two years old; plumpish, balding, and with the open face of a boy. At the moment he looked rather like a boy caught masturbating when his mother walked in. Hedia smiled with more humor than she’d felt before that image came to her.
Nemastes the Hyperborean stepped to Saxa’s side; the outer doorway was too narrow for them to have entered together. He dipped to one knee to acknowledge the mistress of the house. He must have been at least six and a half feet tall—he towered above the German doorman—but he was skeletally thin.
Nemastes’ eyes were large and pale. There was nothing very remarkable about them at a quick glance, but Hedia had never seen the fellow blink.
“We have family business, my lord, regarding the future of your daughter,” Hedia said. Her words
were those of a subservient wife, but her tone would leave a stranger with no doubt regarding the real distribution of power in the household. “Perhaps you can meet with your acquaintance some other day.”
Nemastes rose and waited impassively. He didn’t bother to scowl at Hedia or sneer; rather, he waited for her to get out of the way as he might have done if a herd of swine had blocked his path.
Normally Saxa’s clients would have entered the hall with him and taken their leaves individually in ascending order of rank. It was Nemastes’ presence that had held them outside. In the street they could keep their distance from the Hyperborean while still accompanying the Senator, but the hallway might have squeezed them into closer contact, which they all preferred to avoid.
“Ah, my pet, not now, I’m afraid,” Saxa muttered, staring at his hands as he wrung them.
“My lord, now,” Hedia said. Paving stones would have more give to them than her voice did. “I intend to hold a marriage divination for Alphena at the full moon, which is tomorrow night. She is your daughter and we must discuss the arrangements.”
“Whatever you decide, dearest,” Saxa said, fluttering his hands miserably. “We have to, that is, I have to—”
“Husband,” said Hedia. She didn’t raise her voice, but each of the syllables she clipped out could have broken glass. “We—”
“Hedia, I really must go!” Saxa said. “Master Nemastes and I have business to transact now, men’s business! Good day!”
Head high, back straight, and face set in misery, Saxa stamped through the door to the courtyard and continued around the pool to the rear suite of rooms. The back garden was the end of the lot on which the town house stood, closed on three sides by high walls.
Nemastes stalked along after him, looking more than usually like a praying mantis. He didn’t bother to glance at Hedia, any more than a traveler would be concerned with the pigs which had briefly delayed him.
Hedia sighed. There was very little that she couldn’t get a man to do without help, but this business was exceptional.
She walked into the courtyard, staying on the far side from the Black-and-Gold Hall so as not to disturb the reading.
Hedia was going to the gymnasium. She needed a magician, and that meant she needed the aid of Corylus’s servant.
CHAPTER II
Corylus let his left fingertips slide along the wooden bench. He couldn’t touch the wood with his right hand, because Alphena was there. She’s pressing so hard that if I stand up suddenly, she’ll go shooting into the aisle.
“Fiery as always with love of war and battles and struggles with foes,” Varus recited, “our heroic general snatched up his arms!”
As best Corylus could tell, a giant African dragon had just attacked Regulus’s army. He’d been expecting to hear more about the Carthaginians, though he supposed it didn’t matter much. Varus would have made real history ludicrous, so starting with an absurd notion was perhaps a more efficient plan.
“Shouting encouragement to his cavalry, tried by the war god on every field, he ordered them to charge the foe,” said Varus. His eyes were staring; Corylus didn’t think he was reading the manuscript at all. He’d committed the work to memory and was letting it spew out like water from a tap.
Corylus was trying to stay awake. The room was warm, and the rhythm of his friend’s voice affected him the way a tree shivers in a breeze. Corylus would nod off if he concentrated on the poem, and he didn’t dare let that happen.
It would be awful if he fell asleep during Varus’s reading. It would be far worse if he collapsed in giggles, and that was the likely result if he viewed the verse against the reality of war that he’d grown up with on Carce’s distant frontiers.
The bench, the touch of wood … that was salvation. The boards were merely pine, but they’d been well seasoned and they were joined with mortises and tenons as clean as those of a ship. Corylus felt sunlight on the north slope of the valley where the pine had been felled. It was fitting that a straight-grained tree like this one should have been shaped by an expert.
The Emperor in his wisdom had nominated Saxa to be governor of Lusitania, the province on the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The Senate had agreed by acclamation to the Emperor’s slate of recommendations—which was wise, since the Emperor had never been of an easy disposition and was becoming steadily more irascible as he aged.
Saxa would need a considerable staff to govern a province. Corylus was pretty sure that he could wangle a junior judicial position through Varus. Saxa probably didn’t know his son’s friend from his cook’s brother, but there was no reason he wouldn’t grant the appointment.
That might be a quicker route to success than the path Corylus had intended: becoming a staff tribune in one of the legions and following the legionary commander at increasingly higher rank on his future postings. A civil career might even be safer, though Corylus guessed that a judicial gofer in a province as wild as Lusitania would have plenty of opportunity to get his head knocked in.
He liked the idea of working with words and ideas, and of convincing people to work together rather than forcing them to do as he said … but his father had been army, and Corylus’s own upbringing was army. Also, he’d met enough barbarians—that wasn’t just a term of insult on the frontiers—to know that force was the only convincing argument to many Germans and Iazyges and Sarmatians and Jupiter-knew-who-all-else.
Maybe it was different in the East. There the cultures had been ancient when Carce was inhabited by shepherds who lived on separate hills and stole one another’s sheep, but Corylus knew the Rhine and the Danube.
“Hunching high and then low again,” Varus said, apparently visualizing his monster as a giant inchworm, “the creature rushed toward the attacking men.”
Corylus tried to imagine how you would fight a snake that big. A smile twitched the corners of his lips, so he quickly let his thoughts return to the grain of the wood.
Unexpectedly he entered a world of trees, cool and silent and perfectly graceful. They marched across plains and climbed hills in ragged columns. They sprouted from cliffs, their roots clinging to cracks where no animal could grip; they spread their branches to embrace birds and the breezes.
He forgot about Varus’s poem; it became as meaningless as the whirl of dust motes in yesterday’s sun. Human activities flashed and vanished before Corylus’s new sensibility registered them.
The world was an enormous green unity, all times and places in a single spreading carpet of trees. In the distance ice glittered north to all eternity. Fringing that sterile mass were cold marshes sodden with meltwater; spruce and cedars and larches grew there in packed profusion. Dead trunks slanted into the branches of their living kin and rotted in the air.
Snow had fallen deeply around the trees. Frost drew traceries from the coarse grasses, but the runoff from the glaciers was too vast to freeze over as yet. Corylus understood that. He was part of the forest’s sluggish omniscience.
Elephants with thick black hair and curved tusks moved through the trees in a loose herd. They were bigger than the species from the North African coast that Corylus had seen often in the amphitheater, bigger even than the occasional Indian elephant which had been trekked overland to tower above its African kin.
The creatures’ feet were the size of storage jars, but for all their bulk they made less sound than men walking. Corylus could hear the deep rumble of their bellies, like sheep only many times louder; their trunks moved constantly to sweep in crackling branches. The elephants’ jaws worked side to side, pulverizing sprays of conifer needles and occasionally dribbling the green mush out the sides of their lips.
The herd moved on, squealing brief notes to one another. Their dung was green and steamed where it splattered onto the snow; it had a resinous odor.
A lynx watched from a high branch, showing the same careful interest in the elephants as in the ice cap distantly visible from its perch. It didn’t move. If the cat was aware of Corylus, it g
ave no sign of the fact.
Corylus drifted across the dank landscape, fully aware but having no more volition than a tree. The forest exists, but it neither plans nor cares.
Something cared. It was drawing Corylus along.
Before him was a grove of twelve great balsams. Water dripped from their dangling fronds, but the ground in their center was higher than the surrounding marshes. There stood two foggy human figures, bending toward a tripod where herbs smoldered on a bed of charcoal.
On the inward-facing sides, the bark of the balsams had been carved with elongated human features. Corylus drifted into the circle; the trees’ slitted eyes turned to follow his invisible presence.
The scene sharpened as though someone had opened the shutter of a dark lantern, throwing light on what had until then been shadowed. First Corylus registered the ornate bronze tripod: three Chimeras gripped the edges of the brazier; their snake-headed tails were looped up into carrying handles. The piece was striking and unique, easily identifiable as part of the furnishings of Gaius Alphenus Saxa’s town house.
Saxa, wearing a toga with the broad stripe of a senator, stood on one side of the brazier. Sweat glistened on his pinkish bald spot. He stared at Corylus in amazement.
The other man was inhumanly tall and so thin that his arms and legs made Corylus think of a spider. He wore a garment pieced together from small skins sewn fur-side in. He was barefoot, though the ground he stood on was frozen; his long black toenails resembled a dog’s claws.
He glared at Corylus. His irises were a gray so pale that they were almost indistinguishable from the whites of his eyes.
The cadaverous stranger pointed. Corylus didn’t have a hand to raise to defend himself nor a body to move away.
The forest fell out of reality. Saxa and the stranger were in Saxa’s back garden. Cold had shattered the pear tree beside them; frost sprang from the pebbles of the walkway. The old coping around the natural spring in the far corner glowed with a faint saffron light.