by David Drake
Priscus looked at Varus. Varus hung his head and muttered, “Yes sir, I’m afraid that’s true. All of it.”
“A Hyperborean,” Priscus said in a musing tone. “A foreigner.”
“Yes, my friend,” Pandareus said; he wasn’t agreeing. “A foreigner like myself.”
Priscus snorted. “Not like you,” he said. “But I won’t even ask the Senate if Saxa would oppose the request. I trust you, but my colleagues would not.” He shrugged. “More fools them,” he added. “But that’s not a new thought.”
Priscus had been leaning forward slightly on the couch. He didn’t stand, but his back straightened and he was suddenly a very different man. He looked at each of his three visitors in turn, then said, “Master Pandareus, my true friend: though the world should end, I will not violate my oath. I cannot unlock the chest until I am ordered to do so by the Senate.”
“I understand,” the teacher said, lifting his chin in agreement. “May I ask a favor, though? It’s on behalf of the Republic of which I am a resident if not a citizen. May we enter the vault, all of us together? I don’t intend that the chest be opened, but there are things which I believe we may learn in its presence.”
Priscus remained still for a moment. Then he grinned and said, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t help three scholars with a matter of antiquarian research. Balaton, fetch the—”
But two servants were already bringing a ladder out of the alcove where the stools were kept; two others were walking toward the cartouche which covered the vault. Balaton’s grin was even broader than his master’s.
ALPHENA SCOWLED. Because she’d chosen the forward-facing seat, the lamps on the front corners of the litter lighted her face but left her stepmother in darkness. All she could see of Hedia was a slimly aristocratic shadow.
And Alphena had picked this seat. She’d done it to herself, as she always seemed to do. No wonder Corylus ignored her!
Agrippinus had claimed the bearers were a matched team of Cappadocians who had been working together for over a year. The majordomo had doubtless made a comfortable commission on the deal, but as with other business entrusted to him, it had been handled very well. Despite the size and bulk of this litter, Alphena found the ride the smoothest of any chair she’d ridden on.
“Alphena,” said Hedia, her teeth brief gleams in the shadow, “I’m worried that before long someone will inform the Emperor about Saxa’s activities.”
“Father’s done nothing wrong!” Alphena said, shocked out of sad musings about cosmetics. She didn’t know anything about making up her face, and she could scarcely ask Hedia. “My father would never plot against the Emperor!”
“Of course not,” Hedia agreed, speaking calmly instead of raising her voice in response to Alphena’s shrillness. “But I’m far less sure about what his friend Nemastes is doing. Nemastes is certainly acting to his own benefit, and I would be greatly surprised if his plans would benefit anybody else. Do you agree?”
Alphena felt fear wash everything else out of her mind, the way the surf swept over the battlements children built in beach sand. “Father could never be tricked into anything disloyal,” she said. “He’s a senator! No grubby foreigner is going to fool him!”
Even in her own ears, the words sounded dismal and silly. Saxa was a very learned man, but he had no common sense at all. And Nemastes might have bewitched him, stolen his soul with a poppet of wax or whatever Hyperboreans did!
“We’re going to scotch Nemastes if we can, dear,” Hedia said. “You and I and our friends. But if we don’t succeed, I hope that you’ll be able to escape the wreck under the protection of a powerful husband.”
Alphena jerked upright. Her hair, in a bun to cushion the weight of a helmet, brushed the canopy. She opened her mouth to shout an objection … and closed it.
In a tiny voice, she said, “Hedia, I don’t want to get married. But I’m afraid.”
“Yes, dear,” Hedia said. “We’re both afraid, and so is Anna. I suppose the men are afraid also, though no doubt being men they’d bluster and deny it. But we have to look ahead and prepare.”
The litter bearers were singing a low-voiced chant that kept their pace even. Was it Cappadocian? But it might simply be nonsense syllables to fit a rhythm, not a language at all. It was hard to tell what was chance and what held real meaning in this world.
“I hope Father …,” Alphena said miserably, but she let her voice trail off instead of finishing the foolish sentence. Saxa wasn’t going to come to his senses. He’d never shown good judgment in the past, and now that Nemastes had his claws in him there was even less chance. If Saxa was to be saved, the rest of them were going to have to do it.
The litter turned sharply; the bearers slowed to negotiate piles of building materials which spilled out from either side. Hedia leaned forward to see, giving Alphena a look at her profile in sharp silhouette.
Father didn’t show good sense except perhaps when he married her, Alphena thought. Though she would never say those words aloud.
The bearers stopped, then lowered the vehicle to the pavement. “The Temple of Tellus, noble ladies,” said the deputy steward in charge of the escort. “Your destination.”
Alphena started to get out. Servants congealed about her, three or four of them.
“Get away!” she shouted. “Haven’t I told you I’d have you whipped if you tried to hand me out of a vehicle again?”
There was a brief bustle. Servants stumbled into one another or over piles of construction supplies. Alphena got out and only then realized that the men she’d driven away weren’t those who’d attended the litter: these had come from staff of the temple.
They were in front of the Temple of Tellus. It was a modest structure, but the grounds in which it stood were as extensive as those of more impressive, newer buildings. To make room for heavy wagons, the wall around the temple precinct had been knocked down to either side of the gate.
Alphena maneuvered away from a collection of stone cylinders, column barrels which would be fluted and set here at the site. They would replace the temple’s four existing wooden columns. The originals couldn’t possibly have survived three centuries, but until now the replacements had also been wooden. Those had been stuccoed to look like stone, but that had flaked off in the decades since they’d been placed; rot and wormholes now marked the bare wood remaining.
Farther back in the yard were heaps of bulk materials. On the other side of the vehicle were smaller piles of the tiny cut stones sorted by color; they would be laid into a floor mosaic. There were timbers, too, but in the shadows Alphena didn’t know whether they were for scaffolding or were building materials.
“Good evening, noble ladies!” said a corpulent stranger who bowed to Hedia. Unlike the temple servants, he wore a toga. “The Temple of Tellus is honored to have you! I’m the chief priest, Gaius Julius Phidippides. I own the laundry three doors down on Sandalmakers’ Street and the building next door to it besides.”
Servants from Saxa’s household were shoving the outnumbered temple personnel back. Alphena stepped to the other side of Phidippides to protect him from the same treatment. She shouldn’t have shouted at the temple servants; that was what was making her escort so violently zealous.
“The temple is open?” Hedia said coldly. “And move away! I assure you that I could see quite enough of you from two paces distance.”
The priest was a freedman. He must have been made a citizen by Augustus—formally Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus—because he wasn’t old enough for his patron to have been Augustus’s adoptive father, the conqueror of Gaul. Alphena had already learned that these were the sort of people who made a point of their importance to the Republic. Hedia, a born aristocrat, treated Phidippides’ fawning pomposity with contempt.
The priest backed off hurriedly, stumbling into a pile of clay and barely recovering. It would be fired into roofing tiles here on the site; that avoided the heavy breakage certain if tiles were transported by wagon th
rough the streets of Carce.
“Yes, of course, your ladyship!” he said with nervous brightness. “Come right this way, please, right this way.”
The household servants formed a double line to protect the women. Protect them from the temple personnel, as best Alphena could tell, but Phidippides’ staff had been pushy at the start. They excluded the priest also, but he trotted on the other side of the deputy steward while continuing to chatter brightly toward Hedia.
Temple servants threw the double doors open. There were lighted lamps within, but attendants from both establishments brought in additional ones.
Alphena looked around. The Temple of Tellus was dingy. Of course the objects dedicated to it, particularly the pair of huge elephant teeth, had been removed to Saxa’s house for safekeeping, but the floor was of bricks worn hollow, and the walls were coarse tuff which hadn’t been sheathed with colored marble or polished limestone.
The ten-foot-tall wooden statue of Tellus had been repainted within the past few years, though not with any great skill. Her right forearm was lifted with the palm turned out; her left hung stiffly at her side. The whole figure—head, limbs, and torso—had probably been carved in one piece.
“I wonder, Lady Hedia?” said Phidippides in a wheedling voice that put Alphena’s teeth on edge. “I discussed with your noble husband the Senator the idea of replacing this statue with a modern one of bronze. Do you know if he—”
“Take the matter up with someone who cares, Master Laundryman,” Hedia snapped. “Now, leave my daughter and myself. At once!”
Household servants had hung additional lamps and placed a folding stool at the back of the room. “Your ladyship?” said the deputy steward. “Which of us would you like to remain inside with your noble selves?”
“None of you, Midas,” Hedia said crisply. “Give Lady Alphena the prayer—”
A servant handed Alphena a tight roll; he bowed.
“—and wait for us in the courtyard.”
Hedia followed the scurrying servants to the double doors. Midas closed them, and Hedia herself slotted the bar through its inside staples to lock the valves.
“Now …,” she said, gesturing Alphena to the center of chamber. “Face the goddess, I think. We may as well get started.”
She smiled as she sat on the stool. It wasn’t an unfriendly expression, but it made Alphena again very glad not to be this woman’s enemy.
CHAPTER VI
Hedia twisted her left hand behind her back to rub between her shoulder blades. Her stool was backless, and the rough stone doorjamb provided support but not comfort.
“Golden-throned Juno,” Alphena chanted. She held the scroll open to the light from the lamp stand beside her, but by now she must be reciting from memory. “Queen of the immortals, surpassing all in beauty; sister and wife of loud-thundering Jupiter, goddess of marriage. Grant my prayer for a worthy mate, thou glorious one whom men and gods reverence and honor, even as they do your all-powerful husband.”
The girl had straightened as she recited the prayer; now she slumped again. She turned to Hedia, her face twisted with tired despair.
“This isn’t doing anything,” she said, trying to raise her own spirits by getting angry. “We may as well go home!”
“Not yet, dear,” Hedia said quietly. “It’s not even the middle of the night. We can’t set conditions of our own comfort on the will of the gods.”
“Do you believe this?” Alphena demanded, waggling the scroll as if it were a baton. The layers of glued papyrus creaked in protest. “In Juno? In any religion?”
Hedia laughed. “Daughter, if you mean as an institution, I’m not sure I even believe in marriage,” she said. “But marriage exists, and it protected me at one time. Perhaps another marriage will protect you.”
She got to her feet. Instead of going to Alphena, she bent backward and massaged the small of her back with both hands.
Hedia’s fingers were slim but strong; even so, she half wished that she’d brought Balbo, the household masseur, in with her. He was a eunuch, so perhaps his presence wouldn’t make the rites vain … but on the other hand, this business would be boring and uncomfortable even if her back didn’t hurt, so there was no point in taking a needless risk for negligible gain.
“As for the gods existing,” Hedia went on, “I have no idea. I know that if I strike steel on a flint in the correct fashion, though, I get sparks.”
She crossed her hands before her and felt her expression tighten. “Generations of our ancestors have believed that this sort of divination is effective in bringing maidens into the state of marriage,” she said. “Therefore you will continue to offer a prayer to Juno while standing in a sanctified building, and I will remain here with you.”
Alphena stared at her for a moment. Hedia stood erect. She offered a pleasant smile, but she was ready for whatever the response was.
Instead of replying, the girl turned to face the goddess. “Golden-throned Juno,” she said. “Queen of the immortals, surpassing all in beauty …”
As Alphena read, Hedia walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Sister and wife of loud-thundering Jupiter,” Alphena said, “goddess of marriage. Grant my prayer for a worthy marriage ….”
There was no response this time either. Shortly it would be the start of the third watch, midnight. Alphena would continue to pray till dawn if necessary, and Hedia would stay with the girl as a mother should.
Nemastes and his magic might destroy the whole house of Saxa and the gods knew what else. Regardless, Hedia would be fighting all the way with every tool at her disposal.
Hedia smiled and gave Alphena’s shoulder a slight squeeze. She wouldn’t have survived this long if she hadn’t been willing to fight powerful men.
THE TEMPLE SERVANTS inserted iron cramps into slots in the floor on either side of the mosaic cartouche. The tools were similar to what Varus had seen workmen use at construction sites when they muscled heavy blocks into place.
“Ah—I can lend a hand,” said Corylus, his eyes swiveling from the servants to Priscus. He started forward without waiting for an answer.
“Thank you, sir,” said Balaton, stepping toward Corylus as though he were going to meet him. It took Varus a moment to understand what his friend doubtless had realized instantly: that the servant was blocking Corylus away from the task. “We’re used to doing this, and it’s probably safer that we handle it alone.”
Corylus flashed a genuine smile. “Right,” he said, stepping back with Varus and Pandareus. “If somebody slipped, the trapdoor might drop and be broken. Sorry.”
Varus frowned in surprise. He asked quietly, “Corylus, would you have slipped?”
Corylus grinned. “No,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have forgotten to breathe either. But they don’t know that; and anyway, they don’t need my help.”
Holding the cover up six inches above the floor, the servants walked it in unison toward the temple’s great doors. When they set it down, it was completely clear of the four-by-six-foot rectangle. Another man lowered his ladder into the opening, then slid it a finger’s breadth to the side so that the stringers locked into notches in the concrete subflooring.
Pandareus and the two youths stepped to the edge of the opening and looked down. The vault was of considerable size. In the middle was a chest about three feet long and a foot and a half wide, much like the ossuaries into which Varus recalled that Jews and other Oriental races gathered the bones of their dead after the flesh had decayed. The civilized folk of Carce, like the Greeks before them, cremated their dead and stored the ashes in jars.
This was something else, though. Varus shivered. He crossed his left arm over his chest; by doing that, he squeezed the ivory head against his breastbone beneath the toga.
Priscus shuffled up behind them. “Master Corylus,” he said, “you look like a husky young fellow who wouldn’t mind catching a weight of fat if it slipped off the ladder.”
“Sir?” Cory
lus said.
Priscus chuckled like bubbles in hot grease. He said, “Go down into the vault and wait as I follow you.”
“Here, I’ll go down with the lantern first,” Varus said to a servant with a light. It was actually a bronze oil lamp in the form of a three-headed dragon; each tongue was a blazing wick.
Without real objection, he took the short pole from which the lamp hung; turning, he backed down the ladder. The servant looked at Balaton for approval, but Balaton was instead frowning at his own superior.
“Lord Priscus,” said Balaton, “perhaps your guests would prefer to enter the vault by themselves? There’s no requirement that you go down with them, after all.”
Varus reached the bottom of the ladder and stepped away so that Corylus could follow. When he raised the lamp, he saw that though the ceiling was low—it was no more than six feet above the floor—the vault extended ten feet on the short axis and twenty the long way. It was much larger than it needed to be to conceal the stone chest.
“Balaton,” said Priscus, lowering himself carefully rung by rung on the ladder. “I’m a silly old man, but you are an old woman. I’ll be perfectly all right. You won’t let me fall, will you, Corylus my lad?”
“No sir,” said Corylus, bracing himself to take the commissioner’s weight if he slipped.
Varus smiled faintly, visualizing his friend, answering the legate of his legion as ranks of Germans prepared to charge. Whereas Gaius Varus would be wondering what the commotion was about and why those blond men with bull-hide shields were shouting so loudly.
Priscus wheezed coming down the short ladder, but the chief attendant’s concern did seem overstated. Shrugging to settle his tunic—although the commissioner was on duty, he was dressed for dinner rather than to carry out official business—he said, “When we consult the Books, we do it down here: the Books never leave the vault. And you may think I’m fat and awkward”—he laughed again—“as well you might. But there are commissioners who are far more decrepit than I am, I assure you.”