The Singing Sword cc-2

by Jack Whyte

  "Hmmm!" Caius rose to his feet and shook out the folds of the robe he was wearing, a draped garment cut and tailored to resemble the classical toga, but much lighter and more practical, opening down the front from neck to ankle, fastened with a series of small hooks and girdled with a belt of supple leather. He remained standing, bent forward and looking down towards his feet as he carefully readjusted the cloth and refastened the leather belt about his waist. I knew he was thinking deeply, using the activity as a mask for his deliberations. He was satisfied with his efforts, eventually, and turned towards the brazier, holding his hands out, absent-mindedly, towards the dwindling heat from the coals. I waited for him to speak, and at length he asked me a surprising question.

  "Publius, do you remember our conversation on the first occasion that we met, that night in the desert in Africa?"

  "Yes, I do. We spoke of many things that night."

  "We did, and among them one thing that I had no wish to know of, at first. Do you recall?"

  I smiled at him. "Clearly. The matter of the favour I had done for my commanding legate, the favour that earned me — how did you put it? — intercontinental and inter-legion transfer. You thought at first I had been involved in some kind of extra-legal chicanery."

  "But I was wrong. You had been rewarded merely for 'straightening out' your commander's errant son. Young Seneca. What was his name?"

  "The boy? Jacobus. I called him Jacob."

  "Jacobus. That was my brother's name. What happened to him after you left, do you know?"

  I shook my head. "I have no idea. I have not given him a thought since that night we talked of him. He was only the least of the Senecas. I presume he grew up and became a tribune; he had the makings of a fine officer, in spite of his family name. You will bear in mind that, in those days, I had no thought of Senecas as being different from anybody else."

  "I remember." He heaved a deep, weary sigh. "We all learn through living."

  The pause that followed was so long that I thought he had finished speaking, but just as I opened my lips to speak again, he resumed. "What would you say if I were to tell you he came to Britain?"

  It was my turn to frown now, wondering what my friend was leading up to. "Jacob? I should be surprised that you would know of it and not have told me."

  He answered me with a smile. "Even if I thought the knowledge might be both unwelcome to you and unnecessary?"

  "How could you assume that? He and I were friends, once. But did he?"

  "Yes, Publius, he did. He arrived with the army Theodosius sent to restore order after the rebellion of Magnus Maximus." There was no trace of a smile on Cay's face now. "He is now deputy commander of the garrison at Venta Belgarum — I have been keeping an eye on him, as you can see. He is a Seneca, after all. Jacobus started out here in Britain as a squadron commander at Aquae Sulis, and among his first duties was the task of responding to a mysterious summons concerning the missing Procurator of South Britain."

  "What?" I felt the blood draining from my cheeks, and a roaring noise began building up in my ears. "Jacob? A Seneca found Seneca? How do you know this? And why wouldn't you tell me before now?"

  He held up his hand to silence me. "I would have told you immediately, had there been any substance to the story I heard, but there was none. The details came to me in a letter from a friend in Glevum, Decius Lepido. Did you ever meet him?" I shook my head and he continued. "Well, anyway, he is now chairbound, like most ageing soldiers, near retirement and confined to administrative duties. According to Lepido, the event was a false alarm. A mysterious message came to the garrison commander at Aquae, informing him that the body of the missing Procurator, Claudius Seneca, could be found in a specific place, indicated on a hand-drawn map. A search party was sent out immediately, but all they found was the place and three bodies, one of them still alive, none of them the missing Procurator. The official report of the matter crossed Lepido's desk the following month. He told me about it in his next letter, several months after that, and the only reason he mentioned it at all was that the leader of the search party was Jacobus Seneca, the Procurator's nephew. He said it reminded him of the old saying about setting a thief to catch a thief." He paused again.

  "I remember thinking at the time that you might be interested in the reappearance of your young charge from Africa, quite apart from the news of Seneca himself, but you were away on one of your journeys when the letter arrived and it was hardly a major piece of important news. By the time you came back I had forgotten about it. When I did think about it again, much later, it no longer seemed worth mentioning. You had apparently forgotten all about the Seneca clan, and I thought it better to let sleeping dogs lie. So I said nothing. I can see now I was wrong."

  I had listened to the last part of his explanation without really absorbing it. My mind was filled with the import of what he had said before that: "Three bodies, one of them still alive, none of them the missing Procurator."

  "But that's impossible!" My voice was choked with phlegm. Caius raised an eyebrow at me, saying nothing. I cleared my throat and began again. "You said ... your friend said, in his version of the story, that none of the three men was Seneca." Caius waited for me to continue. "But that's not true. He must have been mistaken."

  Caius shook his head briefly. "No. He was quoting from the official report, Publius. Lepido would make no mistake about that. An official report is, ipso facto, the formal truth."

  "There were three dead men in that clearing, Cay. None was alive." Another thought occurred to me. "What about the confession? Did he have anything to say about that?"

  "What confession? The official report made no mention of any confession."

  "I left it under the swine's arm!"

  "I believe you. But, officially, no confession exists, or ever did."

  Unable to sit still any longer, seething with baffled anger, I sprang to my feet and began pacing the room, kneading my right fist in my left. Caius turned to follow me with his eyes, saying nothing, allowing me to follow the chaotic surging of my thoughts. Finally I stopped pacing and faced him again.

  "Jacob grew to be a Seneca, after all." Cay's only response was to raise his eyebrow in that old, sardonic mannerism of his, and I continued. "I thought he was different... thought he had the makings of a decent man... but he's just as warped and evil as the rest of his brood. He found the body, suppressed the confession and covered the whole thing up. But how? How could he have concealed Seneca's identity? That doesn't make sense."

  Caius ran his hand over his short, iron-grey hair from crown to forehead, pressing it down onto his brow with spread fingers as he sighed again. "But it does. It does, Publius. Think about it, and remember the people with whom we are dealing. Magnus's rebellion was over. New troops everywhere, all of undoubted loyalty to Theodosius, and all from overseas. Probably not one soul in the new garrison at Aquae Sulis had ever set eyes on Claudius Seneca, so when the man's own nephew denied that this was his uncle, who would contradict him? Officially, Jacobus Seneca brought back a nameless survivor who — "

  "Impossible! I've told you, Cay, there were no survivors, other than me."

  He stared at me. "Then why go to all the trouble of denying the identity of the corpse?"

  "What d'you mean? To protect the swine's reputation, of course."

  "Against what, Publius? All Jacob had to do was destroy the written confession, and Seneca was blameless. It would then have been a tragic end to a heroic figure: the noble Procurator, murdered by his abductors after a titanic struggle in an attempt to escape. That would have ended the mystery surrounding his disappearance very neatly, from everyone's viewpoint except yours."

  "Damnation, that's not good enough, Cay." I was digging my heels in, mentally, knowing I was right. "There has to be another explanation. That whoreson was dead when I walked away from him, I swear it."

  Caius shook his head slowly, unwilling to accede the point. "Then what other possible explanation could there be, Publius?"r />
  I slammed my clenched fist into my palm. "I don't know, I don't know. But there has to be something, something devious and serpentine and reptilian. Something that would occur only to a damned Seneca, and we're missing it!"

  Caius arrived at a decision. I saw it happen in his eyes, and then he snapped his head downward in a short, decisive nod.

  "Very well, I'll grant that you may be correct, on the reptilian grounds alone. And we are not exactly devoid of resources in this. The truth is verifiable, although not immediately. I shall write to my friend Marcellus Prello again tonight and ask him to be more specific regarding this alleged sighting of Claudius Seneca in Rome. It may take a month or more to hear whether or not he has anything to add to his original report, but at least we'll know then, with some degree of certainty, if Prello spoke with conviction in his last letter, or if he was merely gossiping."

  I felt better already. "Fine. So be it! But he's dead, Cay, and your friend Prello made an error of identification. I would wager on that. I don't know what motivated Jacob Seneca to do what he did in concealing the death of his unspeakable uncle, but I do know he did it. Claudius Seneca, may he be cursed anew by the ancient God of the Hebrews, is dead and burning in a firepit in Hades."

  There was nothing more to be said at that time, I felt, but in spite of my surge of confidence, my peace of mind had been shattered for that day, and I ended up sleeping most of the afternoon away, lulled by a draught concocted for me by Caius's physician.

  Within a matter of a few more days, however, a series of events was to occur that would drive all memory and all consciousness of Claudius Seneca from my mind.

  III

  There is a beast in every man who breathes, a beast that is born in him and lives within him all his life, in a constant struggle for dominance over what he would prefer to think of as his "better self." I say that with complete conviction because I have had to come to terms with my own personal beast, and it now lies dormant inside me; dormant, but far from dead. It stirs, occasionally, reminding me of its presence, of its poison.

  My beast's chains are strong — as strong as I, a maker of iron chains, could make them. I know to my own cost, nevertheless, that they are frighteningly fragile.

  I have not always known such things, for it is not in my nature to dwell for any length of time on matters I cannot pick up and either bend or straighten with a hammer. I learned of the reality of man's inner beast only when I was a man full-grown myself, and I learned of it from my friend Bishop Alaric, after he and I had seen at first hand the depredations of one sad man's beast, which had caused him to run amok among his friends and neighbours, crippling and maiming before he could be overpowered. Alaric said at the time that the man, whom we both knew, had been "possessed by the beast." Hearing these words from Alaric, a man of God, I assumed he meant the beast, the Devil, and I said so. Alaric, however, quickly brought me to order on my misunderstanding.

  It is too easy, he told me, with that simplicity of speech I so admired in him, to blame all our human griefs and ills on Lucifer. In doing so, he said, we can evade responsibility for our own actions, whereas the fault, in truth, is attributable to a lesser, more human beast that alternates constantly between lying dormant or raging savagely within each of us, male and female. The degree to which each of us subjugates our personal beast dictates the goodness, or the greatness, we achieve in this life.

  This was a new notion for me, a disturbing, discomforting idea with which, I must confess, I did not rush to wrestle. But at that time I had not yet truly encountered my own beast and, try as I would, the closest I could come to seeing it then, or even sensing its presence within me, was in my own cold enjoyment of the kill, in war. I knew what that did to me — the feral enjoyment of battle and the sick revulsion that followed. But that was no beast, I reasoned; it was mere guilt.

  Many years later, under the threat of rain, late on a cloudy summer afternoon that was dark with flies and heavy with omens, I was to recall that occasion, and that discussion, very clearly, as I gazed, horror-stricken, at the signs of the victory of one more man's beast and recognized fully the hideous visage of my own.

  Approaching this episode again has placed demands on me that are new and worrisome, because I must now write about the beast in man, and of the beast in me. I fear and loathe the task, but my course is clear: I may not deal in other people's faults unless I first lay bare, in full confession and acknowledgement, my own gross flaws. And so I must deal here with my friend Domitius Titens, and with the treachery I dealt him for his friendship.

  Domitius Titens was our neighbour, the great-great-grandson, like Caius Britannicus, of one of the original villa builders in the region that we developed as our Colony. He was also my friend and an avid student of ironcraft. He would never have made a weapons-smith, but he learned quickly the artistic sleight of hand required to twist wrought iron into lovely, strong and decorative shapes.

  He had been in the legions at the same time as Cay and me, and most of his soldiering had been done in the eastern marches of the Empire. He had served for years in Asia Minor and had ended up in Constantinople, at the Imperial Court, where he met and wed his red-haired consort, Cylla, bringing her back to his huge estates in Britain when his tour of duty ended.

  Cylla Titens was, for a very long time, a part of my life that I could never bring myself to come to grips with. In the beginning, I thought of her as "Scylla," and imagined her to possess all the attributes of that mythological monster. She made my life a misery over a period of years, but I could never hold her wholly to blame for it. The fault was mine; Cylla was merely herself. Whatever power, for good or evil, she ever held over me she possessed only because I gave it to her, and it was that gift that rendered me incapable of dealing with her satisfactorily. She exercised a dark power with the dedication of a despot, and I was never able to break her hold.

  Cylla and I never lay with each other. Never. Had I lain even once with Cylla Titens, I would have forfeited my wife and my honour, in my own mind, forever. I can state with certainty that Luceiia would have forgiven me had I strayed, because she told me so and I know she spoke the truth. But I could never have forgiven myself for such an atrocity.

  Cylla Titens was everything I mistrusted and disliked in a woman, all smoothly disguised in the shape of what every normal man admires.

  Cylla fascinated me. She was beautiful, with that headlong, dedicated devotion to her own beauty that left no room in her life for anyone or anything else of importance. Her body was her temple, and she worked long and hard to keep it long and hard. Beauty was life's blood to Cylla, and she was entirely taken up with protecting it. She never sat or walked in the sun, because she believed it dried and wrinkled her skin. And there was never any mention of Cylla and children in the same breath. Her self was the only thing she was true to, and she was determinedly dedicated to that.

  I knew how faithless Cylla was; I had reason to. And she knew I thought her a shameless wanton. She never made any attempt to qualify the accuracy or the validity of my opinion. She did not feel she needed to. I lusted after her and she encouraged my lust, deliberately baiting the beast in me, drawing it ever closer to the surface with my own tacit consent.

  There is a perversity in me that enjoyed the experience thoroughly, tormenting though it was, and the memory of some occasions that we shared can still choke me with desire from time to time, even though almost twenty years have gone by since I last saw her. The woman was temptation personified, and every blandishment she offered contained a challenge, I thought, to my ultimate moral strength. That, at least, is what I used to tell myself. In my arrogance, I deluded myself that I was ultimately invulnerable to her attractions, but there was always the chance that I would succumb.

  Our perverse relationship was a secret between the two of us — guilty on my part, blatant and sexually self-stimulating on Cylla's. Between the two of us there were no pretences. Cylla's motivations were hers alone, as was the undeniable satisfa
ction she derived from the entire situation. My own were equally private. We never discussed them, save in the broadest, coarsest terms, in whatever space of time each particular set of circumstances permitted. We would talk then, mostly in whispers, and Cylla would act — perform, I suppose, would be the most appropriate word. I did nothing on these occasions but look and react in tense self-containment that was sometimes agonizing. We conducted our association with these constraints because they were within my control, and they were within my control because I dictated the opening rules of what was to become an elaborate and long-extended game.

  It began when we first met, my first night in the Villa Britannicus, when I had just met and fallen in love with Luceiia. Cylla climbed into my bed that night and woke me from an erotic dream. Had Luceiia not come to my immediate rescue, knowing Cylla and what she was likely to do, I would have had Cylla Titens there and then, uncaring who she was. But nothing happened. Luceiia nipped that blossom before it could even bud, and I did not see Cylla again for almost a year.

  When we did meet again, it was at a gathering of friends, a thanksgiving celebration for a full harvest.

  Again Cylla let me know, without words, that she considered me a potential and soon-to-be-possessed bed-mate. I avoided her designs on that occasion, and for a long time afterward, by the simple expedient of never permitting myself to be alone with her. And so we continued for another year and more, with the four of us, Luceiia and myself and Cylla and her husband Domitius, whom she called Dom, reunited at least five times at similar gatherings.

  Let it be understood here that Cylla Titens was, as I have already said, more than simply attractive. She was wondrous to behold from a distance and she radiated an aura of sexual availability that every man in every gathering was aware of and responded to, with the singular exception of Domitius, her husband.