by Jack Whyte
"Where was Cay during all this? And where is he now?"
Again the headshake. "He's not here. He went out earlier with a man, an old friend of his, who came here about noon. I don't know who he was. I was busy with the children and did not see him. Anyway, the servants said he was a stranger, but Cay knew him well from long ago. The two of them went off somewhere and have not come back."
"Sweet Christ!" I was already limping to the door as quickly as I could move, shouting back over my shoulder, "Call Equus and assemble a mounted party and make sure there's wagons and a medic with them. Tell them to meet me at the Villa Titens as quickly as they can, and you stay here!"
My horse still stood in the yard where I had left him. I flung myself across his back and had him running before I was properly seated. He was a strong animal and ready for another run. Now I whipped him to a gallop and put him to the shortest route towards the home of Dom and his faithless wife.
It took me half an hour, at full speed, to get there, and I was careless now of the poor brute beneath me, abusing him cruelly in my fear. As I went, I fought with my own imagination, telling myself it could not be as bad as I was fearing.
The first sign of tragedy was waiting for me at the villa gate: Carlos, Dom's manservant of many years, lay sprawled and disembowelled across my path. Behind him, some paces distant, lay another corpse, unknown to me. I looked further and saw more, four in all, in the entrance court. It looked like the aftermath of a raid, and I told myself Dom had been unmanned by discovering the scene unexpectedly, but even as my mind formed the thought I knew I was only deluding myself again. Dom, my gentle friend, had done this in the grip of madness.
The last of the corpses, this one a young woman, sprawled stiffly in her dried blood on the steps leading to the portico of the house itself, and I paused there, outside the door, dreading to enter, fearing what I would find. Rather than look too closely at the dead woman by my feet, I looked up at the sky. Night was approaching and heavy clouds had rolled in from the west, gravid with rain. Perfect, I thought. You will need all your rain to wash away the blood here on this ground. I drew my sword, for what reason I knew not, pushed open the doorway and stepped through into Hades itself.
A soldier grows inured to the sight of blood. It is part of his life; the spilling of it part of his occupation; and as he accepts blood and the spilling of it, he accepts as well the effluvia and the ordure that go hand in hand with the abrupt and violent, brutal severance of life. He learns to accept and ignore the stench of voided bowels and bladders; he sees without seeing the liverish, blue-white-purple glisten of entrails, and the sharp, pungent stink of visceral fluids assaults his nostrils only in passing. The soldier is endowed with this detachment in the same way that iron is tempered: by being immersed in fire and then beaten with heavy hammer blows. His tempering is in the fury and the terrors of battle, where nothing may survive in his mind that might distract him from his most sacred, dedicated need: to survive.
Remove the stimulus of dire, frenzied struggle, however, and transport the man, along with all the chaotic slaughter of the battlefield, into the confines of a quiet, spacious, well-lit family home, and you amplify ten-thousandfold all the cumulative horrors he has been able to ignore throughout his life. The result is waking nightmare: horror and loathing beyond description.
I had never really known, in spite of all my experience, just how much blood can spill from human bodies. Every wall in the interior of that house, it seemed to me, was polluted with blood: it was everywhere, smeared and splashed in thick, dark gouts from which grim trickles ran towards the floor, which was completely awash in thick, black, coagulated sheets and puddles of gore. It was a scene from Tartarus, lacking only leering, gibbering demons. I would not have been surprised to see demons. I looked for them, but only their minions were present, the flies. Beelzebub himself, the Lord of the Flies, had been here recently but was now gone, and only his servants remained, their buzzing drone filling the air like the moans of tormented souls.
I stood just inside the open portal, my feet in blood, as though I had frozen to the floor, and my scalp crawled and I found myself fighting to draw breath as the scene seemed to revolve slowly around me. I counted seven bodies, all household servants, all butchered horribly. The broad stairway to the second floor, the stairway where I had first seen Cylla touch herself, was a dried river of blood. I made a mighty effort and succeeded in flexing my fingers, which gripped my sword hilt so tightly that they were in pain, and then I moved toward the stairs, looking down to place my feet carefully, trying to ignore the charnel-house around me.
There was another young woman lying at the top of the stairs. She had been almost completely decapitated and it was her blood that drenched the steps. Cylla's bedchamber lay along the passage to my right, Dom's to my left.
I went to Dom's room first, turning the handle cautiously and pushing the door open with my foot. It swung back slowly, revealing an empty chamber, clean and miraculously free of blood.
It seemed to take me an age to retrace my steps, past the dead girl at the stair head and along to Cylla's room, where I found the door wide open. An open window faced the door directly and I saw the curtains stirring sluggishly, too heavy with dried blood to flap in the strengthening breeze from outside. I stepped inside and vomited immediately, my whole being revolted at the sight that greeted me.
Cylla and someone — I presumed her young deaf-mute — had been destroyed on the bed, hacked and slashed almost beyond recognition, and their dismembered bodies piled together in a heap. In my first glance I saw severed arms and legs, a gutted male torso, and Cylla's head, wide-eyed and screaming, her lustrous hair glued to her skull with blood and her lips drawn back from her bloodied teeth in a rictus of terrified realization of what was happening to her. All of that I saw, and then I threw up, bending over with my hands upon my knees, my sword still gripped bone-tight. Reeling with nausea, and fearing I might fall into the blood, I staggered backward, groping behind me for something to support my weight, and I found Dom. My hand touched his face, warm and alive, and I recoiled with a scream of fright, my sword arm swinging high to strike my assailant down.
But I did not strike. For I saw his eyes immediately, then his face, and then his condition. He was wedged almost upright, hunched over, his knees almost giving way, in a corner behind the door, and he was dying. His left hand hung by a flap of skin from its wrist, where he had chopped it off, and most of his life's blood was already gone. His eyes were ghastly in the whiteness of his face, but they seemed clear and lucid. He knew me. We remained there, immobile as statuary, for what seemed like a very long time before I lowered my sword. Dom's own sword, a fine, sharp one that I had made for him, lay by his feet. When I moved, so, too, did he, gesturing with that grotesquely flopping hand towards the bed and its horrid burden. The movement brought a feeble jet of blood spurting in my direction and I remembered another handless arm that had saved my life in battle long ago, allowing me to be crippled rather than killed.
"Cylla..." His voice was little more than a wheeze of sound. "She mocked me, Publius..." I remained motionless and he went on. "Railed at me... Laughter... Struck me ... Tried to kill me." His eyes looked towards the bed and back to me. "Said everybody knew, Publius... everybody knew... servants ... friends... all knew. Did..." He sagged, then drew his head back with a great effort, fixing me with rapidly glazing eyes. "Did you...?" His strength gave out and he fell to his knees before me like a supplicant. Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he pitched forward on his face. I did not bend to feel for a pulse. Dom was dead and the better for it.
I can remember walking from that house in a state of absolute calm, picking my way with care to avoid the blood as much as possible. I crossed the courtyard to the gate where my horse stood waiting for me, far enough removed from the smell of blood to be unaware of it but sidling nervously, nevertheless. The first, heavy raindrops fell and turned into a downpour as I squatted on my heels against the wa
ll outside that dreadful place. And in my mind I saw nothing of the slaughterhouse, only my good friend Dom looking at me with his incomplete question: "Did you... ?"
We found a gibbering, hysterical survivor in the cellars, a woman who had managed to escape with only a minor slash wound. She told us of Dom's rampage, of how he cried only "Did you know?" before he cut down each living soul he met, and, when he could find no more to kill, ran screaming from the villa.
We burned the Villa Titens and all that it contained, removed its stones and ploughed the ashes under, leaving no sign of its existence in our lands.
It did not occur to me until long afterward that Cylla could not have been in the forest glade that afternoon.
V
The Titens affair affected everyone in the Colony, drawing a cloud over our little society, a pall that coloured every aspect of our lives for a long time. It seems strange to me now, however, that Caius and I barely discussed the matter after the first shock had worn off. We spoke of it in detail in the days that followed that dreadful afternoon, but then, by mutual consent, we consigned it to the past along with its principals. We had too many other things claiming our attention, all of them concerned with the ongoing life around us, for which we were responsible. Luceiia, however, continued to think about the Titens household and the situation that had prevailed there, and, as in all things she turned her mind to, she considered it logically, analytically and exhaustively, arriving in due course at a conclusion she wished to share with me. That sharing became a night-long discussion that lasted well into the dark hours before dawn, with she and I seated on either side of a glowing brazier in our chamber while the rest of the household slept. Luceiia did most of the talking. I listened, and attempted to disagree with her on several points, but she demolished my few objections with ruthless, implacable arguments and I finally had the good sense to stay quiet and absorb what she had to say. By the time we did eventually go to bed, I was convinced that what she had been telling me was accurate and correct in every respect, little as I might like it. That acceptance of her views led directly to one of the few altercations I ever had with her noble brother.
It began abruptly, while I was telling him about the long talk his sister and I had had. I was deeply concerned by some of the things she had said and some of the issues she had raised, and I suppose the depth of my distress and anxiety came through clearly to Caius. At first he listened, courteously as always, to what I had to say. As I went on, however, I could see that he was becoming more and more upset by what he was hearing until finally, unable to listen any longer, he held up a hand to restrain me. I stopped in mid-sentence, surprised by his reaction.
"You want to say something?"
He glared at me. "No, nothing. Not now. Not until I have had time to settle my thoughts and consider your words."
I was mystified. "Then what's wrong with you? You look as though you would like to flay me alive."
He exploded into anger, slapping the table violently and leaping up so suddenly that the stool he had been perched on fell over backwards.
"Damnation, Publius, I can't believe what I'm hearing! Do you know what you are telling me? Can you hear yourself? Have you listened to your own words?" He spun on his heel and walked across the room, his hands clenching and unclenching in agitation, while I stared after him in amazement.
My own concerns were deep, but I had thought about them long and hard before deciding to talk to Caius and I had tried to present them as dispassionately as I could.
Now I was seeing a reaction I thought totally out of proportion to the tenor of what I had been saying, particularly since he had not allowed me to finish what I had begun to say. He swung back to face me, his face contorted by an anger I had not seen in him for years, and I felt myself frowning as I wondered what had caused it. He did not leave me wondering long, and his next words broke over me like cold water.
"Where in Hades has your training gone? Have you lost your manhood? You were a soldier once, Varrus! An officer! A supposedly intelligent commander of men! Don't make me doubt you now. Women's words and women's sentiments and women's pleadings suit you ill. You need to spend more time among your fellows and less among your womenfolk listening to old wives' tales and fears. You're growing soft and feminine!"
The injustice of these words infuriated me; my own anger swept up around me in a red haze and I found myself straining towards him, fighting an urge to beat him to the floor. I took no more than one half step, however, before the discipline of years stopped me. Forcing myself to contain this thundering surge of rage, I bent down slowly and righted the stool he had upset, holding it very tightly in both hands and setting it securely in place before allowing myself to look at him again. His face was still suffused with anger, as, I knew, was my own. His lips moved to form new words, but now it was I who cut him off with a chop of my hand, and whatever he had been about to say remained unsaid. I could hear my heart beating in my head and I waited until the pounding died down before I spoke. It took a long time, and neither of us moved in the interval. Finally, when I felt that I could speak without shouting, or without my voice shaking, I swallowed hard and willed myself to whisper, "Those are not words I expected from you, my friend." And having said that I turned and walked slowly from the room, leaving him alone with his inexplicable anger.
During the following hour I walked alone in the woods, going over what I had said to him and trying to identify the reasons for the astonishing effect of my words. What had I said? Certainly nothing that could be considered incendiary or demeaning; nothing that I could even classify as being unmanly or feminine, even though the arguments I was presenting had originated with my wife. So what, I asked myself over and again, could possibly have upset Caius so much?
I had told him that Luceiia was concerned that our colonists were losing touch with the morality necessary to communal living. The words sounded pompous to my own ears, now that I thought about them, but even so, could that have been the cause of his fury? Pomposity? Or was it the moral stance? Had he taken offence at that, misconstruing my words as a personal attack on his own morality? Surely not, I decided.
I had been describing Luceiia's concerns. She had been talking in generalities most of the time, but she had pointed out a number of specific instances in support of her claims, some of which I had been aware of, but many of which I had known nothing about. All of them had worried me, but several had been really frightening. The Titens family's situation was, strangely enough, the easiest for me to accept, in spite of my own role in it, for it embodied the entire situation in miniature. And Luceiia had assured me that the particular instances she cited were only random examples of a widespread and growing disease in our Colony.
I had told Caius some of this, and I had said that, in Luceiia's opinion, and now in my own, we, as the leaders of the Colony, were faced with a moral responsibility to ensure not only the physical welfare and well-being of our people, but also their moral, if not their spiritual welfare — an uncomfortable responsibility, certainly, if adopted, but an incontrovertible one.
I had then told him Luceiia had convinced me that the ancient laws and morality of Rome were no longer flexible or versatile enough for our times. The context of the times had changed, I said, and was still changing, and it seemed to Luceiia, and to me now, that the rules of the society we were building called for a more simplistic, more personal and more intimate set of laws and regulations.
It was at this point that Caius had interrupted me angrily, but examine it as I might, I could not find any reason for the ferocity of his rejection.
Eventually, after an hour or so, I had cooled down enough to return to the villa. I saw no sign of Caius and made no attempt to find him. I excused myself to Luceiia, claiming to have work to do, and took myself off to my forge with a cold roast fowl, a loaf of bread and a skin of wine. I ate alone and worked until nightfall, when I made my way back to the house to find Caius waiting for me in the family room. He stood up as I ente
red and I stopped on the threshold, looking at him and trying to gauge his mood. He shrugged and turned up his palms, with a curiously shamefaced look in his eyes.
"We need to talk, Publius. As friends."
I put down the bag I was holding and crossed towards the couch by the fire, and he turned to watch me as I passed him. My anger had long since disappeared and the room was warm and cosy with flickering light and dancing shadows.
"Where's Luceiia?" I asked.
He moved to sit across from me. "With the children. She will leave us alone for a time. I told her how ungracious and offensive I was to you this afternoon and she will not come in until I have stewed long in my own juices and made my apologies to you for my — "
"Forget about that, Caius." I cut him off, standing up and moving towards the table where I had seen a leather bucket filled with ice and salt and a stone jug of my favourite Germanic wine. Ullic's people brought us cartloads of ice from the mountains every spring, cut into large blocks and insulated with straw and, stored with care in the whitewashed cool room of the villa, it kept our stored meat and poultry fresh through the heat of the summer. It also served to cool our best wines on festive occasions.
"No apologies are necessary between us, Cay. We have been friends too long. I angered you, you angered me. Things like that happen, sometimes." I picked up the wine jar, feeling its icy coldness and reaching for two cups. "Why the best wine? This is celebration stuff. What are we celebrating?"
He smiled, wryly. "My apology? My dear sister thinks that I should admit to failings more often. She seems to think it makes me more human."
"You told her what we argued about?"
"Yes. I was surprised you hadn't already done so."