by David Drake
And of course, Vettius was quite right. A merchant like Dama could well appreciate the balance of risk against return.
Pyrrhus the Prophet understood the principles also.
"Yes, too bad," Rutilianus said. "Well-spoken old fellow, too. But-" his eyes traced past the nomenclator as if hoping for another glimpse of the boy Ganymede "-some of those perverts are just too good at concealing it. Can't take the risk, can we?"
He looked around the room as his smiling civilian advisors chorused agreement. Vettius watched Dama with an expression of regret, but he had no reason to be ashamed of what he'd said. Even Dama agreed with the assessment.
The wheezing gasp from the garden was loud enough for everyone in the office to hear, but only Vettius and Dama understood what it meant.
Sosius was between Vettius and the garden door for an instant. The soldier stiff-armed him into a wall, because that was faster than words and there wasn't a lot of time when Vettius and Dama crashed into the garden together. The merchant had picked up a half step by not having to clear his own path.
– men were dying.
It looked for a moment as though the old philosopher was trying to lean his forehead against the wall of the house. He'd rested the pommel of Vettius's sword at an angle against the stucco and was thrusting his body against it. The gasp had come when Menelaus vomited blood and toppled sideways before Dama could catch him.
– the swordpoint broke the resisting skin beneath Menelaus's breastbone and slid swiftly upward through the old man's lungs, stomach, and heart.
Vettius grabbed Menelaus's limp wrist to prevent the man from flopping on his back. The swordpoint stuck a finger's breadth out from between Menelaus's shoulder blades. It would grate on the stone if he were allowed to lie naturally.
Dama reached beneath the old man's neck and took the weight of his torso. Vettius glanced across at him, then eased back-putting his own big form between the scene and the excited civilians spilling from the office to gape at it.
"You didn't have to do that, old friend," Dama whispered."There were other households…"
But no households who wouldn't have heard the story of what had happened here-or a similar story, similarly told by an emissary of Pyrrhus the Prophet. Menelaus had known that… and Menelaus hadn't been willing to accept open charity from his friend.
The old man did not speak. A trail of sluggish blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes blinked once in the sunlight, twice Then they stayed open and began to glaze.
Dama gripped the spatha's hilt. One edge of the blade was embedded in Menelaus's vertebrae. He levered the weapon, hearing bone crack as the steel came free.
"Get back!" the merchant snarled to whoever it was whose motion blurred closer through the film of tears. He drew the blade out, feeling his friend's body spasm beneath his supporting arm.
He smelled the wastes that the corpse voided after mind and soul were gone. Menelaus wore a new toga. Dama'd provided it "as a loan for the interview with Rutilianus."
Dama stood up. He caught a fold of his own garment in his left hand and scrubbed the steel with it, trusting the thickness of the wool to protect his flesh from the edge that had just killed the man he had known and respected as long as he had memory.
Known and respected and loved.
And when the blade was clean, he handed the sword, pommel-first, to Lucius Vettius.
There were seats and tables in the side-room of the tavern, but Vettius found the merchant hunched over the masonry bar in the front. The bartender, ladling soup from one of the kettles cemented into the counter, watched hopefully when the soldier surveyed the room from the doorway, then strode over to Dama.
The little fella had been there for a couple hours. Not making trouble. Not even drinkingthat heavy…
But there was a look in his eyes that the bartender had seen in other quiet men at the start of a real bad night.
"I thought you might've gone home," Vettius said as he leaned his broad left palm on the bar between his torso and Dama's.
"I didn't," the merchant said. "Go away."
He swigged down the last of his wine and thrust the bronze cup, chained to the counter, toward the bartender. "Another."
The tavern was namedAt the Sign of Venus. While he waited for the bartender to fill the cup-and while he pointedly ignored Dama's curt demand tohim -Vettius examined the statue on the street-end of the counter.
The two-foot-high terracotta piece had given the place its name. It showed Venus tying her sandal, while her free hand rested on the head of Priapus's cock to balance her. Priapus's body had been left the natural russet color of the coarse pottery, but Venus was painted white, with blue for her jewelry and the string bra and briefs she wore. The color was worn off her right breast, the one nearer the street.
Dama took a drink from the refilled cup. "Menelaus had been staying with me the past few days," he said into the wine. "So I didn't go back to my apartment."
The bartender was keeping down at the other end of the counter, which was just as it should be. "One for me," Vettius called. The man nodded and ladled wine into another cup, then mixed it with twice the volume of heated water before handing it to the soldier.
"Sorry about your friend," Vettius said in what could have been mistaken for a light tone.
"Sorry about your sword," Dama muttered, then took a long drink from his cup.
The soldier shrugged."It's had blood on it before," he said. After a moment, he added, "Any ideas about how Pyrrhus switched the notebook in your friend's purse?"
Like everyone else in the tavern, the two men wore only tunics and sandals. For centuries, togas had been relegated to formal wear: for court appearances, say; or for dancing attendance on a wealthy patron like Gaius Rutilius Rutilianus.
Dama must have sent his toga home with the slaves who'd accompanied him and Menelaus to the interview. The garment would have to be washed before it could be worn again, of course…
"It wouldn't have been hard," the merchant said, putting his cup down and meeting Vettius's eyes for the first time since walking behind his friend's corpse past the gawping servants and favor-seekers in the reception hall."In the street, easily enough. Or perhaps a servant."
He looked down at the wine, then drank again. "A servant of mine, that would probably make it."
Vettius drank also. "You know," he said, as if idly, "I don't much like being made a fool of with the Prefect."
"You'restill alive," Dama snapped.
Vettius looked at the smaller man without expression. The bartender, who'd seenthat sort of look before also, signaled urgently toward a pair of husky waiters; but the soldier said only, "Yeah. We are alive, aren't we?"
Dama met the soldier's eyes. "Sorry," he said. "That was out of line."
"Been a rough day for a lot of people," said Vettius with a dismissive shrug. "For… just about everybody except Pyrrhus, I'd say. Know anything about that gentleman?"
The merchant chuckled. "I know what I've heard from Menelaus," he said. "Mostly that Pyrrhus isn't a gentleman. He's a priest from somewhere in the East-I've heard Edessa, but I've heard other places. Came here to Rome, found an old temple that was falling down and made it his church."
Dama sipped wine and rolled it around his mouth as if trying to clear away the taste of something. Maybe he was. He'd felt no twinge at mentioning Menelaus's name, even though his friend's body was still in the process of being laid out.
Menelaus had always wanted to be cremated. He said that the newer fashion of inhumation came from-he'd glance around, to make sure he wasn't being overheard by those who might take violent offense-mystical nonsense about resurrection of the body.
Vettius looked past Dama toward the bartender."You there," he called, fishing silver from his wallet. "Sausage rolls for me and my friend."
To the merchant he added, as blandly as though theywere old friends, "There's something about a snake?"
"Yes…"Dama said, marshalling his recolle
ctions."He claims to have one of the bronze serpents that Christ set up in the wilderness to drive away a plague. Something like that. He claims it talks, gives prophecies."
"Does it?"
Dama snorted."I can make a snake talk-to fools-if there's enough money in it. And there's money in this one, believe me."
He bit into a steaming sausage roll. It was juicy; good materials well-prepared, and the wine was better than decent as well. It was a nice tavern, a reasonable place to stop.
Besides being the place nearest to the Prefect's doorway where Dama could get a drink.
He poured a little wine onto the terrazzo floor. The drops felt cool when they splashed his sandaled feet. Vettius cocked an eyebrow at him.
"An offering to a friend," Dama said curtly.
"One kind of offering," the soldier answered. "Not necessarily the kind that does the most good."
Dama had been thinking the same thing. That was why he didn't mind talking about his friend after all…
For a moment, the two men eyed one another coldly. Then Vettius went on, "Happen to know where this temple Pyrrhus lives in might be?"
Dama hadn't mentioned that Pyrrhus livedin his church. It didn't surprise him that the soldier already knew, nor that Lucius Vettius probably knew other things about the Prophet.
"As it happens," the merchant said aloud, "I do. It's in the Ninth District, pretty near the Portico of Pompey. And-"
He popped the remainder of his sausage roll into his mouth and chewed it slowly while Vettius waited for the conclusion of the sentence.
An open investigation of Pyrrhus would guarantee the soldier an immediate posting to whichever frontier looked most miserable on the day Rutilianus's wife learned what he was doing to her darling.
You know, I don't much like being made a fool of with the Prefect.
Vettius wasn't going to get support through his normal channels; but it might be that he could find someone useful who took a personal interest in the matter…
Dama washed down the roll with the last of his wine. "And since it's a Sunday," he resumed, "they'll be having an open ceremony." He squinted past Venus and the smirking Priapus to observe the sun's angle. "We'll have plenty of time to get there, I should think."
He brought a silver coin from his purse, checked the weight of it with his finger, and added a bronze piece before slapping the money onto the counter."To cover the wine," Dama called to the bartender. "Mine and my friend's both."
The two men shouldered their way into the crowded street, moving together as though they were a practiced team.
***
They heard the drum even before they turned the corner and saw the edges of a crowd which Vettius's trained eye estimated to contain over a thousand souls. Dusk would linger for another half-hour, but torches were already flaring in the hands of attendants on the raised base of a small temple flanked by three-story apartment buildings.
"Are we late?" the soldier asked.
Dama dipped his chin in negation. "They want places near the front, and a lot of them can't afford to buy their way up."
His eyes narrowed as he surveyed the expensively dyed cloaks and the jewelry winking in ears and coiffures of matrons waiting close to the temple-the church-steps. "On the other hand," he added, "a lot of themcan afford to pay."
The crowd completely blocked the street, but that didn't appear to concern either the civic authorities or the local inhabitants. Vettius followed the merchant's eyes and muttered, "Pyrrhus himself owns the building across the street. He uses it to house his staff and put up wealthy pilgrims."
A flutist, playing a counterpoint on the double tubes of his instrument, joined the drummer and torch-bearers on the porch. Two of the attendants at the back of the crowd, identifiable by their bleached tunics and batons of tough rootwood, moved purposefully toward Vettius and Dama.
The merchant had two silver denarii folded in his palm. "We've come to worship with the holy Pyrrhus," he explained, moving his hand over that of one of the attendants. The exchange was expert, a maneuver both parties had practiced often in the past.
"Yes," said the attendant. "If you have a request for guidance from the holy Pyrrhus, give it on a sealed tablet to the servants at the front."
Dama nodded and reached for another coin. "Not now," said the attendant. "You will be granted an opportunity to make a gift directly to the divinity."
"Ah…" said Vettius. "I don't have a tablet of my own. Could-"
The other attendant, the silent one, was already handing Vettius an ordinary tablet of waxed boards. He carried a dozen similar ones in a large scrip.
"Come," said-ordered-the first attendant. His baton, a dangerous weapon as well as a staff of office, thrust through the crowd like the bronze ram of a warship cleaving choppy waves.
There were loud complaints from earlier-and poorer-worshippers, but no one attempted physical opposition to the Prophet's servant. Vettius gripped Dama's shoulder from behind as they followed, lest the pressure of the crowd separate them beyond any cure short of open violence.
"Pyrrhus's boys aren't very talkative,'' Vettius whispered in the smaller man's ear. "Drugs, perhaps?"
Dama shrugged. Though the attendant before them had a cultured accent, he was as devoid of small-talk and emotion as the messenger who brought deadly lies about Menelaus to the Prefect. Drugs were a possible cause; but the merchant already knew a number of men-and a greater number of women-for whom religious ecstasy of one sort or another had utterly displaced all other passions.
Pyrrhus's converted temple was unimposing. A building, twenty feet wide and possibly thirty feet high to the roof-peak, stood on a stepped base of coarse volcanic rock. Two pillars, and pilasters formed by extensions of the sidewalls, supported the pediment. That triangular area was ornamented with a painting on boards showing a human-faced serpent twined around a tau cross.
The temple had originally been dedicated to Asklepios, the healing god who'd lived part of his life as a snake. The current decoration was quite in keeping with the building's pagan use.
There were six attendants on the temple porch now. The newcomers-one of them was Gnaeus Acer-clashed bronze rattles at a consistent rhythm; not the same rhythm for both men, nor in either case quite the rhythm that the staring-eyed drummer stroked from his own instrument.
The guide slid Vettius and Dama to within a row of the front of the crowd. Most of the worshipers still ahead of them were wealthy matrons, but a few were country folk. Vettius thought he also saw the flash of a toga carrying a senator's broad russet stripe. More attendants, some of them carrying horn-lensed lanterns rather than batons, formed a line at the base of the steps.
Dama had paid silver for a second-rank location. The first rank almost certainly went for gold.
The merchant had opened a blank notebook and was hunching to write within the strait confines of the crowd. The tablet Vettius had been given looked normal enough at a glance: a pair of four-by five-inch boards hinged so that they could cover one another. One of the boards was waxed within a raised margin of wood that, when the tablet was closed, protected words written on the soft surface. A cord attached to the back could be tied or sealed to the front board to hold the tablet shut.
Dama finished what he was doing, grinned, and took the tablet from Vettius. "Shield me," he whispered.
Vettius obediently shifted his body, though the two of them were probably the only members of the crowd who weren't focused entirely on their own affairs.
Dama had been scribbling with a bone stylus. Now, using the stylus tip, he pressed on what seemed to be a tiny knot through the wooden edge of the tablet supplied to Vettius. The knot slipped out into his waiting palm. A quick tug started the waxed wooden back sliding away from the margin of what had seemed a solid piece.
"Pyrrhus the Prophet has strange powers indeed," Vettius said as he fitted the tablet back together again. "Let me borrow your stylus."
He wrote quickly, cutting the wax with large, squar
e letters; not a calligrapher's hand, but one which could write battlefield orders that were perfectly clear.
"What are you asking?" Dama whispered.
"Whether Amasius will die so that I get promoted to Legate of the Domestic Horse," the soldier replied. He slapped that tablet closed. "I suppose the attendants seal these for us?"
"Ah…" said Dama with a worried expression. "That might not be a tactful question to have asked… ah, if the information gets into the wrong hands, you know."
"Sure wouldn't be," Vettius agreed, "if I'd signed 'Decurion Vettius' instead of 'Section Leader Lycorides.' "
He chuckled. "You know," he added, "Lycorides is about dumb enough not to figure how a question like that opens you up to blackmail."
He grinned at the pediment of the church and said, "Pyrrhus would figure it out, though. Wouldn't he?"
Dama watched a heavy-set woman in the front rank wave her ivory tablet at an attendant. She wore a heavy cross on a gold chain, and the silk band which bound her hair was embroidered with the Chi-Rho symbol. Menelaus may not have thought Pyrrhus was a Christian; but, as the Prefect had retorted, there were Christians who felt otherwise.
"Hercules!"Vettius swore under his breath."That's Severiana-the Prefect's wife!"
He snorted. "And Ganymede. That boy gets around."
"Want to duck back now and let me cover?" the merchant offered.
Vettius grimaced. "They won't recognize me," he said in the tone of one praying as well as assessing the situation.
An attendant leaned toward Dama, past the veiled matron and her daughter in the front rank who were reciting prayers aloud in Massiliot Greek.
"If you have petitions for advice from the Prophet," the man said, "hand them in now."
As the attendant spoke, he rolled a lump of wax between his thumb and forefinger, holding it over the peak of the lantern he carried in his other hand. Prayers chirped to a halt as the women edged back from the lantern's hissing metal frame.