by David Drake
She sniffed angrily. “I knew from the smell on you when you come back from the theater, boy,” she said. “It was her ladyship visiting that showed me I couldn’t put it off. I’d been telling myself it wasn’t so, like I was a foolish girl.”
“Tell me what I must do, Anna,” Corylus said, firmly but calmly. He’d never seen his nurse in such a state. Shouting wouldn’t help matters, but he did need to get her to the point at some time before Carce’s thousand-year celebrations—in two or three centuries.
“There’s a thing under the ground,” she said, suddenly herself again. “An amulet I think, but maybe something else. I can’t see it myself—I don’t have that sort of power, boy, you know that. But…”
She swallowed and walked awkwardly over to the dovecote. She used her sticks. She had thrust them down the neck of her tunic so that she could climb the ladder, but they were a doubtful help on the tiles. Still, the surface wasn’t any worse than wet cobblestones.
Corylus wasn’t certain what to do, but after a brief hesitation he followed her. He tried to keep his weight over the beams, but a flash of humor lighted his face. I wonder what Tertia—or perhaps Quartilla—would say if I entered through the ceiling instead of by the door?
It was good to laugh at something when he felt like this. Especially something silly.
Anna rubbed a dove’s neck feathers through the grille; it cooed, squirming closer to her. She looked again at Corylus and said, “I couldn’t see things, but the birds, I thought, might; and the little animals. Which they did. Last night I went with a vole down his burrow into the place that the thing was; and this morning, after their ladyships were gone, I hired a chair to the Esquiline with Dromo, Cephinna’s boy from the fifth floor. We marked the place, and he’ll guide you back to it tonight.”
Corylus licked his lips. “On the Esquiline. That will be to the old burial grounds there.”
“Aye,” said Anna. She looked as fierce as a rebel waiting to be crucified.
“All right,” said Corylus, since there was nothing else to do. “We’ll leave as soon as it’s dark. Ah—will there be difficulties with Dromo? That is, how much does he know?”
Anna sniffed again. “He knows enough not to like it,” she said, “but he’ll do it for me. And for you, master. He trusts you.”
“Ah…,” said Corylus. “I’ll pay whatever you think…?”
“A silver piece,” Anna said. “A day’s pay for a grown man, which is fair enough. Mind, there’s few grown men who’d do what Dromo will tonight. He’s a brave one, which is why I picked him. Though…”
Corylus hooked his hand, as though trying to draw the thought out of the old woman by brute force. It would be simpler if Anna simply spat out all the information in an organized fashion; but then, it would be simpler if everyone loved his neighbor, worked hard, and behaved courteously to others.
There wouldn’t be much use for soldiers, then, or attorneys either. Corylus had seen enough of oxen to know that he didn’t want to spend his life following a pair of them around a field while leaning into a plow to make it bite. Though a return to the Golden Age, where the fruits and grain just sprouted—that might not be such a hardship.
“I told Dromo all he had to do was show you where the place to dig was,” Anna explained. “You and Pulto would do the rest. I’ve already bought mattocks and a pry bar; they’re in the kitchen.”
“That will save time,” Corylus said, smiling faintly. Anna might have trouble saying things she wished weren’t so, but she certainly didn’t hesitate to do anything she thought was necessary.
He looked west over the city. Because this apartment was the tallest building for half a mile, he was largely looking down onto tile roofs much like the one he stood on. Potted plants and dovecotes and rabbit hutches; and now and again there was a shed of cloth on a wicker frame that might have anything at all inside it.
People lived ordinary lives here in Carce, the greatest city in the world. None of them perfect, including Publius Cispius Corylus, a student of Pandareus of Athens … but generally decent folk.
He thought of Typhon, ripping its way through a vision of crystal towers and walls of sun-bright metal. No one had told Corylus that would result unless he—and Anna and Pandareus and Varus and all of them—managed to stop the creature, but it was a logical inference from what he had heard—and what he had seen ten days before, when the Underworld vomited forth its flaming demons.
“Pulto should stay here with you, Anna,” he said. There was no reason to force a brave man and a friend into a night’s work that would torture him worse than hot pincers.
“No,” she said. “You’ll be going into the ground, but you’ll want a solid man up above to watch your back. My Marcus is that; and anyway, you couldn’t keep him away unless you chained him.”
She coughed. “I think it’s a tomb, master,” she said. “An old one, maybe; very old. Etruscan, I’d venture, from before Carce ever was. Though—”
She fluttered her little fingers, since her palms were braced on the smooth knobbed handles of her sticks.
“—that’s a lot to draw from a vole’s mind, you’ll understand. Anyway, it’s cut in rock, the place the thing is.”
Corylus laughed and hugged Anna again. “We’ll find you your bauble, dear one,” he said. “How could any man fail someone they love as much as Pulto and I love you?”
He’d made the words a joke, but it was the truth just the same.
I’d best send a messenger to Varus, telling him I won’t be able to join him this afternoon after all, Corylus thought.
On his way back from class, he’d been concerned about what they might find in Tardus’ home. Now, entering the cellars of a senator’s house seemed a harmless, even friendly alternative to the way he would really be spending the evening.
* * *
“OH!” SAID SAXA as his entourage formed around him with all manner of shouting and gestures. “My boy, I don’t see your friend Corylus. You don’t think he’s gotten lost on the way here, do you? We really shouldn’t wait much longer or we’ll arrive at the dinner hour, which would be discourteous.”
Tardus will probably regard our arrival to search his house under consular authority to be discourteous enough, Varus thought. Aloud he said, “Corylus was detained on other business, your lordship. We will proceed without him.”
Saxa bustled off, surrounded by Agrippinus, who would stay at the house; Candidus, who would lead the escort; and the chief lictor.
It hadn’t occurred to Varus that Saxa would remember that Corylus might accompany them. He’d underestimated his father, a disservice which he would try hard not to repeat.
Pandareus had dropped into the background when Saxa approached; now he joined Varus again. With his lips close to his teacher’s ear, Varus said, “It seems a great deal of argument for what is really just a six-block walk, doesn’t it?”
“It would be, I agree,” Pandareus said, for a moment fully the professor. “But I take issue with your terms, Lord Varus. If we were simply to walk to the home of Sempronius Tardus, we would be wasting our efforts. If this is to be a rite of state—a religious act, in effect—then the litanies are to be accepted as being of spiritual significance even though their human meaning has been blurred.”
Varus chuckled. In an undertone he muttered the refrain of the priests during the rites of Robigus—the deity of corn smut. It was a string of nonsense syllables to anyone alive today.
“Yes, my teacher,” he said. “It does have a great deal of similarity to what we’re hearing now. Or at any rate, to what my father is hearing, merging the three speeches.”
“Plato believed in Ideal Republics,” said Pandareus, watching the commotion with an attitude of bright interest. He was chatting now, no longer lecturing. “I am … willing, I suppose, to accept them also—for the purpose of argument. I don’t find them any more useful in studying real conditions than the Chief Pirate’s Beautiful Daughter would be in formulating the Repub
lic’s mercantile policy.”
Varus chuckled at mention of one of the standards of school orations, like the Reformed Prostitute and the Undutiful Son. “I wouldn’t say that the reign of Dion of Syracuse was a Golden Age, despite Plato’s earnest coaching of his would-be philosopher king,” he said. “I accept your point about real politics generally looking like—”
He gestured to the confusion of servants, lictors, and citizen-clients. It looked as though the procession was close to moving off.
“—that. What I don’t understand is why it looks like that instead of being, well, smoother.”
“It may be that you are asking the correct question,” Pandareus said, reverting to his classroom manner. “You’re asking it rhetorically, however, instead of using the moment as a real opportunity to learn. Why is it that human societies generally organize themselves in fashions that we philosophers deplore as inefficient? Surely it cannot be possible that human wisdom is limited while the cosmos is infinite?”
Varus laughed again. “I’ll want to spend an hour or two considering the question before giving you a definitive answer, master,” he said.
Pandareus had a remarkable ability to puncture displays of excessive ego—by using the Socratic Method, proving that his disciple already possessed the information. That was certainly true in the present instance. Varus wouldn’t go so far as to claim that the fact something existed proved that it was good—but he did accept that everything happened for a reason.
Candidus spoke to a musician holding a double-pipe. Varus believed the piper was the same man—if that was the correct term for someone so slender and feminine—who had led the music during yesterday’s mime. If so, he had come through the ordeal very well.
“We’d best take our places,” Varus said. He moved into the place directly following Saxa. Behind them would come the most respectable of his clients, most of them impoverished relatives.
Varus and Pandareus had just reached the column when the pipe began to sing cadence from the front, among the lictors. The procession started off—not in unison, but a good deal closer than most arrays of this sort.
“In the army, Corylus says they sing to keep time,” Varus said as they ambled through the city. “From the songs he describes, it’s probably as well that we’re not doing that. Otherwise Tardus would be in a panic to lock up his daughters.”
“Or sons,” Pandareus said, straight-faced. “Though I’m sure that the standards of the eastern legions that I’m familiar with are less manly and rigorous than those of the Rhine frontier.”
I didn’t expect to be laughing repeatedly on this expedition, Varus thought. The obvious answer—because everything was a question, looked at in the correct fashion—struck him. He looked at Pandareus and said, “Thank you, master. You have taught me more by example than even from the knowledge you have accumulated.”
“I would not be a good model for most of the young men who become my students,” Pandareus said, looking up with interest at the imperial palace on their right. Only servants were present, since the emperor was—as usual—on Capri. “Certainly not for Master Corylus, of course: he is far too forceful and decisive to gain from my style of self-management. But you, Lord Varus.… I believe you understand my own qualms and uncertainties all too well, so my practiced ways of dealing with them could be useful.”
Changing the subject almost before the words were out, the teacher gestured up the steep slope to the ancient citadel. The great temples of Jupiter and Juno glowered down at the city. In a breezy, less contemplative tone, he said, “I’m seeing this Carce for the first time.”
“But surely you’ve been here before, master?” Varus said. “Why, I’d think you regularly came this way to get from your room to the Forum when you hold class there.”
“So speaks the son of the wealthy Alphenus Saxa,” Pandareus said. “Yes, my feet tread this pavement—”
He half-skipped to rap the toe of his sandal on the flagstone.
“—regularly. But on an ordinary day I would be dodging a crowd of those who would trample a slender scholar who dawdled in front of them. Today, I’m in a capsule formed by the companions of a consul, like a hickory nut in its shell.”
“Ah!” said Varus. “The armor of righteousness, no doubt.”
“I would be the last to claim that the father of my student and—if I may—friend Gaius Varus is not a righteous man,” Pandareus agreed solemnly.
Varus thought about being insulated from the world. Pandareus was talking about physical protection here, but that was really a minor aspect of the way Varus was walled off. His father’s wealth wasn’t really a factor.
Varus had come to realize that though he lived in the world, he was not and never would be part of it. If footpads knocked him down and slit his throat, a part of him—the part that was most Gaius Alphenus Varus—would be watching them through a sheet of clear glass, interested to see how far his blood spurted when the knife went in.
Corylus could probably tell me from having watched it happen to somebody else. That would be a better way to learn.
Pandareus was watching him intently. Varus let his smile fade. He said, “Master, what do you think we’ll find in this chapel? What should we be looking for?”
“Your lordship…,” Pandareus said, being particularly careful in his address because they were in public. “We are intruding on Senator Tardus because of inferences which we deduced from your vision, coupled with additional knowledge which I brought to the discussion. All I can do is to say that I think we are acting in the most logical fashion that we could, given our limited information.”
He grinned, becoming a different person. He said, “I will not lapse into superstition by saying that whoever or whatever sent you the vision was wise enough to give us as much information as we would need. I will particularly not say—”
The grin became even wider.
“—that he, or she, or it, is all-wise. But the less rational part of me believes those things.”
“A textbook example of praeteritio,” Varus said. “And I accept the principle underlying your statement, which I deduce to be that the wise man, when faced with an uncertain result which he cannot affect, should assume it will be beneficial. The price is the same as it would be for a gloomy prediction.”
“I’ve taught you well, my boy,” Pandareus said. They were no longer joking. It was one of the few times Varus had heard what he would describe as real warmth in the older man’s voice.
At the head of the procession the lictors stopped in front of a house and faced outward. Its walls were of fine-grained limestone, rather than marble over a core of brick or volcanic tuff as was the more recent style.
The chief lictor banged the butt of his axe helve on the door and boomed, “Open to Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa, consul of Carce!”
Varus drew a deep breath. He wondered what it would be like to wait for howling barbarians to charge, shaking their spears and their long, round-tipped swords.
At the moment, he would rather be out on the frontier, learning the answer to that question.
CHAPTER VI
Alphena would have been happier walking, but Hedia had insisted that they take the litter to the Field of Mars. This shopping expedition was part of the business—business or trouble or mystery, Alphena didn’t know what to call it—so she’d agreed, but it still made her unhappy.
Her face must have been squeezed into a petulant frown. Hedia raised her slippered foot and wriggled the big toe at her. Because they were seated facing one another in the litter, it was like somebody pointing an accusatory, short, but nonetheless very shapely, finger at her.
“Cheer up, dear,” Hedia said. “We really have to do it this way, you see. No one would imagine me going shopping on foot. And though they’d let us into the shops I want to visit even with your original footgear—you’d be with me, after all—the last thing we want is to appear eccentric. We’ll learn much more if Abinnaeus is thinking only about the amount of
money he’ll get from their gracious ladyships of Saxa’s household. Besides—”
She touched the tip of Alphena’s slipper with her finger. The upper was silk brocade instead of a filigree of gilt leather cutwork, and the toe was closed. Sword exercises wearing army footgear had left Alphena’s feet beyond transformation into ladylike appearance in the time available, despite the skill of Hedia’s own pedicure specialists.
“—these shoes wouldn’t be at all comfortable to walk across the city in, dear. And we really do have to dress for the occasion. Think of it the way men put their togas on to go into court, even though there’s never been a more awkward, ugly garment than a toga.”
Alphena giggled. Even a young, gracefully slender man like Publius Corylus looked rather like a blanket hung to dry on a pole when he wore his toga. Father, who was plump and clumsy, was more like the same blanket tumbled into a wash basket.
The Cappadocian bearers paced along as smoothly as the Tiber floating a barge. They were singing, but either the words were nonsense or they were in a language of their own.
Only the thin outer curtains of the litter were drawn, so Alphena could see what was going on about them. They were making their way through the Forum built by Julius Caesar; the courtyard wasn’t less congested than the streets to north and south, but there was more room for the crowd which was being pushed aside. The brick and stone walls bounding the street wouldn’t give no matter how forcefully Hedia’s escorts shoved people who were blocking the litter.
Alphena nodded in silent approval: someone had chosen the route with care and intelligence. This heavy vehicle required that sort of forethought.
The particular servants in attendance must have been chosen with equal care, because they were not Hedia’s usual escort. “Ah, Mother?” Alphena said. “That’s Lenatus walking beside Manetho, isn’t it?”
“Yes, dear,” Hedia said approvingly. “Manetho is in charge of things under normal circumstances, but Master Lenatus will take command if, well, if necessary.”