by David Drake
Regardless, Saxa was her father. She wasn’t going to let this old man badger him when simply asking a blunt question would change the dynamic of the bout. Nobody expected perfect deportment and courtesy from Saxa’s boyish daughter, after all.
“Well, strictly speaking, I met them when they arrived here in Carce eight days ago,” Tardus said, looking over his shoulder at Alphena. His gaze had a hard fixity that she hadn’t expected from so old a man. “But as to where they’re from, they say ‘the Western Isles.’”
“The Hesperides?” Saxa asked, cocking his head with interest. “What language do they speak, if I may ask?”
“They speak Greek to me,” Tardus said. He spoke with studied care, quite different from the aggressiveness with which he had begun the discussion. “I suppose they have some language of their own, but I haven’t heard them speaking it. And as for the Hesperides—that isn’t their name for their home. Perhaps their ‘Western Isles’ are what Hesiod meant when he spoke of the Hesperides, but apart from summoning him from the dead, I don’t see how we could be sure.”
“And even then,” said Pandareus, “we couldn’t be sure without teaching him modern geography first. In any event, I don’t think—”
He smiled faintly. Alphena decided that her brother’s teacher was joking, which she hadn’t been sure of at the start.
“—that I would choose to start my discussion there if I had the opportunity. I would be much more interested in details of how he created his masterpieces. The style of the Theogony is quite different, it seems to me, from that of The Works and Days; more different than I would have expected to come from the pen—the throat, rather—of a single man.”
Priscus and Varus both laughed; Saxa blinked, then grinned weakly. Tardus was frowning, which was understandable, but there still seemed to be something odd about his demeanor.
The discussion turned to how much Hesiod and Homer knew about geography. Tardus listened glumly.
Alphena grinned. She supposed the situation should please her: her mother’s plan to convince Tardus that this was simply a literary evening was a resounding success. She was utterly, bone-deep, bored, however.
She took an olive from the dish, then paused and looked at it more closely. A man’s face had been carved into it. She popped the olive into her mouth—it was stuffed with anchovy paste, a startling but tasty combination—and picked another one, green this time. The features were female.
“I wonder, Marcus Tardus?” Hedia said in a break as the fish course came in. “Are your Hesperians nobles from their own country who should be dining here instead of down with the servants?”
“I don’t…,” Tardus said, clearly taken aback. “That is, I believe they are priests or wise men rather than, ah, nobles. From what they say. But they didn’t wish to call attention to themselves.”
Are you still pleased that you blackmailed your way into this dinner, Lord Tardus? Alphena wondered. She took what looked like a small crab, complete to the stalked eyes; it proved to be a thin pastry shell stuffed with a spicy fish paste.
“If I may ask, Lord Tardus?” Pandareus said. “You suggest that your guests are the western equivalent of the Magi. The Magi ruled Persia until Darius broke their power in a coup, and even now under the Arsacids they have a great deal of authority. They are certainly as worthy of a place at Gaius Saxa’s table as—”
He curled his hand inward.
“—a professor of rhetoric.”
Pandareus had done full justice to the eggs and olives, and he was now attacking a seeming mullet molded from minced crabmeat. Alphena decided that his lanky frame was a result of privation rather than ascetic philosophy.
“I don’t know what political arrangements exist in the Western Isles!” Tardus said. “The, the … my guests, that is, they said that they would prefer to eat with the servants. They didn’t expect to arouse comment, as I understand it. They’ve come to Carce to observe our customs, and they hoped to do that without their presence affecting those observations.”
The conversation drifted back to literature when Saxa mentioned Plato’s conceit of a Scythian visitor to comment on Athenian society. Tardus ate morosely without adding much to the discussion of fictitious Brahmins, Magi, and Egyptians.
Alphena didn’t speak either. She neither knew nor cared anything about the books the men were talking about; and besides, she was puzzling over the westerners themselves.
Alphena knew them from somewhere; she’d felt that when she saw them in the theater. That didn’t seem possible if they had arrived so recently in Carce, though; and if Tardus was lying—why should he be on a question like that?—then it still didn’t explain why she had no recollection of where she had seen the trio.
The talk droned on. The men might as well have been chattering in Persian for how much Alphena could understand of it.
She thought of the theater and her vision of a man tearing his way through the sparkling city. She thought of the way he had looked at her, and the recognition she had felt in his gaze as well.
Alphena ate mechanically, and thought. She almost could remember.
* * *
“I SEE YOU APPROVE of Father’s cook, master,” Varus said in a low voice to Pandareus, who had just taken another fig-pecker stuffed with a paste of figs and walnuts before being grilled.
“My dear student,” Pandareus said, pausing with the skewer just short of his mouth. “For a man who can’t always afford sausage with his porridge, this meal is the very ambrosia of the gods.”
He paused, pursing his lips in thought. “I misspoke,” he said. “This meal would be the true ambrosia to anyone, whatever his background.”
Varus smiled. The meal had been both pleasant and stimulating, which was a surprise after Tardus had invited himself to join them. Not that Tardus would have been an improper guest under normal circumstances, given his background and interests, but these circumstances were scarcely normal.
He glanced at his stepmother, sitting primly across from him as she nibbled a quail drumstick in which the bone had been replaced by a breadstick and the meat chopped with spices. Thank Jupiter for Hedia! Varus himself hadn’t understood the threat until Priscus whispered an explanation while they mounted the stairs together.
“I am a collector of objects which are supposed to have, ah, spiritual properties, Gaius Saxa,” Tardus said. “I suppose you are aware of that?”
He means “magical properties,” Varus translated. But magic could be seen as a means of threatening an emperor who was reputed to be something of a magician and astrologer himself, whereas “spiritual” had no dangerous connotations.
“I believe many of Carce’s older families have objects from the time when the city was rising to greatness,” Saxa said. His tone was more cautious than Varus would have expected. His father probably didn’t know what was going on, but at least he was beginning to realize that there was cause for concern. “I’m not surprised that the Sempronii Tardi do. We of the Family Alphenus do also.”
“Yes, I had heard that,” Tardus said. “I believe that you have in your collection a murrhine tube, do you not? About as big around as my thumb?”
Pandareus had reached for another fig-pecker. Now he withdrew his hand and looked sharply from Tardus to Saxa.
“I do, yes,” said Saxa. “It was sent to me recently by Gnaeus Rusticus, whom I have been appointed to succeed as governor of Lusitania. He, ah, said he knew that I was interested in such things, so he was giving it to me in a gesture of goodwill and thankfulness that I was allowing him to come home.”
“Might I see the object, if you please?” Tardus said. “I have a fondness for murrhine myself and I would like to observe the structure of the grain.”
“I suppose…,” Saxa began. Then, as forcefully as he ever got, “Yes, of course. Simplex—”
One of the footmen standing near his couch nodded.
“—go to the library and tell Alexandros to bring me the murrhine tube from Rusticus. Hurry
now!”
“Have you decided to go to Lusitania in person, Gaius?” Priscus said. Varus wondered if he was trying to change the subject. “I ask because it has the reputation of being a challenging post, all mountains and mule tracks; and you’re no more of the active, outdoor type than I am myself.”
He laughed and patted his belly. He had been eating just as enthusiastically as Pandareus had, and he’d been drinking quite a lot of the wine that the teacher had been avoiding.
Saxa smiled weakly. “In truth,” he said, “I’ve been considering governing through a vicar, Quinctius Rufus. A very solid man, you know; a Knight of Carce who has served as legate of a legion in Upper Germany. But I suppose Rusticus wouldn’t have known that.”
“I do hope you’ll stay in Carce, dear lord and master,” Hedia said. “My heart would waste away if you were to go into exile off on the shore of Ocean.”
She sounded sincere. Varus, though by no means a man of the world, was at least knowledgeable enough to know to doubt anything his stepmother might say to a man.
“I’ve requested an appointment with the emperor to discuss the matter,” Saxa said. “Of course his will—that is, the will of the people, expressed through the emperor—is paramount, but I’m hoping that, well…”
He fluttered his hands with a wan grin.
“As Marcus Priscus says, I’m not well suited for clambering across the spines of mountains on muleback, which I gather would be required for any official in Lusitania.”
Alexandros, the chief librarian, appeared, leading two attendants who carried a narrow wooden casket about the length of a woman’s forearm. The container’s weight didn’t require two men to carry it, but the librarian’s rank did.
Corylus would like the box. He would know the kind of wood it was, too, with that lovely swirling grain.
Alexandros was a corpulent man, and rushing up the stairs from the library had set him to wheezing. As he approached, Borysthenes signaled to a pair of his juniors who snatched the table holding the tray of fowls out of the space in front of the diners.
The librarian was an impeccable servant, with a good grounding in literature and a flawless memory regarding where things were filed. The only way to locate a scroll was to remember where in which basket it had been stored. This was a matter of some difficulty for Saxa’s library of over three hundred books, but Priscus was reputed to own nearly a thousand; his librarian must be very good.
“Your lordship,” said Alexandros, bowing, “we have brought the curio which you requested.”
The two attendants knelt before Saxa. The librarian lifted the lid of the casket—it was separate rather than hinged—to display the blue-and-yellow crystals of a murrhine tube as long as a large man’s thumb and as thick as two thumbs together; the hollow center was only half that diameter.
Saxa touched the tube, then gestured toward Tardus on the central couch. The attendants shifted to face the guest.
“Where does your librarian come from?” Pandareus whispered, his lips close to Varus’ ear.
Varus turned and whispered, “He’s a Greek from Gaza, I believe. From somewhere in Syria, at any rate.”
“Ah,” said Pandareus. “He’s Jewish, unless I’m badly mistaken. His trying to pass for Greek explains that odd accent.”
Varus hadn’t noticed anything unusual about the librarian’s accent, either the Latin he spoke to members of the family or the Greek he rattled off to other servants from the East. He didn’t doubt Pandareus’ assessment, though. The subtleties of speech were as much a rhetorician’s stock in trade as was the literature of which rhetoric was a branch.
Tardus used his thumb and forefinger to lift the tube from its velvet-lined container. The murrhine had a soapy sheen in the lamplight. The material came from Britannia, generally worked into the form of whimsies like this tube.
Occasionally traders penetrated the interior of the island and convinced the savages to turn murrhine into cups or tabletops for which the aristocrats of Carce would pay astronomical amounts, but that was a difficult and dangerous business. The Britons were headhunters, as their Gallic kinsmen had been two generations before. Caesar’s raid into the island hadn’t been enough to civilize them out of the practice.
A warrior who took the head of a foreign trader didn’t have to worry about the victim’s family returning the favor before long. The difficulties that caused for commerce weren’t a pressing concern to the island’s tattooed savages.
“That’s odd, Gaius,” Priscus said, staring at the object which the man beside him held. “Bring a lamp closer. The ends—”
He pointed, though he didn’t attempt to take the tube from Tardus.
“The one end is cut and polished, you can see the way they radiused it. But the other seems to have been melted, doesn’t it? Cut with a hot knife, but how hot to melt stone?”
“Whose tomb did this come from, Gaius Saxa?” Tardus said, looking from the murrhine to his host.
“I don’t know that it did come from a tomb,” Saxa said. He drew his lips in, then let them out again.
“Rusticus said some of his soldiers dug into a cairn on a headland overlooking the Ocean,” he continued with an uncomfortable expression. “They were looking for gold, but all they found was splinters of bone and this. It may be that it was a tomb, but a very ancient one. They brought it to Rusticus, and he gave it to me.”
“I see,” said Tardus. He weighed the tube in his hands before him, but he didn’t seem to be looking at it.
As best Varus could tell in the lamplight, the old senator was lost in another world. His mouth seemed to go slack momentarily. Is he having a fit?
Tardus roused himself abruptly. He blinked twice and his body trembled.
“Well!” he said. He didn’t return the murrhine tube to its box. “Gaius Saxa, thank you for returning in so lavish a fashion the hospitality I showed when you and Lord Varus visited me. I’m not a young man any longer and I wasn’t given to late hours even when I was, so I think I’ll take my leave now.”
“A colleague of your learning is always welcome, Marcus Tardus,” Saxa said in obvious relief. “Perhaps soon we can exchange visits in a more, well, regular fashion.”
Tardus rose to a sitting position on the back of the couch, then stood. He still held the tube. Varus saw his teacher’s expression harden as he watched what was happening.
“If I may, Saxa,” Tardus said, “I’ll borrow this tube for a day or two. I’d like to compare it with—”
“Lord Saxa!” Pandareus said. Varus was as startled as if a squeak of protest had come from the carved olive he was lifting to his mouth. “I know it isn’t my place to speak, but I would appreciate it—”
“It most certainly isn’t the place of a snivelling Greek to inject himself into a discussion between senators of Carce!” Tardus said. He bent his hands to his breast, still clutching the murrhine.
“Father, you mustn’t let go of that thing,” Alphena said in a carrying tone. “I have an idea for the most darling little ornament for my hair. I’m becoming—”
She rose gracefully to her feet. Standing, she blocked Tardus’ natural path from the dining alcove.
“—very much the fine lady, don’t you think?”
She fluffed her hair with the fingertips of her left hand. She really is quite attractive, Varus realized in surprise.
Alphena reached for the murrhine tube; Tardus hunched back, scowling fiercely. Priscus was leaning forward to whisper to Saxa on the adjacent couch.
Varus wondered if he should stand. Is Alphena going to kick him in the crotch? No, that’s more the sort of thing that Mother—
Hedia rose and stepped forward from her chair, her right hand outstretched. Alexandros and his attendants slid out of her way like cork dolls bobbing in the wake of a trireme.
“I’m so sorry, Marcus Tardus,” she said in a cheery voice. “I know you’ve heard that our daughter is a shameless tomboy and terribly spoiled, but my lord and I love her very
much. I’m afraid I’ll have to take the bauble now. Perhaps when fashions change, dear Alphena will allow you to borrow it.”
Tardus stiffened, then sagged and opened his hands. Varus knew from experience that his stepmother had a stare like a dagger point when she chose to use it.
Hedia took the tube, then replaced it on its velvet bed and closed the box. Alphena stepped aside. Tardus scuttled past her, then walked briskly toward the stairs with his waiting attendants falling in ahead and behind him. The remaining diners watched him go in silence.
Hedia embraced Alphena. “We do love you, daughter,” she said. “You are such a clever young lady!”
* * *
CORYLUS PICKED UP the cornelwood staff that leaned beside the door during daytime. When he went out at night, he carried it.
Carce at night was similar to the forests on the German side of the Rhine. A healthy young man who kept his eyes and ears open probably wouldn’t have any trouble; but if trouble did crop up, you’d best have something besides your bare hands available to deal with it.
“Sure you wouldn’t like me to come along, lad?” Pulto said. “I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs.”
That was a lie. Corylus knew that the old servant’s knees had been giving him trouble, and the last thing he needed was to lace his hobnailed sandals back on and tramp over the stone-paved streets with a youth who wasn’t ready to settle in for the night.
“Keep your wife company, old friend,” he said. “I’m just going to sit in Demetrius’ yard and relax for a bit. I’ve got a declamation to work on, you know.”
“Wouldn’t you—” Anna said.
Corylus raised his left hand palm out to stop her. “Little mother,” he said, “I’m not hungry. If I get hungry, I’ll have a sausage roll at the Cockerel on the corner. Don’t worry, you two.”
He slipped out the door quickly. Back in the suite, his servants were arguing about the cook shop’s sausages. Pulto held that regardless of what Spica, the owner, put in them, they tasted better than a lot of what he or the boy either one had eaten on the Danube.