Horses!

by Gardner Dozois

  "Whining Nicean dog!" yelled Ambrose.

  With his staff the edile rapped Ambrose smartly on the head and poked the second man in the ribs in one smooth motion. Two of the local military reservists hurried up through the crowd.

  "What's this, your honor?" they asked, grabbing the two panting men.

  "Christians," he said. "Since the new emperor Julian let all the exiles and fragmented bishops return, there's been nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble with them. It would be fine if they killed each other in private, but they endanger decent gods-fearing folk with their idiotic schisms. They cause commotion in the reopened temples and trouble at public ceremonies."

  "Quite right," said the reservists, who both wore fish symbols on chains around their necks. They each punched and slapped the man they held a few times for effect.

  "Don't think it doesn't do my heart glad to see officers carrying out their civic duties in spite of their personal convictions," said the edile. "There's hope for this empire yet."

  "Sorry you had to deal with this, sir. We'll take care of them," said one of the reservists, saluting with his forearm across his chest.

  The crowd, grumbling, dispersed. The minor official continued on his way toward the rededicated Temple of Mars.

  The four talked among themselves a moment, then the two policemen and the second Christian grabbed Ambrose and frog-walked him up a narrow alleyway.

  The marketplace returned to its deadly dull normality.

  P. Renatus Vegetius had been on his way to the house of his retired military friend Aurem Prwbens when the fight had broken out just in front of him.

  He shook his head. Surely the new emperor knew what would happen when he allowed all the exiled misfits and disgruntled Christians back. There was already talk that Julian was helping the Jews rebuild their temple in Jerusalem, that he would take state funds away from the Christian churches, that he would renew the imperial office of Pontifex Maximus.

  This small town, Smyrnea, fifty miles from Byzantium where the new emperor sat after his march from Germany, was supposed to have the Emperor's ear. It was in this town he had spent his childhood and youth in exile, watched over by the old emperor's spies, before going to Rome and Athens to study in his young manhood. Well, only time would tell what would happen with Julian's plans to revitalize the increasingly disparate eastern and western provinces.

  Statecraft for the statesmen, thought Vegetius. He was on his way to Prwbens' house to consult manuscripts in the library there so he could put the finishing touches on his work, de re militaria, a training manual to be read to officers in the army. It lacked only a section on impediments and baggage-train convoy duties, of which Prwbens had once written copious notes while accompanying Constantine on one of his eastward marches.

  P. Renatus Vegetius had himself never been in the army. He had held minor offices (he had once been wdile of this very town, twenty years before, but that was when the job consisted of little more than seeing that the streets were swept; the Christians, after their big meeting at Nicea having brought pressure on Constantine and his sons to close down all the temples and call off public spectacles). Not like today where an a'dile got real respect; a broad-shouldered job fitting for a man. Still, Vegetius was glad the present troubles hadn't happened in his times.

  Across the street, hurrying toward him, was Decius Muccinus, nomenclator to his friend Pra'bens. He was moving faster than Vegetius had ever seen him do, almost at a flat run. Unseemly in a slave, even one his master had promised freedom in six months. He was a young man with a beard of the Greek cut.

  "Salve, Muccinus!" said Vegetius.

  The slave jerked to a stop. "Sir," he said, "forgive me. I was hurrying to your house, sent by my master to fetch you. Astonishing news, if true, which I am forbidden to tell."

  "Well, well," said Renatus Vegetius, hurrying with the young man toward Pra'bens' town home. "Surely you can tell me something?"

  "Only that you will be highly pleased." He leaned toward Vegetius, whispering. "Approaching: Singultus Correptus and Sternuus Maximus. Correptus' wife is Livia, Maximus' son is due for a promotion in the army."

  "Salve, Singultus! Sternuus!" said Vegetius, stopping to shake their wrists. "How's the lovely Livia, Singultus? And Sternuus, that son of yours had done alright for himself, hasn't he?"

  After a further exchange of pleasantries they hurried on. "Thank you, Muccinus," said Vegetius. "You needn't have done that for me."

  "Old habits die hard," said the slave.

  book of veterinary you want to write.) Sharpen up your javelin, you old fart! A lion's been seen here in Thracia itself. Less than twenty miles away!" He waved a letter around. "Someone, anonymous, says I and my friends should know before the news becomes general!"

  There had supposedly been no lions this side of the Pontus Euxinus since the end of the Republic four hundred years before. One of Vegetius' secret wishes was to hunt lions from a chariot in the old style and to write a treatise on the subject. He had been planning a trip to Libya the year after next (gods willing) once he had finished this book, and the one on the diseases of mules and horses, to engage in such a hunt. But here, now, in Thracia!

  "I've called on Morus Matutinus (who served in Africa) and Phoebus Siccus (who owns an old hunting chariot) and have sent for three teams of swift coursers for our use!" said Pr Bbens. "How does that grab your testicles?"

  Aurem Prebens was beaming. Vegetius was beside himself. Sometimes the gods were kind.

  Sometimes they weren't. The party had been out for two days; thirty men and slaves, twenty horses, two impedimenta wagons and fifty yelping, fighting dogs.

  As a scent they had brought with them a lion's skin that had hung on one wall of Moms Matutinus' atrium. By the second day of the dogs milling around and biting each other in uncontained excitement, the slaves were betting among themselves that the hounds would soon strike a trail and follow it the twenty miles straight back to Matutinus' house.

  Phoebus Siccus, an old, old wrinkled man, was decked out in his armor from fifty years before. He could turn completely around in the worn leather and metal breastplate before it began to move with him.

  "Either these are the sorriest dogs I've ever seen, or there's no lion closer than Mesopotamia. Who the Dis' idea was this, anyway?" asked Siccus through his lips which looked like two broken flints.

  The dogs had run up a wisent, two scrawny deer and an ass in forty-eight hours. Each time the houndsmen would kick

  them howling away from the cornered animals and then stick their noses back in the lion's skin.

  "I'm going over to the brook yonder," said Renatus Vegetius. He mounted his horse.

  "May I go with him, master?" asked Decius Muccinus. "I should like a swim."

  "The last thing I need out here," said Praebens, "is a nomenclator. The guys who own these hounds all answer to `Hey, shithead!' " He turned to Vegetius. "Sorry. I wanted this hunt for you. We'll take the dogs back north, then home. Follow the wagon tracks. If you miss the lion, though, you'll hate yourself."

  "If I don't cool off, I will die," said Vegetius. "Good hunting."

  "Hah! I'm going to find out who sent that letter and turn the dogs on his butt," said Pra;bens.

  It was a stream straight out of Hesiod, pure, pebbled and cold. Vegetius sat on a rock with his swollen feet in the gurgling water. Muccinus, who had stripped naked and swam back and forth a few times, was now asleep on the grass. Upstream tall rushes grew; to each side of the stream banks lifted up and hung over, shading the western side of the waters in this early afternoon.

  Their two horses stopped their grazing. One backed up whinnying, its eyes growing wider.

  "What is it?" he asked the horse, reaching out to calm it. Then his blood froze. Oh gods, he thought, looking upstream and scrambling for his javelin, what if the lion's found us?

  He kicked Muccinus with his bare foot.

  "Mmmph?" asked the slave, rolling over. Then he jumped up, seeing Vegetius try
ing to put his sandals on over his head. He pulled a dagger from his lump of clothing on the ground.

  "What? What?"

  They looked upstream. Something moved along the tall rushes. The green fronds parted.

  The oldest man they had ever seen stood at the edge of the reeds, naked from the waist up. He might as well have been clothed; his hair and beard were pure white and hung in waves down his back and chest. He looked like a white haystack from which a face stuck out. They couldn't tell if the hair reached the ground as the reeds covered all below his waist.

  In his hand he held a thin tapered pole to which was attached a light line, gossamer in the sun, probably of plaited horsehair. At the end of the line was a hook with a tuft of red and white yarn tied to it. He waved the pole back and forth a few times and flipped the line into the water.

  There was a splash as something rose to the lure. The line tightened, the pole bent, and the old man heaved up and back.

  A two-pound grayling, blue and purple-spotted in the sunlight, its dorsal fin like a battle flag, flew out of the water at the end of the line and landed flapping back in the reeds.

  The old man bent out of sight to pick it up.

  "Well done, sir," said Vegetius. The old man looked up. "I'd be careful though. There's supposed to be a lion about!"

  The old man looked at them, his face breaking out into a smile. He flipped the line back out; soon he was fast to another grayling, this one larger, and pulled it in.

  "I said, there's a lion about!" yelled Vegetius, cupping his hands.

  "Nonchalant bastard," said Muccinus. "Or maybe deaf as a post."

  The old man shouldered the pole and the brace of grayling and went through the reeds on his way upstream.

  "I saw no houses about," said Muccinus. "Wonder where he came from?"

  "Who knows?" said Vegetius.

  The sun was still hot, so they followed the shady side of the brook upstream for a mile or so.

  They came upon the cave around a bend. Outside were hung drying wild onions, radishes, garlics. There was a rack out in the sun on which split fish curled.

  Fungi and mushrooms grew in the shady spots.

  "Quite homey," said Muccinus. "Hello the cave!"

  There was no answer.

  "He has frequent visitors," said Vegetius, pointing to the ground outside the cave opening. It was churned with innumerable hoof prints. "Either he's a companionable old cuss, or he's popular because those aren't regular mushrooms."

  "Hello," Renatus continued, dismounting. He tied his horse's reins to a root which grew from the cliff wall. The horse was nervous again.

  Inside, the cave was cluttered with thousands and thousands of scrolls, book boxes, clay tablets and slates.

  "Muccinus," he said. "Look at this!"

  They walked in. Amid the clutter was a chest-high table; at one corner of the room a pile of mashed-down straw. There were no chairs, only piles and piles of scrolls and books in a dozen languages.

  Decius Muccinus poked around in the stacks. "Greek. The curved writing of Ind. Latin. The old triangle writing. Who could read this stuff? What's it doing here?"

  Renatus Vegetius went to the high table. There were several closed scroll tubes there. One was open. On the table, by itself, was a single page, cut evidently from a lengthy work, headed, as it was, Book 19 in Greek, and at the top, the title . . .

  If lupiter Ammon had pulled P. Renatus Vegetius up to the top of Mount Olympus and said to him: Go anywhere, mortal, and get your heart's content; anywhere in time and anywhere in the world: it is yours, Vegetius would have in the next instant been back in this cave with his hand on this piece of paper.

  It was the Hippiatrika, the lost book of veterinary medicine. It was as old as time, older than Homer. When he had read Pelagonius' Ars Veterinaria, Vegetius remembered the author's railing at the fates which had lost the book to the ken of man since the Trojan War. Pelagonius wailed for the lost knowledge it was supposed to contain.

  And here Vegetius had in his hand a page of it. He read the first paragraph and knew, with all his mind and heart, that this was it.

  Their horses whiskered outside. Then their hooves clattered. The horses ran by, blurs. Vegetius had only his short sword with him—the javelin had been in the saddle boot. Muccinus once again drew the dagger forbidden to slaves.

  They heard another clatter of hooves. At least it wasn't the lion. "Hello! Hello!" they both shouted.

  "I know you're in there. No need to yell," said a voice, an old

  man's voice, older even than that of Phoebus Siccus.

  Then the old man came into the cave, followed by the horse.

  No.

  The old man and the horse came in together.

  No.

  The old man was the horse.

  "Finding anything interesting to read?" he asked, looking from one to the other, then settling his gaze on Vegetius.

  Somewhere down his back his hair turned into a brittle white mane. He was white and grey from the top of his head to his hooves. A black leg lifted, clacked to the floor.

  It was easier, thought Vegetius, if you only looked at the front half.

  "The Hippiatrika?" he asked. "Where did you get it?"

  The centaur looked toward the table. A mixture of warm animal and human body odour came to Vegetius' nose, like sweaty men on a wet horsehide triclinium. More than anything it convinced him that the encounter he was having was real.

  "I wrote it," said the centaur.

  Vegetius nearly fainted.

  "I think your master needs some water," said the centaur to Muccinus. "There's a cup outside. And please don't run away."

  "He's . . . he's not . . . my master," said Muccinus. "And I need some too."

  Vegetius held onto a table leg until the slave returned with the cup. As he stood woozily, he noticed that the hooves of the centaur were in bad shape. One leg, the right front, was thinner than the others, with a knot on it as if it had been broken once. What chest Renatus could see through the drapery of white hair looked thin and mottled. Vegetius took the cup and drank.

  "Chiron," he said to the centaur. Chiron, the teacher of Hercules and Asclepius, the only centaur able to read and write. The only one ever to be married to a human woman; the only centaur able to drink wine without becoming a raging animal. Chiron, author of the Hippiatrika.

  "You must be P. Renatus Vegetius," said the horse-man. "How did you know my name?"

  The centaur laughed, his long hair flying.

  "How goes the lion hunt?"

  "The letter was your doing?"

  "Somewhat. I wanted to meet you. I read a copy of your Histories."

  "And you knew I would come to hunt a lion?"

  "After your rhapsode on lion-hunting in the chapter on Egypt? And in your argument, you said you would someday write a treatise on warfare, and a book amplifying Pelagonius' Ars Veterinaria? To read a man is sometimes to know all you need," said Chiron.

  "Vegetius," said Decius Muccinus. "You're . . . talking literature . . . with . . . a . . . centaur."

  "One with a purpose," said Chiron.

  "What's that?" asked Vegetius.

  "I have something you desire. The Hippiatrika. The whole manuscript." Vegetius looked wildly around. "It's in a safe place. Don't worry. Help me, and it, and all these other works, are yours."

  "What do you wish?"

  "I'm old. I want to return to my homeland to die. You can help me."

  "Your homeland? Scythia? Ind? Africa?" asked Vegetius, following the best authorities as to the homeland of the centaurs.

  "Take me to the Pillars of Hercules," said Chiron. "Then I can be home in a few days."

  "The Pillars of Hercules! That's at the western edge of the Empire! That's where the Greeks once sent an expedition to see if the sun hissed as it went down in the ocean! We're in the East. How am I supposed to get a centaur from one end of the civilized world to the other?"

  "You're an intelligent man," said Chiron.
"If you can't conceive of getting me across the Empire, think what it would be like for me, alone. When I was young and strong, I might have done it. I could outrun any horse when I had to. But no longer. I wouldn't be gone fifty miles before some rich man would have me hunted down for his menagerie. The fact that I'm a rational being, and can think and speak, would appeal to him not at all. I'd end my days in a cage, in Thracia."

  He looked at Vegetius.

  "I can't believe this," said Decius Muccinus.

  "I'm the last one," said Chiron. "And you get the Hippiatrika. It is all you think it to be. Just get me home, Renatus Vegetius. I ask no more."

  "I wouldn't know how to begin," said Vegetius.

  "Nemo Prorsus," said Muccinus.

  "What?"

  "Nemo Prorsus. A very clever man in Cyzicus. If you want to go through with this, I mean," said Muccinus. "He's done everything, been everywhere. All it takes is money. Vast amounts."

  Chiron turned his eyes to Vegetius. "Please?"

  "Done," said Vegetius, crossing his wrists three times and spitting, "and done!"

  In the week following, after he had sent for Prorsus, Vegetius went to Aurem Pribens. He found him dictating to Muccinus. "I'd like to buy Decius from you," said Vegetius.

  "What!?" screamed Muccinus. "After what I've gone through! I'm to be freed in—"

  "Quiet, slave," said Aurem.

  ..1_„

  "Just what did you have in mind?" asked Pra;bens.

  "You're to free him in six months. Sell him to me, now. I'll free him when I return from my—researches in Alexandria." (This was the cover story.) "You know everyone in this one-horse town, anyway. I'll need someone quick with me, a nomenclator, one who can read and write. And I trust no one more than your Decius Muccinus."

  Decius was glowering at him.

  "Besides," said Vegetius, "sell him to me, and it won't be you who has to pay the five percent manumission tax!"

  "Decius, you've been like a son to me, but business is business," said Prwbens to the slave. Then to Vegetius, "Three thousand sesterces."

  "Three thousand? I'm going to have him read to me, not sleep with me!"

  "I'm worth four thousand if I'm worth a talent," said Decius, his feelings hurt.