by Manda Scott
He did not recognize the palace until Severus halted near a door in yet another long, high wall. Coming to it in the dark and from the west, the palace looked smaller and less imposing than he remembered from his last visit. The gilded roof shone no more than glazed tiles under the starlight and the outer walls could have been yet another anonymous villa. Valerius dismounted, feeling the stiffness of the voyage cramp thighs that had been three days without a horse. His pack weighed more than he remembered. He unhitched it from the saddle and hooked it over his shoulder.
Severus took his reins. “Go to the door in the wall on your right and knock twice. Wait until someone comes. It may be a while.”
Valerius thought himself dismissed and was turning away when the centurion gripped his elbow, drawing him back. Up close, the officer’s eyes were bloodshot, like those of a man who has slept too little. “If he needs you so badly that he has called you across the ocean, do as he asks,” he said. “He has few enough who will.”
“I took the oath as you did,” said Valerius. “His will is mine.”
“Good.” Severus grinned as a man grins before battle who does not expect to survive it. “Long may it remain so.” He led the horses back into the dark and Valerius was alone.
The door was a slaves’ entrance, lacking adornment. Standing before it in the quiet of the night, Valerius felt currents of fear that were not his alone. The place reeked of uncertainty and betrayal and ghosts pressed close that had nothing to do with the tribes of a foreign land and everything to do with the desperation of a dying emperor. No sane man would remain in it for long.
Ghosts were no longer Valerius’ concern and fear had long ago ceased to be an enemy; wine and the memory of the god had allowed him to conquer both. Setting his mind to blankness, he raised a hand to tap twice on the door and found it already a hand’s breadth open with a wide-eyed boy peering through the gap. Valerius felt the hairs of his scalp prickle a fresh warning; in the old days, the palace doors had not opened so silently.
The watch-boy lifted a small soapstone lamp and, by its light, stared at the decurion’s face as if matching the features to a description; black, straight hair cut to military length, fine, lean features and eyes that will strip the skin from a slave-boy who dares to stare too long. The boy jerked back, leaving the door only just ajar so that Valerius had to put his shoulder against it if he wanted to follow. Inside, the lad had not waited but was already leading the way down an unlit corridor. It was not the behaviour expected of a slave but this was a place where freed slaves ruled, or it had been; nothing was done in the normal way. Raising his pack, Valerius followed, warily.
The palace was overly warm. The slave-boy was silent and scared and he led Valerius into emptiness, but the walls thrilled to distant activity. For a man who had spent the past decade at war, the place reeked of ambush. Valerius hitched his pack round and knew he could reach neither his dagger nor his sword in time for either to be of use in an emergency. He thought of the filleting knife he had dropped through the dock and cursed himself for a short-sighted fool.
They stopped at a chamber far from the main palace and large enough only to house a bed and a small clothes chest. The walls were of plaster, painted simply in pale aquatic green with sinuous fish near the ceiling and a floor of sand-grey tiles so that he could have been standing twenty feet beneath the surface of the ocean, staring up into the world of air and light. The effect would have been better in daylight. At night, with a single brazier and a rack of hanging lamps pushing a poor glow into the dark, it was more like the river just north of Camulodunum: muddily damp and smelling of mould. The boy nodded and left. This door, like the one before it, was well oiled.
The room was empty and remained so for some considerable time. Valerius was hungry and alone. Neither of these was unusual and the latter was, perhaps, better than any of the alternatives. He propped his pack in a corner, opened it and moved his dagger to a place where he could reach it at need, then, leaning back against the furthest wall from the lamps, he set his mind blankly to wait. Half a lifetime in the legions had taught him this skill above all others; when he put his mind to it, Julius Valerius could outwait the Sphinx.
He had expected the freed slave Narcissus to come, or Callistus, the paymaster; both were reputedly still loyal to Claudius. He got Xenophon, the Greek physician, which disturbed him more than he would have chosen to admit. The man brought ghosts with him, simply by his presence. Valerius stood in the semi-dark and strengthened the walls around his mind, concentrating on the details of the physician’s features, excluding the possibility that others might have joined them in the shadows.
There was much to see in Xenophon. Even allowing for the uncertain light, the physician had aged greatly in the years since their last meeting. The man who had engineered the confrontation between Valerius and his former compatriots had been of vigorous middle-age, exuding vibrancy and intelligent humour. The man who stood in the doorway to the underwater room was tired to the point of exhaustion. His hair thinned back from the crown of his head and that little left at the margins, which had been a distinguished silver, was a lank, translucent white. His skin was mottled with age-spots and creased with care. His nose hooked like a hawk’s over a face too thin for its size.
“Have you eaten?” He spoke from the gloom beyond the reach of the lamps. His voice had the same cadences as that of Theophilus, who was still field physician in the fortress at Camulodunum and with whom he had undoubtedly enjoyed a brisk exchange of letters these past two years.
“I haven’t eaten since the ship.” Valerius roused himself from his corner. He had not drunk since then, either, which was bothering him more although he chose not to say so. “Is it safe to eat in this place?”
The physician gazed at him a moment and then nodded as if confirming a quite different question. “For you, it probably is,” he said. “Safer than Britannia, from what I hear.”
That could only have come from Theophilus. Valerius shrugged. “Britannia is safe as long as you don’t venture into the western mountains in units of less than a cohort’s strength. And keep clear of the Twentieth legion for the time being. They have all the bad luck.” He grinned, sourly, daring the physician to challenge him. When he did not, Valerius said, “You mentioned food?”
“Of course. My apologies.” Xenophon leaned out of the door and signalled. An ill-fed lad with lank brown hair and shy eyes entered, bringing a tray of cold meats, cheeses and—blessed boy—a full jug of wine with two goblets. He bowed to Xenophon, regarded the decurion with a disquieting, professional curiosity and loitered for an extra moment when dismissed.
“Philonikos, my apprentice,” said Xenophon, when the lad had gone. “I always swore I would never take one, but have allowed myself to be persuaded to make an exception.”
“And you regret having done so?” Valerius sat on the clothes chest, balancing the tray of food on his knees.
“No. He may do so, in time, but I will not. I have discovered that it is good, in one’s old age, to believe that a lifetime’s knowledge will not die with its progenitor.”
“Indeed.” The wine, newly poured, was heavy with age and good vintage. Valerius breathed in the smell of it as a man breathes fresh air after too long indoors. The first taste fortified the walls of his mind as the solid certainty of the harbour at Ostia had steadied his legs and his gut; the second washed him clear of the need to talk nonsense. Settling his shoulders against an expanse of green-blue plaster, he said, “So now, perhaps, you might tell me why I’m here?”
“Why do you think?”
“Not to play guessing games with you.”
“No. That would be unfair to us both.”
“And to Theophilus?” It was the soldier’s way, learned long ago, always to expose the enemy’s weapons to clear view.
“Perhaps.” The old man was tired and his guest had just taken the only seat in the room. Surprisingly, given his evident care for his dignity, Xenophon sat on the floor.
“How is life in Britannia really?” he asked. “I heard the new governor has stopped the hangings amongst the eastern tribes. That must ease the tension somewhat?”
He had not been summoned to discuss politics, either, but there was some refuge in doing so and Valerius took it. “Markedly. The Trinovantes and their allies are delighted. In the west, he has sent cohort after cohort of the Second and the Twentieth to their destruction, which nicely bolsters the morale of the Silures and their allies among the Ordovices and the warriors of Mona, while in the north he lets Venutios raise the spears of the northern Brigantes and threaten Cartimandua’s hold on those who remain. If our governor believes the emperor requires him to keep the tribes happy, to give them succour and support their belief that they will drive us ultimately from the province, then, yes, he is succeeding beyond his wildest dreams.”
“You would prefer it if he returned to the constant hatred that existed under Scapula? You know what the tribes think of you and how many dreamers have sworn to see you dead?”
“Of course.” In that one short sentence, they moved to a new, more personal, level. It was not unexpected, simply poorly timed; before the wine arrived, it might have been more damaging. Valerius drank deeply, and, smiling, met the physician’s eye. “Who cares if they hate, as long as they fear?”
Xenophon blanched. “Caligula used to say that.”
“I know.” The cheeses were made of goat’s milk, whitely crumbling. They matched well with the wine. Valerius broke one in half and ate it delicately. “In this, as in many things, he was right.”
There was no possible answer to that. Xenophon knew as well as any man exactly the disdain in which Valerius had once held Caligula. They sat for a while in silence, each reviewing his weapons.
Xenophon pursed his lips and pressed the tips of his fingers to the bridge of his nose, thinking. Valerius watched him make a decision and reject it twice before he lowered his hands and drew a strained breath to speak.
“Theophilus tells me you were a changed man when you returned from Rome two years ago; that you drank to excess, of wine and not ale; that in the gap between Scapula’s death and the appointment of the new governor, you slaughtered the natives unchecked, hanging men, women and children for “crimes against the emperor”—real or imagined—until, even more than before, your name became a curse in tribes from the east coast to the west; that you ran riot through your own ranks, killing an actuary of another wing so that the men threatened mutiny and only the intervention of their prefect kept you safe. Is it true?”
Valerius sat very still. Even after his return from Rome, he had believed Theophilus an ally. The physician had nursed him through the bull-dreaming and knew the measure of his encounter with the god. He had seen the ghosts after the decurion’s return, too, having raised them once with an excessive dose of poppy given to dull the pain while he stitched a spear-wound in Valerius’ thigh. The consequent ravings had not been dignified but they were at least contained within the private room of the hospital at Camulodunum. It was not something of which they spoke but Valerius had refused the drug ever after and Theophilus had not pressed it on him, even when cauterizing an infected sword-cut. There had been nights later when he had offered the same private room and the company of his presence to a man who had urgent need of both. At the time, Valerius had been grateful to have someone with whom he could share the long nights when neither wine nor hard work had kept the walls between the worlds intact. Now, listening to Xenophon speaking in ways designed explicitly to raise the dead, he wondered if the overdose of poppy had not been so accidental, if all of this had been planned.
Valerius drained his beaker of wine and poured another. He would have liked the succour of divine instruction but Mithras came to him only patchily these days and hardly ever when he was in company. He had taken part in initiations of over a hundred acolytes since his first branding; at different times, he had cut the wrist-cords, had lit the lamps, had led the chanting. He had seen countless men come to the god and seen the change in them, not just in the cellar but on the battlefield and the training grounds. They shone with the touch of the deity and each of them believed that Valerius shared that. Theophilus knew the truth and so he must assume Xenophon knew it too; that the visit of the god was a rare thing, sustained through the barren years by hope and faith and a mess of incoherent dreams.
The knowledge of this had never yet stopped him from striving to reach the Sun and all that it stood for. Doing so now, he was surprised before he was grateful when his view of Xenophon wavered and the other worlds pressed in. The red-roan bull came first, as it had done ever since he had seen it in the flesh. Valerius met it as an old friend—his only true friend—and, with its strength, he built the square-blocked altar to the god, adding the incense and the memory of brand smoke to make it real. On the sea-green plaster behind Xenophon’s head, he painted an image of the capped youth who committed slaughter at the behest of older, angrier gods. The roan bull died, forced to kneeling, and the god wept. Tears mixed with the blood and leaked onto the sandstone floor. The gathered ghosts claimed them for their own.
Valerius stared at his god and his god stared back. The ancient and recent dead filled the space between them. Xenophon waited in silence. At some time when the distraction was greatest, he moved across the floor to sit at Valerius’ side. The decurion felt a lean, withered hand test his forehead for heat and another lift his wrist for a pulse. A voice from outside time asked, “What do you see?”
“Nothing.” He would not speak of it again to anyone.
“Are you blind then?”
“No.” Valerius cupped his palms over his eyes. Sometimes the blackness worked, sometimes it made things worse. This time, it gave him space to gather the words he had half-prepared, expecting such an attack as this. When he could speak with a steady voice, he said, “Theophilus is a physician. He views the world through different eyes from those of us who are required to maintain discipline amongst fighting men. Umbricius attacked me openly; I killed him in self-defence. It was witnessed by my troop and his. No-one disputes it.”
“And the rest? The slaughter of the natives? The hangings? The villages razed and their children burned?”
It was too much and too deliberate. Blessedly, the anger came; not the surging, vicious fury that had killed Umbricius, but enough. It worked as nothing else ever did to lessen the haunting. In the consuming cold of his rage, the screaming dead screamed less. Macha, mother to Bán, faded from sight as if she had never been.
A single cold, clear voice remained, of a man still alive who had once echoed the voice and features of the god. What would you have done if…? Only with extremes of wine could that voice be made to stop, but Valerius had learned, over time, to think past it. He dropped his hands from his eyes and was gratified to see Xenophon flinch from what could be read in his face. He remembered the knife in his pack and saw the possibility of death strike the physician. He smiled and knew what it did to the other man’s fear.
With deliberate clarity, Valerius said, “Killing is what war is about. If you don’t like it, you have the ear of the only man who can change it. Tell Claudius to pull his legions out of Britannia and the killing will end. Until then, we have to win or we die. I do not intend to die, but if I was brought here to face the executioner, you should know that my death will not end the war.”
“I have never believed it would.”
Xenophon was not truly afraid of him, which was a mistake. In the renewed emptiness of the room, the possibility of murder hung between them. Valerius set his goblet down and rested back against the wall, his fingers laced behind his head. He was pleased with the steadiness of his hands; it was not always so. “You still haven’t told me why I’m here,” he said. “I don’t believe it was to quibble over the death of a Gaulish actuary.”
In that single sentence, a thousand deaths were reduced to a minor point of law and Roman order was restored. With evident regret, Xenophon moved back to sit at his pla
ce against the opposite wall. When he spoke, it was of other things.
“You’re right, of course. The emperor would not pay what he did to bring you here to discuss the death of a Gaul, although your reasons for killing him may have a bearing on the outcome of your task. Military discipline matters more to some than others, particularly here and now…”
The physician drifted to silence, staring into the reflective surface of his own wine, choosing his phrases for best effect. “If we leave aside the bull-slayer and remain in the temporal world, to whom do you, as an officer of the cavalry, owe your ultimate loyalty?” he asked. “Whose order will you obey without question, to its fulfilment or your own death, whichever comes first?”
Valerius said, “The emperor’s. That is, Claudius.” It mattered now, to state a name.
“And if that emperor is slain, then are you loyal to his successor, or to the one to whom you gave your oath?”
Thus did they quietly enter the realms of treason. Men had died over days for far less. Valerius dropped his eyes. He, too, studied his own floating reflection for the answer. It was not something to which he had given serious thought, although perhaps he should have done. I serve my emperor, in life and to death.
“The emperor commands the armies, whomsoever he may be,” he said presently. “The loyalty is to the position, not the man. In absolute terms, my allegiance is to my prefect, through him to my governor and so to the emperor. But Britannia is not close to Rome and the winter is almost upon us. If an order failed to reach the governor before spring, he would act on Claudius’ last command and amend it as his powers and the situation required. I would take my orders from him.”