by David Drake
Hedia lifted her chin in approval. “We could find a dream interpreter here in Puteoli, I’m sure,” she said. “And in Carce I know the names of several. Caelia Rufa has a very fine one, she says. He’s in her household if you’d prefer to avoid public practitioners.”
Hedia didn’t ask what Alphena had been dreaming, for fear of frightening the girl into silence. Talking to her about serious matters—about anything, really, because who could guess what the girl would find serious?—reminded Hedia of watching a servant feed barley meal in honey to a baby sparrow. Anything more than a tiny droplet offered gently would throw the bird into a wild panic.
“No, no,” Alphena said with a touch of anger, quickly suppressed. “It’s nothing scary. I just thought I’d like to look at jewelry.”
Which made no sense at all, but perhaps it didn’t make sense to Alphena, either. Hedia merely smiled and said, “Of course, dear. Have a good time.”
The aedile and his separate entourage were leaving, going to his house on the Bay. Saxa joined Hedia, but his eyes followed their daughter. “Alphena isn’t coming back with us, my dear?” he said.
“She’s gone shopping on her own,” Hedia said. “I think it’s good for her to develop her own taste.”
She paused, then added, “I believe our daughter is excited to be going out to dinner at the home of Julius Bersinus tomorrow night. She’s becoming quite a lady, Lord Husband. Which I’m glad to be able to say.”
After a period of doubt on my part, Hedia thought, but she chose not to say that aloud to Alphena’s father.
As it was, Saxa frowned uncomfortably and said, “My dear wife, I’m a little concerned about Alphena going into, well, public while she’s still unmarried. It seems to me that society here on the Bay has a reputation of being, well, fast?”
He risked glancing toward Hedia’s face as he finished by twisting his intended statement into a question. She touched the back of Saxa’s hand and said, “Your paternal concern does you honor, Lord Husband, but I believe it’s better that our daughter learn to navigate the reefs of polite society while you and I are still present to guide her.”
“Well, you to guide her…,” Saxa said, making a face. Muttering, he went on, “If you think that this is really something she ought to be doing, my dear.”
“I think it is necessary, Lord Husband,” Hedia said. Her words were courteous and her tone deferential, but she spoke with the cold certainty of an executioner’s axe falling. “I promise you that the party will be decorous. Master Bersinus has assured me of this.”
And I promised Bersinus that if it wasn’t, I would geld him myself, Hedia thought. Saxa wouldn’t be reassured to hear that, however, so she didn’t speak the words aloud.
Her husband sighed. “Well, I’ll leave it to you, little heart,” he said. “I’m sure you know best.”
Hedia patted his hand again. “On my honor, Lord Husband,” she said. “On my honor.”
Movement deeper into the compound drew her attention. “Ah!” she said with deliberate brightness to jolly Saxa out of the brown study into which concern over his virgin daughter had thrown him. “Here comes Varus now! You can ask him about joining you at the aedile’s dinner tonight.”
Mention of Macsturnas brought the priest Paris to Hedia’s mind. I wonder if he’ll be at the dinner too, she thought. She would prefer that he went back to some distant Etruscan city like Caere or Praeneste.
It would be better yet if Paris drowned in Macsturnas’ eel tank and was eaten by the morays.
* * *
“I’M ALL RIGHT NOW,” Varus said to his friends. At least he thought he was. His visions came on him without warning, but it would be unusual for another episode to follow the previous one so closely. Another fit it must look like to those who weren’t standing with the Sibyl on the peak in Varus’ mind.
Corylus nodded and lowered his hand. He’d been ready to grab if Varus suddenly toppled over while babbling gibberish. Pulto watched them both from a polite pace away.
Varus shook his head, trying to make sense of the vision he’d just seen. His parents had gone back toward the entrance, vanishing behind the cage of a pair of hyenas that jutted into the street a little way up.
“I suppose,” he said, “that the snatches I quote from the Sibylline Books aren’t precisely gibberish, but neither do they give us a clear prescription of how to deal with the danger. Which are crystal worms, from what the Sibyl showed me.”
Am I correct in using the word “quote” when I haven’t actually read the Books?
Varus grinned sadly at himself. Because he was frightened and uncertain, his mind was taking him into the familiar territory of grammatical puzzles. That was harmless, but unfortunately it was also useless for preventing the very real danger that threatened the Republic.
“If we know there’s a problem,” said Corylus with a smile of sorts, “then at least it isn’t as likely to slip past the sentries and slit our throats in our sleep.”
His smile grew broader as he added, “Though I suppose we could hand the problem to the Commissioners for Sacred Rites, since they have the duty of examining the Sibylline Books in event of a crisis. Then we could return to Carce and put the final polish on our rhetoric studies.”
Varus considered the proposition. He knew that his friend was joking, but Varus knew also that treating the suggestion as a real question of logic was exactly the right way to bring his mental focus sharply into the here and now.
As Corylus realized. He’s a very perceptive friend as well as a good one.
“I somehow doubt that ordering the construction of a temple to, say, Jupiter the Slayer of Giants is going to cure the problem quickly enough,” Varus said with a deadpan expression. “Besides which, so far as anyone but me knows, there isn’t a crisis on whose basis to assemble the Commissioners.”
Corylus snorted. “I accept your report as accurate,” he said, using military terminology. In a tone of very careful unconcern, he went on, “I wonder about your mother, Gaius? That is, should we tell her what you’ve seen? I’m sure Hedia knew you were, well, weren’t with us from the time we entered the compound.”
Varus suddenly realized that he was turned toward the cage of lizardmen. He hadn’t been looking at them—but they were looking at him with interest of varied sorts. The old one seemed to be smiling. The same look on the face of a crocodile wouldn’t be a friendly greeting, though.
Instead of answering his friend immediately, Varus said, “They call themselves the Singiri. At least the Sibyl called them the Singiri.”
If she exists outside my mind.
“They’re soldiers,” Pulto said unexpectedly. “The old one’s the officer, but he was on the line too when he was younger.”
Varus turned to the man in amazement but didn’t speak. Corylus said, “Why do you say that, Pulto?”
The soldier-turned-servant shrugged uncomfortably. “Why do you say the sun’s in the sky, master?” he said. “Look at the lizards, the way they hold themselves and the scars they got. And—”
He gestured with his left hand. Varus noticed that the pattern of scars and puckering on Pulto’s arm was not dissimilar to the ridges and discolorations visible on the lizards’ pebbled skin, particularly that of the old one.
“—they’re keeping quiet now, but they’re listening to every bloody word we say. I wish the army got recruits who paid attention so well. And I mean legion recruits, not the auxiliaries where you’re lucky if they speak enough Latin to know ‘right foot’ from ‘left foot.’”
The younger Singiri held themselves very still. The old one smiled more broadly.
“Corylus?” Varus said. “Look at their collars.”
“Hercules,” Corylus murmured. “Those are thumb knives. Well, ring knives. There seems to be one for each finger.”
What Varus had first thought were ornate necklaces of dark bronze were, when viewed the correct way, loops from which short, curved knife blades protruded. The points were nee
dle sharp; Varus supposed that the sharpened inner curves were razors, though he couldn’t tell for certain without coming a great deal closer to the Singiri than he had any intention of doing.
“How d’ye suppose they get the links apart?” Pulto said, frowning deeply.
He had edged back, as had Varus and Corylus. Varus didn’t know what his companions were thinking, but for his own part he remembered what Veturius had described happening to the attendant who shirked his duties on the voyage down the Nile.
“Like a conjuror, splitting and joining rings right in front of you, I suppose,” Corylus said. He looked at Varus and went on, “Gaius, this isn’t a monkey jabbing a stick into a bee’s nest to get out the honey. These are tools. Your Singiri aren’t animals.”
“No,” said Varus, “they’re not. Which makes me wonder why they stayed locked up except to solve the problem they had coming down the river. And even then they came back as soon as they’d found their dinner.”
The points of the ring knives could turn the wards of the massive padlock fastening the cage. That assumed the person using the points knew what he was doing, of course, but Varus didn’t have any doubt that the Singiri—these Singiri, at least—were competent.
“Let’s head back to the entrance,” Corylus said, nodding up the passageway.
Varus lifted his chin in agreement and stepped off. Corylus matched him stride for stride, and Pulto brought up the rear.
When the hyena cage was between them and the lizardmen, Varus said, “Do you think we should do something? I mean, the Singiri aren’t animals. They shouldn’t just be shot in the arena.”
Corylus chuckled. “I don’t imagine they will be,” he said. “They’ve proved they can get out anytime they want to, so unless they want to be killed.…”
He shrugged.
“I saw Singiri fighting big horse-headed men that the Sibyl called Ethiopes,” Varus said. “In my vision.”
The images he’d seen were sharper than they could have been if he were watching with his real eyes as far away as the battle had seemed to be. “The Sibyl didn’t say that they were a danger to us.”
“And they aren’t the sort that make me think I’d like to fight them if they aren’t enemies already,” Corylus said in a reasonable tone. “Besides—”
He looked back over his shoulder to formally include Pulto in the conversation.
“—Veturius isn’t stupid, so I don’t think we’d be telling him anything he didn’t know already. If the lizardmen wanted to come to Italy in a cage, then nobody seems to have lost anything by it. Except that Egyptian attendant, I guess.”
The entrance to the compound was in sight. Corylus’ father and Veturius were just inside the open gate. They spoke to each other occasionally as they watched what was going on. Cispius saw his son and they exchanged nods. Hedia and Saxa were in the street; Alphena wasn’t with them.
Varus took a deep breath. He’d finally answered the question he had been deliberating ever since his friend had asked it.
“If Mother asks me what happened,” he said, “I’ll tell her. It may be that Alphena has talked to her or will; that’s fine. But I’m not going to volunteer what I saw because I don’t really know anything. And she makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know what she’s thinking, ever.”
“Your mother is very self-contained,” Corylus said, looking toward the gate instead of meeting Varus’ eyes. “She’s as closed as a block of stone.”
From the odd undertone to the words, Corylus was thinking something quite different about the lovely Hedia. Every man past puberty except for her stepson probably did at one time or another.
That Varus did not was less a virtue than a flaw. He respected Hedia; he even liked her for her quick intelligence and a sense of duty that would have done credit to Cornelia, the Mother of the Gracchi.
But he didn’t think of Hedia as any more human than the splendid statue of Venus in Caesar’s temple was. And he wasn’t sure that he was really wrong.
“My mother would sacrifice anything to preserve what she considers most important,” Varus said, speaking as much to himself as to his friend. “I’m not sure what is most important to her, though. It certainly isn’t her own life.”
Corylus stopped to talk with his father. Varus walked through the gateway to greet Saxa and Hedia.
The life of her stepson isn’t of first importance to her, either, he thought as he nodded to his mother. But the survival of Carce may be.
* * *
A WEIGHT, THOUGH NOT THE whole weight, had lifted from Corylus’ shoulders when he turned toward home with Pulto. Corylus suspected that the servant was even more relieved. The tavern a few doors up from Wharf Street wasn’t prepossessing, but it would do.
“Let’s get a table,” Corylus said, leading Pulto past the counter facing the street where two sailors were drinking wine. The bartender had probably been a sailor also until an accident had crushed his left hand and forearm into a distorted flipper.
All three were small, dark men with short goatees, born on either the African or Spanish shores near the Straits of Hercules. They continued their conversation without taking notice of the newcomers. Corylus didn’t recognize their language.
“Whatever you like, master,” Pulto said. “I was only planning to have a jar of wine, anyway. Ah—if I was hungry, this isn’t a place I’d want to trust the sausage.”
“None of my relatives have died lately,” said Corylus with a grin, “so at worst I’d be spared that sacrilege. But I’m here for a drink too. I just wanted to sit down.”
“Shouldn’t mind that myself,” Pulto said. “My knees being what they are.”
“This one,” Corylus said as his servant started to slide behind the nearer of the two tables. Neither was occupied, but the farther one had a wooden top while the other—like the counter—was a slab of marble.
Corylus ran his fingers over the tabletop, seeing in the foggy distance an elm sprite, hunched and very old. She looked back at him with sad eyes, but there was nothing he could do for her now.
The wood had been a door panel, cut down to cover the table after the marble original was broken. Before it became a door, however, it had been decking on a ship that sailed out of Massillia to Gades on the Atlantic for fish sauce, to Cyrene in Africa to load giant fennel, and finally to Puteoli with a load of fine pottery.
Some of the cargo had been salvaged when a violent storm drove the vessel ashore. The hull had been broken up for reuse when possible, for firewood when the scraps were good for nothing else. Corylus thought of the sprite and wondered whether it might not have been kinder to shovel these planks too into the ovens of a public bath.
He rubbed the wood gently. Looking across the table at his servant, he said, “Do you ever wonder what you’ll be a hundred years from now, Pulto?”
Pulto snorted and said, “That’s an officer-type problem, master. No business of mine, thank Mithras.”
The bartender left his fellows and walked over to the table without speaking. Corylus looked up and said, “Two mugs of house wine, mixed one to one.”
“House wine,” the bartender repeated in a brittle accent. “Like we have any other kind here.”
Then, hopefully, he added, “You want sausage rolls? I could heat the sausage rolls up again.”
“Just the wine,” Corylus said, trying to keep his anger at a human-sized problem in check. If he doesn’t shut up and bring the wine, I’ll stuff his head into one of those wine jars!
Though of course Corylus wouldn’t. He was worried about the lizardmen—worried because he didn’t know what the presence of the lizardmen meant—and he was worried because Varus had gone into one of his waking trances again. When that had happened in the past, it meant something very bad was threatening the Republic and the world.
Corylus had chosen not to interfere with the lizardmen until they gave him a reason to, and there wasn’t a thing in the world he could do about giant crystal worms if they crawled over the
Alban Hills on their way to Carce. The bartender, though, was a problem on a human scale; Corylus could solve it very easily.
But he wouldn’t. Growing up in an army camp, Corylus had too often seen a centurion who was having a bad day take out his anger on a trooper whose main sin had been to be seen at the wrong time, and seen a trooper, angry about being put on punishment detail and maybe a little drunk as well, break his girlfriend’s face to pass the misery along.
The bartender came back with a generous carafe of wine and two mugs of tarred leather, all in his right hand. He thumped them down on the table and glared at Corylus. “You want water in your wine, you go somewhere else!” he said belligerently.
Pulto shifted slightly, waiting for his cue. The sailors at the counter heard the tone if not the words; their hands dropped below the level of the counter, reaching for the knives in their belts.
Corylus laughed. “We’re in a gourmet joint, Pulto,” he said. He raised the carafe—it was stoneware and would make a useful weapon if needed—and poured a mouthful of wine into each mug. “Be sure to treat the vintage with the respect it deserves.”
Corylus and his servant drank, watching the bartender over the tops of their mugs. Pulto’s right hand was hidden at belt level also.
“Not bad,” Pulto said, putting his mug down and filling both properly. “Pretty bloody good, in fact.”
The wine was local and hadn’t been aged for long enough to reach full strength, so mixing it with water would have thinned it more than Corylus had intended. The tang of tar was slight but blended better with the new wine than he would have guessed.
There’d been so much Greek colonization in southern Italy, especially here on the coast, that some called the region Larger Greece. Wine to the colonies was carried in jars waterproofed with tar; many people thought the resin stabilized the wine against the ships’ violent shaking as well.
The locals had turned necessity into a style by blending pitch into the local vintages. Corylus drank resined wine generally when he was on the Bay, and he’d come to accept if not precisely to favor it.