by John Brunner
The only person among them who defied this obsequious custom was Anastasia. She who had little of her own to wash, since her adopted kinfolk had been stolen into slavery, mocked these other slaves when she arrived with laundry belonging to those who could afford—and dared—to rent her time, elbowed her way to the cleanest part of the pool, and kept up a constant flow of muttered insults concerning cowards who let themselves be bought and sold instead of running away to earn an independent living.
Poor though she was even by the standards of a poverty-stricken community, having been orphaned at birth and worse than orphaned in her teens, she was never in rags, for she often took her pay in outworn garments and painstakingly repaired them; moreover, despite being gaunt she was beautiful, with brilliant dark eyes and long sleek hair. The occasional strangers who noticed her invariably demanded why she was neither married nor enrolled in the household of a prosperous family, but the islanders were ashamed to explain why nobody dared lay a finger on her, and dodged the question. Even though the forum was beset with crude statues of gods and goddesses both local and imposed by the Romans, and the whole island was littered with shrines and sacred places, admitting the truth would smack too much of superstition to a sophisticated visitor from Italy, the Greek mainland or Asia Minor. So they did their best to convey the vague impression that she was a harlot but it was wiser not to have commerce with her because she was diseased, and then pointedly changed the subject.
None of this was true. In fact she was a witch.
Every man on the island, bond or free, who did not prefer boys to women, had lusted after her since long before she was left to fend for herself upon the enslavement of her uncle and older cousins. One of the Roman contractors brought in by the island’s temporary overlord, infuriated on realizing that he was not going to be paid for the work he had put in, had sought some other form of recompense. Anastasia’s uncle, who had adopted her in infancy, was a skilled stone carver, and had brought up his two sons in the same trade. A richer rival, assuming that without any menfolk to protect her Anastasia would be easy prey for himself, had suggested to the Roman that he kidnap and sell the masons to recoup his losses, a proposal which the fellow eagerly fell in with.
There was of course no court of justice Anastasia could appeal to; apart from the fact that her uncle’s enemy—who was still fuming because she had rebuffed his offer to take her in with a volley of the filthiest objurgations she could contrive—was now the most powerful man on the island, none of her relatives was officially a Roman citizen. Her mother and all her grandparents being dead, she turned to other cousins, of whom she had several. She received some support from them, but they were humble farmhands, lacking a profitable skill like her uncle’s. They had little to offer save a bare subsistence, and that only on condition that she work at the most menial tasks.
With one exception: her great-aunt Phoebe, who was toothless and rheumatic and could not walk without a stick. But her mind was clear as a summer sky, and she remembered many of the ancient spells that could be used against people who had committed crimes yet imagined they might escape the consequences.
Anastasia’s uncle’s rival also had a son, whom he had likewise apprenticed to the mason’s trade. The boy could pursue it no longer; he had been blinded by stone chips that flew up unaccountably beneath his chisel.
Some of the island’s young men had laughed about that and gone on trying to seduce this desirable maiden. The most importunate of them was now a geck and gull himself, for he had slipped on a hill path and broken his leg; ever since, he had had to walk sidewise, like a crab. After that, people began to draw apart from Anastasia, and though they spoke politely enough on meeting, they seemed to have decided to leave her in peace.
Then, when she tamed the wild man—a feat which echoed the most ancient legend known to anybody here—and decided to bear his child in order to emphasize her contempt for all her other would-be suitors, their respect turned to awe. Some went so far as to maintain outright that one of the Old and Strong had come again, but there was much argument concerning that opinion. At all events, now she was big-bellied and thus in a condition to work still more powerful charms than before, even the randiest of the island’s men had ceased to trouble her.
She was sorry that Phoebe, dead last winter, had not survived to see the full fruits of her instruction.
“A sail! A sail!”
The cry rose from the southern headland of the bay, and at once everybody forgot their work and rushed to the shore. Even Anastasia, having wrung out the garments entrusted to her by the family employing her today and laid them back neatly in her basket, wiped her hands on her woolen cloak and deigned to join the throng, although she was as ever dismayed to notice how many mothers warned their children to keep clear of her. As if she would ever harm a child too young to know what wickedness meant! Some of those mothers, on the other hand…
But Phoebe had warned her that she must never use her spells to afflict either the innocent, or those who lacked the power to control their own destinies. Whether the gods existed or not, magic certainly did, and its laws decreed that it would recoil against all who exploited it with neither justice nor goodwill on their side. Anastasia bestowed broad smiles on those of the children who were looking her way, and a few of them risked smiling back.
Then she turned her attention to the ship approaching harbor. She was, predictably, a Roman galley, her sail furled, her rowers bending to their oars. In the still air the sound of the drum they kept time to could already be heard, and now and then it was punctuated by the crack of their overseer’s whip.
Such a ship as that had carried off Anastasia’s uncle, and his sons whom she had grown to love as brothers…
Her mind filled with visions of losing someone who had become even more precious to her. Blinded with sudden tears, she slipped away.
“Things are terrible, and getting worse,” said Septimus Julius Cornax. “Thanks to our emperor! May his guts burn worse than the bowels of Vesuvius!”
He waved his cup vaguely in the air, and a sullen slave—nothing like as well trained as what he was used to at home—took it away for refilling.
For want of anything better to do while his crew loaded such fresh provisions as were to be had on this dismal island, he had accepted a fawning invitation to lunch at the home of its “richest” citizen. Rich? Someone had to be joking! The house’s cēnādtīō was a mere terrace in the open air, sheltered by a trellis of ill-doing vines, tolerable perhaps in summer, but absurd in November. Its sole ornament was a crude statue supposedly representing an ancient deity, while the company consisted of the man’s dull and pudgy wife, who luckily excused herself early, and his sightless and self-pitying son, who whined endlessly about his misfortune.
Even this, however, might have been tolerable had the food been fit for Cornax’s sophisticated palate. In fact, it had proved ghastly and the wine if possible worse, so he had sent to the ship for a jar of Samian, which was now half-empty. To add to his depression, there was still no wind. His rowers would mutiny if they were ordered back to sea before tomorrow, so he was due to be stuck overnight in this armpit of the universe. In the end he grew so bored he drew his dagger and started to scratch a record of his visit on one of the crude tiles his hostess boasted about using to protect her table from the hot (meaning lukewarm) dishes set upon it. It was about then that she took the hint and made herself scarce.
By stages, however, Cornax’s mood had mellowed. The sniveling son, finding the Samian too strong, had been led away, which was a vast relief. Moreover—as he admitted to himself—it was a pure delight to be able to speak his mind out of hearing of anyone who might relay his treasonable opinions to his enemies. On this lump of rock whither his ship had been driven by a contrary wind, and then becalmed unseasonably, surely there was nobody to carry back gossip to the imperial court!
Accordingly, even though he realized he was upsetting his host (but why should he care about these provincials who
had nothing better to offer a distinguished guest than charred goat and a mess of onions stewed in oil?), he unleashed his tongue.
“Want to know what a plight the empire’s in? Take me as an example, then! Here I am, not just entitled by descent to bear the name of the Julian gens but also favored with a surname that according to all the experts must date back to Etruscan times, because they can’t account for it any other way—in other words, my ancestors predated the kings, let alone the emperors, of Rome!—and on top of that an officer of one of the finest of all the legions, with a roll of battle honors going back centuries—here I am in command of a rotten tub of a ship, on a mission that reduces me to the status of a common or garden lanista, the kind of person who makes money out of pandering to the plebs, supplying them with gladiators to chop each other’s vitals off in public! Ever been to the Games in Rome? No? I could have guessed as much. But that’s what pleases the crowd the best. There’s a fad of late for eunuchs who escape the arena and survive. The emperor likes them a lot… More wine! Come on, you ought to have more too! It may be years before you get another chance to taste so good a vintage!”
His host, eyes rolling every which way, declined with tolerable politeness. Later, Cornax felt, he was likely to reach the stage where he would regard such a refusal as an insult, but he wasn’t there yet, so he let the matter slide, drank deeper than ever, and resumed his tirade.
“And it’s bad enough knowing the slaves I collect are going to be wasted in the arena, but that isn’t the half of it. The mob is constantly yelling for blacks, and beastmen—ever seen one of them? No? Thought not—and… Wine, you lazy scum! Or I’ll call my overseer with his whip! Excuse me; not mannerly in someone else’s house… But I could sell you a girl or two—Sorry again. I’m not allowed to, and anyway since they’re bound for the court you couldn’t afford them. Where was I?”
His host, who by now was looking thoroughly alarmed, muttered something indefinite. It was enough to set Cornax back on course.
“Yes! Worse than being treated like a lanista is being treated like a common merchant! ‘Unguents,’ they tell me—‘perfumes,’ they tell me—‘dormice in honey,’ they tell me—‘lark tongues,’ they tell me—‘Get us lots and lots so we can impress the Parthian Ambassador!’ Or the Persian one, or some other of those foreign bigwigs! Years of effort all due to be squandered on a single Hades-consigned banquet! Then they’re apt to chuck it up again anyhow! Makes me sick, I tell you straight! When I think what one could do with the money I’ve spent to load that ship out there, I could—I could kick the emperor’s arse! But it’s orders, I suppose, and I took an oath back in the good old days when an oath meant something, and… The worst thing about this trip, you know, the very worst, is that when I get back I’m not going to have a chance to plead my case. And that isn’t fair!” Finding his tongue at last, the host say, “Why should you need to?”
“Because things are terrible everywhere in the empire! I said so already, didn’t I? To feed the greedy court—and I don’t just mean feed in the literal sense—they’ve debased the money they gave me! I got to Egypt only to find that because imperial coinage mostly doesn’t contain an honest quantity of gold or silver anymore, they won’t accept it except at a discount! And you’ve no idea what damage that has done to our creditworthiness… Jupiter Tonans! I’m talking like a merchant myself now! But what it boils down to is that I’m going home without a decent load. This wine is all right, even though I had to buy it in Alexandria and pay extra to cover the cost of transport. The food isn’t bad, though those Egyptians don’t seem to have learned as much about preserving as you’d expect, given the way they used to pickle their kings and nobles—but that’s merchant-type stuff, and any African grain ship might carry the same.
“No, what’s wrecked the trip for me is the fact that I couldn’t afford even one Nubian gladiator! Those lazy Egyptians haven’t mounted a slaving expedition to Nubia in years—haven’t even traded any in! If you go looking for blacks, all you can find on offer is kids, locally bred and most of them mongrels! Don’t you think that’s disgusting?”
He held out his empty cup again.
His host ruminated awhile, and eventually said, “You’d be interested in acquiring a black man? I mean, a full-blooded one?”
“Hah!” Cornax exclaimed. “I can’t say someone like that would be worth his weight in gold, but if a lanista didn’t buy him there are a thousand bored rich wives in Rome who’d snatch him quick as lightning, the ones whose husbands are too preoccupied with business or politics to look after them properly! You know what I mean!”
Disregarding the last sentence, the other went on, “Did you know there’s a Nubian on Oragalia? Big, strong, and indisputably—uh—male?”
“What?” Cornax almost choked on his latest swig of wine. “How did someone like that turn up here of all places?”
“Presumably he’s a runaway slave. Very likely he jumped overboard from a passing ship. At all events, last spring he was found living off the land, or in other words stealing from those who work to provide us with food. But he was on the south cape, where most of the time nobody goes—there’s no land worth cultivating. And…”
He hesitated, eyeing the idol in the corner. Tense, Cornax urged him to continue.
“Well… Ah!” He was obviously searching for the right words, but found them at last. “Well, there are some foolish ideas that the common folk adhere to, of a sort your honor is no doubt familiar with, and some of them relate to that particular part of the island, where in fact that statue of mine came from… Don’t you admire it?”
“No!”—curtly. “Come to the point!”
“It’s very old, I believe… I’m sorry. Anyhow, in the event the Nubian was left alone for a month or more. There was much talk of organizing an expedition to go after him, but—well, it shames me to say so, but an awful lot of our people, despite their braggartly words, turned out to be cowards when it came to the crunch.”
Cornax tipped back his crude chair. (Oh for a decent couch like what one found at Rome!…) He said, “So you have a wild black man running around. Very well. The wildest man in the world couldn’t stand up against a squad of my legionaries, so we’ll collect him and take him to Rome with us. Use a net, probably. No trouble.”
The other ventured, “As a matter of fact, sir, he isn’t exactly wild. Not anymore, that is.”
“In that case, what’s the problem? Why hasn’t one of your lot already recaptured this fellow and put him to useful work? It’s legal, if he actually is a runaway slave—in fact, it’s your civic duty. Why didn’t you take on the job yourself, come to that? It looks as though you could do with some extra help around the place!”
“That’s—uh—that’s a long story!”
“I have nothing else to occupy my time until my ship is reprovisioned.” Cornax leaned back further yet and crossed his legs. “You may recount it!”
“Well—uh!…”
“Get on with it, man!”
“Oh, since you insist…” And little by little the tale emerged, shorn of such embarrassing details as the speaker’s complicity in the kidnapping of Anastasia’s uncle and cousins, but full of allusions to the island’s folklore. The latter were sufficiently commonplace for Cornax to get the drift of them.
The first report of the wild man had come from a boy taking goats to pasture. He could add up well enough to keep track of his beasts, and one day the count was short. Later, raw and bloody bones were found. Shortly after, a beekeeper discovered that his hives had been robbed of the first of the summer’s honey. In the normal course of events, herdsmen and beekeepers were the only people to visit the southern cape of Oragalia, where the land was so poor as not even to have attracted the interest of the Roman who had had the aqueduct built, although in bad weather fisherfolk were glad to put ashore there.
Later the culprit was seen by daylight: tall and thin, blacker than the sun could have burned him, and apparently not just naked but devoid
of tools, let alone weapons. However, as had already been indicated, although the islanders talked at length about tracking down and catching him, they proved unenthusiastic when it came to converting brave words into action. They seemed on the verge of deciding to put up with his predations, as though with a force of nature like gales and storms, when a certain woman cried them down and said she would achieve what they dared not.
They would have been overjoyed to see her fail.
“Why?” demanded Cornax, who for all the wine he had drunk was still alert enough to follow.
“Well—ah—that’s another story! Suffice it to say that this woman had made herself unpopular. Perhaps she saw in this venture a means of worming her way back into people’s respect, if not liking.”
“And did she?”
“Not exactly.”
“Man, make yourself clear!”—in a parade-ground voice.
Swallowing hard: “She made herself feared.”
“Without much difficulty, I imagine. Judging not just by my limited experience of your particular island, but an extensive acquaintance with Greeks like you all over the mainland, Asia Minor and Egypt, I’d expect people of your stamp to scare pretty easily!” Cornax was rather enjoying this baiting of his host. “What exactly did this woman do?”