by David Drake
***
As Corylus and Pulto approached the apartment block, one of the daughters of the cobbler on the fourth floor leaned out the window and called, "Hello, Master Corylus! I'm glad you're back!"
Corylus waved a half-hearted acknowledgement and tried to smile. He probably didn't succeed very well.
"I wonder if that's Tertia or her sister?" Pulto said, sounding mildly curious.
Corylus looked at the older man, uncertain whether the implication was a joke. He said, "Quartilla's pretty young, Pulto."
"Well growed, though," Pulto said. "And from the way everybody on the street's looking at us now, you could probably parlay one visit into a two-fer."
Then, with the break in his voice he'd been trying to avoid with the crude jokes, he said, "I wonder what it is my Anna said to everybody to get them so excited? Well, there's nothing to do about it now."
"Ah," said Corylus, who now understood a great deal more than he had a moment ago. Yes, a parade with elephants could scarcely have drawn more attention than he and his servant were getting right now.
Corylus had been thinking about the oration his fellow student Clementius had given today, urging Hannibal not to storm the walls of Carce. Pandareus had responded by 'predicting' all the disasters which had beset the Carthaginian cause when Hannibal marched away without attacking.
Corylus would be speaking tomorrow. His set subject was to advise the imprisoned Socrates either to flee to Macedonia or to stay and drink the hemlock poison. He had planned to argue that Socrates should stay, honoring his principles-but that would give Pandareus the opportunity to blame Socrates for all the misfortunes "the gods" had heaped on Athens after his execution. Perhaps Corylus should argue that from exile in Macedonia, Socrates could foment a revolt of reason within the body politic…
But Publius Corylus had duties and obligations in the real world also, as Pulto had just reminded him. Hedia and her daughter had visited Anna today, and the visit apparently had consequences here in his neighborhood on the Viminal Hill. Now that Tertia-or Quartilla-had addressed Corylus directly, a score of other people were calling to him also.
Hercules! Some are even cheering! He waved again as he ducked into the staircase behind Pulto.
"I'll just have something light to eat and go straight over to Saxa's," Corylus muttered to the servant's back. "Ah-Pulto? You don't need to come with me tonight. There'll be more than enough attendants, I'm sure."
"I guess I do have to come, don't I?" Pulto growled. "I would if you were heading for a dust-up, wouldn't I? And this is a bloody sight worse, the way I look at it."
The way I look at it too, old friend, Corylus thought. But though Pulto wouldn't be of the least use in a situation where the danger was from magic, it was his duty. That was a way a soldier had to think, and it was the way Corylus thought as well.
The door opened before they reached it. "Anna, my heart!" Pulto said, his voice much harsher than was usual when speaking to his wife. "What in buggering Mercury did you say that's got them so worked up down in the street?"
"Never mind that now, Marcus Pulto," Anna said. "You'll give me a hand up to the roof where I'll talk to the master, and you'll stand at the bottom of the ladder making sure other folks understand that he wants his privacy. Do you understand that?"
I do not, Corylus thought. But it took his mind off a quick dinner and what they were going to find in the home of Sempronius Tardus.
"Yes, ma'am," Pulto said in a tone of supplication. That was even more unusual when he talked to Anna than the anger of a heartbeat earlier.
Corylus had wondered how long it would take her to reach the fifth-floor landing, let alone mount the ladder to the roof. Pulto must have had the same thought, because he took her arm as directed, but even that was probably unnecessary.
Anna clumped up the stairs in normal fashion, without pausing or slowing. The doors on the upper landings were all ajar, but nobody actually stuck her head out as they normally would when strangers passed.
"Anna?" Corylus said. "Let me go up ahead of you."
"I can still climb a ladder, master!" she said.
"So that I can help you out over the coaming," he replied, keeping his voice artificially calm. She must be very upset. "And there may be somebody on the roof already."
"There's not," Anna said, her tone contrite; she stepped aside on the narrow landing to let him pass. "But I shouldn't wonder if they'd lift the trap door and listen in once we were up there. I reckon my Marcus can take care of that, won't you, dearie?"
"I guess I could if I needed to," Pulto said. "Which I won't, since nobody in this building is going to show his ass to you. Me included."
He gave his wife a peck on the cheek. Things seemed to be back to normal between them.
The roof was empty, as Anna had claimed. It was tiled, but the pitch was so slight that it was easy to walk on. A poulterer on the second floor supplemented his merchandize by keeping a large dovecote here, and there were eight or ten terracotta pots with flowers and vegetables growing in them.
There was even a spindly orange tree. Corylus lifted Anna from the third rung down, then touched the tree trunk while she closed the trap door. He thought for an instant that flesh wriggled gratefully beneath his fingertips.
"I don't like what I'm going to ask you, master," Anna said. "But sometimes 'like' don't make no nevermind."
She was standing beside him, looking southeast toward the center of Carce instead of meeting his eyes. He put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her. He didn't speak.
"Aye, you know," Anna muttered. She gave him a half-hug also. "You're a soldier's son, and anyway, you're a good boy."
She turned her head to look at him. "It's her ladyship," she said. "She needs something I can't fetch her and I won't ask my Marcus to go for. He'd try, but I think it'd kill him, stop his heart. He'd be that fearful."
"Tell me what you need, Anna," Corylus said. He felt calm."Tell me what the Republic needs, or so I think."
He had been very young, certainly no older than three, when his father came into the room Corylus shared with Anna one night. Something had happened, though at the time he hadn't known what.
Later Corylus learned there had been a battle-not the kind that the historians wrote about, but the sort of little skirmish that happened regularly on the frontier. A party of young Germans had crossed the river for loot, but they got too drunk to return after they captured a handful of wagons loaded with wine.
They were too drunk to surrender also, but Germans never seemed to get too drunk to fight. It had been a nasty one, because the Germans had the wagons in a circle and horses wouldn't charge home. Cispius had dismounted his troop and stormed the laager.
Cispius had taken off his armor before he shook his son awake, but his tunic reeked of sweat and blood. In a voice as rough as stones sliding, he had said, "Don't ever let them know you're afraid, boy. And by Hercules, if you play the man, you'll find you really aren't afraid. Don't let your troops down, and you won't let yourself down either."
Corylus hadn't understood that at the time. He understood it now, with his arm around his old nurse.
Anna nodded and stepped away, visibly calmer. "Lady Hedia came to see me today," she said in the same normal voice in which she would have discussed taking her sandals to be mended. "It isn't her coming, though, because I already knew I'd have to do something."
She sniffed angrily. "I knew from the smell on you when you come back from the theater, boy," she said, "It was her ladyship visiting that showed me I couldn't put it off. I'd been telling myself it wasn't so, like I was a foolish girl."
"Tell me what I must do, Anna," Corylus said, firmly but calmly. He'd never seen his nurse in such a state. Shouting wouldn't help matters, but he did need to get her to the point at some time before Carce's thousand-year celebrations-in two or three centuries.
"There's a thing under the ground," she said, suddenly herself again. "An amulet I think, but maybe something el
se. I can't see it myself-I don't have that sort of power, boy, you know that. But…"
She swallowed and walked awkwardly over to the dovecote. She used her sticks. She had thrust them down the neck of her tunic so that she could climb the ladder, but they were a doubtful help on the tiles. Still, the surface wasn't any worse than wet cobblestones.
Corylus wasn't certain what to do, but after a brief hesitation he followed her. He tried to keep his weight over the beams, but a flash of humor lighted his face. I wonder what Tertia-or perhaps Quartilla-would say if I entered through the ceiling instead of by the door?
It was good to laugh at something when he felt like this. Especially something silly.
Anna rubbed a dove's neck feathers through the grill; it cooed, squirming closer to her. She looked again at Corylus and said, "I couldn't see things, but the birds, I thought, might; and the little animals. Which they did. Last night I went with a vole down his burrow into the place that the thing was; and this morning, after their ladyships were gone, I hired a chair to the Esquiline with Dromo, Cephinna's boy from the fifth floor. We marked the place, and he'll guide you back to it tonight."
Corylus licked his lips. "On the Esquiline. That will be to the old burial grounds there."
"Aye," said Anna. She looked as fierce as a rebel waiting to be crucified.
"All right," said Corylus, since there was nothing else to do. "We'll leave as soon as it's dark. Ah-will there be difficulties with Dromo? That is, how much does he know?"
Anna sniffed again. "He knows enough not to like it," she said, "but he'll do it for me. And for you, master. He trusts you."
"Ah…," said Corylus. "I'll pay whatever you think…?"
"A silver piece," Anna said. "A day's pay for a grown man, which is fair enough. Mind, there's few grown men who'd do what Dromo will tonight. He's a brave one, which is why I picked him. Though…"
Corylus hooked his hand, as though trying to draw the thought out of the old woman by brute force. It would be simpler if Anna simply spat out all the information in an organized fashion; but then, it would be simpler if everyone loved his neighbor, worked hard, and behaved courteously to others.
There wouldn't be much use for soldiers, then, or attorneys either. Corylus had seen enough of oxen to know that he didn't want to spend his life following a pair of them around a field while leaning into a plow to make it bite. Though a return to the Golden Age, where the fruits and grain just sprouted-that might not be such a hardship.
"I told Dromo all he had to do was show you where the place to dig was," Anna explained. "You and Pulto would do the rest. I've already bought mattocks and a pry bar; they're in the kitchen."
"That will save time," Corylus said, smiling faintly. Anna might have trouble saying things she wished weren't so, but she certainly didn't hesitate to do anything she thought was necessary.
He looked west over the city. Because this apartment was the tallest building for half a mile, he was largely looking down onto tile roofs much like the one he stood on. Potted plants and dovecotes and rabbit hutches; and now and again there was a shed of cloth on a wicker frame that might have anything at all inside it.
People lived ordinary lives here in Carce, the greatest city in the world. None of them perfect, including Gaius Cispius Corylus, a student of Pandareus of Athens… but generally decent folk.
He thought of Typhon, ripping its way through a vision of crystal towers and walls of sun-bright metal. No one had told Corylus that would result unless he-and Anna and Pandareus and Varus and all of them-managed to stop the creature, but it was a logical inference from what he had heard-and what he had seen ten days before, when the Underworld vomited forth its flaming demons.
"Pulto should stay here with you, Anna," he said. There was no reason to force a brave man and a friend into a night's work that would torture him worse than hot pincers.
"No," she said. "You'll be going into the ground, but you'll want a solid man up above to watch your back. My Marcus is that; and anyway, you couldn't keep him away unless you chained him."
She coughed. "I think it's a tomb, master," she said. "An old one, maybe; very old. Etruscan, I'd venture, from before Carce ever was. Though-"
She fluttered her little fingers, since her palms were braced on the smooth knobbed handles of her sticks.
"-that's a lot to draw from a vole's mind, you'll understand. Anyway, it's cut in rock, the place the thing is."
Corylus laughed and hugged Anna again. "We'll find you your bauble, dear one," he said. "How could any man fail someone they love as much as Pulto and I love you?"
He'd made the words a joke, but it was the truth just the same.
I'd best send a messenger to Varus, telling him I won't be able to join him this afternoon after all, Corylus thought.
On his way back from class, he'd been concerned about what they might find in Tardus' home. Now, entering the cellars of a senator's house seemed a harmless, even friendly, alternative to the way he would really be spending the evening.
***
"Oh!" said Saxa as his entourage formed around him with all manner of shouting and gestures. "My boy, I don't see your friend Corylus. You don't think he's gotten lost on the way here, do you? We really shouldn't wait much longer or we'll arrive at the dinner hour, which would be discourteous."
Tardus will probably regard our arrival to search his house under consular authority to be discourteous enough, Varus thought. Aloud he said, "Corylus was detained on other business, your lordship. We will proceed without him."
Saxa bustled off, surrounded by Agrippinus, who would stay at the house; Candidus, who would lead the escort; and the chief lictor.
It hadn't occurred to Varus that Saxa would remember that Corylus might accompany them. He'd underestimated his father, a disservice which he would try hard not to repeat.
Pandareus had dropped into the background when Saxa approached; now he joined Varus again. With his lips close to his teacher's ear, Varus said, "It seems a great deal of argument for what is really just a six-block walk, doesn't it?"
"It would be, I agree," Pandareus said, for a moment fully the professor. "But I take issue with your terms, Lord Varus. If we were simply to walk to the home of Sempronius Tardus, we would be wasting our efforts. If this is to be a rite of state-a religious act, in effect-then the litanies are to be accepted as being of spiritual significance even though their human meaning has been blurred."
Varus chuckled. In an undertone he muttered the refrain of the priests during the rites of Robigus-the deity of corn smut. It was a string of nonsense syllables to anyone alive today.
"Yes, my teacher," he said. "It does have a great deal of similarity to what we're hearing now. Or at any rate, to what my father is hearing, merging the three speeches."
"Plato believed in Ideal Republics," said Pandareus, watching the commotion with an attitude of bright interest. He was chatting now, no longer lecturing. "I am… willing, I suppose, to accept them also-for the purpose of argument. I don't find them any more useful in studying real conditions than the Chief Pirate's Beautiful Daughter would be in formulating the Republic's mercantile policy."
Varus chuckled at mention of one of the standards of school orations, like the Reformed Prostitute and the Undutiful Son. "I wouldn't say that the reign of Dion of Syracuse was a Golden Age, despite Plato's earnest coaching of his would-be philosopher king," he said. "I accept your point about real politics generally looking like-"
He gestured to the confusion of servants, lictors, and citizen-clients. It looked as though the procession was close to moving off.
"-that. What I don't understand is why it looks like that instead of being, well, smoother."
"It may be that you are asking the correct question," Pandareus said, reverting to his classroom manner. "You're asking it rhetorically, however, instead of using the moment as a real opportunity to learn. Why is it that human societies generally organize themselves in fashions that we philosophers deplore
as inefficient? Surely it cannot be possible that human wisdom is limited while the cosmos is infinite?"
Varus laughed again. "I'll want to spend an hour or two considering the question before giving you a definitive answer, master," he said.
Pandareus had a remarkable ability to puncture displays of excessive ego-by using the Socratic Method, proving that his disciple already possessed the information. That was certainly true in the present instance. Varus wouldn't go so far as to claim that the fact something existed proved that it was good-but he did accept that everything happened for a reason.
Candidus spoke to a musician holding a double-pipe. Varus believed the piper was the same man-if that was the correct term for someone so slender and feminine-who had led the music during yesterday's mime. If so, he had come through the ordeal very well.
"We'd best take our places," Varus said. He moved into the place directly following Saxa. Behind them would come the most respectable of his clients, most of them impoverished relatives.
Varus and Pandareus had just reached the column when the pipe began to sing cadence from the front, among the lictors. The procession started off-not in unison, but a good deal closer than most arrays of this sort.
"In the army, Corylus says they sing to keep time," Varus said as they ambled through the city. "From the songs he describes, it's probably as well that we're not doing that. Otherwise Tardus would be in a panic to lock up his daughters."
"Or sons," Pandareus said, straight-faced. "Though I'm sure that the standards of the eastern legions that I'm familiar with are less manly and rigorous than those of the Rhine frontier."
I didn't expect to be laughing repeatedly on this expedition, Varus thought. The obvious answer-because everything was a question, looked at in the correct fashion-struck him. He looked at Pandareus and said, "Thank you, master. You have taught me more by example than even from the knowledge you have accumulated."