The Fire Waker

by Ben Pastor

  "My mother's folks, perhaps, not my father's. On Father's side I haven't a drop of italicized, let alone romanized, blood. We can't all go back to the times of the Punic Wars like yourself, and know by name all the generations that came in between."

  "You see what I'm coming to."

  No, it was less than clear what Decimus was coming to. Through the years Aelius had heard similar opinions from civilians, conservative politicians, the occasional urban hothead. Complaints, critiques about the ugly present after the good old days, and the lack of respect younger generations had for their elders. The military cared less in that regard. Integration was a part of its reality, serving together against the common enemy. "I suppose you refer to the composition of the border legions, then," Aelius said. "To the fact that they are often manned by people from the same tribes they're to guard us against."

  "Why, Spartianus, in Asia and Africa it's the rule. You fought the Rebellion in Egypt, you know."

  "Yes, and we won. If you're pining for the time when everyone was Roman and the enemy dwelled on the next hill over, ten miles off, you have to reduce by much the size of the Empire. To—say—Rome itself and its very first colonies."

  "You're telling me? Centuries ago, it was my ancestor Dentatus who bowled over the goddamn Samnites, and was awarded a house with thirty-two acres on the Quirinal Hill for it!"

  "I like it this way, with half the world in our hands, and the other half trying to become us."

  Decimus tightened his lips. His weary mask became fixed and for a moment resembled the ancestral faces lined on the shelf behind him. "That's where you're wrong. They're not trying to become us: They will empty us of our language and age-old customs until we are nothing. Or until we are just like them, which is worse than nothing."

  "May I remind you that fourteen out of seventeen emperors in the last thirty-six years have originated in the Danubian provinces? They're Roman princes."

  "Roman, my ass. Not even Italian, some of them illiterate."

  Aelius felt blood drain from his face, a sign of anger he did not like in himself. "I have not heard what you said."

  "Do you wish me to repeat it? Or do you wish me to put it in writing, since you can read?"

  Notes by Aelius Spartianus, written Wednesday, 13 December: Memorandum: No matter how well you hold your drink, drink half of that.

  I came within an inch of striking Decimus, against all regulations and only because drunkenness protected him from the more serious charge of treason. A crash of broken glass caused me to turn as I stormed toward the door, ready to confront him if he tried to throw something in my direction. In fact, Decimus had fallen backward from his chair; he'd hit his head against the corner of the small table where drinks sat, collapsing it and the lamp stand nearby. He lay on the floor with his eyes half closed, in a swoon or a stroke of some kind, I couldn't tell at the time, losing blood from behind the ear. The noise attracted the cloakroom serf, who, aged as he is, ran in to help. He muttered that it happens to his master once in a while, after drinking parties or long wakes. I lifted Decimus s head to examine the wound, an ugly glass cut that needed stanching. His head lolled like a dead mans, and although his eyes were open, I doubt that he saw me or anything else.

  The house physician took it from there. When I checked on Decimus's condition this morning, they assured me that he's better, yet forgetful of everything that happened after the arrival of his dinner guests.

  At midday, while I was reading the autobiography ofSeverus (like all self-celebrations, much in need of exegesis and critical commentary), I received an unexpected visit by the Minuciis freedman, Protasius. After seeking me in vain at the barracks, where Duco directed him to my new address, he came on his own initiative to ask whether I have any influence on the Medi-olanum judiciary system. I answered truthfully that I have none. Besides, Marcellus's successor has left for the winter holidays, and the fate of the Christians detained at Gallic Meadows is sealed. For all his protestations of having left the superstition behind, Protasius clearly feels for his old fellow believers. Losing the leaders of the local church — the bloom of the kleros, as he calls them — will in his judgment cripple the movement for years to come. I replied that such is in fact the intent of the authorities, even if murder is the official charge.

  Regarding this, he is adamant: The culprit is to be sought elsewhere. (Fulgentius Pennatus, brick-maker in Modicia, remains his chosen villain.) He did admit that two out of three of the Old Baths serfs, already executed, were reputed to be Christians. "Couldn't one of them have killed your master?" I asked. He stayed mum. When I tried to walk him through the moments before and after his discovery of the judge's body in the hot pool, Protasius gave me a description as vague and emotional as the first time. He looked for footprints, uselessly. He took ill. When I mentioned the bloody imprint of a left hand on the wall, he gave me a blank look. Was he so overcome with grief and dread that he did not notice? It's possible.

  Keeping as neutral a tone as I could, I then inquired about the working relationship between Minucius Marcellus and the criminal police. He defined it as "correct on both sides" but in no way amicable.

  It always makes me uncomfortable seeing an old man, whatever his status, standing while I sit. Protasius and his bad back, however, stood before me throughout our conversation, at the close of which we stared at each other for a long, embarrassing moment. I was thinking that the Minuciis house is not far from Casta s refuge, and wondering whether the freedman knew anything about her brief visit; he looked back as if on the point of sharing some information. Did he read my mind? He told me that, recollecting my interest in the fire waker, he has been looking into his old papers and found nothing. (I bet he's cleaned his drawers of religious drivel, these days!) However, he added: 1. That Agnus thundered against Judge Marcellus in a fiery brief to his Mediolanum fellow believers, and 2. that he could obtain a copy of what he calls a "pastoral letter" written by Agnus to the Christians of Aquileia some time ago. Would I be interested? I said I would. While he spoke, pain, worry, pity, any or all of those affects were on his face. On mine, I venture to say, were my usual curiosity and a less than spiritual concern, a mixture of the impression I received from the (beautiful?) deaconess, and the growing, worldly anticipation of Helena's arrival late tonight.

  14 December, Thursday

  "Fresh from the baths—I can smell how clean you are."

  Flavia Julia Helena had not changed in the two years since Aelius had last seen her. She had never been beautiful, thus time used her with a courtesy not granted to great beauties. So, at least, thought Aelius, who had studied the portraits of the empresses of the past. Augustus's wife and Hadrian's wife, and even Severus's Syrian bride, had gone from being delightful girls to frowning matrons, if sculptors did not lie; and it was unlikely that they would portray them as uglier than they were.

  The former imperial concubine Helena, gray-eyed, with her rich hair still dark and lustrous, a swimmer's body, and long-fingered hands, maintained what attractive looks presumably she had always had. Judging by her outfit, she still spent a fortune on clothes (Con-stantius paid the bills to make his repudiation of her more palatable), and even more on jewels. Once Aelius had seen her wear so many drop-shaped pearls that she had seemed to him the goddess Artemis Ephesia, with her many pendulous breast-like ornaments from neck to waist.

  Upon meeting him at court ten years earlier, she had considered him one of the handsome young officers who habitually caught her eye, and made him pine for days before taking him to her rooms. Off and on, they'd been lovers for a summer, although he was not the only one, of course, she was giving herself to. And if Aelius's father (and not only he) said he remembered full well when Helena served drinks in her family wine shop, she was an emperor's former concubine now and—unless gossip was altogether mistaken—stood to be a usurper's (perhaps an emperor's) mother soon. No doubt she was here to further her son's imperial bid.

  In the elegant inn outside Silver Gate, where
she had stopped overnight, they embraced and kissed on the cheeks, then on the mouth, and when Aelius pulled back at last "out of elementary prudence," as he said, Helena lightly gave him her permanent address in the city. She was here to see her old friend Curius Decimus, she said, and a few other acquaintances, over the holidays. "You know," she added, wagging a finger at him, "back then I chose you because you were attractive, not because you were smart. Smart men are as rare at court as anywhere else: Why should I be looking for one of them in Nicomedia? I haven't made up my mind even now whether you're smart or not. And I haven't decided whether I'd want to have a lover who's even marginally as intelligent as I am."

  "Well, I am obliged. The next thing you'll tell me is that in Nicomedia you meant to check my teeth and hoofs before choosing me from the herd, but in your kindness decided to spare me."

  "Oh, I had your teeth checked, and—well, not your hoofs, exactly. Do you recall the military physical you underwent when first called to court? It was not required, but I thought it'd be nice." She laughed. "I have size requirements, and such. Why do you look embarrassed? You men do the same the moment you step into a brothel, or gossip among yourselves about your girlfriends, to hear who's narrow here and big there. I heard my share in my teen years." My teen years was Helena's way of referring to her past as a wine-shop maid, even though Aelius had heard her once or twice say my apprenticeship. "You say you know Curius Decimus: I can tell you about him, for example."

  "No, thank you."

  She stroked his cheek with her knuckles, back and forth. "You do outsize him if not outlast him, but he has a couple of tricks you haven't—unless you learned them in the meantime. Stay away from him, Aelius. He is a smart man, and there's no telling what he might do with his cleverness. And don't trust him, he'll seduce you. No, not in that sense, in a political sense." She stepped back. "Now go. I have to change, and my girls are so clumsy, they're useless."

  Aelius watched her open a trunk, leaning over it with a rather seductive posture of buttocks and hips. "Wait. What about this matter of outlasting?"

  She spoke without turning, elbow-deep in frothy cloth. "Uh, nothing, nothing—you were a baby after all. In a hurry."

  "I'm not in a hurry now."

  "We'll see. I'm staying a few days, so it's possible—" Helena did not complete the sentence. It was her way of speaking, he remembered. She would keep her options open by hinting at a probability without saying exactly what it could lead to. Her voice trailed into a "hm-hm-hm" sound of suspension, leaving a blank space for her interlocutor to fill. Aelius decided it was best not to tell her he was staying at Decimus's.

  She flung around veils and light cottony stuff. "You're one of the few I stayed friends with through the years. I want you to know I did feel sorry for your mother, having you in my clutches for that whole summer.

  "She never even knew."

  "Do you think so? A mother's heart is a mother's heart, Aelius. She feels everything her child needs, and does." Helena turned, suddenly impatient. He couldn't tell whether she was giving in to impulse or voicing a well-pondered decision. "Come by this evening: I'm bored. Nearly all the mineral springs I visited were full of pious temple attendants and priests, with the nasty habit of keeping an eye on you. I haven't had a man in two weeks." She tossed a black, sheer fabric over her head, and when it fell lightly down, draping over her, she stood covered to her waist, visible as behind a dusky haze. "I had to make do with a dull officer from Spain who was at Aqua Nigra to cure an infected ear, and wasn't half-happy with him. Aside from his ear, I mean." Kissing him through the veil, she unbuckled her knees, so that he had to pass his arm around her to hold her up. Her tongue moistened the cloth. "I'm sure I don't know how you manage to do without, during a long campaign."

  Aelius felt her tongue with his. Alcestis, the poem said, climbed from the underworld veiled in black. And the veil was both / impediment and invitation. "I had good teachers, Helena."

  "Good teachers, my foot." She squirmed behind the delicate barrier. "Ten years ago you'd already had your education, and it didn't take me long to bring you to bed."

  "You made me wait a week."

  "Did I?" Her hands moved wisely between them, finding no resistance. "I wonder why. It's sweet of you to remember."

  With two fingers, slowly, Aelius pulled down the veil. Her face emerged white, clean; the small wrinkles at the sides of her mouth seemed to him added perfection. "I wore down the floor in front of your apartments. I'd have brained my roommate, had you preferred him to me."

  "Well, the idea did cross my mind, of seeing the two of you scuffle over me."

  "Scuffle? We were the best swordsmen in the unit, he and I, so we'd end up hacking at each other. And possibly aiming at the best parts we had to offer, aside from our pretty faces." Helena's touch reached for him so daringly, Aelius had to struggle not to groan with pleasure. "I'll come by this afternoon, if you want."

  "Hm, yes. Yes, afternoon is better than evening."

  She was unfastening and lifting leather and cloth, speaking over his lips. Aelius began to see everything through a swimming redness, as if she'd worn a fluttering scarlet veil over her. Blood roared in his ears. "I'm not hungry either, so—that is, I could come by, I don't know, Helena, even before lunch." The throaty silliness of his own words came as from someone else, because he had come hoping this would happen, was happening, and speaking was entirely out of place.

  "Before lunch, what an idea. But it wouldn't be worth your while going home and then hastening back to my place ... what if we say it's before lunch right now?"

  They'd played a similar anxious game the memorable first time in Nicomedia, in a room where there was no bed, only carpets covering the floor from wall to wall, and the cushions Helena had always been fond of. Carpets and cushions abounded here, too, and there was even a bed in this transitory room.

  The first time with her, rain was coming. Nicomedia's sky was black at midmorning; wind pushed doors open and shut, made the drapes billow into the room. From the cushion under her, Helena ran a red strip of silk between her thighs, shiny and narrow, as if emerging from that desirable place; she pulled it slowly up to her belly, navel, between her breasts, to her neck. It seemed like a precious wound cleaving her in two. I knelt beside her and took my clothes off with a blind need to cry, trembling to enter her before the rain came.

  Crouching naked on the bed, Helena held her breasts, letting her nipples show between her fingers. In most other women, let alone women her age, the coquettish pose would have been ridiculous. In Helena, it was seduction and promise of more seduction. She said, "Aelius, you know I'm right."

  "No, I don't."

  "You do." Forenoon, noon, and afternoon had gone, dark crowded at the small window, and once more she began to pull down the sheet from him. He stopped her, but kept his hand on hers. "Constantine is the smartest of them all, Aelius dear. He can t be wasting time waiting for the old men to die or to give up, to have his chance. Maximian has no intention of retiring, whatever he told you. He will plot with his son to retain power, and then there's bound to be war, because Diocletian will never allow his co-ruler to hang on to the throne."

  "I'd rather not think of it. I've seen the Rebellion in Egypt, and it lasted me a lifetime."

  Helena slipped under the sheet to his side. "So, you see that we need a strong man." Kissing and blandishing began again, only on her part at first. "Let Constantine know you care, right now, and you'll both benefit."

  Angry at her as he was becoming, Aelius kissed her back, and was already close to not minding what was being said. "You wouldn't be asking me if you thought Constantine could make it on his own. I doubt that my benefit is what you have in mind, or that it's where your heart is."

  "Well, so you think, darling. But if you are Constantine's friend, there's no telling what you might end up gaining, once he's on top."

  "Your son will have to come up with a better reason than not wanting to bide his time, Helena. There's a system
in place. He has to respect it."

  "But, Aelius, Aelius, once a man's on top ..."

  Which was more than a suggestion for the business at hand.

  15 December, Friday, Feast of Consualia, Sowing-Time Feast

  The glass pane deformed the view. Through its imperfect surface, the glare of morning filtered green. The sun rising from the mist over the fields dilated into a pale, watery opaqueness marking the east (the roads, the border, the frontier). Aelius turned to Helena, seated at her dressing table.

  She pinned her braid up, fastidiously pushing in the wisps of hair that escaped her knotted, shiny crown. The fact that she had here and there a pale thread of a steely color—not quite a gray hair—made her more interesting, more curiously desirable. From her composure, one would not suspect she had not gotten out of him what she wanted, except physically.

  "Whom do you have these days?" she asked, looking back from the mirror. "I know you haven't gotten married, but whom do you keep?"

  Aelius turned to the diminutive window again. Tying his belt, he was ready to go. In two hours the executions of the Christians would begin, and he had promised Duco he'd ride with him to the arena. "No one, in the sense you imply," he answered. "I see women."

  "Women. What does that mean? Whores, ladies, wenches from across the border?"

  "Not the last."

  "Oh, come, Aelius! You're being difficult because you don't want to tell. It's not anyone at court, otherwise I'd know. Two years ago you used to woo Ignatia at Nicomedia."