The Fire Waker

by Ben Pastor

  "That, too."

  The wind outside circled the building like a wolf, seeking a cranny to force its way inside. The sound was low-pitched and insistent, a sound of night watches and standing alone in one's boots and cape. Aelius thought that there had been other times when, sitting with someone else, discoursing, he had suddenly felt detached from the moment and the spot. Ifs because I am used to not belonging, not becoming attached, he told himself. Because, contrary to the man who sits across from me in his bitterness, I have no glorious string of ancestors tying me here and there, entangling me to Rome like a fly in a spiderweb. And he pitied Decimus, as soldiers occasionally are shot through by a painful sense of man's misery. It seemed to him that in his severity and pride, his colleague was struggling in a cocoon of spider spittle, unable to set himself free. Yet such a man could find not one but ten different reasons to justify murder, Aelius was certain of it. Making him stumble into a confession was another matter, and a risky one.

  14 January, Sunday

  They crossed from Italia Annonaria into Noricum in mid-January. Aquileia, Concordia, Tergeste, Emona had each required digging out before continuing the journey. In Aquileia, where Christian presence was said to be strong and pervasive, Aelius picked up the fire waker's trail thanks to an overnight stay in a barracks not far from the city jail. Greek-speaking Christians awaited trial there, after contravening the law by associating and making use of their forbidden holy books. Ag-nus's writing, hidden by Protasius in the basket of apples, had been sent from Aquileia, so Aelius was fairly sure he would hear more about the healer. He did, although not from the Christians.

  The officer in charge of the jail was more talkative than his charges. Agnus had led a congregation in town years earlier, without controversy until the daughter of an official had converted to his superstition. "She had a line of wooers from here to there," the jailer explained, "and to her father she was the apple of his eye. She turns Christian one fine day, starts fasting and mortifying her flesh, will listen to no reason, and within a year or little more she wears down like wax on a taper and dies. You can believe her father went after the Christians, even though in those days they were given a chance to grow like weeds. Agnus, of course, had already moved on to preach elsewhere. There's been an open arrest warrant for him for years. Two weeks ago, informants told us he was rumored to be in Aquileia, passing through. Well, we thought, we'll be damned if we let other girls of ours go pining after his magic tricks. We move, make arrests. Too late. Goes by 'fire waker' these days, eh? That's good to know."

  "I don't understand why the official's daughter let herself die."

  "Why, Commander? Because to Christians women are the spawn of the evil spirits and must punish their sinful bodies. Have you heard of anything more ridiculous? Women have no brains—their bodies is all they have!"

  Emona was the last army town administratively attached to Italy. Its location on the Amber Route gave it already the cultural flavor of the Pannonian region; dialect, hefty walls, and square donjons said frontier, whatever else shops and urban amenities led one to believe. Aelius jotted down his impressions of the place.

  My Guardsmen were allowed to take the evening off for their religious practices at the local Mithras shrine, because this cult, related to that of the Unconquerable Sun, thrives from here to the Danube. The shrine is in the basement of a building next to the place where Decimus and his friends — ''the Romans," Duco calls them — were having dinner together. Close to midnight, the head Guardsman came to see me as I sat up reading; according to my orders that I be briefed about anything out of the ordinary, he reported overhearing a loud argument among my urban colleagues. Not news, exactly. If they drank as Vve seen them do in Medi-olanum, it's a wonder they didn't smash the place up.

  Across the border, past the Savus River and a road station by the telling name of the Tax Collectors, the next city of some importance was Celeia, "Gate to Noricum." Accordingly, the army units made an official stopover to offer sacrifices for a good beginning and end of the campaign. They arrived at sundown, with an eastern wind that cut like a blade and forced men and beasts to seek shelter. The officers requisitioned an inn outside the western gate, too tired to eat or do anything else other than sleep.

  15 January, Monday

  Duco was shaking him. Aelius turned in bed, heavy with slumber but

  already alarmed.

  "What, have I overslept?" he muttered.

  "No, it's wake-up time, but there's trouble." The Briton was not yet dressed. In the faint light of his lamp, his red hair stood up like quills on a porcupine. "One of the Romans is dead."

  "Dead? How, who?"

  "It's the one they called Frugi. He slept two bunks from me. He just won't wake up. I didn't hear a thing, Aelius."

  Aelius was putting his trousers on. "Well, we're all dog-tired." He'd been dreaming an odd combination of faces and events, forgotten as soon as he'd opened his eyes except for the fact that Anubina and Casta figured in it somehow. "Who else is up?"

  "Otho and one of the twins."

  "Decimus?"

  "Still asleep."

  "Go wake him up—no. I'll go." The floor planks felt cold under his bare feet as Aelius hastened to the other room. Like the one where he'd slept, it was square, large enough to contain four or five bunks. Decimus awoke only after much calling and jogging. He listened to the news with his feet out of bed, half-seated. His eyes were glassy. "Bullshit," he replied, and gave a disbelieving, mumbling laugh.

  Within moments the men were up, in different states of undress. Ulpius Domninus felt his dead colleague's congested neck and face.

  "He's cold. Must have died shortly after we retired. He doesn't seem to have struggled, so it must have been a sudden thing, a stroke of some kind. Who spoke to him last?"

  Otho raised his hand, without opening his mouth.

  A few hours earlier, each of them had retired to the first bunk he happened to stumble on. Duco, Decimus, Frugi, and Sinister had taken the room closest to the stairs; Aelius, Vivius Lucianus, Dexter, Otho, and Ulpius Domninus the next room, connected to the first by an open doorway. Aelius looked at Frugi's fat body, stretched out on the anonymous mattress. Of all of Decimus's cohorts, he'd been the least colorful, an obstinate man of few words, even during the party when everyone had bragged about his career. He was the one who'd said Decimus's daughter must be fabulously rich.

  "Who's keeping watch downstairs?" Ulpius Domninus looked at Aelius while he asked the question. "Your Guardsmen?"

  "Yes. I vouch for them personally. Why?"

  "Just asking."

  Summoned without being given a reason, the Guardsmen confirmed that no one had entered the inn after the officers. The intact snow cover around the building proved the fact. Four men had alternated in keeping watch; the second shift had begun only an hour earlier.

  "This is a bad thing twice over." Duco interpreted everyone's thought. "A colleague dead, and a very evil omen for the campaign."

  "Yes, without counting that the gendarmes may delay us all." Decimus had been yawning in his cupped hands, so widely that his jaw seemed to come unhinged. He said the words between yawns. "Spar-tianus, you said you vouch for your men in person."

  "I do. What of it?"

  "Don't misunderstand me. I am thinking what half of us at least are thinking: Frugi is dead, and getting the city authorities involved won't bring him back to life. Hell, we don't have the fabulous fire waker here, do we?"

  "We should at least get a medic here, to make sure it was a natural death."

  Had Aelius dropped a large stone in a puddle, his colleagues wouldn't have drawn back more automatically.

  "What?" "What are you saying?" "Are you out of your mind?"

  Decimus quelled the voices with a slow semicircle of the right hand in the air. "You offend all of us here, Spartianus, including yourself. Poor Frugi ate and drank to an excess; those of us who knew his family can tell you his father died of a stroke in the Senate, his uncle se
ated on the latrine. I say we give him a chance to show us one last courtesy by not delaying our march. Who is familiar with the city?"

  The twins, Otho, even Duco seemed relieved by Decimus's proposal that Frugi be dressed and carried outside while it was still dark. Otho had served in Celeia two years earlier and suggested a small settlement outside the western walls, a mile back.

  "It's all brothels. The whores are Egyptian and Syrian—I promise you they can fuck a man to death."

  "Don't speak nonsense."

  "Why, Aelius—can you vouch for Egyptian whores, too?"

  Ulpius Domninus intervened. "Spartianus is right, I don't like it either."

  Decimus took his boots from his bedside and put them on. "Well, there's two of you, and four of us. Five if you count Frugi, who'd never want to delay our progress toward war. Spartianus, since you want no part in it, send out your Guardsmen before they see us bringing our friend downstairs."

  It went without saying that the sacrifices offered in the morning at the army post shrine were somber and had an undeclared reparative nature. Frugi's body, found by gendarmes at daybreak behind the brothel known as Red Priapus, was considered a casualty the prostitutes could not account for, but an accident all the same.

  Notes by Aelius Spartianus, written on 26 January

  Our march continued along the military route Celeia-Poetovio-Sala-Savaria. We camp outside Savaria tonight, and tomorrow our units will separate after a brief ceremony downtown. The Palace Guards and other soldiers from the Mediolanum garrison will head southeast to Herculia and then cross the border at In-tercisa. I meet my troopers at Mursella by way ofBasiana, and as far as I know, will follow the Marus River upstream from Arrabona into Barbaricum.

  Ever since Frugis death, I have been observing my Roman colleagues. Is it my impression, or is there a level of anxiety within that group? The haste with which a friend's demise was handled troubles them, I think. Ulpius Domninus seeks my eyes now and then, he who was the most disdainful ofDecimus's cohorts. He wants to talk, but does not dare. Decimus keeps a close watch on his companions; they eat and quarter together without exceptions. Duco is left out by them, and even with me he opens up less than he used to. Do we secretly suspect one another for what happened to Frugi, not being so sure that it was a natural death? But what could possibly be the reason for any of us to kill such a colorless colleague?

  The weather has been strange at best. Italy has a reputation for mild winters, yet it dumped snow on us from Mediolanum to Tergeste. Noricum and Pannonia are synonymous with the bad season; still, we've encountered only one snowfall since leaving Celeia. I cant conceal that it all feels like home, or as close to home as anyplace can feel to a soldier. My father served in all the principal posts of the region we are crossing; my mother, while still married to her husband's older brother, lived everywhere on this frontier. Their retirement home is less than forty miles west of here, on the foothills of the heights that stretch toward Scarbantia.

  At Poetovio, seat of the procurator Augusti and accordingly busy in all things bureaucratic, we crossed the bridge into Pan-nonian land. There we stopped to offer sacrifices at the hillside temple of Jupiter, overlooking the well-laid streets fanning down to the Dravus River (with a brief personal halt at the shrine of Isis and Serapis, to leave an offer for Anubina and Thaesis).

  Sala, on Lake Pelso, has become sprawling with vacation homes. Contrary to what Mother wrote, these arent fortified at all; even the least aggressive of attackers would have no trouble plundering them. Who would have believed that I would catch Agnus's scent again in a resort town?

  The local gendarmes were on the lookout for him, "a dangerous Christian charlatan with a public woman in tow." So they said when we filed by at the checkpoint. I observed that I knew the fire waker's companion to be a victim of superstition, but not immoral per se. Am I to assume the two of them have reunited? If so, it can be very dangerous for Casta.

  Dinnertime. After ignoring me for days, Curius Decimus asks the pleasure of my company; the pleasure is all his, but I agreed to join him. I transcribe below, for its drollery, the dialogue preceding the invitation.

  Decimus: "Do you have children?''

  Myself: "I think I have one. "

  "You think?"

  "Her mother wont say for sure. "

  "It's rough when you have no heirs. "

  Especially when one disinherits his only daughter on moral grounds, I told myself, recalling the docket I saw at the Medi-olanum archives in his and Portia s names. Still, I answered. "Well, I'm in no great hurry, but I plan to have them. If my sisters are an indicator of the family s ability to perpetuate itself, I will have no problem in that regard. "

  Only local wine, cut by the appropriate amount of snow water, was served with different kinds of boiled fish; the dishes' elegance was ensured by abundant "sauce of the allies," a flavorful blend of spices and mackerel blood.

  Decimus was in a quizzical mood. The room he'd taken for the night, not far from the campground, had the plain looks of a rental, yet the table had been set with his fine tumblers of spun glass from the Rhine, silver underplates, and embroidered cloth. "From Antinoopolis," he said, as if Aelius had not recognized the minute stitches decorating the cloth's border and napkins. "Didn't you tell us you served there during the Rebellion?" As was his habit, Decimus tore small amounts of crumbs from the bread bun before him and idly played with them. "On the subject of rebellion, I suspect that our common friend Helena has spoken to you about her son's dreams of greatness. Something in her attitude, during an intimate moment, made me think you might be inclined toward supporting her motherly ambition.

  "Helena loses her head when she's under a man, you should know that."

  "A little crude, but I assume it means no."

  "I never mix politics and lovemaking."

  "Yes, yes, and you never stumble, and you're never caught off guard." Decimus rolled his eyes. "1 told Helena the same, that I wouldn't support Constantine if he were the only pretender to the throne."

  "He's not even a pretender, Decimus."

  The Roman watched him with his head bent, nearly resting on his left shoulder; he was making a small ball out of crumbs, smoothing it between his palms. "You should understand once and for all, Spar-tianus, that I do not gather information for His Serenity, as so many of my stupid Mediolanum colleagues seem to think. I would do nothing for His Serenity beyond my duty as a Palace Guard officer. I don't even like His Serenity." Quickly, in a voluble fashion, he pressed words hard upon that sentence, not giving Aelius time to reply. "The fact remains that, whatever Helena's dreams are, a vacuum of power will form as soon as the sun goes down on May 1. Maximian will only pretend to pass the power to his dauphin Flavius. Constantius is sick and has a few months to live at most. I tell you, it's going to be played eventually between Maxentius and Constantine, and it will be bloody. You know this as well as I, whether or not you play hidebound for reasons of your own. No! This is not treason, Spartianus! Do not infuriate me with such sanctimony."

  The ball of crumbs, shot by the pinch of Decimus's fingers, made an arc and fell into Aelius's tumbler. Aelius watched it sink in the wine; before it had time to dissolve at the bottom, he grabbed the glass and violently tossed the contents on the floor.

  Decimus grinned. "Oh, at last. At last a reaction worthy of the name. What I am telling you, dear colleague, is that soon enough we'll all have to make a choice, because there are mighty changes coming. Or do you want to sit like a twig in the middle of the political hearth, waiting for the conflagration to consume you?"

  "And I suppose you have pondered the question extensively, Decimus."

  "For years."

  "Coming to what eminently traditional conclusion?"

  "Phew, tradition." Decimus sipped from his tumbler, smacking his lips. "You have no idea what the word means. Dicunt Homerum caecum fuisse. Not only does tradition say that Homer was blind, it perpetuates other bits of information we can't check against the facts
, or patent untruths. If we had to believe tradition as you intend it, you should have found one-eyed men and men with their faces in their bellies in Upper Egypt, toward the sources of the Nile. And I wager you found no such thing. My sense of tradition is another thing altogether. You, like all outsiders, have no traditions, and can only waver from gullibility to distrust."

  "Whom, in particular, am I guilty of distrusting?"

  "Me. You met Annia Cincia last month and did not tell me."

  Aelius was warned by a tingle on his face that he was growing pale. "You tried to ruin Annia Cincia with your lawsuits, as you ruined your own daughter."

  "Ha! What do you understand, you pup."

  They ate the rest of the dinner in near silence. Aelius felt bruised, irritated; the reasons why he did not leave the table confused him. Traps he'd been trying to avoid snapped around him, and in order not to stumble he did not move at all.

  At one point Decimus stood, squaring his ring-laden hands on the finely embroidered cloth. "A coward, you're not. I challenge you to follow me without knowing where we are going."

  Outside the night was as dark a wolf's gullet; a mile off, the camp's few lights trembled sunken in blackness. A bitter wind blew from the north, where the stars seemed to be resisting being torn from their fixed places.

  The road Decimus took on horseback, followed by his colleague, glared like a spill of milk for the moment a serf stood with a lantern at the door, then it, too, went black. Gravel clacked under the hoofs; distant trees gave out sad sounds of crashing water. Aelius rode without thinking, because he'd been challenged and because curiosity drove him on. Logical thoughts were snatched from him as soon as they were formed, as though the wind were cleansing him of prejudices and easy truths. Childhood terrors, long forgotten, inhabited the darkness and those angry sounds of northern forests. He recalled, out of his credulous past, the tale of the faithless bride who follows her night visitor into the pit where dead animals are thrown, and where he turns into the skeleton of her vengeful dead lover.