by J. B. Lucas
A charming smile, natural and full of welcome. It surprised him before he realised that he must be her first visitor in this place of exile.
“My dear Loreticus,” she said. “Please tell me you’ve brought me a few books or something else to read. Soldiers have such little imagination for conversation.”
He found himself returning the smile of the most notorious woman in the empire. She was the lover who had caused an emperor to disappear. She was a legend, chattered about by the people in the capital, and used as proof of the empire’s moral decline by the religious zealots over the mountains.
“I must admit I didn’t think of books,” he said. “One never does when one’s surrounded by something in abundance. I’m sure I can leave you my travelling collection and suffer on the way home as a penance for my oversight.”
She laughed. He let his smile spread, his eyes closing softly. Her laugh had always caught his ear at parties, but he had heard it differently. Now she was laughing from simple appreciation.
“Does that mean I’ll still be alive by the time you leave?” A moment’s silence. “Of course! You come to view the goods before you send your man to do the deed! I always forget just how professional you are, Loreticus.” The word “professional” was used in a way only people of the court might use it–adept, learned, unnatural. It was a slight not a nudge. His attention instinctively flicked away, avoiding the long-feared confrontation.
Behind her, terracotta pipes ran up the walls to funnel the sparse rainwater into the underground reservoir. They were complemented by cypresses which echoed their height. A bust of a handsome ancestor of the fort’s owners had been forgotten in a niche, overrun by blue flowers.
“Maybe my conversation needs practice,” she said. “Let’s hope you at least bring gossip. I cannot survive without that.” A signal with her chin to her steward, who ducked into the shadows of one of the doorways off the courtyard. They sat on cool stone benches, his feet clumsy on the white gravel ground.
Beside Loreticus sat the woman who had hurt someone he himself loved. Her intelligent eyes watched him, carving out the jowls and the hairline, the hoods over his eyes. She was a polished character, but this environment, this boredom and this outcome had stripped down to the truth of her.
“How are you?” she asked. “You know you and I haven’t spoken alone and in candour since you lost your family.” It was said without malice or motive, at most as a connection.Look at me, she was saying, doomed to die but not knowing when. Committed for a crime of my own choice and condemned by my own lack of foresight. Look at you, Loreticus, the unhappy survivor.
“Well, my dear,” he responded in a dry wheeze. “This is a hard comparison. There is before, of course, and after. I’m only in the early stages of after. So, I have no comparison really. I’d say I was improving, but improving from a horrible place.” The steward came, placed a tray of water, wine and cakes in front of them on an elegant table, then disappeared again. “I miss her of course, but I didn’t ever get to really see my son, so . . . What can I say? I’m a lonely person who defends himself with arrogance and logic.”
She leant forward to pour them each cups – officially his role, but he was preoccupied and he appreciated her diplomacy.
“Don’t limit yourself,” she said wryly. “You also defend yourself with a charming humour.”
He saw her arms had tanned an even bronze and he felt a pang of attraction. It promptly humbled him.
“I can sympathise with your loneliness,” she muttered, staring across the peristyle. “I think any true loneliness must contain a generous dash of remorse. So, I cover my regrets by focussing on the small things, the trivial problems. You know, the greatest irritation of this place is the lack of running water,” she said in a voice from her actress’s collection. “I’ve stared at this damned fountain for days on end trying to imagine what it looks when it has water. I am unsatisfied I will ever know.”
“Why don’t I see what can be done?”
“That would be amazing, Loreticus. That would make my days bearable.” She smiled to herself. “You were always the charmer. Always the one who grants wishes to the ladies through a little connivance or a little influence. Of course, you know how you were seen.”
“Do I?”
“Loreticus, don’t you pretend that it wasn’t cultivated.” He laughed.
The material of her dress caught the hairs on his arm and he experienced a movement of heat from her skin as she lifted her wine. He hadn’t realised she was so close. There was no seduction here, despite her tone. His presence was a reminder of what she once was.
“Do you know where he is?” he asked. It was time to play the hand he had come here for. Loreticus wanted a clear message to leak back to the generals. Marcan was alive and he wanted them to see his shadow everywhere they looked.
“No. I think I’d tell you, but I honestly don’t.” “I wonder whether you would.”
“I would. Not out of spite or regret but somehow as an action it might allow me to help rebuild the old status quo.” “No use regretting your actions because your coup didn’t go according to plan,” chided Loreticus, and he cringed at his supercilious tone. She wasn’t a young servant caught pinching his crockery. “We all miss what was quite dramatically.”
He watched her, slightly askance. Dess had always made it easy to be in her company if she wanted you to relax. At other times, when she lost her temper, a vulgar streak in her erupted. Even in her bright moments, the memory of her scowl coloured her placid features.
“I don’t regret ‘losing’, you patronising ninny,” she said gently. “I regret not appreciating where I was before this all happened.”
“And where were you?”
“In love with a wonderful man, whom I have hurt and ruined. At the pinnacle of life.”
“Don’t worry,” said Loreticus. “He’ll be fine.” He sighed, wishing the topic hadn’t turned to this. “He, Antron and Ferran are now encamped in the administrative court of the palace, plotting and conniving. He’s asked almost daily to see you.”
“Iskandar,” she sighed, smiling. Her eyes filled and she turned her head away from him. “It’s rather unfair that I’m here and Antron and Ferran are there, you know?”
Loreticus examined her, trying to read whether she might offer the generals as conspirators to her scandal. “I always thought Iskandar was an honourable man,” he remarked.
“He is, or was. He came from a very, very humble family. He didn’t ever tell me who because I think they are still alive. How strange to be in that situation.” She paused. “Do you know what breaks an honourable man? Not greed or ambition. It’s pride. Even after his campaigns he had no money.”
“Really?” asked Loreticus in a pitched voice. “I thought he was the shining example of the new man in the court.” “Maybe he is. The money he spent was mine. Any loot was paid back to the funders of his campaigns, or in tribute to the emperor. There’s precious little reward in war nowadays. Unless you think invading Surran or one of the great northern territories beyond the barbarians is worth the effort.”
“I don’t understand,” commented Loreticus. “What has this got to do with pride and honour?”
“He remembers every piece of luck that took him through his career. Every battle that could have gone the other way but for a mistake by his enemy. He’s always been one campaign away from poverty. Imagine how Ferran and Marcan would gloat. You can collect money but it’s harder to grow wealth. Antron and Ferran obviously promised him lands and riches beyond my own, something that was his and his sons’, should they appear.” “So, what they bought was his loyalty and your involvement?”
“Too blunt, Loreticus,” she groaned. “I’m not a whore.” He paused for a moment.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes and helped the old emperor and then Marcan make many more poor choices. I’m a fool and a fraud.”
“You’re neither,” she said. “You’re a man in politics.” “Thank you
for the wine and the conversation,” he said, standing. Her sudden expression caught him unawares, a look of hurt and disappointment at such a short visit. His heart broke as he studied her. Golden blonde hair, young skin, inquisitive blue eyes, all aspects now of a portrait of sadness. She looked harmless. “You should come with me to the carriage. If I leave you boring books, then you might hate me even more once I’ve left.”
She rewarded him with an honest smile which revived a thousand memories and thoughts of young romances in his mind. He turned, resenting the world and the situation he was in and the things he had to do. She stood, took his arm and escorted him to his carriage.
Chapter 7
Loreticus’s meticulous consumption of detail was the spymaster’s defining trait and his obsession. When there was a gap in his logic it worried his mind like a pest, stealing away any sleep or comfort. He had become pensive over the last year in his empty home, poring over puzzles and intrigues rather than the ruins inside himself. As his network slowly suffocated under Antron’s reign, Loreticus felt these tributaries of information from around the empire start to dry up.
And so he took on the mundane tasks he had previously delegated. That morning, he had invited Selban to join him for the official inspection of Dess’s townhouse. Loreticus imagined her walking in her grand prison, her fingers touching the murals or her bare feet on the tiles. He blinked away the thoughts. Unhappily he came back to the moment, walking alongside Selban and surrounded by his small entourage who stamped their boots into the cobblestones.
“Selban, I have an ethical question for you to consider,” he said. The boots of his guard on the cobbles made him raise his voice deliver each word, something he wasn’t enthusiastic about doing.
Selban rubbed his hands together. The implied lack of morality would keep his attention sharp.
“There are things that I have done recently which I deeply regret. However, my regret is at the need to have done them, not at the action itself.” He walked a little, looked over his shoulder to see just Pello with his nose in the air looking at the highest windows, and the guards ten paces behind. What he needed to say next was very difficult, and he kept quiet as he fought in his mind for the right words. He wanted to say, “Am I wrong?” and have Selban understand everything that he meant, but he couldn’t expect that.
A bellowed command cut through his thought and made them both lurch with shock and spin around, their trailing soldiers marching past them. With an aggressive stamp of a multitude of boots on stone, a troop of the new palace guards turned a corner and marched swiftly to within touching distance of his own. They outnumbered his protection, their new livery of engraved silver blazing on dark-red velvet. Selban glanced back at them again and spoke silently to himself. The spymaster’s soldiers marched slowly and stoically around their principal, hairs rising on their necks and their cheeks, ears painfully bending to listen for the scrape of a blade.
Crunch crunch crunch. The crash of nailed soles on to the stones drew tension up Loreticus’s spine. He felt a loose run of sweat fall from his hair on to the nape of his neck, soaking in to the toga underneath.
He could feel blood in the air.
Ahead, guards in Alba’s livery were waiting for them, swinging large fortified doors open. Twenty paces, less. Loreticus wanted to run and turn to face the thugs. Ten paces. Would they charge them as the troop wedged into the doorway? It was only wide enough for three or four men, meaning that if they were attacked as they entered, it would be butchery.
A loud call, and then the other soldiers were gone, turning away down a broad avenue, taking their sickly threat of violence with them. Loreticus heard a gloating chuckle from their officer. Bastard, he spat silently. He closed his eyes as they walked, all a little faster now that they could let their nerves act.
Deep breaths, damp sweat on the edge of his tunic. It was a horribly familiar shock, seeing an enemy with murder in their soul on these streets. He might have been a decade younger the last time he suffered like this, and still the fact both sides were native to this city shook his patriotic identity. A hunger was forming in him, and he knew that it would only be sated with a decisive and bloody strike on his enemy.
He pushed Pello in through the polished door which now stood wide open, flanked by white-faced guards. Loreticus took the boy’s arm and guided him forward, resting a little heavily on the younger man.
“Find me that captain’s name,” he muttered to Selban. As the threat lost its potency and his blood slowed again, he fought to resume a structure of thought. This was what had drawn him out on to the streets this morning, and this was now the spymaster’s glamorous mandate: to hunt down clues for an emperor in his mistress’s house.
“Do you think he will be here?” asked Selban. A little pang of childish joy came to Loreticus at the stupidity of the question, but it seemed Selban wasn’t looking for an answer. Then he reconsidered. Selban didn’t know what he did. His companion was not always a pleasure to be in the company of–and it was most usually just the two of them and Pello–but his knowledge and insight regularly astonished the spymaster.
“Let me ask you a different question, my dear Selban,” he said. “Do you think the emperor really was having an affair with Dess?”
“Very possibly. Aren’t you all?”
“No, we are not all. But if there was the suspicion, then why didn’t Iskandar do something about it?”
“Disinterest, I always thought. Once married, people prefer parallel rather than converging lives.”
“Not good enough.”
“Well, dear Loreticus, if you were a commoner on the rise, should you attack the emperor on unproven gossip?” At times, when Selban was trying to make a point, he used a voice which sounded like a man straining at the toilet. “But more importantly, why didn’t Iskandar seem more upset by the scandal?”
“What do you mean?” asking Loreticus. “Are you implying that he knew in advance?”
“Or perhaps he was in on it. He’s moved from being a stiff-necked general to being one of the three men running the empire. He didn’t come from the gilded folk,” continued Selban, and he smiled to emphasise his point. Loreticus blinked at the food plastered between his teeth.
“He moved as far up the social mountain as he might have dreamed,” commented Loreticus.
“I thought that Iskandar hated court life?” enquired Pello.
“I’m sure he does,” remarked Loreticus. “But the generals currently need each other like the legs of a tripod. It isn’t friendship which brought them together now. Antron the eager, Iskandar the meagre, and Ferran the monster. That’s not fair. I do like Ferran. He loves anything that makes him laugh, and I make him laugh.”
He stopped and folded his arms, examining the spacious courtyard they had just encountered. It was dry and well decorated in a bland manner. Pale tiles, pale walls, medium-height plants, nothing exceptional other than its size. He summoned up old phrases from Dess and Iskandar, trying to imagine their voices creating a home within the building. “But would he have given up his entire marriage and all of his dignity on such a gamble?”
“Maybe that’s his way of getting angry,” stated Pello. He disappeared behind a large shrub in search of something which had caught his attention.
Selban looked to Loreticus for a response, and Loreticus knew that it was a valid piece of logic. If Iskandar was being cuckolded, then this revenge was blunt and effective. Very much in character.
Their marital home wasn’t built out of the red-painted brick of the modern structures, but from an older sandstone. It had an angular feel to it–a façade with once symmetrical rows of windows which had lost none of their impressive impact. Half-buried engravings climbed up the walls to a fierce entablature.
Despite its age, there was something out of fashion about the style of the house. It was too crisp, too clean in its approach to guests. The sharply edged front door led down a utilitarian corridor, its air cool and funnelled. Blind windows off
ered relief to the walls as miniature follies on its twenty-step length. Out into the broad, pale-grey stone of the inner courtyard with its trimmed plants and its flagstones beaten by footsteps into an almost single, polished block. The occasional servant glanced at the visitors as they performed their chores around the building, managing the family finances or guarding the vault until Iskandar came to claim his home.
“Tell me, Selban, why are the generals working together?”
The other man smiled. “I wondered why you had asked me here,” he said. “I’m not known for my searching skills.” He poked at a mosaic on the wall with a thick fingernail. “The only reason why Antron would do a deal with Iskandar would be to stuff Ferran, and vice versa. The only reason why Ferran talks to either is to incite them to hit each other so that he could watch. Iskandar I don’t know well enough. I presume that he is the mortar the other two need between their respective brick heads.”
They were now walking the perimeter of the central peristyle, where guests had been entertained in healthier times. Along the wall there were a dozen small urns containing members of the family who had lived in the house.
Pello stepped forward and started listing the names on the urns in his notes.
Selban peered at the names on the tiles and examined the little pots underneath. “I remember some of these,” he said. “Certainly, her parents and grandparents. Not hugely influential people, but humorous enough and they were always invited and inviting people.”
“I’m sure they remember you fondly as well,” remarked Loreticus mordantly. “How many urns are there in your wall?”
“Oh, not as many and not as pretty,” Selban replied. Loreticus was in the mood to continue to irritate Selban but paused in regret of his pettiness. Instead, his eyes moved to a familiar motif. He came to stand next to Selban and stooped slightly to look at the line-up. Each urn was ebony, carved with a small swift or swallow in what looked like pearl.
