by Cass Morris
“You have observed Aven with double eyes, then,” Bartasco said, “as an outsider and an insider, together.”
Slowly, Corvinus nodded. “Yes, I suppose that is the truth of it.”
Bartasco took a ruminating sip of his wine. “I would wish you to tell me, then, as someone who has seen its workings with perhaps a keener awareness than those born to its world, of the bones of Aven. I have seen much of its muscle. I know a little now, I think, of its soul. But what makes it stand?”
Corvinus’s brow creased in thought before he replied, weighing his words; Bartasco had asked in sincerity, and Corvinus would do him the credit of answering with gravity. “Patrons and clients.”
One of Bartasco’s thick eyebrows quirked toward his hairline. “Eh?”
“It is the system upon which Aven’s society is built. Men—whole families, really, sometimes whole cities—bound together by vows of fidelity and mutual advantage.”
Bartasco snorted. “That word. You Aventans do like to think in terms of advantage.” Then he frowned. “Or do you think of yourself as Aventan?”
“Certainly.” That response came easily, without forethought. Losing his first family, his first nation and identity, that was an act of violence nothing would ever change. The tragedy played out in every nation of the world, so far as Corvinus knew, and was no less a calamity for being common. At first, becoming Aventan had been a matter of survival. Now, Corvinus could no longer imagine the person he might have been without that conversion. “I have been Aventan far longer than I have been anything else. Its gods have been good to me.”
Corvinus did not say that his own had not been; probably they had tried their best. He had not been old enough to know them. Another phantom pain, a half-remembered loss.
Clearing his throat, he continued: “And, yes, we do tend to seek benefit. Aven is the child of Tyre, Athaeca, and long-burnt Ilion—trading peoples, all. Everything is a transaction, even how we deal with the gods. The patron is a man of some wealth or stature. To the client, he offers his protection and the advantages of his station—that might be loans of money, or it might be financial advice. He might arrange good marriage opportunities for the client’s children, or set them up in business ventures.”
“And in return, this patron? He gets . . . ?”
“Loyalty.”
“Ah. A jewel beyond price in any society.”
Corvinus sipped the wine, a touch too sweet for his liking. “Quite often that loyalty takes the form of political support. When a man goes to the Forum to make a speech, his clients attend him. Their voice in the crowd encourages others to listen, and their presence communicates that a man is well-regarded and supported by others of varying social station.” He smiled, a touch ruefully. “It can seem very dry and mercantile, I know, but it’s . . .” Corvinus weighed the thought, weighed all he had learned of Aven since coming within its walls. “It’s sacred. It’s like the guest-right. A bond may be formally dissolved by mutual agreement—I became client to the Semproniae when I was freed, but I could have chosen another patron, if I wished. To betray that bond while it stood, however?” He shook his head at the unthinkable proposition. “That would be like turning against your own kin.”
Bartasco was quiet a moment, and Corvinus was content to let him be. Outside, he heard the discordant song of the legion at work: hammering and thumping and cursing.
“I have heard tell,” Bartasco said at last, “that you Aventans refer to Numidia and Cyrenaica as ‘client kingdoms.’”
“And Bithynia and Phrygia,” Corvinus affirmed.
“And that arrangement—Does the word ‘client’ mean the same for a kingdom as for a man?”
Corvinus began to understand the nature of Bartasco’s inquiry. “You wonder what Aven intends for Iberia, if we are to become further entrenched here.”
“We would not be bondsmen, as your people—” Bartasco rumbled a bit, belatedly awkward. “Forgive me, friend, but it is—”
“It is the truth. The tribes of Albina lost a war, and our bodies were the spoils.” Corvinus rarely smiled, but his lips quirked up at one end, just a touch. “Had it been otherwise, perhaps Praetor Sempronius might have been in thrall to me, and not the other way around.”
Bartasco snorted his recognition of the vagaries of fate, then said, “The Arevaci fight alongside Aven, not against her, and many of us have lived alongside Aventans in peace.” He scrubbed at his beard with the back of one hand. “I do not say the Lusetani have done right, in attacking Aven. But their aggression did not come out of nowhere. We see more Aventans in Iberia every year. Even forts like this may grow into towns and cities. If we are to continue living together and in peace, we must determine what that will mean.”
Many Aventans might take Bartasco for a simple man—a pleasant and companionable barbarian, but a barbarian nonetheless. But Corvinus could tell, even on short acquaintance, that that would be a shallow assessment. ‘This is a man trying to determine the course of a nation, though he controls only a small portion of it.’ Numidia, Bithynia, and the rest all had single monarchs making their decisions. It made signing a treaty a simple matter. Albina had had no such cohesion, to its sorrow—and nor did Iberia.
Bartasco knocked back the rest of his wine and stood up. Corvinus did the same, though he had to take a larger swig to empty his cup. “I thank you, friend Corvinus, for your perspective. I have much and more to consider.”
“Lord Bartasco,” Corvinus ventured, attempting to inject more warmth into his tone than he knew it typically carried, “I am Sempronius’s client, and his friend besides, but he would want me to give you honest counsel, not sway you unjustly. I hope you will come to me with future considerations.”
For the first time in the conversation, Bartasco’s face broke into its easy, broad smile, and he clapped Corvinus on the shoulder. “I will do so.”
When they returned to the Aventan command tent, the Tartessi were just departing. Sempronius looked satisfied. “An accord,” he announced, when Corvinus and Bartasco reached him. “Not quite an alliance, but I will take whatever steps I can toward the restoration of amity. We’ll be paying a sum in recompense for what they suffered at the hands of Rabirus’s legions—”
‘Rabirus and the Optimates won’t like that at all,’ Corvinus thought.
“—and in return for that and some favorable trade concessions in Toletum and the port towns, they’re going to hold the pass between the two rivers. The Vettoni keep rabbiting off that direction, it seems, so perhaps we can choke them on one side or the other.”
Before Sempronius could explain any further terms, swift footsteps approached them up the central road. “Sir!”
They turned to find Felix with a bigger grin on his face than anything besides a pretty girl usually got out of him. Beside him was most certainly not a pretty girl, but a solidly built man of middle years, with black-and-gray hair and a few days’ worth of scruff on his chin, wearing the armor and crested helm of a tribune. Yet Corvinus did not recognize him, and by now he knew all the tribunes of the Tenth, Eighth, and Fourteenth well.
A wicked gleam was in Felix’s dark eyes as he saluted to Sempronius, then gestured to the man. “Sir, you most definitely want to hear what our friend here has to say.”
* * *
City of Aven
“You should have picked a swifter boat.”
Rabirus had sent a message ahead from Ostia, telling Arrius Buteo to anticipate his arrival back in the city, but he had not expected to find his ally waiting for him on the Aventine dock, with a face full of scowls. Buteo was alone but for a pair of protective-looking slaves; no clients or other senators attended him. He held a rolled-up scroll which he slapped against Rabirus’s chest the moment Rabirus approached him, leaving the slaves behind to unload his trunks and find a cart for them. “What is this?”
“News,” Buteo said. “From I
beria. And why in the name of all the gods did you leave?”
“I wanted to be here for the elections,” Rabirus murmured, unfurling the scroll. “And Baelonia isn’t in revolt the way Cantabria is. My legions will winter just fine in Gades.”
“Will they?” Buteo said, a little too pointedly. Rabirus’s eyes fell to the paper.
It was a letter to the Senate, penned by Sempronius Tarren, out of his winter camps west of Toletum. Amid the usual tedious updates was a note that the stray cohort from Legio IV Sanguineus, besieged in Toletum all those long months, was pleased to have been reunited with their fellows, for the rest of the legion had come north to join them.
“I sent them to Gades with the Second,” Rabirus said, in a dull tone of disbelief. “I turned east to the nearer port, but they were meant to go on to Gades with Cominius Pavo . . .”
“The Second went,” Buteo snapped. “The Fourth, it would seem, did not.”
Rabirus’s fingers clenched around the paper, crushing it, until Buteo smacked his hand and snatched it away from him. “The mutinous bastards.” He thought of the recalcitrant prefect, who had scorned Rabirus’s tactics. The surly engineer, who had nearly let them get drowned by the rising river. The centurions, who looked more to their prefect than their general. “Those sons of bitches, I’ll see them decimated!”
“A hard time you’ll have of that, if they join Sempronius Tarren’s heroic efforts. People won’t stand for it. They can understand decimating a legion that’s shirked its duty, played the coward, betrayed its commander, but—”
“They have betrayed their—”
“How will people understand that, when you’re the one here in Aven?” Buteo gestured wildly at the docks. “You’re the one that left your post!”
“The Second obeyed me!”
“So why didn’t the Fourth?” Buteo’s pale eyes were icy with disdain, the sort of look he usually reserved for the Popularists. Rabirus didn’t care for being on the receiving end of it. “This many men, deciding as one to disobey orders? And the Second did nothing to stop them?”
“We don’t know the Second didn’t—”
“It speaks of a failure in the commander, not in the men!” Buteo barked, loudly enough that the heads of nearby dockworkers and merchants turned toward them. “What in Jupiter’s name happened out there?”
Rabirus’s own slaves paused in their work, goggling at the pair of quarreling senators, until Rabirus made an impatient gesture at them to continue. Rabirus began pacing, dragging both hands through his hair. It had been a gamble, returning to Aven before his year as praetor was up. But nothing in Iberia had gone the way he intended. For months and months, all his efforts had gone awry. Even if his strange visitor’s suggestion to come back home hadn’t come with an underlying threat, Rabirus would have been tempted. Returning to Aven, he had hoped, would change his luck. “I can fix this.”
“No.” Buteo sniffed through that enormous nose of his. “You can’t. You can keep your head down and stay out of our way until after the elections.”
Rabirus rounded on Buteo. “After all I have done—all I have sacrificed for our cause—you would turn on me thus?”
“I would not have a liability standing beside me in the Forum when I am trying to secure election for a full slate of our people!” Buteo hissed. “We have a tremendous opportunity this year to restore some sanity to Aven’s government. Half the Popularists are in Iberia, and the other half are chasing their own tails. And when I tell you what’s been happening here—I tell you, the gods have shown their minds, Rabirus, they are speaking their displeasure in every neighborhood of Aven, and the people will flock to us as they seek safety and—”
“The gods are what?”
“—reassurance and—what?” Buteo scowled at being thrown off his speech. “There have been omens. Strange things occurring in the lesser neighborhoods.”
“What sort of strange things?”
Buteo’s face creased in mingled confusion and annoyance. “Things we can make use of, so what does it matter?” He shrugged the folds of his toga back into proper position on his shoulder. “Accidents, fights, some reports of haunting spirits—all signs of negligence and lethargy, if you ask me, precisely what happens when the low plebs ignore the mos maiorum in favor of hedonism, and so I’ve been saying in the Forum, Rabirus, and I tell you it is working.”
Buteo kept speaking, but Rabirus was hardly listening. His mind went back to the strange visitor in his tent in Iberia. ‘We’ve put some efforts into motion, but we’ve met with pushback far earlier than anticipated.’ Accidents and fights, he knew these could be the weapons of Discordia. He had benefited from them the previous year. ‘Haunting spirits, though . . .’ Similar to the complaints from Toletum. ‘If I can find a way to link these things . . .’
His belongings were all off the boat by now, guarded by a pair of slaves while another went to fetch a cart. Rabirus sat down heavily on one of his trunks, and Buteo came to loom over him. “Rabirus? Rabirus, I must have you understand—”
“I’ll stay out of the way the next two months, if you think it best,” Rabirus said. “We can come up with a viable excuse for the Fourth. As for why I’m here—why, because Sempronius Tarren’s reports continue to be hyperbolic nonsense. I am more needed here, at home, among the good people of Aven, than I am in Baelonia. And I have brought tax revenues home, let the people mark that.”
“Sempronius Tarren will want his command extended,” Buteo pointed out. “If you can convince people he truly has been exaggerating, you might be of some use.”
“How gracious of you.” Rabirus rubbed irritably at his chin. His boy had nicked it shaving, and the cut itched. ‘I must find Durmius Argus. And I must send back to Iberia . . .’ How Sempronius Tarren had won the Fourth away from him, he was not certain—but the man would pay for the transgression. ‘That man. That damned demagogue, he’ll bring everything to ruin.’ Maybe these Discordians were right, and a period of chaos was necessary to clear the way for proper order, but Sempronius Tarren would keep the nation churning in pandemonium forever. ‘He’ll take Aven so far from itself that we forget what we are, who we are. Our proud nation will never have the chance to correct to our noble origins. He’d see us polluted with foreign hedonism and vice, he encourages the plebs to upend tradition and harmonious structure for the sake of their own selfish desires, and he would sit at the center of it all, scooping up as much power and wealth to himself as he can manage.’
Sudden fury propelled Rabirus to his feet, and Buteo hastily stepped away.
‘Damn the man. Damn him! Ocella tried to cast him down, yet he survived. I tried to rid the city of him, and yet he persists. What would the gods have me do to protect Aven from that wretched instigator?’ Rabirus kicked the nearest trunk, hard—and heard something unexpected. Inside the trunk, something had shifted and clattered. Nothing should clatter in a wooden box filled with tunics and cloaks. Rabirus snapped his fingers to the nearest slave. “Open that.”
Unquestioningly, the slave obeyed. He pulled the pin that held the trunk closed, and when he lifted the lid, the interior gave way.
Rabirus knelt to examine it more closely, and Buteo came to stand over his shoulder. A false panel had been placed inside the lid, so cunningly and tightly that Rabirus had never noticed it, all these long months traveling. That panel now lay atop the neatly folded tunics, and with it, what it had concealed: a sheet of hammered bronze, carved with deep lines. Rabirus could not understand the words; such things were always written in a kind of code, known only to practitioners of the art. But he knew what it was.
“A curse tablet,” Buteo hissed behind him. “Rabirus—”
“Throw that in the river,” Rabirus said, standing. No sooner had the slave moved to do so than he countermanded, “No! Wait.” The slave paused, hand still outstretched. “Wrap it in something. Don’t touch it, and in Jupite
r’s name keep it away from me. But I would know whose work that is.”
Whoever’s hand had cast the curse, however, Rabirus had no doubt who was behind it. ‘It may have been in my trunk all the time I was in Iberia. Since I left Aven, perhaps!’ All his ill luck was now explained: every delay, every misstep, every gods-damned insect bite pocking his skin. It was almost as heartening as enraging, to know his misfortune had not been his fault. ‘Curse-hounded through Iberia, no wonder I could never get ahead there.’
Now he would be free of it—and Sempronius Tarren would suffer in recompense.
XLII
Latona sat at the desk she had, much to her husband’s irritation, moved from the back corner of the garden and into the domus’s main sitting-room. Since he would not cede her space for an office, she took it and dared him to contravene her. Herennius grumbled to himself and flung caustic words at her, deriding yet another sign of her imprudence and her inappropriately masculine aspirations—but he did not have the desk moved.
Elbows on the table, fingers clenched in her hair, Latona stared at a list of every suspected or confirmed Discordian curse in the city thus far. ‘There must be a pattern. There must, there must.’ There were obvious clusters: the Popularist strongholds of the Esquiline and Aventine had been hit most frequently, and Latona half-wished she could take that as confirmation of her suspicions, that the Discordians were in league with the Optimates. But the very worst curse so far had been in the Velabrium, where the denizens were of mixed factions, or no faction in particular, and even the Optimate-friendly plebeian neighborhoods, where lived families who had been poor in Aven as long as the patricians had been rich there, had suffered. Merula’s instincts, too, had been correct: the dormitories of the public slaves reported hauntings and accidents.
‘They do avoid patricians, though, the thrice-damned cowards.’ Whoever the Discordians were, they were not so devoted to total chaos as to risk attacking those with greater power to defend themselves. ‘Yet, at least. If they continue to grow stronger . . .’
