The Emperor's Games

by The Emperor's Games (retail) (epub)

  “Forst, there is a man in the foreigners’ box. At the center—”

  Forst looked. Emer saw his eyes cast about until he found him, and then his skin, tanned to a light gold under the Italian sun, went pale. Pale and cold… clammy. There was a thin film of sweat on his forehead.

  “Forst? Who is it?”

  Forst shook his head. He stood up, leaving the gnawed pear on the seat. “Stay here.”

  “Forst—”

  He didn’t speak to her again, but just pushed his way out into the wide, sloping corridor that led down to the first tiers and the walkways that circled each level.

  “What’s taken him?” Diulius asked. “Coming on sick?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, he looked gut-sick to me.”

  He had looked sick to Emer, too, and it had been the man in the box who had caused it. Only the tribes of the Suevi, the loose confederacy of which Forst’s people, the Semnones, were a part, wore their hair in that fashion. Emer knew that much, but so little else of what Forst had been before he came to her that she had never considered whether or not she should point out the red-haired man to Forst before she had impulsively done so.

  She had lost Forst in the crowd now. Nervously she watched the little group that milled about the foreign princes. Beyond them, the emperor beamed mercifully and turned a stocky hand palm up. The swordsman rolled free of the net and stood, with all his weight on his good leg.

  * * *

  Forst came out of the outer corridor onto the sloping ramp that ran down through the boxes of the elite, and a large black hand pushed politely on his chest as he stopped at the entrance to the box where the foreign princes sat.

  “Not here, sir,” the guard said politely. Firmly. His voice echoed the pressure of his hand.

  “I—I have—” Forst swallowed. He’d never get in if he acted like a raving lunatic. “I have business with the German lord. With – with Nyall Sigmundson.”

  A name out of the past, the dead time, out of the years he had so carefully erased in Rome. A name out of memory, which carried other memories in the sound, like laughter… boys’ laughter. Three boys, ten years old and restless with the energy of youth and summer, wrestling in the cold shallows of a stream, rolling over and over in the water’s edge… And later, years later, the same three, himself and Nyall and Kari Half-Blood, standing in a ring of torches while the priests chanted and made magics and stared solemnly at the night sky… The three of them, moving over the new snow past those torches to the bright heat of the Council Fire, Forst and Kari on either side, while the priests and the council made Nyall Sigmundson chieftain of the Semnones in his father’s place…

  “I don’t know…” The Nubian’s voice was dubious, and Forst frantically jerked himself out of memory, trying to think of something, anything—

  “The chieftain has asked me to find him a suitable mount,” he said, forcing indifference into his voice. “I am horsemaster for the stables of Julianus. If you don’t let me in, old Julianus will probably be unhappy about it. I expect you’ve heard of him. His son is the emperor’s aide.” He gazed loftily at the Nubian while the man paused to consider.

  “I’ll ask,” the guard said after a moment. He made his way majestically back into the box and bent to speak to the redhaired man.

  A small boy with a palm fan stared curiously at Forst, and a girl in a peach-colored gown that went just beyond the edge of decency lifted her head from a jumble of cushions and gave him an interested eye. The swarthy man beside her, in a costume that looked vaguely Eastern to Forst, leaned down and said something, and she turned her head away petulantly. There were a great many cushions and boxes of sweets and half-drunk wine cups strewn about the box. Rome had a large contingent of foreign residents. It would be easy enough for a client prince to resign himself to captivity, surrounded by fellow countrymen and the pleasures that Rome could offer a man with time on his hands.

  In the midst of this picnic atmosphere, Nyall sat like a wood carving. There was a slave at his elbow to keep his wine cup filled, but the slave could have been put to better use. The wine was untouched. When the Nubian bent down, Nyall’s eyes were straight ahead on the arena, but Forst didn’t think he was seeing it. When the Nubian spoke, Nyall just shook his head, then slowly, as if curiosity had dawned, he turned slightly until he could see Forst standing beside the entrance while someone in the box behind them shouted furiously at Forst to sit down. His eyes were cold, Forst thought, gray, dead, as if everything in them had gone out. But after a moment Nyall nodded to the Nubian. He stood and took a step toward Forst.

  There was something wrong with his leg. With a cold contraction somewhere inside him, Forst thought of the gladiator lying under the net in the garish circus light. It was more than a limp. The leg was twisted outward so that Nyall walked with a dipping, hobbling gait. The lines of old pain spread like a web across his face. He said something to the Nubian, and when the man looked dubious again, snapped in Latin that still had the old, familiar accent of the North, “Do you think I am going to run, maybe, back to Germany?” He put a hand on the twisted thigh and grimaced. “I want to sit in the corridor with this man and talk about a horse.”

  The Nubian thought it over and nodded. It was no business of his if the German chief wanted to get cheated personally over a horse instead of sending his slave to do it, like a gentleman.

  Forst stiffened as Nyall limped carefully through the debris in the box. What should he say? What should he say to a man who had been the chieftain, now that the gods had reached down and taken that from him? Worse than the shame of a pleasant prison in Rome, worse than defeat, worse than anything, was that twisted, dragging leg that had taken Nyall Sigmundson’s chieftainship away. Nyall halted beside him. “I thought you had died,” Forst said, choking.

  “Close.” Nyall put a hand on Forst’s arm, carefully, as if he thought the other man might be an elf-gift that would vanish with the touching. “You… we keened you, the Companions and I, after the raid on the Forts-by-the-River, when we lost you.”

  “The Romans found me,” Forst said. “I wasn’t… quite dead yet.”

  “And now?”

  “I wore a slave collar for a while, but I am free now. I… never went back. When I could have gone… the sons of the man who freed me – they are army men – they told me what had happened in the Black Forest lands. And that you had died.”

  “I expect they thought I had, then.”

  “I gave a bull to Wuotan Father for you.” It was the last prayer Forst had made to the gods of his home.

  Nyall smiled crookedly, the lines in his face twisting sharply with the turn of his mouth. “Maybe he will be remembering it, when the time comes.”

  “Typhon take it, get down!” someone behind them shouted. The other foreigners in the marble box were beginning to stare at them. Nyall came through the gate of the box, and they worked their way past the other boxes onto the sloping ramp that led upward to the first corridor. Behind them the gladiators had begun again, and a trio of musicians played a spritely melody in counterpoint to the fight. The sound of a water organ came faintly over the crowd’s noise as they stepped into the shadows of the corridor. In the arched windows, more statues stood, heroes on this level, Ulysses and Hercules and Hector of Troy. There were stone benches between the windows, and they sat on one, where the statue of Ulysses blocked the sun from the open arch. A trio of girls in bright dresses hurried by, giggling and sharing a sack of candied plums among them. Forst and Nyall sat in silence, the music battering at their ears. Of all the things to be said, there was none that didn’t seem a mockery.

  “Who is chieftain now?” Forst said finally. Surely there would be something left to be chieftain over.

  “I don’t know.” With his face in shadow, Nyall sounded more like the man Forst remembered – remembered and had mourned. In the light outside the box, Forst had thought that man might still be dead. There had been something flat in Nyal
l’s eyes, like a corpse unnaturally wakened. “I made the council promise they wouldn’t choose until I had gone,” Nyall went on. “I would only have wanted to meddle.”

  “Why did you go?” Forst’s voice was anguished. Once he had been closer than most brothers to the twisted man beside him, he and the rest of the Companions. Only Kari had been closer.

  “It was… time,” Nyall said. “There was little enough else left I could do, and a new chieftain had to be chosen.” Some Roman’s sword stroke had brought that choice on the tribe. A maimed man could not be chieftain. The chieftain was the land, in the tribe’s eyes, and a maimed chieftain would bring a maimed land. “I told you, I would only have wanted to meddle, and I am still strong enough to make trouble.”

  With Nyall like a ghost at his shoulder, a new chieftain would never have been able to rule. “But to give yourself to the Romans—” Forst knew now that Kari was dead. Kari would never have let him do this.

  “It was to buy time. To mend. We made enough widows in that war. With me here, the Romans would have little cause to go there, into the Free Lands, and maybe finish the job. Now they will have peace, the ones who are left.”

  “How many… left?” Forst wanted to weep. Worse than all the deaths was what had happened to the man beside him.

  “Of the men, few enough. A fourth of our fighting men, maybe, counting the Black Forest men who came to us when the Romans took their lands. But there would be children to grow up if the Romans didn’t come, so I came here, to them, instead.”

  “The children – yours?” Nyall had been single in the old days.

  “I don’t think so. I had a wife, but… no, I don’t think so.” There was a sharp flare of pain in Nyall’s voice, and then it too went cold, dead as the eyes that had looked at Forst out of the box. “I found I was little enough use to her, either. And she was a chieftain’s daughter and kin to the Black Forest lords. Better that she stayed.”

  Would she have thought so? Forst wondered. Emer would never have let him go alone. But Emer was a freedwoman, British by blood, but third-generation slave stock by birth. She would have no loyalty to the land, only to him. Nyall’s woman though – what was she doing now, neither wife nor widow? He looked at Nyall and didn’t ask.

  “What can I do?” he asked, tormented, trying to reach out to a ghost. It was almost more than he could bear to remember Nyall as he had been, and to see him now, a broken thing, a pet in Titus’s zoo. And Forst had thought he was growing very Roman.

  “Nay, I am well enough treated,” Nyall said with a smile that was like a death’s-head twin to his old one. “As you can see.” He waved a hand at the inner bowl of the arena, and the box full of slaves and wine cups and sticky, half-eaten sweets. “They have even given me new clothes.”

  His shirt and breeches were cut in the German style, but the workmanship had a foreign look to it – made in Rome, Forst thought, by someone not a German.

  “Luxury, in fact – an allowance from the state – enough to buy your horse.” Nyall’s voice was suddenly alive again, bitter as acid. “And nothing to do for it but dance for my supper, like any tame bear.” With that, he rose and limped away, back down the sloping corridor, while Forst sat clenching and unclenching his hands behind him. After a while a small boy in a slave’s tunic trotted by.

  “Here, you—” Forst reached out a hand.

  The boy halted and eyed him suspiciously.

  “Where are you going?”

  “My mistress wants her shawl.” The boy began to edge past him.

  “Do you want to earn a bit of silver?”

  The child edged back again, plainly weighing the lure of the silver against the thumping he would get if he were late with the shawl.

  “This is my seat.” Forst handed him a bronze token with his seat section and number on one side and a likeness of the emperor on the other. “It will only take you a minute. There is a lady with red hair in the next seat. Tell her that Forst said that he will be late, and she is not to wait for him. Also that he said to give you a silver bit for the message.”

  “Forst.” The child considered. “Is that you, lord?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she will give me a whole silver bit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you wear your hair like that?”

  “I’m a German,” Forst said in exasperation. “Among my people, it means I have killed a man.”

  “Who did you kill?” The child appeared willing to keep his mistress waiting indefinitely as the stranger grew more interesting.

  Forst half rose. “Do you want a spanking or a piece of silver?”

  “The silver, lord.”

  The boy trotted off, and Forst leaned back against the wall with his feet on the bench. Emer would ask questions, too, but there was a question Forst wanted to ask first, of Correus and Flavius, who had known and fought Nyall in the Rhenus days and who would surely have seen him here in Rome. And who had told Forst that Nyall was dead.

  * * *

  The air was wet and full of old fish, overlaid with the scent of rotting cabbages and other, more mysterious garbage that Rome threw daily into the Tiber. Augustus’s artificial lake along its banks was nearly filled now – they had filled it a week ago, and it had leaked. The pipes from the Alsietina Aqueduct were running full spate, and the brightly painted warships bobbed higher on the water. The shields slung along their sides and the oars, now held aboard ship, had a fresh coat of paint, and the sails of “Augustus’s” galleys were newly dyed scarlet. Across the lake, “Antony’s” galleys bore the horned headdress of his lover, Cleopatra. It was all show. The galleys marked for the naval spectacle were ready to be scrapped, leaking steadily from all seams, their inner fittings rusted into uselessness.

  “I hope the old bitch makes it across the lake.” Caritius cast a professional eye on the “Roman” flagship. “She probably saw Actium.”

  “I expect she’ll make it,” Correus said. “If there’s any water in the lake, of course. Your damned galleys aren’t the only things leaking. I’ve had ’em leave the water channels open full. I wish I knew where it was going.”

  “Into some senator’s cellar, probably,” Caritius said. “You’ll get the bill tomorrow.”

  Correus growled. The aggravations of the day had been numerous. But the leaks in the galleys and the lake did serve to distract him from the men marked out to fight on them. The emperor had promised freedom to any man on the winning side still alive at the end of the fight. But Augustus’s victory at Actium was too dear to the Roman imperial heart. A victory by Cleopatra and Antony’s ships wouldn’t be overly well received, so the fight was carefully weighted to the Roman side, and Antony’s troops were in no good frame of mind.

  Correus had as good as lived with them for the better part of two weeks, teaching them to fight like marines, while Caritius showed them how to handle the ships. They were soldiers, some of them, Roman and foreign, fallen foul of their commanders and sentenced to the arena for their crimes. These were the ones who bothered Correus the most, more than the civilian lot of thieves and cutthroats. Admittedly, most of the civilians deserved any fate that Rome chose to hand out – but this was no way for a professional soldier to die.

  He groaned and gave a last look at the murky waters of the lake. They’d had it dredged before they filled it, but nameless things still floated to the top and washed ashore on the islands in the center. He looked at the sun. It was time. The last spectacle in the new amphitheater would be winding up, the last criminal killed, the last lion hunted down. The tamer entertainments, the tumblers and mimes, would be rolling up their gear. When the emperor gave the signal, 45,000 spectators would come pouring out of the arena, blocking traffic all the way across the river, to see the capstone of the days’ amusements. And if they weren’t ready, there would be 45,000 angry spectators seated around a leaking lake. The new arena could be flooded, and Correus fervently wished the emperor had done so, but the old lake was bigger and e
asier for launching their fleet.

  “I’ll go and get them set,” he said to Caritius. “Stand by in case there’s trouble.” If someone wanted to make trouble, the possibilities were infinite. The sailors from the arena were stationed at the lake now, with three more centuries of their fellows and a cohort of the Praetorian Guards from the City.

  There were 1,250 men to a side, enough for five ships each. The Augustan ships were manned already, prodded along by the Praetorian Guards, and Correus stood by while the Egyptian crews, hair dyed black and skin stained brown, filed on board. (That most of Antony’s crew had been Romans fighting Romans was tactfully forgotten.) Correus would have liked not to watch, but the Guards’ troops were there, so he stood at attention, while across the lake, the first of the imperial party arrived and settled in to the special enclosure reserved for them. He hoped he didn’t look as sick as he felt.

  “No stomach for it, eh, friend?” The voice was biting, but somehow amused.

  “Get back in line, and mind your tongue.” There was the smack of a vine staff on flesh, and Correus picked out the owner of the voice, a thin, fair-haired Macedonian whom he remembered seeing before, his pale eyes startling now behind the red-brown dye and the blacking in his hair. For good measure, the junior officer gave him another smack with the staff.

  “All right, you lot, get on board.” As they came to the foot of the jetty, another officer held out his staff as the Macedonian marched past. “The rest of you wait here for the next ship. Behave yourselves, and you might come out of this. Give me any trouble, and you won’t live long enough to fight for it. Clear?”

  Beyond him, the Macedonian turned around. He seemed about to retort and then shrugged. With death snapping at his heels for certain this time, there didn’t seem to be much point in it.

  AVE CAESAR!

  The sound came from 2,500 throats together, over the slimy green waters of the lake to the emperor in his imperial box by the shore.

  “May you go down to Avernus behind me,” Eumenes the Macedonian muttered from his post at the middle oar bank in the trireme’s hold. It was too much like the rowing benches of the slavers in that hold, even if he wasn’t chained to the deck. He’d tried to think that this was a quicker way than the slavers, and maybe better – they ground a man to death on the slave ships, with weariness and diseases and bad food. But he’d never been able to resign himself to death, not even now. The mallet strokes began to beat out their rhythm and pick up speed. He gripped his oar and gritted his teeth.