The Emperor's Games

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

  The blond woman had come with him. Correus had seen her with Vettius the day before in the market stalls of the Moguntiacum vicus, under the column with the bronze Jupiter, once dedicated to Nero. The name of that unstable prince had been chipped off in ruthless fashion after his death, but the memorial remained, dedicated by the citizens of Moguntiacum as a mark of their tie with Rome. The woman had been looking at a pearl necklace, and Vettius had had an arm around her shoulders like a hound shielding his bone from the reach of another dog. Her gold hair spilled down over his hand and rippled the way a wheat field does, and her movements were slow and languid. The pearls were good ones, from Alexandria, a little opalescent fortune, and she held them up so that their luster shone against her skin. She had been wearing them when Correus had passed her this morning, riding in her own litter among the baggage wagons.

  His optio came up beside him and told him they were on the march, and Correus nodded, feeling the excitement that nothing else quite matched run through him.

  * * *

  They crossed the Rhenus and moved south into the Nicer Valley. They halted at Lopodunum to set up a headquarters there, and Correus decided he could send for Ygerna to come that far forward, at least. Lopodunum was still well within the Roman zone. He didn’t bother to ask his commander’s permission. If the legate could have his doxy in camp, Correus thought irritably, he could have his wife.

  * * *

  “You will stay here and see that he doesn’t put his nose outside this door,” Ygerna said to Tullius. She gave Lucius Paulinus a firm eye. “Correus and his brother are with this Vettius. They will be doing what they can. It won’t help if you try to take a hand.”

  Lucius nodded glumly. He was used to dealing with matters himself, not hiding in a burrow while someone did it for him.

  “I’ll see he don’t twitch,” Tullius said, looking down at Ygerna genially. He was nearly two feet taller than she was and twice as broad. He could have put her in his hand. He liked the little mistress. She was a woman who made up her mind.

  “Good.” Ygerna pulled her heavy brown traveling cloak around her and checked to see that the children had theirs and the fur boots that were still needed in late spring. Eumenes,

  Nurse, and Cottia were going with them. Septima would stay to keep the house up because it seemed likely that they would be back at Moguntiacum with the fall, and Ygerna didn’t rate Tullius high as a housekeeper. They had all been threatened with the copper mines or any other unpleasantness Ygerna could devise if so much as a peep escaped their lips about Lucius’s presence. Even Felix, who generally told everyone everything, seemed to understand the importance of that. Eilenn, who was only two and a half, didn’t say enough yet to be dangerous.

  One of the cavalry patrols that ranged through the Roman zone across the river was making the sweep back toward Lopodunum, and they would ride with that. The cavalry commander gave them the look of a man much tried and told them to fall in with the supply train he was shepherding south to the emperor’s camp.

  “Don’t see what he’s got to complain about,” Eumenes said. “He’s got those lumbering great wagons to slow him down, anyway. We’re a sight faster than they are.”

  They were on horseback, all of them, except for Nurse, whose bulk was wedged in beside the army driver assigned to their wagon. Cottia, determined that if her mistress could ride a horse then so could she, swayed only slightly in her saddle, and Felix was on his pony, with a lead line handy in case Eumenes thought he needed it. Eilenn was in the saddle in front of her mother, and Baucis the cat was in her usual basket in the wagon. Ygerna had tried to leave her behind in Moguntiacum, but the cat jumped into the wagon and sat on a trunk with her ears flattened out, and Ygerna gave up. The cavalry patrol was split before and behind the wagons as they crossed Moguntiacum Bridge into the Agri Decumates.

  They turned south almost immediately to parallel the broad blue sweep of the river to where the Moenus River emptied into it. Here was another bridge, narrower than Moguntiacum Bridge, and built on wooden pilings sunk into the riverbed and braced against the current. The cavalry horses clattered onto it, their iron shoes ringing hollowly against the planks.

  “Mama.” Eilenn turned her head around and tugged at the front of Ygerna’s cloak.

  Ygerna kissed the top of her head through the baby’s traveling hood. “That’s right, sweetheart. Can you say ‘horsie’?”

  She patted the gray mare’s shoulder with the baby’s hand.

  Eilenn’s brown eyes looked up at her from under the edge of her hood. “Bidge,” she said emphatically. “Bidge fall down.”

  “No, darling, it’s a nice bridge.” Ygerna patted her soothingly. “You didn’t mind the last one. We have to cross it if we’re going to see Papa.”

  “Bidge!” Eilenn wailed. “Bidge fall down!”

  “No, darling, see – it’s just fine.”

  “Bidge!” The child’s face was terrified now, and she was screaming and hiccuping.

  “What’s the matter with little miss?” Eumenes said.

  “I don’t know. She’s scared of the bridge. I—” Ygerna leaned down and took another look at the little girl’s face, and something cold crawled into the back of her mind. Eilenn was still screaming with fear. Ygerna kicked her mare into a gallop and pulled her up sharp at the head of the bridge where the cavalry commander sat watching his men go by.

  “Call them back!” Ygerna said, holding the screaming child with one hand and grabbing at the mare’s reins with the other.

  “What?”

  “Call them back! That bridge is going to go!”

  “Looks fine to me,” the cavalry commander said. “You an engineer?”

  “No, but I know!” Ygerna said desperately. “When the wagons hit it—”

  “Bidge!” Eilenn shrieked.

  “Take that kid back to the wagons!” the cavalry commander snapped.

  “Call them back off that bridge!” Ygerna said.

  “Who in Hades are you to tell me my business? You,” he shouted at Eumenes, “get this damned-fool woman back to the wagons!”

  Eumenes appeared to have been stricken deaf.

  Ygerna pushed back her hood and gave the commander a look that made him a little nervous. “I am Flavia Agricolina,” she said evenly. “I am the wife of Correus Julianus, who is primus pilus of the Fourteenth Legion. I am not a fool. Call your men back off the bridge. It will break when the wagons hit it.” She made her voice stay calm.

  The commander looked at her dubiously as the lead wagon rumbled by onto the bridge. She had eyes like wide black pools set into a pale face, and two bright spots of color on her cheeks now. She didn’t look more than fourteen. But her husband was a senior officer. And there was something in those dark eyes that the cavalry commander found himself unsure he wanted to tangle with. He fidgeted as she lifted her head and glared at him. The child had stopped screaming now and sat hiccuping softly in the crook of her mother’s arm. He supposed the woman could have seen something… There was a creak and a sigh as the wagons rolled past, and he shouted suddenly, “Back ’em up!”

  The nearest wagon driver gave him an inquiring look.

  “Back ’em up, damn it!” the commander shouted. “Here, you, get on up there and turn those wagons back!”

  A cavalry trooper clattered onto the bridge past the halted wagon to the head of the column. They could hear him shouting to back up. The lead riders were nearly across. They too turned and came back, and the bridge gave another groan.

  “You should have let the horses go on,” Ygerna said. “They were nearly over.”

  “I didn’t tell ’em to come back,” the commander said irritably. What was he doing, pulling a whole column off the bridge because this fool woman thought she knew something?

  The bridge was too narrow to turn the wagons, and they backed laboriously off it with much swearing and shoving. The mules flattened their ears and bit at each other. The drivers looked as if they were going to ask
questions, and the commander gave them a look that said they’d better not.

  Ygerna’s wagon had halted this side of the bridge, and Eumenes came up now and addressed himself to her. He took no orders from the cavalry commander. “Is there trouble with the bridge?”

  “I—” Out of the corner of her eye Ygerna saw the cavalry commander watching her. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Go and help these men to check the bridge. It will be weakened somewhere. Rot or sabotage; I don’t know.”

  The cavalry commander swung around. “You mean you didn’t actually see—?” He clamped his mouth shut again. He’d look a fine ass now if he put them back on the bridge without checking. “Go and look at it,” he said curtly to the trooper he had sent to pull the wagons off.

  Eumenes gritted his teeth and followed him. He shucked his clothes on the bank with the cavalry troopers. They weren’t making much effort not to shock the ladies, he noticed, and grinned in spite of himself. The mistress didn’t shock, not that easy, but old Nurse would have something to shake her up. It would do her good. The current was still fast and cold with the melting snow from the mountains, and they swore as they paddled their way along the row of pilings on either side of the bridge to peer upward at the underside. Eumenes’s teeth were chattering, and the current was strong enough that a man who stopped swimming had best keep a good grasp on the bridge while he looked. You have swum in worse for the fun of it, he told himself firmly. But not lately, not since the mock battle on the emperor’s lake in Rome. The air was dank and shadowed and smelled of waterweeds under the bridge.

  Halfway across they found it, five of the horizontal supports cut nearly in two with an ax. It could have been done at night from a boat moored to the upstream pilings.

  The cavalry commander swore when they came back, shivering, to tell him, and he left a pair of troopers at the bridgehead to warn anyone else away until it could be repaired. He made two others swim across to the far side to keep watch there. Then he turned the column around with an uneasy look at Ygerna and took them back through Moguntiacum and down the west bank of the Rhenus to the next bridge.

  Ygerna looked long and thoughtfully at the baby, who now sat happily playing with the tassels in the gray mare’s mane.

  * * *

  “She has the Sight.” Ygerna glanced from her husband to the open doorway that separated her room from the children’s at the inn in Lopodunum.

  “So it would seem. It’s a pity we can’t send her out with the army for a watchdog. They got another bridge last week, and that one went down with a whole century on it.”

  “Correus, this is not a joke. It is a terrible gift, the Sight.” It came through her line, Ygerna thought, from the sidhe folk, the Dark People of the hills.

  “Neither is the sabotage a joke,” Correus said. “It’s getting worse, and we’re beginning to feel the losses from it. It’s come to outright raids occasionally.” He looked at his wife’s worried face. “My dear, there is nothing we can do about it if she does have it. You can’t make it go away.”

  “No. But you didn’t see her, Correus. She saw that bridge collapse and the wagons fall and the men all drown. What happens when she is older and sees things like that and knows what they mean and can’t stop them?”

  Correus looked through the doorway to the children’s room. “Poor little Cassandra.”

  “Who is Cassandra?”

  He put his arm around his wife. “Never mind. And you stopped that bridge from falling, so it may not be like that.” He tightened his grip on her. “We’re lucky that she did see it. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent for you. These attacks are getting worse.”

  “We will be safe enough in Lopodunum. Is it the Chatti?”

  “No, the Chatti are busy fighting with Velius Rufus. It’s Ranvig’s men, despite what he says, and the emperor knows it, but he still thinks Ranvig will get good sense when he’s seen our army in the field.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “No. He’s seen our army. He doesn’t have to see it fight to know what we can do. But the emperor still believes he can make the Semnones come over as a client kingdom and put another leaf in his laurel wreath without working for it. Or maybe he’s just amusing himself by letting Ranvig play with these raids. His mind is like that sometimes.” Correus’s voice was suddenly savage. “But it’s costing us men! And it won’t change things in the long run. We’ll take what we’ve set out to, and that will be the end of it, except for the men who needn’t have died!”

  XVII A Matter of Money

  “It’s money that holds that thief together,” Flavius said. There was nothing any of them could do about Domitian’s war except fight it as ordered, and a family council had gathered to attack the more pressing problem of doing something about Marius Vettius. “Aemelius’s money, pirate money, whatever he’s extorted one way or another – it all goes to keep Domitian smiling on him and to buy the army. No money, no Vettius. A pity we can’t separate him from it.”

  “I do not understand this matter of buying an army,” Ygerna said.

  Flavius chuckled. “That’s because you haven’t read enough Roman history, child.”

  “That’s not true,” Correus said. “That is the black side, but it’s not always true.”

  “Mithras forbid I should insult the army in my brother’s presence,” Flavius said piously, “but it is true. The army holds the empire together, and it makes the emperors as often as not, and soldiers who don’t get paid don’t stay loyal very long. Vettius is passing out some fat bonuses and spending a lot more on gladiators and the like to keep the troops amused. ‘This week’s entertainment sponsored by the unlimited generosity of Marius Vettius, friend of the soldier.’ If we could stop that, we might stop him.”

  “I begin to see,” Ygerna said. She looked disgusted. “Is that why the horse race?”

  “What horse race?”

  “There was a notice put up in the market. The sort they announce the arena shows with. I always read them for the practice. This one was for a horse race, with chariots, at the end of the summer. Vettius is paying for it. Or no, I think it said Vettius will hold the bets. I don’t quite understand that.”

  “I do, the thieving son of a bitch,” Correus said. “If Vettius holds the bets, he expects to win. If that race isn’t fixed, I’ll eat my saddle.”

  “Well, it’s certainly his style,” Flavius said. “He gives the troops some fun and cheats them at the same time. Why Domitian can’t see through him is a mystery fourteen augurs couldn’t explain.”

  “I don’t expect the emperor cares if Vettius cheats the soldiers,” Ygerna said practically. “He didn’t care if he cheated your father-in-law.”

  Correus was looking thoughtful. “When is this race?”

  “The notice said at the end of summer, when the army reaches the Moenus. For a reward. There will be gladiators too, in the emperor’s honor. That is horrid, but I would like to see the horse race.”

  “I expect you can,” Correus said. “We’ll dig in at the Moenus for a while and put up a permanent fort.” Ygerna didn’t like being left in Lopodunum, but he couldn’t take her and the children out with the road-building crews. He was still thinking. If all went well, they would halt at the Moenus to build a bridge and meet with Velius Rufus, with most of the Agri Decumates under control. The emperor would be there, and all the hangers-on who trailed in the army’s wake would come with him. A big enough population to serve Vettius’s purpose. And maybe theirs. He looked up at Flavius. “D’you think we could liven up his horse race for him?”

  * * *

  Three hundred miles to the east, in Steinvarshold on the Semnones’ home ground, Lady Morgian’s husband sat looking at a visitor who had ridden in that morning. The remains of a feast were scattered on the table top, and a thrall was sweeping spilled food into her apron. Steinvar leaned back in his chair, one thin hand wrapped around a beer horn, and the other feeding pieces of meat from the table to a red hound bitch by his feet. His scarre
d face was creased into a smile. Steinvar liked the man who was sitting at the table with him. His name was Decebalus, and he was a prince of Dacia, the country that bordered the Roman province of Moesia along the Danuvius.

  Decebalus was younger than Steinvar, with curling brown hair and beard, and a heavy mouth half-hidden under a mustache. He had a heavy straight nose and a square jaw, and brown, thick-lidded eyes. He looked like a man who was used to arranging the world to suit him. Decebalus wore a shirt and breeches much like Steinvar’s, and a felt cap with a rounded point pulled forward and pinned down over the forehead. He stretched and belched appreciatively. “That was good.”

  “Not so good as your father’s house,” Steinvar said. “But you won’t starve among us. That is enough. Go on, go!” He shooed the thrall away.

  The thrall shrugged and left. They had eaten enough for four men, and the table was still littered with it, but Lord Steinvar was not particular about the housekeeping when Lady Morgian wasn’t there.

  “My father is a petty king.” The younger man dismissed his father’s house. “When I am done, my father’s house will be a cattle shed to mine.”

  “The Romans won’t like that,” Steinvar said.

  Decebalus grinned at him across the table. “Isn’t that why I am here?” They spoke a rough mixture of the Germanic tongue of the Semnones and Decebalus’s Dacian, and they understood each other well enough.