The Emperor's Games

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

  A footstep touched the floor behind him, and he tensed. He made himself relax and turn slowly.

  Flavius held out a stack of thin wooden sheets. “The troop counts you asked for, sir.”

  “Thank you. Has Velius Rufus come in yet?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s on his way.” Flavius laid the wooden tablets on the table.

  “Good.” Domitian tapped them with the air of a man making up his mind. “Send for Julius Frontinus, as well, and make sure someone brings us dinner. Then go and find me the chieftain of the Semnones. He will give his oath to a treaty at midday tomorrow, or we are at war. This has gone on long enough.”

  “Yes, sir.” Flavius saluted briskly, but there was a hunted look in his eyes. Midday tomorrow. Only one day left.

  The emperor reached for the wooden tally slates, and the stack spilled over. Flavius put a hand out to catch them, and the emperor’s eyes narrowed as the mark of a healing burn showed on the inside of his aide’s arm. He opened his mouth to speak, considered, and closed it again. “Dismissed, Julianus.”

  Domitian sat looking thoughtful for a long while after Flavius had gone. Was that burned arm what had had him so nervy lately? And if he had burned it where Domitian thought he had, why? Flavius Julianus was utterly, completely loyal, incapable of being otherwise. If Flavius had covered up treason, he had done it to pull someone else out of danger. And Domitian would never find out who that someone was from Flavius. Domitian decided that he didn’t want to know, not this time. Whatever had been afoot, it was ended for now, buried with Marius Vettius, who had thought he could make himself emperor.

  It wasn’t the first time rumors of assassination had surfaced; they were the constant companions of any man who held the purple. For the rest of his life Domitian would tense at the sound of a footstep behind him, but with Flavius Julianus on his staff, he had a better watchdog than most men had. He was not yet foolish enough to trade that security for vengeance for a plot already dead. Domitian carefully turned the map so that his back was no longer to the door and went back to his work.

  * * *

  The sense of urgency in and around Castra Mattiacorum was growing. Forst could feel it hanging in the thin dawn like the portentous stillness before an earthquake or a summer storm. In the wine stall where he had found a cheap lodging, he shook the straw off his cloak and stumbled out in the half-light past the sleeping forms of the shopkeeper and the thin, cowed girl who served the wine and lay with the customers in the storeroom at the back. He ducked under the door flap and stuck his head in the rain barrel outside. The dirty streets and raw timbered buildings shook themselves into activity as the wake-up sounded from the bugler’s post inside the fort.

  A supply wagon rumbled past, loaded and on the road already. At the end of the street two sentries from the patrol that kept the peace in the vicus by night were trudging back to camp, quarreling over some long-gone dice game. Behind him, the shopkeeper stirred and kicked the girl awake. Forst shook the water from his hair and went slowly, then faster as the urgency in the street began to catch him, toward the house where Ranvig and his people were lodged. The Germans were awake, too: There were thralls coming and going from the house, and a knot of warriors standing lordlywise in the street and watching them work. Forst knew Ranvig and Fiorgyn by sight now, and Barden and Lady Morgian across the long, sad gulf of years, although he had never let himself get close enough for them to see him for fear that that would make his decision for him then and there. But these men were none that he knew. They stared back at him blankly, an unknown man with his hair in a Semnone knot and a desperate indecision in his face.

  “Hai! You!”

  Forst spun around. A wiry blond man trotted across the street, and Forst recognized the Macedonian that Correus Julianus had pulled out of the arena.

  “This came in with the army post last night,” Eumenes said. “Master turned me out this morning to go and find you.” He held out a wooden tablet with leaves sealed with a blotch of wax. Forst read Correus’s name and then his own in laborious Latin letters across the front. He clutched it and stood staring at it with a cold unease. Emer could write, but she did it badly. He could see her in his mind, scratching those characters across the wood, with a thin reed pen.

  “Can you read?” Eumenes asked.

  “What? Oh. Yes, I can read. As… as well as she can write.” He still stared at it.

  “Well, if I was you then, I’d read it,” Eumenes advised. “It’ll have to be important for the old general to have wangled it into the military post for her.”

  Forst looked at the Semnone warriors again, and they looked back at him blankly as at some oddity that had no bearing on their world. He went back to the wineshop and shut himself in the storeroom with the wooden tablet:

  You have a child. A girl, if that will make a difference to you. She was born at the end of April. I had thought not to tell you, thinking that you must make up your own mind to come back or not. But now there is another man, and he will marry me if you do not come.

  Forst leaned his head against the cool clay of the storeroom wall and stared miserably at the straggling letters.

  I do not love him, but he will be good to us, and I need a man, and the child needs a father.

  It was stark, a statement of fact, not as she would have spoken it, but Emer didn’t write well, and it was not a thing she would have been willing to speak to a scribe.

  So now you will have to decide. I am sorry, but the man will not wait, and I will not either, anymore. You have had enough time.

  It was a bitter, proud letter. He could see her image, superimposed on the straw bins and their wine jars, drawing each awkward character, her face set, her red hair pulled up in a knot on her head and coming loose to curl in fine tendrils around her face. There was a splash of freckles across her nose and cheeks, infinitely dear, and remembered with an aching clarity. He stared at the wine jars as if the image could speak and somehow make all other things clear to him, too. The clamor in the street outside rose to a confusion of screams and angry voices before he heard it. He ran for the storeroom door as the face across the wine jars faded out.

  The street was full of Roman soldiers. The girl was huddled under a bench, and the shopkeeper was busy pulling the wine jars that had been set into their slots in the counter for the day’s trade back out again. He stopped long enough to pick up a knife and slap it down on the counter beside him. Everywhere along the street, people were diving into buildings and pulling shut their doors.

  Forst saw that the Romans were fighting with a mounted German war band, caught between the foot soldiers who were pouring out of the fort and the cavalry troop that had chased them into the town. The Germans were armed with oval shields and heavy fighting spears, and they had swords slung from their belts as well. Some of the cavalry troopers were wounded, and a few were riding double behind their mates.

  The Germans must have ambushed a patrol, he thought, and caught the worst of it until the fighting had swept into the town itself. Forst flattened himself back in the doorway as a German horseman toppled a cavalryman from his mount. The Roman fell and lay still in the mud, with a red hole in the scales of his cuirass. The troop horse screamed and crashed into the unshuttered front of a food stall, upsetting the iron brazier that was burning on the counter. Another cavalryman plunged toward the German, who pulled his own rearing mount up and looked for a way out as the stall’s awning fell and caught fire from the brazier. There were unlit torches in brackets on the wall, and the German pulled one free and stuck it in the flames. He whirled it around his head and into the roof thatch of the next shop as the cavalryman closed in on him and they disappeared again into the melee in the street.

  It was then that the odd thing happened, the thing that Forst remembered over all the rest of the skirmish. Someone shouted “Fire!” and suddenly there seemed to be two Roman armies in the street. The foot soldiers’ commander gave an order, and his troops split like two forks in a stream. One purs
ued the now retreating Germans, while the other became a line that passed buckets of water from the channel that supplied the fort, to pour them on the flames of the shop. For a while the fighting raged around the bucket line, but they only put their shields over their heads and let it pass by them, never stopping the water.

  Their commander stood with his optio beside him, and, watching him, something moved into place inside Forst. It felt like a window being flung open, he thought, grasping for the idea that had come to him so quickly and completely in the chaos. Whatever else might be an ill with Rome, the Romans were builders. They would take the land they had conquered and make something of it. In the Black Forest over the last ten years, they already had. Forst had seen that when he had first come back to the Rhenus. His people, if they took the land back, would burn everything in it that was Roman. And that would be wrong now. Forst watched the flames sink under the steady splash of the water and watched the faces of the German shopkeeper and his girl as they stood to one side, out of the soldiers’ way. The towns and the people here were too Roman to go back. That was what it came to in the end. And so was he. There was a dead German warrior in the street, one hand outflung in the mud, his knotted hair pulled from its pins and trampled with it. Forst looked at him sadly, a man he had never seen, a boy come to his sword since Forst had last ridden with a war band.

  Wet ashes drifted down around him. Too much gone, he thought. Too much water gone by in the river and too many men dead. These were new men, this new chieftain and his warriors. Forst had a new tie, a new child, and a wife for whom he had fought as hard as he had ever fought for Nyall Sigmundson. And no one stepped in the same river twice, not ever.

  Most of the fire was out, and the bucket line moved aside as another cavalry troop splattered past them through the mud. Ranvig was going to lose. One more warrior in his war band wasn’t going to make the difference or bring Nyall back. Forst knew that, and knew that he had lost his belief in lost causes. He would say a last prayer to the German gods that Nyall had found his peace, then he would go back to Emer. And that was a Roman way to think. Somehow Rome had made a Roman of him.

  XXI Fiorgyn

  Ygerna took one look at the commotion in the streets, barred the door, and sat down beside it with the silver-handled knife that Julius Frontinus had given her.

  “It’s mostly our own men,” Flavius said, lifting a shutter and looking out at the foot soldiers milling outside. “The Germans will be a mile down the road by now with the cavalry on their tails.” He had come in search of Correus, who was wanted to interpret the emperor’s midday ultimatum, and found him already gone to the fort.

  “It’s your men I don’t trust,” Ygerna said. “Not in this mood. They are jumpy with these raids, and they have left off thinking. This is a German house. They may not care which Germans they chase.”

  As she spoke there was a flurry of angry Roman voices almost under the window, and someone shouted, “There! There’s one of them! Get the heathen devil!” Flavius saw a junior officer of the Claudia lying propped against a hedge with a gash in his leg. Angry voices chorused around him, and he shouted an order that no one listened to. They were nearly out of control, and as he ordered them furiously to hold, the soldiers saw a man from Ranvig’s delegation in the distance and began to move that way up the street, picking up their pace.

  “Mithras god! Fiorgyn!” Flavius hurled himself at the door and wrenched the bolt back. “Bar it behind me!” he shouted, and ran.

  The junior officer of the Claudia was trying to stand up. He saw Flavius and fell back against the hedge, white-faced. “I couldn’t hold them,” he said. “If you don’t stop them, they’ll tear that place apart!”

  Flavius swore at him and ran on without breaking stride. He turned the corner into a street of thatch-roofed houses and saw them battering at the front of the hall where Ranvig’s people had been lodged. The man they had chased had been pulled inside by his fellows, but they hadn’t been able to get the door barred in time, and the fighting was halfway into the house, the German warriors being pressed back by sheer weight of numbers. The street was full of bales and boxes, broken open and trampled in the mud, and one of the thralls was lying among them, dead.

  “Burn the bastards out!” A legionary at the rear of the press looked around him for fire.

  Flavius grabbed him by the neck and pulled him backward into the street. He flung him down in the mud, and the man began to come up sword in hand. His eyes widened when he saw Flavius.

  “Stop it!” Flavius shouted. “Hold! Fall back!” They didn’t hear him, and a pilum sailed past his ear, aimed by a German who had caught it and sent it back again. The soft shaft at the head was bent, and it didn’t fly well, but the range was short and Flavius was wearing only a light parade cuirass. He dived into the cover of the legionaries jamming the front of the house and began to fight his way through them. “Hold, damn you! Back off!” They didn’t hear him over the shouting, or they didn’t care. He fought frantically to the doorway and braced his back against one of the posts. He had his sword out and blocked part of the doorway with it as they surged around him. In the hall beyond, he could see the Germans backed into another doorway behind a bristle of spears, with three or four dead at their feet and Ranvig in the middle. He had a sword in one hand and a spear in the other, and his crooked face was set in a blaze of fury. Ten or twelve more were fighting in the hall itself. In the room beyond, someone was screaming. Flavius saw with horror that there were women among the fighters in the hall.

  “Hold! In the emperor’s name!” He threw himself completely across the doorway, and the onslaught slowed as they began to recognize him. “Hold! That is an order!” He turned quickly to see what was going on behind him. The fighting in the hall had not stopped. There was a flash of blue cloth, and he saw Fiorgyn with a knife in her hand, fighting furiously as two soldiers pulled her away from the rest. Flavius swung his sword and caught one of the soldiers across the helmet with the flat of it. The man spun around, hesitating as he saw Flavius. The soldiers at the door had halted, and with a snarl the Germans began to close in on them.

  “Friend!” Flavius shouted in German. “Friend! Ranvig, call them off!”

  Ranvig’s eyes met his over the scuffling men in the hall. “Damn you! What about my dead?”

  “There’ll be more dead if you don’t call them off!” Flavius shouted. “I can’t keep them back if you don’t!” The men outside the door had begun to press forward again, still angry, still ready to put a pilum in any German they could catch. Flavius pulled the second soldier away from Fiorgyn and flung him against the men in the doorway. His lorica crashed against their raised shields, and they staggered back a step. The other men in the hall had begun to fall back as the Germans came after them. “Get out!” Flavius shouted at them. “Get out while you can. You know the punishment for mutiny.” They looked at him warily and backed away. “Ranvig, call your men to heel!”

  Ranvig gave an order in German, and his warriors halted, spears leveled, glaring at Flavius and the Romans behind him. Flavius let his breath out.

  “Is this the way the emperor of Rome makes a treaty?” Ranvig said sarcastically. There were dead and wounded on the floor. Lady Morgian came out from the back room with the priest and began to look at them. Two Roman bodies were among them, and Flavius called four of the legionnaires back.

  “Take them to the surgeon,” he said wearily.

  “They’re dead, sir!” one of the soldiers said. He took a step toward the Germans.

  Flavius raised his fist. “Get them out of here! And get yourselves out before something worse happens to you.” They knew what he meant, and they picked up their dead and went. The punishment for mutiny was death by stoning.

  Flavius turned to Ranvig grimly. “This is your fault, Ranvig. Your raids, your ambushes, your tricks did this. Not the emperor.” He turned his back on him and strode across to Fiorgyn. “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

  “Yes.”
She had put her knife away and was rubbing a bruised wrist.

  “Come out of here,” he said in a low voice.

  She nodded and began to follow him to the door. Barden was chanting a low, keening song over one of the men who lay with unseeing eyes on the plank floor, and Morgian was tying a strip torn from her gown around the arm of another. Signy was helping her. She had a cut cheek, and tears and blood were running down her face.

  “Fiorgyn!”

  Fiorgyn turned back to Ranvig. Her hair was coming out of its braids, and there was someone’s blood turning dark on the front of her gown. “I will be back at midday,” she said, and went out after Flavius.

  “Let her go,” Signy said unexpectedly, her voice shaking. She held the bandage while Morgian pinned it. “Let her have this morning. It’s the last one, but at least she will have that. I am thinking she is lucky for that.”

  Ranvig looked at her curiously and dropped down on one knee beside her. “What is it, child?” He turned her head up to him and wiped away the blood with one of Morgian’s bandages to look at her cheek. “You’ve a cut on your face.”

  “At least she has a man who wants her for her!” Signy flung at him. “Not just because she needs a home and can have babies!” She burst into tears.