by Manda Scott
Milo, the stud manager, had not found the new colt beautiful. Milo was Italian, from one of the northern provinces far from Rome, and in his world piebald horses were a bane, a sign of the gods’ impending wrath. He had brought the killing hammer with him on his second round of the morning and it was only the unexpected arrival of Amminios—who had liked the colt’s colouring and seen the promise in its lines—that had stopped him from crushing the newborn skull to pulp.
Milo had nursed his resentment and, when the time came for weaning, had ordered the colt north to Amminios’s second farm at Noviodunum. Bán, bereft, had begged to go with him. Amminios’s refusal had prompted the third and final attempt to escape. News had come afterwards that Milo had recalled the foal, intending to have him slain, but Amminios had forbidden the waste of his future racehorse. The weanling had continued its journey north and there had been no news of it since.
The stud had grown steadily since then. Now in its third year, it boasted two hundred breeding mares with eight studhorses, all in use. The young stock from the last season’s breeding was close to weaning, and Bán watched them as a falcon watches her chicks as they balance on the nest’s edge. The red mare’s most recent colt was his most difficult charge. It was a dark, solid chestnut with a white flash between its eyes, too heavy in the bone to be perfect but with the prospect of carrying more weight than its dam when it was older. The problem was one of temperament. The mare’s first two foals had been sharp, as their mother was, but not mean. This one was savage and fought for the sake of it. In the paddocks, it bullied the other foals. In the barns, it struck without warning at those set to handle it. The sire had been Amminios’s choice—he had taken to the good bone and had ignored the wall eye and the vicious temper. Bán had spoken once against it and not wasted his breath after that. He spoke as little as he could to Amminios and only on the topic of horses. They made his life bearable. Were it not for the stud, he would have been harvesting corn or driving bullocks behind a plough. In the worst event, he would have been digging rock for the widening of the road that stretched south from the town towards Lugdunum. The slaves who worked on the chain gangs lived in hell, taking comfort only in the knowledge that they would die before the season’s end. In his bleakest moments, when death seemed a welcome release, the ghost that came most often to Bán was the old elder grandmother, the one he had feared most, cackling a reminder that life could always be worse.
He was carrying water to the troughs in the weanling paddock when he heard Iccius’s cry. The boy was at the barn grooming three-year-olds for sale. At first Bán thought that the impossible had happened and Iccius had been kicked. That would have turned a bad day into a disaster—even the chestnut with the evil temper had not yet tried to kick Iccius. The second cry was shorter and more despairing and he heard his name couched within it, in Eceni. He threw the water into the trough, dropped the buckets and ran.
It was warm and dry in the barn. The rain had damped the dust and the horses were eating new season’s hay. The air smelled of their breath, sharpened by the wet of their coats. The nearest was a black colt. His hide had been polished until it reflected points of light from the harness mounts hung on the wall.
Iccius stood in a corner, holding a grooming brush, his face awash with terror. Over him stood Godomo, the southern Gaulish freedman who acted as secretary for Amminios and had charge of the farm in his absence. He was a long, servile lizard of a man with one leg shorter than the other and a testicle missing so that he bore a grudge against every whole man who crossed his path. Iccius, who was no longer whole, was his favourite plaything.
“You will go,” he said. “Braxus commands it.” His voice had the high pitch and taunt of a starling.
Iccius pressed himself into the brick of the wall. “I can’t! I won’t do it. You can’t make me.”
Only one thing aroused in him this level of terror, made him lose his mind to the extent that he would say something so stupid.
Bán stepped in front of him before he could repeat the calumny. To Godomo, he said, “It’s the hypocaust, isn’t it? You can’t make him go in there again. It’s not safe.”
“Ah, the shadow’s shadow.” The lizard smile stretched far under his cheekbones. Loose strings of saliva threaded the corners. He stepped sideways, back into the line of Iccius’s frozen stare. “It’s as safe as it needs to be. The master requires that the baths be working by this evening. It is up to us to make it so. The flue is not drawing air and the fires will not take. There may be an obstruction in the hypocaust.”
“Then send someone in who knows what they’re doing. Iccius hasn’t the first idea.”
“Did I just hear you offer to take his place?”
Bán would have done it. The thought of crawling into the blackness with no air and old insects biting at his hands filled him with terror as great as the boy’s, but for Iccius’s sake he would have tried his best. “I tried before, in the spring,” he said. “I am too big.”
“Shame.” Godomo had known that. He had been there to watch. “Then it will have to be the little catamite, who fits. I will count to three. If he is not on his way to the hypocaust by the third count, I will call Braxus.” He leered. Braxus was his best and only weapon. “One…”
They ran together. Braxus was waiting for them at the side of the baths. The entrance to the hypocaust was a small gap an arm’s length across and half as much high, blackened with soot and grime. The walls above it were of thin marble, poorly cut and badly fixed to the stone behind. Up above, weak roof tiles clattered under the rain. Already, they showed cracks at their fixings. In the first frosts of winter, they would shatter.
The whole structure of the baths was a disaster and had clearly been going to be so from the start. The problem was that Amminios trusted Godomo. The lizard-man stood straighter in his master’s presence and his voice was firmer. Moreover, once in a while, at clear cost to himself, he told the truth. Thus, in Amminios’s absence he had been entrusted with the supervision of the project; he had been left to handle the budget, which was barely adequate, and had failed signally to restrain himself from creaming off the better portion. The surveyor had followed his lead, and the architect who claimed to be from Rome itself but was not, and the engineers he brought in from the town to ensure the building was up to the highest standard. Every one of them had taken his cut and what was left had not been enough to pay for the materials, never mind the men to build it. Bán himself had been drafted in to help construct the tiled pillars of the hypocaust and lay the floor across them, and the fact that it was the first building work he had ever done, and the first under-floor heating system he had ever seen in his life, had not been considered a handicap.
It should have been. Bán’s part of the floor remained solid; he had the wit to understand what was required of him and a pride that would not let him finish a job badly. Others were less scrupulous, or less competent, and the place had been barely six months from opening when a series of pillars beneath the caldarium had fractured and the floor had subsided. That was when Bán had tried to crawl in to the hypocaust to see the extent of the damage and had failed to worm his way through the gaps between the remaining pillars. Iccius, being smaller, had succeeded.
He was still small enough and there was no question but that he would be sent again; Braxus would do it for spite, whether it was needed or not. The doubt lay in the danger, in how much of the floor had fallen and how much was left to go. Bán ran round to the front door and let himself in.
Inside, every surface shouted colour. There had never been a question of affording mosaic, but the one place Godomo had spent his full allocation was on the glazes for the floor tiles and the artist who had painted the ceilings and walls. The man had worked without pause through the whole of May and the result was considered tasteful to Roman eyes. In the hallway, dolphins in shining turquoise sported with blonde, fair-skinned nymphs with rose-red nipples and gold leaf on their fingertips. Elsewhere, the gods became men, or
vice versa. Jupiter became a red-haired Trinovantian, reclining on a couch. Dark-haired, pale-skinned Minerva waited on his bidding. On another wall, a hook-nosed Pan played pipes before a gaggle of blue-eyed virgins. The god’s eyes were pale yellow, like a hawk’s.
Bán pushed through a curtain to the steam room. Here, heroes rode in painted chariots under a citron sun. On the longest wall, Alexander of Macedon grew from his shining, golden childhood to become the armed god-man who tamed the world. In this, the artist had taken other liberties with history: the golden boy-child dancing in the Dionysian groves of his mother was classically Greek, but as he grew older his hair darkened and his features changed until the adult, the world’s greatest general and builder of empires, bore the straggling straw-coloured hair, bulging eyes and weak chin of Gaius, son of Germanicus, for the past three years emperor of Rome.
The caldarium was musty and damp and a film of early mould spattered the lower walls, staining the yellow of Alexander’s desert sand. Warped benches in white beech lined the walls. Bán followed the line of them to the southwestern corner. The last time the floor had collapsed, the first warning sign had been cracks in the plaster between the tiles there. The builder called in to do the repairs had done a good job but he had said more than once that it would have been necessary to demolish the lot and start again to do it properly. He had pointed out the paucity of the foundations and the impossibility of making the pillars of the hypocaust stand firm on weak earth. His prediction, made in Godomo’s hearing, was that the repairs would break down before winter.
He had been right. A single crack, half a finger’s width across, ran in a jagged line from one wall across the corner to the other. Bán traced it with his finger, then prised loose a chunk of plaster at the angle of the floor and the wall to reveal the greater crack beneath it. The floor curtain whispered and booted feet trod heavily on the tiling behind him. He turned to see Braxus standing on the threshold, watching. If the overseer had not already noticed the crack, he could not avoid it now. Bán pointed. The Thracian nodded, turned on his heel and strode back out into the rain.
Bán caught up with him round the side at the entrance to the hypocaust where Iccius was kneeling at the opening. Bán put himself in the way.
“You can’t send him under the floor. It’s not safe.”
“It’s safe enough.”
“At least let him go in with a rope round his waist so he can follow it out if he gets lost.”
That had been the source of the worst of Iccius’s nightmares: the time spent worming his way round in absolute darkness, unable to find the way out. Later, they learned that Braxus had closed the opening for a while and the boy had almost certainly passed it in his frantic search for air.
“And let him wind the rope round the columns and bring the whole floor down on his head? I don’t think so. Amminios would be sorry to lose so willing a slave.” His words were acid, designed to wound. Whatever Iccius had done, or not done, for Braxus, it still festered between them. The man was the soul of malice and the boy’s shell of obstinacy perilously thin. Bán opened his mouth to offer another alternative—any other alternative—and shut it again when Iccius reached up to touch his arm.
“Don’t. It’s not worth it. I’ll go in.” He spoke in Gaulish, because Braxus was there and it was forbidden to do otherwise. Still, as he bent down and squirmed in through the gap, he said, “Pray for me,” and that was in Eceni. Bán did so, in Eceni, silently. Braxus sneered and ordered him back to the horses.
The morning passed slowly. The rain eased and stopped and was replaced by a southeasterly wind. In the barn, the horses were fed and groomed. The first batch of two-year-olds arrived from the north in the charge of the small, wiry Dacian slave with the unpronounceable name who was in charge of the horses on Amminios’s third and biggest farm, based in the south, near Augustobona, the heart of his mother’s lands. Early on, Bán had named the man Fox, for the colour of his hair. Not long after that, Fox, in his broken Gaulish, had begun to refer to Bán as his son.
They greeted each other warmly and shared news of the stud. The new horses were inspected for soundness, wind-tested and sent on their way to the temporary corrals that had been set up around the auction ring on the outskirts of the town. The eighty horses Bán had selected as fit for sale were similarly inspected, haltered and sent on.
The mares with foals were in the lower paddocks. Fox leaned on a fence and watched them graze. “Yon chestnut colt will be a bastard.” He said it with relish, as if he were looking forward to the fight.
“He already kicks at Milo when he’s leading them in.”
“Good. Intelligent as well.” Fox hated Milo with a passion and made no effort to hide it.
They watched the colt a moment longer and then Fox pushed away from the fence. “Where’s the grey studhorse? The new one from Parthia that we bought last—What was that?”
It was the sound Bán had been waiting for all morning—the crack of falling masonry and the cry of a boy in terror and pain.
“The baths.” He was already running. “It’s Iccius at the baths.”
It was worse than last time. No-one was waiting at the entrance to the hypocaust. He shoved his head and shoulders into the gap and shouted into the stinking, fire-baked darkness. He smelled brick dust over the soot and ash and knew the worst. “Iccius! Iccius, it’s me! Are you all right?” His voice echoed over his head and back but there was no answer. Fox tapped his shoulder.
“They’re inside. The floor’s gone in the steam room.”
He ran for the entrance and through to the caldarium. A knot of men had gathered in the southwestern corner. Godomo stood, white-faced, on the margins. In all ways, the baths were his responsibility. Freedman or not, if Amminios came home to a broken building and no hot water, there would be hell to pay and Godomo the debtor. When Braxus waved at him, shouting, “Get the builder, you fool. Nowl” the lizard-man thrust past Bán and out into the courtyard, shouting orders to the others to make themselves useful. The cluster of onlookers wavered and dispersed until only Braxus was left.
The builder was a good man, but he would have to be a god to mend this in the time allowed. The hole in the floor was bigger than it had been in the summer and that had taken half a month to mend. A crack ran up one wall and a slab of marble had fallen from it, shattering the floor tiles and itself on impact. Braxus stood at the edge of the void, peering in. Bán crashed down on his knees at his side.
“Where is Iccius? Is he all right?”
The Thracian sucked on a back tooth. His face was oddly still. He nodded downwards. “There.”
Iccius lay on one side, his head cradled in a nest of broken tiles, one arm bent out at his side like a peeled and folded stick. The greater bulk of his body, such as it was, lay under one half of another marble slab that had plunged through the cavity and smashed onto the floor of the hypocaust below. It was not as thick as it should have been to face the wall, but it was enough to crush the bones and flesh of a slight, unmuscled boy.
“Iccius!”
“Don’t waste your breath. He’s dead.”
“No!”
“No.” The word rose up on a fine column of dust. Iccius opened an eye. In the dusted gloom of the hypocaust, the blue flashed dimly, like unwashed glass. He had been weeping before; clean tracks scored down the grime of his face, but he was not weeping now. Seeing Bán, he smiled, crookedly, with the half of his face that was uppermost. In Eceni, he whispered, “Now you can kill Amminios.”
“No.” Bán clutched at the edge of the gap. “Iccius, don’t say that. You’re not going to die.”
“Yes, I am. You can’t…No, Bán, don’t…”
The floor was not safe. He brought more of it down as he swung over the edge. Above, Braxus cursed him for a fool and promised a flogging, but did nothing to haul him out. Bán crouched in the rubble. Fractured slivers of tiling sliced into the bare soles of his feet. The columns on either side leaned in at dangerous angles. He knelt
, ignoring the cuts to his knees. Iccius rolled his head towards him. His face was alabaster white as it had been in the morning. Even the hollows beneath his eyes had lost their colour.
Bán kissed a cheek and then the cold, bruised lips. He was weeping. His tears scalded them both. “Don’t move. I’ll get you out. Iccius, listen to me. You are not going to die.”
“I am… just waited for you…” It was less than a whisper—a barely heard breath. The great blue eyes lost their focus, swimmingly. When the boy smiled again, it was at shadows seen in the dank dark of the hypocaust and Bán had no share in what he saw there. Pain racked his heart. He lifted the broken head and cradled it to his chest and felt the shuddering of a soul holding on to life. He kissed him as he had never done, a lover’s kiss, passionate with desperation.
“Iccius, don’t. I love you. You can’t die. You mustn’t.”
The boy smiled. His breathing rasped. Fresh blood and a clear, straw-coloured fluid leaked from one ear. He frowned, struggling to speak again.
“Iccius, don’t. It takes too much from you.”
“No. Listen…” Bán bent low to hear and felt the spider’s touch of a kiss on his ear, then a single phrase stored and given up with all the breath that was left. “Promise me you won’t die for nothing.”
He sighed once, softly, and was gone.
It was harder to climb out than it had been to jump in. Braxus stood watching and did not offer help. Bán emerged, scraped and grazed, and felt none of it. Black rage ate at his heart. He stood before the overseer on legs that shook.
“You saw the crack in the floor. You knew it wasn’t safe. You killed him.”
