“When Gundabald is found floating facedown in the Tiber, you will follow him to his grave, discreetly veiled in black, in tears. Now, what about Hugo? Should I include him in my instructions also?”
Regeane, marveling at her own calm, reached out and poured herself another cup of wine. “I don’t think so,” she said, judiciously. “With Gundabald dead, Hugo will do whatever I say. He’s afraid of me.”
“Excellent,” Lucilla said. “It’s always best in these affairs to keep things as simple as possible. Economy is always preferable to blood-lust and slaughter.”
“Hugo will know,” Regeane said, looking up at the cloudless sky and taking another sip of wine.
“Yes, my dear,” Lucilla said. “But then, he won’t talk, will he?”
“No,” Regeane said. “He has no money and he’d be dependent on me for his keep and his pleasures. He’d be too afraid he wouldn’t be believed and then I’d cut him off.”
“Just so,” Lucilla said. “And he wouldn’t be frightened of you any longer. He’d be absolutely terrified. And sometimes, with some men, terror is a better guarantee of loyalty than love.”
XXVII
THE SKY WAS THE SAME CLEAN, CLOUDLESS BLUE over the Forum, the wind sharp and chill. Maeniel paused in the shelter of an enormous stone block. Beside it, a flight of marble stairs led upward to nowhere. While it was warm enough in the sunlight, the dry air was cool in the shadows.
Gavin shivered. “Let’s ride on,” he said. “These ruins depress me and besides, you never know who might be lurking about, waiting to—”
“Be quiet, Gavin,” Maeniel said.
“Be quiet, Gavin. Shut up, Gavin. Don’t take on so, Gavin. I know what I’m doing, Gavin. That’s all I ever get from you in this mood,” Gavin complained. “I might point out that we’re carrying enough gold to buy half of what’s left of this wretched city and you want to play around in lonely spots where—”
“Gavin,” Maeniel said as he dismounted and began to climb the marble steps. “Have you ever seen anyone who could take anything from me against my will, ever, anywhere, anytime?”
“No, but …”
“No ifs, buts, or maybes,” Maeniel said. “No one ever has. Besides, we’re alone. If we were not, I would see something, smell something, or hear something, and I don’t.”
Maeniel stopped to peer down at the marble steps. They were cracked and broken, stained by centuries’ growth of lichens and moss. Weeds, bearing some golden composite flower, poked up from the interstices between the treads, blooms glowing against the shadowy stone.
One side of the stair was clear, the other disappeared into a velvet mantle of greenery where vines and even small trees struggled to get a foothold.
“Was it here?” Maeniel mused softly. “It’s all changed so much. Augustus is supposed to have said ‘I found a city of wood and left one of marble.’ In fact, I think he found something alive and left only a cenotaph.”
“Maeniel, what in the hell are you talking about?” Gavin asked.
“Caesar,” Maeniel answered.
“Which one?” Gavin asked, sourly.
Maeniel reached the top of the steps and gazed out over the ruins of the Forum. Seen from this slight elevation, the place had a parklike aspect. Though a night of frost had dulled some of its lush vegetation and even stripped a few trees bare, the verdigious color of the hardy ones still prevailed. Here and there a patch of autumn goldenrod among crumbled blocks still flaunted its saffron banners. At his feet in a mossy dell formed by two broken columns, small blue flowers were a cerulean carpet welcoming the sun.
“The first one, Gavin,” Maeniel said.
“The first one,” Gavin smirked. “Who cares about the first one? I doubt if there’s enough left of his dust to raise a sneeze.” Then he suited the action to the words and did sneeze. “Maeniel, I’m going to catch my death—”
“I doubt it,” Maeniel said coldly as he closed his eyes and tried to remember. The sun was hot on his neck. It had been equally hot on that day almost … what … eight hundred years ago. And it hadn’t been winter as it was now, but spring … the ides of March.
The cobbles under his feet had been slick and wet after a night’s rain. The sights, sounds, and smells had almost overwhelmed his wolf senses. For they had been extended against his will, driven by a deep visceral knowledge that this day might be his last on earth.
Street hawkers advertised their wares, sausages, wine, cheese, in voices that were a violent assault on his tender ears. He was surrounded by toga-clad bodies that jostled his, each with its own particular miasma of perfume and perspiration. Above all the smells of stale food, sour wine, hung the smell of burning bone from the morning sacrifices in the temples that surrounded the Senate.
Maeniel had pulled away from the crowd that filled the ancient marketplace and stood by the plinth that supported the statue of some Arabic goddess with a thousand breasts. He had brought his wolf senses sternly under control and waited for Julius Caesar to reach the long flight of stairs leading to the Senate. Their eyes met for a second and Maeniel, young creature that he was, was stunned by the terrible look in them. He saw before him a greedy, needy face. The face and eyes of someone who had wanted, desired with a poignancy beyond mortal flesh, something for so long that he has forgotten what it is. A face alive only to the pointless, futile energies driving it from within.
Even now after the passage of so many years, the sheer futility in that face drained Maeniel’s arms of strength, his soul of will. His hand had been on the hilt of his sword. In that moment, it slipped and fell away.
Gavin broke in on his thoughts of the distant past. “Maeniel, are you just going to leave all that gold on the horse?” He pointed to a leather saddle bag on Maeniel’s big roan.
“Gavin,” Maeniel said, quietly. “Don’t trouble me about a few trinkets.”
“I like what you call a few trinkets,” Gavin said, outraged. “The best of all the wealth we’ve ever won. I can’t remember how many years of hard fighting—”
“A few trinkets,” Maeniel said firmly. “What we’ve won over the many years of fighting is our valley, our mountains, and above all, our freedom. Compared to those, I consider a little gold a trifling matter.”
“We’re riding to meet your prospective bride, Maeniel,” Gavin said. “I’d like to get on with it. I want to find out what’s wrong with her before we go much farther. Did you see that marriage contract? She demanded everything, her own court practically. Maeniel, that woman can ruin you. She’ll have her own soldiers. What will we do if she decides to …”
“To what?” Maeniel met Gavin’s gaze.
“Well, I don’t know.” Gavin threw up his hands. “But I’m sure if this marriage lasts, she’ll think up some form of treachery to practice.
“In God’s name, at times you worry about everything. The damn hay, the damn harvest, the damn firewood, even all the way down to the mold on the damn cheeses. But here when all we’ve won is in mortal peril, you’re standing in a patch of weeds, muttering to yourself about Julius Caesar. I ask you, what the hell has Julius Caesar to do with anything? Besides, you couldn’t have known much about him, you’re not that old. You can’t be that old. No one is that old.”
“That’s it,” Maeniel said. “Try to convince yourself. But I’ll tell you the truth, Gavin, I was a boy your age when I came here at the behest of my master to kill Julius Caesar.”
“No,” Gavin exclaimed, turning his back. “I won’t listen to this. It’s impossible.”
Maeniel laughed harshly.
Gavin spun around again and faced him. “I’ve never known you to have a master. Who was he and how did he persuade you to …”
“He didn’t have to persuade me,” Maeniel said. “I was willing, even eager. Caesar destroyed my people.”
The breeze blew hard, whipping around the two men, the noise deafening them. Gavin felt the back of his neck prickle.
“What was he like, this Caesar? H
e’s nothing to me … only a name in a history book the priests made me read a long time ago.”
“I’m not sure I know,” Maeniel said. “After all, I’m only a wolf who is a man. Sometimes I’m not sure I understand any man, not fully.”
Gavin ducked his head and looked away from his chief toward the crumbling ruins of the Colosseum on the horizon. “But,” Maeniel continued, “he destroyed a whole people and their way of life to pay his debts. In the process, he ruined countless human lives. Killed hundreds of thousands and led as many away into slavery. I know,” Maeniel said, “I saw them here. So many with wounded eyes, enduring the Romans’ alien ways, learning, painfully, to speak in another tongue. A few of them recognized me for what I was when I traveled here. Sometimes they spoke to me, not asking for succor or even comfort, but I think simply to hear, for one last time, the music of a world they had been commanded to forget. But I wasn’t of their world, even as I am not fully of yours. So there was little I could do. The only reason I stopped here today was that I seemed to recognize and remember this place. But everything is changed now.”
“How about that?” Gavin said, pointing to the Colosseum.
“It wasn’t even built then,” Maeniel said.
A sense of age washed over Gavin as he realized that Maeniel had been here before a thing now falling apart had been constructed.
“How long have you been alive, then?” Gavin asked.
“I don’t know,” Maeniel said. “It is for such as Caesar to count the sands of time. I am wolf and never felt the need.”
“Then,” Gavin said, “how did you get to the city, get close enough to kill him?”
“My master, Blaze …” Maeniel said.
“Blaze taught Merlin,” Gavin said. “And Merlin is only an old story.”
“Perhaps … or perhaps not,” Maeniel said, strolling a little farther away from him. “I forget. You don’t know how strange it is to be old, to know that events that once seemed of catastrophic importance in my own life are only the dry bones of history to you.”
“All right,” Gavin said. “I’ll bite.”
“I hope not,” Maeniel said with a grin.
“What I meant,” he said with exasperated patience, “is you’re telling this story, so tell it your way.”
“Very well,” Maeniel answered. “My master, Blaze, spent a year preparing me to be a Roman. After all, he said, Caesar’s friend Dacidicus managed it. So should I. I learned all I could of their dress, their language, their manners and customs. By the end of the year, I could pass among the Romans as one of them. I learned quickly enough when I came here that I needn’t have bothered. The city then as now was an aging whore always ready to sell herself for the right price.
“Posing as a wealthy landowner from Crisalpine Gaul, I quickly found out all I needed to know to accomplish my objective. The location of Caesar’s residence in the city, the hours when he went to visit the Senate, who his friends and habitual companions were.
“But I had not seen the man himself until I shouldered my way through the Forum to the very steps of the Senate and waited with my hand on my sword.”
“How did you plan to escape after you killed him?”
“I didn’t.” He turned and faced Gavin with a half smile on his lips.
Gavin was struck by his eyes. They were a peculiar color, a deep steel blue in some lights, dark as a troubled sea in others, and now, sunstruck, they were the hazy color of a storm wrack when the day fades into purple dusk.
“Strange,” Gavin said sarcastically, “I always thought you were intelligent.”
“I was young then,” Maeniel said, “and headlong courage was what was expected of a warrior.”
“If you ask me,” Gavin began.
“Nobody did,” Maeniel answered.
But Gavin finished anyway. “Those Gauls had too much headlong courage and not enough common sense. That’s why Caesar found them such easy prey.”
“Perhaps,” Maeniel said. He was looking away again over the quiet ruins basking in the clear autumn light. “At any rate, I waited for him there. And I met his eyes. He was a lean man, hollow cheeked, and in their deep sockets the eyes burned with the unquenchable hunger.”
“I suppose,” Gavin said, “it’s my function to ask for what?” He tried to sound bored.
Maeniel turned toward him, again with a slight smile on his lips. Then his eyes followed a ring dove as it flew overhead, its wing feathers a sunlit fan against the sky.
“I don’t know,” Maeniel said.
“Maeniel,”‘ Gavin said, in a warning tone. “I don’t like you when you get enigmatic.”
“Men,” Maeniel said, “weaken things by naming them sometimes. Thank all the gods that they have not found a name for this. But I know what it is. I have it, you have it, even the bird has it. How else would they trust their wings to the invisible air? How else would the pinions of a hawk ride the heat rising from a sunlit mountainside? A wolf has it when he curls in his den after a hunt, not caring for tomorrow, knowing he must hunt again but sure of his strong legs and sharp fangs. I had it, too, even in Blaze’s house, cut off as he wanted me from the world of beasts. I knew the transcendent confidence when I crossed the meadow, breasting the ground mist, to bathe in the river at dawn. An infant knows it when he seeks a mother’s breast with his lips and finds his pleasure and ease. I had it even in my own magnificent stupidity and showed it by not caring what happened to me, if I could but sink my blade into his body.
“But I could read the truth in his restless, hungry gaze. All his power had brought him no ease, no hope, no joy. So I watched him, sickened, pass toward the top of the steps. Then I smelled it. A reek that drowned out the myriad other smells that hung like a foul miasma surrounding me. The powerful odor of human rage, human fear, and desperation. And I realized it came from the men around him. The smell of a pack closing in.
“Damn it, Gavin, did he know those he thought of as his brothers were going to kill him? Was that the reason for that heart-hungry gaze? I think now perhaps he did not care. He was tired of life. Perhaps he would have preferred me to finish him. A clean kill by an avowed enemy. I don’t know. I only know they paused at the top of the stair. As if to urge a petition on him. A moment later their steel was in him. Even the blade of one who they say was his son.
“Men make such a fuss over a kill,” Maeniel mused. “A wolf would simply have left him for the carrion birds.
“I left quickly, a riot was beginning. I brought the news to his wife, Calpurnia. A great, stately lady very much like the Romans of old. Strange, women preserve the virtues of a people longer than men do.”
“That’s because they’re forced to,” Gavin said. “Give them any choice at all … well, I ask you, look at Matrona.”
“That’s your problem, isn’t it?” Maeniel asked slyly. “She won’t let you look at her often enough.”
“Maeniel,” Gavin wailed. “I have. I go in search of a little adventure and she cuts me off for months.”
“In any case,” Maeniel continued, “I told Calpurnia and ordered the servants to keep a watch over her. I was afraid she might take some Roman way out. Then I hurried away from Rome, not just Rome, but from man. Night found me fleeing toward the mountains. A wolf.”
Maeniel turned and walked back toward the horses.
“He was a great man,” Gavin said.
Maeniel paused and looked out again over the sweep of ruins and the wide empty sky. “No, he wasn’t. Great men always leave the world a better place than they found it. He didn’t. He destroyed a state that could have stood as a buffer between his people and those beyond the Rhine who have washed over them since, like a tide. And he wrecked his own government.”
“It may be,” Gavin said, “that those Romans saw his seizure of power as a choice between disorder and despotism.”
Maeniel gazed into Gavin’s eyes again. “That’s no choice at all, and you know it, growing up as you have among people who make their ow
n laws and obey them. No, Roman government was contentious, disorderly, and all too often corrupt. But it had room for growth and change. And above all, when one attended deliberations, it was possible to hear more than one voice.
“After he passed by, it was never anything more than the projected will of one man. That’s why I said Augustus found something living and left a cenotaph. Just as Caesar in Gaul found something living, a people who might have become mighty and magnificent and stood as a bulwark against the savagery beyond the Rhine.
“No, he was not a great man, only a talented, small one driven by greed and a lust for power beyond the common run. Be glad we have no Caesars and no faceless legions to be his instruments.” He turned away abruptly toward his horse.
As Gavin hurried after Maeniel, he only half believed what his war chief was telling him. Still, the quiet that surrounded the big man frightened him. He was in the saddle and the two of them were setting off for Lucilla’s house when he asked, “Why are you telling me all this?”
Maeniel reined in his horse abruptly. “Because,” he said. “I want no Caesar to come to my valley in the mountains, be his name Charles or any other, and destroy my friends.
“I am explaining to you why the stakes are too high in this marriage for me to behave otherwise than as a father to my people. I will marry the girl, whatever she is. And she will be honored in my house by the rest of you. And we will keep our secrets as well.
“So, I hope you enjoyed the freedom of the Campagna last night, because that freedom is about to come to an end. Understand, Gavin, an end. For the time she is with us, we will be men, not wolves. And you will behave yourself at the villa of Lucilla. All of you.”
Gavin showed an uncharacteristic meekness when they reached Lucilla’s house. Maeniel lifted the heavy saddle bag from the horse as Gavin announced his identity to the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper was a pretty young girl and Gavin didn’t even roll his eyes at her.
He followed Maeniel at a respectful distance when they entered the atrium garden. The girl paused, looked at them once, giggled, and disappeared into the house.
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