An Emperor for the Legion

by Harry Turtledove

  Long before he reached the bottom of the stairway, Marcus knew he would never find the taxroll, even if it was here. The little clay lamp in his hand was not very bright, but it shed enough light for him to see boxes of records haphazardly piled on one another. Some were overturned, their contents half-buried in the dust and mold on the floor. The air tasted dead.

  The lamp flickered. Scaurus felt his heart jump with it. There could be no worse fate than to be lost down here, alone in the blackness. No, not altogether alone; as the flame blazed up again, its glow came back greenly from scores of gleaming eyes. Some of them, the tribune thought nervously, were higher off the ground than a rat’s eyes had any right to be.

  He retreated, making very sure that little door was bolted. Strobilos stared incuriously down at him; even the imperial artist had had trouble portraying him as anything but a dullard.

  Its torches bright and cheerful, the prison level seemed almost attractive compared to what was below it. The guards with their handcart had not moved ahead more than six or seven cells. Their rhythm was slow, nearly hypnotic—a loaf to the left, a bowl of stew to the right; a bowl of stew to the left, a loaf to the right; a water jar to either side; creak forward and repeat.

  “You, there!” someone called from one of the cells. “Yes, you, outlander!” Marcus had been about to go on, sure no one down here could be talking to him, but that second call stopped him. He looked round curiously.

  He had not recognized Taron Leimmokheir in his shabby linen prison robe. The ex-admiral had lost weight, and his hair and beard were long and shaggy; months in this sunless place had robbed him of his sailor’s tan. But as Scaurus walked over to his cell, he saw Leimmokheir still bore himself with military erectness. The cell itself was neat and clean as it could be, cleaner, in fact, than the passageway outside.

  “What is it, Leimmokheir?” the tribune asked, not very kindly. The man on the other side of those rust-flaked bars had come too close to killing him and was condemned to be here for planning the murder of the Emperor the Roman supported.

  “I’d have you take a message to Gavras, if you would.” The words were a request, but Leimmokheir’s deep hoarse voice somehow kept its tone of command, prisoner though he was. Marcus waited.

  Leimmokheir read his face. “Oh, I’m not such a fool as to ask to be set free. I know the odds of that. But by Phos, outlander, tell him he holds an innocent man. By Phos and his light, by the hope of heaven and the fear of Skotos’ ice below, I swear it.” He drew the sun-sign over his breast, repeating harshly, “He holds an innocent man!”

  The convict in the next cell, a sallow man with a weasel’s narrow wicked face, leered at Scaurus. “Aye, we’re all innocent here,” he said. “That’s why they keep us here, you know, to save us from the guilty ones outside. Innocent!” His laugh made the word a filthy joke.

  The Roman, though, paused in some uncertainty. Barefoot and unkempt Leimmokheir might be, but his speech still had the oddly compelling quality Marcus had noted when he first heard it on that midnight beach, still carried the conviction that here was a man who would not, or could not, lie. His eyes bored into the tribune’s, and Scaurus lowered his first.

  The food cart came groaning up. The tribune made his decision. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. Leimmokheir acknowledged him not with a nod, but with lowered head and right hand on heart—the imperial soldier’s salute to a superior. If this was acting, Scaurus thought, it deserved a prize.

  He began to regret his promise before he got back to the palace compound. As if he didn’t have troubles enough, without trying to convince Gavras he might have made a mistake. Thorisin was much more mistrustful of his aides than Mavrikios had been—with reason, Marcus had to admit. If he ever learned the tribune had planned to defect …! It did not bear thinking about.

  If, on the other hand, he approached the Emperor through Alypia Gavra, that might blunt Thorisin’s suspicions, the more so if she took his side. At least he could learn what she thought of Leimmokheir, which would give better perspective on how far to credit the ex-admiral. He smacked fist into open palm, pleased with his own cleverness.

  She might even know where that fornicating tax roll was, he thought.

  The eunuch steward Mizizios rapped lightly at the handsome door. Like most of those in the small secluded building that was the imperial family’s private household, it was ornamented with inlays of ebony and red cedar. “Yes, bring him in, of course,” Scaurus heard the princess say. Mizizios bowed as he worked the silver latch.

  He followed the tribune into the chamber, but Alypia waved him away. “Let us talk in peace.” Seeing the eunuch hesitate, she added, “Go on; my virtue’s safe with him.” It was, Marcus thought, as much the bitterness in her voice as the order itself that made Mizizios flee.

  But she was gracious again as she offered the Roman a chair, urged him to take wine and cakes. “Thank you, your Majesty,” he said. “It’s kind of you to see me on such short notice.” He bit into one of the little cakes with enjoyment. They were stuffed with raisins and nuts and dusted lightly with cinnamon; better here than over goose, he thought. That midwinter meal still rankled.

  “My uncle has made it plain to both of us that the pen-pushers’ iniquities are of the highest importance, has he not?” she said, raising her eyebrows slightly. Was that surprise at his thanks, Scaurus wondered, or lurking sarcasm? He could not read Alypia at all and did not think the reverse was true; he felt at a disadvantage.

  “If I’m interrupting anything …” he said, and let the sentence drop.

  “Nothing that won’t keep,” she said, waving to a desk as overloaded with scrolls and books as his own. He could read the title picked out in gold leaf on a leather-bound volume’s spine: the Chronicle of Seven Reigns. She followed his eye, nodded. “History is a business that takes its own time.”

  The desk itself was plain pine, no finer than the one Marcus used. The rest of the furnishings, including the chairs on which he and Alypia sat, were as austere. The only ornament was an icon of Phos above the desk, an image stern in judgment.

  At first glance, the princess seemed almost equally severe. She wore blouse and skirt of plain dark brown, unrelieved by jewelry; her hair was pulled back into a small, tight bun at the nape of her neck. But her green eyes—rare for a Videssian—held just enough ironic amusement to temper the harshness she tried to project. “To what pen-pushers’ inquities are we referring?” she asked, and Scaurus heard it in her voice as well.

  “None,” he admitted, “unless you happen to know where they’ve spirited away Kybistra’s tax records.”

  “I don’t,” she said at once, “but surely you could have a mage find them for you.”

  “Why, so I could,” Scaurus said, amazed. The notion had never entered his mind. For all his time in Videssos, down deep he still did not accept magic, and it rarely occurred to him to use it. He wondered how much sorcery went on around him, unnoticed, every day among folk who took it as much for granted as a cloak against the cold.

  Such musings vanished as he remembered his chief reason for seeing the princess. “I’m not here on account of the pen-pushers, actually,” he began, and set out the story of how Taron Leimmokheir had recognized him and insisted on his own innocence.

  Alypia grew serious as she listened, alert and intent. The expression suited her face perfectly; Marcus thought of the goddess Minerva as he watched her. She was silent for several moments after he finished, then asked at last, “What do you make of what he said?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. The evidence against him is strong, and yet I thought the first time I heard his voice that he was a man whose word was good. It troubles me.”

  “Well it might. I’ve known Leimmokheir five years now, since my father won the throne, and never seen him do anything dishonorable or base.” Her mouth twitched in a mirthless smile. “He even treated me as if I were really Empress. He may have been artless enough to think I was.”

  S
caurus rested his chin on the back of his hand, looked down at the floor. “Then I’d best see your uncle, hadn’t I?” He did not relish the prospect; Thorisin was anything but reasonable on the matter of Leimmokheir.

  Alypia understood that, too. “I’ll come with you, if you like.”

  “I’d be grateful,” he said frankly. “It would make me less likely to be taken for a traitor.”

  She smiled. “Hardly that. Shall we find him now?”

  The bare-branched trees’ shadows were long outside. “Tomorrow will do well enough. I’d like to see to my men with what’s left of today; as is, I don’t get as much chance as I should.”

  “All right. My uncle likes to ride in the early morning, so I’ll meet you at midday outside the Grand Courtroom.” She stood, a sign the audience was at an end.

  “Thanks,” he said, rising too.

  He took another little cake from the enamelwork tray, then smiled himself as the memory came back. He’d had these cakes before and knew who baked them. “They’re as good as I remembered,” he said.

  For the first time he saw Alypia’s reserve crack. Her eyes widened slightly, her hand fluttered as if to brush the compliment away. “Tomorrow, then,” she said quietly.

  “Tomorrow.”

  * * *

  When the tribune got back to the barracks he found an argument in full swing. Gorgidas had made the mistake of trying to explain the Greek notion of democracy to Viridovix and succeeded only in horrifying the Celtic noble.

  “It’s fair unnatural,” Viridovix said. “ ’Twas the gods themselves set some folk above the rest.” Arigh Arghun’s son, who was there visiting the Gaul and soaking up some wine, nodded vigorously.

  “Nonsense,” Scaurus said. The Roman patricians had tried to put that one over on the rest of the people, too. It had been centuries since it worked.

  But Gorgidas turned on him, snapping, “What makes you think I need your help? Your precious Roman republic has its nobles, too, though they buy their way to the role instead of being born into it. Why is a Crassus a man worth hearing, if not for his moneybags?”

  “What are you yattering about?” Arigh said impatiently; the allusion meant nothing to him and hardly more to Viridovix. The Arshaum was a chieftain’s son, though, and knew what he thought of the Greek’s idea. “A clan has nobles for the same reason an army has generals—so when trouble comes, people know whom to follow.”

  Gorgidas shot back, “Why follow anyone simply because of birth? Wisdom would be a better guide.”

  “Be a man never so wise, if he comes dung-footed from the fields and speaks like the clodhopper born, no one’ll be after hearing his widsom regardless,” Viridovix said.

  Arigh’s flat features showed his contempt for all farmers, noble and peasant alike, but he followed the principle the Celt was laying down. In his harsh, clipped speech he said to Gorgidas, “Here, outlander, let me tell you a story to show you what I mean.”

  “A story, is it? Wait a moment, will you?” The physician trotted off, to return with tablet and stylus. If anything could ease him out of an argumentative mood, it was the prospect of learning more about the world in which he found himself. He poised stylus over wax. “All right, carry on.”

  “This happened a few years back, you’ll understand,” Arigh began, “among the Arshaum who fellow the standard of the Black Sheep—near neighbors to my father’s clan. One of their war leaders was a baseborn man named Kuyuk, and he had a yen for power. He toppled the clan-chief neat as you please, but because he was a nobody’s son, the nobles were touchy about doing what he told them. He was clever, though, was Kuyuk, and had himself a scheme.

  “One of the things the clan-chief left behind when he ran was a golden foot-bath. The nobles washed their feet in it, aye, and pissed in it, too, sometimes. Now Kuyuk had a goldsmith melt it down and recast it in the shape of a wind spirit. He set it up among the tents, and all the clansmen of the Black Sheep made sacrifice to it.”

  “Sounds like something out of Herodotos,” Gorgidas said, little translucent spirals of wax curling up from his darting stylus.

  “Out of what? Anyway, Kuyuk let this go on for a while and then called in his factious nobles. He told them where the image came from, and said, ‘You used to wash your feet in that basin, and piddle in it, and even puke. Now you sacrifice to it, because it’s in a spirit’s shape. The same holds true for me: when I was a commoner you could revile me all you liked, but as clan-chief I deserve the honor of my station.’ ”

  “Och, what a tricksy man!” Viridovix exclaimed in admiration. “That should have taught them respect.”

  “Not likely! The chief noble, whose name was Mutugen, stuck a knife into Kuyuk. Then all the nobles gathered round and pissed on his corpse. As Mutugen said, ‘Gold is gold no matter what the shape, and a baseborn man’s still baseborn with a crown on his head.’ Mutugen’s son Turukan is chief of the Black Sheep to this day—they wouldn’t follow a nobody.”

  “True, your nobles wouldn’t,” Marcus said, “but what of the rest of the clan? Were they sorry to see Kuyuk killed?”

  “Who knows? What difference does it make?” Arigh answered, honestly confused. Viridovix slapped him on the back in agreement.

  Gorgidas threw his hands in the air. Now, put in a more dispassionate frame of mind by his ethnographic jotting, he was willing to admit Scaurus to his side. He said, “Don’t let them reach you, Roman. They haven’t experienced it, and understand no more than a blind man does a painting.”

  “Honh!” said Viridovix. “Arigh, what say you the two of us find a nice aristocratic tavern and have a jar or two o’ the noble grape?” Tall Celt and short wiry plainsman strode out of the barracks side by side.

  Gorgidas’ note-taking and his own visit to Alypia Gavra reminded Marcus of the Greek doctor’s other interest. “How is that history of yours doing?” he asked.

  “It comes, Scaurus, a bit at a time, but it comes.”

  “May I see it?” the Roman asked, suddenly curious. “My Greek was never of the finest, I know, and it’s the worse for rust, but I’d like to try, if you’d let me.”

  Gorgidas hesitated. “I have only the one copy.” But unless he wrote for himself alone, the tribune was his only possible audience for his work in the original, and no Videssian translation, even if somehow made, could be the same. “Mind you care for it, now—don’t let your brat be gumming it.”

  “Of course not,” Scaurus soothed him.

  “Well all right, then, I’ll fetch it, or such of it as is fit to see. No, no stay there, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll get it.” The Greek went off to his billet in the next barracks hall. He returned with a pair of parchment scrolls, which he defiantly handed to Marcus.

  “Thank you,” the tribune said, but Gorgidas brushed the amenities aside with an impatient wave of his hand. Marcus knew better than to push him; the physician was a large-hearted man, but disliked admitting it even to himself.

  Scaurus took the scrolls back to his own quarters, lit a lamp, and settled down on the bedroll to read. As twilight deepened, he realized how poor and flickering the light was. He thought of the priest Apsimar back at Imbros and the aura of pearly radiance the ascetic cleric could project at will. Sometimes magic was very handy, though Apsimar would cry blasphemy if asked to be a reading lamp …

  Concentration on Gorgidas’ history drove such trivia from his mind. The going was slow at first. Scaurus had not read Greek for several years—it was distressing to see how much of his painfully built vocabulary had fallen by the wayside. The farther he went, though, the more he realized the physician had created—what was that phrase of Thucydides’?—a ktema es aei, a possession for all time.

  Gorgidas’ style was pleasingly straightforward; he wrote a smooth koine Greek, with only a few unusual spellings to remind one he came from Elis, a city that used the Doric dialect. But the history had more to offer than an agreeable style. There was real thought behind it. Gorgidas constantly strove to reach
beyond mere events to illuminate the principles they illustrated. Marcus wondered if his physician’s training had a hand in that. A doctor had to recognize a disease’s true nature rather than treating only its symptoms.

  Thus when speaking of anti-Namdalener riots in Videssos, Gorgidas gave an account of what had happened in the particular case he had observed, but went on to remark, “A city mob is a thing that loves trouble and is rash by nature; the civil strife it causes may be more dangerous and harder to put down than warfare with foreign foes.” It was a truth not limited to the Empire alone.

  Helvis came in, breaking Marcus’ train of thought. She had Dosti in the crook of her arm and led Malric by the hand. Her son by Hemond broke free from his mother and jumped on Scaurus’ stomach. “We went walking on the sea wall,” he said with a five-year-old’s frightening enthusiasm, “and mama bought me a sausage, and we watched the ships sailing away—”

  Marcus lifted a questioning eyebrow. “Bouraphos,” Helvis said. The tribune nodded. It was about time Thorisin sent Pityos help against the Yezda, and the drungarios of the fleet could reach the port on the Videssian Sea long before any force got there by land.

  Malric burbled on; Scaurus listened with half an ear. Helvis set Dosti down. He tried to stand, fell over, and crawled toward his father. “Da!” he announced. “Da-da-da!” He reached for the roll of parchment the tribune had set down. Remembering Gorgidas’ half-serious warning, Marcus snatched it away. The baby’s face clouded over. Marcus grabbed him and tossed him up and down, which seemed to please him well enough.

  “Me, too,” Malric said, tugging at his arm.

  Scaurus tried hard not to favor Dosti over his stepson. “All right, hero, but you’re a bit big for me to handle lying down.” The tribune climbed to his feet. He gave Dosti back to Helvis, then swung Malric through the air until the boy shrieked with glee.

  “Enough,” Helvis warned practically, “or he won’t keep that sausage down.” To her son she added, “And enough for you, too, young man. Get ready to go to bed.” After the usual protests, Malric slipped out of shirt and breeches and slid under the covers. He fell asleep at once.