by Sarah Zettel
A thought came to Risa. “Your brother will not be pleased.”
But Gawain only smiled. “Agravain will not be pleased when God Almighty raises him from the dust on the last day. It is far more than mortal man can accomplish.”
Side by side they set themselves on the road to Camelot.
Walking the streets of Caer Ludien, Euberacon saw the ruins of greatness on every side. The temple of Mithras crumbled in on itself, the roads were buckled and potholed, even the bridge had begun to list to one side. There were some great houses that still looked habitable, even well-appointed, but most had fallen down, leaving heaps of rubble to be overgrown by encroaching greensward, or shored up by mud and thatch hovels with wicker fences. Some efforts had been made to repair the wall, at least. Even a Saxon could see the need for defense.
The market was still there. It was a sea of mud, and the tiny warehouses looked as if they could barely hold enough cargo for one of the native’s little coracles to carry. But there were ships berthed at the broad river’s edge. Fat valley sheep milled about in their pens. Tall, blooded horses from Andalucia gazed about with scorn. Men sat at rickety tables, examining samples of metals or artisan work, hunched over their cups, speaking the universal language of barter.
He had heard that in the days of the Romans this place had been bustling, its ports crammed with ships come for wool, enamel, tin, silver, lead and slaves. Arthur was working to restore the Briton’s trade, but so far the results had been meager indeed. The Saxon overlord who held this place was both arrogant and greedy. Arthur had flattered and traded, and bribed and bullied, and had some measure of success. At least now his people could walk here unmolested.
The air by the river was somewhat fresher than in the warren of the ruinous city streets, with fewer smoky fires and stinking animals wandering free. Little dark men had set up tables, or just stacked up crockery jugs, to sell the black beer and fiery liquor the Saxons were learning to relish along with their native mead. They squatted in the mud or on chunks of broken stone, trading lies and drinks, growing more raucous and unsteady with each round. There would be fights before long, and the traders would have to look to their tents and their sheep.
In the middle of this display of barbarity was a small island of civility. A clean shaven man with his black hair swept back from a high, intelligent forehead wearing a dark blue cloak surveyed the ruffians over the top of a clay liquor cup. He wore a short sword at his hip, and held himself as if he knew how to use it, but his real protection clearly came from the two square men who flanked him with their axes in their hands and their knives in their belts. He conversed with another man who looked to be from Greece, or perhaps Crete. Both were sun-browned and clean, well-barbered and unafraid. Envy gnawed at Euberacon’s heart as he strode forward.
The man in the blue cloak saw the magus approach and touched his companion’s elbow, saying something softly. He set the liquor cup on the rickety table without any sign of having touched its contents and came forward, his hand outstretched.
“Magister,” he said as they clasped each others arms. “God! How do you bear it here? It’s no wonder the Romans fled this place.”
“I prefer life to death, Quintus,” Euberacon replied blandly. It felt good to speak his native language again. The patterns rolled comfortably off his tongue. “But come, give me the news.”
Quintus looked around him, but the only man who might possibly understand what they spoke of stood over by the Andalucian horses, and he already deep in conversation with their keeper. Even so, Euberacon moved them away from the liquor-sellers to stand by a fragment of brick wall that had somehow remained standing. His body guards followed, repositioning themselves to better keep up their watch. “The news is good. Justinian has ideas about tax collection that have upset many.”
Euberacon snorted. “That is to say he means to collect them.”
“The fog has not entirely dampened your mind,” said Quintus with a nod. “Yes, that’s it exactly and both the Greens and the Blues are making noises that something needs to be done about it.”
The idea of those two parties uniting should have been laughable, but an emperor who actually meant to enforce the tax laws might just drive those rivals together. “Have any of them a plan?”
“Not yet, but they do have a man, or a boy at any rate.”
“Who?”
“Hypatius. He’s a nephew of old Anastasius.”
Anastasius had been emperor when Euberacon’s father was a boy. Content with having enough in the treasury to fill the Hippodrome with chariot teams and exotic animal acts, he had never bothered anyone for more than that. Just the sort the richest citizens of Constantinople would prefer to have wearing the purple.
“Has he any strength of character about him?”
Quintus shrugged. “Not that I’ve seen, but that may be all to the good. Justinian has strength of character and to spare.” Quintus was a smuggler. Euberacon had in the past bought a number of jewels and poisons from the man that should not have been sold. If Justinian meant to enforce the tax laws, what else did he mean to enforce and who would he empower to do that enforcement? It was hideously expensive to bribe honest men.
“And Justinian’s woman?”
“You had best learn to call her Empress,” said Quintus, leaning against the broken wall. “They are to be married.”
No. Euberacon felt his spine straighten one joint at a time. “Impossible. The law forbids a patrician to marry an … actress.”
“Justinian is changing the law.”
Euberacon pressed his hand against the wall. The rough bricks scraped his palm. Theodora, the daughter of a whore and a dead bear-keeper. Theodora was to be empress? It could not be. It could not! If she wore the purple … if she was legitimized … he was trapped here in this place of mud and cold. He could never go home. He was lost.
“It will not happen,” he said through clenched teeth. “I will not permit it.”
“Magister,” said Quintus carefully. “You’ll need money to buy your way back in. You are a joke in the city now, the great magus chased out by Justinian’s whore.”
Euberacon ignored that. “Before two more winters have passed, I will have enough wealth even for Byzantium, and then we will make Justinian regret his choice of wife.”
Quintus’s face wrinkled as he looked over Euberacon’s shoulder at the crumbling city. “I don’t want to doubt you, Magister, but … how are you going to find that much gold out here?”
Euberacon smiled. “Even the barbarians have their gilded idols. The one they call the High King, Arthur, has a treasury stuffed with wealth his father raided from the Romans as they fled.”
“You’re going to bring down a barbarian king to bring down an emperor to bring down a woman?” Quintus looked as if he did not know whether to be impressed, or appalled.
Euberacon only smiled. “You will tell the ones who should know in the city that men and treasure will be coming to their aid?”
Now Quintus just looked skeptical, but he shrugged again. He knew Euberacon well enough to know he did not make promises he could not keep. “They will be glad to hear it.”
They spoke of politics awhile longer, of who was heading up the Blues and who the Greens, and of who had decided to throw their lot in with Justinian, and what shape those shifting loyalties were taking, of who was yet living and who had suddenly died. The men of this island thought themselves fierce because they would kill each other over a handful of cows? They knew nothing. In Constantinople, a man could be murdered for training animals too well, or for keeping the horses for the wrong chariot team and no one would think of it twice, as long as the proper bribes had been paid.
Almost no one.
It took awhile, but at last, Quintus’s store of news and gossip was emptied. Regretfully, Euberacon held out his hand again. “I must bid you farewell, Quintus. I have business to attend to here, and then I must go see that an item I have need of has been acquired.”
They clasped arms again. Whatever Quintus thought of Euberacon’s chances of success here, he kept it to himself. It didn’t matter, as long as he told those who needed to know that Euberacon would return, as long as he came back next year to bring the news and to remind Euberacon of the world beyond these shores.
The world to which I will soon return, Euberacon told himself as he walked away from the trader and the river, heading back into Caer Ludien’s smoke and shadows. Where I will take my rightful place, and make Theodora wish she had kept hers.
Euberacon had been meant for a clerk. His father had paid a decent bribe to get him apprenticed to a secretary in the imperial warehouses. It was a good enough position from which he could rise to a reasonable level of prominence, but not so close to the imperial palace that he would have to be made a eunuch to gain an appointment, nor that politics would get in his way, if he were quiet and kept his head down.
That was his father’s ideal. Work hard, take what you were given. Stay quiet and uninvolved, and you could live a good life. He had no ambition, no courage, no ability to understand why his son might be plagued with discontent.
But Euberacon saw a world around him that made no sense, a world of wealth he could never have, of secrets and powers he would never know. So much that was forever shut off, so much that was shifted without warning and yet could not be made to shift by the likes of him. Why? Be content and trust in God, his father said. But how could one trust in a God that was so far away, and who tormented even his chosen people?
He might have learned contentment eventually. He might have become the private secretary for some prominent citizen and found his place in intrigues enough to believe he was actually shaping the world around him in some fundamental way. Instead, however, his master, Lucius decided to give Euberacon access to his library. Lucius, and his father, and his grandfather, it seemed, had all drilled their apprentices by having them make copies of books and public documents, and then keeping those copies for themselves. Euberacon had never seen so many books in one man’s hands before. He spent all of his free time in that bright room with its high windows. He pestered Lucius to teach him Greek and Arabic as well as Latin so he could decipher some of the older texts.
It was in that room, late one night, by the yellow light of an oil lamp, that he found the book on necromancy.
At first he thought he was reading some fable, but it quickly became clear they were recipes — for love, for divination, for finding what was lost, for guarding, for poison. It explained the nature of several of the various demons and of angels, and when they might be summoned, and what they might be called on to do. It explained that any man, be he pure of body and of learning and intelligence, could have this mastery over the invisible.
Such promises were made in the market every day. Tis unguent would bring beauty. That amulet wealth. Euberacon shut the volume and returned it to its place, but he returned to it time and again, reading over the mysteries, wondering if he had been wrong. What if God was not distant after all. What if the divine and the ethereal were close beside him?
“Could it really be reached out and touched so simply?”
“Not so simply.”
Master Lucius stood in the library doorway. Euberacon made some feeble attempt to hide the book, but soon realized it was pointless. His master already knew what it was he read, and what was more, he was pleased.
“Much of what that book says is pure foolishness.” Lucius was a tall man, and he crossed the library in three strides, lifting the slim, red volume out of Euberacon’s hands. “But there is enough of truth in it to begin with.” He smiled and ran his hand across the leather binding. “You have the talent, Euberacon. I saw it in you. You can learn the High Arts, if you want.”
Euberacon did not hesitate for so much as a heartbeat. “Yes, Master. I do.”
That night, Euberacon had dared the curfew and crept out to the city walls. He had sat on the warm stones beneath the sky’s million stars and he’d thought about what the book said, about the angels and how each ruled a day and an hour, about the devils and their ranks and orders. It seemed to him that all that was solid had become soft, like clay, and that it could be molded and worked, and if one could speak to the hands that molded it, if one could tell them what to do … then anything was possible. Even for a clerk with a mouse for a father.
It was no wonder the Father Church forbid such studies, it was a dangerous route he undertook. The Church disapproved, and while they were willing to tolerate a number of heresies in Constantinople, this was not one of them. If he were caught in its practice, he would die, publicly and painfully. The Church, hand-in-hand with the imperial powers, traded on the ignorance of the people and would permit only those they blessed looking into esoteric matters. Master Lucius assured him that if he went into the church, it would be one way could continue study in safety. But Euberacon did not mean to cloak his studies in a cleric’s robe. He would take the other route.
In Constantinople, wealth bought power. Power, in turn, brought safety and safety brought peace. With enough wealth, he could buy the peace he needed to practice the highest arts. He could study without fear, and he could understand all the greatest secrets, of angels or of devils, of the workings of the universe and how they could be made to turn or not, as he chose.
A few of the smallest miracles, and men began to come to him. A chariot race won unexpectedly. A successful prediction, a caught spy, a dead thief. They came with documents to be copied, or to have letters written, and they left with cures and charms, potions and prophecy, and Euberacon’s house grew rich with books and fat with secrets. He was able to purchase the dragon’s blood and gems, and even poisons needed for the most subtle and complex of summonings. He was able to bribe the proper officials to keep their eyes averted.
Then, a fat and sweaty man calling himself Octavius had come to Euberacon, sodden with drink. He wanted a girl. A girl he had seen that day in the Hippodrome. He would pay to have her, but it could not be done the ordinary way. Her father had worked with the animals, been a bear-keeper or some such. He might still have friends. But he would pay for a love potion so the girl would come to him willingly.
Euberacon had sent him away, staggering even more badly than when he had come. But the fool had returned. He would have his girl. He would pay for her to come to him willingly.
By this time, Euberacon had heard something of the story. Apparently it had been a small and sordid drama. A woman, the wife of the Greens’ bear trainer, had stood up in the Hippodrome, before the emperor and all the public, with her two daughters beside her and exhorted, cried, shamed and begged for the pension owing her so that she and those same two daughters would not starve.
“Why not buy the one you want from her, if she’s short of money?” Euberacon had asked.
“No, no,” the fat fool had insisted. “She must come to me. She must be willing. She must love me.”
It was as unsavory as anything Euberacon had yet done. In addition, it was a complex spell involving a particularly difficult sacrifice. He named an enormous sum. “Octavius brought it soon thereafter. Apparently the mother had been only partly successful with her public plea for help and had been forced to put the girls on stage to help earn their keep. He had seen her. She was marvelous. He could not sleep for wanting her.
“Why do this?” Euberacon remembered asking, although he normally cared little what his clientele were doing, unless it might be something of use to know later. “An actress can be purchased for one-tenth what you give me.”
“No!” cried the fat man, shrinking backwards. Beads of sweat rolled down his cheeks. “She must want me, as I want her! An actress … with other men … no, no. She must be all mine!”
Euberacon shrugged. He took a white dove and made the sacrifice. He drew the required picture and anointed it with the blood as prescribed. He wrote the necessary runes and said the incantations, and at last added the girl’s name. Comito. One look at Octavius while he had th
e parchment about his person and she would fall madly in love. She would burn for him and forsake everything she had to be at his side.
Euberacon took his payment. Octavius went happily to the theater. Euberacon continued to back his men, do their favors and pursue his studies in safety.
So he had thought.
No divination however powerful could have told him that the other sister, the one he had heard had been reduced to acting and wool-spinning for her keep, would catch the eye of Justinian, Emperor Justin’s heir, that she would help guide him through the maze that was politics in Constantinople, where a friend could as easily poison one as a foe, and be raised up herself in return. Any true man would have discarded her, but Justinian did not, and as soon as it became clear power was within her grasp, men began to die.
It seemed her father had not just died. He had been murdered. For money or favor, there were those who would right such wrongs. Theodora now had both, and she was going to find the men who robbed her of her father, and of her sister. Comito, it seemed, had never returned to her family, or anywhere else.
The men who had killed her father went first. “Octavius followed shortly thereafter. Euberacon was supposed to have been next.
How she found out it had been him, he did not know. Presumably, if she had assassins in her pay, a magus would not have been too much for her indelicate sensibilities. Or her men could have simply wrung it out of Octavius’s fat throat. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had paid her men enough that they had been willing to chase him up the coast all the way to Gaul and had only given up when he had crossed the sea to this God-forsaken place.
And now this woman was to be empress in Constantinople. Well, let her wear the purple. Let her rule Justinian and the empire for as long as they could stand her. It would be sweet indeed to watch her fall from that highest of all places.
But now there were different men to visit. The Saxons who held this place and the surrounding lands needed to be pricked and pushed. Things were not going well in Pen Marhas, and these men, their southern brothers, had to know of it. These were not men who wanted to believe they were weak, that those farther north and inland were better men than they. Some of them were even intelligent enough to realize that while Arthur’s cadre was out poking about in the western lands, his eastern border might be vulnerable for a very little while. These were men who were used to moving quickly, to seizing their opportunities, and Euberacon’s business now was to show them what those opportunities were, without them knowing it was he who had done so. There were ways to alter appearance, to make men forget where or how they had heard a thing.
