Dwyrin struggled to clear his sight, focusing on the meditations and the rituals that Nephet had taught him. For a moment, it worked, and he could suddenly see with the "clear sight" that the teachers at the school had drilled into them over and over. The links of the chain in his hands became completely clear, perfectly distinct. His thin fingers ran over them, suddenly catching on a discolored link.
It is not in harmony with the others, he thought. He pressed against the iron of the link with his thought and the ragged purple scar that ran across it in his clear sight sparked, then flared up for a moment. The iron splintered in his hand. Suddenly fearful of discovery, Dwyrin slowly passed the chain through the ring on the neck collar one link at a time. In a moment it was gone.
Free, he stood up. Hundreds of other captives lay all around him, sleeping tightly packed together. Ten or fifteen feet away, a raised walkway ran down the center of the hold. There was a carpet of bodies between him and the walkway. Behind him, the hull was solid oak planking. Above, however, were the timbers of the main deck. A series of tie-hooks were screwed into the beams.
Gauging his spring, he leapt up and snatched at the first one. One hand laid hold, the other scrabbled at the splintery planks. For a moment he swung there, his arm trembling with effort. Then his other hand caught the next tie-hook. His feet he drew up in a curl. Panting with the effort, he let go of the first hook and swung out, grabbing for the next. By luck he caught it on the first try and immediately let go of the previous one. The momentum carried him to the fourth and then he dropped lightly onto the walkway. The ship creaked as it rode over a swell, groaning along its full length.
Dwyrin panted, crouched on the walkway in the darkness. His arms trembled and he felt light-headed. Regardless, after a moment, he stood up and quickly ran to the end of the hold. A ladder led up to the deck, and now he could spy an edge of stars through the hatchway and past the square sails that caught the wind to send the ship northward. He crept up the stairs.
Cautiously, he raised his head above the hatchway and looked about. The rear of the ship rose up in front of him, a high stern castle with two great steering oars mounted on either side. On the steering deck, a lantern guttered in a green-glass holder. Low voices drifted down on the night wind. Dwyrin looked back up the main deck, seeing little, only great piles of goods, tied down with netting. As quietly as he could manage, he crept out of the hold stair and to the near edge of the ship. Beyond it the sea rushed past, a vast depth shot with blue flames and violet clouds. The wavetops glittered with pale-blue fire. Colors began to spill out of the corners of his eyes, blinding him.
Unsteady, he climbed up onto the gunnel, gripping one of the ropes that ran from the edge of the ship to the nearest mast. Below him an abyss of light and shadow convulsed as he stared down into the infinite depths. Vast sea creatures writhed in the void, intricate and complex beyond all imagining. A sensation of falling gripped him and he clung tight to the rope. Distantly, like an echo in a dream, he heard someone shouting. At last he managed to relax his hand enough to let go of the rope.
Hands seized him, rough and callused, dragging him back onto the deck. Sounds rushed past, but he could not understand them. He struggled, striking out with weak fists. Something fast smashed into the side of his face and the pain cleared his vision again. The faces of brutal men crowded above him. One held more chains, another a sack whose dark opening yawned like a hungry mouth. Dwyrin cried out in fear, and focused his thought against the hands holding him down. There was another bright flash and then a horrid wailing. The man who had been holding him down leapt back, his head wreathed in bright white flame. Soundlessly he tried to scream, but the flame burrowing into his chest consumed all of the air in his lungs. The other sailors scattered in horror. The burning man fell backward against the gunnel, his limbs thrashing in extreme pain.
Dwyrin scuttled to one side, seeking safety in one of the great bales tied to the decking. An iron hand suddenly gripped his throat. Still weak, he struggled to tear the talonlike fingers from his windpipe. It was no use, and after an endless passage of trying to breathe a giddy darkness swallowed his mind.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Offices, The Palatine Hill, Roma Mater
Unlike the isolated detachment of the Summer House in Cumae, the Offices of the Palace were crowded shoulder to shoulder with bureaucrats, lictors, patrons of all sizes and shapes, Imperial officers, Praetorians in their red cloaks, foreigners and hundreds of slaves.
Maxian stood for a moment on the steps of what had once been the Temple of the Black Stone, built off of the north side of the Palatine Hill on a great raised platform. Now the temple was the venue of the various embassies, both from foreign states and from cities and provinces within the Empire. A constant stream of people swarmed up and down the steps, hurrying across the narrow way to the vaulted arch and gate that led into the Imperial Offices themselves. The young healer, dressed in a nondescript cloak and tunic, leaned back into the tiny bit of shade the column provided him. The air was heavy and hot, thick with the miasma of thousands of sweaty people going about their business in a great hurry. He continued to peer over the heads of those on the lower steps, looking for the man he had come to see. Though armed with a good description—tall, sandy blond hair, crooked nose—he still failed to pick him out.
The heat of the day did not better his temper, which had been worn of late. Dreams of the night in Ostia continued to haunt him, now intertwined with memories of the vision he had experienced in the little temple at Cumae. A recurring sense of familiarity linked the two events, and he had been spending long, and late, hours in the Imperial Archives to try find out what could have caused the deaths of Dromio and his whole family in such a way. Too, he still held serious reservations about his brother's plan to aid the Eastern Empire. He rubbed tired eyes with an ink-stained hand. Where was this Briton?
Old Petronus, at the library tucked into the back of the Baths of Caracalla, had suggested this foreigner to him and had, supposedly, arranged this meeting. Odd that the Briton, Mordius, required a meeting in a public square—it would have been far more comfortable to meet in an inn or banquet house. No matter, the Prince thought, if he has answers...
"My lord?" Maxian looked up. A tall northerner stood on the step below his, though his height easily raised him to an equal eye level with Maxian. Sure enough, he had a nose once broken and now crooked, long blond hair tied back in braids, and he was dressed in trousers and a light cotton shirt. A small, neat beard completed the picture.
Maxian squinted at him. "You are Mordius? A Briton?"
The man smiled. "Aye, my lord, the very same. Petronus sent a message that I should meet a young, tired-looking Roman with long dark hair here. Are you he?"
Maxian smiled back. "I am. Let us go someplace dark and cool, with wine..."
—|—
An hour later, in the recesses of a tavern in a narrow street just north of the Coliseum, Maxian thought he had a good mark on this barbarian. As Mordius had explained over an amphora and a half of middling Tibertinan wine, he was a man sent to Rome to make money for his investors in distant Londonium. He had been in the city for six years, first to handle shipments of ceramics and glass back north to Britain, then handling a growing traffic of wool, lumber, amber, iron, coal, and tin from the icy northern islands to the ever-hungry markets of Italia. He was married to a Roman woman now and had a young son. Two of his cousins had come to join him; they handled the warehousing and traffic of goods. Mordius had a new objective—to make more money with the money that he controlled in Rome itself.
None of this surprised Maxian. Foreigners had been coming to the Eternal City for centuries, looking for work, looking for riches. Some few found it; many more failed and went home or became refuse in the streets of the Subura. Others passed onward, always looking for a new Elysium. This one, however, had stuck and from the restrained richness of his clothes, from his accent and his bearing, the Prince thought that he had become
successful.
"It is impossible to be successful in Rome if one does not follow proper custom," Mordius was saying. "One requires a patron, both to represent your interests in the courts and to help you navigate the intricacies of the State and the will of the people. I account myself lucky to have made the acquaintance, even the friendship, of Gregorius Auricus."
Maxian looked up in surprise. "The one they call Gregorius Magnus? He is a powerful man in the Senate and the city."
Mordius bowed his head in assent. "Just so. Without his friendship, all of my efforts here would be dust. I would doubtless be back in Britain, digging stumps out of fields." He paused and raised the earthenware cup he was drinking from. "Even this poor vintage would be acclaimed throughout Londonium as an exemplar of the vintners' art. I drink to Rome, the Roman sun, and fine wine." He drained the cup. Maxian joined him, then put the cup down on the table between them. "Petronus, at the baths, said that you had encountered a difficulty with a business deal. He told me this after I had related to him a problem that I had with a business arrangement of my own. It seems, and I say seems, that the two troubles might be related."
Mordius refilled his cup, then offered the amphora to Maxian, who declined, turning his cup over. It joined a confusion of old wine stains on the tabletop.
"A difficulty, yes," the Briton said, his face growing still and grim. "Almost seventy thousand sesterces in investment, gone. A man who had become a good friend, gone. Nothing to indicate an enemy, a business rival. All ashes within a day."
"A fire?" Maxian asked, disappointed. Petronus had hinted at more than that.
"The fire came after," Mordius replied. "Joseph and his family were dead before then. I will tell you what I know, what I heard, what I saw." The Briton sat up a little straighter in on the bench and the cadence of his voice changed. Maxian wondered if the man had trained as an orator in his youth.
"Two of the businesses that I represent are the importation of lumber, which is cut into planks for building in the city, and wool, particularly to be made into heavy cloaks. As such I see the foremen of both the lumber mills and the weavers on a daily basis. Five months ago each man told me an odd story about a silversmith, a Jew, who had come to them to ask them for their refuse. To the mill he had come and asked for the dust that comes from the saws when they are cutting the logs. To the weaver he had asked for their old scraps of linen. This intrigued me, for I can smell business, particularly new business, from miles away. I asked around, spent a few coppers, and found the silversmith. His name was Joseph and his shop was down in the Alsienita, across the Tiber. A poor neighborhood, but cheap enough for him to afford a workshop without too many bribes.
"The day that I went in to talk to Joseph about his sawdust and linen rags he was despondent. He had been spending all of his time on his new project, and his wife was beside herself at the state of their jewelry business. His sons and daughters were spending all of their time making a terrible mess in the back of the shop with his oddments, while customers went waiting at the door, and then did not come at all.
"Needless to say, it seemed a reasonable business opportunity—not as if I were setting his house afire and then buying it from him in the street... I had some silver in my bag and I gladly pressed it into his hand in exchange for his story. He looked hopeful, and I know that he was more open with me, a fellow foreigner, than with some—pardon me, my lord—snobbish Roman. So he told me the tale and it pricked my ears right up.
"Joseph had a brother, Menacius, who was a scribe and made a good living in the shops down behind the Portica Aemilla copying scrolls and letters and what-not. I know the kind of living a good scribe makes, I've paid my share of gold to them. Still, this Menacius was very successful, for he was blessed with three sons, all with good eyes and steady hands. The three of them were like peas in a pod and this suited Menacius very well, for their letters were all but indistinguishable from one another. He could set all three of them to one book and each would take a section. Three working instead of one makes quick work. The sesterces were wheeling themselves up to the door—that's how good it was. Now, like most good things, this came to an end.
"One of the sons fell sick, and then another ran off with a snake-dancer from Liburnium. To make things worse for Menacius, he had just caught a deal with the Office of the Mint for no less than seventy copies of the Regulation of the Coinage. A very good sum he stood to make from that too, no doubt, but to win the deal he had to agree to a tight delivery schedule. Now, with only one scribe, he was in a terrible state. Being a man of family, he had gone to see Joseph and poured out his tale of woe. Joseph, who was a fellow good with his hands and clever to boot, thought about it for a time and then struck upon a solution.
"If there were not three sons, then make one son do the work of three. Their strength came from their handwriting being steady, firm, and clear. So he struck, so to say, upon this." Mordius opened a small leather bag and removed a tiny object, pressing into the Prince's hand.
Maxian turned over the little piece of lead in his hand. A square bolt, no more than a little finger's bone in length. Flat at one end with two notches, one on each side, bumpy on the other. He looked tip in puzzlement at the Briton, who was grinning broadly.
"A bit of lead?" Maxian asked. The Briton nodded, taking it back. With one scarred hand, he cleared a space on the tabletop. Then he carefully took the bit of lead and dipped it in his wine cup. Even more carefully, he then pressed the bumpy end into the tabletop.
"Look," Mordius said, moving his hand away. Maxian leaned over and squinted down at the table in the poor light. "An alpha," he said. A tiny, almost perfect, letter was scribed on the tabletop in dark wine. The Briton nodded.
"Joseph and his sons made hundreds of them from lead scrap, all of the letters of the alphabet, even all the numbers. Each little peg was scored at the flat base, so that they could slide into a copper slat to hold them straight. Seventy slats per frame, each frame made of wood with a backing. Each frame a whole page of printing." The Briton paused a moment, watching Maxian's face closely.
Maxian stared at him in dumbfounded astonishment. After just a moment fear replaced astonishment, and then a universe of possibilities unfolded before him. He sat back stunned, unable to speak. Mordius reached out, turned over the wine-cup, and then filled it. The Briton pushed it toward Maxian's hand, which of itself moved, took the cup, and brought it to his lips.
After a time, Maxian could speak. "And then what happened then?"
The Briton shrugged. "There were troubles, of course. Papyrus was no good to use with the frames; the scrolls kept splitting when they were pressed against it. None of the inks used with a brush or quill would stick right to the lead and they smeared anyway. The frames were awkward and really no faster than a trained scribe to use. Joseph and Menacius and their families labored for weeks to solve the problems. That was what had led Joseph to the mill and the weavers. He was looking for something that would make a better writing surface than papyrus. His sons had found that there were fine-grained woods that would hold the ink and fine linens that were flexible enough not to split when the frames were pressed upon them.
"By this time I was a partner in the enterprise, though they kept the details to themselves. The deal that I struck was for the right to use the frame-scribe for my own business and to export books made with it to the north. A scroll is like gold there, there are so few, so I knew that my fortune was assured. One copy of Plato or Sophocles could become a thousand copies, each easy to transport and worth a hundred times its own weight in silver.
"Only a month ago one of Joseph's sons came to me at the warehouse and bade me come and visit the shop that night. His father had finally solved the last puzzle. They were determined to make a clean copy of the Regulations that very night and do the rest of the lot over the following days. The deadline was very close and I know they must have been overjoyed.
"But when I arrived that night, the shop was shuttered and dark. I knocke
d and knocked, but no one came to the door. At last a neighbor saw me in the street and told me that they had all gathered for a late-afternoon meal and none had gone out. Fearing that something was wrong, I forced the door—no easy task at a jeweler's shop!—and went inside. I was back out again in minutes, gagging at the smell and the sights I saw within. They, of course, were all dead amid the clutter of their meal."
Maxian, unbidden, felt a great pressure upon him, seemingly from the air all around him. For a moment he was back in the dim kitchen in Ostia, dragging Dromio onto the table, pleading for his friend to hold on just a little longer. Trembling, he drank again from his cup. The eyes of the Briton, hooded, were on him.
"I have seen much the same," the Prince said, his voice weak. "Like loaves of bread."
"The neighbor saw me, of course," Mordius continued, "and ran out of his house. I gasped something about them all being dead and the smell. He thought it was the plague and ran off shouting. Within minutes half of the neighborhood was in the street with buckets and torches. The vigiles came, but could not reach the house for the press of the crowd. The shout of plague, plague was like a drumbeat. They burned it, the whole house and the ones on either side, to keep the plague from them. I fled, knowing that I would be next on that pyre.
"I went back a few days ago. There was nothing left, only the burned-out shell of the house and, in the ashes, a few of those, unmelted. I took that one as a souvenir, but nothing else. I account myself lucky that my visits were few and I knew little of their work. I am alive."
Maxian stared at the little lead token on the table. He scratched his beard. That odd feeling was back, tickling at the edge of his perception. "No one else now, save you and I, know of what they had devised. No other scribes, no officials?"
Mordius nodded. "I thought the same thing. But these Jews are a secretive lot and they do not talk to strangers, particularly Roman ones. Someone killed them, but who I cannot say. There would have been many who cursed their names, if they had been successful, but now they are unknown."
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