The Shadow of Ararat

by Thomas Harlan

  Maxian, still terribly weary, shook his head no. Then his head rolled back against the wall and he began snoring. Gaius Julius sighed and put the odd ball of metal on the end of the table. This done, he carefully lifted up the Prince and, straining with the effort, carried the boy up the stairs to the main floor of the house.

  —|—

  Anastasia de'Orelio, Duchess of Parma, looked up in irritation at the sound of rapping on the door to her private study. Sighing at the latest interruption, she put down the letter she was reading and composed her hair.

  "Enter," she said, her voice tired and on the edge of open irritation. She sighed again inwardly when Krista entered the chamber and knelt by the side of the desk. Perhaps it had been a mistake to begin using the girl in the field. She was quick and usually circumspect, it was true, and rarely drew attention to herself—she was a slave, after all.

  "Yes, my dear, what is it?"

  "We kept watch on the Egyptian house in the hills, mistress, until the Prince and his servant returned. They came back very early this morning and they had two bodies, fresh ones, in a wagon. They took them inside the building and we came back to the city to warn you. The Prince is up to something dreadful up there! We should inform the aediles, or the prefect, and stop him."

  Krista was almost breathless. She and Sigurd had hastened back to the city as fast as they could.

  Anastasia sighed and looked down at the girl, still kneeling at her side, panting. Youth! she thought to herself, rubbing the graininess from her eyes. Too many late nights, now that the Emperor was gone from the city, and too little sleep were wearing her down.

  "My dear, the Prince may be a little odd, but this news is nothing untoward. Remember, he is a healer of the Temple of Asklepius. Though it is not particularly pleasant that he may traffic in the bodies of the dead, it is his profession to understand the workings of the human body. The other watchers in the city reported to me earlier today that two bodies were purchased from the burial temple on the road south of the city. The families, I suppose, would be upset, but they are dead, you know.

  "You must learn to see the whole picture, Krista, if you are going to be of use to me. It is good, even, that the Prince has decided to undertake his medical investigations outside of the city. If it were discovered that he was carting bodies around in the wee hours, it would reflect badly on the Emperor."

  Krista gave her mistress a frowning look but quickly schooled her features into calm acceptance and polite attentiveness.

  Lady de'Orelio continued: "The Prince has a project that is consuming all of his attention—which is a welcome change from his previous lassitude. Though I surely appreciated his pursuit of the available women in the city, this is far better for him. His brother, I know, is worried about his apparent disappearance, but I'll have a talk with him tomorrow. In the meantime, you need to return to your previous duties here. I will send Sigurd and Antonius to watch the Egyptian house."

  For a moment, Krista considered telling her mistress what she felt about that in a loud and angry voice, but the memory of previous, very short-lived arguments with the Duchess quelled that impulse. Instead she bowed her head to the tiles and retreated demurely from the room. In the hallway, after closing the door, she cursed—entirely silently—for fifteen minutes before, shaking with anger, she stalked off to her own cell in the servants' quarters.

  Pigheaded old woman, she snarled to herself in the safety of her thoughts. The pretty Prince may be a healer and all, but he and that old man are up to something evil.

  But she could see no way to do anything about it if she wanted to continue living. Disobedient slaves were treated harshly in Rome.

  —|—

  "It's lead." Maxian spilled the remains of the metal shavings into a cup on the long wooden table. The air in the basement was still fetid and stank of corruption. Two days of sweaty work in the darkness had not freshened the air any. Abdmachus was perched on a stool they had scavenged from one of the outbuildings of the house. Gaius Julius, fresh from dragging the body of the young black man out to the crematorium in the back garden, was sitting on the steps down from the main floor, drinking deep from a flagon of watered wine.

  "Lead?" Abdmachus' voice was filled with curiosity. "Did he eat it?"

  "I don't know... It permeated his whole body, in minute fragments, much smaller than can be seen with the naked eye. His liver held most of it, though his kidneys and stomach lining had some. When I started drawing it out, there was a great deal suspended in his blood as well." Maxian's voice was still weary, but he had begun to recover from his second examination.

  "Gaius Julius." The Prince turned to the old man. "This man was a longtime resident of the city, yes?"

  The dead man nodded and wiped his mouth before saying: "By the report of the aediles in his district, he had lived there almost his whole life, fifty-two years. He was the oldest man in the area, or at least the oldest recently dead. It's lucky he had no relatives to pay the burial tax, or they would have cremated him before I got there."

  "So, a Roman citizen of fifty years. He probably never left the city in his life, unless to visit the gardens outside of the city on a holiday. Somehow he ingested a large quantity of lead. Now, the other man, he was not long in the city?"

  "No more than a month," Gaius Julius said, "a Mauretanian slave who angered his master. Clubbed on the head with a pewter mug and left to die in the alley behind the master's house. The street sweepers picked him up. Just fresh the morning we brought him here."

  Maxian nodded, pensive. "He is reasonably healthy, foreign, and he has no lead to speak of in his body, though there were minute traces in his stomach."

  Abdmachus raised an eyebrow at this. "Then he was exposed as well to something common that carries the metal."

  Maxian picked up the fragment ball and crushed it between his fingers. The particulate metal collapsed easily into a powder at the bottom of the cup. He rubbed his fingers clean on a cloth.

  "I have lead in my body too," the Prince said, his face calm and considering. "I checked after I examined the African boy. Far less than the old man but more than the slave. We were all three exposed to the metal, and I think that I know how."

  Abdmachus cocked his head, staring at the Prince.

  Gaius Julius spoke into the moment of silence before Maxian, however. "The aqueducts again. I remember reading in the logbooks of the Imperial architects that the pipes that carry water from the stone channels to the public fountains and insulae are made of lead. Is it the taste in the water that you noticed before?"

  Maxian turned and his face was dark, turned away from the lantern light. "Yes. Subtle and almost unnoticeable—unremarked by anyone because Romans do not, as a matter of course, drink their water straight. Anyone who did notice the taste would assume that it was river water. So! Another piece of the puzzle."

  Gaius Julius stood up and stretched, groaning at the ache in his old bones. "Not the whole answer then? Is lead poisonous? Would it cause these things that you see?"

  Abdmachus cleared his throat. "I doubt not that this much lead in a man's organs is cause for concern and may have hastened his death, but the thing that we are seeking is sorcerous in its base nature. Lead, my dear general, is most assuredly inimical to sorcery."

  "He's right, Gaius. Generally when you desire to prevent sorcery from affecting something you wrap it or stop it up with lead. It is a neutral metal, neither positive nor negative in influence. The unseen powers slide off of it like water off glass."

  Gaius Julius' answer was interrupted by a sudden bark of laughter from Abdmachus. Both the Prince and the dead man turned, their faces puzzled, to look at the Persian.

  "All this time..." Abdmachus put his hands to his face, though his body shook with laughter. "All this time, we wondered and argued and plagued the gods with our pleas for knowledge..."

  "All this time—what?" Gaius Julius snapped.

  Abdmachus held up a hand and pinched his nose to stop giggling.
"All this time, my dear fellow, the Kings of Persia have made one unceasing demand upon the magi—why is the Roman Legion immune to sorcery? Have you not considered it yourselves? Rome marches out without sorcery and nearly conquers the world—smashing Egypt, a veritable den of wizards—crushing the remains of Alexander's empire, breaking the backs of the Gaels and their druids, the Germans and their witchmen. Who thinks of a Roman sorcerer?"

  "No one!" Gaius Julius huffed. "Sorcery is the work of weak Easterners and Greeks. Roman spirit conquered the world!"

  Maxian laid a hand on the dead man's shoulder and shook his head slightly.

  "You think that each soldier marched out from Rome with a belly full of lead," he said quietly, watching the little Persian. "Each man carried, all unknowing, a puissant shield against the wizardry of his enemies."

  "Yes," Abdmachus said, his face weary. "Workings and patterns that could lay waste to whole nations of warriors fail or falter when directed at the ranks of a Roman army. I am a fool not to think of it before. Even some of your weapons are made of lead... all innocently impervious."

  The dead man rubbed the stubble of beard that had accumulated while he had been passing on sleep and rest for the pleasures of digging in body yards and rubbish dumps. "Well, all that aside, do the bodies show the influence of this 'dark power' that you two can see pervading the city?"

  Maxian breathed deep and sat down in the high-backed chair again. His head was splitting again, this time with a fatigue-induced ache. Though he felt stronger than ever after the ill-remembered events in the Appian tomb, the kind of detail work that he had done with the two bodies carried its own price.

  "The old man's body carries it like a mother cat her kittens. It hides in his blood and crawls, unseen, along his bones. It seems... it seems to be almost a part of him. The African has none of it. He is a clean slate."

  "Again, something tied to the city, to Rome," Abdmachus said. "And you? Could you find it in you as well?"

  "Yes," Maxian said, his face drawn with fatigue. "As strong, or stronger, than the old man. It seems to be quiescent now, but I fear that it is waiting for the opportune moment to come out and destroy me somehow. I could try removing it from my body, perhaps here, where it is attenuated by this foreign building. I could succeed..." He shook his head to try to dispel the gloom that threatened to overwhelm him.

  "Odd," the Persian said. He picked up his note tablets and began shuffling through them. "Pardon me if I pry, but you were born in the provincial city of Narbo, if I remember correctly. You have come only recently to Rome—no more than, what, twelve years ago? Yet you say that you show as much effect of this curse as a man who has lived in the city all his life. This augurs that the curse is not borne by something specific to the city of Rome at all."

  Maxian considered this—it could be true. But if so, then what carried the curse? Something that affected men thousands of miles apart, yet possibly only within the confines of the Empire. What commonality did they hold that subjected them to this?

  He and Abdmachus continued talking and the afternoon whiled itself away. Gaius Julius took the opportunity to slip away and sleep in the shade of the cedar trees in the garden. They would argue for hours, he knew, and never realize that he was absent. The sun was hot, and the afternoon still and quiet. He yawned mightily. Even a six-hundred-and-forty-year-old needs a nap now and then, he thought.

  —|—

  Krista crept through the wild irises and lilies that grew on the northern side of the house like a slinking cat. She had traded her bright shift for a dusty gray tunic, nondescript and already worn. Her feet were bare, though the calluses that she had acquired on the hard floors of the house of de'Orelio served her well as she moved through the overgrown bower. Her long hair was tied back behind her head. She had left the broad-brimmed straw hat she favored for going out in the sun back at the tree line. Coming to an old aisle in the garden, she peered out from the high grass. There was no one to be seen, or heard. She darted across to the foundation wall that held up the northern end of the portico.

  Again she paused, listening. Very faintly from inside the house, she could hear the banging of a hammer and chisel on stone. Well, that's at least one of them, she muttered to herself, under her breath. Fear churned slowly in her belly—fear not only of being caught by the men here at the house but also of what would happen to her if she was not able to complete this excursion before the Duchess noticed that she had been on her trip to the flower market in the Forum Boarium for a very long time. Luckily, no one had bothered to tell the stable master that she was no longer taking the white pony out to the hills with Sigurd. It was tied off to a tree in a field almost a half mile away, downhill.

  The prospect of being seriously whipped or even losing a foot for running away did not please her at all, but she was bone-certain that the pretty Prince and his foreign companions were up to something dangerous. She had wrestled with her feelings for the Prince on the long ride up from the city and had come to the sobering conclusion that though he was quite nice for a Prince of the Empire, and seemed to like her quite a bit, if he was up to something that would hurt the Duchess, then he would have to pay for it. This digging up of bodies and carting them about secretly put her on edge. That and the odd feeling she had gotten about the old man she had waylaid in the Archives. He looked like a grandfather, but he had been far too active in their little tryst than he had a right to be. His eyes and skin were funny too. She had dreamed bad dreams about him for a week after that.

  She pattered down the line of the portico wall, keeping her head low, to the end. There she peeked out and saw that the back garden was also empty. The sharp crack-crack of the chisel continued to echo from inside. She glanced around again. Twenty steps and she could get up the stairs and inside, or maybe she should climb this little wall and go in through the portico?

  An iron clamp suddenly closed on "her left arm and a heavy hand, smelling of freshly turned dirt and worse, closed over her mouth. She nearly screamed, but twisted aside instead and lashed out with a long brown leg. Her heel caught something soft and fleshy and there was a sharp grunting sound behind her. The clamp released on her arm and she darted away from the wall. Her heart pounding with fear and her veins afire, she sprinted off down the hill, leaping over the broken fountains and the scattered bushes. A rock, thrown with a keen eye, clipped her on the side of the head as she vaulted the crumbling brick wall at the bottom of the garden, and she tumbled, senseless, down the hillside to crash into a rosebush. The last thing she heard were boots clattering over the wall.

  —|—

  "Your friend is quick," Gaius Julius said sorely, sitting on the steps to the upper floor and kneading his inner thigh to try to get the knot out of the muscle. "Another two fingers to the right and I'd have been puking my guts out while she made like Diana into the woods."

  Maxian ignored the dead man, all of his concentration was focused on the deep wound on the side of the girl's head. The rock the old man had brought her down with had cracked her behind the ear and left a bad cut. Little sharp fragments of stone had been driven into her scalp and the fleshy part at the top of her ear. The power buzzed and trembled in his hands, flickering a faint green while he worked. Under his gentle fingers, the slivers of stone trembled and then slowly eased themselves out of the flesh with a liquid pop. Skin knit closed behind them and shattered veins closed up.

  After fifteen grains, he smoothed back her long hair and the flap of skin settled back into place, becoming one with its fellows. There would be no scar. Maxian smiled and felt in himself a simple joy that he had not felt in a long time. For just a moment, his mind was clear of the heavy dread of his burden. He gently turned her face back up and raised her head to slide a brocade pillow under it.

  "Known her long?" Gaius Julius' voice was carefully neutral. Maxian looked up, his eyes narrowed. Abdmachus, sitting in the background, turned away a little and concentrated on his notes and writings. The dead man regarded the Prince with
a level eye.

  "Two years," Maxian said, his voice cold.

  "What are you going to do with her? By your account she is the servant of a possible enemy of ours. By her presence I'd say that she had been spying on us for quite some time. I've checked the hillsides both above us and below us. There are places on the upper hill where two people have been regularly watching the house. This Duchess of yours, she knows that we're here. She might even know what we've been doing."

  Gaius Julius' voice was calm and mildly curious. With a start, Maxian realized that the dead man really didn't care that he had just nearly killed a sixteen-year-old girl—but he was concerned about the effect she would have on their tactical situation. For a moment the Prince was fully conscious of the vast gulf between the old man, who had done more than his share of terrible things in the name of the old Republic, and himself. Then he shook his head and reminded himself that the margin they trod was very narrow and, sometimes, for the good of the people, some few might have to be expended.

  "We are not going to do anything with her, beyond keeping her here. You're right, the Duchess may know. If we assume so, then we have to move again. How soon do you think we'll have to go?"

  Abdmachus coughed quietly, and Maxian turned away from the dead man. The Persian was standing on the other side of the table that the Prince had used for his impromptu surgery, gazing down at the unconscious girl with a quizzical look on his face.

  "What is it?" Maxian asked.

  "My lord... please do not take this amiss, but when you were working on her wound, did you feel the curse within her?"

  Maxian paused for a moment, reconstructing memories of his work in his mind.

  "No," he said, shaking his head, "I felt the lead in her body, of which there is more than a little, but not the contagion."