The Fire Waker

by Ben Pastor

  Even though they were still outside the residence itself, armed guards were everywhere. Guardrooms, roofless passageways, and small courts formed a labyrinth impossible to negotiate without a guide. Aelius kept one step behind his peer, with the impression that such a convoluted arrangement was supposed to confuse a single attacker rather than a horde, the assassin rather than the barbarians. And he wondered then whether Maximian had not built his palace so close to the walls precisely to secure a quick way out of the city if necessary. After all, in the last one hundred years, if history told the truth, not one of twenty-seven official rulers and usurpers had died a natural death.

  His companion looked at him sideways, not directly, with slight contempt or amusement that was difficult to gauge. He had neither introduced himself nor engaged Aelius in the usual army way, informal and meant to make a soldier feel everywhere one of the group. But when they finally entered a well-lit, wide corridor, he did say, as if searching his memory, "Aelius Spartianus—any relation to the Aelii of Hispania?"

  Now Aelius knew the officer was mocking him, as it was highly unlikely that a man so obviously non-Roman, with such a barbaric last name, could be even distantly related to the deified Hadrian's imperial family. "No." He smiled back. "We're from Castra Martis on the Danube, but the excellent Aelii from Hispania owned us once. In a small but literal way, that's belonging to the family, isn't it?"

  The officer laughed openly. He was a spare man, by Pannonian standards, sallow and dark-haired, with his hair a little long and thinning on top, sinewy arms, and an intense angry look. He was one of those men who look angry even when they laugh. "Manius Curius Decimus, from Rome." Shaking his head, he stepped ahead. "I will inform the chamberlain of your arrival. Wait for me here."

  Waiting was something Aelius was used to. Serving at headquarters and at court had educated him to the art of standing in antechambers for indefinite periods of time. He'd learned not to wonder, not to fret. Even when—as now—the delay was prolonged beyond a reasonable time, he kept his peace without yawning or pacing.

  When Decimus finally returned, the last flicker of day had long gone. Wicks and torches had been lit in small niches and in brackets along the walls, and the increasingly rare sounds in the building meant offices were emptying themselves as officers and bureaucrats left for the night.

  Maximian would not receive him. Not even the chamberlain would receive him. Aelius took the news without comment, revealing nothing by his behavior to the officer, whose duty might be to study his reaction. But he understood well enough it was because he carried a reminder the co-ruler would not accept; His Divinity had warned him that such might be the case. "If he receives you but does not give you a message to bring back to me, all is well; he is merely cross at being reminded we're abdicating. If he does not receive you but the chamberlain walks out to pick up the message from your hands, things are still acceptable, as he's bound to read it. If not even the chamberlain agrees to see you, you are not to protest when you're invited to leave. Walk out with courtesy and send me a military dispatcher with the news in all haste. But as for yourself, do not leave Mediolanum at once. There's always gossip that filters through at court, and Italia is particularly prone to palace camarillas. If there's a chance, try to get to know the officer or officers who let you in, Aelius Spartianus. There's no telling what you might find out."

  Decimus hardly seemed the type of aristocratic officer who lowers himself to engage in friendly chatter, much less gossip, and in fact his farewell three halls down was curt, nearly brusque. Only after leaving the palace and finding himself in the musty wind of the street did Aelius permit himself to be in a contrary mood.

  Unlike Rome, Mediolanum was dark at night. Canals and sluices must run under the streets, judging by the sound of rolling water that came from manholes; it accounted for the odor of dampness, wet bricks, wet cement. Ever since crossing the Alps, Aelius had wondered at the lakes, the marshes, how the land north of the city was rich in rivers and irrigation ditches, still of a vibrant green despite the advanced season; such wealth of watercourses can make the fortune of a city at the same time that it eats at its foundations. Once out of the imperial complex, Aelius knew more or less where to go: keep east until he met the straight old street that with its perpendicular quartered the original colony. At the Mall, ease northeast out of the old city gate, seeking the recently added district beyond, inside Maximian's fortified new walls.

  He'd come as far as a towering box-like structure, several stories high, before realizing that for all of his good sense of direction he'd gone off course and was—judging by the stench—probably much closer to the leather-making district than to the center of town. Governmental grain deposits faced him, enormous, blocking the night, and the pungent smell of animal skins stretched to cure came from obscure archways. Torches at a corner allowed him to read sors fauni on a plaque, and that was all.

  "I thought you would seek the army camp, Commander."

  How is it that some voices, heard only once, become immediately recognizable? Aelius could see nothing in the dark at the end of the alley but knew who it was.

  Decimus had followed him, or more likely he'd ridden ahead by shortcuts, so as to find himself waiting for Aelius in the narrow street. Only the glare from a doorway—eating place, brothel, or both— intervened between the two horsemen, but the second was invisible to the first. Thoughts raced to a roadblock and stopped, except for the certainty that Decimus had been sent to murder him, as he still carried in his saddlebag the message to Maximian from His Divinity. Aelius could kick himself for not having ordered his bodyguard to wait outside the palace to escort him, but recriminations served little now. Fleetingly a girl's naked leg, a round arm, like a vision, flashed across the doorway glare, without registering in Aelius's mind except to make him realize that he was about to die in front of a brothel.

  "What's that, you're pulling your sword out of the sheath?" From the dark where his horse stood, Decimus reacted to the sleek sound of metal with such amusement as to seem to be struggling with laughter. "We're not on the Danube, Spartianus." He came, urging his horse one step forward with a click of his tongue, to the place where the light from the doorway showed him unarmed in the saddle. "It must be true what they say, that you can take the boy out of the borderland, but not the borderland out of the boy!" Although he wore no headdress in the cold night, Decimus was tightly wrapped in a cape so long that it partly covered his horse's saddle quilt. Pulling a weapon from under that bundle of cloth would be a feat.

  Aelius felt a little silly, but still annoyed. "It may be. At the army school they taught me that officers are to make themselves recognizable to one another, sir."

  "Don't be such a stick in the mud, Spartianus. Will you join me for dinner tomorrow night? I live in the southeast of town, not far from Porta Romana." Decimus grinned. "Ro-ma-na: what a beautiful sound. What can I say, the name of the gate alone makes me feel somehow less distant from the city. Make sure you bring nothing but your appetite. I can't stand it when guests send ahead wines I do not care for, or venison I wouldn't put on the table."

  "I haven't yet told you whether I wish to join you, Commander."

  "But of course you must! No one ever turns my invitation down in Mediolanum."

  Had it not been for His Divinity's encouragement to hear gossip, Aelius would have told Decimus that he might be in for his first refusal ever. As things were, he said he would come. The girl's leg swept again across the doorway, pink and agile. "But on one condition: that there be no more than three or four guests. I don't care for large dinners."

  "I promise you there will be no more than one guest: yourself. Is that acceptable?"

  Thanks to Decimus's directions ("one street down, right at the temple, and then follow the old walls to the first gate you meet"), Aelius was before long leaving the republican city limits. Minding to "bear right at the second street, as if you see the New Gate you've gone too far," he came to the cavalry barracks housing t
he regiment of five hundred men and horses known as the Maximiani Juniores, in what seemed to be a sparsely populated, dark lowland.

  1 December, Friday

  In the morning, he had to think twice to remember what he was doing in an army camp, and where the camp might be. He'd slept with the imperial message for Maximian in his belt, tight inside its tube-like envelope, so that hip and ribs ached with the chafing bulk of leather and metal prongs. Informing His Divinity of Maximian's refusal to receive him was a priority: Aelius's first care was to dispatch one of his men to Nicomedia; traveling nonstop, his own posthaste note could presumably reach Diocletian within a week. He was to await further instructions in Mediolanum, with the usual proviso that he spend part of the time doing historical research—that is, exploring the city's public and private archives for information on the lives of the ancient emperors, specifically Septimius Severus and his predecessor Didius Julianus (whose grandfather was born here), and taking minute notes on anything else worth reporting.

  The day was clear. Only the canal beds and manholes had veils of haze, wispy and white. Judging by the number of cats prowling around the camp, rats, frogs, and who knows what other vermin must populate the unbuilt marshy spaces all around. From the walkway outside the tower room where he had slept, Aelius saw that what he'd taken the night before for weapons factories were actually army clothing manufactures, felt-making, dyeing, and sewing shops. Madder red capes hung to dry, with felt caps perched on top, formed a phantom parade across a lattice fence. Beyond the compound, past the city walls, rose a barrier of snowcapped mountains, the color of steel in the morning air; to the right of two pyramidal peaks, one overlapping on the other, there ran a longer massif like a crocodile's back. If he turned the corner (the wooden balcony surrounded the tower on three sides), he could look clear across the city in the diametrically opposite direction: There, the land grew flatter and greener, if possible, scored by brooks and roads leading to Ticinum and to Laumellum, where Casta was said to come from. Steel gray hills sealed the view far to the southwest.

  Closer in, through the gate in the old walls, muleteers drove brick carts toward the new district's building sites—foundation holes bristling with stilts, stuck in the muddy earth like traps for wild animals, or defenses against cavalry attacks. The slow advance of the brick carts brought Lupus back to Aelius's mind; he was curious to hear from ben Matthias by letter, or in person eventually, about the murder case. Had the weeping relatives traced Agnus, and asked him to restore the life fire to the dead once more? Head surgeon Gallianus had promised he'd be on the spot if the attempt was made, "Because, by all that's good, if a corpse who's been stifled and cut open comes back to life, I want to see it, and hear the victim accuse his killers with my own ears." That the brick-maker still lay dead, Aelius was reasonably certain. As he contemplated the facts, he grew idly curious: How would public opinion have judged Lupus's death, if murder had not been revealed as its cause? Would the good people of Treveri take it in stride, or blame the fire waker for failing to keep Lupus's flame burning with life?

  When something squat and gray scooted swiftly in front of the mule train, Aelius mistook it at first for an otter, but its motion betrayed it as a huge sewer rat, of the kind they impertinently called "of imperial size" along the Nile. Vm still thinking of Egypt, he told himself. And considering that I didn't even want to return there last summer, that the land repels me as much as it attracts me, it has to be Anubina I'm thinking of. Her white thighs, large and round at the top, tapering to a dancer's knees, came to his memory as he'd first seen them on the night he'd rented her from Thermuthis. It was just short of buying her off the brothel. "You might as well keep one at home, Aelius—it'd cost you less," Thermuthis had said. He had chosen Anubina out of three, because of those white thighs and her name: the name of the jackal-headed god of the dead, so sweetly incongruous for a castanets dancer. "She was a virgin until three months ago." Thermuthis had smiled from under the red sweep of her beautiful hair. "But I'm not charging you extra for it." He'd taken her along oddly ashamed, and that first night he'd sat with Anubina in his lap, embracing her, until they'd both fallen asleep.

  Before leaving camp for the morning, in an offhand tone Aelius asked the officer of the day about Curius Decimus. He heard what he had already observed himself: proud, from a glorious and ancient family, well connected, bored with provincial life. Whether his colleague read a note of uncertainty in the question or not, he saw fit to add, "He doesn't like men, if that's what you're thinking. Decimus just comes across as a bit effete because it's an intellectual pose with him. Deems the lot of us boors and parvenus. Hell of a soldier, though. Did perfect wonders against the Picts and the Frankish pirates. He likes to invite people to dinner to find out things from them."

  "And does he succeed?"

  The officer of the day, a Briton full of freckles who must himself be related to those defeated Picts, raised his eyebrows. "Yes and no. Most often, as everybody suspects an official reason for the invitation, officers and politicians run at the mouth with the glory of Maximian and the Empire, hoping to benefit once their thoughts are reported."

  "I see. And what is Decimus's real intent?"

  "Intent? He does not have any intent. It's a game with him. If he were not old enough to be your father or mine, he'd still be playing with toys. Well, he's fifty, at least. Was married four times, and all he has to show for it is a daughter no one has ever seen. What else, let me see—His Tranquillity's former concubine Helena was his lover last winter, although they argued like cats and dogs."

  Decimus, too? It seemed that everyone who had served at court in the East or the West had been Helena's lover at one time or another. Aelius knew how small such privilege in fact was, even though in Nicomedia he'd walked on a cloud during their weeks together. It only puzzled him that Decimus was not—by age or looks—the type of athletic youngster Helena prided herself on attracting.

  "I have to come up with a password for the day." The Briton took advantage of the conversation. "Since you're a historian, give me one."

  "How about 'Let's get to work,' Septimius Severus's imperial password?"

  "A funny one, but it sounds good, thanks."

  Until the lunch hour, Aelius stayed at the Mall, where thanks to his letters of presentation and rank he was given access to the city archives. Only because he wished to avoid seeming provincial did he not stop and stare at the monument to Brutus that sat under a bronze contraption in the middle of the square. But he did pass by slowly, looking at it. The bronze likeness of Caesar's murderer wore a periwig of verdigris, and the same blue-green patina formed something like mutton-chops at the sides of the face. Slim columns held a roofed pediment over it, all in sheet bronze, and it was through rust holes that rain had dripped in to form incrustations. A scruffy dog was presently smelling one of the columns, with the intention no doubt to leave its own mark on history.

  The bookseller whose shop opened just beyond, seeing that Aelius was headed his way, stepped back ceremoniously. "It's just because Brutus served as city governor, Commander, not because of what else he did." After the officer stepped inside, he added affably that each new imperial administration had considered removing the embarrassing monument. "But we're used to it in Mediolanum, and since the deified Augustus, he who was Caesar's heir, had the goodness to let us keep it where it was, it's bound to serve as traffic island and dog love-post for a long time to come."

  Aelius had already stepped to the shelf where history volumes and sheepskin rolls lined up. He asked for the autobiography of Septimius Severus, Herodian's collected works, and "the pamphlets of a chronicler who goes by Aelius Maurus, but might have been the deified Hadrian's freedman Phlegon." Only Herodian's books were in stock, and when Aelius heard how much they sold for, he opened a small papyrus notebook to the page listing Diocletian's maximum prices for manuscripts. "His Divinity sells them for less."

  "But they come from Greece, and there's freight."

  "He's
an imperial envoy, Nicanor. Did he mention it?" Decimus looked into the shop without walking in. Hatless, in the morning light he looked rather like a spiteful monkey. He replied to Aelius's nodded greeting with a flip of the hand, shaking his head at the bookseller. "Come, don't make us all look like money-grabbing Insubrians. Give him the Herodian works for the edict price, or he'll tell His Divinity on you. Commander, I'm off to my post at the Palace, but now that I happened to see you walk in here, I think I'll wait until you finish your shopping and give you directions to my place."

  Aelius muttered, "Thank you," and without rushing completed the transaction.

  Nicanor jotted down the other titles, promising that he'd secure them. "Anything else, Commander?"

  "Yes. Any pamphlets or tracts you may have concerning miracle workers, wonders, and similar phenomena."

  "I have Philostratus's Life of Apollonius ofTyana, just copied."

  "No, I read that. Something more recent, about eastern cults, or even the Christian sect."

  The bookseller grew rigid, as if a wooden board had come between his back and the clothes he wore. "We don't keep such things around here, sir." The reaching gesture he'd begun to make toward a higher shelf halted in midair. "I will bid you good morning, sir, and send word when the other titles come in."

  Out of the corner of his eye, Aelius glimpsed his colleague's grin outside the shop. When he joined him, Decimus said in a not-so-low voice, "He has them, he has them. If it's Christian fairy tales you're looking for, you have to go to Nicanor after hours. Or do you really think we're burning all the Scriptures our policemen find in their raids? You should have asked him if he has your biography of Hadrian, Commander. It's a best seller in the city."

  They walked together no more than a block, parting midway along the oldest north-south central avenue, where there was a private library Aelius meant to visit. Decimus insisted—and Aelius saw no reason not to listen—that before sundown he take a long, roundabout way to his house by Porta Romana. "Leave the city by the westernmost gate they call Porta Herculea, behind the baths, and take the lane due south. Never mind if it's a little smelly, as it is an area of bogs, and notwithstanding the canal upkeep, leaves rot in the low fields. Where three lanes fork, about sixteen hundred feet out, keep to the middle one till you join the road to Laus Pompeia and to Rome. There, hang a left and you'll see the portico. Once you pass through Porta Romana, my place will be immediately to your left. But make sure you start out when there's still plenty of daylight, to enjoy the tour. Very important."