The Fire Waker

by Ben Pastor

  Since Aelius seemed disinclined to say more than that he would do so, Decimus kept him from walking into the library by pronouncing his next words. "If you're waiting in town hoping that His Serenity Maximian will change his mind and receive you, you'll have time to get covered with verdigris and bird droppings like Brutus's monument. His chamberlain, the eunuch, had a hissy fit when I announced your arrival. Maximian could be heard shouting obscenities from two halls away, all if I overheard correctly related to the moral habits of your mother, and His Divinity's mother. Good thing you were three halls away."

  Aelius kept a polite lack of involvement in his demeanor. Even weighing Decimus's words on the plates of truth and falsehood would result in a ruffled expression, so he did not place them on the scales at all. He turned to knock on the door facing him, as though the old paperwork he was about to view were more important than what he'd heard.

  "How many hundred feet out of the walls before the lanes fork?" was all he asked.

  Having reached Porta Romana with the sun sinking ahead, in a glory of etched details and gleaming roofs, Aelius was duly impressed with the rich colonnaded road he'd just ridden along. He'd read that Palmyra's streets were a veritable forest of marble shafts, but this was three times, at least, the length of the Asian city's. Decimus had stressed to him the magnificence of the two-mile portico, crowning the entrance into Mediolanum, of the road from Rome. Still, the odor of mildew wafted in the pinkish air, and twice already since taking the beautiful avenue, Aelius had crossed moss-choked lazy canals flowing south.

  When Decimus said that he lived "hard by the walls," it was not an overstatement. The antiquity of the Curii's urban villa was proven by the fact that the first line of walls, built at the tail end of the Republic over three hundred years earlier, cut through one wing of it, mutilating an ample sitting room paved in black-and-white mosaic of a simple design.

  "Refreshingly pre-Caesarian," was how Decimus described it as he welcomed his guest, simpering, "because Caesar made even our floorings more complicated."

  In fact, the brutal city wall, bricks and stones without plaster, blocked the otherwise elegant room in the way a volcano stops its lava flow after destroying all it can. "This is as clear a symbol as I need to remind myself of governmental intrusion. Come, come, the better part is beyond the waiting room fish pond—I'm very proud of the fish pond, I designed it myself. There's a spring under the house, actually, so I thought I'd put it to good use rather than fighting it like my ancestors." He led his colleague through a sober hall painted black, with small yellow squares each representing a different freshwater fish. A glare that seemed to rise from the five-foot-square pond drew patterns like pale green stabs on the ceiling; something so unique and so novel that Aelius was not ashamed to show his wonder. Decimus's simper became a smile. "The bottom of the pond is glass, and when there's company I have lamps lit in the basement so that the reflection comes right through. Tell me it isn't beautiful."

  "It's absolutely beautiful."

  Giving Aelius time to admire the small fish darting in the shiny water, Decimus leaned against the wall with his arms folded. "Did you hear? Two men died in the grain depot last night: They stumbled in while they were checking the aeration of the storage bins and were strangled by an avalanche of wheat. It happened at the same time that you and I were chatting in front of that dreadful little whorehouse, just a block away. How close life and death can be, no? You pulling your sword out thinking me a murderer, the germ of life being shot into the harlots next door, those two mouthing their last in a sea of grain ... It'd make me melancholy if it didn't make me laugh." In the next space, a cloakroom, a venerable old serf was waiting to take Aelius's cape but did not move until Decimus snapped his fingers. "I knew you would show up in a uniform, Commander Spartianus, albeit an elegant one. You people never know what civilian clothes to wear on private occasions."

  You people may mean any of half a dozen unflattering things, all connoting class or national origin. Aelius chose not to reply. He had meant to appear the soldier rather than the imperial envoy: Because his host doubtlessly knew this, it was a game for him, as the Briton said. Without military clothing, on the other hand, Decimus seemed less impressive, and his relative smallness noticeable. At a time when applied embroideries—strips, squares, or ovals stitched in color— were the rage for civilian and army dress, his old-fashioned woolen tunic seemed singularly bare. Correctly Aelius judged it a way of distinguishing himself, rather than a sign of modesty. Gesturing toward a doorway to the dining room, Decimus glanced back, no differently than when he'd preceded Aelius through the palace's halls. When light struck his face sideways, mouth and nose jutted out like a clever animal's snout, and his shaven cheeks seemed carved by a strong finger into hollows, closely following the bone. In his vanity, he combed his hair to cover the balding top and temples, as one saw in the portraits of ancient Romans.

  With a small wag of the head, he pointed to the cloakroom. "Nice brooch you had there. His Divinity's gift?"

  The army cape clasp was something Aelius was proud of, Diocletian's personal token of appreciation after his mission in Egypt; but the amused way Decimus looked at it embarrassed him. "I'm sure you have a bigger and better one," he said, renouncing the contest.

  Dinner was excellent, and such that Aelius described it in his notes as delicacies spiced with questions, so cleverly and ambiguously put that I had to sieve each time the political implications, at the cost of seeming a yokel entrusted with official duties. Decimus is not one to he distracted, and if this inquisitiveness is simply a sport with him, he's overly taken with his toy.

  It was after they finished eating, and went to sit in a studio Decimus called the ancestors' room, that a chance to counter the flood of questions arose for Aelius. Because he chose to inquire about the application of anti-Christian laws in Mediolanum, his host made a short explosive noise, between a snort and a cough, as irritated women do at times.

  "Why do you ask me about those annoying people? You cannot go past a courthouse or a theater without hearing them tried or thrown to the beasts, even though reports of their martyrdom—that's what they call it, unaware that such a concept of witnessing is not unknown to other philosophical traditions—are greatly exaggerated. Thanks to Judge Marcellus and his turtle-speed justice, not half of those who should have their heads lopped do. I have nothing to do with Christians, as my preference is for gods who don't go around asking folks to die for them."

  On three shelves, busts of the family members created a mute audience of men and women of different ages, some of them so closely resembling Decimus that Aelius could reconstruct through them his host's appearance as a youngster, and anticipate the looks of his old age. The headstone his own father had ordered years before on the frontier seemed crude in comparison, little resembling anyone but a roughly carved officer; only the name below it would identify it as Aelius Spartus's monument.

  "Why do you ask?" Decimus urged him again, seated in front of the ancestral crowd.

  Concisely Aelius reported the events surrounding Lupus's "first and second death," and his curiosity about Agnus the miracle worker. It seemed a harmless after-dinner conversation, likely to amuse his host. "I may be mistaken, but at Brigantium I came under the impression that the fire waker's acolyte is a woman originally from this region— Laumellum, I think."

  Unexpectedly, Decimus's diverted glance grew rather narrow for an amicable get-together. Throughout the dinner, chatting at ease, he had been making small balls out of bread crumbs, rolling them between thumb and forefinger. Having idly brought one along from the dining room, he now squeezed it flat on the studio table. "You're either dumb or very clever, Commander Spartianus."

  "I don't know what you mean. It's a civil question. If you do not wish to answer it, someone else in town will. I'm not aware Casta's identity is a state secret."

  "A state secret, no. A source of some embarrassment to her native great city of Mediolanum, I'd have to say yes. Wha
t made you ask me is what puzzles me. I am nearly related to her. And I say 'nearly' because I am not sure how many degrees of kinship there are between us. She was married to one of the wealthiest landowners in Ticinum."

  "I see."

  Pacified by the comment's equanimity, Decimus relaxed once more. "Well, it makes a good story, and I haven't told it in a while. Why not." The bread was smoothed into a round ball again, about the size of those clay marbles boys play with. "The landowner—Pupienus, he was called—was an old man when he took her and, like all respectable old, wealthy husbands, had the good grace of leaving her a widow after a couple of years. There were no children from the marriage, so she inherited the whole property. Which made her very palatable to any male who could legitimately aspire to her hand: The city prefect wooed her to no avail, and so did Judge Marcellus's youngest son. Old man Pupienus was a traditionalist, a man after my own heart. She came from a family much along the same lines (it is not an accident that we are related), but had taken it into her head during her husband's last illness two years ago that holy men and miracle workers could do something for him."

  "It was a love match between them, then."

  "I don't see how, but I suppose so. The nymph Galatea was pursued by Polyphemus, and he was a one-eyed giant. At any rate, their Laumel-lum villa was for three months and more like Alexandria's harbor, with all sorts of characters coming and going, from all over the world. The old man in his sickbed was prayed over, incensed, fumigated, sprinkled with lustral water, given enemas, covered with amulets and sacred formulas. You name it, it was done. Then Agnus showed up. Not invited, mind you. It is unclear how it went. One morning he showed up on the doorstep, and next he was blathering his enchantments."

  "Obviously Casta's husband did not live."

  "Obviously, you say. But what is obvious is that the suffering he was undergoing before ceased after Agnus's visit, and the few days he lived afterward were as serene as Socrates's in his final imprisonment. I was present, so I can vouch for it. He died with a smile, discussing philosophy and Lucretius's theory of the atom." With the nail of his thumb, which he kept rather long, Decimus cut the crumb ball in two. "What you and I—or at least I—would say is that the illness had taken its course, and simply ran out of energy before the last flame was extinguished in the old man. Fact is that, one month to the day after the funeral, the woman you heard called Casta—which is not her name— renounced her immense wealth and kept for herself only a small suburban house outside Porta Ticinensis, by the arena, which she gave to the only servant she retained, her aged wet nurse. The next act of the drama saw her publicly giving away her clothes and jewels—jewels worth over five hundred thousand denarii—and becoming a Christian. This was two years ago, before the religious prosecution began. After telling one another that grief, or whatever it was, made her lose her mind, friends and gossipers thought no more of it."

  Aelius had no specific reason but was beginning to feel an instinctive antipathy toward the miracle worker. "Interesting. Who was the recipient of the lady's wealth?"

  "Why, the Christians themselves—their hierarchy, or church, as they call it. As unfortunate and untimely a choice as I can envision, given that within a few months the Christians' goods would be confiscated and end up in the government's coffers." Decimus tossed the minute crumb balls in the air, catching them one after the other. "So it was as if old man Pupienus had made the Emperor his heir, he who kept the letters of Brutus and Cassius in his library. There's more than irony in it."

  Aelius spoke with his eyes on the portrait of the sole beautiful one among Decimus's foremothers. "I miss the connection between divesting herself of riches as she turned Christian and deciding to become Agnus's assistant. It's a leap." The marble image wore her hair in a tall beehive of curls above the forehead, as did the ladies in Titus's day, two hundred years earlier. Her face was so delicate, known somehow; calmness became sweet melancholy between the eyes and the mouth.

  "Yes, it is." Quickly Decimus glanced back, to see where the guest's attention rested. "It puzzled us all that she would make such a choice, when she'd been used to giving orders rather than taking them. But, you see, at the time I was undergoing my third divorce, so I did not exactly have an interest in knowing what others did with their lives."

  "Do you ever see her these days, or communicate with her?" Aelius was not sure why he was even asking. Mere curiosity, although the sight of the beautiful ancestress made his desire to know less disinterested; as if out of the five women represented, four were not decidedly ugly.

  "With a Christian 7 . No. We were hardly ever in touch before she changed her spiritual skin. Now she is probably in hiding. But I suppose that if you felt the overpowering need to meet her, wherever she is, you could take along a presentation letter from me. For the sake of kinship she may be disposed to receive you. Annia Cincia was a beauty once. For all I know, she may yet be one."

  So, she is beautiful, or was. Her choice to serve an itinerant preacher, or whatever Agnus was, suddenly seemed more heroic than foolish. Aelius imagined Casta in her bare cell-like room in Treveri, perilously traveling snowy roads, mortifying her flesh—even defying the judges as he'd seen Christians do in Egypt, in the face of torture. It was intrigued, anxious thinking about a woman he might never meet, whom he supposed handsome like the marble lady in curls.

  Decimus might have captured the flavor of that interest, and mentioned Castas beauty on purpose to provoke him. "At court, we all heard of your sleuthing in Egypt, of the conspiracy that was discovered in the process. But now you tell me this tawdry story of stifling with charcoal. A dead brick-maker, Spartianus—who cares how it happened. A murdered brick-maker is only slightly more interesting. From the fire waker's point of view, it would have been better if this Lupus fellow had remained alive, but if he had to die, then murder is more acceptable, as it does not point to Agnus's failure. My advice, especially these days, is that you keep away from such a gullible group. For your own amusement, however, know that in Mediolanum live some of those who claim to have benefited from the wonder couple. Yes, they started their legerdemain here, before the government put a stop to such nonsense." Lazily Decimus tossed the minute crumb balls beyond Aelius's chair, like a boy purposely missing a target. "Come, let us speak about something more interesting than superstition."

  Aelius fell neither for the sophistication nor for the casualness of the aristocrat sitting in front of him. He is a man all external; there is nothing real about him. His culture and the beautiful objects in his house are also somehow void — facades covering nothing. And yet he is dangerous. I am not sure of the extent of his malice, but the empty air behind the mask, behind the fancy dress, may be perilous to breathe. How many had stumbled into convivial traps, spoken too loosely, and been jailed or executed for it? The layers of intrigue at court—in any of the four capitals cross-beaming power across the Empire—were all politeness and honeyed compliments, while spies thrived. What did the Briton say? That Decimus wanted to "find out things" from people. On whose behalf, it remained to be seen.

  An amiable nod was how Aelius agreed to the change of subject. "I have reason to believe I may have acquired an original Roman helmet from Teutoburg Forest."

  "Now, that's intriguing!" Decimus sat up, all ears and a simper. "How do you know you haven't been duped by the seller?"

  2 December, Saturday

  Notes by Aelius Spartianus, continued

  What Curius Decimus says is true. Mediolanum is a city of merchants, of handlers of goods, and artisans of all kinds. While in Rome one has the impression of being the guest of a noble old woman whose house is the repository of all that is sacred and official, here one feels that if one has no money, one doesn't count at all. Although the mint was closed in the days of Our LordAu-relian (Restorer of the Army), business keeps thriving, and one still currently finds coins in use that were minted here, and in great quantity.

  When I left after dinner last night, against promise of giving D
ecimus the opportunity to view my Teutoburg acquisition, I found my way back to the barracks without trouble. After all, compared to Rome or Alexandria, this is a large burg, but everything is built sparing no expense. Seldom have I seen such lavish use of marble and porphyry on columns for private use, although the floorings, from what I could judge, generally do not compare to the mosaics I saw in Sicily, and the figures on them are rather stilted. The porticus maximiana, as they call thepor-ticoed avenue I took yesterday to Decimus's place, is instead a masterpiece of architecture, a glorious terminus into the city from theAemilian Way. It flattered me to recognize that on the triumphal arch, in painted relief, our campaign against the Egyptian Rebellion is illustrated among the wars fought by our rulers to secure the Empire. The Pyramids in the background are finished in gilded detail, and some of the cavalry weapons are appliques of gilded bronze, so realistically rendered that you can recognize our long swords and even the devices on our troopers' shields.

  Under the colonnades on both sides of the street, bookshops and jewelry stores alternate with sellers of fine dyed cloth and expensive spices. I must visit the bookshops. Which reminds me I must take down some of the prices encountered in Mediolanum, higher than elsewhere in the Empire. Aside from Nicanor's expensive books, I recall noticing that silk sells for 15,000 denarii per pound, a full one-fourth above the governmental fixed ceiling of 12,000 denarii, or 48,000 drachmas. Since death or exile is contemplated as a punishment for exceeding the ceiling, I can only deduce there's connivance on the part of city administrators (and although I am not telling on anyone, as Decimus would have it, I must find a way to inform His Divinity without appearing to be critical of his colleague's rule).