The Fire Waker

by Ben Pastor

  Then a truncheon or something like it struck at random. His wrist seemed to explode into sparks with pain. Aelius kicked hard; the wall gave out a hollow sound when the man's body slammed and bounced off it. His wrist hurt and white sparks kept crackling up from it, but it was not his wrist only. Aelius saw himself precisely—precisely— digging his heels into the horse's side as he went over the barricade at Gallic Meadows, over the rioters' upturned faces and bending backs, and yet this time he did not land squarely, reining in the mount, but went capering forward head first. Head first. He'd seen troopers die that way during charges. Head first against the hard paving stones. Head first. Amber and honey flowed on him, as they had on the poem's prisoner insect.

  Notes by Aelius Spartianus:

  What I felt on my face during the attack was blood and not honey, but sweet and sticky all the same. The bed, as I saw when I came to shortly, and fumbled about for the lamp, resembled Caesar's toga on the Ides of March. I did not bleed so profusely, nor had I tracked gore out to the hall, not having left the accursed cubicle where I let myself be surprised. To this moment, I have no recollection of having used my army knife (I do recall it falling on the floor, instead, out of my reach), but the blade was stained nearly to the hilt, so I must have. Blood, as I say, had been tracked up to a certain point of the hall, where it stopped, in the middle of the wooden planking. The hooded cape one of the two fleeing attackers had been wearing lay still where it had fallen. Madder red army cloth, but not an army cut. The first impression was that a badly wounded man had reached a certain spot and hesitated there, before dissolving in air (see below).

  The blow to my head had broken the skin, that's all —J received worse knocks during basic training. Even when I had the wound attended to, the rift in my scalp merely hurt and pulled. It is my truncheoned right wrist that worries me, because — even though no bones were fractured — I feel it useless as far as effectively fighting with it (and even writing, for now at least —/ am dictating this). The Circus's physician was the closest available; summoned by the innkeeper as soon as the commotion got everyone up, he confirmed the relative smallness of my problem. Would he speak otherwise, when he is used to caring for charioteers with broken backs and run-through gladiators? With his exclusive style of bandage, he assures me, not only will my wrist ache less: In a week's time it will return to full motility. We'll see.

  Matters would have gone differently had I not been wearing the anti-riot vest (a whim on my part, choosing to sleep with it on). The knife blow deeply sliced the leather, but had it met flesh, I wouldn't be here to speak of it. Still in the quilts I used to grab it from the attacker's hand, the blade is common, bone-handled, was filed down to a razor's edge. The innkeeper assures me that he "sleeps with one eye and both ears open," so he called out the alarm as soon as he heard the scuffle. It's the sole thing that accounts for the fact that I wasn't finished off, unless:

  1. They realized I was the wrong victim.

  2. They did not want to kill in the first place.

  Anyhow, as far as I can reconstruct the events of the past night, they went something like this:

  — 3rd night hour: Spartianus retires to Faunus's Fortune inn, by the Circus; he occupies alone the second floor.

  — 9th night hour, more or less: Two men attack him, and a brief scuffle ensues; attackers are interrupted and/or choose to escape, one of them wounded.

  — 10th night hour: Everybody is up, night watchmen are summoned, and also the physician.

  — Through the 12th night hour: Inn and the surrounding streets are effectively searched (see below for details).

  — Balance: Good judgment and poor judgment mingled in my behavior. In fact, while I wisely presented myself as an anonymous army colonel to the Faunuss Fortune, I decided at the same time against having any of my Guardsmen stay with me.

  The abovementioned innkeeper, a man from the lake country north of here, fears repercussions. As soon as the confusion abated, he stood there groveling and swearing he did not know how such a thing could happen — as if public inns were ladies' sewing circles! "But your lordship knows how, when there are games, folks come from all over, especially if there's no charge. Judge Minucius's widow did things the grand old way, giving out money to all those who attended."

  I, who had meanwhile solved the small detail of the vanishing blood, was doubtful about a random attack by occasional thugs. "How many would know of a trapdoor in your roof?" I inquired, and, holding before his eyes the hooded cape Vd found, "What can you tell me about this piece of clothing?"

  He replied it is "homespun found anywhere around the city." Which is possible, given that Mediolanum produces government-issue sagum cloth, and fabric below standard is probably sold cheaply on the civilian market. According to him, the trapdoor leads to a low attic where wine was kept and fruit used to be laid out to season, but due to dry rot and vermin, the practice was discontinued a year ago. Habitual customers knew of its existence. He pointed out that the nails keeping the trapdoor shut had been yanked out, or rather hammered out from above. This could have only happened before I retired for the night, while the cheers and racket from the nearby Circus would cover more than hammering.

  As the innkeeper came downstairs with me, to a ground floor still crowded with customers and serfs detained for the time being, the night watch came in to report that a mans body had been found in the washery not far away, by the round end of the Circus. So out I followed them, in the dark that still sealed the district, with a fierce wind channeling along the towering racetrack wall, and a mercilessly clear sky.

  The man, in undistinguished civilian clothes, leaned over the edge of the open-air tub, with his head underwater, as if he'd dragged himself to that point to die. But the physician, following at my request, declared after a quick exam by the light of the torches that he had reached the spot alive and drowned, possibly because he'd swooned, falling with his face in the water. "Could he have been forcibly held down?" was my question. The physician, who along the way had paid close attention to the amount of blood dripped by the fugitive on the street, answered that it was possible, but given the hemorrhage it would have been easy to finish him off. The wound, we saw, had in fact reached him under the rib cage, an expert blow from below with a half-turn of the blade. It's the sort of stab-and-twist wound I have inflicted in combat, but not exactly the casual blow I am likely to have given during a scuffle in the dark.

  It was one of the night watchmen in our group who recognized the dead man once his face was illuminated. His words, which I reproduce faithfully, were, "If it isn't the shop boy at the Greek butcher's, under the Circus's arches! A brain the size of a lentil. To participate in an attack against an official, he must have had even less sense than I thought."

  As for me, no trace of the other attacker having been discovered, I am beginning to form a hazy idea of this incident. It is now close to the end of the first morning hour, and something tells me I will receive visits soon.

  In the crude morning light, the head of criminal investigator Sido looked more menacing than it had inside his office; a Minotaur's head, Aelius thought, bull-like, with a neck as wide as his nearly shaven skull, roped with muscles. Judging by the way his eyes bulged from the orbits and were bloodshot, the steam room flush was still on him.

  He came by with two speculatores at the pearly edge of sunup, to ask what happened. As no one had summoned them, and this was a routine case not requiring their competence, Aelius searched their faces for smugness or satisfaction. But they were only hard, seamed faces one would not want to sit across from in an interrogation room. They were already informed of the man's body found at the washery.

  "Some stags ran off last night from a bakery by Porta Ticinensis." Sido used the slang term for runaway slaves, fists on his hips, looking up and down the alley in front of the inn. "Coincidentally, we caught all but two."

  "I doubt my attackers were slaves. They lowered themselves with a rope through a trapdoor from the roof
to the upper floor, which is why I did not hear them climb the stairs. Trained well, because they made no perceivable noise across the planking between the hall and my bed. I couldn't be so stealthy myself."

  Sido wetted his lips. The meaty, pink point of his tongue, too, resembled a ruminant's, as it layered moisture on the mouth. "Slaves are stealthy by definition. Besides, houses are crowded on this alley, as you readily see, so attackers could easily walk from one roof to the next. Impossible to discover where originally they came from. Why, the corpse at the washery has got a cheap ring on him, low-grade bronze or copper, no bezel, just a button-like decoration. They make them by the thousands on the Danube."

  "Well, he wasn't from the Danube but from the butcher's stall down the way. And one of the two at least had crossed the street at the head of the alley, coming to the inn. I smelled the canal mud on him."

  "There's canal mud everywhere in Mediolanum."

  Whether excitement or the able care received was responsible for it, Aelius felt no pain whatever in his head or wrist. But he fretted. He watched Sido's bulky figure lean against the inn's wall, where a brightly painted, merry goat-footed Faunus entered a nymph from behind. "It seems to me, sir," he said, "that an attacker of mine should have had more marks and bruises on him. I did defend myself."

  "Perhaps you punched the other, or did not hit as hard as you thought, with the dark and all." Sido spoke with his arms folded, a stance that made his shoulders look huge. "The hale one must have pulled his wounded cohort up the rope, through the trapdoor, across the roof, and down the side of the trellised house one block from here. There are bloodstains between the trellis and the washery. Once abandoned because of his weak state, the man died. Let us not seek complications over a random nighttime attack in a disreputable inn. You escaped with your life, and in such lucky cases, as they say, the rest is sauce over a good steak. If there is news about the matter, you will be informed."

  Notes by Aelius Spartianus, continued

  I am not convinced. It puzzles me that a perfect fool was somehow convinced to participate in a risky assault on a random victim, and that I did him in without having recollection of it. Besides, it is true that blood stains the pavement from the trellis to the washery, but I detected no blood on the trellis itself, nor any evidence on the ground of displaced roof tiles, dirt, or other matter from the eave above.

  No sooner had Sido left with his associates than I hurried to the butcher's stall under the Circus's arches, opening for business just then. When I arrived, the butcher was foaming at the mouth. Ranting to himself that his shop boy was nowhere to be found, he used colorful expressions the lightest of which are reported here. "The son of a whore, I will split him in half! I've got ten hog carcasses to cleave and he doesn't show up! He didn't even sleep in his cot, son of a bitching whore," and so forth.

  As he'd begun a threat aimed at the bastard who delayed his employee, I thought I should say, "You re looking at him, butcher."

  "Legatos ... Strategos ..." (I notice how I rise in rank exponentially when civilians try to endear themselves to me.) Turning and seeing my coloneVs uniform, the Greek butcher all but made me chief of staff, changing his tone and his tune. "I meant nothing by it, sir. It's just that I cant understand what you d want with that no-good idiot of mine." Before I could answer, some perky spirit returned to him. "But if he's committed some fool thing or other," he specified, "Vm not paying for it. Before the law he's a freeman employee, so do with him as you please."

  "It seems I did."

  After I concisely reported the facts, the butcher gave himself to trembling and muttering in Greek. With another about-face, he swore up and down that his boy was big but harmless, a bumbling idiot who kept his old mother (I expected the old-mother detail) by an honest day's work, gladly running errands for anyone who'd pay him a copper. "The brain of a flea, my lord! Wouldn't know how to climb a roof to save his life."

  "But he can cleave ten hog carcasses."

  "Under supervision, high lordship. Strong, but so clumsy I had to make sure he wouldn't smash the cutting block in two."

  This was all very interesting. I showed him the knife used in the attack, and he seemed not to recognize it. "Not a butcher's knife, with this file job that thins out the blade. Apart from the excessive smoothing, they make them like this in the valleys west of Lake Larium."

  "Well," I said, "did your freeman at least tell you last night whether he was to run errands for anybody before morning?"

  The butcher acted as if my question were extravagant. "No, but he wouldn't tell me nothing ever, exalted Commander: He was unable to speak from birth."

  With that intriguing additional detail in mind, I walked back to Faunus's Fortune, where I am determined to spend a second night. Head of criminal police Sido, minus the specula-tores, was standing on horseback at the street corner, where his shadow drew long in the rising sun. Waiting for me, obviously. And whether he referred to my returning to the inn, or to my initiative to inquire at the butcher's, his sole words to me were, "Do you know what 'cease and desist' means, Commander?"

  In his room at the barracks, where Aelius had come to gather his books in view of his move to Decimus's annex, Duco listened, and said he did not like the look of things. His red eyelashes were so thin that his eyes looked like worried rabbit eyes, set in a worried-rabbit freckled face in general. "A nice bump," he remarked, "and it's a good thing it bled. Blows to the head that do not bleed are dangerous."

  "It may be a nice bump, but it makes me furious. It makes me furious that they surprised me in my own bed."

  "Whom did you inform that you'd spend the night in that hole? And why did you, in the first place? Holy Diana, you could have shared my quarters. Bumpkins and Jews stay at the Faunus's Fortune, not officers!"

  "I had my reasons to stay there. And I told no one. Not a great idea in retrospect, but I did not even tell my Guardsmen."

  The Briton cracked the door open, looked around the balcony, and pulled the panel shut again. "If it's the speculatores you ran afoul of, rank won't help you much."

  "I know. In Egypt the police were on the take and more brutal than highway robbers. In Europe, in a capital city, I assumed things were different."

  "Don't make me talk, I get in trouble enough as it is. All I can say is that Sido is not one to forget a wrong: even a perceived wrong."

  With the excuse of supervising the serfs sent to take Aelius's luggage, Curius Decimus stopped by to see him in the officers' mess at noon. Holding a kerchief to his nose in disgust, as he said, at army greasy spoons, he made it clear that news of the attack had made the rounds in Mediolanum. "Had you stayed at my annex, none of this would have happened."

  "I'd have stayed in your annex, had the last-minute trouble with the pipes not delayed things."

  " What? I will pass over the fact that you seem to suggest some kind of involvement on my part. But suspicious tenants annoy me, and I will require three months' advance rent."

  "And I will be thankful to you if you do not put words in my mouth, Commander. I imply nothing, and said exactly what I meant: Trouble with the heating system delayed the start of my tenancy."

  "Jesus, how can you eat in this place?" Decimus waved the bunched kerchief in front of his face. "What do they serve, hog feet in fish sauce?" He laughed, showing his small, stained teeth. "Why did I say 'Jesus'? I don't know, Spartianus, it's a Christian exclamation. I find it droll. In case you change your mind about tonight's lodgings, I can put you up in one of the guest bedrooms."

  "No, thank you. I will come as agreed tomorrow at the fourth morning hour, bringing a three-month rent deposit." Aelius was beginning to feel the sting of the wound on his scalp, and his right arm and shoulder had grown progressively sore. His colleague's disdain of the food and drink encouraged him to finish his watered-down army wine. "Say," he added, to provoke, "I have it from a traveling correspondent of mine that your lady relative incurred a regrettable incident at a checkpoint in Belgica Prima."

&
nbsp; The news, briefly explained, did not appreciably alter Decimus's humor. "As far as I am concerned, it's as if she ran away with the acrobats, when she became a Christian. She deserves the respect due to a rope-walker, or a juggler." He stood from the bench with the same derisive smirk he'd allotted the mess hall. "If I weren't due back to the Palace, I'd indulge in expressing to you how completely and utterly I will ignore her plight if the former Annia Cincia is arrested at any checkpoint for her superstition."

  9 December, Saturday

  Just as she had chosen to disregard the customary interval of seven days between death and burial in her husband's case, so did Lucia Cat-ula leave instructions for a private funeral as soon as possible after her demise. Its final act took place Saturday morning at the family us-trinum, a fenced-in area where a permanent dais was set for the cremation pyre. Its garden, planted with cypresses and bloomless roses, lay adjacent to the Minucii's monument, not far from their estate on the road to Ticinum.

  The small funerary complex looked upon a wet meadow stretching between the suburban arena and a time-worn, gloomy temple of Nemesis, while in the back it bordered a modest private property. Smoke rising from the consuming pyre all but concealed the latter's view, but Aelius could now and then discern a low tiled roof among the shiny evergreens. Hadn't Decimus said something about Castas retaining a small property in this neighborhood for her aged nurse?