The Fire Waker

by Ben Pastor

  Some coincidences do exist: One of the brick-makers underbid by Lupus helped with his expertise Marcellus's ruling against the fraudulent Modicia brick-maker. The latter sent a threat against Marcellus. Am I missing something, or am I making this connection up, as Decimus says? Speaking of Dec-imus, he is related to Agnus's assistant Casta but anti-Christian, conservative, and no friend of Marcellus s.

  On the surface, it appears that animus against Christians may lie behind both murders, especially as they are suffering the consequences of them. And yet there's the accusation of black magic against the fire waker, and Christians were convicted of planning the judge's death. Even Casta does not discount the possibility, or at least she is not willing to say her fellow believers are innocent. Although no real proofs were brought against them, and the sentence was hurried at best, this in itself does not guarantee the innocence of those soon to die in the arena. What else does Casta know? How do Christians behave, when confronted with the choice between telling the truth and exposing one of their own? She was ready to surrender to the authority of the State, represented by me in her eyes. It's like the Christians not to resist arrest — they elude it at most. Why? Baruch ben Matthias says that the church hierarchy in Treveri was effectively decapitated. The same is happening in Mediolanum. Cui prodest, in Decimus's words? Only possible answer for the moment: the conservatives, who have long been preaching the elimination of these zealots.

  Anyhow, the Jew promised to keep me abreast of any rumor filtering out from the Christian community: Is there a group this formidable rogue has no friends or informers in?

  Taking advantage of the holiday, which keeps gendarmes and police busy downtown, this morning I rode by the Minucii's monument and ustrinum. / was bound to the arena, curious to see it close up. I was, like all officials in town, sent a reminder to attend the public execution of the Christians, which is to take place on the fifteenth. Because that date, marking the sowing-time feast ofConsualia, is what the priests call an endotercisus dies, unfavorable morning and evening, but favorable at midday, the execution will take place at noon. If a snowfall does not intervene, it is likely that the show will take place as planned.

  There's an army saying that goes, "The world is not so large that you can ever be sure you won't meet someone you know." Imagine when you go to a neighborhood visited before! Paying her respect to Marcellus's and Lucia Catula's ashes, as it seemed, Castas feisty old nurse stood at the edge of the funerary area. I recognized her by her diminutive size. All bundled in black, she resembled one of the witches Horace speaks of in his verses; were I superstitious, Vd have stayed well away from her. Instead, I approached and, after praying to the Manes of the dead couple, looked at her meaningfully. She did not return my stare. All she said was, "She's gone. Gone gone gone," with such malicious satisfaction that only fear of me must have kept her from bragging about the way her mistress managed to escape. To be sure, if Casta is headed eastward, she will try to avoid the cities of Brixia, Verona, and Vicentia, following the road to Aquileia in order to avoid the mountain passes out of Italy. It will be the same route the army, and I, too, will follow in a month as we travel to the frontier. His Divinity's second message has in fact reached me, yesterday afternoon. It acknowledges without comments His Tranquillity's refusal to receive me at the Mediolanum court, and directs me to leave the city as soon as possible, when chosen Mediolanum units will move out. This is according to my wishes. During my few days at Aspala-tum, after sailing back from Egypt, I did in fact ask that he look favorably on my intention to return to active duty. One long year and a half has passed since my return from a military campaign. I may be "you people" to the likes ofCurius Decimus, but feel so strongly my love for Rome that leaving the intrigues of civilian life for war sounds more exciting.

  Duco, who anticipated the date of his wedding contract, invited me to meet his bride and family. The little girl is scarcely older than Thaesis, Anubina's daughter — and mine, unless Anubina swears to me that someone else fathered her. Meeting her for the first time, my red-haired colleague seemed less than taken with her betrothed. The girl's mother, however, is a florid woman with all the attributes that may make a Briton (or a Pannonian, for that matter, or a Roman) anxious to enjoy his marital rights with her. I told Duco that the little girl will probably resemble her in a jew years, and he cheered up considerably. A personal parenthesis: Several weeks have elapsed since I enjoyed a woman's company (my good Stoic teachers' euphemism for what I first did with heart in mouth in a little brothel at Poetovio, with my father waiting outside to keep an ear on things). I believe myself rather good at controlling my passions, but temptation is what it is. Perhaps I should have joined Dec-imus's party — some of the girls I saw stumble out of his doors in the morning were authentic beauties. Still, Mediolanum is a place where Venus must feel at home: I am confident about my opportunities for lovemaking. Having heard from colleagues that Constantines mother, Helena, will be here in a couple of days frankly makes my desire more acute, as a few years ago she was an accomplished lover, and to all reports she is still beautiful and man-crazy.

  This afternoon I am off to the Palace, where I asked for an interview with the head of criminal police. That well of all gossip, ben Matthias, hinted at multiple layers of entanglement and competition among imperial offices and their holders, but from the outside they certainly give the impression of a wall as solid as those surrounding the city.

  Perhaps Sido was satisfied that Aelius had followed procedure in order to be received by him, or else he was in a good mood. He freed his spacious office of the underlings who occupied the other desks with a curt "Out," then gave a pleasant nod to the visitor.

  "How is the wrist, Commander? Are we on the mend?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  There was no chair on this side of the desk, likely because the majority of those brought here had no hope of being treated as guests. Sido came around the paper-strewn table and stood at arm's length from Aelius. He was armed, an unusual detail in a man of his rank, in a secure office, within such a well-guarded imperial residence. A blade narrower than, but as long as, an old-fashioned army sword emerged from a plain leather sheath at his belt. Its ivory handle was actually closer to a sword's grip, carved in the shape of an eagle's head and feathery neck.

  Careful not to stare at the weapon, Aelius explained he had come to hear whether there was news about his attackers. "I appreciate your assurance that I would be notified. Still, what can I say, I am anxious to hear your professional evaluation." Saying the words without sounding sarcastic was something he had practiced in his bedroom several times upon awakening. Sido's suspicious gray eyes searched his face, although composing his features to serene neutrality had been Aelius's second exercise.

  "It's a rough area around the inn," the policeman said, rocking on the fores and soles of his boots, relaxing enough to clasp his hands behind his back. Why not? He had no reason to fear, since Aelius had been thoroughly searched not once but twice before reaching this office. "They fish corpses out of the canal now and then, Commander. Men with assignments like yours may come to see themselves as privileged and distinct, and assume that what befalls them is also special. Believe me, despite our efforts on behalf of the good citizens of Medi-olanum, what happened at the Faunus's Fortune happens virtually every night in one or the other of the city's inns. Even if we should find a connection between the branded thief and the attack against you— well! A thief is a thief, and does what thieves do. When we climbed to look for traces in the attic, we also checked the roof above. No corpse lay there at that time. How do you explain it?"

  I don't, and I think you're lying, Aelius said to himself, without elaborating. "Those who first saw the body say his neck was broken."

  Sido looked behind Aelius; he made a sign to someone standing at the door, or out in the hallway—a dismissive wave that meant things were under control. "Affirmative. The fact that my men did not discover him during their search, the morning after the attack,
tells me he had nothing to do with your accident. And even accepting the possibility that he ever was on the roof, clearly he slipped and killed himself by falling. Happens to the best of thieves."

  Ben Matthias, in his brief examination of the corpse, had recognized an injury to the neck that might or might not derive from a fall. They could have snapped his spine on the roof all the same had been his comment to Aelius. Someone, though, stabbed him in the stomach beforehand, and I wager it was his blood that you saw in your bed and on the floor.

  It was not a detail Aelius found wise to share. He took note of the policeman's silence about the stab wound. "The body," he said, "could have been artfully wedged on the roof until the snow displaced him."

  "Not necessarily." Sido reached for a piece of paper on his desk distractedly, placing it flat and even with the edge of the wooden surface. Either he loved order, or else he needed a moment to adjust his expression to the lie. "The interspace between the two houses is small, and full of garbage. A perfect place to conceal someone killed down the street, in a neighborhood where folks tell the authorities nothing if they can help it." He glanced up at Aelius, who in turn was wise enough to be found staring at a corner of the office. "Why do you insist that there is a connection between this corpse and what happened to you?"

  Aelius had had just about enough. He would rather Sido admitted his role behind the attack, because rough play—even within a inch of killing—is admitted between men of action. "With all respect, perfectissimus, I suggest a wild hypothesis of mine, namely that there were three confederates, two of whom actually participated in the assault. One of these two, the branded thief, was killed right off to eliminate a possible witness, and soon after the same happened to the butcher's boy, who kept watch by the trellis below. The third man escaped."

  A small muscle pulled the skin under Sido's right eye, contracting and releasing. "Excellent!" he visibly forced himself to say. "That is cleverl Now we have three criminals, two of them being too few for a victim like Caesar's envoy. If it weren't fanciful nonsense, I'd ask you to consider the possibility of lending your deductive abilities to the State, joining the speculatores"

  The joke made Sido regain his good humor. When he amicably placed his hand on Aelius's shoulder he must have felt the stiff hardness of his muscles, no matter how the visitor tried to pretend calm. "You natter me, perfectissimus" Aelius managed to squeeze out of his tension, "or at least I think you do. Is there any word on the Greek butcher, the employer of the man I seem to have killed?"

  "None. But a slimy Greek is a slimy Greek: You can be sure he won't be found, Commander."

  / bet I can, Aelius thought. You 11 make damn sure he's never found.

  His powerful grasp still on Aelius's shoulder (he could break the bone in a quick, single move, there was no doubt in his mind), Sido accompanied him to the door. "Do stop by if you have any other suggestion for us. You and I will see one another at the execution, won't we? We both owe it to the judge."

  12 December, Tuesday

  "You will not refuse me again, Spartianus. I forgive you for snubbing my birthday, but tonight I celebrate the vigil of Tellus's day, and Mother Earth is a goddess none of us can disagree about."

  The invitation to dinner, so affably and straightforwardly presented, left little room for Aelius to wiggle. He promised Decimus he would come, bought an illustrated copy of Eliodorus's Ethiopian Tales as a birthday gift to him, and attended the elegant get-together in the company of those Decimus called amici quasi fratres, his brotherlike friends. The officers Aelius had already met were there, plus three more, whose scrutiny of him went beyond the mild curiosity they could feel for Caesar's envoy.

  If reclining on dining couches was becoming a thing of the past, here it represented only the first of a series of traditional ceremonial features. Finding himself between Decimus and Ulpius Domninus on the middle couch, the place of honor known as "the consul's seat," confirmed to Aelius that his assignment was acknowledged. The menu followed the ancient division of entrees (Decimus had chosen flounder from Ravenna, pond-grown pike, and peacock eggs), three main courses (boar, hare, pheasant), and sweets (preserves and honey apples). Warm and cold wine, mixed with water and honey by handsome boys, was passed around in goblets from the Rhineland, intricately decorated with outer reticles of spun glass, wishing long life and happiness the Roman way: bibe vivas multis annis, vivas feliciter.

  Throughout the reception, chatter seemed directed in subtle ways. With the excuse of the coming war, and of going east, much was made of each guest's background and career, travels and acquaintances. Aelius watched Decimus direct his friends in the choice of food and drink like a chorus master, and waited his turn with the unease of the outsider among men who know each other through family, education, service in the same unit.

  It was not the self-consciousness he'd felt when first seeing Rome from the Aurelian Way, so overwhelming that he'd spent the night outside the walls, but rather insecurity, provoked by this game that was midway between braggadocio and the male marking of the post Pen-natus the brick-maker had spoken of in Modicia. Thankfully laughter and idle comments interrupted the telling of this or that campaign experience. The twins' assignment to the same command made for a hilarious comedy of errors that included a general officer's wife; Decimus's own disastrous encounters with Caledonian cuisine peppered his tale of harsh frontier duty.

  When Aelius's turn came, the uneven attention paid by the guests to one another's stories became a nearly uninterrupted silence. Eyes rose toward him above half-empty plates, full glasses; men who had seemed tipsy took the keen posture of listeners. Sarmatia, Egypt, Armenia, Persia, the days at court: Decimus encouraged him to speak of those experiences no differently than he'd done with the others. Yet, and it was more than an impression on Aelius's part, his telling attracted a scrutiny that only politeness separated from a test. The sense of being evaluated remained with him even after repeated toasts put an end to the comparison, when the cheers to emperors and army units became maudlin wishes to faraway courtesans and girlfriends, and boy lovers for those who had them.

  At the close of dinner, the host's absence from the table for the selection of more wine created an odd parenthesis that made more acute Aelius's feeling of exclusion. Ulpius Domninus opened it, the way one takes up an old conversation about something that continues to puzzle. "Nothing doing, gentlemen. Our Decimus keeps the secret so well, I say we abandon our bets, or else put the speculatores after him."

  "Why?" Lucius Sinister, who had drunk more than the rest and struggled to stay propped on his left elbow, patted his couch like a customer asking for another glass. "We could add Spartianus to the wager instead: He makes good money as Caesar's envoy, I'll bet."

  His brother, next to him, laughed in his glass. "If we haven't found out in years, how's a newcomer to figure it out? You don't even know what we're talking about, do you, Commander Spartianus."

  Answering that he didn't, or a self-conscious protest against gossip, would accentuate his otherness. Aelius said nothing, with the result that he heard of the mystery anyway. It surrounded Decimus's daughter, whose existence he had never even mentioned to Aelius. She was fabled in the officers' imagination as very rich and proud, being the sole heir, of such beauty that her father kept her locked up like Danae, so that neither man nor god could take her, so learned that it would be shameful for a woman to exhibit similar knowledge in public.

  "Some of us think her name is Plautilla," a tanned man called Vivius Lucianus said for his benefit, "because Decimus's first wife was called Plautia. Some swear it's Portia. We just don't know. She probably lives in another city, or here under another name. He won't say, and we can only wonder."

  "Why is it necessary that you know?"

  Aelius's words snipped a tense rope. Ulpius Domninus laughed. Had a provincial recruit put his feet on the table, he wouldn't have looked more amused. "What do you mean, why? We're curious. Isn't a pyramid or a labyrinth or a sealed box there to be f
orced open? Of all people, you should live by that dictum!"

  Months it had taken Aelius to trace letters, documents, to undo lies and deceptions, to discover where one sepulcher lay, which coffin to unseal in order to know the truth. His last mission had shown him the terrible nature of secrets, and not because he'd nearly died in the process. "Forgive me." He tried to speak without arrogance. "I feel no need to unravel this particular secret."

  "But would you tell, if you unraveled it?"

  "No."

  After everyone left—even Ulpius Domninus, who tarried longer than the others—Decimus watched Aelius take his cape from the venerable old serf in the cloakroom. "You hold drink well."

  "It's not a virtue."

  "Not a vice, either. Drinking to oblivion is a vice. Won't you stay a little longer? Talk of old times makes me melancholy."

  Aelius found the excuse thin. "It was you who evoked careers and campaigns. We could have spoken of Mother Earth instead." But he did follow Decimus to the ancestors' room.

  How does it happen that in the middle of the night men who know one another imperfectly speak more freely than they would to friends? Aelius took it as the next level of fact-finding on Decimus's part. He kept his restraint even when the disproportion between confidence given and that obtained in return grew too large to be of use to his colleague, never mind how tempted he was to reciprocate.

  "If you read the founding fathers, Spartianus, you realize how far we have come from our ideals, our original design."

  "Well, it depends on which founding fathers you refer to. Romulus and Remus? The Seven Kings? Or do you go back to those who sailed from Troy to found a new world on Italy's shores?"

  Decimus wagged his head in denial. Weariness and drink made his face sag; the left eye, particularly, under a lid that wanted to close. He was at the age when men keep themselves up by massage and exercise, but the artificial freshness of the morning does not last. "You know exactly what I mean. The Republic, the people—the will of the people intended as citizens. Look around yourself: We have no idea of who or where or how many hundreds of thousands are coming through the borders any one day. You have to strain your ear to hear Latin spoken in most cities." He made a pause, correcting with an apologetic rise of an open hand the impression of contempt he had given. "I don't mean people like you, yours have been romanized for a couple of centuries."