The Fire Waker

by Ben Pastor

  "Spartianus, son of a bitch."

  Worse than a barbarian, it was Sido. He crouched in the snow, calling, "Spartianus, you son of a bitch. Look at me. Look at me! Keep your eyes open. Look at me."

  The late afternoon sky above seemed blinding, even though stars were already pinned impossibly high over the fringed branches of the dark trees. Wearing belted tunics to their hips, trousers, and boots, the fur-caped, fur-hatted speculatores were standing around, a circle of wolves. One of them passed his foot through the bloody snow; another said, "It's a wonder bears didn't come to finish him off."

  Sido held his head up. "The last man on earth I wanted to rescue, but it does give me satisfaction." He slapped him roundly. "Tell me if you feel this. God, it does give me satisfaction. Here, drink." Warm wine materialized in a cup, held to his lips. "Slowly, drink. The Roman left you in the lurch, eh? Your mount made it back by itself. It's got more sense than you do."

  Aelius had a vague idea that he was shivering. Quilts were heaped on him; they were stirring a bright fire. The chatter of teeth in his head kept him from hearing the words he was trying to say.

  "I know," Sido answered to whatever those words had been. "I know. Frugi was my man. The moment news came of his death at Celeia, I knew he'd been killed. I simply didn't know who among you had done it. Then Lady Helena told me you'd infiltrated them to guard her son's interests: I won't let you be the only one she is grateful to." Aelius wanted to say it was nothing like that, but a great torpor was overtaking him. They forced him to drink. "How could you go into the woods alone with Decimus? If the hostiles hadn't ambushed you, he'd have cut you down himself after you threatened him—either way, you weren't meant to come out alive from that errand. Now you've got to tell me where I can find Decimus. He's gone, and you're a witness. If you know where he might have fled, you must tell me, it is your duty to tell." Swallowing the warm wine was so consoling, Aelius was tempted to close his eyes again and let go. But Sido kept shaking him. "Stay awake, don't do that." Someone else rubbed his hands, pinched him.

  It took them an hour to get him back to lucidity. Bits of hardtack were handed him, no more than sips of the warm drink. He must have been in a moment of blackout when they'd reduced his dislocated shoulder, because he had not felt the pain, but now he could move the left arm a little, and the ache was considerably less. In the dark, the fire burned high. Sido stood in front of it, a hefty silhouette with arms crossed, listening to what Aelius said.

  "Yes, whatever," he interrupted then impatiently. "I don't have time to hear any of that. Murders are another kettle of fish, especially those committed elsewhere. Leave them aside. There's one culprit I want to catch, and that's Curius Decimus. We can't find him. His colleagues were rounded up at Carnuntum yesterday. They won't say where he is, or don't know; I think they don't know, otherwise I would have gotten it out of them. You've got to tell me."

  Aelius sat up. Life poured back into him; his wits were rallying at an increasing speed. "Well, I don't know where he is, either."

  The closest crossover point to Roman territory was not the burgus. From the speculators, riding back, Aelius heard of the raid against Aquae Mortae that followed the ambush. It'd been a relatively small incident, ending with the repulse of the hostiles, but in the confusion no one doubted Decimus's report of his colleague's death. It had been the handful of barbarian negotiators that made the goodwill gesture of informing Roman authorities; they'd witnessed the ambush from the woods where they'd fled, and reported it to the commander at Ala Nova. Sido was there, on Decimus's trail, and had used the information to search for his witness in the barbarian woods. Near Ala Nova, Sido and Aelius forded to safety, several hours after Curius Decimus had left the border for destination unknown.

  Gervelata, 15 February, Thursday, Lupercalia, Feast of the She-Wolf

  "What do you think? For over a year I'd kept an eye on Judge Marcel-lus, who through his vaunted honesty accumulated more threats and antipathy than any accommodating judge I know." The keenness Sido had shown listening to Aelius's report on Cato's Sodality waned into restless lack of patience now that they spoke of other things. "There's no protecting someone all day and all night, especially when he does not care to be protected. WTien he was killed, it was little surprise. Still, it offered me an opportunity to find out who—among all those who swore vengeance against him—had succeeded. The last thing I needed, Spartianus, was someone like yourself meddling in criminal investigation. Because of your imperial contacts, whether or not your credentials as Caesar's envoy were accepted by His Serenity, you had to be stopped the only way I know how: giving you a lesson, short of killing you. You overreacted; those I hired bungled matters and had to be eliminated. The Greek butcher would have lived, had you not stuck your nose into his halfwit helper's role in the attack against you. You forced me to get rid of him, too, so I added him to the number of the Christians to be executed. One more, one less—who's counting?"

  "So now it's my fault if you had me attacked and then had to cover your tracks. But you did not find the judge's killer, did you? You knew it was not Protasius."

  "Of course not. It was your traitorous colleague Decimus. His grudge against Marcellus was well known. He had the means of doing it; he provided the bricks and the workers used in the building site near the Old Baths. His men had the advantage of proximity: Any one of them could have done it, and I plan to have them all tortured until the culprit coughs up a confession."

  "You're wrong again." In the courtyard of the army post, Aelius supervised the packing of his saddle. Although the wound on his side was a light one, and his sore shoulder on the mend, he'd requested five days of recovery leave in view of the energy needed for the coming campaign—and for other reasons of his own. "You'd waste a jailer's time. It wasn't Decimus, either."

  Sido grunted. In his wolf cape, with two wolf's heads falling over his shoulders, he resembled a hybrid creature of the woods, none too friendly. "Rubbish."

  "On the contrary. Had you not been in such a hurry to eliminate the Christian slave crew at the Old Baths you'd have found that one of them was indeed Marcellus's killer—but he acted on commission."

  "Yes, from Decimus!"

  "No, from Decimus's cousin, Annia Cincia."

  Sido threw up his hands, causing the wolf's heads to look alive and about to bite his neck. "What? And who's she 7 . What does she have to do with this?"

  "It's a long story. I had it fairly clear in my mind a week ago when I met her old cohort, the fire waker, in Barbaricum. Until then I'd been unsure of my hunches: I still thought Agnus might have been behind it all—Lupus the brick-maker's death in Treveri as well as Marcellus's death. He's certainly self-deluded and arrogant enough to bend events in his favor. But—more's the pity—he is a fraudulent charlatan and a trickster, not a murderer. I heard him out as he slobbered on himself with self-adulation, then gave him my version of the truth. He showed no overt surprise when I explained my theory, so at first I thought he disbelieved it and shook it off his back. Now I venture to say he was struck hard, deep down. His own fire turned against him in the end; he has a responsibility in what happened. On the part of Annia Cincia, or Casta, as she is known, there was instead a formidable series of clever moves, following true feminine tactics. She managed to be where both murders happened, while remaining invisible, and did not hesitate to cause collateral deaths in order to strike her intended victims."

  "Rubbish," Sido insisted. "But if so, what was her plan?"

  "What is her plan, you mean. Let us say that her final intent is to call down the heavy hand of Roman justice on the present Christian hierarchy. Conservatism? No, nothing like that, Sido. The lady is a Christian herself."

  "I don't get it." Sido watched Aelius vault with some difficulty onto his horse but would not offer help. "I'm not sure I want to get it. If Christians kill one another, they save me the trouble. What I want is Decimus, and the moment you return from leave I expect you to hand me a written, detailed report on the
se goddamned Roman traitors' harebrained scheme. There'll be time to catch a murderess."

  Aelius wound the reins around his left fist. He was thinking of that morning in Treveri, riding to the brickyard, glancing at the pilgrims huddled in the fields. "Not this one. If I think that Fate itself had placed a hint for me in the Old Baths, on that wall where a bored client scratched a verse from Greek tragedy: 'Woe, woe, look, look! Keep away the bull from the heifer —'"

  "What?"

  "It's spoken by the mad seer Cassandra, foretelling the king's murder in the bath by his queen."

  "I don't know what you mean. You speak in riddles."

  "Well, I should have thought that behind Marcellus's death, too, there could be a woman's murderous plan. Not to worry, I will explain all in writing, perfectissimus. But unless you get your men after her— and it may be already too late—she'll slip through our fingers as she did before."

  There was a road—less than a road, actually, a lane following the bank of a seasonal stream—that from Savaria, in a roundabout manner, skirting two patches of forest land, led over the hills. From there, picking up a trail in the direction of Decimus's isolated villa would be easy. Still, Aelius did not follow this route. He took a longer, untracked way from his parents' estate, following lanes bordering other properties, along low walls built of stones without mortar, crossing thickets and small watercourses. The last few miles he rode on unmarked land, through a wilderness that had traces of having been cultivated once.

  Snow turned to mush under an icy rain; dark fell before his arrival. The serfs let him in without questions, so Decimus must have given them a description of his colleague, and permission to open to him.

  The Roman sat in his library, smaller than the one at Mediolanum but, as Aelius remembered from the night when the panegyric on Severus had been lent him, well stocked and cozy. Neat drapes hung before shelves to protect the books from dust. Decimus neither stood nor spoke when Aelius appeared on the threshold. He did raise his eyes. In an instant, the sum of the frantic moments when they'd last seen one another was drawn and resolved; the personal anger Aelius had expected to feel at this time did not materialize. It did not even try to climb to his throat. He did not recall confronting it during the ride here, or in the hours of recovery before it; it simply stayed where it was, so deep and low within him that it might as well not exist.

  "There's no getting rid of you, is there." Decimus looked years older—centuries older, Aelius wanted to say, as if the weight of ages impossible to resurrect had crashed on him at once. The attempt to be ironic was like paint on a dead man's face. "Won't you have a seat?"

  "No. Sido is after you. He doesn't know where you are, and I don't think his men followed me here. I rode one of our unshod horses, and I'm at my mother's for all he knows. But it's a matter of time."

  "Not necessarily." Decimus had been writing, not reading. Letters sat already rolled up and sealed on his desk. "This property is registered under another man's name. The serfs are faithful. Sido and his minions may search the cadastre of the entire region for weeks and find nothing. The fact that you know is the problem ... for you, I mean. I am beyond problems."

  Aelius took the words in stride. He expected them. All in all, it was the reason why not even his political contempt for the man had reason to be anymore. "Have you decided how to do it, and when?"

  "Two questions in one, two answers in one, Spartianus: long ago, and tonight."

  "Is there any way I may help?"

  Decimus made a grimace. For a moment, amusement succeeded in lifting the corners of his weary, downturned mouth. "No, thank you. I'm not exactly Nero, and you're not exactly my merciful freedman. Hand-holding during suicide is tasteless."

  "Frankly, I thought you'd seek one of the distant provinces."

  "Oh, do not suggest the provinces to me, Spartianus. Life in the provinces is not life. I had to put up with Mediolanum for three years, and before then it'd been ages since I set my eyes on Rome. It only pains me having to die outside of Rome, so I am doing the next best thing." Without leaving his chair, he pulled aside the drape behind him. There was no shelf there, only a wall, and a fresco on the wall. Against a black background, like a night sky or a tempest, a view of Rome was illustrated. Aelius recognized the Capitol, Hadrian's massive grave by the Tiber, the circuses and temples. It was painted in a pale gilded bread color, as if it were a cake in the shape of Rome, a great delicacy to consume.

  "Do you want me to stay?"

  "As you wish."

  From a drawer of his desk Decimus took out a surgical scalpel and set it calmly before himself. "Open that cabinet and look inside." He pointed to a low piece of furniture at Aelius's right. "I paid her fare to Africa. You can keep it."

  In the cabinet sat a small alabaster portraying a woman, young, large-eyed, with a firm, exquisite little mouth. Aelius recognized who she was without asking, without saying.

  "I pursued the bitch, but she wouldn't marry me. Took that old fool Pupienus instead."

  "You loved her and were rejected —that was your true grudge against Annia Cincia!" When Aelius looked over, Decimus had turned his chair to the painted wall, and the scalpel was gone from the desk.

  "Don't speak nonsense. I wanted her wealth."

  The motions of wrist-cutting were quick, hardly detectable from where Aelius stood. Decimus did not so much as wince as he did it.

  "What about your daughter?" he thought he should say.

  Decimus moved his head from side to side. Aelius did not understand if it was to refuse the argument, or because he had nothing to say, or what else. His shoulders were still erect; the neck showed no weakness. "What about your daughter?" He echoed Aelius's question.

  "She's not mine."

  "That is hard."

  Until the end Aelius watched his colleague's neck, the lack of tension under the fastidiously arranged hair, and then little by little the straight line of the tendons beginning to sag, the knotty bone between his shoulders protruding slowly as the head began to lean forward, the shoulders drooped. Blood on the floor pooled at the sides of the chair; an imperceptible slope in the floor made it snake under the desk. Aelius waited for the small convulsed motion of the end, a slump he walked forward to arrest. When he lifted Decimus's head, his colleague seemed to stare at him; on his sallowness, death did not show as readily as it would on a ruddy man, but life was gone from the eyes. He closed those, composed the body, and stood there a few moments more before calling the serfs.

  Sido and his men were at his mother's doorstep to check on him before dawn, when Aelius had just returned. Justina, already up, received them, giving him time to undress and slip into bed. "My son had his first night of good sleep after risking his life beyond the river, and you come to annoy him at this hour? Go ahead, check in his room, check on his horse in the stables, awaken my newborn granddaughter!"

  The insistent mewing of Belatusa's days-old child accompanied the speculatores through the house, to Aelius' bedroom. "What is it, has the war started?" Aelius asked, turning on his pillow. Sido himself squelched in the mud to the stables, to examine the army mount and its harness, and found that neither it nor the other horses had been ridden recently. He came back grumpily, passing unawares by the barn where the unshod, weary horse chewed on hay. Mouthing, "My apologies, lady, we had to make sure," he left the property in haste.

  ASHES

  Intercisa, Pannonia Valeria, Thursday, 22 February,

  Cara Cognatio, or Dear Kinship, the holiday to resolve family disputes

  There was already a sour, green hint of spring in the air, even though two months at least would pass before the snow would melt. It was one of those mid-February passing thaws, when ice booms as it cracks in the great river, and mounds of wet snow collapse without noise from the roofs. A lukewarm sun burrowed through the overcast sky like a burin through a milky stone; wherever the narrow beam came down, the thing or animal or man touched by it seemed to catch on fire with color, whatever its col
or was.

  Aelius traveled to Intercisa for a number of reasons, professional and private. He was to lead the transfer of a unit of mounted archers from the city to Carnuntum, and it so happened that his mother's lawyer, recommended by the ubiquitous ben Matthias, resided there. Ben Matthias himself, who had gotten good commissions from the army, told Aelius the case was as good as won. "They haven't got a leg to stand on, those hunks of beef." He referred to Gargilius and Barga, rubbing his hands. "To try to rob a widow: terefah! But you're wrong in not claiming your part of the inheritance; a man's got to have prop-erty.

  "At any rate, I sent for my copy of the quitclaim document at Nico-media. How long have you been here, Baruch?" "A week."

  "It means you already know everyone's business, eh?"

  The Jew modestly raked his beard. "Not everyone's. I did hear there was a purge in the army, among your Roman colleagues. They were tight-lipped to the day of their execution, and Decimus is dead by his own hand. Tsk, tsk, Commander: the kind of idealistic harebrained scheme aristocrats come up with. What else? Well, I hear that our per-fectissimus Sido took all the credit for exposing the camarilla and is mounting Lady Helena day and night."

  "Let him: They deserve each other." Aelius knew Helena well enough; her telling Sido that he'd infiltrated Cato's Sodality was not so much meant to save him from trouble as to make him politically beholden to her, officially declaring his concern for Constantine's life.

  Ben Matthias misunderstood Aelius's irritation. "Oh, she'll let you into her bed again, be sure." He turned away in disgust from the door when a drover passed by, leading hogs meant for sacrifice to the family gods. "Today I do not set my foot out, there's too much impurity around. Tomorrow, instead, I go to Aquincum, but not for the reason you may think."

  "What reason should I think of? I have been at army posts until this morning."

  "It's your old bogeyman, Commander—the miracle worker. Gave himself up to Roman scouts at Contra Aquincum and was brought back over the river. For three days he's been held at the city jail, and promises that the wild beasts in the arena will refuse to maul him, blades will fail to cut him, fire will not consume his flesh, et cetera. Folks are nocking from everywhere to see the fire waker's wonder, although I rather think they want to see him cut to ribbons by bears."