Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (10 page)

Drago and Rago were Illyrians, probably former pirates. The best that could be said of their Greek was that it was better than their Latin; but they were quick-witted, fearless, and had demonstrated that they were willing to face death on their mistress’s behalf.

Alphena considered the situation for a moment. The Illyrians were unnecessary, and their presence would irritate the jeweler. On the other hand, Syenius would serve her to the best of his ability regardless, and she had no reason to care about his opinion. She might need the cousins to face a gang of bandits—or demons.

“They will stay,” she said, reclining on the couch covered in pale green silk. “Show me what you have that would be worthy of the Lady Hedia.”

Two young men came from the curtained rear of the shop, carrying a small, round table of desert cedar, waxed and polished to a luster that brought out the grain. The servants mixed wine one to three with water at Alphena’s direction. They poured it into a cup with a stag hunt in gold pressed between two layers of clear glass.

Servants brought out wonders on trays or cushions. Alphena examined them, sipping wine and feeling satisfied with herself.

It was meaningful that Theodromus hadn’t stopped her Illyrians from entering. Alphena didn’t imagine that he was afraid of them or of her whole escort together: they might well kill him, but the man who had battered the Seven-Foot Thracian unconscious wouldn’t back down for a pack of scruffs.

By letting Rago and Drago inside, Theodromus had avoided a scene in front of the shop, whether or not his brother-in-law realized it. There was another possibility too, though Alphena might be flattering herself to consider it: the Macerator was no longer fighting, but Theodromus might make allowances for a knowledgeable fan whose escort didn’t have all the polish of some noble entourages.

Syenius began with polished jewels—he claimed the seven large emeralds set into a gold breastplate had come from lands beyond the Indies—but he quickly realized that his customer wasn’t particularly interested in them. Close up, Alphena could see that a ruby was far more brilliant than a bit of red glass and that diamonds really did have an internal fire like nothing else. She could see those things—but she didn’t care.

Syenius, who was as observant as a good salesman has to be, murmured to an assistant who returned a bracelet of pearls and sapphires on gold to the back room. Another man bustled in with a cushion on which was spread a necklace of seven gold plaques, each embossed with the winged figure of the Mother Goddess flanked by rampant lions.

“This is very old,” Syenius murmured. “It came to me from Rhodes, but I cannot say with certainty that it was made there. Is the Lady Hedia perchance a devotee of the Great Mother?”

Alphena examined the necklace carefully. Hedia didn’t have any religion that her daughter knew about: she believed in the gods, but she trusted them to keep to their own spheres while human beings—Hedia herself, at any rate—dealt with human affairs.

Alphena didn’t want to be insulting about religion, though: Egyptians were notoriously superstitious. The necklace interested her. Either its age or the goddess images whispered to the secret places in Alphena’s mind, but this was not the piece that had drawn her to the shop.

Syenius made a hand gesture toward the service area. Alphena leaned back from the necklace, frowning. The attendant carried the cushion away, and another slim youth swept in with a diadem on a tray of mica in a silver frame.

That’s it. That’s what I’ve been dreaming of.

“The work is of Tarantine style,” Syenius said. “The piece came from Egypt, from a tomb in Egypt, one of the later Ptolemies. Many craftsmen came to Alexandria to suit their taste and that of the Greek mercenaries they hired as well.”

Alphena didn’t know history,
certainly
not Egyptian history, and didn’t care. What she cared about was the stone gripped in the jaws of the two gold lion heads at the front of the diadem. The remainder of the piece was a simple gold band with a clamp at the back for adjustment.

A fragment of Alphena’s mind noticed that the gold lions were well crafted, but her consciousness was focused on the jewel the lions were holding. It was a flat—well, slightly convex—plate of pulsing color the size of her thumbnail. The edges were irregular but rimmed with heavy gold foil to which the lion jaws were soldered.

It wasn’t a color; it was all colors. When Alphena turned her head, she remembered the stone as blue; but under close scrutiny bands and bubbles of color rippled up from deep inside it.

Alphena blinked and looked at Syenius.
There is no inside. It’s as thin as the foil of the setting.

“What is this jewel?” she snapped. “And where did it come from?”

Her voice sounded angry in her own ears. In truth she was more frightened.

“Your Ladyship,” Syenius said, “I know no more than I’ve told you: the diadem, including the stone, was found in the tomb of a pharaoh who died during the One Hundred and Thirty-second Olympiad. I have never seen or heard of another stone of its type, nor has any other dealer to whom I have shown it.”

Alphena
had
seen this sort of stone before. The Nubians who danced in her dreams strung chips like this one on lengths of twine to make their belts.

Syenius had stiffened slightly at the initial edge in Alphena’s voice. As she relaxed from her initial surprise, the jeweler did also.

He coughed and said, “You’ll notice that the edges are irregular. I wondered at that when I purchased the piece on a buying trip to Alexandria, but I’ve been unable to cut it myself. One of my most skilled workmen tried the edge under the foil with a diamond drill but was unable to scratch it.”

“But…,” said Alphena as she considered what she had just been told. “How could naked savages pierce them to string?”

“They could not pierce a stone like this, Your Ladyship,” Syenius said, gesturing toward the diadem with his left hand. “No more than they could fly. So far as I know there is nothing harder than a diamond, and a diamond could not mark this.”

Syenius wore no jewelry, and hanging from the door to the service room was a peaked “Phrygian” cap, the mark of a freedman. That a man so obviously successful and cultured would openly admit his former slavery made him suddenly more impressive to Alphena.

“I see,” she said, but she didn’t really see. It had been a dream, but it seemed utterly real in memory. “I.…”

Alphena rose from the couch, suiting her action to the sentence she hadn’t completed aloud. The shop assistant swung the tray back as though he and the customer were parts of the same mechanical device, one acting on the other like a lever.

I wasn’t going to knock it to the floor!
Alphena thought, but she controlled the flash of anger before it reached her lips. She was …
disturbed
 … by the situation, and therefore ready to take her mood out on whoever was closest.

Hedia had taught Alphena the value of bridling her temper. If people liked you, they were apt to treat you better. That was as true of the servants who fed and dressed her as it was of her father’s senatorial friends.

Alphena didn’t think she would ever be as smooth as her mother. She had seen Hedia calmly direct that a maid be sold to a dockside brothel for stealing a lace mantilla; she hadn’t raised her voice or shown anything harsher than ironic amusement. But Hedia’s daughter was getting better than the frustrated child who screamed more often than she smiled.

“I will take the diadem with me,” she said. “Send the bill to Balbinus at my father’s house here.”

She realized as she spoke that she had given Syenius a license to rob her father. The money didn’t matter, not measured against Saxa’s wealth, but the thought of being imposed on hardened her expression.

As though he had read her thoughts, Syenius said, “Thank you, Your Ladyship. I think that your steward will consider the cost to be very moderate.”

An assistant was wrapping the diadem in red silk brocade. The other assistant held ready a polished wooden box to hold the item. Florina joined the assistants to take the completed parcel.

Syenius smiled faintly. “To be honest, Your Ladyship,” he said, “I find the piece disquieting, though I couldn’t give a reason for that. I actually considered taking the gem from its setting and disposing of it in the sea.”

He shrugged. “It was a unique piece, though,” he said. “I wasn’t willing to do that for … antiquarian reasons, perhaps. It’s so much easier to destroy things than to create them, is it not?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Alphena said. Her throat was dry.

Florina had the package. Alphena turned; Theodromus pulled open the grill and bowed.

“I’m glad it’s going to a good home,” Syenius said to his customer’s back.

I hope you’re right about that,
Alphena thought. But for now at least she would trust her instinct.

*   *   *

H
EDIA KNEW FROM THE BUSTLE
among the servants that something was happening. “Something” might not be very interesting to her, of course.

The house here on the Bay had eighty servants. That wasn’t exceptional for a senator’s household: Saxa had some two hundred in his town house in Carce, and some of his colleagues had larger staffs yet. Nevertheless, most of what any one servant of eighty did during the day was nothing. They were likely to find excitement in matters that made their mistress yawn.

At the archway between the loggia where Hedia sat and the house proper, Syra whispered to an understeward, then returned purposefully to her mistress.

“Speak,” Hedia said. There was no point in trying to conceal the news from the six additional servants with her in the loggia.

Two held trays of snacks and drinks; Hedia occasionally sipped diluted wine poured from the carafe that sat in a water-filled basin of earthenware to keep cool, but she always directed Syra to carry out that duty. Two more held ostrich-plume fans; Hedia disliked the fans’ repetitive motion at any time, and the sea breeze this afternoon was delightfully sufficient.

The last two carried saffron silk sunshades, which would be useful only if Hedia moved to the corner of the curved bench touched when the sun slipped under the marble roof. There was no chance of her doing so on such a warm day.

Even if Hedia would prefer that a message be kept secret, it would have been impossible. The understeward would babble to somebody. Balbinus, who had sent the understeward, would babble to somebody. And in the order of a dozen other babbling servants had been present when the message was delivered to Balbinus.

Also, the message was probably completely unimportant.

“The Lady Alphena has returned from shopping,” Syra whispered. “She will shortly come to see you with the piece of jewelry which she purchased this afternoon.”

Hedia lifted her chin slightly in acknowledgment. She had received messages even more inconsequential—but not many. Regardless, it would be interesting to see what Alphena’s taste in jewelry was when she was on her own.

Almost with the words, Alphena appeared in the archway. She was followed by her new maid—who seemed to be working out, Hedia was glad to see. She would not have interfered with her daughter’s choice of a chief maid, but Hedia might have interfered—discreetly—with the maid herself if she had turned out to be unsuitable.

Hedia rose, smiling with cool pleasure. “Greetings, Daughter,” she said. “I hope you had a successful outing? Here—”

She patted the cushion on which she had been sitting. A second cushion appeared beside it, winged by the hands of a servant who disappeared as swiftly as he had arrived.

“—won’t you sit with me and tell me all about it.”

Hedia really was glad to see Alphena. The girl was Saxa’s offspring by blood, but she was quickly becoming Hedia’s daughter in spirit if not tastes.

Alphena turned and took the flat wooden box her maid was carrying. Hedia noted the dovetail joints at the corners and the swirling grain of the lid.
Very upscale,
she thought.

Hedia had a great deal of experience judging the quality of a gift without seeming to more than glance at it. While she didn’t do anything simply for the money, the amount of money an admirer spent on her was certainly a factor in judging the man himself. You could never know too much about people with whom you might shortly find yourself in intimate contact.

She saw Alphena’s eyes drift out to sea past the pink-flowering branch growing over the loggia’s railing from the almond tree planted below. The air was hazy this afternoon, muting the blue water and softening the lines of the ships on the water. Many were pleasure craft, but there were working vessels too: motionless fisherman, and freighters tacking on a breeze that was strong enough to spare their crews the backbreaking work of the sweeps.

Hedia found the sea restful to watch, though she didn’t care to get it on her body. Seawater made her feel sticky when it dried, and sand had a way of getting into delicate places that salt made even more uncomfortable.

Smiling, she said to Alphena, “It’s even prettier at night, when the fishermen’s lamps reflect on the water.”

Alphena swallowed and sat down beside her. “I was thinking of someone else, I suppose. Sorry.”

Hedia lifted her chin, barely enough to be called a motion. There had been a man in Alphena’s life, not so very long ago. Well, Hedia knew that feeling also.

When Alphena didn’t immediately bring up the subject that had brought her out to the loggia, Hedia said, “Our lord Saxa and your brother are dining tonight with Senator Macsturnas. Would you care to join me, or would you prefer to be on your own for dinner?”

The words jolted Alphena out of her thoughts. She looked startled, then forced a smile and said, “I haven’t been thinking.…” Then, “I’d like to eat with you, Mother. I’m sorry that I was—”

She fluttered her free hand with a grimace.

“—missing, there.”

“Not at all,” Hedia said. On instinct, she touched the back of the girl’s wrist. “Now, what is it that you’ve purchased? Something to wear tomorrow night to dinner with Bersinus?”