Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (24 page)

*   *   *

“
T
HAT’S THE HOUSE UP THERE,
Your Ladyship,” the coachman called, pointing up the hillside with his whip when Alphena stuck her head out of the window. “D’ye want we should get all the way up to it?”

“No,” said Alphena. “Master Pandareus and I will go to the door ourselves and bring Paris back.”

She wasn’t going to insult the driver by telling him he couldn’t get the heavy carriage up a track so steep, but that was what she thought. It was almost certainly what the driver thought also, though she was sure that he’d have made a try.

She looked at her companion. “Ah, if that’s all right with you, master?” she said.

Pandareus had reached for the door on his side to open it. The footmen whipped it open before his hand touched the lever. He smiled and said, “The road isn’t as steep as the steps to the Capitol, which I climb most clear nights to view the stars. It will feel good to stretch my legs.”

Servants formed around her and the scholar with the usual amount of shouting and argument. The coachman wanted them out of the way so that he could turn, which was going to be tricky even without leaving the main road. It curved around the middle of the hillside and, though the pavement was fairly level, the slope to either side—up to the right and Paris’ farmhouse, down to the left and a small stream—was another matter.

She and Pandareus started up the track. A man and a woman—middle-aged, wearing worn tunics and looking worn themselves—watched over the courtyard wall, but they were obviously servants. There was no sign of Paris.

“Surely he must have heard us?” Alphena said. “Maybe Collina’s messenger didn’t reach him and he’s not here.”

“I suspect Master Paris is making a point,” Pandareus said. He smiled again, very slightly. “I’m interested in seeing how he lives, so this may be fortunate.”

Pandareus was having an easier time with the track than Alphena was. She realized that, just as he had said, he regularly tramped through the backstreets and defiles of Carce at night.

She was used to people saying politely that this or that wasn’t a problem when of course it was. She smiled: Pandareus probably didn’t do that. He was
very
unworldly.

Alphena had been considering how to rouse Paris if he continued to ignore his visitors when they reached the house. The Illyrian kinsmen Drago and Rago solved the problem by jerking the door open without orders.

“Hey, Your Ladyship!” one of them called. “Want we should haul him out?”

“We’re coming up, Rago,” Alphena said, hoping she’d named the right cousin. “We’ll talk with Master Paris in his reception room.”

To Pandareus she added in an undertone, “It’ll take some time to turn the coach. I think we’re better off up here where we can be sure it won’t topple onto us.”

A third servant was watching them from the olive orchard on the slope beyond the house. The building had three small rooms parallel to the road and a slightly larger one as the lower bar of its L shape. Even if Paris and the three visible servants were everyone living on the farm, quarters must be crowded.

The stone-walled courtyard closed the rectangle. There was a lean-to shed against it and an olive press under a thatched roof taking up most of the rest of the space.

Pandareus, apparently thinking the same thing, said, “This is the sort of cottage which a small olive grove—on rocky soil—would just about support. Given what the wealthy folk of Carce would pay to a soothsayer with the presence of Master Paris, it gives me to believe that he’s honest. Although he’s not—”

Pandareus smiled at Alphena. He was a remarkably good-humored man. That was despite being a foreigner in a society that didn’t pay a great deal of money to real scholars, according to comments Varus and Corylus had made.

“—a man to whom I’ve warmed in our brief acquaintance.”

They reached the door just as Paris came to it. The Illyrian cousins waited hopefully for Alphena to tell them how to react.

“This is what passes for courtesy when the self-styled master race comes calling, I suppose,” Paris said.

“We’ll go inside,” Alphena said, “since we’re here already.”

She stepped forward. Paris hopped back out of the way so briskly that he must have understood at least some of what the Illyrians were thinking.

“I was rather surprised myself,” Pandareus said conversationally as he followed Alphena inside. “I would have expected Rago and Drago to kick the door down instead of opening it. I suppose they were on good behavior in front of Lady Alphena.”

The interior was cramped, dark—the small windows were under the eaves—and smelled as though cleanliness wasn’t of much concern to the occupants. There was a rectangular table, a low couch that probably doubled as a bed, and a single chair. The walls were mud brick without plaster or other decoration.

Indeed, there was nothing inside that was in the least decorative, unless you counted the strings of onions hanging from along one sidewall. Alphena
didn’t
count them, and she doubted that Paris did, either.

The Etruscan soothsayer was dressed for travel. Alphena said, “We’ll leave as soon as the carriage is ready. If that’s all you’re taking—”

She nodded to a cloak rolled into a bindle, probably holding a few objects in its folds.

“—I can have one of my men take it down for you.”

“I will carry it myself,” Paris said. Her offer of courtesy seemed to have made him angrier, though it was hard to say.

“I don’t see any books, Master Paris,” Pandareus said. “Is your library in another room?”

“Books are the business of clerks,” Paris said with a sneer. “A wise man listens to the flow of the Cosmos instead of reading the words of men who know
nothing
of reality.”

“Indeed?” Pandareus said in a tone of mild curiosity. Alphena had the sudden impression that she was watching a pair of gladiators, though she suspected that neither man had ever held a sword in his life.

“And if I may ask out of scholarly curiosity…,” Pandareus continued. “Is yours a family name, or did you choose ‘Paris’ yourself from the
Iliad
?”

“Your
Iliad,
” said Paris, “is a lie told by a race of liars. This much is true: My people were driven from their home by Greek barbarians and settled here, only to be displaced again by even greater barbarians. The Greeks called the prince of my people ‘Alexandros,’ but Homer knew him by his real name too, Paris.”

Alphena frowned. She had heard of the
Iliad,
but she thought that it was very old.

“Do you mean that you’re descended from the man in the poem?” she asked. Another possibility struck her and she added, “Or do you claim you’re his reincarnation?”

Looking at Pandareus, Paris said, “She is completely without logic, and she appears to be unable to listen. Yet I am to bow to her!”

Pandareus smiled in a fashion that restrained Alphena in a way that nothing physical could have done. He said, “Her Ladyship is, of course, a woman. She has therefore not been educated in logic and rhetoric—or in literature, for that matter. But I have found her withal to be intelligent and clearheaded in difficult circumstances. In addition…”

Alphena waited in anticipation.

“… Her Ladyship has practiced swordsmanship with a degree of success which has impressed better judges than a Greek scholar like myself. She would not need the help of her entourage to end your earthly cares, Master Paris, and to set you adrift in your flowing Cosmos.”

“Hey, Rago!” Drago said, ostensibly to his cousin, also in the doorway, but in fact loudly enough to be heard in the olive grove. “Archias got the wagon turned around down there.”

Alphena smiled. Phalanthus, the understeward in charge of the present detail, was probably horrified, but the Illyrians’ subterfuge served the purpose of informing her.

“We’ll go on to the Collinus estate, masters,” she said. “I hope we’ll reach it within two hours, from what the coachman estimated.”

She walked back outside and stepped away from the door so that Pandareus and the Etruscan could follow her. When Paris came out, carrying his bindle, she added, “And Paris? Master Pandareus was too polite to mention this, but I’ll point out that it was his reading of books which has located the gryphon’s egg we’re all interested in seeing.”

Alphena let her lips quirk, not
quite
into a sneer. Paris was glaring at her.

“Perhaps age,” she said, “has deafened the ears you use to listen to the Cosmos. Reading books may be a better technique in the long run.”

*   *   *

V
ARUS AND HIS ESCORT ARRIVED
at dawn at a home on the Palatine Hill, coming from Saxa’s town house nearby in the Carina District. He didn’t know where Lucinus had spent the night, but he and one of the black goats were already standing at the gate with a thin, balding man.

“Lord Varus?” Lucinus said. “This is Lucius Trebianus, the owner of the house.”

Trebianus made a half bow to Varus. His fringe of hair had probably been red when he was younger. Two servants accompanied him, but they were staring at the black goat. They looked terrified.

So was the trembling goat, tethered to the handle of the gate to the back garden. Its eyes rolled and it was too frightened to bleat.

“You promise that you can lay the spirits here?” Trebianus said, turning to Lucinus. He had a slight lisp and a tendency to put his nouns in the nominative case, whatever their position in the sentence structure. From his name, he was a Gaul from the Po Valley.

“I promise nothing of the sort,” Lucinus said calmly. “But since you’re not paying me and my colleague, I think I can promise that we will not cheat you.”

He lifted the lid of the wicker basket at his feet, part of the slight luggage he had brought from his farm near the Bay. He took out a wooden boat wrapped in raw wool. It was flat bottomed and the length of Varus’ forearm; there was a small cabin in the middle.

“Has your family been disturbed by spirits here, Master Trebianus?” Varus said. His escort, a dozen men directed by an understeward named Coccius, formed an arc around him and his companions; they narrowed the street as effectively as a builder’s dray. More effectively: a wagon wouldn’t club you senseless if you bumped it.

“Well, not that exactly,” Trebianus said. “I’ve got a house on the Aventine; that’s where I live. I bought this place for the lot, you see. This house—it’s run-down, but mainly it’s tiny. It’s a hundred and fifty years old, here on this prime location! I figured to tear it down and build something big enough for folk nowadays to live in. Only—”

He licked his lips, glancing toward the gateway.

“You see,” he went on, “the crew I brought in didn’t like the feel of the place. They downed tools and the overseer wasn’t any happier about sticking around to whip them than the crew was to keep digging like they’d been doing. And I—”

He glanced back again. Varus realized that the reason they were having this discussion in the street was because the owner didn’t want to enter his own property.

“—don’t like the place much myself. So when Master Lucinus said he was a magician, well, I was glad to meet him.”

A wagon that must have hauled quicklime to a building site rattled along the street in a miasma of stinging white dust. The driver whipped his pair of mules along. Wheeled vehicles weren’t allowed on the streets of Carce during the hours of daylight, but he was hoping to reach the apron of the Piling Bridge over the Tiber before the Watch stopped him.

Varus’ escort drew together, shouting threats and waving their cudgels. They were probably concentrating on a possible normal danger so that they didn’t have to think about the magic they might be about to witness.

“If I can ask you, lordship?” Trebianus said. “I was wondering just where you come in on this, you being a senator’s son and all?”

He sounded suspicious rather than merely curious.
Perhaps he thinks I’m going to try to cheat him out of the property to build a house for myself.

Suppressing a smile, Varus said, “This house was the property of Lucius Sulla during his dictatorship following the Social Wars. It was here that those whom he had proscribed as Enemies of the Republic were brought for identification.”

Varus had dropped into the dry lecturing tone that he often used unwittingly. This time it was deliberate, showing himself to be the sort of pedantic scholar who might accompany a magician for no better reason than knowledge.

As I really am,
he thought.

“That is, their
heads
were brought here, to this house,” he continued aloud, “where they remained until either Sulla or one of his aides confirmed their identification so that they could be struck off the list. There were four thousand, seven hundred of them, forty-seven hundred severed heads, waiting here until they could be carried to the Forum and displayed to the populace at large.”

Varus gestured toward the open gate like an orator. “It’s scarcely surprising that this place should be the haunt of restless spirits,” he concluded. “If malign influences exist anywhere, then surely it is here.”

Master Pandareus would be amused at what I was doing with his rhetorical training,
Varus thought. Then,
I wish Pandareus were here. His presence helps me believe in logic and the role of intellect, which I sometimes come to doubt.

“Right, right, I see that,” Trebianus muttered toward the ground. “It can’t have been this bad all the time, though. Up to a couple years ago, there was people living here, and they couldn’t do that if it was like it is now.”

“I think we’re ready to begin, Master Trebianus,” Lucinus said. “Do you care to come into the garden with us?”

“Hercules!” the owner said. “Are you out of—”

He remembered who he was talking to. If fear of magic hadn’t driven Varus’ escort to a distance, one of them might have corrected him already.

“That is,” Trebianus said, “I have no part in such matters, sirs. I’ll leave you to it—and wish you Good Fortune!”

He started off, then paused and looked back at Lucinus. “I’ve given you the keys. When you’re done, just lock up.”