Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (7 page)

“I say, Lord Saxa?” Macsturnas said as he came abreast of Hedia and her husband again. “I’m giving a small dinner tonight. I would be honored if you and your son could join me.”

Hedia glanced back to see if Varus and Corylus were with them now. They had been talking with Alphena, but they hadn’t joined the girl when she strode off.

Perhaps they were still viewing the lizardmen. At any rate, they weren’t visible for as far as Hedia could look back along the road into the compound. Four burly men were moving a cage of baboons down a cross aisle. The laborers looked as savage as the beasts, and the ridged scars of old whippings covered the back of one of the nearer men.

“My premier cook remains in Carce,” the aedile was saying, “but my man here at my house on the Bay is quite good, especially for seafood. His Lucrine oysters in a sauce of cheese and giant fennel are wonderful, wonderful. And the oysters won’t be more than an hour out of the water, of course!”

“Well, I don’t know about Varus…,” Saxa said doubtfully. He looked around anxiously: he didn’t seem to have noticed that Varus was staying behind.

“Our son is continuing to examine the creatures, Lord Husband,” said Hedia over her shoulder as she walked to Alphena’s side. “And I believe Master Corylus is with him.”

“We thought Pandareus should be told about the lizardmen,” Alphena said quietly when Hedia joined her and they turned to go out into the street. “And about my brother’s vision, since he already knows that Varus has them. He said he saw the Sibyl again and there were Worms.”

“Master Pandareus is a very sensible man as well as a learned one,” Hedia said calmly. “I shall be pleased to hear his advice in this instance, as before.”

She spoke in a normal voice, but no one outside the household would be able to overhear the conversation. The attendants had kept a considerable space clear for the return of the senators and their closest associates, but of course the attendants themselves were a crowd.

“Our lord is discussing dinner with Lord Macsturnas tonight,” Hedia said. Her index finger made so slight a gesture toward the senators that only someone who knew her well would notice.

She smiled with an almost professional brightness and continued, “Are you looking forward to our own dinner tomorrow with my friend Bersinus? It may not be as learned as a senator’s table, but I have reason to hope it will be more interesting.”

“I’m going,” Alphena mumbled toward her hands. She raised her eyes to meet Hedia’s with conscious effort—and blushed. “That is, I’m a little nervous, but I realize I must learn about … about this sort of thing.”

Syra and Florina, Hedia’s chief maid and her daughter’s, stood at arm’s length from their mistresses, as silent as the rolled awning of the jeweler’s stall behind them. Florina was the first permanent servant Alphena had had since she outgrew her nurse.

Until recently, the duty of serving Saxa’s willful, contrary daughter had been assigned as a punishment rotated among the members of the household who were out of favor with the majordomo. Alphena had resented more or less everything, so far as Hedia could tell. Saxa could avoid her tantrums, but the servants could not.

Hedia could have kept away from Alphena—and Varus—also, but she took her duties as their mother by law seriously, as she took seriously everything to do with family. She smiled; a stranger might have said that the expression would cut glass. Alphena had been making a real effort to behave like a lady since she had learned—been forced to learn—that though this was a man’s world, a proper lady was by no means powerless in it.

“You have a charming face,” Hedia said, “and you move as gracefully as any woman of your age. It’s time that polite society learns to appreciate your beauty.”

“If I’m really graceful…,” Alphena said. She was trying to sound cynical, but Hedia heard an underlayer of pride. “Then it’s because of the swordsmanship training I get from Master Lenatus. You should thank him.”

“I
have
thanked Lenatus for his many services to the family,” Hedia said, though the words weren’t precisely agreement. The trainer, an old soldier and a friend of Corylus’ servant Pulto, had been very circumspect in giving the lessons Alphena had demanded and her father was unwilling to forbid. “And you certainly are graceful, though I think the more usual sort of deportment teachers would have been able to bring out your natural gifts as well.”

Lenatus was a freeborn citizen of Carce, but the gap between an ex-soldier and a senator’s daughter was as great as the distance between the soldier and a slave. A weaker man might well have allowed Alphena more leeway—sparring with her or even arranging secret bouts and praying that they wouldn’t come to the attention of his employer.

As they would certainly have done. Even Saxa would have had all those involved in the business executed; and if Hedia was on the scene, they would have been tortured to death. It would have brought disgrace to the family.

Still, wearing armor as she danced about the post she was hacking at with a heavy wooden sword probably had made Alphena more graceful. Clumsiness spilled her in the sawdust of the exercise yard, after all.

Recent events had taught Hedia to respect her daughter’s merits as well as teaching Alphena to respect her mother. Swordsmanship wasn’t a common accomplishment for a polite lady, but Alphena’s skill had saved her life; and it had saved her mother’s life as well.

Alphena shifted into a marginally stiffer posture. Her lips pursed as she formed the words she intended to say next. Hedia noticed the hesitation, but her pleasant smile didn’t slip.

“I think I’ll go shopping by myself this afternoon, Mother,” Alphena said. “Rather than going straight back to the house.”

The girl was trying to keep her statement from being a challenge, but she obviously felt that any attempt to assert her own will was going to be examined by her mother before it would be allowed to take place. Alphena was correct in her understanding, of course.

“I’m sure you’ll be quite safe with your own escort, dear,” Hedia said. “Though if you’d like to borrow some of my servants, I can easily spare them as I’ll be with Lord Saxa.”

Hedia offered the additional attendants to show gentle interest instead of brusquely sending Alphena on her way. They would be quite unnecessary unless the Germans raced over the Alps and began pillaging Puteoli.

A few weeks earlier, when the Alphenus household had been in an uproar because of the way Hedia had vanished, Alphena had kept her head and managed to right the situation. Ten of the male servants had coalesced around her, because she was fearless and her crisp orders convinced others that she was in charge of whatever was happening.

Those servants had since become Alphena’s escort. They had come from various divisions of the staff: footmen, kitchen staff, groundskeepers, and even one of the hairdressers. They weren’t in their original positions, but Saxa’s house in Carce had a staff of over two hundred, so there was no reason they couldn’t assign themselves to escorting the daughter of the house.

They weren’t the biggest servants in the household man for man, and they weren’t even the ugliest and most threatening, which was the usual way to select personnel for public escort. The fact that they had volunteered themselves into what looked at the time like a dangerous job outweighed—in the opinion of Lenatus as well as in Hedia’s own—any amount of muscle.

“Oh, I’ll be all right, I’m sure,” Alphena said, looking relieved that Hedia hadn’t made a fuss. Alphena took a deep breath and said, “I thought, I’d, ah, look for jewelry. Not for swords or armor or something. Not today, I mean.”

“I’m sure that will be very nice, dear,” Hedia said, also relieved. “Something to wear to Bersinus’ dinner?”

She had forced herself not to ask what kind of shopping her daughter had in mind. Hedia’s real concern had been that Alphena planned to buy not a sword but rather a gladiator or two. Hedia would have had to prevent that, which would have undermined her recent months of building trust between her and her daughter.

“Not really,” Alphena said, looking unexpectedly concerned. “Well, I mean I suppose if I find something that I think.…”

In a burst of candor she met Hedia’s eyes and said, “Mother, I’ve been having dreams and I don’t know what they mean and I just felt that I ought to go shopping!”

Hedia lifted her chin in approval. “We could find a dream interpreter here in Puteoli, I’m sure,” she said. “And in Carce I know the names of several. Caelia Rufa has a very fine one, she says. He’s in her household if you’d prefer to avoid public practitioners.”

Hedia didn’t ask what Alphena had been dreaming, for fear of frightening the girl into silence. Talking to her about serious matters—about anything, really, because who could guess what the girl would find serious?—reminded Hedia of watching a servant feed barley meal in honey to a baby sparrow. Anything more than a tiny droplet offered gently would throw the bird into a wild panic.

“No, no,” Alphena said with a touch of anger, quickly suppressed. “It’s nothing scary. I just thought I’d like to look at jewelry.”

Which made no sense at all, but perhaps it didn’t make sense to Alphena, either. Hedia merely smiled and said, “Of course, dear. Have a good time.”

The aedile and his separate entourage were leaving, going to his house on the Bay. Saxa joined Hedia, but his eyes followed their daughter. “Alphena isn’t coming back with us, my dear?” he said.

“She’s gone shopping on her own,” Hedia said. “I think it’s good for her to develop her own taste.”

She paused, then added, “I believe our daughter is excited to be going out to dinner at the home of Julius Bersinus tomorrow night. She’s becoming quite a lady, Lord Husband. Which I’m glad to be able to say.”

After a period of doubt on my part,
Hedia thought, but she chose not to say that aloud to Alphena’s father.

As it was, Saxa frowned uncomfortably and said, “My dear wife, I’m a little concerned about Alphena going into, well, public while she’s still unmarried. It seems to me that society here on the Bay has a reputation of being, well, fast?”

He risked glancing toward Hedia’s face as he finished by twisting his intended statement into a question. She touched the back of Saxa’s hand and said, “Your paternal concern does you honor, Lord Husband, but I believe it’s better that our daughter learn to navigate the reefs of polite society while you and I are still present to guide her.”

“Well, you to guide her…,” Saxa said, making a face. Muttering, he went on, “If you think that this is really something she ought to be doing, my dear.”

“I think it is necessary, Lord Husband,” Hedia said. Her words were courteous and her tone deferential, but she spoke with the cold certainty of an executioner’s axe falling. “I promise you that the party will be decorous. Master Bersinus has assured me of this.”

And I promised Bersinus that if it wasn’t, I would geld him myself,
Hedia thought. Saxa wouldn’t be reassured to hear that, however, so she didn’t speak the words aloud.

Her husband sighed. “Well, I’ll leave it to you, little heart,” he said. “I’m sure you know best.”

Hedia patted his hand again. “On my honor, Lord Husband,” she said. “On my honor.”

Movement deeper into the compound drew her attention. “Ah!” she said with deliberate brightness to jolly Saxa out of the brown study into which concern over his virgin daughter had thrown him. “Here comes Varus now! You can ask him about joining you at the aedile’s dinner tonight.”

Mention of Macsturnas brought the priest Paris to Hedia’s mind.
I wonder if he’ll be at the dinner too,
she thought. She would prefer that he went back to some distant Etruscan city like Caere or Praeneste.

It would be better yet if Paris drowned in Macsturnas’ eel tank and was eaten by the morays.

*   *   *

“
I
’M ALL RIGHT NOW,”
Varus said to his friends. At least he thought he was. His visions came on him without warning, but it would be unusual for another episode to follow the previous one so closely. Another fit it must look like to those who weren’t standing with the Sibyl on the peak in Varus’ mind.

Corylus nodded and lowered his hand. He’d been ready to grab if Varus suddenly toppled over while babbling gibberish. Pulto watched them both from a polite pace away.

Varus shook his head, trying to make sense of the vision he’d just seen. His parents had gone back toward the entrance, vanishing behind the cage of a pair of hyenas that jutted into the street a little way up.

“I suppose,” he said, “that the snatches I quote from the
Sibylline Books
aren’t precisely gibberish, but neither do they give us a clear prescription of how to deal with the danger. Which are crystal worms, from what the Sibyl showed me.”

Am I correct in using the word “quote” when I haven’t actually read the
Books
?

Varus grinned sadly at himself. Because he was frightened and uncertain, his mind was taking him into the familiar territory of grammatical puzzles. That was harmless, but unfortunately it was also useless for preventing the very real danger that threatened the Republic.

“If we know there’s a problem,” said Corylus with a smile of sorts, “then at least it isn’t as likely to slip past the sentries and slit our throats in our sleep.”

His smile grew broader as he added, “Though I suppose we could hand the problem to the Commissioners for Sacred Rites, since they have the duty of examining the
Sibylline Books
in event of a crisis. Then we could return to Carce and put the final polish on our rhetoric studies.”

Varus considered the proposition. He knew that his friend was joking, but Varus knew also that treating the suggestion as a real question of logic was exactly the right way to bring his mental focus sharply into the here and now.

As Corylus realized. He’s a very perceptive friend as well as a good one.

“I somehow doubt that ordering the construction of a temple to, say, Jupiter the Slayer of Giants is going to cure the problem quickly enough,” Varus said with a deadpan expression. “Besides which, so far as anyone but me knows, there isn’t a crisis on whose basis to assemble the Commissioners.”