The Shadow of Ararat (38 page)

"All this time..." Abdmachus put his hands to his face, though his body shook with laughter. "All this time, we wondered and argued and plagued the gods with our pleas for knowledge..."

"All this time—what?" Gaius Julius snapped.

Abdmachus held up a hand and pinched his nose to stop giggling. "All this time, my dear fellow, the Kings of Persia have made one unceasing demand upon the
magi
—why is the Roman Legion immune to sorcery? Have you not considered it yourselves? Rome marches out without sorcery and nearly conquers the world—smashing Egypt, a veritable den of wizards—crushing the remains of Alexander's empire, breaking the backs of the Gaels and their druids, the Germans and their witchmen. Who thinks of a
Roman
sorcerer?"

"No one!" Gaius Julius huffed. "Sorcery is the work of weak Easterners and Greeks. Roman spirit conquered the world!"

Maxian laid a hand on the dead man's shoulder and shook his head slightly.

"You think that each soldier marched out from Rome with a belly full of lead," he said quietly, watching the little Persian. "Each man carried, all unknowing, a puissant shield against the wizardry of his enemies."

"Yes," Abdmachus said, his face weary. "Workings and patterns that could lay waste to whole nations of warriors fail or falter when directed at the ranks of a Roman army. I am a fool not to think of it before. Even some of your weapons are made of lead... all innocently impervious."

The dead man rubbed the stubble of beard that had accumulated while he had been passing on sleep and rest for the pleasures of digging in body yards and rubbish dumps. "Well, all that aside, do the bodies show the influence of this 'dark power' that you two can see pervading the city?"

Maxian breathed deep and sat down in the high-backed chair again. His head was splitting again, this time with a fatigue-induced ache. Though he felt stronger than ever after the ill-remembered events in the Appian tomb, the kind of detail work that he had done with the two bodies carried its own price.

"The old man's body carries it like a mother cat her kittens. It hides in his blood and crawls, unseen, along his bones. It seems... it seems to be almost a part of him. The African has none of it. He is a clean slate."

"Again, something tied to the city, to Rome," Abdmachus said. "And you? Could you find it in you as well?"

"Yes," Maxian said, his face drawn with fatigue. "As strong, or stronger, than the old man. It seems to be quiescent now, but I fear that it is waiting for the opportune moment to come out and destroy me somehow. I could try removing it from my body, perhaps here, where it is attenuated by this foreign building. I could succeed..." He shook his head to try to dispel the gloom that threatened to overwhelm him.

"Odd," the Persian said. He picked up his note tablets and began shuffling through them. "Pardon me if I pry, but you were born in the provincial city of Narbo, if I remember correctly. You have come only recently to Rome—no more than, what, twelve years ago? Yet you say that you show as much effect of this curse as a man who has lived in the city all his life. This augurs that the curse is not borne by something specific to the city of Rome at all."

Maxian considered this—it could be true. But if so, then what carried the curse? Something that affected men thousands of miles apart, yet possibly only within the confines of the Empire. What commonality did they hold that subjected them to this?

He and Abdmachus continued talking and the afternoon whiled itself away. Gaius Julius took the opportunity to slip away and sleep in the shade of the cedar trees in the garden. They would argue for hours, he knew, and never realize that he was absent. The sun was hot, and the afternoon still and quiet. He yawned mightily.
Even a six-hundred-and-forty-year-old needs a nap now and then,
he thought.

Krista crept through the wild irises and lilies that grew on the northern side of the house like a slinking cat. She had traded her bright shift for a dusty gray tunic, nondescript and already worn. Her feet were bare, though the calluses that she had acquired on the hard floors of the house of de'Orelio served her well as she moved through the overgrown bower. Her long hair was tied back behind her head. She had left the broad-brimmed straw hat she favored for going out in the sun back at the tree line. Coming to an old aisle in the garden, she peered out from the high grass. There was no one to be seen, or heard. She darted across to the foundation wall that held up the northern end of the portico.

Again she paused, listening. Very faintly from inside the house, she could hear the banging of a hammer and chisel on stone.
Well, that's at least one of them,
she muttered to herself, under her breath. Fear churned slowly in her belly—fear not only of being caught by the men here at the house but also of what would happen to her if she was not able to complete this excursion before the Duchess noticed that she had been on her trip to the flower market in the Forum Boarium for a very long time. Luckily, no one had bothered to tell the stable master that she was no longer taking the white pony out to the hills with Sigurd. It was tied off to a tree in a field almost a half mile away, downhill.

The prospect of being seriously whipped or even losing a foot for running away did not please her at all, but she was bone-certain that the pretty Prince and his foreign companions were up to something dangerous. She had wrestled with her feelings for the Prince on the long ride up from the city and had come to the sobering conclusion that though he was quite nice for a Prince of the Empire, and seemed to like her quite a bit, if he was up to something that would hurt the Duchess, then he would have to pay for it. This digging up of bodies and carting them about secretly put her on edge. That and the odd feeling she had gotten about the old man she had waylaid in the Archives. He looked like a grandfather, but he had been far too active in their little tryst than he had a right to be. His eyes and skin were funny too. She had dreamed bad dreams about him for a week after that.

She pattered down the line of the portico wall, keeping her head low, to the end. There she peeked out and saw that the back garden was also empty. The sharp
crack-crack
of the chisel continued to echo from inside. She glanced around again.
Twenty steps and she could get up the stairs and inside, or maybe she should climb this little wall and go in through the portico?

An iron clamp suddenly closed on "her left arm and a heavy hand, smelling of freshly turned dirt and worse, closed over her mouth. She nearly screamed, but twisted aside instead and lashed out with a long brown leg. Her heel caught something soft and fleshy and there was a sharp grunting sound behind her. The clamp released on her arm and she darted away from the wall. Her heart pounding with fear and her veins afire, she sprinted off down the hill, leaping over the broken fountains and the scattered bushes. A rock, thrown with a keen eye, clipped her on the side of the head as she vaulted the crumbling brick wall at the bottom of the garden, and she tumbled, senseless, down the hillside to crash into a rosebush. The last thing she heard were boots clattering over the wall.

"Your friend is quick," Gaius Julius said sorely, sitting on the steps to the upper floor and kneading his inner thigh to try to get the knot out of the muscle. "Another two fingers to the right and I'd have been puking my guts out while she made like Diana into the woods."

Maxian ignored the dead man, all of his concentration was focused on the deep wound on the side of the girl's head. The rock the old man had brought her down with had cracked her behind the ear and left a bad cut. Little sharp fragments of stone had been driven into her scalp and the fleshy part at the top of her ear. The power buzzed and trembled in his hands, flickering a faint green while he worked. Under his gentle fingers, the slivers of stone trembled and then slowly eased themselves out of the flesh with a liquid
pop
. Skin knit closed behind them and shattered veins closed up.

After fifteen grains, he smoothed back her long hair and the flap of skin settled back into place, becoming one with its fellows. There would be no scar. Maxian smiled and felt in himself a simple joy that he had not felt in a long time. For just a moment, his mind was clear of the heavy dread of his burden. He gently turned her face back up and raised her head to slide a brocade pillow under it.

"Known her long?" Gaius Julius' voice was carefully neutral. Maxian looked up, his eyes narrowed. Abdmachus, sitting in the background, turned away a little and concentrated on his notes and writings. The dead man regarded the Prince with a level eye.

"Two years," Maxian said, his voice cold.

"What are you going to do with her? By your account she is the servant of a possible enemy of ours. By her presence I'd say that she had been spying on us for quite some time. I've checked the hillsides both above us and below us. There are places on the upper hill where two people have been regularly watching the house. This Duchess of yours, she knows that we're here. She might even know what we've been doing."

Gaius Julius' voice was calm and mildly curious. With a start, Maxian realized that the dead man really didn't care that he had just nearly killed a sixteen-year-old girl—but he was concerned about the effect she would have on their tactical situation. For a moment the Prince was fully conscious of the vast gulf between the old man, who had done more than his share of terrible things in the name of the old Republic, and himself. Then he shook his head and reminded himself that the margin they trod was very narrow and, sometimes, for the good of the people, some few might have to be expended.

"We are not going to do anything with her, beyond keeping her here. You're right, the Duchess may know. If we assume so, then we have to move again. How soon do you think we'll have to go?"

Abdmachus coughed quietly, and Maxian turned away from the dead man. The Persian was standing on the other side of the table that the Prince had used for his impromptu surgery, gazing down at the unconscious girl with a quizzical look on his face.

"What is it?" Maxian asked.

"My lord... please do not take this amiss, but when you were working on her wound, did you feel the curse within her?"

Maxian paused for a moment, reconstructing memories of his work in his mind.

"No," he said, shaking his head, "I felt the lead in her body, of which there is more than a little, but not the contagion."

"Has she lived in the city her whole life, then? Or is she another import, like the Mauretanian?"

Maxian considered—though he had spent more than one enjoyable afternoon or evening, or even night, in the house of de'Orelio in the company of the slave girl, their conversation had rarely turned to herself. With a little start, the Prince realized that he had told the witty green-eyed girl far more than he had ever intended about himself and his brothers.

"I don't remember it well, but I think that she was raised in the house of the Duchess. The daughter of house slaves, probably."

Abdmachus scratched his head in puzzlement. "So she has lived in the city for—what?—sixteen years? Yet she is not afflicted. You have lived here for only twelve years and you carry as much of the curse as that old man of fifty. I think, my lord, that what we seek is not tied to the city at all. The lead, surely, is as much an affliction to the people of the city as the coughing sickness in winter. This is something else, something that is tied up in the Empire. It only manifests itself in the city so strongly because so much of the effort of the Empire is concentrated there."

The Prince nodded slowly, as his mind broke apart the Persian's argument and turned it around and about, examining it from all angles. He rubbed his nose, deep in thought.

"The old man," he said at last. "What do you know of his life, Gaius Julius? What was his occupation? Did he always live in that district, or did he come from somewhere else? What did he
do
?

The dead man spread his hands.

"Well," he said, "to hear the neighbors tell of it, he had always lived there, in a top-floor apartment with a bad view. He did tinker's work—repairing shoes, leather goods, pots, pans, things like that. He drank his share of wine, didn't make any trouble, and kept out of the way of politics and crime. By my view, quite a respectable citizen. You probably know him better, having been in his guts and seen what he ate and shit the last day of his life.

"But I know one thing that they seem to have forgotten—I wager he never mentioned it, less he was dead drunk and the wine wasn't enough to keep his memories at bay. He was a citizen—a twenty-year man, by the Legion brand on his shoulder and the discharge mark."

Maxian turned back to look down on Krista's recumbent form. Her chest rose and fell slowly under the grubby cotton tunic that she was wearing. Without thinking of it, he checked the pulse at her neck and wrist. She was sleeping easily now. He ran his hand over her face and the sleep deepened. When she woke, she would feel no pain or aftereffects of the blow.

"A citizen. I am a citizen, by birth and action. The slaves are not..."

Something tickled at the edge of his thought, something from his youth in Narbonensis, something about...

"...the children of citizens, or citizens themselves. I remember a herdsman on my father's estates in Narbo, he said that the young of a strong bull are stronger than the offspring of a weak bull. The blood of the father and the mother affects the child." His voice sharpened.

"This contagion is carried by those who are citizens of the children of citizens of the state. It must be passed by blood from generation to generation."

Abdmachus rose from his chair and joined Maxian at the table.

"Eventually," the Persian said, speculatively, "it would affect the majority of the population, save those who were never citizens or whose parents had always been slaves. I might even get stronger with each generation."

"A pretty theory," Gaius Julius said from the steps, "but how did it afflict the citizens of the city in the first place? The lead didn't carry it if what you say is true. I somehow doubt that a wizard wandered around the city, bespelling everyone. Someone would have noticed. So, how did it first happen? And, more to the point, is it still happening now?"