Shadow of Ararat

ROMA MATER

Maxian rubbed his eyes. They were weary from days of poring over hundreds of account books and histories that he and Gaius Julius had recovered from the Imperial archives or purchased from booksellers in the city. He was attacking the problem of the curse from the viewpoint of a physician. Something, some event or carrier, had started the contagion upon the people and the city. It had a source of infection. If that could be discovered, it could be lanced or burned away. Then, perhaps, the city and the people would be able to recover. Exhausted, the Prince rose from the stiff-backed chair and walked to the counter built into the wall of the apartment room. He poured a glass of wine from the amphora there.

At the far end of the room, the little Persian was working too. Unlike Gaius Julius, he did not read Latin well, but he had a more pressing task. Soon after the three men had taken up residence in the apartment, odd things had begun to happen. Things fell over and broke or caught fire suddenly. After a week of an increasing series of disturbances, Abdmachus had taken it upon himself to open his awareness and keep watch, both in the physical world and in the unseen world, for a day and a night. When he roused himself at last he reported to a grim Maxian and an unconcerned Gaius Julius what the Prince had suspected from the beginning.

The contagion was collecting, like rainwater in low ground, around the building. The Prince seemed to be the focus. Careful examination of the walls, floors, and other rooms then revealed a subtle, but swiftly acting, corrosion of the plaster, the wood of the walls, the tiles of the floor. The dark tide was washing up around the building and wearing it away.*?

So today, like the days before, Abdmachus slowly worked along the walls of the rooms that they used, muttering and chanting. Pots of paints lay by his side, and from them he daubed a constant series of sigils and glyphs upon the cracking, eroded plaster. Maxian looked around in mild disbelief. Every surface-wall, floor, and ceiling-was etched with ten thousand signs of warding and protection. To the hidden eye, the rooms were filled with a flickering blue glow, shining forth from the writing on the walls. Now it was safe to work within the rooms, though the tension of the quiet siege wore on all three of them.

The back door of the flat banged open and Gaius Julius sauntered in. Now he wore a toga of soft white wool, with a dashing light-blue half-cape and hood thrown over one shoulder. He bore a great load of new books, parchments, and scrolls that he unceremoniously unloaded with a great clatter on the one piece of bare table in the main room.

“What ho, citizen! Still drudging about, I see, Persian. Perhaps you could pick up around the place and sweep while you’re kneeling down there?”

Maxian put the glass of wine aside, untasted, and stepped up to the dead man. There was something odd about him today, and not just his good humor. That had surfaced only a few days after their return to the city. Compared to the Prince’s restrained demeanor or Abdmachus’ polite quietude, the dead man was a veritable volcano. Maxian eyed him closely while the dead man stacked the new acquisitions into different piles. Suddenly, the Prince seized the dead man’s shoulder and spun him around. Gaius Julius’ hot retort died to see the naked fury on the Prince’s face.

“What have you done?” the Prince hissed. “Abdmachus, come here!”

The little Persian carefully put down his paints, brushed his hands off, and joined the Prince, who had the dead man by the ear and was checking his pulse with the other hand. “What is it, my lord?”

Maxian pinched the cheek of the dead man, his voice harsh. “Look at the flesh; it’s warm and flexible. See the pulse of blood at his throat, the texture of his hair. Our dead friend has been up to something. What have you been doing, Gaius?”

The dead man stepped back, rubbing his ear. “Nothing of note, priest. I do admit that I feel better than I have in… well, centuries!”

Maxian scowled at the easy laughter of the dead man. He turned aside to the Persian, keeping his voice low. “He’s becoming more alive each day-what could cause this? Is there some way for the dead to restore themselves to full health once they are raised?”

The Persian squinted at the dead man, who had shaken his head in disbelief at the concerns of the living and was unloading fresh apples and pears from the pockets of his cloak.

Abdmachus turned back to the Prince. “I hesitate to bring up the possibility, my lord, but I have read in some of the older tomes that the risen dead can restore vitality to their corrupted bodies by the ingestion of the fluids of the living…”

“By drinking their blood?” The Prince’s eyes widened in shock. This was fast becoming some Greek tragedy. He turned back to the dead man, who was leaning against the big table, noisily crunching an apple between broad white teeth. “Gaius Julius, what have you been up to? I want you to tell me everything you did today, and I do mean everything…”

The dead man leered at Maxian, saying, “Everything? I’m surprised that such a young man would need to resort to the voyeurism of the old!”

Maxian’s hand twitched and his fingers formed a brief, quickly traced sign in the air at his side. The dead man suddenly staggered, the apple dropping from his hand, half eaten. Gaius Julius’ face trembled and a shockingly rapid white pallor flooded his flesh. He bent over, moaning in terrible pain, collapsing to the floor on his hands and knees.

“In another place and time, old man, your levity would be welcome. But right now, with very little room for error, we cannot afford it.”

Maxian bent down and dragged the dead man’s head up with one hand. Drool spilled from his mouth. The Prince leaned close. “Tell me everything that you did. Now.”

Gaius Julius rolled over on his side, gasping, as the Prince restored some of the necromantic energy that sustained life and thought in his ancient limbs. “Pax! Pax! I will tell you.

“I left in the morning with a sullen disposition, as I’m sure you noticed. These dreary rooms wear on me. I went to the Palatine and renewed my acquaintance with the master of the archives. After a few cups of wine and some silver, he allowed me to search through the old Legion and city militia records. After several hours of digging in the dust and sneezing, I took a break to have lunch. I had gathered almost all of those items on the table.

“Ah, the sun served to lighten my spirits tremendously. I purchased a meat pastry with pepper and a cup of weak wine from one of the vendors on the square of Eglabalgus and found a place to sit in the garden on the north side of the hill, not too far from the archives. While I was sitting, I happened to catch the eye of a young lady on an errand and, by some fine words, convinced her to sit with me a while and share my wine.”

A tremendous smirk flitted across the face of the dead man.

“She was a fine beauty-long legs, tousled raven hair, the disposition of a minx. Not so much chest, but I am rather fond of such a woman. No matter. We passed some enjoyable time together and then I shooed her out of the archives and went back to work. The master of the archives was taking a nap, so I thought it might be best if I brought the things that I had found back here, rather than spending the rest of my failing eyesight copying them.

“Oh, and I purchased some pears and apples from the stall at the end of the street.”

Abdmachus, who had returned to his paints and chanting, looked up, his brush poised only inches from the wall. He and Maxian exchanged glances. The Prince’s face was cloudy with tremendous anger. His fists clenched.and unclenched unconsciously at his side. Abdmachus felt the ambient power level in the room rise.

“Old man, what did you tell this stripling of a girl about your work?”

Gaius Julius spread his hands. “Nothing, nothing at all. We chatted about inconsequential things.”

“Did you tell her your name?”

“Of course, I introduced myself quite politely.”

“Did she recognize it?”

Gaius Julius smiled broadly. “Of course, but it is a common name, she had no inkling of who I truly am. Doubtless, if she thinks of it at all, she will assume that my family is of poor nature but great ambitions. Really, my Prince, who is going to think of me being meT

Maxian shook his head sharply. “Did she tell you her name? Was she, perhaps, a slave in the garb of one of the great houses?”

Gaius Julius paused, thinking. It was evident that he had not thought it important to remember the cognomen of his afternoon’s dalliance. By the wall, Abdmachus muttered something under his breath as he resumed painting.

Maxian had caught it, though, and repeated it aloud, his grim humor melting a little. “Husband to all the wives, and wife to all the husbands.”

“I have it,” said the dead man, now sitting up. “It was Christina, or Christiane, or something like that.”

Maxian snarled, his face contorted with rage. “Not Christina, but Krista. She wore an emblem of three flowers intertwined with the head of a ram. Her hair is wavy with curls and it falls just past her shoulder. She has deep-green eyes. She is a slave.”

Gaius Julius blinked in surprise. “That is the very woman!”

Maxian dragged the dead man up off the floor as if he weighed nothing. There was a blur of dim radiance along his arm, and he threw the dead man against the nearest wall. Gaius Julius, his mouth open in an O of surprise, crashed heavily against it and then slid down with a sickening crunch to the floor. The Prince stalked across to where the dead man lay, gasping, on the ground.

“Fool! You would bugger your way into our common destruction! That slip of a girl, all breezy ways and innocent desire, is the agent, the very eyes, of the mistress of the Imperial Office of the Barbarians!”

Abdmachus caught his breath and turned his full attention, at last, to the confrontation between the two men. Maxian had seemingly grown in the last little while. His rage was palpable in the room and the barely harnessed power that the Persian had tricked out of him in the tomb under the Via Appia was leaking into the air around him. The scrolls on the table rustled and glass tinkled in the other room. Despite the late-afternoon sun outside, within the long narrow room it had grown dark. Gaius Julius cringed on the floor, seeing his final and utter dissolution reflected in the enraged eyes of the Prince.

“Office… Office of Barbarians?” he wheezed.

“Yes,” Maxian bit off. “Her mistress, well known to me, is Anastasia de’Orelio, the so-called Duchess of Parma. She sits in the shadows behind the Emperor and pulls many strings. Though I have long accounted her a friend, both personally and politically, she knows nothing of what I have discovered and is unlikely to apprehend it even if I did tell her. Further, since I have accepted the assistance of our Persian compatriot here, I could now be well accounted a traitor. Coupled with my mysterious absence of several weeks, I expect that she has her agents about, quietly looking for me.”

Gaius Julius flinched away from the Prince and his scathing voice but pulled himself back to his feet, leaning against the wall. His voice was quiet, showing restored composure. “Enough. I am no stranger to plots and politics, boy. You can destroy me, but then you will not have my skills or service or leverage. If this de’Orelio is on the lookout for us, then we will have to move, disappear. I can deal with anyone, man or girl, that is watching us.”

Maxian continued to stare at him, anger smoldering in him.

Gaius Julius stepped away from the wall and made a little, hesitant half bow. “Apologies, Prince Maxian, I did not mean to endanger our enterprise. I will make sure that it does not happen again.”

Abdmachus held his breath for a moment, but then the Prince nodded and turned away, going back to the books on the table. Gaius Julius looked after him for a moment, then shrugged. He had plenty of perspective on the matter; he had already been dead once.

“Ah, my lord,” Abdmachus said.

Maxian looked up, his face a rigid mask.

“My lord, Gaius Julius-for all his faults-is right about one thing. We must move from these rooms. Not immediately, but surely within the week.”

“Why so?” the Prince growled, but his anger was beginning to fade.

“Here, my lord.” Abdmachus brushed the section of wall behind him. The symbols that he had been drawing were pale and faded. Under his fingertips, the plaster shaled away from the wall in a big chunk, clattering to the floor. Behind it, the lathes of the wall were revealed, corroded and eaten by termites and worms.

“You see? The building itself is being eroded by the power of the curse. Soon the walls and ceiling will collapse. I have checked the upper floors-they are no longer safe to walk on. There is a sewer main under the northern corner of the house. I fear that the mortar of its walls is weakening as well. If we remain, the building may soon collapse.”

Maxian sighed and slumped back in his chair. The weight of the effort was telling upon him. Each day some new complication arose, and still they had found nothing of note in the old books and records. The public histories of the early Empire were filled with nothing but praise for the first Emperor. The other records were all horrifically mundane-the daily accounts of clerks and scribes. Any books of sorcery or magic from the dawn of the Empire were well hidden away by the thaumaturges of the time or their current contemporaries. Maxian was sure that a single circumstance had precipitated this chain of events, but so far there was no sign of it. Further, there must be some mechanism, or several, that promulgated the curse through the centuries. Again, there was nothing that had stood out from the reams of dry parchments and papyrus.

“Then we will have to move. Where to?” The Prince’s voice was exhausted.

Abdmachus frowned now; this was an important consideration. Slowly he spoke. “Someplace near the city, but not within it. The curse is too strong within the walls. Someplace that is free from this influence… I don’t know. The suburbs are unknown to me.”

Gaius Julius, still rubbing the knot on the back of his head, spoke up. “If I understand you, magician, it should be a place that was not built by Romans. Perhaps someplace where the owner used imported laborers?”

Maxian slowly turned and stared at the dead man for a long moment. Then he smiled a little. “Abdmachus, our dead friend has the right of it. We need a villa or a summer house outside of the city, one built by a foreign ambassador, or merchant, or exile. Somebody that wanted a taste of home in their new surroundings. But it will have to be built by foreign hands, perhaps even with materials from beyond Italy or at least Latium. Can you find such a place while I pack the books and other materials?”

Gaius Julius raised a hand. “I will find the place, Prince. Abdmachus has important chanting and mumbling to get to. I will start this very evening.”

Maxian nodded. They needed a safe haven.

“I feel three and a half kinds of a fool, Prince Maxian,” Gaius Julius said as the two of them topped the rise on their horses. Maxian was riding a dappled chestnut he had borrowed from the stables maintained by his brother. The dead man was riding a skittish black stallion. Though he was obviously a masterful rider, the horse was tremendously nervous around him. Behind and below them, the vast sprawl of the city filled the valley of the Tiber. They were northeast of the city, not too far from the famous estate of the Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli. Here, low rolling hills rose up from the swampy bottomlands toward the distant spine of the Apennines.

The road they followed was in poor repair. The stone blocks were ridged by grass and some trees had sprouted at the edge of the road, cracking the carefully fitted stones. Still, the air was clear and the smell of orange trees filled the air with a heady scent. Maxian felt better already, just being out of the city. The contagion exerted ever more pressure on him now, and he felt it as a bone-deep weariness. They came to a high dark-green hedge and followed it through a tunnel of overarching trees to an ancient gate. Maxian pulled up, surprised to see that there were two sphinxes flanking the gateway.

Gaius halted as well and turned his horse. The corners of his eyes were crinkled up in amusement. He gestured at the gateway. “I felt the fool first for forgetting that this place was here at all.,Second, for forgetting that I had paid for it. Third, for forgetting that I had urged its construction and a half for being addled enough to bring her here, to the city.”

Maxian shook his head, puzzled by the rueful look on the face of the old man. “Who?”

Gaius laughed and spurred his horse through the gate. “Who? Don’t they teach that story to the young rich men anymore? A scandal indeed. She was a Greek all right, she came as a gift and nearly walked away with the whole party.”

Maxian followed and they rode up a short lane that ended in a circular garden. Beyond the garden, now overgrown with flowering shrubs and tall grass, stood a striking building. Twin lines of pillars flanked the central entrance on the opposite side of the garden. At the end of each line of pillars, a slab-sided obelisk rose. Two facing statues guarded the doorway, their half-man, half-beast bodies facing one another. Beyond this a flat-topped building rose up with two floors. Though perfectly situated on the grounds and within the context of the hills and the long slope behind it, it seemed an unexpected foreigner found-startlingly- at a family gathering.

“The Summer House of the last of the Ptolemies: Kleo-patra, Pharaoh of Egypt. Built by Egyptian and Phoenician craftsmen imported months in advance of her arrival in the city at my side. The stone was shipped by barge from the Upper Nile to Alexandria and thence, to Ostia. Five hundred stonemasons, carpenters, architects, and laborers came with it. It took them six months to raise this, after they had flattened the ground and built a berm down there to keep the slope from slipping.”

Gaius Julius pointed downslope, where a ridge was now overgrown with saplings and oak trees.

“Here she held court, while I muddled about in the politics of the city and prepared for my great expedition. It was a house of beauty, Prince, filled with scholars and philosophers. No real Roman, of course, no Senator, would come within miles of the place. Look around; they still do not build close to here. They felt that she was the very devil-temptress of the East. A harbinger of an ‘oriental despotism.’ And see what Octavian gave them… he who cursed her name the loudest.”

“Huh”1 was all Maxian said, staring around at the grand edifice. Even over long years, it still stood, an exemplar of the craftsmen that had built it. “Who owns it now?”

“Why,” Gaius Julius said with a grin, “you do, my lord. Or, rather, your brother owns it. It is a property of the state, but a forgotten one. We should be quite undisturbed here.”

Maxian swung himself down off his horse. He walked up the broad sandstone stairs to the first level of the house. The front portico was apparently solely for show; the pillars enclosed a long arcade on either side of the garden and shaded the front of the house. The roof was pocked with holes where stones and lumber had decayed and fallen down. He picked his way across the entryway and into the first room. In the dimness, he fumbled along the wall, then stopped, cursing himself. Gaius Julius, after hobbling the horses, joined him.

Maxian muttered and a pale-yellow light sprang up from his raised hand. Gaius Julius hissed in surprise.

“I had forgotten this was here,” the dead man said, looking past the Prince into the house.

The sorcerous light had revealed a half-circle of a room. The walls were marble and the floor a great mosaic of many colors. A great deal of litter, blown in from the garden, lay in drifts across the floor, but the ceiling was still intact and in the facing circle of the chamber, on a broad marble pedestal, stood a statue of a man. He was tall, taller in stone than in life, and nearly naked, though a‘ breastplate and leather kilt had been cunningly carved upon his torso. In one hand he leaned upon a tall spear and the other reached toward the viewer. Curly hair graced his head, and the artisan-from life or more than life-had made him handsome. At his feet the figures of men, much smaller than he, bowed before him or lay dead. The sculptor had been a man of surpassing skill, for the personality of the figure was like a stunning blow to Maxian.

“Alexander…” breathed the Prince.

At his side, Gaius Julius snorted with disdain. “You paid attention to least one of your pedagogues, I see. It has suffered through the long years. A pity, it was quite a work of art when it still had paint on it. She was obsessed with him, you know. Often she would try to convince herself that I was his spirit, invested in flesh once more.”

Maxian turned. The dead man’s voice had an odd, almost haunted quality to it. “What do you mean?”

Gaius Julius sighed. “I don’t know. Near the end I think that I was under her spell. I believed it too, that I would be the new Alexander. They killed me over the cost of the appropriations for my expedition, you know. I was emptying the treasury of every last coin.”

Maxian shook his head. “I don’t remember that. I thought you were preparing a campaign against the Dacians. That’s what my tutors said, anyway.“

The dead man snorted, waving his hand in negation. “I read that history too. Written by someone ninety years after the fact of the matter. No, I had a grander plan than that, my young friend. I intended nothing less than the conquest of Persia-even as Alexander had done-and then to swing north and conquer the Scythian lands north of the Sea of Darkness and fall upon Dacia upon my return, from behind.”

Maxian stared at the old man in shock, his eyes suddenly widening in apprehension.

Gaius Julius looked back at him with puzzlement. “What is it, Prince?”

Maxian shook his head. “Nothing, just something I had heard before. Let us look at the rest of this house and see if we can use it.”

The girl, brown and quiet as a deer, crouched in the rhododendrons on the hillside. Below her, in the old house, she could hear the faint voices of the two men as they moved from room to room. Her long dark hair was tied back in a braid and stuffed down the back of the light cotton tunic she wore. Her feet, tucked under her, were wrapped in leather and sandals. A light, leather girdle circled her narrow waist. From it hung two pouches, a hard leather case, and, in the small of her back, a thin dagger in a plain scabbard.

Behind her, the brush rustled quietly.

“Sigurd.” The girl hissed, not bothering to look back. “Quit staring at my butt and get back to the horses. Take them over the hill, out of the wind, so that the ones down in the garden don’t smell them and say hello.”

The brush whispered again and Krista felt the sensation of being watched recede.

Men, she thought, mighty easy to distract… It’s a wonder they get anything done.

Below, the voices suddenly became clearer as the two men walked out onto the rear porch of the villa. More exposed to nature on the open slope, it was in much worse shape than the front, and they picked their way carefully across a band of broken tile and collapsed fountain drains.

“… do, old man. Arrange for wagons to bring all of the materials from the insula up here. I’ll begin moving in immediately, and I’ll fix the water mains so that it’s livable, at least.”

Krista parted the brush enough to get a clear look. Then she grimaced. She recognized both men. This was very interesting, much more interesting than either she or her mistress had anticipated. Quietly she returned the brush to its original position and slipped away up the hillside. Time to return to the city. There was more work to do.