Shadow of Ararat

THE EGYPTIAN HOUSE, LATIUM

The pipe made a groaning sound, like a soul in torment in Hades, then quivered and finally, after another long moan, spit muddy water. Maxian, his face, arms, and hands covered with grime, bits of leaf, and plain old dirt, stepped back, smiling in delight. The water flowed murky for a few minutes and then, finally, clear. The cistern at the top of the house echoed as the water fell into its depths. The Prince rubbed his eyes with the edge of his tunic, trying to get the dirt and sweat out of them. After making an even greater mess of his clothing, he gathered up the lengths of copper pipe that he had scavenged, the hammer and tpng-shaped grippers, and set off down the brushy slope.

Inside the house, he piled all of the scrap and tools in a heap inside the back garden door. He stripped off the fouled tunic and threw it into a basin that stood inside the door. Farther into the house, he came upon Abdmachus and two of his servants who had come up from the city to assist their master. The Persian was carefully measuring the length of the main hall in the villa.

“We’ll have running water in the house within the afternoon,” he said in passing.

Abdmachus grunted and continued to carefully spool out the length of twine that he was using to mark distance. The two servants followed along, making marks in colored chalk at regular intervals. Maxian shook his head in amusement. He went up the steps to the upper floor, a grand stair flanked with statues of ibis-headed maidens and hawks. In the upper rooms, another two of the Persians’ servants were mopping the floor and carrying away the debris that had blown in through the windows. Gaius Julius was lounging on a couch that had been brought up from the city. Sets of papyrus scrolls were laid out on a low table next to him. He was ignoring them and eating part of a roast pheasant.

“We’ll have water soon,” Maxian said as he opened the hamper containing the picnic lunch that the dead man had brought with him on his latest return from the city. “The Baths might even work if we have the servants clean them out.”

Gaius Julius nodded appreciatively. He was a good Roman.

“It’s not a proper house without a bath,” he said, picking bits of bird out of his teeth.

Maxian set down on the other couch and began cutting slices of cheese off the wheel he had found in the basket. There were black grapes as well, and a jug of wine. The Prince sniffed it and wrinkled up his nose. “For a dead man, you have odd tastes in wine.”

Gaius Julius shrugged. “These modern wines have a foul taste to my palate. This Gaulish wine is the best I’ve found. There’s vinegar in that other jug, if you need your thirst quenched.”

Maxian shook his head and picked up a wine-cup left over from the night before. He stood and cleaned it out with a cloth. “I’d rather water than that piss! And thanks to my hard work, we have it.”

He went out of the room and down the hall to a little private room with a marble privy seat. Built into the wall next to die bench was a shallow bowl. Above it, a corroded green bronze handle in the shape of a dolphin was set into the wall over a spigot. The Prince tapped on the dolphin with the handle of his knife and it squeaked a little. He dragged on the handle and the pipe complained and gurgled. Water spilled out and he caught it in the wine-cup. After three cupfuls it ran clean.

Abdmachus was sitting on the other couch when he returned to the room overlooking the back garden. The Persian had a wax tablet covered with markings from his survey. He looked up at Maxian’s entrance., “My lord, this house is almost thaumaturgically correct-following Egyptian practices. I think that we’ve finally gotten the blessing of the gods on our pro… is something wrong?”

Maxian had halted suddenly and was staring at the cup of water in his hand. His face was a confusion of emotions. He looked up and thrust the cup at Abdmachus. “Drink this, and tell me what you taste!”

Confused, the Persian took the cup and drank.

“It tastes like water, milord, good water at that. Fresh from the spring. A little coppery.”

Maxian handed the cup across the table to Gaius Julius. “Drink!”

“Faugh! I hate water,” the dead man said, but he drank anyway. “Huh. Sweet and cold. Not like that crap we drink…” The dead man looked up, his face startled. “… in the city.”

Maxian nodded, his face both grim and filled with exultation. “One way or another, everyone in the city drinks water-either straight, or in soup, or mixed with wine.” The Prince’s voice was filled with utter certainty. “They bathe in it, they wash their clothes in it. But they don’t drink it out of the river anymore, the Tiber is too foul for that. And many of the little springs that used to provide the Hill districts with water are dry. Not all, but most. And where does everyone get the water they drink?“ Maxian turned to the Persian.

Abdmachus frowned at him, then the sun rose in his mind. “The aqueducts! Nearly all of the water in the city comes from the eleven aqueducts. All are controlled by the Imperial Offices-they’re critical to the function of the city. A spell placed upon them would affect the waters and, through the waters, every person in the city…”

Maxian nodded sharply. “Here is what we’re going to do, then.” He began speaking rapidly. Abdmachus began taking notes on his wax tablet.

A hundred yards up the hillside from the Egyptian house, in a thicket of rowan trees, two figures sat quietly, their backs to the largest of the trees. From their vantage, they could see down both the overgrown lane that wound up the hillside to the house and into the front garden. Early-morning dew sparkled on the leaves of the bushes and trees around them, but both were thickly bundled in woolen cloaks and blankets against the night chill. The larger was snoring softly, his head at an angle. The smaller was awake, her sharp ears having caught the creak of a wagon and the whickering of horses on the still morning air.

To the east, the sky was a slowly spreading pink and violet. The sun would soon rise over the mountains and wash the land below with light. For the moment, there was a calm stillness as the land still slept, but the dawn crept in on light feet. The dark-haired girl sat up a little and doffed the straw hat that she had been covering her head with. There was a wagon in the lane, with two drivers. They clip-clopped past on the road below and turned into the garden path. Quietly enough to keep from waking her companion, she slid out of the scratchy wool blankets and slunk off down the slope, flitting from tree to tree.

The two men, one gray-haired, the other with a dark mane, pulled the wagon around to the back garden entrance and unloaded two heavy kegs-filled with wine or water by the apparent weight of them. They rolled the kegs inside the house, raising a clatter on the tile floors. Indistinct voices echoed in the empty hallways. The girl crept lower on the hillside on her hands and knees. Now the wagon was only thirty feet away, across the little side road that ran around the house. The horses were patiently waiting in the traces, The voices continued to echo in the house, though now they receded. The girl looked left and then right. Predawn stillness continued to cover the land.

She waited a moment, but no new movement came from inside (he house. Crouching low, she scuttled across to the side of the wagon and paused, peering under the heavy wooden bed. She could just make out the steps on the other side, but no one was on them. Her nose wrinkled up; there was a foul odor seeping from the wagon, like rotten meat. Oog… what are you doing, pretty Prince? Krista swallowed, suppressing the sudden desire to throw up. There was still no noise from the house, so she crept around the end of the wagon and peered inside the bed.

There were two long shapes, wrapped in ancient, dirty canvas. The smell was thicker now, but she steeled herself and reached into the back of the wagon to twitch the nearest edge of canvas aside. Her face flickered with revulsion at the sight of a gray-black foot protruding from the bundle. It was scabrous and the toes were swollen. Nitrous dirt clung to it in clumps. The smell was worse, like a fist in the face, and she had to sit down behind the wagon, gagging The clatter of boots echoed on the stone steps at the back of the house. Krista started, then realized that she was trapped behind the wagon. Carefully she drew her legs up under her and edged beneath the wooden bed. From underneath the rough boards, she saw two sets of sandaled feet tromp down from the house and go to the back of the wagon.

“Gods, that is a foul stench… like rotten butter.” That was the Prince.

“Huh, you’re an ill-experienced pup. I don’t even note it anymore.”

They bumped around in the wagon and then there was a sliding sound as they dragged the first of the two bodies out. She heard Maxian grunt as he took the weight, then the older man jumped down and took up the rest of the burden.

“Watch the steps,” the older man said, and then they staggered off with the body between them. Krista peered from under the wagon until they had entered the house, then she slipped out from under it and darted off into the shelter of the woods. Twenty minutes later she was back on the hillside, shaking Sigurd’s shoulder. He came awake, only slightly muzzy from sleep.

“Come on, we’ve got to go back to the city immediately.”

The dreadful sickly sweet odor still hung in the air, but Maxian had grown inured to it. His medical training had taken over and now he gazed down upon the two bodies- secretly dug from potters’ fields south of the city and now spread open with clamps and tongs-with a detached air. Gaius Julius loitered behind him, leaning against the wall of the basement of the Egyptian house. The older man wore a butcher’s apron and heavy leather gloves, spattered with dark fluid. Maxian placed his hands on either side of the first body’s head and began to breathe carefully.

Perception fell away as his flesh relinquished control of his view of the world. The hidden world blossomed, an infinitely textured flower opening in his mind. Detail flooded his mind like a swift mountain torrent, and he struggled for a moment to compose and order it. He bent over the body of the ancient man, dead now for weeks. His fingers moved in the body cavity, sliding over the glutinous remains of liver, spleen, and lungs. His fingers, so used to the work, were his anchor and focus now as his awareness plunged into the recesses of the decaying body. Flesh parted before him, and the innermost secrets of the organs were revealed.

Against the wall, Gaius Julius watched with apprehension. He had seen more than his share of death, and it was no stranger. But the air in the tomblike basement seemed chill and noisome compared to a battlefield. Too, the work of the past nights, of trolling the alleys of the Subura and Aventine slums for suitable bodies, had been grim. The poverty and dissolution of the lower classes of the city that he still, after centuries, loved shook him. In his previous life, he could remember thinking of the people of the lower city, below the hills, as nothing but useful tools in his quest for power. Now the decay of the city and its people struck him cruelly in the heart. He knew that during the short period in which he had the power to revise the workings of the Republic or the customs that supported it, he had done little or nothing. And what now? Had he, somehow, caused all of this to come to pass?

An hour passed, grains trickling through the glass. Maxian suddenly shuddered and stepped back from the first body. Sweat trickled down his face and he looked exhausted. The dead man stepped quickly to his side and helped him to a chair next to the wall. Gaius Julius squatted, peering at his young master. The lad’s eyes were flickering, unfocused. His right hand was clenched in a death grip. Gaius Julius stood and brought him back some wine. Maxian shied away from the cup, but the dead man gripped the Prince’s head in his free hand and forced him to drink. After the first taste, the young man took the cup in his own hands and drank deeply.

“How do you feel?” Gaius held Maxian’s head up in his hands, staring at his eyes.

“Exhausted. I may have to wait until tomorrow to examine the other body.”

“Can Abdmachus do it?”

The Prince shook his head, too weary for words. Gaius Julius lifted the Prince’s clenched hand up, so that the boy could see it. Maxian had trouble focusing, but when he did, he frowned. “Odd. Why is my hand doing that?”

Gaius Julius pried the fingers back and revealed a small, irregular clump of pale-gray metal in the Prince’s palm. He plucked it out and rolled it in his fingers. An eyebrow rose. “It looks and feels like a slinger’s bullet. Was it in the body? I saw no wound like this would have made-had he carried it for a long time?”

Maxian, still terribly weary, shook his head no. Then his head rolled back against the wall and he began snoring. Gaius Julius sighed and put the odd ball of metal on the e’nd of the table. This done, he carefully lifted up the Prince and, straining with the effort, carried the boy up the stairs to the main floor of the house.

Anastasia de’Orelio, Duchess of Parma, looked up in irritation at the sound of rapping on the door to her private study. Sighing at the latest interruption, she put down the letter she was reading and composed her hair.

“Enter,” she said, her voice tired and on the edge of open irritation. She sighed again inwardly when Krista entered the chamber and knelt by the side of the desk. Perhaps it had been a mistake to begin using the girl in the field. She was quick and usually circumspect, it was true, and rarely drew attention to herself-she was a slave, after all.

“Yes, my dear, what is it?”

“We kept watch on the Egyptian house in the hills, mistress, until the Prince and his servant returned. They came back very early this morning and they had two bodies, fresh ones, in a wagon. They took them inside the building and we came back to the city to warn you. The Prince is up to something dreadful up there! We should inform the aediles, or the prefect, and stop him.”

Krista was almost breathless. She and Sigurd had hastened back to the city as fast as they could.

Anastasia sighed and looked down at the girl, still kneeling at her side, panting. Youth! she thought to herself, rubbing the graininess from her eyes. Too many late nights, now that the Emperor was gone from the city, and too little sleep were wearing her down.

“My dear, the Prince may be a little odd, but this news is nothing untoward. Remember, he is a healer of the Temple of Asklepios. Though it is not particularly pleasant that he may traffic in the bodies of the dead, it is his profession to understand the workings of the human body. The other watchers in the city reported to me earlier today that two bodies were purchased from the burial temple on the road south of the city. The families, I suppose, would be upset, but they are dead, you know.

“You must learn to see the whole picture, Krista, if you are going to be of use to me. It is good, even, that the Prince has decided to undertake his medical investigations outside of the city. If it were discovered that he was carting bodies around in the wee hours, it would reflect badly on the Emperor.”

Krista gave her mistress a frowning look but quickly schooled her features into calm acceptance and polite at-tentiveness.

The Lady d’Orelio continued: “The Prince has a project that is consuming all of his attention-which is a welcome change from his previous lassitude. Though I surely appreciated his pursuit of the available women in the city, this is far better for him. His brother, I know, is worried about his apparent disappearance, but I’ll have a talk with him tomorrow. In the meantime, you need to return to your previous duties here. I will send Sigurd and Antonius to watch the Egyptian house.”

For a moment, Krista considered telling her mistress what she felt about that in a loud and angry voicey but the memory of previous, very short-lived arguments with the Duchess quelled that impulse. Instead she bowed her head to the tiles and retreated demurely from the room. In the hallway, after closing the door, she cursed-entirely silently-for fifteen minutes before, shaking with anger, she stalked off to her own cell in the servants’ quarters.

Pigheaded old woman, she snarled to herself in the safety of her thoughts. The pretty Prince may be a healer and all, but he and that old man are up to something evil.

But she could see no way to do anything about it if she wanted to continue living. Disobedient slaves were treated harshly in Rome.

“It’s lead.” Maxian spilled the remains of the metal shavings into a‘ cup on the long wooden table. The air in the basement was still fetid and stank of corruption. Two days of sweaty work in the darkness had not freshened the air any. Abdmachus was perched on a stool they had scavenged from one of the outbuildings of the house. Gaius Julius, fresh from dragging the body of the young black man out to the crematorium in the back garden, was sitting on the steps down from the main floor, drinking deep from a flagon of watered wine.

“Lead?” Abdmachus’ voice was filled with curiosity. “Did he eat it?”

“I don’t know… It permeated his whole body, in minute fragments, much smaller than can be seen with the naked eye. His liver held most of it, though his kidneys and stomach lining had some. When I started drawing it out, there was a great deal suspended in his blood as well.” Maxian’s voice was still weary, but he had begun to recover from his second examination.

“Gaius Julius.” The Prince turned to the old man. “This man was a longtime resident of the city, yes?”

The dead man nodded and wiped his mouth before saying: “By the report of the aediles in his district, he had lived there almost his whole life, fifty-two years. He was the oldest man in the area, or at least the oldest recently dead. It’s lucky he had no relatives to pay the burial tax, or they would have cremated him before I got there.”

“So, a Roman citizen of fifty years. He probably never left the city in his life, unless to visit the gardens outside of the city on a holiday. Somehow he ingested a large quantity of lead. Now, the other man, he was not long in the city?”

“No more than a month,” Gaius Julius said, “a Maure-tanian slave who angered his master. Clubbed on the head with a pewter mug and left to die in the alley behind the master’s house. The street sweepers picked him up. Just fresh the morning we brought him here.”

Maxian nodded, pensive. “He is reasonably healthy, foreign, and he has no lead to speak of in his body, though there were minute traces in his stomach.”

Abdmachus raised an eyebrow at this. “Then he was exposed as well to something common that carries the metal.”

Maxian picked up the fragment ball and crushed it between his fingers. The paniculate metal collapsed easily into a powder at the bottom of the cup. He rubbed his fingers clean on a cloth.

“I have lead in my body too,” the Prince said, his face calm and considering. “I checked after I examined the African boy. Far less than the old man but more than the slave. We were all three exposed to the metal, and I think that I know how.”

Abdmachus cocked his head, staring at the Prince.

Gaius Julius spoke into the moment of silence before Maxian, however. “The aqueducts again. I remember reading in the logbooks of the Imperial architects that the pipes that carry water from the stone channels to the public fountains and insulae are made of lead. Is it the taste in the water that you noticed before?”

Maxian turned and his face was dark, turned away from the lantern light. “Yes. Subtle and almost unnoticeable- unremarked by anyone because Romans do not, as a matter of course, drink their water straight. Anyone who did notice the taste would assume that it was river water. So! Another piece of the puzzle.”

Gaius Julius stood up and stretched, groaning at the ache in his old bones. “Not the whole answer then? Is lead poisonous? Would it cause these things that you see?”

Abdmachus cleared his throat. “I doubt not that this much lead in a man’s organs is cause for concern and may have hastened his death, but the thing that we are seeking is sorcerous in its base nature. Lead, my dear general, is most assuredly inimical to sorcery.”

“He’s right, Gaius. Generally when you desire to prevent sorcery from affecting something you wrap it or stop it up with lead. It is a neutral metal, neither positive nor negative in influence. The unseen powers slide off of it like water off glass.”

Gaius Julius’ answer was interrupted by a sudden bark of laughter from Abdmachus. Both the Prince and the dead man turned, their faces pqzzled, to look at the Persian.

“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 sattdown 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 no ticed 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 the 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 doT

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 prob: ably know him better, having“ been in his guts and see: what he ate and shit the last day of his life.

“But I know one thing that they seem to have forgotter I wager he never mentioned it, less he was dead drunk ani the wine wasn’t enough to keep his memories at bay. H was a citizen-a twenty-year man, by the Legion brand 01 his shoulder and the discharge mark.”

Maxian turned back to look down on Krista’s recumber form. Her chest rose and fell slowly under the grubby cot ton tunic she was wearing. Without thinking of it, h checked the pulse at her neck and wrist. She was sleepini easily now. He ran his hand over her face and the sleq deepened. When she woke, she would feel no pain or af tereffects of the blow.

“A citizen. I am a citizen, by birth and action. The slave are not…”

Something tickled at the edge of his thought, somethin: from his youth in Narbonensis, something about…

“… the children of citizens, or citizens themselves. I re member a herdsman on my father’s estates in Narbo, h said that the young of a strong bull are stronger than th offspring of a weak bull. The blood of the father and th mother affects the child.” His voice sharpened.

‘This contagion is carried by those who art citizens o the children of citizens of the state. It must be passed b; blood from generation to generation.“

Abdmachus rose from his chair and joined Maxian b; the table.

“Eventually,” the Persian said, speculatively, “it wouli affect the majority of the population, save those whose wer never citizens or whose parents had always been slaves. 1 might even get stronger with each generation.”

“A pretty theory,” Gaius Julius said from the steps, “bu 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 somehov doubt that a wizard wandered around the city, bespellin] everyone. Someone would have noticed. So, how did it firs happen? And, more to the point, is it still happening now?“

Abdmachus sighed and returned to his chair. He was growing weary of the strain of all this. He devoutly wished that he could slip away and find a ship to take him back home. It was nearly a decade since he had last seen the green hills of his homeland or ridden under night skies familiar from boyhood. He had trouble understanding merchants from home now, and he continually caught himself thinking in Latin. Sadly, he put those thoughts away and wrote down the latest conclusions in short-stroked characters on the wax tablet that he carried with him always.

“My lord,” he said when he had finished, “this is a strong spell to maintain such durability. I’ve been a sorcerer for nearly all my life, and the thought of constructing such a thing makes me feel a little ill. There are two kinds of things I can think of that would make such a thing work; first, that a sacrifice of blood be made when the working was done. Second, that the subject be permanently marked or forced to ingest something that fixed the pattern to them. These things make me think that perhaps… perhaps it is a religious ceremony. Something that each citizen undergoes upon coming of age? I am not familiar with those kinds of customs among your people…”

Gaius Julius shook his head, grimacing. “No, there’s the little ceremony when you come of age-but that’s just wine and grain on the family altar and a party. I suppose excessive drinking might cause it… that would explain much of the last six centuries. But then it must be past my time, since I don’t show its effects… What?”

Maxian was staring at the dead man.

“Show me your arms,” the Prince said.

Gaius Julius stared at the Prince for a moment, then shrugged out of his tunic. He showed first one arm and then the other, front and back sides. Maxian grunted and turned away, lost in thought.

“Well?” the dead man asked as he pulled the tunic back on. “You want to explain that?”

“You served in the Legions?”

“Yes, though from the reading I’ve been doing, not the Legions that you have now! My troops were either my personal followers or citizens called up when the city was threatened. No, let me take that back. My men were professionals-I suppose the last of the citizen-soldiers were in my grandfather’s time. What of it?”

“You don’t have a brand, or mark, on your arm.”

Gaius Julius laughed; a sharp bark of amusement. “No, boy, I was a political officer! The brands are for the men who enlisted or were levied-they had to serve a long term-six to twenty years-and you don’t want them to desert, now do you? I would never be branded, nor would any officer of the equites. We served out of choice, to further our political careers. This Augustus, this ‘son’ of mine, seems to have reorganized the Legions and instituted new programs-the branding, the issuance of a certificate of enlistment, an identity badge stamped from tin.” He paused. “So much changed after I died.”

The dead man looked old suddenly; truly old, not just his appearance, but his spirit and will, for a moment, seemed to be as ancient as his body. Enough of his new world was the same, or similar, that the things that had changed-like the wine, or the size of the city, or the abject poverty of the poor and the rampant excesses of the rich- struck him hard. Maxian looked at him with sympathy just for an instant and then forced his mind to remember that the old man was dead and a tool, little more. A lever, perhaps, to move a mountain.

Abdmachus had been shuffling through the notes that he and Maxian had made, and he pulled out a parchment book, complete with a leather binding. He opened it and turned to the third or fourth page. Clearing his throat, he read aloud in a carrying voice: “To the Republic of Rome, to the Senate, to the People and to the Law of the City of Rome, I swear that I will serve faithfully, to obey my officers, to follow commands, to keep ranks and to stand when others may flee. Upon my honor, the honor of my family and my blood I do so swear.“

He put down the book and nodded his head slightly, paging forward through the chapter of the Annals Milita-tum. Maxian frowned.

“This is the oath,” the Persian said, “that Augustus instituted during his reorganization of the army in the sixteenth year of his reign as princeps of the Republic. The previous oath, by my notes here, was taken to an individual Legion and hence to the commander of that Legion. With this change and oath, made before the standard of the Legion as tutelary representative of the city and the state, Augustus attempted to impress upon the troops that their responsibility was to the Republic, to the Senate, and to the Emperor rather than their own commanders.”

“Did it work?” Gaius Julius asked in an envious voice. Abdmachus shrugged, saying “I have not read the military histories of the Empire, but the discipline and elan of the Roman army is known throughout the whole world. In battle they stand fast against terrible odds. They have rarely mutinied and they do not pillage or rape their own lands.” Maxian spoke, his voice thoughtful. “The oath is followed by the branding-it might be enough to fix the ritual upon the mind and body of the soldier. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Roman citizens must have taken the oath throughout the history of the Empire. Many are given grants of land, spreading them willy-nilly throughout the Empire. They have children, and their children must carry the oath-binding down through the generations as well…”

Abdmachus flipped to another set of pages and read: “The sons of the man who has completed his service, and accepted either the grant of land or the payment of cash monies to begin business for himself, are compelled as well to take service with the Army of the Republic after the passing of their sixteenth birthday. To those who complete their service as well, these same benefits and exemptions will accrue.“

The Persian closed the book, his fingers tapping on the binding.

“Many generations might take the oath, then,” he said, “with each one becoming more firmly fixed than the one before. Over hundreds of years, the minuscule talent for the power that lies in each man and woman, bound by this oath, would accumulate and feed into the thing that we know today. Each stone that they laid, each cloak that they weave, even the wine that they ferment-all are touched by a little bit of the power and it grows, it grows monstrous…”

Maxian sat down heavily in the chair. His mind whirled to accommodate the prospect of a pattern of sorcery grown, man by man, woman by woman, over six hundred years. Millions of citizens living and dying, each adding to its power. Growing like a fungus in the darkness under the shade of the state, until it swallowed the world. My gods, the raw strength inherent in such a structure of forms! A voice in the back of his mind gibbered in fear-there was no way that he could overturn such a power!

He shook his head sharply and stood. “Bring me more bodies-these ones alive. I would know the strength of this thing.”

On the cold table, Krista moaned slightly and turned over, away from the Prince.

Maxian ignored her. “Gaius Julius, I need soldiers, both those newly inducted-if there are any left in the city, and those who have served their term as well. The sooner the better.”