Shadow of Ararat

ROMA MATER, ITALIA

A thin slat of daylight filtered down from above to cast a pall on the face of the young woman in the stained blue robe. Unconcerned with the thick crowd thronging the narrow alleyway, she pushed through mendicants, draymen, butchers with hogs’ heads slung over their shoulders, and off-duty aediles to finally reach the end of the sweetmeat lane. At the corner, she sneezed in the dust of the wider city street and then quickly crossed between two crowds of chanting priests. Each troupe bore a profusion of banners, small figurines on stands, and a cacophony of drums, trumpets, and rattles. The faithful moved slowly along the street, chanting and singing at the direction of their priests. On the far side, under the awning of a pastry shop, she tucked a loose curl of deep red-gold hair back into the patched hood of the threadbare robe and idly glanced up and down the street.

A half block away, Nikos was looking in her direction, his stubbly face turned up under a broad straw hat. He caught her eye and nodded, then touched the brim of the hat with a thick finger.

From her great height of almost six feet, she could pick him out as he melted into the flow of traffic, pushing stead ily in her direction. Distantly, there was a trumpeting sound and the rattle of gongs. It was hot in the Subura district and the air was heavy with a long familiar stench. Thyatis turned the other direction, casting her eye to the opposite side of the avenue. The crowds continued to spill in their disorderly way into the street, blocking traffic and causing the girl to weave her way slowly forward.

The crowd thinned as the road made an inelegant turn into the dye-makers’ district. Her sharp nose flared, catching the wretched smell of old urine. She trembled a little, though the sun was hot in the lane, as bitter memories picked at her thoughts. She snorted in disgust and mentally pushed them away. Then her clear gray-blue eyes widened as she caught sight of the Persian.

He stood in the doorway of a tannery, oblivious to the noxious reek that was billowing from the arched windows piercing the wall above the door. He was of a moderate height, only four feet and odd inches. A beaded round brim-less hat clung to his head, and a fine watery green robe, bordered with a dull crimson, was draped around his shoulders. He was speaking to a brown-faced man in a brown leather apron, brown cowhide boots, and a sullen brown disposition. As he spoke, the Persian repeatedly pointed across the street to the closed door of a linen shop. Gold bracelets wrapped the Persian’s wrists and held back the cuffs of an immaculate white linen shirt.

One of the Roman girl’s eyebrows crept up unconsciously as she took in his supple silk pants. She was surprised that the tanner, obviously of old Roman stock, would even trade words with such an obviously decadent Easterner. She turned and pulled back the hood of her robe. A cascade of deep gold-red curls spilled down her back, only barely constrained by two dingy ties of cotton cloth.

Consciously forcing herself to look to the right as she crossed the street, away from the Persian to her left, she loosened the cheap copper clasp of the robe. The robe fell back from her lightly tanned shoulders, drawing the eyes of the tannery workers in the immediate vicinity. She smiled briefly at the nearest one, but the quirk of her plush red lips did not reach her eyes and the young man averted his gaze.

Unseen beneath the robe, one hand loosened the short stabbing sword in the sheath tied to her right leg. Her left hand rose, bunching the flap of the cloak and drawing it across her front. It slid away from her right thigh, revealing a short cotton kilt, a generous expanse of smooth golden-tan leg, high doeskin boots coming almost to her knee, and the loosed sword, clasped lightly in the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. With unhurried steps, she walked up the narrow brick walkway to the front of the tannery. The Persian, gesticulating with his left hand and raising an exasperated voice to the tanner, was utterly unaware.

Something nickered at the edge of her vision.

Only feet from her victim, Thyatis leapt to the left, crashing sideways into two slaves carrying great bales of raw Egyptian cotton. A javelin shattered against the tannery wall, causing the Persian and the tanner to turn in surprise. Snarling, Thyatis surged to her feet, her cloak falling away behind her, the sword darting out like a steel tongue. The Persian, his eyes wide with astonishment over a small mustache and a neat goatee, screamed loudly and bolted past the tanner into the building.

Without sparing a glance for Nikos or her other backup, Thyatis bounded after him. For a moment she rushed forward blind, but then her eyes adjusted and she caught sight of the Persian’s green robe fluttering around a corner on a landing at the end of the narrow work-hall. She took the stairs three at a time, then skidded around a corner into a whitewashed room filled with tables, surprised clerks, and clattering shutters as the Persian exited the other side through the window.

Beyond the window, she found a narrow brick balcony looking out over the sprawling yard of the tannery. The space between the buildings was crammed with vats, tres ties, and brawny half-naked men laboring to raise stinking hides on long iron-hooked poles from the great barrels. An acrid stench billowed up from the hundreds of vats. She ran lightly along the balcony, ducking under twisted hemp lines strung across the space to hold laundry and rugs. At the far end of the balcony, the Persian staggered to a stop, looked both directions, and then sprang outward, arms outstretched.

The Roman woman sprinted to the end of the balcony and kicked off, her legs flashing in a brief passage of sunlight that had worked its way down between the haphazard brick tenements. Like the Persian, her reaching hand caught a heavy guy-line that was holding up a decrepit banner between the back of the tannery and the building across the alley. For a moment a sea of marveling faces flashed past below her, then she was through a poorly scraped sheepskin window with a loud ripping sound and crashing through a light framework of slats into the room beyond.

She went down in a welter of rough parchment, filthy sheets, and the crushed remains of a flimsy bed. Thyatis rolled up, slashing with the shortsword, but her blade caught nothing. The enormous ebony man that had sprung up from the bed wailed with fear and scuttled backward, toppling a bedside table and an amphora of water. The hanging that served as a door had been ripped from the rod that held it, and Thyatis rolled up and darted through it without a second thought. The dingy walls and reed-scattered floor receded as the edges of her vision clouded with gray. A fierce grin stretched her face, but she was unaware of her appearance.

A hallway filled with tiny doorways flashed past. At the end, a narrow flight of stairs rose up into smoky gloom. Thyatis bounded up the crumbling steps but found them blocked by old chests and empty grain jars. Cursing, she leapt back down the steps’four at a time and ran to the one doorway where the hanging was pushed aside. A room occupied by a puzzled-looking naked legionnaire and an irate lupa blurred past before she slid the sword back into its sheath and leapt up to grab the sides of the window casement in her hands. With a heave, she hauled herself up and leapt out through the window.

A sloping tile rooftop met her as she spilled out onto it. She tried to get to her feet, but the tiles cracked with a sound like ice breaking and she slithered down the slope of the roof. Flailing wildly, she managed to grab the cornice before pitching off into the garden below. For a moment she swung by one arm, suspended fifteen feet above a confusion of squatters’ tents, then managed to hook her foot on the edge of the roof and dragged herself back onto the tiles. Levering herself up, she glanced about. There was no sign of the Persian. Below her, the old widows and immigrant families living in the courtyard of the building stared up at her in amazement.

“Hecate!” she cursed. Teetering, she stood up on the tiles, her eyes running along the windows, rooftops, and disreputable roofs of the nearest buildings. Nothing. She turned back to the window, finding it occupied by the amused faces of the young soldier and the younger prostitute. She grimaced.

The sound of cracking tiles snapped her head around. At the far end of the tile roof, near the back wall of the garden, the Persian had crawled out of a similar window, now without either his hat or his expensive silk robe. He scuttled down the tiles to land heavily on the edge of the garden wall. Thyatis whistled, a long piercing sound that drew the attention of every face in the garden below.

“A handful of denar? for his head,” the Roman shouted as she flexed her knees and jumped down into what little clear space was below her. “He cheated me at dice!”

A shout went up in the garden and there was a sudden flurry of movement as out-of-work animal tamers, lazy day laborers, paid mourners and their wives began running toward the back wall. Thyatis sprinted at an angle across the garden. The Persian, knowing his own business, had ig nored her imprecations and was quickly walking along the top of the crumbling mud-brick wall, his arms outstretched for balance. Thyatis reached the corner of the garden wall only an instant behind the Persian. She scrambled, up a squishy pile of offal and broken pots to snatch at his heel.

He skipped aside and swung around the side of the building, his hands catching at a series of knock-off Etruscan bas-reliefs that studded the brickline between the floors. Thyatis hissed in rage at missing him and swung up onto the roughly finished wall-top, cutting a long scratch in her leg. Nimble fingers slid a flat-bladed, hiltless knife from her belt, and for a moment she leaned out over the tiny alleyway between the garden wall and the warehouse beyond, gauging the distance for a throw. A shout from behind her caught her attention and she glanced over her shoulder.

A burly man in a striped black and yellow shirt had clambered up onto the wall behind her, and with a start she realized that he was one of the Persians’ confederates. He lunged toward her, his knuckles wrapped in leather bindings. The sun glittered off the hooks set into the leather, She swung away out over the alleyway, her left foot wedged against the corner of the wall, her left hand clinging to the embrasure, as his fist flashed past. Her right foot hit the opposite wall of the alley and she pushed off, levering against her grip on the wall to the left. There was a snapping sound as the bronze-shod tip of her boot flashed into the wrestler’s throat. Her leg whipped back into a half flex and then she kicked him again in the stomach. Slowly he crumpled at the waist and then pitched backwards off the wall into the refuse pile.

When Thyatis turned, the Persian had almost reached the far end of the tunnellike space between the buildings. Biting back a stream of lurid curses, she reached out for the next bas-relief, praying that the cheap pressed-concrete statuette would hold her weight.

Two streets over, the stocky bald Illyrian, Nikos, dumped the body of the javelin thrower back behind a great pile of crates and other rubbish. Wiping sweat and blood from his hands on ill-treated leggings, he peered out into the crowded street. He had seen Thyatis vanish into the tannery, though he had been preoccupied with rushing the gladiator who had tried to skewer her from behind. Quietly he joined the flow of traffic on the street.

Within minutes he had jogged into the alleyway behind the tannery, seen no sign of either his team leader or the quarry, and then rejoined the bustle on the street of coppersmiths.

Fugitives run in a straight line, he worried as he pushed his way through the throng. / hope this one knows what he’s supposed to do.

The street ran into a round plaza where it met with two other roads coming in at odd angles. A great religious procession was clogging the intersection, trying to reach the temple of Helios that stood three and a half blocks up the hill to the left. Nikos hissed in fury; there were hundreds of supplicants, priests, and a whole cavalcade of mules, horses, litters, and no less than three elephants. The din was tremendous, between the braying of the animals, the trumpeting of unhappy elephants, and the clashing of gongs and cymbals in the hands of the priests.

The crowd surged and Nikos found himself ground into the brickwork front of a wineshop by the press of bodies. Gasping forbreath in the throng, he grasped an awning pole and swung himself up onto the sheet of taut canvas. Sweat ran off his bald pate, stinging his eyes. Standing the heat in the densely packed city was not his forte.

See the greatest city in the world, they said, have an exciting life, they said.

Shaking his head, he scrambled along the narrow lintel over the awnings. From this new height, he could see that there was a commotion halting the procession.

The Persian’s booted foot slammed against the side of Thyatis’ head and she slid back a foot or more on the back of the elephant. Her feet dangled over the heads of a crowd of angry, shouting priests. The blur of white sparks that clouded her vision passed and she dug in with her boots to climb back up. The Persian staggered in the howdah as the elephant, distressed by Thyatis climbing up his tail, heaved against the heavy iron manacles that bound its feet. The driver, screaming imprecations, lashed at the Persian with his prod, cutting a long gash in the man’s arm. The Easterner hauled himself back into- the little platform and snatched at the darting metal hook. Seizing it, he slammed it back into the driver’s face. There was the crunch of bone and the driver howled in pain before disappearing off the front of the elephant.

Thyatis swung over the side of the howdah and crashed into the Persian, her leg lashing out to cut his feet out from under him. The elephant, frantic, reared up, and the Persian and the Roman were thrown into a tumble at the back of the fragile wicker box. The slats broke away and both spilled out onto the street. Almost unmarked amid all the commotion was the sound of the iron links on the elephants’ manacles snapping.

The Roman girl hit the cobblestones in a half crouch and was only partially stunned by the shock. The Persian was not so lucky, falling heavily on his side with a sickening thud. The Helian priests scrambled back, leaving a widening circle around the two and the elephant. Thyatis struggled shakily to her feet and slipped a long knife out of her girdle. The Persian, cradling a broken and bleeding arm, eased up into a crouch, his face streaming with tears of pain. Thyatis started to circle, crouched, the knife in her right hand.

“ ‘Ware!’ came a shout from above, and the sound of a frenzied elephant bellowing cut through Thyatis’s concentration. Alarmed, she sprang to the side as the elephant, now berserk, suddenly stampeded in the street. The driver, thrown from his perch, was crushed under massive feet with a despairing scream. The other elephants, hearing the distress of their fellow, also began rearing and trampling. Thyatis, her eyes wide with fear, was frozen for an instant. Then she saw the Persian crawling away from the street, heading for a taverna door.

The rampaging elephant now shed the howdah in a cloud of splinters, wicker, and rope and was dancing in an odd circle. It smashed into the shopfronts and hurled supplicants and priests this way and that. Thyatis dodged across the street to snatch up the Persian from the doorway. Grunting with the strain, she hauled him up over her head and into the waiting arms of Nikos.

A moment later Nikos punched in the window of a second-floor room with the Persian’s head and tumbled the fugitive and himself into a storeroom filled with baskets, pots, and old cheese wheels. Thyatis followed only moments later. Outside, the screams of the elephants rose and rose, blotting out the din of the city.

In the darkness, Thyatis dragged the Persian up and slammed his broken arm into the wall, raising a cloud of plaster dust. The Easterner started to scream but was cut off by Nikos’ scarred fingers closing off his windpipe like a vise-clamp. v

The woman’s face leaned close to the Persian’s, blood trailing down from the cut on her scalp. She smiled, all white teeth in the dim light of the little room. Her fingers dug into his thick dark hair and pulled his head back.

“No man could capture Vologases the Persian,” she whispered, “and none did. But I did.”

A sense of deep contentment filled Thyatis as she stared down at the Persian agent. Nikos’ broad hands were busy, binding the Easterner’s wrists behind his back. She smoothed her hair back and smiled again. Well done, she thought, very well done.