The Dog and the Wolf (43 page)

Rufinus appeared. He spent the winters in town, except when he went off on one of his solitary and unannounced, unexplained long rambles. In the uneasy red light, he might have been a demon from hell. “This isn’t accidental,” he said. “It was set. Somebody crossed the ditch and the wall—about the middle of the east side, I’d guess—and went around with a torch.”

Verania heard. Anguish wrenched her mouth out of shape. “Why?” she wailed. “Who would do such a thing? A man possessed?”

“I suspect not,” said Rufinus bleakly. “Sir, may I take a party to try tracking him down?”

Gratillonius nodded. “Go.” He thought Rufinus must share his guess as to who had sent the arsonist.

He had more urgent business. With those men and women who showed themselves capable of it, he pushed his way into the throng, bullied, cajoled, bit by bit imposed a ragged sort of order.

People in Aquilo were aware; their own watchmen had seen and called them. Several arrived to offer help. Gratillonius got most of his homeless across the bridge and onto the road leading there. A number of able-bodied men he kept. The basilica manor house and its outbuildings could shelter them. Once again those stood vacant except for caretakers. Verania might have lived there with her husband in much more comfort than his dwelling afforded, but had said of her own accord that his place was among his Ysans and hers at his side.

He set about roughly organizing his gang. “We’ll try to save what can be saved,” he told them. “We won’t get reckless; nothing is worth a life. But it’ll mean a lot if we can keep the town granary from burning, for instance, and I think maybe we can.”

Verania caught his arm. “You
will
be careful?” she pleaded.

Even then, he could smile down at her. “Certainly. I want to meet my son, you know.”

“That manuscript—I forgot it, God forgive me, but could you possibly—not to take any chances, oh, no, but it is a precious thing—”

He had forgotten too. Memory jolted him. She had lately carried from the basilica what there was of Runa’s Ysan history, mostly notes, to study at home in her rare moments of leisure. Otherwise she never mentioned Runa, nor did he. At that time, though, she had said, “I have her to thank for all this about your city. Maybe we can find someone who’ll carry on the work.”

By flanraelight and starlight, he shook his head. “I’m sorry. That’s bound to be impossible.”

And it drummed within him: The Veil of Brennilis, the revenge of the Gods, whatever it is, casts its shadow yet, and always shall, until Ys is wholly lost and forgotten. We’ll never find time to write that chronicle, nor will anyone else. The story of Ys will die with the last of us who lived the last days of it; and our city will glimmer away into legend.

He turned to his men. “Let’s go,” he said.

—Rufinus came back about dawn. Gratillonius was awake in the basilica. The sleep of exhaustion held the others. They had kept the blaze from spreading to granary and warehouse. Those Gratillonius had originally directed to be built near the Stegir, with space between them and adjacent structures. Some houses had survived as well, some valuables were pulled out of others before they caught fire. It was no great victory.

Under the pale east, Confluentes was ash heaps. Dwindling flames gnawed at charred timbers. Most walls had collapsed as the wood weakened too much to hold clay. A few stood black, like boles after a forest has burned. Smoke lay in a stinging, stinking haze.

“We found tracks in the frost, a couple of fellows and I,” Rufinus reported. “Three sets. They’d sneaked out of the woods and returned. There they dispersed. We couldn’t follow two. They’d taken care to leave no trail we could see by night once they reached the trees and brush. The third was a dunderhead He’d actually made a campfire and rolled out a blanket for a rest before daybreak.” His curtness dissolved in a sigh. “Unfortunately, when we
appeared he panicked and bolted. Before we could run him down, one of us put an arrow through him. I’d rather not say who. He’s young, hot-headed; the damage is done, and he’s loyal and promising. When I dressed him down, he cried and asked to be whipped. A month’s worth of the silent treatment will drive the lesson home better than that.”

He must be an adorer of yours, Rufinus, thought Gratillonius. Aloud: “Are you sure the party you found was guilty?”

“His clothes were freshly stained with oil. How’d that happen, except when he was pouring it out of a jug onto the wood he was going to set alight? Good clothes, too; he well fed, and barbered within the past few days; so, no landlouper. What else would he be doing in the wilderness at night in the dead of winter?” Rufinus studied Gratillonius. “Do you want to come with me for a look at the corpse? We’d better cover it up, just in case, but it might be somebody you’d recognize. Somebody who—let’s say—was with tax agent Nagon Demari on his last visit to us.

“I think likelier not,” Gratillonius replied. “They aren’t stupid, those who ordered this thing. They’d guard against the chance of their bully boys getting caught at it.”

“And mine wringing the truth out. M-hm. A middleman hired them.” Rufinus pondered. “Not common alley lice. You couldn’t rely on that sort, especially to get through the forest. Maybe the middleman paid their gambling debts and told them he had a long-standing grudge against Ys. If we’d gone to Turonum with his name, we’d have found he’d left for the far South, leaving no address, and no underling of the governor’s had any knowledge of him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Gratillonius.

Weariness overwhelmed Rufinus. “No, it doesn’t, does it?” he croaked. “Confluentes, your colony, your hopes, they’re gone.”

Gratillonius put a hand on his man’s shoulder and tightened the grip till Rufinus met his eyes. The windows in the atrium came awake with the first wan light of day. “Wrong,” Gratillonius told him. “We have that treasure Apuleius is keeping for us. We have friends who’ll help us
again, more willingly this time when they know what we’re worth. We have ourselves.

“Those maggots won’t eat us away. We’re going to build Confluentes over; and we’ll make it too strong for them.”

1

Springtime dusk. The air was soft, odors of greening and blossoming not yet cooled out of it. A moon close to fullness had cleared Mons Ferruginus. It looked like old silver afloat in an ever deeper blue sea. The earliest stars trembled forth. Sunset’s ghost still lightened the western sky. After the tumult of day—hoofs, boots, wheels, hammer, saw, chisel, trowel, shovel, hod, shout, grunt, oath, banter, the trudging off at day’s end—quietude rested enormous over the land. Through it drifted little save belated bird-cries, ripple of the Odita, occasional tiny splash when a fish leaped, footfalls on the river road.

Gratillonius had been gone half a month, traveling about to make his arrangements. He wanted to see how the work had fared meanwhile. At this hour he could get an overview; tomorrow he would watch it in progress. His wife accompanied him from her parents’ home in Aquilo, where they were living until their new dwelling was ready. The manor house was full of engineers and other directors. Mostly hired from elsewhere, they naturally expected better quarters than the shacks and tents that served common laborers.

Verania’s brother Salomon had asked if he could accompany her and her man. They gave leave, for they had talked about him earlier, when they were alone and after they were; at peace with nature.

He pointed. “See,” he said importantly, “they’ve begun on the new wharf.”

Gratillonius made out pilings planted just above the juncture of the rivers. The ground beyond was trampled, muddied, heaped and littered with lumber, equipment, scraps, trash. In the end this was supposed to become facilities for ships. Then the bridge at Aquilo would be demolished, so they could come here to the actual head of navigation, a better site in every respect.

A new bridge would span the Odita at Confluentes, stone, with towers at either end for its defense “Wait,” requested Verania, halfway over the old wooden one. “The evening is so beautiful.” They lingered a few minutes, watching light shiver and fade on the stream, before they continued.

The same light touched the pike of a guard on the opposite side. A number paced their rounds, for the legionary embankment had been levelled, the ditch filled in. Stakes marked where a real wall of the Gallic sort was to be. It would make a complete circuit, east of the Stegir and north of the Odita. That would give room for proper streets and large buildings, as well as a population growth Gratillonius hoped would prove rapid.

The sentry challenged the newcomers. When he recognized the man among them, he snapped a Roman salute. It was crisp, though his outfit was homemade. Drusus and his veterans had long since stopped counselling the local reservists—that came to be frowned on in Turonum—but they were instructing Osismii who had formed an athletic association.

“How goes it?” Gratillonius asked.

“Right well, my lord,” replied the guard.

“He speaks truth,” said Salomon as the three walked on. “It really does go apace, now when rain and darkness don’t hamper us so much. There’s no trouble to speak of with thieves. Rufinus’s scouts stop any that try to sneak here from outside, and we inspect outbound loads for stolen goods.”

“We?” teased Verania. She had been bubblingly light-hearted since Gratillonius returned; but he sensed that it cost her an effort.

“Aw, well,” muttered Salomon, abashed. He had grown taller than she, close to the height of Gratillonius, but was
as yet reed-thin; under a shock of brown hair, his face continued, for days after he had been shaved, as smooth as hers.

Gratillonius took pity. “He worships you, not far short of idolatry,” Verania had told him. “Well he might.”

“You stick by your studies,” Gratillonius said. “That’s your share of the work, making ready for when well call on you.”

Dim in twilight, Salomon nonetheless glowed.

They wandered about. Order had begun to emerge from confusion and ugliness. Scaffolding and cranes loomed where masonry climbed. Elsewhere were only sites marked off or foundations partly dug, but space and ambition prevailed—for a real basilica, for the big church that Corentinus would make his cathedral, for workshops and storehouses and homes, for a town whose bones were not clay and turf but brick and stone—a
city.

Northward and eastward, greenwood no longer crowded close. Axes had slain trees across a mile or more in either direction, to make room and timber. Cookfires glimmered yonder, throughout the encampment of the workers. It was a huddle of the rudest shelters, hog-filthy, brawling, drunken, whorish. Dwellers in the neighborhood were too few, and generally bound down by their own occupations. Gratillonius’s agents had ranged from end to end of Armorica during the winter, recruiting muscle where they found it. Many of the hirelings were doubtless runaways, claiming to be laborers with a right to take jobs elsewhere. As word spread, no few barbarians who had wandered into Roman territory joined the force. But stiffened by armed men at their beck, the supervisors kept it disciplined in the workplace, without strength left at day’s end for much riotousness. And … there was life in the camp, a gusty promise as in an equinoctial storm. The new Confluentes would remember.

Not that Gratillonius meant to keep that lot of boors here. For those who proved themselves desirable and wanted to stay, he’d make what arrangements he was able. The rest must go, once the basic task was finished. It might be hard to get rid of some, he might have to bloody heads, but he wasn’t going to allow more rabble than he
could help. The immigrants he hoped to attract were steady, civilized men, seeking a chance to build a better life for their families. Gallia must hold many such, who would find ways to reach him. And more were
in
beleaguered Britannia. If he sent word across the channel—

That was a thing to think seriously about, and maybe do, in years unborn. Tonight he walked in peace with his wife, who carried their child within her, and the boy to whom he was like a second father. Distance dwindled noise from the camp to a bare murmur beneath the hush. A bat swooped by. The last light from the west shone through its wings. “Look,” Verania said. “Like an angel flying,”

“A sign unto us?” marveled Salomon. He gestured at the murky heaps around. “How splendid this will soon be.”

Gratillonius smiled. “Easy, there,” he cautioned. “It’ll take a while.”

“The work goes fast.”

“Because we’re pushing with everything we’ve got. The city has to be habitable and defensible before winter. But afterward things will slow down. It’ll be mostly up to individual people, and they have their livings to make. We’ll have spent every last nummus in our present treasury.”

Verania sighed. “The cost—” She checked her voice. He heard a gulp, and laid his left hand over hers, which rested on his right arm. Gently, he pressed it.

“You know how we’ll meet that,” he said.

Since he revealed his plans to her, secretly, last month, she had been fighting desperation. She did so wordlessly, but he knew, and wished he could find reassurances that wouldn’t sharpen her fears. They burst through for an instant: “You can’t change it?”

He shook his head. “No. That’d break faith with a good many men. With the whole people.”

She tensed her clasp on him. “God watch over you, then.”

They had stopped in their tracks. “With you to pray for me, what have I got to worry about?” he responded, the weak best he could think of.

“What’s this?” asked Salomon.

Gratillonius drew breath. “We’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said. “Here were safe from eavesdroppers. Your father and your sister both believe we can trust you to keep silence, absolute silence.”

The skinny frame quivered and grew taut. “I s-swear. By God and all the saints, I do.”

Verania too was relieved a little by speaking forth. “You’ve heard the talk about Gratillonius going along when Evirion Baltisi makes his first voyage of the season, soon after Easter,” she said.

“Of course. To look for markets. Oh, sir, I’ve asked you before. Take me! Ill earn my keep, I promise I will.”