The Shadow of Ararat (8 page)

"Ah," Anastasia said, "as pretty as ever." She laid her hand possessively on Thyatis' shoulder. The younger woman trembled a little under the light pressure. Idly, Anastasia stroked her hair. Thyatis grimly kept from leaping to her feet or lashing out with the edge of her hand.

The matron continued, "Aurelian is all that the popular troubadours would have an Emperor be—brave, handsome, kind to children and women in distress. Possessed of a noble bearing and a clear voice. Sadly, he is not the best Emperor for us, for the State, for the Senate and the People. Do you know why, child?"

Thyatis, mute, shook her head no. Anastasia slid the drape of the younger woman's dress off her shoulder. Her long fingers ran over Thyatis' smooth flesh, raising hundreds of tiny goosebumps. Part of Thyatis' hidden mind began to gibber in fear at the intimacy of the delicate fingers. Still, she remained still, though her left hand slid quietly between her thighs.

"Because he has not the sense of one of his beloved horses." The older woman sighed. "He would doubtless ignore the business of the Offices, or hand those paltry details such as the shipment of grain, or the state of the coinage, off to advisors and seek out adventures, glory in battle. He would be slain on some muddy field by a chance-shot arrow, or thrown by a tiring horse, or vomiting his life away in encampment around some Frankish hill-town. Stand, my dear."

Anastasia rose, Thyatis' hand in hers, so that both stood. Thyatis' robe, unclipped, fell away in a dark puddle at her feet. Anastasia smiled again, her face mostly in shadow. The breeze had snuffed the candles and lamps, leaving only the moonlight to wash over the younger woman's naked body.

"No," the matron continued, "Aurelian will not do. But,
tertius
, Maxian Julius Atreus, now, he is a young man with potential. The potential to be a very fine Emperor. And he is a young man, with a young man's preferences... you will please him greatly, I think."

Thyatis flinched at last, as if struck. The Duchess, seeing her fear, laughed softly.

Dwyrin woke to semidarkness again, but now there was no crane-headed man looming at the foot of his bed. Instead there was cool dimness and long slats of light falling across the sheets. As he woke, coils of shimmering red and blue light flared quietly around the door frame, ran along the heavy wooden beams of the ceiling, and slithered down the ridges of the cotton quilt. He blinked and they were gone, the stones and beams of the room solid and distinct, even clear in the subdued light.

Dwyrin rose up, expecting to wince at the movement, but there was no pain. He felt oddly calm, like a deep well had opened in him and its strong waters carried through his limbs to his ringers. The room was small, with a low writing table and two chests of burnished dark wood, bound with bronze. Scrolls of the writings of the teachers hung along the walls, revealing portraits of stars, of diverse animals, of cabalistic signs.

A master's room,
he thought. None of the apprentices or students rated a room to themselves.
What has happened to me
? The stones were cold under his bare feet. He tested his arms, his stomach. He remembered flames, being consumed in fire. There were no marks upon him, nothing to indicate the things he half remembered. His stomach growled suddenly and he realized that he was famished.

His tunic and belt were under the low bed, and thus attired he ventured out into the corridor.
How am I going to get breakfast!
he thought.
By the height of Ra it's too late for the students or masters to be eating. The cooks have their eye on me, and no one will have thought to smuggle me food.

Dwyrin stood in the shadow of the hall, distressed to realize that there was no friend among his fellows that he could truly call upon at this time. Patroclus had been sort of a friend, but the prank with the bees had ended that. He shook his head, trying to clear away the dark thoughts.
I could just wait,
he mused,
but no, I'm too hungry.

Padding quietly on the smooth tiles, he reached the end of the hallway and looked down from the second story of the masters' quarters into the garden below. Beyond its red brick walls lay the kitchen building and beyond it the students' dormitories. Dwyrin looked warily about and skipped quickly down the wooden steps into the garden. The garden was quiet, with the subdued buzz of bees and flies muted in the sunny morning. Tiptoeing, he passed through a high hedge to reach the rear wall of the garden. Here the bricks of the wall were sheathed in white stucco and covered with ivy and roses. Dwyrin backed up, eyeing the top of the wall and measuring it for his leap. Taking another step, he collided with a solid figure, whose hand settled easily on his right shoulder. Dwyrin froze and the hand spun him easily around. A thin old man, barely his own height, stood there, clad in a simple white kilt and tunic. His head was bare and a rich bronze color. Thick white eyebrows hooded his eyes. The old man smiled, his entire face crinkling up like parchment.

"Apprentice Dwyrin, I am surely pleased to make your acquaintance at last. I am Nephet. Surely you must be hungry now after your interesting experience. Please, come with me."

The little old man's hand was soft on his shoulder, but Dwyrin found himself firmly guided back across the garden and then into the ground floor of the masters' quarters. As they entered the hallway that bisected the main floor, they just missed Ahmet, who came down the stairs into the garden rather quickly and then stood, looking around in concern.

Maxian trudged up the long pathway from the narrow beach that lay below his brother's Summer House. Though it had once been a rocky trail, filled with washouts and steep inclines, it was now broad and paved with fired tile. A low edging of worked stones capped the seaward side of the trail, and sconces were cut from the rocks to hold torches and lanterns at night. With each step on the cleverly worked pavement, the young Prince grew more and more despondent. Where once the trip down the hillside to the beach had been an adventure, filled with slippery rocks, startled deer, and nettles, now it was an easy afternoon excursion. All of the mysterious edges of the property were gone, carefully smoothed away by an invisible host of gardeners, laborers, and stoneworkers. Even the beach was calmed, the sands carefully raked into a pattern pleasing to the eye. Even the driftwood had been placed by the gardeners before the sun had risen.

At the top of the last switchback in the trail, the Prince turned and stared down into the little cove. The blue-green waters glittered up at him, merry in the high afternoon sun. From the top of the cliff the wire net that closed the mouth of the cove was all but invisible, only an occasional flash off of the green-glass floats that held it up betraying its presence. Maxian fingered the tattered edge of his tunic, feeling the grit of the city under his roughened fingers. His hair was greasy and laid back flat along his scalp. His chin was unshaven, sporting a lumpy three weeks' growth of beard.

He laughed a little, suddenly realizing why the fishermen who guarded the cove had stared at him so, to see the Emperor's younger brother drag in on a leaking ketch to the all but invisible sea-entrance to the summer house. Though they had recognized him, they must have thought him at the tail end of a horrendous drinking binge. His thought stilled, realizing that this was the first time he had laughed since he had left the charnel house in Ostia.

"Milord?" inquired a soft, even delicate voice from behind him. Maxian slowly turned around, his hand unconsciously brushing back the soot and grease in his hair. A slight woman with her once-blond hair bound up in a bun stood at his side, one hand outstretched in concern. Dressed in a very plain dress with muted red and green embroidery, her wrinkled face was graven deeper than usual with great concern. "Are you well?"

"
Domina
." He bowed and she smiled at the gesture. "No, not well. How is the house of my brother?"

"In a great state on your account, young master. Though I hazard from your current appearance that you had not heard, your brothers have been raising a great commotion in search of you. I would wager that every praetor and civil governor between Genova and Syracuse is shaking in his boots at the invective issuing from the offices of the Emperor."

"Oh," he said, puzzled at the bemused look on the housekeeper's face. "Have they been looking for me for very long?"

"Only for the past ten days. Messengers come and go at all hours, bearing the dire news that you... have not been found."

Maxian scratched his head, digging tiny bits of charcoal out of his scalp. "I suppose that they have not happened to mention why they wanted to talk to me?"

The housekeeper shook her head slowly, her bright-blue eyes sparkling with hidden delight. "Not a word."

Now the Prince scratched his beard, finding it equally greasy and thick with minute flecks of soot. "Well, I guess I had better go relieve their concerns. Where, ah, where would they be this afternoon?"

The
domina
turned, looking back over her shoulder. "Where they always are, when they are here together," she said, walking away into the shaded arbor path that wound along the top of the cliff.

Maxian shrugged. He would have to forgo cleaning up, then. Uneasy, he slouched away across the neat lawns that bordered the sprawling marble and granite house that he had grown up in. It was nearly unrecognizable to him now.

The hallways of the servants' quarters of the Summer House were quiet and empty. As Maxian passed the entrance to the vast kitchen, he caught a glimpse of a dozen brawny men quietly eating a lunch of fresh loaves, olives, and cheese. They did not look up as he passed, his boots in his hands. At the back of the great staircase, he opened the door to the tight little stairway that predated the vast mechanism of Aurelian's "Stairway." The dark space under the staircase, crammed with its gears, wheels, and slave benches, was empty. There were no foreign visitors or dignitaries to impress with its smooth gliding ascent to the second floor of the house. At the top of the stairs, he paused to put his boots back on.

When he had been little, the second floor of the Summer House had been the domain of their mother, and it had been filled with women, children, looms, buckets, and a constant bustle of comings and goings. Though dogs and pets of all kinds had been banned, it was filled with a great energy. Now the old hallways and rooms had been torn out and replaced with a stately set of rooms with vaulting ceilings, dark-colored wooden floors, and wall after wall of cunningly painted scenes. Maxian walked through the rooms, filled with furniture, clothing, desks, beds, and the dead eyes of painted figures, with a mounting sense of unease. In his current state of mind, the whispering of the living seemed to bleed from the walls and floor. A sound came from ahead, like the echo of a barking dog, and he spun around.

There was nothing. He shook his head to clear away the phantoms.

Now at the door to the one section of the old house that remained as it always had been, he stopped and cleared his mind. The Meditations of Asklepius came to him and calmed him. His fingers twisted in the air before him. Softly, with a barely audible whisper, the grime, soot, and dried sweat that had been his companions for these last few days lifted away from his garments, from his hair, from his skin. Clenching his right fist, the spinning dust cloud coalesced into a hardened black marble, which he plucked from the air and placed in the leather bag at his waist. Taking a breath, he rapped lightly on the door frame.

"Enter!" came a shout from within, and he pushed the heavy sandalwood door open.

His brothers looked up; Galen thin and wiry, cleanshaven, with his short-cut dark hair thinning at the temples, Aurelian tall and broad, with a full dark-red beard. Galen grimaced at the sight of his missing sibling and shook his head. Aurelian turned, his light-brown eyes sparkling with surprise and delight. Maxian rubbed the stubble on the side of his jaw, stepping down the short flight of steps into the map room. The room, never neat, was a tumult of parchments, ledgers, half-empty amphorae of wine, wax writing tablets, and two new things.

First was a great map table, its leaves unfolded to show the entire Empire on its incised and painted panels. All of the chairs, divans, and benches had been pushed to the walls amid stacks of papyrus scrolls and dirty plates to make room. There, on pale wood, lay the breadth of the Known World—from icy Scania in the north, to barren Mauritania in the south, from the Island of Dogs in the west, to the uttermost reaches of silk-rich Serica in the east. Tiny cubes and pyramids of red clay littered its surface, clustered around the great port cities of Ostia, Constantinople, and Alexandria.

The Emperor, dressed in a red linen shirt and gray cotton pantaloons in the style of the Hibernian barbarians, stood at the eastern apex of the table, arms akimbo. Opposite him, behind Hispania and the tiny blue-tinted waves of Oceanus Atlanticus, Aurelian was perched on a high stool, one stout leg tucked under the other. One thick-wristed hand was toying with a long ivory stick with a fork at the end.

"There is some trouble afoot?" ventured Maxian, sliding into a low chair pushed against the corner of Africa. A great weariness settled over him now that he was in the safe confines of their father's study.

"I hear tell that you were looking for me. I cannot say that I remember owing either of you a sufficient sum of money..." A wry smile played across his features.

"Money, of a wonder, we have enough!" Galen snapped. "What we have lacked these last days is a wayward younger brother of certain useful skills. One that, by all appearances, has been crawling in the gutter with Bacchus for company." The Emperor stepped quickly around the edges of the table, his movement quick and filled with a nervous energy.

Maxian looked up at his brother in surprise; he had not seen him so agitated in a long time. "Gods, brothers, are we at war?"