Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth Page 2

  “If he were the usual charlatan who blathers a Stoic mishmash to a wealthy meal ticket,” Varus said, “he would have a beard as part of the costume. Which implies that whatever he is, he’s real. And I agree that Macsturnas doesn’t appear to be philosophically inclined, though we may be doing him an injustice.”

  Varus found comfort in his friend’s comfortable acceptance of present reality. Corylus didn’t worry about every danger that could occur, but he was clearly willing to deal with anything that did happen.

  Corylus’ father, Publius Cispius, had started as a common legionary and been promoted to the rank of knight when he retired after twenty-five years in service. Corylus also intended an army career, but his would begin as an officer: a tribune, an aide to the legate who commanded a legion as the Emperor’s representative.

  That was the formal situation. Informally, Corylus had been born and raised on the frontiers and he’d spent more time on the eastern bank of the Danube—with the scout section of his father’s Batavian squadron—than most line soldiers did. Corylus didn’t talk about that to Varus or to other students, but sometimes Varus listened while Pulto talked to Saxa’s trainer, Lenatus, another old soldier.

  There was a great deal Varus didn’t understand about his friend’s background, but he understood this: Corylus might be frightened, but fear would never stop him from doing his duty to the best of his ability.

  He was, after all, a citizen of Carce. As am I.

  “Eh?” said Corylus.

  I must have spoken aloud. “I was thinking that we have duties as citizens of Carce,” Varus said. “As well as our rights.”

  Corylus said, “That had occurred to me, yes.”

  Part of Varus’ mind considered that a mild response for a soldier to make to a civilian who was talking about duty. His consciousness was slipping into another state, however, in which the Waking World flattened to shadow pictures like those on the walls of Plato’s Cave of Ideal Forms.

  Corylus had joked about them being a royal procession visiting the seeress whose temple was nearby at Cumae. Varus in his mind was climbing a rocky path to an old woman who stood on an outcrop above all things and all times.

  She was the Sibyl, and during the past year she had spoken to him in these waking dreams.

  * * *

  HEDIA SAW VARUS GLANCE in her direction from beyond the squad of attendants. She smiled back, but almost in the instant she saw him stiffen as his eyes glazed.

  Varus faced front again. He was walking on, his legs moving with the regularity of drops falling from a water clock. Hedia had seen the boy in this state before. Seeing him now drove a blade of ice through her heart.

  Smiling with gracious interest, Hedia looked past Saxa and said to the aedile, “If I may ask, Lord Macsturnas—why did you decide to give a beast show in thanks for your election instead of a chariot race?”

  In a matter touching her family, Hedia would do whatever was proper. Not that poor, dear Saxa was capable of thinking in such terms, but it was possible that one day he would need a favor from Macsturnas. If on that day the aedile remembered how charming Saxa’s lovely wife had been—well, courtesy cost Hedia nothing.

  Aedile was the lowest elective office, open to men of twenty-five; Macsturnas was no older than that and seemed younger. An aedile’s main duties—even before the Emperor began to guide the deliberations of the Senate and therefore the lives of every man, woman, and child in the Republic—were to give entertainments to the populace.

  “I thought it was more in keeping with my family’s literary interests to offer the populace a mime when I was chosen consul,” Saxa volunteered. “My son is quite a poet, did you know?”

  Hedia had no more feeling for poetry than she did about the defense of the eastern frontier: both subjects bored her to tears. Varus had assured her, however, that his one public reading had proved to him that he had no poetic talent and that he should never attempt verse again.

  Saxa, in trying to become part of the life of the son whom he had ignored for so long, was resurrecting an embarrassment. Well, that was easy to cover.

  “Though of course we’re great fans of chariot racing also,” Hedia lied with bubbly innocence. “After all, some of the most illustrious men in the Republic are. We follow the White Stables in particular.”

  Hundreds of thousands of spectators filled the Great Circus for even an average card of chariot racing; it was by far the most popular sport in the Republic. Hedia didn’t care about that, though charioteers tended to be more lithely muscular than most gladiators and thus of some interest.

  The Emperor was a racing enthusiast. Hedia cared about that. And because the Emperor backed the Whites, Hedia would swear on any altar in Carce that her husband did also. She didn’t have any particular belief in gods, but she felt that any deity worth worshiping would understand that the survival of the Alphenus family was more important than any number of false oaths.

  “Well, you see…,” said Macsturnas, his tone becoming more oily and inflated with every syllable. “My family were nobles of Velitrum. Our house was ancient before the very founding of Carce.”

  He gestured with both hands, as though flicking rose water off his fingers as he washed between courses of a meal. A more prideful man than Saxa might have taken offense at the implied slight; and though Saxa’s wife, also a noble of Carce, didn’t let her smile slip, this bumptious fellow might one day regret his arrogance.

  “To Etruscans of our rank,” Macsturnas continued, “gladiatorial games are not a sport but a religious rite. I therefore expected to hire pairs of gladiators for my gift to the people. But then the agent I sent to Puteoli learned that Master Veturius was back from Africa with a number of unique animals. I ordered him to purchase the whole shipment and came down to look at them myself. My gift will be unprecedented!”

  Varus’ sister, Alphena, was out of sight. She and Hedia had been getting along well since recent events had forced them to see each other’s merits, but the relationship of a sixteen-year-old with her stepmother was bound to have tense moments.

  Today Alphena had planned to walk with her brother and Corylus at the head of the procession; Hedia had forbidden her to do so. Instead of joining Hedia and the two senators, Alphena had flounced back to the very end.

  Hedia hadn’t objected; the girl wouldn’t get into any trouble surrounded by her personal suite of servants and the roughs of the senators’ households who formed the rear guard. Alphena probably wouldn’t have gotten into trouble in the company of Varus and Corylus, either, but Hedia knew too much about taking risks to allow her daughter to take a completely unnecessary one.

  Varus, of course, wasn’t a problem; nor was even Corylus, not really. Varus’ friend was a very sensible young man. The attitude of a sixteen-year-old girl toward a youth as brave and handsome as Corylus might become a problem, though, if they spent too much time together.

  For all his virtues, Corylus was a knight and therefore an unsuitable husband for a senator’s daughter. After Alphena was safely married, of course, her behavior was a concern for her husband, not her mother.

  Hedia smiled faintly. She had been sixteen herself not so very long ago. Alphena didn’t have the personality required to make a success of her stepmother’s lifestyle.

  Macsturnas laid his hand on Saxa’s shoulder and leaned across the former consul to bring himself nearer to Hedia. In a conspiratorial tone—though a rather loud one in order to be heard over the cheerful banter of spectators—he said, “The man accompanying me, Master Paris—he’s a priest of great learning. He honors you by asking to join us, Lord Saxa. Paris is the recipient of the wisdom passed down from the great founders of the Etruscan race.”

  If Etruscan wisdom is so remarkable, Hedia thought, smiling softly toward the pudgy little man, then why is Velitrum a dusty village in the hills and Carce the ruler of all the known world?

  “Is this soothsayer helping you plan your gift, Quintus Macsturnas?” Saxa asked, glancing for th
e first time at the Etruscan who walked behind them. “Choosing the day for you to give it, that is?”

  Paris glared at Saxa, and at Hedia, who turned with her husband. She hadn’t paid any attention to the scraggly old man until now. He was barefoot, wearing a simple tunic and a countryman’s broad-brimmed hat. His appearance made him unusual in a nobleman’s entourage—but not interesting, at least not to Hedia.

  And what an odd name. Surely he can’t be a freedman whose former owner gave his slaves names out of Homer?

  “Oh, no, nothing like that,” Macsturnas said, lowering his voice to where Hedia was as much reading his lips as hearing the words. “He, ah … I knew of Paris, of course, but I haven’t had actual dealings with him. As some of my fellow Etruscans have. He asked to come along today to see the scaly monkeys. I, ah … I really don’t know why.”

  There was a look of nervousness on Macsturnas’ pudgy features, as though he actually cared about what the old man thought. Even if Paris was freeborn, the opinion of a poor commoner was no proper concern for a noble of Carce.

  “Well,” said Saxa expansively. “I’m more than happy to have your little priest get the benefit of my son’s wisdom. Varus is an exceptional scholar, you know. Marcus Atilius Priscus assured me of that when we were last chatting. Do you know Priscus? He’s the most learned of our senatorial colleagues, in my opinion. He’s head of the Commission for Sacred Rites and a great friend of my son’s teacher, Pandareus of Athens.”

  Hedia almost giggled. That sort of patronizing boast would be alien to her husband under most circumstances. Apparently Saxa hadn’t been quite as unmoved by Macsturnas’ tone as she had believed.

  On the other hand, everything Saxa had said was quite true. Varus was quite a remarkable youth … as in different fashions was his friend Corylus. Corylus was a respectable scholar himself—that was how a noble like Varus had become friends with a youth of only knightly rank—but he was also an accomplished athlete and a very handsome young man.

  Unfortunately—Hedia smiled ruefully at herself—Master Corylus also had better sense than to chance an affair with a senator’s lovely young wife. Well, that was probably for the best.

  She was glad that Saxa was taking an interest in Varus. Though Saxa was anything but a social manipulator, his wealth allowed him to give dinners at which his son would be introduced to the sort of people whose help he would need while steering his future course through society. Hedia had recently begun to craft guest lists that suited that purpose, and her husband acquiesced to them happily.

  She wished she could find some more worldly fellow to give Varus a grounding in the more earthy aspects of life, though. All the men Hedia knew were rather too worldly, unfortunately. The last thing she wanted was to turn her son into a hard-drinking wastrel like those with whom she had whiled away her time during her previous marriage, to Gaius Calpurnius Latus.

  She still met them, though more discreetly since she married Saxa. Saxa was a very sweet man, but Hedia had needs that her husband couldn’t satisfy. Saxa had known he wasn’t marrying a Vestal. She suspected that he was secretly proud of her and her reputation, but it wasn’t a subject they discussed.

  The procession was about to reach the entrance to Veturius’ animal compound. The walls were masonry—coarse volcanic tuff from the beds layering all the land overlooked by Mount Vesuvius—and over ten feet high.

  Hedia had never visited a beast yard before, but she often toured gladiatorial schools when she was summering here on the Bay. The schools were fenced off—the gladiators were slaves, after all, and under a stiff training regimen—but she hadn’t seen any barriers so impressive as this.

  “I wonder why Veturius has such walls?” Hedia said aloud. “Do you know, Lord Husband?”

  “Why, no,” said Saxa, frowning. “You’ll build a wooden enclosure in back of the Temple of Venus for your gift to the people, won’t you, Quintus Macsturnas? Or have you engaged the Great Circus? You’d need several thousand animals to justify that, I would think.”

  “My gift won’t be that extensive, no,” Macsturnas said with a flash of good humor. “Not for the aedileship, at least. If I gain the honor of the consulate like you, Gaius Saxa, perhaps I can manage something on a greater scale.”

  Hedia pursed her lips in silent approval. Macsturnas had asked to accompany Saxa to curry favor with his senior colleague, after all. He must have belatedly realized that boasting about his lineage wasn’t the way to accomplish that.

  “Well, when we’re inside, we can ask my son,” Saxa said. “I’m sure Varus will know why it’s built this way.”

  “Better that we ask Veturius himself, my dear heart,” said Hedia, patting her husband’s hand to take away any suggestion of sting in her rebuke. “See, there he is in the gateway to receive you.”

  The servants leading the procession had fallen away to either side. Varus and Corylus waited with two older men. The elder Cispius would be the one wearing the toga whose border was dyed with the two narrow stripes of a knight.

  The other man must be Veturius. The beastmaster’s toga was plain, and he looked as though he’d been used very hard.

  Hedia consciously avoided a frown: been used and used himself. The broken veins in Veturius’ nose were surely the result of wine.

  “Welcome, noble Senators Gaius Alphenus Saxa and Quintus Macsturnas!” Veturius said. His voice was strong, though it reminded Hedia of rusted metal. “You are most welcome to my establishment, Your Lordships!”

  Corylus had a hand on Varus’ shoulder, a silent direction to his mentally distant friend. Hedia relaxed slightly. Corylus would prevent her son from injuring himself in his present state. If Varus suddenly shouted an incomprehensible prophecy, as he had done before, that would be easy enough to brush from the consciousness of social inferiors, Macsturnas included.

  But it didn’t remove Hedia’s deeper fear. When Varus had fallen into waking dreams in the past, it had always been a warning of some event that was about to occur.

  Some terrible event.

  * * *

  CORYLUS TOUCHED THE FRAME of the gateway, feeling the dryad still present though the wood came from the ancient keel of a broken-up trading vessel. She stirred faintly. Though the sycomore sprite was aged, she managed to smile at him; her eyelids were shadowed with kohl.

  Corylus was worried by Varus’ state and still more worried at what his waking dream might mean this time, but there was nothing to be done about those things at the moment. His present duty was to act as intermediary between his father and the pair of senators facing him.

  “My lord Gaius Saxa…,” Corylus said in a clear voice. He and the two veterans were all braced to attention. “Allow me to present my father, Publius Cispius, and his friend Marcus Veturius.”

  Instead of bowing—they were freeborn citizens of Carce—Cispius and his friend each saluted by striking his clenched right fist on his chest. If they had been equipped for battle, that gesture would have banged their spear shafts against their shield bosses.

  Saxa had stepped down from the consulship after the usual month in office, but he remained Governor of Lusitania and nominal commander of the troops there. Saxa had the right to the salute, though it probably startled him to receive it.

  Lusitania was on the rocky Atlantic coast of Europe, closer to Britain than to Carce or to civilization generally. Saxa would never visit it: a younger, fitter, hungrier Knight of Carce was acting as the governor’s representative. Saxa had an antiquarian’s knowledge of Carce’s history, though, and enough patriotism to feel the honor of a salute from two of the men who had held the Republic’s borders against barbarism.

  To Corylus’ surprise, Saxa returned the salute. The new aedile, Macsturnas, blinked at the scene.

  Of course. Saxa probably couldn’t draft a dinner invitation in an organized fashion, but he would have read lengthy monographs on the forms of military protocol. Varus’ father wasn’t a stupid man, though he was a profoundly silly one.


  “Marcus and I had the honor of serving under your cousin Sempronius Mela,” Cispius said. “When he was Legate of the Alaudae, that is. It’s a real pleasure to meet a kinsman of Mela.”

  Corylus didn’t let his mouth drop open in amazement the way Macsturnas was doing, but he was certainly surprised. Instead of creating an awkward situation, Cispius—the third son of a farmer in Liguria—was handling the wealthy senator perfectly.

  Corylus suddenly realized that his father wouldn’t have risen through the ranks as he had without meeting many noble officers. Some would have been as foolish as Saxa and a great deal less pleasant personally.

  “Master Cispius, I’m pleased to meet you,” Saxa said. “And to meet your friend, of course. You’ve a fine son in Master Corylus, a very fine son.”

  “We are here to view the scaled monkeys from Africa, are we not?” said the old farmer who had come with Macsturnas. His tone was querulous.

  “And who would that be, lad?” Cispius asked, quietly but in a voice that sounded like the growl of a big cat. Corylus might not have understood the words if he didn’t know his father well enough to expect them.

  Cispius didn’t have the vinewood swagger stick he had carried as a centurion, but as a child Corylus had met his father’s calloused hand enough times to remember its weight. Cispius had grown plump and softer in retirement, but he could still deal with the likes of Macsturnas’ hanger-on without help or a weapon.

  “I’m sure we all wish to see the strange animals, Master Paris,” Macsturnas said nervously, glancing between Saxa—who wasn’t the sort to take offense—and the farmer. “As soon as Lord Saxa is ready to, of course.”

  “The aedile’s pet philosopher, I guess,” Corylus said quietly to his father. “And the aedile’s not a particular friend of Saxa’s, but he’s footing the bill for this load of animals.”

  “Right,” said Veturius, relaxing. “Not the business of a poor working soldier like me.”