Out of the Waters-ARC Read online

  "I wonder how they'd look in armor?" Corylus whispered to his companion.

  Pulto snorted. "I'd sooner train a cohort of fencing dummies to hold the frontier," he said. Unlike Corylus, he spoke in a normal voice. "At least they wouldn't talk back to me. And they'd stop spears just as well as this lot."

  Besides the normal entourage and the similar band which attended Lady Hedia, Saxa had a consul's allotment of twelve lictors. They had been hired from the Brotherhood here in Carce, though there was no absolute requirement to do so. An official who wished to save money could outfit his household servants as lictors instead.

  From weapons drill, Corylus knew that it wouldn't be as easy as a layman might think to handle the lictor's equipment. Each man carried an axe wrapped in a bundle of rods, symbols of the consul's right to flog and to execute.

  The additional cost of professionals meant nothing to Saxa. The mental cost to him if a servant turned lictor dropped an axe on someone's foot or spilled his rods at a gathering of dignitaries was beyond calculation.

  There was room for the mob of attendants backstage: the Emperor sat in the Tribunal when he attended performances. Besides the retinue of a civilian magistrate, he was always accompanied by fifty or a hundred German bodyguards.

  Corylus smiled grimly. This complex included, along with the Temple of Venus at the front and the portico and gardens behind the theater proper, a fine Senate Hall. It had not been used since the afternoon Julius Caesar was assassinated in it.

  Caesar had dismissed his Spanish guards, saying that a magistrate of Carce did not need foreigners to protect him from his own people. None of his successors would be so naive.

  The chief lictor watched Corylus approach, but here in the city the lictors generally took their cue from the consul's household whose members knew their master's friends. Manetho, a deputy steward, and Gigax, a doorman, stood to either side of the steps up to the Tribunal.

  "Hullo, Master Corylus!" Gigax boomed. He would have to lose his thick Illyrian accent before he was promoted to daytime duties on the street door, but he was a good natured fellow who sometimes fenced with Corylus in Saxa's private gym.

  "I'm sure the family will be glad to see you, Master Corylus," Manetho said. He was Egyptian by birth, but his Latin was flawless and his Greek would have served an Athenian professor. "But if you please, room is a little tight in the box...?"

  "I'll stay down here, never fear," Pulto said. He grinned. "If you think you'll be safe, master?"

  From being raped by Hedia, he means, Corylus thought. She wouldn't do that! She's a lady!

  He blushed, and an instant later blessed Fortune that Pulto hadn't completed his thought aloud. That was the sort of joke that soldiers told one another. It would not be a good idea in the middle of the household of the husband, who was also Consul of Carce.

  "One moment!" said another voice sharply. Candidus, also a deputy steward, was crossing from the other wing of the stage at a mincing trot. "Manetho, you're exceeding your authority. Exceeding your authority again, I should say!"

  Manetho turned toward his fellow servant, hunching his shoulders like a Molossian hound about to tackle a boar. Corylus made his face blank, but mentally he grimaced. If only he'd hopped up the stairs a few heartbeats quicker! An outsider had nothing to gain by becoming the token by which a rich man's powerful servants battled over status.

  "Manetho," called Varus from the top of the stairs, "my friend Corylus--oh, there you are, Publius! I saw you coming this way. I was just telling Manetho to send you up as soon as you got here."

  "I was just doing that, your lordship," said Manetho unctuously. "Despite some Bithynian buffoon trying to prevent you from meeting your friend."

  Corylus had never known where Candidus came from originally: the fellow had no accent. Apparently he'd been born in Bithynia....

  Corylus took the steps in three long strides. He wasn't bothered by the number of people in the crowd beneath the Tribunal, but the fact they were divided into factions was disturbing. Saxa and his wife had rival establishments, and the lictors were a further element. Add that the individual servants got along badly with one another--as witness the scene of a moment before--and the emotional temperature was very high.

  At least in a battle, there's only two sides, Corylus thought. He smiled.

  Varus clasped hands with Corylus at the top of the steps. They'd become surprisingly close in the months since they'd met as students of Pandareus of Athens.

  Corylus quirked a smile as he edited his own thoughts: it surprised him to be close to a senator's son, certainly; and he suspected it surprised Varus to be close to anybody at all. They were both outsiders in Pandareus' class, but Varus must have been an outsider all his life.

  Saxa was still looking out over the hollow of the theater. He seemed dazed, but Corylus thought his vague smile was sincere.

  Pandareus stood close to the senator but not with him. The Greek had moved back from the railing, but he hadn't chosen to join Varus until he was summoned.

  A foreigner who moved in the highest levels of Carce's society had to be extremely careful not to give offense. Varus wasn't the sort to snarlingly order an uppity Greek to take himself off, but Pandareus was showing his present hosts the same punctilious courtesy that might have saved him from a beating if they had been, say, Calpurnius Piso--another of his present students.

  Candidus reentered the Tribunal and murmured to Saxa, who suddenly came alert. He began giving the steward instructions, tapping his finger up and down in animation. Candidus bowed and disappeared down the stairs again.

  Alphena and her stepmother talked intently at the back corner of the box while their maids hovered attentively. Alphena was an enthusiastic girl, but she had generally seemed to Corylus to be angry about something. Now she looked happily transfigured.

  Hedia, on the other hand.... Corylus had seen Varus' stepmother both icily calm, her public face, and letting her warmth and quick intelligence show when she relaxed in private. This was a different woman: frozen in the way a rabbit freezes when the weasel hops toward it.

  "Did you see the three men with Sempronius Tardus?" Varus said without preamble. "Where did they go, did you notice? Because they weren't in the audience after I came back. Or Tardus either, but we know who he is."

  Came back from where? Corylus thought, but the whole line of questioning had surprised him. Not for the first time, of course. Varus' rank as the son of Gaius Alphenus Saxa gave him access to every library in Carce; he read voraciously and apparently never forgot a word of the contents.

  But Varus tended to forget that other people didn't have the same wide background as he did--and that they hadn't been listening to his thoughts to give them a context for whatever he said. Talking with him was often like having fragments of messages fall from the sky to your feet.

  "I saw the attendants," Corylus said simply. He would get the context by listening carefully to his friend, and it seemed to him that answering the questions was as easy and far more useful than chattering a series of silly questions of his own. "I thought one of them might be a Moor, but I've never seen anybody like the other two. I didn't notice where they went after the performance. I was concerned with getting through the crowd to find you."

  Varus made a moue. "It can't be helped," he said. "And anyway, questioning them might not bring us any closer to an answer."

  "I don't even know what the question is," said Corylus, smiling but nonetheless bluntly truthful. "What did you notice about Tardus' servants that caused you to ask?"

  Pandareus raised an eyebrow over Varus' shoulder. Corylus caught the gesture and beckoned him. Pandareus might know no more than his students did--which in Corylus' case at least was nothing at all--but his age and authority made everything nearby seem more stable

  "That I could see them at all," Varus said. "When I looked into the audience when the vision was at its height, I... it was as if I were on a mountain, looking over the tops of the clouds. Except for
those three men, whom I'd noticed with Tardus. But I didn't see Tardus or any of the other senators."

  He looked at their teacher. "Master Pandareus, did you see them?" he asked.

  "I noticed them with Commissioner Tardus," Pandareus said, using the senator's title as a member of the Commission for the Sacred Rites. "I wondered what tribe they might be from."

  He made a deprecating smile. "I was planning to ask my friend Priscus--"

  Marcus Atilius Priscus, also a member of the commission, and according to Pandareus, the most learned man in Carce. Priscus in turn assigned that honor to Pandareus.

  "--to introduce me to Tardus so that I could learn more. Ethnicities are something of a hobby with me."

  He turned his palms up, as if to show that they were empty. He went on, "I didn't see them during the, well, vision is as good a word as any. I might have missed them, however, because I was so engrossed in the vision itself."

  "Master?" Varus said, licking his dry lips. "Could the city we were seeing be Atlantis?"

  "I suppose it could...," Pandareus said, pursing his lips. "If Atlantis existed, that is. Do you have reason to believe that it does exist, Lord Varus?"

  "I was told it did in a dream," said Varus with a lopsided smile. "At any rate, I'm going to call it a dream for want of a better word. I was told that Typhon was destroying Atlantis."

  "Ah!" said Pandareus. "What we saw fits the descriptions of Typhon in Hesiod and Apollodorus quite well. Rather better than the city matches the Poseidonis of Plato, in fact. Though I always believed that both were mythical."

  Pandareus smiled like a cheerful parrot. "I would rather Atlantis would be real than Typhon, from what we are told," he said. "But I suppose our wishes in the matter aren't controlling."

  Corylus coughed apologetically. "Master?" he said. "Speaking of dreams--you were visited by the sage Menre in the past. Have you dreamed of him again?"

  "I'm not sure that I ever dreamed of Menre," Pandareus said, smiling faintly to take the sting out of his correction. "I believe I saw a man named Menre, yes; and he claimed to be an Alexandrian scholar who helped Demetrius of Phalerum create the Museum three hundred years ago... which certainly implies that I was dreaming."

  He turned his palms up again, then closed them. "But this is a quibble, I know," he said. "The answer that matters is that I have not received further advice from Menre, in dreams or otherwise."

  Varus hunched in on himself, looking as lost and miserable as a kitten caught in a thunderstorm. Corylus hesitated, then put his arm around his friend's shoulders. Let people think what they bloody care to!

  "Master...," Varus said. He started in a mumble with his face downcast. Remembering that he was speaking to his teacher, he caught hold of himself and straightened; Corylus stepped back.

  Varus resumed in a firm voice, "Master, I believe Carce and the world are in danger. You can put that to my dream also, if you like."

  "I share your belief in coming danger," Pandareus said in a dry tone, "I believe the vision everyone in this theater will cause the Senate to call for examination of the Sibylline Books. At least it will if anyone beyond the three of us recognized what was happening."

  "I'm pretty sure Meoetes and the stage company have figured that out," said Varus. He had recovered enough to smile wryly. "Though what actors and stagehands say won't carry much weight with the Senate."

  "And I don't see much reason to convince anyone that it should," Corylus said. "Consulting the Sibylline Books in a crisis is a custom with the weight of six hundred years of tradition behind it, but I don't believe that it's a practical answer to the thing that threatens us. Whatever that thing is."

  "Yes," said Varus. "That's what I thought too."

  Taking a deep breath, he looked from Corylus to Pandareus and went on, "Which is why I hoped that your mentor--Menre that is--would have suggested a path for us to follow. Otherwise we have nothing."

  Corylus exchanged glances with their teacher. Then he said, "In the past, Gaius, you provided the direction for us by quoting the Sibylline Books."

  Varus had never seen the books, nor would he be allowed to unless he were elected to the Commission for the Sacred Rites. He probably would be so elected; but not for perhaps forty years, when he had become a senior senator rather than merely a youth of learning. Nonetheless, responses from the Books had come from his mouth; though not from his conscious mind, he had said.

  "I was told that if Atlantis was destroyed, then all the world was doomed unless Zeus again slew Typhon," Varus said, shaking his head slowly. "And it was strongly implied that Zeus didn't exist. I don't see that this is very helpful."

  "Well, I'm pleased to have my skepticism about the Olympian gods to be confirmed by such a respectable source as the Sibylline Books," Pandareus said. His humor was so dry that even if Varus' superstitious father overheard, he wouldn't be shocked by the sacrilege. "Perhaps more will be offered to you later. As for me--"

  Candidus brushed Pandareus as he bustled into the Tribunal, looking self-satisfied and important. He went immediately to Saxa.

  Resuming with a faint smile, Pandareus said, "I will put my head together with my friend Priscus. We will peruse his remarkable library to see what we can find relating to Atlantis and to Typhon."

  "Master Pandareus?" said Saxa, joining them to Corylus' amazement. From the expressions of Varus and Pandareus--the Greek lost all expression as he turned to face the senator--it was an equal surprise to his companions.

  "I've just invited my colleague Marcus Priscus to dinner tomorrow night," Saxa said. "I'm hoping you will be able to join us. I cannot imagine a more worthy addition to a learned dinner than you, Master."

  Amazingly--given the difference in their ranks--Saxa bowed to Pandareus. The teacher bowed in return, careful to dip lower than the senator had. "I would he honored, my lord," he said.

  Corylus felt a twinge of pity for Varus' father. For all his wealth and position, Saxa really wanted to be known as a wise man. It was his misfortune to be intelligent enough to realize that he wasn't wise.

  Hedia left Alphena standing by herself and touched her husband's shoulder. When he turned, she whispered in his ear.

  "Ah, yes!" said Saxa. "Varus, would you care to invite your friend Master Corylus to join us as well? He has a reputation for learning, and I believe he's already acquainted with Marcus Priscus."

  Corylus' expression hardened. Before Varus could react, he said, "My lord, much as I would like to join you and your distinguished guests, I have a previous engagement. I regret that I must therefore refuse your generosity."

  Corylus would be eating in his own apartment, as usual. That suited him; and it did not suit him to be a rich man's toady. Even less did he wish to dance attendance on the rich man's wife....

  "What?" said Saxa in obvious puzzlement. No one in his social circle expected lesser men to turn down a free meal prepared by his excellent chef. "What? Ah, of course, of course. Well, another time."

  He started down the stairs, beaming again with the success of his entertainment. That applause, Corylus realized, was what had given him the courage to invite Atilius Priscus, whose real erudition was the standard to which Saxa vainly aspired.

  Hedia glanced after her husband, then gave Corylus a knowing smile as she returned to Alphena's side. Corylus watched her, then realized Alphena was glaring at him.

  The light in the Tribunal wasn't good. Corylus hoped that his blush wasn't as obvious as it felt when it painted his cheeks.

  ***

  Alphena turned away. She was suddenly angry with the whole world, starting with herself. She didn't know why she couldn't control these rushes of anger whenever she saw Corylus looking at her stepmother, and it made her furious.

  Hedia's maid Syra babbled, "What a hideous monster! Meoetes should be whipped for building something so terrible! Why, if there were any expecting mothers in the audience, it'll be Juno's mercy if they don't miscarry, it was so awful!"

  Alphena felt h
er face go white, then blaze red again. Her skin tingled as she turned to the servant.

  Syra was talking to Florina, the maid who had been assigned to serve Alphena for the ten days which would end tomorrow. Alphena hadn't chosen a personal staff, so Agrippinus, the major domo, rotated servants through her suite for various periods.

  Alphena suspected that serving her was regarded as a punishment posting. In the past that would have pleased her. More recently she had been reconsidering her attitude, but right now there was room for nothing but fury in her mind.

  "You little snip!" she said. "What do you mean by calling him a monster? He was a man, and a very distinguished man at that! Even if he was a foreigner."

  Florina hadn't been speaking; even so she closed her eyes and began to tremble. Servants were not to talk in the presence of their owners unless they were directed to. Syra was on informal terms with her mistress, but there was no one to protect Florina from whatever torture the daughter of the house chose to inflict.

  Syra, however, stood as though she'd been spitted on a javelin. Yes, she knew a great deal about Hedia's life away from her husband's house, but she didn't imagine that would save her if Alphena really wanted her flayed. Alphena was, after all, a fellow aristocrat; and Syra knew that she shouldn't have been chattering.

  Though Syra would wonder--everyone in the Tribunal would be wondering--why Lady Alphena was so exercised at two maids discussing the recent stage presentation. That outside view of her behavior brought Alphena down from the heights of rage that she had climbed unaware.

  Alphena relaxed, stepping back mentally from a battle she was losing. She took a deep breath, let it out, and gave a dismissive wave with her left hand.

  "Never mind, girls," she said. Florina was a year older than Alphena; Syra was five or six years older than that. "I'm wasting my time discussing such a thing."

  "I hadn't realized it was a man in costume myself," Hedia said from beside Alphena. "To tell the truth--"