Air and Darkness (19 page)

“He
has
held up, sirrah!” she said, trying to copy the tone her mother used when she was putting underlings in their place. “He had no choice but to do so, since some idiot has stopped my servants' vehicle where it blocks the road. Are you in charge here? I am Lady Alphena, here on a mission for my father, Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa!”

The centurion didn't flinch—the Praetorian Guard reported to its prefect and beyond him to the Emperor alone—but Alphena's tone and words changed his attitude. He straightened
almost
to attention and lowered his right hand with the knobbly vine-wood swagger stick to his side instead of slapping it threateningly into his other palm.

“I'm sorry, Your Ladyship,” the centurion said, “but I'm afraid that this area has been sealed by the order of my prefect. There's been some trouble here.”

“There certainly has,” said Corylus. “The senator has directed us to find out what has happened to his wife and son. They seem to have disappeared during a religious ceremony two days ago, and Senator Saxa is afraid that they were abducted by foreigners who are plotting against the Emperor.”

Corylus' voice had startled Alphena, but she didn't look around. He had dismounted discreetly and was remaining politely behind her. He wasn't the sort of man who could approach tense soldiers in a non-threatening fashion.

The centurion grimaced. The Praetorians had originally been the headquarters' guards of a commander. A company of Germans now acted as the Emperor's bodyguard, but five thousand Praetorians provided backup to the City Watch in case of unrest in Carce. They could be sent immediately to deal with trouble in Italy proper, since there were normally no troops here in the center of the empire.

Furthermore, the Praetorians provided many of the officers for the regular legions. This man was neither stupid nor unsophisticated.

“My father the senator is at our house on the Bay,” Alphena lied: Saxa was in Carce, not in Puteoli. The centurion didn't have any reason to doubt her, though. “He immediately went to the Emperor with his concerns. By courier they ordered me and Master Corylus to Polymartium while they determined a broader response.”

“You said that your prefect ordered you to close off the area,” Corylus said sternly. He had picked up her cue. “Was this before he got the Emperor's orders, or has he simply decided to ignore the Emperor's wishes?”

This time the centurion
did
flinch. For the most part the Emperor spent his time in his palace on the island of Capri, leaving the business of Carce to the Praetorian Prefect. A senator who happened to be in Puteoli across the Bay from Capri
might
have gone to the Emperor in a crisis, though, and the Emperor was a notably suspicious man. The prefect wouldn't want to appear to have overridden the Emperor's decision, and a centurion
certainly
didn't want to be the cause of embarrassment or worse for his superior.

“Hercules!” the centurion muttered. Grimacing, he said, “All right, Your Ladyship.”

He stepped back from the coach and turned toward the troops around the lead wagon. He gestured with his swagger stick and bellowed, “Silvaticus! This lot can go through!”

“We have a third vehicle following,” Corylus said. “We weren't sure what we were going to run into here. We didn't know you were already on the scene.”

“The third wagon too, Silvaticus!” the centurion added. To Corylus he said, “I'd say don't make things worse, but I don't bloody well see how they could be worse.
Every
bloody thing's gone to hell. But it's not dangerous; it's not that kinda trouble.”

Corylus handed Alphena into the coach and followed. The driver clucked the mules forward even before Corylus had settled beside her.

“You were brilliant,” he said. “The way you handled that. I didn't expect Praetorians, though I guess I should have.”

“I was frightened,” she said, squeezing her hands together. They had started to tremble as soon as she and Corylus were past the guards. “I could have gotten my father executed. I could have gotten all of us executed!”

“You didn't,” said Corylus. “You and I don't know what's going on, but if the Praetorians are here, then the stories the escort came back with are probably true. And if that's so—”

Corylus smiled. He seemed to be enjoying this. That was ridiculous, but Alphena felt a rush of relief anyway.

“—then being executed might be a relief compared to what else may be waiting for us and everybody else besides.”

Alphena started to speak but burst out laughing. “Publius,” she said, “that's a stupid way to make me feel better,
stupid
. But it works!”

They pulled up beside the lead vehicle. Drago and Rago had gotten down with the nervous-looking guide between them. The Illyrians were former pirates, and a stranger could be excused for wondering if “former” was necessarily the correct adjective.

“This guy, Herminus, says from here on out it's on foot,” one or the other cousin said. He turned, so Alphena could see the missing ear: Drago. “Is that all right with you, lady?”

What are you going to do if it
isn't
all right with me? Build a carriage road over the gully ahead?
Alphena thought.

Aloud she said, “That will be fine. We'll cross the rope bridge.”

“Illyrian tribes have queens sometimes,” Corylus said softly. “I think that pair have promoted you. You're not just the mistress.”

The guards from the leading wagon crossed the swinging bridge with no trouble: the gulley was only twenty feet across, and the banks—though steep—were nowhere more than ten feet above the small stream at the bottom. Herminus, the councillor who had been their guide, waited at the near end.

He bowed to Alphena and said, “Your Ladyship? May I wait for you here? I had nothing to do with the ceremony, I was in my office going over the tax assessments. I—I really would rather stay on this side of the creek.”

“Yes, all right, my good man,” Alphena said. She hoped she sounded kindly, but the fellow's obvious fear worried her. “We'll still want you when we go back, so don't go far.”

Corylus would have led her over the bridge, but she waved him back. There was nothing difficult about it, even when Corylus' weight behind her changed the way the support ropes moved … but at mid-point … when she was on the other side of the flowing water—Alphena felt, well, felt
odd
.

“I want to do a handspring,” she said, turning her head back toward Corylus. “I've never managed to do a handspring right in the gymnasium, but I feel that I
could
now.”

“Umm,” said Corylus as he followed her off the bridge. For a moment she thought that was all he was going to say, but he added, “Herminus must have come here after whatever happened. I guess everybody in the district did, just as they'd go see where some scullery maid slipped when she was feeding the hogs and they ate her.”

“It doesn't feel
bad,
” Alphena said. She wished she could describe what she
did
feel better, but words were her brother's affair. “But it's funny. I can see Herminus not wanting to come back here.”

The area was rocky and wooded. There were paths but no open spaces that Alphena could see. “Were there ever farms here?” she asked.

“You couldn't plow it because of the slopes and all the rocks,” Pulto said, looking around. “There's goats, though—”

He pointed the toe of one hobnailed sandal at a pile of round droppings near where they stood.

“—and they keep the undergrowth down.”

“There should be people here,” Corylus said, eying the three paths that branched in equally unpromising fashions before them. “Maybe we should have brought the guide after all.”

Someone giggled beyond the screen of bushes. Corylus said, “No, Pulto!” Raising his cornelwood staff, he stepped between his servant and the sound. “Remember the Praetorians!”

Alphena frowned, then realized that Pulto had started to draw a sword from under his outer tunic. That wouldn't ordinarily have been a problem in the countryside—within the sacred boundaries of Carce it was a crucifixion offense—but in the midst of soldiers sent to put down unrest it could easily be fatal.

A middle-aged man and a heavy woman who might have been younger walked down the right-hand path. They were arm in arm. “Who are you?” the man asked.

“Why are we going this way, dearie?” the woman said to her companion. “We were going to find some more grapes, and they're the other way.”

“I'm the Lady Alphena,” Alphena said, stepping forward. Corylus had started to speak, but she raised her voice to be heard over him. “I'm looking for my mother, the Lady Hedia. She came here to lead the welcoming ceremony for Mother Matuta.”

“
I
led the ceremony,” said the man. He bowed with grave formality but would have fallen if the woman hadn't tugged him upright. “Lady Hedia merely led the dance.
I
am Doclianus, the priest of Matuta. Or I was.” Doclianus turned around and started in the opposite direction.

“Where is my mother?” Alphena said as she followed the couple. She had let her voice rise.

“Her Ladyship is a fine woman,” Doclianus said without looking back at Alphena. “I'm sure she worships Bacchus now. We all worship Bacchus; I do and Sophia does and everybody will.”

The woman giggled and hugged herself closer to the priest.

“Sophia,” Doclianus said. “That means ‘wisdom,' did you know? But Sophia is as stupid as one of her husband's cows, aren't you, Sophia?”

“If you say so, dearie,” the woman said cheerfully.

“Where is Lady Hedia now, Master Doclianus?” Corylus said in a calm but very firm tone.

“Don't know,” said the priest. “Don't care. Bacchus is my god.”

The vegetation here—ordinary trees and bushes as it seemed to Alphena—was overgrown with vines from which dangled clusters of grapes the size of a baby's fist. The trees had set fruit also. The several spiky trees in sight of the trail bore huge purple plums. A branch of one had broken under the weight of the fruit.

“The wood's brittle,” Corylus said. He touched—caressed, it seemed to Alphena—the trunk of the plum with his left hand. “Somebody should've thinned them before this happened.”

Doclianus and Sophia had each plucked a grape. They were feeding each other.

The path opened on to a rectangular clearing. The ground was flatter than anything Corylus and Alphena had seen since they got out of the coach, though there were outcrops in three directions and a ten-foot drop in the fourth.

Eighty or a hundred Praetorians stood at the top of the open space. They weren't in formation, but they were standing close together as though they were uncomfortable. The centurion in command had thrust his swagger stick under his equipment belt so that he could hold his drawn sword. He looked at Alphena and her companions, but he didn't shout a challenge or send a squad toward them.

There were dozens of civilians present also, in couples and small groups. They mostly sprawled on the ground. Half of them seemed to be in drunken sleep, but others were eating fruit or in some stage of lovemaking.

Alphena noticed a man wearing an embroidered tunic—dress clothing this far from Carce—in a close embrace with a goat. A male goat. She looked away quickly, feeling her cheeks redden nonetheless

“That must be the altar,” Pandareus said, gesturing to the low fieldstone pillar a little to the low side of the middle of the clearing.

“That stone there!” said Corylus. He strode toward a knee-high boulder near where they stood. “I've seen that. The smith I told you about in my vision was using it for his anvil when he forged the locket!”

The stone looked perfectly ordinary to Alphena; she could see a dozen others from where she stood that were more or less identical. She touched her chest over the amulet that she wore on a strap between her inner and outer tunics. It was uncomfortably heavy, but she couldn't think of a better way to keep it with her.

Alphena and Pandareus joined Corylus as he touched the stone with his fingertips. Pulto followed, watching what was happening and particularly what might be happening behind them.

Corylus must have felt his companions' doubt, because he grinned at them and said, “I know it was here, but there's nothing in the rock—”

He patted it.

“—to show anything more than weather. It must've been a long time ago, what I was seeing.”

“Hey!” said Pulto. “There against the outcrop. That's Manetho, isn't it? Your steward, Your Ladyship?”

“Yes,” said Alphena, striding across the clearing. Corylus was beside her, while Pulto and Pandareus followed as quickly as they could

Fury was at the top of Alphena's mind, but the width of the open space gave her time to realize that she was angry, because shouting threats at Manetho would be
something
and she desperately wanted to do something. She had been feeling helpless—helpless and useless—ever since she heard the first report of her mother's disappearance.

But Manetho wasn't responsible for the problem. Granted that the way the understeward sat slack jawed as his owner's daughter approached was behavior that justified being sent to the mines. Manetho himself would agree about that in normal times.

These weren't normal times, and punishing Manetho wouldn't help bring Hedia and Varus back. Six months ago, that wouldn't have kept Alphena from screaming at the understeward; she might even have used Pulto's sword on Manetho. The law didn't prevent an owner from killing a slave, though many intellectuals would tut-tut about the girl's behavior and it would pain her kindhearted father.