Videssos Cycle, Volume 1 (86 page)

“Everyone thinks he sounds wonderful in the baths,” the youth with the strigil said, cocking his head critically. He fancied himself a connoisseur of bathhouse music. “He’s not bad, I must say, for all his funny accent.”

“No, he isn’t,” Marcus agreed, though his ear was so poor he could hardly tell good singing from bad. But only one man in Videssos owned that brogue. Tipping the youth a final copper, he got up and went in to say hello to Viridovix.

The Celt was facing the entranceway and broke off his tune in mid-note when he saw the tribune. “If it’s not himself, come to wash the ink off him!” he cried. “And a good deal of himself there is to wash, too!”

Scaurus looked down. He’d felt his middle thickening from days in a chair without exercise, but hadn’t realized the result was so plain to see. Annoyed, he ran three steps forward and dove into the warm water a good deal more neatly than Viridovix had. It was a shallow dive; the pool was no more than chest-deep.

He swam over to the Celt. The two of them were strange fish among the olive-skinned, dark-haired Videssians: Marcus dark blond, his face, arms, and lower legs permanently tanned from his time in the field but the rest of him paler; and Viridovix, fair with the pink-white Gallic fairness that refused to take the sun, his burnished copper hair sodden against his head and curling in bright ringlets on his chest and belly and at his groin.

“Shirking again,” they both said at the same time, and laughed together. Neither was in any hurry to get out. The pool was heated to that perfect temperature where the water does not register against the skin. Marcus thought of the sharp wind outside, then chose not to.

A small boy, drawn perhaps by the Celt’s strangeness, splashed him from behind. Viridovix spun round, saw his laughing foe. “Do that to me, will you now?” he roared, mock-ferocious, and splashed back. They pelted each other with water until the youngster’s father had to go and take his son, unwilling, from the pool. Viridovix waved to them both as they left. “A fine lad, and a fine time, too,” he said to Scaurus.

“From the look of you, you had your fine time last night,” the tribune retorted. He had been staring at Viridovix’s back and shoulders when the Gaul turned them during the water fight. They were covered with scratches that surely came from a woman’s nails. One or two of them, Scaurus thought, must have drawn blood; they were still red and angry.

Viridovix smoothed down his mustaches, fairly dripping smugness. He said a couple of sentences in his own Celtic tongue before dropping back into Latin, which he still preferred to Videssian. “A wildcat she was, all right,” he said, smiling at the memory. “You canna see it under my hair, but she fair bit the ear off me, too, there at the end.”

He was in so expansive a mood that Marcus asked, “Which one was it?” He was hard pressed to imagine any of the Celt’s three women showing such ferocity. They seemed too docile for it.

“Och, none o’ them,” Viridovix answered, understanding the question
and not put out by it: plainly he felt like boasting. “They’re well enough, I’ll not deny; still, the time comes when so much sweetness starts to pall. The new one, now! She’s slim, so she is, but wild and shameless as a wolf bitch in heat.”

“Good for you, then,” Scaurus said. Viridovix, he thought, would likely jolly this new wench into joining the rest. He had a gift in such matters.

“Aye, she’s all I hoped she would be,” the Gaul said happily. “Ever since she gave me her eye, bold as you please down there on the foggy beach, I’ve known she’d not be hard for me to lure under the sheets.”

“Good for—” the tribune started to repeat, and then stopped in horrified amazement as the full meaning of Viridovix’ words sank in. His head whipped round to see who might be listening before he remembered they had been speaking Latin. One small thing to be grateful for, he thought—probably the only one. “Do you mean to tell me it’s Komitta Rhangavve’s skirt you’re lifting?”

“Aren’t you the clever one, now? But it’s herself lifts it, I assure you—as greedy a cleft as any I’ve known.”

“Are you witstruck all of a sudden, man? It’s the Emperor’s mistress you’re diddling, not some tavern drab.”

“And what o’ that? A Celtic noble is entitled to better than such trollops,” Viridovix said proudly. “Forbye, if Thorisin doesn’t want me diddling his lady, then let him diddle her his own self and not stay up till dead of night kinging it. He’ll get himself no sons that way.”

“Will you give him a red-headed one, then? If no other way, he’ll know the cuckoo by its feathers.”

Viridovix chuckled at that, but nothing the Roman said would make him change his mind. He was enjoying himself, and was not a man to think of tomorrow till it came. He started singing again, a bouncy love song. Half a dozen Videssians joined in, filling the chamber with music. Marcus tried to decide whether drowning him now would make things better or worse.

“P
ANDHELIS, WHERE HAVE YOU HIDDEN LAST YEAR
’
S TAX REGISTER FOR
Kybistra?” Scaurus asked. The clerk shuffled through rolls of parchment, spread his hands regretfully. Muttering a curse, Scaurus stood up from his desk and walked down the hall to see if Pikridios Goudeles had the document he needed.

The dapper bureaucrat looked up from his work as the tribune came in. He and Scaurus had learned wary respect for each other since the latter began overseeing the bureaucrats for Thorisin Gavras. “What peculations have you unearthed now?” Goudeles asked. As always, a current of mockery flowed just below the surface of his words.

When Marcus told him what he wanted, Goudeles grew brisk. “It should be around here someplace,” he said. He went from pigeonhole to pigeonhole, unrolling the first few inches of the scrolls in them to see what they contained. When the search failed to turn up anything, his mobile eyebrows came down in irritation. He shouted for a couple of clerks to look in nearby rooms, but they returned equally unsuccessful. His frown deepened. “Ask the silverfish and the mice,” he suggested.

“No, you probably trained them to lie for you,” Marcus said. When the Roman first started the job the Emperor had set him, Goudeles tested him with doctored records. The tribune returned them without comment and got what looked to be real cooperation thereafter. He wondered if this was another, subtler snare.

But Goudeles was rubbing his neatly bearded chin in thought. “That cadaster might not be here at all,” he said slowly. “It might already be stored in the archives building down on Middle Street. It shouldn’t be—it’s too new—but you never can tell. I don’t have it, at any rate.”

“All right, I’ll try there. If nothing else, I’ll get to stretch my legs. Thanks, Pikridios.” Goudeles gave a languid wave of acknowledgment. A
strange character, Scaurus thought, looking and acting the effete seal-stamper almost to the point of self-parody, but with the grit to confront Thorisin Gavras in his own camp for the Sphrantzai. Well, he told himself, only in the comedies is a man all of a piece.

The brown slate flags of the path from the Grand Courtroom to the forum of Palamas were wet and slippery; most of the snow that had blanketed the palace complex’ lawns was gone. The sun was almost hot in a bright blue sky. The tribune eyed it suspiciously. There had been another of these spells a couple of weeks before, followed close by the worst blizzard of the winter. This one, though, might be spring after all.

The tribune had a good idea of the reception he would get at the imperial offices that housed the archives—nor was he disappointed. Functionaries herded him from file to musty file until he began to hate the smell of old parchment. There was no sign of the document he sought, or of any less than three years old. Some were much older than that; he turned up one that seemed to speak of Namdalen as still part of the Empire, though fading ink and strange, archaic script made it impossible to be sure.

When he showed the ancient scroll to the secretary in charge of those files, that worthy said, “You needn’t look as if you’re blaming me. What would you expect to find in the archives but old papers?” He seemed scandalized that anyone could expect him to produce a recent document.

“I have been through all three floors of this building,” Scaurus said, fighting to hold his patience. “Is there any other place the scurvy thing might be lurking?”

“I suppose it might be in the sub-basement,” the secretary answered, his tone saying he was sure it wasn’t. “That’s where the real antiques get stowed, below the prisons.”

“I may as well try, as long as I’m here.”

“Take a lamp with you,” the secretary advised, “and keep your sword drawn. The rats down there aren’t often bothered and they can be fierce.”

“Splendid,” the tribune muttered. It was useful information all the same; though he had known the imperial offices held a jail, he had not been aware there was anything beneath it. He made sure the lamp he chose was full of oil.

He was glad of the lamp as soon as he started down the stairway to
the prison, for even that was below the level of the street and had no light save what came from the torches flickering in their iron brackets every few feet along the walls. The rough-hewn blocks of stone above them were thick with soot that had not been cleaned away for years.

It was time for the prisoners’ daily meal. A pair of bored guards pushed a squeaking handcart down the central aisle-way. Two more, almost equally bored, covered them with drawn bows as they passed out loaves of coarse, husk-filled bread, small bowls of fish stew that smelled none too fresh, and squat earthen jugs of water. The fare was miserable, but the inmates crowded to the front of their cells to get it. One made a face as he tasted the stew. “You washed your feet in it again, Podopagouros,” he said.

“Aye, well, they needed it,” the guard answered, unperturbed.

The tribune had to ask his way down to the sub-basement. He walked past the rows of cells to a small door whose hinges creaked rustily as he opened it. As with many doorways in the imperial offices, an image of the Emperor was set above this one. But Scaurus blinked at the portrait: a roundfaced old man with a short white beard. Who—? He held up his lamp to read the accompanying text: “Phos preserve the Avtokrator Strobilos Sphrantzes.” It had been more than five years now since Strobilos was Emperor.

Long before he reached the bottom of the stairway, Marcus knew he would never find the tax roll, even if it was here. The little clay lamp in his hand was not very bright, but it shed enough light for him to see boxes of records haphazardly piled on one another. Some were overturned, their contents half-buried in the dust and mold on the floor. The air tasted dead.

The lamp flickered. Scaurus felt his heart jump with it. There could be no worse fate than to be lost down here, alone in the blackness. No, not altogether alone; as the flame blazed up again, its glow came back greenly from scores of gleaming eyes. Some of them, the tribune thought nervously, were higher off the ground than a rat’s eyes had any right to be.

He retreated, making very sure that little door was bolted. Strobilos stared incuriously down at him; even the imperial artist had had trouble portraying him as anything but a dullard.

Its torches bright and cheerful, the prison level seemed almost attractive compared to what was below it. The guards with their handcart had not moved ahead more than six or seven cells. Their rhythm was slow, nearly hypnotic—a loaf to the left, a bowl of stew to the right; a bowl of stew to the left, a loaf to the right; a water jar to either side; creak forward and repeat.

“You, there!” someone called from one of the cells. “Yes, you, outlander!” Marcus had been about to go on, sure no one down here could be talking to him, but that second call stopped him. He looked round curiously.

He had not recognized Taron Leimmokheir in his shabby linen prison robe. The ex-admiral had lost weight, and his hair and beard were long and shaggy; months in this sunless place had robbed him of his sailor’s tan. But as Scaurus walked over to his cell, he saw Leimmokheir still bore himself with military erectness. The cell itself was neat and clean as it could be, cleaner, in fact, than the passageway outside.

“What is it, Leimmokheir?” the tribune asked, not very kindly. The man on the other side of those rust-flaked bars had come too close to killing him and was condemned to be here for planning the murder of the Emperor the Roman supported.

“I’d have you take a message to Gavras, if you would.” The words were a request, but Leimmokheir’s deep hoarse voice somehow kept its tone of command, prisoner though he was. Marcus waited.

Leimmokheir read his face. “Oh, I’m not such a fool as to ask to be set free. I know the odds of that. But by Phos, outlander, tell him he holds an innocent man. By Phos and his light, by the hope of heaven and the fear of Skotos’ ice below, I swear it.” He drew the sun-sign over his breast, repeating harshly, “He holds an innocent man!”

The convict in the next cell, a sallow man with a weasel’s narrow wicked face, leered at Scaurus. “Aye, we’re all innocent here,” he said. “That’s why they keep us here, you know, to save us from the guilty ones outside. Innocent!” His laugh made the word a filthy joke.

The Roman, though, paused in some uncertainty. Barefoot and unkempt Leimmokheir might be, but his speech still had the oddly compelling quality Marcus had noted when he first heard it on that midnight beach, still carried the conviction that here was a man who would not, or
could not, lie. His eyes bored into the tribune’s, and Scaurus lowered his first.

The food cart came groaning up. The tribune made his decision. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. Leimmokheir acknowledged him not with a nod, but with lowered head and right hand on heart—the imperial soldier’s salute to a superior. If this was acting, Scaurus thought, it deserved a prize.

He began to regret his promise before he got back to the palace compound. As if he didn’t have troubles enough, without trying to convince Gavras he might have made a mistake. Thorisin was much more mistrustful of his aides than Mavrikios had been—with reason, Marcus had to admit. If he ever learned the tribune had planned to defect …! It did not bear thinking about.