An Emperor for the Legion (39 page)

“A story, is it? Wait a moment, will you?” The physician trotted off, to return with tablet and stylus. If anything could ease him out of an argumentative mood, it was the prospect of learning more about the world in which he found himself. He poised stylus over wax. “All right, carry on.”

“This happened a few years back, you’ll understand,” Arigh began, “among the Arshaum who fellow the standard of the Black Sheep—near neighbors to my father’s clan. One of
their war leaders was a baseborn man named Kuyuk, and he had a yen for power. He toppled the clan-chief neat as you please, but because he was a nobody’s son, the nobles were touchy about doing what he told them. He was clever, though, was Kuyuk, and had himself a scheme.

“One of the things the clan-chief left behind when he ran was a golden foot-bath. The nobles washed their feet in it, aye, and pissed in it, too, sometimes. Now Kuyuk had a goldsmith melt it down and recast it in the shape of a wind spirit. He set it up among the tents, and all the clansmen of the Black Sheep made sacrifice to it.”

“Sounds like something out of Herodotos,” Gorgidas said, little translucent spirals of wax curling up from his darting stylus.

“Out of what? Anyway, Kuyuk let this go on for a while and then called in his factious nobles. He told them where the image came from, and said, ‘You used to wash your feet in that basin, and piddle in it, and even puke. Now you sacrifice to it, because it’s in a spirit’s shape. The same holds true for me: when I was a commoner you could revile me all you liked, but as clan-chief I deserve the honor of my station.’ ”

“Och, what a tricksy man!” Viridovix exclaimed in admiration. “That should have taught them respect.”

“Not likely! The chief noble, whose name was Mutugen, stuck a knife into Kuyuk. Then all the nobles gathered round and pissed on his corpse. As Mutugen said, ‘Gold is gold no matter what the shape, and a baseborn man’s still baseborn with a crown on his head.’ Mutugen’s son Turukan is chief of the Black Sheep to this day—they wouldn’t follow a nobody.”

“True, your nobles wouldn’t,” Marcus said, “but what of the rest of the clan? Were they sorry to see Kuyuk killed?”

“Who knows? What difference does it make?” Arigh answered, honestly confused. Viridovix slapped him on the back in agreement.

Gorgidas threw his hands in the air. Now, put in a more dispassionate frame of mind by his ethnographic jotting, he was willing to admit Scaurus to his side. He said, “Don’t let them reach you, Roman. They haven’t experienced it, and understand no more than a blind man does a painting.”

“Honh!” said Viridovix. “Arigh, what say you the two of us find a nice aristocratic tavern and have a jar or two o’ the
noble grape?” Tall Celt and short wiry plainsman strode out of the barracks side by side.

Gorgidas’ note-taking and his own visit to Alypia Gavra reminded Marcus of the Greek doctor’s other interest. “How is that history of yours doing?” he asked.

“It comes, Scaurus, a bit at a time, but it comes.”

“May I see it?” the Roman asked, suddenly curious. “My Greek was never of the finest, I know, and it’s the worse for rust, but I’d like to try, if you’d let me.”

Gorgidas hesitated. “I have only the one copy.” But unless he wrote for himself alone, the tribune was his only possible audience for his work in the original, and no Videssian translation, even if somehow made, could be the same. “Mind you care for it, now—don’t let your brat be gumming it.”

“Of course not,” Scaurus soothed him.

“Well all right, then, I’ll fetch it, or such of it as is fit to see. No, no stay there, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll get it.” The Greek went off to his billet in the next barracks hall. He returned with a pair of parchment scrolls, which he defiantly handed to Marcus.

“Thank you,” the tribune said, but Gorgidas brushed the amenities aside with an impatient wave of his hand. Marcus knew better than to push him; the physician was a large-hearted man, but disliked admitting it even to himself.

Scaurus took the scrolls back to his own quarters, lit a lamp, and settled down on the bedroll to read. As twilight deepened, he realized how poor and flickering the light was. He thought of the priest Apsimar back at Imbros and the aura of pearly radiance the ascetic cleric could project at will. Sometimes magic was very handy, though Apsimar would cry blasphemy if asked to be a reading lamp …

Concentration on Gorgidas’ history drove such trivia from his mind. The going was slow at first. Scaurus had not read Greek for several years—it was distressing to see how much of his painfully built vocabulary had fallen by the wayside. The farther he went, though, the more he realized the physician had created—what was that phrase of Thucydides’?—a
ktema es aei
, a possession for all time.

Gorgidas’ style was pleasingly straightforward; he wrote a smooth
koine
Greek, with only a few unusual spellings to remind one he came from Elis, a city that used the Doric dialect. But the history had more to offer than an agreeable
style. There was real thought behind it. Gorgidas constantly strove to reach beyond mere events to illuminate the principles they illustrated. Marcus wondered if his physician’s training had a hand in that. A doctor had to recognize a disease’s true nature rather than treating only its symptoms.

Thus when speaking of anti-Namdalener riots in Videssos, Gorgidas gave an account of what had happened in the particular case he had observed, but went on to remark, “A city mob is a thing that loves trouble and is rash by nature; the civil strife it causes may be more dangerous and harder to put down than warfare with foreign foes.” It was a truth not limited to the Empire alone.

Helvis came in, breaking Marcus’ train of thought. She had Dosti in the crook of her arm and led Malric by the hand. Her son by Hemond broke free from his mother and jumped on Scaurus’ stomach. “We went walking on the sea wall,” he said with a five-year-old’s frightening enthusiasm, “and mama bought me a sausage, and we watched the ships sailing away—”

Marcus lifted a questioning eyebrow. “Bouraphos,” Helvis said. The tribune nodded. It was about time Thorisin sent Pityos help against the Yezda, and the drungarios of the fleet could reach the port on the Videssian Sea long before any force got there by land.

Malric burbled on; Scaurus listened with half an ear. Helvis set Dosti down. He tried to stand, fell over, and crawled toward his father. “Da!” he announced. “Da-da-da!” He reached for the roll of parchment the tribune had set down. Remembering Gorgidas’ half-serious warning, Marcus snatched it away. The baby’s face clouded over. Marcus grabbed him and tossed him up and down, which seemed to please him well enough.

“Me, too,” Malric said, tugging at his arm.

Scaurus tried hard not to favor Dosti over his stepson. “All right, hero, but you’re a bit big for me to handle lying down.” The tribune climbed to his feet. He gave Dosti back to Helvis, then swung Malric through the air until the boy shrieked with glee.

“Enough,” Helvis warned practically, “or he won’t keep that sausage down.” To her son she added, “And enough for you, too, young man. Get ready to go to bed.” After the usual
protests, Malric slipped out of shirt and breeches and slid under the covers. He fell asleep at once.

“What did you rescue from this one?” Helvis asked, hefting Dosti. “Are you bringing your taxes to bed now?”

“I should hope not,” Marcus exclaimed; there was a perversion not even Vardanes Sphrantzes could enjoy. The tribune showed Helvis Gorgidas’ history. The strange script made her frown. Though she could read only a few words of Videssian, she knew what the signs were supposed to look like, and was taken aback that a different system could represent sounds.

Something almost like fear was in her eyes as she said to Scaurus, “There are times when I nearly forget from how far away you come, dear, and then something like this reminds me. This is your Latin, then?”

“Not quite,” the tribune said, but he could see his explanation left her confused. Nor did she understand his interest in the past.

“It’s gone, and gone forever. What could be more useless?” she said.

“How can you hope to understand what will come without knowing what’s come before?”

“What comes will come, whether I understand it or not. Now is plenty for me.”

Marcus shook his head. “There’s more than a little barbarian in you, I fear,” he said, but fondly.

“And what if there is?” Her stare challenged him. She put Dosti in his crib.

He took her in his arms. “I wasn’t complaining,” he said.

It always amused Scaurus how students and masters of the Videssian Academy turned to watch him as he made his way through the gray sandstone building’s corridors. They could be priest or noble, graybeard scholar or ropemaker’s gifted son, but the sight of a mercenary captain in the halls never failed to make heads swing.

He was glad Nepos kept early hours. With luck, the chubby little priest could find his missing tax roll for him before he was due to meet Alypia Gavra. At first it seemed he would have that luck, for Nepos’ hours were even earlier than he’d thought; when he peered into the refectory a drowsy-looking student told him, “Aye, he was here, but he’s already
gone to lecture. Where, you say? I think in one of the chambers on the third floor, I’m not sure which.” The young man went back to his honey-sweetened barley porridge.

Marcus trudged up the stairs, then walked past open doors until he found his man. He slid into an empty seat at the back of the room. Nepos beamed at him but kept on teaching. His dozen or so students scribbled notes as they tried to keep pace.

Now and then a student would ask a question; Nepos dealt with them effortlessly but patiently, always asking at the end of his explanation, “Now do you understand?” To that Scaurus would have had to answer no. As near as he could gather, the priest’s subject matter was somewhere on the border between theology and sorcery, and decidedly too abstruse for the uninitiated. Still, the tribune judged him a fine speaker, witty, thoughtful, self-possessed.

“That will do for today,” Nepos said as Marcus was beginning to fidget. Most of the students trooped out; a couple stayed behind to ask questions too complex to interrupt the flow of the lecture. They, too, looked curiously at Scaurus as they left.

So did Nepos. “Well, well,” he chuckled, pumping the tribune’s hand. “What brings you here? Surely not a profound interest in the relation between the ubiquity of Phos’ grace and proper application of the law of contact.”

“Uh, no,” Scaurus said. But when he explained why he had come, Nepos laughed until his round cheeks reddened. The tribune did not see the joke, and said so.

“Your pardon, I pray. I have a twofold reason for mirth.” He ticked them off his fingers. “First, for something so trivial you hardly need the services of a chairholder in theoretical thaumaturgy. Any street-corner wizard could find your lost register for a fee of a couple of silver bits.”

“Oh.” Marcus felt his face grow hot. “But I don’t know any street-corner wizards, and I do know you.”

“Quite right, quite right. Don’t take me wrong; I’m happy to help. But a mage of my power is no more
needed
for so simple a spell than a sledgehammer to push a pin through gauze. It struck me funny.”

“I never claimed to know anything of magic. What else amuses you?” Feeling foolish, the tribune tried to hide it with gruffness.

“Only that today’s lecture topic turns out to be relevant to you after all. Thanks to Phos’ all-pervading goodness, things once conjoined are ever after so related that contact between them can be restored. Would you have, perhaps, a tax roll from a city close by Kybistra?”

Scaurus thought. “Yes, back at my offices I was working on the receipts from Doxon. I don’t know that part of the Empire well, but from my maps the two towns are only a day’s journey apart.”

“Excellent! Using one roll to seek another will strengthen the spell, for, of course, it’s also true that like acts most powerfully on like. Lead on, my friend—no, don’t be foolish, I have no plans till the afternoon, and this shan’t take long, I promise.”

As they walked through the palace compound, the priest kept up a stream of chatter on his students, on the weather, on bits of Academy gossip that meant little to Scaurus, and on whatever else popped into his mind. He loved to talk. The Roman gave him a better audience than most of his countrymen, who were also fond of listening to themselves.

Marcus thought the two of them made a pair as strange as Viridovix and Arigh: a fat little shave-pate priest with a fuzzy black beard and a tall blond mercenary-turned-bureaucrat.

“Do you prefer this to the field?” Nepos asked as the tribune ushered him into his office. Pandhelis the secretary looked up in surprise as he saw the priest’s blue robe out of the corner of his eye. He jumped to his feet, making the sun-sign over his breast. Nepos returned it.

Scaurus considered. “I thought I would when I started. These days I often wonder—answers are so much less clear-cut here.” He didn’t want to say much more than that, not with Pandhelis listening. He returned to the business at hand. Doxon’s cadaster was where he’d left it, shoved to one corner of his desk. “Will you need any special gear for your spell?” he asked Nepos.

“No, not a thing. Merely a few pinches of dust, to serve as a symbolic link between that which is lost and that which seeks it. Dust, I think, will not be hard to come by in these surroundings.” The priest chuckled. Marcus did, too; Pandhelis, a bureaucrat born, sniffed audibly.

Nepos got his dust from the windowsill, carefully put it down in the center of a clean square of parchment. “The manifestations
of the spell vary,” he explained to Scaurus. “If the missing object is close by, the dust may shape itself into an arrow pointing it out, or may leave its resting point and guide the seeker directly. If the distance is greater, though, it will form a word or image to show him the location of what he’s looking for.”

In Rome the tribune would have thought that so much hog-wash, but he knew better here. Nepos began a chant in the archaic Videssian dialect. He held Doxon’s tax roll in his right hand, while the stubby fingers of his left moved in quick passes, amazingly sure and precise. The priest wore a smile of simple pleasure; Marcus thought of a master musician amusing himself with a children’s tune.