The Shadow of Ararat (37 page)

The two men, one gray-haired, the other with a dark mane, pulled the wagon around to the back garden entrance and unloaded two heavy kegs—filled with wine or water by the apparent weight of them. They rolled the kegs inside the house, raising a clatter on the tile floors. Indistinct voices echoed in the empty hallways. The girl crept lower on the hillside on her hands and knees. Now the wagon was only thirty feet away, across the little side road that ran around the house. The horses were patiently waiting in the traces. The voices continued to echo in the house, though now they receded. The girl looked left and then right. Predawn stillness continued to cover the land.

She waited a moment, but no new movement came from inside the house. Crouching low, she scuttled across to the side of the wagon and paused, peering under the heavy wooden bed. She could just make out the steps on the other side, but no one was on them. Her nose wrinkled up; there was a foul odor seeping from the wagon, like rotten meat.
Oog... what are you doing, pretty Prince?
Krista swallowed, suppressing the sudden desire to throw up. There was still no noise from the house, so she crept around the end of the wagon and peered inside the bed.

There were two long shapes, wrapped in ancient, dirty canvas. The smell was thicker now, but she steeled herself and reached into the back of the wagon to twitch the nearest edge of canvas aside. Her face flickered with revulsion at the sight of a gray-black foot protruding from the bundle. It was scabrous and the toes were swollen. Nitrous dirt clung to it in clumps. The smell was worse, like a fist in the face, and she had to sit down behind the wagon, gagging...

The clatter of boots echoed on the stone steps at the back of the house. Krista started, then realized that she was trapped behind the wagon. Carefully she drew her legs up under her and edged beneath the wooden bed. From underneath the rough boards, she saw two sets of sandaled feet tromp down from the house and go to the back of the wagon.

"Gods, that is a foul stench... like rotten butter." That was the Prince.

"Huh, you're an ill-experienced pup. I don't even note it anymore."

They bumped around in the wagon and then there was a sliding sound as they dragged the first of the two bodies out. She heard Maxian grunt as he took the weight, then the older man jumped down and took up the rest of the burden.

"Watch the steps," the older man said, and then they staggered off with the body between them. Krista peered from under the wagon until they had entered the house, then she slipped out from under it and darted off into the shelter of the woods. Twenty minutes later she was back on the hillside, shaking Sigurd's shoulder. He came awake, only slightly muzzy from sleep.

"Come on, we've got to go back to the city immediately."

The dreadful sickly sweet odor still hung in the air, but Maxian had grown inured to it. His medical training had taken over and now he gazed down upon the two bodies—secretly dug from potters' fields south of the city and now spread open with clamps and tongs—with a detached air. Gaius Julius loitered behind him, leaning against the wall of the basement of the Egyptian house. The older man wore a butcher's apron and heavy leather gloves, spattered with dark fluid. Maxian placed his hands on either side of the first body's head and began to breathe carefully.

Perception fell away as his flesh relinquished control of his view of the world. The hidden world blossomed, an infinitely textured flower opening in his mind. Detail flooded his mind like a swift mountain torrent, and he struggled for a moment to compose and order it. He bent over the body of the ancient man, dead now for weeks. His fingers moved in the body cavity, sliding over the glutinous remains of liver, spleen, and lungs. His fingers, so used to the work, were his anchor and focus now as his awareness plunged into the recesses of the decaying body. Flesh parted before him, and the innermost secrets of the organs were revealed.

Against the wall, Gaius Julius watched with apprehension. He had seen more than his share of death, and it was no stranger. But the air in the tomblike basement seemed chill and noisome compared to a battlefield. Too, the work of the past nights, of trolling the alleys of the Subura and Aventine slums for suitable bodies, had been grim. The poverty and dissolution of the lower classes of the city that he still, after centuries, loved shook him. In his previous life, he could remember thinking of the people of the lower city, below the hills, as nothing but useful tools in his quest for power. Now the decay of the city and its people struck him cruelly in the heart. He knew that during the short period in which he had the power to revise the workings of the Republic or the customs that supported it, he had done little or nothing. And what now? Had he, somehow, caused all of this to come to pass?

An hour passed, grains trickling through the glass. Maxian suddenly shuddered and stepped back from the first body. Sweat trickled down his face and he looked exhausted. The dead man stepped quickly to his side and helped him to a chair next to the wall. Gaius Julius squatted, peering at his young master. The lad's eyes were flickering, unfocused. His right hand was clenched in a death grip. Gaius Julius stood and brought him back some wine. Maxian shied away from the cup, but the dead man gripped the Prince's head in his free hand and forced him to drink. After the first taste, the young man took the cup in his own hands and drank deeply.

"How do you feel?" Gaius held Maxian's head up in his hands, staring at his eyes.

"Exhausted. I may have to wait until tomorrow to examine the other body."

"Can Abdmachus do it?"

The Prince shook his head, too weary for words. Gaius Julius lifted the Prince's clenched hand up, so that the boy could see it. Maxian had trouble focusing, but when he did, he frowned. "Odd. Why is my hand doing that?"

Gaius Julius pried the fingers back and revealed a small, irregular clump of pale-gray metal in the Prince's palm. He plucked it out and rolled it in his fingers. An eyebrow rose. "It looks and feels like a slinger's bullet. Was it in the body? I saw no wound like this would have made—had he carried it for a long time?"

Maxian, still terribly weary, shook his head
no
. Then his head rolled back against the wall and he began snoring. Gaius Julius sighed and put the odd ball of metal on the end of the table. This done, he carefully lifted up the Prince and, straining with the effort, carried the boy up the stairs to the main floor of the house.

Anastasia de'Orelio, Duchess of Parma, looked up in irritation at the sound of rapping on the door to her private study. Sighing at the latest interruption, she put down the letter she was reading and composed her hair.

"Enter," she said, her voice tired and on the edge of open irritation. She sighed again inwardly when Krista entered the chamber and knelt by the side of the desk. Perhaps it had been a mistake to begin using the girl in the field. She was quick and usually circumspect, it was true, and rarely drew attention to herself—she was a slave, after all.

"Yes, my dear, what is it?"

"We kept watch on the Egyptian house in the hills, mistress, until the Prince and his servant returned. They came back very early this morning and they had two bodies, fresh ones, in a wagon. They took them inside the building and we came back to the city to warn you. The Prince is up to something dreadful up there! We should inform the
aediles
, or the prefect, and stop him."

Krista was almost breathless. She and Sigurd had hastened back to the city as fast as they could.

Anastasia sighed and looked down at the girl, still kneeling at her side, panting.
Youth!
she thought to herself, rubbing the graininess from her eyes. Too many late nights, now that the Emperor was gone from the city, and too little sleep were wearing her down.

"My dear, the Prince may be a little odd, but this news is nothing untoward. Remember, he is a healer of the Temple of Asklepius. Though it is not particularly pleasant that he may traffic in the bodies of the dead, it is his profession to understand the workings of the human body. The other watchers in the city reported to me earlier today that two bodies were purchased from the burial temple on the road south of the city. The families, I suppose, would be upset, but they are dead, you know.

"You must learn to see the whole picture, Krista, if you are going to be of use to me. It is good, even, that the Prince has decided to undertake his medical investigations outside of the city. If it were discovered that he was carting bodies around in the wee hours, it would reflect badly on the Emperor."

Krista gave her mistress a frowning look but quickly schooled her features into calm acceptance and polite attentiveness.

Lady de'Orelio continued: "The Prince has a project that is consuming all of his attention—which is a welcome change from his previous lassitude. Though I surely appreciated his pursuit of the available women in the city, this is far better for him. His brother, I know, is worried about his apparent disappearance, but I'll have a talk with him tomorrow. In the meantime, you need to return to your previous duties here. I will send Sigurd and Antonius to watch the Egyptian house."

For a moment, Krista considered telling her mistress what she felt about that in a loud and angry voice, but the memory of previous, very short-lived arguments with the Duchess quelled that impulse. Instead she bowed her head to the tiles and retreated demurely from the room. In the hallway, after closing the door, she cursed—entirely silently—for fifteen minutes before, shaking with anger, she stalked off to her own cell in the servants' quarters.

Pigheaded old woman,
she snarled to herself in the safety of her thoughts.
The pretty Prince may be a healer and all, but he and that old man are up to something evil.

But she could see no way to do anything about it if she wanted to continue living. Disobedient slaves were treated harshly in Rome.

"It's lead." Maxian spilled the remains of the metal shavings into a cup on the long wooden table. The air in the basement was still fetid and stank of corruption. Two days of sweaty work in the darkness had not freshened the air any. Abdmachus was perched on a stool they had scavenged from one of the outbuildings of the house. Gaius Julius, fresh from dragging the body of the young black man out to the crematorium in the back garden, was sitting on the steps down from the main floor, drinking deep from a flagon of watered wine.

"Lead?" Abdmachus' voice was filled with curiosity. "Did he eat it?"

"I don't know... It permeated his whole body, in minute fragments, much smaller than can be seen with the naked eye. His liver held most of it, though his kidneys and stomach lining had some. When I started drawing it out, there was a great deal suspended in his blood as well." Maxian's voice was still weary, but he had begun to recover from his second examination.

"Gaius Julius." The Prince turned to the old man. "This man was a longtime resident of the city, yes?"

The dead man nodded and wiped his mouth before saying: "By the report of the
aediles
in his district, he had lived there almost his whole life, fifty-two years. He was the oldest man in the area, or at least the oldest recently dead. It's lucky he had no relatives to pay the burial tax, or they would have cremated him before I got there."

"So, a Roman citizen of fifty years. He probably never left the city in his life, unless to visit the gardens outside of the city on a holiday. Somehow he ingested a large quantity of lead. Now, the other man, he was not long in the city?"

"No more than a month," Gaius Julius said, "a Mauretanian slave who angered his master. Clubbed on the head with a pewter mug and left to die in the alley behind the master's house. The street sweepers picked him up. Just fresh the morning we brought him here."

Maxian nodded, pensive. "He is reasonably healthy, foreign, and he has no lead to speak of in his body, though there were minute traces in his stomach."

Abdmachus raised an eyebrow at this. "Then he was exposed as well to something common that carries the metal."

Maxian picked up the fragment ball and crushed it between his fingers. The particulate metal collapsed easily into a powder at the bottom of the cup. He rubbed his fingers clean on a cloth.

"I have lead in my body too," the Prince said, his face calm and considering. "I checked after I examined the African boy. Far less than the old man but more than the slave. We were all three exposed to the metal, and I think that I know how."

Abdmachus cocked his head, staring at the Prince.

Gaius Julius spoke into the moment of silence before Maxian, however. "The aqueducts again. I remember reading in the logbooks of the Imperial architects that the pipes that carry water from the stone channels to the public fountains and
insulae
are made of lead. Is it the taste in the water that you noticed before?"

Maxian turned and his face was dark, turned away from the lantern light. "Yes. Subtle and almost unnoticeable—unremarked by anyone because Romans do not, as a matter of course, drink their water straight. Anyone who did notice the taste would assume that it was river water. So! Another piece of the puzzle."

Gaius Julius stood up and stretched, groaning at the ache in his old bones. "Not the whole answer then? Is lead poisonous? Would it cause these things that you see?"

Abdmachus cleared his throat. "I doubt not that this much lead in a man's organs is cause for concern and may have hastened his death, but the thing that we are seeking is sorcerous in its base nature. Lead, my dear general, is most assuredly inimical to sorcery."

"He's right, Gaius. Generally when you desire to prevent sorcery from affecting something you wrap it or stop it up with lead. It is a neutral metal, neither positive nor negative in influence. The unseen powers slide off of it like water off glass."

Gaius Julius' answer was interrupted by a sudden bark of laughter from Abdmachus. Both the Prince and the dead man turned, their faces puzzled, to look at the Persian.