Mary Reed - Five for Silver

As she ran out of the building, a familiar figure raced down the hallway toward them.

No, Felix realized, the figure wasn’t familiar. It was its clothing, which was instantly recognizable. Its elaborate embroidered panels depicting the temptation in the Garden of Eden identified it as a garment he had seen the empress wearing.

It was not actually being worn, but rather was wrapped around the running figure. Whoever it was suddenly flung the robe off, straight into Felix’ face, and bolted outside.

Felix knocked the garment aside. He saw the back of the black-cloaked figure that had worn it and set out in hasty pursuit.

His boots slid on wet tiles and he fell heavily, taking two excubitors with him. For a short space, the hallway was a confusion of sprawled, armored guards, bare flesh, swords, and silks.

Felix found himself pinned beneath the not inconsiderable weight of a plump, pink-faced, matronly woman.

He gently lifted her off and scrambled to his feet, trying not to look at her. “Priscilla, my apologies. Please give my regards to your husband the senator.”

He contained his choice string of lurid curses until he was outside the baths.

“This way!” an excubitor shouted, gesturing toward the clearing down the path as his colleagues poured outside, heads swiveling back and forth, gaping after fleeing women.

“Look at me, men,” bellowed Felix. “Pretend I’m a pretty sight! Keep your eyes on your captain! Now, follow! He can’t outrun us!”

He was right. The leading excubitors burst into the clearing only a few paces behind their quarry.

Unfortunately, those few paces also marked the distance between the edge of the open space and the imperial carriage.

Without saying a word, the strange intruder grasped the carriage door and flung it open.

The furious bear erupted from its prison. In an instant it was on the excubitors like a storm howling in off the sea.

By the time they’d saved themselves their quarry was long gone.

Felix had just sent a number of his men with the tattered net after the bear when the empress made her appearance, properly dressed, albeit in someone else’s fine silks, and accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting.

“Captain Felix! You and the rest of your men escort us to our residence immediately! I must tell the emperor what the chicken had to say.”

Nereus’ house looked deserted.

John stood at the foot of a wide street leading off the Strategion. The steeply roofed dwelling on the opposite corner showed no signs of life. Its shuttered windows gave the impression that the entire household was dead, fast asleep, or had sensibly decamped to less dangerous surroundings.

He glanced up the sloping thoroughfare. Not even a stray beggar was visible for its entire length. Yet behind him, one or two of the vegetable sellers who had long been fixtures of the Strategion market hoarsely cried their wares at the foraging seagulls.

On his way through the square, John had noticed goods were sparse. Here a pale man with a racking cough displayed bundles of limp leeks and shriveled radishes allegedly fresh from the country, while there a plump woman shouted praise for her fine chickens. John had a notion Peter would have sniffed in disdain over both the scrawny fowls offered and the outrageous price demanded. The customary noise and the smell of loam and leafage, recalling a country morning, rising above a chattering, colorful crowd, had gone.

Lack of business was not unexpected. Work and food were both increasingly hard to obtain, and many of the desperate broke into deserted homes seeking edibles or the means to buy them, a thought that directed his attention back to the household he had come to visit.

Stepping quickly across the street, he briskly rapped on Nereus’ door. Muted echoes died away in the atrium. Given the futility of his investigations so far, John half expected no answer, but as he began to turn away there came a shouted reply from within informing him he would be attended upon shortly.

Soon the stout door swung open to reveal a stocky, red-faced man dressed in a short, grass-stained tunic and grasping a large pitchfork. He looked like a farmer just in from the fields, an impression reinforced by stray straws caught in his hair.

“May I be of assistance, sir?” the man inquired civilly, his politeness at odds with the implied threat of the sharp implement he carried.

John introduced himself and the other stepped back with a low bow, holding the door wide open.

“Please to enter the house. I fear that I, Sylvanus, am the only person here. All the other servants have gone to the late master’s estate. He is to be buried there.”

“I regret the death of your master, Sylvanus. However, it may be that you can provide-”

A loud bellow from the inner garden interrupted John’s words.

Sylvanus glanced hastily over his shoulder. “Could I answer your questions in the garden, sir? Apis is agitated. The master would not have liked that.”

“Nereus kept a bull in his town house?” John followed the bucolic servant across the atrium, noting the man had tracked dirt across the lively sea scene depicted by the floor tiles.

“Indeed he did. Apis was his most prized oracle!”

As they emerged into sunlight, John’s first impression was of a miniature farm. Several large fish stirred the water of a shallow pool, an iron grate barring their escape into a channel leading to the bull’s enclosure. A quartet of brass plates hung in the tree shadowing the animal’s pen. Beyond that, chickens in a large cage scratched contentedly in the dust.

Trees and tall shrubs had been planted around the garden’s perimeter, all but concealing the peristyles. It would have been easy to gaze up into the blue square of sky and imagine oneself in a secluded country setting.

Apis, standing at the fence of his pen, angrily tossed his head and emitted another bellow. It was a prime specimen of the animal sacred to Mithra, John thought. A long chain attached to a ring circling one of the bull’s legs ran back to another ring set in a sturdy granite post. Nereus had apparently taken precautions to ensure his house wasn’t invaded by the bull, sacred or not.

Sylvanus began to fork straw into Apis’ enclosure. “Well, sir, I know many have wondered why Nereus would keep such odd company in his town house. The fact of the matter is” — he paused to wipe his brow-“he set great store by Apis and the other oracles, and his visitors were always fascinated as well.”

“I see,” said John. “Nereus’ oracles were for the purpose of entertainment?”

Sylvanus shook his head. “To some extent, yes, but chiefly because he was a man of business. His business was shipping and that’s an enterprise more prone to the whims of Fortuna than most.”

John agreed it was so.

“Yes,” the other went on with some pride. “I’ve cared for a number of different prophetic beasts over the years. You’ll have noticed the fish-the very same species were consulted in one of Apollo’s temples. Their swimming to and fro predict what’s in store for the inquirer.”

John suggested that if such oracles foretold the future as accurately as the ancients claimed, the knowledge provided would indeed have been most useful to Nereus.

“That’s right, sir!” Sylvanus set aside his pitchfork. “Now it’s true that occasionally the Dodona oracles-” he pointed to the four thin brass plates jingling gently in the breeze “-kept us awake on tempestuous nights, but the master would not hear of them being taken down. Set great store by them, he did, although we never knew how he found out the way to interpret the sound the leather strips make slapping against the plates. He often used to say the Dodona oracles can foretell the future, but who can foretell the wind?”