David Drake: To Bring the Light

Flavia Herosilla leaned on the bronze balcony railing and craned forward to get a better look at the placard which the wagon-driver’s attendant held over the snarling tigers. “Egypt?” she read aloud. “That’s nonsense! There aren’t any tigers in Egypt! If the emperor doesn’t have better generals than he has geographers, Rome won’t last another thousand days, much less years.”

“Well, I suppose they’re talking about the port of entry on the Red Sea, then down the Nile and by ship to Rome,” said her host, Gnaeus Julius Maternus. “India isn’t part of the Empire.”

Herosilla snorted. “Neither is Dacia, not really,” she said. “But there’s supposed to be a Dacian display coming later in the day.”

Maternus had extensive shipping interests which paid (among other things) for this mansion on the Palatine Hill. The high balcony, facing the Sacred Way with the Forum on the left, was the perfect location from which to watch the parades Emperor Marcus Julius Philippus—Philip the Arab—was giving to mark the Thousandth Anniversary of the founding of Rome.

Herosilla frowned thoughtfully and added, “I wonder if the Dacian display will have the traditional Sarmatian wagons with painted frames?”

Following the caged tigers were a dozen men whose leader waved a placard reading GUARDIANS OF THE NUBIAN FRONTIER .The dark-skinned men had bushy hair into which ostrich plumes were woven, adding to their already amazing height. Their shields were naturally-patterned oxhide, and their spearheads seemed to be hammered out of pig iron.

“If that’s what’s guarding Egypt from the south,” Maternus said, “then I’m thankful Rome’s grain supply comes from Africa now.

“I suppose the emperor’s picking the most colorful troops for the festival,” Herosilla said. She lived most of the year in Cumae on the Bay of Naples, so she could afford to be philosophical about the chance of bread riots among the Roman poor. “There are wonderful opportunities for an ethnographer here.” “Perhaps you should write a monograph,” Maternus said, shaking his head. He looked up at the clouds. The sky rumbled though there was no immediate sign of rain.

On the broad Sacred Way, a dozen armored horsemen blew a cacophony on silver-mounted horns. Behind them was a convoy of caged hippopotami, one to a wagon. The hippos would soon die along with the tigers and thousands of other animals in the arena, as part of the month-long festivities.

“My goal is to know rather than to teach,” Herosilla said. She was thirty years old and already—in her well-justified opinion—the finest mind of her day. “Although the emperor could do worse than have me for a teacher.”

She gestured at the parade route. A squad of horse archers interspersed the procession of hippos. “For example, I know that the best authorities follow the dating of Eratosthenes. The real thousandth anniversary won’t be for another two years.”

Maternus began counting. The gold and polished stones of the several rings he wore on each finger winked in the wan sunlight. Finally he gave up. “What would the founding date be according to the Christian reckoning, then?” he asked.

“Have you added that superstition to your ridiculous list as well?” Herosilla asked with curl of her lip. Her face had the chiseled beauty of a statue. Men had told her often enough that she was as hard as marble; but for that, it depended on the man. “Since you ask, though, it would be 751 BC.”

The calculation had been easy for her. She’d learned the Indian method of counting, using a zero.

“One can’t be too careful, my dear,” said Maternus. “What I’m really looking for is one that’ll let me take it with me.”

He lifted two fingers without looking behind him. A slave wearing a silk tunic as fine as Herosilla’s own put a bite-sized fishball in the comer of her master’s mouth.

Maternus chewed, grinned at Herosilla, and continued, “Of course one reason Philip probably chose the earlier date because he can’t be sure he’ll still be emperor in another two years. Recent history makes a depressing study, and I must say—”

He glanced at the grim sky again.

“—those clouds provide no good omen for him.”

“Don’t spout superstitions even you can’t believe,” Herosilla said tartly. “As for your real point, the state of the empire—the things that happen on the frontiers needn’t bother a truly civilized person. Now of course I’d rather be reading in my villa at Cumae, particularly since I agree with you that it looks like a storm coming. But these celebrations are a unique event for which a true scholar is willing to undergo the discomfort of a trip to Rome.”

Next in the procession, dark-skinned pygmies led a pair of—were they deer or oxen? Herosilla had never seen anything like them. The beasts’ hides were a dun that was almost purple, with horizontal stripes on the haunches. The long necks suggested kinship to the giraffes that would doubtless be following soon.

“Your problem, my dear,” Maternus said in a voice that was hard beneath the banter, “is that you’re always a scholar. You should remember occasionally that you’re a woman.”

“Oh, I assure you I’m aware that I’m a woman, Maternus,” Herosilla snapped. “I just don’t choose that to be a factor in my relations with you. You’re an amusing enough companion and your house has an excellent view of the procession route, but that’s all. If you need another lesson in what I mean by, ‘No,’ however—”

“Peace, my dear, peace!” Maternus said, holding his palms forward. “I’m still bruised from the other evening.”

“One of the men who had no reason to doubt my femininity,” Herosilla said with a satisfied smile, “was a Bactrian wrestler whom I kept for a time. I learned quite a number of useful things from him.”

She returned her attention to the parade. Egyptian slaves in cotton breechclouts carried pallets with models of the Sphinx and the Pyramids. The men must have been miserably cold, dressed like that in the middle of February in Rome. Perhaps they were giving thanks that they were only part of the display, not the slaughter to come in the Colosseum.

“Of course,” Herosilla said thoughtfully, “any date is really guesswork. All the stories say gods were involved in the founding of Rome—which means all the stories are fantasies.”

“Oh come now, my dear!” Maternus said. “It’s bad enough that you sneer at other people’s gods. Now you’re blaspheming your own! This is really too much.”

“They’re not my gods,” Herosilla said. “They’re not anybody’s gods because they don’t exist. Isn’t that a simple enough concept for you to understand?”

Maternus sucked in his lips and shook his head in disapproval.