David Drake - Out of the waters

Alphena didn't speak either. She neither knew nor cared anything about the books the men were talking about; and besides, she was puzzling over the Westerners themselves.

Alphena knew them from somewhere; she'd felt that when time she saw them in the theater. That didn't seem possible if they had arrived so recently in Carce, though; and if Tardus was lying-why should he be on a question like that?-then it still didn't explain why she had no recollection of where she had seen the trio.

The talk droned on. The men might as well have been chattering in Persian for how much Alphena could understand of it.

She thought of the theater and her vision of a man tearing his way through the sparkling city. She thought of the way he had looked at her, and the recognition she had felt in his gaze as well.

Alphena ate mechanically, and thought. She almost could remember.

"I see you approve of father's cook, master," Varus said in a low voice to Pandareus, who had just taken another fig-pecker stuffed with a paste of figs and walnuts before being grilled.

"My dear student," Pandareus said, pausing with the skewer just short of his mouth. "For a man who can't always afford sausage with his porridge, this meal is the very ambrosia of the gods."

He paused, pursing his lips in thought. "I misspoke," he said. "This meal would be the true ambrosia to anyone, whatever his background."

Varus smiled. The meal had been both pleasant and stimulating, which was a surprise after Tardus had invited himself to join them. Not that Tardus would have been an improper guest under normal circumstances, given his background and interests, but these circumstances were scarcely normal.

He glanced at his stepmother, sitting primly across from him as she nibbled a quail drumstick in which the bone had been replaced by a breadstick and the meat chopped with spices. Thank Jupiter for Hedia! Varus himself hadn't understood the threat until Priscus whispered an explanation while they mounted the stairs together.

"I am a collector of objects which are supposed to have, ah, spiritual properties, Gaius Saxa," Tardus said. "I suppose you are aware of that?"

He means "magical properties," Varus translated. But magic could be seen as a means of threatening an Emperor who was reputed to be something of a magician and astrologer himself, whereas "spiritual" had no dangerous connotations.

"I believe many of Carce's older families have objects from the time when the city was rising to greatness," Saxa said. His tone was more cautious than Varus would have expected. His father probably didn't know what was going on, but at least he was beginning to realize that there was cause for concern. "I'm not surprised that the Sempronii Tardi do. We of the Family Alphenus do also."

"Yes, I had heard that," Tardus said. "I believe that you have in your collection a murrhine tube, do you not? About as big around as my thumb?"

Pandareus had reached for another fig-pecker. Now he withdrew his hand and looked sharply from Tardus to Saxa.

"I do, yes," said Saxa. "It was sent me recently by Gnaeus Rusticus, whom I have been appointed to succeed as governor of Lusitania. He, ah, said he knew that I was interested in such things, so he was giving it to me in a gesture of goodwill and thankfulness that I was allowing him to come home."

"Might I see the object, if you please?" Tardus said. "I have a fondness for murrhine myself and I would like to observe the structure of the grain."

"I suppose…," Saxa began. Then, as forcefully as he ever got, "Yes, of course. Simplex-"

One of the footmen standing near his couch.

"-go to the library and tell Alexandros to bring me the murrhine tube from Rusticus. Hurry now!"

"Have you decided to go to Lusitania in person, Gaius?" Priscus said. Varus wondered if he was trying to change the subject. "I ask because it has the reputation of being a challenging post, all mountains and mule tracks; and you're no more of the active, outdoor type that I am myself."

He laughed and patted his belly. He had been eating just as enthusiastically as Pandareus had, and he'd been drinking quite a lot of the wine that the teacher had been avoiding.

Saxa smiled weakly. "In truth," he said, "I've been considering governing through a vicar, Quinctius Rufus. A very solid man, you know; a Knight of Carce who has served as legate of a legion in Upper Germany. But I suppose Rusticus wouldn't have known that."

"I do hope you'll stay in Carce, dear lord and master," Hedia said. "My heart would waste away if you were to go into exile off on the shore of Ocean."

She sounded sincere. Varus, though by no means a man of the world, was at least knowledgeable enough to know to doubt anything his stepmother might say to a man.

"I've requested an appointment with the Emperor to discuss the matter," Saxa said. "Of course his will-that is, the will of the People, expressed through the Emperor-is paramount, but I'm hoping that, well…"

He fluttered his hands with a wan grin.

"As Marcus Priscus says, I'm not well suited for clambering across the spines of mountains on muleback, which I gather would be required for any official in Lusitania."

Alexandros, the chief librarian, appeared, leading two attendants who carried a narrow wooden casket about the length of a woman's forearm. The container's weight didn't require two men to carry it, but the librarian's rank did.

Corylus would like the box. He would know the kind of wood it was, too, with that lovely swirling grain.

Alexandros was a corpulent man, and rushing up the stairs from the library had set him to wheezing. As he approached, Borysthenes signaled to a pair of his juniors who snatched the table holding the tray of fowls out of the space in front of the diners.

The librarian was an impeccable servant, with a good grounding in literature and a flawless memory regarding where things were filed. The only way to locate a scroll was to remember where in which basket it had been stored. This was a matter of some difficulty for Saxa's library of over three hundred books, but Priscus was reputed to own nearly a thousand; his librarian must be very good.

"Your lordship," said Alexandros, bowing, "we have brought the curio which you requested."

The two attendants knelt before Saxa. The librarian lifted the lid of the casket-it was separate rather than hinged-to display the blue-and-yellow crystals of a murrhine tube as long as a large man's thumb and as thick as two thumbs together; the hollow center was only half that diameter.

Saxa touched the tube, then gestured toward Tardus on the central couch. The attendants shifted to face the guest.

"Where does your librarian come from?" Pandareus whispered, his lips close to Varus' ear.

Varus turned and whispered, "He's a Greek from Gaza, I believe. From somewhere in Syria, at any rate."

"Ah," said Pandareus. "He's Jewish, unless I'm badly mistaken. His trying to pass for Greek explains that odd accent."

Varus hadn't noticed anything unusual about the librarian's accent, either the Latin he spoke to members of the family or the Greek he rattled off to other servants from the East. He didn't doubt Pandareus' assessment, though. The subtleties of speech were as much a rhetorician's stock in trade as was the literature of which rhetoric was a branch.

Tardus used his thumb and forefinger to lift the tube from its velvet-lined container. The murrhine had a soapy sheen in the lamplight. The material came from Britannia, generally worked into the form of whimsies like this tube.

Occasionally traders penetrated the interior of the island and convinced the savages to turn murrhine into cups or tabletops for which the aristocrats of Carce would pay astronomical amounts, but that was a difficult and dangerous business. The Britons were headhunters, as their Gallic kinsmen had been two generations before. Caesar's raid into the island hadn't been enough to civilize them out of the practice.