Thomas Harlan - The shadow of Ararat

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.

"All this time…" Abdmachus put his hands to his face, though his body shook with laughter. "All this time, we wondered and argued and plagued the gods with our pleas for knowledge…"

"All this time-what?" Gaius Julius snapped.

Abdmachus held up a hand and pinched his nose to stop giggling. "All this time, my dear fellow, the Kings of Persia have made one unceasing demand upon the magi-why is the Roman Legion immune to sorcery? Have you not considered it yourselves? Rome marches out without sorcery and nearly conquers the world-smashing Egypt, a veritable den of wizards-crushing the remains of Alexander's empire, breaking the backs of the Gaels and their druids, the Germans and their witchmen. Who thinks of a Roman sorcerer?"

"No one!" Gaius Julius huffed. "Sorcery is the work of weak Easterners and Greeks. Roman spirit conquered the world!"

Maxian laid a hand on the dead man's shoulder and shook his head slightly.

"You think that each soldier marched out from Rome with a belly full of lead," he said quietly, watching the little Persian. "Each man carried, all unknowing, a puissant shield against the wizardry of his enemies."

"Yes," Abdmachus said, his face weary. "Workings and patterns that could lay waste to whole nations of warriors fail or falter when directed at the ranks of a Roman army. I am a fool not to think of it before. Even some of your weapons are made of lead… all innocently impervious."

The dead man rubbed the stubble of beard that had accumulated while he had been passing on sleep and rest for the pleasures of digging in body yards and rubbish dumps. "Well, all that aside, do the bodies show the influence of this 'dark power' that you two can see pervading the city?"

Maxian breathed deep and sat down in the high-backed chair again. His head was splitting again, this time with a fatigue-induced ache. Though he felt stronger than ever after the ill-remembered events in the Appian tomb, the kind of detail work that he had done with the two bodies carried its own price.

"The old man's body carries it like a mother cat her kittens. It hides in his blood and crawls, unseen, along his bones. It seems… it seems to be almost a part of him. The African has none of it. He is a clean slate."

"Again, something tied to the city, to Rome," Abdmachus said. "And you? Could you find it in you as well?"