Britannia, Northern Frontier of the Roman Empire, A.D. 122
QUINTUS POMPEIUS FALCO, PROVINCIAL GOVERNOR OF BRITANNIA, WAS pacing the veranda of his villa at the edge of the frontier as he dictated a letter to his secretary, a report to Emperor Hadrian. It was a simple report, but one he was not happy about making. He had lost the Ninth Legion of the Roman army.
Most Exalted Caesar:
It is with great consternation I report that having been sent into the south of the Caledonia district, in the northernmost territories of Britannia, to restore order to savage people we have come to call the Picts, and bring them under the Empire’s control, that the Emperor’s Ninth Legion, numbering four thousand legionaries and officers, has failed to send any dispatches for thirty days and is presumed lost.
“What do you think?” Falco asked his secretary.
“‘Lost,’ sir?” said the scribe.
“Right,” said Falco. “Somewhat vague, isn’t it?”
“A bit.”
Thus, the governor continued:
And by “lost,” I do not mean to imply that the Ninth is somehow wandering around this accursed, sunless, moldering shithole of a province, trying to solve a navigation problem; what I mean is they have been wiped out, defeated, decimated, destroyed, and murdered to a man. The Ninth has ceased to be. The Ninth has not been misplaced; the Ninth is no longer.
“That clears it up, don’t you think?” asked Falco.
“Perhaps some context, sir,” suggested the secretary.
The governor grumbled, then continued:
In the past, the Picts have met our expansion into Caledonia with sporadic resistance from small bands of the savages with no apparent organization or bond beyond their common language. However, recently, their forces have united into a large army. They seem to be able to anticipate our tactics and attack our troops in the roughest countryside, where our war machines cannot travel, and our ranks are necessarily broken by terrain, as well as coordinated attacks and feints by multiple small bands of attackers. One prisoner, captured a fortnight ago, told us through a slave who understands their abominable language that the tribes have been united by a new king that they call the Colorbringer, who travels with a mystical warrior woman, who leads their army. Primitive myths or not, these “Painted People” represent a formidable threat to the Empire here at the end of our supply lines, and without troops to replace the Ninth, as well as another two legions with provisions, I fear that we may not be able to hold the northern border against them.
I eagerly await your instructions.
In fealty,
Quintus Pompeius Falco
Governor, Britannia
Falco walked to the edge of the veranda and stared out over the hills. In his mind’s eye he saw olive trees, lemon trees, a vineyard ripening under the warm Etruscan sun. What he really saw were gray stones jutting like jagged teeth through the mossy hills and a low fog creeping through the valleys under ash-colored clouds.
“Enough context?” asked the governor. “Or shall I go on about the immediacy of securing this miserable bog and subduing these blue-stained apes for the glory of Rome?”
“Is it true, sir?” asked the secretary. “About the Picts uniting under a king?”
Falco turned on his heel to face the scribe, who flinched under the scrutiny. “They swallowed up a Roman legion, the most awesome engine of war the world has ever known; who cares if it’s true? They are dangerous.”
“So, we are sure the Ninth is lost to the Picts?”
“You didn’t see their message then?”
“No, sir. I don’t leave the villa.”
“Sentries found the head of the legion’s commander on a stake. Outside of the walls of the fort—not on the edge of the frontier, but right here at my home. His crested helmet was still in place, and tacked to it a message written on a sheepskin in their infernal blue paint.”
“Written, sir? The savages have writing?”
“It was written in Latin. As perfect as if you had drawn the letters yourself, scribe. It read: ‘Sorry. Accident. Couldn’t be helped.’”
“What does it mean?” asked the scribe.
Just then a cry came out of the sky, like a hundred hawks calling at once, and Falco saw a jagged blue line forming out of the mist at the top of the hills to the north—a line of warriors. Another call, and the tops of the hills to the east were outlined in blue. Another screech, and the western hilltops were turning blue with warriors, moving like a torrent down on the fort, and the Roman garrison within its gates.
“It means we are never going to see Rome again,” said Falco.
THEY HAD WALKED OUT OF THE FOREST AND INTO ONE OF THE VILLAGES of the Picts, having traveled across Europe to get there—following a rumor, a whisper, a secret passed under the breath of those who had been conquered and then enslaved by the Romans.
“These crazy fucks paint themselves blue all over,” said Bleu. “I’m telling you, Poopstick, these are our people. They’re going to fucking love us!”
She wore only a loincloth threaded over a wide leather belt and two wasp-waisted Roman short swords she’d taken off dead legionaries in Iberia. Her hair was woven into five long plaits, encrusted with the Sacré Bleu, which was also smeared over her skin in rough, finger-shaped streaks. She had once been a girl of the tall, fair-skinned, Teutonic tribes that lived above the Rhine, but for months now she had been only Bleu.
“It’s wet and cold here,” said the Colorman.
He wore an ankle-length, unsheared sheepskin tunic that was snarled with sticks, leaves and burrs at its fringe, and a sheepskin hat that came down to his eyes. From a distance, he looked like an abused and unattractive lamb.
“You’ll see,” said Bleu. “They’re going to love us.”
They gave all the Sacré Bleu they had carried with them to the Picts, who mixed it with animal fat and painted each other’s faces and bodies and found themselves, as a tribe, in communion with a goddess, sharing visions of passion and glory and beauty and blood, for theirs was the art of war.
The Greeks had called her a daemon (who inhabited artists and stoked them with fires of outrageous invention), the Romans called her a genius (for they believed not that one was a genius but that one had a genius, a patron spirit of inspiration, that must be fed with brilliance of mind, lest it move on to a more spritely host, leaving one as stagnant and dull as ditch water), but the Painted People called her Leanan Sidhe, a singular force, a goddess-lover who rode you, man or woman, into the ecstatic light and took life and love and peace as her price for a momentary glimpse of eternity. All would rise and fuck and fight and die for Leanan Sidhe! Sing praise! Howl and rake your nails across the moon in the embrace of Leanan Sidhe! Dash yourself on the rocks, lick the sweet nectar of death from the breasts of Leanan Sidhe! Fall upon your enemies with the spark of an immortal in your eye! For the Painted People! For the Colorbringer! For Leanan Sidhe!
And when they were spent, lying exhausted in slick mounds of flesh and fluids, the Colorman built his fires, sang his chant, stomped his awkward dance, and with a wicked black glass blade, scraped the sacred blue from the very skin of the writhing Leanan Sidhe.
She was right. They fucking loved them.
THE PAINTED PEOPLE CAME OUT OF THE HILLS IN A GREAT BLUE WAVE. Leanan Sidhe and the Colorbringer, their king, stood on their fighting litter atop the backs of two oxen, led by a dozen men with shields. The king was in front, strapped to a frame at his waist, quivers of javelins at his sides. Leanan Sidhe held a timber crossbeam behind the king, with a rack of the heavier gaesum spears at her back, their cruelly barbed brass points, as wide as shovels, looking like pickets in Death’s garden fence.
No Roman lookout had survived long enough to raise the alarm until the Picts were already in sight of the fort. By the time the cavalry was mounted and the archers on the walls, the Pictish horde had closed off any escape from the compound.
At the edge of bow range, the Picts began to circle, swinging clay pots of flaming pitch around their heads on lanyards and hurling them into the kill zone between their lines and the walls, until the ground around the Roman fort was a black, smoking hell and the Picts but blue demons beyond the fire.
Pict arrows came down on the Romans from every direction. Legionaries sought cover from one threat, only to find death raining down from another. The cavalry was sent through the gates to break the Pict ranks, but no sooner was the column outside before the oxen-borne litter rumbled out of the flames and the screech of the blue-woman atop it caused their horses to rear.
Her first spear took a cavalry captain in the chest, knocking him back like he’d been tied to a stake. The Colorbringer hurled a javelin from each hand, taking an archer off the wall with the first, the second driving through the wooden rampart to impale a slave carrying water to douse the flames on the walls. A cry went up from the Picts at the sight of their king’s kills, and the whirling mass of blue warriors closed in on the fort.
Roman arrows thunked into the wooden litter around them. A Pict shield bearer fell and was trampled by the heavy oxen. Leanan Sidhe took an arrow in the thigh, and her next thrown lance cleaved the archer’s helmet and took off the top of his head. As she wrenched out the arrow, the Colorman was hit in the chest with one—two—three arrows, their iron tips passing through to stick out his back.
A cry of fury went up among the Picts. The Romans had the range now and a half dozen arrows pinned the Colorman to the wooden frame to which he was strapped.
“Ouch,” said the Colorman. “I hate arrows.”
“I know,” said Leanan Sidhe. She reached forward and snatched out the arrows that protruded from his back, held the bloody shafts aloft, and screamed at the Romans. The scream echoed across the ranks. The Colorman slumped in his harness, his head lolling with the movement of the oxen. She pulled the rest of the arrows from his chest, threw them aside, then grabbed the little man by the ears and shook his head.
“Up, Poopstick, up!” she said. “They have to see you take the arrows and rise again. Fight!”
The Colorman opened one eye and his head came up. “It’s cold. I hate the cold,” he said, grabbing a javelin in each hand and sending them sailing over the walls into the fortress. “And I hate arrows.”
When the litter reached the walls, Leanan Sidhe leapt from her perch, caught the top of the rampart, and vaulted to her feet atop the wall just as an arrow caught her in the side. She whirled, drawing her swords as she did, and looked into the wide eyes of a terrified archer, who was trying to nock another arrow. He turned to run as she fell on him and took off his arms, leaving him to bleed out, then hacked her way through Roman flesh as the Picts placed their ladders and came over the walls in swarms of blue bloodlust.
A half-hour later, every Roman had fallen, every slave taken from Caledonia had been freed, and the crooked little king of the Picts stood on the roof of the villa, a few arrows still protruding from his chest and back, holding aloft the head of Quintus Pompeius Falco, provincial governor of Britannia, whose last thought had been: These crazy fucks really are painted blue.
Behind the Colorbringer, the muse, Leanan Sidhe, smeared Sacré Bleu over the golden Roman eagle staff and held it over her head as the Painted People chanted her name.
Paris, Île de la Cité, 1891
WITH ONLY THE POWER OF A FEW CACHED PAINTINGS, AND NOT THAT OF TEN THOUSAND blue-painted Pictish warriors, it took the Colorman until the next evening before he could regenerate from the gunshot wounds Bleu had inflicted upon him. Fortunately, a morgue worker who was sweeping up got too close and now lay desiccated and dead on the floor, the life drawn out of him.
The Colorman slid off the morgue slab to the cold floor. Bullets pooped from his wounds and plopped on the stone as he limped naked around the room looking for something to wear. All the dead were either naked, too ripe, or too tall for him to use their clothes, so he settled on a white mortician’s coat that trailed out behind him as he went. The morgue attendant pretended not to see him as he passed, figuring that a spontaneous reanimation would require paperwork that he did not wish to fill out.
It was only three blocks back to the flat, and while it was a very public three blocks, and in the early evening, a time when all classes were out on the street, he went just the same. Gentlemen looked past him and ladies averted their gaze as he crossed the bridge from Île de la Cité into the Latin Quarter. He was near Notre-Dame Cathedral, where often were found cripples and freaks looking for charity, so the crooked little man with the overhanging brow, dragging the tails of a long white coat, attracted no more attention than any other unfortunate soul.
He rang the bell at the building on rue des Trois-Portes and the concierge yelped and leapt back when she answered the door, a woman whose size and cynicism had caused many years to pass since her last yelp or leap. The novelty pleased the Colorman to no end, and he had the urge to pull open his coat for a full penis presentation in celebration, but feared it might be gilding the lily, so he pressed on.
“Bonsoir, Madame,” said the Colorman. “Could you let me in? I seem to have forgotten my key.”
“But, Monsieur,” said the concierge, raising a professionally buoyant eyebrow of suspicion. “I thought you were dead.”
“A scratch, only. Accident. Couldn’t be helped. The new maid was cleaning the gun and it fired.”
“You were shot five times. I heard the shots.”
“She’s not a very good maid. I think we will have to let her go.”
“Your niece said you were attacking the girl.”
“Scolding her for her bad cleaning. Madame, let me in, please.”
“The whole flat is covered in blue powder, monsieur.”
“It is? That’s the last straw. That maid is fired.”
“She was naked. She barely spoke any French. The police took her away wrapped in a sheet.”
“I will give you fifty francs, Madame, but my money is in the flat, so you have to let me in first.”
“Welcome home,” said the concierge, swinging the door wide and stepping aside.
“Did you feed Étienne?” asked the Colorman.
Paris, Montmartre, 1891
“SO YOU SEE, SHOOTING HIM IS NOT ENOUGH,” SAID JULIETTE. “I HAVE TO GO BACK.”
They were sharing a baguette and butter with coffee at the Café Nouvelle Athènes in Place Pigalle. Juliette had volunteered to buy breakfast, since she was the only one with any money left.
Outside, around the fountain in the square, models, young women and a few men, were lined up waiting to be hired. Artists in search of a model need only come to the “parade of models” to find a subject, and with a few francs, the contract would be sealed. Those girls who were not lucky enough to be hired by an artist might move down the boulevard to sell their wares in a different way. There was a fluid line between prostitute and model, dancer and whore, mistress and madame; all were denizens of the demimonde.
“You’re really not hungover at all?” asked Lucien, who experienced something akin to seasickness every time he turned his head to look around the café.
“Muse,” explained Henri. Then to Juliette, he said, “So, you and the Colorman are the reason Hadrian built his wall across Britain?”
She nodded modestly. “Inspiration is my business.”
“He built that wall because he was afraid of the Picts,” said Lucien, jealous that he was not emperor of Rome and could not build a wall across a country for her.
“Or annoyed by them,” said Henri.
“Mon Dieu! For painters, you don’t understand inspiration at all,” said the muse.
“You’re not Jane Avril, are you?” asked Henri, recoiling from the bite of a shifty suspicion.
“No,” said Juliette. “I have not been the pleasure of her company.”
“Oh good,” said Henri. “Because I think she is very close to going to bed with me, and I would like to think she responds to my charm and not a proclivity for the color blue.”
“I assure you, Henri, it is your charm,” said Juliette, laughing musically, leaning over and brushing Henri’s hand with her fingertips.
“Perhaps then, mademoiselle, you and Lucien can accompany me to the Moulin Rouge this evening and help convince the lady to view me on the horizontal, as that is where my charm is most compelling.”
“It’s like breakfasting with a goat,” said Lucien.
“I’m sorry, Henri, but I can’t,” said Juliette.
“A goat in a hat,” said Lucien.
“I really have to return to the Colorman. I have no choice.”
“You can’t,” said Lucien. “Stay with me. Make him come after you. I’ll defend you.”
“You can’t,” she said.
“Then we’ll run away. You’re the one who travels through time and space, right? We’ll go hide somewhere.”
“I can’t,” she said. “He can compel me to return to him. I told you, I am a slave.”
“Well, what then?” Lucien nearly fell out of his chair trying to move to her side, then caught himself on the table.
“I won’t be free as long as he lives.”
“But you said yourself, he can’t be killed,” said Henri.
“He can’t be killed as long as there are paintings made with unharvested Sacré Bleu. That is my theory. When I saw the Manet nude, I thought that was my chance. I thought that painting must be what protected him, but now I know there are others, or it’s something else. He’s alive. I can feel him pulling me back.”
“I don’t understand,” said Lucien. “What can we do?”
She leaned into the center of the table and the two painters leaned in for the conspiracy. “I’ve taken the Sacré Bleu we made with the Manet nude. It’s in the mine with your Blue Nude. He’ll need more. Gauguin is leaving for Tahiti, so I will go to the artist he’s found for me. A Monsieur Seurat.”
“Seurat’s a peintre optique,” said Henri. “He paints with tiny dots of pure color. Enormous canvases. He’ll take years to complete a painting.”
“Exactly,” she said. “The Colorman will have to go wherever he has the other paintings hidden. I know they have to be close, because I was only gone a day before he came with the Manet. And the canvas wasn’t rolled, it was on the original stretchers, so he couldn’t have traveled far with it. There was no crate. When he goes to get another to use for the making of the Sacré Bleu, then you can follow him, destroy the paintings, and make him vulnerable.”
“And why haven’t you done that?” asked Henri.
“Don’t you think I’ve tried? I can’t. One of you has to do it.”
“And if we do this, you will be free?” asked Lucien. “And we can be together?”
“Yes.”
“And Jane Avril will go to bed with me?” asked Henri.
“That has nothing whatever to do with this,” said Juliette.
“I know, but I was wondering if you might intercede on my behalf, since you have broken my heart. Just influence her until we’re in bed, out of gratitude for helping you to gain your freedom.”
“No!” said Lucien.
Juliette smiled. “Dear Henri, she will be yours and there will be no enchantment but your delightful presence.”
“Fine then, I’m in,” said Henri. “Let’s rid the world of this Colorman.”
“Oh, my heroes,” she said, taking each of their hands and kissing them. “But you must be very careful. The Colorman is dangerous and crafty. He’s been the end of hundreds of painters.”
“Hundreds?” said Henri, a quaver in his voice.
“She smells suspiciously of lilac and can put either leg behind her head while singing ‘La Marseillaise’ and spinning on the other foot.” Jane Avril at the Jardin de Paris (poster)—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893
Hey, have a look at these!” said the muse.