WILD, WILD HORSES

Up on the platform, Ambrose was preaching against the heathen, in Latin, to a crowd largely pagan who spoke only Greek.

The spectacle of a man wailing, cajoling, pleading and crying in another tongue had drawn a large gathering. “Go it, Roman!” some yelled encouragingly.

The man on the raised boards at the edge of the marketplace redoubled his efforts, becoming a fountain of tears, a blur of gesticulations, now here, now there. Such preaching they hadn’t seen since the old days when the Christians had been an outlawed sect.

Then another man in the crowd yelled at the onlookers in Greek. “Listen not to him!” he said. “He’s a patripassionist. He believes God Himself came down and took part in the suffering of Jesus Christ on the Cross! He denies the accepted Trinity of Father, Son, Holy Ghost! Come across the creek and hear the True Word, spoken by followers of the True Church. And in a language you can understand!”

With a snarl, Ambrose flung himself over the railing and onto the other Christian. There was a great flurry of dust, growling and coughs as they tore at each other’s faces and clothing. The crowd egged them on; this was better than preaching anytime.

“What’s all this, then?” asked an ædile, on his morning inspection of the roadways. He began beating with his staff of office at the center of the struggle until, with yelps of pain, the two men separated.

“Heretic!” shouted the second Christian.

“Whining Nicean dog!” yelled Ambrose.

With his staff the ædile rapped Ambrose smartly on the head and poked the second man in the ribs in one smooth motion. Two of the local military reservists hurried up through the crowd.

“What’s this, your honor?” they asked, grabbing the two panting men.

“Christians,” he said. “Since the new emperor Julian let all the exiles and fragmented bishops return, there’s been nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble with them. It would be fine if they killed each other in private, but they endanger decent gods-fearing folk with their idiotic schisms. They cause commotion in the reopened temples and trouble at public ceremonies.”

“Quite right,” said the reservists, who both wore fish symbols on chains around their necks. They each punched and slapped the man they held a few times for effect.

“Don’t think it doesn’t do my heart glad to see officers carrying out their civic duties in spite of their personal convictions,” said the ædile. “There’s hope for this empire yet.”

“Sorry you had to deal with this, sir. We’ll take care of them,” said one of the reservists, saluting with his forearm across his chest.

The crowd, grumbling, dispersed. The minor official continued on his way toward the rededicated Temple of Mars.

The four talked among themselves a moment, then the two policemen and the second Christian grabbed Ambrose and frogwalked him up a narrow alleyway.

The marketplace returned to its deadly dull normality.

P. Renatus Vegetius had been on his way to the house of his retired military friend Aurem Præbens when the fight had broken out just in front of him.

He shook his head. Surely the new emperor knew what would happen when he allowed all the exiled misfits and disgruntled Christians back. There was already talk that Julian was helping the Jews rebuild their temple in Jerusalem, that he would take state funds away from the Christian churches, that he would renew the imperial office of Pontifex Maximus.

This small town, Smyrnea, fifty miles from Constantinople where the new emperor sat after his march from Germany, was supposed to have the Emperor’s ear. It was in this town he had spent his childhood and youth in exile, watched over by the old emperor’s spies, before going to Rome and Athens to study in his young manhood. Well, only time would tell what would happen with Julian’s plans to revitalize the increasingly disparate eastern and western provinces.

Statecraft for the statesmen, thought Vegetius. He was on his way to Præbens’ house to consult manuscripts in the library there so he could put the finishing touches on his work, de re militaria, a training manual to be read to officers in the army. It lacked only a section on impedimenta and baggage-train convoy duties, of which Præbens had once written copious notes while accompanying Constantine on one of his eastward marches.

P. Renatus Vegetius had himself never been in the army. He had held minor offices (he had once been ædile of this very town, twenty years before, but that was when the job consisted of little more than seeing that the streets were swept; the Christians, after their big meeting at Nicea having brought pressure on Constantine and his sons to close down all the temples and call off public spectacles). Not like today where an ædile got real respect; a broad-shouldered job fitting for a man. Still, Vegetius was glad the present troubles hadn’t happened in his times.

Across the street, hurrying toward him, was Decius Muccinus, nomenclator to his friend Præbans. He was moving faster than Vegetius had ever seen him do, almost at a flat run. Unseemly in a slave, even one his master had promised freedom in six months. He was a young man with a beard of the Greek cut.

“Salve, Muccinus!” said Vegetius.

The slave jerked to a stop. “Sir,” he said, “forgive me. I was hurrying to your house, sent by my master to fetch you. Astonishing news, if true, which I am forbidden to tell.”

“Well, well,” said Renatus Vegetius, hurrying with the young man toward Præbens’ town home. “Surely you can tell me something?”

“Only that you will be highly pleased.” He leaned toward Vegetius, whispering. “Approaching: Singultus Correptus and Sternuus Maximus. Correptus’ wife is Livia, Maximus’ son is due for a promotion in the army.”

“Salve, Singultus! Sternuus!” said Vegetius, stopping to shake their wrists. “How’s the lovely Livia, Singultus? And Sternuus, that son of yours has done alright for himself, hasn’t he?”

After a further exchange of pleasantries they hurried on. “Thank you, Muccinus,” said Vegetius. “You needn’t have done that for me.”

“Old habits die hard,” said the slave.

“Great news, great news!” said Aurem Præbens. “One of your dreams came true! (And I’m not talking about that damned book of veterinary you want to write.) Sharpen up your javelin, you old fart! A lion’s been seen here in Thracia itself. Less than twenty miles away!” He waved a letter around. “Someone, anonymous, says I and my friends should know before the news becomes general!”

There had supposedly been no lions this side of the Pontus Euxinus since the end of the Republic four hundred years before. One of Vegetius’ secret wishes was to hunt lions from a chariot in the old style and to write a treatise on the subject. He had been planning a trip to Libya the year after next (gods willing) once he had finished this book, and the one on the diseases of mules and horses, to engage in such a hunt. But here, now, in Thracia!

“I’ve called on Morus Matutinus (who served in Africa) and Phœbus Siccus (who owns an old hunting chariot) and have sent for three teams of swift coursers for our use!” said Præbens. “How does that grab your testicles?”

Aurem Præbens was beaming. Vegetius was beside himself. Sometimes the gods were kind.

Sometimes they weren’t. The party had been out for two days; thirty men and slaves, twenty horses, two impedimenta wagons and fifty yelping, fighting dogs.

As a scent they had brought with them a lion’s skin that had hung on one wall of Morus Matutinus’ atrium. By the second day of the dogs milling around and biting each other in uncontained excitement, the slaves were betting among themselves that the hounds would soon strike a trail and follow it the twenty miles straight back to Matutinus’ house.

Phœbus Siccus, an old, old wrinkled man, was decked out in his armor from fifty years before. He could turn completely around in the worn leather and metal breastplate before it began to move with him.

“Either these are the sorriest dogs I’ve ever seen, or there’s no lion closer than Mesopotamia. Who the Dis’ idea was this, anyway?” asked Siccus through his lips which looked like two broken flints.

The dogs had run up a wisent, two scrawny deer and an ass in forty-eight hours. Each time the houndsmen would kick them howling away from the cornered animals and then stick their noses back in the lion’s skin.

“I’m going over to the brook yonder,” said Renatus Vegetius. He mounted his horse.

“May I go with him, master?” asked Decius Muccinus. “I should like a swim.”

“The last thing I need out here,” said Præbens, “is a nomenclator. The guys who own these hounds all answer to ‘Hey, shithead!’” He turned to Vegetius. “Sorry. I wanted this hunt for you. We’ll take the dogs back north, then home. Follow the wagon tracks. If you miss the lion, though, you’ll hate yourself.”

“If I don’t cool off, I will die,” said Vegetius. “Good hunting.”

“Hah! I’m going to find out who sent that letter and turn the dogs on his butt,” said Præbens.

It was a stream straight out of Hesiod, pure, pebbled and cold. Vegetius sat on a rock with his swollen feet in the gurgling water. Muccinus, who had stripped naked and swam back and forth a few times, was now asleep on the grass. Upstream tall rushes grew; to each side of the stream banks lifted up and hung over, shading the western side of the waters in this early afternoon.

Their two horses stopped their grazing. One backed up whinnying, its eyes growing wider.

“What is it?” he asked the horse, reaching out to calm it. Then his blood froze. Oh gods, he thought, looking upstream and scrambling for his javelin, what if the lion’s found us?

He kicked Muccinus with his bare foot.

“Mmmph?” asked the slave, rolling over. Then he jumped up, seeing Vegetius trying to put his sandals on over his head. He pulled a dagger from his lump of clothing on the ground.

“What? What?”

They looked upstream. Something moved along the tall rushes. The green fronds parted.

The oldest man they had ever seen stood at the edge of the reeds, naked from the waist up. He might as well have been clothed; his hair and beard were pure white and hung in waves down his back and chest. He looked like a white haystack from which a face stuck out. They couldn’t tell if the hair reached the ground as the reeds covered all below his waist.

In his hand he held a thin tapered pole to which was attached a light line, gossamer in the sun, probably of plaited horsehair. At the end of the line was a hook with a tuft of red and white yarn tied to it. He waved the pole back and forth a few times and flipped the line into the water.

There was a splash as something rose to the lure. The line tightened, the pole bent, and the old man heaved up and back.

A two-pound grayling, blue and purple-spotted in the sunlight, its dorsal fin like a battle flag, flew out of the water at the end of the line and landed flapping back in the reeds.

The old man bent out of sight to pick it up.

“Well done, sir,” said Vegetius. The old man looked up. “I’d be careful, though. There’s supposed to be a lion about!”

The old man looked at them, his face breaking out into a smile. He flipped the line back out; soon he was fast to another grayling, this one larger, and pulled it in.

“I said, there’s a lion about!” yelled Vegetius, cupping his hands.

“Nonchalant bastard,” said Muccinus. “Or maybe deaf as a post.”

The old man shouldered the pole and the brace of grayling and went through the reeds on his way upstream.

“I saw no houses about,” said Muccinus. “Wonder where he came from?”

“Who knows?” said Vegetius.

The sun was still hot, so they followed the shady side of the brook upstream for a mile or so.

They came upon the cave around a bend. Outside were hung drying wild onions, radishes, garlics. There was a rack out in the sun on which split fish curled. Fungi and mushrooms grew in the shady spots.

“Quite homey,” said Muccinus. “Hello the cave!”

There was no answer.

“He has frequent visitors,” said Renatus Vegetius, pointing to the ground outside the cave opening. It was churned with innumerable hoofprints. “Either he’s a companionable old man, or he’s popular because those aren’t regular mushrooms.”

“Hello,” Renatus continued, dismounting. He tied his horse’s reins to a root which grew from the cliff all. The horse was nervous again.

Inside, the cave was cluttered with thousands and thousands of scrolls, book boxes, clay tablets and slates.

“Muccinus,” he said. “Look at this!”

They walked in. Amid the clutter was a chest-high table; at one corner of the room a pile of mashed-down straw. There were no chairs, only piles and piles of scrolls and books in a dozen languages.

Decius Muccinus poked around in the stacks. “Greek. The curved writing of Ind. Latin. The old triangle writing. Who could read this stuff? What’s it doing here?”

Renatus Vegetius went to the high table. There were several closed scroll tubes there. One was open. On the table, by itself, was a single page, cut evidently from a lengthy work, headed, as it was, Book 19 in Greek, and at the top, the title . . .

If Iupiter Ammon had pulled P. Renatus Vegetius up to the top of Mount Olympus and said to him: Go anywhere, mortal, and get your heart’s content; anywhere in time and anywhere in the world: it is yours, Vegetius would have in the next instant been back in this cave with his hand on this piece of paper.

It was the Hippiatrika, the lost book of veterinary medicine. It was as old as time, older than Homer. When he had read Pelagonius’ Ars Veterinaria, Vegetius remembered the author’s railing at the fates which had lost the book to the ken of man since the Trojan War. Pelagonius wailed for the lost knowledge it was supposed to contain.

And here Vegetius had in his hand a page of it. He read the first paragraph and knew, with all his mind and heart, that this was it.

Their horses whickered outside. Then their hooves clattered. The horses ran by, blurs. Vegetius had only his short sword with him—the javelin had been in the saddle boot. Muccinus once again drew the dagger forbidden to slaves.

They heard another clatter of hooves. At least it wasn’t the lion. “Hello! Hello!” they both shouted.

“I know you’re in there. No need to yell,” said a voice, an old man’s voice, older even than that of Phœbus Siccus.

Then the old man came into the cave followed by the horse.

No.

The old man and the horse came in together.

No.

The old man was the horse.

“Finding anything interesting to read?” he asked, looking from one to the other, then settling his gaze on Vegetius.

Somewhere down his back his hair turned into a brittle white mane. He was white and grey from the top of his head to his hooves. A back leg lifted, clacked to the floor.

It was easier, thought Vegetius, if you only looked at the front half.

“The Hippiatrika?” he asked. “Where did you get it?”

The centaur looked toward the table. A mixture of warm animal and human body odor came to Vegetius’ nose, like sweaty men on a wet horsehide triclinium. More than anything it convinced him that the encounter he was having was real.

“I wrote it,” said the centaur.

Vegetius nearly fainted.

“I think your master needs some water,” said the centaur to Muccinus. “There’s a cup outside. And please don’t run away.”

“He’s . . . he’s not . . . my master,” said Muccinus. “And I need some too.”

Vegetius held onto a table leg until the slave returned with the cup. As he stood woozily, he noticed that the hooves of the centaur were in bad shape. One leg, the right front, was thinner than the others, with a knot in it as if it had been broken once. What chest Renatus could see through the drapery of white hair looked thin and mottled. Vegetius took the cup and drank.

“Chiron,” he said to the centaur. Chiron, the teacher of Hercules and Asclepius, the only centaur able to read and write. The only one ever to be married to a human woman; the only centaur able to drink wine without becoming a raging animal. Chiron, author of the Hippiatrika.

“You must be P. Renatus Vegetius,” said the horse-man.

“How did you know my name?”

The centaur laughed, his long hair flying.

“How goes the lion hunt?”

“The letter was your doing?”

“Somewhat. I wanted to meet you. I read a copy of your Histories.”

“And you knew I would come to hunt a lion?”

“After your rhapsody on lion-hunting in the chapter on Egypt? And in your argument, you said you would someday write a treatise on warfare, and a book amplifying Pelagonius’ Ars Veterinaria? To read a man is sometimes to know all you need,” said Chiron.

“Vegetius,” said Decius Muccinus. “You’re . . . talking literature . . . with . . . a . . . centaur.”

“One with a purpose,” said Chiron.

“What’s that?” asked Vegetius.

“I have something you desire. The Hippiatrika. The whole manuscript.” Vegetius looked wildly around. “It’s in a safe place. Don’t worry. Help me, and it, and all these other works, are yours.”

“What do you wish?”

“I’m old. I want to return to my homeland to die. You can help me.”

“Your homeland? Scythia? Ind? Africa?” asked Vegetius, following the best authorities as to the homeland of the centaurs.

“Take me to the Pillars of Hercules,” said Chiron. “Then I can be home in a few days.”

“The Pillars of Hercules! That’s at the western edge of the Empire! That’s where the Greeks once sent an expedition to see if the sun hissed as it went down in the ocean! We’re in the East! How am I supposed to get a centaur from one end of the civilized world to the other?”

“You’re an intelligent man,” said Chiron. “If you can’t conceive of getting me across the empire, think what it would be like for me, alone. When I was young and strong, I might have done it. I could outrun any horse when I had to. But no longer. I wouldn’t be gone fifty miles before some rich man would have me hunted down for his menagerie. The fact that I’m a rational being, and can think and speak, would appeal to him not at all. I’d end my days in a cage, in Thracia.”

He looked at Vegetius.

“I can’t believe this,” said Decius Muccinus.

“I’m the last one,” said Chiron. “And you get the Hippiatrika. It is all you think it to be. Just get me home, Renatus Vegetius. I ask no more.”

“I wouldn’t know how to begin,” said Vegetius.

“Nemo Prorsus,” said Muccinus.

“What?”

“Nemo Prorsus. A very clever man in Cyzicus. If you want to go through with this, I mean,” said Muccinus. “He’s done everything, been everywhere. All it takes is money. Vast amounts.”

Chiron turned his eyes to Vegetius. “Please?”

“Done,” said Vegetius, crossing his wrists three times and spitting, “and done!”

In the week following, after he had sent for Prorsus, Vegetius went to Aurem Præbens. He found him dictating to Muccinus.

“I’d like to buy Decius from you,” said Vegetius.

“What!?” screamed Muccinus. “After what I’ve gone through! I’m to be freed in—”

“Quiet, slave,” said Aurem.

“I—”

“Just what did you have in mind?” asked Præbens.

“You’re to free him in six months. Sell him to me, now. I’ll free him when I return from my—researches in Alexandria.” (This was the cover story.) “You know everyone in this one-horse town, anyway. I’ll need someone quick with me, a nomenclator, one who can read and write. And I trust no one more than your Decius Muccinus.”

Decius was glowering at him.

“Besides,” said Vegetius, “sell him to me, and it won’t be you who has to pay the five per cent manumission tax!”

“Decius, you’ve been like a son to me, but business is business,” said Præbens to the slave. Then to Vegetius. “3000 sesterces.”

“3000? I’m going to have him read to me, not sleep with me!”

“I’m worth 4000 if I’m worth a talent,” said Decius, his feelings hurt.

“3500,” said Præbens.

“35? Can he fly, too?”

“3800 and not a denarius less!”

“What, does a whole family come with him, eight strong boys?” asked Vegetius.

“4000,” said Præbens.

“Done!”

“Done,” said Præbens, crossing his wrists three times and spitting, “and done!”

Decius was smiling as they had him write up his own bill of sale.

They decided to move Chiron nearer town as they received word Nemo Prorsus was on his way across the Hellespont. Vegetius and Muccinus went out to help him close up his cave, stacking stones across the entrance all one afternoon.

He was to stay in one of the outbuildings in an olive grove owned by Vegetius’ uncle, Verbius Mellarius the rhetorician.

“Excuse me,” said Chiron. He backed up, lifting his tail, and dropped a pile of road apples on the path. “I usually don’t do that so close to home, but I’m leaving. And my stomach’s not what it used to be.”

After they sealed the cavern off fairly well, they began to ride downstream as the sun went down. Chiron took a long last look back.

“If these were the olden days,” he said, “I’d ask one of the Cyclops to keep an eye on the place for me.”

A few minutes later, Decius Muccinus looked at Chiron and began to laugh.

“So this is the famous Mr. Chiron, eh?” said Nemo Prorsus, a squat thick man with a Greek beard. He wore trousers in the eastern fashion and a leather tunic covered with brass spikes. He was bald as a melon. “Glad to meet a real centaur. I once fixed up a mermaid and sold it to the Prince of Parsi, but this is the closest I ever come to a real mythical creature.”

“I’m no myth,” said Chiron.

“Think you can do it, Nemo?” asked Decius.

“That’s Mister Nemo to you, slave boy!” He studied a moment. “Yeah. But it’s gonna take all your master’s money. Have him give it all to me.”

“Why are you talking about me in the third person?” asked Vegetius.

“I didn’t start this,” said Nemo Prorsus. “Yeah, gov, I can do it, but you’ll have to give me near all your money and go along with everything I say. Whatever’s left over we can split. Bargain?”

“Done,” said Vegetius, sighing.

“Done,” said Prorsus, crossing his wrists three times and spitting, “and done!”

“It’ll take about three days to get everything cooking. I suggest we all lay pretty low,” said Prorsus.

“There’s one thing I’d like to do before we leave. If Vegetius is paying,” said Chiron.

“I suppose I am,” said Vegetius, sighing again.

“I’d like to visit a lupercalia.”

“Sonofabitch!” said Prorsus. “You’re what, a million years old or somethin’? A lupercalia, no less!”

“I used to go all five ways when I was young,” said Chiron. “But that was long, long ago. I’d like to go, just once, again.”

“Sonofabitch!” said Nemo Prorsus. “Come on, Mr. Vegetius! Let’s give the old guy a real treat. I know a place, way out in the sticks, where nobody cares what comes and goes. No offense, Mr. Chiron!”

“None taken.”

So in the early morning hours they took him to a brothel by the back ways, and then into a stable by the front door, then back to the brothel again. Several of the women had several rides. Everyone became drunk and agreeable, the night became a warm blur. The women covered Chiron with flowers and sequins; one, a Greek girl name Chiote, poured libations of wine and perfumed oils on his hair and mane.

The next day no one at the lupercalia remembered much of what had happened, or whether it had or that they had only dreamed it; some illusion caused by the edicts of the new emperor, perhaps some psychic slippage to an earlier, simpler time.

“Well,” said Prorsus, when he woke up with matted eyebrows and a dry mouth in the olive grove the next evening. “Time to get to work. Shell out the loot.”

First he bought sixteen horses.

Then he found eight old men, solitary worshippers of Bacchus, and asked them if they could ride a horse in a straight line. Then he made them prove it. He promised them all the wine they could drink each night as long as they could ride the next morning, and free passage back to Byzantium, if they chose it, or could remember where they were from, or why they should go back whenever they got wherever it was.

“But . . . but . . .” said Vegetius. “The money!”

“An empty purse contains nothing but the seeds of failure,” said Prorsus. “We made a bargain. Your centaur wants home. He’s giving you something in return. You’re giving me something—your complete trust and your cash. True?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then let me do my job,” said Prorsus, and pulled more sesterces out of the bag.

Then he went out and bought an elephant with one tusk.

He had draped two white blankets over the pachyderm’s sides, tied on with rope. Prorsus took a paint brush, and in a fairly good hand painted:

VIDE ELEPHANTOS HANNIBALENSIS

on each side with an arrow pointing backwards.

“Not very good Latin,” said Vegetius.

“Good enough for these garlic-eating yahoos!” said Prorsus. “The first rule is, when you’re hiding a marvel, give them something else to gawk at!” He put down the paintbrush.

“Besides,” he said. “Anyone who thinks he’s going to see some 600-year-old elephants deserves to miss a centaur or two.”

He winked and left to see about the Imperial Post Road permits.

“Here goes nothing,” said Muccinus, naked and sitting on the elephant’s head. It was the first morning of the westward trip. They were nearing the first village on the road toward Phillipi and Dyrrhachium.

“Put your lungs in it, you old farts!” yelled Prorsus from his bluepainted horse up ahead.

The eight old men sat up as straight as they could on their horses. Two of them had bagpipes, two had trumpets, two serpentines which curved around them to rest on the backs of their saddles, and the other two flailed away at drums.

It wasn’t music, it was an atrocious noise. The elephant almost ran off the road. Muccinus steered it back by kicking it behind its right ear.

Vegetius, wincing, could imagine Apollo, Orpheus, Harmonia throwing themselves off Olympus in suicide at what was being done in their names.

All the people ran out of their houses, stood in the road, made way for them.

They began to cheer and yell as the blatting entourage came even with them. Prorsus, wearing a headdress of purple ostrich feathers, gave them a sweeping blessing with his arms.

All eyes were on the elephant. It trumpeted, drowning out the cacophony ahead of it for a second or two. It drew even with the middle of the village. Heads turned back toward Byzantium, peering. Most of the villagers were still looking that way when the noisy column drew out of sight around a curve in the post road.

None had noticed that in the middle of the eight old mounted men was another old man, his hair and beard now cut short, his hair combed to hide his pointed ears, who played no instrument and looked neither left nor right.

At one town, Vegetius saw Prorsus proved right. It happened on the edge of a large crowd where he rode. As they drew even with the applause, a child pointed to the mounted musicians.

“Look, mater,” said the girl, “that man in the middle is half-horsey!”

The woman picked the child up by the hair and shook her.

“Learn not to lie, Portia,” said her mother, never taking her eyes off the elephant.

“I can’t believe it,” said Vegetius. “Two and a half months gone by, halfway to the Pillars, and no troubles!”

“These is strange times,” said Prorsus, putting more wood on the fire. “Nobody knows what to expect with a new emperor sittin’ on the throne like it was a pot. They don’t know which way to jump. They’re all just waiting for the other caliga to drop.” They were camped off the road near Aquilia in Noricum. The old men were already drunk or asleep. Chiron lay nearby, his human part asleep over a flat rock, his equine body folded under him. Now and then a long low sound came from his chest.

“This trip’s been pretty easy. Company’s better, anyway,” said Prorsus. “I’ve had some tough jobs, with real scuzzes to work with. I once stole a quinquireme from Ephesus and sold it a week later in Sardis, and nobody ever saw it.”

“Wait a minute,” said Decius. “Sardis is overland from Ephesus. There aren’t any rivers or canals connecting them!”

“It was for a bet,” said Prorsus. “Some jobs is just easier than others, I guess.”

So it went though Mutina and Trebia in Gallo Cisalpina, Dertona in Liguria, where the roads often became crowded, and missing entirely the dead backwater of Italia itself, through Augusta Taurinorem, Massilia and Narbo Martius in Narbonensis, down the long chest of Tarraconensis, past Novo Carthago on the shore of the Mare Internum, and along the coast roads, passing south of Hispalia in Bætica to the Gates of Hercules.

They were on a hill overlooking a small seaport. Across to the southwest was Mauretania, emblazoned with the sunset.

“We’re here,” said Vegetius to Chiron. “Now let’s get you home.”

“We’ll have to hire a ship.”

“So it is Africa we go to!” said Decius Muccinus.

“Not really,” said Chiron.

“Then for the gods’ sakes, where?” asked Vegetius.

“Out there,” said Chiron, pointing to the sunset.

“What! There’s nothing out there!”

“There’s another land. The land centaurs come from. And horses.”

“How the Dis did you get here?! You didn’t have ships?!”

“We walked. It was colder then. The ocean was lower then, and more land stuck out. Of course, we came the other way, through Asia. I’m taking you by a short cut.”

Whistling a tune, Prorsus started down the hill.

“Where are you going?” asked Vegetius, beside himself.

“To find passage back for the drunks and to find a boat that’ll get him home,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the centaur.

“What! What!”

“He hasn’t lied to you yet, has he?” asked Prorsus, over his shoulder.

Vegetius ran down to a cork tree and gnawed at the bark, tears streaming down his face. After awhile, he felt better.

“Sorry,” he said to Chiron. “It’s been such a long trip. I thought it almost over.”

Chiron put his hands on Vegetius’ shoulders. “Soon,” he said. “Soon, you’ll have the book. Soon, I’ll be home. It had to be this way. If I would have told you in Smyrnea, you would not have come. And you would have remained a bitter old man the rest of your life. And I would die in Thracia, so far from my homeland.”

“I’m just tired.”

“I, too,” said Chiron. “More than you know. Let’s make camp. No more masquerades. No more processions. Let the world gape. I’m going home.”

They boarded a ship next midnight and set sail westward. Prorsus had sold the elephant to a merchantman captain returning to Byzantium in exchange for passage for the old men. They had said their goodbyes the evening before boarding.

When dawn broke on the ship in the Mare Atlanticum, it became very quiet. The crew saw the centaur and kept its distance.

“When do we put north or south?” asked the bosun, expecting a turn starboard toward Hibernia, or port to the Wild Dog Islands.

“We don’t,” said the captain. “The course is west by northwest.”

“How long?” asked the bosun.

“As long as it takes,” said the captain. He reached into the poop cabin and pulled out a bag half his size.

He kicked at it.

It jangled.

“Hear that?” asked the captain. “The bag talks!”

“That it does,” said the bosun.

“What does it say?”

“It says west by northwest by the stars, sir!”

“Just what it said to me.”

For two weeks the sea had been still and flat as a sheet of lead, without a cloud in the sky.

The sail was furled. The sailors’ hands were raw with rowing toward the westering sun.

“It used to be much easier to sail there for a while, or so I’m told,” said Chiron. “There used to be a big island out here in the middle, though they charged an arm and a leg for a port call.”

During the last week they had lightened the load as much as possible. Now there was nothing left but food, water, the money bags and some extra canvas on board. Still the hours of flat calm dragged by.

Vegetius, Prorsus and Muccinus took turns at the oars, and Chiron stood helm though there was very little need to steer.

The sun came up abaft them every morning, and set before them each evening, and it seemed they had moved not at all.

They awoke to find themselves, the captain and bosun at one end of the vessel and the crew at the other. No one was rowing. The oars were shipped.

“Well,” said the captain. “What is it?”

One of the men stepped forward. “We’ve been without wind for seventeen days now. We row all day and night. We get nowhere.”

“There’s nothing for it but to put our backs in it and hope for wind,” said the captain.

“We could turn back.” There were grumbles behind him from the others.

There was a consultation with the passengers. “Out of the question,” said the captain. “We’re more than halfway there.”

“Says who?” yelled someone.

“Say I, and I’m the captain.”

“Well, then,” said the crew’s leader. “We could lighten the load.”

“What’s that?” asked Prorsus, suddenly taking an interest in the proceedings.

“You know what I mean, governor,” said the crewman, nodding his head sideways. “Why don’t we put the horsey over the side?”

“Quite right!” said Prorsus. He grabbed the sailor by crotch and tunic and pitched him over the railing. The man coughed and floundered in the glassy water.

“Next!” said Prorsus. “I figure three more make up for my friend Chiron here.” He opened his arms in a wrestler’s invitation. “Weight’s weight.”

No one came forward.

“Toss him a line,” said Prorsus.

They pulled the wet and strangling sailor back aboard.

“Do we understand each other?” Prorsus asked the assembled sailors.

“Aye, aye!” they said in one voice.

As if by some propitiatory magic, a dancing line of water moved toward them from the east. It caught up to and passed the ship. The frill of mane on Chiron’s back fluttered and a cool breeze blew into Vegetius’ right ear.

“Well, hell and damn!” yelled the captain to the crew. “Don’t you know wind when you feel it? Unfurl the fonkin’ sail!”

The canvas came down and filled, the ship groaned and jerked ahead, bearing them away from the morning sun. The sailors, among them the wet one, joined in “Old Neptune’s Song.”

They lowered the gangplank, and Chiron went down into the surf and onto the sandbar in the river estuary.

The shoreline was broken by trees and clearings. Here and there shaggy humped shapes grazed, some few stopping to watch, then returning to their forage. They looked like wisents only they had smaller horns.

Chiron turned to the ship.

“Fishing should be good all up the shore,” he said. “Won’t take long to replenish your stores. Good water, too. Follow the warm water north, then follow east when it turns. You’ll end up in Brittania or Hibernia. You know them, Captain?”

“I’m half tindigger,” he said. “I paint myself blue once a year when the mood overcomes me.”

Chiron laughed, then coughed, a hard wracking series of them. He leaned the upper half of his body against a tree, steadying himself with his right hand. Then he straightened and turned to walk away.

“Goodbye. Goodbye horsey. So long, Mr. Chiron,” they all yelled from the ship.

“Wait! Wait! The Hippiatrika?!” yelled Vegetius.

Chiron turned. “In the cave. On the table. The two unopened scroll tubes. Thank you, Renatus Vegetius. I will remember you always.”

He then turned, lifted his tail, his regrown hair and beard streaming in the wind like a white banner, and broke, for a few paces, into a canter, and disappeared through the nearest stand of trees, heading westward.

A yell of exultation and homecoming, of surrender and defiance rose up, startling some of the browsing creatures. Then it, too, like the drumming hoofbeats, echoed and died away westward.

“Back water and up sail, you sea hogs!” hollered the captain.

In the three years of life remaining to him, P. Renatus Vegetius returned home, retrieved the books in the cave, and incorporated the Hippiatrika into his great work on the diseases of mules, horses and cattle, the Mulomedicina.

Decius Muccinus, free and married, had twin sons whom they named Aurem and Renatus.

Nemo Prorsus became the Christian Bishop of Sardis.

On his deathbed, Renatus Vegetius looked around his room at his sisters and their husbands and children, at his newly-freed slaves, and at what few friends as had not preceded him in death.

About the only thing he regretted was never getting to hunt lions from a chariot in the wet marshlands of Libya.

He remembered one sunny day on a far shore half a world away, and the cry of happiness that had drifted back to him out of those woods.

What was killing a few old lions compared to what he had done?

He had helped a tired old friend get home.

Vegetius was still smiling when they put the coins on his eyes.