Easy is the descent to Hell
Black Dis gates stand open night and day.
Virgil
The Roman stood under the wall of the Insula Juna, listening to his wife crying in the room above.
The apartment was on the first floor of the block; in the street, it was but too easy to hear her lament, through the hot noisy afternoon air. Perhaps she cried more loudly only to be heard by him, her heartless husband. Once she detected the sound of his horse’s hoofs she might leave off.
Better get on then. Better allow her the chance.
He beckoned briskly, and the boy came from under the platanus tree with his cavalry mare. Vusca tipped him a silver denarius, that was the sort of times they were. The boy ran off, and the soldier mounted up and started the mare moving.
Lavinia’s threnody unravelled along the walls.
As he rode through the shadier back lanes around the temple of Venus, and out on to the broad East–West Road, he thought of Lavinia as she had been, the girl he married. He first saw her in an orchard, just west of the town. He had gone out for the hunting, and come back chastened by unsuccess. The sun was low behind him, the dusty road fringed with dark trees that glowed after the day as if they kept the heat. On a curve of land that looked down to the cemetery and the town’s west gate was a villa one always passed going this way. It was a modest building, by now in need of some repair. Like all Par Dis, it had seen kinder days. Then, over a low wall, appeared the orchard, and by the plum trees in the mellowed light, this girl. Her skin was luminous, succulent. Her dark hair, drawn back into a simple knot, had mostly come unbound. He fancied her at once, and hoped she was some nicely-dressed slave. But although she looked admiringly at him in his leather tunic, the casual-wear of the Fort, and as recognisable as full parade armour and cloak of Tyrian purple, she did not answer his polite greeting, and next ran away. She was fourteen. She was not a slave, either, as he presently managed also to find out. When he started to find excuses to go back along that road, when he started to gossip with the stray servants, or beg a drink of milk at the villa farm, when he saw her very often and realised that she herself found excuses to be there at such times as a passing officer might happen by, then he learned she was the ward of the house.
She was a Christian, as well. That he liked even less. He was himself a Mithrian, and had the mark between his brows. He sensibly worshipped Mars, too, the Warrior, for his profession, and gave seasonal respects to Jupiter the Father. The odd mysteries of Jusa Christos put him off, what he knew of them. It sounded like Greek Dionysos, without enough wine.
He began to frequent the house, though, and became friendly with her uncle, the guardian. He was allowed to talk to her, then, and here and there they sneaked off and furtively fondled. He saw he would only get what he wanted by marrying her and that there were advantages in that – for though rough, the villa had some money in it. Then he wondered if they would insist he become a Christian. But that was not their formula. Apparently he might do as he wished, providing he let her practise her own religion.
He saw later, once he had wedded and bedded Lavinia, had had her, and installed her in married quarters at the Insula Juna, that the whole point of this understanding was that she should then attempt to convert him, day and night long. Those were the first arguments.
He did not mind it too much. He was a Centurian Velitis. His bed was in the Fort.
She next withheld her favours, to punish him for not wanting some priest to push him in the river, half drown him, tell him all his sins were washed out, and now he must love his enemies.
“You forget, Vinia,” he said. “I’m a soldier. My enemies I kill.”
“The armies of the Emperor are upheld by Christian legionaries,” she said promptly. Obviously someone had told her what to say. It was probably true, and if it was, accounted maybe for the great running cracks that were dismantling the Empire. There were certainly no legions left by now in this hole of Par Dis where, like a fool, seven years before their meeting, he had got himself sent. Someone had said the best means to promotion were the difficult and savage postings. And Par Dis, with its town of baths and basilica and circus, was not even so bad. It had originated from some silver mines, hence the name (for Pluto-Dis, god of the Underworld and its riches). But the silver ran out after a few decades. The Empire had been ever-stretching in those days, however, and saw no harm in making a frontier station on the site. There were already roads, a fort, a native settlement. The walls and town were added. The river was useful in the trading way, and sometimes provided fine oysters.
The oysters were all gone now, like the silver and the two legions. Only men of the Auxilia, native companies under Roman officers, held the line in this flung forth province.
He had had his promotion. He had reached centurion, with a command of skirmish cavalry. There he stuck.
It was a curious idea: when he was travelling the miles here from Rome, to begin all this, Lavinia had been seven years old. For seven more she grew up, lying in ambush for him on the west road, coming out with the plums at the fatal moment.
When she would not have him, he went with the amiable whores at the She-Wolf. One evening the drunk uncle stormed to the Fort, and made a fool of himself (and of Vusca) over it. How could he (Vusca) be such a barbarian, wasting his strength on these women, neglecting his wife, when all she longed for was to bear him a son.
This turned out to be a fact. Lavinia had now decided to pine not only for a Christian husband, but for a baby.
She went and lived in the villa a while. When she returned to the married quarters, they were reconciled. She had become thin, scrawny with dis-satisfaction, or sadness. Her mouth turned down and there were two cut lines either side of it. He did his best. But he did not seem able to please her now, even in bed. They tried for her baby in grim sweaty grindings.
One day she was pregnant. He, less interested than she, made the correct offerings. He supposed she merely praised her ghastly slaves’ god, who refused presents with typical petulance.
It was a bad winter. There were wolves at the gates. Uncle went wolf-hunting and was mauled. He died a week later and when Lavinia heard she miscarried in the fourth month.
After this, she did not conceive again. They eventually left off the dutiful grindings. He went back to his whores and she went off to her Christ. When Lavinia met her husband, she would cry. She greeted him in tears as if after an absence of months. Then they would talk, attempting to be rational. But soon her niggling would commence, her whining. She could not seem to control it, like foul breath. At last he shouted, or he was cold, or he mocked her. Finally all he was able to do was leave her, and hear her crying again, from the street below. He tried to enact this repetitive scene as seldom as he might. He had only come here today because she sent him a wild message. He had got the impression she was ill.
But she only said she had had some dream. Her god had told her something or other. And that Vusca and she must return to full relations.
She was using her god now to drag in the erring spouse. If he had been a Christian, it might have worked. He could not think why she wanted him. As lovers they had nothing, and as two people, nothing.
She stood there, fragilely brittle and dry as a dead leaf somehow preserved. One tap, and she would be in pieces. His annoyance would not resist that. They might separate, he said. She was not, after all, by blood more than somewhat Roman, and had relatives in the north. Surely she would prefer to go to them. And perhaps, if there were a divorce, she might (he grimaced, who would want to?) remarry, more happily.
To a Christian, divorce was unacceptable.
She had not married a Christian, he reminded her.
He, she said, had undergone a Christian marriage.
To please her, he said.
He had loved her then, she said.
He apologised, which was cruel.
She cried. On his cue, he left her.
The East–West Road ran straight through the town, straight through the forum, with its market, law-courts, temples, straight on to the East Gate and the Fort. The plan of the town was still pure, whatever else crumbled, whatever slums accrued, the two highways unswerving as ruled lines, the original buildings symmetrical. Above the town, to the south, west, east and north, were the endless ups and downs of the hills that held the river valley. The route east, the view of the hills, even the bustle of the forum – when going in this direction – cheered Vusca up. The sight of the Fort itself, though it was the cradle of his disappointments (his life had had little besides), had a look of home which the Insula Juna never did.
Vusca was a man who preferred to be among men. He distrusted women, did not understand them. The life of the legions suited him, with its fellowship of the march, camp or barracks, the orderly routines marked out by trumpets. Though he had yearned in his youth for more active service, now even that had stopped its gnawing. The practice skirmishes of his corps of Velites ably substituted. He realised it was a kind of make-believe. They all indulged in it: the code – that they were ready to repel the hordes, and could do so; the symbol – of Rome astride the world for ever. Rome was not going to last. She was tearing her own heart out. For the hordes, they were those same smiling tribesmen who had their hutment the other side of the river, who bartered with the Fort and in the market, sent stray daughters to train in the brothel, or crossed the water entirely to take up Roman ways, like Lavinia’s grandfather. One knew the horde was still there, of course, behind the friendly obligement, the tunic or dalmatic. It could turn into a snarl, that smile. And then what? The other bet was, Rome would pull the Auxilia in as she had pulled in her legions already, leaving the frontiers bare, letting go. Then you must decide on marching home to the Mother you could scarcely remember. Or deserting.
No, Vusca did not delude himself. He simply, along with the other centurions, and doubtless the Pilum Commander, lived in the moment.
One thing, if the Auxilia was recalled, he could go to Rome and leave Lavinia here.
He was thinking of this in the forum, and its wryness amused him, when he saw a woman coming down the steps of the Temple of the Father and Mother.
There was nothing in that, everyone but the Christians – and sometimes even some of those – went to make offerings to Jupiter or Juna Anga. But she was not dressed like a Roman. Her garments looked more Eastern, and her face was covered by a wisp of veiling. There was an element in her walk, provocative, liberated, that suggested the hetaera rather than the she-wolf. A Greek prostitute’s freedom. No doubt she was a whore, for she had that other look, too.
Something about her aroused him, even as he sat on the horse fresh from Lavinia’s howling. Desire did not come so readily now. He wondered what it was about this one that stirred it. He was not even close enough to catch her perfume.
Behind her trotted a slave, hurrying with a parasol like a huge pansy-flower to shade her mistress. They went away towards the Julian Baths.
Vusca rode on towards the Fort.
“There’s a new woman. She’s set up house behind the Julian Baths. The chief Lupa’s roaring. Reckons this one will put her girls out of business.”
Dianus laughed, and the dark sunlight of evening glinted on his eyes and on the silver of his service bracelets.
“Ah?” said Vusca cautiously.
“An Eastern bit, or so they say. I’ve not been there. Yet. Her name’s some foreign thing, Lilu, Lillit – so they call her Lililla.”
“If she’s an Easterner, she’ll be a Christian.”
“The Christians can’t be whores, their thighs are done up,” said Dianus. “This one worships properly.”
“I maybe saw her,” said Vusca.
“You maybe did. Come and see her again. Or do you want to go back to your wife?”
It was dusk, and up on the roof-walk of the Light Tower the men were igniting the brazier. As they walked away from the Fort, the flame fountained behind them, Dis Light, for a guide to the river traffic, for a warning to any dreamer on the hills: Rome is here, and Rome is still awake.
The evening was thundery, close and hot. Fireflies blinked in the bushes of a garden. Dianus swaggered. He was not a man Vusca had ever liked, but yet, like a brother he had grown up with, he was accustomed to him, prepared to be loyal.
A trumpet sounded gates from the Fort rampart, now several streets behind. The whole town took its timing from there, rising with the sun at cockcrow, securing its door at gates. All but the wine-shops and eating houses which were blooming out on the dark like the fireflies.
They did not go by way of the forum, but cut around to the south. Beyond the Julian Baths was a maze of side lanes. Here Dianus located a modest house that had once belonged to a minor official of the basilica. A baker’s that took up the front was closed, but over the house door hung a shining lamp of expensive Aegyptian alabaster.
Dianus rapped on the door.
After a pause, a male voice spoke up. “Who’s there?”
“I,” said Dianus flirtatiously, “and a friend.”
“Which house are you seeking?” obtusely demanded the porter through the door.
“The house of Lililla.”
“This is that house. Is my mistress known to you?”
“Soon she will be,” said Dianus. And losing patience, battered on the door.
A growl answered from within, not human but canine. Dianus stepped off.
“By the Victory! I think there’s a real wolf in there.”
“Take yourself away,” advised the porter, over the growling. “My mistress receives no one without invitation. There are men and dogs here.”
“So I can tell,” bawled Dianus. “Keep her then, your bloody mistress. But she’d have done better not to fall out with the Fort.” He waited, listening to see if this did any good. It did not. With a volley of oaths Dianus strode off. Vusca kept pace. He was more tickled than anything. Whores came three to the denarius, but this one, as he had suspected, traded by the Greek mode.
He considered the woman Lililla slowly. This was not the hot haste of his passages along the west hill after Lavinia. Lililla was available for an honest price. The dealings of harlotry, if not of women, he grasped.
Eight mornings later, when the drills, and a store inspection, were over, Retullus Vusca went up to the forum and searched among the stalls and shops. He ended up in the cave of discreet Barbarus (a blond hill tribesman, now more civilised-Latinised than half the town, and capable of speaking Greek more honed than the Pilum Commander’s, though this latter was not difficult). Here was found a suitable article. A painted vase of Aegyptian nard – a most generous, but not effusive, down-payment. It was dispatched to the house of Lililla by one of Barbarus’ own sons. The papyrus read: “This from your admirer Centurion Velitis Re. Vusca. If he calls upon you this evening, may he hope not to be refused?”
A smaller papyrus reached him before sunset at the Fort.
It answered: “Lord, I touch your gift to my heart. Come.”
This time the door was opened and the porter bowed.
Lamplight, and a pleasant foreign smell of other oils and incenses filled the lobby. The atrium was the old way – it was an old house – partly unroofed, with a tank of water, but it had been made attractive with Greek lamps and the paint redone on the walls. At the shadow’s edge stood a man with two wolfhounds on leash, just visible, a tactful reminder.
In the central room Rome ceased, and Par Dis too. It became an Eastern pavilion. Silk ropes, draperies, images of ivory. On glowing charcoal burned sticks of something that the Pharaohs might have favoured.
Vusca found himself suddenly excited and nervous, like some boy.
He planted himself firmly, and as the slave went out, looked round and saw the woman, Lililla.
She reclined on a couch, in a fringed robe that gleamed like water even as she breathed. Her lips were nacred and her eyes all kohl. She got up without hurry, and came towards Vusca. When she reached him, she kneeled down with the liquid boneless movement of a snake. She brushed his foot with her fingers and got up again, and looked into his face.
“The centurion honours me,” she said. Her voice was low.
He discovered he had no words. He had meant to play her game with her, all courtesy and fakes. But everything about her was sex. Though she was not to be tumbled like the she-wolves, heated and quick, every line of her said Take me.
He would have to leave it all to her.
Perhaps that was the idea.
She conducted him to the couch, and gave him a wine bowl of silver. Lovers performed acts thereon that, when he caught glimpses, startled him. The wine was black and spicy. Something in it?
Soon, she made him lie back upon the couch. She undid his clothes with damning competence. She began to do things to his body, with her hands, with a fan of feathers she took up, with smooth strigils of enamel. He need do nothing. She worked on him like a complacently smiling physician. She removed her own garment only when he had showed himself ready, as if to reward him. She was small, with round breasts, round heavy hips, an indented waist, strong thighs. Her feet and ankles, like her hands and wrists, her face, were delicately shaped. She was fleshy but firm, like a satiny fruit. Her lips were the same. When she absorbed his penis into her mouth he was half alarmed. She seemed to have no teeth. When she drew on him, he almost could not check himself. He held back with some trouble, wanting to possess her. She seemed to read this from his eyes, let him go and mounted him, and took him in again at the second mouth, the mouth he wanted most.
She performed all the labour, she also controlled him with a wicked, subservient mastery, not permitting him to ejaculate at first, reining him by a strange pressure at the base of the column. When his seed did spurt, it came in a convulsion. He had seldom if ever known a climax so intense. He found, astonished when she removed herself from him, that she had also penetrated him.
She went away briefly, while he lay there, and returned freshly robed, carrying the wine-cup, which she offered on her knees.
Unlike the other whores, she had made no pretence of her own pleasure. Neither had she shown a whore’s aversion, any impatience or indifference. She had been created for his use. It was as natural as that.
When he had drunk the wine and sat up, she said, “It grieves me that my lord must leave me so soon. But I too have some tiresome business that must be completed this evening. I shall number the days, until my lord’s return.”
Vusca was better able to take up the game, now. He said, “I’d meant to buy you a present, Lililla, but found nothing worthy of you. If I left this purse, perhaps you may know of some small thing that might divert you a moment?” He reached among his clothes and handed her the purse, open just enough she could see he had been generous again.
“My lord’s kindness will enhance any gift a thousand times,” said she.
Vusca was aware his kindness would go straight into the coffer.
When he left he was untired, for she had done all the work, and the extreme ejaculation seemed to have robbed him of nothing. He felt fit and jaunty, and congratulated himself on having found her. Though she was rather costly, he could afford a luxury now and then. He had no others.
He began to visit Lililla quite regularly every third or fourth week. He did not know who her other clients were (certainly not Dianus). They were reticent, and so was he.
He and she never talked, beyond short beginning and concluding euphemisms. She wanted no conversation. She wanted, though never appeared interested in, only money. On several occasions, if he was willing, they did things he had never before heard of, let alone experienced. These things were never strenuous on his part, and she seemed a creature with wax for bones. She always welcomed him smiling, and with an obeisance. Her face was not loving, or liking, bored or sly. It simply was, without pretence. She was perfect.
Until, near the summer’s end, Retullus Vusca went to the house of Lililla and everything altered.
That was a rainy twilight, with a lilac tinge to the hills and sky. Even the stones and plaster, the tiled roofs, had a mauve, wet, lizardskin sheen.
He knocked, the porter admitted him. In the lobby he smelled that the aroma of the place was wrong. The gums burning were swarthier, more cloying. In the tank of the atrium the rain plopped. They walked around under the covered area, and the man with the dogs was absent.
The central room was in a mist, a sort of damson gloaming like the streets outside.
The slave shut the doors. Vusca saw where the smoke came from. A large skull, perhaps of a bear, sat on one of the inlaid tables, and resins were fuming out of it.
She was on the far side, dim through the smitch.
He said harshly, “By the Bull, can’t you get rid of that thing.”
Then she stood up, and he saw, with a peculiar clutch somewhere in his loins, that she was clad like some kind of priestess. One breast was bare, and her body bound in a tight garment crossed diagonally by white fringes. On her head was a wig of mulberry black, in ringlets with silver discs on them. Her arms were gripped by bangles of slick black lacquer.
Was this some new sexual gambit? He did not care for it if it was.
“Lililla –” he said.
She said, “Lord, I have had omens. When this happens, I am not my own. Come here, you must attend.”
He was disgusted. Very nearly frightened. And there was the same slithering in his veins he had felt at the initiation to the Rites of Mithras, when he was only seventeen.
He had a veneration for the gods. After a minute, he went to her, and when she told him to sit, did so, gazing at her through the choking smut from the skull.
Presently she started to croon, to sway like a serpent. He thought of the sybils, inhaling volcanic vapours, prophesying, reading riddles. He did not want this to occur. He did not want any of this. He decided, sourly, if she was prone to this, he would not come here again. It was a shame, but he might have known there would be a flaw.
She stopped crooning and swaying.
The smoke was thick in his nostrils, his mouth seemed coated by it. Through the pillar she abruptly said, “You have never had any luck, centurion. Should you relish some?”
It was so unlike her way of speaking to him. Even the timbre of her voice was higher and slightly shrill.
He said, “Don’t be impertinent. I don’t come to you for this. I respect your gods, but my business is my own.”
“I spoke of luck. Is it not true? All you hanker for you miss. Your days with the legions left you here. Your promotion you did not have. Your wife is barren and not fair. If you go to hunt, you kill nothing. If you dice, you take the Dog.”
“You’ve been asking questions about me,” he said. He added, measured, “You bitch, don’t forget who I am. Rome is the power here. Insult me, you insult Rome.”
“Rome is far off. You are not Rome. You are a man who stinks of his disappointments. All your days are marked with blots. I say again, should you wish to change it?”
He swore at her. (How different from the rest, this ultimate dialogue they had managed!) His mind said clearly, She speaks only the fact. Whether she has gossiped or is wise, she does not lie. I am who she says. Change it? Yes, I could wish that.
Just then the smoke in the bear’s skull flattened in a most striking way, as if some vortex sucked it down.
He could see her directly now, before him. Her face was white, her eyes like pebbles. This did not seem to be Lililla. Something had taken possession of her for sure. Some god. Some thing.
“If,” she said, or the god said, through her, “you accept what is offered to you, reach into the skull. Remove what is there.”
Vusca found it hard to look away from her. He made himself do so, looked at the fuming skull instead. The smoke was almost laid now. It clotted in the cavities of the skull-eyes, foamed at the rim. Still he could not see past it, into the hollow case.
“If you accept,” the woman repeated, “reach in. Remove what is there. It will be yours.”
Suddenly, like a boy who is dared, he could not put it off. He thrust his hand, or as much of it as he could, into the baked smoke. And felt something on the hot crusts of the gums. He brought it out. It was warm, glassy, black with the smoke as his hand now was. He brought forward a piece of his damp cloak and rubbed, and the mauve rain-light of sky and hills was shining there on his palm.
It was a small oblong of amethyst, an amulet, presumably, for it was incised with the figure of some protective deity – Vusca scrutinised this, uncertain of its form.
Lililla said, “You have taken it now.”
“Yes, I’ve taken it. But it’s precious, this stone.”
“You gave me gifts, lord,” she said. “I render to you a gift.” It was the other Lililla, the perfect harlot. He looked, and saw she had returned, and was kneeling there beyond the table, with blood behind her skin and sight in her eyes. Even the wig and the costume looked only garish now. It was the smiling face of mere being. “The amulet is from Aegyptus,” she said, “the wine-stone.”
“That is Thot, then,” he said, “cut into the surface.”
The image had a man’s body, a bird’s head. Thot, the Mercurius of the Aegyptians, was bird-headed.
Lililla did not reply. She went away as Vusca sat there staring at the jewel, turning it in his hand. That she should give him something of high price seemed odd. Perhaps her gods truly had made her.
The stone was no longer hot. It had assumed the temperature of his palm. It seemed made of his own flesh, only harder, and more smooth.
The woman came back with her hair loose and her silks, carrying the lewd silver cup.
Vusca stood.
“No,” he said.
She stood in her turn, looking at him. She continued only to smile and only to be.
“I’ve left the money on the table,” he said. “This jewel’s worth more.” He said, to test her, “Do you want it back after all?” And made a movement, as if to hand it to her.
At that she gave ground. She stepped off three or four steps, quickly. The smile stayed. She shook her head, smiling.
“No, lord. My omens told me. Yours.”
“I never heard of a woman of your sort,” he said, “giving the client a payment.”
If she had fallen on him with all her most cunning caresses and amazing tricks, he could not have had her, not then. She had spoilt all that.
As for the jewel, probably it was some stained crystal. If it would be lucky – well, he was due a little luck.
It was dry dark outside. Dogs were baying a rising moon.
He walked down to the north wall, had a drink with the sentry captain at the river gate. Below, the water spread to catch the moonlight, and on the other side were the thatched huts of the native Par Disans.
Rome was far away. Perhaps this very hour, she was burning again, broken. They would be the last to know.
A day later Dianus, meeting him by the quartermaster’s cubicle, informed Retullus Vusca the lily whore had decamped. She and all her trappings had vanished away in a night. The house was empty. Hopefuls, who went in to rummage, found nothing worthwhile. Someone said the Lupa at the She-Wolf had paid her off.
On his hard bed in the officers’ block, Vusca asleep was walking through a long narrow corridor whose ceiling almost brushed his head. The walls were whitewashed, but took no light until the way opened into a courtyard. In the dream, Vusca glanced about ironically, responding as he tended to, to foreign things. The walls of the court, like the corridor, were whitewashed and painted over, with lions and chariots. The other end of the court gave on a flight of white steps going down to dark water under a tight drum-skin of heat-drained sky. Palms grew against the steps, and in the water pale cupped lilies and purple-coloured lotuses.
An overblown altar stood in the court near the water-steps and a man was making an offering there. He was naked but for a kilt of dressed skins. His body glimmered like metal from sweat or from oil; his hair and beard were curled. The incense steamed on the altar, it had an overpowering smell, almost kitcheny, like something cooked or fried, like offal, and like musky sweet things, too.
The altar was carved with creatures that had male bodies, wings, the heads of lions, rams, birds.
Sun hammered out the river. The man’s flesh and hair shone. The streamer of incense rose.
Nothing else happened.
When Vusca woke, the trumpets were sounding the third watch. Here, it was night. Known, every angle and shadow of the cell, its two chests, the lamp, the chair which had once been uncle’s at the villa, the weapons on the wall and the bearskin he had bought from Barbarus one bitter winter. Beyond the door, left open, the mathematical Roman yard, with a ray of light playing down from the torch on the Praetorium wall.
Vusca heard the trumpets out. Then turning on his side, returned into sleep, and did not dream again.
On the evening of the Wall Walk, the Commander elected to lead the squadron. Formerly, there had been a manned sentry-post for every half mile of town wall. In the lax climate that now prevailed, only ten posts were kept up, besides the south, west and river gates.
Every month, at the Calends Moon, one of the ranking centurions took the Walk, a tour of the entire wall, which lasted upwards of four hours. The Fort mason was supposed to accompany the presiding centurion, but normally contented himself with a question or two the following day. Otherwise, the Walker was supported by his adjutant and a block of ten of his men who would have been happier in the Fort. For the Pilum Commander, he seldom if ever took the Walk, as he seldom bothered now with the Night Inspection, delegating this also to his Centurion Secundo or whatever officer was most handy.
Vusca had overseen Nights more times than he could count, and the Wall Walk nearly as often. He learned that he was not to escape on this occasion either. The Old Man wanted both the mason and Vusca for escort, with ten Velites (who as usual would fret and feel insulted, since for the Walk even the cavalry went on foot. In the old days a skirmisher division would never had been put on such a duty. But then.)
Dianus spoke scathingly of the Commander. “What’s stirred him up? Afraid the Emperor’s watching from afar?”
Vusca shrugged. He despised the Pilum Commander, who liked wine too much and spoke Greek like a pimp and Latin like the fishmongers’ descendant he was. Long ago, Vusca had partly hated the man. Yet even in those days Vusca served him impeccably. A soldier must honour the command, if not the dross which might fill it. One did not tarnish one’s own vow because of a fool, a stroke of rotten luck. Nor did one, like Dianus, yap about his faults. It was part of the great pretence that every commander be sufficient.
They started out just after gates. There was still a flush of light in the west, mauvish (like that other night). It was autumn weather now, and the remainder of the sky swagged low with cloud. They would probably get a wetting before the Walk was done, which made it stranger still their comfort-loving Pilum had decided on it.
He strutted ahead, like a barrel on legs, in that dress armour of his with the inlay of silver, iron cap plumed with its white coxcomb, and the Tyrian cloak swaggering, full of wind. He was jovial too, and cracked the odd joke with the mason. Centurion Velitis Vusca kept the proper number of paces to the rear, his Velites marching with a dull clink and clash behind him. At the manned posts, the Commander received the salute with theatrical earnestness. He spoke to the handful of sentries, encouraging them in the wind and light spat of rain that was beginning, as if enormous enemy battalions lay below on the garnering night. A couple of times, he called Vusca up. The second time it was: “That man to be disciplined. Sloppy. Probably drunk.” Vusca accepted the criticism on the man’s behalf. His name was Quintus. He had bad teeth and sometimes dosed himself with poppy. It was irregular but understandable. And was the drug more distracting than constant pain? The Commander, of course, knew nothing of any of this.
They got down to the river gate inside the first hour, the tour had gone briskly thus far.
The Pilum paused for a drink with the sentry captain, complained about Quintus, had another cup against the dank evening.
Out on the wall again, behind the Commander’s cocksure, rolling advance, Vusca heard one of his men mutter, “He thinks he’s going to his Triumph.”
Vusca, for once, saw fit to be deaf.
In the second hour, marching over against the north-west hills, the rain began to come from Jupiter’s slingers. It lashed the right cheek, whistled into the right ear, blinkered the right eye. They tramped on, shimmering iron men with seaweed cloaks. That clown, with his damned plumes, carved through the rain, wine-insured against the weather.
They reached the west gate. This time Vusca was invited to join the drinking. He touched the flagon with his lips.
The core of the storm came when they were on the western stretch, with the rain striking their backs.
For some reason, Vusca thought of a minor engagement in hill country, all of thirteen years ago. The downpour had started in the hour before battle, slanting on the ranks, and up had gone the shields, to make a tortoise against the rain. He was reminded of the sound of it now, a barrage like nails, hitting those hundred or so crossed lightnings, torches, the Medusa faces and snake hair washed and slapped. They had fought in the rain too, skidding and sinking in the mud, while the sky flickered with levin-bolts. They won, that went without saying. When the tempest lessened, the barbarians lay everywhere, while the rain gently cleansed their wounds. His infantry shield remained with him to this day. It had a hole through one of the Medusa eyes where someone had almost finished his unpromising career.
A white crack suddenly wrecked the sky. Everything leapt out stark and dead, a place with no dimensions, colours or shadows. Lightning was here, too.
Then came the boom and shock of heavenly ballistas.
One of the Velites shook himself as he marched, with a rattle. Water down the neck.
Not alone in that, thought Vusca. He watched the Commander rolling on ahead, impervious it seemed. Even the mason had dropped back. The next manned sentry-post was visible, ten minutes away, and below, the town, wild on this side, bothies and brothels, though along the slope the ruined circus stood up like a raised scar.
Vusca turned his head and saw, across the streaming night, the dim glows of the easterly town, the spark of Dis Light on the Light Tower. He felt together a dismal sense of futility and a raw pride. He had come to care for it, this outcast place. Perhaps, when Rome was only a pile of rubble, Par Dis in exile might survive.
More rain went down his neck like a cold lesson. Remember you are mortal.
So much for the whore’s amulet. Even now, like a dolt, he had it in a pouch round his neck. It surely failed to keep him dry.
And then the world blew up.
There was just a dot of white and then a drench like fire. As he flew, turning, falling, he thought, quite distinctly, he had known something like it before, but he did not know where or when – an earthquake maybe, or a nightmare.
He landed hard, bruised on the metal of his armour. He lay and thought about this, and then he found a heap of armoured men tumbling over him like clanking puppies.
He pulled himself out and to his knees, and saw the mason running in a circle screaming. He was naked, and his body smoked.
“By the bowels of the Bull,” said Vusca, standing up.
He seemed to be lightheaded. Drunk after all? He fought the urge to laugh. He lifted his hands. They were scalded. He put up these scalded hands, and touched his singed hair and brows.
The mason fell down.
Beyond, three sentries were pelting up the wall towards them.
The terrible rumbling was only thunder.
Something was on fire.
Something was burning there, just past the mason, between him and the running soldiers.
It was all that was left of the Pilum Commander.
“Jupiter, Father Jupiter,” moaned one of the Velites.
Vusca had the urge to laugh again. He held it down.
“It will be yours,” said the Centurion Secundo. “Not a man here doubts it.”
Vusca did not want to seem like some blushing virgin. But he was afraid too of what had always happened in the past.
“It may be you,” he said.
“You’ve seen more service than I. I’m content.”
The authority would not come from Rome. There was, at the moment, power enough in Gallia to settle this. A few more days, and he would know.
The Velites carried on as if they already did know. How not, when Father Jupiter himself had made the choice? He had struck down the Pilum with his own divine thunderbolt, and left Retullus Vusca and his men unscathed but for a memento of crisped hair. (The mason, though he lived, did not count.)
The authority came at the end of the month, slipshod as things always were now, all language. But the seal was the correct one.
Vusca went out to look at his troops.
They cheered their new Pilum with willing lungs.
He was surprised. He had never thought himself popular, had been sure he was not.
His heart was in his mouth. That moment, perhaps, was the apex of his life.
Lavinia wrote him a letter, and for days he put off reading it, for she seemed only able to say, think, accomplish one thing: misery, complaints, and tears on paper were little improvement on the personal hand-to-hand variety.
Eventually he did read the letter. It was very simple.
She had been a poor wife to him. She regretted this. She wanted to go and live in the villa. If he preferred to divorce her, she acceded. On his advancement she praised him. It was only as he deserved.
He had come to realise there would be monetary complications if they divorced. Besides, he had no plan to remarry. He doubted that Lavinia had. She did not mention it.
He pondered his answer. At last, he preferred not to put anything into writing. He would go to visit her instead, at the Insula Juna. If she really was contrite, she might be quiet. Perhaps she would not cry. He could tell her she could live at the villa, he made no demands. He was sorry for her, and did not want her always on his conscience. He had not seen her for months.
In the dream, he recognised the bearded man, his kilt and oiled muscular body. They walked as if physically together along a white platform, under the leaning wall of a white building. The sky was the drum-skin sky Vusca had seen before, but smooring into darkness. Stars came out. The white glazing caught the starlight, and Vusca saw three shadows falling before them. He was astonished to cast a shadow himself, more curious as to the third. He turned to see who made the third shadow, which was of an odd shape.
No one was there.
She had done something different to the room. It looked brighter, even in that dull daylight. A bowl of purple grapes had white flowers wreathed among them; a local shawl he had never seen before was draped prettily across a couch.
Lavinia came to greet him. For a minute, he did not know her.
“How well you’re looking,” he said lamely, staring.
She had gained weight. Her skin was fresh, her forearms, her throat, were rounded as they had not been since she was sixteen. The linear cuts in her face had filled out and were gone. She wore her hair a new way, not Roman, more Greek, with a ribbon across her forehead. She was not old, ten years his junior. Suddenly he remembered.
She waited on him as she had been used to do when they were first together, sending the slave away. She was very soft. She said very little. She left it all to him.
In the end he was lost for words.
Then she said, “Do you think I’ve changed?”
He looked. He said, “Yes.”
She told him why.
“I’m not a Christian any more.”
She said she had failed all the Christian precepts, although she had tried so hard. She went around with her heart withering, blaming him, blaming God. Then, on the forum, she saw a procession from the Isis Temple. That afternoon she went there. It was not, she assured him, a hive of orgiastic rites. The religion had altered. It had to do with Woman. Lavinia had found herself at the cool feet of the statue. She said that suddenly the terrible gnawing, which had been feeding on her for years, was lifted out of her. She made an offering and joined the prayers. After this, she went regularly to the temple. She had not forgotten the Christos, she said, but it was a religion she was too weak to follow. Isis, who understood, had redeemed her. She could be at peace, now.
She could let him go, now.
Vusca hesitated. Then he said, “It isn’t necessary. A divorce.”
“But Retullus,” she said, “you have an important command. You’ll want to marry again. Get children. Your name can become illustrious.”
“Who should I marry here?” he said. “Some native girl, or a harlot?” Lavinia lowered her eyes. “Let’s leave things as they are,” he said. “We needn’t bother each other.”
“My dear,” she said, “I’ll always love you. But let me go to the villa. Then I won’t be in your way.”
He was embarrassed, but not displeased.
“Of course,” he said, “except – why not keep here until spring? The winter’s nearly on us, snow, wolves – you’ll winter better in the town.”
“If you wish,” she said. She smiled. “Whatever you say.”
Her eyes were limpid. He longed suddenly to embrace her, kiss her lips. She was the girl he had seen in the orchard, or the woman that girl had never before become.
But he did not kiss or embrace Lavinia. He stayed only as long as courtesy required. When he left, she did not cry.
The winter truly was a harsh one. The snows came sweeping down; the river froze. All night the wolves howled in the voices of lost souls that could not find the way back to Avernus.
Added to the normal duties of the Fort were the tasks of winter. The roads were kept clear, the surrounding stations open in case horses might be needed. Even during the blizzards, Dis Light unlidded its nocturnal eye.
In the Commander’s quarters above the Praetorium, Vusca relentlessly attended to the business of the outpost Empire. There was no time to think of anything much beyond work.
Only once or twice he took the amethyst out of the pouch around his neck, and set it down in the brazier light, to study.
Had it changed his fortune?
Had it invited the Thunderer to strike? Had it whispered to the musing powers in Gallia until it brought him the staff of office? And had it borne Lavinia to the feet of Isis?
One twilit day, going over the bridge near the Fort gate, back from a successful winter hunt, Vusca’s horse slid on the ice. He should have gone off, into the iron water, maybe under the panes of the ice itself, from which probably he would never have surfaced. But somehow neither he nor the mare fell.
He played dice now and then, with his centurions, to see. He got a reputation for winning. Perhaps they only let him.
Sometimes there were the strange dreams. He had become used to the platforms and corridors, the court above the lotus water. To the bearded man, a Semite of some variety, conceivably a priest or prince, for Vusca had seen him now both naked, and decorated in silver and jewels, a kilt with fringes, a diadem. He performed rituals at the altar in the court, or in an underground space where something towered away, dark into darkness, and only the offering fire gave any clue. Nothing spectacular or significant ever occurred.
When he dreamed of the man, the priest-prince or magician, or of the places he inhabited, Vusca went armed with memory. He knew, even asleep, he had been there before.
The dreams did not worry him, at first. Then only the recurrence disturbed him. As soon as time allowed, he meant to seek a diviner at the temple of the Father and Mother. But that winter there was not much time, except for sleep.
He did pay a few visits to his wife. His intention was to ensure she had not suffered by staying in the town, that she lacked for nothing. Sometimes he lingered. He got into the way of dining with her, of spending an evening with her. Their conversations were neutral. He spoke of the Fort and its management, or they discussed aspects of the town. He found these interludes to be comfortable, pleasing. She did her best for him. She had learned how to be gracious. They never slept together, as if such things did not exist. He preferred that. It was sex that seemed to have upset the equilibrium before, along with Christianity. Now she had Isis, and for him there were always the she-wolves. But he did not want a woman very often; he supposed that even Lililla would have palled, she had been only a novelty.
As the year turned over towards spring, and the tall clepsydra in the Praetorium began once again to drip and to tell time, Vusca, who had been feeling a little done in, was laid up a day and a night with mild fever. He put the amethyst under his bolster, to keep it out of the way, for the Fort physician was a busy old boy.
Near morning, Vusca thought he dreamed how the amulet was made.
It was not the underground place, though it seemed the priest-prince had come from there. He was walking in the starlight back across the platform, white as the snow of Par Dis in that boiling Eastern night, that had the whiff both of marsh and desert. Together, they entered the low door, passed through the fox-run of the corridor, and came into the court of painted walls.
Going down the stair to the river, the native of the dream took Vusca with him, and gave him a first – and as it transpired, final – glimpse, through the palms, over the water, to the distant bank. Other buildings arose there, raised on platforms as was this, and one ascending in a series of terraces, a pyramid of seven steps. Huge clumps of reeds grew beneath the further bank, and something swam there, some colossal snake it looked, but the priest paid it no heed.
Leaning down, he drew up from the water a sort of basket, and in the basket lay a fish. It had been dead some while, and at a touch, its belly parted to disgorge a lilac-tinted counter.
The purpose of the fish, if it had been made to ingest the jewel, or miraculously had been caught with it already swallowed, Vusca did not ascertain.
The priest plucked the amethyst and carried it to the altar with the creatures carved around.
There the jewel was anointed with oils, beer, milk, and other liquids, and words spoken above it (a sluggish murmuring and chanting Vusca had heard the man give vent to previously). At last the priest moved away, right against the wall, as if to become one with the paintings on it.
The jewel lay on the altar.
It lay there a long while. Then it began to glow. It was like a lilac flame, balanced on the altar stone. One flame – then three. Just above, two other lights had kindled.
In the dream, Vusca, pressed back to the wall with the priest, experienced a gust of fear. It was the correct terror of holy and profane things he had no right to witness. But he was trapped and had no choice.
What burned above the jewel were the eyes of one of the beasts carved in the altar. He could not see which it was, and did not need to. The shape was on the amulet.
The jewel blazed and the eyes of the bird-thing blazed, and there was otherwise a deepening darkness and a terrific silence that seemed to shriek.
Presently the three lights faded. As starshine returned into the court, Vusca thought he saw, for a moment, a shadow cast up against the wall, thrown by a third figure that was not there.
The fever had broken in a sweat. When he could, he shifted the amulet away from him. It felt hot from contact with him, even through the pouch. That was the beginning of his unease.
When he came into his quarters on the third occasion and felt that someone else had recently been there, he went to the door and called the sentry in.
“Who’s been here in my absence?”
The sentry looked surprised.
“No one, sir.”
Vusca’s soldier’s instinct, the same that had made him able once or twice to sense ambush or treachery, told him flatly that, though the sentry did not lie, neither did the ambience of the rooms. The smell was even wrong. Not of men and a man’s belongings, leather, metal, papers, the charcoal and logs in the brazier. Something – almost female.
“Concentrate,” said Vusca to the sentry. “Now.”
The sentry began to roll his eyes.
“Yes, sir. Something’s been in.”
Vusca crossed to the window. The glazed pane was in place and below the drop ran down sheer thirteen feet to the yard. A sentry on the adjacent tower stood alert and unmoved.
There was no explanation, and being inexplicable, it was put aside. Nothing had been damaged, there was no theft. The sense of a presence evaporated quickly.
Thereafter it would happen, or not, apparently as it chose. Once the guard on the door himself reported he had caught a noise inside, during the Commander’s absence. He went to see, and investigated the two rooms, finding them vacant. He admitted that it might have been a rat or mouse. It was a kind of soft scratching he had heard, as if something clawed stole over the floor.
Vusca was tired. He awoke tired, and at night, lying down exhausted, could not sleep, hearing the trumpets through the hours till it was nearly dawn. Something nagged at him. He did not know what it was. It was as if he had forgotten some vital task. He would get up and light the lamp, and check his itinerary at the table. It was nothing to do with the Fort, this forgotten matter. It oppressed him. It never went away. If he slept he even dreamed of it (the other dreams seemed to have come to an end). He dreamed of worrying at forgetting, of trying to remember. He roused agitated, still trying. There was nothing to remember. He had seen to it all.
He hoped spring would lift the malaise. Spring did not. He could not consult the Fort physician, since then word would be round the barracks in half a morning, that he was sick. He visited a healer on the town’s west side, who prescribed an oily draught. It made him sleep. He could scarcely wake up at all. And the nagging, the non-existent forgotten thing, went on nibbling away at him.
Something had made him take off the amethyst. He stored it in a box of bits and pieces, wrapped in its pouch.
One pale evening, as the days began perceptibly to lengthen, his Centurion Secundo, coming in to make some report, was obviously curious at finding Vusca alone. When pressed, the centurion said he had seen, so he thought, two figures at the window above the Praetorium, and meeting no one on the stair – “Oh,” said Vusca, “I had the soldier in from the door a moment.”
A month later, he saw it for himself. He had been waiting, in his heart of hearts, aware he was haunted. He had seen the form before. He was not startled, only afraid.
He had taken a mouthful of the healer’s draught, and slept, and woke suddenly, as if at a loud cry.
But there was no noise. The room was pitch black, but for the thinner darkness of the window. And across the window passed the creature from the amulet.
It was visible for less than a second, yet it left an imprint on his sight, as on the jewel. A tall, provisionally masculine outline, but winged, clawed, and with the hook-beak head of a bird.
Vusca heaved himself up and lighted the lamp. He shook so much that he could not manage it at first. But nothing came near him, and when the light poured out the room seemed empty. He knew it was not. Like a child, he left the lamp to burn all night, sitting bolt upright on the bed.
And that was the beginning of his terror.
That spring Lavinia had joined the circle of initiates at her temple. This, he had to admit, as well as his position, assisted Vusca. Isis was not his goddess, but he had adequate reverence for her, which he demonstrated with a showy offering at the altar. She was depicted in decent Roman matron’s garb, a crown of corn on her head, and a moon in her hand from which shivered drops of crystal “tears.” After the offering, he was taken to a cell where a priest of the upper tier received him. The man was shaven, jaw and skull, in the Aegyptian way, nothing like the priest of the dream.
Vusca did not prevaricate. He told the truth. A harlot had given him an amulet, quite precious, and he had found it benign. But latterly it had brought on some illness that deprived him of energy, though physicians pronounced him fit. Also, an entity was expelling itself from the stone, a ghost, that was sometimes to be viewed, and which seemed to become stronger as he, Vusca, weakened. The priest, Vusca concluded, must say nothing of this to anyone. The Commander’s respect for the goddess would not prevent his punishing an abuse of trust.
The bald priest, face like an egg, regarded him gravely.
“You may trust me.”
Then Vusca got out the amulet and put it before the priest.
“Here. She said it was Aegyptian.”
“No,” said the priest, looking at it, not touching it. “She misled you.”
“I thought that was the case.” Vusca spoke, less decidedly of the dreams. He had to fumble after them now. They had no coherence. The priest, however, listened carefully.
When Vusca finished, the priest said, “I must consult another, more widely-versed than I in these things. Do you allow me to tell him what you’ve said?”
“If you must.”
“Yes.”
“When shall I return?”
“Tomorrow night, before the third watch.” (Even this temple told time by the Fort.) “I’ve seen it, now take it away with you.”
Vusca went, dissatisfied and nervous. He had not told Lavinia the truth, only that he wished the services of a diviner, and would like to favour her own chosen temple. He thought she guessed there was some other problem.
After he had done the Night Inspection and retired to his rooms, he sat by the lamp and accepted that the presence prowled about him. Now and then, something caused the lamp to flicker, although it was a windless night. A faint aroma, like musk and blood mixed, was barely detectable. The shadow appeared plainly once, twice, against the plastered wall, where his legionary’s sword was hanging, the old infantry shield, the knives, the dented breast-plate with the gouge of the axe-man’s dying anger –
The shadow was, and then it was not.
The thing he found the hardest to bear was that it should be here that he was attacked, in this place which represented for him security, totality, reason – here –
He fell into deathly sleep at last, over the table.
The creature from the amethyst had sucked up his bad luck, and now it sucked his life. He dreamed he was with Lililla. She too sucked upon him, in that way she had taught him. He felt no pleasure but he knew he would spend his seed and she would swallow it. Her eyes were a weird dull mauve, and had no mind or soul inside them.
Three of the priests were in the chamber where he was led the second night. Lamps burned; other than a small statue of the goddess, nothing and no one else was there.
“You told me one other priest,” Vusca said.
“For this, three are necessary.”
It was pointless to practise hauteur and the Might of Rome now. He was as much at their mercy as under the surgeon’s saw.
“Very well. What will be done?”
The fattest of the priests, who had a blond skin (a barbarian in Isis’ order), approached him and said, in the beautiful Greek so many of them mastered: “Commander, the amulet the woman gave you is like this: it is, as you found, benign, but then it turns. Before the first symptom, one who knew its secret would pass on the gem to another, who must accept it willingly. That is how to be free of it, to escape the turning of the energy back upon you. The woman did this. You did not know to do it. Now the time for such passage is over. We must try another course.”
“Yes.” Vusca frowned. His hands were wet and his belly griped. “What course?”
“A casting out. A returning.”
He did not understand, but he followed their instructions. They made marks on the floor, and anointed them. One stood outside the marks, by the goddess. In an alabaster bowl he made fire. It was this priest, the one who had never addressed Vusca, who had been given the amulet.
They began to chant. Vusca did not know the words. The sounds they made, keening harmonics, droned up into the roof like mosquitoes, and set his teeth on edge.
He realised he was now more than terrified.
It was very hot in the room.
The priest who had the amulet had never touched it save through a cloth. It lay on the cloth now, before him. He spoke to it, and Vusca caught the names of Isis, and of Thot, and of Osiris. The priest sprinkled water on the cloth with the amethyst, and powders, and salt.
The ritual seemed to go on and on. All the while, Vusca felt his strength bleeding away. His head swam. It was tedious, it was horrible. He realised he had grasped already that it could not work.
Finally, bellowing something, the priest beyond the marks raised the amulet in the cloth and cast it into the fire. The other two broke from their pen and hurled things into the basin after it. An unsuitable smell of cookery rose – they had thrown in onion, and some kind of fruit.
Vusca staggered. He went down on one knee, wiping the sweat from his face. He wanted it to be over. It was useless. He would have to think of another remedy.
When the fire died in the bowl, the amulet lay there. The heat had done something to it, meddled with its colour in some way.
He must take it, they said. Go to the Fort. They tied a knot of little cords on his arm, above the elbow. They invoked the protection of Isis.
He put a sum of money by the statue. They did not acknowledge this, aware themselves that they had achieved nothing.
The Roman commander lay down on his bed, the lamp alight, the sentry at his door.
He could not keep his eyes open. He drifted.
Vusca gripped the sword he had brought to lie beside him. The creature was not corporeal, yet maybe he could smite at it. Besides, there was a power in the sword. The power of what a soldier was. His last companion, the only one who could know everything, and would not betray –
The light fluttered and went out.
At first it was so gradual, he was not sure. It was like a constriction of the breath after too much food and wine. Only like that. But the pressure grew. It became heavier, sentient. In appalling horror he lay there, and felt the weight of the demon, crouching as the woman had done, on his loins and breast. The weight grew ever more sonorous, danker, seeping through him. He could not move. He was rigid with panic fear. And then there came the glow of two eyes, like meltings from the amethyst, hanging over him, watching him, as it sucked his life from every pore and vein and hair.
Vusca howled. By a galvanic effort, seemingly irresistible as the action of birth or death, he flung himself upward, dislodging the half-existent thing upon his chest. And as it dropped away, with the sword he cleaved it through and through, felt the blade go into it. But with no likeness to muscle or flesh, and not the jarring of a single bone.
When the sword ceased to penetrate anything at all, he stood panting in the darkness.
The sentry had not rushed in on him. It appeared Vusca had not even cried out as he thought he had. That was strange. Strange …
He held the sword, hugging it to him. Here was the last solution, after all. One way to cheat.
He sat down by the table, in the dark, with his only ally. He propped the hilt against the table’s edge, the tip against his abdomen, the crucial spot, under the ribs and heart. He leaned, fractionally, on the sword’s sharpness, and felt its bite like sweet consolation. “If you’re there,” he said aloud into the dark, “I have my friend here. My friend will take me from you, if you come close tonight. Then you lose. Be warned.”
He fainted, propped there over the blade.
Barbarus came to the Fort with some display, two of his sons, and three servants.
In the room above the Praetorium, Vusca said to him, “You had no need to be anxious. Did you think I meant to admonish you for something?”
Barbarus said smoothly, “It is the Commander’s privilege.”
“Why, have you been doing something wrong?”
Barbarus said, “Never knowingly, Commander.”
Vusca forced a chuckle. As he had forced the coy opening gambit. Then he said, “What have you been hearing about me in the town?”
Barbarus raised his brows. His horse-boned Gallic face was bland, moving on oiled hinges worthy of a Greek.
“Nothing?” prompted Vusca.
“Merely that we prosper under your hand.”
“And how do I look to you?”
Barbarus considered, and decided on a fact.
“Not well, Commander. There’s been a lot of fever this spring.”
“It isn’t fever.”
“No, Commander?”
“Do you recall, Barbarus, last summer there was a woman in the town. She had a house behind the Julian Baths.”
Barbarus paused, to let the Commander see he had forgotten all that, could only remember if reminded.
Vusca reminded him.
“I thought nothing of it, when she left,” he continued, rather archly he felt, but could not summon the requisite irritation. “But the amulet she gave me – it’s begun to work me ill.”
Barbarus had now altered. He looked like a man listening for a distant, expected shout.
Vusca added details, as many as he thought were needful. When he stopped, Barbarus, with great deference, asked a couple of questions. Vusca replied.
Barbarus said slowly, “The Commander knows I am his slave.”
“Barbarus knows, I’m never ungrateful.”
“Is there anyone I can see who can – rid me – of this – thing –”
To his horror, Vusca found his voice was shaking, cracking like a boy’s.
Barbarus ignored the cracking voice. It had not happened. He said, “There’s a man in the hills. About a day’s journey in good weather –”
“He must come to me, here.”
“That may be more difficult.”
“The problem is,” said Vusca humbly, “I find I haven’t the strength, any more, to ride. Even to walk across this room is – a test.”
It was impossible to tell what Barbarus thought. You never knew. Doubtless, at any stumble they rejoiced. But they must still pretend to be sorry, try to assist, for as long as the idea of Rome remained.
“On the table,” said Vusca, “that box. Count the coins if you like.” Barbarus bowed, tapped the box with his fingers, did not count, since Rome was also perfect. “Pay the man – this healer, magician, whatever he is – pay him as you think fit. For you, I promise you now, if – if I survive, a talent of silver. There’s a letter in with the coins to that effect, having my seal.”
Barbarus lifted the box.
“I shall naturally destroy the letter, Commander. The Commander’s word is all that I require.”
Somehow, he lived, and did not go mad, for three more days, two more nights. By day he oversaw the machinery of the Fort, the drills, a parade under a burning white sun, carried out to it in a chair. He did such sedentary work as he could, even went through an interminable itemisation of stores with the quartermaster. Elsewhere he delegated via his capable Centurion Secundo and various other officers. (Was the dead Pilum sneering at him?) The men put up with it all cheerily, and the rank and file even asked after him, it seemed, their Old Man, laid up with the bloody fever, too bad, and it was nice hunting weather, too.
Sometimes in the afternoons he slept. The steady diurnal rhythms of the Fort seemed to protect him then.
The nights he was alone, alone but in company. The three of them, himself, the demon, and the sword.
The sounds of the trumpets marking the watches were his sanity. They were the voice of human strength and human reason.
But he realised he did not have far to go. Barbarus’ man from the hills was the final throw of his dice. Then it would be the sword. By the Light, he almost longed for it, now.
At sunset, on the third evening, they were sounding gates and he was writing a letter to Lavinia, telling her a crippling sickness had taken him, that he preferred the cleaner exit. It was awkward, this letter. He had wanted to put in some friendly, perhaps loving thing, to reward her for changing. But he did not like the written word other than in an itinerary or report, emotionless and exact. And the letter read just like a report, of course. He put it aside, and then they brought in the man.
He had been awarded a pass, through Barbarus, and would be taken for some roving spy in the pay of the Fort. There were genuine examples of such beings, several as tattered and matted as this one, few with such crazy and wilful eyes. Vusca thought: When they leave him with me, he may fly at my throat. Let him. Only another way out.
But, when the sentry left, the man did nothing, except to stand looking at Vusca.
It was unthinkable this ruffian could achieve anything. The final throw had got the Dog.
Vusca was suffused by a cold and awful relief. It was settled. He could die now.
Then the hill-man spoke, in uncouth Latin, in a scraping voice like a flint.
“See it in he. Seeing shadow. Bird thing. All the air, smelling bird thing.”
A bolt of quickening went through Vusca. It brought him back. He took hold of the table and said, “Did Barbarus tell you –”
“Tell. Now see. Amulet.” And more impatiently, as if with a stupid pupil, “Amulet! Amulet!”
Vusca took the amulet from the casket and its wrapping, and laid it on the table in front of the hill-man. The hill-man glanced at it. Then, he poked it with a black fingernail, and gave off an idiot’s squealing laugh. He was not afraid to make contact, the only one who was not.
The wild eyes came back to Vusca.
“Eats you,” said the hill-man. “Eats you.”
Vusca shivered.
“Yes.”
The hill-man grinned.
Vusca said, “How can I stop it – this eating?”
The hill-man pranced about. He said phrases in the native jargon. Vusca caught the word for eating again. He said tiredly, “Do you know?”
“Knowing,” said the hill-man, coming to a capering standstill. “Eats you. You eat.”
Vusca flinched. Some part of him understood, yet he did not.
“What are you saying?”
The hill-man ignored him. He began to remove an assortment of implements, iron sticks, pincers, little bowls made of bone or shell. They all came out of his clothes.
Vusca watched as these tools of a trade were laid on the floor. In one of the dishes the man lit a flame. Then, as if it were a bit of bread, he scooped the amulet off the table. He sat down with it on the floor as though in his hut. He put the gem into a kind of clamp, and started to work on it, holding it sometimes across the little flame.
Presently mauve dusts veered off into the shell dish.
The shadows were coming down on the rooms. Night had the window, only the torches from the Praetorium to alleviate it. On the floor, the solitary flame lit the wild man’s polecat face as he filed and ground away at the amethyst.
There was no sense of menace. The room seemed empty of anything that was not mortal. Was this feasible? Did the wild man have some wonderful power that held the demon in check even as he destroyed its totem?
Vusca had full understanding now. The jewel was to be powdered. Then, he would “eat” it, swallow the crystals. He had heard of physicians prescribing powdered stones, as for his grandfather’s rheumatism. Even Lavinia, when pregnant, had taken some resin in molasses.
The demon had eaten Vusca’s trouble, and his trouble was Vusca. Bad luck had made him into the man he was. The demon devoured that, and then it could go on, devouring him, down to the marrow of his spirit. Yes, he saw it now.
He was drowsy. Should he make the arrangement with the sword? No, unnecessary yet, besides, he did not want the wild man to see it –
He heard the trumpets of the first watch. He opened his eyes and the polecat was sidling towards him out of the shadows in its draggled fitch, with a cup in its paws.
The wild man stank, much worse than any polecat. Something had screened off the smell before. Vusca basked in the new odour, of reality. One of the paw hands clutched his head, tilted his skull backward. The cup met Vusca’s lip. “Eat,” said the wild man.
Vusca ate. He gulped the wine, greedily, and in the liquid he felt the crystals pass over his throat, gritty, sandy, some larger and smoother, like tasteless pills of salt.
The wild man took the cup away, and peered into it. He was satisfied and made a smacking noise with his own lips.
Vusca became marvellously, swimmingly drunk. There was nothing to be afraid of. He had consumed the consuming one. Father Jupiter! What had he done – could this be the proper trick?
He went over to the bed and lay on it.
The wine had formed a glorious warmth inside him. His entire body seemed to be feeding from it. He felt a content, an assurance he had not experienced since childhood.
The polecat came and stooped over him, and laughed filthy breath into his face. Vusca relished it. He knew, as if the gods spoke in his ear, that he had been saved. He fumbled to find money for the hill-man. The hill-man had skulked away, was going without recompense. Barbarus would see to it. Someone … would see to it.
The lovely night, populated only by natural things, smelling of leather, horse-hide, flowers, gently closed the Roman’s eyes.
He thought: I forgot. The sword is over there.
He thought: I shan’t need the sword.
Then his mind was a river of amethyst light and he went down into it to drink it up and be filled.
“But so many gifts,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling, she almost clapped her hands like a girl.
“I used to send you things.”
“Yes, but that was –” Lavinia flushed and turned her head, shy of him.
She was beautiful tonight.
But then everything had a gloss and gleam upon it. Every dawn was a miracle. Dusk a blessing. Two weeks now since he had been cured. Until today he had been too cautious to be happy, with all the brightness of life summoning him. Today he had gone ten rounds, buckler and short sword, with his Secundo, in the yard. Vusca had the victory. But the Secundo, a man nine years his junior, was no faker.
And Vusca had made the offerings today. He even went down to the Greek Hercules on the forum, and gave him something. Strength for strength. The blood in him was like a young man’s. Everything was better than it had been – his sight, his reach, his nerve, his brain. The accretions of the middle years were all washed off. He could begin again.
When she saw him, there in her house, she had blushed then, too. She had thought him fine. It was like the first look she ever gave him.
The orchards did not seem irremediable, overgrown and in need of pruning, but that could be done. She said she liked to be in the villa, now the summer was coming. It was really rather dreadfully run down. The window in the long atrium was broken and had been patched up with honey and wax. The heating did not work properly. There were swallows in the bath-house.
Somehow all that made it funnier, more likeable. The villa needed them. They could do things for it.
And to come out to her here, tonight, feeling as he did, free and young, that was well-omened.
When they had walked about a little, in the lavender afterglow, on which the fierce hills lay docile, like sleeping swans, they went in to the supper Lucia had set. It was a very familiar feast, the fried sausage and garlic, the basted chicken, black olives and sauce of mushrooms, the round white cheese with raisins, new bread, old purple wine from the home vineyard, and the dish of candied plums. He might have been here only a week ago, not years.
They talked about the villa and the farm. Later he went with her to the small shrine in the garden court. (The shape of the Christians’ fish was gone from it.) After the offering, they sat under the colonnade, in the dark, and watched fireflies. It was what they had been used to do, in the days before their marriage. Now and then, a slave would go across the lawn on some errand. That had happened then. They had had to be furtive, then.
He began to want her, his wife, as he had wanted her long ago.
“Vinia,” he said, “couldn’t we …” like the young fool he had been.
But this time there was no need to dissemble or to say no.
The cries of her joy were strangers to him. Whores never raised this paean, even in pretence. He gloried in what he could do to her, and in the vigour of his own body. His seed burst from him with an overwhelming pang. He had forgotten that, too, the edge a woman’s love could give to it.
They coupled twice more in the night, like hungry wolves.
In the early morning, just before sunrise, her eyes seemed vivid, flowerlike, more savage … husband and wife parted like lovers.
Weeks after, he said to her, “Were your eyes always this colour?”
And she laughed at him.
It was high summer when she told him her news.
“The physician says I’ll bear to term. The auspices are good. Nothing can go wrong.”
He stood with her on the hill among the plum trees. Below the road went down to Par Dis, the cemetery, the walls.
“Isis will help me,” she said.
The curve of her belly was barely visible. In there, the life was, the son perhaps he had made. His immortality.
The other thing … was just a dream. (Now and then he had a slight pain, under his ribs, it was nothing, no worse than momentary indigestion. As the weeks went by, it lessened, never quite going away.)
As he rode back to the town, he kept thinking of her eyes. They had changed, as she had changed. But when he mentioned it, she told him that his eyes too had come to be another colour. And this amused them both. In the dull metal mirror he saw no alteration. Only sometimes, in the faces of men he knew well, a sudden uncertainty, a second glance –
She had a long labour, it was rough on her. But the child was flawless, and a boy.
His eyes, in the first hour he opened them, were the colour of the amethyst, might have been made from the amethyst.
Retullus Vusca, cold as death, held the life of his son in his arms. What should he do? And the impulse came to run to a high place, and there throw back this tiny breathing thing to the gods. But he only held the child, and Lavinia whispered, “You see now, he has his father’s eyes.”
It was the scar of a past battle. Let it be that. The cicatrice of a healed wound, that could no longer kill.