Dreaming the Bull (43 page)

She spoke as a mother to a recalcitrant child, demanding obedience. Breaths were drawn among the Senate, audibly.

With excruciating slowness, Claudius turned. He leaned a long moment on his elbow, the better to look to his left.
Fifty men of good birth and high standing stared rigidly ahead for all the aching time it took their emperor fully to face the woman who was his niece and yet professed to love him. When he spoke, his words were widely spaced and each one a weapon.

“Nor by my wife,” he said distinctly.

The words fell one by one into dead air. Narcissus smiled in triumph. Agrippina’s eyes blazed. She opened her mouth to speak and closed it again, finding discretion at last. The men of the Senate discovered new places to look that were away from their emperor and his wife. Valerius swayed and had to hold himself upright. His heart hung lifeless in his chest. His mother smiled at him and he turned away, tasting ashes on his tongue. Caradoc and Dubornos, each thinking himself unseen, made with the fingers of the left hand the sign of thanks to the gods. Cwmfen wept silently in her wagon. Cygfa, smiling her hate, bent to Cunomar and kissed him.

Fringed around them all, the gathered ghosts of the Eceni dead raised a cacophony of silent celebration. A wren spiralled high in the clear sky, singing.

Julius Valerius, decurion, disembarked from the merchant ship
Isis
at the harbour of Ostia, eighteen miles west of Rome. He arrived after nightfall on the twenty-fifth day of September in the fourteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Claudius. That he did not fall to his knees and kiss the sea-stained wood of the dock in thanks for a safe landing was a testament both to the benevolence of the one god and to the presence of Severus, centurion of the Urban Guard, who had come to escort him to the palace. Mithras had never required the obsequities demanded by other deities and the centurion had made it plain from the moment of first greeting that time was short and not to be wasted. Nevertheless, Valerius stood for a moment holding the mooring rope and let the land support him while the swimming nausea of the sea receded.

He had never been good on water and an ocean crossing made so soon after the equinoctial gales was an invitation to hell for the duration of the voyage, if not some considerable time thereafter. Valerius had known as much when he first
received the message to take ship and travel to Rome but the seal had been imperial and no decurion who cared for his career would use poor weather and the risk of shipwreck as an excuse to refuse his emperor’s summons. It might have been more reasonable to claim that no master in his right mind would set sail at such a time save that the
Isis
rode at anchor on the Thames and the decurion had been given three turnings of the tide to set his affairs in order, find a fast horse, and reach her. Because he cared more for his career than for anything in his life except his god, Valerius had been aboard before the second tide was fully out, carrying a flagon of wine but no food in order that the nightmare might pass quickly, or seem to.

Standing on the solid planking of the dock with his guts lurching to the rhythm of the sea, he was grateful for the wine. More than the nausea, it clouded his memory of Rome, so that he could greet Severus with equanimity, recalling their time served as part of Caligula’s army on the Rhine while avoiding any memory of the day they had together shepherded a blighted victory procession up the via Tiburtina or of the fiasco that came afterwards on the broad plain in front of the Praetorian camp.

Valerius had put over two years of dedicated effort, of prayer, hard work and the judicious use of wine, into banishing the ghosts that had plagued him that day. He did not intend to let them return simply because the emperor had need of him in Rome.

Presently, his guts began to settle and his mind to clear. Small details that he had missed on first landing became plain. Severus was darkly cloaked and he waited in that concealed part of the harbour where both the quayside lamps
and the lighthouse failed to cast light. His horse bore no marks that would identify it as a mount of the Guard. The spare gelding whose rein he held was outstanding in its ordinariness; a solid brown with no splash of white on face or legs. Valerius had ridden a horse like this once before in his early days on the Rhine when it had been important to blend in with the background and not be noticed. Then, it had been the emperor who was dangerous. Now, it seemed less likely to be so.

His legs had begun to trust the land. He stepped away from the circle of light. The dark held an honesty that the orange blaze of the lighthouse had not. Severus watched him carefully. The man had been a solid soldier on the Rhine, hard enough to be a good leader without crushing the spirits of those who served under him. Age had granted him dignity and white hair but no fresh scars. None of this suggested he was a man who might break his first and strongest oath to serve his emperor in all things or die in the attempt. Still, he was not branded for Mithras and so lacked the added certainty of brotherhood, and the word in Britannia was that Agrippina owned the Praetorians in their entirety. It was not safe to assume that she did not own the Urban Guard as well, or a substantial portion of it.

Valerius’ orders had stated that he should come unarmed. His dagger and his cavalry sword were safely bound in his pack. On impulse, as he left the ship, he had picked up a filleting knife owned by the cabin boy and he held it now in the curved palm of his right hand. Scale-slime slipped between his fingers as he moved his grip to the midpoint of the haft, ready to throw or to stab. With a prayer to the god, he asked, “Whom do you serve?”

“The emperor,” said Severus. “To the grave and beyond.” He did not say whose grave, but it was not the centurion’s death that was daily rumoured in Camulodunum, nor his wife who was said to rule the palace and the empire from her boudoir.

“Good. And I also.” Valerius reached down to adjust his boot and let the knife slide unseen through a gap between the planks of the dock. The small splash of its falling was lost in the wash of the tide. “The sea is out of me,” he said. “I am safe to ride. Perhaps we should go?”

Severus nodded. “With all speed,” he said. His eyes marked the space through which the knife had dropped.

They rode fast and hard and kept to the via Ostiensis until they reached the main gate into Rome where two men of the Guard let them through as if expected. In the city, they took the quieter streets, avoiding the main thoroughfares with their parties of drunken youths and too many wakeful eyes who might know a centurion by name and ask questions concerning the identity of the man he escorted.

Valerius had spent half a month in Rome on his last, ill-fated visit and believed he had come to know it. Riding through, he found it little changed and was surprised. The rumours in Britannia had been of a city slumping to ruin along with its emperor. It had been easy to imagine the insidious beginnings of decay overlaying the memories of slave-crowded streets and bright sun and constant noise. He had forgotten the quieter Rome of night, away from the taverns and whorehouses, where citizens retired at dusk and rose at dawn and slept at peace in between. Riding behind Severus, he came to remember the reassuring calm of streets lit by starlight where the only sound was the soft
hoofbeats of two horses and the smells were of night and old buildings and not at all unpleasant after the racking salt and sick of the voyage.

He did not recognize the palace until Severus halted near a door in yet another long, high wall. Coming to it in the dark and from the west, the palace looked smaller and less imposing than he remembered from his last visit. The gilded roof shone no more than glazed tiles under the starlight and the outer walls could have been yet another anonymous villa. Valerius dismounted, feeling the stiffness of the voyage cramp thighs that had been three days without a horse. His pack weighed more than he remembered. He unhitched it from the saddle and hooked it over his shoulder.

Severus took his reins. “Go to the door in the wall on your right and knock twice. Wait until someone comes. It may be a while.”

Valerius thought himself dismissed and was turning away when the centurion gripped his elbow, drawing him back. Up close, the officer’s eyes were bloodshot, like those of a man who has slept too little. “If he needs you so badly that he has called you across the ocean, do as he asks,” he said. “He has few enough who will.”

“I took the oath as you did,” said Valerius. “His will is mine.”

“Good.” Severus grinned as a man grins before battle who does not expect to survive it. “Long may it remain so.” He led the horses back into the dark and Valerius was alone.

The door was a slaves’ entrance, lacking adornment. Standing before it in the quiet of the night, Valerius felt currents of fear that were not his alone. The place reeked of uncertainty and betrayal and ghosts pressed close that had
nothing to do with the tribes of a foreign land and everything to do with the desperation of a dying emperor. No sane man would remain in it for long.

Ghosts were no longer Valerius’ concern and fear had long ago ceased to be an enemy; wine and the memory of the god had allowed him to conquer both. Setting his mind to blankness, he raised a hand to tap twice on the door and found it already a hand’s breadth open with a wide-eyed boy peering through the gap. Valerius felt the hairs of his scalp prickle a fresh warning; in the old days, the palace doors had not opened so silently.

The watch-boy lifted a small soapstone lamp and, by its light, stared at the decurion’s face as if matching the features to a description; black, straight hair cut to military length, fine, lean features and eyes that will strip the skin from a slave-boy who dares to stare too long. The boy jerked back, leaving the door only just ajar so that Valerius had to put his shoulder against it if he wanted to follow. Inside, the lad had not waited but was already leading the way down an unlit corridor. It was not the behaviour expected of a slave but this was a place where freed slaves ruled, or it had been; nothing was done in the normal way. Raising his pack, Valerius followed, warily.

The palace was overly warm. The slave-boy was silent and scared and he led Valerius into emptiness, but the walls thrilled to distant activity. For a man who had spent the past decade at war, the place reeked of ambush. Valerius hitched his pack round and knew he could reach neither his dagger nor his sword in time for either to be of use in an emergency. He thought of the filleting knife he had dropped through the dock and cursed himself for a short-sighted fool.

They stopped at a chamber far from the main palace and large enough only to house a bed and a small clothes chest. The walls were of plaster, painted simply in pale aquatic green with sinuous fish near the ceiling and a floor of sand-grey tiles so that he could have been standing twenty feet beneath the surface of the ocean, staring up into the world of air and light. The effect would have been better in daylight. At night, with a single brazier and a rack of hanging lamps pushing a poor glow into the dark, it was more like the river just north of Camulodunum: muddily damp and smelling of mould. The boy nodded and left. This door, like the one before it, was well oiled.

The room was empty and remained so for some considerable time. Valerius was hungry and alone. Neither of these was unusual and the latter was, perhaps, better than any of the alternatives. He propped his pack in a corner, opened it and moved his dagger to a place where he could reach it at need, then, leaning back against the furthest wall from the lamps, he set his mind blankly to wait. Half a lifetime in the legions had taught him this skill above all others; when he put his mind to it, Julius Valerius could outwait the Sphinx.

He had expected the freed slave Narcissus to come, or Callistus, the paymaster; both were reputedly still loyal to Claudius. He got Xenophon, the Greek physician, which disturbed him more than he would have chosen to admit. The man brought ghosts with him, simply by his presence. Valerius stood in the semi-dark and strengthened the walls around his mind, concentrating on the details of the physician’s features, excluding the possibility that others might have joined them in the shadows.

There was much to see in Xenophon. Even allowing for the uncertain light, the physician had aged greatly in the years since their last meeting. The man who had engineered the confrontation between Valerius and his former compatriots had been of vigorous middle-age, exuding vibrancy and intelligent humour. The man who stood in the doorway to the underwater room was tired to the point of exhaustion. His hair thinned back from the crown of his head and that little left at the margins, which had been a distinguished silver, was a lank, translucent white. His skin was mottled with age-spots and creased with care. His nose hooked like a hawk’s over a face too thin for its size.

“Have you eaten?” He spoke from the gloom beyond the reach of the lamps. His voice had the same cadences as that of Theophilus, who was still field physician in the fortress at Camulodunum and with whom he had undoubtedly enjoyed a brisk exchange of letters these past two years.

“I haven’t eaten since the ship.” Valerius roused himself from his corner. He had not drunk since then, either, which was bothering him more although he chose not to say so. “Is it safe to eat in this place?”

The physician gazed at him a moment and then nodded as if confirming a quite different question. “For you, it probably is,” he said. “Safer than Britannia, from what I hear.”

That could only have come from Theophilus. Valerius shrugged. “Britannia is safe as long as you don’t venture into the western mountains in units of less than a cohort’s strength. And keep clear of the Twentieth legion for the time being. They have all the bad luck.” He grinned, sourly, daring the physician to challenge him. When he did not, Valerius said, “You mentioned food?”

“Of course. My apologies.” Xenophon leaned out of the door and signalled. An ill-fed lad with lank brown hair and shy eyes entered, bringing a tray of cold meats, cheeses and—blessed boy—a full jug of wine with two goblets. He bowed to Xenophon, regarded the decurion with a disquieting, professional curiosity and loitered for an extra moment when dismissed.