The Fire Waker Read online

  At a second offer, Aelius did accept the wine, a more than passable Moselle served without water added. "I suppose you also know how I may find her."

  "Interesting that you should ask. She rooms at Augusta Treverorum with a group of old women, not far from Middle Gate, outside of which the Christians have one of their burial areas. The name of the alley is Solis et Lunae." Ben Matthias counted on his fingers, looking up. "First, second—no, third house from the left exiting town, with a painted garland across the front. See how good I can be, and charge you nothing? Why, no! What are you thinking? You offend me, Commander. I wouldn't dream of asking you to drop a word in my favor with Our Lord Constantius, even though there's such a competition for army commissions of tombstones and monuments, and we're all climbing on one another's backs to beat the others. It's enough for me to be able to claim that Commander Aelius Spartianus, praefectus Alae Ursicianae in the Persian campaign, His Divinity's official historian, has come to me for a fashionable headstone."

  Aelius laughed at the outrageous proposal. "As long as you do not put it in writing on your shop sign, and make all due conjurations while you carve my likeness."

  Augusta Treverorum, 21 November, Tuesday

  Constantius's capital in the old Gallic province of Belgica Prima featured all the bureaucratic buildings expected of its rank, and naturally a noteworthy bridge on the Moselle. A gray city nonetheless, its dull-colored stones seemed to absorb what morning light came through the clouds. It was one of those sunny moments in the midst of rain elsewhere, when open arches and columns assume the opacity of bone against the stormy sky, but white kerchiefs and white shawls on women's heads seem blinding. Aelius, due to meet the co-ruler for breakfast, was up early and did his waiting in true military form, straddling the floor with arms crossed, looking ahead.

  Soon he was to see that despite his well-wishing official titles— Germanicus, Britannicus, Sarmaticus, Persicus Maximus, and more, some granted four times over—Flavius Valerius Constantius no longer looked Herculean or semidivine, far from it. He had aged greatly since the summer in Nicomedia, to the extent that Aelius had to guard himself from showing surprise when he was permitted to glance up at him. As if he were collapsing from within, the old man's stoutness had become flaccid; the handshake (exceptionally granted after the fairly abasing bows and greetings required by ceremonial these days) felt soft and damp, like a wet glove. Yet Constantius dressed his decay with enormous luxury—gold clasps the size of a child's hands, a fanciful uniform that one never saw in the field but only on painted walls of army shrines. "Aelius Bartarius's nephew," he said. "You favor him, especially around the eyes."

  In his youth Constantius had soldiered with Aelius's uncle (incidentally Aelius's mother's first husband) and seen him fall in battle, as he recalled now, "in Germany, protecting the colors." That he had the real commander's gift of remembering his officers' names, he went on to prove. "And you're Aelius Spartus's son."

  Considering he was to become one of the two principal rulers of the Empire in a matter of months, only because of that old friendship did he allow a face-to-face conversation. Still, Aelius had to be told specifically that he was to behave as though conversing with a superior in rank, not the lord of the world.

  "And do look up, boy: I can't be talking to the crown of your head."

  The room—not a throne hall, rather like an administrative office— was severe, even lacking in elegance. By the desk, for the imperial breakfast, a small table had been set with peeled boiled eggs, olives, bright red fish roe. Sitting heavily on a stool, Constantius prepared himself to eat. "Here." He motioned with a dainty knife for Aelius to step over. "Stand where I can see you as I talk."

  Reports that he would have to cross over to Britain sooner or later and fight a major war were known to all. In fact, his regular seat these weeks was Gesoriacum, on the far shore to the northwest. "Trouble on the island's border, I'm sure you've heard," he said, and Aelius noticed there was something like a whistle that came from his chest when he spoke. "At times it seems that this goddamned Empire has nothing but borders, like a loaf of bread that is nothing but crust."

  "Crust is tougher than crumb, Your Tranquillity."

  "Is that supposed to make me feel better or worse?" Constantius bit through an egg, halving it. "Your poor uncle, I remember him well on the frontier south of here, when the barbarians caught us by surprise in the river mist. His last wish was that his young widow marry his brother. Being that a woman bears the imprint of the man who deflowered her, I want to hope that in a way you're a son to both men." Bits of sticky yolk curdled at the side of his mouth, and he did not bother to dab them off. "These foggy days I remember my dead friends better than those breathing around me. Men who never betrayed, those." Yes, Constantius had been all fat and muscle in Nico-media. Now his neck hung with empty flesh, chin and mouth dominated the face, and his hands seemed too large for the meager wrists.

  As if come to his next subject by a roundabout reasoning about betrayal, he added, "You notice that I manage to avoid religious strife in my piece of the imperial cake, crust or crumb. From the start, I met the heads of the local Christians and struck an agreement: You abide by His Divinity's first edict, give up or burn your books, quit practicing, make no trouble, and I will be merciful." Constantius looked at him directly, with his bulging, mud-colored eyes. "You haven't heard of any trouble made by the Christians hereabouts, have you?"

  "None, sir," Aelius hastened to say. "Well—only the story of the brick-maker, but I am not certain one could term it trouble."

  "It could become trouble." Difficult to judge how serious Constan-tius was in saying it. He'd been notorious for his humor in the past, much to the vexation of his imperial counterpart Diocletian, of whom it was said that "he'd been seen laughing only once, but the witness was a deaf and blind man." Constantius picked at his food, sucking rather than chewing it. With a long-handled, minute spoon he laid fish roe on the egg he had in hand, and was quick to lap it off when it threatened to slide down. "I can put up with healing and such, but this! Imagine if those executed by prosecution elsewhere in the Empire—the Christians, I mean—were to resurrect after crucifixion, beheading, and such. Not to speak of those sent to the arena: It'd be quite the spectacle seeing them come back alive in the belly of the animals that tore them to shreds. Would a leg activate in the paunch of a lion, and an arm in that of a panther? Would the limbs magically reunite being vomited out, or would we witness the birth of monsters, half beasts, half humans?"

  "I think it's a tale, Your Tranquillity. Such claims have been made by charlatans before, many times. The fact remains that not even the legendary Pentheus came back to life after the enraged women lynched him."

  Constantius dropped the argument afterward. He ate all that was on the table, pensively chewing on the blue-green olives and swallowing their stones. According to ceremonial, the official reply to His Divinity's message would be handed to his envoy in a sealed envelope by the head of the palace staff, the day after the meeting. What surprised Aelius, however, was that Constantius's first private question had not been about his son. For years Constantine had lived as a high-ranking hostage at Nicomedia by order of Diocletian, who had a farmer's good sense not to trust alliances without guarantees.

  Perhaps His Divinity's message gave assurances about the young man's health and well-being. Perhaps not. Aelius fretted. Did Constantius wait to hear from him a spontaneous declaration, directly from his son's mouth? There had been none. Officially informed of Aelius's errand, Constantine sent no message for his father. He was biding his time, it seemed to those who knew him, spending a good part of the day in the gymnasium exercising as if the future were a great bodily struggle to which he would be called sooner rather than later. Like Maximian's own son Maxentius, his peer, he awaited the two emperors' abdication to see how the rich loaf of the Empire would be carved, and how close to the plate he would find himself.

  So Aelius stood in silence, trying to think of
a way he could convey a greeting from Constantine without blatantly inventing something.

  "How's my son?" Finally Constantius capitulated. "Being his age and at court, I assume you saw something of each other in Nicomedia."

  "He was well when I saw him last April, sir. As a new father, he'll be naturally taken with the pride of the occasion."

  "You're right, yes. Is the child truly curly-haired?" A sudden spiteful turn of the lips made Constantius look sour, not at all accommodating. "Otherwise, why would he call him Crispus, instead of giving him my name?"

  "I have not seen the boy. But since Lady Minervina is wavy-haired, it stands to reason—"

  Rising suddenly from the stool, Constantius unsteadied the small table, so that plates clacked and slid across it, without falling. "All right, you may go." His hollow voice was not irritated, not exactly, and in fact the gesture bidding Aelius to leave had a forbearing tardiness. "Still working on imperial biographies, I hear. Which one now?"

  The question caught the envoy while he backed toward the door, as required. "The life of Severus, Your Tranquillity."

  "Septimius or Alexander?"

  "Septimius Severus, the African."

  "Hm." Constantius grunted. "Not a lucky one with his sons, either."

  The night Aelius spent in Augusta Treverorum would be termed by ben Matthias "like any other," and to men who did not pay attention to details and hues, it might be so. Aelius rather disbelieved that a painter could be counted among them, so perhaps the Jew only played indifferent. Odors were diverse; street corners and stairwells breathed stench or perfume that readily would make an army man say, "Syria" or "Moesia," but not one and the other. Girls in the shade whispered similar things, but from time to time one's response—heightened urge, or irritation, or plain disgust—varied. Invited by a former colleague to share his quarters overlooking a crossroad, in the traveler's occasional insomnia, Aelius stood at the banister of a cramped balcony, catching only glimpses from the humid darkness below. Guards making their rounds, shaking the knockers to make sure doors were locked and safe. Running steps, the clacking sound of laden mules. He caught himself thinking, How does a man supposed to have come back from the dead trust himself with going to bed, and confronting the scary night?

  The power of tales, amusingly told. Already he was fantasizing, as if the miracle had happened, and he'd have to report it to His Divinity in the most appropriate terms.

  It would snow soon. Had he not been used to the cold of army camps ever since childhood, already Aelius would have had to resort to hooded capes and waterproof shawls as others did. He knew the season, the clean odor of winter winds on the way. There would be a mysterious moment when the fog lifted for good and one morning would be perfectly clear to the farthest horizon, and from the sky—soft and wet at first, small and so hard that one could not squeeze it between one's fingers—snow would begin falling. It was not that time yet, but a peculiar crispness in the night heralded its arrival.

  In the morning, only the houses higher than three stories—not many, comparatively—emerged from the fog that covered the city. From the fourth floor, they looked like a scaly archipelago of roof tiles. The lively sounds of human activity below came disembodied to Aelius's ears, and once he left his friend's doorway and walked into the street, he thought that he was becoming a part of that crowd invisible from above. Actually the haze was suspended in midair, so that it formed an impalpable whitish roof, like a tent stretched in little folds. His Guardsmen, temporarily housed in the barracks adjoining the palace, were glad to be given a day off to rest or tour the town; two of them had women and children here, and were thrilled.

  As for Marcus Lupus's clay beds and brick kilns, they stood outside the east gate and across the river, to the left of the military road in a place called At the Happy Diana. Riding in, the day before, Aelius had noticed the turnoff in a copse of oaks, with a bright red little roadside shrine to the goddess, and today he planned to check whether the cult statue or painting showed her indeed in a merry mood.

  The sun had just risen when Aelius paced with his horse against the sleepy flow of merchants entering through the east end of town. Through the fortified archway, the haze took a fiery tinge between orange and madder, as if a conflagration were half seen, raging behind a woman's veil, or a sheet. At the gate, the soldiers saluted and let him through, and once outside Aelius wondered if they had even existed, so quickly the same haze closed behind him, canceling the gate and the walls and the head of the massive bridge across the Moselle. Nothing but the next stretch of the bridge and the rolling sound of water seemed to exist around him. A horseman coming from the opposite side did not cast a shadow but only a darker halo, where animal and man intercepted the flaming mist behind.

  Curiosity was a historian's quality, although not the principal one; love of truth, Aelius thought, headed the list. One or the other, however, might be His Divinity's motivation for sending him out with the command of reporting on all notable incidents met on the way. It had been so in Egypt, where murder and conspiracy were what he'd stumbled on, at his own risk. Here—well, it was difficult to say. For now it came down to noting the state of the provinces visited, and in that sense miracles and portents did not fall under that rubric. But Lupus's "resurrection" could become trouble, as Constantius said, at a time when bloody prosecution across three-fourths of the Empire aimed to quash Christian superstition. In the African and Asian provinces the death penalty was handed down left and right against them, but there was no telling what rallying point for the beleaguered, testy Christians a man like the fire waker could turn out to be.

  Impregnated with moisture, the small shrine at the Happy Diana turnoff had the color of live flesh. Under a worn eave, the little statue did not much exceed the size of a doll: Weather had smoothed it until the goddess's face had no features left but a button nose and the trace of a mouth laved into what could be a smile. Dry flowers and pebbles at her foot bespoke the passersbys' piety, although little crosses and other Christian scrawls had been scratched with a nail or the point of a knife on the niche's plaster.

  Beyond, the brickworks were invisible in the mist. Only the high, reddish ledge from which the clay was obtained drifted in and out of sight, topped with a crown of young oaks that waited to be sacrificed to brick-making. The path, furrowed by deep wheel tracks, sieged by bushes, lay pockmarked with puddles. Water, Aelius noticed, trickled from the higher ground, and ice was already forming in the pools by the verge, where seldom carts passed. Among the trees, in the direction of the riverbank, one could make out a bivouac of makeshift tents, and bundles that no doubt were people sitting in their capes and covers. Aelius imagined they were believers or simply the curious who always flock when there is talk of a miraculous event. Still torpid with spending the night in the open, they barely stirred at the officer's passage. A woman among them glanced his way and covered her head.

  This was the time of day when most manufacturers sent out their wares. On the military road (if Aelius looked back he could see the funerary monuments lining it vanish in the fog), oxcarts and mule trains moved along steadily. But from the figlinae ahead nothing seemed to proceed. Ben Matthias's son-in-law had his office in a small building near the kilns and would be waiting for him there, in order to introduce him to Lupus. Wondering whether by dint of long traveling he had possibly forgotten a holiday, Aelius gave no more thought to the absence of activity on the path until he heard the clatter and squelch of a single mount from the opposite side, and pulled the reins only so much as was needed to stop his own horse. The long ears of a mule and its patient shiny skull emerged first, then two men on its back; the pair, senior workers or overseers, wearing leather aprons, had the faces of anxiety, so that their greeting was hurried as the mounts brushed past each other on the narrow path

  "Trouble at the brickworks?"

  Aelius's dry question kept them from going off. They ogled him sideways, with faces low, as inferiors and—often—civilians did with men i
n authority. One of the two, red-nosed with the cold or recent weeping, answered, "Our master's dead."

  "Yes, I know that." Aelius had to keep from smiling. "And come back to life, no?"

  "No, he's dead again."

  "When? How?"

  "Oh, sir, Lupus's supervisor found him stiff in his bed when he went to wake him up this morning. Of course no one is touching him, just in case he could again—"

  "Yes, God is merciful," the other began to say, but the first man elbowed him in the side, hushing him.

  Aelius was not paying attention to Christian slips of the tongue. "In his bed, where? Not at the brickworks—"

  "Yes, yes. Lupus's house is in town, but he was still weak, and when there is a big order to fill—you may be sure we were receiving requests from everywhere after the miracle—he stays at a little shack above the quarry hole. Why, he's there now, poor master. We're off to look for help."

  That by "help" they meant Agnus was implicit. Aelius's first instinct was to follow them and see how the fire waker reacted to a failed miracle, but curiosity of another order won out, and he rode to the brickworks. There, ben Matthias's son-in-law Isaac, a hairy young man without as much as a cape on his shoulders, was scrambling from the foot of the cliff back to his office. A few words between them sufficed to inform Aelius that yes, the news was true, and that by taking a steep little lane at the right of the cliff it was possible to reach the shack where Lupus lay dead. "Nothing has been touched in the room, Commander," Isaac added. "We thought it best. Poor Lupus—more's the shame, too. The army camp has just contracted a large order with us. They're enlarging the baths and infirmary, so the head surgeon came in person at daybreak, to check on the quality of the bricks. You'll find him at Lupus's bedside."