Anno Mortis Page 3

  "But dominus," Narcissus croaked. "I've no training in accounting. My master—" He caught Caligula's frown just in time. "My former master had me tutored in music, to play the lyre and the flute at his dinners."

  "A musician - how wonderful! I play myself, you know. It's a career I could have pursued professionally, if I didn't have a higher obligation."

  "The whole Empire speaks of your skill," Narcissus said.

  Caligula eyed him coldly. His expression said that he knew he was being patronised, and Narcissus reminded himself that the Emperor wasn't stupid, just mad.

  "That's as may be," Caligula said. "But as you can see, I need an accountant, not a flautist. You're a clever man - or so my uncle's always boasting. I'm sure you'll pick it up in no time. And if you don't..."

  Caligula's eyes were already drifting away, searching the palace for some other entertainment. "But we don't need to worry about that, do we? I'm quite sure you won't disappoint me."

  Petronius had thought he might be given some time to prepare himself. But once his father had made up his mind, he'd always been quick to put his plans into action. It was what made him so successful as a businessman. And it was the reason that, a mere half hour after he'd learned his fate, Petronius found himself at the door of the most tedious man in Rome.

  Seneca looked at him sourly after his father had effected the introduction and then hurriedly left, presumably before Seneca could change his mind.

  Petronius didn't know what the other man found so displeasing in his appearance. He'd often been told that he was a well-developed young man - and not just by the slaves - while Seneca himself was quite an unappealing sight. With his stringy, greying hair and gnarled limbs, he had the look of a man who'd suffered some debilitating illness as a child, and been slowly decaying into middle age ever since.

  "So you're the young reprobate Anthony wants to palm off on me, are you?" he said, in a thin, reedy voice.

  "I am Petronius son of Antonius of the Octavii, yes."

  Seneca looked even less impressed. "Jumped-up plebeians, the lot of you."

  Since this was exactly what Petronius himself had been thinking a short while ago, he elected not to respond.

  "Well," Seneca said, "I suppose you'd better come in." He stood aside, ushering Petronius into the room beyond.

  Dusk was beginning to fall over the city, but that didn't fully account for the gloom Petronius found within. Most Romans of Seneca's station filled their houses with light, a central atrium for greenery and direct sunlight, and windows elsewhere with bright painted plaster and mosaics for colour and life.

  Not here. There were no windows in evidence, and the walls and floor were painted the same stark, gloomy red. The colour of dried blood, Petronius thought, and shivered. The whole place felt old, as if it was a relic from a more ancient city on whose bones Rome had been built.

  Seneca led him through at a slow pace, slow enough for him to inspect the clutter of furniture and objects which filled every room. "You've spent time in Egypt?" Petronius said.

  Seneca turned to stare at him, brown eyes bright and unfriendly. "Yes. How did you know?"

  Petronius laughed. When that just made the other man frown, he gestured around him. A figurine of a cat sat on top of a wooden chest, half-decayed but still inscribed along its length with the little squares and pictures of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. A pile of papyrus teetered in one corner, while the other was taken up with the life-size statue of a cow-headed woman, a half-moon balanced on her crown.

  "Yes, I see," Seneca said. "I'm surprised you recognise it."

  "I have had some education."

  "Little enough, your father tells me. But no matter. With me -" He gestured Petronius through to another room, its door half-hidden behind a thick blue cloth. "You may begin to study those things which really matter."

  Here, at last, was a window. High in the far wall, it cast a wan light down on the stacks and stacks of scrolls which sat on every available surface. In the centre of it all was a rickety wooden chair tucked beneath a small desk. The desk too was piled high. Seneca swept an impatient arm across it, pushing the scrolls onto the floor and a cloud of dust into the air.

  "I did my own studies here, you know. This room made me the man I am."

  "I can certainly believe that."

  Seneca ignored - or perhaps didn't notice - his sarcasm. "Your first task will be to copy some of my more famous speeches. Many of my friends have been begging me for their own editions, and you'll learn a great deal in the process."

  Petronius eased himself into the chair, sending up another cloud of dust from beneath his buttocks. "About what, precisely?"

  "How to address your betters, for a start!" Seneca snapped. He rifled through one of the many piles of scrolls, pulling three out to hand to Petronius. They stank of mildew and old leather. "You may start with these. And I hope your hand is fair - if they're not readable, you'll simply have to start again."

  The door slammed behind him as he left, the impact toppling one heap of paper to slide sibilantly to the floor. Petronius sighed and knelt to put them back in some kind of order. But his hand froze, hovering in mid air, when he saw that these too were covered in hieroglyphics.

  Seneca had scoffed at him, at the idea that he might have attended to any of his education. And it was true that when the Greek slave his father had bought to tutor him had droned on about the history of the Roman republic, or the conquest of the barbarian tribes on its borders, he had closed his ears. But words, language, stories - these were things he cared passionately about. And when he cared, he applied himself. By the time he was thirteen, he could understand nearly every tongue spoken in the Empire.

  He had never told his father, of course. If he'd known, the old man would have sent him off to manage a field office somewhere dreadful like Gaul and that would have been unbearable. A writer of Rome must live at its beating heart. So he'd kept the knowledge to himself, studying by the light of a candle after the rest of the household had retired to their beds.

  He could speak all the languages of Rome. And he could read hieroglyphs, too.

  He placed the fallen scroll on his desk and ran a finger along the first line, mentally translating it. 'And Osiris says, my hiding place is opened, it is opened. And the spirit falls into darkness, but I shall not die a second time in the land of eternal fire.'

  He leaned back, rocking his chair on its legs. This was intriguing. Certainly far more interesting than Seneca's speeches. If he wasn't mistaken, those were lines from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. He'd tracked down a fragment once, in the shop of a shady Syrian who dealt in rare artefacts of questionable provenance.

  Even those fragments had cost him a small fortune, gold coins he's pilfered from his father when he was too drunk to notice. The Syrian had claimed he was lucky to find anything at all. The Book of the Dead had been banned in Egypt two centuries ago, all the known copies burned.

  So what exactly was Seneca doing in possession of one?

  Vali took the bread and olives that Boda gave him without a word. But his red-brown eyes watched her the whole time he ate, thoughtful and assessing. She felt her pulse quicken, though she wasn't quite sure why.

  "How did you come here, clansman?" she asked, when the silence had stretched on too long.

  "I'm a wanderer." He shrugged, as if that was explanation enough.

  "You've wandered very far from home."

  "The world is wide and my time short. I've travelled as far as I can."

  "And who are your parents?" she asked. "Your cousins? Where is your people's hearth-home?"

  His head tilted to one side as he quirked a crooked smile. "You don't trust me, clanswoman. You're right to be suspicious. This place is full of lies - but not mine."

  He was speaking in riddles, like a bard. Could that be what he was? It might explain his presence here. The most famous storytellers among the Cimbri had been known to travel thousands of miles in search of a rare poem or a lost tale.<
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  "You spoke of a secret hidden here," she said to him. "What did you mean?"

  He finished the last of the bread before he answered, chewing each mouthful deliberately before washing it down with a mouthful of wine. His lips were stained dark red with it, and when his tongue flicked out to lick them clean it looked very pink in contrast. "There are secrets," he said. "But are you sure you want to know them? Ignorance is safer."

  She thought about Josephus, dead by her sword because no one had told her the truth. "I don't care about safety. I want to know."

  "Even if it might lead to your death?"

  "Even then."

  "Good." He smiled, as if she'd passed some sort of test, and his long legs uncurled from beneath him as he rose to his feet. A white litter of crumbs fell to the floor around him and she saw a small brown rat dart from beneath the table to seize them.

  "It's through here," he said, moving quickly towards the back of the school, where the weapons and armour were stored between fights.

  There were half a dozen other gladiators in the room and they all turned to stare as Boda walked past. Their gaze felt like a physical blow, filled with hostility. She wanted to tell them that she hadn't known Josephus was meant to live, that if they wanted to blame someone they should blame Quintus. But it was her sword that had been the instrument, and even by the laws of her own people the blood guilt was hers.

  At the far door, Vali paused, his fingers brushing over the iron keyhole. "The key?" he said, and Boda saw that it was locked. That was new. Only last week she'd been in the place herself, trying out different helmets for the match in the Arena.

  She shook her head. "Quintus must have it."

  The other gladiators were still watching. If she tried to kick down the door, they'd stop her. She could already hear them murmuring, no doubt wondering why she was giving this beggar a tour of the place. It was probably only a matter of minutes before Quintus himself was summoned. Vali hadn't said so, but she was quite sure that the secret he spoke of concerned the old man.

  "We don't have much time," she told him.

  He looked skyward for a second, either praying or thinking. Then he shrugged, and turned the door handle.

  The door swung open, creaking a little on its rusted hinges. He slipped through, holding it open only a crack for her to follow. When he pushed it shut again, she heard a click that sounded like a lock turning.

  She grabbed his arm. "How—"

  He put his finger over her lips. His skin was dry, and hotter than she expected, as if he had a fever.

  "There's not much time," he whispered. "You can ask your questions when I've shown you what you're here to see."

  She could hear nothing except the gentle sound of her own breathing and the harsher rasp of Vali's. The sun had set outside, and the room's two windows were dark and blank. But there was a flicker of golden light, illuminating the neat racks of swords and the shelf after shelf of breastplates and helmets and greaves. The light seemed to be coming from behind them, in the far corner of the storeroom. Candles, she realised, smelling the honey-scented wax in the air. But why leave them burning in an empty room?

  Vali nodded at her, as if he knew what she was thinking.

  She crept forward, bare feet cold on the marble floor. Vali's footsteps slapped softly beside her. If there had been anyone else in the room, they would have heard him. But there wasn't. There was no one else living inside.

  Josephus had been laid on a slab of stone at the far end, wedged into a corner beside a row of tridents. The candles were arranged around him, two of them already burned out and one guttering near extinction.

  His body had been mutilated. Her sword had pierced his heart, but it had left a neat hole when she withdrew it. Now his chest had been cut open entirely, the ribs peeled back to emerge from the red flesh beneath like a row of jagged white teeth. She could smell rotting meat and shit combined, but there were no flies buzzing around this feast, though she could see them thick on the window above. It was as if something about the corpse repelled them.

  Boda felt bile rise into her throat, acrid and burning, but she forced herself to move closer. She peered into the wide cavity of the chest, and saw that the wound in his heart had been repaired, the jagged edges sown together with small black stitches. The heart should have nestled between the two lobes of his lungs, but those were gone, nothing but a bloody vacancy in their place. The folds of the intestine were also missing and the great purple disc of his liver.

  His face was mostly intact, but his nose was bloodied and broken. A thin white gruel dripped from one of his nostrils and Boda realised with a nauseous shock that it was what remained of his brains.

  Set on each corner of the slab on which he lay were four earthenware jars. Up close, she could see that their lids were fashioned in the form of heads: man, monkey, fox and something that might have been a hawk. The smell of shit came most strongly from this last, and after a moment's hesitation, she lifted its lid.

  Josephus's intestines lay coiled inside, like a slick brown serpent.

  She dropped the lid, hardly noticing as it smashed on the floor beside her foot. Vali shifted beside her and she wrenched her eyes away from the corpse to look into his grave face.

  The sound of the key turning in the lock was startlingly loud in the silence.

  Boda spun to face the door. The rack of tridents was beside her, and she snatched one to defend herself, though the foreign weapon had always felt clumsy in her hand.

  There was a slight hesitation before the door opened, as if the person on the other side was equally nervous about what he might find inside. Boda placed herself in front of Josephus's body, though she wasn't sure what she could defend him from, except further desecration.

  Finally, the door flew open. The light was far brighter behind it, blinding her for a moment so that all she could see was the dark silhouette of a man. A spear of cold fear shot down her spine and she tightened her grasp on the trident, fingers suddenly slippery with sweat. Then the figure stepped forward. Two steps and the softer light of the candles washed over his face.

  It was Quintus. For just a second his expression was closed and hard. Then his eyes met hers and his face sagged into its usual weak, ingratiating lines.

  "Boda, my lioness, what are you doing here?"

  "We were looking for a fresh sword," she said, knowing that a quick lie was always more convincing than a slow one. "My old one is nicked from the fight."

  "We?" Quintus said.

  Boda turned to Vali - only to realise that he was no longer standing beside her. She jerked a look behind her, thinking he might have tried to hide, but the room was empty save for her and Quintus.

  Then a waft of air blew into her face, from a window that she was sure had previously been shut, and she saw the edge of a booted foot slide across the sill and out of sight. But the window was high above the floor. How could he possibly have reached it?

  "Boda, sweetness," Quintus said. "Are you quite all right?"

  "Yes," she said, turning back to him. And then: "No! Quintus, what have you done to Josephus?"

  "I? It was you who dispatched him to a better place, my treasure."

  She stepped to one side, so there'd be no question that he saw the body.

  His eyes widened in shock. But there was something theatrical about it - too rehearsed to be quite real. "For the love of Mars, what has happened here?"

  "Yes," Boda said icily, "what has happened here?"

  He studied her for a moment, no doubt gauging the probability that she'd believe a denial. He must have realised that she wouldn't. His eyes returned to their normal size and his mouth to its customary greasy smirk.

  "I'm sorry that you had to see this, truly," he said. "Josephus begged me to do this for him, in the event of his death. It's the death ritual of his people, you see. Without it, he told me he'd be condemned to wander the near shore of the afterlife forever."

  Boda looked back at the body, lying with candles
all around it, nearly all extinguished now, and the four jars at the four corners of the slab. There was a ritual look to it, that was true, but a deeply unholy one. "His people?" she said.

  "The Egyptians."

  "But Josephus was of Judea," she said. "A Jew."

  Quintus shrugged with a look of careful unconcern. "Once, maybe. But he converted to the worship of Osiris. You know those Jews, a flighty lot, changing gods as easily as the rest of us change tunics."

  He looked at her, face bland and composed and eyes so unreadable it was as if he had shutters behind them. She could see there was nothing further to be gained from doubting his word, and much to be lost. By Roman law, she was property, with no more rights than a table. If she became too troublesome, he need only dispose of her.

  She bowed her head. "I apologise for questioning you, Quintus. It... disturbed me to see a body treated this way, that's all."

  "Understandable, my northern star." He smiled and slipped an arm around her shoulders to guide her from the room. She stiffened, but managed to stop herself from shrugging it off.

  Outside the room, he noticed her watching him as he carefully locked the door and pocketed the key. "To spare anyone else the shock you've had," he said.

  She nodded, as if she understood, and he turned and walked away. She watched him go, wondering how much he guessed of what she believed. And what exactly he might do about it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The next day began as the previous one had ended - with Petronius banished to the musty room at the back of the house with nothing but a stack of scrolls for company. Seneca left him with a slice of flatbread, a pot of honey and the suggestion that he might like to try working a little harder than yesterday.

  By the time the old man returned, Petronius had uncovered five other pages from the Book of the Dead, as well as three papyruses so ancient even he could barely decipher them. He heard the old man approach a few seconds before the door opened, and hurriedly re-seated himself at his desk, pulling a scroll open in front of him at random.