The Silver Branch [book II] (3 page)

Carausius set a hand on his shoulder and turned him—for it was dusk by now—to get the lamp-light on his face. After a long unhurried scrutiny, he said, ‘So you are our new Junior Surgeon.’

‘Yes, Caesar.’

‘Where did you serve your Cubhood?’

‘With the third Cohort of the Fretencis, at Beersheba in Judea,’ Justin said. ‘Fulvius Licinius, who commands the garrison, bade me salute you from him, and ask you if you remember the boar that you and he killed below the pine-woods at the third bend of the Scaldis.’

Carausius was silent a moment. Then he said, ‘I remember that boar, yes—and Licinius. And so he’s in Judea, is he? He was senior to me in those days; and now he commands the garrison at Beersheba, while I wear this’—touching the mantle of Imperial Purple that he wore clasped by a huge ruby at the shoulder. ‘There’s naught so odd as life. Maybe you haven’t noticed that yet, but you will, you will, if you live long enough … So my brother Emperors send me a Junior Surgeon from the Fretencis. There have been several postings from overseas to the Legions here in Britain, lately. Almost like old times.—Yet they showed themselves none so friendly this spring, as I remember.’ Voice and manner were musing, nothing more, the hand on Justin’s shoulder barely tightened its grip, there was no change in the blunt, straight-featured face so near his own, save that perhaps for a moment the eyes seemed to grow a little paler, as the sea whitening before a rain-squall; and yet suddenly Justin was cold afraid. ‘Can you read me the riddle, I wonder?’

Somehow he held his ground under the light, deadly hand on his shoulder, and gave back the Emperor’s look without wavering.

A voice—a pleasantly cool voice with a laugh in it—protested lazily, ‘Excellency, you are too hard on the boy. It is his first night among us, and you will put him off his dinner.’

Carausius paid not the faintest attention. For a few moments he continued that terrible raking stare; then a slow, straight-lipped smile spread over his face. ‘You are so right, my dear Allectus,’ he said; and then to Justin, ‘No, you have not been sent to play the spy, or if you have, you do not know it.’ His hand slipped from the young surgeon’s shoulder, and he glanced about him. ‘Shall we begin dinner, my friends?’

The man who had been called Allectus caught Justin’s eye as he turned away, and smiled. Justin returned the smile, grateful as always for kindness, and slipped back through the crowd to Flavius, who greeted him half under his breath with a swift ‘Eugé! That was well done!’ which warmed him still further.

And a little later he was sitting between Flavius and another Centurion at the foot of the table. His right-hand neighbour was too busy eating to have any conversation, and he was free to give his whole attention to the highly irreverent account of the great ones at the upper end of the table, with which Flavius was favouring him under cover of the general hum of talk.

‘You see that one with the sword-cut down his cheek?’ said Flavius, dealing with a pickled herring. ‘That’s Arcadius, the captain of the
Caleope
, our biggest three-bank galley. He came by that mark in the arena. A bright lad, Arcadius, in his young days. Oh, and the melancholy fellow beside him is Dexion, a Centurion of Marines. Never,’ said Flavius, wagging his head,
‘never
shake the dice with him unless you want to lose the tunic off your back. I don’t say he doesn’t play square, but he throws Venus more often than any mere mortal has a right to.’

‘Thanks for the warning,’ Justin said. ‘I’ll remember.’

But his eyes strayed with an odd fascination, as they had done more than once before, to the man whom the Emperor had called Allectus, who now sat among Carausius’s staff officers near the head of the table. He was a tall man with a cap of shining fair hair greying a little at the temples; a man with a rather heavy face that would have been good to look at but that it was too pale; everything about him just a little too pale—hair, skin, and eyes. But even as Justin watched, the man smiled at something his neighbour had said, and the smile, swift and completely charming, gave to his face all that it lacked before.

‘Who is the tall very fair man?’ he murmured to Flavius. ‘The Emperor called him Allectus, I think.’

‘Carausius’s Finance Minister and general right-hand man. He has a vast following among the troops, as well as the merchants and moneyers, so that I suppose after Carausius he’s the most powerful man in Britain. But he’s a good enough fellow, in spite of looking as though he’d been reared in a dark closet.’

And then, a few moments later, something happened; something so slight and so ordinary that afterwards Justin wondered if he had simply let his imagination run away with him—and yet he could never quite forget it, nor the sudden sense of evil that came with it. Roused perhaps by the warmth rising from the lamps, a big, soft-winged night-moth had come fluttering down from the rafters to dart and hover and swerve about the table. Everyone’s attention was turned towards the Emperor, who was at that moment preparing to pour the second Libation to the gods. Everyone, that is, save Justin and Allectus. For some unknown reason, Justin had glanced again at Allectus; and Allectus was watching the moth.

The moth was circling wildly nearer and nearer to one of the lamps which stood directly before the Finance Minister, its blurred shadow flashing about the table as it swooped and spun in dizzy spirals about the bright and beckoning flame, closer and closer, until the wild, ecstatic dance ended in a burst of shadows, and the moth spun away on singed wings, to fall with a pitiful, maimed fluttering close beside Allectus’s wine-cup. And Allectus, smiling faintly, crushed out its life under one deliberate finger.

That was all. Anybody would crush a singed moth—it was the obvious, the only thing to do. But Justin had seen the pale man’s face as he watched the dancing moth, waiting for it to dance too near, seen it in the unguarded instant as he stretched out that precise forefinger to kill.

A
S the days went by, Justin grew used to the great fortress that was the heart and headquarters of Carausius’s defence against the Saxons. Under the tall grey pharos that had once been triumphant with bronze and gleaming marble, the galleys and the merchantmen came and went; and all day behind the noises of the fortress, behind the parade-ground voices and the trumpets and the tramp of marching feet, sounded the ring and rasp of adze and hammer from the dockyard below the rampart walls. And behind the hum of the busy dockyard sounded always the sea.

Three times that autumn, before winter closed the seaways, there were brushes between the British fleets and the black-sailed ships of the Saxons; and Justin had much practice for his skill when the wounded were brought in, and won grudging praise from the irascible Senior Surgeon, which made him happy.

That was a good autumn for him in other ways too, and for Flavius, with whom he spent a good deal of his off-duty times. The quick liking of their first meeting had grown into a close and enduring friendship. They were drawn together by a common loneliness; for Flavius, brought up by a widowed Great-Aunt after the death from pestilence of both his parents, had loneliness behind him also. That autumn and the winter that followed they hunted boar together in the Great Forest, and took their birding bows out after wild-fowl in the marshes, and poked about the fishing village that considered itself a town, with its added huddle of shops and temples and beer-sellers’ bothies beneath the fortress walls.

One place that they haunted a good deal was a shop close under the North bastion, kept by one Serapion, a little withered man, half British, half Egyptian, with jewel-bright eyes and pointed fingers like a lizard. A veritable dog-hole of a shop, viewed from outside, but inside, filled with delights; with little bundles of dried herbs and pots and jars of unnamed substances, with fragrant oils in little crystal flasks, and dried and shrivelled things that one did not care to guess at too closely. It was a shop much frequented by the garrison; here one might buy scented oils and unguents for oneself, or a stick of perfume for a girl.

Flavius went there for the sake of Serapion’s rubbing-oil, which was good when one was stiff and tired from the hunting trail, and for some unguent which he vainly hoped would make his hair lie down; Justin went because Serapion’s concoctions interested him, and the man’s talk of healing and harming herbs and the influence of the stars interested him still more.

On an evening just after Saturnalia, Justin and Flavius turned in through the low doorway of Serapion’s shop, to find the little Egyptian serving another customer; and by the light of the small hanging lamp, recognized Allectus. Justin had seen him many times, by now, in the Emperor’s train; this tall man with the ashy-fair head and the heavy face that lightened so pleasantly at his ready smile, who was, after Carausius, the most powerful man in Britain. He had never told Flavius about the moth—after all, what was there to tell, when one came to put it into words? ‘I saw him kill that moth, and he enjoyed doing it.’ That was all. And as time went by he had almost, though never quite, forgotten the whole thing.

Allectus looked round at their entrance, with that swift, pleasant smile of his. ‘Ah, I trust you are not pressed for time. I fear I am lamentably slow to make my choice, this evening.’ Then he turned back to the matter in hand, which seemed to be the choice of a phial of perfume. ‘Something out of the common—something that will be at once a gift and a compliment, for the lady’s birthday.’

Serapion bowed, smiled, touching with one pointed finger the fine alabaster flask that he had set on the table before his noble customer. ‘This is the perfume that I blended especially to your order last time, Excellency. Was the lady not pleased?’

‘Yes, but this is a different lady,’ said Allectus, with that cool note of laughter in his voice; then, tossing the words casually over his shoulder to the two young men in the gloom behind him, ‘Never give the same perfume to two different women at the same time—they may meet. That is a thing for you to remember, my young cockerels.’

‘Ah, now I understand, Excellency.’ The little Egyptian bowed again. ‘If your Honour could give me until tomorrow to blend something worthy of the lady whom Allectus honours with his gift—’

‘Do I not tell you her birthday is tomorrow, and I must send it off tonight? Show me something that you have here ready blended.’

Serapion was still a moment, considering, then turned, and moved, silent as a cat, into the farthest shadows, to return holding something between his cupped hands. ‘I have this,’ he said—‘this, the perfume of perfumes. Blended by myself, ah yes, as I alone can blend the precious essences into one exquisite whole.’ He set the thing down on the table, and it stood there, a small crystal flask, glowing under the lamp like a green-gold jewel.

‘It is a charming flask,’ said Allectus, taking it up and turning it in strong white fingers.

‘A charming flask, ah, but the fragrance within—the flowering essence of a thousand summers caught in amber! Wait now, I will break the seal and you shall judge.’

He took back the tiny flask, and with a sharp thumbnail peeled away the film of wax about the neck, and withdrew the stopper; then dipped in a thin glass rod, and touched Allectus on the back of the hand he held out for the purpose. Instantly, as the drop of precious liquid ran on to the man’s warm skin, a wonderful scent arose, strong but delicate, engulfing the other odours of the place.

Allectus held his hand to his nostrils. ‘How much?’

‘A hundred sesterces, Excellency.’

‘That is a great price for a very small flask of perfume.’

‘But such perfume, Excellency! The cost of such ingredients is very great, and I assure you a hundred sesterces allows me but a very small reward for my time and skill.’

‘So. I still think it a great price, but I’ll take it. Seal it up for me again.’

‘Allectus is most good and gracious.’ Serapion bowed, and continued his plaint as he warmed the stick of wax he had taken up, and again sealed the neck of the flask. ‘Aye, aye, costly they are indeed, such ingredients as these—sheer liquid gold. And on so many of them one must pay a king’s ransom in duty, to bring them into the province. Ah me, they come hard upon a poor man, these new taxes of the Emperor’s.’

Allectus laughed softly. ‘Maybe you should lay the taxes at my door, friend. Who else should take the blame if not the Emperor’s Finance Minister?’

‘Why of course, your Excellency. See, here is the perfume.’ Serapion handed it over, glancing up under his thin lids as though to judge how far he might venture. ‘But is an Emperor always guided by his Finance Minister? They say in the market-place that sometimes a Finance Minister might be—not altogether at one with his Emperor in all things; that the taxes might be less harsh if—’

‘It is generally foolish to listen to market-place talk,’ said Allectus. ‘And generally foolish to repeat it.’ He slipped the flask into the breast of his fine woollen tunic, shaking his head with smiling impatience at the Egyptian’s protestation that he meant no harm. ‘Nay, man, we all let our tongues run away with us at times. Here, take your hundred sesterces.’ And with a courteous goodnight, which included the two young men, he gathered the folds of his cloak about him and was gone into the wintry darkness.

Serapion the Egyptian stood looking after him, with an expression of sly understanding in his little bright eyes. Then he turned back to the two young men, with a face empty of everything except willingness to oblige.

‘And now, young sirs—I regret that you have been kept waiting. Is it some more of the muscle oil?—or maybe a gift for the ladies at home? I hear that you go on leave together in a few days’ time.’

Justin was startled, for it was only that morning that Flavius had managed an exchange with another Centurion, so that they could take their leave at the same time.

Flavius laughed. ‘Does ever anyone sneeze in Rutupiae that you don’t know about it within the hour? No, just the muscle oil.’