Night of the Wolf (42 page)

“Are there any more of them?” Antony asked.

“No, not here,” Maeniel answered. “But at the end of this hall . . . a lot.”

“How many?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Well, if you know they’re there, you should know how many.” Antony sounded annoyed.

“I can smell them. A lot more than two hands.”

“Over ten?” Antony whispered.

“Yes. Let’s get out of here.”

“Oh, no.” Antony positively chortled. “This is the most fun I’ve had in weeks. I wouldn’t leave here for anything in the world.” He advanced down the hall.

Maeniel followed.

Gordus brought Dryas to a passage under the arena. It was dark. He preceded her, carrying a torch. Dryas followed along with Marcia. Aquila, with another torch, came last. The passage stank of cat urine and other barnyard smells of animals living in confined spaces. The passage ended in a larger stone-floored room that extended under the seats above. There were cages here. Most were empty. They were small and had wooden bars, but Gordus led them to the back, where a much larger cage with iron bars stood before them. It was also wheeled, so that it could be rolled along or drawn by mules. The length and breadth of the mass stretched out on the floor of the cage in the shadowy torchlight was astonishing.

Gordus shook one of the bars and shouted, “Wake up, Terror. Wake up and greet the lady.”

The thing rose sluggishly, padded into the circle of light cast by the torches, lifted its immense head, bared its fangs, and roared.

Dryas stepped back a pace, drew in a deep breath, and let it out slowly. She glanced to one side and saw Aquila’s face. His eyes were wide with horror. Marcia covered her mouth to stifle a shriek. Gordus seemed impassive.

Oddly enough, Marcia’s and Aquila’s reactions steadied Dryas. Her first impression was one of beauty. The bright orange hide with the black stripes was magnificent, as was the rippling grace of the muscles moving easily under the short coat. Yes, it was cat. The great head with its white ruff bent down as if to touch noses with her and two golden eyes, pupils contracted in the torchlight, studied her rather incuriously. Then it raised a paw to the bars and she saw the ends of the dreadful scimitar-shaped retractile claws. They extended themselves lazily from their furred sheaths and then slowly slid back in.

It turned, giving something on the cage floor a desultory nudge with its nose, and returned to the pile of straw bedding in the corner from whence it came.

Dryas looked closely at the thing the cat nudged, then drew back her lip, curled in disgust. It was the bloodless, mostly fleshless remains of a human arm, hand still attached, resting on the floor of the cage.

“It belongs to Antony,” Gordus said. “They call the thing ‘Terror’ and it is. As I said, they use it for executions, and most of what it eats is human flesh because Antony throws it the remains of the men it kills. He says we pay even slaves something and Terror deserves his fee.”

“I take it they won’t throw me to it unarmed?” Dryas asked.

“No,” Gordus said, “but then, how much good do you think a sword will do you? Even the men it executes are usually given something.” He gestured toward the cage with the torch. “You can see even a sword and shield didn’t do that one much good. I think that’s what Antony enjoys. At least a few of them are game enough to make a fight of it, but they lose. Oh boy, how they lose.”

“Thank you, Gordus,” Aquila said. “I appreciate your solicitude. I really do.”

Marcia wept quietly.

“I told you not to get involved,” Gordus said angrily to his wife. “I told you you’d only get hurt. I told you to leave her alone.”

“Hush!” Dryas embraced Marcia. “It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever faced and trust me, death isn’t the worst thing either.” She kissed the older woman on the forehead. “Thank you for all your kindness. Now, let’s go lay Priscus to rest. I promised him last night I would if I could.”

They continued along the corridor under the arena until she sensed they were outside. Above, cut through the limestone rock, were light wells. By night, they showed only stars.

Then they came to the mortuary chapel.

“We don’t invite outsiders here,” Gordus said, placing his torch in a metal bracket on one side of the door. Taking his cue from Gordus, Aquila placed his on the other side.

The chamber they illuminated reminded Dryas of a banquet hall, and that was as it should be. There were four large stone couches grouped around a stone table in the center of the room. Along the walls there were benches, also stone, that could easily be covered by cushions to accommodate more people if necessary. The walls were whitewashed and painted. The dominant color was red, a brilliant flame-colored scarlet—the same color worn by the bride at a Roman wedding in a veil that draped her entire body.

At Dryas’ feet was an opening into the floor where libations could be poured. It was surrounded by a shallow cone.

Dryas stepped around it and walked toward the table. Above it was a square light well leading up to the open and yes, there were the stars.

“Yes,” she said. “This is entirely fitting.” She could see it in her mind’s eye by day. The light well illuminating the entire chamber with a soft glow, lighting the benches, stone couches, and even the table covered by cushions and cloths, filled with men reclining on the couches and seated or reclining on the benches around the walls. The head of the officiant would be covered, out of respect for the dead man, and he would make the offering into the libation hole. Bread, oil, meat, and wine given to the earth for their late comrade in arms that he might have food and drink as he undertook the long and sometimes difficult journey into eternity.

Then the rest would feast together, sharing among themselves the provisions brought in baskets to the tomb in thanksgiving that they each would have a little longer to take joy in the light, but knowing also that one day they must go, as this voyager had, on his last journey alone.

We love.
Dryas remembered other loves.
We love and it is not eternal, but nonetheless, we love.

“Even the damned need consolation in their damnation, so we built this,” Gordus said. His voice echoed in the stone room. “Even the damned are due something from those who pronounce sentence, and they respect this. Woman, we will hold your rites here, if we must.”

“Thank you,” Dryas said. “I will endeavor to deserve it.” Then she entered a small antechamber, the cubiculum of the gladiators where their ashes rested in niches in the walls. She found Priscus’ amphora almost at once and carried it into the main room. It was perhaps a foot long, a smaller version of those used to hold wine. Marcia had a stand to hold the pointed amphora upright, and Gordus had oil and wine.

Aquila handed her his dagger without thinking twice about it. She used the metal hilt to break the seal on the amphora and the handle of one of Marcia’s wooden spoons to grind the remaining bones to powder. Then she mixed oil and wine in the amphora with them and placed it in the stand on the table under the stars gleaming through the light well.

When she turned to set the piece of wood in her hand on fire, she saw that Gordus, Marcia, and Aquila had covered their heads with their mantles, so she covered hers, then pushed the wooden spoon handle into the torch flames. The oil caught and she returned to the table and dropped it into the ash-filled vessel.

For a moment, she was afraid it wouldn’t catch, a bad omen, but then the oil flared and flames leaped from the top of the amphora. Up rose the smoke, carrying the oil, wine, and the perfumes used on Priscus’ funeral pyre up, up toward the stars and the night sky beyond.

And she went with it. She saw Caesar, the author of so much misery. He sat alone, writing by the illumination of a five-branched bronze lamp cast in the form of six gladiators killing each other.

He looked up when the presence entered, as if he felt both minds bent on him.

He is old,
she thought,
and this should have happened long ago.
She saw the hawk’s profile, the hollow cheeks, the skin sagging at his throat, the everlastingly unquiet eyes probing the gloom in the corners of the room as if he willed himself to see them. See them and somehow prevent Priscus’ escape from the greedy, controlling force that had destroyed so much and so many.

But they were moving, circling him, and even had he been able to see beyond time to where they were on the cusp of eternity, he would have had no more than a fleeting glimpse before they were in the night and gone.

Then Dryas found herself looking down at the stars. They were spread like an ocean before her. Burning in myriads before her, their thousand roads traced the pathless seas and the green continents, their movements certain and predictable from the beginning of time to its end and yet a vast mystery that she and her kind might never fully comprehend.

Then the presence that had been Priscus spread wider, the way smoke from a dying fire does when caught by the wind, vanishing, scattered into the air. He was gone, part of the ocean of stars.

Dryas awoke, back in the chamber, where she watched the amphora crack and fall. The dust, spun into a whirlwind by the air warmed by the fire, and pulling cold air from the dark chambers around her, rushed up the light well into the night beyond.

Behind them in the passage, something moaned. Maeniel went cold, knowing it must be the first one. He was relatively sure the other two must be dead.

Antony didn’t seem to hear. On they went. Once beyond the bend in the corridor the wolf could see and, being a wolf, see well. The courtyard was full of men. They were seated on low cushions around equally low tables. They watched a pair, girl and boy, dance. They were both naked. Maeniel and Antony stopped, brought up short by perhaps the most erotic thing they had ever seen.

At first, Maeniel thought they were children, but then on closer inspection, he saw they weren’t that young. No, both were adults, though small. They were very brown with dark hair. The girl was standing center stage and the boy moved around, circling her, trying to draw close. Though standing still, her body undulated with an exquisite play of light and shadow as she slowly turned to remain face-to-face with her male partner. And though Maeniel had, at first, thought her naked, she was wearing something: snakes.

One serpent circled her waist like a belt and Maeniel saw as she and the boy slowly turned on the stage that it moved and was alive. She had two others, one on each arm, and each time the male drew near, she raised an arm and the serpent lifted its head, hissed, and the mouth opened as if to strike, and the boy drew back. He resumed his endless circling ’round and ’round the tantalizing she-creature and each time he tried to close with her, she threatened him again with the serpents, all to the whistling and skirling of the pipes and the heartbeat of the drum.

Braziers burned everywhere in the courtyard, keeping off the night chill. At Maeniel’s side, Antony stood swaying, more than half-drunk, but Maeniel’s head was clear. Still, something in the fumes from the braziers began clouding his mind, making it difficult to think and impossible to tear his eyes away from the couple in the center of the courtyard.

As he watched, slowly the dance changed. The girl began to bend her body back, legs apart until her shoulders were almost parallel to the ground. Then she rested the fingers of her right hand on the ground and the snake flowed down the arm to the earth, was caught by a handler, and placed in a basket. She did the same with the other until she was leaning back, supported on fingers and feet, her long hair brushing the ground, the snake at her waist the only one remaining.

Her partner, his body undulating as hers did, had a full erection and moved closer and closer to the wet red structures between her parted labia. Only the reptile encircling her waist held him off. It lifted its head and the mouth opened only a few inches from the male’s phallic organ. Maeniel, feeling his blood heat, understood the point of the dance and he, like everyone else in the garden, was rigid, hypnotized by the young man’s rhythmically swaying body. And the snake, seemingly equally caught up in the rhythms of the man’s intensity, slowly lowered its head and, using her leg as a ramp, abandoned its post on her waist. The male dancer entered his kingdom, being welcomed through the gates in an intimate kiss by the woman’s other lips.

Maeniel spun around, knowing they were there and knowing that they’d hesitated out of fear for the dancing couple’s safety. He was right. There were at least a dozen men. He snatched the drunken Antony by the belt and dashed past the joined bodies of the dancers. It took every trick Dryas ever taught him to stay alive and moving until he reached a wooden gate in the wall. He used Antony’s head as a battering ram to open it. Pushing the semiconscious man in front of him, he fled.

Lucius was awakened by a nightmare. As in all his worst dreams, it concerned some personal failure of his, but he wasn’t sure what. Unlike most Romans, he had no servants sleeping in his room. At bedtime, he had dismissed Octus, propped himself with cushions, read till he became sleepy, then blown out the lamp.

Now, trying to remember his nightmare, he saw a light pass on the porch in front of his door and opened it, surprising Octus walking toward Philo’s room, a few doors down. The servant turned and faced him.

“What’s wrong?” Lucius asked.

“Nothing,” Octus said, shielding the flickering lamp flame from the night wind. “I was going to call Cut Ear to accompany Philo. Calpurnia sent for him, a rather urgent summons. She’s been taken badly with her usual problem. I hope our stirring around didn’t awaken you.”

“No, I had a nightmare. I saw your light.” He lifted his mantle from a hook on the back of the door and wrapped it around himself. The dream was fading, but he still wanted company, though he couldn’t put his finger on the source of his disquiet. The dream had shaken him badly and the fear lingered on into waking consciousness.

Yes, he understood what was gnawing at him: his fears for the woman who had fought the boar. Fulvia would tell him little. He assumed she was still smarting because of his treatment of Firminius and, though she didn’t say or admit she knew, his visit to Caesar and what was certainly a payoff. She refused to communicate Dryas’ whereabouts to him. Fulvia, shocked that her brother had shown any backbone at all, was probably looking for anything she could possibly use against him, something to push him back into what she considered his place among the relatives she either patronized or ignored.