The Art of War

Chapter 16

Rome, 3–4 August AD 69

Julius Scopius, innkeeper and dream-teller

I am Scopius. In childhood, I was a friend of the lady Caenis before she was a lady. Now, I am innkeeper, dream-teller, husband to Gudrun, and father to the acrobats Zois and Thais. Amongst other things, I own the Inn of the Crossed Spears.

Your man came to us that night shyly, shamed to be asking for a bed and unwilling to ask for more. He was hurting and desperate and he wanted us to think he could simply sleep did we but give him a safe bed on which to lie.

With another man at another time, I would perhaps have given him the keys to one of our private rooms and if he was dead in the morning, who would care? But I am a dream-teller and Gudrun watches the branching futures in the smoke bowl and we both knew that this man must live.

Why? Because we would not be here, talking now, if he had died, and here is where we need to be.

So; he came from Caenis who had saved my life once and for that alone we would not turn him away. We knew what he needed and we each have our specialty; me, Gudrun, Zois and Thais.

Between us, we bathed him and oiled his hurts, the old as well as the new, and wrapped his hands and his head in willow bark and when he was warm again, and had drunk the hot, sweetened herbs that Gudrun cooked for him, and was pliant, we laid him on a bed with a good straw mattress and sang him to sleep.

In truth, he was already sleeping. Better to say that we sang him good dreams, to sweep away the nightmares in which men hit and burned him. They were not helping him to heal.

He woke before dawn the next day with less pain than he deserved and more than he wanted and then, at his request — still shyly made, but he knew by then what we could do — we set about changing how he looked.

Gudrun mixed the paste for his skin and hair and I smoothed it on, to be sure that every part of him was covered. Some hours later, when he had endured as much of the itch and discomfort as he could, we let him wash it off at the well; his self-respect needed it by then.

I gave him sacking to dry himself and then Gudrun held up the broad, flat, silvered bowl that he might see himself.

‘Will you look?’ she said.

He looked at her queerly, then. I think he did not remember her speaking the night before and this was the first time he had heard her truly. Her voice is northern, far, far northern, from the ice floes where walrus lie and many-horned deer run across the plains, and she speaks her Latin as one who learned it late, and still it splits her tongue. I love the sound of it, round in my ears, but it can take some getting used to.

Or maybe it was the bowl he recognized, for she had looked in it at the smoke-futures while he lay on his mattress and he might have woken and seen her.

But she was holding it up for him to use, so he stopped looking at her and instead looked at his own face in the bowl’s reflection. We saw his eyes grow wide with shock and knew we had done what he needed much better than he had expected.

He took the bowl from Gudrun, tilted it this way and that, and what he saw was the same from every angle. Truly, he had become a Berber: every part of his skin was as dark as a paste of walnut juice mixed in ewe’s milk butter with the egg of a dark-feathered hen can make it. On top of that, Thais and Zois had worked for an hour with certain other pastes so that the wound on his head, which had been angry and swollen the night before, looked as if it had been done in childhood.

His hair, once straight to the nape of his neck and glinting amber where the sun had caught it, was now black and curled tight to his head, like lamb’s fleece. Since he was become a Berber tribesman, we had fashioned on his face the spiral tattoos that those people wear. With a sharpened quill, Gudrun had applied a mix of copper rust and powdered granite and ash that gives the look of an old tattoo, but will come off again with vinegar or lemon juice.

Catching sight of them, Pantera tilted the mirror so that it caught the light and sent dazzling patches a-dance across the walls and we could see the work as if under the noonday sun.

Gudrun grasped his chin and manoeuvred his face a little to examine her craft. Her fingers worked a little around the edge of the contusion on his brow, blending it in. If I say it myself, he was a testament to a great art; the scar looked ancient and the tattoos, too, looked as if they had been done at a puberty so long ago, the world had aged in between.

Only Pantera looked young and vital; our songs and our medicaments had rejuvenated him. Then, setting down Gudrun’s mirror, he wrought his own magic, and even as we watched he seemed to age before us, to shrink into himself, to grow smaller, more frail; if you had passed him on a street corner you would have thought him half dead with the weight of time laid on his shoulders.

He looked at Gudrun, and then at me. ‘If I need to change back,’ he said, ‘can it be done?’

‘I am Scopius,’ I said. ‘Anything can be done. Come to me with a night to spare and you can become who or what you will.’

He gave me a sharp glance, but took me at my word. ‘Then all that’s left to be done is that I go and lie for half an hour on the manure heap, so that I smell more like an unwashed Berber grandfather and less like a good winter stew.’

He was recovering his sense of humour, and we were coming to recognize it. Zois, above all of us, was mesmerized by him. As soon as he was awake, she had come to sit cross-legged at his feet, to ply him with questions. He, for his part, had answered them honestly and freely, treating her enough as an adult for her not to feel patronized, not so much that she was lost. I know now that he had a child who would have been around her age, had she lived; then, I thought he was just taken with Zois, as so many men were, and that I had need pay mind to her virtue.

So I was more than half concerned when she asked, ‘Where will you go?’

He could have sent her away, told her it was none of her business, or that she was safer not to know if the Guards came visiting, all of which was true. He did none of these things, but rather magicked a silver coin from the tip of his nose and tossed it to her, saying, ‘Into the market, first, I think, to buy a sack of nuts or dates to carry: nobody looks much at lame Berber grandfathers, but even fewer will look at one if he is balancing a sack of dates on his crown.’ His eyes met mine across the top of her head. ‘I may also visit the silver-boys. Unless you would caution me not to?’

That gave me pause; nobody visits the silver-boys who has not been one, and I did not know him, or thought I did not. But then Rome is a big place and the silver-boys of the Quirinal, where we were, are different from those on the Palatine who are different again from those on the Capitol, and so it goes for each of the city’s seven hills.

‘They will be safe for the likes of you,’ I said. ‘And you may give them my greeting.’ Which is to say, my assurance that he, Pantera, was safe. It was the greatest gift I gave him that day, but neither of us knew so at the time.

He lifted the mirror-bowl and held it a moment in such a way that my daughters were shown in it together. Zois is like me, small and dark and stringy; she will never turn men’s heads with the curve of her figure, but she has a sharpness to her features that raises the blood.

Thais takes after Gudrun, since you ask; they are both ice-blonde and Nordic, and while the girl has not yet grown into the stature of her mother the signs of it are there, and are what hold men’s attention when she dances on the tightrope across the street or spins at the top of a pyramid of men.

Pantera took the bowl and set it down, so that the only reflection was his. ‘I saw your wife watching the smoke-dreams last night, after you had put me to bed.’

‘You should not ask what she saw,’ I warned him.

‘I don’t plan to.’ He gave a tight smile. ‘If death is coming, I would rather not know. If it’s not…’ He shrugged. He had been close enough to death often enough to know that there are worse things than dying. ‘I wouldn’t want to become careless. I just wanted you to know that I had seen.’ And then, briskly, shaking himself clear of the memory, he asked, ‘Have you been out to market this morning? Have you heard any news?’

The question was directed at me; he must have known I’d been out.

‘If you mean are they hunting you,’ I said, ‘yes they are. Half the Guard is out asking for you by name and description in the morning markets. They say you are an enemy of the state and offer five hundred denarii for news of you. A lot of people say they have seen you. None of them is telling the truth. Yet.’

An enemy of the state is what they called Nero, which was enough to make him kill himself when he thought they might take him alive. Enemies of the state have their necks caught in a cleft stick and are flogged to death, although not, of course, until they have revealed all they know about other enemies of the state. People who harbour them are subject to the same sanctions.

Pantera’s face grew grave. Formally, he said, ‘I endanger you all by my presence here. I’m sorry, I had not thought they would be so swift to act. I will leave now.’ He delved into his money belt and brought out gold. ‘Perhaps this, for your trouble.’

I was the shy one then. It was Gudrun who put words to it. ‘We don’t need your gold.’

This was true: we owned the Inn of the Crossed Spears, plus the entire acrobat troupe who played in it. At least half of the houses strewn along the Street of the Lame Dog were ours while the inhabitants of the other half, if they didn’t owe us rent, at least owed us loyalty.

Pantera closed his fist over his hand. He didn’t turn away. ‘Every man has his price. How long before the emperor’s silver outweighs a promise?’

‘Long enough for what you need,’ Gudrun said and then, seeing his face, said, ‘We have our dreams, too, and they tell us we shall not be betrayed while you are with us.’

Zois, who has eyes of the same hot-ice green as her mother, looked up at him and said, ‘Your death is not at our hands.’

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask whose hand would kill him — we all saw that — but he must have known the ways of the dream and how it harms a man to hear too much of his future, for, with no further comment, he donned the loose white robes of the Berber, took a stick that we gave him, and leaned on it. He stooped his back, dropped his left hip as if the arthritis had crippled him, and like that, bent and old, he ventured out into the city that was hunting him.