Three for a Letter

Chapter Twenty-nine

“Potions? Do you mean Poppaea has been subjected to the ministrations of an ignorant village herbalist without her mother’s knowledge?” Godomar had risen from the chair in which he had been seated reading scripture aloud when John and Anatolius entered Poppaea’s room.

“I thought everyone knew, Godomar,” stammered Anatolius. “In fact, Calyce predicted Minthe’s potions would make the girl stronger and you can’t deny they have.” He gestured toward Poppaea, who was sitting up in bed, looking pale but alert.

“You may attribute her recovery to magick,” Godomar told them. “But I drove the unclean spirit from her frail body.” He glared at Anatolius.

“I must speak to Poppaea concerning Sunilda,” John said sharply, too fatigued to practice the civility he prized.

“I doubt you’ll ever find her,” Godomar returned.

“You know something useful concerning her disappearance?”

The prelate’s bloodless lips tightened into a smile suitable for a death mask. “I fear the demon was too willful and I could not drive it out of her, Lord Chamberlain. Isn’t it obvious? It would have been better for her poor soul had she died with Gadaric. Now the foul spirit has taken her away somewhere beyond our reach.”

“I see. I regret I must now ask you to take yourself away, Godomar,” John replied curtly. Seeing that the prelate was about to protest, he added, “and as Justinian’s Lord Chamberlain, you may consider my order to be his own.”

Godomar strode out of the small room without a word.

Anatolius idly fingered the codex Godomar had left open on the table by the bed. “It’s the tale of the Gadarene swine,” he noted. “I must say that’s a poor choice of something to read to a child.”

“Godomar’s read it to me more than once,” Poppaea said gravely. “He says I had a demon living inside me, just like those poor pigs did.”

John sat down on the chair. “A few morsels of tainted food is all you had inside you, Poppaea.”

“Would I know if I had something bad living inside me?”

“Of course you would, but you didn’t, so don’t let the notion give you nightmares,” Anatolius replied.

“Do you remember much about your picnic?” John asked the girl gently.

“Yes. It was very nice. Bertrada got honey cakes and apples and sweetmeats for us. She said the cook was very cross to be asked to find such things so early in the morning.”

“And then after the picnic?” John prompted.

The girl made a show of thinking hard, pursing her lips and frowning fiercely. “I went to a grand party but I don’t remember much about it. I got sleepy and my stomach hurt. Sunilda was at the party too. Why don’t you ask her about it?”

“But there weren’t any demons there as well, were there?” Anatolius put in.

Poppaea shook her head vigorously.

“So, you see,” Anatolius said with a smile, “there couldn’t be any lurking about to jump inside you, could there, or else you would have seen them.” He paused. “Was Minthe at this party?”

The girl shook her head again. “She wasn’t invited.”

“Did you see her on the day of the picnic?”

Poppaea shook her head a third time.

“Has she come to your room to give you any potions?”

“No. She’s Sunilda’s friend, not mine,” the girl replied firmly. “But Calyce keeps making me take some horrible tasting mixture.”

“It was for your own good, as people are so fond of saying,” Anatolius said with a smile.

“And you can’t recall anything about the party?” John asked.

“No, I can’t.” Poppaea looked unhappy. “It all seems like a dream.”

John said he understood and, changing the subject, asked her if she had any idea where Sunilda might be hiding.

He did not really expect her to know, but she did.

“Oh, yes. I think she’s hiding in our secret place.”

“A secret place?” Anatolius echoed with interest.

“We found a place to hide that only we know about,” the girl explained with an impish smile. “We play there a lot. And Sunilda keeps her letters there so Godomar can’t read them. He’s always poking about peoples’ rooms, you know.”

“Letters?” John hid his surprise.

The girl hesitated.

“That sounds like a fine jest,” Anatolius observed. “I’m certain Godomar would have loved to read them! But who were these letters for, Poppaea? Don’t worry, we won’t tell!” he added in a conspiratorial whisper.

Poppaea giggled. “Sunilda often writes to her Aunt Matasuntha in Italy, but Zeno told her it wasn’t any good sending them because Belisarius was ‘beseeching’ Ravenna and they wouldn’t get there. So Sunilda decided to keep them safe till he was done ‘beseeching.’” The rush of words stopped for a short time. “Only we knew about our hiding place,” she went on, “and Gadaric did too. Oh, and Barnabas as well. Gadaric insisted on that. He thought Barnabas was very funny and just had to show him where we hide.”

“Will you tell us where this secret place is, Poppaea? I think it could help us find Sunilda and bring her safely home,” John said softly.

Poppaea started to speak, then stopped, looking distressed. “But if I tell you it wouldn’t be secret anymore, would it, and besides I promised Sunilda I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“But you see, Poppaea,” John replied, “I must ask you to tell because it’s also the emperor’s business.”

“Couldn’t you tell the emperor about my promise?” the girl replied slowly. “If you did, I’m sure he’d understand. Everyone says we have to keep promises, even Godomar.”

“John,” Anatolius interrupted. “Let me have a few words with Poppaea, would you?”

John got up and moved out of earshot by the door as his young friend whispered for a few moments with Poppaea, then beckoned him into the corridor.

“I believe I know where she means.” Anatolius kept his voice low. “She didn’t tell me directly, of course. She just answered a question I posed to her.”

***

The two men made their way to a far corner of Zeno’s gardens where tangled thickets of laurel and rose bushes rioted in a manner that would have made even the stoutest-hearted gardener pale if faced with the prospect of pruning them.

Plunging into the thick and thorny jungle, Anatolius got down on his hands and knees to squeeze along a natural tunnel under the mass of entwined vegetation and limbs. John followed, uncomfortably reminded of the short tour of the garden Theodora had so recently arranged for him.

When he was finally able to stand he found himself some distance from the path, in a cramped clearing invisible to any passersby. The small space was almost filled by a moss-encrusted marble structure whose open entrance revealed a narrow stairway leading down into the depths of the earth. Three large birds, obviously ravens, were carved over the doorway.

It was a mithraeum dedicated to Mithra, John’s god-not to mention that worshipped by Anatolius as well as Felix and most of the excubitors.

“Uncle Zeno built this years back when he had an enthusiasm for exotic, not to say proscribed, religions,” Anatolius explained. “Although as usual he did not entirely follow tradition. I mean, look at those coraxes over the door. One of his little personal touches, I suppose.”

“An appropriate motif for a doorway, though, since each Mithran enters the order as a corax,” commented John, who had reached the high rank of Runner of the Sun. “At least it’s well hidden from official eyes.”

“Its concealment is probably more from neglect than design, John. Uncle isn’t one of those subtle thinkers. It’s just as well he doesn’t live at court.”

“Even though it’s said that a raven brought sad news to Apollo,” John replied, “I can’t help feeling that that trio of birds is a good omen. They remind me of that strange rhyme I heard so long ago in Bretania. You know the one, I’ve mentioned it before. ‘One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a letter…’ Of course, there were those who declared vehemently that three was for a girl but I’ve found that there’s always disagreement over even the smallest things. Yet if Lord Mithra has been kind, we’ll find Sunilda hiding down there, safe in His care. Tell me, though, what made you think of it?”

“I found myself wondering if this could be what Poppaea was talking about, so I asked her if their secret place was underground.” Anatolius pulled bits of twigs from his hair as he spoke. “She nodded but would say no more. Of course, she didn’t realize what she’d revealed. This is just the sort of hiding place that children love, John. In fact, when I was a lot younger I played here myself, in a manner of speaking.”

“And that means…?”

“I would hide here with one of the girls from the kitchen,” Anatolius replied, with a grin. “Let me go first. The stairs were in sad repair even then.”

As Anatolius paused beneath the doorway the sound of stealthy movement floated up from the depths of the small building.

The missing girl?

A small shape raced up out of the mithraeum and skittered away. It was a small, striped cat. Obviously frightened, it vanished into the thick undergrowth pressing in around the clearing.

Anatolius called Sunilda’s name as he led the way down the crumbling stairway.

Sunilda was not there.

It was obvious from a cursory glance that the area at its foot had originally been an antechamber. Now only a few fragments of the woven wickerwork screen that had separated it from the rest of the mithraeum remained. From where they stood, the whole of the narrow room with its rough plastered walls, far smaller in size than the mithraeum concealed in a cellar on the grounds of the Great Palace, was visible in the greenish light filtering down the steps. An odor of decay hung heavily in the small chamber’s thick air.

Anatolius started forward but John placed a hand on his shoulder, directing him look down.

There were small, muddy tracks on the cracked flagstones.

“The children’s footprints!” commented Anatolius.

“All that’s obvious is that they are small footprints,” John replied thoughtfully.

Anatolius was struck by inspiration. “Barnabas! Of course! He was hiding here!”

John made no reply.

They stepped over a dead rat that lay at the foot of the stairway, accounting for the rank smell that had greeted them.

“Evidently we disturbed that little cat at its supper,” Anatolius commented idly as they walked slowly up the narrow space between low benches set along the two longer walls. A quick glance revealed that the benches were formed of thickly plastered solid slabs with no hiding places beneath.

The stone altar in front of the far wall was carved with bas reliefs of Mithra. Reaching it, the two men paused and bowed their heads briefly in honor of their god, who had acquired a holy place in an unexpected manner.

Stepping away, they glanced around again.

Anatolius picked up a clay pot. It rattled as he up-ended it and the skull of a small animal, perhaps another rat, spilled out.

“Sacrifice or some spirited play?” Anatolius wondered aloud. “But it shouldn’t be left here to pollute Lord Mithra’s house. I’ll get rid of it and the rat when we leave. And what’s this?”

A board game was hidden behind the altar, along with a pair of small ceramic plates and two cups.

John examined the ceramic ware. They all bore the mark of Zeno’s household.

“The children obviously borrowed these from the kitchen to play with, Anatolius. You’ll recall Poppaea talked about a party. I thought she was referring to their picnic but now I’m beginning to think she wasn’t. Perhaps she meant that they had played here later that day?”

The wall behind the altar was decorated with the traditional sacred scene depicting Mithra killing the primeval bull. The wall painting would have originally displayed brilliant reds and greens, but now it was faded. Patches of plaster had fallen off, leaving much of the scene missing, and the blade in Mithra’s hand had been reduced to little more than a few flakes of pigment clinging to the rough surface of the wall.

Anatolius slipped into the cramped space between wall and altar.

“I made this little hiding place before I realized it was blasphemous and an insult to Mithra,” he confessed shamefacedly. “I’m sure He understands that I was but a child at the time and that it was not meant as an affront to Him.”

A slight scraping ensued as he quickly pulled an irregularly shaped piece of stone from the back of the altar, exposing a small niche in which nestled a sheaf of parchments.

The letters Sunilda had written to her besieged aunt in Italy.

John rapidly scanned them when they had emerged back into the green-tinted light of the small clearing.

The girl’s handwriting and grammar were certainly very accomplished for one of her age, he thought. As for her imagination, as he read Sunilda’s visions of her future as a queen, her descriptions of conversations with Porphyrio the whale and accounts of marvelous events and astounding adventures that simply could never have happened, he found it difficult to credit that a child could possess such powers of invention. Surely she must simply be describing the world as she truly saw it, however mistaken such a view might be.

He remarked on this to Anatolius, adding, “I suppose we all live in different worlds. The one I live in now is not the one I inhabited as a young man.”

Then he abruptly stopped scanning the neat lines of writing and reread the passage that had startled him.

“What is it?” Anatolius asked.

“It seems Mithra has indeed smiled upon us,” John replied. “For indeed his sacred ravens were right, whichever version of that old rhyme you accept, Anatolius!”

“But how can that be?”

“Because from this letter I know where to find the girl,” John said rapidly. “She’s gone to meet the whale. Apparently it’s promised to take her to Gadaric. She describes her plans to her aunt, right down to the last detail.”

Anatolius sadly shook his head over the girl’s mistaken notion of being reunited with her brother, characterizing it as a childish fantasy. “But at least we now know where she is. Where is that, John?”

The parchment crackled as John’s fingers tightened around it.

“We’ll find her hiding near the headland when the straw man festival is under way.”

“That’s at dawn tomorrow! This is wonderful news! But how does she expect to meet a whale on a cliff top? Does she suppose it will fly up to carry her off?”

“Hardly, Anatolius,” John replied. “Unless we can stop her, it seems she intends to throw herself into the sea at the same time as the straw man-just like the Gadarene swine.”