Three for a Letter

Chapter Eight

“You want your men to patrol my estate?” Zeno flapped his hands in horror. “It’s impossible, Felix! Some of my servants live in the village. How could an excubitor possibly tell one of my gardeners from a prowler lurking in the shrubbery with evil intent?”

“The village is part of your estate, Zeno,” put in Livia. “I’d expect it would be patrolled as well.”

The lady-in-waiting made a valid point, John thought. He said as much.

Felix had spent hours surveying Zeno’s estate. The main house was a rambling edifice with multiple wings and interior gardens connected by colonnades. A maze of ornamental gardens interspersed with groves and meadows in which stood workshops, baths, and shrines surrounded the large dwelling. Beyond, the estate proper gradually merged into fields and the outskirts of the village with no clear demarcation between them, let alone a wall.

Now Felix had convened a meeting to discuss this security nightmare. The gathering was in an unadorned office looking out into an interior courtyard. Even with the writing desk pushed against its back wall, with several members of Zeno’s household as well as the visitors from Constantinople present, the small room was crowded. It did however have the advantage of being devoid of any of Hero’s mechanical monstrosities.

“Yes, that’s right, the village is part of my estate,” Zeno said vaguely. “I’ve never paid much heed to the matter. My servants have always come and gone as they wish and I’m certain they won’t want armed men patrolling on their doorsteps.”

Livia glared. “But surely if their master says they’ll have patrols, they’ll have patrols-and be glad of them, too.”

“Oh, Livia, what I am going to do with you? We’ve only been guests since summer began and already you want to run the entire estate!” Calyce spoke laughingly but her smile looked forced.

John’s gaze passed wearily over the two women. They formed a marked contrast. Calyce was slim and dark with an overly prominent jaw, while Livia was shorter, fairer, rounder in figure and face. He had no doubt that the empress had chosen them deliberately. It was the sort of pairing she’d find highly comical and if they also happened to dislike each other, well, the imperial mistress of the disgruntled ladies-in-waiting would doubtless find that even more amusing.

Bertrada, the nursemaid who had hitherto remained standing near the door, now took a couple of steps forward and spoke. She was, John noted, an angular young woman, balanced precariously between the girl she was no longer and the woman she had not yet become. She had the blonde hair and blue eyes of the northerner.

“I’m in favor of extended patrols, sir,” she timidly addressed Felix. “As Sunilda’s nursemaid, her safety is always my first responsibility.”

“And an excellent job you’ve done so far,” remarked Livia sarcastically.

Bertrada looked as if she was about to cry. “Gadaric wasn’t…it was an accident…” The girl’s lips began to quiver. Her eyes filled with tears and she whirled and ran from the room, closely followed by Calyce, who shot Livia a look of hatred as she left.

John exchanged glances with Felix. Behind his shaggy beard the excubitor captain appeared pale, strongly suggesting that he would rather face twenty armed foes than one hysterical woman.

“I think it would be wise to have wider-ranging patrols,” John advised, turning to Zeno. “You were just relating to us what a terrible fright you’d had when Bertrada and Poppaea came back from the beach without Sunilda. This time you were fortunate to find the girl safe with her friend, but next time you may not be so lucky.”

“I suppose you’re right, John.” Zeno’s uncertainty grew. “Only you don’t suppose that all these new arrangements and guards and patrols going about will impede our preparations for the festival, do you?” He stared out at the sunny courtyard as wistfully as a child toiling over its lessons while longing to go out and play. “Hero seems confident that everything will be completed in good time, but the day is fast approaching.”

“I’m happy to hear that your plans are going forward, Zeno,” observed Livia. “Theodora doesn’t want her personal tragedy to ruin the villagers’ little bit of rustic joy, you know. That’s why she intends to attend the festivities herself, although of course it will be with a heavy heart.”

John suppressed a sigh. His visit to Zeno’s villa was going to seem exceedingly long, however short a time it might turn out to be as measured by a water clock.

***

“I don’t suppose you’ll require this, Lord Chamberlain.”

Entering the guest room Zeno had allotted him, John was surprised to see the tall man whose words had prefaced the appearance of the whale at the banquet reaching up to remove a wooden cross hung high on the wall.

“I am Godomar, the twins’ tutor, and a plain-spoken man, as you can tell from what I just said.” Godomar bent to add the cross to a crate almost filled with codices and writing materials. “I make no apologies for that. After all, my host Zeno is a plainspoken man himself in his own way.”

“Do you mean he has a loose tongue?” John replied with a smile.

Godomar did not return it. John wondered if the man were capable of such an expression or whether his starved features had been paralyzed by disuse, like the legs of stylites perched too many years atop their columns. He was one of the few household members John had not yet interviewed.

John moved to the small table by the window and picked up a wax tablet, reading aloud the Latin scratched thereon. “Thy hair is like the wool of goats.”

“One of Bertrada’s exercises,” growled the other impatiently. “She’s also my pupil. I’ve had to instruct her to confine herself to appropriate works to study repeatedly. However, I fear that, like goats, she tends to stray and I regret to say that I have had to correct her about that tendency on more than one occasion.”

As he handed the tablet to Godomar John caught a faint hint of the perfume wedded to the wax. “My taking this room won’t inconvenience your lessons, Godomar?”

“No. I’ll just tutor elsewhere. Zeno has a very large residence and the only reason I used this particular room is because it’s next to mine.”

The room was hot. Looking out of its small window, John noted shrubbery and ornamental trees as still as the bucolic scene surrounding the mosaic girl on his study wall.

“Lord Chamberlain, I must speak frankly with you,” Godomar said abruptly. “It is about your religious inclinations.”

John wondered who could have mentioned his religious beliefs to Godomar. Zeno’s careless prattling, perhaps.

“You and the excubitor captain have been ordered to protect Sunilda from physical harm,” Godomar went on. His deep-set eyes gave the impression of having seen much pain, John thought. The eyes of a martyr-or of a torturer. “My duty is to guard her spiritual welfare, for how can it benefit us to prolong our ephemeral sojourn in this earthly realm if we lose our immortal souls in the process?”

“Sunilda is only a child, and thus I would think hardly in danger of losing her soul,” John observed.

“Evidently you do not realize that although yet an innocent child, the blood of heretics runs in her veins.”

“But surely the Ostrogoths are Christians?” John pointed out.

“Their blasphemous beliefs have been proscribed for two centuries,” retorted Godomar. “I have traveled to Ravenna, Lord Chamberlain. In a church in that city there is a depiction of our Lord being baptized, and whereas the workmanship is undeniably exquisite, yet consider how the Arians view Him.” Outrage and agitation became increasingly obvious in his expression and voice as he continued. “As a created being-admittedly the highest of all such creations-rather than one who shares the substance of God, that’s how they see Him. And this disgraceful work was commissioned by King Theodoric, my remaining charge’s great-grandfather.”

“The young Theodoric did not have the benefit of your excellent guidance,” John replied tactfully.

Godomar swept a codex off the table and into his crate. “Someone should have guided him, Lord Chamberlain. He grew to manhood in Constantinople, after all.”

“Yes, he was an imperial guest just like the twins. Therefore I think you’ll agree that we have an even more compelling common interest in seeing that his great-granddaughter comes to no harm.”

“Indeed we do. This has been a most rigorous summer, Lord Chamberlain. My patience has been sorely tried between infernal machines on one side and fortune-telling goats and magick on the other. Now there has been the unspeakable tragedy of Gadaric’s death. But at least he died uncorrupted. I am convinced that this estate is situated in the atrium of Hell.”

He hefted the heavy crate with a slight grunt and proceeded to bear his burden out of the room.

***

“You must have suffered from far worse neighbors than Godomar in all those military camps you lived in during your years as a mercenary, John.”

Felix’ remark sounded humorous but he looked as morose as Godomar. The Lord Chamberlain had found the stalwart captain looking around the back of the villa, not far from the workshops where one of his excubitors was stationed. The occasional clang of metal striking metal broke the stillness of the hot air.

“You look unwell, Felix,” John replied. “Perhaps you should get out of the sun? There’s a seat under that tree.”

Felix followed him silently across the courtyard and sat down on the lion-footed marble bench. He appeared distracted. After tugging unhappily at his beard once or twice, he finally burst into speech. “I’ve seen something that has greatly disturbed me, John.”

John remarked that he was not surprised since there was much to be disturbed about on the estate, especially from a security viewpoint.

“True enough, but it isn’t anything to do with that. I’m ashamed to admit it. I-” Felix broke off and shook his shaggy head silently.

John waited, hoping Felix would continue. Beside their bench unfamiliar flowers on slender stems swayed, not in the breeze, for there was none, but bent by the arrival and departure of bees. John could hear the insects’ buzzing in the short, quiet intervals punctuating the sound of Hero’s metalworking.

“Well, here we are, two followers of Lord Mithra who have also been comrades a long time,” John finally said. “What could there possibly be that you would be ashamed to confide to an old friend like me?”

Felix attempted a smile. “It’s the sight of the girl,” he finally muttered, looking away from John at the nearby statue of Eros as he spoke. “The young blonde. Didn’t you notice her?”

“The nursemaid? Bertrada?”

“Yes, Bertrada.” Felix looked as if about to strangle on the name. “It is she, John! She’s Berta. The very likeness of my love, even to the name! She has come back to me.”

John thought of Isis’ young employee Berta, a blonde like Bertrada and the girl Felix had wished to marry. “Berta has gone from you, my friend,” he said gently, “and I must say that I do not see any likeness between the two women.”

He tried to persuade Felix of the folly of his strange delusion but his words sounded unconvincing to his own ears. Even as he spoke them, he could not help thinking how much Sunilda resembled the mosaic girl, Zoe.

He did not have time to reflect further on these enigmas because Calyce suddenly appeared, running toward them in a panic. A thin strip of her silk tunic, doubtless torn by some thorn in her hasty passage through the garden, was flying out behind her.

“Lord Chamberlain! Captain Felix!” she gasped out. “It is Poppaea! Someone has tried to murder her!”