experience in tunnels before he took the sacramentum, the military oath.'
The legionary looked more embarrassed. No one went down the mines by choice. As a civilian, Castricius must have been convicted of something bad to end up there.
'Well, Castricius, you had better show me where you found him.' Telling Maximus to attend him and everyone else to wait above ground, Ballista followed the legionary. Just inside the tunnel they paused to light lamps and let their eyes adjust. The soldier was making small talk. Ballista was not listening; he was praying.
This tunnel was worse, far worse, than the other one. The footing was rougher and more slippery. There were reasons it had been boarded up. Several times they had to climb over piles of rock fallen from the ceiling or collapsed from the walls. Once they had to crawl through a gap little wider than the northerner's shoulders. It must have been hell getting the corpse out of here. Down and down. It was very dark. It was very wet. There was water underfoot, water running down the walls. It was like a living descent into Niflheim, Misty Hell, the bitter-cold realm of unending winter, the realm of the dead, where the dragon Nidhogg gnawed at the roots of Yggdrasill, the World Tree, until the end of time.
'Here. I found him here.' They were in an abandoned side gallery, a dead end, too low to stand up in.
'Exactly where was he?' Ballista asked.
'Just here.'
'What position was he in?'
'On his back. Arms outstretched against the walls. Feet together.'
'Maximus, would you mind lying down in the position of the corpse?' Filthy as all three men already were, the bodyguard shot his dominus a look that suggested he minded quite a lot. Nevertheless, the Hibernian got down on the floor and let Castricius arrange him in precisely the right position.
'Scribonius Mucianus was certainly not killed here. Maximus, would you get on your hands and knees?'
The bodyguard looked as if he were going to make a joke, but decided against it. Ballista drew his spatha. He tried to mime a cut at Maximus's head. The ceiling of rock was far too low.
'It must have been hell getting the corpse down here,' said Ballista. 'It must have taken more than one man.'
'Almost certainly. But maybe one very strong man might just have been able to do it,' Castricius replied.
Emerging into the sunlight, they were confronted by a ring of faces. At the front were the army officers, Mamurra, Acilius Glabrio and Turpio. They had been joined by the three caravan protectors, on the grounds that, as commanders of units of numeri, they were also army officers now. Behind them, still kept back by the legionaries, the crowd had grown yet bigger. It was fronted by the other councillors, Theodotus the hirsute Christian well to the fore. The ordinary people, the demos, were further back and further back still were the slaves. At any gathering, the people of the imperium tended to arrange themselves by status, as if they were at the theatre or the spectacles.
'The poor fool, the poor fucking fool,' said Turpio. 'As soon as he heard of your appointment he started acting more and more strangely. Just before he disappeared, two days before I set out to meet you at the coast, he had taken to talking to himself. Several times I heard him mutter that now everything would be all right, he had found something out that would make everything all right.'
'What did he mean?' Ballista asked.
'I have no idea.'
Ballista was fighting the urge to leave his desk. He had a vague sense of unease, a strong feeling of restlessness. Several times in the past hour he had given way. Pacing about did no good. Yet it could have been worse. It was not as if he had received a nocturnal visit from the big man. Indeed, thankfully, the late emperor Maximinus Thrax had not made an appearance since that night on the Concordia off the Syrian coast. Did this undermine Julia's Epicurean rationalism, her view that the daemon was nothing more than a bad dream brought on by fatigue and anxiety? Since Ballista had reached Arete he had been dog-tired, and no one could deny he had been under great stress – one of his chief officers missing then discovered murdered, the other insubordinate and insufferable; the loyalty of the leading locals questionable; the artillery magazine burnt down. And at least one murderous traitor loose in the city.
It was the military dispositions for the defence of the town that were troubling him now. As a Roman general should, he had summoned his consilium, heard their opinions, taken advice. But ultimately the decisions were his alone. His plans had been finalized, making the best use of the pitifully inadequate manpower at his disposal, and were ready to be unveiled to his staff and put into operation. Yet he worried that he had missed something obvious, that there was some terrible logical flaw in them. It was ridiculous, but he was less worried that the thing he had overlooked would cause the fall of the town, lead to bloody ruin, than that the omission would be obvious to one of his officers straight away, that he would be exposed to the mocking laughter of Acilius Glabrio. A large part of him remained the barbarian youth of sixteen winters dragged into the imperium of the Romans. He still feared ridicule above all things.
Ballista got up from his desk and walked out on to the terrace of the palace. The sky was a perfect Mesopotamian blue. It was winter, the sixth of December, ten days before the ides of the month. Now the sun had burnt off the early morning mist, the weather was that of a glorious spring day in Ballista's northern homeland. He leant with his back to the wall of the terrace. From the river far below the sounds of the water carriers and the fish market, now all under military supervision, floated up. Nearer at hand, off to his left beyond the cross wall which separated the terrace from the battlements, he heard children playing. Turning to look, he saw four small children throwing a ball. One clambered up and stood precariously on the crenulations. Without thinking, Ballista started towards him. Before he had gone more than a few paces a woman in the flowing robes of the tent- dwellers snatched the boy to safety. Her scolding carried in the clear air.
Ballista thought of his son. Marcus Clodius Isangrim he had named him. No one could object to the first two names: nothing could be more conventional than the first son taking the good Roman praenomen and nomen of his father. Julia, however, had objected as vociferously as only an Italian woman can to her son carrying a barbarian cognomen.
Ballista knew that it was only their exquisite good manners, the manners that came with generations of senatorial birth, that had stopped Julia's relatives sniggering at the naming ceremony. Yet it was important to Ballista. Fear ridicule although he did, it was important that the boy grew up knowing his northern heritage. As he had tried to explain to Julia, it was not sentiment alone that had decided the choice. The imperium used diplomatic hostages as tools in its diplomacy. At any time, if the emperors became dissatisfied with Ballista's father, they would without a moment of hesitation uproot Ballista, send him back to the north and, backed by Roman arms and money, attempt to install him as the new Dux of the Angles. If Ballista were dead, they would send his son. Such things seldom worked out well, but neither Ballista nor his son would have any choice in the matter. So the boy was called Isangrim after his grandfather and he was learning the native language of his father.
They called him Isangrim. He was very beautiful, his hair a mass of blond curls, his eyes a green-blue. He was three years old, and he was playing hundreds of miles, several weeks' journey away.
And what of his familia here? Bagoas had taken a bad beating. He would be laid up for some time. Calgacus had been right that the boy should be followed. It did seem that, in his naive way, the boy was playing at being a spy. It was lucky that Maximus had been there. Calgacus was tough, but it was unlikely that the old Caledonian could have dealt with four legionaries on his own. There were two particularly worrying features to the incident. First, the legionaries had been encouraged, at least indirectly, by Acilius Glabrio. Second, two of the equites singulares had watched and not intervened as the boy was dragged off. And what should Ballista do with Bagoas when he recovered? Yet another cause of an uneasy mind.
The usual coughing, wheezing and muttering heralded the arrival of Calgacus.
'That hot-looking Syrian girl you want is here. I said you were busy, but she said she needed to see you badly.' The stress on 'badly' was accompanied by a lascivious leer of epic proportions. 'I hope you can give her what she badly needs.'
'Thank you for your concern. I will do my best. Would you show her in?'
'Dressed as a boy she is, trousers and the like.' Calgacus showed no sign of moving. 'Turn her round and you can have the best of both worlds.'
'Thank you for the advice. If you could show her in, you can get back to whatever appalling things you get up to in your own quarters.'
