He settled with a sigh that had more of exhaustion than aggravation to it.
You will never see the land now. At least, though, you leave no one desolate.
Quintus's temples throbbed with new punishments. Too many whispers in the night. Too many sounds in the marshes. The water and the weeds and the trees had murmured by Tiberbank, not whispered this way. And there were other voices too. Hush, they murmured at him. Be comforted. And, most seductive of all and the most mad, Live.
He still wore his child's bulla when he had found the little bronze statue that might have been new in the days when the Tarquins ruled Latium. Even now he carried it with him, a solemn little thing with a face worn away under its peaked bronze cap, its stubby arms upraised and bearing torches, its feet eternally dancing, but solemn somehow. Even now he remembered how the earth-warmed metal had felt as he clawed it from the earth and cleaned it. In the next moment, he almost dropped it. A voice, praising him, brought him upright. Yet, when he looked around wildly, the only disturbance was the undergrowth he himself had rustled; the sun glinted off the rippling water.
He had not fled ... not quite. His grandfather's face rose before him—practical, strong, sure of his rights. His grandfather would frown at a boy who did not master his fears. So he kept the little statue with him. And he had forced himself to return to the spot the next day, unwilling to be run off by what might be no more than his own fancies. Strangely enough, it was the memory of that first all-but-flight from the voices he imagined that had sustained him during the long, long hours in the shrinking square, while the Parthians charged and charged, their banners swooping behind them and turning the sunlight into fire.
The fear of madness, of religious madness at that, made death in battle a cleanliness that, if not to be sought, could be welcomed.
He remembered his fear beside the river and his conquest of fear. A voice had spoken to him, true enough, from the rushes and the trees. It was the genius loci, the spirit of the place, as much a guardian of him and his land as the lares and penates to whom his grandfather, attended by Quintus's father, gravely sacrificed. The voice was deep, sleepy, like bees about their hive on a hot summer's day: honey, strength, and a little fear commingled. It was a woman's voice, not mother or sister or nurse, not any voice Quintus had ever heard; and it made him want to be taller and stronger and wiser than he was.
He feared such voices, of course. He was a Roman who trusted very little in gods. But he did not fear that voice; it was part of his soul. An odd thought—had you asked him before he heard it, he would have sworn by all the hardheaded Roman gods that he did not care about such things.
Day after day, like the sort of expensive Greek pedagogue his family would never have approved even if they could have afforded one, the genius loci taught him of the land, of the waves of men and women who had strode across it, bled for it, and loved it. One day, he took his own dagger—his first, and a gift—and slashed his finger, letting his blood too drip into the soil. That day, he swore he had seen a figure reflected beside him in the pool— dark hair, honey-dark skin, flickering in and out of his line of vision so quickly he never knew for sure what he had seen. A wave of love and acceptance washed over him. It had felt like his family's approval. It had also felt like the dreams that had, this close to his coming to manhood, begun to haunt his sleep. No matter: The land was his, and he was the land's, whether or not he ever saw it again.
And now it looked as if he would not. Never mind. Even if he left his bones in Syria, a part of him lived forever in the grasses outside Rome.
"This one will make a fanner," his grandsire said approvingly at a supper as frugal as that of their tenants. Chickpeas. Some lettuces. Cheese. Very little meat. His father seemed pleased. His mother, like the good woman that she was, sat and tended her wool.
Quintus slipped a hand into his tunic to feel the small bronze statue. It seemed to warm at the praise. He thought then that his life was beginning. But that was the evening he first heard the name "Sulla." He heard it more in the days to come until he came to hate the sound. Often he heard it coupled with the name "Marius," spoken by his father in a tone of reverence that rivaled the way he addressed to his grandsire.
In the days that followed, Quintus's bulla lay upon the house altar. Wrapped in an unfamiliar toga virilis, he stood beside his grandsire to watch his father march away. The old man kept a hawk's dignity, but he looked as worn as the tombs on the Via Appia they passed on their way into the City of Seven Hills. Even Quintus's bronze figurine, frozen in its ancient dance, had been no more weathered. But six months later, he saw how much older his grandsire could look. A man had come to the door, his tunic poor, his body twisted by ill-healed wounds. Not the sort of man a gentleman wanted visiting him, Quintus thought, until he saw the care with which the stranger limped over the threshhold, careful not to stumble and thus bring bad luck to the house.
He could not have brought more ill-luck to the house had he fallen flat. The news he brought was the death of Quintus's father.
"Did he die well?" asked the old man.
The visitor nodded.
"Then I have a son yet," he said.
Quintus had clasped his hand about his talisman. It paused in its dance, and one of the bronze torches stung his palm as if it were in truth alight. His mother, who had lingered to hear, had grasped her spindle so hard that blood dripped onto the bleached wool. She opened her mouth to cry out, but the old man's hand forestalled her lamentations. It shook once, then closed, clasping the hand of his son's friend, urging him to accept what hospitality the house could muster.
"Leave that wailing to hired mourners," he commanded. He was paterfamilias. He was obeyed.
No body was ever returned to the farmhouse near the Tiber, just as none would come back from Carrhae. His father slept gods only knew where, not in the roadside tomb carved with a mantling Roman eagle rather than mourning figures. Some whispered that his father had died a rebel and it were best to cut the ceremonies short or omit them altogether: His grandsire stood by the tomb in his toga, dark for mourning, refusing to veil his head with a fold of cloth as anyone had a right to at the funeral of his only son. Perforce, Quintus too did not cover his head or face. He fought to keep his mouth from jerking in grief, trying to convince himself that that battle meant as much to him as the wars between Marius and Sulla that had robbed him of a father and his country of its peace.
Like two dogs, he thought, as curs fight on the paving stones, who fought over a stolen haunch until both beasts were bleeding and the meat was spoiled.
Whenever he might, he escaped to the river. The voice he had come to trust crooned comfort for his loss, a comfort that warmed him even as he returned to a cold hearth and a mother whose life turned feverish, flaming high and fitful like a dancer's torch, then guttering out as if it were thrust into sand.
They had few slaves left. Even Quintus's grandsire took his turn at tending her. But she died, and it seemed to Quintus that his dark mourning toga was made of lead, not his mother's wool. Even the coos of the doves by the riverbank seemed to mourn her.
"She was a good, thrifty woman," said his grandsire. "I have my son's son yet. And my land."
Quintus's mother had served him well and loved his son well, but the old man did not weep. One weakness only he showed: that Decia, who loved her husband so well that she could not live without him, should not lie alone in the family tomb, but instead sleep in peace beneath the olive trees of their farm. She would hear the doves and the voices, Quintus thought. He took comfort from that, if nothing else.