"Dearest," she said, hoping that concern wouldn't give her voice the whip-crack edge she knew it got at times. "Get up and thank the emperor. Raise your hands for silence. When things quiet a little, say that this was done by the emperor's gift. Make sure that at least the orchestra hears you. Do you understand?"
"What?" said Saxa. He looked at her, blinking. He seemed surprised to hear words in the midst of applause that had as little content as a crashing thunderstorm. "The emperor, my dear? No, Meoetes did all this, but he was doing it for me."
"My lord and master," Hedia said, chipping the words out and no longer trying to hide her frightened anger. "Tell Carce that it owes this entertainment to the emperor. Otherwise you and Meoetes and your family will be entertaining the city from the tops of crosses!"
Saxa looked blank for an instant. "Oh!" he said. "Yes, this was… this was…"
Apparently he couldn't decide how to describe the vision any better than Hedia could have, so he lurched to his feet instead of finishing the sentence. He raised his arms. For a moment the cheers increased, but Saxa turned his palms outward as though pushing the sound away.
Hedia sank onto her stool, feeling unexpected relief. She couldn't do anything about the glass figures of her dreams, but at least she had gotten Saxa-gotten her whole family-out of the immediate trouble. At any rate, she had done what was humanly possible to avoid immediate repercussions from this vision, this waking nightmare.
The curtain was canvas and split ceiling to floor down the middle. Ordinarily only half was used at a time, concealing set changes on a portion of the long stage. Now both right and left portions began to move toward the center, but they jerked and stuttered instead of sliding smoothly as they had before. By leaning over the railing, Hedia could see that three and four men were manhandling the heavy curtains rather than the dozen stagehands in each of the original crews.
Candidus must have carried the message successfully; that, or Meoetes had come to the same conclusion on his own. The actors still on stage looked like casualties of a gladiatorial show that the doctors and Charon-the costumed slave who drove the dead wagon-hadn't gotten to yet.
"My fellow citizens!" Saxa said. "Hail to the noble and generous Emperor who has granted you this gift. Carce rules the world, and the Emperor is the soul of Carce!"
His voice was pitched too high to command authority, but he was managing good volume; he would be heard. Hedia nodded approvingly.
"Long live the Emperor!" Saxa said. "Long live the Emperor, our father and god!"
Cheers and the banging of sandals on stone again overwhelmed the theater. Hedia noted wryly that her husband's fellow senators were the most enthusiastic, capering like monkeys in the orchestra. Nobody wants word to get out that he was behind-hand when everyone around him applauded the Emperor.
Hedia started to relax, but now that the immediate danger was past, memory of the dreadful glass figures returned. The memory gripped her like a hawk sinking its talons into a vole. She felt dizzy for an instant; she felt Alphena take her arm to steady her on the chair.
She recovered, straightening like the noble lady that she was. She patted her daughter's hand affectionately.
There was something very wrong going on, but there had generally been things wrong in Hedia's life-before her first marriage to Calpurnius Latus and most certainly ever afterwards. She had seen her way through those troubles, and she would see her way through this one also.
She had to, after all. What would poor dear Saxa and his children, her children now, do without her?
Tomorrow she would visit Anna, Corylus' housekeeper and his former nurse. Anna was the wife of the boy's servant Pulto-and she was a Marsian witch.
And if Anna couldn't send away those glass nightmares, Hedia would find another way. It was her duty as a wife and mother, and as a noblewoman of Carce.
But oh! She wished Corylus was holding her now in his strong young arms!
The spectators were beginning to drift toward the exits. Corylus led his burly servant through them against the flow. Pulto would have been more than willing to force a path, but Carce wasn't a frontier cantonment and Publius Corylus was no longer the son of a high military officer.
Still, though Corylus didn't push people out of his way, the senator's toady who thought to shove the youth aside got a knee in the crotch for his bad judgment. He heard Pulto chuckle behind him. I am a freeborn citizen of Carce, and I learned on the Rhine how to handle lice.
They got clear of the audience and found that the steps from the orchestra to the stage were concealed behind an offset panel. "Just like a Celtic hill fort," Pulto said as he followed his master up them.
Corylus' face blanked as he tried for an instant to fathom the deep inner meaning of what his servant had just said; then he smiled. There isn't any deep inner meaning, here or ever with Pulto. He'd seen the entrances to Celtic hill forts designed the same way, so he said so.
Corylus ducked behind the curtain. A few actors were still standing on stage. One had been dressed as a naiad in silk pantaloons painted to look like a fish's tail with flowing fins. She had stripped off her costume and stood nude, weeping desperately.
"What's all that about, do you think, lad?" Pulto said in puzzlement.
Corylus glanced at him; they were side-by-side again. Pulto still thinks it was all stagecraft!
Picking his words carefully, Corylus said, "I think it must have surprised the actors even more than it did us in the audience. They were closer, you see."
The performers had been inside the vision. Perhaps the effect simply blinded them, which would be frightening enough. From the stunned looks and worse on the faces of the actors he saw, the experience had been worse than that.
Pulto would realize before long that there had been more than trickery behind the vision. Corylus didn't see any reason to hasten his servant's discomfort, however.
And Pulto would be uncomfortable, because magic frightened him in a way that German spears did not. He knew how to divert a spear with his shield-and how to deal with the blond pig who'd thrust it, too. Magic, though, was as unfathomable as a storm at sea.
Corylus felt the same way. His smile became wry. He had too good an education, however, to allow him to pretend something hadn't happened simply because he wished that he hadn't seen it happen.
A great number of people waited in the wing beneath the Tribunal. A senator never went out without an entourage of both servants and clients-freemen who accompanied him in expectation of gifts, dinners, and similar perquisites. They had nothing better to do with their lives than to be parasites on a rich man.
"I wonder how they'd look in armor?" Corylus whispered to his companion.
Pulto snorted. "I'd sooner train a cohort of fencing dummies to hold the frontier," he said. Unlike Corylus, he spoke in a normal voice. "At least they wouldn't talk back to me. And they'd stop spears just as well as this lot."
Besides the normal entourage and the similar band which attended Lady Hedia, Saxa had a consul's allotment of twelve lictors. They had been hired from the Brotherhood here in Carce, though there was no absolute requirement to do so. An official who wished to save money could outfit his household servants as lictors instead.
From weapons drill, Corylus knew that it wouldn't be as easy as a layman might think to handle the lictor's equipment. Each man carried an axe wrapped in a bundle of rods, symbols of the consul's right to flog and to execute.
The additional cost of professionals meant nothing to Saxa. The mental cost to him if a servant turned lictor dropped an axe on someone's foot or spilled his rods at a gathering of dignitaries was beyond calculation.