‘The woman has sent you a gift.’
The two eunuchs entered. Between them they carried a strangely heavy-looking roll of silk carpet. Carefully, they placed it on the floor. One stood forward, bowed. ‘Our kyria said we were to open the gift only when you were on your own, Kyrios.’
Ballista gave Calgacus a look which said that, even naked with an injured shoulder, he had nothing to fear from a couple of court eunuchs. The Caledonian made a strange face – possibly a smile – and withdrew.
The eunuchs gently unrolled the soft, embroidered material. A tangle of white limbs, a mass of blond hair. They helped her to her feet. She was naked. She was biting her thumb to stop herself laughing out loud. The eunuchs bowed to her, to him, and backed from the room.
She took her arms away so he could see her. She was smiling. A necklace, a bangle or two, nothing else. ‘Just like Cleopatra to Caesar,’ she said.
He walked across. She put her arms around his neck, careful to avoid his injured shoulder. He put his around her waist. She tipped up her face. He leant down. They kissed, her tongue in his mouth. He slid his hands down to the small of her back, pulled her to him. Her breasts pressed against his chest. She was tall. He smelt her perfume, her body. She leant back, looking up at him. Her blue-grey eyes were shining. He felt the familiar surge of powerful lust. It was going to be all right, more than all right.
Ballista woke in the early hours of the morning. A feeling of dread was on him. He was sweating, heart racing. The girl was asleep beside him. Moonlight slanted in from the narrow arrow slits. Ballista forced himself to sit up, look across the room at what he knew he would see. There by the door, as he knew it would be, was the tall, hooded figure. The huge, pale face, the grey eyes full of hatred.
‘Speak,’ Ballista said.
‘I will see you again at Aquileia.’ Maximinus Thrax spoke, although he had been dead these more than twenty years.
Holding his courage tight, as he had every time before, Ballista replied. ‘I will see you then.’
Pythonissa stirred, put her arm across him. Ballista looked down at her. She opened her eyes. He looked back towards the door. The daemon was gone, just the odour of the waxed canvas of its cloak lingering.
‘What is wrong?’ She suddenly was very awake. She quickly scanned the room for threats. Seeing nothing, she relaxed. ‘You look as if you had seen Hecate herself.’
Ballista tried to smile, to speak – he could do neither. He lay back.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
He told her – the centurion who had taken him from the hall of his father to be an imperial hostage, the siege of Aquileia, the conspiracy, the wild fight, stabbing the iron stylus deep into the throat of the emperor, the decapitation of Maximinus, the desecration of his body, the daemon that walked by night, the threat of Aquileia – told her all of it.
Pythonissa listened until he was finished. She kissed his chest.
‘You think it is more than a dream?’ he asked.
‘It could be a dream, but of course the dead walk.’ She kissed his chest again. ‘Avoid the Italian city of Aquileia and nothing more will happen.’
Now he could half smile. ‘Unless it is another place of that name, or Aquileia is something else – a state of mind.’
Her blue-grey eyes regarded him. ‘Does the daemon ever return the same night?’
‘No.’
She kissed his lips, then his chest. He felt her hair slide down his body, her tongue licking. She started doing what will take almost any man’s mind off his troubles. At least while it lasts.
Her eunuchs returned an hour before dawn. She told them to wait, turned to him.
‘I am not a young man any more.’
She took no notice.
After she had gone, he had to endure the sly smiles of Wulfstan, Calgacus and the others as he washed, dressed, had breakfast. Maximus kept tiresomely remarking how tired he looked. Ballista wondered what it would be like to live in a culture where you had privacy. In Germania, in the imperium – everywhere he had been it was the same. The poor lived many to a room. The houses of the rich were packed with servants. As some satirist had written, ‘When Andromache mounted Hector their slaves stood with their ears glued to the door, masturbating.’ It would be good to live somewhere where you could have sex with reasonable certainty that no one was listening. Despite such thoughts, Ballista found himself smiling a smile he would have found smug and annoying on someone else. It was interesting that Hector had liked his wife to get on top.
Someone came to say the kyria was leaving. They crossed the river by the stepping stones, arriving only moderately damp at the other side. Pythonissa walked her horse forward from her entourage. Ballista bowed, blew a kiss; wished her a safe journey. Very formal, she returned the proskynesis; asked the gods to hold their hands over him. He had a sudden vision of her naked, on her hands and knees, of him taking her from behind. He had to have her again. She smiled, full of mischief, as if she could tell what he was thinking. She leant down from the saddle, passed him something.
It was an ice-white gem hung on a golden chain. ‘From the peak where Prometheus was chained,’ she said. ‘A cure for nightmares.’ He thanked her, slipped it around his neck. She turned her horse and rode away to the south.
They got back to work. There was a change in the Suani. While they would never labour like helots promised their freedom, they were better than they had been. It might have been connected to the visit of Pythonissa, or possibly to Ballista saving Tarchon. Whatever the reason, they were a little more assiduous.
Within a few days, progress was apparent. Once the scaffolding was rebuilt, the gate on the track began to take shape. The new piers in the Alontas were put in place, and the first tentative spans of timber began to connect them. The final finishes were made to the tower of Cumania.
There was a new purpose and a better routine to the day. At first light, sacrifices were made to Prometheus and Heracles. Respect for local sentiment meant that nothing was ever offered to Zeus or Athena. The workers were fed hot bread with cheese. This was prepared by native cooks at fires on the side of the road. To spare the inhabitants of the fort from being choked by smoke, Agathon cooked their breakfast with the others, then carried it across the stepping stones. Their favoured deities and their stomachs placated, the workers went to their assigned places. Lunch was a simple affair – more flat bread, this time with soup or millet porridge – taken where they toiled. An afternoon’s work, another set of sacrifices, and the Suani were free to pass the evening with more eating, drinking and singing their sad songs by their fires.
The sixth morning found Ballista on the battlements as the sun hit the peaks above the gorge. He had a panoramic view over the dark river, the road, the sawing camp fires and the as yet quiet half-built fortifications. Pythonissa was much on his mind. For years, he had amazed his friends and, if he were honest, himself, with his fidelity to his wife. Maximus had never been able to understand it at all. Not even on the many occasions, inevitably when they were drinking, when Ballista had tried to explain the true reasons. Apart from Roxanne – and he felt nothing but guilt about that – he had not had another woman in part because he loved his wife but also because he had developed a strange superstition. He had somehow convinced himself that if he had another woman, the next time he was in combat he would be killed. Almost every fighting man he had ever known had a talisman he hoped would keep him safe – the belts of Roman soldiers were covered in the things. Ballista had clutched his uxorious faithfulness to himself like a sealskin amulet, a rabbit’s foot, or some such trinket. But at Soli he had taken Roxanne, and he had not died at Sebaste, or in any of the other places where the spirits of death had hovered close, not in Galilee, Emesa, Ephesus or Didyma. Things had not been right between him and Julia, not since he had returned from Galilee. He had no idea why. Yes, he supposed he felt guilt, but man was not built for monogamy. Celibacy was bad for the health of man or woman. Julia was far away. And Pythonissa was… wilder than any girl he had known, wilder than any of the whores of his youth. He drifted into a reverie about her body, the things she did.