Raptor (51 page)

Maecius said solemnly, “Friends and fellow Roman citizens, I must announce some startling news. This message was urgently relayed hither from my agents in Ravenna, so you are hearing it well before any official word can get here. The news is that Olybrius is dead.”

There was a chorus of astonished exclamation:

“What? Now Olybrius
too?”

“How did he die?”

“Another assassination?”

I did not blurt, as I might once have done, “Who on earth is or was Olybrius?” I merely sniffed indifferently and took a draft of my wine.

“Not assassination this time,” said Maecius. “The emperor died of the dropsy.”

There was a chorus of murmuring:

“Well, that at least is a relief to hear.”

“But what a
peasant
sort of death for an emperor.”

“It makes one wonder. What next?”

I did not blurt, as I might once have done, “But I thought
Anthemius
was the emperor at Rome!” I simply indulged in another long drink of wine.

The praefectus echoed that other guest’s question: “What next? I suggest you ask the illustrious young Tornaricus yonder, though I strongly suspect that he would not tell. Behold him, friends. Only he among all of us seems both unsurprised and unmoved by this news.”

Everyone in the triclinium turned to stare at me. I could do nothing but look blandly back at them. I did not think a laugh or even a smile was called for, but I was disinclined, too, to burst into tears.

“Did you ever see such an innocent aspect?” Maecius demanded of the room at large. “Now
there
sits a young man possessed of secret knowledge!” But he sounded more admiring than accusing, and so were all the faces regarding me.

The praefectus went on, “Here am I, appointed to this praefectura by the empire itself, and what do I know? Only that in July the Emperor Anthemius was most foully murdered, and at the instigation of his own affinal son, the very man who had set him on the throne, the King-Maker Rikimer. Exactly forty days later, Rikimer himself is dead,
allegedly
of natural causes, and another of his puppets, Olybrius, rules the Western Empire. Now, just two months after his accession,
Olybrius
is dead. Come, Tornaricus. Tell us. I know that you know. Who next will be our emperor, and for how long?”

“Tell us,” urged others around the room. “Tell, Tornaricus.”

“But I cannot,” I said, smiling in spite of myself at their nonsense.

“There! Did I not say so?” Maecius roared, but jovially. “Some of you others who aspire to be men of affairs, take example from Tornaricus. A man who can be trusted with secret knowledge
will
be trusted with it. By the Styx, I wish I had your sources of information, young Tornaricus! Who are your agents? Can I bribe them away from you?”

“Come, Tornaricus,” said another of the city’s elders. “If you refuse to speak the name of Olybrius’s successor, could you not at least give us a hint of what we may expect to hear from Ravenna in the future? Turmoil? Calamity? What?”

“I cannot,” I said again. “I know nothing that I can tell you of affairs in Ravenna.”

I heard whisperings around me:

“He
could
tell, but he will not.”

“Still, take note that he did not
exclude
turmoil and calamity.”

“Only not in Ravenna, he says.”

And so, when Vindobona got the news, three weeks later, that the volcano Vesuvius in Campania had erupted in its mightiest convulsion in four hundred years, my acquaintances regarded me with immeasurably increased respect and awe. All agreed that I was omniscient not only in affairs of state but in those of the gods.

Thereafter, I was often accosted, in corners of rooms and in unfrequented streets, by this or that rich man seeking my counsel on the wisdom of investing in this or that commodity… by this or that matron asking what I thought of the latest advice she had been given by her astrologus… by this or that young man begging me to divine what his superiors
really
thought of his work and his prospects for advancement… by this or that young woman pleading to know her father’s
real
opinion of this or that suitor of hers.

But I refused them all—my equals politely, my inferiors coolly—because it was by being silent on matters of which I knew nothing that I had gained some reputation.

I learned that the high and mighty of Vindobona were exceedingly selective as to the sorts of people they would admit into their circles of intimacy. For that matter, I would find the high and mighty everywhere in the empire to be so. An aspirant to the upper levels of society had to be more than sociable, personable and respectable. As I once heard the resident herizogo, Sunnja, declare:

“Respectability is only a virtue, and even a commoner can attain to that. But dignity, now, that is a glory. It belongs only to those persons who have distinguished themselves—in war, in letters, in service to the empire—and that dignity is not diminished by their sometimes disdaining to behave in the conventional, narrow-minded, self-righteous manner that is called respectability.”

Neither was the possession of riches a sufficient qualification for admission to the company of the best people, because even men who once were slaves have sometimes amassed fortunes. Among the patricians, those families that derived their wealth from owning land were regarded as the highest-ranking. Although trade and commerce were generally looked down on, the next rank comprised those families that had earned their riches from commerce on a large scale, meaning that they or their forebears had been negotiatores, importing or exporting goods in vast quantities. The mere mercator families, whose trade consisted in keeping shops or warehouses or markets—no matter if they had been engaged in the business for generations, no matter if they built palaces to live in—were unfit to mingle with their betters. The most contemptible class of cityfolk contained all those who worked with their hands—smiths and artisans and laborers, of course, but aurifices, fine painters, mosaicists and sculptors were lumped in with them, and considered little better than toiling peasants.

I do not mean to say that wealth was at all scorned, or regarded as something to be kept hidden. Indeed, if one possessed the qualities of distinction, dignity and status necessary for being accepted in the best company, then it was essential to have also the money to maintain oneself in a style likewise acceptable. Of all newcomers to those lofty circles, the most warmly welcomed would be a genteel man or woman who was rich, unmarried
and
childless. That was because he or she, if young enough, might marry and thereby augment the wealth of some local spinster or bachelor. If the newcomer was too old for that, but was without heirs, there was still hope that some local patrician child might become that person’s surrogate son or daughter and eventually inherit his or her fortune.

The Vindobona families who possessed great wealth were not shy about showing it. Many of them lived in lavish Roman-style villas, and even the grounds surrounding their residences were tailored to their owners’ tastes. In addition to gardens and arbors and bowers, there were shrubs and hedges sculptured—in what I was told was “the Mattian manner”—into the shapes of gods, animals, urns and other forms, all in living green. Among them stood statues, some of gods but mostly of the family’s more distinguished ancestors. Those were expensively made of bronze or marble, but they might as well have been carved of cheap wood, because their costly materials were covered all over with even costlier gold leaf. The insides of the houses were resplendent with mosaics and murals; many of the furnishings were crafted of warm ivory and sweet-smelling thuja wood; the floors were intricate geometries of patterned inlay.

Several of the villas contained, in a position of prominence, where its proud owners could frequently and ostentatiously consult it, an Egyptian-made clepsydra. That is a machine which marks off the hours of the day—the proper time for the prandium or the sexta rest or the cena or whatever—and even the hours of the night, for it does not depend on sunshine, but functions by means of water trickling through it and regulated by a modulus gate.

The upper-class Vindobonans were as fond of display in public, out among the commonfolk, as they were in private. Men and women alike went abroad in garments bordered with Girba purple or Janus green or whatever other color accorded with their rank. And they would find frequent necessity “accidentally” to slip open their cloak or coat to let passersby glimpse their undercoats or skirts or hose of shining silk. On the few occasions when a patrician woman walked anywhere, she always carried a gilded umbraculum over her head—or had a servant carry it—to protect her dainty skin from the sun or rain or wind or snow. More often, though, such a woman would be carried about in a chair, if she wished to be noticed, or in a Liburnian car, if she wished not to be. And if she had to undertake a long journey, it would be in the horse-drawn vehicle called a carruca dormitoria, a heavy, boxy, four-wheeled and closed carriage in which she could recline and
sleep
along the way.

Of the money those fine folk spent on their comfort and adornment, a good deal went for the buying or hiring of domestics. Besides the stewards and gardeners and stable hands and cooks and chambermaids that I would naturally have expected to find employed in those large households, there were others whose jobs—even whose
titles
—I had never before heard of. The master of the house would have his nomenclator, who went everywhere with him, to nudge him and remind him of the names of other personages he might meet on the street. A mistress would have her ornatrix, whose sole duty was to help her get dressed and do her hair and paint her face. The scion of a house would have his adversator, to see him home from his nighttime revels, warning the young master of obstacles in his path over which he might otherwise drunkenly stumble. The praefectus Maecius even employed one outdoor servant whose title was phasianarius, because he had charge of feeding and caring for Maecius’s penned flock of rare birds—all of them being the breed of wildfowl that Wyrd had told me was the pheasant, but which the praefectus said was properly called “the Phasian bird,” because its original habitat was the river Phasis in far-off Colchis.

All those servants charged with such specific tasks were almost as haughty as their masters, in being vain of their particular employments and titles, and they would recoil if anyone asked them to do anything in the least removed from their defined duties. An ornatrix, for instance, would have resigned her post rather than obey a command to run an errand, because that was the job of the lowly pedisequa. I remember once, when I had been a dinner guest at some villa, I thought I was paying a compliment to one of the kitchen stewards who had helped prepare the meal, but I addressed the man as “my good coquus—” and he coldly interrupted me:

“Excuse me, illustrissimus, but I am no commonplace coquus, who shops for his cooking materials at the market stalls. I am my master’s obsonator. I buy only from the most exclusive purveyors, and I prepare only dainties and delicacies.”

It appeared, also, that such servants took their titles and honors with them all the way to the afterworld. In the legionaries’ graveyard at the fortress, I came upon the headstone of one Tryphon, who, according to the stone, had been tabularius to the legatus Balburius. And he was further described as “pariator,” which I suppose is the most praiseful epitaph a bookkeeper could desire. It meant that, after Tryphon’s death, his ledgers of income and expenditure had been added up and found to come out perfectly even.

I need hardly point out that I could boast not a single one of the attributes and qualities that I have said were necessary for acceptance in Vindobona’s upper circles. I was not of any family whatsoever, let alone a family of eminent lineage. I was not a landowner or even a mercantile negotiator. I had never distinguished myself in war or letters or imperial service or anything else. The one and only “servant” that anyone had ever seen attending me was now gone away. I had some money, but nothing approaching riches. Really the sole attribute that I had was audacity, but I kept being surprised by the way it kept on serving me.

Everyone knew me by the name that Thiuda had invented, Thornareikhs (or, oftener, Tornaricus), and all seemed to take that as evidence of my having come from
some
wellborn Gothic family. When a conversation afforded the opportunity, I would occasionally and casually drop in a passing mention of “my estates,” and that seemed to persuade my listeners that I owned land
somewhere.
The praefectus Maecius had already asserted that I commanded some body of secret agents, hence that I possessed privileged knowledge of everything occurring in the empire. That fiction was widely repeated, and the coincidence of Vesuvius’s subsequent eruption gave me my undeserved reputation for prescience, so I acquired the “distinction” I could not otherwise have claimed. Since I did have enough money to dress well and to lodge in the city’s best deversorium, and to stand my rounds of drinks whenever other young men and I disported ourselves in the tabernae—and since I did not, like so many genuinely affluent men, ceaselessly complain about expenses, taxes and wages—I was assumed to have much more money than I did. Most important, I was a young man, unmarried, childless and, so I was told, comely of face and figure.

Of course, I had embarked upon this imposture with one intangible but demonstrable advantage. I was far better educated than even the sons of such personages as Maecius and Sunnja. And, during my travels, I had garnered enough of politeness and poise that I was no cloddish rustic. Now, in Vindobona, at dinners and other gatherings, I took care to mimic the manners of my elders, and thereby to put further polish on my deportment. I learned to dilute my wine with water and to spice it with cinnamon and cassia, and to drink that abomination without making a wry face or uttering one of Wyrd’s oaths. I learned to refer contemptuously to commoners as the plebecula, “the rabble.” I learned to knock at doors in the Romanly approved manner, with a genteel tap of my sandaled foot instead of my knuckles. And I must confess that I frequently had occasion to knock at closed doors, and to do it most discreetly.