The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels (14 page)

Mamillius stepped down from the loggia to the garden. He was pleased with his appearance. The wide straw hat, enabling one to stand or walk in a pool of shade, was sufficiently un-Roman to be a declaration of independence without being openly defiant. The light cloak, attached to either shoulder and cut from the thinnest Egyptian linen, added masculine dignity without oppression. If one walked fast—and for a moment he did so quite deliberately—it floated on the air and gave an effect of mercurial speed. The tunic was daringly short and slit at the sides but this, after all, was merely fashionable. If I were to come on her now, he thought, sitting between the lichened Naiads, would she not draw the veil from her face and speak? He kept his eyes open for her as he passed down the many steps, but the hot gardens were deserted. Each square of lawn was like velvet as it should have been according to literary convention and the clipped yew patterns were less alive than the statuary they surrounded. He peered into arbours and herb gardens, threaded his way between groups of stone Hamadryads, Fauns, Bronze Boys; he made the usual salutation mechanically before the Herms that stood among the denser thickets.

But the trouble was she would not speak and was rarely to be seen. I know a little about love now, he thought, and not only from reading about it. Love is this nagging preoccupation, this feeling that the treasure of life has condensed itself to the little space wherever she is. I guess ahead and understand that love was reared in the wilderness and sucked the lion’s dug. What does she think of me, how does she speak, is she in love?

A kind of burning spread over him and set his flesh trembling. I dislike this, he thought, I must not think of her. At that, a procession of horribly masculine lovers presented themselves to his imagination. By the time he had reached the lily-pond on the edge of the cliff at the foot of the garden he was struggling up out of his mind like a diver coming out of deep water.

“I wish I were bored again.”

Perhaps the hat had not been such a good idea after all. The edges of his private pool of shadow were dulled and though the heat was already intense the sky to seaward was not as blue as it had been yesterday. There was a faint haze lying along the horizon and spreading towards the land. He spoke to a weather-beaten Satyr.

“We shall have thunder.”

The Satyr continued to grin toothily. He knew what it was all about. Euphrosyne. Mamillius jerked himself away and turned to the left where the tunnel ran through the little headland and down to the harbour in the next cove. The sentry at the mouth of the tunnel came to attention. Partly because of the uninviting tunnel and partly because talking to soldiers always gave him a comfortable feeling of superiority, Mamillius spoke to him.

“Good morning. Are you comfortable here?”

“Sir.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Twenty-five, sir. Five officers and twenty men, sir.”

“Where are you billeted?”

The soldier jerked his head.

“Through the tunnel, sir. In the trireme alongside the quay.”

“So I shall have to climb across her if I want to visit the new ship?”

“Sir.”

“Tiresome. Pleasanter in the Emperor’s garden than in the harbour, isn’t it?”

The soldier thought.

“Quieter, sir. Very nice for them as likes a bit of quiet.”

“You prefer your billets in hell?”

“Sir?”

Mamillius turned away and walked into the dark tunnel and a confusion of green after-images that remembered the toothy Satyr. He held his breath for as long as possible because the guards used the tunnel as more than an approach to the gardens. The after-images were pierced and then replaced by his first view of hell.

To anyone but an Emperor’s grandson in a brief and slit tunic, hell would have seemed an interesting and even attractive place. The port was built in a small bay that was like half a cup. Round it climbed gaudy warehouses and tenements that were painted red and yellow and white. The inside of the cup had a half-circle of quay running round it where every kind of vessel was lying, five or ten deep. The entrance to the cup was defended from the sea by two quays that almost met each other. The tunnel emerged on to the root of the nearer quay. Tenements, quays, warehouses, ships—they crawled with people. There were seamen, slaves or free, swinging over the sides of ships, and smearing on tar or paint. There were boys swung aloft and working at running rigging, there were men in skiffs and barges, and naked harbour rats oaring themselves after driftwood through the lolloping garbage. The hot air of the harbour shook the warehouses and tenements, shook the steep hills, would probably have shaken the sky if there had been any clouds to reveal the movement. Smoke from caulking braziers, from steaming pipes where the planks were twisted, from vats and cookshops and galleys dirtied the air and cast a hundred brazen shadows. The sun burned into all this and blazed from the water in the middle of the harbour in molten shapelessness.

Mamillius pulled down the brim of his straw hat and folded a corner of cloak across his nose. He paused for a while, appalled and secretly gratified by his genuine distaste for humanity and the violent mess they made of themselves. Moreover he felt he had a contribution to make to the mythology of hell. It not only stank and burned; it roared. Noise climbed with the heat, vibration, a drum-roll of sound on which screams floated like the twisted flight of a gull.

He turned from the port itself to the quay where his business was. The quay stretched across half the port to the entrance with a shoulder-high wall to seaward. There were three ships made fast to it. The first, on his left hand and only a few yards from him, was the imperial barge. She lay low in the water, her rowers sleeping on their benches in the sun, a slave boy doing something to the cushions of her throne under its huge purple baldachino. Ahead of her was the slim shape of the trireme, her oars unshipped and stowed. Slaves were working on her deck, but she was very dirty from the traffic that crossed and recrossed her, for
Amphitrite
was made fast on the outboard side of her, squat and uniquely ugly.

Mamillius strolled along the quay as slowly as possible, putting off the moment when he would have to endure the heat from her hold. He stopped by Phanocles’ second invention and examined it curiously, for he had not seen it before. The tormentum had been set up and trained over the wall, pointing out to sea. Against all military sense, Phanocles had wound back the chain that served for a string and cocked the mechanism. Even the sledge that would drive the peg and release the string was lying ready. There was a bolt lying in the groove and on the other end of the bolt was a shining keg ending in a brass butterfly with a projecting iron sting. The thing was a suitable insect for hell. Strike the peg and the bolt would buzz seaward, out to the fishing boats, would bear the keg to them, a drink with the Emperor’s compliments.

Mamillius shuddered at the machine, then laughed as he remembered Phanocles’ explanation. In the end, desperately, as though the Emperor were a child, he had flung out his arms, said one sentence and refused to add to it.

“I have shut lightning in the key and can release it when I will.”

The sentry who had been dozing behind the tormentum found himself discovered and attempted to cover his fault by chatting as though he and Mamillius were on one side of a fence and military discipline on the other.

“Nice little horror, isn’t she, sir?”

Mamillius nodded without speaking. The sentry looked up at the heat haze creeping over the quay wall.

“Going to have thunder, sir.”

Mamillius made the sign that averts evil and walked hastily along the quay. There was no sentry on the trireme to meet him and no one to greet him at the gangway. Now that he was aboard her he could identify the ground bass to the uproar of the harbour—the slaves in every ship were growling like beasts that lust for the food of the arena. The only silent slaves were those working listlessly, moodily on deck. He crossed the trireme amidships and stood looking down at
Amphitrite.

She made the tormentum look like a toy. Projecting from her on either side were the biggest wheels in the world and each wheel bore a dozen paddles, A great bar of iron that Phanocles had had twisted into a wicked shape writhed its way across the deck between them. Four metal hands held this bar, two pushing, two pulling back. Behind the hands were iron forearms and upper arms that slid back into sleeves of brass. Mamillius knew what Phanocles called the sleeves. They were the pistons; and because there was no other way of making them with the ludicrous accuracy he demanded they had been drawn off two alabaster pillars that had been intended for a temple of the Graces.

Reminded by the Graces of Euphrosyne, Mamillius turned aft. Between the pistons was the most daunting thing of all: Talos, the man of brass. He was headless, a flashing sphere half-sunk in the deck, his four arms reached forward and gripped the wicked crank. Between him and the crank, fitting in the space that the arms left between them, was a brass funnel, tall as a mast, scandalous parody of the Holy Phallus.

There were few men about. A slave was doing something highly technical to one of the steering paddles and someone was shovelling coal in the hold. The coal grit lay everywhere on her deck and sides and paddles. Only Talos was clean, waist deep in the deck, breathing steam, heat, and glistening with oil. Once
Amphitrite
had been a corn-barge that labourers had hauled up the river to Rome, an ungainly box, smelling of chaff and old wood, comfortable and harmless. But now she was possessed. Talos sat in her, the insect pointed over the harbour wall and hell roared.

Phanocles poked his head out of the hold. He squinted at Mamillius through his sweat, shook his beard and wiped his face with a piece of waste.

“We are almost ready.”

“You know the Emperor is coming?”

Phanocles nodded. Mamillius grimaced at the coal dust.

“Haven’t you made any preparations for him?”

“He said there was to be no ceremony.”

“But
Amphitrite
is filthily dirty!”

Phanocles peered down at the deck.

“This coal costs a fortune.”

Mamillius stepped aboard gingerly.

“The hottest corner in hell.”

The heat hit him from the boiler and sweat streamed down his face. Phanocles looked round at Talos for a moment then handed Mamillius the piece of waste. He conceded the point.

“I suppose it is hotter than usual.”

Mamillius waved away the waste and wiped his streaming face on the corner of his elegant cloak. Now that he was cheek by jowl with Talos he could see more of his construction. Just above deck level at the after-end of the sphere was a projection surrounded with springs. Phanocles, following his gaze, reached out and flicked the brass with his fingers so that it tinged and gave out a puff of steam. He looked moodily at the projection.

“See that? I call it a safety valve, I gave exact instructions——”

But the craftsman had added a winged Boreas who touched the brass with an accidental toe and rounded his cheeks to eject a fair wind. Mamillius smiled with constraint.

“Very pretty.”

The springs strained, steam shot out and Mamillius leapt back. Phanocles rubbed his hands.

“Now we are ready.”

He came sweatily close to Mamillius.

“I have had her out in the centre of the harbour and once out in the bay. She works as certainly and easily as the stars.”

Mamillius, averting his face, found himself regarding his own distorted face in Talos’ shining side. It faded away from the mouth and pointed nose. No matter how he moved it followed him with the incurious but remorseless stare of a fish. The heat from the boiler and the smoking funnel was like a blow.

“I want to get out of this——”

He made his way under the contorted cranks and paused in the bows. The air was a little cooler here so that he took off his straw hat and fanned himself with it. Phanocles walked forward too and they leaned their backs against the bulwarks. Slaves were working on the fo’castle of the trireme only a few feet above them.

“This is an evil ship.”

Phanocles finished wiping his hands and dropped the waste over the side. They turned to watch it drift. Phanocles pointed upward with his thumb.

“She is not evil. Only useful. Would you sooner do that?”

Mamillius glanced up at the slaves. They were clustered round the metal crab and, he could see most of it though the claws were hidden by the trireme’s deck.

“I don’t understand you.”

“Presently they will centre the yard-arm and swing the crab up—all ten tons of it. Steam would do it for them without fuss or exertion.”

“I do not have to swing the crab up. I am not a slave.”

They were silent for a while, standing on tip-toe to inspect the crab. It was a spreadeagled mass of lead and iron, its claws resting on blocks of stone to keep them from cutting through the deck. It was as strictly utilitarian a mass as could have been found anywhere in the Empire, for its sole use was to be dropped through an enemy’s bilges and sink her outright: but the same impulse that had made the brass on the keg into a butterfly and stood a Boreas on the safety valve had been at work on the crab too. The makers had indicated the eyes and the joints of the legs. It had a kind of formal significance and the slaves were tending it—cleaning the claws—as if it were more than metal. Other slaves were swinging the seventy-foot yard round, were centring the hoist over the ring.

Mamillius turned and looked along
Amphitrite
’s deck.

“Life is a perplexing muddle, Phanocles.”

“I shall clean it up.”

“Meanwhile you are making it dirtier.”

“No slaves, no armies.”

“What is wrong with slaves and armies? You might as well say, ‘No eating or drinking or making love’.”

For a while again they were silent, listening to the roar of the port and the shouted orders from the trireme.