"You're all right, then?" said Vonones, looking away from his friend's face as he spoke the question. Only the slaves thought that the words had anything to do with Lycon's physical state.
The beastcatcher swallowed his mouthful of bread. He nodded away the boy's attempt to feed him more at the moment. A doctor in the background shifted from one foot to the other, waiting to offer the potion he held in his hands. "I'm all right," said Lycon. "Why am I here?"
"I arranged for it," Vonones said. He took the dripping bread from the slave and offered it with his own fingers. "Here, try a little more and then we'll help you sit up. I-offered Crispinus an arrangement which he found satisfactory. He explained to our lord and god that you were quite necessary for the hunt to succeed and that Lacerta had badly misinterpreted the events of that night. A party arrived with the documents for your release somewhat-" he swallowed and looked away "-a great deal later than I would have wished."
Lycon mumbled around his bread. Deliberately the beastcatcher lifted himself into a sitting position, swallowed as a pair of slaves stacked pillows behind him unbidden, and said, "It wouldn't have made any difference. Don't…"
"Lycon, I-" the merchant began in the pause without any real notion of where he was going to take the sentence.
"I said it didn't matter," Lycon said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and let the motion stir the blood throughout his body. "It was going to happen the same way, in the apartment or wherever, because I wouldn't have believed it could happen until it did."
"Don't stand up yet," the doctor blurted from behind the other slaves.
Lycon stared at him for a moment. "Right," he said at last. "And don't you open your mouth again."
No one moved until Vonones reached for the bread again.
"The soup smells good," said Lycon mildly. "I think I'd like the soup."
As the slave hovering over it handed him a steaming cup, Lycon continued, "What are we expected to do now, you and I?"
Vonones sat down on the bed beside him and said, "Catch the creature, the same as before. I understand that our lord and god has become increasingly interested since the…" Vonones had not been looking at Lycon. Now he turned so that he could do so. "The whole staff in the guardroom was killed. I'm not sure Domitian knows about what we found in Mephibaal's loft, all the details, but he knows about the Amphitheater."
Vonones reached over and touched his friend's arm, pretending not to notice the tears. "Lycon," he said, "it's been three days. I've taken care of all the arrangements. There's a memorial plaque on the side of the monument I built for myself, and we can go there any time you like." He fumbled again for words. "I had over a hundred witnesses to the cremation. It was a nice one."
"We're going to kill it," Lycon said. He stood up, looking into the cup of broth, and took a deep drink from it before he tried to walk unassisted to the far wall. "I thought we should from the start, and now I think that would be a nice memorial. Better than stone."
He, too, was pretending there were no tears on his lined, weathered face. Keeping his back to Vonones made it easy for both of them. There was no one else in the bed chamber, only slaves, property with voices but no place in a computation of human beings.
"N'Sumu is still in charge," Vonones said carefully. "I don't know how he feels about your release, but I'm quite sure that he still intends to capture the sauropithecus alive."
"He could have killed it," Lycon said, staring in the direction of the wall. It was a fresco of a scene from the Odyssey-the Laestrygonians wrecking the fleet with huge blocks of stone hurled from their clifftops-but to Lycon it was simply a monochrome blur bounding his memories. "When it leaped at me that night at the fountain. He must have stunned it, and that saved me… but it didn't save Zoe and…"
That was not a direction in which his thoughts should have turned. He slammed his cup into the wall, denting the thick plaster and shattering the delicate vessel-a cup fashioned of porcelain ten thousand miles away, by the same folk who wove worm cocoons into silk garments.
"Pollux, I'm sorry," Lycon blurted, shocked into full consciousness by the splash and the prickling in his hands of shards of porcelain. A lifetime ago, he had killed a lizard-ape chick thus. "That was a good one, wasn't it? Probably worth more than I'd fetch on the block myself." He faced the Armenian with a crooked smile, holding a sliver of the cup between his thumb and forefinger.
"I think it's one you brought me yourself one year when you were trading on the coast of the Red Sea," Vonones said calmly. He recognized Lycon's mood and repressed a shiver. "I've got a really valuable one-a cup of hollowed out agate. If you like, I'll smash that one myself to show you how little I care about any of that now." He paused.
"Of course," he went on in the same tone, "that won't help us with what we need to do. To kill the lizard-ape ourselves."
Lycon flicked his eyebrows upward in assent. He walked to the tray of food-he was moving almost normally by now-and, ignoring the efforts of a slave to serve him, took a handful of crab paste and a wedge of bread to use for a napkin.
"All right," Lycon said, filling his mouth, "what do you think of N'Sumu?"
"I don't know what to think," confessed Vonones.
"We'd best go talk to him," Lycon said quietly. "After I've eaten. And after-" he ran his knuckles down the skin of his thigh, wrinkled and clammy with the days he had spent unconscious and unmoving "-I've had a long steaming at the bath."
He smiled at Vonones, dismissing the worry etched on the merchant's features. "You always try to get me to sit in the sedan chair with you. Well, today I won't argue."
Lycon hesitated. The brave efforts at sociability evaporated. His face had all the reassurance of a bleached skull. "Don't worry about me, Vonones," the hunter said. "I'm going to finish this one. Whatever it costs."
Chapter Twenty-four
"Gaius Cornelius Sempronianus?" asked the centurion wearing the scarlet tunic and sandals of the Praetorian Guard.
The doorkeeper who had opened the panel to an authoritative knock now blinked in amazement to see the third-floor hallway filled with troops and their servants. The Praetorians did not carry spears or shields for this assignment, but their helmets and belted swords left no doubt of what they were.
"But sirs, he's only a schoolmaster!" the slave in the doorway blurted.
The centurion grinned and knocked the door-keeper aside as he strode within. Some of the servants behind him were carrying lamps, others held lengths of rope. The first three of the soldiers following the centurion simply trampled over the doorkeeper, but the next pair paused long enough to pinion the fellow's arms behind him. A servant trussed the doorkeeper wrist to wrist with one of the cords he carried already cut to length.