Vonones pulled himself onto his mount again, lifting his weight with one hand on either of the pair of forward pommels on his saddle. Under normal circumstances, a slave would have given him a leg-up, but he would not ask a friend for that service.
"We'll see when the time comes," Vonones agreed cautiously. "We'll see when we've actually found the sauropithecus."
Chapter Eight
The imperial lodge east of Rome was not itself very large, but its grounds enclosed over a thousand acres of the Alban Hills. The Emperor was at his leisure in a clearing within sight of the main house. There were over a hundred men around him: guards, slaves, and a half dozen of his closest advisors.
"Loose!" the Emperor called.
A slave opened a basket and gave it an underarm swing that tossed the pigeon within airborne in the right direction. One of the bird's flight feathers on either wing had been clipped. That slowed its rise, but it also gave the bird a deceptive stagger through the air. Domitian drew his bow and tracked the pigeon's flight against the arrowhead. When he shot, the bird was almost twenty yards out. The release was part of the same smooth motion with which the Emperor had drawn the bow. The arrow's flat arc flicked it across the pigeon and past. The bird fell in two pieces, the head and the remainder.
Onlookers cheered wildly. The boy who was sprinting to pick up the arrow well down-range began to turn cartwheels. A microcephalic dwarf in a saffron tunic waddled up to Domitian and hugged his knee. The Emperor reached down and caressed the dwarf's head.
"What do you think of Glabrio for Upper Germany, Crispinus?" the Emperor asked, as he handed his bow to a slave to have another arrow nocked.
Crispinus, a greying man with a wizened face and eyes like a shark's, shrugged. "I think he's trustworthy, lord and god. I just don't think he's bright enough to tell dung from mincemeat."
"With four legions under him, I think we'll go with trustworthy," Domitian remarked languidly, as he reached for his bow.
A party of men, half a dozen of them, was coming from the lodge. That was unexpected. The six guards closest to the Emperor stood in an arc at his back, facing outward. They already held swords naked in their hands, but they stiffened to lift their armored heads a half-inch higher, like cats sighting prey. The outlying curtain of guards straightened also, but the newcomer, whoever he was, was being escorted by household staff members in normal fashion.
"Excellency, I'm so embarrassed," now whined a plump steward who had been conversing in a low voice with the slaves who were handling the pigeon baskets. "We haven't any more birds ready for your excellency. Some very nice deer, some panthers, or…"
The steward broke off and swallowed. Domitian had said nothing, but the Emperor's eyes were focused unblinkingly upon the steward. The unhappy servant forced his tongue to continue speaking, although he had very little consciousness of the words. "Or we could drive peacocks by, of course."
"Regular arrow," Domitian said, handing his bow to the loader without looking away from the steward.
Down the field, the slave boy was still cartwheeling expertly with bloody palms and sandals toward the distant arrow. There were scores of pigeons strewn between ten and forty yards of the imperial archer. Almost all of them had been lopped apart by arrows like the one now being exchanged for a normal point by the loader. The heads of the arrows that Domitian was using on the birds were double-pointed sickles a hand's breadth wide. The crescent blades were razor sharp across the whole inner curve. A few of the pigeons had fluttered to safety in the distant woods, but very few; the blood of the remainder had spattered the grass across a wide area as they fell. The slave had cartwheeled across the expanse of carnage, concerned only that he not slip in the blood and loose feathers. He had often seen worse.
The last six arrows had fallen at some distance one from another, depending on the angle at which panic had taken individual pigeons into the air. The slave stuck the shaft of each arrow into his mouth so that he could continue to cartwheel to the next. He had known before the steward had realized it that there were no more pigeons ready to be shot. The slave was determined to end his performance on a high note.
At Domitian's feet, the dwarf attempted a cartwheel of his own. Midway through, he shifted into a series of forward and backward somersaults, then stood on his hands giggling.
The slave boy caught up the sixth arrow and sprang into the air with his arms spread wide, a trio of arrows in either hand. Domitian moved, drawing the bow as if he and the bow and the boy down-range were all part of the same complex machine. The slave had a bright smile as his feet touched the ground again. His eyes did not have time to focus on what the Emperor was doing, much less on the arrow that was only a flicker in the air as it snapped toward him.
The boy yelped and fell over.
The house staff-a senior usher, two ushers, and a pair of armed Germans-had arrived with the newcomer, a richly tanned foreigner over six feet tall.
"You go stand against that beech tree there," the Emperor said to the steward responsible for the morning's recreation. He gestured with an eyebrow toward a tree ten yards away. Its size, four feet in diameter at head height above the ground, had caused it to be spared when lesser trees were cleared for the sports area. "Hold your hand above your head and spread your fingers."
"Master and god…?"
The boy who had been gathering arrows bounded upright with an amazed look upon his face. His right foot was now bare. He held not only the six crescent-headed bird arrows but the last shaft as well-spiked through his right sandal between where his first and second toes had rested.
The gathering-the freemen and the higher-ranked slaves-hummed with "Brilliant!" and "Magnificent!" The steward was particularly enthusiastic, until the Emperor's eyes turned back to him. The pudgy servant scampered toward the beech tree with a fixed smile on his face.
"Yes, it was rather good, wasn't it," the Emperor said with a pleased smile. He was already beginning to forget that only chance could have been that accurate, and that all he had been trying to do was to pin the slave's foot to the ground.
"And what are you, barbarian?" Domitian called from behind a hedge of armed guards. The Emperor's nose was wrinkling, although the newcomer had no odor discernible to the servants and counsellors closer to the man.
"I am N'Sumu, lord and god," said the tall man. He spoke Latin with a pronounced Iberian accent, though the words were intelligible enough. "I am an Egyptian from south of Elephantine Island in the Nile. In my native land I am renowned as a great hunter of the strange beasts that dwell beyond the cataracts of the Nile. Your Prefect of the Watch, Laurus, thought I might be of service to you because of my long experience in capturing sauropitheci. I understand from certain talk I have heard during my visit to Rome that you have one that needs to be recaptured."
"Yes, whatever did happen to that one?" the Emperor demanded of no one in particular. He did not care so long as he got an answer. If no one answered, then so much the worse for whoever and however many the Emperor decided should have answered him. The counsellors-one of them seventy and blind, all of them learned and powerful men-began to perspire.
The third secretary in a rank of six began to recite while his fingers danced through the tablets thonged to his belt. "The beastcatcher Lycon has been reporting lack of success at five-day intervals. The area of search has been focused in the region between Portus and the third milepost on the Via Ostia where the barge was first discovered to have been attacked. In the course of the past three reports, the beastcatcher has expressed doubts that the sauropithecus is still alive and has requested that the search be terminated in order that he may seek to obtain more of the beasts from the Numidians."