Dimly, he could hear the woman chuckle again, feel her hands, though they weren’t searching in any way amorous this time, they were searching for his purse, and there was another pair of hands busy, too, trying to wrench at his belt, his sword… Then his vision cleared just enough for him to see a huge blade sweeping down at him out of the darkness. Panic shot through him and he tried to roll, but his body wouldn’t respond… A roar filled his ears. Something slapped up under his shoulder and sent him spinning. Under the circumstances, he didn’t mind. The roar broke again, and there was a lot of screaming, some of it masculine. There was a pounding that faded. Finally, Matt managed to push himself up off the ground. The world tilted around him, then reversed direction. He caught his breath and swallowed his stomach back down to where it belonged, squeezed his eyes shut, waited for his inner tilting to stop, then tried looking again, and saw… A great tawny wall of fur. It looked vaguely familiar, so he tilted his glance upward, up and up and straight into a grin-two of them, and Manny’s eyes twinkling with amusement up on top. “You said I could not eat them, man,” the manticore said, “but you did not tell them that.”
“Th-Thanks, Manny.” Matt pulled himself up to a sitting position, amazed that he ever could have thought this beast was his enemy. “They… they got a lot closer that time… didn’t they?”
“It is easier to overcome a man,” Manny reflected, “if you do not give him a chance to fight.”
“There is that,” Matt agreed. “Get him busy with a willing wench, then sap him from behind.”
“It somewhat galled the wench,” Manny observed, “that you were not willing.”
Matt smiled ruefully. “Or at least, that she had to keep me rolling for a while before my engine would catch.”
The manticore frowned. “ ‘Engine’? What device did you use?”
“Only a lute,” Matt sighed, “but apparently that qualifies as a lethal weapon in this universe.” He looked around and saw his instrument, miraculously uncrushed. He took it into his lap, checking, but finding no more than a scratch. “Remind me to be very careful who’s around when I sing songs.”
“With all due respect, minstrel-knight,” Manny said, “I doubt that it was either your words or your songs that brought on this… encounter.”
“No.” Matt stared down at the lute, brooding. “It’s the same sorcerer who’s been trying to kill me all along, isn’t it? But why?”
“Why not?” Manny replied. “A manticore needs no more reason for killing than hunger. Perhaps your foe needs not even that.”
“Am I that big a threat? Just me alone?”
“It would seem so-and in the midst of this carnival, who would know you had been slain for any reason more than jealousy over a woman?”
“If anybody even bothered to look that far,” Matt muttered. “Yes. Perfect cover for a murder, wasn’t it?”
“Perhaps not perfect,” the manticore said judiciously. “If it had been I who did it, now-”
“Uh, yes, I’m sure you would have managed it much more efficiently.” For some odd reason, Matt wasn’t in the mood for hearing the gory details of the manticore’s no doubt fabulous plan. He climbed to his feet, trying to ignore the piercing pain in his head. “Let’s say it may not have been perfect, but it was certainly good enough.”
“Nay. Almost.”
“Right. Almost good enough.” Matt took an experimental step. “I’m still alive, aren’t I? Thanks to you, Manny.”
“It was nothing,” the manticore assured him. “Anything for a friend.”
“I’ll try to return the favor some day.” Matt looked around him at the merrymakers, most of whom were no longer standing. “It just makes you wonder why putative Christians are so busy breaking the Commandments.”
The manticore winced. “Please! If you must use strong language-”
“Uh, yes, sorry again,” Matt assured him. He’d forgotten that the creature had been so long a pawn of evil that words associated with virtue might be offensive to it. “And I suppose nobody can be openly a Chr-religious, even under the new regime. In fact, most of them probably aren’t at all.”
“Not so. King Boncorro has let it be known that he will not move against any who worship as they please.”
“And nobody believes him. They think it might be a ruse to bring all the believers out into the open, where he can cut them down. Having been persecuted for a hundred years might tend to make a person paranoid. Besides, there’s no assurance Boncorro won’t be bumped off, and his throne usurped by a sorcerer-and then where would they be, the people who had started going to church again? Still, you should be able to tell them by the way they live-by moral conduct.”
“Not under the old king,” Manny said. “Even if people lived morally in private, they did not necessarily want it known.”
“Morality became a matter of taste, eh? And Boncorro hasn’t seen any reason to change that.”
“Other than to let people who want to be moral, be so, no.”
Matt nodded. “Besides, the moral folk wouldn’t have left spouse and children to go trooping south to Venarra-and the kids might be in rebellion against moral parents as easily as they might be running away because they had no morals.”
“You might say it is unpopular,” Manny said thoughtfully. “Moral living is not considered to be in the best of taste. Your northern prudery never did have all that strong a hold here. The folk of ancient Reme lived lives quite scandalous by your standards. Their descendants have been somewhat tempered by the preachers, but not overly much.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about the Roman orgies,” Matt said, “but I thought they were only for the people who could afford them.”
“Smaller purses yielded smaller vices,” the manticore agreed. “But the city was Reme, mortal, not Rome.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot-the other brother won the fight here.”
“ ‘Other’ brother?“ Manny frowned down at him. ”Why should Remus have been the ‘other’ brother? Surely that would have been Romulus!“
Matt was about to protest that the whole story of Romulus and Remus had just been a myth, but was hit by a sudden stab of uncertainty. Sure, it had been a myth in his universe, but here it might have been documented fact. “They were orphans who were suckled by a she-wolf, right?”
“Nay. Their nurse was a wildcat.”
Matt let that sink in. If the whole story of the she-wolf were just a symbol to express the inner nature of the Romans, what did that make their analogs here? A lynx was just as much of a hunter as a wolf, but went after smaller prey, and wasn’t anywhere nearly as rapacious-except in self-defense, or defense of its young. What kind of people could have established an empire just because they were good at self-defense? Paranoids, probably. If they defended themselves all the way into North Africa, Spain, Asia Minor, and England just to make sure nobody would attack them…
Or diplomats? That had a better sound to it. After all, in the myth of the founding of Rome, Romulus was the one who had started building the wall for a future city, and Remus was the one who had made fun of him and jumped over the wall to show how useless it would be. Then Romulus had killed him… But here, Romulus had lost-and his city had been founded by the descendants of the man who didn’t believe in walls. “So Reme has no wall to guard it.”
“Wall? Around Reme?” Manny stared at him as if he were insane. “Why would the citizens have done that? ‘Twas not Babylon or Ninevah, after all!”
“I thought we were discussing its morals. But if they didn’t have a wall, what happened when the Etruscans attacked?”