Gaius halted as well and turned his horse. The corners of his eyes were crinkled up in amusement. He gestured at the gateway. “I felt the fool first for forgetting that this place was here at all.,Second, for forgetting that I had paid for it. Third, for forgetting that I had urged its construction and a half for being addled enough to bring her here, to the city.”
Maxian shook his head, puzzled by the rueful look on the face of the old man. “Who?”
Gaius laughed and spurred his horse through the gate. “Who? Don’t they teach that story to the young rich men anymore? A scandal indeed. She was a Greek all right, she came as a gift and nearly walked away with the whole party.”
Maxian followed and they rode up a short lane that ended in a circular garden. Beyond the garden, now overgrown with flowering shrubs and tall grass, stood a striking building. Twin lines of pillars flanked the central entrance on the opposite side of the garden. At the end of each line of pillars, a slab-sided obelisk rose. Two facing statues guarded the doorway, their half-man, half-beast bodies facing one another. Beyond this a flat-topped building rose up with two floors. Though perfectly situated on the grounds and within the context of the hills and the long slope behind it, it seemed an unexpected foreigner found-startlingly- at a family gathering.
“The Summer House of the last of the Ptolemies: Kleo-patra, Pharaoh of Egypt. Built by Egyptian and Phoenician craftsmen imported months in advance of her arrival in the city at my side. The stone was shipped by barge from the Upper Nile to Alexandria and thence, to Ostia. Five hundred stonemasons, carpenters, architects, and laborers came with it. It took them six months to raise this, after they had flattened the ground and built a berm down there to keep the slope from slipping.”
Gaius Julius pointed downslope, where a ridge was now overgrown with saplings and oak trees.
“Here she held court, while I muddled about in the politics of the city and prepared for my great expedition. It was a house of beauty, Prince, filled with scholars and philosophers. No real Roman, of course, no Senator, would come within miles of the place. Look around; they still do not build close to here. They felt that she was the very devil-temptress of the East. A harbinger of an ‘oriental despotism.’ And see what Octavian gave them… he who cursed her name the loudest.”
“Huh”1 was all Maxian said, staring around at the grand edifice. Even over long years, it still stood, an exemplar of the craftsmen that had built it. “Who owns it now?”
“Why,” Gaius Julius said with a grin, “you do, my lord. Or, rather, your brother owns it. It is a property of the state, but a forgotten one. We should be quite undisturbed here.”
Maxian swung himself down off his horse. He walked up the broad sandstone stairs to the first level of the house. The front portico was apparently solely for show; the pillars enclosed a long arcade on either side of the garden and shaded the front of the house. The roof was pocked with holes where stones and lumber had decayed and fallen down. He picked his way across the entryway and into the first room. In the dimness, he fumbled along the wall, then stopped, cursing himself. Gaius Julius, after hobbling the horses, joined him.
Maxian muttered and a pale-yellow light sprang up from his raised hand. Gaius Julius hissed in surprise.
“I had forgotten this was here,” the dead man said, looking past the Prince into the house.
The sorcerous light had revealed a half-circle of a room. The walls were marble and the floor a great mosaic of many colors. A great deal of litter, blown in from the garden, lay in drifts across the floor, but the ceiling was still intact and in the facing circle of the chamber, on a broad marble pedestal, stood a statue of a man. He was tall, taller in stone than in life, and nearly naked, though a‘ breastplate and leather kilt had been cunningly carved upon his torso. In one hand he leaned upon a tall spear and the other reached toward the viewer. Curly hair graced his head, and the artisan-from life or more than life-had made him handsome. At his feet the figures of men, much smaller than he, bowed before him or lay dead. The sculptor had been a man of surpassing skill, for the personality of the figure was like a stunning blow to Maxian.
“Alexander…” breathed the Prince.
At his side, Gaius Julius snorted with disdain. “You paid attention to least one of your pedagogues, I see. It has suffered through the long years. A pity, it was quite a work of art when it still had paint on it. She was obsessed with him, you know. Often she would try to convince herself that I was his spirit, invested in flesh once more.”
Maxian turned. The dead man’s voice had an odd, almost haunted quality to it. “What do you mean?”
Gaius Julius sighed. “I don’t know. Near the end I think that I was under her spell. I believed it too, that I would be the new Alexander. They killed me over the cost of the appropriations for my expedition, you know. I was emptying the treasury of every last coin.”
Maxian shook his head. “I don’t remember that. I thought you were preparing a campaign against the Dacians. That’s what my tutors said, anyway.“
The dead man snorted, waving his hand in negation. “I read that history too. Written by someone ninety years after the fact of the matter. No, I had a grander plan than that, my young friend. I intended nothing less than the conquest of Persia-even as Alexander had done-and then to swing north and conquer the Scythian lands north of the Sea of Darkness and fall upon Dacia upon my return, from behind.”
Maxian stared at the old man in shock, his eyes suddenly widening in apprehension.
Gaius Julius looked back at him with puzzlement. “What is it, Prince?”
Maxian shook his head. “Nothing, just something I had heard before. Let us look at the rest of this house and see if we can use it.”
The girl, brown and quiet as a deer, crouched in the rhododendrons on the hillside. Below her, in the old house, she could hear the faint voices of the two men as they moved from room to room. Her long dark hair was tied back in a braid and stuffed down the back of the light cotton tunic she wore. Her feet, tucked under her, were wrapped in leather and sandals. A light, leather girdle circled her narrow waist. From it hung two pouches, a hard leather case, and, in the small of her back, a thin dagger in a plain scabbard.
Behind her, the brush rustled quietly.
“Sigurd.” The girl hissed, not bothering to look back. “Quit staring at my butt and get back to the horses. Take them over the hill, out of the wind, so that the ones down in the garden don’t smell them and say hello.”
The brush whispered again and Krista felt the sensation of being watched recede.
Men, she thought, mighty easy to distract… It’s a wonder they get anything done.
Below, the voices suddenly became clearer as the two men walked out onto the rear porch of the villa. More exposed to nature on the open slope, it was in much worse shape than the front, and they picked their way carefully across a band of broken tile and collapsed fountain drains.
“… do, old man. Arrange for wagons to bring all of the materials from the insula up here. I’ll begin moving in immediately, and I’ll fix the water mains so that it’s livable, at least.”
Krista parted the brush enough to get a clear look. Then she grimaced. She recognized both men. This was very interesting, much more interesting than either she or her mistress had anticipated. Quietly she returned the brush to its original position and slipped away up the hillside. Time to return to the city. There was more work to do.