Padding quietly on the smooth tiles, he reached the end of the hallway and looked down from the second story of the masters’ quarters into the garden below. Beyond its red brick walls lay the kitchen building and beyond it the students’ dormitories. Dwyrin looked warily about and skipped quickly down the wooden steps into the garden. The garden was quiet, with the subdued buzz of bees and flies muted in the sunny morning. Tiptoeing, he passed through a high hedge to reach the rear wall of the garden. Here the bricks of the warl were sheathed in white stucco and covered with ivy and roses. Dwyrin backed up, eyeing the top of the wall and measuring it for his leap. Taking another step, he collided with a solid figure, whose hand settled easily on his right shoulder. Dwyrin froze and the hand spun him easily around. A thin old man, barely his own height, stood there, clad in a simple white kilt and tunic. His head was bare and a rich bronze color. Thick white eyebrows hooded his eyes. The old man smiled, his entire face crinkling up like parchment.
“Apprentice Dwyrin, I am surely pleased to make your acquaintance at last. I am Nephet. Surely you must be hungry now after your interesting experience. Please, come with me.”
The little old man’s hand was soft on his shoulder, but Dwyrin found himself firmly guided back across the garden and then into the ground floor of the masters’ quarters. As they entered the hallway that bisected the main floor, they just missed Ahmet, who came down the stairs into the garden rather quickly and then stood, looking around in concern.
CUMAE, ON THE BAY OF NEAPOLIS
Maxian trudged up the long pathway from the narrow, beach that lay below his brother’s Summer House. Though it had once been a rocky trail, filled with washouts and steep inclines, it was now broad and paved with fired tile. A low edging of worked stones capped the seaward side of the trail, and sconces were cut from the rocks to hold torches and lanterns at night. With each step on the cleverly worked pavement, the young Prince grew more and more despondent. Where once the trip down the hillside to the beach had been an adventure, filled with slippery rocks, startled deer, and nettles, now it was an easy afternoon excursion. All of the mysterious edges of the property were gone, carefully smoothed away by an invisible host of gardeners, laborers, and stoneworkers. Even the beach was calmed, the sands carefully raked into a pattern pleasing to the eye. Even the driftwood had been placed by the gardeners before the sun had risen.
At the top of the last switchback in the trail, the Prince turned and stared down into’the little cove. The blue-green waters glittered up at him, merry in the high afternoon sun. From the top of the cliff the wire net that closed the mouth of the cove was all but invisible, only an occasional flash off of the green-glass floats that held it up betraying its presence. Maxian fingered the tattered edge of his tunic, feeling the grit of the city under his roughened fingers. His hair was greasy and laid back flat along his. scalp. His chin was unshaven, sporting a lumpy three weeks’ growth of beard.
He laughed a little, suddenly realizing why the fishermen who guarded the cove had stared at him so, to see the Emperor’s younger brother drag in on a leaking ketch to the all but invisible sea-entrance to the summer house. Though they had recognized him, they must have thought him at the tail end of a horrendous drinking binge. His thought stilled, realizing that this was the first time he had laughed since he had left the charnel house in Ostia.
“Milord?” inquired a soft, even delicate voice from behind him. Maxian slowly turned around, his hand unconsciously brushing back the soot and grease in his hair. A slight woman with her once-blond hair bound up in a bun stood at his side, one hand outstretched in concern. Dressed in a very plain dress with muted red and green embroidery, her wrinkled face was graven deeper than usual with great concern. “Are you well?”
“Domina.” He bowed and she smiled at the gesture. “No, not well. How is the house of my brother?”
“In a great state on your account, young master. Though I hazard from your current appearance that you had not heard, your brothers have been raising a great commotion in search of you. I would wager that every praetor and civil governor between Genova and Syracuse is shaking in his boots at the invective issuing from the offices of the Emperor.”
“Oh,” he said, puzzled at the bemused look on the housekeeper’s face. “Have they been looking for me for very long?” * “Only the past ten days. Messengers come and go at all hours, bearing the dire news that you… have not been found.”
Maxian scratched his head, digging tiny bits of charcoal out of his scalp. “I suppose that they have not happened to mention why they wanted to talk to me?”
The housekeeper shook her head slowly, her bright-blue eyes sparkling with hidden delight. “Not a word.”
Now the Prince scratched his beard, finding it equally greasy and thick with minute flecks of soot. “Well, I guess I had better go relieve their concerns. Where, ah, where would they be this afternoon?”
The domina turned, looking back over her shoulder. “Where they always are, when they are here together,” she said, walking away into the shaded arbor path that wound along the top of the cliff.
Maxian shrugged. He would have to forgo cleaning up, then. Uneasy, he slouched away across the neat lawns that bordered the sprawling marble and granite house that he had grown up in. It was nearly unrecognizable to him now.
The hallways of the servants’ quarters of the Summer House were quiet and empty. As Maxian passed the entrance to the vast kitchen, he caught a glimpse of a dozen brawny men quietly eating a lunch of fresh loaves, olives, and cheese. They did not look up as he passed, his boots in his hands. At the back of the great staircase, he opened the door to the tight little stairway that predated the vast mechanism of Aurelian’s “Stairway.” The dark space under the staircase, crammed with its gears, wheels, and slave benches, was empty. There were no foreign visitors or dignitaries to impress with its smooth gliding ascent to the second floor of the house. At the top of the stairs, he paused to put his boots back on.
When he had been little, the second floor of the Summer House had been the domain of their mother, and it had been filled with women, children, looms, buckets, and a constant bustle of comings and goings. Though dogs and pets of aU kinds had been banned, it was filled with a great energy. Now the old hallways and rooms had been torn out and replaced with a stately set of rooms with vaulting ceilings, dark-colored wooden floors, and wall after wall of cunningly painted scenes. Maxian walked through the rooms, filled with furniture, clothing, desks, beds, and the dead eyes of painted figures, with a mounting sense of unease. In his current state of mind, the whispering of the living seemed to bleed from the walls and floor. A sound came from ahead, like the echo of a barking dog, and he spun around.
There was nothing. He shook his head to clear away the phantoms.
Now at the door to the one section of the old house that remained as it always had been, he stopped and cleared his mind. The Meditations of Asklepios came to him and calmed him. His fingers twisted in the air before him. Softly, with a barely audible whisper, the grime, soot, and dried sweat that had been his companions for these last days lifted away from his garments, from his hair, from his skin. Clenching his right fist, the spinning dust cloud coalesced into a hardened black marble, which he plucked from the air and placed in the leather bag at his waist. Taking a breath, he rapped lightly on the door frame.