It was raining again, and that only seemed to force the stench and the smoke of Rome downward onto the city. Still, Lycon gave thanks for a solid roof and a dry place to sit. After a week or more in the field, of chasing shadows and rumors along the banks of the Tiber, it was a welcome relief to rest here in Vonones' office. He had returned to the merchant's compound ostensibly for fresh supplies and additional men; in point of fact Lycon was more interested in seeing his family and enjoying one last night of good food, a soft bed, and Zoe's warm embrace.
The search for the lizard-ape had drawn a total blank—as Lycon had rather suspected and indeed hoped that it would. Vonones had gone to Crispinus with their latest report of failure, and Lycon no longer very much cared whether tomorrow would find him back in the field or hanging from a cross. Perhaps Domitian would order them to Africa; if there were no lizard-apes to be found there, Lycon knew of places where an exile might find a haven beyond the reach of the Emperor's wrath. For now the hunter only knew that he was tired, apathetic, and would cheerfully die tomorrow for one quiet night with his family.
Lycon grunted and massaged the old wound on his thigh. How many years had he carried that now? Too many.
He heard the din of Vonones' return. The entrance of the litter and its bearers inevitably set every animal in the compound into an uproar, but today the disturbance seemed more frenzied than usual. Lycon put it down to nerves. At least it wasn't Domitian's soldiers coming to arrest him.
He was expecting Vonones, but the merchant was the second person to enter the office. Pushing through in front of him was a tall bronzed man—towering easily over Vonones and his servants, and as self-possessed as an Eastern potentate entering his own palace.
"You are Lycon, son of Amphiction," the stranger said as he stepped toward the hunter. He bowed. His torso hinged higher than Lycon would have expected, and the bulges beneath the pair of linen tunics did not seem to be hip bones at all. "I am N'Sumu, an Egyptian hunter from Nubia. I will help you capture the sauropithecus."
"What?" Lycon glanced questioningly toward Vonones, then quickly back again to N'Sumu.
"His orders don't exactly say that, Lycon," said Vonones hurriedly. Lycon had to realize immediately what their relative positions had now become. Otherwise he might react in a fashion that would mean the cross—or the arena—for them both. "His orders say that our lord and god puts him in charge of the hunt, and that all subjects of the Empire, free and slave, will cooperate or face divine displeasure."
"What?" repeated Lycon. He must have fallen asleep.
"My only interest," said N'Sumu smoothly, "is to capture the sauropithecus. The credit, so far as I am concerned, will be yours."
He was speaking Greek. While Lycon had no trouble understanding the Egyptian, the effect was unnerving because N'Sumu's vocabulary and elocution were those of the classic stage. Even his elisions were those of metrical drama rather than of the sliding, careless Common Tongue that was the language of trade throughout even the Latin-speaking West of the Empire.
"Where in Hades did you learn that Greek?" Lycon wondered, dazed and focusing on the immediate puzzle before he moved on to greater ones.
"You prefer Latin?" N'Sumu said in that language. Even his voice was different, and his accent could not have been told from that of a Spaniard on the coast of Ocean.
"Yes, I think I do," Lycon said. "But that doesn't answer my question." He probably would awaken from this dream in another moment, find himself lying in the rain beneath a hedgerow.
"In Tipasa," N'Sumu said nonchalantly. He showed no sign of irritation at either the question or the dumbfounded tone in which it was asked.
His answer was true, as well. A touring company had been performing a series of the plays of Euripides in the theater in Tipasa when N'Sumu reached the city. The chorus master had provided the emissary with an expert if idiosyncratic knowledge of Greek during three hours in a private room. The Greek had a very different memory of what had gone on during that time, but it explained in an acceptable fashion the way his head and muscles ached the next day.
A Spanish trader, met in the same North African port, had provided him with his Latin. It appeared that N'Sumu should refine that, refine both apparently, due to regional peculiarities. It pleased him, for all the additional effort, that he found it necessary to supplement the store of native languages provided him by the all-knowing Cora, who had programmed his communications nodes with North African tribal dialects. This evidence of their less-than-perfect intelligence of this planet's culture held promise for the emissary's personal intentions here.
"Gods," Lycon muttered. He rubbed the skin of his face with scarred, knobby fingers. "Where did Domitian ever find you?"
"I think we'd do best to get to a restaurant," suggested Vonones smoothly. "To determine how we best can support you, N'Sumu, and do the will of our god and master. Crispinus made it quite clear, Lycon, that the Emperor has complete confidence in N'Sumu's abilities."
N'Sumu smiled. "We can better discuss the things which are necessary in other surroundings, yes. You will lead us to what you think suitable."
His smile, thought Vonones, was wrong—but everything was horribly wrong, and if this N'Sumu were the creature of Ahriman, then Ahriman was clearly taking his turn on top as the Wheel turned and Ormadz the Light descended. "Yes," Vonones said aloud. "There's a nice place just down the street. Many a deal I've closed there."
It was only after the three men set out in company that Vonones remembered the deal he had most recently closed in that particular shop. It was for the shipment that had included the sauropithecus.
The restaurant's owner was tasting the soup in one of the stone urns set into the sales counter. He had a critical look on his face and was already beginning to shout: "Hieron! How many peppers did you . . . !"
At sight of Vonones and his companions approaching the counter, which was open to the street along its full length, the man broke off. "Service!" he called toward the back. "A table in the garden for Master Claudius Vonones and his friends? Master Lycon, is it not, sir? And your other companion? Or would you prefer the enclosed dining area, Master Vonones?"
"No, no—the arbor's fine," said the Armenian absently. "Unless N'Sumu would rather . . . ?"
"By all means make whatever arrangements you prefer," said N'Sumu easily. "After all, I am a stranger here."
To get to the door that opened onto the back, they walked around the sales counter. Its top was covered with a mosaic of the beasts of the sea savaging one another. The centerpiece between two of the warming urns was a pair of octopuses dismembering a spiny lobster. It was balanced on the other side of the middle urn by sharks tearing a hapless sailor, while moray eels squirmed in for their share of the fragments.
"The fish stew here is excellent," said Lycon, tapping the countertop with the sharks as he passed.
The frescoes in the courtyard had, unlike the counter mosaics, been recently redone. Pride of place on the wall facing the door was a fresco of a chariot race—not in the Circus, built for the purpose with long straightaways, but in the Amphitheater itself. The nearly circular course meant that only the inside track had a prayer of winning. It also meant that when the gates opened and six four-horse chariots leaped for that inside track, there was an absolute certainty of a multiple collision.
The fresco artist had caught several of the high points of such novelty races in his panorama. In one, the driver for the Green Association was whipping his horses literally over the piled-up chariots, horses, and drivers of the other five associations. The painting showed the Green driver lashing at his Gold-tuniced opponent, who was trying to hold himself clear of the wheels by a grip on the frame of the Green chariot.
Further along the same wall, the artist focused on an individual rather than on a general collision. Philodamas, a Blue Association driver with an impressive series of wins, had been thrown forward when a wheel-bearing froze. Normally that would have meant that the driver was pulled along by the reins laced to his left forearm. In this case, however, the reins had gotten looped around the driver's neck. Philodamas had been decapitated spectacularly to the cheers of the crowd, and given such immortality as this fresco could provide.
The table toward which the waiter was leading them was in a grape arbor. A customer was already relaxing there, waiting for his food to be brought. He was moved out with scarcely more ceremony than that with which an additional stool was snatched from another table and set beneath this one.
"How much do you pay these people?" Lycon asked, as he took the seat farthest within the arbor and against the back wall. He did not fear men, particularly, but he had never been comfortable in an arbor since the night a leopard clawed him through a blind of woven brush. The four parallel scars on his buttocks were still quite obvious, ten years after the event. The scars on his mind showed only in situations like this one, and then only to those who, like Vonones, knew him very well.
"I don't expect the service my business requires to come cheaply," Vonones said airily. "After all, I pay enough for my animals so that the beastcatchers who contract with me always see to it that I have my pick of the healthiest ones." He sighed and let his mind concentrate on dining—thank the gods, civilized dining once again.
"And your pick of the exceptional ones as well," Lycon said pointedly. Vonones had told him of his ill-advised purchase here.
"Your orders, gentlemen?" the owner of the shop interjected from the mouth of the arbor. "Will we have a meal today, or merely something from our selection of fine wines?"
Vonones blinked. Lycon had almost ruined his appetite. The merchant grimaced and returned to his best professional mood. This was going to be expensive—always worth the expense to create the proper impression, of course—and he wasn't going to let the bad business of the lizard-ape sour his digestion.
Lycon was already ordering for himself. "Rhodian," he said. "One to two with water." As much to himself as to his companions, he added: "You can get it anywhere, and with the resin and seawater blended to help it travel, it's always just the same. Right now I don't need any surprises." He rubbed a sore toe against the nearest of the three table legs. They were cast bronze, shaggy, and had feet like those of a goat or satyr.
"The Caecuban, I think—mulled," said Vonones. He was no more a connoisseur of wines than the beastcatcher was. Therefore he accepted as the height of sophistication what the literary snobs told him—despite the fact that the vineyards of Southern Latium had decayed to a shadow of their former quality during the century following Horace's enthusiastic remarks. It didn't really matter since Vonones—as with Lycon—would really have preferred the taste of resined wine with which he had lived for decades in the field.
Now he turned with a smile, he hoped, of quiet sophistication to the Egyptian and said: "Master N'Sumu, may I recommend the Caecuban? Urbicius, the owner here, lays in a stock for me personally."
Lycon had relaxed enough that he had to smother a snort. That was a laugh—still, let Vonones impress upon this Egyptian, the Emperor's chosen sauropithecus stalker, that he and Lycon were themselves men of the world.
N'Sumu looked at the merchant without interest and said, "Water for me. Only water." The filters implanted in his esophagus would keep most of the local foodstuffs from playing hell with his digestive processes, but that did not mean that he intended to press his luck. Nourishment prepared in private from local raw substances would sustain life for as long as he had to remain here. Certainly the notion of actually eating alongside these animals was more unpleasant than the food itself was likely to be.
The shopowner bowed and snapped his finger to a waiter who scampered off. Bowing again, the owner backed away also. Vonones, thought Lycon, probably spent more lavishly on his wine than he did on his animals. And that brought them back to the business at hand.
"All right," Lycon said bluntly before the merchant could waste more time with small talk. "You've hunted sauropitheci in your own homeland, so I can see you might do a better job catching the lizard-ape than we would. When I'm in the field, I always talk to the local hunters before I set up my own plans. Even when the quarry is an animal I'm familiar with, the local terrain may affect hunting conditions. Good enough—you know lizard-apes and I don't. But that isn't going to help either one of us capture something that's at the bottom of the Tiber by now."
N'Sumu shook his head in a gesture unfamiliar to Lycon and Vonones. It was sometimes difficult to fit particular gestures into the correct cultural setting on a world as fragmented as this one. The bronze-skinned man then bobbed his head downward in the proper sign of negation for the locals whom he now faced.
"There is a very good probability that the sauropithecus is not on the bottom of the river," he said confidently. "The beasts are quite at home in the water, being in some aspects related to fish. And I very much doubt that the beast would have died from its wounds. In my homeland we often find it necessary to chop them into their separate parts to make certain we have killed them, so quickly do they recover from seemingly mortal wounds. Besides, we know what it did on the grain barge. I suggest that you have simply been looking in the wrong place."
Lycon, his face blank and his voice emotionless, said, "We've been looking in a lot of wrong places, then, I guess. We've got a network of informants throughout every farm and hamlet between Rome and the coast, fifteen miles to either side of the Tiber. We've caught or killed maybe a dozen packs of feral dogs, so I wouldn't say the effort was wasted—but it didn't bring us any closer to the damned thing we were looking for."
"Because you weren't looking in Rome," N'Sumu said. This time he suited the correct gesture, a lift of his chin and eyebrows, to the words. "Because you were looking for a wild animal, Lycon, when in reality the creature is very cunning—and practically as human as you are."
N'Sumu was smiling when the waiters arrived with the order. There were five of them: one with a mixing bowl and three cups, one with two jugs of wine, and one with a larger jug of water—dark with the moisture that sweated through its unglazed surface to evaporate and cool the remaining contents. The last pair of waiters carried a freestanding stove of bronze by the handles on either side. They walked gingerly with their burden, because live coals had already been shoveled into the firepot.
The stove was of hollow construction. When the men carrying the piece set it down by the arbor, one of them lifted the lid from the container, which was cast integrally with the firepot. A servant with a wine jug tipped it to fill the stove container. The wine gurgled as it rushed through the passages cast into the walls of the firepot. The thin bronze popped and hissed as the fluid cooled metal which the charcoal had already expanded. The other wine bearer poured from his jug into a cup, while the man with the water filled a second cup for N'Sumu with a flourish.
"We can serve ourselves, boys," said Vonones. He did not offer to pay. That he would do discreetly at ten-day intervals, feeling that the show of credit was more impressive than an open display of silver would have been in a business setting. The waiters—one was the cook, Hieron; the owner must be alone in the front—bowed and backed away obsequiously.
The wine in Lycon's cup merged and blended in the swirls it cut through the previously poured water. Slowly the richer color smoothed itself to blanket the buff glaze of the cup's interior. "Where would you look for a lizard-ape, then?" he asked. "And no more jokes about looking for it in Rome."
The Egyptian hunched forward. "A grain of sand would hide on a beach, would it not? A wisp of straw in a hayfield. Where would something human hide, beastcatcher?"
"Well, now, we don't want to overestimate the lizard-ape's cunning," Vonones scoffed, wondering if they were meant to laugh. He held his cup beneath the spout of the mulling stove and opened the cock. Steaming wine gushed from a bronze faucet cast in the form of a lion's jaws. "The lizard-ape, it isn't human, not at all. It couldn't just walk around in the midst of Rome—no more than could an escaped lion, or any other large and dangerous beast."
"I remind you that it isn't like any other beast known to you," said N'Sumu with his dreadful smile. "The sauropithecus is right here. In Rome." He touched the faucet of the mulling stove, opening it just enough in curiosity to jet a thin line of Caecuban onto the brick paving.
"If you know that," said Lycon sarcastically, "then you can tell us how you know." He sipped his diluted wine and savored the bite of resin and alcohol, as he stared at the strange Egyptian.
N'Sumu paused with his fingers still on the lion's head. He met Lycon's eyes. "Simple logic, my friend. We know that it was on the barge. Now where could it have gone from there?"
As N'Sumu talked, he lifted the lid of the container portion of the hollow stove and peered inside. "It did not jump to the bank of the river between here and Ostia. Either bank. It would have been easy to track if it had done that."
Lycon was trying to hold his cup still, but the tension in his grip set the wine adance in the shallow vessel. "True enough. We've found no sign of tracks, and we've had our noses to the ground up and down both banks of the Tiber. That's why I'm convinced the beast must have drowned."
"It seems reasonable that the sauropithecus stayed with the barge even after it had finished with the sailors," said N'Sumu, as he let the lid fall with a rattle of hollow bronze. "If it had been watching other barges pass along the Tiber from its place of concealment, it is cunning enough to have understood their navigation. Whether the helmsman fell overboard in the course of the struggle or whether his body was deliberately let fall into the river by the lizard-ape is an interesting question for speculation. Since there was no report of a large splash being heard that night, I've drawn my own conclusion.
"Regardless of that though, the lizard-ape almost certainly manned the steering oar until it drew close to Rome. At that point it may have then left the barge, but more likely it clung to the hull for the remainder of the distance. In the darkness, it might well have even hidden within the hold—it sees very well in the dark, you understand, while the teamsters had only sputtering rushlights for illumination. Quite possibly it left the barge only at the docks. Now the sauropithecus has all of Rome to hide in—and to hunt in."
Lycon downed half his wine. "An interesting theory. But why hasn't the lizard-ape been seen? And even if it's managed to hide, why haven't we heard reports of wholesale slaughter?"
"I warned you that the lizard-ape is extremely cunning," said N'Sumu, as his eyes returned to the mulling stove. He began scraping with one square-cut nail at the soot that coated the interior of the open cylindrical firebox.
"I think it will have found a lair—a ruin, an abandoned building, perhaps the sewers. I can't say where. But if it hunted by night, and killed only for food instead of sport . . . Well, how many murdered corpses greet the dawn from Rome's alleyways, or vanish forever during the night? I tell you again, these lizard-apes are very cunning."
"Well," said Vonones, holding in both palms the cup of warm wine from which he had not drunk. "Then we need to set up a reporting network in Rome like the one with which we've covered the countryside. That shouldn't be very difficult, Lycon, should it? We'll operate through the Watch commanders, offer rewards for any information that might be in point—mutilated bodies, or reports of disappearances that center upon one particular district. It won't cost us all that much—and if we do manage to learn something concrete about the lizard-ape's whereabouts, we can call in all our men from the countryside."
The hunter spat into the firebox of the mulling stove. The gobbet of saliva struck the bright metal where N'Sumu's finger had scraped away the soot. The spittle hissed in serpentine anger as it boiled away from the hot bronze. Lycon pointed the index and middle fingers of his right hand at N'Sumu's chest. "So you really think the lizard-ape's lurking about right here in Rome? I find that hard to accept, but it's a new tack, and maybe that will impress Domitian for a while at least. You know you're going to be standing there in the arena beside Vonones and me if this proves to be another waste of time."
"It's unlikely that I will end up in the arena," said N'Sumu, and the other two understood his threat. "I know I'm right. I'd capture the sauropithecus by myself, but I need good men, and that's why I chose to work through you. My authority from our lord and god is as great as may be required for my purposes. But you have the experience—" the smile spread across his face without showing any teeth beneath the broad lips "—of working in local conditions. And you will have the credit when we succeed."
Lycon swallowed the last of his wine without taking his eyes away from N'Sumu's face. "Then we'd better get started, hadn't we."
Lycon's tone gave Vonones the same feeling as would the sight of a lion in the grass—its body taut, its haunches raised slightly, and no part of it moving but the tip of its tail, quivering like the trigger that would shortly launch the beast upon its prey. But after blinking up at his friend, the merchant's gaze returned to the sizzling bronze that N'Sumu's bare finger had cleansed.