What the Dead Remember

"A man who has died once learns two things: that the world does not stop, and that it does not forgive."

He dreamed of the river.

It was the Mahali in the rains, wide and silver, flooding past the white walls of the city with the evening light lying across it in long gold bars, and the women stood in the shallows with their wet cloth and sang. He could hear the song quite plainly. He could hear the lowing of the cattle on the far bank and the shrill laughter of boys riding them bareback into the reeds, and the sweet dry smell of dust and dung-smoke and ripening millet drifted across the water to him, so real that his heart ached with it. He took one step toward the shore. And the river began to burn.

It burned from the barracks outward, in a long red wall that ran along the edge of the city and leapt from roof to roof, and over the roar of it he heard the screaming. Ten thousand voices. He knew each of them. He ran, and his legs would not move, and the heat blistered his face, and in the middle of the flames, quite calm, quite cold, a woman in white silk stood with her hands folded and watched him with brown eyes that held no mercy at all.

It is mercy, she said.

He woke with a cry that tore his throat.

…

The first thing he knew was pain, and the second was warmth.

The pain came from everywhere at once, a deep dull ache that lay over his whole body like a lid, sharpening in the chest and the temples and the long muscles of the back into bright separate flames. But the warmth was stranger and more wonderful. It pressed around him on every side, thick and heavy and animal, a weight of furs piled over his legs and shoulders; it rose from a brazier glowing somewhere beside his head; it ran down his throat in a thin sweet scalding trickle that tasted of honey and wine. He swallowed. It hurt. He swallowed again.

"Slowly," said a woman's voice, in Kavanu. "Slowly, you great fool. You'll bring it up again."

He knew the language before he knew the voice. The sound of it, the soft liquid vowels, the slow rolling consonants, went through him like a hand through water, and the muscles of his face did something that he had not allowed them to do in half a year. He opened his eyes.

A low roof of dark beams, thick with cobwebs and hanging bundles of dried fish. A smoky lamp swinging on a hook. Beyond it the lined, patient face of a woman of perhaps fifty, with hair as grey as ash bound back in a cloth, and a cup in her hand. Neema. He had known her all his life. She had set his shoulder at the age of fifteen, when he had fallen from a horse; she had sewn up his scalp after the battle of the Two Rivers; she had held his dying wife's hand in the long hot night before the war.

"Neema," he said. It came out as a croak.

"Be quiet. You are not to talk." She lifted his head with a strong brown hand and tilted the cup to his lips again. "Drink. All of it. If you spit it up, I will pour another."

He drank. When it was gone she laid him back among the furs, and he lay with his eyes closed, breathing, breathing, in the dim warm smell of tar and smoke and fish, hearing somewhere below him the dull rumble of male voices and the clink of cups. A tavern. He was in a tavern. A tavern in Rome that spoke his language.

"How long?" he said.

"A day and a night. And most of another." She was pressing two cool fingers against the side of his throat. "I thought we had lost you twice. Once on the field, when we found you. Once last night, when the heart stopped altogether for the space of a hundred beats and I had to beat on your chest with my fist."

He opened his eyes again.

A shadow had fallen across the lamp. It was huge, much larger than the little woman, and it stood quietly at the foot of the pallet with its arms folded and its head bent beneath the beams: a lean grey-bearded man with a scar slashed across his mouth from lip to jaw, and a face that seemed to have been left out in the weather for fifty years. He wore a dockhand's leather jerkin and a tattered woollen cap pulled low over his brows. He said nothing. But the eyes beneath the cap, wet, black, burning, held on Jabari's face as though afraid to look away for fear he would vanish.

"Zuberi," said Jabari.

"Lord."

"You are an old fool."

"So the lady tells me every morning." The scarred mouth twisted. "I came to see whether you would die. It is the one thing I have not yet watched you do."

Jabari tried to laugh. It turned into a cough that made the room swing, and Neema swore at both of them and pushed him down by the shoulders, and for several minutes there was a flurry of cloths and cups and low impatient murmurs. But when it was over he found that Zuberi had knelt beside the pallet. The big scarred hand lay over his own, rough as bark, and trembled.

"Half a year," Zuberi said. His voice cracked. "Half a year, lord, I have walked this city, begging, hauling, cutting hay, listening at the gates of the Tullo house. Twice I went over the wall. Twice they nearly took me. I could not reach you. I could not get one word to you. I saw them bring in the other prisoners and I saw them carry out the dead and I did not know. I did not know if you were…"

"I am here."

"You are here." The old captain bowed his head until his forehead touched the pallet. His shoulders shook once, hard, and were still. "By the sun and the river, you are here."

…

It was a long while before they would let him ask questions.

They fed him broth, thin at first, then thick with barley, and watched him eat. They changed the dressings on his wrists, where the iron had worn the skin to raw red bracelets. They bathed his back, now a ruin of old scars and new, with warm vinegar water and a sponge, and Neema's face as she worked was hard and still, like a woman cutting stone. Only when he had slept again, and woken, and slept, and the grey Roman daylight had come and gone twice through the chinks in the shutter, did Zuberi sit down on an upturned barrel at his side and tell it.

The note had come three nights ago, he said. A scrap of papyrus, pushed into his hand by a ragged child in the alley behind the wharf, who ran off before he could be questioned. No name. No seal. It told of a body, and a place, and an hour.

"A trap," said Jabari.

"That is what I said. A trap, laid by a Roman who had heard whispers of the Kavanu in the Emporium and wished to take us all with one net." Zuberi's mouth tightened. "I said it for a whole day. But we had heard that the Black Lion was to be put to death in the arena on the third night of the feast. All the docks were buzzing with it. And I thought, if it is a trap, then it will cost me my life, and what is that to me now? And if it is not…"

"You came."

"We came. Six of us, with a hand-cart and a roll of oxhides, to the field behind the potters' kilns. It was bitter cold. There was frost on the clay. They had been throwing the dead there for a hundred years. Cats, dogs, the offal of the butchers, the carcasses of slaves…" His mouth worked. "There was a cart waiting, lord, with a man who did not look at us. He held out a leather bag and said it was paid for. In the bag was a flask of honeyed wine and a heavy fleece. And when he had gone, we found you, laid out on top of the pile as neatly as a bride. Naked to the waist. Stone cold, with your eyes half open. I thought…"

He stopped. Neema, behind him, filled the silence.

"He thought we had come to bury you," she said dryly. "I put my ear to your chest and heard nothing at all. It was only because I am a stubborn woman that I held a mirror to your mouth a second time, and saw it cloud. A little. Hardly more than a breath. I have never seen anything like it. A man so far gone that the cold itself had mistaken him for stone."

"Poison," Jabari said slowly.

"A sleeper's draught. A fearsome thing, and a clever one." The healer's eyes narrowed. "I have seen its cousin in the south. The shamans of the high plateau use something like it in their death-trances. White hellebore. Mandrake. Something from the sea that I cannot put a name to. It slows the pulse until a man seems dead. But no common executioner uses it, lord. This is the work of someone who knows the old herbs well. Or knows someone who does."

"They wished to make sure of me."

"Perhaps."

"The Roman women have their poisons."

Neema pursed her lips and said nothing.

"And the wound?" he asked.

"A slash." She leaned forward and lifted the linen from his chest, and he looked down for the first time at the neat red line that ran along the ridge of the collarbone, a hand's breadth long and swollen at the edges, already crusted dark. "A clean one, though not deep. It slid across the bone. A fraction lower and it would have gone into the lung. A fraction to the left, and the heart." Her fingers were very gentle. "You were lucky, my lord. The blade was blunt."

"Blunt?"

"A cheap dagger. Badly honed. Or a thrust badly aimed." She shrugged. "The Romans do sloppy work when they are drunk. And I think everyone in that arena was drunk."

He lay quite still, looking at the cobwebbed beams.

He remembered, with a terrible sharp clarity, what he had seen. A white gown. A face like a mask of ivory. The slow descent down three marble steps, the silver cup in the small steady hand, the dagger glittering in the other. Is it poison, matron? he had asked, in the roar of the crowd, in a tone so low he had hardly heard it himself. And she had looked up at him with her large brown eyes, which had held the red lamplight and nothing else, and said: It is mercy.

He had known. That was the thing he could not forgive himself for.

He had known, in the instant he lifted the cup, that it was not wine alone. Something in the faint sweet bitterness at the back of the tongue; something in the stillness of her face. He had had a hundred heartbeats in which to refuse, or to throw the wine in her face, or to take her throat in his chained hands and break it before the guards could reach him. He was Jabari, the Black Lion, who had never in his life gone willingly to a death he could cheat. And yet he had looked down into her eyes and thought: I said I would not blame her.

He had said it. He had meant it. He had sat in the dark with his hand on her cheek and told her to do what she must, and be unafraid.

I did not think she would do it so well.

The ache beneath his ribs was not the wound.

"Lord," said Zuberi uneasily, watching his face.

"Who sent the note?"

"I do not know." The captain glanced at Neema. "The paper was burned. I would not keep it. It was Roman hand, and Roman ink. Some slave, some freedman, perhaps. Someone who wished the Senator ill and thought to save you out of spite."

"Or a Roman who feared the dead would walk."

"Perhaps."

"What did it say?"

Zuberi's eyes slid away, just for the length of a breath. When he answered his voice was careful and flat.

"Only where, and when. There was no more."

Jabari looked at him for a long moment. But he was tired, and the pain was a great grey tide pulling at the edges of his mind, and he let it go. A slave. A kindly one. Or a coward with a conscience. In this city there were doubtless many such. It did not matter.

It does not matter.

He heard, from the wharf below, the faint call of a ferryman and the slow creak of a mooring-rope. The brazier whispered. From the street, muffled and cheerful, came a drunken snatch of song: Io Saturnalia, io Saturnalia! The festival was still running. All over Rome, it seemed, men were still drinking to the god.

"Tendaji," he said suddenly. "Mosi."

Neema's face closed.

"They were put to the bear, lord," said Zuberi quietly. "The night before you. Before the whole house. We were told in the market. They say it was… not quick."

Jabari shut his eyes.

He saw them as he had last seen them, huddled together in the grey straw with their knees drawn up, young, frightened, trying not to show it. Tendaji, who had been a goatherd and had never held a sword before the war. Mosi, who could do any birdcall you named, and whose father had been a friend of his own. They had looked to him in the dark, in the weeks of cold and hunger, and he had told them stories of the river. He had told them it would be soon.

Soon.

A deep, slow, dreadful rage began to gather in him, somewhere below the pain, like the first tremor of a distant earthquake.

"And the woman?" he said. His voice was a stranger's. "The Senator's wife."

"Lady Claudia?" Zuberi frowned. "They say she did it, lord. With her own hand. The whole city is speaking of it. They say she walked down the steps in white silk with a silver cup and a dagger and put it in your heart before two hundred senators, and never so much as blinked." The old soldier spat on the floor. "The Romans call her the Lady of Mercy. They are making songs."

Jabari did not reply.

He lay quite still among the furs, with the honey-sweet taste of the wine in his mouth and the smoke in his eyes and the soft, savage, heavy darkness of grief crawling up his chest. He did not move. He did not speak. After a time Neema drew the fleece up under his chin, and the two Kavanu moved quietly away to the far end of the loft, and left him to his silence.

He lifted his hand to his throat.

The leather cord was still there, thin and worn, with the upper half of the broken sun hanging from it against his breastbone. He closed his fingers over it. It was warm from his skin. And the other half, the lower half, the half he had pressed into a woman's cold hand in the dark of a dungeon, with a promise that was not a promise, lay somewhere in the cedar-scented chambers of the Tullo villa, against a white breast that had not trembled when it drew the knife.

He thought of her eyes.

He had seen them last by the glare of two hundred lamps, in the instant the blade went in. He had been looking for something. He did not know what. A flicker, perhaps, a crack in the ice, some faint sign that the woman who had knelt beside him in the dark with her fingers in his wounds was still there behind that perfect face. He had searched for it as a drowning man searches for a rope.

There had been nothing. Brown eyes, wide and clear and cold as the stones of a riverbed. A mouth that did not shake. The look of someone who has finished a task.

As the poison took him, that was the last thing he saw.

It was the last thing he remembered still, as the lamp burned lower and the Roman night closed in around the wharf, and the dead man, who was not quite dead, turned his face to the wall.