Ash and Salt

"A wound that is never spoken of does not close; it learns to walk upright and wear a general's cloak."

It took him nineteen days to learn to stand again, and by the end of them he had decided never to speak her name.

They were not easy days. The sleeper's draught had left behind a weakness in his limbs that no amount of broth could cure, a trembling in the knees and a fog behind the eyes, so that for the first week he could not so much as lift a cup without spilling it, and the sight of his own big brown hands shaking like an old man's filled him with a cold, sullen fury. Neema bullied him through it with a cheerful brutality that would have got any other healer a knife in the ribs. She made him eat. She made him walk, one slow step after another, along the length of the loft and back, with his hand on the beams and his teeth clenched; she made him lie still beneath poultices of hot mustard until the stiffness left his back. And in the evenings, when the Syrian's customers had gone and the tavern below had settled into a snoring dark, the men came up the ladder one by one, in twos and threes, to sit on the floor in the lamplight and look at him.

There were thirteen of them in all. Dockers, mostly, and caravan guards, and three who had been field hands on a Campanian estate until a rope and a good knife had made them free. They were the last of the Kavanu left in Rome: men who had slipped through the burning gates, or been sold from the slave pens, or run, and had found each other in the pitiless anonymity of the wharves by the sound of a half-forgotten tongue. They did not talk much. They sat with their arms around their knees, big broken-nosed men with the patient faces of cattle, and now and then one of them would reach out a rough hand and touch the hem of Jabari's blanket, quickly, as if to make sure he was real.

He bore it as long as he could. On the nineteenth night, when the youngest of them, a boy named Kito who had been a drummer at the east gate on the night of the burning and had run when the barracks fell, and whose shame still hung about him like a smell, crept forward and pressed his forehead to the floor at his feet, Jabari took him by the shoulders and raised him up.

"You were fifteen," he said. "A drummer does not hold a gate. The fault was not yours."

The boy's face crumpled. "Lord…"

"I have said it. It is finished. Go and wash your face."

It was the first time in six months that he had felt like a king, and he found that he hated it.

…

"There is a ship at Ostia," Zuberi said.

It was the end of the third week, and the winter storms had eased a little, so that the Tiber ran grey and swollen under a pale lid of cloud. Zuberi had spread a rough chart across the floor, scratched on a tanned hide with a burned stick, and he knelt over it with his scarred mouth set in a grim line. "A grain freighter bound for Carthage. Her master takes passengers for silver, and asks no questions, and he has a cousin in the customs-house who is fond of silver too. We have enough, if we sell the horses."

"What horses?"

"The ones we stole last month from a legionary stable." The old soldier gave a ghost of his old, savage grin. "We shall not want them where we are going."

"Carthage."

"And from there, by the coast road to the Nile, and up the river, and out through the desert gate." He drew a long line with his finger, down and down the hide into emptiness. "Three months, lord, if the gods are kind. Five if they are not. But I know the road. Our people hold the wells at Siwa. There are men there who would follow you to the gates of Hades."

Jabari looked at the chart.

It was a poor thing, rough and blurred, with its coastlines drawn from memory and its mountains marked by blotches of soot. But he had been reading such maps since he could walk. He saw what Zuberi saw: the long dry sweep of the African shore, the green cleft of the Nile, the endless tawny reach of the desert beyond it. And at the far end of that line, at the very edge of the hide, a small black ring that stood for a city on a river. He had not allowed himself to think of it, not once in all his months in the dark, because it was a pain too great to carry. Now it rose in him all at once, white and vast and shining, and the breath caught in his chest.

"My people," he said slowly. "How many remain?"

"The council at the river counts some forty thousand who did not fall. Women, old men, children. Most are scattered in the hills." Zuberi's voice dropped. "They have no leader, lord. The elders quarrel. The Romans have set a governor over what is left of the city, a man named Piso, who takes a tenth of every harvest and sells the rest. They say the hunger is already beginning."

"And the tribes beyond the river?"

"Divided. Afraid." Zuberi looked up. His black eyes were bright and hard. "They are waiting for a name."

The words fell into the silence of the loft like a pebble into a still pond, and for a long time neither of them spoke.

A name.

Jabari sat quite still, his big hands hanging between his knees, and let the thing take shape in his mind. He saw the long hungry plains and the scattered fires; he saw the councils of the elders, weary, grey-headed, each clutching his small authority like a beggar clutching a coin. He saw the hundred tongues and hundred quarrels of the southern peoples, who had never in all their history stood together against a common foe, and who had died one by one before the legions because of it. It was a vast wreck of a thing. But a general knows how to read ruin. He knows that ruin has a grain to it, like wood, along which a skilled hand can split it.

If they were one, he thought. If they were one army. If they had one mind.

He turned the idea over, coldly, carefully, and found to his surprise that he was not afraid of it. For the first time since the walls of the city had fallen, the numbness in his chest shifted a little, and underneath it he felt something that might have been the beginning of purpose.

"We sail at the next tide," he said.

Zuberi bowed his head. When he lifted it, his scarred face was wet.

"You are going home, lord," he whispered.

"I am going to build a weapon," said Jabari.

…

Neema found him alone on the last night, sitting at the shuttered window with the lamp turned down and the cold air coming in through the cracks.

She had come to change his dressing for the final time. She set down her basin and knelt behind him on the boards, and he felt her thin strong fingers on his shoulder, unwinding the linen, probing the long pale scar that would for the rest of his life run along his collarbone like a seam. She worked for a while in silence. The tavern was quiet. Below, someone laughed, and was hushed.

"It has closed clean," she said. "It will not trouble you."

"Good."

"Jabari."

He said nothing. She had not called him by his name since she had held him, a blue-lipped infant, in her aprons, and so he knew before she spoke that she meant to say something he would not like.

"I have been turning a thing over in my mind," Neema said. "For three weeks. I did not wish to speak of it while you were weak."

"Then do not speak of it now."

"The knife was blunt."

"So you told me."

"Blunt, and short, and the blade turned on the bone. I have dressed ten thousand wounds in my life, my lord, and I have never seen a killing thrust that ended in a scratch." She was unwinding the last of the linen, her voice level, dry, and thoughtful. "And the draught. I have not slept for thinking of it. It is a cunning thing, and rare, and costs a fortune to make. If a Roman wished you dead, why spend a fortune on a potion that makes a man look dead? Poison, a rope, a knife in the dark, any of these would be quicker. And the cart. And the fleece, and the flask of hot wine, left lying by the man who drove the cart—"

"Stop."

The word cracked across the loft like a whip.

Neema's hands went still. In the dim light Jabari had turned his head, and she saw his face, and for an instant, so swift she hardly believed it, she saw what lay behind the stone: a raw, white, terrible hurt, like something skinned.

"Do not do this," he said, very low. "Do not hand me hope, Neema. I will not have it. It is a poison too, and a worse one, because it tastes sweet."

"I only say—"

"I know what you say. I have turned it over myself. I turned it over for three weeks, on my back in the dark, while you thought I was sleeping." His voice shook, and steadied. "And I will tell you what I have concluded. I will tell you what a woman does who has lain with a prisoner, and borne his whip-marks, and grown afraid. She wishes the matter ended. She wishes the witness gone. And perhaps, afterwards, she feels a little guilt, and she buys a cart and a fleece, as a rich woman throws a coin to a beggar." The corner of his mouth twisted. "Pity is the most expensive luxury in this Rome. She told me so herself. On the second night."

"Jabari—"

"I looked at her face." He turned it away. "I looked at it for as long as I had breath. There was nothing in it, Neema. Nothing at all. If you have ever seen a woman's face when she lies, you know that it is warm. It is warm and it leaks. Hers did not. It was ice from end to end."

The healer was silent for a long time. Then, slowly, she set down the roll of linen, and laid her hand against the side of his face, as she had when he was a child.

"Then I am an old woman who sees what she wishes," she said gently. "Forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive."

"Perhaps not." She rose with a grunt, her knees cracking, and gathered up her basin. At the head of the ladder she paused. "But my lord, when you have had time to think, a man ought to ask himself which of two stories he would rather be wrong about."

She went down. The ladder creaked, and was still.

…

They left Rome at dawn, by the river road, in two ox-wagons piled with sacks of grain.

He had insisted on walking the first mile. It was a bitter morning, thick with fog, and the fields on either side of the road lay flat and white under hoarfrost, and the great seven-hilled city dissolved behind them into a blur of grey and gold. Jabari walked bareheaded, in a labourer's rough tunic, with a heavy cloak thrown over his shoulders and his braids tied up in a rag. He did not look back. When they reached the crest of the first rise, Zuberi, trudging beside him, did look, once, and swore under his breath, and then was silent.

At Ostia the sea was waiting.

It lay beyond the harbour mole, enormous and metallic, heaving slowly under a low sky the colour of lead. The freighter rode at anchor among a forest of masts, a fat-bellied tub with a patched sail and a carved goose-head on her prow, and the gangway was already down. A gaggle of sailors cursed and heaved at the cargo nets. Gulls screamed overhead. The smell of tar and salt and rotten fish came down the quay in a thick, wet, salty wind, and Jabari, standing at the rail with his hands on the cold wood, breathed it in as a man breathes in his own death.

The others had gone below to stow the bundles. He stood alone.

Slowly, almost without meaning to, he put his hand to his throat.

The cord was rough under his fingers, rubbed thin by months of wear. He drew it over his head in a single movement and held it up before him, the upper half of the broken sun spinning slowly on its string, ebony and copper, dull gold in the grey light. Beneath it, far down, the green water of the harbour slapped against the hull. It would be so easy. One flick of the wrist, a small clean arc, a soft small sound. And the thing would be gone, and with it the memory of a hand laid over his in the dark, and a voice saying Tell me about the river.

He thought of Tendaji's face. He thought of the arena, of the red wall of the crowd and the sweet bitter wine and the white-gowned figure on the marble steps. He thought of ten thousand men burning in a barracks because he had trusted a man who smiled. I have been a fool once already in my life, he had told her. And a nation burned for it.

He had not learned. That was the shame of it. Twice now, he had let a pair of dark eyes in the dark undo the labour of a lifetime, and twice the price had been paid in other men's blood.

He lifted his arm.

The wind off the sea tugged at the cord. The little sun swung, and caught a single pale gleam of light, and for the space of a heartbeat he saw, with ruthless clarity, not the arena at all, but a quiet gloom beneath the earth, and a woman with her hair coming loose from its pins, laughing aloud for the first time in her life, and clapping a hand to her mouth in horror because she had made a noise.

His fingers closed.

He stood for a long time, with the harbour breathing under him and the sailors shouting on the quay, his fist clenched so tight around the sun that the copper bit through the skin. Then he lowered his arm. He drew the cord once more over his head, and settled the half-disc against his breastbone, where it lay as it had always lain, warm already from the place it came from. He knotted the string twice, hard.

To remember, he told himself. Only to remember what it costs.

It was a lie. He knew it was a lie. But the gulls were crying and the anchor was coming up, and he was a general with a nation to raise, and a general knows when to let a retreat be called by another name.

The ship swung slowly out into the grey tide. Behind it, Rome sank into the haze like a thing that had never been.