The Dead Man's Name

"The dead do not return. It is only that the living, who loved them badly, were never quite finished with them."

She unlocked the dungeon on the night the prisoners came.

There were two hundred and eleven of them, taken in the ruins of Thapsus after the Roman counter-stroke of the autumn, and they were marched up from Ostia in chains along the Appian Way and housed in the cattle-pens beyond the Servian Wall, where the people of Rome could come and stare at them for a copper coin a head. They were gaunt, sun-blackened men with matted hair and ragged cloaks, and they stood silent in the rain with their heads up, looking at the crowd without hatred and without fear, as men look at weather. Claudia had gone to see them in her closed litter. She had not got out. She had sat behind the curtain, with her fingers wound in her sleeves, for the better part of an hour, and she had watched the faces go by one by one, searching for something she could not name.

It was a man at the very end of the line who stopped her breath.

He was not tall. He was a thin, wiry man of five-and-thirty, with a drum-skin tattoo across his forehead and a crippled left hand, and he walked with a limp, dragging his chain. But as the guards prodded him past the litter his head turned, quite slowly, and she saw his eyes go to the curtain. They did not search. They did not question. They simply rested there, large and dark and sad, with the perfect patient certainty of a man looking at a thing he has been told about all his life.

Then the guards jerked the chain, and he turned his face away.

She gave the order that night. She said it very quietly to Quintus, in the library, without raising her eyes: The one at the end. The one with the hand. Bring him to the house, by the cellar door, before dawn. See that no one speaks of it. The old freedman, who was seventy-one now and walked with a stick, looked at her for a long moment, and for the first time in forty years she saw an expression in his face that was very like fear.

"My lady," he said. "The cellars have been shut since the old Senator died."

"I know."

"The gate is rusted."

"Then take a file."

…

The key turned with a shriek.

She stood in the passage at the foot of the stair, with a bronze lamp in her hand and her cloak held close about her, and watched the iron gate swing slowly back on its hinges for the first time in twenty years. A breath came out of the darkness. It was cold, and it smelled of wet stone, of old iron, of damp earth and the faint sweet ghost of rotting straw. It touched her face. It stirred the hem of her robe. And she stood quite still, with the lamp held high, and felt something in her chest break very quietly, like ice cracking under a heavy foot.

She went in.

The cells were smaller than she remembered. It was the first thing she noticed: how low the roofs were, how narrow the passages, how close the walls. The torch-brackets had rusted to stubs. The rings of iron in the stone were red with age. Cobwebs hung in grey sheets from the vaults, and under her sandals the straw crumbled into dust. There was a sound of dripping, somewhere far off, slow and even and endless, and it was this, more than anything, that made her hand begin to shake. She had heard it every night for ten weeks. She had thought she had forgotten it.

At the far end of the vault, in the deepest corner, a stone ledge ran along the wall.

She did not look at it. She set the lamp on the floor in the centre of the cell, where the light fell in a pool of gold on the flags, and sat down on a rickety stool that Quintus had brought, and folded her hands and waited. After a time she heard footsteps in the passage, and the clank of a chain, and the low, patient voice of the old freedman saying, in his careful Latin, "This way. Mind the step."

They put him in front of her and withdrew to the gate.

For some moments neither of them spoke.

He stood in the lamplight with his chained hands hanging before him, a ragged, thin, dignified figure, blinking a little at the glare, looking not at her but at the walls. At the rings. At the dark mouth of the passage. At the stone ledge in the corner, where the shadows were thickest. And she saw his face change, slowly and strangely, as a man's face changes when he hears a name spoken that he has not heard in years.

"I know this place," he said.

His voice was hoarse and soft. His Latin was perfect.

"Do you?" said Claudia.

"I have never been in it. But I know it. I have been told of it every night of my life." His dark eyes came round to her at last, and rested on her face, and stayed. "You are the Lady."

"Which lady?"

"The one in white." He said it without malice, as a man names a landmark. "The Lady of Mercy. The one who held the knife."

She felt the blood leave her face, but she did not look away.

"Sit," she said. "You are tired."

"I will stand, lady. I have been sitting too long."

"As you wish." She drew a slow breath. "What is your name?"

"Kito."

"You were at Thapsus."

"I was at the east gate." His mouth moved. "I am always at the east gate, it seems. A drummer. When I was fifteen I ran from a gate. Since then I have not run." He glanced at the walls again. "Why have you brought me to this place, lady?"

"Because I have a question." She heard her voice come out clear and level, as if from a long way off. "I am told that your people follow a king. I am told that he has no name that a Roman can say. His enemies call him the Tyrant, and his soldiers call him by some word I cannot pronounce. A word that means the Sun that Rises Twice."

"Jua-linalo-chomoza-mara-mbili," said Kito softly. "Yes."

"What does it mean? Why twice?"

The thin man looked at her for a long time.

It was a strange look. There was no triumph in it, and no fear, and not even much hatred; only a kind of vast, calm, exhausted pity, as for a child who has asked a question to which the answer is a grave. When he spoke at last it was in a low singsong voice, slow and careful, the voice of one reciting a thing he has by heart.

"There was a war," he said. "Many years ago. A great king led our people, and the Romans destroyed him. They burned his city and took him in chains over the sea to a city of white stone. There was a feast in that city. They put him in a pit and made him fight beasts for the pleasure of the rich. And on the last night, before two hundred of their lords, a woman came down the steps in a white gown. She carried a silver cup and a knife. She gave him wine, and he drank. And she put the knife into his heart."

Claudia did not move.

"They threw him on a midden," said Kito. "With the dead cats. With the blood still wet on his chest. And in the cold of that night, in the darkness, when there was none to see, a few of his friends came with a cart, and took up the body, and carried it away. And on the third day the king opened his eyes."

The drip of the water fell, slow and even, into the silence.

"He had been dead," Kito said. "All who saw him said so. They felt no breath, they found no heart. But in the old tongue there is a story of a sun that dies at evening and is born at morning, and when the king rose from the cart and put on his cloak, the people said the sun had died in Rome and risen on the other side of the sea, and that this was no man but a god's anger walking. So they gave him the name. The Sun that Rises Twice." The drummer's hands tightened on his chain. "He does not like it. He says that he was a man who died, and that a dead man has no right to be worshipped. But the people like it. They say that a god can be killed once. They say it takes a great deal of killing to kill him twice."

"And his true name?"

"I am a drummer, lady."

"His true name."

Kito looked at her. In the lamplight his scarred face was very still and very kind, and she saw, with a faint shock, that his eyes were wet.

"Jabari," he said.

…

She did not hear the rest.

She heard his voice go on for some time, low and flat, telling her what she had not asked. That the king had spent eleven years in the south, among the hill tribes and the desert nomads and the river peoples, going from fire to fire, from council to council, with no army and no gold and a face like carved stone. That he had spoken to the elders in the language of their fathers and eaten the bread of their poorest. That in the third year the Garamantes had joined him, and in the sixth the Nasamones, and in the ninth the whole of the white-robed river kingdoms of the upper Nile, and that when at last the horns were blown at Leptis he had a hundred thousand spears behind him and a single purpose written on his face. She heard that he did not drink. That he did not marry. That his officers said he slept three hours a night, and that when he slept he spoke a woman's name.

She did not ask what name. She did not need to.

She sat on the creaking stool with her hands folded in her lap, and a curious thing happened to the room. The walls drew away. The lamplight seemed to grow thin and distant, like a flame seen through water, and the dripping of the unseen spring slowed until each drop fell with the weight of a tolling bell. She was aware of her own heart. It was beating with a slow, heavy, deliberate force, a great hollow knocking behind the ribs, like a fist on a locked door. Alive, it said. Alive, alive, alive.

He is alive.

She had said it to herself so many times in the dark. She had said it as a prayer, a charm, a lie, a cry against the silence. She had sat on a hot terrace in the glare of the sun, and watched a speck of dust crawl down the Appian Way, and said it. She had said it on the night that her husband died, and the night her son came to the library door with his scarred hand on the latch. She had said it so often that it had lost its meaning, like a word repeated too many times, until it was no more than a sound.

And now, in the stinking silence of the old cell, a stranger had spoken it aloud, and it had meaning again, and it was the worst thing she had ever heard.

For he was not a lover in a dream. He was not a young man in a loincloth, with a smile on his scarred mouth and a promise in his palm. He was a god. He was a king. He was a hundred thousand spears and a hundred burning cities, and he had come across the sea for one purpose, and the purpose was Rome.

And Rome, said a small cold voice, with perfect clarity, is sending him a general.

She thought of the dispatch on the cedar desk. She thought of a boy at a gangway, with his wife in his arms, saying I will be home before the vintage. She thought of a tall brown hand closing round hers at a wedding in the sun, and a thin leather cord at his throat, and a half-sun of ebony that had been turned over and over in the sunlight on a bench under a fig tree. She thought of black eyes in a scarred young face, level, steady, unafraid, and then of black eyes in another face, lit by two hundred lamps.

They have the same walk, she thought. They have the same eyes. They think the same way. He has taught his son to fight without ever knowing it.

And I have sent them to kill each other.

It came slowly, the knowledge, with no sound, like the creeping of the dark. She sat quite still and let it come.

…

When Kito had been led away, she stayed on in the cell.

She told Quintus to go, and he went, with his stick tapping, glancing back once from the gate. The lamp burned low on the floor. After a time she rose from the stool and crossed the flags, slowly, as though walking in her sleep, to the corner where the shadows were deepest. The ledge was still there, a long slab of black stone worn smooth by years of use. She put out her hand. It was cold, and damp, and rough under her palm, and she could feel on it, or imagined she could, the faint hollow where a man's shoulders had worn it away.

She lowered herself onto it, and sat.

The darkness closed around her. Somewhere in the vaults, a drop of water fell, and fell, and fell. She felt the cold of the stone strike up through her robe. She closed her eyes, and breathed in the smell of old iron and wet earth, and for the space of a heartbeat she was twenty-two years old and her hair was coming loose from its pins and a voice in the dark was saying, very low, Look at me, Claudia.

She did not know that her hand had moved until she felt it.

It lay flat against her stomach, over the folds of her gown, spread wide, the fingers curved a little, just as it had lain on a winter morning in a room full of light, with a sprouting grain of barley in a dish. It was an old gesture, and she had not made it in twenty years. She had thought she had forgotten it. But her body had not forgotten, and it held her there in the silent dark with her palm pressed to the place where nothing grew, and her head bowed, and her eyes shut, and the tears she had refused for twenty years running down her cheeks in the black stone cell and falling, one by one, into her lap.