The Slide

"The blade does not choose its master. It remembers only the hand that held it last, and the way that hand was taught to fall."

Rome gave him a triumph.

It was the greatest the city had seen in a hundred years, and it was held on a bright cold morning in early December, with the sky a hard clear blue over the Capitol and the whole of the Sacred Way strewn with bay-leaves and the petals of late roses that had been brought in baskets from Campania at the cost of a province's tribute. The Senate had voted it by acclamation. It had voted him the title of Africanus, and a statue in gilded bronze, and a seat in the front row of the Curia at the age of twenty-one, which no man had been granted before him. The old Emperor, who could not rise from his bed, had sent a laurel crown and a letter in a secretary's trembling hand. And the people of Rome, who had stood in the rain in June to watch the burned ships come home, who had trembled for six months at the rumour of a black king and a hundred thousand spears, poured into the streets in their tens of thousands to see the man who had killed him.

He rode in a gilded chariot drawn by four white horses, in the purple robe and the golden wreath, with his face painted red as the old rite required, and a slave behind him holding the crown over his head and whispering in his ear, as the custom was, Remember that you are mortal. He did not need telling. He sat motionless, with the reins in his scarred hands and his eyes fixed straight ahead, and let the noise break over him like a surf. They screamed his name. They threw flowers under his wheels. Women held up their children to touch the hem of his robe, and old soldiers, drunk since dawn, wept openly and shouted that Mars himself had come down from the heavens in the shape of a boy. In the long procession that wound behind him, the carts of captured spoil rumbled past, piled with ivory and gold, with the skins of lions and the feathers of ostriches, and last of all, on a litter hung with black, there came the one trophy that the Senate had demanded and that he had refused: an empty bier, with a single white cloak spread upon it, and nothing else.

He had said that the king was buried. He had said it in a flat voice, in the Curia, before three hundred men, and no one had dared to ask where.

Behind the chariot, in a closed litter of dark purple, rode the Lady Claudia. The people cheered her too. They called her Mater Legionum, Mother of the Legions, and flung roses at her curtains, and she sat behind them with her hands in her lap, saying nothing, as she had said nothing for eleven weeks. He knew exactly where she was. He had known it at every moment of that long slow progress through the city, with the same acute unwilling sense with which a man knows the position of a wound. He did not turn his head. He had not spoken to her since the night of the pavilion. He had eaten at the other end of the ship's table, and ridden at the other end of the column, and when she had written to him, in her small clear upright hand, he had given the letters unopened to a slave to burn.

Remember that you are mortal, whispered the voice in his ear.

I know, thought Cassian. I have seen how it is done.

…

The killing began in January.

It did not look like killing. That was what Varro said afterward, to the few men who dared to ask: that it was done so quietly, with such perfect formality, that for the first weeks nobody understood. A list was drawn up in the Dux's own hand. A warrant was signed. A centurion with a squad of the Praetorians rode out of Rome before dawn on the road to the south, and two days later an old man in a farmhouse in Capua was dragged from his bed, and a week after that a notice appeared in the Forum, in the usual form, announcing that one Gnaeus Rufus, a veteran of the Fourth Legion and a former trainer of gladiators, had been found guilty of fraud against the state in the matter of certain army contracts, and was dead.

Cassian had gone to see him himself.

He rode down to Capua alone, on a grey winter morning, with a single groom, and found him in a cell under the barracks he had once commanded. The old man sat on a pallet of straw with a blanket round his shoulders. His beard had gone white. He had been beaten, though not badly; there was a cut on his lip and a darkening bruise on one cheek. But when the door opened and the tall figure in the scarlet cloak came in and stood against the light, he lifted his face with an expression that was not fear at all. It was a kind of tired, rueful affection, such as a man shows to a dog that has bitten him.

"So you've come yourself," he said. "I thought you might."

"You knew."

"I knew you were somebody's." Rufus shifted on the straw. "I'd a notion. When the lady sent me the first purse, and the letter. I thought: that's no foundling. That's a good house, with something to hide. And then you grew." He wheezed out a laugh. "You grew the wrong way for a lady's bastard. Too much of the shoulder. Too steady. I used to look at you in the yard, and I used to think, I've seen that walk somewhere. And one day I was in the market at Capua, and there was a man from the south, a trader, a big dark fellow with a limp, and he crossed the square with his weight on his left foot and his knee a bit loose. And I knew it. I knew it was the same walk." He shrugged. "I said nothing. What would I have said? You were a good lad. You'd have made a good sergeant."

"You knew for ten years."

"Aye."

"And you said nothing."

"I was paid not to." The old man looked at him steadily. "And I'd have said nothing for nothing, boy. You were mine. You'd come out of that laundry-basket with your fists up. I'll not say I loved you. Soldiers don't. But I'd have put my hand in the fire."

Cassian stood without moving.

The cell was very cold. A drip of water fell from the roof into a puddle in the corner, slowly, evenly, and he found that he was counting, and could not stop. He had expected to feel something. He had thought, riding down, that the old man's face would break the thing in him that had been hardening for six weeks like cooling iron, and that he would weep, or shout, or fall on his knees. Nothing came. He looked at the grey head and the cut lip and the faded blue eyes that had watched him learn to hold a sword, and felt, far down in himself, a great flat silence, like a stone at the bottom of a well.

"You are the only man who ever struck me for drawing a crescent," he said.

"And I'd do it again."

"Why did you do it?"

"Because I saw what it meant." Rufus's voice was gentle. "And I knew what they'd do to a boy that could draw it. I was trying to save you, you young fool."

"I know." Cassian turned to the door. "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

He did not answer. He stepped out into the passage and said to the centurion waiting there, in a voice so quiet and even that the man took a moment to understand it, "It is to be done tonight. Quickly. He is not to be hurt."

He rode back to Rome in the dusk and did not speak a word the whole way.

…

By March it was no longer a secret that something was wrong.

Quintus died next. The old freedman, who had served the house of Tullo for fifty years and carried a boy's laundry basket out of a back gate in the dead of night, had been arrested at the villa in his nightshirt and put in a cell under the Palatine, where he died in the course of the week. The record said of a fever. The old man had been seventy-one, and walked with a stick, and had refused food from the day he was taken, saying that he had no appetite for a world that did not want him; but there was a rumour among the Praetorians that he had stood up, on the last night, and walked to the door of his cell with his stick in his hand, and said in a clear voice to the sentry that he would like to see the young master, and that he had a message. The sentry had not let him. In the morning he was dead.

Then Philon, the Greek who made daggers for the theatre, who was found one evening in his workshop with his hands cut off at the wrist. Then the physician Hermes, who fled to Alexandria and was brought back in chains. Then Sabina, the herbwife of the Subura, who kept owls; her shop was burned, and the owls were let loose, and for a week the sound of their calling could be heard over the roofs of the Aventine, high and wild and mournful, until the neighbours could not sleep. And then the others. The lesser ones. A kitchen boy who had been sent to Veii. A porter who had once carried a litter. A clerk who had once copied a letter. They went one by one, in the early hours, in silence, and the lists grew longer, and the men who carried them out began to walk with their eyes lowered and to avoid their own wives' questions.

He no longer read the names. A secretary brought them to him each morning, in the cold white light of his study, on a sheet of wax, and he glanced at them and made a mark, and the secretary went out. He did not look to see who was written there. He told himself that it was a question of security. He told himself that a secret of this kind, if it escaped, would destroy the state: the Dux of the southern army, the Africanus, the saviour of Rome, the son of the Tyrant and a Roman lady, a man who had killed his own father with his own hand. He told himself that it was necessary. He heard himself saying it in the hard clear voice that was becoming so familiar, and some small dim part of him, far at the back, said: That is her voice.

It did not stop him. Something had gone out of him in the plain, and nothing had come to take its place. He was not angry. He had expected rage, and been ready for it, but rage requires a kind of heat, and he found that he had none. He was colder than he had ever been. He moved through the days like a man walking through a house where everyone has died, and everything he looked at seemed distant and small and without weight. He ate, because the body demanded it. He slept little. He found that in the hours of the night he would sit for long periods without moving, with a lamp unlit, turning the joined sun in his hands, and that when he came to himself the dawn was in the window. He had begun to dream of a plain without a horizon, and a man with open arms. In the dream he did not stab him. He walked into the embrace, and it closed around him, and he felt the heart beating against his own. Then he woke, and found his face wet, and went down to the yard and fought with the Praetorian champions until his knuckles bled.

He fought, now, differently. They noticed it. They said, in the barracks, that the Dux had grown cruel. He had always been hard. He had always been just. But there was a thing in his fighting now that had not been there before, a quality of cold, patient, deliberate ferocity, a way of drawing out an opponent with a feint that was not quite a feint, letting him think the centre weak, waiting till the man had overreached, and then closing the horns upon him with a smooth savage precision that left his sparring partners bleeding on the sand and looking up at him with the eyes of men who have seen a thing they do not understand. He never smiled. He never raised his voice. He fought as though he were remembering how it was done.

…

Livia came to him in April.

He had avoided her for four months. It had not been difficult. She slept in her own chamber now, at her own request, and had never asked why; she was too gentle, and too proud, and she had seen his face the night he came home. She had waited. She had sat at the end of the long table every evening in a clean white gown with her hands folded, and her golden hair braided about her head, and her blue eyes lifted to his face with the same patient, bewildered tenderness with which she had watched him on the day of the wedding. He ate without speaking. She did not ask him to. She laid her hand over his once, in the first week, and he had drawn it away so sharply that she flinched, and she never did it again.

She came to his study one evening, uninvited, and stood in the doorway.

She was twenty. She had grown into her beauty in the three years since the wedding, slender and fair and clear-skinned, with a soft grave face and a way of holding her head a little to one side, like a girl listening for music. She wore a plain dark shawl. She had been crying, and had tried to hide it.

"They have taken Phoebe," she said.

He did not look up. "I know."

"She is in a cell under the Esquiline. They say she is to be questioned. They say there is some charge of—" Her voice caught. "Of concealment. Cassian, she is old. She was my nurse. She taught me to read. She has never done anything to anyone in her life."

"The matter is in the hands of the court."

"The court is you."

She said it quite softly, and he lifted his head.

She was standing with her chin up and her hands tight on the shawl, and her eyes were wide and blue and brimming, and there was something in them that he had not seen there before. It was not fear. It was a kind of dawning, painful, appalled comprehension, the look of a girl who has been walking through a house in the dark for a long time and has just seen, in a flash, the shape of the walls.

"What have you done?" she said. "What is it that you are doing? I do not understand. I have tried. Rufus is dead, and Quintus, and half the old servants of the house, and I have asked and asked, and everyone looks at the ground. Your mother will not speak to me. She sits in the library and writes letters that she does not send. And you—" She stopped. "You look at me as though I were a ghost."

"Livia—"

"Tell me what it is. Whatever it is. I am your wife." Her voice shook. "Is it something I did?"

No, he thought. No, my love. It is nothing you did. You are the only thing in this whole house that is clean.

He looked at her. He looked at the pale oval of her face and the golden braids, at the large kind eyes that were not her mother's and not Servius's and not anyone's he had ever seen, and he thought of an old Greek woman asleep on a pallet in a cell, with her grey hair on her arm, who had once held a screaming newborn in a hot room full of women and had never said a word. You held me, he thought. You were the one who held me. He could not tell her. He could not tell her that the old nurse she loved was the woman who had borne her, and that she herself had been bought for the price of a bargain in the dark. He could not tell her what she was. The knowledge would kill her. It would kill her as it had killed everything else.

"Phoebe will not be harmed," he said.

It came out of him before he knew. His voice was low and rough.

"She will be sent to Veii. To the farm. She and her husband. They will be well looked after. They will not be questioned, and they will not come back to Rome." He drew a breath. "I give you my word."

Livia stared at him. The tears had begun to run down her cheeks, quite silently, and she did not seem to notice them.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"It is nothing."

"It is not nothing. It is—" She hesitated. "You are still in there. Aren't you? You are still somewhere."

He did not answer, and after a moment she turned and went away, and he heard her light steps fade down the corridor. He sat at the desk with his hands flat on the wood. A great weariness came over him, and with it a thought so quiet that it did not seem to be a thought at all: That was the last kind thing. I will not do another.

…

He found himself in front of the mirror at three in the morning.

It was in his dressing-room, a tall sheet of polished silver in a frame of carved cedar that had been Servius's, and had hung there for thirty years. He had not planned to go there. He had risen from the bed where he did not sleep, and put on a tunic, and walked through the sleeping house with a lamp in his hand, and found his feet taking him to a door he rarely opened. He set the lamp on a table. The flame trembled, and steadied, and the silver took it and gave it back, a pale gold light that lay across the floor and the walls and the stooped shape of a man.

He looked at himself.

He had done it before, of course, a thousand times, in the course of shaving, and dressing, and the ordinary business of living. But he had not looked. He had seen the face as one sees the hand in front of one's eyes, without attention, as a convenience. He looked now. He stood perfectly still in the light of the little flame and let his eyes travel over it slowly, feature by feature: the high straight brow, with the two deep lines between the eyes. The long scar along the jaw. The heavy dark hair, cropped close. The mouth, grim, rather wide, set in a line he knew from somewhere. The nose, broken once in the barracks and badly set, which gave the face a look of rough force. And the eyes, which were hazel, and her eyes, and looked back at him without expression from the depths of the glass.

It is his face, he thought.

It was not, of course. Not wholly. He had her colour, and her bones. But it was the arrangement of it, the set, the weight of the thing, that was not his own; it was that of a man he had held for the space of a single breath. He saw it as he had seen it in the white glare of the plain: the broad forehead, the black steady gaze, the thick wet beard against his shoulder. The glass held them both. He turned his head a little, and so did the other. He lifted a hand, and the other lifted its own, slowly, as a man lifts a hand to greet someone across a river.

He did not know, for a moment, which of them he was.

It frightened him. It was the first thing that had frightened him since the plain. He stood with his hand raised and his heart going like a drum, and the man in the silver looked back at him with a calm black patience, and the corners of his mouth began slowly, slowly, to curve, in a smile that was exactly, to the last hair, the one he had seen on a woman's face on a purple stand.

He did not know whose face it was.

He did not know whether it was the face of the man who had been killed, or the man who had killed him, or the woman who had made them both; and in the stillness of the sleeping house, with the lamp guttering at his elbow and the cold silver light on his hands, he found that the question no longer seemed to matter. They were all the same face. They had always been. It was only that he had never before been made to see.

He reached out and put the lamp out.