The Egyptian House
"Hey! Hello!" The shout echoed down the corridor, ringing off of the mossy stones. "Anyone! Hey, you motherless bastards! Hello!" Krista hung from the bars of the cell that she had woken in, feet on the bottom rung of the door, shouting at the top of her lungs. Her hair was a tangle of mud and dried blood, one arm was badly scratched, and the side of her head and face was very tender. The cell had some blankets and straw on the floor as well as two buckets.
"Let me out! Let me out or you'll be in some deep shit!"
Disgusted and hoarse from shouting, she jumped down onto the floor again. Restless, she prowled around the little room. It was small and mean, and all too obviously a cell.
The old bastard can sure throw, she muttered to herself, seething with anger at having been caught. The mistress isn't going to be very pleased with me.
Her jewelry and belt were gone, along with her sandals and the leather thongs she used to tie her hair up. Krista guessed that she had been thoroughly searched before being dumped like a sack of millet on the floor of the room.
Footsteps echoed in the hallway and she turned and curled up on the floor, facing the barred door. In a moment her breathing was even and steady and a soft snore escaped her lips. A haggard figured stopped at the entrance to the cell and leaned on the bars, exhausted.
"Ai, poor girl. What am I going to do with you?" The Prince's voice was faint, burned out by exhaustion and terribly long hours of unremitting effort. He wore a heavy butcher's apron, deeply stained by blood and crusted with dried gore. His leggings were spattered too, and there was a faint charnel stink around him like an invisible mist. Krista was horrified by his appearance, watching him from between almost closed eyelids. His hands, too, were dark with dried fluids.
"Let me go," she whispered. Who knew where that old man was, or the little Orientals she had seen coming and going from the house? "I didn't mean to spy, I was only curious…"
Maxian raised his head and, through a blur of exhaustion, could make out that she had raised her head, catlike, from the floor to look at him. A wave of relief swept through him, leaving him giddy, that she was all right and that his work on her head wound had not been in vain. He suddenly realized that he was tremendously tired and should sleep.
"That's a good idea," Krista said, for the Prince had spoken his thought aloud. "If you let me out, I'll help you back upstairs. You need a bath too."
Maxian looked down at himself and staggered a little to see how gruesome a sight he was. For a moment his mind spun in all directions, as he comprehended how much blood there was on him and how old some of the stains were. Memories began to crowd back into his waking mind, a hurried procession of subjects-some live, some dead, some near death-coming to the examination table. The grating vibration of a saw cutting into bone. The crack of a limb breaking open in the vise. First the buzz of the power in his hands, cleaving into the organs of a still-thrashing body, then the howl and the lightning as he split open the skull of a long-dead general and the power of the corpse flooded into him.
A terrible howl of anguish tore out of him and filled the corridor. Krista clapped her hands over her ears and rolled up into a tiny ball at the back of the cell, far from the shuddering thing that crouched at the door to her cell. Then it began to weep, its body racked with great heaving sobs. She crept forward and a lithe hand snaked out to lift a ring of keys from the back of the stiff apron. One of them fit the door and it swung inward. Krista stepped out, gazing down in pity at the man on all fours, grinding his head against the stones. The door at the end of the hallway was open.
"Please," came from behind her as she slipped up the steps, "please don't leave me…"
She half turned, looking back down the dark corridor.
– |Downhill from the bulk of the house, in a grove of cypress trees, there was a crude shrine to Jupiter. Maxian knelt in the brick building before a rude altar. Thick ivy covered the outside of the little building and filled the tiny windows.
The Prince had placed two tallow candles on the altar, one at each end. Once there had been a small statue of the god in the recess behind the altar, but it had long since vanished. He reached out, placing two pieces of tin on the grimy stones.
"O lord of justice, forgive me. I have defiled the bodies of two of your servants-these men, Aurus Antonios Sabeinos and Julius Terentius-who served the state and the Emperor and did not do ill. I have desecrated their bodies and cut them up into pieces. I beg you to let them enter the peace of your afterlife and to ascend, whole, into your heaven to be rightly judged."
The Prince's hand trembled slightly as he spilled wine into a shallow ewer placed on the ground before the altar. He sprinkled crystallized honey and grain, taken from two small bowls, into the ewer. His whole body hurt, savaged by the power he had drawn upon to examine the bodies dragged into his basement room. Odd whorls of light and shadow fluttered before his eyes. He would not have been able to reach the little building down the hill without Krista's help.
"O Mithras, he who judges and assesses all that is man, forgive me for these acts. I seek to help the many, the People and the Senate, and for this, some few must die. I take this sin upon myself, I accept the responsibility, both now and in the time after life, for these actions."
Maxian bent his head to the floor of the temple, pressing his forehead into the soft loamy soil. His mind, at least, was clear. After his collapse in the hallway in front of Krista's cell, he had been bedridden for three days, barely able to feed himself. His body, pressed beyond its own limits, had finally revolted, refusing to support his demands. Also, he had realized that he had committed, in the fury of his work, dreadful crimes. He raised his head from the floor, tears dripping from his eyes. He struggled to put revulsion at his acts aside, hearing the cold calm voice of Gaius Julius in his mind: Lad, a good commander must be willing to spend the lives of a few to secure victory and the safety of all.
"O lord Mithras, accept my offering, please, please forgive me…"