The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories Part 33

"Alas, it'll take several months since I'll have to go about this discreetly. You do understand that from now on we'll need to observe the utmost discretion?"

The following months dragged. I kept in touch with Albert through Ester when she returned to Vienna with her husband - I too had gone back there as clandestinely as I'd left. Emma had thrown me out and the situation was getting worse by the day. Pogroms were reported in the regions of Salzburg, Timifloara, Lake Balaton and Carinthia. In Turkey, the progressive government of Mustapha Kemal's successors, which had ma.s.sacred the Armenians and forced the survivors into exile, were rattling sabres, seeing a chance to grab territory from the Empire in disarray.

The situation was growing tense everywhere. Csar Michael had appointed old social democrat leader Kerensky as Prime Minister; so a united front was on the go from Saint Petersburg to Madrid, including Berlin where a revolutionary government had kicked out the old Kaiser and proclaimed a republic - which promptly went on to establish a long-term alliance with France in exchange for partial return of the areas confiscated in 1871 along with the breaking off of diplomatic and commercial relations with Franz-Ferdinand. Prince Otto, whom I liked not merely because we shared the same name, had publicly broken with his father and quit the country. All of this intensified my determination.

Through the Network, with the help of the Slav Resistance Front, I was able to get photos and detailed notes about the room in Sarajevo which Albert would need to carry out the plan; fortunately it seemed the room was just as it had been.

Things were getting urgent. It was already April 1943, and Franz-Ferdinand had surprised everyone by declaring his support for the Pact of Ceuta, and in this very same month the two other signatories to the pact, Franco and Gamelin, rebelled against their respective governments.

This didn't suit the business we had in hand, not one little bit. Albert let me know, via Ester, that he'd been registered as a suspect person and suspended from teaching because he hadn't spoken out clearly enough against the rebellions. Of course this delayed his work on our project.

I must confess I felt so discouraged that I thought of throwing in the towel even though I was well aware that our plan was the only thing that could stop our twentieth century from becoming known to history as the era of a world war, which I could see fast approaching.

With the shock of the j.a.panese landing in California in July, and the occupation of Provence by Gamelin a month later, matters became even more pressing. If we did nothing, the world was rushing towards doom. We absolutely had to succeed and there was no time to waste.

Another problem was that Fermi was supporting Mussolini's national fascist government in Italy. But Albert let me know, always by way of Ester, that he hoped he still had enough contact with the scientific community to be sure of access to the necessary energy when the moment came. Nevertheless, he had to decamp, this time to Germany, which meant more delay.

Thus far, war was raging in Spain and in the French colonial empire as well as in the USA; the Americans were hard put to block the j.a.panese advance at the Rocky Mountains. Meanwhile, my own life was getting harder. We were totally at the mercy of Hitler's gangs of thugs, abusing and a.s.saulting us freely. I'd started attending the synagogue and became friends with the rabbi, Eliazar Ben Rahhem, with whom I studied the Torah twice a week. The rest of the time I spent struggling to survive, mostly by giving lessons to the kids of our community, who weren't allowed into the state schools any more.

Ester's husband was now amba.s.sador in Rio de Janeiro, at the cost of leaving his wife behind - there was some Jewish blood in her ancestry. She let me know that she was now under surveillance; contact between us was increasingly difficult.

By the start of 1945 I was seriously thinking of giving up and going to join our people's settlements in Palestine. Then the Emperor suddenly banned all emigration and decided to gather all the Jews into special camps. Happily for me, the Network helped me get out of Austria so that I could finally meet Albert and hand over the object which Ester had managed to get to me the day before her arrest. Namely, the very gun which the Crime Department of the Ministry of the Interior had kept stored in the capital. In Berlin a gunmaker friend, to whom I couldn't of course spill the beans, quickly worked out why the pistol had jammed and supplied me with an identical, but functioning, twin.

In September Albert and I both took up residence in Munich where we could now work together. At last Comrade Albert (as one needed to call oneself under Rosa Luxemburg's regime) and I had almost reached our goal. Munich was the right place to be because of its close proximity to the German Energy Commissariat, which now had a Fermi-style pile in operation. Albert managed to get me a post as a secretary in the Physics department of the university, and in any spare time I worked on the necessary geographical co-ordinates while he was busy perfecting the autoglider. A wit once said that history is geography in practice, yet I had to be so exact with the maps and large-scale street plans.

Even though I can't go into too much detail, I think that I can safely say that with the help of the Network I managed to have a beacon sent to Sarajevo to be installed inside the wall just above the table, in the drawer of which the man had confessed during his pre-trial interrogation to having kept his pistol. Whereupon Albert installed the geographic co-ordinates, then proceeded to adjust the device "bite by bite", as he put it, to the date that concerned us.

I received news of Ester from a woman writer who'd been interned with her before being expelled, because of some quibblings about her national origin. This woman, Milena Jesenska, made no secret of how much worse conditions were in those special camps than anyone imagined. There'd been typhus epidemics. My poor Ester! I couldn't help thinking that I was partly to blame for what had happened to her. We absolutely had to succeed!

I can hardly believe it: the moment has come! Today, we did it. We met up at the nuclear lab at Dachau. The countryside was glorious in the May sunshine. In the morning I'd thought about Emma. Her birthday was on the 8 May .. . May the Lord (bless His name!) help me forget what she did to me. But in a few minutes that won't matter and even the sheets of paper I'm writing on probably won't have existed. Our task will be accomplished: Franz-Ferdinand will never have been the Emperor of Austria, never will he have called Hitler to power, and the twentieth century will be known to history as the century which brought happiness and prosperity to humanity.

I'm content. The involvement of a historian was essential to settle on the crucial moment as being the failed a.s.sa.s.sination attempt in Sarajevo, on the 28 June 1914. How often have we thought during the past years: "If only Prinzip's pistol hadn't jammed ..."

Well, in ten minutes, that'll be it. Gavril Prinzip will be known as the one who a.s.sa.s.sinated Franz-Ferdinand, the world will be at peace and I, here in Dachau, will enjoy the happy tranquillity of a nice spring day, not even knowing what I've escaped.

Translated from the French by Sissy Pantelis and Ian Watson *

Tales From the Venia Woods.

Robert Silverberg.

This all happened a long time ago, in the early decades of the Second Republic, when I was a boy growing up in Upper Pannonia. Life was very simple then, at least for us. We lived in a forest village on the right bank of the Danubius, my parents, my grandmother, my sister Friya, and I. My father Tyr, for whom I am named, was a blacksmith, my mother Julia taught school in our house, and my grandmother was the priestess at the little Temple of Juno Teutonica nearby.

It was a very quiet life. The automobile hadn't yet been invented then--all this was around the year 2650, and we still used horse-drawn carriages or wagons--and we hardly ever left the village. Once a year, on Augustus Day--back then we still celebrated Augustus Day--we would all dress in our finest clothes and my father would get our big iron-bound carriage out of the shed, the one he had built with his own hands, and we'd drive to the great municipium of Venia, a two-hour journey away, to hear the Imperial band playing waltzes in the Plaza of Vespasia.n.u.s. Afterward there'd be cakes and whipped cream at the big hotel nearby, and tankards of cherry beer for the grownups, and then we'd begin the long trip home. Today, of course, the forest is gone and our little village has been swallowed up by the ever-growing municipium, and it's a twenty-minute ride by car to the center of the city from where we used to live. But at that time it was a grand excursion, the event of the year for us.

I know now that Venia is only a minor provincial city, that compared with Londin or Parisi or Urbs Roma itself it's nothing at all. But to me it was the capital of the world. Its splendors stunned me and dazed me. We would climb to the top of the great column of Basileus Andronicus, which the Greeks put up eight hundred years ago to commemorate their victory over Caesar Maximilia.n.u.s during the Civil War in the days when the Empire was divided, and we'd stare out at the whole city; and my mother, who had grown up in Venia, would point everything out to us, the Senate building, the opera house, the aqueduct, the university, the ten bridges, the Temple of Jupiter Teutonicus, the proconsul's palace, the much greater palace that Trajan VII built for himself during that dizzying period when Venia was essentially the second capital of the Empire, and so forth. For days afterward my dreams would glitter with memories of what I had seen in Venia, and my sister and I would hum waltzes as we whirled along the quiet forest paths.

There was one exciting year when we made the Venia trip twice. That was 2647, when I was ten years old, and I can remember it so exactly because that was the year when the First Consul died--C. Junius Scaevola, I mean, the Founder of the Second Republic. My father was very agitated when the news of his death came. 'It'll be touch and go now, touch and go, mark my words,' he said over and over. I asked my grandmother what he meant by that, and she said, 'Your father's afraid that they'll bring back the Empire, now that the old man's dead.' I didn't see what was so upsetting about that--it was all the same to me, Republic or Empire, Consul or Imperator--but to my father it was a big issue, and when the new First Consul came to Venia later that year, touring the entire vast Imperium province by province for the sake of rea.s.suring everyone that the Republic was stable and intact, my father got out the carriage and we went to attend his Triumph and Processional. So I had a second visit to the capital that year.

Half a million people, so they say, turned out in downtown Venia to applaud the new First Consul. This was N. Marcellus Turritus, of course. You probably think of him as the fat, bald old man on the coinage of the late 27th century that still shows up in pocket change now and then, but the man I saw that day--I had just a glimpse of him, a fraction of a second as the Consular chariot rode past, but the memory still blazes in my mind seventy years later--was lean and virile, with a jutting jaw and fiery eyes and dark, thick curling hair.

We threw up our arms in the old Roman salute and at the top of our lungs we shouted out to him, 'Hail, Marcellus! Long live the Consul!'

(We shouted it, by the way, not in Latin but in Germanisch. I was very surprised at that. My father explained afterward that it was by the First Consul's own orders. He wanted to show his love for the people by encouraging all the regional languages, even at a public celebration like this one. The Gallians had hailed him in Gallian, the Britannians in Britannic, the Lusitanians in whatever it is they speak there, and as he traveled through the Teutonic provinces he wanted us to yell his praises in Germanisch. I realize that there are some people today, very conservative Republicans, who will tell you that this was terrible idea, because it has led to the resurgence of all kinds of separatist regional activities in the Imperium. It was the same sort of regionalist fervor, they remind us, that brought about the crumbling of the Empire a hundred years before. To men like my father, though, it was a brilliant political stroke, and he cheered the new First Consul with tremendous Germanisch exuberance and vigor. But my father managed to be a staunch regionalist and a staunch Republican at the same time. Bear in mind that over my mother's fierce objections he had insisted on naming his children for ancient Teutonic G.o.ds instead of giving them the standard Roman names that everybody else in Pannonia favored then.) Other than going to Venia once a year, or on this one occasion twice, I never went anywhere. I hunted, I fished, I swam, I helped my father in the smithy, I helped my grandmother in the Temple, I studied reading and writing in my mother's school. Sometimes Friya and I would go wandering in the forest, which in those days was dark and lush and mysterious. And that was how I happened to meet the last of the Caesars.

There was supposed to be a haunted house deep in the woods. Marcus Aurelius Schwarzchild it was who got me interested in it, the tailor's son, a sly and unlikable boy with a cast in one eye. He said it had been a hunting lodge in the time of the Caesars, and that the b.l.o.o.d.y ghost of an Emperor who had been killed in a hunting accident could be seen at noontime, the hour of his death, pursuing the ghost of a wolf around and around the building. 'I've seen it myself/ he said. The ghost of the Emperor, I mean. He had a laurel wreath on, and everything, and his rifle was polished so it shined like gold.'

I didn't believe him. I didn't think he'd had the courage to go anywhere near the haunted house and certainly not that he'd seen the ghost. Marcus Aurelius Schwarzchild was the sort of boy you wouldn't believe if he said it was raining, even if you were getting soaked to the skin right as he was saying it. For one thing, I didn't believe in ghosts, not very much. My father had told me it was foolish to think that the dead still lurked around in the world of the living. For another, I asked my grandmother if there had ever been an Emperor killed in a hunting accident in our forest, and she laughed and said no, not ever: the Imperial Guard would have razed the village to the ground and burned down the woods, if that had ever happened.

But n.o.body doubted that the house itself, haunted or not, was really there. Everyone in the village knew that. It was said to be in a certain dark part of the woods where the trees were so old that their branches were tightly woven together. Hardly anyone ever went there. The house was just a ruin, they said, and haunted besides, definitely haunted, so it was best to leave it alone.

It occurred to me that the place might just actually have been an Imperial hunting lodge, and that if it had been abandoned hastily after some unhappy incident and never visited since, it might still have some trinkets of the Caesars in it, little statuettes of the G.o.ds, or cameos of the royal family, things like that. My grandmother collected small ancient objects of that sort. Her birthday was coming, and I wanted a nice gift for her. My fellow villagers might be timid about poking around in the haunted house, but why should I be? I didn't believe in ghosts, after all.

But on second thought I didn't particularly want to go there alone. This wasn't cowardice so much as sheer common sense, which even then I possessed in full measure. The woods were full of exposed roots hidden under fallen leaves; if you tripped on one and hurt your leg, you would lie there a long time before anyone who might help you came by. You were also less likely to lose your way if you had someone else with you who could remember trail marks. And there was some occasional talk of wolves. I figured the probability of my meeting one wasn't much better than the likelihood of ghosts, but all the same it seemed like a sensible idea to have a companion with me in that part of the forest. So I took my sister along.

I have to confess that I didn't tell her that the house was supposed to be haunted. Friya, who was about nine then, was very brave for a girl, but I thought she might find the possibility of ghosts a little discouraging. What I did tell her was that the old house might still have Imperial treasures in it, and if it did she could have her pick of any jewelry we found.

Just to be on the safe side we slipped a couple of holy images into our pockets--Apollo for her, to cast light on us as we went through the dark woods, and Woden for me, since he was my father's special G.o.d. (My grandmother always wanted him to pray to Jupiter Teutonicus, but he never would, saying that Jupiter Teutonicus was a G.o.d that the Romans invented to pacify our ancestors. This made my grandmother angry, naturally. 'But we are Romans,' she would say. 'Yes, we are,' my father would tell her, 'but we're Teutons also, or at least I am, and I don't intend to forget it.') It was a fine Sat.u.r.day morning in spring when we set out, Friya and I, right after breakfast, saying nothing to anybody about where we were going. The first part of the forest path was a familiar one: we had traveled it often. We went past Agrippina's Spring, which in medieval times was thought to have magical powers, and then the three battered and weatherbeaten statues of the pretty young boy who was supposed to be the first Emperor Hadria.n.u.s's lover two thousand years ago, and after that we came to Baldur's Tree, which my father said was sacred, though he died before I was old enough to attend the midnight rituals that he and some of his friends used to hold there. (I think my father's generation was the last one that took the old Teutonic religion seriously.) Then we got into deeper, darker territory. The paths were nothing more than sketchy trails here. Marcus Aurelius had told me that we were supposed to turn left at a huge old oak tree with unusual glossy leaves. I was still looking for it when Friya said, 'We turn here,' and there was the shiny-leaved oak. I hadn't mentioned it to her. So perhaps the girls of our village told each other tales about the haunted house too; but I never found out how she knew which way to go.

Onward and onward we went, until even the trails gave out, and we were wandering through sheer wilderness. The trees were ancient here, all right, and their boughs were interlaced high above us so that almost no sunlight reached the forest floor. But we didn't see any houses, haunted or otherwise, or anything else that indicated that human beings had ever been here. We'd been hiking for hours, now. I kept one hand on the idol of Woden in my pocket and I stared hard at every unusual-looking tree or rock we saw, trying to engrave it on my brain for use as a trail marker on the way back.

It seemed pointless to continue, and dangerous besides. I would have turned back long before, if Friya hadn't been with me; but I didn't want to look like a coward in front of her. And she was forging on in a tireless way, inflamed, I guess, by the prospect of finding a fine brooch or necklace for herself in the old house, and showing not the slightest trace of fear or uneasiness. But finally I had had enough.

'If we don't come across anything in the next five minutes--' I said.

'There,' said Friya. 'Look.'

I followed her pointing hand. At first all I saw was more forest. But then I noticed, barely visible behind a curtain of leafy branches, what could have been the sloping wooden roof of a rustic hunting lodge. Yes! Yes, it was! I saw the scalloped gables, I saw the boldly carved roof-posts.

So it was really there, the secret forest lodge, the old haunted house. In frantic excitement I began to run toward it, Friya chugging valiantly along behind me, struggling to catch up.

And then I saw the ghost.

He was old--ancient--a frail, gaunt figure, white-bearded, his long white hair a tangle of knots and snarls. His clothing hung in rags. He was walking slowly toward the house, shuffling really, a bent and stooped and trembling figure clutching a huge stack of kindling to his breast. I was practically on top of him before I knew he was there.

For a long moment we stared at each other, and I can't say which of us was the more terrified. Then he made a little sighing sound and let his bundle of firewood fall to the ground, and fell down beside it, and lay there like one dead.

'Marcus Aurelius was right!' I murmured. 'There really is a ghost here!'

Friya shot me a glance that must have been a mixture of scorn and derision and real anger besides, for this was the first she had heard of the ghost story that I had obviously taken pains to conceal from her. But all she said was, 'Ghosts don't fall down and faint, silly. He's nothing but a scared old man.' And went to him unhesitatingly.

Somehow we got him inside the house, though he tottered and lurched all the way and nearly fell half a dozen times. The place wasn't quite a ruin, but close: dust everywhere, furniture that looked as if it'd collapse into splinters if you touched it, draperies hanging in shreds. Behind all the filth we could see how beautiful it all once had been, though. There were faded paintings on the walls, some sculptures, a collection of arms and armor worth a fortune.

He was terrified of us. 'Are you from the quaestors?' he kept asking. Latin was what he spoke. 'Are you here to arrest me? I'm only the caretaker, you know. I'm not any kind of a danger. I'm only the caretaker.' His lips quavered. 'Long live the First Consul!' he cried, in a thin, hoa.r.s.e, ragged croak of a voice.

'We were just wandering in the woods,' I told him. 'You don't have to be afraid of us.'

'I'm only the caretaker,' he said again and again.

We laid him out on a couch. There was a spring just outside the house, and Friya brought water from it and sponged his cheeks and brow. He looked half starved, so we prowled around for something to feed him, but there was hardly anything: Some nuts and berries in a bowl, a few sc.r.a.ps of smoked meat that looked like they were a hundred years old, a piece of fish that was in better shape, but not much. We fixed a meal for him, and he ate slowly, very slowly, as if he were unused to food. Then he closed his eyes without a word. I thought for a moment that he had died, but no, no, he had simply dozed off. We stared at each other, not knowing what to do.

'Let him be,' Friya whispered, and we wandered around the house while we waited for him to awaken. Cautiously we touched the sculptures, we blew dust away from the paintings. No doubt of it, there had been Imperial grandeur here. In one of the upstairs cupboards I found some coins, old ones, the kind with the Emperor's head on them that weren't allowed to be used any more. I saw trinkets, too, a couple of necklaces and a jewel-handled dagger. Friya's eyes gleamed at the sight of the necklaces, and mine at the dagger, but we let everything stay where it was. Stealing from a ghost is one thing, stealing from a live old man is another. And we hadn't been raised to be thieves.

When we went back downstairs to see how he was doing, we found him sitting up, looking weak and dazed, but not quite so frightened. Friya offered him some more of the smoked meat, but he smiled and shook his head.

'From the village, are you? How old are you? What are your names?'

This is Friya,' I said. 'I'm Tyr. She's nine and I'm twelve.'

'Friya. Tyr.' He laughed. 'Time was when such names wouldn't have been permitted, eh? But times have changed.' There was a flash of sudden vitality in his eyes, though only for an instant. He gave us a confidential, intimate smile. 'Do you know whose place this was, you two? The Emperor Maxentius, that's who! This was his hunting lodge. Caesar himself! He'd stay here when the stags were running, and hunt his fill, and then he'd go on into Venia, to Trajan's palace, and there'd be such feasts as you can't imagine, rivers of wine, and the haunches of venison turning on the spit--ah, what a time that was, what a time!'

He began to cough and sputter. Friya put her arm around his thin shoulders.

'You shouldn't talk so much, sir. You don't have the strength.'

'You're right. You're right.' He patted her hand. His was like a skeleton's. 'How long ago it all was. But here I stay, trying to keep the place up--in case Caesar ever wanted to hunt here again--in case--in case--' A look of torment, of sorrow. There isn't any Caesar, is there? First Consul! Hail! Hail Junius Scaevola!' His voice cracked as he raised it.

The Consul Junius is dead, sir,' I told him. 'Marcus Turritus is First Consul now.'

'Dead? Scaevola? Is it so?' He shrugged. 'I hear so little news. I'm only the caretaker, you know. I never leave the place. Keeping it up, in case--in case--'

But of course he wasn't the caretaker. Friya never thought he was: she had seen, right away, the resemblance between that shriveled old man and the magnificent figure of Caesar Maxentius in the painting behind him on the wall. You had to ignore the difference in age--the Emperor couldn't have been much more than thirty when his portrait was painted--and the fact that the Emperor was in resplendent bemedalled formal uniform and the old man was wearing rags. But they had the same long chin, the same sharp, hawklike nose, the same penetrating icy-blue eyes. It was the royal face, all right. I hadn't noticed; but girls have a quicker eye for such things. The Emperor Maxentius's youngest brother was who this gaunt old man was, Quintus Fabius Caesar, the last survivor of the old Imperial house, and, therefore, the true Emperor himself. Who had been living in hiding ever since the downfall of the Empire at the end of the Second War of Reunification.

He didn't tell us any of that, though, until our third or fourth visit. He went on pretending he was nothing but a simple old man who had happened to be stranded here when the old regime was overthrown, and was simply trying to do his job, despite the difficulties of age, on the chance that the royal family might some day be restored and would want to use its hunting lodge again.

But he began to give us little gifts, and that eventually led to his admitting his true ident.i.ty.

For Friya he had a delicate necklace made of long slender bluish beads. 'It comes from Aegyptus,' he said. 'It's thousands of years old. You've studied Aegyptus in school, haven't you? You know that it was a great empire long before Roma ever was?' And with his own trembling hands he put it around her neck.

That same day he gave me a leather pouch in which I found four or five triangular arrowheads made of a pink stone that had been carefully chipped sharp around the edges. I looked at them, mystified. 'From Nova Roma,' he explained. 'Where the redskinned people live. The Emperor Maxentius loved Nova Roma, especially the far west, where the bison herds are. He went there almost every year to hunt. Do you see the trophies?' And, indeed, the dark musty room was lined with animal heads, great ma.s.sive bison with thick curling brown wool, glowering down out of the gallery high above.

We brought him food, sausages and black bread that we brought from home, and fresh fruit, and beer. He didn't care for the beer, and asked rather timidly if we could bring him wine instead. 'I am Roman, you know,' he reminded us. Getting wine for him wasn't so easy, since we never used it at home, and a twelve-year-old boy could hardly go around to the wineshop to buy some without starting tongues wagging. In the end I stole some from the Temple while I was helping out my grandmother. It was thick sweet wine, the kind used for offerings, and I don't know how much he liked it. But he was grateful. Apparently an old couple who lived on the far side of the woods had looked after him for some years, bringing him food and wine, but in recent weeks they hadn't been around and he had had to forage for himself, with little luck: that was why he was so gaunt. He was afraid they were ill or dead, but when I asked where they lived, so I could find out whether they were all right, he grew uneasy and refused to tell me. I wondered about that. If I had realized then who he was, and that the old couple must have been Empire loyalists, I'd have understood. But I still hadn't figured out the truth.

Friya broke it to me that afternoon, as we were on our way home. 'Do you think he's the Emperor's brother, Tyr? Or the Emperor himself?'

'What?'

'He's got to be one or the other. It's the same face.'

'I don't know what you're talking about, sister.'

'The big portrait on the wall, silly. Of the Emperor. Haven't you noticed that it looks just like him?'

I thought she was out of her mind. But when we went back the following week, I gave the painting a long close look, and looked at him, and then at the painting again, and I thought, yes, yes, it might just be so.

What clinched it were the coins he gave us that day. 'I can't pay you in money of the Republic for all you've brought me,' he said.

'But you can have these. You won't be able to spend them, but they're still valuable to some people, I understand. As relics of history.' His voice was bitter. From a worn old velvet pouch he drew out half a dozen coins, some copper, some silver. 'These are coins of Maxentius,' he said. They were like the ones we had seen while snooping in the upstairs cupboards on our first visit, showing the same face as on the painting, that of a young, vigorous bearded man. 'And these are older ones, coins of Emperor Laureolus, who was Caesar when I was a boy.'

'Why, he looks just like you!' I blurted.

Indeed he did. Not nearly so gaunt, and his hair and beard were better trimmed; but otherwise the face of the regal old man on those coins might easily have been that of our friend the caretaker. I stared at him, and at the coins in my hand, and again at him. He began to tremble. I looked at the painting on the wall behind us again. 'No,' he said faintly. 'No, no, you're mistaken--I'm nothing like him, nothing at all--' And his shoulders shook and he began to cry. Friya brought him some wine, which steadied him a little. He took the coins from me and looked at them in silence a long while, shaking his head sadly, and finally handed them back. 'Can I trust you with a secret?' he asked. And his tale came pouring out of him. The truth. The truth that he had held locked up in his bosom all those long years.

He spoke of a glittering boyhood, almost sixty years earlier, in that wondrous time between the two Wars of Reunification: a magical life, endlessly traveling from palace to palace, from Roma to Venia, from Venia to Constantinopolis, from Constantinopolis to Nishapur. He was the youngest and most pampered of five royal princes; his father had died young, drowned in a foolish swimming exploit, and when his grandfather Laureolus Augustus died the Imperial throne would go to his brother Maxentius. He himself, Quintus Fabius, would be a provincial governor somewhere when he grew up, perhaps in Syria or Persia, but for now there was nothing for him to do but enjoy his gilded existence.

Then death came at last to old Emperor Laureolus, and Maxentius succeeded him; and almost at once there began the four-year horror of the Second War of Reunification, when somber and harsh colonels who despised the lazy old Empire smashed it to pieces, rebuilt it as a Republic, and drove the Caesars from power. We knew the story, of course; but to us it was a tale of the triumph of virtue and honor over corruption and tyranny. To Quintus Fabius, weeping as he told it to us from his own point of view, the fall of the Empire had been not only a harrowing personal tragedy but a terrible disaster for the entire world.

Good little Republicans though we were, our hearts were wrung by the things he told us, the scenes of his family's agony: the young Emperor Maxentius trapped in his own palace, gunned down with his wife and children at the entrance to the Imperial baths. Camillus, the second brother, who had been Prince of Constantinopolis, pursued through the streets of Roma at dawn and slaughtered by revolutionaries on the steps of the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Prince Flavius, the third brother, escaping from the capital in a peasant's wagon, hidden under huge bunches of grapes, and setting up a government-in-exile in Neapolis, only to be taken and executed before he had been Emperor a full week. Which brought the succession down to sixteen-year-old Prince Augustus, who had been at the university in Parisi. Well named, he was: for the first of all the Emperors was an Augustus, and another one two thousand years later was the last, reigning all of three days before the men of the Second Republic found him and put him before the firing squad.

Of the royal princes, only Quintus Fabius remained. But in the confusion he was overlooked. He was hardly more than a boy; and, although technically he was now Caesar, it never occurred to him to claim the throne. Loyalist supporters dressed him in peasant clothes and smuggled him out of Roma while the Capital was still in flames, and he set out on what was to become a lifetime of exile.

There were always places for me to stay,' he told us. 'In out-of-the-way towns where the Republic had never really taken hold, in backwater provinces, in places you've never heard of. The Republic searched for me for a time, but never very well, and then the story began to circulate that I was dead. The skeleton of some boy found in the ruins of the palace in Roma was said to be mine. After that I could move around more or less freely, though always in poverty, always in secrecy.'

'And when did you come here?' I asked.

'Almost twenty years ago. Friends told me that this hunting lodge was here, still more or less intact as it had been at the time of the Revolution, and that no one ever went near it, that I could live here undisturbed. And so I have. And so I will, for however much time is left.' He reached for the wine, but his hands were shaking so badly that Friya took it from him and poured him a gla.s.s. He drank it in a single gulp. 'Ah, children, children, what a world you've lost! What madness it was, to destroy the Empire! What greatness existed then!'

'Our father says things have never been so good for ordinary folk as they are under the Republic,' Friya said.

I kicked her ankle. She gave me a sour look.

Quintus Fabius said sadly, 'I mean no disrespect, but your father sees only his own village. We were trained to see the entire world in a glance. The Imperium, the whole globe-spanning Empire. Do you think the G.o.ds meant to give the Imperium just to anyone at all? Anyone who could grab power and proclaim himself First Consul? Ah, no, no, the Caesars were uniquely chosen to sustain the Pax Romana, the universal peace that has enfolded this whole planet for so long. Under us there was nothing but peace, peace eternal and unshakeable, once the Empire had reached its complete form. But with the Caesars now gone, how much longer do you think the peace will last? If one man can take power, so can another, or another. There will be five First Consuls at once, mark my words. Or fifty. And every province will want to be an Empire in itself. Mark my words, children. Mark my words.'

I had never heard such treason in my life. Or anything so wrongheaded.

The Pax Romana? What Pax Romana? There had never been such a thing, not really. At least never for very long. Old Quintus Fabius would have had us believe that the Empire had brought unbroken and unshakeable peace to the entire world, and had kept it that way for twenty centuries. But what about the Civil War, when the Greek half of the Empire fought for fifty years against the Latin half? Or the two Wars of Unification? And hadn't there been minor rebellions constantly, all over the Empire, hardly a century without one, in Persia, in India, in Britannia, in Africa Aethiopica? No, I thought, what he's telling us simply isn't true. The long life of the Empire had been a time of constant brutal oppression, with people's spirits held in check everywhere by military force. The real Pax Romana was something that existed only in modern times, under the Second Republic. So my father had taught me. So I deeply believed.

But Quintus Fabius was an old man, wrapped in dreams of his own wondrous lost childhood. Far be it from me to argue with him about such matters as these. I simply smiled and nodded, and poured more wine for him when his gla.s.s was empty. And Friya and I sat there spellbound as he told us, hour after hour, of what it had been like to be a prince of the royal family in the dying days of the Empire, before true grandeur had departed forever from the world.

When we left him that day, he had still more gifts for us. 'My brother was a great collector,' he said. 'He had whole houses stuffed full of treasure. All gone now, all but what you see here, which no one remembered. When I'm gone, who knows what'll become of them? But I want you to have these. Because you've been so kind to me. To remember me by. And to remind you always of what once was, and now is lost.'

For Friya there was a small bronze ring, dented and scratched, with a serpent's head on it, that he said had belonged to the Emperor Claudius of the earliest days of the Empire. For me a dagger, not the jewel-handled one I had seen upstairs, but a fine one all the same, with a strange undulating blade, from a savage kingdom on an island in the great Ocea.n.u.s Pacificus. And for us both, a beautiful little figurine in smooth white alabaster of Pan playing on his pipes, carved by some master craftsman of the ancient days.

The figurine was the perfect birthday gift for grandmother. We gave it to her the next day. We thought she would be pleased, since all of the old G.o.ds of Roma are very dear to her; but to our surprise and dismay she seemed startled and upset by it. She stared at it, eyes bright and fierce, as if we had given her a venomous toad.

'Where did you get this thing? Where?'

I looked at Friya, to warn her not to say too much. But as usual she was ahead of me.