Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [104]
Chapter Thirty
Coping
What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not.
Mark 5:7
Death is never something that you become accustomed to, Ian Chesterton reflected, as the funeral pyre of Fabulous was ignited by Erastus.
‘I shall miss him,’ noted Drusus sadly, watching the cremation begin and the fire take hold.
‘A good man,’ added Gemellus, wrapping his cloak tightly around his neck as a chill wind blew through the gardens of remembrance. A cloud chose that moment to pass in front of the sun and the sudden darkness and cold seemed to say something profound to all of those present about mortality and their relationship to it.
‘Would you like to say something, Ian?’ Drusus asked, poignantly.
‘I knew him for such a short time,’ Ian confessed.
Nevertheless, he accepted the opportunity and stepped forward. ‘We are gathered here today, not to mourn a death but to celebrate a life,’ he said. ‘Fabulous once told me that history would never die so long as the knowledge of it was carried within the hearts of men. That is true, also, of our memories of the departed.’
There was a smattering of applause as Ian stepped down from the plinth and watched with misty and smoke-filled eyes, as the burning continued.
‘All things are changing rapidly,’ said Gemellus. ‘Arrests continue apace and, with reinforcements to the legion, there are so many comings and goings within the Villa Praefectus that I am lost in a sea of confusion.’
‘l know what you mean,’ Drusus added. ‘Only an hour ago, I ran into yet another of the waifs and strays that we seem to be collecting by the dozen.’
Gemellus clearly sympathised. ‘Another of the reinforcements?’ he asked.
‘Actually, no,’ Drusus replied. ‘It was a young Briton. A girl who was found within the Greek quarter by Crispianus Dolavia and his men, acting on information received. Efforts are being made to find the youth a suitable family with whom she can live until a husband is found for her.’
It was such a casual conversation that Ian, lost in his own thoughts, almost missed it. On another day, perhaps, he would have done.
Luckily, the important words carried themselves to him.
‘British, did you say?’ he asked. ‘A young girl?’
‘Yes,’ said Drusus. ‘Perhaps you could marry her?’
Ian Chesterton began to rock with unexpected laughter, quite oblivious to the funeral proceedings still going on around him. Fabulous, he was absolutely certain, would not have minded in the slightest.
Vicki was walking in the dark again.
Literally as well as metaphorically.
lt was becoming a familiar part of each day.
There was a narrow annex corridor that ran from her room in the guest quarters of the legion’s barracks through the Roman complex to a door at the base of the mezzanine behind the servants’ rooms in the Villa Praefectus.
Bored by a day spent watching the massed ranks of legionnaires outside practising stabbing straw opponents with their swords (it had been fun for ten minutes, but there was a limit to even Vicki’s tolerance for sweaty bodies and taut, rippling muscles), Vicki had gone off exploring. She immediately found herself in the villa and was quickly spotted and chased by one of Drusus’s minions, before being cornered and dragged (complaining) into the kitchens for questioning by the master of the household.
She was getting used to interrogation, almost looking forward to each day’s new adventure in the field.
Once Drusus had discovered her position of being under army protection and her status as a citizen and not a slave, he seemed to lose all interest in Vicki herself, simply telling her not to get in the way if she intended to hang around with the slaves.
Vicki liked that idea. The slaves she met were friendly and, when they weren’t rushing around carrying out mind-numbingly mundane tasks, they treated her like an equal; they were just about the first people in Byzantium to do that.
Of course, being the equal