The Dance of Time: Chapter Thirteen

Barbaricum, on the Indian coast

    Anna and her companions spent their first night in India crowded into the corner of a tavern packed full with Roman soldiers and all the other typical denizens of a great port city—longshoremen, sailors, petty merchants and their womenfolk, pimps and prostitutes, gamblers, and the usual sprinkling of thieves and other criminals.

    Like almost all the buildings in Barbaricum, the tavern was a mudbrick edifice which had been badly burned in the great fires which swept the city during the Roman conquest. The arson had not been committed by Belisarius’ men, but by the fanatic Mahaveda priests who led the Malwa defenders. Despite the still-obvious reminders of that destruction, the tavern was in use for the simple reason that, unlike so many buildings in the city, the walls were still standing and there was even a functional roof.

    When they first entered, Anna and her party had been assessed by the mob of people packed in the tavern. The assessment had not been as quick as the one which that experienced crowd would have normally made. Anna and her party were... odd.

    The hesitation worked entirely to her advantage, however. The tough-looking Isaurian brothers and Abdul were enough to give would-be cutpurses pause, and in the little space and time cleared for them, the magical rumor had time to begin and spread throughout the tavern. Watching it spread—so obvious, from the curious stares and glances sent her way—Anna was simultaneously appalled, amused, angry, and thankful.

    It’s her. Calopodius the Blind’s wife. Got to be.

    “Who started this damned rumor, anyway?” she asked peevishly, after Illus cleared a reasonably clean spot for her in a corner and she was finally able to sit down. She leaned against the shelter of the walls with relief. She was well-nigh exhausted.

    Abdul grunted with amusement. The Arab was frequently amused, Anna noted with exasperation. But it was an old and well-worn exasperation, by now, almost pleasant in its predictability.

    Cottomenes, whose amusement at life’s quirks was not much less than Abdul’s, chuckled his own agreement. “You’re hot news, Lady Saronites. Everybody on the docks was talking about it, too. And the soldiers outside the telegraph office.” Cottomenes, unlike his older brother, never allowed himself the familiarity of calling her “girl.” In all other respects, however, he showed her a lack of fawning respect that would have outraged her family.

    After the dockboys whom Anna had hired finished stacking her luggage next to her, they crowded themselves against a wall nearby, ignoring the glares directed their way by the tavern’s usual habitués. Clearly enough, having found this source of incredible largesse, the dockboys had no intention of relinquishing it.

    Anna shook her head. The vehement motion finished the last work of disarranging her long dark hair. The elaborate coiffure under which she had departed Constantinople, so many weeks before, was now entirely a thing of the past. Her hair was every bit as tangled and filthy as her clothing. She wondered if she would ever feel clean again.

    “Why?” she whispered.

    Squatting next to her, Illus studied her for a moment. His eyes were knowing, as if the weeks of close companionship and travel had finally enabled a half-barbarian mercenary soldier to understand the weird torments of a young noblewoman’s soul.

    Which, indeed, perhaps they had.

    “You’re different, girl. What you do is different. You have no idea how important that can be, to a man who does nothing, day after day, but toil under a sun. Or to a woman who does nothing, day after day, but wash clothes and carry water.”

    She stared up at him. Seeing the warmth lurking somewhere deep in Illus’ eyes, in that hard tight face, Anna was stunned to realize how great a place the man had carved for himself in her heart. Friendship was a stranger to Anna of the Melisseni.

    “And what is an angel, in the end,” said the Isaurian softly, “but something different?”

    Anna stared down at her grimy garments, noting all the little tears and frays in the fabric.

    “In this?”

    The epiphany finally came to her, then. And she wondered, in the hour or so that she spent leaning against the walls of the noisy tavern before she finally drifted into sleep, whether Calopodius had also known such an epiphany. Not on the day he chose to leave her behind, all her dreams crushed, in order to gain his own; but on the day he first awoke, a blind man, and realized that sight is its own curse.

    And for the first time since she’d heard Calopodius’ name, she no longer regretted the life which had been denied to her. No longer thought with bitterness of the years she would never spend in the shelter of the cloister, allowing her mind to range through the world’s accumulated wisdom like a hawk finally soaring free.

    When she awoke the next morning, the first thought which came to her was that she finally understood her own faith—and never had before, not truly. There was some regret in the thought, of course. Understanding, for all except God, is also limitation. But with that limitation came clarity and sharpness, so different from the froth and fuzz of a girl’s fancies and dreams.

    In the gray light of an alien land’s morning, filtering into a tavern more noisome than any she would ever have imagined, Anna studied her soiled and ragged clothing. Seeing, this time, not filth and ruin but simply the carpet of her life opening up before her. A life she had thought closeted forever.

    “Practicality first,” she announced firmly. “It is not a sin.”

    The words woke up Illus. He gazed at her through slitted, puzzled eyes.

    “Get up,” she commanded. “We need uniforms.”

    A few minutes later, leading the way out the door with her three-soldier escort and five dock urchins toting her luggage, Anna issued the first of that day’s rulings and commandments.

    “It’ll be expensive, but my husband will pay for it. He’s rich.”

    “He’s not here,” grunted Illus.

    “His name is. He’s also famous. Find me a banker.”

    It took a bit of time before she was able to make the concept of “banker” clear to Illus. Or, more precisely, differentiate it from the concepts of “pawnbroker,” “usurer” and “loan shark.” But, eventually, he agreed to seek out and capture this mythological creature—with as much confidence as he would have announced plans to trap a griffin or a minotaur.

    “Never mind,” grumbled Anna, seeing the nervous little way in which Illus was fingering his sword. “I’ll do it myself. Where’s the army headquarters in this city? They’ll know what a ‘banker’ is, be sure of it.”

    That task was within Illus’ scheme of things. And since Barbaricum was in the actual theater of Belisarius’ operations, the officers in command of the garrison were several cuts of competence above those at Chabahari. By midmorning, Anna had been steered to the largest of the many new moneylenders who had fixed themselves upon Belisarius’ army.

    An Indian himself, ironically enough, named Pulinda. Anna wondered, as she negotiated the terms, what secrets—and what dreams, realized or stultified—lay behind the life of the small and elderly man sitting across from her. How had a man from the teeming Ganges valley eventually found himself, awash with wealth obtained in whatever mysterious manner, a paymaster to the alien army which was hammering at the gates of his own homeland?

    Did he regret the life which had brought him to this place? Savor it?

    Most likely both, she concluded. And was then amused, when she realized how astonished Pulinda would have been had he realized that the woman with whom he was quarreling over terms was actually awash in good feeling toward him.

    Perhaps, in some unknown way, he sensed that warmth. In any event, the negotiations came to an end sooner than Anna had expected. They certainly left her with better terms than she had expected.

    Or, perhaps, it was simply that magic name of Calopodius again, clearing the waters before her. Pulinda’s last words to her were: “Mention me to your husband, if you would.”

    By midafternoon, she had tracked down the tailor reputed to be the best in Barbaricum. By sundown, she had completed her business with him. Most of that time had been spent keeping the dockboys from fidgeting as the tailor measured them.

    “You also!” Anna commanded, slapping the most obstreperous urchin on top of his head. “In the Service, cleanliness is essential.”

    The next day, however, when they donned their new uniforms, the dockboys were almost beside themselves with joy. The plain and utilitarian garments were, by a great margin, the finest clothing they had ever possessed.

    The Isaurian brothers and Abdul were not quite as demonstrative. Not quite.

    “We look like princes,” gurgled Cottomenes happily.

    “And so you are,” pronounced Anna. “The highest officers of the Wife’s Service. A rank which will someday”—she spoke with a confidence far beyond her years—“be envied by princes the world over.”

The Iron Triangle

    “Relax, Calopodius,” said Menander cheerfully, giving the blind young officer a friendly pat on the shoulder. “I’ll see to it she arrives safely.”

    “She’s already left Barbaricum,” muttered Calopodius. “Damnation, why didn’t she wait?”

    Despite his agitation, Calopodius couldn’t help smiling when he heard the little round of laughter which echoed around him. As usual, whenever the subject of Calopodius’ wife arose, every officer and orderly in the command bunker had listened. In her own way, Anna was becoming as famous as anyone in the great Roman army fighting its way into India.

    Most husbands, to say the least, do not like to discover that their wives are the subject of endless army gossip. But since, in this case, the cause of the gossip was not the usual sexual peccadilloes, Calopodius was not certain how he felt about it. Some part of him, ingrained with custom, still felt a certain dull outrage. But, for the most part—perhaps oddly—his main reaction was one of quiet pride.

    “I suppose that’s a ridiculous question,” he admitted ruefully. “She hasn’t waited for anything else.”

    When Menander spoke again, the tone in his voice was much less jovial. As if he, too, shared in the concern which—much to his surprise—Calopodius had found engulfing him since he learned of Anna’s journey. Strange, really, that he should care so much about the well-being of a wife who was little but a vague image to him.

    But... Even before his blinding, the world of literature had often seemed as real to Calopodius as any other. Since he lost his sight, all the more so—despite the fact that he could no longer read or write himself, but depended on others to do it for him.

    Anna Melisseni, the distant girl he had married and had known for a short time in Constantinople, meant practically nothing to him. But the Wife of Calopodius the Blind, the unknown woman who had been advancing toward him for weeks now, she was a different thing altogether. Still mysterious, but not a stranger. How could she be, any longer?

    Had he not, after all, written about her often enough in his own Dispatches? In the third person, of course, as he always spoke of himself in his writings. No subjective mood was ever inserted into his Dispatches, any more than into the chapters of his massive History of the War. But, detached or not, whenever he received news of Anna he included at least a few sentences detailing for the army her latest adventures. Just as he did for those officers and men who had distinguished themselves. And he was no longer surprised to discover that most of the army found a young wife’s exploits more interesting than their own.

    She’s different.

    “Difference,” however, was no shield against life’s misfortunes—misfortunes which are multiplied several times over in the middle of a war zone. So, within seconds, Calopodius was back to fretting.

    “Why didn’t she wait, damn it all?”

    Again, Menander clapped his shoulder. “I’m leaving with the Victrix this afternoon, Calopodius. Steaming with the riverflow, I’ll be in Sukkur long before Anna gets there coming upstream in an oared river craft. So I’ll be her escort on the last leg of her journey, coming into the Punjab.”

    “The Sind’s not that safe,” grumbled Calopodius, still fretting. The Sind was the lower half of the Indus river valley, and while it had now been cleared of Malwa troops and was under the jurisdiction of Rome’s Persian allies, the province was still greatly unsettled. “Dacoits everywhere.”

    “Dacoits aren’t going to attack a military convoy,” interrupted Belisarius. “I’ll make sure she gets a Persian escort of some kind as far as Sukkur.”

    One of the telegraphs in the command center began to chatter. When the message was read aloud, a short time later, even Calopodius began to relax.

    “Guess not,” he mumbled—more than a little abashed. “With that escort.”