Infamia, part xi-b
Infamia, Part xi-b
XWP AU, Xena/Gabrielle
Previous parts: part i/
part ii/ part iii/ part iv/ part v/ part vi/ part vii/ part viii/ part ix
part x-a
part x-b
part xi-a
The eunuch and the message
The messenger, a panting statue of sweat and dirt, stands erect as Xena holds the latest communiqué from Pergamum. Her thumbnail scrapes Lepidus’s seal. Now what? On the pretext of awaiting more soldiers, Lepidus has already once delayed the legions to Alexandria. A month’s time spirals into the void of the past; she grows dangerously bored of playing pseudo-consort and advisor to the queen.
She is about to pry open the missive when Pullo bursts into the suite. “They’ve found him. Pothinus.”
Xena tucks the unread message into her cuirass. “Alive?”
“Just barely.” Pullo shrugs. “Has a stomach wound that’s gone septic. Ping says he won’t last the night.”
“Then that, I suppose, is that.”
Pullo does not share her jocularity. “He wants to see you. He says he has information for you.”
“There’s nothing he could tell me that I don’t already know. Ptolemy is dead, his loyalists nonexistent.”
Eyes respectfully downcast, Pullo begins to recite: “The commandments of Mithras-“
“-condemn the wrongful or unfair treatment of defeated or dying enemies. I know.”
“It’s not good luck to ignore the request of a dying man, Empress.”
“A dying eunuch, you mean.”
Pullo shuffles his feet.
Xena represses a sigh. For her Mithraism had been a means to power; an intangible proof of debatable meaning, and as such meant little to her. For Pullo the career soldier, however, it is a blood bond celebrated among those who fight-and now inclusive of her. “You’re right, Pullo. Let’s go.”
In the cool damp labyrinth of the prison, once catacombs, Xena thinks she hallucinates when the torchlight brings into view the image of the gladiator standing outside Pothinus’s cell. At first glance the gladiator shifts nervously, as if anticipating a less than benevolent welcome. “Did that old crow kick you out of the library? I’ll have words with him-“
The torch is high enough to accentuate Gabrielle’s quick, modest smile. “It’s not necessary, Empress. My exile is only temporary. Pullo sent word that Pothinus was captured and-” She shrugs.
Suspiciously Xena purses her lips. “Did you kill someone?”
“No.” Restless, Gabrielle rubs her hands against the front of her tunic. “Well-“
“I see.” Xena’s frown is prompted not so much by this admission, but the gladiator’s curiously nervous state. Like a fish flopping in the air, a very simple question-that of what’s wrong?-cannot exist within their complex relations and within these unstable environs. Solicitousness means weakness. It is not something she can risk in front of surly guards eager to seize upon any sign of the Empress actually acting like a woman. But the grim reason for their meeting clamps down upon her as Pullo, eager to see the end of the conniving eunuch, prompts, “Empress?”
Xena nods. The door yields against a guard’s shoulder and unleashes the stench of blood and sepsis. The eunuch lies on a straw pallet dyed red with his blood, his eyes brightly glazed with pain and the determination that his very last act be one of vituperative, senseless rage. “Whore,” he hisses.
The Empress steps closer to the dying man; she feels Gabrielle behind her, and a flickering backward glance captures the welcome sight of that calloused hand at rest upon a sword. “Ponthius, if I had good coin for every time I’ve been called that, I would own the world several times over.”
“Forgive me. You are a vestal virgin who deigns to visit me out of the pure kindness of your heart.”
“I’m told you have information for me. Say it.”
“You think I am nothing-because I served Ptolemy.” He laughs harshly, coughing blood that flecks his dry lips. “Then you-what does that make you? You served Caesar. You have no power except by proxy of spreading your legs. And you are gutless-you wanted Pompey dead, you were too cowardly to kill him. So I did your dirty work for you. Did you like that? Enjoyed the gift we gave you? I killed Pompey by my own hand. I told him before he died I would hack off his fucking head and that my king would give it to you. He was afraid at that. He begged for his life.”
After so many months of stagnant regret, Xena finally gives into that darker force-the one she’s always managed brilliantly, the one Caesar taught her to harness for the good of the Empire, the one compelled by hate and not mercy- and with the intent to crush the last bit of life out of him, her hand seizes his throat. The corded muscles underneath his clammy skin pulse desperately in an ever-weakening current until the soft utterance of her name shockingly severs this black connection.
Gabrielle says it again. “Xena.”
Her grip slackens. Pothinus gags. More blood is coughed up; a crimson constellation maps the back of her hand. The room is hot, claustrophobic, and the gladiator’s fingertips graze her bracer, gently requesting her attention with a clean-looking cloth.
“It’s not worth it,” the gladiator says softly.
Pothinus rebounds with one last effort. “No, it’s not worth it, whore. My time has ended,” he wheezes. “And yours-is shorter than you think.”
With a deep, steadying breath, Xena wipes away stars of blood from her hand. “You’ve lived your life by halves, Ponthius: Half-man, half-oracle. Tell me what you mean to tell me, so I may let you die in peace.”
Surprisingly, this provides some measure of peace to the eunuch. He closes his eyes in beatific surrender. When he opens them one final time, they appear devoid of pain and almost regretful. “Caesar is dead.”
It seems such a fabrication, such an astonishing lie, that she laughs. Even as the faces of Pullo, Gabrielle, and Ping, the healer, grow pale. Could it be true? Could it explain the change she feels in the air, the profound sense of disconnect? She is Rome as much as her husband is. If he is gone, what is she now? And what is Rome? “You lie.”
Ponthius’s breathing grows labored. “If you do not-believe me, you will be surprised when the magister equitum arrives at your door.” He smiles wretchedly. “But if you find the medlar, then you will believe me.”
He dies. The slender, somber Ping searches for a pulse, a heartbeat, and shakes his head.
Xena stares intently at the corpse. All present wait for her to say something. Instead, with a flutter of her cape, she is gone, striding through the door and disappearing down the dank hallway before anyone thinks to follow.
Gabrielle moves toward the door, and then hesitates. She yearns to follow, but in acknowledging this also recognizes the capricious emotions that drive such impulses. Despite the emergence of certain feelings, she possesses no clue how to express them, nor how burdensome they might appear to a woman who’s just been informed, by a dying eunuch no less, that her husband, the most powerful man in the world, is dead, and who could quite easily find both solace and counsel concerning this as of yet unsubstantiated fact in the arms of the (supposedly) most beautiful woman in the world, and not a scarred, banged-up former gladiator and slave who swoons over Sappho. And then there is the mysterious matter of-
Pullo says it: “A fucking medlar?”
Departures and arrivals
The messenger is new: A lithe runner who will be stuck on a boat until Rome, but who will be arrow-swift on the roads leading to Marc Antony. He stiffens nervously as the Empress hands him the note, her blue eyes more fine and piercing than the most slender of needles. “Waste no time. You sail now.”
He is about to protest that it’s nearly evening; then realizes he’d rather die later, in Rome, than now. His only hesitation is bowing to Cleopatra, who enters as he leaves. The queen gives the backside of the fleet-footed youth an admiring glance before the slave closes the door, and she turns her attentions to Xena, who is unfurling a cipher. “Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” Xena mutters. The message from Lepidus is placed next to the cipher. Her fingers run parallel to lines of text that waver slightly while proceeding with the linear rush of a river, the thick letters are stalwart ships, Trojan horses awaiting the dispensation of meaning, and she calmly awaits the moment when it all comes together, when the message will reveal itself.
Cleopatra’s lovely voice, however, intrudes: “Is it true?”
Xena looks up sharply. “Is what true?”
The Egyptian queen regards her for a moment before continuing. “About Pothinus. That he’s dead.”
“Yes.” Xena’s gaze drops back to the task at hand.
Fascinated, Cleopatra watches Xena’s elegant hand move along the lines of the long missive, her eyes flicker back and forth between parchments. “Aren’t you going to write down the translation?”
Xena doesn’t look up again. “I don’t need to.”
The queen’s mouth falls open. She does not consider herself a stupid woman; the librarian Apollonius, who tutored her as a child, would vouchsafe her considerable intellect. Yet at every solitary, clandestine opportunity over the past months, she has attempted cracking this cipher with great vigor and concentration and has, each time, failed miserably. Not to mention Xena’s familiarly with the language of Chin-which she speaks at times with her healer-and her fondness for hieroglyphics bitterly remind the Egyptian queen that the barbarian daughter of a common innkeeper is no fool. She sighs.
Then Xena rolls up both scrolls.
“Well?”
“Lepidus and his troops will arrive within a fortnight.”
“At last!”
Xena’s fingers bob and weave along the rolled-up parchment, as if it were a flute and she an acolyte of Pan; her expression remains unreadable. “He’s bringing a guest.”
Cleopatra sucks in a breath and wonders if, at last, she will get to meet the infamous Antony. “Dare I ask?”
“Dare away, Cleopatra. It’s Marcus Junius Brutus.”
The empire of medlars
Lake Mareotis, the brackish southern border of the city, bustles with activity at every moment of the morning. As such it’s not the place where one would seek solitude for moments of reflection, unless one is an alchemist accustomed to transforming life’s apparent dross into moments of gold. The modest Ping, the Empress’s healer, would be loath to attribute to himself such powers. He no longer remembers the rural village or the destitute family from which he was taken; even now memories of life in the court of Lao Tzu grow distant. He does, however, recall the shock that rattled his pampered spine when the great ruler’s wife, Lao Ma, informed him he had been gifted to a visiting emissary from their western ally-some wild, surly woman named Xena, who had just become the consort of the Roman Emperor and who, to his great dismay, was healthy as a horse.
Life with the Empress, however, has not turned out to be as barren as he had anticipated. He is granted unprecedented freedom of movement, and his considerable leisure time affords him many opportunities for study and enhancement of his art, and of the strange new world he finds himself in. He is fascinated by the landlocked, purple-hued lake with its strange fish, the plants he’s never seen before; every morning takes him out beyond the crowds to the deserted eastern edges, the sluggish canals, the abandoned vineyards, the wreckages of unknown ships.
One gray morning, the lake lifeless as lead, compels him to go out even further in his long, flat-bottomed boat, navigating the calm waters with a barge pole toward the tributaries that lead to the seas. It is not uncommon to discover the wreckage of skiffs and other smaller boats. And, on occasion, the unfortunate occupants of these ruined vessels. But on this gray day the wrecked skiff he encounters looks like one from a Roman warship, and not far along the shore is the body of a Roman officer, dead for some months. Even allowing for the caprices and variables of deterioration, Ping is mystified by the object that bulges in the dead man’s mouth.
It takes some patience to pry the object from the mouth-Ping begs the pardon of multiple Roman gods for mutilation of the dead-which turns out to be that most curious of fruits, the medlar. A medlar will rot before it is ripe; the wrinkled exterior envelops the sweet, slushy fruit within. Turning the medlar in his hands, Ping sees that the brown, withered rind holds no fruit but a crumpled ball of parchment. As he delicately extracts the parchment from the medlar, he recognizes the half-deteriorated seal upon the missive.
As does Xena, when Ping hand over the unread note to her hours later. The seal says enough, the seal confirms what Ponthius had said. She barely needs the cipher to read the brief note from Antony, which informs her that her husband of five years and the guarantor of her power, Gaius Julius Caesar, the Emperor of Rome, is dead.
to be continued
XWP AU, Xena/Gabrielle
Previous parts: part i/
part ii/ part iii/ part iv/ part v/ part vi/ part vii/ part viii/ part ix
part x-a
part x-b
part xi-a
The eunuch and the message
The messenger, a panting statue of sweat and dirt, stands erect as Xena holds the latest communiqué from Pergamum. Her thumbnail scrapes Lepidus’s seal. Now what? On the pretext of awaiting more soldiers, Lepidus has already once delayed the legions to Alexandria. A month’s time spirals into the void of the past; she grows dangerously bored of playing pseudo-consort and advisor to the queen.
She is about to pry open the missive when Pullo bursts into the suite. “They’ve found him. Pothinus.”
Xena tucks the unread message into her cuirass. “Alive?”
“Just barely.” Pullo shrugs. “Has a stomach wound that’s gone septic. Ping says he won’t last the night.”
“Then that, I suppose, is that.”
Pullo does not share her jocularity. “He wants to see you. He says he has information for you.”
“There’s nothing he could tell me that I don’t already know. Ptolemy is dead, his loyalists nonexistent.”
Eyes respectfully downcast, Pullo begins to recite: “The commandments of Mithras-“
“-condemn the wrongful or unfair treatment of defeated or dying enemies. I know.”
“It’s not good luck to ignore the request of a dying man, Empress.”
“A dying eunuch, you mean.”
Pullo shuffles his feet.
Xena represses a sigh. For her Mithraism had been a means to power; an intangible proof of debatable meaning, and as such meant little to her. For Pullo the career soldier, however, it is a blood bond celebrated among those who fight-and now inclusive of her. “You’re right, Pullo. Let’s go.”
In the cool damp labyrinth of the prison, once catacombs, Xena thinks she hallucinates when the torchlight brings into view the image of the gladiator standing outside Pothinus’s cell. At first glance the gladiator shifts nervously, as if anticipating a less than benevolent welcome. “Did that old crow kick you out of the library? I’ll have words with him-“
The torch is high enough to accentuate Gabrielle’s quick, modest smile. “It’s not necessary, Empress. My exile is only temporary. Pullo sent word that Pothinus was captured and-” She shrugs.
Suspiciously Xena purses her lips. “Did you kill someone?”
“No.” Restless, Gabrielle rubs her hands against the front of her tunic. “Well-“
“I see.” Xena’s frown is prompted not so much by this admission, but the gladiator’s curiously nervous state. Like a fish flopping in the air, a very simple question-that of what’s wrong?-cannot exist within their complex relations and within these unstable environs. Solicitousness means weakness. It is not something she can risk in front of surly guards eager to seize upon any sign of the Empress actually acting like a woman. But the grim reason for their meeting clamps down upon her as Pullo, eager to see the end of the conniving eunuch, prompts, “Empress?”
Xena nods. The door yields against a guard’s shoulder and unleashes the stench of blood and sepsis. The eunuch lies on a straw pallet dyed red with his blood, his eyes brightly glazed with pain and the determination that his very last act be one of vituperative, senseless rage. “Whore,” he hisses.
The Empress steps closer to the dying man; she feels Gabrielle behind her, and a flickering backward glance captures the welcome sight of that calloused hand at rest upon a sword. “Ponthius, if I had good coin for every time I’ve been called that, I would own the world several times over.”
“Forgive me. You are a vestal virgin who deigns to visit me out of the pure kindness of your heart.”
“I’m told you have information for me. Say it.”
“You think I am nothing-because I served Ptolemy.” He laughs harshly, coughing blood that flecks his dry lips. “Then you-what does that make you? You served Caesar. You have no power except by proxy of spreading your legs. And you are gutless-you wanted Pompey dead, you were too cowardly to kill him. So I did your dirty work for you. Did you like that? Enjoyed the gift we gave you? I killed Pompey by my own hand. I told him before he died I would hack off his fucking head and that my king would give it to you. He was afraid at that. He begged for his life.”
After so many months of stagnant regret, Xena finally gives into that darker force-the one she’s always managed brilliantly, the one Caesar taught her to harness for the good of the Empire, the one compelled by hate and not mercy- and with the intent to crush the last bit of life out of him, her hand seizes his throat. The corded muscles underneath his clammy skin pulse desperately in an ever-weakening current until the soft utterance of her name shockingly severs this black connection.
Gabrielle says it again. “Xena.”
Her grip slackens. Pothinus gags. More blood is coughed up; a crimson constellation maps the back of her hand. The room is hot, claustrophobic, and the gladiator’s fingertips graze her bracer, gently requesting her attention with a clean-looking cloth.
“It’s not worth it,” the gladiator says softly.
Pothinus rebounds with one last effort. “No, it’s not worth it, whore. My time has ended,” he wheezes. “And yours-is shorter than you think.”
With a deep, steadying breath, Xena wipes away stars of blood from her hand. “You’ve lived your life by halves, Ponthius: Half-man, half-oracle. Tell me what you mean to tell me, so I may let you die in peace.”
Surprisingly, this provides some measure of peace to the eunuch. He closes his eyes in beatific surrender. When he opens them one final time, they appear devoid of pain and almost regretful. “Caesar is dead.”
It seems such a fabrication, such an astonishing lie, that she laughs. Even as the faces of Pullo, Gabrielle, and Ping, the healer, grow pale. Could it be true? Could it explain the change she feels in the air, the profound sense of disconnect? She is Rome as much as her husband is. If he is gone, what is she now? And what is Rome? “You lie.”
Ponthius’s breathing grows labored. “If you do not-believe me, you will be surprised when the magister equitum arrives at your door.” He smiles wretchedly. “But if you find the medlar, then you will believe me.”
He dies. The slender, somber Ping searches for a pulse, a heartbeat, and shakes his head.
Xena stares intently at the corpse. All present wait for her to say something. Instead, with a flutter of her cape, she is gone, striding through the door and disappearing down the dank hallway before anyone thinks to follow.
Gabrielle moves toward the door, and then hesitates. She yearns to follow, but in acknowledging this also recognizes the capricious emotions that drive such impulses. Despite the emergence of certain feelings, she possesses no clue how to express them, nor how burdensome they might appear to a woman who’s just been informed, by a dying eunuch no less, that her husband, the most powerful man in the world, is dead, and who could quite easily find both solace and counsel concerning this as of yet unsubstantiated fact in the arms of the (supposedly) most beautiful woman in the world, and not a scarred, banged-up former gladiator and slave who swoons over Sappho. And then there is the mysterious matter of-
Pullo says it: “A fucking medlar?”
Departures and arrivals
The messenger is new: A lithe runner who will be stuck on a boat until Rome, but who will be arrow-swift on the roads leading to Marc Antony. He stiffens nervously as the Empress hands him the note, her blue eyes more fine and piercing than the most slender of needles. “Waste no time. You sail now.”
He is about to protest that it’s nearly evening; then realizes he’d rather die later, in Rome, than now. His only hesitation is bowing to Cleopatra, who enters as he leaves. The queen gives the backside of the fleet-footed youth an admiring glance before the slave closes the door, and she turns her attentions to Xena, who is unfurling a cipher. “Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” Xena mutters. The message from Lepidus is placed next to the cipher. Her fingers run parallel to lines of text that waver slightly while proceeding with the linear rush of a river, the thick letters are stalwart ships, Trojan horses awaiting the dispensation of meaning, and she calmly awaits the moment when it all comes together, when the message will reveal itself.
Cleopatra’s lovely voice, however, intrudes: “Is it true?”
Xena looks up sharply. “Is what true?”
The Egyptian queen regards her for a moment before continuing. “About Pothinus. That he’s dead.”
“Yes.” Xena’s gaze drops back to the task at hand.
Fascinated, Cleopatra watches Xena’s elegant hand move along the lines of the long missive, her eyes flicker back and forth between parchments. “Aren’t you going to write down the translation?”
Xena doesn’t look up again. “I don’t need to.”
The queen’s mouth falls open. She does not consider herself a stupid woman; the librarian Apollonius, who tutored her as a child, would vouchsafe her considerable intellect. Yet at every solitary, clandestine opportunity over the past months, she has attempted cracking this cipher with great vigor and concentration and has, each time, failed miserably. Not to mention Xena’s familiarly with the language of Chin-which she speaks at times with her healer-and her fondness for hieroglyphics bitterly remind the Egyptian queen that the barbarian daughter of a common innkeeper is no fool. She sighs.
Then Xena rolls up both scrolls.
“Well?”
“Lepidus and his troops will arrive within a fortnight.”
“At last!”
Xena’s fingers bob and weave along the rolled-up parchment, as if it were a flute and she an acolyte of Pan; her expression remains unreadable. “He’s bringing a guest.”
Cleopatra sucks in a breath and wonders if, at last, she will get to meet the infamous Antony. “Dare I ask?”
“Dare away, Cleopatra. It’s Marcus Junius Brutus.”
The empire of medlars
Lake Mareotis, the brackish southern border of the city, bustles with activity at every moment of the morning. As such it’s not the place where one would seek solitude for moments of reflection, unless one is an alchemist accustomed to transforming life’s apparent dross into moments of gold. The modest Ping, the Empress’s healer, would be loath to attribute to himself such powers. He no longer remembers the rural village or the destitute family from which he was taken; even now memories of life in the court of Lao Tzu grow distant. He does, however, recall the shock that rattled his pampered spine when the great ruler’s wife, Lao Ma, informed him he had been gifted to a visiting emissary from their western ally-some wild, surly woman named Xena, who had just become the consort of the Roman Emperor and who, to his great dismay, was healthy as a horse.
Life with the Empress, however, has not turned out to be as barren as he had anticipated. He is granted unprecedented freedom of movement, and his considerable leisure time affords him many opportunities for study and enhancement of his art, and of the strange new world he finds himself in. He is fascinated by the landlocked, purple-hued lake with its strange fish, the plants he’s never seen before; every morning takes him out beyond the crowds to the deserted eastern edges, the sluggish canals, the abandoned vineyards, the wreckages of unknown ships.
One gray morning, the lake lifeless as lead, compels him to go out even further in his long, flat-bottomed boat, navigating the calm waters with a barge pole toward the tributaries that lead to the seas. It is not uncommon to discover the wreckage of skiffs and other smaller boats. And, on occasion, the unfortunate occupants of these ruined vessels. But on this gray day the wrecked skiff he encounters looks like one from a Roman warship, and not far along the shore is the body of a Roman officer, dead for some months. Even allowing for the caprices and variables of deterioration, Ping is mystified by the object that bulges in the dead man’s mouth.
It takes some patience to pry the object from the mouth-Ping begs the pardon of multiple Roman gods for mutilation of the dead-which turns out to be that most curious of fruits, the medlar. A medlar will rot before it is ripe; the wrinkled exterior envelops the sweet, slushy fruit within. Turning the medlar in his hands, Ping sees that the brown, withered rind holds no fruit but a crumpled ball of parchment. As he delicately extracts the parchment from the medlar, he recognizes the half-deteriorated seal upon the missive.
As does Xena, when Ping hand over the unread note to her hours later. The seal says enough, the seal confirms what Ponthius had said. She barely needs the cipher to read the brief note from Antony, which informs her that her husband of five years and the guarantor of her power, Gaius Julius Caesar, the Emperor of Rome, is dead.
to be continued