Imperial Ghosts by Arinn Dembo
The Severan Funeral Garden was the planet’s largest public park. Bordered on all sides by the imperial city of Nova Roma, its grounds extended for several hundred kilometers, featuring ornamental terrain of every kind. In its green commons were thousands of monuments to the dead. Standing tombs stood shoulder to shoulder with shrines and reliquaries. Fountains murmured alone in empty clearings. The dark forests were crowded with stone angels and obelisks to mark the passing of royalty.
It was a fine playground for a young empress, with a million places to hide. On one particular morning, a child crept through the weeds, hardly stirring a blade of grass as she prowled on her hands and knees. She was stalking an old man, who had taken shelter in the shade of the trees. A born hunter, she came silent and deadly on his right flank: the daisies nodded wisely around her head, stirred more by the morning breeze than by her passage.
The old man watched her from the corner of his eye as she circled through the shrubbery behind him, waiting for her pounce.
“Boo!” she crowed, leaping from the shadows.
“Awk!” The old man clapped a hand to his chest, in the timeworn gesture of heart-clutching terror, which all old men know.
It was most gratifying. “I scared you!”
“You most certainly did.” The old man hid a smile.
“Did you fink I was a ghost?” She was only four, and still struggling with the fricative sounds of the old Imperial tongue.
“Oh yes.” It was the truth.
“I came here to see the ghosts too. But all I found was you!”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you. Most of the real ghosts sleep during the day. They only come out at night.”
“Oh.” She squinted up through the boughs of the trees. “I’m not allowed to stay out after dark.” The tapestry of spring leaves overhead was still broken here and there, scattering cool light over her face like silver coins.
The old man looked up as well, pleased by the breeze and the birds high in the tangled branches. It was a good morning . . . and the garden was far more wonderful with her in it.
She turned to him at last, remembering her manners. “What’s your name?”
“I am Tiberius.” They had met before, although she would not remember the occasion.
“I’m Cleona.” Even at her age, her voice rang with pride.
He inclined his head graciously. “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.”
She cocked her head at him, eyes narrowing with calculation. “Are you one of my uncles?”
“I suppose so. My sister and your father are related, although distantly.” Tiberius met her level gaze without flinching. “Why do you ask?”
Although there was very little resemblance between them otherwise, the eyes of the old man and the little girl were very much the same: bright copper and piercingly intelligent. “I have lots of uncles. And cousins.” Her gaze was steady and grave. “Mommy says I shouldn’t trust them. Some of them are bad.”
“Really? That’s a shame.”
“Are you one of the bad uncles?”
He smiled ruefully. “I suppose that would depend upon whom you ask, my dear. My own nephew was not fond of me. I mean you no harm, however—which does set me apart from most of your relations, I suspect.”
“Someday I’ll be empress. Everyone will want to sit in my chair.” She paused. “I can’t let them, though.”
“Yes. This is very true.” He patted his old stone bench, cracked by ivy and mottled with lichen. “This one is better. Far more comfortable.”
“Really?” She eyed the bench dubiously. “It doesn’t look better.”
“Why not try it?” He stood up, offering the bench with an elegant half bow.
Cleona said nothing. With a very serious expression, she climbed up onto the offered bench and sat. She made a pretty picture there. Someone had given her a miniature naval uniform to wear, brass buttons shining and gold piping along the collar and sleeves. Her boots swung a few inches above the ground; she looked down and rocked back and forth a few times, testing the feel of cool granite.
“What do you think?”
“It’s all right.” Her tone was thoughtful. “Hard, like chairs in a temple. I think it would hurt if I had to sit here a long time.”
“The throne is much the same.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he held up a hand to forestall her. “It looks soft, Cleona—that’s why everyone wants to sit there. But looks can be deceiving. That golden chair grows harder the longer you sit—and it’s sometimes very hot as well.”
“Your chair won’t ever get hot, Uncle. It’s very cold.” She looked up at him, curious. “Even though you were sitting here a long time. Why didn’t it get warm?”
He stood in the shade of the tree and held out one of his dark hands toward her, palm up and open. “Take my hand, Cleona, and you will understand.”
She hopped down off the bench and went to him, very slowly. Some instinct made her stop a few feet away; she reached for his extended fingers from a good distance.
Her little fingers flickered as they passed through his, disappearing within the seemingly solid boundary of his milky flesh. Her eyes went wide and her mouth popped open; she snatched her hand back and stared at her fingers in disbelief, as if they had somehow betrayed her.
When she looked up at him again, still gaping in astonishment, Tiberius raised one eyebrow and smirked.
“Boo!”
The little girl ran away yelling. It was most gratifying.
* * *
Many years passed before the child came back. When she did, she was taller, and she carried a heavy book in her arms. The play uniform of a little girl had been traded for the tight-fitting suit of a real military cadet, and her hair had darkened from the pale yellow wool of early childhood to neat cornrows of dark summer gold. The strands closest to her brown face were plaited neatly and tucked behind her ears.
When she saw him, standing on the broken path beneath the trees, she stood her ground. “Hello, old ghost.”
“Hello, young niece.”
“You can’t hurt me.” She was still afraid. She took a slow step toward him, holding the book against her washboard chest as though it were an aegis of life.
“True,” he agreed. “Not directly, at any rate.”
“I’ve read about you.” The sound of her own voice seemed to steady her. “You’re nothing to be afraid of—only a trick of the light. You may move and talk and seem to live . . . but you’re not alive. Not really.”
His eyes twinkled with amusement. “Is that so?”
She faltered. “You’re not a person . . . j-just the echo of a person.”
Tiberius made a sour face. “Are we having a conversation, child, or are you holding a lecture?” He made an impatient beckoning gesture with one hand. “Let’s have a look at this book of yours. Sounds as if it’s full of hogwash.”
Still young enough to be obedient to her elders—even the dead ones—she held out her prize.
Tiberius laughed. “Come now—you know that I can’t hold it, dear. Show me the cover, please.” She turned the unwieldy tome over in her arms and he leaned forward intently. “The Imperial Ghosts,” he read aloud. “A Walking Tour of the Famous Funeral Gardens of the Severans. The date escapes me . . . I never could fully grasp the new calendar.”
She stepped away from him again, folding the book back up in her arms. “There are three shades named Tiberius listed; I came here today to find out which one you are. But I suppose that if you predate the current calendar, you can only be Tiberius the Third . . .”
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken.” He cocked his head, glancing at the spine of the book again. “The author of your guide—Diodorus, is it?—has apparently misled you.”
Her eyes narrowed with distrust. “How so?”
Tiberius turned and walked away through the trees, hands clasped behind his back. When the girl didn’t immediately follow, he looked back over his shoulder. “Coming?”
She hesitated. “All right.”
She picked her path over the broken pavement carefully, following him up out of the dark trees and into a wild hillside meadow. Tiberius waded through the sunlit grass ahead of her, the folds of his simple robe gathered in one hand, and made his way to the crest of the hill.
Someone had built a sundial at the summit, a great flat disk of silver under the open sky. The standing arm, which had once told the hours, was bent, a thick wedge of steel folded down and melted, but the hours of the day were still deeply incised into the base.
“We can talk here.” Tiberius sat down between the eleventh hour and the stroke of noon.
The girl sat down cross-legged between two and three o’clock. “Good. Tell me what’s wrong with my book, then.”
The old man laughed. “Straight to the point! Fair enough. In the first place, there are more than three Tiberiuses in the garden of your ancestors. There are actually eight of us, if memory serves.”
“Eight? How so?”
He smiled, looking away down the green slope. “Your great-grandfather was Tiberius the Twelfth, was he not? A good man and a middling emperor. One of the last Severans to be buried in the garden. He’s in one of those little tombs down there.”
He pointed to a line of strangely geometric mounds at the foot of the hill. Cleona sat up straighter, shielding her eyes; the white marble pyramids were wound so tightly with kudzu that they looked more like tiny tropical mountains than anything built by men.
“He rises very rarely. And nowhere near here, of course. I’ve seen him once or twice by the waterfall holding a reader in his hand.”
Cleona looked down at the cover of her text. “He must have died after this book was written. It is over two hundred years old.”
“We also have Tiberius the Seventh and his cousin Tiberius the Eighth. They played here as children—I still hear their laughter on the night of the winter festival.” He cleared his throat. “A tragic story, that. Turbulent times. . . . Neither of the boys ruled for more than a year.” The old man crossed his arms suddenly, as if he were cold, although the summer afternoon around him sang with heat. “I remember the night they brought the little one to the garden,” he muttered vaguely, as if to himself. “There’s nothing more terrible than a tiny coffin in a shallow grave.”
Silence followed for several moments, which the girl finally broke. “You said eight Tiberiuses.”
“That I did. Tiberius the Tenth was lost in one of the colonial rebellions, but someone built a monument for him at the western gate. It was cleverly done; the architect saw the place where his ghost appeared and built the shrine around the haunting. There was a reflecting pool lined with colored tiles; when you stood close and looked down into it, you could see the gas giant that swallowed his ship, just as if you were looking down from a low orbit.”
“Sounds beautiful.”
“It was. He used to appear there on summer evenings, reenacting his daily exercises. Crowds would gather at the gate to watch him. Tiberius Chilo was a great martial artist. When he danced his kata across the water, it was something to see.”
“Can you take me there?” her eyes sparkled eagerly. “I’ve read about his campaigns—he was a fine commander.”
“I could.” He shrugged sadly. “But the pool is long dry, and the tiles have all fallen now; his ghost is hardly more than a flicker these days.”
“Oh.” Her golden lashes dropped. “That’s a shame.”
“It is,” he agreed mildly. He crossed one bony leg over the other and sat back at his ease, fingers laced around one knee. “Now . . . how many would that be so far?”
“Four. And I know about Tiberius the Third. His burial chamber is supposed to be one of the biggest in the garden.”
The old man made a face. “Yes, it is. A horrid little man, Tiberius Orthrus. He had to make that vault of his extravagant. He wanted to take it all with him when he went.” He pointed his sharp chin at the book in her lap. “If there’s any truth at all in that thing, you’ll know that his reign was a bloody disaster—and never more so than when he lay dying. He couldn’t bear the thought that anyone might enjoy his possessions when he was gone. He had everything that wouldn’t fit into his tomb destroyed. It was an appalling waste.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every beast in his menagerie was butchered, even though he wanted only the rarest specimens to join him in the grave. Hundreds of his servants were poisoned, but only fifty were dressed and mounted to serve him after death.” He smiled to himself. “On the day they buried him, they tried to strangle all his concubines as well . . . but his wife put a stop to that, thank the gods.”
The girl leaned forward, pleased. “She was my namesake, Cleona the First! Where did you hear that story? There aren’t any concubines in my books.”
The old man gave her a lopsided grin. “No, I don’t imagine so. Royal historians don’t usually chronicle royal scandals, unless they want to part company with their heads.” His bright eyes flashed with amusement. “And it was something of a scandal, you know, when the sixteen-year-old new empress refused to obey her husband’s wishes, even while his ghost stood by wringing his hands and blustering about postmortem retribution. It was even more scandalous when she married off all those women to landed nobles over the next few years.” Cleona’s eyes widened at this, and he winked at her merrily. “Cleona always said that she was repaying a favor—that the concubines had done her a great kindness when her husband was alive. I expect that they kept Orthrus out of her bed.”
“But . . . how did she persuade her nobles to marry commoners?”
Tiberius laughed. “Oh, they didn’t take much persuading, my dear! Orthrus had fine taste, and half of his intended victims had been culled from the noble families. They made stunning, accomplished wives . . . and even if a man was inclined to disobey the royal edict, how could he turn down a bride deemed fit for the emperor? It would be a dangerous insult to the throne!”
“I never knew any of this.” She shook her head. “Amazing.”
“Yes, she was. I admired her a great deal.” He closed his eyes and turned his face toward the sun. “Cleona always had an eye for situations that could be turned to her advantage.”
“She was only empress for fifteen years, though.” The girl was clearly disappointed.
The old man chuckled again. “Oh, her reign was considerably longer than that, my dear! Don’t be fooled by the superficial details of succession. Cleona held power in her own name for fifteen years, in her son’s name for close to fifty, and in her grandson’s for another twenty after that. The poor man cried like a child at her funeral—he was terrified to rule the empire without her.”
Cleona giggled. “Really?”
“Really.” He yawned. “Now, where was I?”
“Tiberius the Tenth,” she said promptly.
“Ah yes. Well, Tiberius the Sixth and Ninth are also here in the garden; they were laid to rest in the family catacombs. The entrance to those passages collapsed four hundred years ago, however, and the area is badly overgrown. No one could find it today . . . unless I were to show them where to look.”
She laughed. “Well, that’s seven . . . but you still haven’t said which Tiberius you are, old ghost.”
He met her eyes, no longer smiling. “I thought you would have guessed by now. Being a student of history. But we will make formal introductions, if you insist.”
The old man stood up and faced her, planting his bare feet in the grass. When he drew himself up to his full height, the girl paled. It was a frightening transformation; in one breath he went from an old man in his dressing gown to a white-haired wolf, captured for eternity in the winter of his life. He was a legend, a man to be feared . . . and when he put on the grim mask of authority again, she knew him right away. She’d seen the same stern face many times in marble, and even stamped in gold.
“Oh no.” Her voice was hushed with horror. “You must be—”
He cut her off with the tiny formal bow of imperial courtesy. “Tiberius Marcus Severan. Also known as Tiberius Atroxus and—”
“Tiberius the Great,” she finished. She stood up, knees shaking, and backed slowly away from him. “You’re the Tiberius who—”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted testily. He sat back down on the sundial, turning away from her—a weary old man once more. “No need for a catalog of my crimes. I’m sure the bloody tales have lost nothing in the telling, even in your generation.”
“No. They certainly haven’t.” She hesitated. “I’ve known about you since I was six years old. My father told me the story when he executed my uncle Kaeso.”
Tiberius shook his head. “Charming. Still the family ogre . . .”
“No, no—it wasn’t like that. My father admires you. He told me that I shouldn’t be afraid to follow your example, if I have to. He says you don’t live long as emperor unless you’re willing to cut a few throats . . .”
“Oh my. Better and better—I’ve become the patron saint of imperial fratricide.” The old man put his face in his hands, and his shoulders trembled with some suppressed emotion. “If your father follows my example, my dear, I’d step lightly in years to come. You never know when he’ll decide it’s your throat that needs cutting.”
She waited a few moments before speaking again. “So. Is it all true? What they say about you?”
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
