Two days later, the wagon arrived in Volos at noon.
Slinging the sack over his shoulder, Dracus stumbled off the wagon into the blazing sun. Limbs stiff, mind groggy, he shaded a palm over his sore eyes, adjusting them to daylight.
Volos was a different world.
Where Pethens was elegant and orderly, Volos was bold and robust with rowdy streets and towering monuments, whose size seemed to compensate for their lack of design. The stables where they stopped were situated on the west to the entrance of an expansive forum sprawled with houses of large stones.
Dracus kicked his legs and rolled his head. Curiosity took him for a stroll. Behind the arch gate, makeshift stalls under awnings of colors in stripes straggled from either side of the street. In the center of the square, a screen wall about a hundred feet in width stood behind a large fountain crested with the alabaster of what appeared to be his stepfather in his prime, when he could still fit into his gold cuirass. Men began to gather, walking from either portico that flanked the square. The same nerves shadowed their different faces.
The announcement of law practitioners in Volos, Dracus remembered. With hundreds of men jockeying for five positions, the exam was no less combative than the Pyrrhic Battle. Dracus felt little for the winners or the losers. Big fucked small as was the law. The only law.
He turned away from the gathering crowd.
Back to the stables, he rapped a fist under a rickety window. A brawny man in a soiled doublet drawled, "What do you want?"
"When is the next wagon leaving for the south?"
"You gotta be more specific with where you're going, boy!"
"I don't care so long as it goes south." He winced. Inside the hut, the air was thick with the stench of sweat and piss.
"There's one to Tamia, leaving soon. Wait if you want, no promise there." The man cackled, throwing back his head, his feet up on the table.
Dracus considered the man exercising perhaps his only means of power by denying others of their rides. He took out a silver piece of five denarii and flipped, sending the coin to a spin. It drew a glittering arc through the window before hitting the cob floor.
The brawny jerked to his feet, making his chair screech. He ducked under the table behind the windowsill and fumbled around the floor. When he rose, his eyes glittered as if the silver in his hand.
"Two more if you can find me a seat in the back," Dracus intoned. He didn't deign to give the man another look in the eye but swiveled to the colonnade under the stone arcade. Leaning on one foot against a column, he glanced at a tavern across the rutted street. Men and women bustled about, stuffing their faces, quenching their thirst. Steam plumed from a terracotta counter. His stomach grumbled.
"How long before the wagon leaves?" he shouted over the shoulder.
"Soon," said the brawny, stretching his neck out into the light, his thinning grizzle tousled in the wind. "I'd stay and wait if I were you, young lord." He smiled, his blotchy face plowed with wrinkles spreading like cobwebs.
Dracus grunted inwardly, reminding himself that to feel hunger is a good thing, a necessary thing, as good and necessary as to feed. The last time he felt such an astute hunger had been so long ago, a time before his mother met the Praetor Marcus Uranus while he was still a commander. Too long also had it been since Renania suffered the last famine. Having consigned the fear of hunger to the past, they relished the present established upon the supplies of foreign grain imported from Seneca across the Huron sea. But save the prosperity they rejoice, the bustling Renanian livelihoods hinged on the flimsy works of politics, and the bigger they grew, the easier to topple. The only crops that grew in the saline soil of their lands were honey figs and dew melons. Dracus was going away to experiment with salt-tolerant wheat.
If only he could succeed, he thought wistfully, Renania would regain some leverage in their foreign politicking. All the tactics, the schemes, and the cunnings meant very little if their land didn't possess much value itself. But nobody took his word for it. He was eighteen.
Lost in thoughts until his thoughts started to lose focus, he found, to his dismay, all his logic giving in to the smell of roast chickens basted over a grill across the street.
"Will there be a wagon leaving for the Praetor's Port soon?" A young woman's voice sounded behind him. Dracus sized her up from the corner of his eyes. Holding two wineskins each in either hand, she had sleeky blond hair in a warrior braid. Her supple skin exuded youth while her nose seemed disproportionately big for her small, heart-shaped face. A sweet girl overall, but too nondescript for his taste.
"There is one leaving after dark," the brawny drawled again, lazy eyes peering from the dark.
"And what about tomorrow?"
Dracus lost his interest. He looked away at the wagons stabled by the street that could be his next ride. The afternoon sun scorched over his head, bobbling his vision. He stepped into the shade.
A foot stumbled on his. The young woman with wineskins fell on her back. Groping at his tunic, she took him down with her. Wine spilled in a rainbow over their heads.
Propping on crooked elbows, Dracus glared.
"I'm so sorry!" she apologized, blotting the wine stain on his silk with her flax sleeve.
He snatched her wrist and squeezed. "Don't touch me." Disdain brimmed in his voice. Dracus held little respect for a pariah like her but not because he thought of himself as better. Honor fled when grueling circumstances cried for desperate measures. He despised her because he remembered being in such circumstances, and he recognized in her pretty doe eyes a thirst for such measures.
"I was just," she slurred. "I only wanted to help—"
"Out of my way!" a man croaked.
Dracus let go of her to make way for the man.
Gods blight. He shut his eyes for a long draw of breath.