Free Island of Ghosts by Gillian Bradshaw

begged Eukairios.
    “I said, be quiet!” Natalis snapped.
    Eukairios staggered over to Natalis and dropped to his knees, reaching out a hand to his master. “Please, my lord, I beg you, my lord, please don’t—”
    Natalis shoved the hand away. “Why are you making a scene like this? You don’t have any family in Bononia.”
    “No,” pleaded Eukairios, “but I have friends, old and dear friends and—”
    “I know all about your friends,” Natalis said, now tight with anger, “and I don’t want them connected with anyone in my office. You’d disgrace us all, Eukairios, if there was trouble here like there was in Lugdunum. Do you think I want to see a scribe from my own office—the office of the procurator of the British fleet!—killed in the arena to amuse the mob? You can go off to Britain with the Sarmatians. Even if you find some more of your ‘friends’ there, no one will pay any attention to them.”
    Eukairios went white. He knelt with his hands on the floor before him, like a beast. “I’m sorry, Lord Valerius Natalis,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I . . . I . . . you know . . .” He rubbed at his eyes. “Oh my God, my God!”
    “Get out,” Natalis ordered him. “You’re embarrassing Lord Ariantes.”
    Eukairios staggered out.
    Natalis turned back to me with a forced smile. “The truth of the matter is, I’d be glad if you’d take him off my hands,” he said, apparently realizing he had to explain the scene. “He’s a good, reliable scribe, but he’s a Christian. I’ve overlooked that in the past, but there have been some demands in Gaul to stamp them out, and I don’t want any scandal to attach to the office. He’d be all right in Britain. No one cares about the Christians there.”
    “What is a Christian?” I asked, torn between pity for Eukairios and suspicion of Natalis at this admission that he wanted to get rid of the man.
    “A follower of an illegal cult. Christ was a Jewish sophist crucified for sedition under the emperor Tiberius, and some of the Jews were stupid enough to decide that he was a god—and not just any god, but the Jewish god, who can’t even be spoken of by name. The rest of the Jews naturally turned on them with all their usual ferocity toward blasphemers, so they went Greek, and now there are adherents of this lunacy in every city in the empire where Greeks are found. It appeals to slaves and riffraff, of course, not the better classes.”
    He rolled his aristocratic eyes in contempt, and went on pompously, “The Christians practice disgusting rituals in private houses at night, hoping, poor wretches, that this will give them immortality, and they refuse to worship any divinity except their crucified sophist, and even refuse to make offerings to the genius of the emperor and the spirit of Rome—so, of course, the cult’s illegal. It was banned almost immediately after it appeared, but that hasn’t stopped it spreading. Personally, I don’t see any point in punishing the Christians, and I’ve turned a blind eye to the business as much as possible. I don’t believe most of the stories about them—they aren’t wicked, just silly pathetic fools. And, as I said, nobody’s ever bothered with the cult in Britain—and even if somebody did, no one would worry that you, a barbarian nobleman, had the least sympathy for that kind of nonsense. But if anyone took official notice of Eukairios and his ridiculous religion, he could be killed for it. Complete waste of a good scribe, in my opinion. Now you know the worst of Eukairios. The best—that he’s hardworking, experienced, and able—you knew already. I can add to that that he doesn’t drink, doesn’t get into trouble with women, and keeps out of quarrels. This cult is the one great daring secret of his drab little life.”
    “There has been trouble with this cult in Gaul?” I asked, after a moment.
    “They executed a pack of the cultists in Lugdunum,” Natalis admitted, “and some