He backed away instinctively, as if a viper had just reared up in his path.
“Is that any way to treat an old friend?” Lepida gracefully shook off her cloak, revealing a jade-green gown and a rope of pearls around her neck. “We were once such good friends, Arius. I remember a certain banquet at my father’s house when you were very friendly—”
“Where’s Thea?” The words grated harshly on his ears.
“Why, she’s gone.” Lepida perched on the edge of his bed, cocking her head like an inquisitive bird. “Quite gone, my dear Arius.”
Something cold uncoiled in the pit of his stomach. “What do you mean?”
“My father sold her. The slave trader took her out of the city—oh, yesterday morning, I think.”
Slave trader. “Took her where?”
“Now how would I know that?” Lepida examined her gold-lacquered nails. “I don’t concern myself with slaves.”
The room whirled and turned white. Exactly the same effect, he thought dimly, as being crashed across the head with a shield boss.
“—I know you were fond of her, of course,” Lepida was chattering, “but she wasn’t worth it. Really. She let every man in the house cover her.”
Thea. Thea with her eyes half-closed as she sang, Thea laughing up into his eyes at night, Thea kissing him in a dark doorway and showing him how to be gentle. Thea.
“—I was really quite put out when you took her over me, you know.” A soft little hand touched his arm, kneaded it. “But I think I could be persuaded to forget. Are you in a persuasive mood, Arius?”
Thea. Thea. Thea.
He reached out, curving his hand around Lepida’s face. Her blue eyes sparkled, and she turned to sink her teeth playfully into his thumb.
“You—utter—bitch.” He sank his hand into her hair and threw her against the wall.
She staggered, rebounding, and before she could lift a finger he’d seized up the knife on the bedside table and flung her across the bed.
“Where’s Thea?” Blade pricking the soft white throat. “Where?” Lepida heaved in a breath to scream and he covered her mouth with a hard hand. Sharp little teeth sank into his palm, no longer playful, but the demon was roaring in his blood and he felt nothing. “I’ll carve you like a roast,” he whispered. “Where is she?”
Lepida heaved uselessly under his weight, spitting threats against his hand.
He ripped the knife through her high-piled hair. Wrenched a severed black curl loose and jabbed it in front of her eyes. “I’ll shave you bald as a leper. Where is she?”
The blue eyes spat poison over his palm.
He sliced off another handful of her hair. “Where is she?”
“In a whorehouse, that’s where she is!” Lepida spat when he removed his hand. “A whorehouse, any whorehouse in the Empire where savages pay for their sluts.”
Another fistful of silky black hair slithered to the floor. “Where?”
“Do you think I know? Do you think I care? She’s miles away, that’s where she is—servicing every brute in Ostia or Brundisium, and you’ll never see her again!”
Another white explosion rocked his eyes, and Lepida Pollia let out scream after scream as he carved her hair to pieces. Her necklace snapped, pearls falling with a soft rattle like rain on an upturned shield. It took five of Gallus’s thugs to pry his hands off her throat.
“Lady Lepida!” Gallus fluttered. “My sincerest apologies—the severest punishment will be—”
She shoved him away. Hideous now, Arius thought disjointedly, with her face mottled red with fury and her hair shorn within an inch of her scalp. He saw her mouth open, spitting vitriol, but nothing reached his ears. Even when they packed her out the door, still shrieking her vengeance, and Gallus laid into him, he didn’t hear a word.
HE fought three Moroccans in the Colosseum the following month, and it was a fight no one would ever forget.
He slipped his blade through the ear of the first, then stove in the skull of the second with the boss of his shield, and when the third dropped his sword and raised a hand for mercy, he curled his fingers into hooks and ripped out the man’s throat with his bare hands.
The mob carried him shoulder-high through the streets that night, breaking windows, breaking jugs, breaking heads, and he smashed and roared and caroused at the fore. He hoisted an entire barrel of wine over his head to drink, he shattered a drunk’s jaw for stepping on his foot, and when a prostitute wound an arm around his neck and kissed him, he kissed her back and drew blood from her mouth. The winter dawn showed cold and steel-gray before Arius staggered back toward Mars Street, spikes of pain driving through his temples, his tunic stained with somebody’s blood.
“So you’re back,” Gallus said coldly. “I should have you knocked on the head like a rabid dog.”
Arius swayed, indifferent.
“But we can consider ourselves blessed, dear boy, for two reasons. First, Lady Lepida Pollia evidently has elected not to inform her father of your appalling behavior. Or else we’d have had the Pollio guards knocking on our door calling for your blood. And second, the Spanish governor sent this, as reward for a splendid fight.” He held up a heavy purse. “Keep the purses coming, gladiator, and I’ll keep you. Hear me, boy?”
An eruption of animal snapping and snarling drowned him out. “Dogs,” said Arius, weaving. “Killing something.”
“I’m not finished with you yet. Come back here!”
Striding unsteadily across the street, Arius waded into the writhing mass of dogs. Growls became yelps as he booted them out of the way, and they fled snarling. All but the one they’d attacked: a silky little gray bitch covered in bite marks, one leg a tangled ruin. He dropped to one knee and pried up a cobble to crush its skull.
But the bitch had huge eyes that stared up into his. Dark, desperate eyes.
He dropped the cobble and scooped her up, careful not to touch the mangled leg.
“No vermin in my barracks.” Gallus drew the folds of his tunic aside as Arius brushed past. “It’s probably diseased.”
Arius banged his door shut on the querulous words. He laid the bitch down on his bed and stared at her a moment. “You’ll be dead by tomorrow.”
He was surprised when the dog chewed feebly on his extended finger. Useless little thing. It would be kinder to wring her neck. He got some scraps from the kitchens, coaxed her to eat.
“Thea,” he said, and his voice sounded loud in the still room. “Is that what I call you?”
The bitch started at the sound of his voice, the thin silky skin quivering in the cold room.
“No. Too scared to be a Thea. She wasn’t afraid. Not of anything.” Except the night he’d lost his first fight, when she burst into the middle of the barracks with eyes like holes burned into her face and sobbed in his arms, saying that she couldn’t bear to lose him . . .
“No name. You don’t deserve a name—you’ll be dead by morning—”
The nameless dog gnawed on a corner of his pillow as Arius buried his face in the bedclothes and wept.
THEA
I opened my wrist with one firm stroke of the knife, watching as the blood dripped out of the vein. No blue bowl anymore, just a common copper pot, but my wrists were latticed with fresh knife scars and I sleepwalked through my days with the old mists clouding my eyes.
“Thea!” The harsh shout of my pimp. “Thea, get down here!”
I tied off my wrist indifferently and rose, straightening the dark robe and saffron-dyed wig that marked me a common prostitute. I’d worn them for two months. I smelled like a hundred unwashed men: sailors, galley slaves, tavernkeepers. In Brundisium, over two hundred miles from Rome, we had all kinds.
“Thea!”
I swayed as I started down the rickety stairs, but it wasn’t the bloodletting. I only drained a drop or two at a time these days. I wanted to lay my wrist open to the bone, but I didn’t. There was a fierce little presence kicking inside my belly, planted during those few snatched
hours in the cold barracks cell that had once been my heaven. Arius’s child. It appalled me—but when I poised the knife over my wrist, the knife that would release a quick rush of blood and take the child with it if I bled enough, my hand stilled. Bring a child into this life? I told myself savagely. A girl to be a whore like her mother? A boy to die in the arena like his father?
But I couldn’t kill it. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t think it would die.
No child of Arius the Barbarian would ever be scared away by a little blood.
PART TWO
JULIA
In the Temple of Vesta
Gaius is dead. Executed for treason. My husband, my cousin. Dead.
I had to watch. His eyes accused me when the guards took him away. He is dead. I am alone.
“New rubies, Lady Julia?” Marcus asks me on his next visit.
“A gift.” They wind my throat, a noose of scarlet fl ames. “From my uncle.” He likes me in red. Not green. “My wife wears green,” he said once. “And I hate her. You should wear red.”
“He means the jewels for an apology,” Marcus says quietly. “He does not hold Gaius’s sins against you.”
“Sins? What sins?” My voice sounds shrill. The words pour out, a torrent of them, and when I babble about voices in the shadows and eyes in the corners, Marcus looks troubled and draws me to sit on a marble bench in the atrium as he speaks of lighter things. He has been a great comfort to me. Sometimes he reminds me of my father.
“Grieve for Gaius,” Marcus tells me. “No one will punish you for grief.”
Gaius was never easy with me. After the fi rst week or two he kept his own bed, and we met only at the dinner couch where he would look at me strangely and I would realize I had been muttering again, and biting my nails until they bled. He was angry with me when I refused to eat in his sumptuous new triclinium with the carved golden beasts on the wall. “I see their eyes,” I said in a small voice. “They watch me.”
“Gods, Julia!”
But I’ve always seen eyes. My uncle’s eyes most of all. He tells me I am to call him Uncle and not Lord and God. “Even a Lord and God must have someone who is not afraid.”
But I am afraid. And he is lord and god, at least of my world.
“Like slates,” I tell Marcus dreamily. “His eyes are like slates.”
He looks troubled again. “Are you . . . well, Lady Julia?”
Vesta, holy mother, goddess of hearth and home. How I envy your Vestals, whispering about the temple in their white robes, untouched by any man under pain of death. I would have liked to be a Vestal. Here I am always safe, and I see no eyes at all.
Vesta, watch over me. I have no faith in anyone but you.
Eight
LEPIDA
A. D. 88
EVEN my new pearls didn’t console me. “Get out!” I flung a scent bottle at Iris. “I can’t stand your stupid flat face. Out!”
She fled wailing. What a bovine slut. She turned my hair into a haystack every time she touched it. I’d send her to the slave market and find myself a new maid, that’s what I’d do. A senator’s wife deserved no less.
But what did it matter if my hair looked like a haystack? What did it matter, with no one there to see me?
“Lepida?” The familiar knock at my door. “I heard a crash.”
“Just a perfume bottle, Marcus. Iris knocked it over.” I arranged my face in a winning smile.
My husband entered, kissing my cheek in greeting. Ugly and out of place in my pretty blue and silver bedchamber, and smelling like ink as usual. “Down in the library again, Marcus?”
“I can’t find Cicero’s Commentaries.”
“The slaves don’t put your things away properly. You should take a firmer hand.”
“No need. Poking through the shelves, that’s half the fun.”
Fun. Lepida Pollia, the toast of Rome, married to a man who poked through scrolls for fun. “How sweet,” I murmured.
“And you?” His eyes caught mine. “Have you been keeping yourself amused?”
“Half my things aren’t even unpacked yet. As for the city—” I waved a hand airily. “Well, Brundisium may not be Rome, but I imagine I can find something to do. There’s a new production of Phaedra at the theatre. Oh, and I bought more pearls. They were so pretty I just couldn’t resist.” Dimpling.
“Buy what you like.” He smiled. “See? I told you the quiet would do you good.”
“Perhaps you were right.” I held my smile steady.
“Paulinus is coming for dinner tonight. And a few friends. It’ll be quite a party. You’ll like that, won’t you?”
Quite a party. Marcus’s serious son Paulinus, and a few old men droning on about the Republic. When for four years I’d shared dining couches with senators, with provincial governors, with the greatest patricians of Rome. “Of course I’ll enjoy it, Marcus. I’ll tell the cook to make up some of that venison with crushed rosemary that Paulinus likes.”
“I’ve asked him to come early. Sabina loves his stories before bed.”
“You both spoil her,” I chided. “She’s got a nurse to tell her stories.”
“Can I help it if she likes Paulinus’s better?” He kissed my cheek again—ugh, that inky smell!—and quietly limped out.
I waited until he was safely out of earshot before I threw another perfume bottle at the door. I hate Marcus! I hate him, I hate him, I hate him!
PAULINUS Norbanus lowered his sword as his opponent doubled over. “You all right, Verus? Did I—”
“Hah!” Verus straightened, whipping his blade up at Paulinus’s throat. “Knew you’d fall for it. Yield?”
“Yield.”
They sheathed their swords, loping out of the heat of the practice ring back toward the Praetorian barracks. “You’ve got to go for the kill, Norbanus. Augustus’s great-grandson? You’re just a baked clam.”
Paulinus grabbed him in a headlock, and they wrestled across the sunny courtyard. A pair of sparring Praetorians dodged out of the way, swearing amiably. “Yield,” Paulinus panted, thumbs jammed into Verus’s windpipe.
“Yield, yield.”
They ducked into the Praetorian baths, stripping off their sweat-stained tunics and collapsing gratefully in the hot steam of the laconicum. Verus groped through the billows of steam for the wine decanter. “Going to Marcellus’s dinner party tonight?”
“I can’t.” Paulinus swiped a towel across his forehead.
“Got another party?” Verus grinned. “Maybe an intimate dinner for two?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, come off it. It’s that singer you’ve been tagging after—Antonia?”
“Athena. And no, it’s not her.”
“Don’t blame you; she’s a nice piece. Pricey, though. Expects lots of little presents. How much is this intimate little dinner for two going to cost you?”
“It’s my father, you ass. He’s in town.”
“Your father, eh? Didn’t think he ever came out of the Senate.”
“Don’t you know anything? Senate’s out for the summer. Like school.” Paulinus waved the bath attendants away as they approached with oil and strigils. He never felt comfortable letting slaves scrape him down. Soldiers should look after themselves.
“Maybe I’ll pay your singer a visit for you. Tell her how much you miss her, while you’re off listening to all those backbone-of-the-Empire types declaim the virtues of the Republic in Alexandrine verse.” Verus groaned as the bathhouse attendant dragged a strigil across his back, scraping away the sweat. “Or maybe I’ll say you’re paying court to that toothsome stepmother of yours.”
“Hey,” said Paulinus.
“Oh, don’t start. I’m just expressing my heartfelt admiration for that absolutely mouthwatering creature who happens to be your legal mother—”
Paulinus flung a towel at him. In the ensuing scuffle, a tray of bath oils was knocked over. Paulinus waved the slaves back, neatening the little vials into soldierly rows.
&n
bsp; “You know—” Verus flopped down on a marble slab, beckoning the masseur. “I’ve never thought your father would wed a girl a third his age. My father, now, that old goat’s on his fourth. But yours—”
Paulinus drew the strigil down his arm, sloughing away the sweat. He could remember thinking the same thing. “Father—this Pollia girl—well—she’s a child,” he had blurted out five years ago. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”
“A natural observation.” His father smiled. “I know what people are thinking—old lecher, young girl. I don’t mind giving people a laugh.”
A rush of angry color flooded Paulinus’s cheeks. No one was going to ridicule his father while he was there. “Who’s laughing?” he demanded.
“Everybody,” said Marcus dryly. “Don’t bristle, boy.”
“But if they’re saying—”
“They’re saying I’ve lost my head over a girl young enough to be my daughter. They don’t know that the Emperor ordered it, rather against my wishes. Though I think we may do well enough together, Lepida and I.” Marcus smiled. “I have no illusions, Paulinus. Not at my age. But Lepida likes me well enough, and that could be pleasant.”
Paulinus was uncomfortably aware that his own mother had not really been . . . pleasant. “Pleasant?” his aunt Diana had snorted once. “Paulinus, she was a bitch on wheels.”
“Aunt Diana . . .” but he hadn’t really been able to refute that. He had only been three when his mother divorced his father, ten when she died, but even so he could remember her shouting and throwing things. Once, he recalled, she had dumped all one hundred forty-two scrolls of Livy’s Ab Urbe Conditi into the atrium fountain. “Not a very good edition anyway,” his father had remarked calmly.
Well, if his father wanted a little peace in his old age, then he could have it with his son’s blessing, and no one was going to laugh. Not in front of Paulinus Vibius Augustus Norbanus, anyway.
Verus was still talking, voice muffled against the marble massage slab. “I know you’re touchy about letting your father help you—though I don’t see why; if he were my father I’d have begged a prefecture by now—but if you won’t ask him for a transfer to the front in Germania, get one for me.”