Paulinus, escorting the prisoners on his black horse, felt haggard.
A rustle greeted the two condemned women, walking in a cluster of Praetorians to their fates. Both small and fair-haired, one in stained coral-colored silk; the other in a pristine Vestal’s robe. A ship awaited Lady Flavia, and then a small sea island; but all that awaited the Vestal Justina was an airless bricked-up chamber.
Vestal Virgins who broke their vows were buried alive.
Arm in arm the two women passed through the street. “Why?” Paulinus heard Flavia say dully. “Leaving me alive on an island for the next forty years—why is that kinder than dying?”
“Who said the gods were kind?” Julia’s voice was gentle.
“Oh, I know they aren’t kind. Your goddess or my God. My boys are dead, Julia. My eldest with Flavius, my youngest—I won’t even know when he’s executed—”
“I wouldn’t give up on him yet, Flavia.”
“No. I know Domitian. He hates children because they remind him he’s mortal—he beat his own children out of his wife before they were even born, and he’ll kill mine, too—”
“Watch the horizon.”
“W-what?”
“When you get to Pandateria. It’s a silent place—sea grass waving in the wind, and quiet stretches of sand, and a little stone hut with a small shrine. You’ll be alone, and the silence will be unbearable for a while, so listen to the sea birds cry and watch the horizon. You won’t be alone for long.”
Her voice was low and lulling. “One day soon you’ll see a sail on the edge of the ocean. A faded red sail, I think, and a bank of oars flashing each side of it. You’ll think of assassins and you’ll want to run, but you’ll stand proudly because you’re a Flavian and you’ll want to die like one. But the galley won’t land. It will lower a tiny fishing boat, without oars, and the tide will carry it to shore, and long before it lands you’ll see who sits in that boat waving his arms and calling for you. And you’ll plunge into the ocean, and you’ll reclaim your son.”
“You can’t know that.” Flavia’s voice was a whisper. “How can you know that?”
“I see things sometimes. And you have even more than that to live for, Flavia Domitilla.”
Paulinus turned. Julia had stretched out a hand, placing it on Flavia’s abdomen.
“What?”
“We’d better keep walking. I don’t want to get Paulinus in trouble.” Julia tugged her sister forward. “A daughter. You can’t feel her yet, but she’s there. She’ll be born in the summer, on Pandateria, and I rather think you will name her after me.”
Tears pricked Paulinus’s eyes. He stared blindly ahead. “But—but how do you—”
“Oh, I know. Let’s leave it at that. I know, but I’m the only one. Domitian won’t find out at all; once he’s landed you on your quiet little island he’ll forget all about you. But the Empress won’t. She’ll see you’re fed, and I imagine she’ll even smuggle you a midwife when your time comes. Maybe she’ll even find a way to get you and the children off that island someday. She used to be brave—maybe she will be again.”
“Julia—Julia, I—”
“It’s time,” said the guard at Paulinus’s side.
“No!” Flavia’s voice rose. “No, I can’t—”
“Quiet, now,” Julia said peaceably. “Safe journey, Flavia Domitilla. And if you don’t mind—do name your daughter after me.”
A breath, and Flavia was gone.
NO Vestal could be killed within Rome’s walls. A small chamber had been built near the Colline Gate, in the campus sceleratus . A place more often known as the Evil Fields. The Emperor had ordered a dais and stands erected, as if for a festival, but the crowd that gathered there was curiously hushed as they watched the Vestal Virgin pause before her burial chamber, gathering her snowy robes. Paulinus saw his father standing with Calpurnia, their hands unexpectedly linked tight. On the royal dais the Empress looked stiffer and more marble-carved than ever, the Emperor ruddy-faced and hard-eyed, Vix in his scarlet tunic frankly sick.
The Vestal put a bare foot over the lip of her grave and started down the rough steps.
“Halt!”
The tension snapped as Paulinus lunged off his horse. In half a second he was at her side, seizing her arm.
“Justina—Julia—”
“Justina. I like it better. It’s what my father always called me. Because he said I looked as grave as a judge.”
“You did—I remember.” He could hardly see her for the tears in his eyes—she was just a white blur. “Justina, I can’t let you—”
“So you’ll make off with me over one shoulder? Slay the Emperor?”
“Justina—”
“Shhhh.”
She put her hand over his mouth. He closed his eyes and leaned his mouth into her palm. For a moment it stayed there. Then it glided away under his hand like a ghost.
With his eyes still closed, he heard her bare feet against the makeshift steps. Imagined the Scythian-gold flash of her hair as she passed into the tomb. Saw in his mind’s eye the door sealing her up. Heard the dreadful shoveling of earth, the clods of ground quickly clotting the entrance to the tomb.
He opened his eyes. Domitian looked down from the dais, watching with impassive black eyes as his niece was buried alive. He smiled. “Some dice later, Prefect?” he suggested, and went back to his portfolios.
LET’S go,” Arius said quietly, putting a hand on Thea’s shoulder. “Vix looked all right,” Thea said in a thin, high voice. “He looked well. Didn’t he look well?” She paused, then added very softly, “She looked at me.”
“I saw.”
Thea didn’t say another word until Arius bolted the door of the tiny attic room in the slums that they’d managed to rent with the last of their money. Then she fell across the narrow fetid bed and lay shivering.
“Before she stepped down into that tomb—her eyes went over the crowd and she found me—like she knew I was there—”
“Thea—” Arius rested a tentative hand on her shoulder, and when she didn’t flinch, he crawled into the cold bed beside her and stroked her hair. No tears, but her body racked itself now and then in a great shudder. Arius thought of the man she had shared with Julia.
Careful. Careful. He banished the demon, burying his face in Thea’s hair. He touched her temple with his lips, meaning only to soothe her, but his mouth somehow strayed to the curve of her ear, then to the hollow behind her jaw.
She stirred and he pulled away, terrified of frightening her. But with a ragged sigh she nestled against his chest, settling her head in the hollow of his shoulder.
For a moment he lay still, holding her as if she were made of glass. Then he slid his fingers up into her hair, tipping her head back so he could kiss her. She had as cool and sweet a mouth as she’d had at fifteen.
He could feel the tension coiling back into her body, but when he pulled back she clutched him fiercely. So he kissed her again, soft as snow, then kissed the weals around her throat left by an Emperor’s collar, and then the first of the white scars left under her breast by an Emperor’s games. He pulled her tunic over her head and loved the abused, luxury-whitened body underneath; loved it and grieved over it, smoothing the scars away with his hands and his mouth, doing his rough and imprecise best to give her back the sun-browned, work-hardened, unscarred body she’d once given him.
She closed her eyes, back arching with a tentative pleasure, and he touched her with all the eloquence his voice could never find, fighting with all his strength to make her stubborn, clever brain understand how much he loved her . . . and maybe something worked, because she kissed him with half a sob as her arms closed like a vise around his neck, and through every bone in his body he felt a thrum of quiet, quiet joy. They fell asleep knotted like a tangle of warm rope, without saying a word.
THE Vestal Virgins gathered up the bloodied veil and laid it on their altar.
PART FIVE
JULIA
In the l
ast temple
It is a small tomb, this place beneath the earth. Small enough to touch all four walls without stirring from my stool. There is a candle, guttering low because candles need air to breathe as much as people, and the air in this earth chamber is growing short.
I sit in the flickering dark, and smile.
Vesta, I thank you. For so many things, I thank you. I thank you for allowing me to serve you. I thank you for the man who loved me. I thank you for the courage to save my sister. I thank you for the gift you gave her son.
I thank you for a life that has not been wasted.
I stretch forward, and blow out the candle.
Vesta, goddess of hearth and home . . .
Is that You?
I did not know You would be so beautiful.
Thirty
LEPIDA
MARVELOUS,” I said lazily. “What is it?” “The juice from some flower or other,” said my Imperial lover. He took the goblet from my limp hand, excitement coming in blank flickers across his eyes.
Who would have thought that a flower crushed into old Falernian could produce this delightful torpor? I closed my eyes, letting the Emperor labor over my passive body. He had rather peculiar tastes, but nothing one couldn’t get used to. Nothing one couldn’t even grow to be excited by.
To be the mistress of the Emperor . . . that was exciting enough!
Oh, these last three months were everything I had ever dreamed of. The applause. The power. People bowing when I paraded past. People begging me to drop just one word in the Emperor’s ear. Power a thousand times magnified. I was the mistress of Rome now!
As for Domitian himself . . . well, I didn’t see what all the dark rumors were about. He was a man. Odd-tempered, mercurial, but still a man. I’d known how to handle men since I was fourteen. Emperor or no, I never let him be too sure of me. Sometimes when the Imperial freedman knocked on my door I told him I was “out.” Sometimes I hinted at rendezvous with unnamed men. Sometimes I threw myself adoringly at his feet, sometimes I just smiled remotely. Just to keep him interested.
“Cover yourself.” Finishing, he pulled away. “You look like a whore.”
He was already reaching for his folders, his tablets and slates. I lifted a languid arm and draped my body with a fold of silk. “By the way”—casually—“you really must do something about that astrologer of yours. He’s abominably rude. Three times I’ve asked him to draw up my horoscope, and he ignores me.”
“He sees the future as clearly as the rest of us see the past.” My Imperial lover never looked up from his work. “Eyes like that are worth all the gold in Egypt.”
“Very rude eyes. He’s always glaring at me.”
“Then look the other way.”
“You’re in a temper tonight, Lord and God.” I rolled over, propping my chin on my hand and letting my hair fall in a wave over my eye. “So you keep the astrologer for his precious eyes. Why do you keep Athena’s beastly brat of a son?”
That, of course, was what I really wanted to know.
“Do you really want a reminder of her underfoot everywhere you go?” I persisted when an Imperial silence answered me.
He turned a slate over, working rapid figures on the back.
“Lord and God?” I dandled my fingers along his wrist.
He jerked his wrist away. “Go home. And send in my secretaries.”
Crossly I slid off the bed, tugging my gown over my head with fingers still sluggish from the drug. I stalked out with my most enticing sway of hips, but he never called me back. Well, he was prone to odd little moods. More of them than usual, since the rebellious Vestal’s execution . . . but never mind that. Next time I’d make him forget all about it.
“Watch where you’re stepping,” said a voice at my feet.
I jumped. In the marble corridor outside the Emperor’s apartments, Thea’s son sat cross-legged on the mosaics. He rolled a pair of grubby dice in one hard palm, and he cocked his head back up at me. “Roll?” he suggested.
From the corner of my eye I saw the usual hovering freedmen and courtiers, pricking their ears at the sight of the Emperor’s two favorites. “Why not?” I said sweetly, taking the dice and dropping them as fast as possible. No doubt they were crawling with street-urchin diseases.
He whistled, looking at the dice. “Bad luck, Lady Lepida.”
“What would you know about luck?”
“I’ve got my mother’s luck,” he shrugged. “All Jews are born lucky, or we wouldn’t any of us still be alive.”
“But what about your father? Didn’t you inherit half your luck from him?” I smiled. “Perhaps gladiators aren’t so lucky as Jews.”
We regarded each other. For the benefit of the audience—an Emperor’s favorites always have an audience—I patted his head. He snapped at my fingers like a dog, and I took a step back. It wouldn’t do to be careless. Not with a boy who had been fathered by a man called Barbarian.
I took a quick look back over my shoulder, and Thea’s son put two fingers in his mouth and let out a piercing whistle that made every slave, freedman, and courtier within fifty yards spin around. “Better hope your luck changes, Lady Lepida,” he shouted. “Or you’re screwed, screwed, screwed.”
One or two titters reached my ears.
MARCUS?” Calpurnia slipped through the door of his library, smiling. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“Enjoying a pretty sunset on a spring night.” He smiled. “Enjoy it with me?”
“Of course.” She took a stool. “Though the sunset’s that way, and you’re turned away from it.”
“I’m arranging a journey.” Marcus rolled some papers out of sight.
“For yourself?”
“No, not for me.” For Flavia’s son, recuperating quietly at the house in Brundisium. From Brundisium it was a short sea voyage to Pandateria, where his mother had already been delivered. The Empress had assured Marcus of secrecy.
“I’ll see Flavia and her son cared for,” the Empress had said impassively. “It was Julia’s last wish. Marcus—she could not have falsified her own death and escaped to the House of the Vestal Virgins without help. Did you . . .”
“I did.” Marcus had shrugged. “She wrote to me in Cremona, after the madness had gone. After she tried to open her stomach. I hadn’t believed her before, but I believed her then. I helped.”
Something had gleamed in the Empress’s usually impassive eyes. “Marcus,” she’d begun—
“Keep your secrets.” Calpurnia’s voice broke his thoughts. She pulled a chair beside his, turning her face toward the orange sunset. “I’ll not pry.”
“You never do. You realize, Calpurnia Sulpicia, how unusual that makes you?”
She smiled. “I sent a slave to Paulinus’s apartments at the palace—they say he hasn’t come out of his bedchamber yet, except for his work.”
“How long has he been in there?”
“Since the Vestal’s execution.”
They were silent a moment.
“Sabina has a request.” Calpurnia leaned forward to refill Marcus’s wine goblet. “She asked me to make it for her, since she thinks I can persuade you to anything. She wants to go to the games with you tomorrow.”
“The games?” Marcus blinked. “She’s too young to go to the games.”
“She said she’s been before.”
“I didn’t allow her to watch. She was seven years old. She sat with her back to the carnage, playing with the slaves. That is, until the Emperor began tossing people into the arena.”
“Well, it must have made an impression on her because she wants to go back. She says it will be interesting. She also says Paulinus will be there, and she never gets to see Paulinus anymore.” Calpurnia smiled. “She means it. She looked just like you at the last Senate debate when you were determined to get the tenements in the south quarter shored up before they collapsed, and Publius’s claque was objecting.”
“I didn’t know you came to watch the Senate debat
es,” Marcus said mildly.
Calpurnia flushed. “I sit at the back.”
“I see.” He smiled, rotating a pen between his fingers. “You think I should take Sabina to the games, then?”
“You’re asking for my opinion?”
“I’ve come to value it.”
Calpurnia looked down, fussing with the folds of her dress, but Marcus saw her smile. “Take her long enough to visit with Paulinus—perhaps she can get a smile out of him. Then we can take her home before the blood starts to flow.”
“No. If she goes, she stays for it all. A Norbanus doesn’t cover his eyes at the unpleasant. Or her eyes.”
“Heavens, how grim. I suppose I’ll have to stay for it all, too.”
“You’ll go?”
“I’ll go, and you owe me for it. I hate the games.”
“What would I do without you, Calpurnia?”
She smoothed a tendril of hair behind her ear. “Dinner will be ready in a quarter of an hour. Pheasant and onions, in sweet pepper sauce.”
“Have you been browbeating the cook again?”
“She’s terrible. I’m going to buy you a new cook.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one to buy you a wedding present?”
“I’m not married yet, Marcus Norbanus.”
THEA
IT’S his birthday today.” I propped my chin on my hand. “The ides of June. He’s thirteen.”
“I was going to give him a sword.” Arius’s voice muffled briefly as he pulled his tunic over his head.
“Encouraging the dreams of gladiatorial glory, Barbarian?” I teased.
Arius’s head emerged. “Thea, our son wants to be a gladiator. He’s an idiot.”
“Yes,” I agreed, scratching the ears of the dog curled on my knee. “He is an idiot. Must come from his father’s side of the family.”