Daughters of Rome (33 page)

The door banged as Densus came in. Cornelia turned, still holding the little statues. “You
live
here.”

“Shocked, Lady?” He rummaged under the thin mattress.

“. . . No.”

“I throw out the customers if they get rough on the girls. In return, the madam lets me have the room.” He retrieved his short
gladius
from under the mattress.

“You kept that?”

“I earned it. Twelve years in the Praetorian Guards.” He scowled at the edge, rummaged under the mattress again, and came up with a whetstone.

She gestured at the little room around them. “You don’t decorate much, do you?” Striving for a little lightness.

“Keep anything here but the household gods and the bed, and it’ll get stolen.” He rasped the whetstone down the short blade. “The whores lift anything that isn’t nailed down.”

Cornelia sat on the rickety little stool. “Maybe you shouldn’t take me home. My family knows what you look like, and the slaves—someone might turn you in.”

“
You
could turn me in, Lady.” He tossed the whetstone aside.

“I won’t. And even if I did, I don’t think anyone would listen to me. I’m very unpopular with the Vitellians right now. At least some of them.”

“Are you a traitor too?” He turned his back on her, rummaging for his cloak.

“Maybe. Commander Valens wants me to marry one of his officers, you see.”

“That’s not treason.”

“It might be if you tell him to go to Hades.” Cornelia smiled, feeling very light inside somehow. “Maybe I’ll be arrested when I go home.”

“You can’t be arrested for refusing a marriage proposal, Lady.”

“You can now.” She shrugged. “You can be arrested for anything the Vitellians don’t like. So maybe you’d better steer clear.”

“I’m not giving your earrings back either way, so I might as well take you.” Densus turned, a rough brown cloak over one arm. “Let’s go.”

Cornelia looked up at him from the stool. “My sister was at Bedriacum. She said you fought very bravely.”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”

“They never should have accused you of treason.” Rising. “I know you didn’t sell Galba and Piso—”

“Generous of you, Lady.” His chestnut eyes stared into hers. “Am I supposed to thank you for that?”

“I’m just trying to—”

“You’re glad I was booted out of the guard, aren’t you? You think I deserved it. I didn’t save Senator Piso, did I, so I’m not worthy to be a Praetorian.”

“No.” She fell back a step under his rage.

“You think I’ll bow and feel grateful, because you’re telling me I’m not a traitor? Think I’ll apologize again for getting your precious husband killed?” Densus hurled his cloak down. “Piss on that, Lady. I did my best to save him. It wasn’t good enough, but I did my best. I’m
done
apologizing.”

He turned away, his breath coming harsh and fast in the little room. Cornelia saw his hand opening and closing on the hilt of the
gladius
and addressed the tense knotted back. “I never thought you should have been thrown out of the Praetorians. You’re the best of them. Better than the Prefects who give you your orders—”

“The ones you let suck on your neck behind closed curtains?” Densus swung around again, jaw clamped. “Not much of a compliment.”

“I wanted information,” she said miserably. “The Prefect gave me information, and I passed it on to the Vitellians. I just wanted Otho dead—”

“Well, it worked. You like the results?” Densus flung the sheathed
gladius
across the room. It crashed into the little niche, and the figurines of Mars and Minerva tumbled over with a tinny rattle. “All you meddling patrician bitches, playing with lives—”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You never do. You never do.” Densus dropped down on the narrow bed, clasping his square hands between his knees. His fingers were shaking. “Get out, Lady. Find your own bloody way home.”

Cornelia crossed the room, all of two steps. She opened her mouth, but her mind had never been so blank, wiped clean by his rage. She just stood awkwardly before him, wishing she knew what to do. She could only see the top of his head, dropped level to his heaving shoulders.

“Go home,” Densus repeated thickly. “Marry some Vitellian thug and lie there thinking about your duty while he’s mounting you. You patricians are all so good at doing your duty.”

“Not always.” Cornelia reached out and touched his cheek. He flinched, but she stepped closer, pulling his head against her waist. His arms closed around her, bruisingly hard, and Cornelia ran her fingers through his curly hair as his shoulders heaved. Through the thin door panels she could hear the moans of a woman down the hall, a man’s grunting.
A whorehouse in the slums, a fetid summer day, an accused traitor
, she thought distantly.
There are no poems that begin like this.

Cornelia kissed him first, leaning down to take his face between her hands. He looked up at her, startled, and all she could do was shake her head silently and press her lips to his again. His rough jaw scratched her skin as he rose, sinking his hands into her hair. He pulled the dress off her shoulders, burying his face in her breasts, and she sank down on the narrow bed as she helped tug the tunic over his head.
So strange
, she thought remotely as she pulled him down beside her, rubbing her cheek against his rough shoulder. The only other man’s body she’d ever known was Piso’s. Densus was broader, browner, harder. So different from Piso’s lean height. Cornelia tried to close her eyes against the strangeness of it, but Densus cradled her face between his hands. “No,” he said, “no,” and he kissed her eyes open as he moved inside her, so slowly. She clutched him, crying out, and Piso disappeared.

 

T
HEY
lay on the narrow bed, hands clasped between them on the ragged pillow. The room was stifling. He ran a hand slowly over the curve of her hip, sheened with sweat. “Cornelia,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.” His face was serious, drained of rage, the chestnut eyes steady over their linked hands. “Weeks I spent following you around on guard duty, dreaming about calling you by name. Cornelia.”

“Drusus.” She said his name shyly. They had made love half the afternoon in the ferocious heat, and only now did she feel shy.

S
HE
said
what
?”

Marcella mimicked Diana’s flat matter-of-fact voice. “ ‘Get yourself a whore. I’ll never marry a Blues fan.’ ”

Cornelia winced. “That sounds like her. Which one of Vitellius’s officers was it?”

“The same German thug who proposed to you.” Marcella smiled. “Two rejections in a row! I’ll leave you to imagine the scene that ensued. Tullia said—”

Marcella lifted her feather fan to hide their whispering. The Theatre of Marcellus was full for once with the Emperor in attendance in his box rather than at the races, and the air was swelteringly close. The actors sweated under their masks and paint on stage as they declaimed through the lines of some turgid drama, and fans waved listlessly through the packed tiers of the audience—feather for the patricians, paper for the plebs below. No one from the Emperor on down appeared to be paying much attention to the play.

Marcella kept whispering. “At least now we know—Vitellius doesn’t want Diana for himself, or his officers wouldn’t dare set their caps at her. I think that’s what maddened Tullia the most. She had such a touching little dream of Vitellius divorcing that meek wife of his and making Diana Empress instead.” Marcella glanced at the Emperor, ruddy-faced and roaring with laughter in the Imperial box just one row away, surrounded by his officers. Properly men and women sat apart at the theater, but Diana had the stool at his feet as she always did these days, and Vitellius’s heavy drink-reddened face was tilted down toward the little blond head. “I could have told Tullia he wasn’t interested in Diana that way. He might pat her hips now and then when he’s drunk—but since when is a man like Vitellius really interested in anything besides eating, throwing up, and watching the Blues win?” Marcella cast her eyes up to the heavens. “And that’s our Emperor.”

Cornelia just nodded absently, and Marcella suppressed a sigh. She’d dragged her sister out to the theater that afternoon, hoping to give her a treat—Gaius and Tullia were still barely speaking to her, after all—and all Cornelia could do was twitch in her seat, fingers beating a restless tattoo on the ivory handle of her fan. It wasn’t like her, but everyone in Rome seemed overheated and distracted these days. Summer rolled toward September, scorching hot, bringing swirls of dust on the slightest breeze. Everyone groaned about the heat, spent hours in the
natatio
pools of the bathhouses, bemoaned their cool river villas in Toscana or Tivoli.

Everyone but me.
Marcella felt cool as ice in all the heat, and she wouldn’t have left this boiling, bubbling, scheming city for all the gold in Egypt.

Her eyes drifted speculatively over to Vitellius again. She could hear his bull voice clearly over the declaiming of the actors—and even if he’d whispered, she thought she would have heard him.
My ears can pick up every whisper in Rome
, she sometimes thought.

“—those chestnut stallions of yours, the ones named after winds,” Vitellius was saying down to the little blond head at his side. “You’re afraid to stack them against my Blues!”

“Caesar,” Diana shot back, “your Blues are spavined cow-hocked mules compared to my Anemoi.” The other guests in the Imperial box exchanged glances—Marcella knew they couldn’t believe how freely Diana spoke her mind to the ruler of Rome. But Vitellius had spent a good many years as governor in rough places like Germania and Africa: he liked plain speaking, and he liked Diana. He roared laughter, and his friends were quick to laugh with him.

“You might think he’d be more worried,” Marcella mused aloud. “What with the news from Judaea . . .”

Cornelia blinked, drawn out of her reverie again. “Oh, that.”

“Aren’t you even
interested
that Vespasian’s been proclaimed Emperor?” Marcella didn’t understand her sister. What an exciting time they were all living through, and all Cornelia could do was mope around taking endless trips to the bathhouse! “Surely you realize this means war.”

Cornelia pushed a strand of hair behind her ears. “We’ve had war all year.”

“But Vespasian has the eastern legions! The Tenth, the Fourth, the Twelfth, and the Fifteenth—” Marcella ticked them off with satisfaction. “He’ll march on Rome, and Vitellius will have to muster an army to beat him. And I wonder . . .” She trailed off, thoughtful.

“I ever tell you how I got this limp, girl?” Up in the Imperial box, Vitellius heaved his bulk out of his carved chair.

“A battle in Africa, wasn’t it?” Diana took his arm as he swayed. “Gods’ wheels, you’re drunk. Lean on me, Caesar.”

“I tell everyone it was a battle. But the truth? A horse kicked me.” Vitellius grinned down at Diana. “Don’t tell.”

“See this, Caesar?” Diana lifted the hem of her red silk dress, showing an ankle Marcella couldn’t see. “I told my family I tripped getting out of a litter, but really—” She stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear.

“Really?” A laugh. “What a devil you are.”

“Don’t tell, Caesar?”

“Not if you won’t.” He ruffled her hair. “What a pair of frauds we are, eh?”

His smile had a bluff kind of charm, Marcella conceded. Despite his grosser habits, Vitellius had a certain direct appeal: he laughed when he was amused, ate when he was hungry, drank when he was thirsty, and rarely got angry at anyone. Refreshing after so many subtle politicians with wheels spinning in their heads and plots behind their backs—but would such easy simplicity be enough to hold the loyalty of his generals?
They’re a shifty bunch.
If more legions went over to Vespasian, the rats might just start wondering which ship was about to sink . . .

The play halted momentarily as the Emperor left the box to go relieve himself, and a buzz of half hearted overheated gossip rose. “Where’s Lollia?” Diana was asking Fabius, flopping back onto her stool. “She likes the theater.”

“The bitch says the heat’s giving her headaches,” Lollia’s husband complained.

“You’re very stupid to treat her so badly,” Diana told Fabius calmly. “But ambitious little toads like you are usually stupid.”

Fabius looked at Diana with loathing. “You won’t always be the Emperor’s pet, girl.”

“Poor Lollia,” Cornelia said, overhearing. “She’s been crying all week, since Fabius flogged her slave. And I’m not sure he doesn’t beat Lollia too—she’s got marks she keeps trying to cover up with powder and bracelets, and she’s avoiding her grandfather. I suppose she doesn’t want him to see the bruises. He didn’t want the marriage to happen in the first place, and he’ll just be miserable he can’t do anything about it now.”