Mistress of Rome (41 page)

“Do you believe Lady Flavia?”

“I don’t know!” Raking his hands through his hair. “He’s my friend! Gods, whatever Lady Flavia says about him, I can’t
see
it. I just see him, pouring me wine and asking me questions about the army and—and joking about lazy legionnaires and incompetent governors. But as soon as I make up my mind to forget it, I think about the way Thea weaves when she comes out of his rooms, like she’s drunk only she never drinks as much as that—and I start to wonder all over again.”

“So what will you do?” The words were quiet drops of water into a pond, spreading ripples through the room.

“I don’t know.” He let out a ragged sigh. “I can’t do nothing. Not now that Lady Flavia’s waved it in front of me. But what proof do I have? Whose word stands up against the Emperor’s? Thea’s a slave. Julia’s dead. Flavia’s hated him since her sister’s death; she already goes against him in her little child-rescuing business—”

Justina looked inquiring.

“Lady Flavia saves children from the Colosseum and the prisons,” Paulinus explained tiredly. “Jews, Christians, other heretics; she’s been doing it for years. She bribes the guards to let them out of the cells, brings them back to her villa as slaves, and finds them families among friends and tenants. The Emperor says let it be since it keeps her busy and who cares if a few children escape the lions?”

“He’s the one who sentences them, isn’t he?” Gently.

Silence.

Justina tilted her face toward him. “So if you doubt Lady Flavia’s word, and if Julia isn’t here to speak for herself, then whose word will you trust? Who has the best judgment of anyone you know?”

“My father.” No hesitation.

“Why not ask him? This isn’t about your stepmother, after all. It’s about politics, and people. You can ask him what’s right.”

“When I can’t even look him in the face?”

“Well, who else could you ask?”

“I could ask you.” His eyes came up, locking hungrily on hers. “Do you—do you believe in the rumors?”

She folded her hands. “Yes.”

He closed his eyes. “Then what should I do?”

“Are you asking me to be your conscience?”

“Yes, I—I am.”

“I can’t do that for you, Paulinus. No one can.”

“Advise me, then. Help me.”

“Tell me this. Of all the wrongs you’ve heard attributed to Domitian, which would you right if you could? What would you undo?”

“I’d have gone to Lady Julia and seen for myself if she was truly mad.” The words surprised him. “After a childhood of playing games in gardens, I owed her that.”

“It’s too late to help her. But it’s not too late for Thea. Help her, in Julia’s name.”

“. . . Don’t tell the Emperor about her old lover?”

“It’s a start.”

“I watched them,” Paulinus found himself saying. “All summer I watched them. Not that they met very often—two times, maybe three. They didn’t touch each other; she kept her word about that. But they were like—like a team of matched horses.”

“That’s love for you.”

“I’m not going to marry Calpurnia,” he said suddenly. “She and I, we don’t run in unison.”

“Rather unfair to her, isn’t it? You’ve been betrothed a long time.”

“She doesn’t want me. No more than I want her.” Paulinus shook his head. “No wedding. Not until I find the one who—who runs in unison with me.”

“Such things are rare.”

He looked at Justina: the narrow three-cornered face between the white wings of veil, the deep grave gaze, the pale eyebrows hinting at pale hair he’d never seen.

“I’ll wait.”

I
heard the voices dimly, outside my door. “Gods, I don’t know what to do with her.” Nessus, agitated out of his usual ebullient cheer. “Hasn’t even come out of her room since she came back from Tivoli. Came to see how she was faring, and found her like this—I couldn’t even get the knife away from her!” Voice lowering. “Can you do something?”

A soft sound.

“Of course you can. No one’s better than you at the whole soothing bit.”

I looked up through half-closed eyes to see Ganymede drop a kiss on his lover’s head just at the spot where the hair was prematurely thinning and pad into my bedchamber. Such a nice bedchamber: all gray and white with its lavish silver-veiled sleeping couch and the statues of Minerva. The statues writhed when my blood-dreams were on me.

I fought him when he tried to take the knife, and the bowl upset. Blood everywhere, splashing the mosaics, from the bowl and from my arm, which I’d cut down to the blue gaping veins. But Ganymede paid no mind to the blood or my hazy cursing, just wrenched the billowing curtain off the sleeping couch and wadded the gauzy stuff around my wrist.

“No—no, don’—”

He picked me up easily, laying me on the couch. As soon as he pulled back I ripped the bandaging away from my wrist, clawing at the slit veins. He pinned my hand and wound my wrist in gauze again. The white was already checkered in scarlet.

“No—” I battered at his hands, weeping. “Let it go—let it go this time—’s the only way they’ll leave; they’ll never get out if I’m alive, just pull it
off
—” I gave a tremendous tug, and Ganymede pinioned me against his chest with both arms, crooning wordlessly.

“I can’t stand it anymore—four years, four years, Julia stood eight and I don’t know how—can’t take another year, not one—toys and games—no more games—he’ll see, Arius will see, he’s not stupid; he’ll see and that’ll be the end of him, don’t you see that? He’ll come after the Emperor and he’ll die, he’ll die again and I—can’t—take—it!”

I don’t know if Ganymede could understand me through the sobs. He rocked me back and forth.

“And Vix, Vix will find out, too; it’s a miracle I’ve fooled him this long; he’ll find out and he’ll be ashamed of me—and he should be, I’m a coward—oh, God, Arius will hate me when he finds out—”

The words went off into a howl, muffled against Ganymede’s chest. He smoothed my hair; checked my wrist. I could already feel the blood drying.

“You know why he’ll hate me?” Gasping. “Not because Domitian made me a whore; because he made me weak. Just four years and he’s cut out my backbone. Four years of his toys and his games and his questions and his eye around my neck, and he’s ruined me. Can’t trust a man anymore, even Arius—when I would have put my life in his hands in a heartbeat once—can’t bear to touch him, when I used to throw myself on him like a dog on a bone. Domitian’s won, hasn’t he? He’s taken my lover away—didn’t even know he was doing it; just a little bonus for him! All I’m good for anymore is closing my eyes and telling him I’m not afraid, and even that’s a lie!”

Ganymede cradled me in the curve of his arm, humming low in his throat.

“Let me die. Oh God, let me die before Arius finds out what a worm I am. Let me die.”

I shuddered in Ganymede’s arms, strangling a little guttural sound in my throat, and he pulled me down into the cushions, tucking the coverlets up around us both. He shooed away my curious slaves and folded himself around me, holding me softly, and I knew he would be there all night. Dimly I hoped that Nessus would understand—but of course he would. He loved Ganymede, and what’s more, he trusted him. I had no knowledge of love anymore, but I remembered something about trust.

A
man?” “Yes, Domina. That’s what she said.” My maid fixed her eyes nervously on the tiles.

“So what is it this friend of yours saw, exactly? Tell me everything.”

“My friend—she goes in at dawn to get the sheets off Lady Athena’s bed, when Lady Athena’s with the Emperor. But she’s not this morning, she’s sound asleep in her own bed and there’s a man with her.”

“Hmm.” I tapped my lacquered scarlet nails against each other. “Who was he?”

“Just a slave, Domina. Ganymede, his name is. Her body slave. All folded up around Lady Athena. S’what my friend says, anyway.”

“Well!” I made a note to find out more about this Ganymede. “You’ve done very nicely. Take this, and tell your friend there’s another purse for her. Anything else she can tell me, of course—”

“Yes, Domina.” My maid bowed out, already counting her coins. I sat down at my little desk, musing. A slave for a lover . . . not much to go on, really. I wished Thea had chosen someone a little more scandalworthy—say one of the Imperial cousins or even Paulinus. Bedding a slave wasn’t much of a sin; even patrician ladies frequently amused themselves with handsome slaves. Lollia Cornelia, that famous patrician hostess who was mother to Lady Flavia Domitilla, was well known to have borne two children by her body servant. But Lady Lollia’s husbands came and went, happy to let her do as she pleased . . . would the Emperor be so obliging? The Emperor who had once had some unassuming actor killed on the vaguest, most ridiculous rumor that the man was mounting his impeccable Empress?

I thought not.

Maybe Thea’s indiscretion would give good value after all. Phrasing would be everything . . .

I began, delightedly, to compose a certain letter.

 

 

 

H
EY!” Lady Flavia’s son stumbled backward, looking down at the welt across his ribs. “Not so hard.”

“And the crowds roar as fi rst blood goes to Vercingetorix the Vicious!”
Vix whooped, and he brought up his wooden sword again, circling in the practice ring of the gymnasium. Arius watched from the sidelines, chewing on a straw. Vix didn’t often spar with the two princes—“They’re too easy!” he scoffed—but the younger boy’s tutor was laid up with a fever and he’d begged a workout from Vix. Arius wondered if he might be regretting it: The boy was Vix’s age but a head smaller. A nice boy. He often sneaked meat scraps from his own plate for Arius’s dog after dinner.

“The opponent begs for mercy,”
Vix chanted, swinging two-handed.
“The first games of October, and Vercingetorix the Vicious looks ready to take his fi rst kill.”

The boy dodged, letting out a hiss of pain as the flat of Vix’s blade cracked across his shoulder. “Vix, this isn’t funny.” Arius was starting to think it wasn’t funny, either.

The young prince crumpled into the sand with a howl, leg streaming blood. “Vix, stop it! You’ve won, all right? You won!”

Arius spat out the straw in his mouth.

“The Colosseum erupts as Vercingetorix closes in for the slow kill!”
Vix flung himself on his opponent and laid the wooden blade across his throat, digging the dull edge slowly into the soft flesh.

“Vix—” Scrabbling.

“The thumbs signal for death across the stands—”
Vix pressed his fingers against the beating jugular—

And slammed into the sand as Arius knocked him loose with the side of one fist.

“He’s had enough,” said the Barbarian.

Vix blinked, as if coming out of a dream. Flavia’s son was on his knees, rasping for air. A wide shallow cut lay across his throat. “He was—he was going to kill me—”

“Go get patched up.”

Lady Flavia’s son didn’t need to be told twice. He took one look and limped off.

Arius took a deep breath and kicked Vix over onto his back.

“Hey.” Scrabbling upright. “I was just playing! I was in the Colosseum; they were all cheering me like they cheered you—”

The first blow knocked a tooth out of his head.

 

 

 

VIX
puked twice on the way back to his father’s hut. Both times Arius waited until he was finished, then picked him up again and hauled him onward.

“I’m bleeding,” Vix said through puffy lips as Arius dumped him on the packed dirt floor of the vineyard hut.

“You’ll live.” Arius took stock of the injuries he’d inflicted on his son: one side tooth lost, jaw swollen, both eyes blacked, bloody nose, ribs marked by sandal prints. He winced inside, but clamped his teeth on it.

“You killed me,” Vix rasped. “You son of a bitch, you’ve killed me.”

“You deserved it,” returned the Barbarian, tossing more wood on the fire. “Arrogant little bastard.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck
you
, boy.”

Arius stripped off his sandals and settled down with his back against the wattled clay wall. He cored an apple with his dagger, eating off the point and wondering what the hell he was going to do next. He’d gotten a beating or two from his own father as a boy, but his dimly remembered mother had been the one to follow it up with the appropriate stern but kindly words. That was a mother’s job, wasn’t it? He didn’t have the slightest idea what to say.
I wish Thea were here.

“Don’t I get any dinner?” Vix asked.

“No.”

“How about a bandage?”

“You want to be a gladiator? Sit there and bleed, and hope you get better.”

“Thanks.”

Arius flicked the apple core at the dog.

Vix dragged himself up, resting his back against the wall by his father. “I wouldn’t have hurt him.”

Arius turned over a few responses to that, but decided on silence.

“I was just playing!”

“No more lessons,” Arius said finally. “Not from me.”

“That’s not fair!”

“I won’t have a bully for a son.”

“You weren’t even around the first ten years,” Vix snarled.

“I’m around now, and I don’t teach bullies how to fight.”

Vix looked sullen.

“Just tell me something.” Arius rotated the knife blade, looking at the fire. “Do you hear a voice in your head, when you fight? A little black voice?”

Vix looked startled. Arius looked at him, searching for words, but found none. He was no good with words. They both looked away, stretching their legs toward the fire, and Vix groaned as a joint popped. “I hate you.”

“Likewise.”

“I don’t suppose Lady Flavia’ll take me to Rome with her, now.”