Emperor: The Death of Kings E#2 (9 page)

Antonidus watched her writhe in worry and fear and wanted to slap her. She was beautiful enough for it to be obvious why she had been summoned, though he wondered how Sulla could have been aroused by a body still loose from birth.

He wondered if her father had been behind the murder, and almost cursed as he realized there was yet another name to add to the list of enemies. His informants had told him Cinna was on business in the north of Italy, but assassins could have been sent from there. He stood suddenly. He prided himself on his ability to spot a liar, but she was either witless or knew nothing.

“Don’t travel. Where will you be if I need to bring you back here?”

Cornelia thought for a moment, fighting the sudden elation. She was going to be released! Should she return to the town house or travel back to Julius’s family estate?

Clodia was probably still there, she thought.

“I will be outside the city at the house where I was sought before.”

Antonidus nodded, his thoughts already on the problems he faced.

“I am sorry for the tragedy,” she forced herself to say.

“Those responsible will suffer greatly,” he said, his voice hard. Again, she felt the intensity of his interest in her, making her own expression seem false under his scrutiny.

After a moment more, he stood and walked away across the marble floor. The baby awoke and began to whimper to be fed. Alone and deprived of a nurse, Cornelia bared her breast to the child’s mouth and tried not to cry.

  CHAPTER
7
  

T
ubruk awoke, cramped and stiff with cold in the darkness of the slave house. He could hear other bodies move around him, but there was no sign of dawn in the chain room where they slept and were made ready for travel.

From the first hours with Fercus, working out the details, it was this part that he had barely allowed himself to consider. It seemed a small worry with the possibility of torture and death to come if the attempt on Sulla’s life had failed, or if he was caught escaping. There were so many ways for him to suffer a disaster that the night and day he would spend as a slave had been pushed to the back of his mind, almost forgotten.

He looked around him, his eyes making out shapes even in the dark. He could feel the weight of the metal cuffs holding his hands to the smooth chain that clinked at the slightest movement. He tried not to remember what it had been like the first time, but his memory brought back those nights and days and years until they clustered and murmured within him and it was hard not to cry out. Some of the chained men wept softly, and Tubruk had never heard a more mournful sound.

They could have been taken from distant lands, or had slavery forced upon them for crime or debt. There were a hundred ways, but to be born to it was worse than all the rest, he knew. As small children, they could run and play in happy ignorance until they were old enough to understand they had no future but to be sold.

Tubruk breathed in the smells of a stable: oil and straw, sweat and leather, clean human animals who owned nothing and were owned themselves. He pulled himself upright against the weight of the chains. The other slaves thought he was one of them, guilty of something to have been beaten so badly. The guard had marked him as a troublemaker for the same reason. Only Fercus knew he was free.

The thought brought no comfort. It was not enough to tell himself that he was just a short journey from the estate and freedom. If you are thought a slave and if you are chained in darkness, unable even to rise, where then is precious liberty? If a free man is bound to a slave coffle, he is a slave, and Tubruk felt the old nameless fear he had felt in the same room decades before. To eat, sleep, stand, and die at another’s whim—he had returned to that, and all his years of pride in winning his way to freedom seemed ashes.

“Such a fragile thing,” he said, just to hear his voice aloud, and the man next to him grunted awake, almost pulling Tubruk over as he struggled up. Tubruk looked away, thankful for the darkness. He did not want the light to come through the high windows to reveal their faces. They were heading for short, brutal lives in fields, working until they fell and could not rise. And they were like him. Perhaps one or two of the men in this room would be picked out for their strength or speed and trained for the circus. Instead of ending their lives as crippled water carriers or taken by disease, they would bleed away their futures into the sand. One or two might have children of their own and see them taken for sale as soon as they had their growth.

The light came slowly, despite him, but the chained slaves were still, listless in their confinement. For many, the only sign of wakefulness was a slight noise of the chain as they stirred. With the light came food and they waited patiently.

Tubruk reached to his face and winced as he gauged the swelling from Fercus’s blows the night before. The guard’s surprise had been obvious when Tubruk was brought in. Fercus had never been a cruel man and the guard knew Tubruk must have insulted him grievously to have such an obvious beating on the very night before being delivered to his new owners.

No questions had been asked, of course. Even though the slaves might pass only a few days in the house while Fercus took his profit, he owned them as utterly as the chair he sat in or the clothes he wore.

They were given wooden bowls filled with a slop of cooked vegetables and bread, and Tubruk was digging his fingers into his when the door opened again and three soldiers entered with Fercus. Tubruk kept his face down with the others, not daring to meet an eye, even by accident. A murmur of interest swept the room, but Tubruk did not add to it. He guessed why they were there and his belly seemed cold with tension. They would have spoken to all Sulla’s kitchen staff by now and found that one called Dalcius was missing. Fercus had said he would be examined at the gates of the city before leaving, but had not expected them to be so thorough as to search his slave rooms even before setting off.

In the gray light of morning, Tubruk felt he would be spotted immediately, but the soldiers moved without hurry amongst the slaves as they ate, clearly intending to be thorough with the task they had been given. As well they might be, Tubruk thought sourly. If they missed him here and then he was identified at the gate, they would be severely punished. He wondered if Sulla had eaten the poison, and knew that he might not be sure for days or even weeks, if the Senate chose to delay the news. The people of Rome hardly ever saw the Dictator except from a distance over a crowd. They would continue with their lives unknowing, and if Sulla survived they might never learn of the attempt at all.

A rough hand reached under his chin as he chewed his food slowly. Tubruk allowed his head to be raised and found himself looking into the hard eyes of a young legionary. He swallowed the mouthful and tried to look unconcerned.

The soldier whistled softly. “This one’s had a kicking,” he said softly.

Tubruk blinked through his swollen eyes, nervously.

“He insulted my wife, officer,” Fercus said. “I administered the punishment myself.”

“Did you now?” the legionary continued.

Tubruk felt his heart pump powerfully in him as he looked away, remembering too late that he had been meeting the gaze where he should not.

“I’d have ripped his stomach out if he insulted mine,” the legionary said, letting Tubruk’s chin fall.

“And lose my profit?” Fercus replied quickly.

The officer sneered and spat one word: “Merchants.”

He moved on to the next with Fercus, and Tubruk cleaned his bowl, gripping it hard to hide hands that shook with anger. Minutes later, the soldiers were gone and the guards entered to kick them to their feet, ready to be fastened into the cart that would carry them out of Rome and to their new homes and lives.

*      *      *

Julius pressed his head up to the bars of the little cell below the trireme deck, closing his left eye to see what was going on more clearly. With it open, the blur brought on his headaches and he wanted to delay that as long as possible each day. He pulled a deep breath into his lungs and turned back to the others.

“Definitely a port. Warm air, and I can smell fruit or spices. I’d say Africa.”

After a month in the cramped semidarkness, the words caused a stir of interest in the Romans, who sat or lay against the wooden sides of their prison. He looked at them and sighed before shuffling back to his place, levering himself down carefully to avoid putting weight on the splinted arm.

The month had been hard on all of them. Denied razors and water to wash with, the usually fastidious soldiers were a ragged crew, filthy and dark-bearded. The bucket they had been given as their toilet was filled to overflowing and buzzed with flies. It had a corner to itself, but excrement had slimed the floor around it and they had no cloths to wipe themselves. In the heat of the day, the air had the stench of disease and two of the men had developed fevers that Cabera could barely control.

The old healer did what he could for them, but he was searched thoroughly every time he brought their food or tended their sick. The pirates still kept him busy with their own ailments, and Cabera said it was clear they had not had a healer on board for years.

Julius felt a headache beginning and stifled a groan. Ever since recovering consciousness the pains had been with him, sapping at his will and strength and making him snap at the others. They were all irritable and what discipline they had once had was being eroded in the darkness day by day, with Gaditicus having to step in more than once to stop blows as tempers frayed.

With his eyes closed, the headache remained quiescent, but Cabera had told him he must not stop using the blurred eye and to spend hours of each day focusing on the near and far or it would be lost to him when they were finally back in the sun. He had to believe it would end. He would return to Rome and Cornelia, and the misery would become memories. It helped a little to imagine it had already happened, that he was sitting in the sun on the estate wall, with his arm around Cornelia’s slim waist and cool, clean air off the hills ruffling their hair. She would ask him how it had been in the filth and the stench of the cell, and he would make light of all of it. He wished he could remember her face more clearly.

Julius held his hand up and squinted at it, then the barred door, over and over until the headache began to throb in his left temple. He let his hand fall and closed his eyes to its wasted condition after a month on rations that kept them from death but did little more. What he wouldn’t give for a cold oyster to slip down his throat! He knew it was stupid to torture himself, but his mind produced bright visions of the shells, as real as if they hung before him and as sharp as his sight had been before the fight on
Accipiter.

He remembered nothing of that day. As far as his memory told the tale, he had gone from healthy and strong to broken and in pain in a moment, and for the first few days of consciousness he had been filled with rage at what had been taken from him. He had been blind in his left eye for long enough to believe he would never see again, and never be able to use a sword with any degree of skill.

Suetonius had told him that one-eyed men couldn’t be good fighters, and he had already found he was missing things as he reached for them, his hand swiping the air as he failed to judge the distance properly. At least that had come back with his sight, though the shimmering outlines he could see with his left eye infuriated him, making him want to rub the eye clear. His hand rose to do just that again in habit, and he caught himself, knowing it would do no good.

The headache seemed to find another channel in his brain and worked its way into it until that spot throbbed in sympathy with the first. He hoped it would stay there and not go on. The thought of what had begun happening to him was a fear he had barely started to explore, but three times now the pain had swelled into flashing lights that consumed him and he had woken with his lips bitter from yellow bile, lying in his own filth, with Gaditicus holding him down grimly. In the first fit, he had bitten his tongue badly enough that his mouth filled with blood and choked him, but now they had a strip of grimy cloth torn from his tunic to shove between his teeth as he convulsed, blind.

All the red-eyed, stinking soldiers raised their heads at the tread of steps on the narrow rungs from the deck above. Anything unusual was seized upon to break the endless boredom, and even the two who were feverish tried to see, though one fell back, exhausted.

It was the captain, who seemed almost to glow with clean skin and health compared to the men of the
Accipiter.
He was tall enough to have to duck his head as he entered the cell, accompanied by another man, who carried a sword and a dagger ready to repel a sudden attack.

If his head hadn’t been pulsing its sullen sickness, Julius might have laughed at the precaution. The Romans had lost their strength, unable to exercise. It still amazed him how fast the muscles became weak without use. Cabera had shown them how to keep themselves strong by pulling against each other, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.

The captain breathed shallowly, his eyes taking in the full slop bucket. His face was tanned and creased from years of squinting against the glare of the sea. Even his clothes carried a fresh smell in with him, and Julius ached to be out in the air and the open spaces, so powerfully that his heart hammered with the need.

“We have reached a safe port. In six months, perhaps, you will be put down some lonely night, free and paid for.” He paused to enjoy the effect of his words. Just the mention of an ending to their imprisonment had every man’s gaze fastened to him.

“The amounts to ask for, now that is a delicate problem,” he continued, his voice as pleasant as if he addressed a group of men he knew well instead of soldiers who would tear him apart with their teeth if they had the strength.

“It must not be so much that your loved ones cannot pay. We have no use for those. Yet somehow I don’t believe you will be truthful if I ask you to tell me how much your families will bear for you. Do you understand?”

“We understand you well enough,” Gaditicus said.

“It is best if we reach a compromise, I think. You will each tell me your name, rank, and wealth, and I will decide you are lying and add whatever I think would be right. It is like a game, perhaps.”

No one answered him, but silent vows were made to their gods and the hatred was clear enough in their expressions.

“Good. Let us start, then.” He pointed to Suetonius, his gaze drawn as the young man scratched at the lice that left red sores on all their bodies.

“Suetonius Prandus. I am a watch officer, the lowest rank. My family have nothing to sell,” Suetonius replied, his voice thick and hoarse with lack of use.

The captain squinted at him, weighing him up. Like the others, there was nothing to inspire dreams of wealth in his thin frame. Julius realized the captain was simply enjoying himself at their expense. Taking pleasure from having the arrogant officers of Rome reduced to bargaining with an enemy. Yet what choice did they have? If the pirate demanded too much and their families could not borrow the money, or worse, refused to, then a quick death would follow. It was hard not to play the game.

“I think, for the
lowest
rank, I will ask for two talents—five hundred in gold.”