Mistress of Rome (13 page)

He sparred the next afternoon with the trainer, then sat back to watch the beginners hack and slash at each other. “Keep your feet planted,” he called out to an Oriental boy with a trident. “Here, let me show you—” and found himself drilling them, as his brothers had drilled him. As he would drill his sons someday, his and Thea’s.

“Barbarian,” one of Gallus’s pretty slave boys piped from the shade. “Your lady’s here.”

Arius sent the practice sword thudding point-down into the sand and swung into the corridor. He pushed open the door to his little cell, grinned to see her standing at the narrow window slit with her hood still drawn up over her face. “Thea, are you—”

He stopped.

“So sorry,” said Lepida Pollia, turning and pushing the hood off her high-piled black hair. “Thea couldn’t come.”

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?”

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

E
VEN 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.”