Mistress of Rome (55 page)

His voice trembled a moment, and Paulinus saw Thea’s eyes flare. She took a step forward, running a hand along the end of the sleeping couch.

“What do you want with Vix, anyway?” she cajoled. “What use is he to you? You don’t like children—and as children go, he’s appalling.”

“True.” Domitian turned. “Is he mine?”

She blinked. “You know he isn’t. He’s too old to be yours.”

“I know.” Domitian looked up at the ceiling, reflective. “I suppose it’s just as well. A God cannot have sons—Jupiter himself murdered his child by Metis when he discovered that it would grow to be greater than he. But Vix . . .”

“What?”

Domitian shrugged. “He amuses me.”

“I used to amuse you.” Thea took another step forward. “Didn’t I?”

He reached up toward her cheek again. But this time he wound her hair around his hand and forced her to her knees.

“Fear me?” he said, and for the first time Paulinus saw terror in his face. “You fear me, Athena? Say it. Please say it. Please—”

Then she said it.

“Yes.”

A
short ride to the palace took me nearly an hour. A cart had turned over on some street or other; the wagons and litters were jammed for blocks. I had another time of it persuading the Praetorian to let me in. Only the assurance that I had information about a conspiracy—plus a good number of sesterces—bought me entry. Quite a changed place, with no messengers or courtiers or hangers-on scurrying about the lavish halls in their finest silks and perfumes. Only bunches of nervous-looking slaves, and absolutely hordes of guards.

“Lady Lepida!” Vix, the young darling of the Colosseum, caught my elbow impudently. “I’ve been looking for you—me and Prefect Paulinus.”

“You were expecting me?”

“We had a warning you’d come. I’ll take you to the Emperor. He’s gone mad; only you can calm him down.”

I smiled, letting him take my arm as I imagined his head stuck on a spear right beside his father’s. It was such a pretty picture that I didn’t notice when he led me down the wrong corridor. An empty slave’s passageway, not an Imperial hall.

“This isn’t—”

He caught my elbows behind me and popped my knees out with an expert jerk. Even before I hit the mosaics, he had his foot planted firmly between my shoulder blades.

He doubled my arms up behind my back and began looping them with coils of cord pulled out of his sleeve.

I twisted and writhed underneath him, scratching at his hands. He shifted out of reach, his knee sinking into my back like lead. Impossible. Absurd. I was a grown woman; he was a boy of thirteen. Ridiculous that he should—get—the upper hand—this way—impossible—

I drew breath to scream, and he slapped a rag into my mouth.

This couldn’t be happening. He was a
child
.

He was tying up my ankles.

I kicked and struggled. I screamed curses through the gag. He took me by the feet and dragged me along the hall like a sack of potatoes. Dragged me to a little door in the wall that looked like a closet. It couldn’t be a closet.

It was a closet.

He calmly put me in it. I doubled my feet up to kick him, but he jumped to one side and stuffed my knees through.

No. No. Lepida Pollia, soon to be Empress and Augusta of all Rome—stuffed into a broom closet by a thug of a child?

The door clicked shut. He stood on the other side, breathing a trifle heavily, and I waited for mockery. But like his father, he wasted no words. Just turned away and left me there, doubled up in the dark. Dimly I heard his voice farther down the hall.

“That you, Nessus? Look, do something for me—”

“The Emperor wants you.” The astrologer’s vague tones. “Now.”

Vix cursed. “Look, find Prefect Norbanus for me and tell him Lady Lepida’s been taken care of. All right?”

“What do you mean?” The astrologer’s voice held a faint question.

“None of your business. Just tell him she’s out of the way. And, um. Don’t go looking in any closets.”

Retreating footsteps—and then I was alone.

T
HE look in my son’s eyes appalled me as the guards shoved him through the door, but for a moment all I could do was drink in the sight of him. Taller, almost as tall as me, with new muscle in his right arm where he’d practiced with a shield. Oh, Vix—

“Spring for my throat, Young Barbarian,” said the Emperor, “and she dies.”

I could feel Domitian grinning over my head. His eyes sparkled, color rose high in his cheeks, and his mouth parted in that Flavian smile that could charm the gods. His hand rested casually on the stem of my neck, and my hair coiled over his feet where I crouched on the floor.

“Say hello to your son, Athena,” said the Emperor, stroking my throat.

“Hello, Vix.” Through the curtain of my hair I saw the shock jagging away from his face, swiftly replaced by terror.

“Say hello, Vercingetorix. Like a good boy.”

“You—” Vix sounded as if he’d eaten arena sand. “You said you’d let her alone.”

“Oh, but she came to me. To beg for your life, of course. Which must have taken a great deal of courage because—tell him why, Athena.”

I pitched my voice low and unsteady. The best performance I’d ever have to give, and there wasn’t even any music. “Because I fear you.”

Domitian set his foot against my shoulder and shoved me sprawling. “Make your son believe it. Make him see.”

“All right!” I reared up on my knees, biting down hard on my tongue to bring the tears springing to my eyes. “All right, I’m terrified! Is that what you want to hear? Every time you touch me, every time you look at me—I can’t think, can’t breathe—and I hate you! Hate you—
hate you
—” I collapsed into sobs, rocking back and forth on my knees. But my eyes burned dryly against my hands.

Domitian threw his head back and laughed as if he’d just heard a good joke. I heard Vix lunge, but the Emperor just snapped his fingers, still chuckling, and two Praetorians grabbed my son at the elbows. “Aren’t you the dutiful son, Vercingetorix.”

Vix wrenched at the grip on his arms, muscles bunching like snakes under the skin—and stopped. Because I shot him a look between my splayed fingers, a look of pure iron.
Vix, you never obeyed me in your life
, I prayed.
Obey me now.

“You fear me.” Domitian petted my hair as he would have petted a dog.

“Yes, Lord and God.” Dropping my face instantly back into my hands.

“Take your hands off her!” Vix howled.

Domitian frowned. Dropping my hair, he crossed the room and belted Vix twice across the face. His fists fell like Vulcan’s hammers. “Quiet now,” he said. “I’ll get to you later—what?”

The Emperor whipped around, following the flick of Vix’s eyes, but only saw me shivering beside the sleeping couch. It had taken just a bare instant while Domitian’s back was turned and the guards struggling to hold Vix: a bare instant to flash my hand under his pillows and draw out his dagger. Another instant to flick it spinning below the couch, and then I was rocking and weeping again: a threat to no one.

Domitian crossed back to my side. “So. Where were we, Athena?”

The guards hammered at Vix to still him, and I longed to leap for the dagger. Not yet. So I crouched and cried as my son sagged bloody-nosed between two Praetorians and the Emperor pulled me onto his lap on the bed.

“Crying,” he said. “You’ve never cried easily.”

I found it quite easy now.

“Perhaps I’ll take you again, one more time—for old times’ sake, shall we say. Your son here can watch. But afterward, my dear, I don’t think I’ll bother watching you die. One dead Jewess is very much like another, after all.”

“Sir.” A double knock at the door; Paulinus’s voice. I’d never heard anything so welcome in my life. “A moment?”

“Enter.”

Paulinus gave a smart salute, meticulously keeping his eyes from me. Domitian pushed me aside and saluted back, smiling. I wondered with a mad calmness if he had orders for Paulinus’s death, too, once his own finally struck. The best friend of a god would surely not be allowed to outlast the god himself . . .

“A slave has arrived, sir,” Paulinus was saying. “He claims to have information about a conspiracy.”

“Conspiracy.” Domitian started upright. “Dear gods, what time is it?”

I spoke, muffling my voice in the corner of the couch. “A little past the sixth hour.” I raised my eyes, red-rimmed with surreptitious rubbing. “You managed to cheat death after all, Caesar. May God damn you.”

“The sixth hour?” Domitian’s eyes swung toward the vast window, where the sun still showed over the Tiber.

“The sixth.” Paulinus sounded puzzled. “I thought you’d be keeping track.”

“I was . . . distracted.” Domitian’s smile grew and broadened. “Nessus caught in a mistake at last! Him and his stars.” The Lord and God of Rome rose from the sleeping couch. “I feel young again—like I could conquer Persia. Perhaps I will. My cloak, Paulinus. I’ll dine well tonight.”

“The slave, sir?” Paulinus asked. “He says he has important information.”

Domitian hesitated, then shrugged. “Show him in.”

Paulinus dismissed the guards, and Domitian settled himself on the edge of his sleeping couch. “Enter, slave. You are—?”

“Stephanus, Lord and God.” The voice rumbled in my ears. “Former gardener to Lady Flavia Domitilla.” I trained my eyes on the carved silver arm of the sleeping couch, still weeping softly, every nerve in my body humming like a harp string. The only thing I saw of Arius was the white sling that muffled his arm.

Domitian frowned. “You have information?”

“Found papers. Didn’t look right to me.” The knotted brown hand I loved so well passed over a scroll: lists of closely written names.

“Senator Nerva?” said Domitian, reading. “Who would have thought?” He unrolled the parchment, and as I risked a glance up, I saw his eyes fell on Vix. My son, crouched forgotten in the corner where the guards had dropped him—but his head was up, and his blazing eyes fixed directly on the slave supposedly named Stephanus. The slave behind whose head the sun slanted much too high over the Tiber for twilight.

 

 

 

DOMITIAN’S
eyes flicked back and forth, panic settling in just as Arius pulled a dagger from the sling around his arm.

The Emperor screamed as the dagger plunged into his groin.

The demon howled its pleasure. Arius howled back.

He flung himself forward, shaking the false bandage off his arm, and struck again. The Emperor got an arm up and the blade sheared along the length of the bone. Blood leaped up, spraying Arius’s face. He breathed it in like Indian perfume.

In the dull reflection of the moonstone, he saw Thea grope under the bed in the tangle of silk sheets, snatching up the Emperor’s fallen dagger, half-running and half-falling across the room to throw herself over Vix. That first blow in the groin had been for her. For the weeping he’d heard as he waited outside the door. For the Emperor’s laughter.

Domitian clawed screaming for his eyes. Arius twitched his head to one side, feeling the bloody fingers skate off his cheek, and drove his fist into Domitian’s throat. The blow flung the Emperor against the silk cushions of the couch, where he scuttled backward like a spider, scrabbling for the dagger that never left its place under his pillow. Arius waited until his groping fingers had found nothing—until his eyes flew to Thea in panicked accusation.

Then he gutted Domitian like a fish.

“GUARDS!” the Emperor screamed, doubling over. “GUARDS!”

No guards. Paulinus had assigned them to the other end of the palace grounds, sent them on pointless errands, bluntly bribed them with Marcus’s gold. Arius could see Paulinus from the corner of his other eye, pressed rigid against the wall.

Pretty boy
, the demon whispered.
Forget him.

The mad black fury roared up so fast his vision slipped. Just like the early days of the Colosseum, the days when the world had been a sword and a stretch of sand and someone to kill, nightmares afterward and no Thea to sing them away. He struck again, crushing Domitian down into a bed full of blood and silk, and it wasn’t enough.

“Paulinus!” Domitian shouted. The pretty boy’s hand went to his
gladius
as if he were about to fall on Arius, and Arius tensed to fight two men at once, but Paulinus never moved. Only stood against the wall, rock still, his eyes huge.

“
Paulinus!
” Domitian looked at his closest friend with eyes swimming in blood, and Arius let him look until betrayal swam to the top and Paulinus looked away.

The Emperor howled, scrabbling, and Arius straddled Domitian without haste, dropping a knee between the Emperor’s shoulder blades. He plunged his blade into the broad back, shearing the spine through like a silk rope. The Emperor gave a quiet gasp.

He’s dying
, thought Arius remotely.
I’m killing the Emperor of Rome.

“No!” The shout broke from Paulinus as he lunged away from the wall. The blow caught Arius sideways, knocking him off the Emperor. He came up rolling, but Paulinus had dropped to one knee over the Emperor’s body, holding Arius off at dagger point. “It’s enough, for gods’ sake, let him die like a man—”

“He’s not a man!”
Arius snarled.

But Paulinus never heard him. He lifted Domitian up in frantic, loving hands. Blood poured everywhere. Paulinus was weeping.

“Caesar—Caesar, I’m sorry—
get away from him
,” he snarled at Arius, slashing out with the dagger. The blade missed Arius by an inch.

Domitian tugged the hard brown arm.

“Caesar—” Paulinus bent closer. “Sir—”

Domitian tore the dagger from Paulinus’s hand, and ripped his throat out.