Mistress of Rome (6 page)

No one could help but compare them. Belleraphon smiling and joking, Arius sour and uncomfortable. Belleraphon nibbling daintily from every dish, Arius fueling himself from whatever plate was put before him. Belleraphon lounging on the silk cushions as if born to it, Arius sitting as stiffly upright as a statue. Belleraphon the civilized and Arius the barbaric.

I drew a fold of my cloak up around my face and slipped quietly away.

 

 

 

ARIUS
was tired of the overheated chamber, tired of the too-soft cushions, tired of the constant babble, but most of all he was tired of the girl at his side.

“You’re frightfully brave, risking your life in the arena day after day.” She shifted on her couch, and one varnished nail brushed against his arm. “Are you ever afraid? I’d be terrified.”

He imagined her clamped between the jaws of a lion. “Yes,” he agreed.

“A whole word!” She tossed her head back and laughed. “What progress.”

He reached for the wine decanter.

“Don’t be cross with me.” She pouted, sliding over onto her back so he could admire the curve of her breasts under the blue silk. Beautiful breasts. Beautiful hair, too. Beautiful face. Eyes like a ferret. A burst of music from the flute players drowned him out before he could tell her to leave him the hell alone. The guests were slipping off their couches and wandering toward the gardens. Senators took the arms of women who were not their wives and made discreetly for the moonlit paths of the conservatorium, while gladiators openly grabbed slave girls and pulled them into the privacy of the night. The great Belleraphon disappeared behind a statue of Neptune with a distinguished matron of the Sulpicii.

A hot little hand descended on his. “Would you care for a stroll in the gardens?” said the girl with the ferret eyes. “Don’t worry about my father. He’s busy cutting deals with your
lanista
.” Her tongue flickered over her painted lips.

He let her drag him off the absurd couch, stopping only to seize up a flagon of wine. The soft hand with its lacquered nails tucked into his elbow, propelling him down a gravel path that curved away from the house. The smell of jasmine and roses cloyed his nose.

“So,” she smiled up at him. “Wherever did you come from? I’m mad with curiosity.”

“Nowhere, Lady.”

“Everyone’s from somewhere—”

“Isn’t that your father, Lady?” He pointed over her shoulder.

When she turned to look, he twisted his arm out of her hand and ducked into the bushes.

“Arius!”

He came up against the atrium wall and veered around the corner to the rest of the Pollio house. The lamps were unlit, the rooms dark. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw his host’s daughter still standing on the garden path, craning her neck. He ducked inside the first available doorway before she spotted him.

The bathhouse. He could see the faint glimmer of the pool. The marble felt wonderfully cool against his back as he slid down by the wall and uncorked the flagon. Now here was a place a man could get drunk in peace. Who cared if his head ached the next morning? He was going to die, anyway. He took a long swallow of wine.

A soft scrape from the far corner froze him sober. He rose noiselessly, stealing along the edge of the pool.

Another soft sound. He lunged into the dark and caught hold of a wrist. “Don’t move. Or I’ll kill you.” The demon snapped on its leash. “Who are you?”

“I’m Thea,” said a polite female voice. “Do you always start conversations this way?”

Her wrist was narrow and smooth, easily circled by his hand. He dropped it, stepped back—and realized his fingers were sticky. “You’re bleeding.”

“Yes,” the voice agreed. “Quite a lot. The blue bowl’s got a good inch on the bottom. I think I cut too deep this time.”

He wondered if she was drunk. “Who are you?”

“Thea,” she repeated. “You can’t see my hand, but it’s extended for a proper shake. The unbloodied hand, that is.”

Her narrow hand was callused across the palm: a slave’s hand. “Cut yourself?” he asked.

“Yes, I cut myself,” she returned agreeably. “I do that, rather often. My wrists look like your back.”

He started.

“It’s Arius, isn’t it? A Roman name on a Briton. ‘Thea,’ though—that’s a Greek name on a Jew. Sorry, I’ll be quiet now. I imagine you just want to sit in some dark corner and get drunk.”

He sat, propping his back against the wall, and drank off the rest of the wine in a few swallows. His eyes were used to the darkness now. He could make out a dim profile, a straight nose, a shadowy cable of hair, a wrist flexed over the bowl. She was singing something softly in an odd tongue.

“She’ma Yisroel, Adonai Aloujanou, Adonai echod.”
Her voice slid around the marble walls of the bathhouse; a warm, melodious alto. He closed his eyes as the strange music trailed off into silence.

“Arius?”

“What?”

“Are you going to lose tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Pity. I’ll have to watch. I get dragged to all the games,” she added, “and I hate them. Hate them, hate them, hate them.”

He imagined he could hear her blood sliding down the side of that blue bowl. “Yes.”

“You, too? I thought so. You’re no Belleraphon, drinking up the applause.”

So dark. It could have been the beginning of the world. “What am I, then?”

“Barbarian,” she sang softly. “Barbarian, barbarian, barbarian. Where did you come from, Barbarian?”

“Brigantia.” With fumbled amazement he heard the wine-slowed words uncoil. “In Britannia, but we call it Albion. Far to the north. Mountains by the sea.” He could still see the mountains, pressed up against the night like a dark wild song.

“Family?”

“Two brothers. My mother died young. My father . . .”

“He was a great chieftain?” she prompted.

“A smith. He believed in iron and bronze, not fighting. My brothers taught me to fight. Brought me up on stories of Vercingetorix.”

“Who?”

“Vercingetorix. A Gallic chieftain—nearly defeated Julius Caesar. Hero of my childhood.”

“How did he die?”

Arius smiled without amusement. “In the arena.”

“Oh.” There was a little silence. “What else?”

“There was—there was a Roman fort. Nearby. We paid tribute—cattle, grain, iron. My brothers, they liked to raid the Romans. They got cocky, killed a few sentries. The Romans killed them.”

The arrows, the advancing shields, the screaming men and screaming horses . . . Madoc falling beneath a circle of stabbing spears, Tar-cox trampled by a tribune on a tall horse.

“And you?”

“I was thirteen. Stupid. Made a stand over my brothers’ bodies instead of running to warn my father. Thought I was Vercingetorix the Invincible. Romans captured me, of course. My father, killed. The village, burned. The rest of us . . . sold.”

The smoke, the blood, the screams of the women. A thirteen-year-old boy grabbing up a sword too heavy for him and running at his enemies.

Stupid boy. Arius turned his eyes away from the memory.

“And then?”

He had almost forgotten Thea. “The salt mines. I was big for my age; went to haul rocks in Trinovantia. Then in Gaul. Kept making trouble, kept getting sold. Rock-carrier. That’s the Barbarian’s glorious history.”

His head was full of mist. He wanted more wine. She said nothing, and he was grateful. Hearing the quiet whisper of her breath, he glanced over. The bowl in her lap tilted, a shining disc in the dark. “Why?” he asked simply.

For a long time he thought she wouldn’t answer. Then: “Have you ever heard of Masada?”

“No.”

“It’s a fortress carved out of a cliff top in Judaea. It’s hot, dry country, baking under the sun like an iron plate. I was born there. Fifteen years ago.”

Fifteen. She sounded older.

“Masada was full of Jewish rebels. The Romans decided to smoke us out, but they couldn’t. Not until they built a ramp up to the top of the cliff, and used Jewish slaves to build it so we couldn’t hurl down our rocks and pitch. Six months’ worth of Jews built that ramp, and then they brought up the battering ram to break down the gates.”

“You remember?”

“Not much. I was too young. I remember peering over dusty stone walls to watch the little armored men swarming around like ants . . . I remember being happy. I pieced out the facts later, from rumors.”

“What happened?”

“This part—this part I remember. I remember it perfectly. A hot night. Such a hot night. Like tonight. I’ve hated hot nights ever since. My father was talking with the other men in low voices. My mother looked grave. Even my sister Judith was worried—she was fourteen, old enough to worry. I was only six. I was still playing with dolls.”

Her profile was perfectly still. “It was night when Father came back. He talked to my mother for a long time, in the bedroom with the door shut. He came out alone, and drew Judith aside. I wandered into the bedroom. I saw my mother on the floor, with her throat cut. I ran out screaming. Just in time to see Judith stab herself while my father covered his eyes. Then he turned and looked at me, and told me to be a good girl and come give him a hug, and when I saw he had a knife in his hand I ran.

“I ran to the next house, where my friend Hadassah lived, and it was the same there. Everyone stabbed. The same everywhere, in every house in Masada. So when the Romans battered their way in the next day, they found a fortress full of dead Jews—and one six-year-old girl sitting in a room full of bodies, waiting for her family to wake up.”

“You—you were the only one?”

“A few others lived. I don’t remember.”

His throat felt thick. “Why?”

“Better to be dead than alive when the Romans came crashing in with their swords. Better to leave them with a thousand corpses rather than a thousand captured rebels to parade in chains past their Emperor. Better to be dead than a slave. That’s what they decided, when they all went home and killed themselves.”

“But you . . .”

“A Greek merchant bought me. He gave me the name Thea; taught me to read and write. He was kind, really. Most of my masters were kind. It hasn’t been a bad life.” Her voice was even.

“The blood?” Looking at her blue bowl.

“My people have an old proverb.” Lightly. “ ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ And blood for blood, because I should have died with the rest of them; I should have been brave like my sister and fallen on a knife, but I ran like a coward and I’ve been paying back in blood ever since. Is there any wine left?”

“No.”

“Pity.” She levered herself up, grasping at the wall. Like a priestess carrying a sacrifice she picked up the bowl and swayed out the door. Arius, only slightly steadier on his feet, ducked after her. She was kneeling by a camellia bush, draining the bowl out into the earth. He stood by awkwardly, feet planted apart for balance.

“There.” She rose too quickly, staggering, and he caught her by the shoulder before she fell. The light of the distant lamps revealed that she was tall, the top of her head level with his eyes, and as angular as a doe. The point of her shoulder was sharp under his hand.

“Good luck to you tomorrow.” She offered a smile. “I’ll be watching.”

Her eyes were black, dilated too far. He’d seen them before, those eyes. The same brave desperate gaze—on the Amazon he had slain in the arena. A nerve prickled along the back of his neck.

“Good night,” he said roughly, and left her.

T
HE next day, when it seemed too bright and glaring to believe that the previous night had ever happened at all, I watched Arius kill Belleraphon.

It was brutal, stomach-turning, utterly unforgettable. He strode out quietly, dwarfed by Belleraphon’s strutting, preening elegance, and then launched an attack of such savagery that my knees buckled in the stands. Belleraphon’s grin slid away as his shoulder was laid open; he began to fight in earnest, but it wasn’t enough. Arius’s sword took the top half of his shield, took another wide cut out of his ribs, took half the fingers on his left hand. Belleraphon’s dancelike grace was hewed away a piece at a time, cut down to raw desperation, and even that wasn’t enough. He wavered, a broken, bleeding thing, and he died on Arius’s sword.

The Colosseum rose with a roar, stamping for him as they had stamped only last week for Belleraphon. They screamed, they shouted, they wept, they tore gold from their fingers and silver from their purses to rain down on the solitary figure in the sand. Men cuffed tears from their eyes and swore he was the god of war come on earth to walk among men. Women tore their
stolas
to bare their breasts, sobbing that they would love him forever. In the Imperial box, the Emperor nodded approval. Arius threw his sword into the sand, and they shrieked their love for him.

Miserable, in the middle of such glory? No one would ever believe it.

B
EAUTY is fate’s gift—and every time I looked in my mirror, I knew Fortuna loved me.

I dressed carefully: lilac silk to set off my black hair, a chunk of amethyst on each hand to showcase slender fingers, strands of amethysts on silver wire emphasizing the length of my neck. Lovely—and then I had to ruin the effect with a hideous brown cloak over the top, and that long-faced, blank-eyed Thea at my back.

“I’m not carrying that.” I wrinkled my nose at the basket she held out to me.

“Slave girls carry baskets on the way to the forum, Lady.”

I took it grudgingly, looking in the mirror again. At least no one would recognize the beautiful Lady Lepida Pollia when she went incognito to the gladiator barracks. “Get behind me,” I hissed at Thea as she fell into step at my side.

“Slave girls on the way to the forum don’t walk behind each other,” Thea said, impassive. “They walk in pairs.”