The Egyptian Royals Collection (145 page)

“This has to be something special,” she’d said as February drew to a close. She’d begged her father to let Gallia take us to the Forum Boarium, where barges from Ostia unloaded their goods. This way, we could barter for cloth before any other woman in Rome had a chance to see it. He finally agreed a week before Liberalia, and with seven of the Praetorian guards we followed Gallia into the cattle market.

“How can anyone stand this?” Julia complained, holding up a ball of amber to her nose.

“This was your idea,” Gallia reminded.

“But look at these people. They’re so poor.”

Gallia gave me a weary look. “Welcome to Rome.”

Unsatisfied with Gallia’s response, Julia turned to me. “Have you ever seen so much dirt? I’ll bet these people don’t even bathe.”

“It’s their work,” I said. “They can’t help it, dealing with cattle all day.”

“Even so.” She passed her hand in front of her nose. “If my father wasn’t so obsessed about his reputation among the plebs, he could have ordered the bargemen to just bring their cloth to the Palatine.”

The odor of cattle excrement really was overwhelming. On either side of the road, concrete apartment buildings teetered three and four stories high, and I wondered how the inhabitants could live with such stench and noise around them. We passed the bronze bull that occupied the center of the marketplace, and Gallia warned us to watch for cutpurses.

“You never know what sort lurks around here. And sometimes—”

A woman screamed on the other side of the Forum Boarium, and suddenly people were running. Julia grabbed my arm. “What is it?” she cried.

For a moment, we couldn’t see anything; and then a space cleared in the middle of the Forum, and Gallia shouted, “Bulls!” The guards fanned out around us, but as the two animals charged, the soldiers scattered.

Julia and I pressed ourselves against the side of an apartment building. As the bulls drew closer, Gallia shouted, “Move!”

But there was nowhere for us to run. I closed my eyes as the first bull charged past us through the open door of the apartment building, missing us by a hairsbreadth. But the second bull lowered its head. It had no intention of following its brother, and as it ran toward us, Gallia’s screams rang out like a whistle. Then, suddenly, the massive bull staggered, and from the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a blond man with a bow and arrow on the balcony of an adjacent building. A second arrow pierced the air, then a third and a
fourth. The bull bellowed with rage, turning to see where the attack was coming from. In those precious moments, a soldier leapt forward and speared the beast with his metal
pilum
.

The bull collapsed at Julia’s feet, and when I looked up again to see the blond bowman, he was gone. But men were still shouting in front of us, and two of Octavian’s guards leapt over the bull and dragged us away from the building. Above our heads, the first bull was roaming the balconies.

A crowd of shouting merchants were warning anyone inside the building to flee. The bull didn’t understand its confinement, and in its anger it was pushing its horns into the rails and ramming the walls again and again. Then there was a terrible crack, and the bull looked up as if it sensed what was about to happen. The balcony gave way, and in a shower of concrete the bull fell to its death where Julia and I had been standing. There was a moment of shocked silence from the crowd, then a sound like thunder rumbled above us as the upper stories began to crumble.

“Go!” one of the guards shouted, and the men ran with us before we could be engulfed in dust and debris. When we stopped to look behind us, the upper floor of the apartment building was gone.

Julia began to shake. Our tunics were covered in dust, and merchants from across the Forum Boarium were running to see what had happened. “The man on the balcony.…” She trembled. “He saved our lives.”

We looked to the apartment balcony where the bowman had been standing, and one of the guards approached the building. As he reached the door, he stepped back quickly. “Gaius, Livius, take a look at this!”

We followed the men to the door.

Fastened with the same type of arrow that was used to fell the bull, an actum had been posted about the mistreatment of slaves on the
Aventine. At the bottom of the sheet of papyrus, written in hasty lettering, the rebel had added:

There was a frenzy of excitement as people around us realized who the archer must have been. The guards Octavian had sent with us burst into the building and raced up the stairs.

Julia gripped my hand. “Do you think he’s still up there?”

“No,” Gallia said. “He’s probably long gone.”

“But what could he be doing here?” I asked.

“Many men keep several apartments,” Gallia said. “This could be his third or fourth home.”

When the guards returned, they were carrying bottles of ink and a copy of the same actum that was posted on the door. The eldest of the guards introduced himself as Livius. His short gray hair exposed the hard, chiseled planes of his face. He looked first at Julia, then at me. “What did you see when those arrows killed the bull?”

Julia hesitated. “A … a man on the balcony.”

“And what did this man look like?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

Livius’s eyes bored into mine.

“I couldn’t tell either,” I added swiftly. “A bull was headed right for us!”

“Why?” Gallia asked. “What has the landlord said?”

“He tells us he’s never seen the tenant in that room.”

“But someone must have rented it!” I exclaimed.

Livius smiled slowly. “He says that money simply appears whenever the rent is due, and that men don’t ask questions in the Forum Boarium.”

“That’s true,” Gallia offered.

“It may be true,” Livius returned hotly, “but no man is invisible. Someone has seen him. Someone in that building. And when Caesar hears of this,” he warned, crumpling the Red Eagle’s actum in his hand, “the men he sends won’t be interested in excuses.”

We began the walk back to the Palatine, and Julia whispered, “Marcellus and Alexander will never believe this. I told them they should have come with us instead of going to the Circus!” Her fear had turned to excitement with the appearance of the actum, and even though our shopping trip was aborted, she remained in high spirits. “We’ll return tomorrow,” she promised gaily. “And we can show them where we were almost killed!”

“There may have been people who died inside that building,” I chided.

“And there would have been two more if the Red Eagle hadn’t saved us!”

When we returned to Octavia’s villa, Julia wanted everyone to know how we had almost lost our lives, and that evening in the triclinium, she repeated the story. “That’s when the Red Eagle saved us,” she said breathlessly.

Her father lowered the scroll in his hands. “What?”

Julia looked uneasily at me before turning to Octavian. “It was him. He shot the bull just as it was coming toward us. Didn’t the guards tell you?”

I could see that Livia was growing enraged, but Octavian remained perfectly calm. “And how do you know it was the rebel?” he asked evenly.

“Because the same kind of arrow was used to hold the actum to the door.”

Marcellus whispered severely, “Stop talking.”

But Octavian was already on his feet. Obviously the guards hadn’t
told him. When they’d reported finding the Red Eagle’s apartment, they had failed to mention the fact that the rebel had saved Julia and me. Octavian seated himself on Julia’s couch and put his arm tenderly around her shoulders. “So he saved you.”

“From death,” she said. “Right, Selene?”

I nodded.

“And did you get a chance to look at him?”

I could see Alexander and Marcellus holding their breaths.

“I … I don’t know.”

“This is very important,” Octavian said gently. “See if you can remember.”

Julia frowned. “Yes. Yes, I did. He had flaxen hair and strong arms.”

Octavian stood. “Thank you,” he said. “Tomorrow, buy whatever silks you would like.”

Julia grinned, clearly proud of herself.

That evening, in the privacy of my chamber, I railed against Julia’s foolishness. “What’s the matter with her?”

My brother sat on his couch and shook his head.

“A man’s life is at stake!” I cried.

“And it may be someone she loves.” He leaned forward, and his voice dropped low. “Marcellus wasn’t at the Circus this afternoon.”

“What do you mean?”

“We went together, then he asked whether I wanted to have a little fun. I thought maybe he meant he was going to visit
the fornices
, so I told him no, but he was gone for so long even Juba and the Praetorians couldn’t find him.”

“None of them?”

“Only seven were with us.”

“So what did they do when he returned?”

Alexander gave me a long look. “They warned him that if he ever did that again, our trips to the Circus would be finished.”

“They must have been furious. But where did he say he went?”

My brother turned up his palms, and I noticed how large his hands had grown. He was taller than me now. Women had begun to stare at him in the streets, and Julia liked to run her fingers through his hair and ask for his opinion on her tunics. I wondered what kind of husband he’d make, but couldn’t bear the thought of being apart from him. What if Octavian decided to send him back to Egypt and keep me in Rome? Or, worse, send us to opposite ends of Rome’s vast territories. He was watching me with the light amber eyes the two of us shared, and their expression was anxious. “He didn’t. Marcellus just elbowed me in the side and said, ‘You know.’ Is it possible he was the bowman, Selene?”

I thought back to the afternoon when the bull had been charging us and I had caught only the briefest glimpse of a man on a balcony. “His hair was golden. But I was too far away to see his face.”

“Well, what if his performance in the ludus is just an act? What if he’s smarter than any of us give him credit for?”

I thought of Marcellus—laughing, silly, always quick with a jibe—and shook my head. “He’s brash enough for it. But you’ve seen his writing in the ludus, Alexander. It can’t be him.”

“Handwriting can be disguised.”

“But you’re forgetting that there’s Magister Verrius as well. They both have the same light hair and eyes.”

“Except Magister Verrius wasn’t the one who went missing.”

“How do you know? He could have left the ludus as soon as we did.” We stared at each other in the lamplight. “Magister Verrius or Marcellus,” I said, “Julia has all but given him away.”

“What do you think Octavian would do if it was Marcellus?”

Fear, as cold as ice, traveled down my spine. “He would kill him,” I said with certainty.

My brother closed his eyes. “You need to speak with her.” He
looked at me, and his gaze became intense. “She needs to understand what she’s done.”

As a reward for the information Julia had given him, Octavian allowed silks of every color to be brought to the Palatine, fresh from the barges of Ostia. Julia directed the merchants to Octavia’s atrium, where Livia couldn’t spoil the fun. But before she could begin choosing, I pulled her aside and whispered harshly, “I hope you understand what these silks cost.”

Her black eyes widened innocently. “I only told him the truth. You saw him, too. He was probably a slave. He had hair like every other German or Gaul.”

“With access to the Palatine, and Capri, and rich enough to keep apartments across Rome? What slave do you know who has that kind of wealth?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re not that foolish,” I said cruelly. “Of course you do. There are only two men on the Palatine who fit that description. Magister Verrius and Marcellus.”

She blinked slowly, as if considering it for the first time. Then her eyes filled with tears. “No … It can’t be.”

“Why not? Yesterday, while we were in the Forum Boarium, Marcellus disappeared from the Circus, and the gods only know where Magister Verrius was.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. “My father would never suspect them—”

“Of course he would. And even if he didn’t, then Juba would. He was there when Marcellus left and even he couldn’t find him. And Juba reports everything to your father.”

“No.” She backed away from me. “It can’t be Marcellus. Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

I raised my brows, given what she’d already done.

She panicked. “But what does he care about slaves? He likes to gamble on horses and have fun.”

“What about the Temple of Isis?” I challenged. “He cared about those slaves.”

“Because they happened to cross paths! He’s rash and foolish.”

“And idealistic,” I reminded her.

“Why, Selene?” The distress on her face was real, and I almost felt sorry for her. “Why did I have to tell my father?”

“Whatever you do, keep your silence from now on.”

“But what if it’s too late?”