The Egyptian Royals Collection (152 page)

“Aquila,” the old man said, and suddenly Tullia rushed past the rostrum into her father’s arms. But instead of laying her head upon his chest, she fell to her knees and exposed her neck. It happened so swiftly that even the guards were taken by surprise. Then shrill screams echoed across the Forum as the plebs realized what had happened. The centurion had killed his own daughter in order to save her from slavery and rape.

Lucius covered his mouth with his hand, and even Juba looked pale. We didn’t wait to see what would happen. I had seen plebian anger at the Circus Maximus and the trial of Gaius Fabius’s slaves, but this was outrage on a different scale. Juba took my arm, and Alexander and Lucius followed swiftly behind us. “Move!” Juba shouted at the people around us. “Move!” By the time we reached the Palatine, a fleet-footed slave had already told Octavia what had happened, and dozens of people were gathered on Augustus’s platform, watching the conflict in the Forum. Something was burning in the courtyard of the Senate, and I presumed it was the rostrum where Tullia’s father had killed her rather than let her be violated. The small flecks of scarlet darting in and out of the Forum had to be soldiers attempting to put out the fire, but small fires had already started up in other places.

“They’re burning their own livelihoods,” Tiberius said scornfully.

“They don’t care,” I told him. “They’re sending a message to the Senate.”

“And what is that?” he demanded. “That the plebs can’t be trusted to watch an open trial? That from now on, trials should be held in secret?”

“She was alive,” Julia said plaintively. “Just yesterday, she was alive.”

Agrippa looked murderous, and I wondered if he was thinking of his daughter, Vipsania. “I should have gone today.”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything,” Vitruvius assured him. “The judices were bought.”

Octavia remained silent, watching the small fires burn across the Forum. One by one they were being put out, but the sound of the raging mobs was carried on the wind.

“Do you think her father will be charged with murder?” I asked no one in particular.

“She was the property of Aquila,” Juba replied. “His slave. If he wishes to ask for money in reparation, he may.”

“Someone should kill him in his sleep,” Julia hissed. “He should be slaughtered the way Tullia’s father slaughtered her.”

The young slave girl Faustina approached Octavia with hesitant steps. “Domina, the cook says the feast is ready.”

“It’s too soon,” Octavia snapped, and the girl flinched. I had never heard Octavia raise her voice to a slave.

“We can watch the fires burn or go inside,” Vitruvius said. “Either way, the girl is gone.”

It wasn’t a merry homecoming. What was supposed to be a festive celebration in honor of Marcellus’s return with Tiberius and Juba became a subdued meal. Magister Verrius and Gallia joined us in the triclinium, and there was a purposeful silence about what was happening
below the Palatine. But after a little music and several courses of wine, Marcellus described for us his feats in battle, and Tiberius even honored us with a poem composed after a bloody clash. I heard my brother whisper to Lucius that
he
could have done much better, and when Marcellus saw the intimacy between them, he looked at me. I smiled helplessly, and when he nodded, I wondered how long he had known about Alexander.

“So tell me about Rome,” Marcellus said to me.

There was not much to tell. Only that the Pantheon was nearly done, and that building had begun on his theater a month ago.

“Shall we see it tomorrow?” Marcellus asked eagerly.

“You mean, after the ludus?” Octavia reminded.

If Magister Verrius hadn’t been there, I’m sure that Marcellus would have rolled his eyes. Instead he smiled politely. “Of course. So tell me,” he added excitedly to Vitruvius, “what does it look like?”

Vitruvius smiled. “Don’t ask me. Ask Selene. She is your architect.”

“Really?”

“Didn’t you say the design should be left up to her?” Vitruvius asked.

Marcellus grinned. “So?”

“It looks like the Circus Maximus,” I said. He slapped his knee, and I’m sure I felt my heart expanding. “There’s three stories of arches, and columns in the Corinthian style.”

“Is it big enough to hold races?”

“Marcellus!” Octavia reprimanded.

But everyone laughed, and when the evening was finished, Juba caught me watching Marcellus and Julia. He was telling her goodbye, promising that he would see her in the morning and that there wouldn’t be any more wars for a very long time.

“Their marriage was arranged years ago,” Juba said. “There’s no use staring.”

“I wasn’t staring,” I said angrily.

“Then what were you doing?”

“Observing.” Before I could think of something far more clever to say, he was gone.

His comment rankled me the entire night. I thought about it when I should have been asleep, and even turned it over in my mind the next morning while I should have been concentrating on what Vitruvius was teaching me. But when a commotion erupted in the atrium, I forgot about Juba entirely. I looked up at Vitruvius, and he rose from his chair.

“Is someone shouting?” I asked him.

“I don’t know.”

We both went to see.

“On every basilica,” Faustina was saying, “an actum as long as your stola. And news that Aquila has been murdered!”

“In his sleep?” I cried, thinking of Julia’s request.

“No.” She turned to me. “On the Aventine. Left for dead like a pig and not a single person willing to come forward as a witness.”

“Is it any wonder?” Octavia whispered.

My brother and Lucius hurried into the atrium. “What is it?” Lucius looked to his father.

“Plebian justice,” Vitruvius replied.

There were seven more acta between the time of Tullia’s trial and our progress to Capri in July. Agrippa’s soldiers stood guard at every temple and basilica in Rome, so the rebel began posting on the windows of merchants’ shops, making those shops instantly popular with the plebs. And when the merchants were threatened with imprisonment, he posted his next actum on the heavy cedar doors of Augustus’s villa. The sheet was taken down before any of us could read it, but enough slaves had seen it on Augustus’s door to send the story spreading like fire throughout the city.

I COULD
see the relief on Octavia’s face when summer finally came, and she could escape the plebian hostility for Capri. She’d said nothing to me about her charity in the Subura, but Vitruvius admitted that at some homes, people had begun to turn away her help, preferring to beg or steal for their food than receive it from a patrician.

As our ship sailed from Naples to the little island where Augustus’s Sea Palace rose from the rocks, Alexander turned to me. “I wonder if the Red Eagle is following us.”

I looked from the rails to Octavia and Vitruvius, who were sitting on the deck, shaded from the sun by a thin linen canopy. “Every home on Capri will be searched if he dares to post anything there again,” I told him.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they have soldiers in disguise across the island, waiting for him to make a mistake.”

“It didn’t work in Rome.”

“Rome isn’t an island,” my brother said.

But after a week of sun-bleached days spent lounging in the Sea Palace, there was no sign of the rebel, and the men of the Praetorian
Guard began to relax at their posts. They tossed dice, ate fish, and were willing to place bets on nearly anything, from the fastest-moving boats passing on the sea to the height of a palm tree.

Without Augustus or Livia to watch us, there was almost nothing we couldn’t do. Even Tiberius and Drusus enjoyed themselves a little, joining us on Marcellus’s daily boat trips into the Blue Grotto, where Roman patricians had turned the sea cave into their own bathing pool. The walls were painted with images of Neptune rising from the waves, and small statues of the bearded sea god rested in niches carved into the rock. Toward the end of the summer, when Claudia became adventurous enough to come along, both Agrippa and Juba paddled with us to the cave.

“What do you think makes the water so blue?” Claudia asked. It was as if something was lighting the sea from underneath, turning the water the brilliant shade of cornflowers.

“It’s the opening down there,” Juba said from the boat, pointing to a gap in the rock that was completely submerged. “That’s where the sunlight enters and lights the water from below.”

“First in!” Marcellus shouted, tearing off his tunic and diving into the water in his loincloth. Claudia immediately averted her gaze, but Tiberius and Drusus stripped off their tunics and dove overboard, too.

“Are you coming?” Drusus called to Vipsania.

She stood at the edge of the boat. “It looks a little cold.”

“Nonsense!” Lucius exclaimed. “Let’s go!” He pushed Julia and Vipsania from the boat before they had time to take off their clothes, and Alexander followed.

“Are you going in?” I asked Claudia, stowing my sandals in the prow of the little boat where they wouldn’t get wet.

“In my breastband and loincloth?”

“Why not?” I took off my tunic. “We come here every day.”

She looked uneasily at Agrippa and Juba, who were already swimming.

“Go,” I persisted. “Your husband doesn’t mind. Look at Vipsania. Do you think he would let his daughter do something dishonorable?”

Claudia hesitated, then took off her tunic and slowly, timidly dipped her foot into the water.

“What are you waiting for?” Marcellus cried, pulling her in.

“Marcellus!” she shrieked, but once she was completely wet, she giggled. “It’s warm in here. Like bathwater.”

“You see?” I told her. “It’s not so bad.” I slipped over the side of the boat and swam up to Marcellus. Immediately, Julia was at my side.

“Can you imagine being here at high tide?” Claudia asked worriedly. “The water would rise and we’d all be trapped.”

“It’s not high tide for another few hours,” Marcellus said.

“Besides,” Julia added, “there’s a secret path over there to the mountain.” She indicated the end of the cave, where a limestone platform led to a series of steps.

“Have you ever used it?”

Julia shook her head.

“Then how can you be sure it works?”

“Because we saw a goat come through it once!”

Claudia looked to her brother to confirm the story.

“It’s true,” Marcellus said. “Ask Agrippa if you don’t believe me.”

She swam away to her husband, and Julia said critically, “She’s so nervous.”

“Like all my sisters,” Marcellus said. “Why do you think Antonia and Tonia aren’t here?”

“Because your mother forbids it?” Julia guessed.

Marcellus shook his head. “So long as I’m with them, they’re welcome to come. But they’re afraid. They’d rather be playing their lyres or planting boxwood in the garden.”

Julia wrinkled her nose. “How boring.”

“They’re like my mother,” Marcellus observed. “They enjoy the simple, quiet pleasures.”

And there was something very endearing about their simplicity that evening while everyone played dice in the summer triclinium. Neither Antonia nor Tonia gambled, and Vipsania and Drusus were deemed too young to play. So the four of them sat together on a couch, quietly watching the roll of the dice. Only Alexander, Lucius, and Julia remained in the game. Marcellus whispered eager tips to Julia, and once in a while Juba or Agrippa would look up from their reading to see who was winning.

Julia rolled, and Lucius exclaimed, “Four Vultures!”

She groaned. “I’m finished.”

“But no one’s thrown a Venus,” Lucius protested. “The next roll could be yours.”

“It’s always the next roll with you two. You can keep my denarii in the pot.”

“Your loss,” my brother said temptingly, but she didn’t care. He and Lucius battled it out, and by the time Lucius won, I realized that Marcellus and Julia had disappeared.

I looked around the triclinium. “Where did Marcellus go?”