Blood Debts

by Ashley Gardner

  A clever arrangement—if the man didn’t lose his voucher and if he could be reasonably certain he’d get his money back at the other end.

  “Selenius wasn’t a shipping agent,” I pointed out.

  “Some money-changers honor the vouchers,” Cassia said. “If they have an arrangement with the shipping company. Money-changers have plenty of coins, don’t they?”

  “All right then, this Selenius was a man travelers visited to collect on their vouchers,” I said, making certain I’d followed her explanation. “What of it?”

  Even ordinary transactions excited Cassia’s heart, but this did not explain her elation over the slip of paper.

  “This voucher is a bit different.” Cassia held it up again, smiling hugely. “This one is a forgery.”

  Chapter 3

  I stared at the paper she waved but was no more enlightened than before.

  “How do you know that?”

  Cassia laid the sheet neatly on the table next to the broken cup. “When I was in the household of Glaucia Rufina, I traveled extensively with her. It was my task to go to the shipping agents and money-changers and pay in and take out. I kept track of all the finances.” She trailed off.

  She meant before Glaucia Rufina’s husband had laid his hands on Cassia, and Cassia, once a trusted slave with many privileges, found herself banished.

  Now she kept accounts for me. My finances were a fly to the elephant of those of a lady like Glaucia Rufina, but Cassia kept them with the same efficiency. She never complained about the difference in amount except when there wasn’t enough to feed us or pay the rent. I’d realized that Cassia liked figures, any figures, didn’t matter how large or small. As long as she had numbers to play with, she was content.

  “I’ve handled many of these, some from this very man Gaius Selenius,” Cassia said. “This is neatly done. Selenius decorates his with a symbol derived from his mark, so that all will know it’s his. There has been an attempt to copy the mark, but it’s not quite right. As I say, though, very neatly done. Most people would be fooled.” She sounded admiring.

  “Why kill him for it?”

  Cassia shrugged. “It might have nothing to do with his death. What did you do when you found him? Did you tell anyone?”

  “No.” I glanced at Sergius, who had lost interest in the conversation and was looking about the apartment in curiosity.

  Cassia’s eyes widened as she followed my gaze. “You don’t think …?” She swallowed, turning back to me in consternation. “You said you thought it was professional.”

  “I don’t know.” I balled my fists. “Might have been professional. Or luck.”

  A frightened person could slice a knife across another’s neck and kill him without much effort. The human body was a fragile thing. Trainers, as well as the physicians who’d patched us up, had showed us every single vulnerable point on a man’s body and how to stab them to bring about his swift end.

  Cassia’s dark eyes began to sparkle as they did when she was interested in a thing. I watched her run through scenarios and calculate their likelihood with lightning rapidity. I could do such a thing when it came to a fight, although it was best to let my training take over and not think very hard. Cassia could evaluate a dozen problems from what to eat for breakfast to who might have murdered a money-changer in the time most people could think to wonder what the weather was like.

  “You must report it,” Cassia said abruptly. “The baker knows you went to Selenius. He sent you. Did others see you near Selenius’s shop?”

  I told her about the few people who’d been left in the macellum, including the two Gauls who’d been finishing their business with the garum vendor.

  “When someone finds Selenius dead, they will remember Leonidas the Gladiator walking in and then vanishing.” Cassia’s cheeks lost color, and she twisted her fingers together as she did when she was particularly worried.

  “Leonidas, who knows how to kill,” I finished for her. This was not the first time someone had connected me, a professional murderer, with a death. “The baker could have known Selenius was dead—he sent me to discover him and to be taken for the murder, so he wouldn’t have to pay our be-damned fee.” I paused. “I’m sorry I didn’t get your money, Cassia. I should have shaken it out of him.”

  “Never mind about the money.” Cassia sprang up and came to my side. She didn’t touch me but she stood close enough that I felt the warmth of her stola. “You cannot be accused of this crime. You did not commit it.”

  I was stunned by two things: First, Cassia saying the words Never mind about the money. The second was her stout belief that I had not killed the man. She could not possibly know whether I had gone into the deserted shop of Gaius Selenius, taken all his money, and slit his throat. She hadn’t been there, couldn’t have seen.

  But she believed in me, had from the day she’d met me.

  That is, from the moment she’d realized I wouldn’t set upon her, ravish her, beat her, and throw her into a corner as she’d fully expected. I’d only asked her what she wanted for dinner.

  “If they come for me,” I said slowly. “How do I prove I did not kill him?”

  Cassia took a step back and surveyed me with calm assessment. “You haven’t a drop of blood on you. That is a wine stain.” She pointed at the purplish splash on the side of my tunic. “You don’t even have blood on your shoes—you must have stepped carefully.”

  I nodded. I had, not wanting to touch what had poured from Selenius’s throat.

  “Was the blood liquid?” Cassia asked. “Still flowing? Or dried?”

  I had a good memory for details, which Cassia had once told me she admired. This surprised me, as I hadn’t thought it any sort of special trick. She’d responded that she wrote everything down because she didn’t have a good memory. I’d had to think on that for a while.

  I brought to mind Selenius’s wide-open eyes, the blackening gash on his pale neck, the red pool of blood. “Somewhere in between. No longer flowing. Patches shining here and there. Selenius’s face was gray.”

  “Which means he died some time before you arrived. Not a long time, or the blood would be completely dried. It would have helped if you’d touched his body and could tell me whether it was cold or not, but no matter. How long did it take you to reach the shop from the baker’s?”

  I had little idea of time other than morning, noon, and evening. I could barely make out a sundial, and there hadn’t been one conveniently along my route.

  “I walked to the baker’s from here,” I said. “I stopped when Sergius showed me his cup, and then I reached Quintus. Spoke to him for only a few moments. Walked straight from there to Selenius’s shop on the Clivus Suburanus, not long before the fountain of Orpheus.”

  Cassia nodded as she no doubt calculated exactly how many strides I’d taken and how soon that had put me at the macellum. She was very good at such reckonings. I’d come to believe she could tell the legions exactly how far they could march every day on the supplies they had and still have energy for battle.

  Cassia moved to the table and lifted one of her many wax tablets. “You left here at the beginning of the fifth hour,” she said. “I’d say it took you about a quarter of an hour from the baker’s to Selenius’s.” She marked a note. “From the state of his blood, Selenius might have been killed a half hour to an hour before you arrived. That can save you, if a competent physician examines the body and Quintus will agree you were talking to him at the time we say. As you had no notion who Selenius was before Quintus mentioned him, there was no reason for you to kill him before you visited the baker.” She sank to her stool as she made her notes, then she tapped the stylus to her lips. “This would clear Quintus as well. He was putting bread in the oven as you arrived, you say, and that’s a tricky business. The dough has to rise to a certain point but no further or it’s ruined. He’d have to be there to shovel it into the oven at the crucial moment.”

  Cassia could not cook—she knew the theory of
cooking, baking, beer brewing, wine making, and many other crafts of food, but she could not execute any of these herself. We bought all our meals from the tavern down the street.

  “That means the boy didn’t do it either,” I said in a low voice. Sergius had wandered to the corner where my bed was, and now pulled back the shutter to look down into the street. “He followed me to the baker’s.”

  “Unless he did it before you saw him the first time,” Cassia pointed out. “Though that’s unlikely. I see no blood on him either. Dirt, yes. Whoever cares for him doesn’t bathe him.” She shook her head in disapproval.

  Cassia was always clean, from the toes that peeped from her sandals to the curls on top of her head. She bathed every afternoon and came home smelling of scented oil. I believe one reason she didn’t complain about being a slave to a gladiator is that I did not hinder her leaving for the baths at the eighth hour of every day precisely.

  “I’m not taking him back to the brothel.”

  “I agree. Poor lad.” Cassia set her stylus on the table. “Where will you take him?”

  We both knew he could not stay here. We barely had the coin to feed ourselves, in spite of our “benefactor.” Cassia tirelessly worked to uncover his identity, but she’d so far not been successful.

  I thought in silence then said, “Marcella.”

  Cassia’s brows rose. “Widow of your friend, who has five children of her own?”

  “She is kind and always needs help on the farm.”

  Marcella had been the wife of a gladiator who’d called himself Xerxes. I never learned his real name—I don’t think he remembered it. He’d been secundus palus at our gladiator school, the second-best fighter. The primus palus, the top fighter, had been me. Many commented on the irony of our names—Xerxes the Persian and beaten down Leonidas the Spartan at the Battle of Thermopylae—but we only stared at those who mentioned it until they quietly slunk away.

  Xerxes, probably the closest friend I’d had in life, had married and produced five children, even though he’d returned to the ludus every day for training and to the arenas for the games. He’d never been paired with me, and that fact had eventually gotten him killed. If I’d been his opponent that fatal day, I’d have let him win. I’d had nothing to lose—he’d had everything.

  Marcella had been grateful to me for returning his body, along with his meager belongings. I’d contributed some of my winnings to help her set up a monument to him with a long inscription she’d told me said what a good husband and father he’d been. Xerxes, dead at age twenty-six.

  Cassia watched me a moment and then simply went back to studying the false voucher, which told me she approved of what I wanted to do.

  “Can you mend this?” I asked, stirring the shards of the cup with my finger.

  Cassia switched her gaze to it, considering. “I believe so. I’ll go to the potters’ yard and find some paste.”

  She’d likely have it fixed better than new, or talk the potters into doing it for her. I held out my hand to Sergius. “Come with me.”

  Sergius looked around from where he held the shutter open, letting in a chunk of hot sunlight. His eyes filled with fear. “To Alba?”

  “No. To my friend. She has a farm.”

  Sergius’s face screwed up as though he had to think hard about this. I began to wonder if there was something wrong with him. He’d been streetwise enough to find his way through Rome but had not enough wit to tell me all of his name or who this woman called Alba was until I’d pried it from him.

  If Alba owned the boy and I stole him away, I’d be taken to court. If I returned him, he’d go back to being a body to fulfill some senator’s lustful fantasy. One of those fantasies could get Sergius killed.

  I prayed Mars was looking out for me today, and made my decision. I’d take the boy to Marcella, and if this Alba fussed about it, I’d ask Cassia to come up with the money somehow to pay her off.

  “Never seen a farm,” Sergius said doubtfully.

  Cassia stood and went to him, leaning down to speak in a bright tone I’d never heard her use. “Well, today you will, my lad. I’ll mend your cup, and Leonidas will bring it to you later.” She straightened up, reached to him as though to pat his head, then withdrew her hand before it touched his greasy hair.

  Marcella would bathe him. She had a spring on her farm, which she diverted to her own makeshift baths, and her children spent every summer day in them. She laughed and said they were half fish.

  I held out my hand. Sergius, at last making up his mind, came and took it.

  Cassia sent me a look I could not interpret. I ignored her and led Sergius out.

  I saw Cassia dart back to her table to make a mark on her tablet as we left, likely the time I departed and where I was going. I felt relief more than annoyance. Her record-keeping had saved my life more than once.

  I took Sergius through streets that had emptied for the heat of the afternoon. The sixth hour had passed—work was finished, time to sleep out of the sunshine or head for the baths to while away the bright hours of the day.

  We walked toward the Forum Augusti. From there we’d make our way to the Porta Capena as Marcella lived a few miles west of the city along the Via Latina.

  If Selenius’s body had been discovered, there was no sign of it in the people who wandered around the end of the Forum Augusti’s walls and down to the district called the Carinae. No one pointed at me and cried murderer! At least not today.

  Even so, they noticed me. As they had this morning, people pointed, whispered, noted my passing. They’d wonder about the boy now too.

  I halted at the corner of a lane that led to a small piazza. A narrow fountain spouted from the side of a tall tower that connected to the aqueducts, the overflow from the fountain’s stone basin sliding down the street until it found the nearest drain in the concrete curb. Most fountains did this, rendering Rome’s streets damp streambeds. Water flowed constantly into and out of Rome without a break.

  I crouched down next to Sergius. “Do you know a faster way to the Porta Capena?”

  The lad nodded readily, as though he’d been waiting for me to ask.

  I rose and took his hand, letting him pull me along through the packed houses and apartments between the Oppian and Palatine hills. If we continued on this road, we’d skirt the Palatine and turn near the Circus Maximus to reach the gate, a route that would take us through some of the most populated streets in Rome.

  As I’d hoped, Sergius knew a way around. He moved unerringly down a side passage to a scarred door much like the one he’d brought me through earlier.

  This door was locked, but Sergius lifted an iron sliver that had been tucked under a rock, picked it open, and returned the iron sliver to its place. No one paid any attention to him, I noted. They looked at me, but they took no heed of what the small boy a few feet from me was doing.

  Sergius opened the door a few inches and slid through. If I hadn’t been watching him, he’d have disappeared before I’d been aware. I waited until the street cleared a bit then caught the door before it closed and slipped inside after him.

  I found myself in a dark, narrow passageway that smelled of urine and decay. For a moment, I imagined myself in the outbuildings of an amphitheater, waiting with both beasts and men to go to what might be our last fight. Darkness crept over my mind, wanting to suck me into it, but I shook it off and hurried after the boy, the sound of his footsteps guiding me.

  The passageway led downward, and the floor grew wet as I descended. Soon my large sandaled feet sloshed in water and who knew what else, the walls now damp to my touch. I came to a branch in the passageway, emptiness to the right and to the left. I could no longer hear Sergius.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  My words echoed back to me, but no reply from Sergius.

  The darkness was complete, the light that had streamed through the cracks of the outer door far behind. I felt a rush of air to my left, and the soft grunt of a man striking out.

>   My instincts, honed from years of training for the deadliest games in the world, had me grabbing the wrist of the hand that came at me, turning it back and breaking the bone, even as a knife slashed through my tunic, biting into my flesh.

  Chapter 4

  The man wailed. I heard a thump as he fell back against the wall, and another cry of pain. A knife clattered to the damp floor, and I picked it up. It had cut me, but only a glancing blow.

  “Don’t kill me,” the man wheezed. “Please …”

  I groped until I found him then hauled him up by the back of his neck. He continued to plead and beg, and he smelled like filth.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “No one.” His whisper was hoarse. “No one.”

  “Tell me, No One, do you know the way from here to the Porta Campena?”

  His groan cut off. “What?”

  I squeezed his neck a bit harder. “Do you know where this tunnel leads?”

  “Yes, yes. Don’t hurt me anymore. Sir.”

  I wasn’t a patrician or an equestrian and never would be, but I didn’t correct his use of the honorific. Down here in the dark, I could be anyone.

  “Show me,” I said.

  The man trembled all over. I loosened my grip but not enough to let him run away. He shuffled forward, me half supporting him with one hand on his neck, the other under his unhurt arm.

  We moved a long way through the barrel vault of the tunnel, the stench of the damp floor nauseating.

  I didn’t usually mind closed-in spaces, feeling safest in my life when I’d been holed up in my tiny bedchamber in the ludus. The cell at the ludus had been my sanctuary, a place where no one expected me to do anything but lie on my back and wait for the next day. Perhaps that’s why I slept so much now—bed was the only place in which I felt protected.