“My lady!” Nurse was growing red in the face, and Felix watched with interest.
“Mother of All, what now?” Ygerna came up. She was wearing a broad straw hat to keep the sun off her face and a plain traveling gown of brown linen.
“What I’m called upon to put up with, with this… this – It’s too much!” Indignantly Nurse pointed at Eumenes, who was slinging the extra baggage into the wagon to suit himself.
“I was bought for a body servant,” Eumenes said. “My mother didn’t raise me for a damned lady’s maid.”
“I assume by your manners that she raised you for a pickpocket,” Ygerna said tartly. “Nurse, the wagon is loaded now; it will have to stay until we stop tonight. We will rearrange then, when we see what we need. Cottia, put Eilenn and the cat in the carriage, please. Here.” She handed the baby a piece of honey cake, and she stopped howling. “We can’t go on listening to that.” She looked around briskly. The wagon driver had the horses hitched now, and Felix was sitting on one of them. “Get down from there, please, and go with Nurse. Eumenes, get the things strapped down, but go gently with them. That case has perfume in it.”
All parties departed grumbling to do her bidding, and Ygerna passed a hand over her forehead. Eumenes grinned at her over his shoulder and gave her an army salute, and she started to laugh. “I’d sooner herd a flock of wild cows. But you are going to have to be polite to Nurse. Start now.” She looked around. “Where is Julius?”
He came lounging up with a bridle over one arm. “Diulius is lookin’ for me, but I thought I’d say good-bye.”
Ygerna put a hand on his shoulder affectionately. “We’ll miss you, Julius.”
Julius looked embarrassed and muttered something unintelligible. Poor Julius, she thought. He had hated her when he was fifteen and she was thirteen. It was a pity he couldn’t have gone on feeling that way.
“Behave yourself, Julius, or Diulius will tell Correus.” She gave him a smile and turned back toward the house.
Appius and Antonia emerged and kissed her. “Good-bye, my dear. Write to us and come home soon.” Flavius gave her a hug, and old Thais bustled through the door and put a little pewter image of Vesta in her hand. “To bring you back to us.” Lucius Paulinus smiled and patted her hand and went to the carriage to tell Felix good-bye. Helva and Julia were not to be seen, she noted. Julia had said her good-byes to Felix already.
The wagon driver pulled the cart into line behind the carriage, and Eumenes took up the reins of the carriage horses. Felix’s pony and a gray mare with red tassels in her mane and a red saddle were tethered behind the wagon. When they were out of Rome, Ygerna said firmly, she would ride. If she spent a two-month journey in a curtained carriage with Nurse, maids, cat, baby, and Felix, she was sure to kill one of them. For now she settled in beside Nurse and took the baby from the nurserymaid to feed her. Felix bounced gently on the cushions, his bright green eyes wide with excitement. He opened and closed the curtains over and over. The carriage lurched, and Eumenes swore as the near horse stumbled on a stone and kicked.
* * *
The journey took a full two months, and it would have taken longer if Ygerna and Eumenes, with equal determination, hadn’t pushed forward ruthlessly, to arrive in Germany before the journey drove them mad. The paved, banked carriage road over the Alps was awe-inspiring enough to make Ygerna gape, and Felix immediately wanted to know how it had been built. It was cold even in summer, a place of empty spaces and precipitous cliffs dropping into dreadful nothingness. And silent. The rattle of the carriage wheels and the clip of the horses’ hooves were a sharp, lonely sound in the air. They occasionally passed other traffic on the road, edging uncomfortably near the outer bank to slip by, and once were nearly tipped over by a loose horse dragging half a careening cart. They never did find the cart’s driver, or the rest of the cart, and after that, Nurse drew the curtains of the carriage and refused to look out, and Septima, the nurserymaid, was in constant, terrified prayer from the moment they set out in the morning until they stopped at night.
All the Alpine passes boasted imperial way stations a day apart, for which Flavius had provided them with a pass, and lesser inns and taverns for the common traveler. The way stations were properly heated, and no one was likely to steal the baggage, so Ygerna thankfully passed by the taverns. Felix, unimpressed with the engineering knowledge available from his stepmother, got a lesson in road building from the commander at one, and a guard who hadn’t seen a woman all summer fell in love with Cottia.
The frontier road along the Rhenus from Augusta Raurica was nearly as intimidating to Roman eyes as the Alpine passes. It followed the broad course of the river through Argentoratum and Moguntiacum to the rapids in the wild beauty of the Rhenus Gorge below Bingium. On the Roman side, the vineyards sloped steeply from the bank, clinging to their brown shale terraces, their leaves turning to gold in the sun. Across the river, beyond a narrow band of fields, the wild lands rose up green and impenetrable. It had been a good year for wine, the innkeeper at Bingium told them – hot weather to sweeten the vintage. You could see the rock of the Ara Bacchi, the Altar of Bacchus, in the river; that was always a good sign. Below the gorge, the land softened to a gentler contour, but to Italian eyes it was still alien country, wet and wild and covered with trees – far too many trees, which undoubtedly held hidden horrors. Septima’s prayers continued.
They reached Colonia in mid-September and found the city in a festival mood at the start of the fall wine-making. Ygerna blinked as a trio of sailors with drying vine leaves in their hair danced by with a blond girl among them and a wine jar under each free arm. A musician with a monkey, also with vines in its hair, was playing a little organ outside the triple temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. A workman with a slimy broom in his hand, busily clearing the drains for winter, popped up through a hole in the street and applauded them, and someone put a wine cup in his hand.
Eumenes pounded on the door of the palace, and they were ushered in with much ceremony by the governor’s staff while someone sent a slave off to the naval station to fetch the prefect.
Ygerna had time to bathe and let Cottia curl her hair before they found him, and she was relaxing in the newly painted bedchamber watching the painted fish leaping in a silver stream when he came in. She threw herself at him and then backed off indignantly.
“Take that off!”
He grinned and shucked off his lorica and harness tunic, then scooped her up and sat down with her in his lap. “I have missed you.”
She gave a sigh and snuggled down into his arms. Baucis appeared from under the bed, looking suspicious, and, seeing a familiar lap, sat down in it, too.
“Damn it!” Correus dumped the cat on the floor and pulled Ygerna down on the bed. In a minute her clothes were a tangle on the floor. She shivered and put her arms around his neck, and he put his lips against the five-petaled blue-gray pattern painted indelibly between her breasts, the mark of her wild heritage underneath the Roman gown and Cottia’s curling tongs.
After a while she opened her eyes again. “Correus?”
“Mmmm?”
“You haven’t said hello to Felix. You haven’t even seen the baby yet.”
He started to sit up.
“No, not yet. In a while. When I’ve had all I want of you.” She put her lips against his arm, and one hand slid along his back.
“Then why did you tell me?”
“Just so I wouldn’t forget later.”
He smiled and slipped a hand between her legs again. Her own smile was drowsy and full of hunger still.
“Do that some more.”
“Like this?”
“Yes. You know like what. You always do.”
She had thought it would be like the first time again, after so long, but it wasn’t. They fitted together now, like a lock and its key, an aching pleasure that was sure and familiar and undiminished. After a moment he slipped inside her again, and she wrapped her legs around his back. They rolled ent
wined in the feather mattress on the bed while the sun went down and the painted fish leaped into shadow on the wall.
* * *
They emerged at dinnertime, feeling guilty, and sent for Felix, who was finally found asking Governor Clarus why the town walls were three kinds of stone and who had thought up the patterns in them. He hurled himself into his father’s arms while the governor smiled at them. It was as good as making love to Ygerna, Correus decided, to hold his small son in his arms again.
Nurse brought in Eilenn, and he inspected her with pleasure and took her inexpertly into his lap with Felix. She was little, delicately boned like a bird, with her mother’s white skin and a dark cap of fine hair that felt like silk under his hand. But her eyes were the same light brown as his own, not Ygerna’s nearly black ones, and he thought that her features were going to be more aquiline than Ygerna’s. There was something of him in her at any rate, although at first glance she was purely Ygerna’s child, a dark, graceful baby who might have been a sidhe woman’s changeling. She opened her eyes wide at him and giggled and kicked her tiny feet, and he was lost. This is the next generation, he thought. This is the future, and I have had a hand in it. It would be good to spend the winter with the future, watching it grow, in a peacetime posting removed from war and Rome. Felix snuggled back against his shoulder. Ygerna put an arm around them both, and the baby laughed. Governor Clarus beamed at them.
And then a slave came through the door with a military courier on his heels and whispered in the governor’s ear, and the governor’s face went white.
IX Interlude
The emperor Titus Caesar Vespasianus Augustus died of a fever on September 13 after twenty-six months of reign, in the same country villa where his father, Vespasian, had died. On his deathbed he whispered that there was only one action of which he had need to repent, but what it was, no one ever knew. Like his father before him, Rome gave him divine honors. He was not yet forty.
The Jews, hating to the end the destroyer of their temple, called it the justice of God, but to the rest of the world he was Divus Titus, and they mourned his passing with a fervor given to no emperor since Augustus. There was no doubt as to his successor. Titus had meant Domitian to be his heir, and Domitian galloped straight from his brother’s deathbed to Rome to be acclaimed as Imperator by the Praetorians the same day. The Senate, wanting more than anything a peaceful, orderly succession with no blood in it, made haste to confer upon him the usual powers. He counted his years of tribunician power from the following day, and by the end of the autumn had also accepted the titles of Pontifex Maximus and Pater Patriae and given his wife the appellation of Augusta.
While the Praetorian Guard was shouting his name, Domitian’s couriers went out to the commanders of every legion in the empire and the governors of its provinces with the news of his succession and the promise of a bonus to his loyal servants and soldiers. By the time the rumors that he had had his brother poisoned had begun to circulate, there was no one with the support to oppose him, and even such detractors as Flavius Julianus and Lucius Paulinus were inclined to think the rumors untrue. An unseemly haste to leave his dying brother and ride for Rome did not necessarily argue a responsibility for the death.
Marius Vettius received the news while he was on his way to dinner. He gave a shout of laughter, sent a message of congratulations and condolence to Domitian, and went to dine, still chuckling. How immensely helpful of Titus to contract a fever while his brother was still trying to get up the nerve to kill him. Vettius was sure that Domitian hadn’t done it – Domitian had been still wavering three days before, and he was not a man who could make that sort of decision without considerable prodding.
Vettius reclined on his dining couch and regarded a plate of oysters with satisfaction. Everything would be much simpler now. Domitian would allow his cronies free rein. Better yet, Domitian by his very nature would contrast unfavorably with his brother, especially if he were encouraged to be high-handed. After that it shouldn’t take long to incite unrest. Vettius had a far greater goal for the long run than to be the emperor’s sandal licker. He ate the last of his oysters and thoughtfully arranged the shells into a little pattern on the plate. It would prove far easier to dispose of Domitian than Titus. Given six months,
Vettius thought that half the men in Rome could be provoked into doing it for him. A slave brought in the next course, pigeon with honey and new onions. Vettius nodded approvingly. He took a pigeon from the dish, broke it in half, and considered how best to insure that Domitian aggravated as many men as possible. First there would be new appointments…
* * *
If Marius Vettius regarded Domitian’s accession and appointments with enthusiasm, he was the only one. For anyone even faintly connected with the government, the loss of Titus meant the exchange of the known quantity for the unknown and, possibly, the unstable. There would be new posts, new assignments, new favors conferred. There might also be some new retirements. Everyone stood nervously on one foot and waited for it to happen.
Aemelia looked wistfully around her dining chamber. There was scaffolding against the walls, and a bald man in a paint-stained tunic was carefully filling in the colors of a frieze on the top level. She had ordered the whole room repainted in honor of an event that would never be celebrated – the emperor Titus’s birthday banquet. “What will you do now?”
“Back to the army, I expect,” Flavius said. He was wearing an old and much-patched military tunic and had been out in the stables all morning. Flavius had been on unofficial leave since the emperor had died, because no one had thought to give him a new assignment. Or because Domitian was saving something up, but Flavius didn’t tell Aemelia that. Domitian was almost totally unpredictable, so Flavius would worry about his assignment when he got it. The chances were good that he would be in the field again.
“Maybe I’ve been off active duty too long,” he said. “A frontier tour might do me good.”
He made a face when he said it, but Aemelia looked at him suspiciously. Flavius had been restless ever since Correus had gone to Germany. He hadn’t used to care much for Correus, but something had happened in Britain that had pulled them together, and now they were acting like twins. Aemelia thought she preferred things as they had been. At least Flavius hadn’t been talking about field commands. Aemelia closed her eyes and fought down a mental picture of Flavius being carried into her rooms and put down in her bed, with both hands black and stinking with gangrene, and raving out of his mind. He had tried to kill the physician when the poor man had suggested amputation. Correus had yelled at her and gone to get an army surgeon to treat him, then yelled at her some more because she couldn’t bear to look at those hands to help clean them. The army man had saved them, and Aemelia had got used to their odd, elongated shape once they were healed, but she had never gone back to the frontier. And with Flavius on the emperor’s staff it had been so pleasant, knowing all the people in the government and giving parties.
Flavius saw the distress in her face and put an arm around her. “Come along. Let’s enjoy my leave while I’ve got it. At least you have a new dining room. We’ll find a party to put in it, don’t worry.”
Aemelia shook her head. “I sound so selfish. It isn’t that. I will miss him. He was so kind, and… and nice.”
You are selfish, my sweet, Flavius thought, but you can’t help it. He kissed the top of her head, dodging ivory-tipped hairpins. “I will miss him, too.” Flavius had sat at Titus’s bed while he died, and seen all that promise and intelligence blown out like a lamp flame. Titus had been what an emperor ought to be, and Flavius mourned that as much as he mourned the man himself, but that was too complicated to explain to Aemelia.
But for good or bad, it was Domitian who was emperor now. Maybe the office would make the man. It had done it for Titus, of whom no good had been predicted at the start. But it had been there under the surface, Flavius thought. Somehow Domitian was going to have to find it, too.
* * *
“I am afraid, sir, that I will have to decline.” Lucius Paulinus stood stubbornly in front of the new emperor, his plain freckled face showing as much apology as he could muster.
Domitian leaned forward in his gilded chair, his hands playing with the gold and purple folds of his toga. “Do you feel that that’s wise?” he said frankly.
“Perhaps not, sir. But I am a private citizen, and I feel that it is time for me to devote myself to my writing.”
“Which you were happy to neglect in the service of my father and my brother!” Domitian snapped.
Lucius was silent. There is very little that it is safe to say when one is declining to work for an emperor.
“It is my intention,” Domitian said, “to restore the ancient moral values of Rome and the conduct of its citizens. To do that I need the help of men of judgment who can keep me informed.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Lucius said again. He seemed to have been saying “I’m sorry, sir” all morning, and was beginning to wonder if he was a bigger fool than he had taken himself for. Would it be simpler just to work for the man? No. “I was only a sort of unofficial observer,” he said, trying to slide as gracefully as possible out of the fire. “I don’t think I’m the man you are looking for.”
“I know what service I require!” Domitian snapped.
“What he means is, he wants a set of spies to tattle on all his other spies,” Lucius said when he got home, his face set and strained. “I told him I wouldn’t do it.”
“Was that wise?” Julia asked. She had been overseeing the slaves drying fall herbs in the kitchen, and she wiped her hands on her apron in a fragrant cloud of crushed rosemary.
“Maybe not. I think we’ll lie low for a while and be unobtrusive. But I know too much, Ju.”
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