The Emperor's Games

by The Emperor's Games (retail) (epub)

  “No? You’ve been busy enough about everyone else’s welfare!”

  “And you’ve been acting like a damned stallion!” They were squabbling because Flavius had been making love to Nyall Sigmundson’s widow all summer.

  They stood and glared at each other until an optio came scouting through the crowd for them. The optio saluted. “They’ve been looking for you.”

  “We’re coming.” Correus put a hand on his brother’s shoulder in apology. “It’s just that I hate to see a man stretch himself out on a cross and wait for someone to string him up. You or Forst.”

  “I know. But I honestly don’t think I can do anything about it,” Flavius said. “I won’t have much of her, Correus. Let me take what I can.”

  “And what happens when you lose her?”

  Flavius’s face was set. “I live with it.”

  * * *

  He asked himself the same question at the end of the day, when he found another letter from Aemelia waiting in his quarters. His life seemed to be tangling itself around his feet until the only way clear was to kick it to pieces and start over.

  He slumped down on a couch to read the letter. He knew what was going to be in it before he started. Aemelius had lost his lawsuit and retired in prideful, genteel obscurity to the one house left to him. Valeria Lucilla had taken to her bed with an undefined ailment. And Aemelia, left alone in her own big house to fret, was afraid of her shadow. Vettius had become for her a sort of night goblin out of a nursery tale, a dark presence that might turn its malevolence on her next. Flavius must be able to make the emperor do something. Maybe if she wrote to Domitian herself? Flavius was heartless not to have done something before now. He must not love her now that she had lost her inheritance.

  The illogic of this last statement was not something he felt up to explaining to her. Flavius put the letter down and flipped over on his back, staring at the pale green plaster on the ceiling. Did he love her? Yes, but Fiorgyn was his heart-mate. And now there was no way he could keep her, even if he had gone momentarily mad enough to think that he might. To leave his wife for love of another woman was something that the world, if not the wife, would not forgive. To leave her now, when the marriage had lost its financial advantage, would gain him a reputation he didn’t want to live with. And it would be crueler than he had the heart to be.

  * * *

  “Run along now.” The emperor patted the little slave on the cheek and put a sweet from the gold bowl beside him into his hand.

  Domitian was collecting boys again, Flavius thought with more disgust than he generally permitted himself with regard to the emperor’s affairs. That might be all right out here, but it was going to upset the conservative faction in Rome.

  “Ah, Julianus,” Domitian said pleasantly when the slave had trotted off. He waved a hand at the other couch and at the bowl. It was full of some sweet, repellent concoction. “Do relax.”

  Flavius sat on the edge of the couch and ignored the bowl.

  “Do you have news for me?” Domitian looked inquiring.

  “Uh, no. I’m afraid I’ve come to ask you again if there isn’t something that can be done for my father-in-law.”

  “The suit went against him.” Domitian didn’t make it a question.

  “Yes, sir. I hesitate to cast accusations on anyone, and it may well have been the middle buyer who tampered with the note, but I know my father-in-law. He is much too prudent to borrow an amount like that and squander it. And too honest to lie about it afterward.”

  “Well, someone is lying,” Domitian said in pained tones.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now see here, Julianus. I’ve told you that I must leave it for the courts to decide.” He sounded aggrieved. “I simply can’t interfere in matters like this, especially when I have no firsthand knowledge. I have more important matters to consider just now, you know.”

  “Yes, sir. It is only that justice—”

  “Justice is what I have appointed judges to deal with. I would be very irritated if I found that a member of my staff was taking it upon himself.” Domitian’s voice had grown sharper. “I do hope I’m understood.”

  “Yes, sir,” Flavius said stiffly. “I will see that you are not troubled again.”

  “Good.” Domitian nodded approvingly. “I’ve always thought that you were a sensible fellow. I wouldn’t like to be disappointed in you.”

  * * *

  Flavius picked up a pen and stared at the papyrus sheet in front of him. He loathed writing letters, but this one had to be managed somehow. Aemelia was carrying his child again. He couldn’t let her go through that thinking he didn’t love her. More important, he had to make sure that she didn’t do anything as unwise as she had hinted at in her own letter. Domitian’s warning had been quite plain.

  Flavius dipped the pen in the ink, assured his wife that he loved her, and forbade her to write to the emperor directly. Aemelia had been able to charm Titus, but Domitian was not Titus. And you ought to be able to see that. The pen snagged and splattered ink, and he slammed it down on the table in aggravation.

  * * *

  “I understand about courts,” Fiorgyn said. “Ours are much the same, but it is the chieftain who makes the judgment. Sometimes a chieftain will take bribes. Not often.”

  Flavius chuckled. “Almost always a judge will take bribes. Your chieftains are more honest.”

  “No, it is only that the council that made a chieftain can unmake him. It has been done. Your emperor rules the judges, and the only way to unmake him is to kill him.”

  “That has been done, too,” Flavius said, “but it’s dangerous to remember it.” They were sitting on a bank that ran down to an old dry ditch among the trees, the ancient fortifications of one of Drusus’s marching camps. There were vines growing into it now. He put an arm around her and laid his head against hers and sat looking down into the ditch. Rotten wood poked up through the vines at the bottom. “Lilies” maybe, the little sharp stakes the Romans set into dry moats. The Rhenus had been new territory then. He shouldn’t have told Fiorgyn about the lawsuit, Flavius thought. She saw too many things too clearly, and he was desperately trying to keep what was between them separate from the rest. That way, there would be fewer gut-wrenching memories later. But she was no longer merely a dangerous liaison; she had become a retreat for him. And despite his intentions, a great many griefs and questions that he would have hesitated to tell Correus, and shielded entirely from Aemelia, he had laid in her lap.

  A squirrel with something in its mouth wriggled through the vines and up the trunk of a beech tree.

  “It will be winter soon,” Fiorgyn said.

  Flavius tightened his grip on her. Domitian would go to Moguntiacum soon, with Flavius behind him, no matter what the results of Ranvig’s peace talks. If they were peace talks. Flavius, like his brother, doubted that entirely. But there was an unspoken pact with Fiorgyn not to ask her the things that she couldn’t tell him. She turned her face and kissed him, a kiss with coming separation in it. The dim light of the woods was green under the canopy of the trees, and it gave her pale skin and hair an otherwordly cast. There was a German song about a chieftain’s son who met an elf girl in the wood and vanished away into her world. The chieftain’s son hadn’t had a Roman wife and an army oath and a world of his own that didn’t permit things like that, Flavius thought savagely.

  He stood up and tugged her insistently to her feet. Then he caught her against him until he could feel the shape of her through the blue gown and smell her hair in his face.

  “How can I give you up?”

  “Flavius, don’t. There is no choice for either of us. There never has been a choice.”

  He bit back his reply. It wasn’t fair to put the burden of keeping an eye on reality entirely on her. Not when he knew the same things she knew, and knew that he could not have taken her with him or gone with her, if she had been the one to ask.

  “I am sorry,” he said into her hair. “And I am asha
med. You are behaving better than I am. I will accept what I can have, and not do that again.” She was shaking in his arms. It was wrong to play at things that were not possible, pretending that they might be. He kissed her hair. “I have paid for a room.”

  They went by the path that led past the old ditch, out of the wood into a road that skirted a farmer’s hayfield, cut to stubble now, with the hay standing in neat shocks. In the dusty sunlight her skin and hair were white and gold again, not green and silver like the elfin girl’s. She wore her old gown, but she walked with her head up, as if it were her right to go to an inn with her lover, and no man’s right to question it. She slipped an arm through his, and he forgot his misery in the sharp shock of the desire that the mere thought of her could stir in him.

  The shadow of a hawk went by on the ground, and the rustle of something in the stubble of the hay field froze into stillness. Along the Rhenus people had frozen too, tense, silent, waiting for the war that would surely come with spring, praying for the talons to pass them by.

  XIV “…In the Interests of Justice”

  “Hello, Nephew. Don’t you know that if you stay in there too long, the water will leak through your skin and you’ll drown?”

  Lucius Paulinus opened an eye to find his uncle Gentilius beaming genially down at him, a towel wrapped around his ample middle, and a slave with hot tongs trying to finish curling his hair as Gentilius made his rounds along the edge of the swimming bath.

  Lucius, who had been floating on his back, flipped upright and paddled to stay afloat. He shook the wet hair out of his eyes. “You have more skin to let the water in than I do. It will take me longer, I should think.”

  He paddled to the edge of the pool, and his uncle squatted down on the marble tiles, ignoring the slave – slaves were expected to get on with it as best they could; that was what they were for. Gentilius adjusted his towel. “Came back to town, I see.”

  Lucius hooked his elbows over the edge, dripping on the red and green squares. “Why, yes,” he said innocently. “I thought I would.”

  “As long as the cat’s gone to Germany, the mouse can go bathing, eh?”

  “I can bathe at home,” Lucius said. “But it’s more interesting here.” The public baths in Rome were more than a place to get clean or practice one’s backstroke. Appointments were kept, marriages arranged, and fortunes changed hands in the baths. A bather could buy sausage and cakes from the vendors who shouted their wares through the crowd, a rubdown in the massage rooms, and quite possibly a country estate from a down-on-his-luck acquaintance who needed to raise cash in a hurry. Beyond the swimming bath were the warm room, the steam bath, the cold plunge, and, finally, the entrance hall with the ticket taker’s booth. There were beauty parlors for the women, ball courts and exercise rooms, and lead weights for the muscle builders. A hardy soul was grunting his way through a bout with these a few feet away, and a shouting and scuffle from the direction of the changing room announced that one of the pickpockets who also worked the baths was being hauled away. A pleasant fog of steam and rubbing oil hung in the air.

  “That poor fool Aemelius’s land comes up for sale today,” Gentilius said. “I’m surprised you aren’t there. He’s a relative of yours.”

  “Only in a complicated sort of way,” Lucius said. “I’ve done everything I can.”

  “I heard you were spreading silver around the law courts,” his uncle said.

  Lucius lost his lazy expression, and his eyes snapped open. “Oh, you did?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. You were wonderfully discreet. I just happened to find out that someone was, and Appius is well enough off but he doesn’t have that kind of money, especially now that young Flavius’s expectations don’t include his father-in-law’s land. So I assumed it was you. Your mother left you more money than is good for you.”

  “My mother’s money came from the same inheritance that yours did,” Lucius pointed out. “I suppose you mean that it would have been better if you had had it all.”

  “Certainly,” Gentilius said. “I am older than you and have more sense. Just take your recent refusal of the emperor’s favor, for instance.”

  “It seems to me,” Lucius said, “that I heard – oh, just in the marketplace – that you had retired.” Gentilius had served the old emperor, Vespasian, and had kept his hand in for Titus’s benefit as well; Lucius was nearly sure of that.

  “I have the weight of my years to lend plausibility to that,” his uncle said. “My health has not been good.”

  Lucius gave his uncle a disapproving eye. “There is nothing wrong with your health but the weight of your stomach. You should go on a diet of bread and vegetables.”

  Gentilius shuddered. “I would rather be dead.” He sat down on the wet tile and put his head nearer his nephew’s. The slave, seeing his chance, went to reheat the curling tongs. “I expect you were right all the same,” Gentilius said quietly. “The rumor that runs in the marketplace is not something I would care to give Domitian to make charges out of, and you always did have entirely too good an ear for it.”

  “Too good for whom?”

  A chubby youth, still wet from the cold plunge, dropped a clammy towel on the tile beside them and heaved himself into the swimming bath. A mountainous wave of water shot up around him, and he surfaced spouting a fine spray. Gentilius glared at him, and he paddled off to a group of cronies who were tossing a ball at the far end of the pool. Gentilius poked the wet towel away from him with distaste. “Puppy.” He considered his nephew speculatively. “The baths are not a particularly good place to talk.”

  Lucius waited to see what was coming. He thought his uncle hadn’t found him by accident.

  “You might dine with me,” Gentilius said.

  “I might.”

  “A gentleman’s dinner, to discuss philosophy perhaps, and, uh, the nature of things. Don’t bring Julia.”

  “Julia will be consoling Aemelia, I expect,” Lucius said.

  “Quite.”

  “The nature of things being what it is just now.”

  “Yes.” Gentilius heaved himself to his feet as the slave trotted up with the reheated tongs. “Perhaps we’ll discuss that. Tonight then. It will be a small party.” He went off, clutching his towel, while the slave scurried behind him with the tongs.

  Shortly after nightfall, Lucius stopped in the pool of light cast by the gate lamps of his uncle’s house and adjusted the folds of his toga.

  “I’ll just be waiting for you,” the man beside him said.

  Lucius gave him a bland look. “That’s hardly necessary, Tullius. This is my uncle’s house, you know, not a robbers’ den.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Tullius said. “That old robber inside never said a straight speech in his life.”

  “All the same, I won’t need a strong-arm man.” Tullius was an exlegionary with the physique of a gorilla and the firm conviction that his employer needed protection at all times. “You may come back for me in four or five hours, but I won’t have you hanging about the place like a watchdog. You know you don’t get on with my uncle’s staff.”

  “I get on all right with Cook,” Tullius said hopefully. “She’s not so fine haired as that fancy houseboy. I’ll just wait in the kitchens and have a bite.”

  Lucius gave up. “All right then, but see that you stay there and behave. My uncle won’t like it if he sees you lurking about.” He gave him a firm look. “The conversation at dinner is going to be private.”

  “Got something up his sleeve, I expect,” Tullius said. “You just watch yourself.”

  Lucius’s face was suddenly serious and a good deal older in the lamplight. “I’ve got an idea I already know,” he said. “So stay away, or I’ll be the one protecting you.”

  He pushed open the iron gate and crossed the narrow strip of yard to the great house, which sat inside. It turned a blank face to the street; like most Roman houses, all its windows faced inward on the courtyard around which it was built, a little world drawn in
on itself to shield its master from the dirt and traffic of the City outside. An elderly majordomo with a prim face and a carefully curled fringe of hair around his ears met them at the door. He ushered Lucius in and held out his hands for the younger man’s mantle. He gave Tullius a look of finicky distaste.

  “Tullius will go around and wait for me in the kitchens,” Paulinus said firmly. He gave Tullius a push on his way before either of them could protest. The majordomo gave Tullius a sniff of disapproval.

  Uncle Gentilius’s dining room was on the far side of the house, and they crossed between neat, clipped borders of boxwood in the open central court to get to it. A fountain splashed in the moonlight at the center, and a marble naiad poised on tiptoe above it. The air was warm and thick with the scent of rosemary and bay trees. The dining room also had a fountain, which murmured pleasantly as a backdrop to dinner conversation. Flowers adorned the marble busts of Gentilius’s ancestors in their niches along the walls, and the table was set with the sort of cooking by which Gentilius had acquired his stomach, a girth he hadn’t carried with him in his army days. But the usual array of musicians and dancers and impoverished poets invited to sing for their supper was conspicuously absent. Lucius noted that his uncle and his guests were serving themselves.

  As Gentilius had said, it was a small party. Besides his host, there were only two other men reclining on the couches around the table. Lucius recognized one of them: a dark restless man named Faustus Sulla, who was a distant kinsman of the great Republican dictator and one of this year’s triumviri capitales. He blinked with surprise when Gentilius introduced the second: Roscius Celsus, a spidery young man with pale, shortsighted eyes, whose father had been the head of the Oil and Wine Importers’ Guild, and a power in almost every other trade guild in the City. He had died in the plague two years ago, and Roscius Celsus was now one of the richest young men in Rome. But he was an odd addition to Uncle Gentilius’s dinner party. Lucius’s expression grew wary as he took his place on a couch beside Faustus Sulla’s. Roscius Celsus reclined on the third couch beside his host.