The Emperor's Games

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

  “Nothing of the sort. It was her idea, frankly. I think she wants to show off.”

  Frontinus gave a bark of laughter. “I wouldn’t doubt it!” When he had known Ygerna, she had been a hostage in his keeping. She had been strong-minded then, at fifteen. Ygerna grown up might be something to see. “I’ll bring her a present. For old times’ sake.”

  * * *

  They would be on the march in two days. Ygerna’s dinner party became a farewell-and-good-luck offering for her, an effort to so charm Sextus Julius Frontinus that he would somehow keep his hand over Correus before Vettius could do him an evil. Something about Vettius made her hackles rise. In her mind Frontinus was a shield against him. Frontinus must have a dinner set before him that would make him remember them with kindness. With an unshakable determination, she turned the vicus outside Moguntiacum upside down for the delicacies she had learned that Romans liked at dinner. She set Cottia and Septima to haunting the markets at opening time, and sent Eumenes with a piece of silver to bribe the cook in the officers’ mess in the fort for an amphora of better wine than the vicus shops offered. She brushed and washed Felix within an inch of his life and threatened him with horrible retaliation if he put so much as a foot wrong during his presentation to their guest. She changed her own gown three times before the party.

  Correus bowed before the whirlwind and went obediently to find fresh lettuce. He didn’t think Julius Frontinus needed bribing with lettuces, but if Ygerna thought it would help, he wouldn’t deny her the solace of her efforts. She had developed an obsession about Vettius. He wondered uneasily if she had the Sight. She had always said she didn’t, but he had heard that one could possess it in many forms.

  Moguntiacum marketplace produced no lettuces that would have met Ygerna’s standards, and on a last chance he went where the best food in town was reputed to be – the palatial house near Nero’s Column that Rhodope had hired for her brood to await the new campaign. He wanted to tell her about the blond woman, anyway. She was still there, or so he had heard. There had been a knife fight two days ago, and he knew without asking that it had been over her.

  Rhodope provided him with new lettuces and a clay pot of snails into the bargain when he told her about Ygerna’s relentless preparations.

  “You take her these,” she said, her gold tooth glinting. “Tell her it’s a present from a friend. Maybe better not tell her which one.”

  “You are a jewel among women, Rhodope,” Correus said solemnly. “It was all my life was worth to go back without lettuces.” He took her by the arm and led her away from the cluster of girls who had gathered around them, into the shadowed corner at the end of the atrium. “I’ll give you a warning in return. I should have come sooner.”

  “Not that the emperor is passing laws on whores again?” Rhodope looked annoyed. “He is a fine one to make noise, that one.”

  “No, no. It’s one of your women. The new one. I’ve seen her before.”

  “The one with Earth Mother in her eyes,” Rhodope said. She nodded. “I know, I saw it, too. She takes men, that one, right down to the soul. I made her leave when there was the knife fight. But she has gone with one of your officers.”

  “You mean a man in my legion, or just an officer from Moguntiacum?”

  Rhodope snorted majestically. “One who should be a man who knows better. Your new legate.”

  Mithras, Correus thought. If there was anything to make Vettius a more chancy commander than he was, it was that pale, golden woman with the hungry eyes. “How did you get her?” he asked Rhodope.

  Rhodope shrugged. “She came. She had manumission papers, but no money. She said her master had freed her, but when I asked why, she never said. He didn’t give her any money.”

  Some man had run for his life, Correus thought. And now she had Marius Vettius. He paid Rhodope for the lettuces, and she bustled away to put the coin in some secret hoard. She had new shoes, he noted: scarlet with purple laces.

  When he got home, Lucius Paulinus was waiting for him, and with a puzzled look Ygerna took the lettuces.

  “I have sent for Flavius,” she said. “He says I am to tell no one else but you that he’s here. He is up to something, I think.”

  “What’s he doing in Germany at all?” Correus muttered, unpinning his cloak. Faces that ought to be elsewhere seemed to be springing up in his path like mushrooms. The day had begun to take on a sort of mad quality with his quest for lettuce, and Lucius’s appearance, sub rosa, heightened the effect. “Here.” He gave Ygerna the snails, and she wrinkled her nose at them. “You bake them,” he said. “With butter and herbs.” He went to find Lucius, leaving her peering dubiously into the pot.

  Flavius appeared, practically on his heels, swearing because Eumenes had fetched him out of his bath, and they found Lucius sitting miserably in the room that Correus had commandeered for his office. Tullius was with him, and Lucius told him irritably to go away with Eumenes, that he wasn’t a mother hen.

  Correus took one look at his brother-in-law, pulled up a chair, and said, “What have you done, Lucius?”

  For so grave a matter it didn’t take very long to tell. Two or three minutes, no more, until Flavius sat looking at him with a pale, shocked face, and Correus was cursing a blue streak and trying desperately to think, think of something besides what would happen to his brother-in-law and his sister if so much as a word were whispered in Domitian’s ear. Or worse, what would happen if the plan that Lucius and the rest of those poor high-minded fools had started couldn’t be stopped again. It wasn’t Lucius’s plan anymore; it had a life of its own. And it wouldn’t benefit anyone but Marius Vettius… Marius Vettius, who had had his predecessor murdered by his own primus pilus, to pave his own path to the purple.

  Flavius licked his lips and looked from Lucius to his brother. “Go away,” he said finally to Lucius. “Go and lie low until we can do something about this.” There was no point in arguing the rights and wrongs of it now, but he didn’t want to see Lucius for a while.

  “I came here to stop Marius Vettius,” Lucius said. “Not to hide while you two stick your necks out.”

  “And Marius Vettius will take one look at your face and know just what you’re after,” Flavius said. “And us. He’s Correus’s commander, you miserable fool.”

  Correus glared at Flavius to shut up and put his hand on Lucius’s shoulder. Lucius Paulinus was no fool, but he looked just now like a man at the end of his rope. “Go to the kitchen and have Eumenes show you the guest rooms. Take Tullius with you. And Flavius is right about one thing: Lie low, for Mithras’s sake. We have Julius Frontinus coming to dinner.”

  Flavius stood up.

  “Go and unobtrusively put some extra bodies around the emperor,” Correus said to him. “But I don’t think they’ll try anything until we’re in the field.” He looked at Lucius. “Will they?”

  “No.”

  “And not until Vettius has had a chance to settle in and get on the right foot with the army.” Flavius gave a short laugh with not much amusement in it. “There’ll be bonuses all around, I expect.”

  * * *

  Dinner was a mad affair with a strong undertone of hysteria that Julius Frontinus fortunately seemed not to notice. Maybe it was all in his own mind, Correus thought. Ygerna presented them with lettuces and the snails, which were rubbery but passable, and broiled fish from the river, and a dish of spiced raw lamb with fish sauce, and set herself to charm the chief of Engineers.

  Julius Frontinus patted her hand. “I think I did well, my dear, to make a Roman of you. This is for the one I wouldn’t let you carry in my camp.” He put a little dagger with a silver handle in her hand.

  Ygerna grinned at him. “Thank you, Governor.”

  “I’m not a governor now,” Frontinus said placidly. “Just an engineer. On the emperor’s service like the rest.”

  “A chief of Engineers,” Ygerna said. “You’re the one who makes the roads and bridges for the emperor. It seems to me that that i
s better than being a governor.”

  Frontinus laughed and dipped his fingers in the bowl of snails. “Of more lasting use, certainly. Treaties come unstuck. A road is forever.”

  In an odd way it was a family party. Julius Frontinus and

  Ygerna, come together again in the no-man’s-land of Germany, took to each other happily. Before the last course, she had Nurse bring Felix in, and he eyed the chief of Engineers with the greatest admiration.

  “You build things,” he said. “I built an aqueduct once, in the garden, but it fell down.”

  “Ah,” Frontinus said. “And do you know the principles of construction of the arch?”

  Felix shook his head.

  “That would be your problem.”

  “Will you teach me?” His green eyes rested on the engineer hopefully.

  “Well, I’m afraid there isn’t time before we leave Moguntiacum,” Frontinus said. “But this winter, maybe – you never know. Would you like to see a bridge built? We’ll be doing a lot of that this season.”

  “May I help?”

  “Not this war,” Frontinus said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if you grew up to build a few of your own. When you’re ready, you come to me. I was there when you were born, you know. A sad affair, but a happy outcome. You are named for me. And they swaddled you in one of my old cloaks.”

  “Frontinus Appius Julianus,” Felix said. “But mostly they call me Felix. Grandfather has the cloak, at home in Rome. He says when I am grown up, maybe I can wear it. It’s purple,” he added thoughtfully, “so I expect I’d have to be very grown up.”

  “It’s a military governor’s cloak,” Frontinus said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you got there.”

  Felix smiled at him. “This winter you can teach me to build an aqueduct. That would be a start, I should think.” He seemed to feel that the chief of Engineers would regard this as a high treat. Nurse took his hand, and he went with her obediently. “I am pleased to have met you, sir,” he added when Nurse prodded him.

  “You have made a conquest,” Ygerna said.

  “Well.” Frontinus looked pleased. “It’s no bad thing to be a hero in someone’s eyes. You’re raising an engineer, I think. This winter I’ll show him what he wants to know.”

  “He didn’t tell you,” Ygerna said, “that when he built the aqueduct, he built it in his grandfather’s rose garden with tiles he pried up from around the pool.”

  The evening passed on a convivial note, and Julius Frontinus seemed inclined to stay. If Ygerna had set to charm him, Correus thought, she and Felix had done the job. But Lucius was still in the guest room, and Correus wished the chief engineer would go home. When Frontinus eventually took his leave, it was late, and they said farewell in the portico under a scattering of stars in a black sky.

  “That was nice,” Ygerna said sleepily as Frontinus walked back toward his quarters in Moguntiacum Fortress.

  “It will be less nice when I have to get up in the morning,” Correus said. “And I’ve got to talk to you about Lucius.” He was plainly worried.

  Ygerna settled herself on the couch in the atrium and looked suddenly wide awake. “I was afraid something bad was happening when we couldn’t tell Julius Frontinus that Lucius was here. What is it?”

  It took no longer to tell Ygerna than it had for Lucius to tell his brothers-in-law, but she looked less shocked than they had, apparently considering the matter solely from the angle of its effect on her husband. Ygerna had no great love for Domitian, and she had grown up under the ruthless wing of her uncle Bendigeid, who had been willing to throw first Ygerna and then himself to the wolves if it would buy security for his tribe.

  “Lucius will have to stay here with me when the army goes,” she said. “If it is safe enough for us to follow you, what then?”

  “I don’t know,” Correus said. “We’ll worry about that then. It will be a few weeks before I can send for you, after we see how much resistance we meet. Maybe I can think of something by then.” He didn’t sound as if he thought he could. His face looked lined and tired. He couldn’t shake off a vision of executions, a flood of blood. Lucius, Julia, the children…

  “Go to bed,” Ygerna said. “You have parade in the morning. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  When he had gone, she slipped into the room he used for an office and rummaged in the desk for the writing implements she knew were there. Writing was something new to Ygerna, or it had been when she had first met the Romans. Tribal history and the descent of kings were memorized by the bards; the Britons used their runic letters only to make magics with. But the Romans wrote down everything. It had unnerved her at first, but she had doggedly learned it when they had made her into a Roman. She pulled out a sheet of papyrus – this was going to be too complicated to scribble in wax – and sat down to think it out.

  Berenice had grown up with palace intrigue in the tangle of the old Judaean court and had waded through it unscathed in her husbands’ and her brother’s courts. And she knew Domitian. She would know the best way to stop something like this.

  Ygerna had a suspicion that Correus wouldn’t care for her telling their dangerous secret to Berenice; after all, he didn’t know her. So it seemed simpler not to fight over it, and just do it. If Berenice had any help to offer, Ygerna could tell him then. The only problem was telling Berenice without telling the world. Ygerna chewed on the end of the reed pen, and then dipped it in the ink.

  I hope that you are well… It is very cold and boring here, and when it snowed this winter, I used to sit and remember how nice it was to have lunch with you in the room that looks onto the garden and tell each other stories. So I thought that I would send you one in a letter, and maybe you can send me one back. This one is about my family.

  When I was in Britain, there was a king who should not have been made king, perhaps, and there were many men who thought that. One of them was married to my sister. They decided, foolishly, that they would kill him and put in his place another man who had the god’s hand on him to be king, they thought. But the other man was killed in a cattle raid, and then they found that their plan had grown by so many men that it could not be stopped, and one of the men – a sleek, slippery man that was not such a one as men trust – insisted that they do murder on the king anyway, thinking to be king himself when it was done. If they would not agree, he said, he would tell the king about their treason, and then there would be more innocent blood spilled than anyone had ever seen.

  In this story, they couldn’t stop him, and the king died, and the sleek man became king after him, and then used the others’ treason to make the council put them to death afterward. I have always thought that it should not have happened that way, but such a plan is a hard thing to stop. What do you think?

  Will you tell me a story now? I hope that you are well, and that I can visit again when we come back to Rome…

  Ygerna read the papyrus over one more time. She didn’t have a sister, and Berenice knew it. And knew also, she thought, that no such event had enlivened Ygerna’s childhood. She took the guttering lamp, poked a sealing stick in it, and daubed it on the folded sheet. She folded a second around it the other way and sealed that, too. It was risky, but as long as Marius Vettius didn’t know that Lucius was in Germany, he would have no reason for suspicion. Some spy along the way might read her letter just on principle, but it was unlikely that he would get much out of it. A pair of bored women amusing themselves with silly tales.

  She tiptoed into their bedchamber. Correus was asleep with the cat on his chest, and Ygerna slipped the letter into her sewing basket. In the morning when Correus was on parade she would find some trader or one of the civilian posts to carry it.

  She climbed into bed beside Correus and said a quick prayer to the goddess whose priestess she once had been. Killing a king was a dark magic, so maybe the Goddess would intervene. But she wasn’t sure if Earth Mother would care whether a Roman emperor were killed or not, so she prayed to Jupiter, and Juno, too, for
good measure, and to the Eastern god that Correus worshiped. Mithras didn’t admit women to his service, but maybe he would listen to her anyway.

  * * *

  Domitian’s army marched out two mornings later in the cold air, their breath making little clouds before them, like the mist that drifted ankle-deep along the ground. Domitian was in command, with Julius Frontinus as chief of Engineers, and the bulk of four legions: the Fourteenth Gemina, the First Adiutrix, the Eleventh Claudia, and the Eighth Augusta, in which Correus and Flavius had held their first commands. The senior officers of the Augusta were all changed over now, promoted to other legions, but Correus recognized a junior centurion whose promotion he had recommended from the ranks in the first war for the Agri Decumates. Centurion Quintus blinked when the primus pilus of the Gemina rode by and nodded to him, then recognized Correus and raised his vine staff in salute.

  The German delegation from the barbarian lands rode in the emperor’s train, and Correus saw Fiorgyn, riding with the same easy grace that the German warriors had. Ranvig was on one side of her and the brown-bearded priest on the other, and at least Flavius was showing enough sense to keep away. Or maybe he was only keeping his eye on the emperor. Correus could see his brother’s straight back under a purple cloak among the generals in Domitian’s train. Marius Vettius was there also, in a helmet with the eagle-feather crest of a legionary legate, and he seemed content to leave his primus pilus to ride in his place at the head of the Gemina, under the shadow of the great gilded Eagle of the legion. It soared above him, its silver wings stretched back, its claws grasping the golden thunderbolts, above the staff that carried the legion’s wreaths of honor. Last night as every night, Correus had made his prayers before it in the Chapel of the Standards with the rest of his men, but he could never see the Eagle without feeling something clutch at his heart. It was the life and the honor of a legion, and it embodied his love for the army in a way he couldn’t put into words. He shot Vettius a look of pure dislike. The man was a thief and a danger, but in some ways it was worse to Correus that he had no caring for his legion. It was only a stepping-stone, an appointment charmed out of an unwary emperor to further his own ambitions. As Flavius had predicted, the new legate had made a handsome bonus to every man in the legion, but he would leave the on-the-march command of it to Correus. Vettius didn’t waste his time when there was no glory to be had.