“I don’t know all of it,” Lucius said grimly, “and neither do you. You may not like what we find.”
“We’ll chance it,” Correus said.
“Yes.” There was very little choice in the matter, Lucius thought, cursing himself again for pulling his family and his friends into this catastrophe with him.
Lucius was right, Correus thought. There were some things it was undeniably safer not to know. But he could live with the knowledge better than he could live with Lucius’s death – and Julia’s. And he was a soldier. Like his father before him, he would usually be too far from Rome for unpleasant secrets to be a danger.
Lucius wrapped a nondescript cloak around his tunic. His servant Tullius was still asleep, and Lucius decided against waking him. There were already four of them, and he would as soon not bring Tullius into it. If they failed, which was entirely possible, there might be just a faint chance that Tullius could still get out with a whole hide. Someone ought to survive, Lucius thought grimly.
* * *
The private house that Marius Vettius had taken for his off-duty hours was an L-shaped building with a roofed portico forming the other two sides of a rectangle and enclosing a formal garden at the center. It stood conveniently near the fortress, between Drusus’s cenotaph and the theater. Too near the fortress, Correus thought, standing in the shadow of the house across the street. One noise would bring down more guards than the farmer’s geese had done.
A thick hedge nearly five feet high was planted along the edge of the portico to screen the garden from the street. There was a gate set into it, opposite the main wing of the house. A lantern hung from a post above the gate, with its flame guttering out. Correus looked at the sky, trying to gauge the time, but the cloud cover had blown in more thickly, and it was hard to tell. He thought there was a faint shading of light to the east, but it was still nearly pitch black except for the lantern. As they watched, the flame sank and rose, and then died out completely. Correus breathed a sigh of relief. He would rather rely on the night sight that the dark ride down the river had given them than have that lantern illuminate them like moths at a lamp flame.
“Come on.”
They ran for the gate, tried it, and it opened with a shrieking of old hinges. Correus jerked his hand back. “Typhon! It would have been better to climb it.” The gate was open only a few inches, and he drew it back experimentally. It closed without protest. He latched it and pulled himself over the top, landing catfooted on the other side. Flavius came down after him with slightly more noise, then Eumenes and Lucius behind him in perfect silence. Correus gave them an approving look and decided not to ask either where he’d learned that.
The main door was barred, as they could have predicted. They would have to risk a noise now, but at least they were screened from the street. Correus pounded his fist on the door and waited for a reaction. He pulled his cloak around him to cover the shirt and breeches, and motioned the other three out of sight into the shadows. On the third knock there were sounds of stirring in the house, and the rattle of a bar being pulled back. A burly man with a nose that looked as if it had been broken lifted a lamp and gave Correus a suspicious eye through a six-inch gap.
“Master’s not home.”
Correus recognized him as one of Vettius’s personal toughs and said a swift silent prayer of thanks to the God of Soldiers that it hadn’t been a man of his legion. “Of course he’s not, you fool,” he said, pushing on the door. “I’ve got orders from him to fetch you and the rest of the house up to the Moenus. He’s closing this one down.”
“At this time o’ night?” The man shifted the lamp. “Who in Erebus are you?”
Correus made an exasperated noise. “Here, it’s all written out. Can you read?” He stepped forward as he spoke and brought a hand from under his cloak. There was a dagger in it.
The man at the door had just enough time to see the lamplight on the blade but no more. He made a gagging sound at the back of his throat and fell, spitting up blood. Correus pushed him back from the doorway, wincing as the lamp clattered on the tile. He closed the door as soon as the others were through, and bolted it. Eumenes crouched by the man on the floor with his knife out, but he was dead already.
“We’re in,” Correus said. He kept his dagger out. “It’ll be in his office.”
“Is there anyone else in the house?” Eumenes whispered.
“We’ll hope not,” Correus said grimly.
The bronze lamp had spilled when it had fallen, and there was a little pool of oil burning on the tile floor. Lucius stamped it out gingerly and picked up the lamp. They left the dead guard in the darkness and moved on through the shadows of the house, opening doors cautiously, daggers in hand.
They found the office on the third try, a red and blue room with painted gardens on the walls and an ornate desk in front of a pair of carved scroll shelves.
“No!” Correus said as Eumenes put a hand to the shelves. “This is for Lucius and Flavius and me. Go and guard the door, but don’t come in.”
Eumenes backed out again, and Correus began pulling everything from the desk while Lucius held up the lamp. Flavius started on the scrolls. He unrolled the first, which proved to be pictures, gave it a revolted look, and dropped it on the floor. “If this is his entertainment,” he said, “he has unpleasant tastes.”
“It won’t be in the – wait!” Correus pulled an iron box with a lock on it from the desk. “This may be it.” There was very little use in looking for the key. No man locks a box and leaves the key beside it. He jammed his dagger in the lock and wrenched it sideways. The blade snapped, but the lock came open, and he pushed the lid back. Flavius snatched the top sheet from the pile inside, scanned it, and his mouth came open a little in sheer horror. Correus looked at first one scrap of papyrus and then the next, his own horror growing. They were letters mostly, deadly letters, some to Vettius, some not, gathered by clandestine means: promises of aid, commitments to treason, a handful of pleas against exposure. There was a list of names in Vettius’s hand that made Correus cold to read it. The evidence against Lucius Paulinus was there, but the rest of the box was enough to ruin half the families in Rome, guilty and innocent together: men who had begun this conspiracy in a sense of pious outrage, men who had been sucked into it later or terrorized into it by Marius Vettius or simply framed by him to give him a hold over them when he should need it. What Domitian would do with this box full of death was unspeakable.
Flavius looked up, with slips of papyrus clutched in both hands and real fear in his eyes. “I feel like I’m standing knee-deep in blood,” he whispered.
“I told you,” Lucius said. He didn’t move to inspect the box himself. He must have known most of what it contained already. Correus thought he didn’t want to touch it.
“We can’t leave this,” Correus said.
“This may not be all.” Flavius looked around the dark room. There might be more deadly hoards.
“He’ll have copies somewhere else in the house,” Lucius said. “Bet on it.”
There was a sharp movement at the door. “Someone’s coming!” Eumenes hissed.
Correus grabbed the lamp from Lucius and lit the papyrus in his hand with it. He dropped it back in the box, and it blazed up like a live thing, twisting into blackness. He poured the lamp oil over the desk and the scrolls in their shelves. Queen
Berenice had spoken literally when she had talked of burning. Burn the whole plot to the ground, he thought savagely, and take the chance that Vettius would go free, to save the other poor fools who had put their feet in this tar. The desk was old wood, and it was blazing now, too. He kicked the side in and pulled one of the legs free with the fire licking at the end of it. There was shouting in the corridor. Swiftly he touched the flame to anything in the room that would burn and ran for the door. Flavius was behind him, sword in hand. Correus saw as he looked over his shoulder that Lucius had his dagger out, a thin, plain-hilted blade that looked oddly at home in his brothe
r-in-law’s hand.
In the corridor Eumenes was crouched with his back to a corner as three men tried to get past his dagger to him. Correus put his torch in his right hand and drew his sword. A dark-faced man spun around to face him. He had a long curving knife that gleamed evilly in the flames, and he slashed at Correus with it. Correus scrambled backward, waving the burning wood in the other man’s face. The dark man hacked at the wood, while Correus tried to knock the knife away with his sword. The room behind them was blazing now. He could feel the heat at his back. The other man came in again, crouched to slash with the curved knife that had a longer reach than Correus’s short stabbing sword. Correus feinted with his sword and then swung the torch at the man’s hair as the knife came up to block his sword thrust. The man screamed and stepped back with his hair on fire. Correus’s sword opened up a deep gash across the thigh, and the dark man fell, clutching at his hair. Correus drove the sword in through his chest.
The flames had caught the hangings in the corridor now. Correus looked frantically through the heat and the hellish light for the other three. Lucius, who had always claimed he couldn’t fight, had somehow killed a sword-armed man with that plain, murderous-looking dagger. Flavius was pulling the third man off Eumenes. The man turned to fight Flavius, and Eumenes, bleeding from a gash in his shoulder, put his knife into the man’s back as the whole corridor exploded into flames.
“Run!” Correus yelled. They held their breath and dived through the smoke-filled corridor into the atrium beyond. Flavius’s cloak had caught fire, and he threw himself onto the tile floor and rolled on it, then pushed his arm into the atrium pool up to the shoulder.
“Are you all right?”
“Burned,” Flavius said, with gritted teeth. He pulled himself back from the pool. Correus set the torch upright in a bronze urn and peered into the pool, looking for the drain. He reached in and pried it out with the tip of his sword. His dagger was back in the holocaust of Vettius’s office.
“What’re you doing?”
“No point in making them a present of water.” The pool had begun to empty. Correus picked up the torch again, singeing his hands, and touched it to the atrium hangings and furniture. There was a shattering sound as window glass broke from the heat. The flames rose with a roar as the night air rushed in.
“Get out!” Lucius yelled. “These walls are timber!” He pulled the torch out of Correus’s hands and pushed him at the door.
The painted plaster was beginning to crack, and there was another explosion of flame as the doorway from the corridor collapsed. They dragged the bar from the main door, pulled it open, and stumbled choking into the garden.
“You did a mite too good a job,” Eumenes said, coughing. He could feel the blood running down his arm from the wound in his shoulder, and he stopped to wrap his cloak around it. Above him the house had begun to fall in, in a hellish boiling of smoke and flame, and he backed away from the heat. He would never be afraid of water again, he thought.
Shouting from the house across the street and running footsteps in the distance sent them racing for the gate. Correus wrenched it open and turned to look at the house as Lucius, Flavius, and Eumenes stumbled through. “Burn,” he said with harsh satisfaction in his voice. “Burn!” He turned and raced after them into the dark, empty streets, with the sounds of the hunt growing behind them.
XX A Roman Way to Think
“Let us in!” They hammered on the door of Correus’s house in the vicus.
Septima gave a little screech at the ragged, burned men in the doorway, and Tullius appeared behind her with a menacing expression.
Correus pushed past Septima. She recognized him and screeched again while Tullius helped the others in. “Quit squawking and go get some water and bandages.” Tullius pulled the cloak away from Eumenes’s shoulder and peered at it professionally.
Septima gave Correus a look of nervous apology. “You did give me a turn, sir.” She hurried out.
The atrium was gray with the dawn light, and Correus could still hear yelling in the distance. “I think we lost them, but we’d better get out of sight.” He herded the rest through the back of the house into the kitchen and gave Eumenes’s shoulder a worried look. “Is that going to need a surgeon?”
“No, you got lucky.” Tullius was a time-expired legionary, and, among other things, he had been a surgeon’s orderly. “It looks nastier than it is.” Septima brought him the bandages, and he cleaned the gash and tied a clean bandage around it while Eumenes grimaced.
Flavius was inspecting his burned arm in the pale light from the kitchen window. “Go and find me some salve for this.” Septima scurried out again, looking scared.
Lucius Paulinus perched himself on a kitchen table, and Tullius gave his master a long look of disapproval. “What in Typhon’s name have you been doing? And is that you they’re chasing out there?”
Lucius nodded wearily. “I doubt they’ll come here. No one saw our faces.”
No one who’s still alive, Correus thought. He leaned against the scrubbed wooden table and looked at the other man. “You’re clear, Lucius.”
Paulinus’s face flushed. “I’m ashamed,” he said in a low voice, “that you had to take that risk.”
“Don’t be,” Flavius said. “Not for that. We owed him an evil ourselves. But you can be ashamed you ever began this, Lucius, and there’s a price on tonight. You are to make your peace with Domitian.”
Lucius nodded. “Yes, I expect I owe you that.”
Flavius made a satisfied noise and began smearing salve on his arm, gritting his teeth.
“That’s Flavius’s price,” Correus said. “Mine is that you make my sister make her peace with my wife.”
Lucius gave a ragged chuckle. “That may be harder.”
“I expect you’ll manage,” Correus said. “Don’t think I’m not grateful to Julia, and to you, because I am. But it’s my fault, not Ygerna’s, that Julia got to thinking Felix was hers. Felix has settled down very well, and I won’t have it all started up again.” He braced himself against the table. “I think I could sleep for a week.”
“You’d better,” Tullius said. “You look like a fresh corpse.” He glared at Paulinus. “I won’t tell you what I’ve been thinking since I found out you was gone. Put your head in a noose it won’t come out of one of these days, I expect.”
“You may continue to keep your thoughts to yourself,” Lucius said. He turned back to Correus. “He’s right about sleep, though. Can you lie low here for a day?”
Correus shook his head. “We told a large tale about a hunting trip to get us here, and it wasn’t very plausible then. If we don’t get back fast to Castra Mattiacorum, it’ll smell like old fish. We need horses. Beasts that can’t be tied to this house.”
Tullius considered this necessity. “There’s a nice little livery stable down by the ferry,” he said finally. “Be a bit quieterlike, crossing on the ferry.”
“And the stableman to say where we went,” Eumenes said sarcastically. “And identify the three of us.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Tullius said. “I’ll meet you there. Give me a quarter hour’s start.” He departed purposefully, and Eumenes raised his eyebrows. The gap between slave and free, master and servant, had been bridged in that burning house. “What’s he going to do?”
Paulinus chuckled, this time in genuine amusement. “Don’t ask. I never do.”
* * *
Correus knotted the reins around the dun horse’s saddle horns and gave it a smack on the rump. It began to trot wearily back the way they had come. It might even get back before the stableman woke up in his feed bin and shouted for someone to come and untie him. He picked up Antaeus’s reins and leaned wearily against the gold neck for a moment. They would make it. If they didn’t pass out on the trail back. Flavius and Eumenes looked ready to drop.
Julius gave them an appraising look. “You might just get away with it. There’s the grandmother of all rows going on up at the fort. T
he ghosts of Carthage and all their elephants could’ve come through there and I doubt anyone would’ve stopped arguing to notice ’em.” He hopped up into the saddle. He was riding Ygerna’s mare. “Give me a bit of a start. It won’t do to come in together. There’s a deer under a pile of rocks to keep the wolves off, by that big twisty pine west of the town. Not much of a deer, but I wasn’t after one that could fight back.”
It was nearly dusk when they found the deer as promised, pulled it out from under the cairn of rocks, and tied it on the back of Eumenes’s horse. It looked as bedraggled as they did, Correus thought.
They trotted through the dirty streets of the vicus to leave the deer at a butcher’s stall to be dressed, and rode smack into Julius Frontinus striding purposefully in the other direction.
“Julianus.” He gave Correus a suspicious eye, which then roved over Flavius and Eumenes as well. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Correus laughed. “Don’t tell me you lost money on that race, too! If I’d known it would cause such a stink, I wouldn’t have entered. But poor Quintus – someone doped his horses, you know,” he added helpfully.
“Hmmm.” Frontinus did not look impressed. “Where have you been?”
“Hunting.” Correus pointed a finger at the deer.
Frontinus inspected it. “It looks like you beat it to death with clubs. It looks worse than you do. What happened to that man’s shoulder?”
“It turned and tried to gore me, sir,” Eumenes said. He pulled his cloak over the bandage.
“A courageous beast,” Frontinus said. The deer’s horns were three inches long. “What about you?” He directed his gaze at Flavius’s forearm. A twist of bandage showed under his shirtsleeve.
“Burned it in the campfire,” Flavius said shortly.
“I see.” Frontinus considered. “Well, I came to tell you that your commander’s under house arrest,” he said grimly to Correus. “So you’d better get to that legion before they riot. They’re shaky enough. You won’t be hunting again for a while.”
The Emperor's Games Page 37
