Mistress of Rome

by Kate Quinn

  All of it would vanish overnight, of course, if he lost his next fight. And I wondered how long he would last.

  “Savages never live long,” an aging legionnaire said critically, slamming a mug of beer down on the table at a tavern where I’d gone to sing. “The Barbarian’s just like all those tribesmen I came up against in Britannia—throws too much into every stroke. Savages always lose in the end because they can’t keep their heads.”

  Quite correct, I thought. Men who want to die usually do, and Fortune’s smile on gladiators is notoriously fickle. But . . .

  I watched Arius stride through the forum, seeing the icy rigidity of his shoulders, the iron grip of the fingers clasped at the small of his back, the fierce impassive gaze he turned on the lanista who waddled complacent and perspiring at his side. Thin ice over savagery—a potent brew, and the fans lapped at it deliriously. The ice never broke, but stories persisted of the men he’d killed in street brawls, the taverns he’d wrecked in drunken rages, the fellow fighters he’d slain in sparring practice, and hopeful crowds turned up daily outside the Mars Street training courtyard in hopes of seeing it for themselves.

  Yes. While he lived, while he lasted, he’d rise to the top.

  “What’s the news in Rome?” Lepida wrote to me after a careless description of Tivoli’s cool winds and soothing rains, her success at local parties, the Tivoli girls she put to shame. I wrote back an inventive account of Arius’s carousing, naming each and every fabled beauty who’d reportedly offered her services free of charge, and volunteering my personal opinion that he’d sampled them all.

  “My, aren’t you talkative,” she wrote back snappishly. “Well, you’d better start delivering these right away, one per week. And don’t think I won’t know if you conveniently lose them.”

  “These” turned out to be a packet of letters: prewritten on expensive paper, sealed and scented, and addressed to “Arrius the Gladiator” in Lepida’s none-too-literate hand. Dutifully I took one and made my way to Mars Street.

  “Oh yes,” Gallus purred. “Lady Lepida’s maid—you have a delivery from your mistress? These noble ladies and their plotting! Never fear, I’ll leave you in privacy.” He disappeared, leaving me alone with the Barbarian.

  For a moment we just looked at each other. “I have a letter from my mistress,” I said crisply.

  “I can’t read,” he shrugged. “Only fight.”

  “I’ve been charged to read it to you.” I cleared my throat, retrieving the letter and breaking the seal. “ ‘My dear Arrius,’ ” I read, feeling my cheeks flush. “ ‘How horibly dull it is up here in Tivoli with no games. I so much look forward to the gladitorial shows when I get back. I’ve perswaded my father to give you a prime spot. I do hope you haven’t forgoten all about me. Lepida Pollia.’ ”

  I folded the letter up. “Reply?”

  “None.” He was leaning up against the wall, arms folded across his wide chest, gazing out the window.

  “She won’t like that,” I said, and noticed incongruously how a scar behind his ear interrupted the line of his russet hair.

  No answer. I curtsied, turned—

  “Thought I saw you at the Golden Cockerel last week.”

  “Yes. The taverner likes me to sing.”

  I saw Arius there the following night, drinking. Deaf to me.

  Another letter the following week. “No reply,” he said.

  “All right.”

  “It’s hot today.”

  “Hot?”

  “Oh—maybe not. In Judaea it must get much—”

  “No—no, it’s hot.”

  Every week I came with another of Lepida’s misspelled notes. Read them aloud. Then waited for the diffident word that always came.

  “Cut yourself?” Indicating, one day, my neatly bandaged wrist.

  “Yes,” I said evenly, turning my hands over to hide my scars.

  Too late.

  “Your wrists look like my back,” he observed, and looked at me. Just eyes, gray eyes, and they weren’t as cold as people said they were.

  There was an old woman among the Pollio slaves, a Brigantian woman who did the laundry. I wheedled a song out of her, a song from Britannia. It was a lovely thing that haunted the ear, and the strange words were cool and slippery in my mouth. “A song about home,” the old woman said. “Like all songs from slaves.” The next night at the Golden Cockerel, at the dawn hour when the drunks were nodding and Arius drinking grimly in his corner, I sang the Brigantian song about home. Sang it low and soft so the melody slipped coolly through the torpid room, sang it so a damp island breeze freshened the congealed air, sang it to the top of Arius’s head as he stared down into his wine. He never looked up, but—

  “Where did you learn that?” he asked me the next time I came with one of Lepida’s notes.

  I shrugged. “From a slave.”

  He said no more, but I was starting to know the planes and shadows of his face, the flickers of expression that crossed his eyes . . . and I was well pleased.

  THE heat was making him crazy. The boredom, the inactivity, but mostly the lazy shimmering heat. He dreaded the arena, woke up swearing when he thought of the applause on his head, but the thought of the approaching games was getting better. Anything was better than feeling his own blood boil inside his veins.

  He prowled out into the courtyard, where the midday sun made mirage pools on the packed sand, and got a wooden practice sword. He stripped off his tunic and drilled—relentless mechanical drills that satisfied his body if not his temper. The trainer paired him with a Greek for a practice bout, and Arius didn’t wait for the Greek’s salute before bringing his sword down in a vicious side sweep.

  “Lay off!” The Greek jumped out of the way. “It’s just training!”

  Kill him, whispered the demon in Arius’s head.

  He launched forward. The Greek brought up his own blade, and wood met wood with a flat crack. The Greek’s sword broke off at the hilt in a spray of splinters. He leaped back and Arius leaped with him, smashing his sword hilt into the Greek’s nose. The Greek toppled, and they rolled in a flaying tangle across the courtyard. Arius got his hands around a sweating throat, gritty with sand—

  Kill him. Kill him.

  “That’s enough, dear boy.”

  He blinked.

  “Save yourself,” Gallus said languidly from the shade of the doorway. “I want you fresh for the Romani games in September.”

  Finger by finger Arius unlocked his hands. Sat back. Rolled to his feet. He was bathed in sweat.

  “You bastard,” the Greek growled, “you broke my nose!”

  Kill him, the demon whispered inside Arius’s head. You want to. Kill him.

  He turned his back and walked away. All along the courtyard he could feel the sour eyes of the other fighters. On the street side, on the other side of the bars, were the curious stares of passersby. He wondered how long it had been since he had lived without strangers watching.

  There was no wind, but the sweat on Arius’s skin had already evaporated. A violent pang of homesickness stabbed him, a longing for cool rains and green hills, for sweet mists that kissed the skin and soft winds rustling in the oak groves. He was tired of barren skies and hot, lifeless air. The heat would wither him into a dry soulless husk long before he ever grew old.

  He turned away, aiming a vicious swipe at the air. A crowd had already gathered at the side of the courtyard, peering through the bars and laying bets.

  Kill them.

  He was about to turn back into the barracks when he caught sight of Thea through the bars. She was standing at the corner of the courtyard, a little apart from the crowd, a basket balanced on her narrow hip and a rope of dark hair hanging over one shoulder. On her way to the forum, probably. But pausing—pausing and watching him with her grave, quiet gaze. He gazed back. She had one of those damn bandages around her wrist again.

  He didn’t know why—but he brought up his sword and saluted her.

  Ha
il, he heard the gladiators roar out in his head. We salute you from death’s shadow.

  He swung the blade in a graceful arc, halting the point a quivering inch from the sand, then followed through with a thrust at an imaginary enemy, a dodge back, a turn and then a feint. A slow and elegant dance with the sword, the sun heating his back, the sand gritting under his feet, every muscle in his body flowing as smoothly as warm honey. Thea’s eyes never turned away.

  Show-off, sneered the little black demon.

  He whirled, bringing the sword high over his head and slamming it deep into the sand. It vibrated back and forth, the hilt humming under his hands, and he turned his eyes to Thea’s.

  The crowd was applauding, but the sound was far away. He had made her smile.

  ANOTHER letter from my mistress.” Thea lifted her brows. “Do you care if I read it? You know what she sounds like by now.”

  He shrugged, struggling to thread a needle he’d borrowed from a slave. The sleeve of his tunic had a jagged tear.

  “I won’t bother, then.” Thea folded her arms around her own waist. “Any reply? She keeps asking me peevishly why you don’t say anything.”

  “She’s got eyes like a ferret. Tell her I said that.”

  Thea’s face opened up into laughter. “She’d slap me senseless, but it would be worth it.”

  A little silence. Arius got the needle threaded, tugging his torn sleeve across his arm where he could get at it. “Surely the slaves do that for you,” Thea observed.

  Arius shrugged again. “I hate asking Gallus for anything.”

  “Then you’ll need to learn to mend properly. You’re going about it all wrong, you know.”

  Arius found himself laughing. Rustily. “Never learned to sew.”

  “I’ll teach you.”

  “All right.” For the first time he took her into his little cell, watching her touch the stone wall, the back of a chair, the rough blanket on the bed. “What?”

  “It’s not what I expected. Austere.” She turned, letting out another smile. “Needle?”

  “Here.”

  “Good. Now sit down.”

  “Why?”

  She placed her hands on his shoulders and pushed him down into the chair. Her voice was playful. “Because I’m the teacher, and the teacher has to loom over the pupil. First of all, that tunic has got to come off. You don’t mend something while you’re wearing it.”

  Self-consciously he shrugged out of his tunic. He still wore his training kilt underneath, from that morning’s sparring, but he felt naked. One side of Thea’s mouth flicked up, but her hands were businesslike as she turned the tunic inside out. “You’ll need to trim the stray threads. Do you have a knife?”

  “Gallus doesn’t let me have anything sharp.”

  “Don’t suppose I blame him. Just tuck the threads in and lap the edges over, then.” Showing him. “Now take the needle, and use a roundabout stitch like this.”

  His stitches were crude next to hers. “It’s no good.”

  “Did Vercingetorix beat Julius Caesar on his first campaign? Try again. Careful, you’ll break the needle if you hold it so hard. It’s not a sword, Arius.”

  His name was sweet in her mouth. She leaned over his shoulder, her work-hardened hand gentle as she readjusted his grip. He felt her breath whispering on the back of his neck, the plaited ends of her hair caressing his bare arm. Her skin was smooth and cool in the stagnant heat. The little cell suddenly seemed much hotter.

  The needle broke in his hand.

  He jumped up then, knocking her back against the bed. “Get out.”

  “What?” Half-sprawled across his rough blankets, she looked puzzled. “Arius—”

  “Go away.” He said it brutally. Before the demon could whisper, Hurt her.

  Something in her face shuttered. The second woman he’d thrown out of his room. Only this one left without a word, quietly and on her own two feet.

  He banged the door behind her. Sank his back against the latch, head in his hands, and listened to her quiet footsteps retreating down the hall. Now she would have gone through the door, now the gates would have shut behind her, now she would be walking back toward the Pollio house and her blue bowl . . .

  He yanked the door open. “GALLUS!”

  “Yes, dear boy?” His lanista appeared in the hall, groomed and jeweled for a party, a pretty slave boy holding his pomander.

  “Don’t let her back in here again. Ever.”

  He slammed the door, and the demon laughed.

  Four

  THEA

  CAREFUL with those bracelets, stupid!” The festival of Volturnalia was past, and my mistress was back.

  “What a summer!” She stretched like a cat, impossibly pale and smooth and lovely. “Tivoli is so beautiful in August; not a bit hot. Too bad you had to miss it. Goodness, Thea, you do look brown. All dry and baked like a saddle. Anyway, you’ll never guess what the Emperor’s done! Marcus had the news before anyone. He’s divorced his wife! Emperor Domitian, that is. Packed her off to Brundisium or Toscana or somewhere. Can you imagine? She probably had a lover—they’re talking about that actor, the one named Paris who plays at the Theatre of Marcellus. I can’t see an Empress with an actor, so it’s probably just talk, but they say Domitian had him killed anyway. He’s a very jealous husband.”

  “Shall I unpack now, my lady?”

  “Yes. Marcus is coming to dinner tonight, so leave out the yellow silk. Don’t bother with jewels; no need to look beautiful for Marcus.” She regarded her betrothal ring impatiently, then her gaze flicked up to me. “So, Thea—”

  “The jasmine perfume, my lady?”

  “Don’t change the subject, Thea. How did your little summer errand go?”

  “He didn’t get the last three letters.”

  Her fine black brows drew together. “If you lost them—”

  “No.” I busied myself with her perfume bottles. “He wouldn’t see me.”

  “What do you mean, wouldn’t see you?”

  “I went to deliver a letter.” I spoke tonelessly. “He told me to get out.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You idiot, you’ve ruined everything!” Lepida hauled back and slapped me across the cheek. “I should have known you’d mess it up somehow! How dare you!”

  She whirled away from me, storming up and down the room in her bright silks. “And how dare he! He’s nothing; he’s just a gladiator. Doesn’t he know who I am? I’ll tell Father to throw him to the lions, I’ll—” Her eyes shot back to me. “He has someone, doesn’t he? Who is she? Some patrician whore? Some boy tribune?”

  “No. He just—doesn’t like people.”

  “Oh.” She paused a moment in her pacing. “Perhaps he’s just—shy?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Who would have thought it? The Barbarian is shy. I suppose it stands to reason. I mean, he can’t have had anyone like me before. Maybe something can still be done.” She flung herself down elegantly on the couch, piercing me with a needle-sharp glance. “Not that I’ll be asking you to run any more messages, the way you’ve botched things.”

  As soon as I bowed out I sent up a prayer of thanksgiving. The God of the Jews is hard, merciless, a joker—but occasionally He relents. Yes, Lepida Pollia was back and there would be no more singing for me in taverns—but I wouldn’t have to see Arius anymore. And surely when I didn’t have to see him—swinging a sword two-handed across the training courtyard, with his gray eyes meeting mine over the blade as he saluted me . . .

  Fighters. A bad choice for—well, for anything. I knew all about investments after living in the Pollio house. Gladiators are bad investments. They die too quickly.

  “Thea!” A large, moist hand plastered over my elbow, and I looked up into Quintus Pollio’s jovial eyes. “Thea. Just the thing I need.”

  WRAPPED in a coarse cloak with a deep hood, he got as far as the Aurelian Gate.

  “Hey, you.” A clerk
frowned at him peremptorily. “No skulking out like a criminal; let’s see your papers all right and proper—wait, I know you!” A double take. Too late, Arius covered the gladiator tattoo on his arm. “Saw you in the arena. You’re the Barbarian! What are you—”

  Arius hammered both fists into the clerk’s middle, and ran. Six guards brought him down in the middle of the dusty road.

  I should’ve had a sword, he thought disjointedly as they dragged him back to Mars Street by the elbows. They’d never have gotten me if I’d had a sword.

  “Yes, thank you,” Gallus said coolly, passing money out among the guards with a liberal hand. “He’ll be chained during training next time . . . hamstrung a guard? With his teeth? Perhaps this will ease the pain.” More money changed hands, and four of Gallus’s thugs locked manacles onto his wrists and ankles. Arius knew, hearing the sickeningly familiar rattle of the chains, that there weren’t going to be any strokes or smiles this time.

  As soon as the gate shut behind the grumbling guards, Gallus turned and smashed him twice across the face with a heavy jeweled hand. So there really was muscle under all that pendulous pink flesh.

  “Stupid boy!” the lanista hissed, and he launched a string of gutter invective straight from the slums.

  “Your origins are showing, Gallus,” Arius commented, and another blow rocked his head back against the wall.

  “So you made your grand bid for escape, eh?” Gallus spat. “And where did it land me? Out of pocket, that’s where it landed me! Stupid boy!” Another massive blow.

  Arius tasted blood in his mouth, and felt a surge of macabre cheer. Beatings and chains and curses; here was a coin he could deal in. “Go to hell, Gallus.” He bared his bloody teeth in a grin.