B007IIXYQY EBOK

by Gillespie, Donna

  Sunia frowned in a token effort of comprehension, then shrugged. “Ramis herself would not count these Roman wolves kinsmen. I tire of them parading you before their people as some joke.”

  Auriane sadly abandoned all attempts to explain—Sunia lived comfortably among what she could touch and see and had no more use for the spirit world than had a cat for a cloak.

  “Novelty is the word Erato uses, Sunia, not joke.”

  “No matter. When you meet Aristos, the novelty is going to be on them.”

  “That’s not rightly said, Sunia. It’s another of their words we’ve no word for—” A succession of sharp shouts from the street silenced her.

  “Free him!” came scattered cries. Bottles and bricks cracked against the school’s monolithic wall. Auriane moved to the narrow window.

  “All day I’ve listened to that baying and yelping,” Sunia said with a shrug. “By Fria’s necklace, these are a noisy and fretful people. They must have arrested someone important.”

  Auriane was suddenly alert and still, knowing the truth with her body before she knew it with her mind. A ghastly cold bit into her bones.

  “I’m surprised there’s anyone important left to arrest,” Sunia went on, then fell mute as she realized what Auriane was thinking.

  Auriane’s heart clenched shut to avoid knowing the thing that she knew, with fatal certainty, was true. Numbly she struggled to make sense of the scene below: A group of unruly citizens with torches stormed the mounted statue of Domitian that stood in the cleared way about the Colosseum and began pelting it with offal. Then the city police streamed in and started herding everyone indiscriminately into the Via Sacra and on to the prisons, where she knew they would be sorted out according to social station—those with powerful protectors would be let go, and those with no patron to bribe a magistrate would suffer punishment, whether they had a part in the rioting or not.

  A single, clear cry from below jarred her from dazed denial—“Doom to us all! They’ve taken the only sane and good man in the government from us!”

  Sunia heard it too; she came up beside Auriane and put her hands about her shoulders.

  Auriane perceived it first as a simple fact: The precarious structure on which Marcus Julianus had balanced for so long had finally crashed down. It was inevitable, was it not? Then came a riot of rage and pain.

  He is at the mercy of a monster. They will torture him.

  She shut her eyes to escape the sight but only saw it with pulsing clarity. She wanted to scream with her whole body and dash herself against the walls until she either killed herself or brought the walls down. She wished she were a spear tearing through Domitian’s body. She longed to draw together an army and sack the Palace, but only the dust motes settling on the sill were ready to move at her command.

  There is no solace in this world. It is one devouring mouth. From birth to death is one long shriek.

  Beloved. You have no chance.

  Sunia was quietly crying, her face buried in Auriane’s tunic. Auriane felt her whole mind careening toward an embrace of death. I could twist my rune-cloth into a rope and…

  No. I made an oath. An oath reaches beyond this life. Even now in this school my people are mumbling poor, pitiful prayers for my victory. And I want the one within me to see the sun and moon. My people need not know I’ve fled the world. Aristos will do battle with a ghost.

  When Domitia Longina was brought word of Julianus’ arrest, she summoned Carinus and ordered him to die with her. While her maids rouged her face and softened her skin with pumice so her corpse would be beautiful, Carinus mustered the courage to defy her and secreted his own draught of aconite into one of her empty cosmetic pots. When they lay down on her canopied bed for their final rest, Carinus waited until he saw her lids drop closed; then he padded quietly out of her bedchamber and found her personal physician, who administered the antidote.

  When Domitian was informed that his wife lay gravely ill, he made a formal visit; one of his strongest instincts was to maintain a look of propriety. So the first sight that confronted Domitia Longina when she returned to the world was her husband’s face as he bent over her, peering at her with brusque formality, examining her with the bland incuriousness of a goat. Thinking herself to be dead, Domitia Longina thought—is this monster then lord of this world too, as well as the one I just left?

  Domitian turned to leave, then paused and said offhandedly, “Do not imagine you’ve the wit to deceive me, my coy lamb. I know what spurred this childish fit of self-immolation—grief because I’ve brought Marcus Arrius Julianus to justice. Did you think I did not know he was your lover? A pity…. It seems your criminal lechery has finally outdistanced your cunning.”

  Julianus’ house was stripped of its treasures and sealed; all was to be sold at a public auction to help pay for September’s Ludi Romani, the next days of games. But the house itself Domitian decided to give to Veiento as a gift for his services, for without his keen-sighted Councillor he might never have known of Julianus’ treachery. Veiento could not stop boasting of the irony of it—he would now take up residence in the mansion of the very scoundrel who once caused his exile. Victory was complete. Veiento was annoyed that he could not take possession at once, but the Emperor ordered him to wait until his secretaries calculated the extent of the property of the accused, which would require at least a month.

  Within the day, men whom Marcus Julianus had helped to various posts dared not speak his name. His shut-up house was shunned as though it were haunted. To a foreign traveler it would have appeared as though he never was. But out of public view, he was mourned more than any man ruined before him. Offerings for his deliverance were made secretly at family altars or at street shrines under cover of night. Others prayed feverishly at the Temple of Diana, begging the ancient goddess to take her form of Nemesis and seek retribution on Domitian.

  On the day after the arrest, the dawn of the Ides, the Senate was to convene for another day of prosecutions, but at the news of Julianus’ arrest, the Senators stayed away in dozens, claiming a variety of ailments so they would be close to family and affairs—and swift, convenient means of suicide. By afternoon, when word got about that Julianus’ arrest was the result of some private quarrel with the Emperor, hesitantly they crept out and took their seats. Petronius got word to members of the plot, one by one, that the conspiracy was intact.

  Julianus was taken to the warren of passages beneath the Old Palace. As he was led deeper into the moist, earthen tunnels he felt he had been sucked down into a drain, submerged in the unspeakable foulness of the bottom of the world. Along the passages, hands stretched out to him from barred windows; slight stirrings could be heard in the darkness, but he could not tell whether they were produced by humans or outsized rats. The odor of blood and rot seemed thick enough to leave a scum on the walls. From somewhere ahead came a thin, tremulous wail that occasionally sharpened into a screech, a sound without age, gender, or humanity—the cries of a victim in the interrogation rooms.

  He was given a cell opposite the torturers’ rooms, whether by accident or design he was not certain. He felt he was among the ghosts of madmen—the prisoners in adjacent cells kept up a continuous droning, chanting songs and nonsense phrases to cover up the cries of the men on the rack.

  His cell was hardly more than a fissure in a cave. Foul water dripped on his head. At every fresh shriek from the torturers’ rooms he felt a bone crack or smelled flesh frying beneath a brand. But the sight that stayed before him steadily was that of Auriane lying torn and bleeding on the sand. In grief’s delirium he thought the torturers’ arts would bring relief from this agony of the mind. Night came; during the few hours when the torturers ceased their work he lapsed into lurid dreams in which he repeatedly rushed to Auriane’s rescue, only to be dragged back by a river of slime. Then the cries from the interrogation rooms began anew, and a day passed unseen. He kept track of time by the distant shouts of guard changes.

  On the second morning
the guards pushed a new prisoner into the cell.

  Julianus sat up, reality flooding round like ice water. He guessed it was the first hour of day, if once again they were bringing in prisoners. The assassination would be, Providence willing, tomorrow afternoon, a span of thirty-three hours away.

  He listened for a time to the new prisoner’s frantic breathing as the man cringed like a beaten hound against the opposite wall. Eventually a passing guard paused at the window, torch aloft, and Julianus saw his cellmate’s face.

  He felt a jolt of alarm as he recognized that lazy ferret’s countenance, those hunched shoulders, that fair hair, straight as straw, combed forward so that it resembled a hastily thatched roof. The man was Petronius’ secretary, Bato, whom the Guard’s Commander had admitted to the upper hierarchy of the plot over his own protests. Julianus thought Bato had been told far too much for safety. This secretary was one of the few who knew of the participation of both Prefects.

  Curses on Charon. He’s of an irresolute nature. If he was brought in for conspiracy in any form, they will torture him. He’ll babble all he knows and more he doesn’t know, when the interrogator so much as nods at him.

  But then, Julianus reassured himself, he might be here for another reason.

  He waited through two guard changes. Five more prisoners were brought in—poor plebeians arrested for rioting, he surmised from the guards’ talk. Finally he attempted speech with Bato, but only got whimpers and moans in reply. He then gave Bato an edited tale of his own arrest, in order to win the man’s confidence. They did not exchange names, and Julianus kept his voice at a whisper to better disguise it. He was fairly certain the secretary did not recognize him in the cavernous darkness, which was as he wished it. Finally he asked Bato why he had been taken. Bato answered eagerly, his manner that of a terrified child reaching out to the hand of an adult.

  “An informer named me as one of the messengers who carried Saturninus’ orders to the Rhine commanders. It is villainous absurdity. That was three plots ago!”

  We are done, Julianus thought. A conspiracy charge. They will torture him for certain. I cannot believe Domitian is still dragging in men for that long-cold rebellion. As soon as Bato names Petronius and Norbanus, our plans will come apart. Some successor to myself—none of us will live to see it—will have to begin all over again to win, man by man, the support of enough of the Guard to eliminate Domitian without civil war.

  While Bato began pummeling the naked rock, bloodying his fists and crying out the name of someone called Calpurnia, who might have been a ladylove or a mother, Julianus considered rapidly.

  I must not let the interrogators have Bato. They’ll come for him soon enough—they’re systematically taking in all the prisoners in this passage. Fair Nemesis, what is to be done?

  I see no other solution but to somehow persuade them to take me instead. Yes, it must be so.

  Even if I’m successful, though, I can at best only delay them—sooner or later they’ll realize the mistake. For safety’s sake, the assassination must be moved a day closer so they’ve less time to unravel what I’ve done.

  Yes. All will play the same part, at the same hour—but Domitian must die today.

  He moved to the window, examining the faces of passing prison guards. Somehow he must get a message through to Petronius. But the guards he saw were either completely ignorant of what was to come or men he knew to be loyalists.

  Afterward many tales were told of this dawn. Some claimed that just as the sun showed its fiery head it halted in its ascension, as if to slow the coming of day. Others said that at sunrise two moons shone on the west horizon. A traveler on one of the great roads leading into the city reported that a sudden wind tore an inscription plate from one of Domitian’s triumphal arches and hurled it into a nearby tomb. It was commonly said that no child born in Rome as this evil dawn broke lived more than nine days.

  This was the fourth day of the Augustan Games. Sunia awakened with an unpleasant start, remembering.

  Antonius, Cleopatra. The day of deliverance.

  Sunia realized she had been roused by Auriane’s voice—frail and earnest—as she intoned a prayer to Fria.

  “You who are the red-gold crown of the sun…” The words caused Sunia to remember intimately the lost things: Footprints in the mud about her village’s well, filling rapidly with water as the rains came. The sound of the sky’s water slashing through boughs of ash. The image of her own stern black-garbed mother laying lilies on Baldemar’s cairn.

  “You who watch with the eyes of sun and moon until we are waste… …nourish me with your milk. Light my hearth. I know I am lost. I am terrified of this day. Lay your hand on my brow and walk with me while the sun goes into midheaven…for justice is your nature. Your winds sing the law.

  “Let me be enfolded in your black-earth arms. Let me love vengeance a little longer so my sword can strike for the dead…their blood cries out from the ground.

  “Let Baldemar know it—today I either free him or come to him. Eastre, his death-day, will pass no more in sorrow.”

  There was a soft clink at the cell door; slowly it eased open.

  “No,” Sunia said, rising to her feet. “Not yet!”

  Auriane turned around, startled, then moved swiftly to Sunia’s side.

  “Sunia, listen to me,” Auriane said urgently, her voice husky and dark. “If I fail, and if he…if Marcus survives…and you speak to him—I think he would seek you out—do not tell him about the child.”

  “I would not. Why make him suffer more?”

  Two guards from the night watch peered into the cell.

  “Tell him I have done this thing because I and my people are one. Tell him I loved him more than I thought it possible for a human creature to love. I do not remember if I told him that. And, Sunia—”

  One of the guards broke in gruffly, “Not this one? That’s Erato’s favorite. Latius, you’ve made a mistake—your last one, I’ll own.”

  “No mistake. Fetch her out of there and be quick about it.”

  “But Erato—”

  “This is not Erato’s business. Step quickly or answer to Plancius and the givers of the games.”

  The reluctant guard entered, then prodded Auriane’s arm with the butt of his javelin. “Step along there, Cleo. It’s time to get dressed for your day’s audiences!”

  Auriane pulled Sunia to her breast and held her for long moments. “Don’t grieve! Our people will be watching your face to see how I fare. Stay near Thorgild and Coniaric. Sunia!” Auriane drew the aurr from her tunic. “This is the hearth of the world. Why was it returned to me if not to lead us back to our own ground?”

  Sunia pressed the earth amulet to her lips. Then Auriane disengaged herself from Sunia and put on the hooded cloak that one of the guards held ready for her. Sunia saw that Auriane’s hands shook as she fastened it.

  “Remember that I loved you,” Auriane said, her voice pale. “You are my sister. May we meet again on earth.”

  At the third hour of morning the throng in the Colosseum was a placid sea; no one could have guessed at the titanic storm waves to come. Though no favorites were expected to appear today, the amphitheater was filled past capacity with thousands standing in the wooden upper gallery because word had gone round that the Emperor was to appear alongside Plancius, the Praetor who was official giver of the games. Loathed as Domitian was, still he drew crowds like kites to a kill.

  Erato had not slept. He had scarcely calmed himself enough to sit since the hour he was brought the news of Marcus Julianus’ arrest. Before the day was done, the loss of his patron would prove disastrous. He discovered Plancius had brazenly cheated him of payment for the five hundred men and twenty women he provided for the Augustan Games, paying less than half the agreed-upon price. When he raised this with Plancius’ procurator, Erato found himself accused of slandering a member of the nobility, a dangerous charge difficult to fight—and Plancius fully intended to bring it to the courts. Before Julianus�
�� fall, Erato would have laughed at Plancius’ feeble attempts to cheat him. But now he stood helpless and alone against a ruthless aristocrat. Since dawn he had frenziedly gone over his figures to help prove his case, knowing the matter was hopeless, for half the judges in the city owed their positions to Plancius.

  His panic was not eased when he entered his offices at dawn and discovered his bust of Domitian shattered into dust on the floor. He was dumbstruck with spirit-fright, as if he had come upon bloodied cock-feathers in an alleyway. What vileness does this portend? As he cursed the clumsy slave who had knocked it from the shelf, a more earthly terror settled in—he had allowed an image of the Emperor to be abused. Men and women were executed for less than this. Hurriedly he swept up the pieces himself, fearing to leave the mess for a slave, who might allow word of this to reach the wrong ears.

  And so when Meton came to Erato at noon to report that Aristos was missing, he found the school’s Prefect too distracted to listen or care.

  “Meton, if you are burdening me with this and you’ve not searched every tavern and brothel—”

  “But they are closed. It is a festival day.” Meton frowned, surprised Erato had not thought of this.

  “Then imitate Penelope and bide patiently. I wouldn’t fret overmuch—it’s bad for the color and complexion.”

  Meton flushed; he despised references to his womanly appearance.

  “But the Acrobat and the Eel don’t know where he is. What if Musonius Geta made another try at packing him off to Hades—”