Render Unto Caesar

by Gillian Bradshaw

  “Thank you,” he told her at the top.

  She looked at him sideways. “Thank you for refusing to make me fight.”

  He set his teeth again, this time against the rage. “He wanted you out of the way, do you realize that?” he said in a vehement whisper. “He wanted you dead, to make it easier for his people tomorrow.”

  “You said he was not going to kill you,” she pointed out, frowning.

  “I was wrong. I think he means to give me to Rufus. As part of the bargain.”

  Her frown deepened. “How do you know that?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t. But I think it is what he will do. It’s the kind of man he is.”

  She nodded. “An evil man.” She tugged at his arm to start him moving again. Her shoulder was bony and hard under his sore armpit, but the curve of her breast was soft against his side. He felt a spasm of tenderness toward her, a tingle of improbable desire.

  “I was never going to make you fight,” he told her warmly. “That oily bully would have killed you!”

  She gave him one of her hard blue looks. “I might have won. Ajax was a retiarius. I have beaten retiarii. I think maybe I should have fought him, and let Lord Pollio have his show.”

  He felt obscurely slighted. “I thought women didn’t normally fight men.”

  “Normally, no. But sometimes, if they’re good, and if the organizers think it will please the crowd. I was a secutor or a dimachaeri; I could fight retiarii. It’s not the same as going against a Thracian or a myrmillo.”

  He remembered the savage efficiency with which she’d killed his attackers in the Subura. Perhaps she could have won. “But then what?” he asked aloud. “Even if you did kill or disable that idiot, you might have been injured—and why should you fight to amuse that … that disease? I could never have let you fight!”

  “I did not want to fight,” she said, very serious. “I hated the school and the arena, and I would never go back to them. I refused to reenlist; even when I was hungry on the streets, I preferred to starve. I was glad when you refused, and again when you made him give way. But it made me afraid, too.” They had reached the rooms, and she stopped, just outside the door. “You fought Pollio in your way so that I wouldn’t have to fight Ajax in mine,” she whispered. “He had not expected that, and certainly he had not expected you to get the better of him. He will think about you differently now, not as a weapon but as an opponent. That is not good.”

  She was probably right, he realized. If he succeeded in getting away, he would be viewed not just as a lost tool but as a potential threat—a dangerously perceptive man who had probably understood things Pollio didn’t want known. Pollio would want to kill him just as much as Rufus did. “Oh, Isis!” he groaned, and took his arm from around Cantabra’s shoulders to rub it wearily through his hair.

  She opened the door for him and helped him through.

  Nestor, who was on his own, was surprised to see the guest arrive back without Pyrrhus and the chair. He dithered miserably, clearly unsure whether to go and fetch his partner or stay to keep watch over the guest. Hermogenes took pity on him, and told Cantabra to pass the message to Pyrrhus, if she could.

  “And perhaps you could see if the kitchens have any more of that special barley broth,” he suggested. “The first kind, with the nutmeg, not the one with fish sauce. Tell the cook it was delicious.”

  She looked startled, but nodded and went off.

  She returned not long afterward. With her came Pyrrhus, carrying a steaming jug and a cup on a tray. “The cook sends this,” said the young man.

  “My thanks to him and to you!” Hermogenes exclaimed, smiling. He had had time to regain his composure now, and he knew exactly what he meant to do. “But that’s far more than I need. I only wanted a little to mix with the medicine the doctor left for me. Would the rest of you like to share what’s left? It’s very good, and it should be drunk while it’s hot.”

  The slaves were uneasy about it: they undoubtedly felt there was something wrong with sharing a guest’s drink. On the other hand, they were, he was certain, very seldom offered delicacies, and the broth smelled delicious. “Thank you, sir,” quavered Nestor, blinking. “That’s very kind.”

  Hermogenes sent Pyrrhus into the study to fetch a cup he’d used earlier that day. It was then a simple matter to wait until Nestor had gone to help his partner search for it, and to divide the dose of opium between the cup which went with the room’s water jug and the cup which had come with the tray. “It may be in the sleeping cubicle,” he called to Pyrrhus, and began to pour out the spiced barley broth to conceal what he’d done.

  Pyrrhus and Nestor came back with the fourth cup, which had of course been in the sleeping cubicle all along. He filled that too, emptying the jug, and handed it to Cantabra. Her eyes were puzzled. He realized she didn’t know what the drug did: he and the doctor had spoken in Greek. She probably thought it was another purgative. He picked up his own cup—the one which both the slaves knew had held the drug—and raised it to the others. “Good health!” he said, smiling. “I hope this gives me the sound sleep the doctor promised.” Cantabra’s expression cleared.

  “Good health, sir!” the two slaves echoed, and drank the broth with guilty pleasure.

  He made all the usual preparations for going to bed, then lay down in his cubicle in the dark, staring up at the ceiling. Tarius Rufus wanted to obtain the documents and kill him. If he escaped, Vedius Pollio would simply want to kill him. Where could he go now? Titus Fiducius’s house wouldn’t be safe, but he didn’t have much coin. Perhaps he could go back to the house, collect his letters of credit, and take them to a bank and an inn.

  And then what? Write off the debt, and try to sail back to Alexandria in secret?

  He remembered his daughter, waiting for him to come home. Probably she was not getting on well with Aunt Eu-kleia, whom he had brought back from Cyprus only that spring. Eukleia was querulous and irritable with grief, and she felt strongly that her grand-niece had been allowed to run wild far too long, and should definitely be taken in hand at once. Probably she was right, but he so adored his wild little acrobat that it hurt him to think of her prim and subdued and ladylike. What would become of her, without him? There was money set aside for her dowry, but how would she live until then? What would she do, what would she feel, if he never came home?

  There were the slaves, too. If he didn’t come home, Eukleia would have to sell most of them, and move to a smaller house. They had been part of a household for years—for their whole lives, in many cases—and it would be a total degradation, a change from being a member of a family to being property. How could he inflict it on them?

  But how could he accept letting another man cheat him, beat and abuse him, and try to kill him, with impunity? Some hard knot of pride and self-respect inside him would be severed forever: he would not be the man he had always believed himself to be. He would not be “someone” at all but what Pollio had called him, nobody. He would rather be dead.

  Besides, would going home be enough to secure his safety anymore? Wouldn’t Rufus or Pollio send men after him? Pollio at least had many connections in Egypt, and he was not the man to let a potentially dangerous opponent slip away. No. He could not risk bringing the trouble back home. He had to see this through to whatever end he could force on it.

  What, then? Sell the debt to Gaius Maecenas, who loathed Rufus and probably didn’t like Pollio, either? Or try to find “Titus”? Was any powerful Roman going to be better than Rufus and Pollio?

  This all assumed, he reminded himself, that he succeeded in slipping out of Pollio’s house that night, which was by no means certain.

  He thought of the way Nestor had smacked his lips after drinking the drugged broth, and the real gratitude in the old man’s eyes for the treat. He remembered Pyrrhus dragging him out of the steam room and depositing him in the chair. He hoped they would not be punished for letting him escape. If he did escape.

  After what seemed eons
worrying, he got up and limped into the dressing room. Nestor and Pyrrhus were barely discernible heaps in front of the door. They did not stir when he went through into the study and lit the lamp.

  Cantabra sat up. “It is still too early,” she whispered reprovingly. “We should wait another hour.”

  He grunted, went to the desk, and rummaged about for papyrus and pens. Cantabra got up and came over. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t want Nestor and Pyrrhus to get into too much trouble,” he whispered back. “It wasn’t their fault.”

  He found ink, sat down, and wrote: Do not blame the slaves. I drugged them with opium I obtained from the doctor through a lie. I began to suspect that you mean to sell me to Rufus.

  “What does it say?” whispered the barbarian irritably.

  “Just that I drugged them,” he whispered back. He put away the pens and ink and moved the sheet of papyrus to the center of the desk.

  She shook her head. “You are a strange man.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  “Because it is true.” She looked down into his upturned face. In the lamplight her hair was the color of embers, and her exotic pale eyes seemed dark. “I never knew any Greeks before. Are you like other Greeks?”

  “I don’t know. Are you like other Cantabrians?”

  “No,” she replied at once. “Before the arenas I was. Now I am not.”

  He looked away. “Yes. The arenas would change anyone.”

  She grunted, then suddenly said, “Tonight at the dinner. You said you hated the games, and Vedius Pollio replied as though he knew all the things you would say about them. Do many other Greeks say things like that—that ‘the deaths of men and women should not be entertainment’?”

  “That is something that our philosophers say, and I agree with them. But I fear that most other Greeks like the games almost as much as the Romans do. There is an amphitheater in Alexandria, and whenever they give games there, the mob rejoices.”

  “Still. I like it that your pil-o-sop-ers say that. What does that word mean, pilosoper?”

  “‘Lover of wisdom.’”

  “Huh. The lovers of wisdom hate the games. I like that.” She smiled.

  He smiled back. “You have a good memory for what we said.”

  “I always listen if an enemy is talking. Sometimes I learn things that let me prepare for what he will do.”

  “You are a clever woman—and very good at your work. This afternoon when you told me you had been looking for a way to escape before I’d even thought about it … I was very, very glad.”

  She touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. “I told you you would be glad that you decided to hire me.”

  He caught the hand in both his and pressed it. “So you did. And so I am.”

  She froze, her eyes widening, then snatched the hand away. She rubbed it against her tunic as though he’d dirtied it. He felt a surprisingly sharp stab of hurt and indignation.

  “Maybe it is late enough to go,” she whispered. “Do you want to take the splints off, or leave them on?”

  He swallowed his feelings. She had told him flatly that love wasn’t included in her hire, and given what she must have suffered since she was enslaved, he couldn’t blame her. She had almost certainly been raped by soldiers before being sent to the arenas, and probably abused by her keepers afterward. The real surprise was that he’d started to think of her as a desirable woman at all.

  “Let me untie them and see what feels best,” he said matter-of-factly.

  The ankle was no longer swollen, though it still felt sore. He unwrapped it and cautiously tried his weight on it; it hurt, but bearably. He tried it with no splints, then with both, and settled for one, on the inside behind the joint. Cantabra helped him retie the bindings, and then he went back to his cubicle and collected his sandals, cloak, and belt. He checked his purse: it contained only six denarii and a few coppers. He would have to get some more coin. He glanced round the cubicle again, then picked up the crutch from its place against the wall. In the last resort, it was the only weapon he had.

  The two slaves had not stirred even when he went through the dressing room with the lamp. Nestor’s breath whistled a little in his sleep, but Pyrrhus’s was soft and even as a child’s.

  Cantabra was looking at the two men. “How did you persuade the doctor to give you the right drug?” she asked him.

  “I told him I had symptoms they normally prescribe it for. I assumed they wanted me incapacitated anyway.”

  “Huh! You are as cunning as that evil man said. Blow out the lamp now: we must let our eyes get used to the dark.”

  He blew out the lamp and set it down, and they stood together in the darkness, listening to Nestor’s whistling breath.

  “Now,” said Cantabra at last, and moved soundlessly to the door.

  It would not open wide enough to let them slip out: Pyrrhus was in the way. Eventually, seeing this, Cantabra took hold of his mattress and dragged it aside. The young man sat up abruptly and gazed at them, his eyes shining liquid even in the dimness. Everything seemed to freeze: Hermogenes was certain that even his heart stopped beating. Cantabra put her hand down the front of her tunic and pulled out a knife.

  Pyrrhus muttered indistinctly and lay down again. His soft, childlike breathing resumed as though it had never stopped.

  After a long minute, Cantabra prodded the young man’s shoulder with a cautious knuckle. He did not stir.

  “Probably he was never really awake at all,” Hermogenes told her, his voice unsteady. “Opium does that.”

  The bodyguard shook her head and slid the knife back into its place. She must have a sheath for it stitched into her breast band, he thought, and wondered when she’d acquired that. The shopping trip before she carried his message to Pollio’s house, probably: the knife looked like the one she’d taken off Rufus’s man. She opened the door, stepped carefully around the sleeping slave out into the corridor, and Hermogenes followed her, closing the door behind them. Cantabra strode off, a shadow in the blackness, and he limped after her as quickly and quietly as he could.

  They met no one in the corridor or the colonnade. Cantabra turned right at the bathhouse wing and led him along a path under the trees. The night was dark, with a half moon occasionally showing as a pale blur behind low cloud. Water gleamed on his right, and he wondered again about the lampreys.

  When they neared the bottom of the garden, Cantabra made him wait in the shadows under a bush while she went to retrieve her rope and check that the wall was clear. Hermogenes sat quietly rubbing his sore foot for what seemed to be hours. At last, however, the barbarian woman reappeared, the rope in her hands. It was dark with dirt and smelled of compost: presumably she had buried it.

  She put her mouth against his ear and breathed, “The place to climb the wall is there,” pointing with a hand held low near the ground. He looked where she indicated, and saw that the ground rose slightly, making the climb less. “There is a tree to tie the rope to, there. But there are spikes on top of the wall, and there is a drop on the other side. You will have to be careful.”

  “I will?” he murmured back. “What about you?”

  “I am going to distract the watchman.”

  “There’s a watchman? Where?” His voice had risen, and she made an angry hushing gesture.

  “Over at the far end of the wall,” she told him, gesturing into the darkness. “At the foot of that tree. He is half-asleep, but he would notice you climbing the wall. I am going to go up the slope from him and make small noises, like an animal caught in the bushes or a slave trying to hide. When he comes to investigate, I will slip away silently and follow you over the wall. I will go now. Count to two hundred, then go, tie the rope to the tree, and go over as quickly as you can.”

  “Will you be able to ‘slip away silently’?” he asked with dread.

  “Yes,” she replied at once, and slid off into the night.

  He counted to two hundred, then sto
od and walked down to the place his bodyguard had indicated. He made himself move quietly and carefully, despite the desperate desire to hurry: the last thing he needed was to turn the ankle again by running in the dark. He looped the rope about the tree, tied it, then approached the wall. Despite the rise in the ground it was higher than his head, and, as Cantabra had warned, the top was guarded with spikes of sharpened wood. They were angled outward, however, to catch thieves trying to climb in, and he thought they would not cause too much trouble to someone trying to climb out. He tossed the end of the rope over the wall, took off his cloak and threw it over the spikes, then worked the end of his crutch into the ground, got his left foot onto the handle, and scrambled up onto the top of the wall. A trapped pinecone fell, rattling against the brick, and he thought for a moment he would be sick. He caught hold of the rope and slid off on the other side; dangled a moment above a half-seen roadway, then lowered himself quickly, careful to land on his left leg.

  He pressed back against the wall, trying to control the harsh gasping of his breath, which seemed as loud as a shout in the stillness. He realized that he’d left his crutch on the other side of the wall. He reached up and caught the trailing edge of his cloak, but did not pull it down: Cantabra might want it.

  She might want to pull herself up the rope, too. At the thought he caught a loop around his forearm, got both hands on it, and prepared to brace himself.

  He stood waiting, his back against the rough brick. The only sound was the occasional hush of wind in the pines of Pollio’s garden. As the minutes wore on he told himself that it was good that everything was so silent. The thing to worry about would be shouts of alarm.

  A footstep rustled on the other side of the wall and he braced himself. There was no pull on the rope, however, merely a dark shape appearing on top of the wall. It dipped, then reappeared, and then Cantabra slid down the rope, and he had to jump aside so that she didn’t land on top of him.