Render Unto Caesar

by Gillian Bradshaw

  She had a point about the Baths of Agrippa, he supposed, but there were other bathhouses in the region. The fleabites itched, and besides, it seemed shameful to hide in the apartment like a robber, when he was a free man, and innocent.

  “Please!” she said, and put her hand on his wrist. “Please, be careful! It’s only for two days!”

  He groaned again, but surrendered. “Very well! I suppose I can manage without a bath for two days.”

  She smiled, and he felt ridiculously pleased with himself, because he had pleased her. He regarded that feeling with astonishment, and advised himself to stop behaving like a lovesick youth.

  The storm began about an hour later: an ominous rumble of thunder, and then suddenly, rain. It smashed down in torrents, darkening the light and rattling against the roof tiles. Hermogenes threw open the window shutters and leaned out: the drops instantly plastered his hair to his head. He watched them splash high and white off a lower roof nearby. He craned his neck, trying to see the lightning, but the street was too narrow, and the window faced the wrong way. Water ran into his mouth and eyes and trickled down the back of his neck.

  “You’re getting wet,” Cantabra pointed out disapprovingly.

  “And I’m going to get wetter!” he exclaimed. He took off his cloak and started down the stairs.

  She followed him, alarmed. “Where are you going?”

  “I just want to see it,” he told her. “I like thunderstorms. Look, I left my cloak behind, so it will be dry to sleep under.”

  The narrow alleyway stank worse than ever as the accumulated filth of many hot summer days was flushed away by the torrent. Hermogenes picked his way around it as well as he could, then paused on the corner. Lightning cracked overhead, and he laughed and tilted his face up to the rain.

  “You’re mad!” said Cantabra, behind him.

  “I just like thunderstorms,” he corrected her. “You can’t pretend that Pollio’s men are going to find me in this! Where shall we go? Where’s the best place to watch it?”

  She rolled her eyes, but led him a block and a half down to the river. Every street was a stream in flood, and the thunderclaps were deafening. They passed a few people huddled in doorways, but nobody else was about in the rain.

  At the Tiber bank there was a huge theater, with an open space around it, and beyond it the rain was turning the surface of the river white. The force of the downpour was already beginning to ebb, however, and the storm was moving off, flickering lightnings up to the north and grumbling sullenly. Hermogenes stood by the riverbank and watched it go.

  When the first break appeared in the clouds southward, Cantabra touched his arm. “Can we go back now?” she asked.

  She couldn’t have been any wetter if she’d just climbed out of the Tiber. Her tunic was plastered to her skin so closely that he could see the outline of the sheath for her knife, and her hair was dark and dripping. He sighed. “I suppose so.”

  They started back. “Sorry,” he said. “I just like thunderstorms.”

  She stopped, stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. She caught his arm, holding him. Water from her hair was trickling along her sword scar, and her blue eyes glinted. “You are a strange, strange man,” she told him. “If someone had told me you existed before I met you, I would not have believed him.”

  “I’m not that strange,” he objected indignantly.

  “Yes, you are!” she said firmly. “Come back and get dry.”

  The rain had stopped by the time they reached Gellia’s insula, but the landlady was still slow to answer the door. When at last she opened it and saw them, she exclaimed in dismay. “Oh, you poor things, you got caught in the rain! I didn’t even know you’d gone out again. And it was a terrible downpour, look at it, the streets are still running!”

  “He likes thunderstorms,” Cantabra informed her, and led the way up the stairs.

  When they were back in the rooms, Cantabra shut the door firmly, then turned to him, still with that glint in her eyes. She flung her strong arms around his neck and kissed him fiercely. Her body, wet and cold and smelling of rain, pressed against his until he felt like clay taking an imprint. He had to put his hands behind his back again.

  “I am going to take that wet tunic off you,” she told him, smiling into his face. It was odd, looking up into a woman’s eyes, but he found that he had no objection to it, when the eyes in question had that light in them.

  “You are?” he asked hopefully. “And what will I do?”

  “Exactly what I tell you.”

  “Ah. Well then. Whatever you say.”

  A little while later, stark naked on the floor with Cantabra on top of him, he started laughing. “Woman, you’re killing me!” he protested. “Please can’t I touch you?”

  “No!” she told him. “Lie there and hold on to the bed.”

  He held on to the legs of the bedframe with both hands. “Oh, please!”

  “No!”

  “I’m going to die!”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  “Mercy! Mercy!”

  “Ha!” she exclaimed. “You surrender, do you?”

  “Yes! Yes! I surrender unconditionally!”

  “Then I will take your sword.”

  When she’d finished taking it, she sighed, and folded herself down beside him and on top of him, long-limbed and graceful. Her hair, still wet from the storm, spread out in tangles across his chest. She began tracing the stitches in the half-healed cut on his face, her eyes gentle and heavy and deep with love.

  “Can I touch you now?” he whispered. “Just on the face?”

  “Mmm.”

  He thought that was agreement, so he brushed back her hair and traced the line of her eyebrows, her crooked nose, her lips, her scar. “I was wrong,” he told her. “You are beautiful.”

  She kissed him.

  “I didn’t expect this,” he went on. “Not so soon. I thought, maybe by the time we reach Alexandria…”

  “I didn’t expect it, either,” she admitted, smiling. “But I didn’t expect you to run out into the rain. Why something so stupid made me want you so much, I do not know. Har-mo-genes.”

  He hesitated on the brink of one reply, and then asked quietly, “Your name isn’t really Cantabra, is it?”

  Something seemed to change in her, some deep-caught grief breaking into a smile of profound happiness. “No,” she admitted, kissing him again. “It’s Maerica.”

  “Maerica. I like that.”

  She kissed the cut on his face, then lowered her head against his chest. “You are a magician. Restoring a name is magic … You can put your arm around me.”

  He did. It felt very good.

  “It was at Taurus’s school that they started calling me Cantabra. ‘The fierce Cantabrians: even their women are deadly!’ They used to say that when they announced my fights, and I hated it. But afterward … it was what I was, ‘the fierce Cantabra.’ Maerica was gone. I thought she was dead—but then I met you.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I love you.” He hadn’t meant to say it, but it was true.

  She picked her head up and looked at him very hard, then relaxed into his arms. “I love you, too. You must not die. You must never die. If you die, I will have to be Cantabra again.”

  “I will try very hard not to die. Maerica.”

  They lay wrapped quietly in each other’s limbs. Water drying on bare skin made them cold; he reached across the floor, found his discarded cloak, and draped them both in Scythopolitan linen. Outside the window there was sun on the streets, and the sounds of Rome were beginning again. He thought, idly, that he would never have run out into the rain that way if he’d had slaves around to make him behave like a master. He was glad that he was here alone with only her. In that moment it seemed possible to spend the rest of his life alone with only her, enclosed in this one room and her arms and perfectly content.

  “What will I do in Alexandria?” she asked, breaking the spell. “Will I stil
l be your bodyguard?”

  “You will be anything you want to be,” he told her contentedly. “There is time and there is money, as much as you need. There is no need to make any decisions now.”

  “Huh. Will your daughter like me?”

  He thought about what Myrrhine would make of the arrival of an exotic barbarian ex-gladiator in the household, then began laughing. Cantabra—Maerica!—sat up in alarm.

  “It’s all right!” he told her at once. “You are not to teach my daughter sword fighting. Promise me you won’t teach her sword fighting, no matter how much she begs you to. Oh, Lady Isis, what have I done?”

  “She will beg me to?” Maerica asked in anxious confusion.

  “She will admire you unspeakably,” he replied confidently. “Oh, by the immortal gods! The two of you will conspire together, I foresee it—and even one of you is too many for me. I won’t have a chance. Promise me you won’t teach her sword fighting!”

  “I promise,” she replied, still unsure of it. “How old is she? What is she like?”

  “She is ten. She is little and thin, with long black hair and big eyes. She wants to be an acrobat.”

  “An acrobat? Surely a rich girl—”

  “Shh! No, of course she can’t be an acrobat. I have told her that, but … well, she practices anyway, and I don’t stop her, though I know I should. I admit it, when she asks me to watch, I applaud. My aunt was horrified when she found out.” He frowned. “I fear that my aunt will be even more horrified when I introduce her to you. Well, we will simply have to solve that problem when we meet it.”

  She lay down and put her arms around him again. “I want to meet your daughter. What is her name?”

  He realized that he’d never even named her to Maerica. He had a blissful sense of time stretching away before them both, full of all the things they would learn about one another. “Myrrhine. You will like each other. I am sure of it.”

  “Mur-ree-ney,” she repeated softly. “Mur-ree-ney. Har-mo-genes. I like the way Greek sounds.”

  “You will have to learn it.”

  “What was your wife’s name?”

  “Eudaimonis. It means ‘Lucky,’ though she wasn’t, poor sweet girl.”

  “No?”

  “She died so young, in so much pain…” He remembered her lying in the bed they’d shared, her face white, gaunt with agony, her eyes dark and astonished. He remembered her small hand burning with fever in his own, and her labored breathing, and the terrible smell.

  “You loved her,” said Maerica. She was watching his face closely.

  “Yes,” he agreed. After a moment he went on, “It was an arranged marriage, of course. I don’t know how things are among Cantabrians—maybe you fall in love and carry one another off?”

  She snorted. “Mostly our parents arrange our marriages for us.” She hesitated. “My uncle arranged mine.”

  “He sounds an important man, your uncle.”

  “No. Just in our village.” She snorted again. “There were five families in our village, and my uncle was the headman. My father died in a war against the Astures, so I belonged to my uncle’s household. When I was sixteen, he arranged for me to marry Deivorix, who was the son of the headman in the next village.”

  When she said no more, he went on, “Well, my father and Eudaimonis’s father arranged our marriage—they were business partners; I still have dealings with him. I was twenty; she was fifteen. I wasn’t very happy about it, because I had another girl and my father sent her away, but I knew it wasn’t Eudaimonis’s fault. I felt very sorry for her from the moment I met her—she was so small and frightened. On our wedding night she curled up in the bed and cried. She missed her mother and her little sister and she was afraid I would hurt her.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Patted her on the back and told her she could visit her family as often as she liked. I didn’t sleep with her then. She was so frightened. We sort of … danced around the act … for the better part of a month.” He smiled, remembering the growing pleasure and desire, the way the bedroom had slowly filled with erotic excitement: will we tonight? tomorrow? “She made me feel wise and strong,” he admitted. “I wanted to protect her. Five years is such a huge gap at that age.”

  She snorted. “Deivorix didn’t fuck me on our wedding night, either, but that was because he was drunk. I sat in our new hut waiting for him, but the men’s feast went on and on, and when he finally came in, he was sick all over the floor and passed out. I had to clean up. It wasn’t his fault, though. He was my age, and he’d never had mead before, and he was nervous, too. Next morning he was terribly ashamed. I poured water over his head, and he told me I was entitled to. That made me like him.”

  “What was he like?”

  She shrugged. “Tall. Thin. He had beautiful hair, the color of wheat separated from the chaff. It was long, and in the evenings I would comb it and kill any lice. Our men always grow their hair long. In battle they wind it about their heads.”

  “I’ve seen you do that.”

  “Yes. Because I am a warrior. Deivorix was a warrior. Well, between the wars he was a shepherd and a hunter, but when war came, he was a brave warrior. He boasted a lot, and he drank too much whenever he could, and he lost his temper easily, but that is what warriors are supposed to be like. Young men are such fools.” She was silent a moment, and then said slowly, “He never even tried to be clever. He would have thought it was dishonorable somehow, to fight with words and your wits instead of your sword. If Taurus had chained him to a post, he would have cursed him and died bravely. None of our people ever fought with his mind. That is one reason why we lost the war.”

  “We lost our war, too,” he murmured. He tried to imagine Deivorix, the tall, brave young warrior with wheat-colored hair, the last man Maerica had slept with willingly. He wondered uneasily how he compared.

  “Did you fight? You are old enough to have fought.”

  “I was old enough, but no, I did not fight. Ai, Zeus! the truth is, the queen never trusted the Alexandrians, and she certainly wasn’t going to allow us arms. We’d fought against her in the past, and she was probably right to think we would have fought against her again if someone had turned up promising to throw out the Romans. We knew she would never do that. So we played very little part in the war in which we were conquered. All the troops who fought at Actium, on both sides, were Roman. Only the fleet was Egyptian, and even it had Roman officers. I know, I know: the Romans say that it was a war against the queen of Egypt—but that is because it sounds better to call it that than to admit that it was a war between two Roman nobles over which of them got to rule the world.” He sighed. “The fact is, Egypt was conquered in all but name long before Actium. The queen’s father bought his throne by bribing the Roman Senate, and he borrowed the money from a Roman financier, then put that same rapacious moneylender in charge of the taxes of Egypt. The queen was no better—always a Roman general in her bed and Roman thieves in her offices. When the emperor arrived, most people felt we’d be better off as a Roman province: then at least we could use the empire’s laws to get redress when we were robbed. And in many ways, they were right.”

  “But you regret that you never fought.”

  It was not a question. “Yes,” he admitted. “I do.” After a minute he added, “My father had me taught Latin from when I was very young. That’s very unusual, but my father was an unusual man. He wanted me to understand how our rulers saw us. The trouble is, I did. I heard the way they talk about us when they think we don’t understand. These degenerate half-Greeks, they say, these Alexandrian cowards: led by a woman and a rabble of eunuchs, no wonder they didn’t fight even for their own country.”

  She stroked his hair. “So now you are fighting to make them see you differently?”

  He laughed. “I suppose I am. How did we get onto this?”

  “My husband.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  She ignored his lack of enthusiasm for the subject and con
tinued her cautious probing. “You said your wife died five years ago. But you have not remarried.”

  “No. I made arrangements with a couple of courtesans. Not both at the same time, of course—one after the other. I … don’t really want to marry again. Poor little Eudaimonis, she suffered so much at the end it still hurts when I think of it. Childbed fever, after a stillborn son. Everyone kept telling her she must give me a son, she must give me a son, even though I said I was perfectly happy with my daughter. She wanted that boy so badly, but he killed her. I sat with her, and gave her opium as I could, and watched her die. My mother died the same way, when I was nine, and I had to watch that, too. I don’t think I could bear to do it again. Courtesans use contraceptives.”

  “What if I have a child?” she asked, in a very small voice.

  He hadn’t even considered that—but of course it was entirely possible. More than that: it was very likely. And he knew, without any word spoken, that she wanted a child. Nothing could replace the ones the soldiers had murdered, of course—but if she had a child she would become fully herself again: Maerica, a woman who could love and be loved, and not a gladiator anymore.

  It was perfectly respectable for a gentleman who’d lost a wife to take a concubine, but bastards were another matter—particularly when the gentleman had legitimate children, and in-laws who might be insulted. Contraceptives were in order, and, if they failed, abortion—and, if that failed, exposure of the unwanted infant in a public place, to die or to be raised in another man’s house as a slave. He could not require that of this woman. He recognized it between one shocked breath and another: he could not and would not require it. He had promised that he would never hurt her.

  “You will have to try very hard not to die,” he made himself say.

  She hugged him so hard he winced. “I won’t die,” she whispered into his ear. “I am strong, and I will give you a strong son. You must not die, either.”

  He felt another delicious stirring in the groin. “If I promise not to die,” he said, beginning to smile again, “will you let me touch you?”