“Request permission to transfer.” Correus slammed the wax tablet containing his request down on the desk. The wax cracked off at the corner, and he glared at it, thumbs hooked in his belt.
The optio in the headquarters at Misenum Naval Base scooped the tablet into one hand. “I’ll see that it goes through,” he said, blank-faced. Centurion Correus Julianus put in for a transfer once a week, regular as sunrise. Another tablet in the stack wasn’t going to make any difference, but the optio wouldn’t have dreamed of saying so. Centurion Julianus was a senior officer and a man plainly on the thin edge of his temper. “A bad week, sir?” he inquired carefully.
“Oh, no,” Correus said sarcastically. His aquiline face was tight-stretched, and a few locks of brown hair stuck out untidily from beneath his helmet rim. He looked as if he had jammed it on his head in a hurry. “I’m a professional soldier. I put in nine years in the field so I can come here to ship fourteen lions and a hippopotamus up the Tiber! Along with a herd of goats to feed the lions. Have you ever slept on a ship where they’ve been slaughtering goats? Have you ever smelled a lion? Mithras god, I can still smell their stench on me, and I soaked in the bath with half a bottle of my wife’s scent!”
“Well, I expect the next run won’t be so bad, sir,” the optio said soothingly. The duties of a peacetime navy got on most men’s nerves, but Centurion Julianus looked ready to go around the bend.
“No, this time we’ll get to ship a hold full of sand. Sand, mind you – we’ll need half the whole damned fleet because Italian sand isn’t pretty enough! And now the emperor wants a water fight, bless him, to cap off the big day for his games. On the old Augustan lake by the Tiber. It hasn’t been filled in thirty years, and we’ll probably drown half the audience. If I’d wanted to be a damned actor, I’d have put on a gold wig and a dress and gone into the theater!”
The optio nodded sympathetically. A water spectacle meant two navies of condemned men in fake uniforms, fighting each other for the promise of life if they came in on the winning side. That was all right for the civilians and the mob, of course, but not really an amusement for the professional man. And Centurion Julianus didn’t much like arena games, anyway. “I’ll put your request through, sir,” he said, “with the rest of ’em. But I wouldn’t be holding my breath.” The centurion had nearly a year yet to run to the end of a standard tour, and the Misenum commander didn’t like training new officers when he could help it.
Correus nodded, growled, and turned on his heel. The optio watched him go. Centurion Julianus was really going to be unhappy when he got the specific orders for the water fight. The optio had heard about the emperor’s water spectacle already – very little information missed a headquarters optio – and word was that it was to be a carefully choreographed rendition of the Battle of Actium, not the usual free-for-all. It would take a lot of training to get the condemned men to put their backs into learning military formation on the slim hope of coming out alive. And Centurion Correus Julianus was going to get to train them.
This posting was a favor to him, and Correus knew it – a chance to get fleet experience and mark himself as a well-rounded military man destined for great things. His brother, Flavius, who was on the emperor Titus’s staff, had no doubt had a hand in the appointment. But Correus had had a year of it by now, growing daily more rebellious, and had put in for transfer to an active command more times than he could count. Still, here he sat, shipping lions and condemned men up the coast to Rome or, sillier yet, a cargo of nothing but African sand to keep the arena floor clean. The men condemned to fight in the arena crept into Correus’s dreams at night, shackled together and bleeding, lost eyes fixed on his own.
After he and Caritius, captain of the flagship of the Misenum Fleet, had begun to work out the details of the emperor’s naval spectacle, Correus awoke at night, sweating, to discover that he had kicked off the covers trying to rid his own leg of an imaginary shackle, and to find his wife, Ygerna, also coverless, huddled into a chilly ball beside him with her hands over her face as if somehow his dreams had crept into her own. One night he had actually sat up screaming, convinced that he was drowning, chained by the leg to a sinking ship.
Ygerna sat up too, her thin face scared in the moonlight. She had seen him afraid only once before, and then it had been of her. He had let loose his grief for his son’s dead mother, enough to fall in love again. This was different, a cold fear from inside the mind, like a dark snake that slithered out with the sunset. She put her arms around him as far as she could reach, and after a minute he stopped shaking.
“Mithras god.” Correus flopped back down on the pillows. He put a hand to his face. The skin felt clammy.
“The same dream?”
“With a few refinements.” He shivered. “I’m sorry, dear. This is the third night running I’ve waked you.”
“I don’t mind. I just don’t understand. You’ve seen worse things. Why does the arena do this to you?”
That was true enough. He hadn’t been a professional soldier for nine years without stacking up a few horrors to remember. But they didn’t come crawling into his dreams at night. “This one’s a birthright,” he said sourly.
“That is a lot of years down the road,” Ygerna said. “And you had more pampering than most free children.”
“I know.” Correus made a face. He always felt foolish when the subject of his slave birth cropped up. In truth he had led a charmed childhood, running tame on his father’s estate, being freed and formally adopted at eighteen, and helped to a military career that would take him as far as he had the ability to go. His mother, Helva, still lived on the estate in the privileged position of the master’s longtime mistress and mother of his second son. There had never been any prospect of the gladiators’ school or a slave galley for Correus. But somehow the arena and the slave market always gave him the same feeling: There but for the grace of the gods and Appius Julianus went Correus. As a result he “collected strays” – his old commander’s phrase – a parade of the lost and hopeless who had crossed his path and found Correus unable to let them go by to their fate. Julius, his body servant and stable boy, was one. His son Felix’s mother had begun as another – bought by Correus to spare her from a worse master.
“It isn’t fear for yourself, you know,” Ygerna said quietly. “It’s – you are mad because you can’t change things… can’t save them all.” She switched from Latin into the soft dialect of the Silure hills, her homeland in West Britain, as she still did when she wanted to explain something carefully, not in a language that she still found stiff. “You want to be the god who is lowered on a wire at the theater, in a mask, with gold spikes on his head, and makes everything work out properly.”
Correus started to laugh, softly, and pulled her down on the bed beside him so that he could rest his head on her breast. “You are a witch.” His hand traced the delicate five-petaled flower that was pricked into the skin between her breasts with blue dye: the mark of the Goddess, the Dark Mother.
“I am not needing the Sight to tell you that much,” Ygerna said. “You know it yourself, but it gives you bad dreams, anyway. I thought once that the dreams might be because of me – that the Mother might be angry, for stealing her priestess—”
“No, love. I’ve had them before.” His voice was tired.
“I know. And the Goddess doesn’t come to me anymore, so I doubt she cares what I do. I have grown too Roman for her, I think. And your dreams are out of your own mind. You’ll have them until you get rid of them.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. They aren’t my dreams. Learn to think like your brother, maybe.”
Ygerna had always been able to figure him out, and, somewhat to his surprise, he had found that she could generally tell what his half brother, Flavius, was thinking, too. “You might as well tell me to think like a maenad or a Nubian from Africa,” he said about that. “I can’t even understand his thinking half the time.” It was only in the last few years that he and Flavius had learned to put childhood rivalry far enough behind them to be friends. But each still found the other a puzzle, an oddity only partly comprehended.
“You and Flavius are like that god with the two faces—” Ygerna said.
“Janus,” Correus said.
“Janus. The back and front of the same thing. You are more alike than you think. You just can’t look at each other straight on and see it.”
“Maybe.” He was beginning to be sleepy. The nightmare drifted away with the sound of her voice. Sweet reason in a white night shift, with her long hair braided into two thick plaits and the front curls incongruously tied up in a wild array of rags. He kissed one breast sleepily, and she ran a light hand across his forehead.
“Go to sleep. You don’t dream when I hold you.”
No, nothing ever touched him in Ygerna’s arms. But he couldn’t spend his life huddling in his wife’s embrace to close the demons out.
In the morning Correus found a family row brewing up over breakfast, to take his mind off his dreams. He eyed the storm signals warily.
“Felix may not go to a barbaric water battle. He’ll stay at home in Misenum with me.” Ygerna gave Correus a horrified look that made it quite plain that she found his countrymen revolting in this guise. When a Roman spoke of barbarians, he meant a people like the Britons, the half-tamed folk who were Ygerna’s kin. Ygerna’s expression said clearly whom she meant.
Since Felix, who was five, rarely saw eye to eye with his stepmother – or anyone else in charge, for that matter – the conversation quickly degenerated into an exchange of “I won’ts” and “You wills,” until Correus sent him off wriggling like a squid under his nurse’s arm.
Ygerna slumped down at the stone table in the secluded, shaded courtyard that was the center of their house at Misenum Naval Base and put her head in her hands. “Correus, it’s no use. I’ll never be able to manage him.” She sounded nearly ready to cry, but she gave a rueful chuckle. “And in another few years he’ll be bigger than I am, and then what am I going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Correus said. “Carry a club, maybe.” He put his hands on the nape of her neck, where a few fine black curls were coming loose from the intricate knot on her head. He would rather discuss Felix than the emperor’s water fight, he thought. “Dear heart, he’ll come round. He is already. He’s a willful little demon, but he does like you. And me, I hope. It’s not so easy, being suddenly handed over to a father you don’t even remember. It’s my fault for leaving him with Julia for so long.”
“You didn’t have anything else to do with him,” Ygerna said practically. When Felix’s mother had been killed, Correus had been a cohort commander in the wilds of West Britain, and the rest of his household had consisted of a fifteen-year-old slave and a cat. Correus’s half sister, Julia, had been sent straight from the gods when she offered to take the baby. It was giving him back again that had proved to be the problem.
Felix, or Frontinus Appius Julianus, to give him his full name – he had been named for Julius Frontinus, then the governor of Britain – had lived the first four years of his life with Julia and her husband, Correus’s old companion Lucius Paulinus. Julia thought of Felix as her firstborn; not even two babies of her own had changed that. When Correus had come home at last, with a seventeen-year-old wife and a determination to meld his oddly assorted household into a family, Julia had gritted her teeth and given him back his son, but she hadn’t liked it, and neither had Felix.
It didn’t help, Correus thought, that Felix was so plainly not Ygerna’s child. Ygerna was white-skinned and dark-haired, with black eyes and dark, winging brows in a sharp-pointed face. She hardly came up to Correus’s collarbone. That was the sidhe blood in her, her grandmother’s folk, the little Dark People, the Old Ones of Britain who had ruled before the golden Celts had come. She had been a royal woman and a priestess of her tribe, the Goddess-on-Earth through whom Earth Mother made her presence felt, before she had been a hostage to the Roman governor and then, in the end, a Roman citizen – Flavia Agricolina on the official papers, in honor of the governor who had requested the citizenship and the Flavian emperor who had granted it.
Felix’s mother, Freita, had been a German woman, tall enough to look Correus in the eye, and if there was something of his father in the shape and features of his face, Felix’s coloring was all his mother’s. His thick hair was the sleek gold color of ripe barley, and his eyes were as green as sea grass. He was strong and big boned, like the half-German colts his grandfather raised for cavalry remounts, and as much in need of discipline. By the time he was eleven, he would be taller than his stepmother. Correus wouldn’t be surprised if Felix outweighed her two years before that.
“He’ll come round,” Correus said again. He didn’t think that sounded like much help, but no other thoughts occurred to him. “You were doing fine last night.”
“I was teaching him to play Wisdom,” Ygerna said. “I learned it when I was his age. As long as I act like a sister, we do well enough. It’s when I try to be a mother and say no that we get into trouble.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Correus said. “It’s not Felix’s best word. But you’re right about the emperor’s games. I’m not taking a five-year-old to watch men kill each other. There will be races at the Circus Maximus next week, and he can go to those.”
Ygerna snorted. “I suppose men don’t kill each other in your chariot races.”
“Not intentionally,” Correus said. “At least I don’t think so. They’re certainly no worse than some British races I’ve seen. And there’ll be trained elephants and whatnot. Felix’ll love it. You tell him he can go to that and see if it takes the sting out of the other. You ought to see the circus yourself, before you get too fat to be comfortable sitting so long.”
He put a hand on her belly, and she glared at him. “I am not fat,” she said with dignity, “and I don’t even show yet.” Ygerna was more than five months along with her own child.
Most days she was pleased with that, but there were times when she would have liked to let Correus try being pregnant and see how much he cared for the experience.
“Yes, Princess.” He bowed gravely to her, and she grinned at him. For some reason, Ygerna never looked like a Roman when she showed any emotion. There was something about joy or anger or just plain disgust that would bring out the sidhe blood in her and give her face an odd, exotic cast. Correus’s own mother always explained to people that her daughter-in-law used to be a witch, and Correus had long ago given up trying to point out to Helva the difference between a priestess and a witch. Helva knew it well enough, anyway. And, looking at Ygerna, Correus sometimes thought that there wasn’t all that much difference.
Julius put his head through the doors that opened from the atrium to announce that Captain Caritius was hot to cast off and about to split his gut for fear of missing the tide; the centurion had better hop to it.
“The centurion will be with the captain directly,” Ygerna said repressively. She was trying to train Julius into a proper majordomo, but so far no one felt that she had had much success. She stood up and kissed her husband. “Go and attend to your sailors. We’ll meet you in Rome at your father’s house.”
The one bright spot of the emperor’s latest assignment, Correus thought as he walked up the boarding plank of the Misenum Fleet’s flagship with Caritius, was that Ygerna had agreed to brave the rigors of a full-fledged family gathering, and spend the time that he was posted to Rome at his father’s house outside the City. At least he would have her warm company at night instead of a century of sailors and the dubious comforts of the Praetorian Guards barracks. And maybe that would keep the dreams at bay.
The whole world came to the emperor’s games that year – a hundred days of spectacles, horse races, and trained elephants, wild beasts, gladiators, and, always, blood – an endless celebration of anything that anyone could think of to celebrate, from the emperor Titus’s accession to the purple to the completion of the newest wonder in that city of wonders, the Flavian Amphitheater: four tiers of smooth travertine stone from the quarries of Albulae, brought to Rome on a road especially built to carry it, soaring skyward above Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, above gilded statues in their niches, to the great, multicolored canvas awnings that shaded the inner bowl and the arena floor below. The light flowed brightly red, blue, and yellow, like paint poured through the awnings, giving a circus gaudiness to the gilded statues and the spectators in their seats. From the marble boxes of the privileged on the first level, up through the public tiers to the galleries on the top, the seats were filled with pages, attendants, message carriers, and laughing, pushing holiday-makers, trailing cushions and hampers of food.
Titus, dedicating the amphitheater constructed by his father, the Deified Vespasian, on land once occupied by Nero’s private palace, had decreed that it belonged to the people of Rome, and all, down to the humblest, were to have their place in it. There was even a terrace above the third public tier to give standing room to the few slaves and foreigners too lowly to receive one of the 45,000 entrance tokens distributed each day.
Crowded into the doorways that led to the third tier of the public seating, a half century of seamen in the naval green tunics of the Misenum Fleet jostled each other for a view of the arena floor, while Correus Julianus, resplendent in the golden oak leaves of a corona civica and the gilded parade uniform of a senior centurion, his vine staff tucked under his arm, leaned in an arch beside a statue of Athena Nike and watched them. The man who didn’t behave himself would rue the day, his expression said plainly.
To the bored peacetime sailors of the Misenum Fleet, a week’s duty in the emperor’s grand new amphitheater was a high treat, theirs merely for the price of running the awnings out on their rigging when the sun became too bright for comfort – an easy enough task for a man used to doing the same thing on a pitching ship in a thunderstorm. They shoved at each other for places in the doorways or scrambled up the stairs to the upper terrace to push the lowly out of theirs.
“Centurion Julianus, sir!” A short, sandy-haired seaman with a scar on his nose bobbed up in front of him and saluted, and Correus glared at him. “There’s a bit of a fight up top, sir – Lucan and that silly Greek and somebody’s slave!”
Correus hefted his vine staff and made an exasperated noise in the back of his throat. He headed for the stairs.
By the time he had sorted things out, to the accompaniment of cheers and whistles from the rest of the gallery, Seamen Lucan and Demetrios found themselves deprived of the rest of their tour of arena duty, and the slave, loudly protesting that he belonged to Marius Vettius and the centurion had better watch out, had been told to sit down and pipe down.
“And if there’s another squawk from up here, whether it’s my men or not, I’ll have the whole gallery cleared,” Correus snapped.
Across the arena, on the top tier, he could see more flashes of naval green, the other half century under the watchful eye of Caritius. The captain of the Misenum flagship was having a fine time, Correus thought. When the emperor had personally requested their expert advice and assistance in planning the naval spectacle and mock battle that was to be the highlight of the day’s events, Captain Caritius had set himself to the project with the enthusiasm of an impresario. Correus had gone kicking and dragging his feet until his brother, Flavius, who was staff aide to the emperor, told him to keep his opinions to himself if he didn’t want a hitherto shining career nipped in the bud.
“How’d you like to grow a long gray beard at Misenum?” was the way Flavius had put it.
Correus gave a final baleful stare of admonition to the top gallery and returned moodily to his post in the shadow of Athena Nike’s gilded wings.
Most of the house of Appius Julianus were at the games today. The master himself had remained at home, claiming bad health (Appius Julianus was never fool enough to insult an emperor), but Julia and Lucius Paulinus were below in the senators’ boxes, and Flavius and his wife were in the emperor’s own box. And in the public tiers the free staff of the house of Appius had found seating.
Emer, dressed in her best, her red hair shining, was squeezed in between her husband and old Diulius. Diulius had driven in the Circus Maximus itself in his young days and could never resist a spectacle. The heady excitement of the crowd and the danger were in his blood. Emer’s husband, Forst, merely liked to watch men fight, with the scientific appreciation of a man who had done much of it. He was a German from beyond the Rhenus, tall and blond and big boned, with the fairness of the North. He wore the plain tunic and sandals of a Roman freedman, but his face sported a drooping mustache, and his pale hair was long, pinned in an odd, exotic knot at the side of his head. He had been a weapons master to the sons of Appius before he had been freed. Now he was a head horseman, settled, married, and master of the stock that the estate bred for sale to the army. He lounged in his seat and wrapped a long arm around Emer as a roar went up from the crowd.
The gladiators swaggered up from the chambers under the floor, marching smartly to the harsh music of drum and trumpet. They made a circuit of the arena, while a little rain of flowers and coins showered down on them from patrician admirers in the marble boxes of the first tier. They smiled their thanks with a raffish gaiety that made the crowd roar out its approval. The spectators had no love for a man whose face showed his fear, and later their approval would matter greatly. The music reached its height and stopped, and there was a sudden hush like an indrawn breath as the gladiators formed up in ranks before the emperor’s marble throne to give the old salute:
Ave, Caesar. Morituri te salutamus.
We who are about to die… There was an extra spice to that greeting today, in the knowledge that for this spectacle alone, a hundred death fights had been purchased. These were not the hopeless and condemned, doomed to be slaughtered wholesale, but the highly trained warriors of the gladiators’ schools, expensive pieces of property. It was a mark of the emperor’s free spending that of the two hundred smiling swordsmen who stood with arms raised before him, half would never leave the white sands of the arena with the breath still in them… unless the crowd should choose to spare them. The spectators shivered, eyes bright, and waited.
In his garlanded box, the emperor Titus Caesar Vespasianus Augustus – a stocky, bull-necked figure with a gilded laurel wreath set somewhat incongruously on his carefully curled hair – sat to receive the gladiators’ salute. Titus’s head, like that of his father, Vespasian, always looked as if it belonged under a helmet. Beside him, amid the flutter of gold and purple ribbons and the sweet scent of rose-and-lily garlands, was the emperor’s brother, Domitian, his own dark curls adorned with flowers and his face bored and slightly surly. He shifted his feet restlessly under his consul’s robes, and his fingers tapped the marble arm of his chair in a maddening rhythm, until in irritation the emperor slapped his own hand down on his chair.
Domitian shrugged and began to toss dice with the cronies who attended him. A young blond boy with the face of a marble Apollo stood behind his chair, draped over Domitian’s shoulders like a cloak. Titus winced. He had put his own vices behind him when he took the purple, and he found it irritating that his brother could not manage to do likewise. Although, Titus thought grimly, he preferred the blond boy to the dubious company of Marius Vettius and his ilk.
Vettius, cheerfully swilling the emperor’s best wine and throwing dice with Domitian while the gladiators’ parade went by, was an influence that Domitian could have done without. In the manner of sandal lickers throughout the ages, Vettius’s stocks-in-trade were the lavish compliment and the outstretched hand. He sang Domitian’s praises to his face, encouraged him to drink too much and spend too freely, and feathered his own nest with the posts that such tactics gained him. His latest plum was a prefecture in the City Shipping Offices.
Titus swung his head around and glared at him and noted with satisfaction that Vettius lowered his voice and dropped down a little in his seat. It would have given Titus great pleasure to drop Vettius off the Capitoline, but enough blood had flowed during the civil wars before Vespasian took the purple to give Titus nightmares even now. He had marked his own accession with a public vow to Jupiter Capitolinus that if there were no concrete proof, there would be no executions. He had since wondered occasionally if that had been wise, but one didn’t go back on a vow, not of that sort, without looking over his shoulder ever after.
Titus shrugged and turned his attention back to the arena, gravely raising his hand in answering salute to the gladiators’ ranks. If he were lucky, someone else might see fit to get rid of Vettius for him. The emperor wouldn’t overly object to Vettius’s blood on someone else’s hands. Young Flavius Julianus, maybe, he thought with a half smile, catching sight of his aide’s aquiline face and crisp dark curls under the golden glint of a corona aurea. “For bravery above that normally expected of a Roman soldier…” Flavius had paid for that corona aurea: The long, slim hands resting on the marble railing of the emperor’s box had only four fingers each. The other two had stayed behind him in West Britain, hacked off with a dagger by a British chieftain who wanted to know a military secret. Flavius’s brother – up there with his seamen and glowering at the spectacle, no doubt, Titus thought with a quick grin – had got a corona civica for pulling Flavius out of that, and they were both currently in very good odor with the army command – which meant Titus. Titus glanced again at Flavius. He was facing the arena, but his eyes were slued sideways so that Vettius was in his line of vision. He had the expression of someone keeping an eye on a snake.
The dark-haired girl beside Flavius put a hand on his arm, and Flavius turned his eyes away from Vettius.
“Dear, you’ve got your eyes all turned around like an owl’s. What are you looking at?”
“Owls turn their heads, sweet, not their eyes,” Flavius said absently, but he gave his wife his attention.
“Well, whatever, it makes you look very odd from this side.” Aemelia slipped an arm through his. “And you’ll miss the show. What fun to sit in the emperor’s box!” She giggled. “Half my friends are giving me dirty looks, and just look at the expression on Papa’s face!”
Flavius turned his head toward the senators’ boxes on their right, where the plump face and round blue eyes of his father-in-law, Aemelius, radiated satisfaction as he admired his daughter’s dark beauty in the emperor’s own box. Beside the senator, his wife, Valeria Lucilla, was enjoying herself hugely, being condescending to an old acquaintance whose daughter, a tall, sallow girl two paces behind her, showed no signs of catching any husband, much less a staff aide to the emperor.
“Your vanity is showing,” Flavius said, teasing. Aemelia laughed and nodded, but it was fun, and the emperor leaned forward and patted her hand.
“You must come to the games with us more often, my dear,” Titus said, in an avuncular tone carefully older than his years in case anyone should get the wrong ideas about his fondness for his aide’s young wife. Titus had never cared for schoolgirls, and it would be a shame to start a scandal. Aemelia was much too unknowing to deal with it. “You make the scenery much prettier.” He waved a slave over to refill her wine cup and push a standing tray of sweets and iced fruit a little closer to her reach.
Aemelia gave him a smile and a sigh of content. “Are they going to start soon?”
“Very shortly,” Titus said. “Flavius, you may cease watching my brother and his unfortunate friends. No one is going to attempt my assassination at a public spectacle. I am not Gaius Caligula. Watch the games instead – unless you share your brother’s views on the arena?” he added with a raised eyebrow. A man’s opinions were his own, but the crowd wouldn’t care for it if they thought the emperor and his staff found the public’s amusements beneath them. And a City mob got out of hand all too easily.
“Not at all, sir,” Flavius smiled. “I’m quite enjoying myself.” He turned to the arena again, arms crossed on the railing. Unlike his half brother, Correus, who always got sick to his stomach, or their father, Appius, who merely disapproved, Flavius liked the harsh combat of the arena, the blood, and the strident music. He had long since ceased to wonder if that said something unpleasant about himself. Although Seneca had claimed that the games rotted the soul, Titus’s court had no choice but to attend, so it was just as well to like them.
Aemelia also turned her face, a dark rose among the rose-and-lily garlands, to the arena floor. She hadn’t been allowed to attend the games until she was married, and they never seemed quite real to her. In truth she hadn’t the imagination to see the cold-eyed warriors below her as real men or the doomed and condemned as a higher order than that of the beasts roaring in their cages beneath the floor, so she enjoyed herself with the happy pleasure of a theatergoer. And afterward there would be the dinner party, which six senators and their wives, a poet and a philosopher and the emperor himself had promised to attend. Aemelia gave another little sigh of pleasure. Life had become very exciting since Titus had risen to the purple.
Athena Nike’s face was splashed with red from the red canvas of the awning. One more month, Correus thought. I can take one more month of this. He made himself look down at the arena as the gladiators lifted their swords and the crowd noise swelled around him, a hungry sound, half-animal. Maybe Ygerna was right, and he was closer kin in the soul to Flavius than he had thought. Maybe it would be too easy to be lost in the blood and the harsh cry of the trumpets. Maybe that was what he was afraid of.