Daylight. Correus groaned and stuck his head deeper into the pillow. Something warm snuggled up next to him, and he wrapped an arm around her. Ygerna. He was sleepily glad that he had made the ride to his father’s house last night, wet and unpleasant as his mood had been. He didn’t think he could have stood waking up in the Praetorian Guards barracks this morning.
There was a clatter outside the door and Julius edged his way around it, precariously balancing a silver tray. “Everyone has eaten,” he said reproachfully. “I brought you this.” He set the tray on the marble-topped dressing table, pushing Ygerna’s flasks of scent to one side. He removed the napkin to reveal fruit, olives, bread and a honey pot, matching jugs of wine and water, and a pair of silver cups.
Ygerna sat up suddenly as the scent bottles rattled. “Julius! Be careful!”
“There is a man in the slave quarters who says he belongs to you,” Julius informed Correus. He gave Ygerna a sideways glance and carefully poked the fragile flasks back from the edge of the table. “And Forst is here. He wants to see you.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Correus groaned. He had Typhon’s own headache. He pushed Ygerna’s cat off the bed and sat up. Forst had been trying to see him since last night, and Correus had been dodging. “Tell him I’ll come find him at the stables.”
He knew what Forst wanted – Correus had also seen the foreign princes in their fancy box – and he simply hadn’t wanted to deal with Forst’s indignation and the emperor’s water fight at the same time. So he had dodged. And now it was going to be worse than ever. He shuddered, remembering the night before…
Correus and Eumenes had come upon the screaming girl quite by accident as they squelched their way over the old Pons
Sublicius across the Tiber, damp and smelling of rotting weeds. The girl stood outside a house on the lower slopes of the Aventine, just by the bridge. She had on a night shift, and there were curling rags in her hair. She stood on the top step of the house, shrieking hysterically into the darkness.
Without much thinking about it, they went up the steps, shook her, and said, “Stop that! What’s the matter?” In the madhouse atmosphere of that night it seemed quite ordinary to find in their path a screaming woman in her nightdress.
She pointed a shaking finger back toward the dimly lit atrium beyond the open doorway, and Correus saw that there was something dark and liquid on her hands.
He and Eumenes looked at her and then at each other before sprinting into the atrium. There was another dim glow from a guttering lamp set in a wall bracket in the passageway beyond, and farther still an open doorway with a bright pool of light spilling out. The girl came behind them, moaning. Correus turned to her.
“In there?”
She nodded dumbly, putting her hands to her face, then jerking them away as she realized the dark stain had smeared on her cheeks. Inside the brightly lit room, the stain became red – red as the pool that had soaked into the white bedclothes. Nyall Sigmundson lay on top of his unwrinkled blankets, one arm folded across his chest, the other trailing over the side of the carved wooden bed frame. The knife lay beside the bed on the floor. His throat had been cut from ear to ear.
“Oh, no…” Correus whispered, looking down.
The girl, a slave of the house by the look of her, continued to gibber in the doorway.
“Stop it, woman, for the gods’ sake!” Eumenes snapped. “He’s past hurting anyone, the poor bastard.”
“The murderer – he could be hiding,” she wailed. “Waiting—”
“There isn’t one,” Correus said. “You fool – he did this to himself.”
“Himself?” She hiccuped and looked curiously at the centurion. She took a step into the room. “Why ever would he do that?”
Correus just stood looking down at the chalk-pale body on the bed. The flaming hair had come partly unpinned, and there was blood in it. “I expect he had his reasons,” Correus said. “The knife’s there by his hand. Didn’t you notice?”
“No. I just saw the blood – I leaned over and put my hand in it!” She began wailing again. “And the guards are all asleep – I think they’ve been drugged – and I couldn’t wake them, and I didn’t know what to do!”
“Well, standing outside screaming doesn’t seem to have been very useful,” Eumenes said acidly. “Run along and get the City guards, for the gods’ sake, like an intelligent girl.”
“Y-yes, sir.” She hurried out, apparently finding no reason in their mud-stained garments to question the voice of authority.
“Thank you,” Correus said. “I should have sent her for the guards right off.”
“You looked like you had other things on your mind,” Eumenes said. “You knew him, didn’t you?”
Correus looked down at the copper-colored hair, the green shirt and breeches, and the right leg that was twisted outward.
“Yes, in a way. I knew him.”
Correus put his hands to his temples. And now there was that to tell Forst as well. And Eumenes had to be explained to the courts, which had condemned him into the arena. Correus had taken the Macedonian with him the previous night on the strength of his dubious authority as overseer of the water battle, but there were complications and legalities involved in buying a condemned slave. He would have to bribe someone, he expected.
Julius returned to say that Forst had gone back to the stables, but if the centurion didn’t go down there soon, he’d be back on the doorstep, most like. And would my lady like him to send her maid to her? And this had come for the centurion. He held out to Correus a wax tablet sealed in purple.
Ygerna, who had been about to get up and dress without her maid, dived back under the covers and said tartly that what she would like was for Julius to quit popping in and out, so that she could dress.
Julius turned beet red, looked wildly at the floor and walls, and fled. Ygerna collapsed on the bed, giggling.
“You shouldn’t tease him,” Correus said reprovingly, but she just grinned at him. Correus sighed. Ygerna was even younger than Julius, and occasionally she could be a bit stupid about things. He thumbed open the wax tablet, and his eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“What is it?” Ygerna watched him as he got out of bed and went to hold the wax under the light from the window. She still liked just to look at him. She had been in love with Correus since she was thirteen, but she still hadn’t got tired of looking at him.
“It’s my transfer! Back to the Rhenus, to – damn it, to the fleet again! But out of Misenum, at any rate.” His eyebrows went still higher. “I’m to have an audience with the emperor on the subject. Do I detect Flavius’s hand in this again?”
“You shouldn’t be so suspicious. He means well.”
“I know he does, bless him. And if he’s got me out of Misenum, I’ll kiss him.”
He found a clean loincloth in the clothes chest, knotted it around his hips, and shrugged on an old tunic that Ygerna thought must be a relic of his boyhood. The hem appeared to have been let down twice, and the sleeves rode high on the muscles of his upper arms. He ran a comb through his hair, peering into her dressing-table mirror. The cowlick over his brow lay flat for a moment and then sprang into its usual untidy wave. “You’d think all these years of putting a helmet on my hair would at least make it lie down,” he said. “I’m going to have a ride, if possible, after I talk to Forst.” He picked up an apple from the tray and bit into it. “Don’t forget to eat something.”
She grinned. “Don’t worry.” Ygerna had always had a light appetite, but with her pregnancy she seemed to have developed a state of perpetual starvation. Correus wasn’t sure where she was putting it, but she was going through more food than he could eat.
“Do you want me to explain Eumenes to your father?” she asked. “Someone had better.”
“Yes, please.” Ygerna was on polite if wary terms with Lady Antonia, Julia’s and Flavius’s mother, and did her best to ignore Correus’s mother, Helva, but for some reason the most formidable member of the family, his father, Appius, held no terror for her. He took another apple and headed for the stable and Forst. Whatever he encountered with the Rhenus Fleet wasn’t going to be worse than this.
Two colts, a black and a gray, improbable stilt-legged creatures racing the morning breeze, careened wildly past the lower pasture fence. Correus and Forst leaned with crossed arms on the fence rail, not watching them. Forst was watching nothing, some invisible point midway over the horizon. Correus was watching Forst.
“So he is dead,” Forst said finally. “Truly dead this time.”
“Should I have told you?” Correus sounded half-helpless, half-angry. He would have liked to throw something. “I thought you would only grieve.”
“Yes.”
Wrong to have robbed him of that, maybe, Correus thought. And then, He will grieve now. There was no proper “should” or “shouldn’t,” no easy way to tell Forst that Nyall – his friend and chieftain – was alive, or that he was now dead. There was no easy way out from under the burden of his own knowledge. Finally he had blurted it out and watched Forst wince and crumble a little and then turn around and look at the line of fir trees that lined the road in the distance and masked the horizon. Now Correus wanted only to be gone, back into Rome to talk to the emperor and then onto a horse and north across the Alps, where there were simpler things to cope with than Forst’s grief.
“I would like to know where he is to be buried,” Forst said.
“I will find out.”
Forst nodded and slipped through the fence rails into the pasture. “Tell your father that the red mare foaled last night. It’s a colt, if he would like to see it.”
It was a dismissal, and Correus took it gratefully. “Yes, I expect he would.” He picked up the bridle he had hung on the fence post and very nearly ran back up the hill to the upper barn.
The emperor Titus Caesar Vespasianus Augustus settled himself on a couch and tugged the purple and gold folds of his toga into place. “Distressing how quickly muscle turns to fat,” he said ruefully. “I should go back in the field. Twenty miles a day is the best way I know to keep a flat belly.”
“That and the army’s cooking, sir,” Flavius said with a smile.
“Fortunately I command enough privilege to save me from that,” the emperor said. He motioned at two other couches, luxuriously upholstered in silk. “Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen.”
Correus stretched himself out on one, wondering what horrible things his parade armor was doing to the silk. He had dressed in full kit for his audience with the emperor, the gold scale polished and shining over a full-dress harness tunic of white leather and gold fringe, with every decoration he owned strung across his chest. He felt vaguely like a racehorse. At least the gilded oak leaves of his corona civica made his hair lie flat. Flavius, equally resplendent in the light silvered cuirass and purple tunic of an imperial staff aide, took the third couch, crossing his long legs at the ankles and leaning on one elbow.
There was an ebony table edged in brass in the center, laden with a green glass bowl of figs, two-handled silver drinking cups with gilded edges, and the usual pitchers of wine and water. A pair of slaves hovered beside it, and one of them passed Correus a cup. The wine was a deep, rich ruby, out of the emperor’s private stock.
Occupying a fourth couch, pulled slightly away from the perimeter of the conversation, the emperor’s brother, Domitian, reclined, and looked bored and sulky. Flavius and Correus nodded to him respectfully, but the co-consul merely eyed them over his wine cup and continued drinking.
Titus looked at the Julianus brothers’ attentive faces turned toward him, then glanced at his own brother. He hasn’t enough to do, Titus thought. And not much that the emperor could trust him to do if it came to that. Titus had no sons, and Domitian was heir presumptive to the purple – but Titus was thirty-eight and healthy, and it looked like a long wait. The effect on Domitian was unpleasant. Titus had made his brother co-consul with him last year in the hope of soothing his restlessness, but under the empire, there was no real power attached to the title, although it was a great honor. The emperor was generally a consul, and the second consul, if he had any sense, agreed with the emperor. Domitian knew just what his consulship was worth. It was like being given one bite of someone else’s cake, Titus thought, looking at his brother’s heavy face, a younger, cleaner-lined version of his own. It only set Domitian to thinking how to get the rest of it.
If his brother had shown more sense when their father took the purple, the emperor thought, suddenly irritated, he wouldn’t have a problem now. Instead, when the grim days of civil war had ended with the acclamation of Vespasian as emperor, Domitian had reacted to the heady power of being the only member of the new emperor’s family as yet in Rome with all the restraint of a street urchin let loose in a bake shop. Domitian had handed out appointments and commissions with a fine free hand while his father and brother were still on the march from the East. Finally Vespasian had remarked wryly that he was lucky that Domitian hadn’t thought to appoint a new emperor while he was at it. There had been a slight unpleasantness when Vespasian arrived in Rome, and although he had let most of the appointments stand, that episode had set the mark for the amount of power he was willing to allow his younger son. Domitian was appointed Princeps Juventutis and allowed to adopt the name of Caesar, and they both looked very nice on paper and meant next to nothing. The army command for which Domitian had hoped had never been forthcoming, and so far Titus had not seen fit to change his mind on that subject, either.
“So, Centurion Julianus.” The emperor ignored his brother and set his cup on the table. He nodded at Correus to distinguish between the brothers – Flavius also held senior centurion’s rank. “I understand you want to get back to the field yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” Correus said fervently, and hastily qualified it. “I’d be more use to the army there, sir. I don’t feel I’m earning my keep at Misenum.”
“You mean you’re bored.” Titus smiled.
Correus gave up. “To be truthful, sir, yes.” He glared at Flavius.
“Your brother didn’t tell me that,” Titus assured him. “When an officer puts in thirty-seven requests for transfer in the course of a year, I can draw my own conclusions.”
Correus looked embarrassed.
“Well, I think we can oblige you,” Titus said briskly. He waved a hand, and one of the slaves trotted over with a map. He spread it for the emperor on the brass-bound table. “Here.”
The emperor’s thick finger jabbed at the map. Correus recognized the river delta that spread away under the emperor’s hand – the mouth of the Rhenus where that great river widened out to sink into the cold waters of the German Ocean. “We’ve always had a certain amount of trouble with river pirates around Rhenus mouth,” the emperor said, “but the Lower Rhenus Fleet has kept them in hand. Lately, though, the pirates have been multiplying like flies in the summer, and they’ve been raiding farther down the coast with every foray. The fleet can’t find them, but they seem to have no trouble finding the fleet. The few identifiable goods from their hauls have been turning up in the damnedest places or never surfacing at all. If—” Titus broke off and glanced at the slaves, standing straight-backed against a wall, with the expressionless stares of well-trained servants. “Leave us,” he said brusquely. When they had gone, he gave Correus a long, troubled look. “If the pirates aren’t controlled, they could put a halt to the entire German Ocean trade.” He ran his hand swiftly down the coastline as if in erasure. “And somebody who knows too much about our shipping is courting a treason trial.”
Correus turned on the couch and sat up to get a better look at the map. “Someone’s feeding them information?” That sort of arrangement with a pirate fleet was about as safe as going into partnership with a family of crocodiles – unless a man was operating from a very secure position indeed.
“Someone’s holding their hands like a nanny,” Titus said. “Or bribing them to keep us busy. Or both. You’re going to find out, Centurion. And you’re going to find out where their home harbor is. Then you’re going to take the Lower Rhenus Fleet and knock them into kindling.” The emperor bent his head over the map again, motioning Flavius into the conference, too.
Behind them, Domitian cast a disgusted glance at the three men and the map, and rose, lifting his bulk from the couch with unexpected grace. He was heavyset like his brother, a stocky, businesslike figure, but with a touch of the courtier in his walk. He ambled down the palace hallways at random, partly bored with this matter of pirates that seemed to occupy his brother’s mind so thoroughly just now, and partly angry that Titus hadn’t seen fit to ask his advice. He wasn’t overly surprised when, a few minutes later, Marius Vettius appeared at his elbow. Vettius generally knew where Domitian was. Vettius made it his business to know anything that might be useful.
“A fine day, Consul,” Vettius said genially. “Too fine to spend on affairs of state.”
“I haven’t been requested to!” Domitian snapped. Vettius put on a bland, soothing expression. The shipping prefect was tall, with a smooth, pale cap of prematurely graying hair and a toga that fell in perfect, graceful folds. His tunic displayed the broad purple stripe of a senator. Domitian knew that Vettius was not above provoking trouble between him and his brother the emperor, but today he felt like having someone treat him with the respect that Titus so pointedly denied him. “My brother is exercising his brain over a bunch of raggedy German river pirates,” Domitian said. “He does not feel the need of my assistance in the matter.”
“Oh?” Vettius’s pale eyes looked interested, but he only said, “How tiresome for you. But hardly a matter of great importance. I am sure the consul has more pressing matters before him.”
“Certainly,” Domitian said. “I can go and inspect the Praetorian Guard again – it keeps them on their toes. Or I could bring a few decrees before the Senate for the fun of watching my brother withdraw them. Or I could go and inspect a whorehouse – they might actually pay some attention to me there. There’s supposed to be a new one, with a most interesting stable, just below the new amphitheater.”
“Hardly in the province of a consul,” Vettius said.
Domitian cocked an eye at him. “Too proud for a whorehouse, Vettius?” He shrugged. “Then don’t come.” The shipping prefect came from a family that was nearly as old as the City of Rome itself, and had what Domitian regarded as a fastidious streak. Domitian had a taste for whorehouses and the wineshops that were little more than holes in the wall along the Tiber docks, and it amused him to drag Vettius there.
Vettius gave him a genial smile that masked a fleeting look of distaste. “Certainly I will come with you, if that’s what you’re in the mood for.” Domitian’s appetites were repellent but useful. He wasted his lust on fleeting pleasures; thus he was easily controlled. Marius Vettius had only one lust, of the abiding sort, and that was for power. “I only thought it a pity,” he said carefully, “that the emperor doesn’t see fit to give his heir more responsibility during the, uh, emperor’s lifetime.”
“That will come,” Domitian said sourly. “So my brother says. There is, unfortunately, plenty of time.”
“I cannot help feeling that that is shortsighted,” Vettius said seriously. “I should not wish to criticize the emperor, but – one never knows what the Fates have in store, does one?”
Domitian gave Vettius a sharp look. “Don’t pussyfoot with me, Vettius. Are you suggesting I have my brother killed?”
“Certainly not!” Vettius made a shocked face, but he kept his words plain and unable to be misconstrued. This was dangerous ground. “That would be treason. I do not suggest treason. Ever.” And you will come to it yourself in a year or two, he thought, watching Domitian’s surly, discontented face. “Only that it is well to be prepared.”
Domitian scowled, but the seed was in his mind now. Eventually it would flower. “Who are these pirates your brother is so exercised with?” Vettius changed the subject.
Domitian shrugged. “No one so important. A nuisance merely.” Titus had forbidden him to discuss the matter with anyone, he remembered now. He wasn’t ready to risk his brother’s wrath just yet by disobeying. The word “treason” hung in the air. The matter of the pirates was nearly as dangerous as murder.
While Domitian found his amusement with Marius Vettius in the whorehouse by the amphitheater, Correus and his brother trotted down the Via Salaria out of Rome.
“Merciful Athena! Oh, my departed ancestors!” Flavius leaned over the saddle horns and hooted weakly. “Well, you wanted a field command! Pirates and treason! You can’t say he didn’t oblige you!” Flavius’s mount, a big gray, sensed his master relax and took advantage of the moment to swing his head around, teeth bared, at Correus’s kneecap.
Correus punched him hard in the nose, and the gray jerked his head back with a snort. “Your concern for my skin is touching.” Flavius grabbed the reins and dug hard into his horse with his heel. “Mannerless bastard!”
Correus chuckled. “That’s one of Aeshma’s colts, isn’t it? They all bite.”
“They make good troop horses, though,” Flavius said, “once you knock it out of them. The third-generation lot seems to be a touch tamer.”
“I miss that demon,” Correus said wistfully, thinking of the big gray stallion he had brought back from Germany at the end of his first posting there. “You and Freita and Julius and I were the only ones he didn’t bite. It will be odd, going back there now.”
Flavius watched him sympathetically. Correus had ceased to grieve for his first wife after he had found Ygerna, but he wasn’t going to forget her, ever. “I expect you’ll have enough to keep busy.” His voice was serious now. “Don’t be too big a hero. I don’t doubt you can take on a fleet of pirates, but if they’ve got a connection in Rome, that part could get dangerous.”
“Don’t I know it. Palace intrigue scares me a hell of a lot more than pirates and Germans put together.”
“What are you planning?” Flavius asked him. “Getting yourself held for ransom?”
Correus grinned at him. “How well you know me. I don’t really see any other way, do you? I can hardly go and say I’ve heard they have a profitable venture and I’d like to sign on. Even if I could find them. Successful pirates are not generally stupid by nature. If we want them to bite, we’re going to have to let them take a ship with me on it. Then you and Father can argue with them about the ransom while I nose around their camp. We’ll have to work out some sort of code.”
“That’s dangerous,” Flavius said.
“So’s war.”
Correus noticed that his brother looked more interested than disapproving. He wondered if Flavius was getting bored with his palace post.
“You’ve done this before,” Flavius said thoughtfully, remembering that Correus’s commanders had found that his ear for foreign tongues and his ability to slip on another man’s skin made him an admirable spy.
“A time or two.”
“Well, see that what you’re up to doesn’t get around in
Rome,” Flavius said. “If there is a connection here and he gets wind of it, the pirates will drop you off the deck in midocean and never mind the ransom.”
Correus put his heel to his horse’s flank. “Kick that menace of yours up a bit. Julia and Lucius are coming to dinner. It occurs to me that this is right up Lucius’s alley.” Their brother-in-law was an unofficial adviser to the emperor and knew most things that went on in Rome.
“Anything Lucius can tell us,” Flavius said, “he’ll have told Titus already. And if Titus didn’t want to tell us, you can bet that Lucius won’t.”
“Dear gods,” Correus said disgustedly. “Spies and secret messages! A nice war will be a pleasure.”
Their sister Julia’s husband, Lucius Paulinus, proved annoyingly evasive when Correus and Flavius cornered him by the fish pool in the garden before dinner.
When they had recounted their interview with the emperor, he merely said, “Oh, dear,” in a mild voice and contemplated the fish. Flavius ground his teeth, but Correus thought that he could probably winnow what he wanted out of Lucius later, unless Lucius had orders from the emperor to keep it confidential. Lucius Paulinus was a slim, sandy-haired man with a plain, pleasant face and ears that stuck out too much. He looked younger and more innocent than his twenty-eight years. Correus and Flavius had first encountered Lucius in the Rhenus country when the brothers had been very junior centurions on their first tour. Ostensibly Lucius was a historian, occupying himself as did most gentlemen of letters, with publishing his most recent work, a History of Modern Rome, and with extensive revisions of the work that would one day make him famous. What Lucius really did, Correus and Flavius had since discovered, was serve as the emperor’s eyes and ears. In those days it had been the emperor Vespasian; now it was his son Titus.
“Pleasant evening,” Lucius said. “Did I tell you I saw old Porcus in the Forum? He’s trying to find a husband for that youngest daughter of his again. The last prospect bolted for Greece!” He launched into a lengthy, gossipy description of poor Porcus’s tribulations in attempting to buy respectability for his errant offspring. Lucius’s homely, freckled countenance presented an animated imitation of Porcus’s doleful one. “And the mystery is how she manages to be so depraved, because she’s got a face like the back end of a carriage horse and a figure to match!”
Flavius chuckled and drifted off. Correus looked at Lucius consideringly. When he set himself so determinedly to be amusing, it was generally because there was something else that he didn’t wish to discuss. Correus looked around the garden. It was crowded with slaves and children. The ladies of the family made bright spots of color against the espaliered fruit trees and rose-colored brick walls. Lady Antonia began a move toward the dining room, trailing the thin wrap that was as much warmth as fashion allowed.
Correus eyed his brother-in-law, amused. “You slither like a sacred snake. Let’s go dine.” He would catch up to Lucius Paulinus later. Lucius needn’t think he wouldn’t.
Dinner was a crowded, noisy family gathering. The children threw food at each other at one table, and the adults commented proudly on their respective offsprings’ accomplishments at the other. Correus’s mother, Helva, did not dine with the family, but undoubtedly she would contrive to present herself later. Correus had been to see her already, and Ygerna, gritting her teeth, had made a dutiful visit. Helva had told her she looked thin and that she certainly hoped Ygerna would be able to carry the child a full term.
The dining room was a pleasant area, open at one end to the evening breeze and looking out into a vista of trellised vines and a fountain where three marble dolphins danced on their tails. The mosaic floor suggested an appetizing meal of fruits and lobsters, and the walls were fashionably painted with legendary scenes and vistas supposedly conducive to good digestion. Correus was pleased to note a new one on the far wall: An unappetizing banquet table laden with dead game had been replaced by Europa and Zeus, in the form of a bull. The bull was white and muscular, with a little wreath of roses between his horns. Europa seemed to be enjoying herself. He thought that might have been his father Appius’s idea; it didn’t look like Lady Antonia’s sort of wall.
Appius Julianus shared a couch with Lucius. To one side of them, Correus and Flavius were sprawled on their own couch, and on the other side, Appius’s wife, Antonia, and daughter, Julia, reclined, happily catching up on a week’s household news. On the fourth side of the table, conversation had ground to a halt, and Appius could see his daughters-in-law wildly trying to think of something to say to each other. It was a lost cause, Appius thought, mildly amused. Ygerna thought Aemelia was a featherhead but was willing to be polite, while Aemelia in turn couldn’t help thinking of Ygerna as something foreign and mysterious and therefore not quite safe. It was a Briton, after all, who had cut off Flavius’s fingers. It made conversation difficult.
Appius felt a little sorry for Correus’s wife. He knew his son well enough to know that there would be little on Correus’s mind just now but the new campaign. The army had been Correus’s life before either Freita or Ygerna had entered it, just as it had been Appius’s. Although Correus was capable of giving his wife equal attention (something Appius had never been), she occasionally had to remind him to do so. Right now he had undoubtedly forgotten that Ygerna, nearly six months with child, was going to have to stay here while he was chasing pirates. That was going to be awkward.
There was a shriek of fury from the children’s table, and a sharp admonition from one of the much-tried nurses in attendance. Very awkward, Appius thought, watching Julia out of the corner of his eye. The shriek undoubtedly came from Julia’s daughter, Paulilla, who was three, and the perpetrator, equally undoubtedly, was Felix. The other two babies at the table were too young to be the culprits.
Julia half rose from her couch. “Felix! Now whatever did you do that for?” Paulilla’s tunic was liberally splattered with stewed pears, evidently a direct hit.
Felix looked thoughtful, green eyes considering. “To see if I could,” he said finally. “It was a catapult.” He held up his knife and pulled the blade back with his finger. Paulilla continued to shriek.
“Pauli, that will do. Felix, dear, that’s very smart of you, but you mustn’t make catapults at the table.”
“I really think we should let his nurse deal with him for now,” Ygerna said with considerably more calm than she felt. She had no intention of entering into a dinner-table competition with Julia for the privilege of disciplining Felix, but she was also of the opinion that Felix had a bit more coming to him for plastering his cousin with stewed pears than a compliment on his creativity.
“An excellent suggestion,” Appius said. “That is the function of nurses. I am prepared to admire my grandchildren at dinner, but not to enforce their table manners.”
“You have to understand Felix,” Julia said. There was a sharp note in her voice, and her eyes were unhappy. Felix looked at her curiously.
“I’m trying to,” Ygerna replied pleasantly. Her Latin had the soft, clear accent of the educated classes and no discernible foreign traces, but Appius had the feeling that under it there lurked a stream of exotic British bad language. Correus, he noticed, looked aggravated but was eyeing Ygerna and Julia with the air of a man reluctant to step between two bowmen.
Lucius Paulinus rose to the occasion. He caught his wife’s attention, and she bit her lip. “That is not your affair, Ju,” he said quietly.
Julia looked ready to burst into tears, but she managed to control it. Lucius gave her a look that wasn’t without sympathy. A forceful young man, Paulinus, Appius thought, not for the first time.
Ygerna appeared to be counting to ten.
Felix looked from one woman to the other, dubious now, catching their tension.
“Perhaps Felix would get Paulilla one of his tunics to wear,” Lucius Paulinus suggested gently. “Nurse, you might go with him, please.”
Felix, aware now that he had stirred up more with his catapult than he had bargained for, put his napkin down and scurried out of the room. Paulilla stuck a finger in the pears on her tunic and licked it. Dinner proceeded.
“Now see here, Felix.” Correus swung the boy up into the chariot beside him and put the ponies into a gentle trot around the training track. “I thought this would be a good place to talk,” he said. “Just us.”
“Can I drive?”
“If you listen while I talk, yes. If you interrupt me to ask about ponies or catapults or why fish have scales, then no.”
Felix thought it over. “How long do I have to listen?”
“Until I say you can stop,” Correus said. “This is important. Don’t think I didn’t notice what was going on last night, because I did. You are not to shoot your cousin with a catapult anymore, but that’s not what I want to talk about. I hope you’re old enough to understand this, Felix. There’s going to be a war between your mother and Aunt Julia if we’re not careful.”
“She’s not my mother,” Felix said firmly.
“No, she’s not,” Correus agreed. “But neither is your aunt Julia. I’m your father, and Ygerna is my wife, and that makes her your mother in everything but blood. Your real mother died when you were born.”
“On account of me?” Felix looked worried now, and Correus took the ponies’ reins in one hand and put an arm around his son. Death in childbirth was a fact of life, but there was no reason that Felix should think it was his fault when it hadn’t been.
“No. You had nothing to do with it.” Felix seemed satisfied with that, to Correus’s relief. She was dying anyway, and they took you from her dead body. That was nothing to tell a child. “Now, see here. I’m going to have to go away for a while – to the Rhenus country, where your mother’s people come from – and you and Ygerna are going to have to stay here until her baby is born and is old enough to travel.” And don’t you fight me about it, because I went through it last night with Ygerna and one of you is all I can stand.
“She can stay,” Felix said helpfully. “I’ll go with you.”
“You can’t,” Correus said.
“Why not?”
“Because there won’t be a house for you to live in, not till spring.”
“I could sleep in your tent,” Felix suggested.
“It’s not allowed.” Correus was beginning to feel a little harassed. “Now that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. While you’re here, I want you to be very careful how you behave around Ygerna and Aunt Julia. They both love you, you see, and they’re both afraid that you like the other one better. So you must be very careful not to take advantage of that and try to make them spoil you.”
“Why not?” It seemed like a useful opportunity.
“Because it will make them both unhappy if they fight. And because I will smack you when you get to Germany if that’s what you’ve been doing.”
“All right. Can I drive now?”
“Have you been listening? Carefully?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t look like it, but Correus gave up. “Come on, then.
Hold the reins… like so. Good. Now put your feet like this…”
He moved Felix’s legs apart until they were braced at the correct angle to take the swaying of the chariot. “Can you hold them?” Felix nodded.
“All right. Let’s go.” They made a sedate circle of the track, with Felix holding tightly to the reins, his green eyes dancing.
A second chariot and a team of black ponies swept by them, drew rein, and waited until the red roans that Felix was driving caught up. Flavius lounged over the side of his chariot. “Race?”
“Can I stay?” Felix bounced excitedly and tugged at Correus’s tunic.
“All right, but put your helmet on or Diulius will never let us hear the end of it.” Diulius, the ex-Circus driver who had charge of the racing stable, had laid down the law about helmets in Correus’s and Flavius’s youth, and it had stuck. Correus adjusted his own, and Felix picked up a smaller version, made by the estate blacksmith, that lay on the floor of the chariot. He knotted the strap under his chin.
The red ponies, smelling a race, began to dance sideways across the track. Correus pulled them in and lined them up with Flavius’s blacks by the starting pole. “Give us a signal!” he shouted to Diulius, who was tightening a harness strap on a third team outside the track.
Diulius pulled a grimy scarf from around his neck, waved it once, and let it fall. The ponies shot forward. Diulius watched them with satisfaction. They rode and drove like centaurs, both of Appius’s sons. If they hadn’t, Diulius would never have let them put a finger on his precious stock, even if they’d been the emperor’s sons.
The blacks shot out ahead, well locked into the inside position, and Flavius gave Correus a grin over his shoulder, then settled down to keep them there.
Correus gave the red ponies their heads and inched up until he hung on Flavius’s chariot wheel. He’d driven those blacks; a team on their wheel made them nervous. They swept around the second turn into the long, straight side of the track. The blacks were almost but not quite in stride with each other. Flavius could feel it and was trying to distract their attention from the red team. Correus let his team drift just a hair closer. They careened into the third turn. Felix held onto the chariot rim with both hands, his eyes bright.
Flavius shot Correus a quick look. He shook out the blacks’ reins, and they lengthened their stride with one last rush. Flavius pulled their heads around so that they shot across the front of the red ponies’ noses. Correus drew rein. Flavius had slowed him, but he had also given up the inside slot. Rounding the last turn, that would make a difference. Correus slipped the red ponies to the right and leaned forward. They thundered onto Flavius’s heels, then to wheel level, on the opposite side now, before he could move back to the fence. They rounded the last turn and came into the straight, nearly neck and neck. And there they hung as the starting pole flashed past.
They drew rein and trotted the ponies around another half turn before they slowed to a walk. They pulled their helmets off and shook their Hair out, waiting to catch their breath.
“I don’t know why I bother to race you,” Flavius said, mock-serious. “No challenge to it.”
“I had extra weight in the chariot,” Correus said indignantly, “or I’d have taken you.”
Flavius grinned. “Hah! I’ll swap you teams, put my wife in the chariot, and still walk all over you.”
“Hah yourself. Diulius!” Correus shouted as the old trainer strolled over. “Who’s the better driver?”
“Neither one of you’s fit to drive a goat cart,” Diulius said. “My old granny can outdrive you both.”
They laughed, and Diulius grinned at them. “You could have gone into the Circus Maximus, either of you, and had all the old ladies tossin’ flowers. Master Correus, I want to borrow that slave of yours for a day or so. Three of the stable lads are down sick, and that Julius can handle about any team in the place. There’s a sale coming up, and half the ponies are going stale for lack of training.”
“You’re welcome to him,” Correus said. He looked thoughtful. “He takes to the chariots, does he? How good could he get?”
Diulius thought. “Good as you. Better, if he wanted to work at it.”
“I told you, sir, I’d as soon let it go by.” Julius looked up from a polishing rag and a rusty pile of Correus’s field armor.
“Well, you don’t have a choice,” Correus said. He felt like a mother robin throwing her chick out of the nest. “And nobody said anything about the auxiliaries.” He’d said plenty about the auxiliaries before, but the suggestion had met with no enthusiasm from its intended beneficiary. Since Correus had first bought Julius, he had intended to free the boy when he came of age and help him to some career. Julius had been of age for two years now, but the career had failed to materialize. Julius had seen as much as he wanted to of the army in Correus’s service. The idea of joining up personally to get a spear stuck in him held no charm.
“Diulius tells me you’re a passable hand with a chariot team.”
“Fair enough.” Julius looked suspicious.
“Good. You’re his for the next year.”
“Why?”
“You don’t want to be a slave all your life, do you?”
“I dunno. Maybe.”
“Horseshit. Go with Diulius. If you don’t like it after a year, we’ll think of something else.”
“Who’ll you take to the Rhenus with you?”
“Eumenes. I’ve got to do something with him. And if it comes to that, I’m not so delicate that I can’t polish my own armor. Just think about it for a year.” Julius was City-bred. The Circus would catch him if he gave it half a chance. Correus grinned. “Think about all the beautiful girls throwing money when you drive by. Think about what a top driver makes in a year.” It’ll keep you from thinking about my wife. He didn’t say that. Julius couldn’t help it, and it was making him miserable: another good reason to shove him out of the nest. “Think about a big house in Rome. Think about not having to spend the winter on the Rhenus this year.”
Julius laughed. “Colder than a river sprite’s kiss. All right, I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Old Diulius thinks I could make the Circus, does he?”
“He does. So you’ll try it?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not for a year.” It wouldn’t take more than that, Correus thought, looking at Julius’s thoughtful expression. He could see the Circus at the back of Julius’s mind now, growing solid… enticing. Rome was where Julius had been born. He was part of it. It would hold no horrors for him.
Having dealt with Felix and Julius, Correus went to hunt up his brother-in-law, Lucius Paulinus. Correus found him finally, after a tour of house, gardens, and bath, sitting under a hayrick, watching four field slaves scythe grain. Lucius had a sheet of papyrus propped on a board in his lap, and he was drawing on it with a piece of charcoal. Correus peered over his shoulder.
“I wish I could do that.”
“You could, I expect,” Lucius said, “if you’d sit still long enough.”
Correus sat down beside him in the shadow of the rick. “I’m not a gentleman of leisure, such as yourself.”
Lucius Paulinus chuckled. He and Correus Julianus went back a long way. Each affected a profound horror at the other’s mode of life, and each had an affection for the other that went far deeper than the mere kinship formed when Lucius had married Correus’s half sister, Julia. “So now you’re chasing pirates,” Lucius said thoughtfully. He sketched a broad sweep of grain behind the M-shape of two slaves bent to their scythes. “It may be that all the pirates aren’t in the Rhenus mouth.”
“So the emperor implied.”
“Oh, did he?” Lucius sounded noncommittal. He never admitted out loud, even to Correus, who knew it perfectly well, that he was invaluable to Titus.
“A clam has more conversation,” Correus said.
Lucius put the charcoal and papyrus down and weighted it with a rock. He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in the hayrick. “I’m not being obscure on purpose,” he said seriously. “Last night at dinner – well, my wife and yours know enough to keep their tongues behind their teeth, and certainly so does Lady Antonia. But Aemelia has dandelions where most of us keep a brain. She’s the most indiscreet woman I ever met, and she’s too much about court these days.”
“You’re being a bit hard on her, don’t you think? There’s nothing malicious about Aemelia.”
“No indeed. She’s a sweet little thing. But she does get things tangled. I make it a practice not to discuss anything but fluff in front of her.”
Correus chuckled. Maybe Lucius was right. The emperor certainly wouldn’t like it if Aemelia brightly asked him one day who it was that Lucius was spying on this week. “Now that we have adjourned to your private office” – Correus indicated the hayrick grandly – “maybe you will tell me what your long ears have picked up about these pirates.”
Lucius looked worried. “There’s the trouble. Nothing. Or at any rate nothing more than moon dust. I’m almost certain that someone in the City is feeding them information, which is bad enough, but frankly that’s only one man’s treason, and one man can be eliminated. What worries me is that he seems to be so hard to nose out. If he has very high protection, it could be embarrassing.”
“Do you mean Domitian?” Correus asked bluntly.
Lucius winced. “That’s treason, too. Domitian is the heir. For the gods’ sakes, shut up. But yes, since you ask, I do smell a connection. Maybe not a direct one. I haven’t got any evidence, mind you, just a feeling.”
It wasn’t much to go on, but Correus was inclined to give Lucius’s “feelings” a good deal of credibility. “What’s your feeling about trouble brewing in Germany? On top of the City connection?”
Lucius sighed. “Titus will have told you everything I know. That’s the army’s province. But frankly, yes, if you’ve been wondering where these pirates’ loot has been disappearing to, so have I. And the thought ‘into a German war chest’ does come to mind. You’ve been wanting to get back to active duty, friend. I think you’ve got it.”
We are always saying good-bye to someone, Lady Antonia thought. In the early years it had been her husband, Appius, midway through a career that had taken him from birth in a respectable but obscure equestrian family with a tradition of legionary service to a post as legate of a legion of his own and finally to a military governorship. Now that he had retired, the children seemed always to be scattered to the four winds – even her daughter, Julia, whose husband, Lucius Paulinus, was writing a modern history of Rome’s provincial wars and believed in looking at them firsthand – or so he said. Privately, Lady Antonia suspected that most of what Paulinus saw went into a report to the emperor and not into his History. They probably would be off again soon. And Flavius, her son, the child of her heart. The emperor was a soldier, too. There would be a campaign somewhere, and Flavius would go with him.
Today it was Correus. He was leading the big gold gelding his father had given him the day he went into the Centuriate, with the new slave behind him on a spotted horse from the cavalry stock. As always, the whole house had turned out to bid him farewell, not just out of respect to the master but for love of Correus.
Forst and Emer – she had been a kitchen maid before Forst had requested her freedom when his own had been granted – were there; Forst still had black circles under his eyes, but he was there nonetheless. Old Thais, who had been nurse to both boys; Sabinus and Alan, who was almost as old now as Thais, and Diulius – men who had taught the brothers to fight and ride and drive a chariot; Philippos, the steward of the house; and Helva, of course, hanging onto Correus’s arm, and, at forty-three, still looking beautiful enough to stop traffic, in a sky-blue silk gown that was highly unsuitable for a morning at home. She gave Correus a proud maternal smile. Helva had never been much use as a mother (it was Antonia or Thais who had bandaged skinned knees and banished nightmares), but she did have her priorities firmly in mind – the more successful Correus’s career, the more comfortably Helva would live when Appius died and freed her. Helva occupied a privileged position in a wealthy household. She didn’t want to be freed at the cost of that.
Antonia sighed. The older she got, the less she wished that it wouldn’t be such a scandal if she had Helva beaten within an inch of her life. But there were still times… Antonia’s marriage to Appius had been an arranged one, as alliances among the privileged generally were. She didn’t begrudge Helva the nights that Appius had spent in her bed. But Helva could be such a nuisance…
Julia and Lucius were there to say good-bye, and Flavius and Aemelia, and of course Correus’s British wife on his other side, her thin arm through his, her dark eyes upturned to him. She still didn’t look much more than fourteen, but Antonia suspected that Ygerna had been a forceful personality from birth. She had Felix by one hand, scrubbed, his thick, corn-colored hair brushed down flat, and wearing a tunic as yet unstained.
Correus gave Helva a hug, and bent and kissed Ygerna, his eyes smiling into hers. Then he swung up onto the gold gelding’s back.
Ygerna, glowering, watched him go, leaving her abandoned among his family.
Flavius and Aemelia waved good-bye, and Aemelia leaned her head against Flavius’s shoulder for a moment. She had tried living on the frontier, and it had not been within her strength, although she had once sworn it was. But that had been when she wanted to marry Correus. Looking back on it, she had lately begun to think that it was as well that she hadn’t been allowed to. Correus had become a stranger in the last years. And he would have wanted her on the frontier with him. Flavius understood her. Flavius was… safe. And he loved her. Although this last week, she had begun to wonder if his brother’s wandering feet hadn’t been rubbing off on Flavius: There was a thoughtful, gone-away-over-the-hill look in his eye, and more often than not she would talk to him for a while and then realize that he hadn’t been listening at all. Was he wishing for a chance to chase pirates, too? Aemelia looked at her husband’s hands and gave a delicate shudder. Let Correus have the pirates.
“What will he do when he gets there?” she asked. “To the Rhenus, I mean?”
Flavius gave her a startled look, as if the answer was obvious, or as if her words had pulled him back out of some daydream. “Walk into their den, of course,” he said, watching his brother’s back disappear down the tree-lined road that ran from his father’s lands to Rome. “And hope he looks innocent.”
Marius Vettius flicked his fingers through the shipping schedules laid out before him on his desk, sliding them back and forth across the smooth black marble top, making patterns with them. The information in them was too valuable not to sell to the pirates, even with the emperor poking his stubborn nose into the matter. Vettius weighed the emperor’s interference against the profit when the Rhenus pirates paid him his percentage. Finally he stacked the wax tablets into a neat pile, corners aligned, pulled another tablet out of his desk, and began to write. When he had finished, he sent for Fulminatus, who was a junior clerk in the City Shipping Offices and not overly burdened with honesty.
Fulminatus held out his hand for the tablet and gave the prefect a cocky smile. “Same place, Chief?”
Vettius ignored him and left Fulminatus standing there until he got the idea. The clerk’s smile faded, and he stood up straight. “To be delivered as usual, sir?” he asked crisply, but his eyes shot Vettius a look of dislike. Fulminatus considered the prefect too fine in his ways for a man who was up to something shady. Still, Vettius paid well for service, and Fulminatus, like a great many other people in Rome, was too afraid of Vettius to push him very far.
“Yes, to the usual place,” Vettius said. “Just give it to the man who tells you his name is ‘Mercury,’ with no chat, please.”
Fulminatus nodded. He looked curiously at the sealed tablet. He’d unsealed one, very carefully, once, but he hadn’t been able to decipher what was written on it. Fulminatus thought Vettius had found out; he had been set on by robbers in an alley afterward. They hadn’t taken anything, but they beat him black and blue. Since then Fulminatus had kept his curiosity to himself.
When the clerk had gone, Vettius tapped his long fingers together idly, waiting for the incense that burned in a silver pot on the desk to clear the air of the dank river smell that had come in through the open door with Fulminatus. All the shipping offices occupied a row along the Tiber docks, and most had subsidiary offices at Ostia Harbor, twenty miles downriver.
All smelled vilely of rotting garbage – the City merchants burned more incense in their offices than they sold at a profit. Vettius poked with one finger at the silver burner so that a half-burned piece crumbled on the grate in a cloud of scent. Titus would probably send a fleet after the pirates, Vettius thought. Equally probably the fleet couldn’t catch them; they were hidden too well in the labyrinth of the Rhenus delta. But it would tie up the Rhenus Fleet for a while. If there were any anti-Roman elements at work in the Rhenus delta, as Vettius was beginning to suspect, that might be all to the good. A war gave an ambitious man a wider scope. A war had put Titus’s father, Vespasian, on the throne. The next war could put another man there. Vettius watched the red heart of the incense reflected in the silver burner, and smiled.