Mistress of Rome (10 page)

“I’m sorry, my lady. I spoke out of turn.” She busied herself among the perfume vials and massage oils. “Would you like your robe, now?”

“I know why you don’t want to hear about it, Thea.” I smiled, feeling a little thrill of satisfaction inside. Finally something had cracked behind that long blank face of hers. “Because you’re jealous. Yes, you are. You’ve got a little crush on the brave, savage Barbarian, haven’t you? Were you hiding behind a bush last night, watching when he kissed me? Were you just aching and wishing it was you?” I uncoiled languorously, rearing up so close I could feel Thea’s breath on my face. “Shall I tell you what it’s like, Thea? To be crushed by those hard arms, yanked off the ground by those callused hands, scraped by that rough jaw—”

Her face was like wood, but her eyes hated me.

“Poor little Thea,” I smiled. “I’ll give you a few coppers next time we go shopping, and you can buy one of those garish little portraits the vendors hawk by the Colosseum. Hang it around your neck on a ribbon, and sleep with it under your pillow—”

“Will that be all, my lady?”

“Yes, you can go. I’m quite finished with you.” For now, at least. Once I had the Barbarian in my bed, I’d make her watch.

 

 

 

GALLUS
had begun letting Arius out in the evenings. He tried running, but these days he was recognized before he got ten steps. No use. Easier just to get drunk.

“Water,” he bit out, ducking through the door of the Golden Cockerel, a flood of his fans banging raucously after him. “Wine. Food.” He flipped a coin at the tavernkeeper.

“No, no, everything for the Barbarian is free! Such a splendid fight this afternoon! When you disemboweled the Greek—”

“Forget the food.” Arius flung himself down at the corner table. “Just wine.”

Drink and fight. Blood and wine.
Drink the blood, dear boy, spill the wine; it’s all the same thing.
He stared into the mug.

“Careful,” someone whispered nearby. “Just last week he broke someone’s jaw for getting too close—”

Drink and fight.
Take it, swallow it, choke on it; it’s all you get.

The mug made a fine crash against the opposite wall. His fans cheered and followed suit, nine more mugs shattering to the sound of drunken applause. He could have pitched them all out into the darkening street.

Then a section of brown tunic and a neat work-hardened hand blocked his vision. “Arius.”

He knew the sound of her voice before it had finished his name. “Get out,” he said quietly.

“For God’s sake, I’ve spent half the night tracking you down. My mistress won’t let me back in the house until I’ve found you. The least you could do is be civil.”

He curled his fingers around the wine jug.

“I have a message to deliver.” Thea’s voice was toneless. “My mistress wants you to meet her in the Gardens of Lucullus tomorrow at midnight. She’s already bribed your
lanista
. You understand? Good.”

For the first time he looked up, but she was already vanishing into the throng. He saw her briefly at the door, buffeted by a crowd of drunks as she slipped out into the street. He half-rose from his bench.

“Better hole up here for a while, Barbarian.” The tavernkeeper thumped down another brimming mug. “Looks like the first of the winter storms is on its way. Only the pickpockets and the murderers are out tonight.”

A crowd of plebs flooded in, struggling out of their cloaks and swearing. Arius grabbed his cloak, making for the door. A cluster of fans rose to follow him, but he rounded on them.

“You follow me,” he said, “and I’ll kill you.”

Some followed anyway, but he knocked a few heads together, tossed a third man into the hearth, and while he was yelping and putting out his blazing hair Arius ducked out the door.

It wasn’t raining yet, but it soon would be. He could smell it when he lifted his nose up to the iron-colored sky. The wind blew cold for the first time in months, and he shook back his hood. The first rain since . . . how long? He’d missed it.

He found Thea halfway down a tenement side street. Walking tall and straight, arms swinging easily at her sides. He caught up in a few strides. “Stupid,” he said roughly. “Stupid to walk alone in this part of the city.”

“My mistress is expecting me.” She looked straight ahead, ignoring the dust that a spiteful breeze blew up against her face. “Lady Lepida Pollia doesn’t wait.”

“It’s going to rain.”

“No matter. I like rain.”

They walked along in silence.

“You fought well today, Barbarian.”

He shook the dust out of his eyes; the wind was picking up. More silence. They rounded a corner, ducked into a new gust.

“Who are you killing?” Thea’s voice was barely audible over the pulse of the wind. “You don’t kill for the fun of it. Or the applause. Or the money. So who are you really killing when you put your sword through all those Greeks and Thracians and Gauls?”

Gallus. The Emperor. The crowd.
“Everyone.”

“Even me?”

“Just—just once.”

“Only once? Oh.”

“The Amazon. Remember? She had—she had dark eyes—desperate, but not—and your eyes, they—” He stuttered to a halt, struggling for words. “Never mind.”

“You killed her.”

“She wanted it.”

“What if I wanted it?” Thea halted in the blustering wind, tipping her head back. “Right now. Would you finish me off? I’ve been trying for years, a bowl at a time, but it’s obvious I’m getting nowhere.” She held out her hands, palm up. The scars along her wrists gleamed white. “Would you kill me, please?”

“What?”

“Here, I’ll even start it for you.” In one swift movement she stooped, dislodged a sharp stone from the road, and raked it down her wrist. Blood welled, sickeningly vivid in the gray light. “Finish it.”

“No.” He looked at her, looked and couldn’t look away. He wasn’t any good with words. “No.”

For a moment she gazed back at him, her dark eyes as savagely miserable as the Amazon’s. Then she pulled her bleeding arm close, cradling it against her breast like a baby, and pulled away. As she turned, her sandal strap broke and she tripped.

He caught her before he even realized she was falling, lifting her off her feet in both arms before she could sprawl across the hard stones. She caught at his shoulder, her work-hardened hand curling against the nape of his bare neck and leaking blood. He clutched her awkwardly off the ground as the wind tore at her hair, and he wanted her so badly.

He dropped her, and they stared at each other. Her mouth, he thought, would taste cool and sweet.

The first clap of thunder roared overhead, and they looked away. For the first time Thea seemed to feel the cold; she crossed her arms over her breasts and the sight of her bleeding wrist hit him like a stone barrier. “I—I should get this tied up,” she said, and he nodded dumb agreement.

There were no shops, no taverns to duck into. Only a dark vestibule to a tenement house, the door barred. Arius banged, but no one answered. The wind picked up, blowing dust down the road in buffeting clouds, and he could see flickers of lightning beyond the distant edge of the Colosseum. He groped for words, any words. “Your mistress. She’ll be angry?”

Thea looked at him blankly. “Oh. Yes. But—never mind, I’m used to it.”

His arm brushed hers in the cramped doorway. They both jerked back. She bent down to fi x the broken strap of her sandal. Her tunic molded flat against her spare body; he could see the supple brown curve of her waist, her back . . . He turned away.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see her hands swiftly tearing a strip from the bottom of her tunic and doubling it around her bleeding wrist. She tied it off neatly with the cord that fastened her braided hair, and the long plait unraveled down her back. She shook her head forward, and the dark sheet of hair hung past her waist, a wall hiding her face. Through the wall he could see flashes of her profile, her straight nose, her mouth.

He reached out.

In his head he heard a voice, too low and pleading to be the demon:
Don’t hurt her.

He stirred the ends of her hair with his fingers. The dark strands were silk against his palm and smelled like the coming rain. He gathered up a handful of her hair and carried it to his mouth.

She turned, eyes flickering toward him with a wary despairing hunger, and a sickening surge of memory flooded his mind: all the times in the arena when he had locked body against straining body, and the end had been a hot spurt of blood and a fading life. The Amazon died again in his eyes, turning into Thea, and he nearly told her to go away then and go away fast before he killed her, too . . . But then she leaned forward to lay her cheek against his throat and kiss the pulse behind his ear, and the arena disappeared, taking the blood with it. His hand tangled fiercely with hers; he felt her bones creak in his grip, and had to remind himself to be gentle. He had never been gentle with anyone in his life. He traced her lips with his thumb and then his mouth, felt her lips part beneath his own, and a stab of joy rocked him to the soles of his feet.

They slid against the wall to the ground, his cloak pillowing the stones under her head, and her hands slipped through his hair as he folded his body awkwardly into hers. He kissed the hollow of her collarbone, his hands following her back’s pliant arc around to the soft curve of her breast, and something caught at his throat, something so alien it took him a moment to recognize it as happiness . . . Her skin was warm and sweet, and he never wanted to touch a sword hilt again.

 

 

 

THE
rain came down at last, drenched the streets, moved on. “Well, the
idea
—get out, you riffraff, off my doorstep!” An outraged voice trumpeted behind them as the vestibule door opened suddenly and torchlight flooded the doorway. Hastily they pulled their clothes about them and escaped in opposite directions, pursued by curses.

H
E did not come to meet my mistress in the Gardens of Lucullus. She paced and shrieked for a while, her enticing sleeping robe billowing in the cool breeze that was perfect for trysting, but I heard nothing. Lepida raged all the way home, stiffing the hired litter-carriers of their tip and stamping back to her solitary bed, and none of it registered.
My Arius, not yours.
Mine for more than just one short hour in a cold doorway.

The house was asleep. I stole quietly through the dark halls, my heart knocking like a drum, and paused outside the door of the bathhouse. I stripped my hair out of its plait, covered my face with my hands for a moment because surely it couldn’t be right to show this much happiness . . . and then I stepped inside.

Before my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I knew he was there. Before the faint rustle reached my ears, I knew he’d risen from the corner where we’d first met. Before my fingers touched flesh, I knew his hands were outstretched toward mine.

“Thea?”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.” His hands gripped mine, engulfed them. “Thea. Thea.”

He bent down, scooping me easily off my feet, and I shook my hair forward around his face, making a private cave just for the two of us.

Sanctuary
, I thought. After that I didn’t think at all.

 

 

 

W
ELL, well.” Gallus arched his plucked brows, stroking the arm of one of his slave boys. “Aren’t we in a good mood this winter. No broken chairs, no smashed mugs, no ears lopped off my fighters—my wine cellar is all but untouched—why, I don’t even think you’ve put a knife through a patron’s foot for at least a month.”

“Stuff it,” said Arius. But amiably.

A busy winter. No more seedy arenas or back-alley rings; the Colosseum had been thrown open to the mob. The Emperor had come back to Rome just long enough to reconcile with his Empress before heading back up to Germania in a foul temper, but the games-loving Spaniards were in town and eager to be entertained. They packed into the tiers in their unaccustomed furs, shivering in the keen cold winds, and Arius fought for them. He fought Serpicus, the trident fighter with live snakes on his helmet; he fought Lupus, a German in wolf skins; he fought a Spaniard imported from Lusitania to uphold Spanish honor. They all met their ends in the Colosseum, to the sound of frenzied cheering. “For God’s sake, can’t you get yourself wounded?” Thea groaned. “Then for a nice long month or two you’ll get to lie in bed with no sharp things trying to poke your life out, and maybe I’ll get a little peace.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” He lifted her up, squeezing her so hard her ribs creaked. “I’d drag you to bed with me.”

“Mmmm.” She kissed the scar that interrupted his eyebrow, making his flesh shiver. “I like the sound of that.”

“Thea.” He cupped her chin in his hand, tilting up her face. “Stay away when I fight.”

“Lepida makes me come.”

“But I don’t want you watching when—” He broke off, but the sentence continued itself silently.
I don’t want you watching when I’m killed.

He lowered his face into her hair as she wound her arms around his neck. The next week, fighting a Gaul, he took a trident through the shoulder.

The Gaul took Arius’s sword through the mouth.

“I still won,” Arius pointed out to an irate Gallus as the barracks doctor cleaned and bandaged the triple wound.

“Yes.” Frowning. “And since you can apparently fight with your right hand as well as your left, I’m not canceling your bout next month. You have
commitments
, dear boy, so don’t think you can cry off just because someone pricked you with a trident.”

“Bastard,” Thea fumed that night. “I’m going to learn how to hex, just so I can put a curse on Gallus.”

Arius threw back his head and laughed.