Daughters of Rome (42 page)

Thrax gave a sharp shake of his head. “Lie. I know you, Domina.”

“It appears you do,” Lollia said wryly. “Well, don’t worry about me. No one will dare sack Rome.”

“Then why have the little one taken away?”

“Better safe than sorry.” The second cupboard was full, and Lollia closed it up. If looters did break into the house, at least some of her grandfather’s favorite pieces would be saved.

“You should have guards, Domina.” Thrax sounded stubborn.

“I’ll hire some.”

He hesitated. “Let me stay with you.”

“No. You need to stay with Flavia.” His face was stormy. “
Please
, Thrax.”

He looked away. Lollia drank in the sight of his fair hair, his wide shoulders, his broad Gallic face and blue eyes, memorizing everything. They hadn’t touched or spoken alone since she’d transferred him to her grandfather’s house with his back a sheet of lash marks . . .

“Let me ask you something, Thrax.” She looked down at an ivory bowl, turning it over in her hands. “Fabius got sick, just before he was supposed to march north.”

“Yes, Domina?” He looked suddenly cautious.

“Food poisoning, everyone said. From that banquet my grandfather threw in this house for Vitellius. And really, who wouldn’t get food poisoning, eating fifty courses and throwing them up and eating fifty more? But Fabius has—had—a stomach like an ox. He never got sick before, eating red mullet.”

Thrax wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“You tried to poison him, didn’t you?”

A long silence.

“I won’t tell,” she sighed. “I just want to know.”

“The first time I see him since you sent me away,” Thrax said softly. “And he’s laughing. And you look so sad next to him, the sad with your eyes and not your mouth. And—and I just go to the cupboard where the cook keeps nightshade to kill rats . . . but he didn’t get enough, not with the way they all throw up their food between courses. Not enough.” A sigh. “I wasn’t thinking. I should not have tried—my Lord, he doesn’t like murder.”

“I think he’d have forgiven you, Thrax.” But Lollia shivered, thinking of the penalties for slaves who attacked their masters. Public execution in the Forum, disembowelment in the arena—no punishment was too harsh. He’d risked the lives of the other slaves too, who would have been put to death for his crime, and even the life of her grandfather, who had lived in panic of being accused of killing the Emperor’s right-hand man. “Gods, Thrax,
why
? Why did you risk it? Because he had you flogged?”

Thrax blinked, surprised. “Because he hurt you.” Fingers brushed her throat, light as butterflies where Fabius had struck her after she came to Thrax’s defense.

“But I’m not worth it!” she cried. “I’m a stupid girl who gets married too much and drinks more wine than she should and spends too much money—”

“You were kind to me,” he said.

“Was I? It’s my fault you were flogged, Thrax, all my fault—I should have known Fabius would hurt you if he found out—”

“You were
kind
to me,” Thrax repeated stubbornly. His accent was stronger now as he struggled for words. “Always kind. You asked my name. Asked about my family—my sister. Said ‘Thank you’ when I got you things.”

“What does that matter?”

“Owners, they—I’ve had three, since I was ten. All three, they bought me for prettiness, but—” He gave an awkward shrug. “They used me, hard. You were kind.
Are
kind.”

Lollia could hardly bear to meet his eyes, they were so full of light.

“I didn’t look out for you, with Fabius,” she managed to say. “But I’m doing it now, Thrax. You’ll take Flavia now, and you’ll get to safety.”

“Domina—”

“There’s no one else I trust my daughter to, Thrax.” Lollia looked up at him. “Please—take care of her.”

“Like she’s mine,” he said simply. “Sometimes I pretend she
is
mine.”

Lollia reached up and cupped his cheek in her hand. “When this is over, I will find your sister and I will buy her, and any other family you still have, and I will bring them all here for you.”

He turned his face against her hand, kissing the palm. Lollia hesitated for a moment, thinking of Fabius and his whip and the blood flying in sprays across a flower-filled atrium—but Fabius was dead now, beheaded in Urvinum, and for what he’d done to Thrax, Lollia hoped the headsman had been drunk and taken at least ten messy strokes to get Fabius’s foul screaming head off his neck. A hundred strokes. But fast death or slow, he
was
dead; she was a widow twice in one year—and for once this wasn’t adultery. So Lollia put her hands on Thrax’s shoulders and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and pushed him to sit on a barrel of salted herring as she climbed into his lap. He knew a hundred different ways to please her by now, but this time she wanted to please him, and she pushed his hands away. She moved slowly, slowly as she could, and he gripped her hard and the words he muttered into her hair were in his own language. She knew the last word, though.
“Lollia,”
he gasped against her throat, shuddering, and Lollia held him a moment longer.
The first time he ever called me by name.

“We’d better go,” she said softly.

He disentangled himself, and for a moment Lollia thought he’d just throw her across one shoulder and carry her out of Rome kicking and screaming rather than abandon her here. But his habit of obedience was still strong, and so instead he just helped her move a gold-inlaid wine service into another of her grandfather’s hidden cubbyholes. She brushed a cobweb out of Thrax’s fair hair, and he took the little wooden cross from his neck and slipped it over her head. “For God to protect you.” He reached for her hand, gripping it for a long desperate moment, and then he went back up the stairs.

Lollia watched her grandfather leave for Ostia the following morning, taking with him Thrax and Flavia and his cash box and most of his slaves. Flavia had a tantrum at the last moment, wanting her mother to come along, but Thrax fixed her with a stern look and she subsided, waving over his shoulder as he carried her into the wagon. Lollia waved back with a happy smile, waved until they were just specks in the road. Afterward she went back inside and sat in the deserted atrium and had a good cry, clutching Thrax’s little wooden cross and surrounded by ivory-eyed ebony statues.
Me crying
, she thought.
Lollia the scandalous.
This time, scandalwise, she’d really surpassed herself. What would the other Cornelias say if they knew she’d done the worst—worse than taking lovers, worse than marrying five times by the age of twenty, and three of those marriages in one year?

She’d gone and fallen in love with a slave.

I
think I’ve seen enough,” said Diana.

“Enough?” Marcella’s heart was pounding.
He’s finished; Vitellius is done.
There would be no escape now, no mercy—and she’d seen it all. “You want to leave already?”

“Don’t you?” Diana looked down the long hall of the Domus Aurea, curiously empty though the streets outside resounded with uproar.

“I thought you’d be glad to see it,” Marcella said. “You’ve been furious at Vitellius since your race, after all.”

“I don’t like seeing a horse stagger along with a broken leg,” Diana said tightly. “Still alive, but not knowing it’s dead.”

“Oh, I think Vitellius knows. And it won’t be long before someone comes to knock him on the head and put him out of his misery.”

“I hope I don’t have to see it, that’s all.” Diana looked as lovely as ever in a blue cloak pinned at the shoulder with a round silver brooch from Britannia, but there were shadows under her eyes. “Let’s go before the streets get worse.”

Reluctantly, Marcella let herself be tugged along. Seeing history being made close at hand might be exciting, but she had no desire to get killed in a mob. That was a little
too
close at hand.

A moon was rising in the frosty purple sky by the time they fought their way out into the streets. Rough and jubilant crowds shouted on every street corner and in every forum, and Marcella was glad of the guards Vitellius had distractedly assigned to escort them home.
Anything for his little pet, even now.

“Wait.” Diana stiffened for a moment, craning her neck, then slipped out from behind a pair of Praetorians. “What are you doing here?”

A man paused, looking down at her. Iron-gray hair, a bronze torc, breeches—yes, the rebel’s son, Llyn ap Caradoc. Marcella remembered how resentful she’d felt at the games earlier this spring when he’d ignored her questions about his father’s rebellion in Britannia.
Why was I so interested?
she wondered.
A failed rebellion twenty years ago certainly isn’t as interesting as a simmering rebellion under my nose. Especially when I’ve done so much to help it simmer!

“You shouldn’t be out in the streets, Lady,” he was telling Diana. “I heard there was killing before the Capitol.”

“There was.” Diana rubbed the back of her neck tiredly. “Vitellius tried to abdicate. He didn’t know how to do it, really—there’s never been an emperor who abdicated before. So he offered his dagger to the crowd and made a speech, but he was drunk and it didn’t go over very well.”

Marcella thought of Vitellius’s bravado as he went out to make his abdication speech, his terrified eyes over a wide smile as the crowd roared his name. “Well,” he said, coming back inside and spreading his rough horseman’s hands, “I suppose I’m still Emperor. They seem to want me.” There had been a mix of horror and courage in that reddened, food-bloated face.

Llyn’s eyes gleamed like two pieces of steel. “Is he dead?”

“No,” said Diana, “but his soldiers ran wild. They went looking for Vespasian’s son to kill, but they couldn’t find him. So they found some inoffensive brother of Vespasian’s and tore him to bits instead.”

Marcella wondered absently if Domitian would survive the next few days. The Moesian legions who supported his father’s claim were rumored to be camped just ten miles away . . . still, Domitian wouldn’t live to see their arrival unless he found a very safe place to wait out the danger.
I’m certainly not going to hide him under the bed if he comes crawling to
my
door.

Diana was looking at Llyn critically now, and her eyes came to rest on the long sword he wore strapped against one breech-clad leg. “I’m quite certain you’re not supposed to have that.”

“Are you?” Amused.

“That’s no Roman sword,” Marcella interjected, interested despite herself. “Too long for a gladius. Surely it isn’t the sword you had in Britannia? They’d have disarmed you and your father the minute you were captured.”

He shrugged. “You should both go home.”

“So should you,” said Diana.

“I have business here.”

“Business? With who?”

“Vitellius.”

Diana smiled coolly. “Don’t pretend he’s the Emperor who imprisoned you here, Llyn.”

He balanced one foot on a curbstone, graying hair stirring in the twilight breeze. “I never pretend anything.”

Their eyes drilled each other. Marcella tilted her head, watching.

“Vitellius is a dead man still walking,” Diana said at last. “What does he matter to you?”

Llyn smiled at her, the last gleam of daylight catching the torc at his neck and the rings on his arms. Prizes won in battle against another Emperor of Rome, long ago. “I am a dead man too, Lady.”

“You still have a remarkable ability to make all other men in Rome look small,” Diana remarked. “I wish I had met you in Britannia.”

He laughed at that. “I’d have made a warrior out of you.”

“You made me a charioteer instead. Good enough.”

“Diana?” Marcella raised her eyebrows. “Are you done yet? It’s nearly dark, and you were the one to warn me about mobs.”

Diana turned, signaling the guards as she moved past Llyn, but her blue cloak fluttered back and his hand caught her bare arm.

“If anything happens to me,” he said, “my horses are yours.”

“Did you have to do that?” Diana glared at him. “Now I have to decide which I want more—your safety, or your horses. And you have
very
good horses.”

He smiled again, released her arm, and moved noiselessly into the milling crowds. “What was that about?” Marcella asked as they hastened on. “Don’t tell me that’s your lover. He’s a complete savage.”

“Oh, gods’ wheels,” Diana said disgustedly. “Let’s go home before we get invaded.”