B007IIXYQY EBOK (117 page)

Domitian sat for a time in sour silence, eyes doggedly probing Julianus’ face for deeper motives. Then he said suddenly, “The woman—what was
that demented she-beast’s name?” His eyes smoldering with repressed interest, he leaned close, alert as a cat waiting for its quarry to run from cover. “I hear your man Erato has taken her under wing.”

Julianus’ whole mind braced for disaster. He said with brisk annoyance, “I would not know. I do not follow such things—you know my opinion of the games.”

“Oh, come. What have I done to deserve this tiresome prattle? I’ll pry a vice out of you yet. Do you mean to tell me, Julianus, she does not intrigue you, even a little?
Can all your philosophy tell me why your presence persistently brings her to mind? You’ve not only her lofty innocence,
you know, you’ve also got her unfortunate tendency for stupid, futile heroics…. Myself, I don’t think of her at all, of course; I mention her only because you
mention Erato.”

Julianus sought frantically for an argument that would lead Domitian to disassociate his choice of Erato from Auriane. “Yes, Erato,” he said at last, “who will not only save money but lives—expensive
lives—for it is well-known that when swordsmen are thoroughly trained and exhibit impressive skill, the crowd’s thirst for blood noticeably slackens.”

“Ah,” Domitian said with delight, as if he had won the board game with a surprise move. “So that’s
it. You had me puzzled for a time. This all comes from some misguided Pythagorean notion of compassion—I should have known
it.” Domitian wagged a finger at him. “You’re tenacious as a burr. You have it, then. Erato has the post. But if he shows the least
disloyalty or incompetence, I’ll not forget who selected him.”

Late in the afternoon the next day, a baffled and amazed Erato moved into the Prefect’s offices. His first act was to overturn the order for Auriane’s execution; his second, to order a close inspection of the rations given the men of the lower grades.

Auriane felt she had been lifted out of darkness by the hand of a god. She had escaped a miserable and ignoble end. Marcus Julianus was well and living and for her sake had banished the beast, Torquatus. She would not have known who her benefactor was except that Erato named him, uttering the First Advisor’s name with a reverence that surprised her, for Erato was naturally inclined to be contemptuous and distrusting of the great. The increasing devotion she felt now alternately exhilarated and terrified her; it was a flood tide too powerful to oppose that might bear her away from all she knew. But it was also a welcome comfort after the harshness of the last years, lulling as a suspension in birth-waters. For so long she had been solitary as the ash, sheltering others when she could; she had forgotten how it was to be sheltered herself. It brought haunting memories of the days before the Hall burned, when last the world seemed a stable place. But in these days she could not forget its illusory side; in the beat of her blood was the warning—the hall will ever burn again.
His protection was a well from which she might drink, not a sea in which to immerse herself. Only Fria protects perfectly, she reminded herself when she found herself taking dangerous comfort from his love.

When Auriane was returned to her cell, she abruptly ended Sunia’s joy at their reunion when she told her of her grim discovery at the banquet of Aristos. At first Sunia would not believe. Surely Auriane had seen a wraith, a fetch or some other kind of spirit-double—or a conjuring of a sorcerer.

“Sunia, it was
Odberht, and he was alive as
the worms that animate corpses. It requires no sorcery, no wandering spirit-doubles—only that he was sent off to Rome with the earliest captives, which would mean he’s been here for a year and a half…which is the length of time Aristos has been here. Doubtless he hoped I would be killed before we discovered him.” Her eyes sharpened with a realization. “Sunia, he was the one who tried to poison me in the prison cell—I’m certain of it.”

Sunia lapsed into miserable acceptance, terror accumulating in her eyes. “Every breath he draws poisons our blood. What will we do? We are prisoners. We can do nothing but watch him thrive.”

“Perhaps you are wrong. All of us who are here will stand against him. I’m not sure what to do, but the matter’s not mine to solve alone. Tonight over our gruel I’ll call a council.”

Auriane rose restlessly and walked to the small, barred window of the cell door. Across the passage was a vertical window cut into the thick wall; beyond, the ghostly disk of a near-f moon haunted a clear afternoon sky. She seized it with her mind and fervently prayed, but got no strength from it; that moon seemed too weak, too wan, too distant. She felt certainty draining out of her as it always seemed to when an ill-omened thing occurred and the old shame rose up like some evil sap, fouling her heart, flooding her lungs, suffocating her.

I thought my shame more than half conquered, she thought. But still it slinks back when I am weak, like the slender gray wolf who creeps out of the snows when he scents death is close.

Barely audibly, Auriane said, “My own curse is everlasting. It follows me in dreams, it follows me across the world….” Her voice was a cruel hand working open an old wound. “Because of me, we are
battered down, and Odberht thrives…. Because of me,
vengeance is impossible, the tribe is scattered, and we are mocked in this place where men are trained to fight like dogs.”

Sunia caught her breath at the pain in Auriane’s voice. Slowly she rose to her feet. “Auriane, none are left alive who still believe in your shame—except you.” She hesitated as if she ventured where she should not, then went on anyway. “I have no good understanding of such things, but…the Fates must have preserved Odberht’s life for some purpose we cannot see. As they’ve not cut
our
threads, they must mean to weave us into one weaving. That man in the Emperor’s garden, who, by your own words, loves you, he who sees with the eyes of Wodan—would not
he
have seen your shame and despised you, had it been there to see?”

Auriane turned to look at her, managing a weary smile. “An intriguing twist of thought, Sunia.” She turned away. “What does he
know of shame? Kingly innocence lies on him like a cloak.”

Sunia tentatively approached Auriane, smiling hopefully. “Perhaps it’s not your curse but your great heart that throws us in with Odberht at this time. Perhaps, for you, he is a gateway to another world.”

“Another world?” Auriane smiled more warmly. “You’ve a gift for saying encouraging words, Sunia.”

Sunia seemed faintly embarrassed by this. Auriane took her hand in silence.

I struggle mightily and it is never enough, Auriane thought, remembering the spear she cast at the legion when she was told Avenahar would die if they did not open the gates. Perhaps this time the wind will carry the spear and it will fly at the stars…and it
will
be enough.

CHAPTER XLII

D
OMITIA
L
ONGINA WAS IN TORMENT THROUGH
the winter, desperate for some way to respond to Marcus Julianus’ request without risking her life. She felt like a moth fluttering about a small, still flame, caught in troubled suspension, attraction balanced by fear.

Then one night she found herself unavoidably confronted with him. She dined in her suite of rooms in the West Palace among friends with literary pretensions who still enjoyed imperial favor—a dozen modestly talented lyric poets, among them three noblewomen, and several authors of plodding epics—men whose work she could no longer bear to read, for it was so distorted with turgid praises of Domitian. Her dining chamber overlooked a circular garden, the site of the small library she was having built to house her rare volumes of early Greek and Latin poetry. Construction had stalled indefinitely when Atrides, an architect-engineer employed by the Ministry of Public Works, halted suddenly, claiming the design she had approved could not be built. His reasons were vague. Sometimes he complained of the too-sandy soil; at others, he protested that the precious marbles she wanted could not be found. She suspected the truth was that he chose to please her husband rather than her. Domitian saw her library as evidence of anarchic tendencies on her part, as though it were a temple into which she could flee from him and couple with the geniuses of the poets. Or perhaps, she surmised, he resents that my love of the poets is genuine, and his own, feigned.

She entered her dining chamber only after all her guests were in place. Two bored Praetorians flanked the door; a half dozen more were placed strategically about the walls—a reminder that Domitian’s unblinking eye followed her everywhere.

And there was Marcus Arrius Julianus, boldly present at her own table, reclining on the couch opposite from the place of honor reserved for her, next to young Castor and the aging Lucullus. She found him maddeningly at ease, jesting with her friends with the easy alertness of a hunting animal at rest.

She felt a quiet start of terror. Who let him in?
But then, who could keep him out? Quickly she realized the Guards, doubtless, assumed he was there with her husband’s blessings, sent to observe her among her friends—though she knew better; more likely he was there for some inscrutable purpose of his own. She chose to play his game, greeting him as though he were expected, thinking—curses on him; he knows there is no privacy here. Panic and obscure excitement knotted together in her stomach. What did he intend?

The others shied away from him at first, but as they drank deeply of her Setinian wine they lost some of their fear of him. He asked her question after question about her unfinished library, polite but insistent, and she fought vainly for indifference. She understood why even those friends she counted petty tale-bearers called him a man of uncommon grace. She watched him with great pleasure, holding his eyes long as she dared, then dropping her gaze to his hand as, with swift, assured motions, he moved a dish and traced forms and figures on the table to illustrate a point, showing her that Atrides was wrong.
What you will can be done.
Was this
all he had meant by that message—that her library could be built? She wondered with a flash of panic if those about her guessed how warmed she felt by his tantalizingly brief smiles of understanding.

Once she saw a quick look of concern come into his eyes; it happened when he heard an exchange between Castor and Lucullus, whose talk had long since slid down from matters of the mind to the mores of Junilla.

“How could
she?” Castor said with relish. “She might as well mate with a bull!”

“That was last year, you’ve not kept up.”

“Are they certain
it was Aristos?”

“Oh, there is no doubt. I know a man who lifts a cup with the freedman of the very guard Junilla bribed to be let into his cell,” Lucullus went on, aglow with the attention this succulent bit of gossip was netting him. He decided to make the most of it. “He said last time she stumbled out of there looking like a wrung-out rag. Imagine those pearly arms, white as sea foam, white as…as Aphrodite’s milk, encircling that grunting, hairy behemoth, that leather-skinned, lice-ridden bull—”

“That’s not the picture I hold in mind,” Castor broke in. “He perfumes himself and sings to her, and just to please her, softens the hairs on his legs by singeing them with hot walnut shells.”

The Empress shot the two a sharp, reproving look, misinterpreting Julianus’ unease as some lingering loyalty to that creature who was once his wife. But Julianus caught her gaze and said in a covered voice, “Let them talk on, it does not offend me.”

The true reason for his alarm would have been impossible for Domitia Longina to guess. Junilla, he thought, I know what you are doing. You stalk not one man but two. You suspect something, that’s been obvious since you outbid me for her horse. Aristos is to your taste, I’ve no doubt, but linking me with Auriane is even more
to your taste. And now you’ve got Aristos as your pawn, with all his thugs and spies infesting that school at your service. You’ll be lingering about, watching, perhaps bribing the same guard I must bribe on that night, soon coming, when I must
get in to see her.

“That tiresome Atrides will still say it’s impossible,” Domitia Longina went on, a cautiously muted teasing look in her eyes as she returned his attention to her library.

“Nonsense, more excavating will have to be done, that’s all, and the foundations redone. It must be set with piles, and they should be of charred alder or olive wood, placed closely together, like bridge piles. And the intervals between them must be filled with charcoal. I myself could work up a plan for the portico you want. Atrides gave up too soon.”

He paused, then said smoothly, as if the idea had just occurred to him, “There is still a little light.” He cast a professional glance in the direction of the colonnade at the rear of the room, which overlooked the library’s site. “Perhaps I could show you what Atrides could not, if you were of a mind to step out onto that colonnade.” That look, reassuring but with a glint of intrigue, startled her into the realization that this
was what he had planned from the first.

She suppressed an answering smile.

Clever man, she thought. He found a way to speak to me alone while remaining within sight of everyone, including the Guards. In sight, but not in hearing. And to those about us, it appears spontaneous. Who, watching this, could suspect us of collusion?