Arena (26 page)

“What’s done is done. Marcus would not fight in any case.”

“He would have fought after we whipped and starved him a while longer!”

“Futile, Syrax. I hold no brief for these Christians. But after talking to that Paulus, it’s clear to me that they are determined men. Marcus would only languish and die, if not here, then helplessly in the Circus. I saw no need to be a party to a useless slaughter.”

“You don’t seem to see the need of many things these days,” Syrax snarled.

“Enough! I’m a partner here and my order stands.”

“What possesses you lately, Cassius?”

Angering, I said, “Perhaps I’ve had a bellyful of your deceitful ways.”

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“Oh-ho!” Malice gleamed in his glance. “So now I’m deceitful, am I? You never objected to my tactics before.”

“True. But only lately have I stopped to think of the price we’ve paid for our success. We’ve caused countless people misery, driven innocent men to their deaths —”

Syrax drew back a step. He cocked his head insolently. “Who is this speaking? Certainly not Cassius Flamma. Not the man who fought like a devil to win the wood sword. Not the man who opened the most famous beast school in the Empire. Cassius Flamma has died somewhere along the way. Left a weakling for a ghost. A weakling and worse. A coward.”

My hands closed to fists. “Be quiet. You’ve not seen the things I have. The horrors of the time in Africa —”

“I’ve seen something worse,” he cut in. “The decline of a man. This argument has been in the making ever since you returned, Cassius. Now it’s plain you’ve become a sympathizer with traitors to the Emperor. You might as well tell me the rest. Lost your taste for money, too?”

“Gods, you’re insufferable!” I shouted. “At what price is money gotten, you twisted fool?”

“Oh,” Syrax purred, “and now I’m twisted. Twisted, because I helped you to fame.”

“There’s more to living than fame and a purse full of coppers and the simpering approval of that gross boy who rules us!” My voice had risen to a shout. My face felt hot. I knew I was provoking him dangerously, yet the words I spoke had been gathering inside me many months, and I could not check them. “My father — a failure, a miserable man who died without a coin to his name — taught me to seek fame, but not at the price of decency. That’s what I have forgotten so long, Syrax. It’s taken quite a few unsavory things to make me remember. The tricks of that slut Locusta. The way you cheat Serenus’ brother so blandly. Your condemning that Christian to death when he had twice the courage of you or I.”

My partner opened his mouth to retort, then closed it. He dipped his head, as if to acknowledge my words. Then, that damnable smile crept across his face, eerie in the dimness of the gallery.

There was more for me to fear in his calm, cunning grin than all his rantings.

“Cassius, I don’t intend to stand here and let you abuse me. One last thing I will say, prompted by your remark about courage. It’s you who have lost courage. You who have become the cowering failure. I’m going to give some serious thought to this enterprise. I’m not at all sure I want to remain in business with a stinking milksop.”

He gathered spit in his mouth, hawked and blew it against the hem of my toga. Then he spun around and vanished down the gallery, tunic flying, sandals slapping with the rhythm of his rage.

My bearers carried me along through the darkening streets, crying for all and sundry to get out of the path of the illustrious eques Cassius Flamma.

Was I looking at things from the wrong end?

Did I deserve the tongue-lashing Syrax had delivered?

I decided I’d acted correctly in letting Marcus go free. Manumission, while not a frequent occurrence at the arena schools, happened often enough so that my act shouldn’t excite too much comment.

Yet why had I done it?

Had I been led down false paths from the beginning? Dazzled by the splendor of Rome that was only a tawdry illusion?

Either I truly was becoming a coward, as Syrax maintained, or else I’d been living wrongly for too many years. Not being a man of much formal education, I was hard put to explain away my decision fully, but I knew one thing — I had gained more satisfaction from the thanks of the cultist Paulus than I had lost by incurring Syrax’s wrath. I realized that Paulus had predicted it would happen thus.

I remembered Acte had once said, the first night we met, that Rome and its ways might harden my heart. I believed it at long last. Because now I felt the hardness cracking and crumbling. I had become a different man.

The difficulty was, if I suddenly chose to live a different sort of life, my past would make it hard
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to do. More than hard, as I learned that very same night. Dangerous.

To soak the aches from my bones produced by the damp spring wind, I took my chair after dinner to an imposing bath in the Field of Mars. Warm and cold dips lulled and relaxed me, made me sleepy. On the way home I was only half aware that my small retinue was passing through a particularly fetid arcade when the chair set down with a bump. I heard scuffling.

Torchlight jigged crazily on the litter curtains. Before I could jump out, a frightened, frantic voice cried, “Robbers! Help, get the watch! We’re being attacked by —”

Thrusting the curtains aside, I leaped into a confused melee of shouting men and slaves. One of my retinue was down, his blood-foaming throat slashed. A knife sailed by my ear. I ducked and bowled against a bulky man who smelled of leeks and sour wine. A torch fell to the ground, another. How many brigands had come out of the night I couldn’t see. I had my hands full with the one trying to close his sweat-stinking fingers on my throat.

I stumbled back as the strangler cursed. “Fights harder than any fop I ever jumped before.

Where’s your purse, gentleman? Let —agh! ”

Pinned against the chair, I drove my leg between his thighs a second time. He doubled over. I dug my right thumb in his eye and jerked, bringing out something wet and lumpish. He shrieked and reeled back against his companions, eye socket spraying hot blood.

“Lidor! Frimus! Someone!” I shouted. “Run! Rouse the watch —”

But my slaves were struggling for their lives. I counted at least a dozen robbers. They must have slid from the rooftops and the doorways of shuttered shops. The slaves, lightly armed with staves, whacked heads valiantly. But they had no defense against knives.

Fallen torches burned dim on the pavement, illuminating a tangle of legs. Inside the litter, a thief was ransacking. He’d entered from the other side. I heard him cry in dismay.

“A filthy trick! Nothing here. No gems, not a damned —”

“Nothing but punishment, you scum,” I screamed at him, grasping his throat.

His face grew pale, tongue protruding, hands scrabbling at air while he made queer cluckings in his throat. Another thief fell on my back, tried to pull me off. One of the slaves knocked him out of action with his staff. The man on whom I’d fastened a stranglehold found his knife somehow.

It flashed upward between my wrists for my throat. I wrenched aside. The iron tip grazed my cheek, drawing blood. It was a trifling hurt, but it enraged me. I grappled the man down onto the cushions of the litter, nearly broke his arm wrestling away his knife. I held his throat with one hand and raised my other, ready to skewer him.

“The gods defend me,” he mumbled, wetting himself out of fear. “The gods take my soul when I die —”

Abruptly, in the place of his slack, evil face. I saw the eyes of Paulus.

“Kill me,” the brigand wept. “Don’t dangle me. Kill me and have done —”

Cursing, I thrust him bodily out the other side of the litter. “Run. Before I change my mind.”

Sobbing in disbelief, he fled. Lights flashed distantly. Men shouted. “Scatter!” a thief yelled.

“The vigiles — up to the roofs!”

Quickly as they had come, the death-dealers faded away. They’d killed one slave, a boy named Frimus, barely sixteen. I knelt beside him but it was too late. His throat had been opened ear to ear. The watch raced nearer.

“Bad luck followed us tonight, master,” a slave said sadly.

“Bad luck? I suppose. These streets are infamous for thieves. But —”

I said no more. I had only then recalled Syrax’s final words to me at the school. He questioned whether he wished to remain my partner.

The convenient timing of the strike by the robbers planted a suspicion I could not ignore no matter how hard I tried.

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THE LADYPaulina told me firmly, “My husband prefers seclusion. He no longer sees visitors.”

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“I beg you, my lady, at least carry my request to him. It’s of great importance.”

Rather like a protective hen worrying over one of her brood, the philosopher’s wife shook her head. “Cassius, my husband is weary of the world.” Her fine face, which I remembered as pretty and composed, showed signs of the same weariness. “For years he put aside private considerations, his desire for the solitude in which to think and write, in order to serve and counsel that young — the Emperor,” she amended. “With what result? He was dismissed, humiliated. No, Cassius, I’d only provoke his anger if I spoke to him about you. His orders —”

“My lady,” I broke in, “I understand all you say, and I sympathize. But I must ask him a question in confidence. A question I don’t dare ask any other man in Rome, for fear it would drift back to the wrong ears. What might happen to me if it did, I can only surmise.”

Paulina frowned. “Are you trying to suggest your life is threatened?”

My mouth jerked in a grim smile. I recalled the attack by street thieves, six weeks before. “Yes, my lady. I’ve waited patiently for Seneca to return from his country estate. If I’m to be turned away now —”

She sighed. “I know it will anger him if I disturb him. But, I will try.”

She turned and glided from the atrium. I waited, uneasy in the unnatural quiet of the great house.

Seneca had manumitted most of his slaves and barred his doors to clients. I had been forced to make a fearful row outside and practically assault the sole slave who admitted me before the lout would even speak to the philosopher’s wife. I paced back and forth, perspiring. The chilly spring was turning to warm summer.

I had not gone near the Cassian School since the day of my quarrel with Syrax. Following the incident with the robbers, no more attempts had been made upon my life. Perhaps the attack had been coincidence. Yet the very fact that nothing had happened merely increased my apprehension, until I found myself starting at the smallest noises in the night.

Paulina returned, smiling in a rather astonished way. “I could hardly believe my ears. He will see you.”

As I started quickly away she laid a hand on my arm.

“Please, Splendidi. Don’t trouble him overlong. He’s a very sad and tired man.”

“I will heed your wishes, my lady.”

The philosopher was in the peristyle. The curtain had been dropped in place across the roof opening, lending the viridarium beneath a mysterious, clouded look. On a bench in the center of this patch of greensward, Seneca busied with a tablet and stylus. He wore a plain toga which accented his pallor and the age lines upon his face. Beside him was a tray of coarse barley cakes, more befitting an anchorite than a millionaire.

He glanced up, laid the tablet aside. “Welcome, Cassius. Be seated.”

“Thank you.” I took a place opposite him. “I am sorry to intrude upon your privacy.”

“Rules are meant to be broken occasionally. Paulina said it was most important.” He put me at ease by extending the barley cakes. “Would you care for one? Such fare suits me better nowadays than the vulgar gluttonies of the Palatine. I understand the Emperor’s latest rage is breast of finch in butter and mushrooms. He’s so busy diverting himself with new and exotic pleasures that he’s lost sight of what’s happening in this rotting city.”

When I took a cake, he selected one in turn, nibbled a bit of it, then cocked an eye at me. “I see you’ve taken the narrow stripe. Perhaps you’re not in sympathy with my views.”

“Strangely enough, sir, though I can’t put it so well as you, I feel much the same.”

“Then you won’t last long as a favorite of Nero. If you ever were foolish enough to want to be one in the first place. Ah, the madness of that boy! Have you seen the new coinage?”

“The denarius with the head of the Emperor capped with a radiating crown? Yes.”

“The devalued denarius,” he corrected somberly. “Our money grows worthless. So does everything Rome stood for once. And that foolish, spiteful youth still insists upon perpetuating the cult of his personal fame by striking money showing his head with the radiant crown. That crown was formerly reserved for dead Caesars. Men who had demonstrated their greatness. And
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then there’s his scheme for rebuilding Rome to resemble Athens. Not to mention that frightful stupidity with Bassus.”

“Do you mean Caesellius Bassus?”

“Aye, the Senator. I knew him well. He has all the wits of a newborn infant. That opinion is only confirmed now that he’s told Nero he knows where the legendary treasure of Dido is buried in Africa. Why, that treasure is myth, nothing else. But the Emperor is spending public tax funds so heavily, he must yet spend more to equip Bassus with two thousand slaves to go on his fool’s errand in search of nonexistent treasure.” Seneca’s eyes sparked with sour amusement. “Are you surprised I keep up on things, living alone as I do?”

“Somewhat, yes.”

He hesitated, as if debating whether he ought to speak. Then, studying me carefully all the while, he went ahead.

“I do have a few visitors. Generally late at night. Certain disgruntled Senators. One or two highly placed officers of the Legion. We discuss the excesses of the Emperor. And what should be done about them.” The glance he threw me was unmistakably a question.

“There is no need to tell me of matters that don’t concern me, sir,” I said quickly.

“I realize that. However, from the first morning Serenus brought you here, I had the impression you were not quite the hard person you pretended to be. So when I speak in riddles, of treason, conspiracies, I feel I’m on safe ground. We’re quite alone. I can easily deny all I’ve said. Do you find it strange I smile over murder?”