B007IIXYQY EBOK (100 page)

“All of you! Do not fight for me. You will only bring grave trouble on yourselves, and you have already endured the sufferings of world’s end. If I don’t return, then rejoice—for it means I have claimed holy vengeance.”

The women in the next cell watched her sadly. Two softly cried.

Then four Praetorians came to take her off. The one who opened the cell door proved to be the same black-haired Guard with whom she once played dice. He grinned broadly as though this were all a lascivious joke. But he betrayed no sign that he had ever seen her before.

Sunia knew she could delay no longer. She rushed at Auriane, crying piteously—
“No!
Do not take her!”

Auriane whirled round to meet her. For a brief moment, her back was to the Guards. As they clung to one another, Sunia brought the surgeon’s tool up, slipped it beneath Auriane’s tunica, and secured it in the breastband.

“Well done, extremely well done,” Auriane whispered in the Chattian tongue.

“If they search you again—”

“They will not.”

“Get that she-ass off her before she smears her paint,” shouted a Guard.

The maids seized Auriane and jerked her away. Swiftly the Guards manacled her wrists.

She is a strange and heartbreaking sight, Sunia thought. A chained nymph, a fettered goddess.

They led Auriane out into the waiting afternoon.

When Auriane saw the bewilderingly ornate carriage into which they put her, the plumed Praetorians who served as outriders, the monumental city with its endless ribbon of wall, and the brilliantly garbed footmen shouting at the wheeled traffic, ordering it to make way for them, she felt she floated into a lovely, lurid nightmare.

CHAPTER XXXIII

D
OMITIAN’S HUNTING GARDEN, THE JEWEL OF
his sumptuous villa tucked into the side of the Alban Mount, was stocked this day with ostriches. The Emperor stood on the hunting platform that overlooked the rambling gardens. A gently fluttering canopy of checkered aquamarine-and-rose sailcloth protected him from the dying sun. Beside him brooded his ascetically thin Councillor, Veiento, concealing boredom and distaste with a cold, courteous smile, and Veiento’s partner in informing, Senator Montanus, who was often cruelly reminded by Domitian of how happily apt his name was, for he was a small mountain of a man who got his bulk about with difficulty. Montanus was propped precariously between two Egyptian slave boys, who served him as crutches.

Veiento sensed Domitian was strangely unnerved on this evening. In the midst of the seventh course of a dinner honoring the return of the Governor of Hispania, the Emperor had risen restlessly, ordering them to follow. Veiento saw that the guard about the hunting garden had been doubled. By Minerva, he wondered, what was afoot? And what was the meaning of the
satyrion
dissolved
in
white wine the Emperor had called for an hour ago between courses? Did he need an aphrodisiac to help him kill an ostrich?

Montanus noticed none of this—he was in mourning for the seventh course, his favorite quince pastries. Petty overindulged tyrant,
Montanus thought. The ostriches will be here tomorrow. The quince pastries won’t.

Leonidas, Master of the Gardens, appeared promptly with quiver and bow. Domitian took them in a manner that was studied and grave, as if even this small act would be recorded and cherished by the historians.

Domitian drew the bow, impatiently scanning the shifting green shadows and rambling undergrowth of the vast garden. It had been planted with an eye to imitating the random work of nature. The confusion of acanthus, myrtle and Mediterranean fan palms, the masses of oleander, stately plane trees and dwarf pines were roped with serpentine paths. The whole abounded in wild and secret places. Playful statuary loomed throughout—here, dancing Satyrs playing panpipes with wineskins slung over their shoulders rose unexpectedly among fragile blooms of autumn crocus, artemisia, and lilies of the Nile; there, a bronze dryad fled through yellow cyclamen, while an antic Pan strove to mount a she-goat cavorting among the flowering dianthus. A brook had been diverted through the garden; it looped around, pooling in granite basins, trickling beneath stone bridges, rippling down artificial waterfalls. Rosemary, basil, lavender, and other herbs selected for their scent were planted throughout; the garden’s perfumed breath enveloped them with each gust of wind.

Quite suddenly an ostrich emerged from behind a rose bush. The creature gave them a befuddled look, then abruptly turned, as if realizing it had made a grave mistake. As the ungainly bird attempted to speed away with long, floating strides, its questing head thrust forward, Domitian aimed and shot. The small head snapped back; huge feathers scudded upward. The creature’s neck was broken.

Montanus and Veiento clapped noisily. “Well done!” Veiento exclaimed, the studied modulation of his voice the only sign that such blandishments did not come easily to him. Veiento was not in the habit of using flattery for survival. “And at such a great distance.”

“Incredible!”
Montanus sputtered. “You should hold a competition open to the whole of the city and enter it in disguise so your majesty would not frighten them off. You would win!” Montanus did employ flattery as a first line of defense, but his taste for it was crude and exaggerated as his taste in food. Domitian gave Montanus a pitying look and ignored Veiento completely.

“Leonidas,” Domitian called out sourly. “How many of these bungling birds are left?”

“Six, my lord. You killed twenty today, I believe.”

“Well then, where
are
they? I despise it when creatures get clever. Go and flush them out!”

“At once,
my lord.”

“Veiento, amuse me now with what those quibbling old women prattled on about today.”

Veiento concealed the flash of hatred that filled his eyes. As he drew from his tunic a copy of that day’s proceedings of the Senate, he thought—grandson of a mule-driver, do you think we do not know your need to make the Senate look like a pack of fools is envy and jealousy?

“They opened with another prayer of thanksgiving for your glorious victory,” Veiento reported with his usual dry efficiency. “The very first order of business was to vote you the title
Germanicus.
The whole world now hails you as the conqueror of Germania. The vote was unanimous—and sincere.”

“This is where Marcus Arrius Julianus is worth ten palaces and you are worth dung,” Domitian said lightly. “He would have told me every man as he voted had one eye on his neighbor to see how
he
voted. But then, that’s not why I keep you. By the way, where
is
that man tonight?” A genuinely wounded look came into Domitian’s eyes.
“This is the third banquet of state he’s missed in as many nights.”

“He chose at the last moment not to come,” Veiento said with silky malice. “He disliked what you were serving tonight.”

“It’s irritating when someone with no sense of humor tries anyway.” Domitian seized Veiento with dark brooding eyes.

“He will be here,” Veiento amended hurriedly, regretting that even for one rare moment he allowed his hatred for Julianus to show. “He sent word. He was detained at the investigation of evidence in that business of the counterfeit Parian marble. It seems he’s the only man in Rome who can tell what quarry it comes from.”

“Much better. Show the man a thimbleful of respect. You’ve a talent for courteously slitting throats, my dear Veiento, but admit it, he
has all nine Muses on a leash. What is that man not expert in?” Domitian smiled blandly at Veiento. He took great pleasure in keeping the two Councillors at each other’s throats. It was a delicate business. Causing Veiento to despise Julianus was almost too easy. But the reverse required more expertise; Julianus was not naturally inclined to think ill of his fellows.

“And what else?”

“They proposed and passed every measure you wanted.”

“How surprising. I do like a well-trained Senate.”

“There
was
one unpardonable moment of insanity. Young Lucilius must have been off his head—it’s stupidity, not ingratitude, I think—but he proposed that the rebel leaders be pardoned and pensioned off, including even the Amazon.
‘Are we to show less clemency in this enlightened age,’
or some such thing, he finished off.”

“Are they drinking wine in the Curia now?”

“I think it is more serious than that,” Veiento replied, narrowed eyes bright with suppressed rage. “The mob about the doors of the Curia cheered the measure and raised quite an angry shout about it when it was put down. They’re oddly disposed to sympathy for these Germanic beasts.”

Another ostrich strode confidently into view, blithely oblivious to mortal danger. Domitian raised the bow and squinted, his forehead gleaming with perspiration in the autumn heat. But the muscles of his arms were rigid with frustration. He shot and missed for the first time that day.

“A plague on Nemesis!” His face contorted with disgust. He thrust the bow at Leonidas.

“Of course, mobs swarm round silly futile causes like ants about honey cakes,” Veiento continued smoothly with a small, tight smile.
Stew in your anger, you strutting, lowborn tyrant.

“That was today,” Montanus spoke up like an eager schoolboy desperate to join the game, his voice sweet as ripe melons. “Tomorrow they will have forgotten the whole matter, and all that will concern them is if Scorpus the charioteer wins his next race.”

Domitian hoped this was true, but he did not want to hear it from Montanus. He turned to him coldly. “Go and change that tunic,
Mountainous.
It looks like it was worn by a blind beggar at Saturnalia.”

Montanus sputtered half-coherent apologies, but quickly saw it was useless; Domitian continued to glare at him as he spun about with ponderous agility and scurried back to the banquet, the Egyptian boys hurrying to keep apace.

Domitian wondered—how had those barbarian animals managed to win the very thing that was always maddeningly just out of his reach—the unprompted love of the mob? A polite, muted clap was the best he could ever draw from them. After finally winning the army’s adoration and deriving a brief moment of pleasure from it, he learned it did not satisfy. He yearned now for love freely offered, inspired by his person, not by his deeds.

I want this stinking city to sacrifice in secret to my health, as they did for my cursed brother
.

Leonidas returned as unobtrusively as a cat. Bowing gracefully, he announced with aristocratic humility, “My lord—she is here.”

Domitian gave him the rough scowl he reserved for menials. “Well then, you tell her to pack herself right back off to the Palace. She was not summoned.”

Leonidas looked bewildered for an instant. Then he said quickly, “Not your wife,
my lord.”

Domitian’s scowl melted away, and a look Veiento had never seen there, akin to childlike wonder, came into the Emperor’s face. “In the garden? She is here already?”

“By the Serpent Fountain,” Leonidas answered smoothly, bowing again to conceal a faintly amused smile.

“Excellent,” Domitian exclaimed, smiling and rubbing huge hands together. “Why are you two hovering about like horse flies? Leave me.”

Leonidas slunk away with dignity, like a cat. Veiento whipped about and crisply walked off, lost in angry puzzlement.

Domitian set out at once into the garden. The sun illumined the tops of the fan palms, then sank swiftly behind the garden’s walls, suspending all in unearthly blue-gray mystery. Low lamps held aloft by capering bronze fauns were set at intervals along a path no more than a hunter’s track; as he advanced, their firefly-lights loomed large, then melted back into numinous gloom. Occasionally he startled a peacock. A wind tugged anxiously at the cypresses, bowing them; he fancied nature herself paid him homage. He was a young Hercules out on his first hunt. A marble Satyr half clad in ivy leered at him, approving heartily of the lusty adventure he set out on now. Though a detachment of Guards was posted so close he barely had to raise his voice to summon them, they had been carefully placed out of sight—and Domitian easily imagined himself lost in some remote fastness of nature, trapped in mythic time.

Here I am just a man, coupling with a primeval woman whose mind is not poisoned with the vices of cities.
She cannot have learned our women’s varied and deft ways of belittling a man. With this wild creature who knows nothing of me except that I rule, I’ll prove this cursed infirmity is their
doing, and no fault of mine.

He found himself conscious of his body in a way he never was with his wife or with poor, frightened Carinus. Would the musculature of his chest and arms, well-formed from his frequent practice of archery, be pleasing to a lover?

Perhaps I am wrong to waste myself on this primitive woman who will not fully understand the honor I confer upon her.

He heard the urgent sound of rushing water. Before him was the Serpent Fountain. From the center of an oval basin of black marble rose a great, silver serpent, its muscular body coiled round a many-branched tree of bronze; at the height of a man the serpent’s body separated into five parts with as many evil-looking heads. Each gaped mouth emitted a moon-bright stream of water into the pool below.