B007IIXYQY EBOK (111 page)

Often Corax would secretively observe Auriane from a distance, concealing his acute interest in her progress. Never would he say words of encouragement to her, no matter how quickly she demonstrated facility at any new lesson.

Coniaric was one of the few who consistently drew Corax’s praise. “There now…. Good man. That’s right—parry close to the body,” she heard him say one day. “Anticipate your man’s advance. Good—you moved into it. You must sense your opponent the way an animal scents fear. Finely done there, Coniaricus.” At first Auriane had been amused by these people’s tendency to append
-us
to all men’s names; now she scarcely noticed it.

After this, Corax turned to Sunia and began reprimanding her as usual. But on this day something in his voice caused Auriane to whip about and look. It was too soft, too coaxing. “Wrong, hopelessly
wrong,” he was saying.
“Straighten
that arm for a thrust. There. You announce your move every time. Let’s hope the panthers have a taste for your hide.”

Corax’s hand was closed about her wrist as he demonstrated a feint. His free hand was cupped about Sunia’s breast.

“Like this.
Strike deep enough to draw your man into a parry. Keep those knees flexed, now, that’s the way.” His voice had become a crude caress. Sunia twisted and writhed while Corax held her fast, continuing with his instructions as though all were well. “Now remember, when you move forward, that’s
when you’re vulnerable. And don’t forget to keep that pretty head still as you advance—”

Auriane dropped her wooden sword and sprang like a mountain cat onto Corax’s back. All three of them toppled to the sand.

This time Auriane fared less well. Corax barely restrained himself from ordering her execution—his desire to watch her die was greater than any lust he ever felt. But once again, he remembered Meton. He contented himself with ordering twenty lashes with a weighted whip, and nine days in the pit.

When Auriane was released, she gave Corax looks of such deep and dedicated hatred that the uneasiness she inspired in him bloomed into terror. She was a witch and she was insane. He half expected to awaken one morning and find himself dying horribly from her curse, with maggots crawling in his flesh. He would not work near her unless guards were posted close. The guards promptly circulated a tale that Corax was a sniveling coward, fearful even of his women charges.

Auriane no longer knew how long they had been in this place of no seasons. Had the day of rekindling the fire slipped past invisibly, without its solemn dances, and brought them, unknowing, into the time of sowing cakes into the first furrow? Without the moon and stars it was impossible to tell. Time did not move forward here; it swirled and pooled, gathering strength to pull them down. But the day came when Corax announced in his most self-important manner: “In four days’ time is the test of aptitude. Those judged skilled enough will stay on with me. Most of you know it from gossip, but I’ll say it, nevertheless. The School’s to provide twenty women and a hundred men for the Games of Ceres on the third day after the Nones of
Aprilis,
and I’ve got to give my share. Some of you will be kept on to help us defend our honor against the Claudian School. There are no victors in these tests. I mean only to judge your skill and select the ones with spirit and promise—and prune out the wretches that will dishonor us out there. Four days.
Prepare yourselves!”

Sunia,
Auriane thought with desolation. She has improved but little. What is to be done?

For four days Auriane scarcely slept, listening to the distorted shouts of guard changes issuing from far down the feebly lit stone passages, the stifled sobbing in adjacent cells. Sunia feigned sleep, but Auriane felt her alertness. She seemed too terrified to weep.

CHAPTER XXXVII

“
W
HAT
I
PLAN,”
M
ARCUS
J
ULIANUS SAID
to Diocles, “will be a risk for you as well. Should it fail, I’ve made arrangements for your escape from the city.”

“I’m old and useless, you must not worry over me.”

“As if I could not worry over you.” His eyes were in ferment with care and sadness. “Before you heap objections on me, remember we’re perilously short of time—her training’s progressed more than half way.”

They stood alone on a travertine landing at the western extremity of the fastnesses of the great-house’s gardens. Julianus halted between two sculptures along the low wall— Phidias’ head of an Amazon atop a herma, and a bust in Parian marble of Zeno, founder of the Stoic school. Diocles was seized with the rightness of it, thinking: If I were a painter I would paint him thus, poised between that mythic barbarian woman of battles, bringer of chaos, and Zeno, great lover of order. I think he must choose or go mad.

Before them was a dramatic drop down the Esquiline’s slope. The city Julianus loved and loathed was shrouded in a deathless red-gold haze as the sun eased into the unseen sea. The crowded hills shimmered with mystic light; this chimerical scene might have been a vision from the remote days of Rome’s foundation when all humbled themselves before the horned temple of Diana, or a dream of Morpheus, or of some future realm of a philosopher-king. You are ill, he silently addressed the city as if it had one soul. Ill, and with imperceptible slowness, dying. You’ve blundered off too far from your source, which was—how did Isodorus say it?—
“pure, vigorous nature.”
The eye of empire drowses into morbid sleep.

“I do not know if any
of my messages to her got through,” Julianus continued. “For certain she thinks I’ve abandoned her. And now I’ve lost my last hope of ridding the city of its scourge before
she’s sent to her death.”

Diocles nodded in wary acknowledgment. In the last months the Fates rose to oppose the conspirators again and again. Domitian in these days made a great show of ruling mildly, inspired partly by the terror brought by the omen he received during the procession. He increased the days of games and raised the soldiers’ pay by one third. He slackened in his attempts to humiliate the Senate, occasionally allowing them to debate issues of relative importance, which lulled the opposition into blind contentment. Julianus cursed their shortness of memory and knew this temperance could not last—but it could easily outlast Auriane.

Other events as well stayed the conspirators’ hands—a serious war threatened on the Danube, with a group of allied tribes who promised to be far more formidable adversaries than the Chattians; Julianus judged it too perilous a time to attempt a change of government, for this enemy would take swift advantage of instability in the capital city.

“Months have passed,” Diocles objected. “I, for one, am not convinced the Emperor has not simply forgotten
about her.”

“He will never forget about her. One sign is how strenuously he strives to get me to believe he has.
She has become an evil passion with him, one he cloaks even from himself, for it fills him with shame, so much so that he’s given no special orders concerning her to the school’s Prefect, lest he
suspect his obsession. Not so, however, with the guards—the ones I’ve thus far approached have proved strangely unsusceptible to bribes when the message involves her. He is not watching her, yet he is
watching her.”

“Beware the tyrant that blushes at his own lusts.”

Julianus gave Diocles a nod of agreement. “At the Alban Mount he keeps a new concubine who, in his
mind at least, resembles Auriane. The real Auriane disturbs him too much—he seems satisfied with his imitation, at least for now. Of late all he seems to desire from Auriane herself is the prospect of watching her fight and die. And if you need more proof she’s branded upon his soul, I have seen his plans for the games of Ceres, for which he’s recreating the battles of the Chattian war. The native women he’s collected will be used to reenact the taking of the Chattian supply train.”

“He would glorify a victory over women?”

“It’s an excuse to use them in a combat without publicly embarrassing himself more than he already has,” Julianus explained. “What’s peculiar is that Auriane’s not to be part of that sad spectacle. He’s got more specific plans for her. Domitian has personally chosen a man for her, a certain Perseus, for an individual bout…. He’s selected a fighter who is strong, but not so strong he would destroy her too quickly and spoil his amusement.”

“Perseus?
Perseus.”
Diocles exclaimed. “I know of the man. He’s a free fighter. He’ll be about in the streets. Have him put out of the way.”

“To what purpose? Domitian would simply find another who’d do as well. Anyway I will not murder an innocent man.”

Two gardeners approached on the gravel path; they pushed a small cart and carried shears for trimming the box hedges. Diocles angrily waved them off. Julianus idly countermanded this, waving them forward again, then he moved farther along the low stone wall so they would still be out of hearing. Diocles followed him, mildly exasperated. Only Julianus, he thought, would show such consideration for two nearly worthless gardeners while discussing matters of grave import.

“But the most
troubling thing,” Julianus went on quietly, “is that he’s somehow scented a connection between Auriane and myself. Last night, while probing me with those bleary prosecutor’s eyes, he spoke thus: ‘You remind me of someone…a woman…that barbarian Medusa.’ Then he went on to say: `What did I do
with her?…I’ve misplaced her…. You’ve got that same quality of…lofty innocence.”

“An oblique threat, by Charon’s eyes,” Diocles observed. “You’ve been careful. It’s uncanny.”

“I’ve heard Junilla called many things, never uncanny.”

Diocles looked at him with alarm. “Of course.
She bid for the wench’s horse. And doubtless she hissed all that she suspects into Domitian’s ear. She must be enjoying herself immensely. You are a dead man.”

“Do not look so. The fortunate thing about Junilla is the more she enjoys herself, the sloppier she gets. And the next throw is mine.”

Diocles turned sharply away. “I know already what you’re going to propose and I want to say in advance—grief has stolen your wits.”

“Why should I
not
make use of the one woman who can aid us, who, I’m certain—if I can get past her fear—will prove to want precisely what we want?”

“I knew it.” Diocles dramatically put his hands to his temples. “Not the Empress.” He shook his head vigorously in a way that put Julianus in mind of a balking mule. “She’s got feathers for brains. And she’s as approachable as as the concubines of a Persian satrap.”

But Julianus scarcely heard. His gaze intent as a hawk’s, he saw only the Colosseum among the complexity of red-tiled tenements, the warren of dark streets, the gilded domes and temple roofs; from this distance the amphitheater’s mass looked like the stump of a severed column that at full height might have parted the clouds. The dying sun tinted the brutish structure rose, and he imagined it stained by the blood of the impossible multitudes of men and animals that already had perished there. It was malign and alive, seeming to reproach him for having studied and governed and taught alongside its horrors—this carnivorous child of Vespasian’s that had torn loose from the bonds of rational thought and grown primitive and strong feasting on human flesh. Its familiar bands of columns were bared teeth, set to devour Auriane.

“Admittedly the Empress is not a…
practical
woman,” Julianus said at last. “But I believe she is predictable. I’m prepared to stake my life on what I judge she’ll do.” He clamped a comforting hand on Diocles’ bony shoulder. “I’m sorry, Diocles, there’s no other course open to me. She’s my last hope for saving Auriane—and my first, for what I plan next.”

The Empress Domitia Longina sat naked before her polished bronze mirror, appraising her form with a ruthless eye. She approved of its comfortable abundance, of her stable, settled hips, her skin of ivory silk with its delicate rose flush, the pearly sheen of her heavy breasts. She was less pleased by the blur of fear she saw in her eyes, and the first muted signs of age about her mouth. And delighted even less by the thickening about her waist.
The monster managed to put another child in me. This one,
by Artemis’ black dogs, I’ll have out.

And she was repelled by the sight of her cleanly plucked pubic triangle. She found it dismayingly ugly, but
he
desired it, demanded it, for such things roused him. Domitian had depilated her himself, as he had all his concubines. She counted it as much a sign of her enslavement as she would a scar from a brand.

She was being prepared for a dinner party in her suite of rooms at the Palace. Though her husband lingered at his villa on the Alban Mount, still Domitian watched her through the eyes of every chamberlain, every Guard posted near her quarters. While a maid applied to the Empress’s face a foundation made of sweat of sheep’s wool, three hairdressers worked on her coiffure. One applied curling tongs, creating in front the effect of an impressive, multistoried edifice of ringlets. A second braided the back and twisted the braids into a coil, while a third skillfully wove in false hair, for Domitia Longina’s own tresses were too scanty for the lofty hairstyles in fashion in these times.