One With the Darkness (29 page)

“Let me out! You never listen to me.”

The woman with her face stood with her hands on her hips next to a vine-covered rock wall in the garden near the thermae.

“Why should I listen to you?” she asked. “You’re probably a symptom of madness.”

“I am your future self. I know what’s best for you.”

“That’s not possible. Perhaps you are a demon come to haunt my dreams or trick me into doing exactly the wrong thing.”

“Just listen to me. I know what it is you must do to avoid a lifetime of unhappiness.” The figure straightened. “I hold the key.”

“What is it?”

A knock sounded on the door. Livia roused herself from Jergan’s arms and reached for her
stola.
It would hardly cover her. Jergan wrapped her instead in the woolen blanket he had drawn over their bodies sometime during the day.

“Who is it?” she said. Her voice was calm. The Praetorian Guard did not knock. She pulled the wool around her shoulders. It was dark outside. How long had they slept?

“Drusus Lucellus.”

Jergan reached for his own tunic.

“Come in, my friend.” The door opened before Jergan could don his tunic, so he held it to his loins as he stood. She could not help but admire his strong form. His muscles moved under his skin. His tangle of black hair hung down his back, the leather thong still holding the sides away from his face. Only the burns and the welts, which still stood out lividly against his flesh, marred his image.

Drusus almost shrank away from him, he looked so powerful. “My … my lady,” Drusus said. “It is reported
that Caligula has his Guard looking everywhere for you and your slave.”

“Jergan is no longer a slave, Drusus. He is a freedman.” She would ignore the fact that Caligula had declared him a slave again.

The fat man glanced to Jergan and nodded. “Congratulations. I hope your freedom lasts.”

“Is there no word of a struggle at the palace?” Livia asked. Chaerea must have had opportunity to act by now.

“No. They say Caesar is raging and calling you a witch. The Guard has orders to bring you both to him personally when you are found.”

“They have not come here yet.” She touched a finger to her chin. “But since you bear my last name, they will. We must leave.”

“I will lie and say you are not here,” Drusus declared, puffing out his chest.

“We will be gone. And you will say, dear friend, that we used one of your rooms and paid you well like any other patron, and that you know nothing of our whereabouts at the moment.” She racked her brain. Where could they go? She thought it would all have been over by now.

“You must leave the city, my lady.” Jergan took one arm firmly under the woolen blanket and glared at her.

The panic rose inside her. It washed up from her belly and splashed inside her head. She blinked. “You know I can’t do that.” She didn’t like that the panic showed in her voice.

Jergan set his lips. “They will have already searched the house and found it empty.” He glanced to Drusus.

“Yes, yes.” The fat man nodded. “They destroyed everything. The place is nothing but a ruin. … All your lovely things, Lady Lucellus.”

“Then that is where we will go. But we cannot stay
long, my lady,” Jergan said. “Another day, perhaps. Then either the deed is done, or we must be gone.”

She looked up at him. Again, his idea was a good one. She nodded. Now the problem was how to get to the Capitoline Hill without discovery.

Jergan glanced down at the floor. “We will have need of this carpet, Drusus.”

J
ERGAN LET THE
rolled carpet gently down from his shoulder to the cracked marble of the floor in Livia’s sleeping quarters and kicked away the shards from the broken busts that had once graced the room. The fine wooden furniture was fit only for firewood. The tapestries hung in shreds. It would break Livia’s heart to see it so. The only things intact were the great wooden shutters that covered the windows to the garden. Which made this room her only sanctuary from the coming sun outside. He set down the lantern he had carried.

“Are you well, my lady?” He whispered by instinct in this mausoleum of a house. He heard a muffled wheeze that might have been an affirmative. “I’ll get you out.” He pushed at Drusus’s carpet and watched it roll away, disgorging a rumpled, gasping Livia. He helped her sit, and watched her look around. “I’m sorry.”

“They are only things, Jergan, in a long line of things that pass through one’s life.”

That brought home to him what a barrier of experience rose between them.

“Did anyone remark a huge barbarian carryrng a rug through the streets?” She managed a crooked smile.

“The hour was early. Few were about. Besides, there are many barbarian slaves in your city. I am not the only one who is tall.”

“Well, I suppose that’s good then.” Her brows knit together as she peered around.

“What is it?”

“It feels right to be back here. Almost too right. Whatever it is I can’t leave, it is here, Jergan. I feel it.”

“Then perhaps it is a safe place.” He drew her up and sat her on the bed. Its posts were gone, but the frame was intact. “Stay here. I’ll see if the Guard left anything in the larder.”

“Don’t let anyone see you.” She was whispering, too.

“The walls around your house still stand, my lady,” he chuckled. “Their stone will protect me from prying eyes.”

He came back sobered. There had been a single unbroken amphora of wine. Under the rubble of shattered pottery and broken crates he had found one miraculous basket of eggs and some olives, and inside a wooden cupboard that hung open, a half round of cheese and a heel of bread. The rest of the bread, the meat, poultry, was gone, looted no doubt. The vegetables had been trodden on and spoiled. Well, they could get by on what they had. For one day. And he was determined that that was all that they would stay. Livia couldn’t risk being in the city longer. The emperor might not be able to kill her, but he could hurt her. Her wounds healed, but they were wounds nonetheless. Jergan couldn’t imagine seeing Livia stabbed or cut, or whipped or …

He was driving himself crazy with these thoughts. He set his lips and balanced the cracked platter in the hand that held the amphora while he opened the door with the arm that clasped two goblets to his side. He had to start taking control of this situation if he was going to protect her.

“I could smell you coming.” Livia smiled, erasing an anxious look he had surprised there. She was worried,
too. She rose to take some of his burden. “Hmmmm. Scrambled eggs and cheese and olives. Excellent. I could eat an ox.”

“It was all that was left, my lady.” He had called her Livia when they were making love, but since he realized how much stood between them, that familiarity seemed either an imposition or a refusal to acknowledge reality. “My lady” was safer. He poured her a goblet of wine while she sat on the bed with the platter next to her. She used the bread to scoop up some eggs. He hadn’t found spoons.

“Good eggs. And you cook, too,” she said around a full mouth.

“May I ask a question, my lady?” He handed her a goblet and sat beside her, one leg under himself.

“Of course. You don’t have to ask permission anymore.”

“I have been thinking about these attacks on you. If someone knows about your plot, why not just tell the emperor about it, and let the rest take its course? The emperor couldn’t hold you, but no one knows that, do they?”

She swallowed, and took a deliberate drink of the wine to settle herself. “I have been asking myself that for a week.” It seemed to upset her that she didn’t know the answer. “If Asiaticus is behind the attacks, it could be because he wants to quell the plot before he reveals it. Otherwise the emperor will be mad with paranoia and a danger to everyone around him. You know the old saying, ‘Don’t raise a question you can’t answer.’ He’d make Asiaticus’s life a living hell until the conspirators were captured.”

Jergan nodded. That could be true. Or there could be another answer. He looked up at her.

“What?” she challenged. Then she took another sip of wine, thinking.

He chewed his way methodically through some cheese and waited.

“Or … it could be Chaerea himself, couldn’t it?”

He nodded. She’d gotten it. That possibility was, in fact, what he was most worried about.

“I’m the only one who knows his role in the conspiracy. If he was going to reveal it to increase Caligula’s dependency upon him and the Guard, he might want me dead first, so I could make no accusations. But he doesn’t know who the others are.”

“Has he ever asked?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes. He wanted to know the quality of men he was in league with, he said. I always refused.”

“And yet he may know through other ways. Could he not have had your house watched?”

“But most of the Senate come to my audiences. Titus and the others’ presence wouldn’t be remarked.”

“Except perhaps by its frequency?” Jergan asked.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now. Chaerea must know who has been asking around the Senate about what would happen in case of a republic. He might miss Flavio’s ploy, but Marcus and Titus would be obvious.” She leaped up from the bed. “I brought Chaerea into it. I thought he was the perfect tool, uniquely placed to do the job, uniquely placed to survive it and make certain the republic survived its infancy as well. I thought he was a believer.” She turned on Jergan. “It could still be Asiaticus. He said he wants to pry my secrets out of me and turn them to his advantage.”

Jergan rose and took her goblet gently from her. “But if it is Chaerea, then there will be no assassination attempt. We wait in Rome for nothing, when you could be on your way to safety.”

He saw the anxiety at the mere mention of leaving engulf her. She whirled, rubbing her temples. “I can’t think. If it isn’t Chaerea … then there’s still a chance. He just hasn’t found an opportunity. It can still work out. And I can’t leave. I can’t.”

“Come, sit and finish eating.” Jergan wouldn’t press her now. At least not about that. He poured her more wine. She gulped convulsively and calmed.

“Perhaps we might profitably use our time here to discover what it is you cannot leave.”

She sighed. “I’ve thought and thought. Clarity always seems to be just beyond the reach of my poor brain. I get this feeling of … of urgency. I can’t explain it any other way.”

“Is there a pattern to it?” he asked.

“A pattern?” Her eyes were big with fear. She was afraid of this feeling she had.

“Is it after a dream? One of
those
dreams?”

“Yes.” Now she was thinking hard. “Actually, there are two separate kinds of feelings. There’s the feeling that there’s something I must do.” She rushed on. “And then there’s another feeling that something is here I cannot leave. That’s different.” She paused. “And of course, there’s the feeling I’ve been having of being too … too
full
. Like something inside me was trying to get out. That might be the voice. It … it wants to control me.”

The thought that she might be possessed by some kind of demon crossed his mind. If she was a witch, and more, almost something some would call a demon, could she not be possessed by some worse spirit? He closed his eyes. He didn’t believe that. He didn’t. The gods would not make her so perfect, so imperfectly human, so wonderful, only to let a demon possess her. He heard his father’s
practical voice adjuring him not to believe in the supernatural.

“You know,” she was saying as he opened his eyes. Her own eyes were fixed on the remains of the small bronze statue of Pan. It lay on the floor, Pan’s flute bent, his hooves crushed. “I’ve gotten the feeling about something I shouldn’t leave most often in the garden on the way to the bath.” She ripped her gaze from the statue and let it drift back to Jergan. “Near the rock wall with the vine.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “As soon as it grows dark, we will examine this place and see what it is you feel is so important.”

“And the last time I dreamed …” Her eyes grew round. “The woman, the woman that is me that I dream about … she was standing just there, in the garden….”

“My lady?”

They heard the call together. They both knew the voice.

“Lucius?” Livia breathed. “What are you doing here?”

17

L
IVIA COULDN’T BELIEVE
her eyes. Lucius should be well on his way to Tuscany and safety with the rest of her staff. Had something happened to them? The small man hurried into Livia’s chambers, wringing his hands and moaning as he glanced first to one precious object destroyed and then to another. “My lady, I knew … I knew I should never have left your house.”

“You would only have been killed, and lives are more precious than any of these silly things.” She sat him down on the bed. “Now, tell me, are the others well?” There had been twenty on her staff, including the old man who tended the gardens and his two helpers.

“Yes, yes. They are probably outside Ostia by now.”

“But why have you left them? They depend on your leadership.”

He waved a hand dismissively, his eyes still darting around the room in distress. “Catia and old Nara know the way. I left Tufi in charge. The gardener’s boys have their short swords. They will get to Montalcino safely.”

“But I gave express orders that you accompany them,” she said gently. It was not like Lucius to disobey a direct command.

“How could I leave you in such distress?” His eyes grew sad. His breathing calmed. “One cannot abandon
those one loves, no matter the cost.” He looked away. “No matter the cost.” This last was almost a whisper.