Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (100 page)

The rest of them, cousins, uncles, and aunts, marched behind me. I couldn't face them. I'd shrivel and die beneath the collective gaze of anger and disappointment.

Behind me and to my right marched Appius Viridius Murena. The name
Murena
was derived from the word “eel.” A second cousin, my father's cousin, and head of the emperor's secret police, Rome's curiosi. It was he who took over the role after my uncle Quintus was promoted from there to the proconsulship of our house. I had always liked him more than Quintus. He had a natural charm in place of my uncle's direness, but not much more. Beside him walked Julia, here representing the emperor. I was not the only one who'd had a promotion.

*   *   *

T
HE DAY BEFORE THE
funeral, they'd come to me in my chambers where I lay on my bed, staring at the cameo of Aulus and my mother.

“My condolences,” Appius Murena said. Beside him stood Julia. I'd avoided her until that moment, but you couldn't lock the door when the emperor sent his representatives to see you.

Julia was wearing imperial sigils of the curiosi on the shoulder straps of her dress toga—the emperor's man now—the first of the collegia to be granted a noble title and lands.

“You're a spy now?” I asked her.

“I was a spy before.”

“Now you're the emperor's man.”

“Can you guess who I'm supposed to spy on?”

“Me?”

“Good guess,” she said.

“He wants to keep me under observation.”

“Of course he does. You're the hero of the hour, but you're amassing a following. He wants to make sure you keep your feet on the ground.”

“Know my place, you mean?”

“Not as a woman. He doesn't want you to marry, to follow your husband's orders. He wants you to act as a quaestor. Know your place in the empire. You have one, a position of honor and power. Isn't it better this way?”

“There will be no ‘way.' The hero of the hour is Aquilinus dressed up as Gaius Sertorius Crassus. I'm the curiosity of the hour, the imperial freak show. Don't you see? The emperor knows it's Aquilinus. He's keeping him around. He's behind all this.”

“Yes.”

“That's the best you've got to say?”

“You can't mourn forever,” Murena said. “I saw the footage of your final fight with your father. The entire empire did. He sacrificed himself so that you could keep fighting in his stead. You honored him. He gloried in your strength. Why do you think that not a single citizen has dared label the accusation of patricide upon you? They know, Accala. They see what you do not.”

“Forget this moping about the house,” Julia added. “You're not suited to life here, you never were. It's time to fly, Accala. To reap the rewards of all that you've fought for, all that you've sacrificed. You wanted to remake the empire, now's your chance. Let's show them.”

“Are you both finished?” I asked, standing up from the bed. “Listen carefully. I don't care about this. I want to know about you,” I said to Julia. “What happened to the cloud city? You know I sent letters to the emperor on your behalf?”

“I know and I thank you for that. My sister is receiving top treatment—she's been flown here to Rome. And he offered me that position as an engineer on the cloud world—he did, I swear it—and I turned it down.”

“But that was your dream,” I said.

“I had a dream, things happened, now I'm a different person with different dreams.”

She held up her right hand and pulled off the glove she wore. Had I been so distracted that I forgot about her hand? The one crafted for her by Lumen was gone; no ichor remained now that the Hyperboreans were gone. It seemed that Julia had been fitted out with a machinarii replacement.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I accept what I am, what's become of me,” Julia said as she slipped the glove back on. “I have another dream now, one you stirred within my breast. From within the curiosi, having the emperor's ear—I can do more for the collegia and for my sister and others like her than I ever could before. You should find a new dream too, Accala.”

“I have only nightmares now,” I said.

“That's because you're not doing what you're meant to be doing. You're heading down the wrong path. You need to come. With me. Everyone thinks you're being solemn, communing with the gods, but I know better. You're moping.”

“Leave me.”

“Julia told me you were talking about Plato and Socrates on the voyage home,” Murena said. “You know life's not like the pointless labyrinthine words of philosophers. Life's more like a spiral. You experience the same lessons, but each time on a different plane. You're learning, improving all the time. You're back at the beginning, but now you possess hard-won experiences, and from them is born a wisdom the empire could well use.”

“Leave me be. Now.”

Julia held out a small message disc with the imperial seal.

“He asked me to give this to you. It will explain everything.”

“It's my father's funeral tomorrow. This is hardly the time to…”

“We'll leave you,” Julia said, “but please, activate the disc when we're gone. Hear what he's got to say.”

As they departed, I heard Appius Murena say, “I didn't realize Aquilinus had beaten her down so badly. Her father's fire is gone, she's broken.”

“She's no coward,” Julia replied. “She was filled with the power of the gods and then emptied. She's been put up on the high mountain and shown how everything fits together and then been thrown back down into a mortal body. She's disillusioned. Imagine if you were suddenly turned into an ant with the memory of having been immortal. I'd rather be crucified.”

Julia understood. Perhaps it was her hand that gave her that insight. Not that that changed a thing. Not a single thing.

I stared at the disc for an hour or two and then placed it on my bedside table, beside my cameo, and tapped its central ring. I expected a holographic recording, but instead the form of a man appeared, sitting behind a marble desk, scrolling through items on a tablet. There was a chime and he looked up, right at me. It was the emperor and the connection was live. This was a personal audience, albeit at a distance.

“Imperator,” I said, rising from the bed to kneel.

“No, no, sit. Come, let us talk informally. We have some shared history between us, you and I.”

I'd been taught to venerate the emperor my entire life. Even after what I'd been through, it was difficult to sit still and relax, even in a transmitted presence.

“You'll have to excuse me for not coming in person, but the current climate is delicate. Those followers of yours who crowd the Aventine in the hope of catching a glimpse of you, well, it wouldn't do to have the emperor coming to you in that kind of environment, would it?”

“I hate it,” I said.

“The people's adoration?”

“I hate it, every minute of it. I wish they'd just go away.”

“I know you do. You've proved yourself loyal to me, to the empire and the Pax Romana. You could have aided your traitorous uncle, but you didn't.”

“He was no less greedy than any other proconsul desperate to seize glory for his house, as you once were for yours.”

“I suppose I was, though it's not polite to bring such things up,” the emperor said.

“You did say we could speak informally.”

“I suppose I did. It wasn't your uncle's greed that I objected to, it was his foolishness. He thought only of his house and not of the empire's well-being. The ichor would have been too much power for any one house to wield. Sometimes, wisdom is in leaving a thing be, even something of great power and value.”

“That's why I couldn't stand with him.”

“You sided with Lady Minerva instead, and what a powerful ally she turned out to be. She was within you, her power filling a chosen hero, just like the ancient stories.”

“It wasn't like that.”

“Then what was it like?”

“It's hard to explain. Like I was two people at once: a fragile, straw Accala and one who could touch the sky.”

As I spoke, I realized that I was providing a description that fitted the emperor's first impression perfectly, but when I searched for the right words to say it in a way that sounded logical and self-effacing, I found myself at a loss.

“It's a performance I can't replicate,” the emperor said. “We've got to take steps, or the cult of Accala will rise up. They'll become unstoppable. They love you.”

“They don't love me. They don't know me.”

“They adore you, you should see what they've been writing on the vox populi. The curia, the curiosi, the frumentarii, my Praetorians—they can't stop sending me reports. You've got their hackles up. They're worried.”

“There's nothing to worry about. I want to go to the Amalfi Coast. I'm going to retire completely from public life like Scipio Africanus.”

“That sounds nice. So no more public profile, then?”

“I wanted to step out into the empire and show them a woman could seize justice, could shake Atlas' pillars, and I did it. Now I want to retire. I want peace and quiet, to tend the orchards at our ancestral villa.”

“Now you see, it's talk like that has me concerned. Scipio Africanus went and worked his farm, but the moment they called him back to war, he fulfilled his duty and trounced the enemy.”

“There is no duty left for me to perform. Only a daughter's duty.”

“But you'd always be there, you see? Waiting for history to poke you into action again. That's far too concerning for my advisers.”

“You're going to have me killed, then?”

“I wish it were that simple. A martyred Accala would be more dangerous than a living one. You, I can reason with. A mob with leaders and zealots, there's no reasoning with them. They'll twist everything you've done, interpret your life to suit their own desires. No, I'm not going to kill you. I'm going to offer you a job.”

“You already did, I turned it down.”

“You don't get to turn down the emperor's offer. It doesn't work that way. You say, ‘Thank you, Imperator, it is an honor to serve.'”

“No.”

“No?”

“Why have you not executed Gaius Crassus? You know full well that Aquilinus possesses him. The greatest enemy to the Pax Romana strolls around Rome as a hero.”

“The answer to that question is a state secret and lies on the other side of my offer. Accept and I will tell you. Until I know you work with me, I can say nothing.”

“I refuse to be manipulated.”

“This is Rome, fitting square pegs into square holes is what we do. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

“And if I don't accept?”

“Then you'll be elevated to the throne in a matter of months. All my prognosticators and analysts say so. My house will fall, yours will rise, and you'll have my job. Then, when the empire needs you elsewhere, you will be tied down to the throne, desperately trying to work out how to run an empire. How's that for a threat? I think I've read you well enough to know that you don't want my job.”

“No.”

“So?”

“Let me think about it.”

“Your father told me you were stubborn. Now I'm beginning to understand. You have two days. After that … well, let's not get into that now.”

The image faded out and the power cell in the disc died. There would be no return call; I'd had my audience.

*   *   *

D
RESSED IN HIS SENATORIAL
robes, my father was laid on a simple bier constructed from dried branches of wicker and sage. I would be the one to light it when we reached the temple, sending his spirit up with the smoke, up to paradise—to the Elysian Fields. That's where I hoped he would go, what I'd prayed for. I never understood what Lumen said about death being a remembering and never got the chance to ask him. Now it was too late.

Above the bier shone a large holographic portrait. My father appeared as a younger man, smiling with both eyes intact, eyes that were lit with hope—a man I never knew. The image slowly morphed, shifting through the stages of his life until it came to rest upon his final portrait, an image captured in the Senate in the days before I joined the Sertorian team.

“It is a dark day for Rome, Accala,” Murena said as he walked beside me in his black dress armor. “She has lost a great hero.”

I couldn't hold back the tears now. The last of my mother's Stoicism had been leached out of me. They streamed down over my cheeks, hot and shameful tears that I had no right to let flow.

“Let me mourn in silence,” I said. “I have disappointed him. I can barely stand for the weight of the shame I feel.”

Murena scowled. “This is a difficult day for you, but remember that you are a Viridian. Stand strong. I may not be your favorite uncle, but I know you well enough,” he said, “and I've never known you to indulge in self-pity. Hold back your tears until you are out of public view.”

I turned on him, anger suddenly burning inside of me, evaporating the tears.

“What do you know of strength? Slinking about in shadows like an eel? You accuse me of cowardice?”

I turned from him to see the audience crowded behind the banners, watching me, the lines four deep. And I hated them, hated their being here, gawking at me. They'd transformed my father's funeral into an arena event. They were here to watch me perform, to see firsthand, here in the streets of the capital, the end of the conflict that they'd been watching from a distance.

“Go!” I yelled at them. “Leave me alone or I swear to the gods I will burn you!”

There was fear in their eyes, a worried murmur, and then they were falling away. Some of them couldn't get out of there quickly enough at the thought that what happened to the Sertorians on Olympus Decimus might be visited on them now. Suddenly they were too close to the action for comfort.