Love Is in the Air (34 page)

“This will not do! We must have the seamstress come back at once!” Lylith demanded, as her pale cheeks blotched with worry.

To imagine living through another moment with the shrill old seamstress weighed far too heavily on Brutus. Stepping off the small dais, he turned to his wife. “It will have to do.”

Allowing the women to sputter behind him, Brutus strode toward the front of the mansion and grabbed his rough, wool cloak. Both women shrieked and tried to catch up, but the senator was in the litter before they could snatch his favored garment from his shoulders. It smelled of papyrus from his office at the Temple of Saturn. A place he wished very much to be, but not tonight.

Horat helped the women into the litter, then backed away. However, Brutus motioned his servant into the litter. The senator was not about to be trapped for the long ride across Rome with none but these two. The servant looked surprised, yet entered as asked.

Once underway, Olivia moved the curtain aside and took in a sharp breath. “Oh, my…”

Brutus was used to his mother’s many moods, but impressed was usually not one of them. Despite his disdain for this entire affair, he was drawn forward. One glance out the drawn curtain, and Brutus could understand his mother’s exclamation.

Rome was aglow.

The entire city was illuminated by thousands of torches. It was as Homer had once written of the mighty Mount Olympus. Apollo himself must have supplied the torches, for they burned true. Even the fire within the Temple of Vesta sparkled brighter than the closest star.

“Have them stop, Brutus. We must tie back the curtains,” Olivia demanded.

“No! We are already late!” Lylith pointed to the packed streets leading to the Forum. “We will never find a place.”

Olivia patted her daughter-in-law on the knee. “Dear child. Your husband is a senator—”

“But look at them all!”

Brutus hated to admit it, but his wife was right. The area encircling the Forum was already overcrowded with white-robed senators. In an effort to increase his influence, Caesar had enlarged the number of chairs from six hundred to nine hundred. This expanded legislative body could not even be fit into the ancient Curia. Julius was forced to build another just to accommodate the swelling ranks.

“And they are…” Lylith sputtered. “They are nothing but rabble! They will steal our seats right out from under us!”

Once again, his nervous wife was correct. Most of the newly established senators were from less-than-noble families with no real sense of how to govern or even how to be governed. Some even wore brown sandals rather than the red sandals that each and every senator had worn since ancient times. Rome was changing, and not necessarily for the better.

Luckily, Olivia calmed Lylith before she had another outburst.

“Sweetness, Brutus has been named the Praetor Urbanis. Caesar has no need for his own right hand with Brutus to tend to him. A place of great honor will be saved for us. Do not fret so, Lylith.”

Brutus disliked greatly the glow of pride upon his mother’s face. She could not have written a play that was more to her liking. Olivia had berated her only son for his support of Pompey and had begged him to throw his lot in with Caesar. Now that he was Julius’ closest advisor, his mother could not keep the look of satisfaction from her lips for more than a parting second.

On Brutus’ command, Horat hopped from the litter and drew back the silk curtains, then bowed his head. It was clear that the older man would rather walk the steep grade rather than accompany the women in the litter. If only Brutus were so free to choose his own path.

While others of his class might order the man to do his bidding, Horat was more like a father. The servants were more like family than his own mother. While Olivia had provided him life and a comfortable existence growing up, it had been men like Horat who had truly raised him.

With a tired smile, Brutus accepted the old man’s silent request and ordered the litter onward. They snaked their way down the Sacred Way. Brutus’ mind wandered from this night’s events as they passed the unassuming, yet ancient, stone wall that encircled Palatine Hill. What would the builder of this ancient wall think of Rome now?

Could Romulus have imagined that his tiny camp would become the center of civilization not seven centuries after its founding? In the dim past, Romulus had been at war with dozens of other cultures to settle this fertile land near the Tiber River. Rome’s founder had boldly drawn a line around Palatine Hill, declaring to all other armies that this was his land.

His new country.

Not a handful of centuries later, Rome was not just Italia’s desire to live at the bosom of civilization. Refugees from untold wars streamed into the grand city.

“The world has arrived,” Horat said quietly at his shoulder.

From his vantage point, Brutus could witness this immigration firsthand. Visitors poured through the city’s three gates as rapidly as water flowed down Rome’s aqueducts. All wished to share in the fifty days of thanksgiving that Caesar had declared upon his return.

Brutus cared for none of this pomp and wanton feasting. His concern was how much this celebration cost the treasury. He had not been named Praetor Urbanis simply to placate the proletariat. Caesar knew that Brutus loved this Republic more than even himself and would care for it with the same diligence as he had under Pompey.

“And Caesar means to rule it,” Horat mumbled before he walked to the front of the litter.

Looking across the Tiber, Brutus studied the great army assembled just outside the city. With relations so strained, Caesar had felt the need to bring his loyal battalions to the heart of Rome. The Senate had been scandalized by the general’s breach of protocol, but the populace embraced the general’s return as children do their fathers’. The army had lingered just outside the walls for three full weeks while these festivities were prepared.

Yet the city still throbbed with anticipation. The masses were not awaiting a returning general. They wished to see Mars himself ride through the Triumphal Arch.

* * *

Syra knew she dreamed. Knew her body still lay upon the rough slats of the slave cart, a cart she had been chained to for over three months. Yet, she felt that she stood in a rock-hewn chamber. Could she not feel sticky, hot blood dripping between her clenched fingers and a bone-handled dagger? Was the air she struggled to pull into her lungs not stale? Was the marble beneath her soles not slick with slaughter?

All of this she felt as surely as she had felt the blow that had cracked her skull upon the Spanish hill. While battles blended over the decades, Syra knew she had never faced an enemy in a subterranean chamber. She also knew that she had never felt such an entanglement of her gut. A dread that obliterated all hope.

Despite all those years upon the battlefield, she had never known such wretched fear. Something horrible happened in this darkened room. Something worse than betrayal or defeat. Something that threatened to not just destroy her body, but destroy her soul as well.

The darkness tugged at her, beckoning her home. There was not a hint of light to the chamber, yet it felt a beacon.

Remember…

The whisper both caressed and cursed her ears. Syra tensed as a presence approached from behind. Hot breath stroked the curve of her bare shoulder. She gripped the dagger tighter. Dream or not, Syra would not suffer an ambush.

Remember…

Tensing as the stale air stirred, Syra lashed out.

Her fist hit a jawbone, jarring her awake. Instinctively her left hand followed suit, snagging a handful of hair.

“Don’t! Please!” a woman’s scream pierced the night air.

Shaken and disoriented by the dream, Syra could not place the voice. She only knew it did not belong to the insidious whisperer. It took a moment to realize that the night here had stars, and the air smelled of mildewed hay.

Still, she held a foe by the scalp.

The older woman’s face contorted. “I swear I’ll never try again.”

After the dread of that nightmare, the fact that an old woman had tried to steal the corner of a stringy blanket from Syra seemed not such a mortal offense as it might have before she slumbered.

Syra released the woman, but not very gently. “See that you don’t.”

Free, the gray-haired woman scrambled back, nursing a bruise to her cheek. She was lucky that the bone-handled dagger had only existed in Syra’s dream.

Long ago she had grown accustomed to her mind’s strange nighttime wanderings. As if she did not fight enough on the battlefield, the dreams insisted that she had fought hundreds more in her sleep. Each year they worsened, growing more vivid.

And since being forcibly driven toward Rome? Syra shuddered and tugged the rag over her shoulders, but it provided little comfort. Neither did the slats of the dirty cart that had grown no softer in the passing months. Months of tainted water. Months of jostling all day and into the night. Yet, Syra knew they were months still from their southern destination.

Which was why it seemed odd that the long line of slave carts rumbled to a stop. She knew it was not to feed them. Their cart had been thrown a moldy loaf of bread to share amongst the five of them earlier that day. There would be no more food this evening.

No, the only reason they would stop so soon after the sun dipped below the horizon was to pick up more slaves. There was a great amount of shouting and screaming, yet Syra ignored it. She had had enough loathing in her dreams. She did not need to witness more here. Brother sold off brother. Sons sold off fathers.

Despite this Spanish war being brought by Rome, it had descended into a civil war, splintering the normally tight-knit villages. The wailing continued, but Syra kept her eyes tightly shut. While the other slaves gawked at the spectacle, she tried her to block her muscles’ call to action.

She should be defending these people. Her blood raced to bring these slave peddlers to their knees, but in chains there was little that she could do.

Then a sobbing so inconsonant that it reached Hades itself stirred Syra from her self-imposed exile. Peering over the cart, she watched a tiny slip of a girl being pulled away from a fallen man—most likely a daughter of a man who had chosen to back the wrong side in this despicable war. Tugging her eyes from the tragic scene, Syra adjusted her manacles and tried to find a soft spot amongst the seedy hay, but the wailing continued. Would that woman not accept her fate and climb in the damnable cart? Not even Syra had made it so difficult on the slavers.

Finally the girl must have run out of breath, for only a quiet weeping carried on the crisp breeze. Syra could feel her four cart-mates hunker back down into the hay. Rax must be close. They all feared the sneering slave driver, and none wished to be noticed by the cruel man.

“I said, drag her!” Rax bellowed as he passed Syra’s cart.

“But we’ve no more room,” squeaked the slaver’s skinny assistant.

Rax was obviously in no mood to loiter. “Put her in there.”

“But it is full of men.”

Normally Rax would have agreed with his errand boy. The one thing Rax took care to do was to segregate the men-slaves from the women. Pregnant women fetched far lower prices at the auction block. But tonight, the slaver seemed to be in quite the mood.

“Maybe they can shut her up!”

Syra could not help herself, and rose high enough to look over the rough wooden cart. Rax’s errand boy practically had to carry the frail girl. She lay completely collapsed in his arms. Only by her weeping could anyone tell that she still lived. The cart that Rax pointed to was filled with three large men. Syra did not know what the slave driver thought. Those three had already killed two captured soldiers and nearly decapitated one of Rax’s guards. The girl would not last a single hour with them.

Syra did not realize that she had stood up until the boy sneered at her. “What do you want, wretch?”

Was it trying to break free of the helplessness from the dream, or just idiocy, that made her announce, “She can ride with us”?

The would-be thief of an older woman tugged hard at Syra’s thin shift and hissed, “No! There are too many already.”

“What was that?” the boy asked as he sagged under the girl’s weight.

Syra tried to ignore the old woman, but her tugging became more persistent. So far luck had been with Syra. Rax was at the head of the train, goading the oxen forward. But not much of a fuss would bring him back and doom the girl. Grabbing the old woman by the wrist, Syra looked into her bloodshot eyes.

“No one would be surprised if you died in the night, old woman.” Satisfied that the woman would hold her tongue, Syra motioned the thin boy over. “Bring her here.”

It was obvious that the boy did not wish to go near the cart with the three men, nor did he wish to disobey Rax. “He said to put—”

“And how angered will he be in the morning if she is dead? He paid a fair price for her, did he not?”

The look on the boy’s face answered her. They both knew that there was no rhyme or reason to Rax’s moods. By the morn, the slave driver would have forgotten his rushed orders and blame the boy for his loss.

After a moment’s hesitation, the boy lifted the newest slave into Syra’s arms. She was surprised at how little the girl weighed. Carefully, she lowered the girl to the cart’s floor. The movement must have jarred the slave out of her shock, for she sprang up, screaming.

“No!”

Syra brought her beneath the cover of the cart’s sides. They could not risk irritating Rax in his current mood. “Shh. What is your name?”

The girl seemed to have a hard time even remembering this. “Navia.”

“Navia, you must listen. You are still in danger. You must be quiet.”

“It’s not fair,” the girl moaned as she slumped. “It’s not fair.”

Rocking her as she would a child, Syra murmured, “It seldom is.”

“But he… My husband only sold two loaves of bread!”

Syra kept the girl close as she asked, “To Caesar’s men?”

“Aye. Just like he has for the past six months.” The girl gulped twice. “But this time, Sextus… He… They…”