Mistress of Rome (15 page)

“Don’t be silly, Marcus.” I made my voice rich and teasing. “I want to be a proper wife. With children . . .” I embroidered on those themes for a while, and watched his eyes get soft, and as soon as I leaned over and kissed him, well, that was that.

It wasn’t horrifying at all. Nothing to turn anyone’s hair white. Marcus was just what I expected. Gentle. Tender. Considerate. A little
too
considerate. I don’t want to be treated as if I’m made of glass. I like a little . . . handling. But of course I sighed and gazed up at him adoringly and said he was wonderful, and he never suspected that when I closed my eyes it was because I couldn’t look at his bare crooked shoulder without being disgusted. But it was worth it, because he let me do anything I wanted. Go anywhere I wanted. Spend anything I wanted.

I sighed and ran the silver comb through my hair. What glorious years those were. Marcus trudging off to the Senate every day and me running off to dinner parties every night. Really, sometimes I felt quite fond of Marcus. I hadn’t thought to stay married to him so long—I could easily have moved on to someone younger and handsomer within the year—but I learned fast that a permissive old senator is better than a jealous young soldier.

“You don’t mind if I go out?” I always made sure to ask him every so often. “I do love parties and plays, darling. I’m just not brilliant and intellectual like you.”

“No, you’re young and lovely and utterly charming.” He kissed my cheek. “So go enjoy yourself.” I always thanked him sweetly before whirling off to my round of parties. What parties! Wine and music and handsome men who paid me compliments, men who pressed around my couch and told me I was beautiful, men who wouldn’t have looked at me the year before, but who all wanted me now because I was Lady Lepida Pollia and I had a dozy old husband who let me do whatever I liked, and I’d made myself into the most beautiful woman in Rome.

I learned how to paint my face so I looked elegant rather than provincial. I learned how to knot my
stolas
carelessly at the shoulder so the silks looked as if they were about to slide off altogether. I learned how to sway and lounge inside those silks. I learned how to laugh with my eyes and promise unspecified delights with my lashes. I learned the drawling court jargon that revealed at once who was in the know and who was not. I learned that my father was considered rather gauche, really, and it was better not to be seen with him by anyone who counted. I learned about the potions one could swallow to prevent children. I learned that a married woman could do anything she pleased as long as her husband didn’t care, or at least didn’t see. Oh, I learned a lot.

“How can you bear to leave Sabina?” Marcus asked me, hanging besotted over the cradle after our daughter was born.

“I don’t want to smother her, darling.” And off I went in jade silk or sapphire, revealing more of my shoulders than ever—thank goodness the baby hadn’t thickened my figure!—to meet with senators and soldiers and tribunes, because a married woman with a child indisputably her husband’s can do whatever she pleases.

“I’ve waited so long for you,” Lucius Marcellus groaned, and Aulus Didianus, and that rather marvelous African trident fighter who never spoke much but was more than ready to
handle
me. I was quite put out when Arius killed him in the arena.

Marcus never suspected a thing. That was another lesson I learned. And how wonderful it all was, the parties and the jewels and the banquets and the men. Lepida Pollia, the toast of Rome. I’d always known it would be that way. Always. No less than I deserved.

And then—over. All of it. Stuck in Brundisium, a pretty little seaside town with airy summer villas and a sapphire-blue harbor and far too many exotic languages reverberating around its docks; a hundred leagues from Rome. And Marcus—ever-amiable, ever-obliging Marcus—suddenly a stone wall.

Iris’s voice broke in on my thoughts. “Your sleeping robe, Domina?”

“Yes.” Suddenly I was sick of the red
stola
. Red the bridal color, the color I’d worn when I’d married Marcus. Marcus, whose fault it was that I was stuck here.

Iris clumped away, and I contemplated my reflection in the polished steel. I looked utterly enticing. My hair had even grown out again, down toward my waist in a shining blue-black cascade. How could my husband refuse me anything?

 

W
HAT happened then?” Sabina murmured, yawning. “We’ll finish the story tomorrow, sweetheart. You’re half asleep.”

“No’m not . . .” She yawned again, and Marcus stroked the feather-brown hair. It was as silky as Lepida’s. He smiled, thanking his wife silently for giving him Sabina. His first wife hadn’t wanted children; Paulinus had been an accident for which she’d heaped blame on Marcus. “Well, I hope it’s my fault, Tullia,” he had said, trying to make a joke of it, and she had grabbed up a marble bust of his father and heaved it at him.

“Well, I’m not Tullia,” Lepida had teased in her rich voice. And in the first year of their marriage: Vibia Sabina.

“Good night,” he told his daughter softly, and withdrew.

“Marcus?” Lepida called as she heard his footfall outside. “Darling, do come in. It’s cold in that corridor.”

What warmed him was her smile of welcome as she turned from her mirror, her black hair loosed down her back and the dimple winking in her cheek. “Sit down, Marcus. I’ve heated some wine.”

He smiled back, and let her draw him into the warmth.

 

 

 

T
HE bout was a Thracian with a net and trident, famed in Silicia but shaking with nerves to be facing the Barbarian in the Colosseum. Arius killed him fast and indifferently with a blade through the shelf of the jaw and stalked out through the Gate of Life. The fans cheered, and the demon went yawning to sleep at the back of Arius’s mind.

“Very good, dear boy.” Gallus hardly looked up from his accounting as Arius came back to the barracks doctor for his usual examination. “Go get drunk if you like. Try to be back before dawn, will you?”

There was the usual riot of games fans at the tavern, the usual smash of wine jugs and windows. They knew to keep their distance—it was July, the streets boiling under a blazing brass sun, and everyone knew the Barbarian’s temper was black and short in the heat of summer. A girl approached him with a nervous giggle. “I’m Fulvia,” she said breathlessly as he drank straight from an ale cask. “You’re the Barbarian, aren’t you?”

He looked at her. Blue eyes. Fair hair. She’d do.

“I saw you today in the arena. You’re a wonderful fighter—”

Arius jerked a thumb toward the stairs where the innkeeper let him use a room. She giggled and raced for the bed. An undemanding girl. She didn’t mind when he turned his face to the wall afterward and fell silent. None of them did, those dozens of girls who had shared his bed these past years. They seemed disappointed if he talked, as if talking took the mystery away. They wanted the Barbarian brooding and silent and intact.

That was all right with him. He didn’t want to talk to girls anymore. Not ever.

He used to see Thea everywhere. Every dark braid of hair had been hers, every narrow hip balancing a basket. His hopes had leaped and crashed a dozen times a day. Agony, but he missed it. Agony was better than forgetting.

Her face slipped his mind now, the exact arrangement of eyes and nose and mouth escaping him. He sometimes sat with his eyes squeezed shut, trying to remember until his head ached. If he forgot her face, he’d forget everything: the way she’d touched his scars, the way she’d coaxed him to talk, the way she’d convinced him that things like demons and blood and nightmares weren’t real.

She was probably dead by now.

He left the blond girl soon after, padding silently through the stinking back alleys to Mars Street. Gallus’s thugs let him in without a word: the star gladiator had no curfew. Gallus even gave him a small allowance. It had all become very civilized, except for the killing part.

His dog yipped as he came into the room. She lay curled on his pillow, gnawing a hole in a leather gauntlet. “That’s the third set of gauntlets this year,” he growled.

The gray bitch wagged her tail and hopped nimbly down to the end of the bed. She’d lost a leg to that pack of street dogs, but managed quite well on the other three. He lowered himself into bed with a groan, abused bones protesting, and the bitch curled herself neatly behind his knees. “You’ve got a nose for the soft spot, haven’t you? Worthless dog.” He tweaked her silky ear, and her dark gaze reminded him helplessly of Thea.

G
RAY gown, silver bracelets, braided hair: my armor. “Thea?” Penelope poked her head of gray curls into my neat little chamber. “You know you’re to sing at the faction party before Senator Abractus’s dinner?”

“Yes, I’m all ready,” I answered, twisting a last bracelet into place and looking for my lyre.

“Larcius is lending you a big slave for an escort. Those charioteers can get rowdy.”

“Dear Larcius,” I smiled. My master. How I loved him.

After Lepida Pollia discarded me like a stained dress, I’d gritted my way through three months in a waterfront brothel. Three months of sweating grunting men: endured until they finished, forgotten as soon as they left me. My growing belly saved me; my pimp forced potions into me to make the child slip, but I vomited them up. When my belly made me too unwieldy for whoring, my pimp clouted me over the ear and looked about for someone who might take me off his hands. I was bundled off to a rather lovely little villa overlooking Brundisium’s busy forum and was soon gazing at my plump and pink-faced new master. Just another pimp, I assumed.

But: “My steward tells me you have a lovely voice, child.” The pleasant patrician voice surprised me, and so did the kindness of the eyes that assessed me. “He heard you singing on the windowsill of some deplorable waterfront establishment. What he was doing down in that quarter of town I shan’t ask, but whatever his recreational tastes, his musical judgment is almost as good as mine. Tell me, can you sing ‘Cythera’s Eyes’?”

After an hour’s recital in the sunny little atrium, my delighted new master—not, apparently, a pimp—called for the plain freedwoman who was more or less his wife. “Penelope, wait until you hear the newest acquisition. What’s your name, child? Thea? She’s marvelous! Who would have thought? She’ll have to have lessons right away. A voice like that has got to be trained, nurtured, polished—can you play the lyre? Lessons for that, too. We’ll launch you as a singer. Think of it!”

“Oh, shut up, Larcius,” Penelope laughed. “You’re confusing the poor girl.”

She explained it all as she helped me move into a little room so airy and clean that I felt every bit the dirty whore in it. “Larcius buys musicians, you see. It’s his hobby—‘Larcius’s Stable.’ This house is stuffed full of flutists, drummers, lute players, a boy choir. Don’t give me that look, dear, the choirboys are for
singing
in this house. Nothing but the best for Larcius; he’s got a very good eye for talent.”

“What’s in it for him?” I said cautiously.

“The pleasure of hearing you sing.” She patted my hand. “And you needn’t worry about any of
that
, my dear. He doesn’t bother the slaves. He’s got a stuck-up wife in Rome, not that he ever goes to the city, and here he’s got me. Now, when is the baby due? A few months? You just put your feet up—”

My baby came early, screaming like a demon and wringing me out like a wet tunic and my new master could hardly wait to begin my instruction. “You’ll have to study this closely, child—Aristoxenus’s
Harmonics
. It’s critical that you understand enharmonic microtones—”

“Larcius, really,” Penelope chided. “She only finished pushing a baby out thirty-six hours ago. And that’s a big baby there,” she added, eyeing the puce screaming bundle that was my child.

“Very big,” I’d said feelingly.

“But she doesn’t even understand the difference between the highest note of a
parthenios aulos
and the lowest of a
hyperteleios
!” Larcius protested.

“I want to begin my training,” I broke in before Penelope could protest again. “I want to start now.” Arius’s son had come into the world howling the house down, chewing ferociously on his own wrist, his hair already showing in russet-colored spikes along his soft head, and I could hardly look at him without a knot of love and longing and pain rising in my throat. Much easier to think about the notes of a
parthenios aulos
than about what I could possibly name my new son.

Larcius plunged me into work. He bought me singing lessons and lyre lessons, criticized my technique minutely, taught me the tricks of performing. “Don’t pander to the audience, Thea. Bring them in to you.” How did he know so much? He was a patrician trained in Roman law who had never performed for an audience in his life. “Do admit, though,” he said when I argued. “About music, I’m always right.”

Penelope bathed me in milk to bleach the brown out of my skin, washed my hair in sage and elderflower decoctions to give it gloss, anointed my hands with butter to soften the old calluses. “You’re an artist now,” she said as she taught me the rules of fine dining and elegant conversation. “You’ll need a performance name. Something cool and dignified, I think. Calliope, perhaps, or Erato—the muses of epic verse and poetry . . .”

So I went from Leah of Masada, to Thea of Arius, to a nameless waterfront whore, to Larcius’s newest nightingale—and on the whole, life was good. All Larcius’s musicians wore a little welded copper ring carved with his name, but otherwise his ownership sat lightly on us. So lightly, it was hard to believe five years had gone by. Five years of singing lessons, of practicing with my lyre, of chatting to guests and arguing with Larcius over song interpretations. Five years of musical engagements: intimate suppers demanding hushed love ballads, rowdy faction parties where only cheerful drinking songs would be heard. Five years.