Return to Exile (13 page)

“Quiet, girl.” Still the same grisly teenager who’d refused to let her treat his arrow wound.

“You don’t need to snap at her.” Lisbeth quickly tugged one of the garments over what remained of her shredded twenty-first-century pants and shirt. Maggie was too wide-eyed and distracted by Barek’s pacing to complain about the tight fit of the coarse brown wool. “What errand brought you and Naomi so far from Cyprian’s villa?”

Something about Barek’s excessive agitation compelled Lisbeth to conduct her own search for trouble. The city that appeared strangely familiar, yet totally foreign, also seemed eerily quiet. Lisbeth surveyed the deserted streets, remembering them full of children kicking balls made of animal skins and old men gathered around beer crocks. These streets were vacant of the fish vendors, vegetable growers, and beggars. It was so quiet she could hear the surf several blocks away.

Barek’s eyes scanned the area. “People are afraid to leave their homes.”

She hadn’t lost her footing. She’d lost her mind bringing her child to Carthage.

The moment she and Maggie were dressed, Barek had them moving again. The cadence of Lisbeth’s bare feet upon the hewn cobblestones arranged in a cunning jigsaw pattern had taken some getting used to her first time navigating this world. Despite her growing reservations about being here now, having the ancient pavers beneath her feet felt right. Based on the fact that Barek and Naomi would neither confirm nor deny her questions about Cyprian, Lisbeth was choosing to believe her husband was still alive. Maybe even still in Curubis.

They passed through some open gates, and Lisbeth gasped. Broken shop awnings flapped in the breeze. Despite the coolness of the night, maggot-speckled carcasses of fowl, sheep, and even a cow rotted on lines strung across vendor booths. Baskets of raw fish guts had turned rancid. Acrid smells burned her nostrils.

Lisbeth drew two scarves from her backpack. She covered the lower half of her face and helped Maggie do the same. “Pinch your nose, and don’t touch a thing.”

Missing were the greasy olive oil merchants who pranced before colorfully decorated booths bragging about how their superior inventory had kept the lamps of Rome burning night and day for a hundred years.
“Warms the body. Protects from the cold. And calms a fever in the head,”
they’d boasted to the rich patrician women who entertained themselves with shopping the same way modern women cruised the mall. These retail experts could take one sniff of an oil salesman’s product and know whether it had been purified properly.

Dusty were the long shelves of African red slip, exquisite thin-walled vases whose usual sparkle rivaled decorative potteries produced in the Italian Arezzo. Where were the quiet men who eyed the silk pocketbooks of the wealthy and shooed beggar children with sticky fingers away from their priceless wares?

Shuttered were the tax-collection booths everyone hated.

This wasn’t the bustling market awaiting nighttime deliveries. Throw in a couple of tumbleweeds blowing across the avenues normally crawling with people, and Carthage would have become an ancient version of an American Wild West ghost town. Something was terribly wrong. If this desolation had been the result of conquest, anything of value would have been looted. Instead the vendor booths were fully stocked and deserted, as if the proprietors had abandoned their goods and left town in a hurry. Or worse. Died before they could settle their business affairs. Lisbeth couldn’t be sure, but she suspected the latter. If she was right, she was looking at the aftermath of an outbreak turned epidemic. She tightened the straps on her backpack. She’d underestimated everything. With the few supplies in her bag, she’d be lucky to save her family.

Maggie’s face was ashen. “What is this place?”

“It’s kind of like a superstore.”

“You sure my daddy lives in this town?” Maggie’s brow puckered. “It stinks.”

“Shhh.”

Until she could confirm they’d landed in the right time, she couldn’t offer the solid reassurance Maggie needed. There were far more bodies stacked at the crossroads than when she’d helped the frantic Numidicus drag his dead wife to the street. She couldn’t put an exact estimate on how much time had passed, but if she and Maggie had overshot their target by even a day, Cyprian’s headless body could be buried in one of the city’s smoldering garbage heaps.

Lisbeth pushed the gruesome thought from her mind and took Maggie’s hand. “Come on, baby. Let’s go.”

By the time they reached the affluent climes of the city, the brisk, salty sea breeze had scrubbed the stink of the market from the air. Lisbeth clung to the hope that maybe the epidemic hadn’t spread as far as she first feared. They hurried down a broad avenue lined with large
houses where climbing vines circled the balconies that overlooked the harbor’s turquoise waters. This was their street, the place where she’d spent some of the most exhausting yet happiest days of her life.

Anxious anticipation pumped Lisbeth’s legs. She was home. Hope surged toward her heart. Maggie had to run to keep up. While Barek fumbled with the gate latch, Lisbeth wished she’d added a mirror and a comb to the essentials in her bag.

She licked her fingers and wiped dirt smudges from Maggie’s face.

“Mommy.”

“Hold still, baby.” She tried to finger-comb some order into her daughter’s damp curls.

The gate squeaked open.

Maggie broke loose and shot around Barek. Lisbeth hurried after her.

The courtyard had the same deserted feel of the marketplace. Dry fountain. No exotic fish. Unruly vines obscuring the stone pillars. Dried leaves skittering over the garden pavers. Varnish peeling off the front doors in jagged little pieces. No barking dogs.

“Where is everyone, Barek?” Lisbeth’s knees turned soft. “Please tell me they’re alive.”

Barek planted his body between her and the door. “Wait here.”

“No.” She tried to push past him. “This is my home. I don’t even have to knock.”

“You’ve been gone awhile.” He held her at arm’s length. “I think it’s best if I prepare them.”

“Them?”

“Wait.” He wheeled, slipped inside the house, and shut the door in her face.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?”

“I don’t know. . . .” Lisbeth noticed Naomi watching from the shadows, an expression of impending doom on her face.
What’s happened here? Has the plague swept through and killed
 . . . Lisbeth captured her fears. If they were too late and Cyprian had already returned and been executed, her sorrow would only escalate Maggie’s disappointment. Until she had more information, she would tuck Maggie in the safest place she could find. She glanced around the empty courtyard. “Let’s play a game, baby. You hide behind the fountain, and stay there. Don’t come out until you hear me say . . .
child.
Then you can jump out and yell ‘Surprise!’ Understand?”

Maggie didn’t seem too keen on being stuck out of sight, but for once she played along and crouched behind the empty fountain.

The door flew open, and Cyprian rushed out. “Lisbeth!” He stopped, only a couple of feet short of embracing her. Except for the slight drooping of his shoulders, Cyprian was the same handsome, square-jawed man she remembered. Movie-star sex appeal infused with irresistible kindness and charm.

For a moment, his eyes said what his mouth could not. “Lisbeth.” He opened his arms, and she fell into his embrace.

“You’re home and safe.” She buried her nose in his clean, familiar scent, holding on to him as hungrily as he held on to her. The substance of the words gushing from his lips was lost in Lisbeth’s pure joy at seeing her husband again.

At first she thought her inability to understand what he was saying was her shock of hearing him speak her name after so many years, but she soon realized it was the way he drew out the syllables. Sad and . . . hard. She pressed her ear to his chest. Something had changed. Lisbeth pulled back. She kissed his lips to reassure herself that her imagination was simply playing tricks, that Cyprianus Thascius was still the strong and compassionate person she remembered, but he immediately pulled back. Shock, no doubt.

Her eyes sought his. “I’m not too late.”

His mouth opened and closed. Finally, he managed, “Lisbeth, I . . .”

“Lisbeth?” Ruth stood in the open doorway, lamplight framing her in a hazy glow. “You’re back?”

“My friend!” Lisbeth started for Ruth, but Cyprian snagged her arm.

“Lisbeth . . . I . . . Ruth is . . .” Cyprian’s words hung in his throat, his eyes darting hopelessly between the two women.

“His wife.” Barek stepped from behind his mother, his expression smug. “And she carries his child.”

“Surprise!” Maggie shouted in perfect Latin as she scrambled out from behind the fountain. “Daddy! It’s me, Maggie!” She barreled across the courtyard and threw her arms around Cyprian’s legs, looking up at him with her big, blue eyes.

Lisbeth glanced from Ruth’s ashen face to her swollen belly, then back to Cyprian. For what seemed an eternity, they stood face-to-face. No one moving. Each of them stunned into silence.

“Daddy?”

Maggie’s pleas yanked Lisbeth from her stupor. “Funny, I thought Barek just said Ruth is your wife.”

Cyprian swallowed. “She is.”

Lisbeth didn’t know what to say or which language to say it in. Her mind sorted the jagged pieces, laying them down one at a time. She had given birth to Cyprian’s child alone. Risked her normal, stable life to return for him. And then discovered her husband had married another.

Slowly, an unexpected picture formed. An image of betrayal.

The baby her best friend carried belonged to Cyprian.

Where did that leave the claustrophobic child clinging to Cyprian’s legs?

Or the lost, bent, and broken piece of this convoluted puzzle . . . her?

Where did her marriage to a man she no longer knew belong? She couldn’t have crammed this piece into her plan if she’d tried.

13

T
HE CLATTER OF FARM
wagons rolling through the city roused Aspasius from a fitful slumber. Through the fog of his hangover, he struggled to organize the slatted patterns of moonlight on the ceiling into some kind of tangible recollection. Celebrating his success at keeping secret the order for Cyprian’s recall may have been a bit premature.

Aspasius shoved his girth upright in the bed and wrestled his plump arms into a silk robe. He would make his regular appearance at the temple of Juno after he popped into the public baths to check on the progress of his senators. If filling the temples with sacrificing plebeians failed to appease the gods, he would have no choice but to return to pressuring those who flatly refused to give his gods their due respect. People like the Christians. He should never have listened to the complaints of a few narrow-minded senators’ wives who thought it beyond good taste when he allowed the arena cats to shred a defenseless believer’s child. If Christians refused to bow, no matter their age or status, he would toss them into the ring and laugh at their screams.

He grabbed the massive bedpost and pulled himself to a standing position. Hot streaks of pain shot from his toes to his groin. Curse Magdalena. Curse her diabolical salves and bandages. Curse her ability to cure plebs of anything while his sores contin
ued to fester. Most of all, curse the woman who’d slipped through his fingers and taken her attractive daughter with her. Aspasius forced his swollen feet into a pair of fox-lined red slippers.

What if Magdalena’s creams and tonics were as lethal as the concoctions she’d mixed for him to drink? What if her plan had been for him to rot from the inside out? More than once, he’d downed the wine she’d proffered for his aching legs only to sleep for hours and awake disoriented and in more pain. He could only guess at the full extent of the treachery she’d accomplished during his long periods of incapacitation. He’d been a fool to submit to her ministrations and even more foolish to believe she might one day come to care about him. In the end, Magdalena had been as deceitful as Numeria and as willing to leave him.

Magdalena had been his slave for more than two decades, and somehow she’d managed to keep her dalliances with the Christians a secret. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have overlooked her treachery? Somehow, in some way, he would make every treasonous heretic who’d received her help pay for what rightfully belonged to him.

With a pleased chuckle, Aspasius drew his robe closed and shuffled to the double doors leading to his marble balcony. He stepped into the clear, crisp night. To view his city from a god’s perspective was a privilege and an obligation he took seriously.

He would not lament Magdalena’s unexpected disappearance. No matter how much it angered him. No matter how betrayed and alone he felt. He did not miss her far-too-thin body in his bed any more than he missed her sharp tongue and the eternal judgment smoldering in her eyes. Being rid of her was actually a relief. No longer would her observations about his inability to rule the unsettled masses make him feel the fool.

If anyone inquired of her whereabouts, he would say she and her high-strung daughter had died at their own hands.

In the meantime, he would secretly have them both found, returned to him, and Magdalena put to death for separating him from Lisbeth Thascius. He considered Cyprian’s wife the spoils of war. As ruler of this province, he had the right to claim the property of any convicted war criminal. He intended to claim it all. First, Cyprian’s vast estate, and then his wife.

A voice broke through his thoughts. “Master, you’ll catch your death out here.” Pytros came to him and draped a fur across his shoulders. “Come in and warm yourself.”

“Tell me again what Felicissimus said.” Aspasius turned to look at his scribe. “Is Cyprian’s estate still occupied?”

“I had to remind him of his obligations before he was forthcoming with information.” Pytros brushed lint from his robe. “Sick plebs from the tenements have flooded the nobleman’s villa.”

“It’s been more than a year. Why do the masses still flock to his halls?” he demanded. “What could possibly still draw them there? Are you sure Cyprian has not returned home? Perhaps slipped in behind my back?”