Usurpers

by Q V Hunter

  ‘I see.’ His hands stopped shuffling papers and he heaved a sigh. ‘I thought I might attach a strong young fighter like you to a pivotal surveillance posting. You could continue to keep an eye on your new friend, Gaiso.’

  He must mean he wanted to send me back to Treverorum.

  ‘I’d prefer Customs, really.’

  ‘Really?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s too bad. I see, I see. Well, you’re not my slave. I learned long ago that men don’t work well in an unsuitable post but I pride myself on fitting the man to the job.’

  I sat, silent and sad, but determined.

  ‘Well, Numidianus, more training won’t hurt you in any event, so start tomorrow on those courses I just mentioned. If you’re set on staying in Roma for Customs, add the Accounting Course, too. You can skip Disguises and Dialects.’

  ‘Thank you, Apodemius.’

  He hobbled around his desk and escorted me to the door. We had been together well over half an hour. I’d disappointed him and even rebuffed an exciting assignment, so why was he being so courteous?

  He hesitated before excusing me. ‘Tell me, Numidianus, how would you say that man Eusebius sees the world?’

  ‘A marketplace for trading secrets?’

  ‘Indeed, but I think he sees a spider's web stretching from Antiochia to Londinium. His Empire looks fragile and porous and he warns you of cracks, but secretly he thinks it’s resilient and sticky enough for his purposes. And he wants whatever sticks to it for himself.’

  ‘Is he right?’

  ‘No, Numidianus. The Empire is fragile and porous. It’s a piece of fine but aging linen, like this robe of mine, a seamless fabric with the sheen of age. But it’s worn, my boy, worn with use and tension. It may fray without warning, if we're not careful. We saved it a hundred years ago, by sheer force of will. We must save it now.’ He laid a distended hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind, Magister, and do my best.’

  ‘If Customs Collectors can save the Empire, Numidianus, which I very much doubt.’

  ***

  The next morning I registered for Accounting and Long Document Memory Training. The first course was well above my number skills. I was set long problems to calculate after dinner, which meant I missed the rounds of Knucklebones or Lucky Six that made the Castra such a pleasant place off-duty.

  Long Document Training was easy for me at first, because our instructor set texts I’d read as a child to the Senator. After receiving a few marks of one hundred percent on the satirical poems of Juvenal and tedious passages from Sallust, he twigged that I was a bit of a ringer, despite my Numidian ex-slave dossier. By the end of the week, he’d dredged up some turgid arguments from the Council of Nicea to test my ability to recite by heart a passage I’d only read through once. Then he tested my ability to read it upside down and regurgitate it word perfect.

  Silent Assassination Skills started up after two weeks of Accounting. I was desperate to get out of the Castra library. If I was de-enrolled from the Assassination class, I was ready to argue that a Customs Officer might need to assassinate a recalcitrant taxpayer when you least expected it. I turned up for that class, fully armed and five minutes early.

  There was one other student waiting, in northern trousers, loose-tailed tunic shirt, a wide leather over-tunic and felt cap. He was smooth-cheeked, short and young. I didn’t know they enlisted such squirts into our schola.

  He didn’t like my expression. ‘I thought the point of this class was to look unarmed and harmless,’ he said, pointing to my spatha.

  I ignored him, ready to offer a little self-assertion in the form of a clout or punch if he got above himself.

  ‘Mind if I try out your sword?’ He reached for my scabbard.

  I stared down at his face to tell him to piss off.

  He was a she.

  ‘My name is Roxana.’ Her grip was like a vice pressing my palm. ‘I’m what they call around here a Special.’

  ‘You’re what we call around here a girl,’ I retorted.

  The other three students showed up—one my own age from Rhaetia who cracked his knuckles as he chatted, a thuggish-looking rider from Pannonia and a tall, thin man so stooped, I wasn’t surprised to learn that he was not trying to join Customs Accounting but to get transferred out of it by any means he could.

  We filed into the room. I was in trouble from the beginning.

  ‘Numidianus. Drop your weapons. In this room, we only fight dirty.’ The nearly naked instructor waited, hands on his hips, at the end of the long, tiled exercise room. I left my blades at the door. As I approached him, he dropped to one knee and adjusted one of his boots.

  The next thing I knew I was on my back with a wire wrapped around my neck and cutting into my flesh. With one deft pull of the wire’s end, my head might be rolling across the floor.

  He unwrapped the garrote and helped me to my feet. I realized it was his bootlace, reinforced from within. He wound and tucked the lethal string around his formidable wrist.

  ‘Tomorrow I want you each to return to class with a disguised ligature of some kind—a chain, rope, scarf, wire or fishing line—anything that could strangle a person and be hidden on your person without detection. You don’t get into this class with less than Wrestling Five. Anyone out?’

  That got rid of the Accountant. So now there were only four students. We paired up to practice strangleholds. I pulled short straw and got Roxana, which was a bit of a joke unless I planned on strangling Constantia during our next bedroom encounter.

  Before I knew it, Roxana had me on the floor. I was panting, purple-faced and gurgling between the strangling cords of her underwear belt.

  ‘Very good, Roxana,’ the instructor smiled. ‘Numidianus, stop trying to remove the cord and kick her feet out of under her . . . Numidianus? Roxana, release him!’

  If this was how Roxana ‘practiced’ strangling, I resolved to partner with the evil-looking Pannonian in Poisons Class.

  Chapter 6, Call It ‘Christ Mass’

  —The Castra Peregrina, roma—

  By early December, I’d mastered the basics of accounting and even obtained the highest marks of the season for memorizing half a dozen pages by some bishop named Athanasius.

  I hardly understood a word of it.

  A week’s classes in Arrest Procedure wasn’t hard, just a lot of rigmarole about titles, legal rights, hierarchies and displays of respect, depending on the alleged crime and position of the unlucky felon. We practiced ‘resisted arrest,’ ‘arrest before judicial suicide,’ arrest after interrogation,’ and ‘arrest of high-ranked females.’ We took turns announcing our arrests in ever more stentorian tones meant to intimidate the accused out of all hope of escape. The hardest part of that class was keeping a straight face.

  From what I heard, tax dodgers and crooked customs collectors didn’t try to commit suicide very often. If you were lucky, they offered you a cut on the side to look the other way. I was sorry to see the Arrest Procedure course come to an end.

  I kept fit in the gymnasium by wrestling with the knuckle-cracking Julius and lifting weights with the Pannonian. Other men grunted and wrestled around us from dawn to dinner.

  Roxana was ‘special’ indeed, the only female I saw in the barracks who wasn’t a cook or a girlfriend. She kept to herself during our free periods. She went running on the outdoor track in her exercise halter and short trousers, even as the Roman weather turned nasty. She used her room basin for washing or visited the women’s baths in town.

  Late some evenings, she swam length after length in our pool by herself. We men were on our honor not to peep at her lithe limbs stroking the heated water each night, her chestnut hair trailing almost to her waist. She was a graceful animal, her dark nipples taut as she swam, her undertunic clinging to her stomach and hips as she lifted herself out to rest, prone and panting, on the stone floor.

  I knew this, of course, because I peeped.

  She was wat
ching me, too. The barracks were full of agentes. But when you took a good look at them, most of the men in our schola were better suited than I to spying on others, precisely because they were the kind of men nobody noticed.

  Some looked slow and overweight. They were the watchful kind that Apodemius posted to process paperwork at provincial crossways of the Cursus Publicus or to linger in taverns listening to the gossip of the day. Nobody linked them to an intelligence service.

  Some were lean, quick riders, real veterans of the saddle, made of nothing but sinew and backs folded forward by years riding express. They looked like dried meat hung on hooks in the smoking house.

  Some, like our friend the accountant, were talented at numbers and fated to ferret out any imperial cheats by auditing the praetorian records, prefecture by prefecture. Our accountant was not only round-shouldered, but also shortsighted. No Apollo there.

  I grew happier by the day as I checked off the competition for Roxana’s favor. Too short here, a bit cross-eyed there, bald or bow-legged, lisping or limping, my eyes cancelled one man after another from the ranks of her potential suitors.

  It took my mind off my troubles. When I got a night off, I’d sit with Verus in a greasy popina near the Porta Esquilina at the foot of our hill.

  ‘Clodius has got some of the books off to that book dealer Soren in the Vicus Sandalarius, he did, before Lady Kahina asked him where he got so much money for gambling. It was a real to-do, I can tell you.’

  ‘What did the Senator say?’

  ‘You don’t think I’d upset him? The books disappeared while he was on the potty bowl in the little room at the back. But he suspects something, because now he keeps that filthy thing right next to him in his study. Won’t let anybody but me empty it.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  Verus sat up straight. ‘I’m honored and don’t you mock.’

  I steered my questions away from Kahina and the child but the two of them never left my thoughts. ‘When does Gregorius get back? The patrol season is over. The whole army should be in winter quarters until spring.’

  Verus could smell this was information I wanted, so he waited until I’d bought him a fresh drink.

  ‘Well, that’s the thing.’ He lifted his eyebrows and nodded like a sage.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The young missus hasn’t had word for weeks and weeks. Our warrior Gregorius was never one for love letters, as Lady Laetitia well knew, but this is a pretty long no-sign-of-life, even from the Commander. He was always home by Solis Day.’

  ‘I remember. He never missed it.’ The Roman festival of Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the birth of the Sun Deity, came every December. Extra torches and lamps brightened the neighborhood. Banquet tables groaned with expensive treats in every house on the Esquiline Hill. As a favored boy-pet, I stole my best nibbles from the Solis feast tables.

  Verus frowned. ‘You don’t think he’s hurt again?’

  ‘Then we’d get word for certain.’

  Verus nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. Wouldn’t we?’

  It was odd. I knew I had to stick close to Roma now, more than ever. My training upgrade would finish in another week and a half, but I would insist that Apodemius keep me here. I’d explain that my suspicions that the Manlius estate could be dismantled were turning to sad realities under our very noses.

  First the rest of the books would go. Then Clodius would uncover the deeds. More than two hundred years’ worth of family acquisitions and prudent management would disappear over his signature.

  I had promised Kahina to protect her and our boy. I had to accept any job, no matter how boring, to keep my sights on Clodius. Some day Gregorius would thank me, even if Apodemius didn’t.

  Roxana and I had a week of Poisons training to finish. I had prepared a truth serum based on the herb I’d seen used in the army to relieve pain. Herba Apollinaris always loosened men’s tongues, but an overdose could kill.

  Roxana arrived late for class. For a change, she was wearing female dress. She fiddled a little with the fibula pinning down one fold of the outer tunic over the shoulder of her under tunic. She carried no poison vial or bottle and there was no waist pouch hanging off her belt.

  ‘Forget your homework?’

  ‘Search me.’ Her eyes were playful. Suddenly I wanted to kiss her right there next to the gymnasium entrance. Instead, I took up her challenge. I ran my hands up and down her hips, then around her firm buttocks and down her shoulders to her wrists.

  ‘Nothing there,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not finished,’ she teased.

  I took a breath and resumed my slow, delicious search, running my palms up and down her back and finally, slowly, from her neck, over her upturned breasts and under their weight to her waist and even below.

  ‘Nothing . . . much.’

  We went into class. When it was my turn, I explained my poison—how I’d seen it used on the battlefield by Dr Ari, the Greek medical slave and how I had once witnessed a fatal overdose. Nobody was much impressed. Distracted by the memory of Roxana’s warm breath brushing my shoulder, I barely passed the oral exam on antidotes.

  Roxana was the last to be tested. She slowly walked up to the instructor, a wily ex-spice merchant from Carthago. She reached into her hair and took out a small, bent hairpin. She was about to press its two points into the teacher’s neck, but he stopped her with one strong fist and laughed.

  ‘I don’t need a demonstration, just an explanation, my dear,’ he said. ‘But before you describe your poison, I should point out that your victim would see what you were doing too far in advance. We all did, didn’t we, gentlemen?’

  ‘Yes, Magister.’ She gave a discouraged shrug and lifting both arms, replaced the ornament. We all admired the thick coils of her hair. Her outer tunic shifted off her shoulder and she adjusted that unreliable fibula. Then before the teacher realized, she had moved on him again. He yelped and stared down at his forearm to see two ugly red welts rise up off his white skin.

  Her fibula dropped on the floor. She bent down and recovered her deadly accessory.

  ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you, Magister. I diluted the venom, of course. If I’d used the full strength, you’d be dead by nightfall,’ she said, with bright eyes. ‘You did promise that we’d be graded on technique as well as composition.’

  Sometimes Roxana scared even me, but not enough to forget the promise I’d seen before class in those thick-lashed brown eyes.

  That night, I lay on my cot, listening as usual to the richer agentes lose their money and laugh it off. I couldn’t sleep. How could I stop Clodius from denuding the townhouse of Manlius treasures? Too much was sitting there for the taking—imported rugs, statues, silver tableware, carved furniture and worst of all, the beloved books collected by one Manlius after another, reaching back to the days of the Republic. How could Clodius do it?

  A knock at my door stopped my restless tossing. ‘Come in,’ I mumbled. No doubt one of the gamblers, full of wine, hoped to borrow a centenionalis or two off me. But I sat up, prepared to warn him that I was low on bronze that week.

  Roxana stood in the doorway, her figure untouched by motherhood or care, her muscles taut and shining with some kind of oil under the corridor’s lamplight. Her hair was still wet from her swim and pinned high onto her head but there was no lacquer or false fashion about it. Golden earrings twinkled at me as I borrowed the flame of her lamp to re-ignite the one next to my bed.

  ‘I hope those hairpins aren’t poisoned,’ I said.

  ‘Just in case,’ she answered, ‘here they go.’ She pulled her hair loose and shook her head, sending brown waves tumbling down to her waist.

  She dropped her shift and came to me. I saw she was depilated in the Eastern style and perfumed with oil between her thighs. I got off the cot and she stretched out in the very warm contours I left in the thin mattress. I slipped one leg over the cot and placed one knee next to her thigh. I ran my fingers along her slippery skin and realized that the perfum
ed oil came, not from a bottle, but from her own excitement.

  As I said, sometimes Roxana scared me, but that night of rocking, sighing and moving inside her strong and sleek body wasn’t one of those times.

  I fell into an ecstasy balanced between abandon and control, astonished at her supple skill and unfettered passion. After twenty minutes of her encouraging sighs and mounting gasps, even I had nothing left and finally gave in to a release that left me limp.

  Sated, she moved off and sat on one end of the cot. I lay on my back, with my eyes closed, but opened them in time so as not to miss the sight of her pulling her shift back over her head. She stood up and checked the corridor for stray agentes or strangers through a crack in the door. She was the only female recruit, but she wasn’t the only woman smuggled into a cell. Our barracks were jammed with healthy, normal men—unlike those ghettos down in the Subura slums of forswearing Christian cultists.

  ‘You’re wonderful, Roxana.’ I could not take my eyes off the soft rosy-olive curve of her hip visible under the thin linen.

  ‘I’m supposed to be,’ she said. ‘A Special has to take certain courses in skills the ordinary agentes never master.’

  I stared at her and gulped. ‘Surely what just happened was more than a training exercise.’

  ‘It was pleasant enough. More enjoyable than swimming regulation lengths to keep slim or learning how to poison a lady’s face cream.’

  ‘Roxana! You can’t fool me!’ I laughed and jumped up to hold her tight. I brushed her forehead with kisses and reached through her shift to play a bit with her bottom. I’d had many women in the houses, from Lambaesa to Lugdunum. I knew a woman’s cries of true contentment from false. Men like me heard both.

  ‘We’ll each have new assignments soon, but mine are different from yours. If I cannot fool every man I meet, I’ll soon be nothing but a lovely corpse,’ she said. ‘Goodnight, Marcus. Let’s hope we can practice together again, very soon.’