The Emperor's Games
Page 1
The Emperor’s Games
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
I The Emperor’s Games
II Charon
III The House on the Aventine
IV Julius Caesar
V Veii Market
VI The Man in the Office
VII Theophanes
VIII The Mercy of Caesar
IX Interlude
X Meeting in Colonia
XI The Lamp Flame
XII Cavalry Canter
XIII The Shadow of the Hawk
XIV “…In the Interests of Justice”
XV Marius Vettius
XVI The Bridge
XVII A Matter of Money
XVIII The Race and the Rose of Italy
XIX A Box Full of Blood
XX A Roman Way to Think
XXI Fiorgyn
XXII Autumn Battle
Epilogue
Cast of Characters
Glossary
Copyright
The Emperor’s Games
Damion Hunter
For Jeff and Felix
I The Emperor’s Games
“Request permission to transfer.” Correus slammed the wax tablet containing his request down on the desk. The wax cracked off at the corner, and he glared at it, thumbs hooked in his belt.
The optio in the headquarters at Misenum Naval Base scooped the tablet into one hand. “I’ll see that it goes through,” he said, blank-faced. Centurion Correus Julianus put in for a transfer once a week, regular as sunrise. Another tablet in the stack wasn’t going to make any difference, but the optio wouldn’t have dreamed of saying so. Centurion Julianus was a senior officer and a man plainly on the thin edge of his temper. “A bad week, sir?” he inquired carefully.
“Oh, no,” Correus said sarcastically. His aquiline face was tight-stretched, and a few locks of brown hair stuck out untidily from beneath his helmet rim. He looked as if he had jammed it on his head in a hurry. “I’m a professional soldier. I put in nine years in the field so I can come here to ship fourteen lions and a hippopotamus up the Tiber! Along with a herd of goats to feed the lions. Have you ever slept on a ship where they’ve been slaughtering goats? Have you ever smelled a lion? Mithras god, I can still smell their stench on me, and I soaked in the bath with half a bottle of my wife’s scent!”
“Well, I expect the next run won’t be so bad, sir,” the optio said soothingly. The duties of a peacetime navy got on most men’s nerves, but Centurion Julianus looked ready to go around the bend.
“No, this time we’ll get to ship a hold full of sand. Sand, mind you – we’ll need half the whole damned fleet because Italian sand isn’t pretty enough! And now the emperor wants a water fight, bless him, to cap off the big day for his games. On the old Augustan lake by the Tiber. It hasn’t been filled in thirty years, and we’ll probably drown half the audience. If I’d wanted to be a damned actor, I’d have put on a gold wig and a dress and gone into the theater!”
The optio nodded sympathetically. A water spectacle meant two navies of condemned men in fake uniforms, fighting each other for the promise of life if they came in on the winning side. That was all right for the civilians and the mob, of course, but not really an amusement for the professional man. And Centurion Julianus didn’t much like arena games, anyway. “I’ll put your request through, sir,” he said, “with the rest of ’em. But I wouldn’t be holding my breath.” The centurion had nearly a year yet to run to the end of a standard tour, and the Misenum commander didn’t like training new officers when he could help it.
Correus nodded, growled, and turned on his heel. The optio watched him go. Centurion Julianus was really going to be unhappy when he got the specific orders for the water fight. The optio had heard about the emperor’s water spectacle already – very little information missed a headquarters optio – and word was that it was to be a carefully choreographed rendition of the Battle of Actium, not the usual free-for-all. It would take a lot of training to get the condemned men to put their backs into learning military formation on the slim hope of coming out alive. And Centurion Correus Julianus was going to get to train them.
This posting was a favor to him, and Correus knew it – a chance to get fleet experience and mark himself as a well-rounded military man destined for great things. His brother, Flavius, who was on the emperor Titus’s staff, had no doubt had a hand in the appointment. But Correus had had a year of it by now, growing daily more rebellious, and had put in for transfer to an active command more times than he could count. Still, here he sat, shipping lions and condemned men up the coast to Rome or, sillier yet, a cargo of nothing but African sand to keep the arena floor clean. The men condemned to fight in the arena crept into Correus’s dreams at night, shackled together and bleeding, lost eyes fixed on his own.
After he and Caritius, captain of the flagship of the Misenum Fleet, had begun to work out the details of the emperor’s naval spectacle, Correus awoke at night, sweating, to discover that he had kicked off the covers trying to rid his own leg of an imaginary shackle, and to find his wife, Ygerna, also coverless, huddled into a chilly ball beside him with her hands over her face as if somehow his dreams had crept into her own. One night he had actually sat up screaming, convinced that he was drowning, chained by the leg to a sinking ship.
Ygerna sat up too, her thin face scared in the moonlight. She had seen him afraid only once before, and then it had been of her. He had let loose his grief for his son’s dead mother, enough to fall in love again. This was different, a cold fear from inside the mind, like a dark snake that slithered out with the sunset. She put her arms around him as far as she could reach, and after a minute he stopped shaking.
“Mithras god.” Correus flopped back down on the pillows. He put a hand to his face. The skin felt clammy.
“The same dream?”
“With a few refinements.” He shivered. “I’m sorry, dear. This is the third night running I’ve waked you.”
“I don’t mind. I just don’t understand. You’ve seen worse things. Why does the arena do this to you?”
That was true enough. He hadn’t been a professional soldier for nine years without stacking up a few horrors to remember. But they didn’t come crawling into his dreams at night. “This one’s a birthright,” he said sourly.
“That is a lot of years down the road,” Ygerna said. “And you had more pampering than most free children.”
“I know.” Correus made a face. He always felt foolish when the subject of his slave birth cropped up. In truth he had led a charmed childhood, running tame on his father’s estate, being freed and formally adopted at eighteen, and helped to a military career that would take him as far as he had the ability to go. His mother, Helva, still lived on the estate in the privileged position of the master’s longtime mistress and mother of his second son. There had never been any prospect of the gladiators’ school or a slave galley for Correus. But somehow the arena and the slave market always gave him the same feeling: There but for the grace of the gods and Appius Julianus went Correus. As a result he “collected strays” – his old commander’s phrase – a parade of the lost and hopeless who had crossed his path and found Correus unable to let them go by to their fate. Julius, his body servant and stable boy, was one. His son Felix’s mother had begun as another – bought by Correus to spare her from a worse master.
“It isn’t fear for yourself, you know,” Ygerna said quietly. “It’s – you are mad because you can’t change things… can’t save them all.” She switched from Latin into the soft dialect of the Silure hills, her homeland in West Britain, as she still did when she wanted to explain something c
arefully, not in a language that she still found stiff. “You want to be the god who is lowered on a wire at the theater, in a mask, with gold spikes on his head, and makes everything work out properly.”
Correus started to laugh, softly, and pulled her down on the bed beside him so that he could rest his head on her breast. “You are a witch.” His hand traced the delicate five-petaled flower that was pricked into the skin between her breasts with blue dye: the mark of the Goddess, the Dark Mother.
“I am not needing the Sight to tell you that much,” Ygerna said. “You know it yourself, but it gives you bad dreams, anyway. I thought once that the dreams might be because of me – that the Mother might be angry, for stealing her priestess—”
“No, love. I’ve had them before.” His voice was tired.
“I know. And the Goddess doesn’t come to me anymore, so I doubt she cares what I do. I have grown too Roman for her, I think. And your dreams are out of your own mind. You’ll have them until you get rid of them.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. They aren’t my dreams. Learn to think like your brother, maybe.”
Ygerna had always been able to figure him out, and, somewhat to his surprise, he had found that she could generally tell what his half brother, Flavius, was thinking, too. “You might as well tell me to think like a maenad or a Nubian from Africa,” he said about that. “I can’t even understand his thinking half the time.” It was only in the last few years that he and Flavius had learned to put childhood rivalry far enough behind them to be friends. But each still found the other a puzzle, an oddity only partly comprehended.
“You and Flavius are like that god with the two faces—” Ygerna said.
“Janus,” Correus said.
“Janus. The back and front of the same thing. You are more alike than you think. You just can’t look at each other straight on and see it.”
“Maybe.” He was beginning to be sleepy. The nightmare drifted away with the sound of her voice. Sweet reason in a white night shift, with her long hair braided into two thick plaits and the front curls incongruously tied up in a wild array of rags. He kissed one breast sleepily, and she ran a light hand across his forehead.
“Go to sleep. You don’t dream when I hold you.”
No, nothing ever touched him in Ygerna’s arms. But he couldn’t spend his life huddling in his wife’s embrace to close the demons out.
In the morning Correus found a family row brewing up over breakfast, to take his mind off his dreams. He eyed the storm signals warily.
“Felix may not go to a barbaric water battle. He’ll stay at home in Misenum with me.” Ygerna gave Correus a horrified look that made it quite plain that she found his countrymen revolting in this guise. When a Roman spoke of barbarians, he meant a people like the Britons, the half-tamed folk who were Ygerna’s kin. Ygerna’s expression said clearly whom she meant.
Since Felix, who was five, rarely saw eye to eye with his stepmother – or anyone else in charge, for that matter – the conversation quickly degenerated into an exchange of “I won’ts” and “You wills,” until Correus sent him off wriggling like a squid under his nurse’s arm.
Ygerna slumped down at the stone table in the secluded, shaded courtyard that was the center of their house at Misenum Naval Base and put her head in her hands. “Correus, it’s no use. I’ll never be able to manage him.” She sounded nearly ready to cry, but she gave a rueful chuckle. “And in another few years he’ll be bigger than I am, and then what am I going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Correus said. “Carry a club, maybe.” He put his hands on the nape of her neck, where a few fine black curls were coming loose from the intricate knot on her head. He would rather discuss Felix than the emperor’s water fight, he thought. “Dear heart, he’ll come round. He is already. He’s a willful little demon, but he does like you. And me, I hope. It’s not so easy, being suddenly handed over to a father you don’t even remember. It’s my fault for leaving him with Julia for so long.”
“You didn’t have anything else to do with him,” Ygerna said practically. When Felix’s mother had been killed, Correus had been a cohort commander in the wilds of West Britain, and the rest of his household had consisted of a fifteen-year-old slave and a cat. Correus’s half sister, Julia, had been sent straight from the gods when she offered to take the baby. It was giving him back again that had proved to be the problem.
Felix, or Frontinus Appius Julianus, to give him his full name – he had been named for Julius Frontinus, then the governor of Britain – had lived the first four years of his life with Julia and her husband, Correus’s old companion Lucius Paulinus. Julia thought of Felix as her firstborn; not even two babies of her own had changed that. When Correus had come home at last, with a seventeen-year-old wife and a determination to meld his oddly assorted household into a family, Julia had gritted her teeth and given him back his son, but she hadn’t liked it, and neither had Felix.
It didn’t help, Correus thought, that Felix was so plainly not Ygerna’s child. Ygerna was white-skinned and dark-haired, with black eyes and dark, winging brows in a sharp-pointed face. She hardly came up to Correus’s collarbone. That was the sidhe blood in her, her grandmother’s folk, the little Dark People, the Old Ones of Britain who had ruled before the golden Celts had come. She had been a royal woman and a priestess of her tribe, the Goddess-on-Earth through whom Earth Mother made her presence felt, before she had been a hostage to the Roman governor and then, in the end, a Roman citizen – Flavia Agricolina on the official papers, in honor of the governor who had requested the citizenship and the Flavian emperor who had granted it.
Felix’s mother, Freita, had been a German woman, tall enough to look Correus in the eye, and if there was something of his father in the shape and features of his face, Felix’s coloring was all his mother’s. His thick hair was the sleek gold color of ripe barley, and his eyes were as green as sea grass. He was strong and big boned, like the half-German colts his grandfather raised for cavalry remounts, and as much in need of discipline. By the time he was eleven, he would be taller than his stepmother. Correus wouldn’t be surprised if Felix outweighed her two years before that.
“He’ll come round,” Correus said again. He didn’t think that sounded like much help, but no other thoughts occurred to him. “You were doing fine last night.”
“I was teaching him to play Wisdom,” Ygerna said. “I learned it when I was his age. As long as I act like a sister, we do well enough. It’s when I try to be a mother and say no that we get into trouble.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Correus said. “It’s not Felix’s best word. But you’re right about the emperor’s games. I’m not taking a five-year-old to watch men kill each other. There will be races at the Circus Maximus next week, and he can go to those.”
Ygerna snorted. “I suppose men don’t kill each other in your chariot races.”
“Not intentionally,” Correus said. “At least I don’t think so. They’re certainly no worse than some British races I’ve seen. And there’ll be trained elephants and whatnot. Felix’ll love it. You tell him he can go to that and see if it takes the sting out of the other. You ought to see the circus yourself, before you get too fat to be comfortable sitting so long.”
He put a hand on her belly, and she glared at him. “I am not fat,” she said with dignity, “and I don’t even show yet.” Ygerna was more than five months along with her own child.
Most days she was pleased with that, but there were times when she would have liked to let Correus try being pregnant and see how much he cared for the experience.
“Yes, Princess.” He bowed gravely to her, and she grinned at him. For some reason, Ygerna never looked like a Roman when she showed any emotion. There was something about joy or anger or just plain disgust that would bring out the sidhe blood in her and give her face an odd, exotic cast. Correus’s own mother always explained to people that her daughter-in-law used to be a witch, and Correus had long ago given u
p trying to point out to Helva the difference between a priestess and a witch. Helva knew it well enough, anyway. And, looking at Ygerna, Correus sometimes thought that there wasn’t all that much difference.
Julius put his head through the doors that opened from the atrium to announce that Captain Caritius was hot to cast off and about to split his gut for fear of missing the tide; the centurion had better hop to it.
“The centurion will be with the captain directly,” Ygerna said repressively. She was trying to train Julius into a proper majordomo, but so far no one felt that she had had much success. She stood up and kissed her husband. “Go and attend to your sailors. We’ll meet you in Rome at your father’s house.”
The one bright spot of the emperor’s latest assignment, Correus thought as he walked up the boarding plank of the Misenum Fleet’s flagship with Caritius, was that Ygerna had agreed to brave the rigors of a full-fledged family gathering, and spend the time that he was posted to Rome at his father’s house outside the City. At least he would have her warm company at night instead of a century of sailors and the dubious comforts of the Praetorian Guards barracks. And maybe that would keep the dreams at bay.
* * *
The whole world came to the emperor’s games that year – a hundred days of spectacles, horse races, and trained elephants, wild beasts, gladiators, and, always, blood – an endless celebration of anything that anyone could think of to celebrate, from the emperor Titus’s accession to the purple to the completion of the newest wonder in that city of wonders, the Flavian Amphitheater: four tiers of smooth travertine stone from the quarries of Albulae, brought to Rome on a road especially built to carry it, soaring skyward above Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, above gilded statues in their niches, to the great, multicolored canvas awnings that shaded the inner bowl and the arena floor below. The light flowed brightly red, blue, and yellow, like paint poured through the awnings, giving a circus gaudiness to the gilded statues and the spectators in their seats. From the marble boxes of the privileged on the first level, up through the public tiers to the galleries on the top, the seats were filled with pages, attendants, message carriers, and laughing, pushing holiday-makers, trailing cushions and hampers of food.