Jocasta blinked and sat up on her bed. “You haven’t been here more than ten minutes!” she said indignantly. “You’re going to destroy my reputation!”
“Sorry,” Alexander told her, a twinkle in his eyes. “I have an appointment to keep.”
“You said I was your last stop.”
“On the tour that duty impels me to make, yes.”
“You don’t want to fuck me?” Jocasta wasn’t sure if she should be outraged or not. Did I age in the past month? Am I some old and stringy harridan all of a sudden?
The twinkle in his eyes became more pronounced, but his lips barely curved. “I’m feeling remarkably sated at the moment. But if it will do your reputation harm for me to leave so soon, I can stay here and we can talk. How’s your sister doing?”
Jocasta gave him a narrow-eyed glance, wondering if he was making fun of her. “If you won’t take your one solid fuck a day, as any medicus would prescribe,” she told him, rolling to her feet, “at least let me give you a massage.”
He frowned. “No more than twenty minutes,” he told her, taking off his toga and tunic, revealing the cleanly-muscled torso underneath—and the vicious scar right over his heart. The amulet of Sekhmet, she’d seen many times before, but it almost seemed to be glowing tonight.
“You really are concerned about this appointment,” she murmured as he lay on the bed, face-down.
“You have no idea,” he replied, and then she felt his muscles go limp as she began to work the wolf’s blood oil into his back. Shoulders. She straddled his narrow hips, feeling the oil tingle in her palms, as it always did, and along her thighs now, too, as she poured more on his skin. Half a bottle, Livia said. This is going to get my bed even messier than it usually is. Down to the buttocks now, though he’d not taken off his subligaria, for some reason. Sliding back, and then down the backs of the hard thighs, too, thumbs working in circles. Hearing soft groans of pure pleasure and relaxation as she did. “So what’s her name?” Jocasta asked, feeling a prickle along her tongue. “I’m sure your appointment has one.”
“She told me she wants to be called Aurea.” Alexander’s voice was slurred, and very close to sleep.
Jocasta moved up again, straddling his hips once more, though now they were slick from the oil. Felt a bit more of a sting than she expected in her own most tender places, but ignored it; it had never really been an issue before with the wolf’s blood. “Aurea? That’s not a name, that’s just the word for a coin I’ll never see,” she laughed, draping herself along his back, rubbing her breasts enticingly against his shoulder blades. “Why do you want to meet with her, anyway?”
“Because I’m in love with her,” Alexander replied sleepily. “Didn’t even know there was a difference between loving someone, and being in love with them. I hope Tiberius likes her. I . . . hope she likes Tiberius.”
Jocasta suddenly felt deeply sleepy, herself. Prickling warmth radiating up from all along his body, like a toasty fire. “Why . . . would that matter?” she asked, her tongue thick in her mouth. Something isn’t right, her mind nagged at her. Why am I . . . so sleepy? He said . . . no more . . . than twenty minutes . . . ?
“Might not matter at all. But I’d like them to.”
She never heard the answer.
______________
Alexander snapped awake, feeling the amulet against his chest burn with cold. Heaviness over his back, not a crushing weight, but definitely about a hundred pounds more than he’d like. His entire back felt as if it were on fire, his heart stuttered in his chest, and raw nausea filled him, making him spew uncontrollably into the pillow just in front of him. He could smell his own bile as it tried to fill his nostrils, and he recoiled, very distantly grateful that he hadn’t eaten much dinner at all. Whatever was on his back slipped free limply, rolling away from him with a thump, and he threw up again, his vision skewing.
He tried to get to his feet, failed, and fell out of the bed. Crawled to the door. Managed to remember, after several moments, how to work the latch. Got the door open, and called in a low voice down the hall, “Help. I . . . need help. . . .”
______________
Minucius Spurius, the frumentarii agent who’d been accompanying Alexander on his rounds, hastened down the brothel’s hallway, aware of various other doors cracking open along his path. He scowled in the direction of both whores and customers, and the doors shut once more. He found his young employer sitting half-naked against the plaster wall, barely able to hold his head up, a strange, medicinal smell around him. Poison, was the first thought that crossed Spurius’ mind, and he got his hands under the younger man’s arms, feeling oil on the skin, making it slick and harder to move Alexander. He kicked the door open, and half-carried him back into the room—and saw the limp body of the young whore Alexander was here to visit, sprawled across the bed. In here, the medicinal smell was much stronger, and he could feel a faint tingling in his hands now, himself. I fucking hate poisons and poisoners, he thought grimly. He’d seen far too much of this kind of shit in the east.
Spurius let Alexander fall into a chair. Checked the girl’s pulse in her wrist, and could barely feel the flutter of a heartbeat there. Wiped his hands free of the oil on a piece of cloth, and got Alexander’s tunic over his head. Wrapped the white folds of the toga around the girl’s body, already pragmatically trying to determine his best course of action. Throw her over my shoulder. Get the young lord on his feet, his arm over my other shoulder, walk him out of here. Get him on his horse, belly-down . . . looks bad, but can say he’s had too much to drink. Get him to the villa of the Julii, and drop this harlot in the Tiber . . . no. Too public.
Alexander’s eyes fluttered open. “Spurius,” he said, his breathing labored now.
“Yes, dominus. Trying to work out how to get you to the villa—“
“No! Too . . . many . . . eyes.” Alexander struggled upright. “Merges. And . . . call for Ianthe. At the winter camp . . . of the Sixteenth.”
Spurius felt a chill go through him. He knew of the priestess of Hecate. He’d managed to avoid being on Alexander’s detail any of the days on which the young lord had visited the Empress’ private school. “You’re sure?”
“Knows . . . her poisons. Knows . . . antidotes.”
Spurius swallowed. “Yes, my lord. Can you walk?”
“With help.” Sweat trickled down Alexander’s face, and his head swung almost blindly towards the bed. “Jocasta?”
Who? Oh. The whore. Spurius frowned. “Not quite dead yet. Probably best to get rid of the evidence—“
“I didn’t kill her!” That was a stark whisper.
“No, my lord, it’s fairly evident she tried to kill you, but no one outside this room will believe that.”
“Bring her. With us. To Merges.” Each cluster of words punctuated by a gasp for breath, Alexander managed to get himself upright, and then his knees buckled, and Spurius had to catch him. “And the bottle of oil. Had to come. From somewhere.”
Spurius groaned under his breath. The young lord needed to lose some of his sentimentality. It was baggage that only weighed him down. But an order was an order. He got Alexander leaning against a wall. Stoppered the bottle and tucked it in a fold of his own toga, praying to all the gods of the underworld that none of the shit in it would bleed through onto his own skin. Tossed the girl’s limp body over his shoulder, wondering if she were even breathing still, and then put Alexander’s left arm over his shoulder. And somehow got them all out the door.
Aware of the doors cracking open behind him, Spurius got Alexander onto one horse, where the young lord listed, but managed to sit more or less upright. Put the girl in front of his own saddle, and held her up, while paying the servants who’d been holding the horses. And then added, tersely, “There’s an assarius in it for you, lad, if you run to Flavius the fishmonger on the docks, and tell him Spurius needs fresh eels sent to Merges.”
“Fresh eels?” the boy said, staring at the reeling Alexander and the unconsc
ious girl.
“Yes,” Spurius said, deadpan. “Good eating for when you’ve had as much to drink as these two have.”
And then he kicked his horse and led Alexander’s back to the taverna near the theater. Hoping that Flavius, damn his hide, would remember the code, and would bring several slippery frumentari agents with him, and not a basket of eels fresh-caught from the Tiber this morning.
______________
Servia Sulpicia had spent the evening since dinner happily occupied at the desk in what she was slowly coming to consider a home away from home. She’d decided that her cast of characters wouldn’t be the commoners usually found in comedy, no matter what Aristotle had to say about that. Nobles are for tragedy and commoners are for comedy, my ass, she’d decided. If Alexander wants to see a play about high-class hypocrisy, how can I possibly show that with a flock of Hellene shepherds?
Her mind had drifted, and she’d decided on the title, first and foremost: Masters and Servants. There. Something for everyone. I can have the low-brow clowns that everyone turns out to see, and the high-born people that Alexander wants to mock. We need young lovers, since this is a comedy. Forcibly separated by their families. Should I bring in Marcellus, scurrying off to marry a woman he hadn’t seen since he was three years old, because his family demands it? No, too easy to recognize, unless I disguise it—ahh, our young hero, just back from the wars, is in love with one of the family slaves, an Egyptian girl, and wants to free and marry her. Except his family has betrothed him elsewhere, and his beloved slave also has another possible lover—the butler. His father is . . . like Rullus, I think. All stern lectures on how even if the girl was free, she couldn’t make more Roman babies . . . whoops, no. This has to be set in Hellas. Or does it, really? Do I really need that much distance? At any rate, he’s all stern lectures in public, but behind everyone’s back, he’s sneaking out at night to visit his favorite male prostitute, like in Aristophanes’’ The Frogs. Oh, this has potential. What’s the mother like? Why, she’s sleeping with the same butler who has designs on our maiden fair! Sulpicia’s stylus cut into the wax, and she chuckled to herself, already imagining bawdy, farcical scenes that she’d couch in the best poetry she could manage. And our hero’s bride-to-be? Sulpicia tapped the stylus against her teeth, and then laughed under her breath. Why, none other than Octavia Thurina. Suitably disguised and exaggerated. Do I dare have her ask our hero if he’d please bring a cyclops home from Etna, the next time he visits Sicily?
She snickered under her breath and launched into the prologue, light banter between two slaves in verse, to set the scene. Then heard a thud beside the door. Turned with a smile, expecting nothing more than Alexander coming through the door to greet her with a kiss.
And then her smile vanished as a strange man helped Alexander through the door. Her lover’s face was nearly gray, and his toga was missing, his tunic stained across the shoulders with some sort of fluid. He staggered to the bed and dropped there, convulsing briefly as he tried to retch, but brought nothing up but a thin trickle of bile on the floor. “Darling,” Sulpicia said, dropping to her knees and stroking his face. “You didn’t eat dinner—it can’t be that! What happened?”
“Poison,” Alexander managed to whisper, and then another thud from the doorway got her attention.
The man once more appeared, this time carrying a slim form wrapped in a white toga. He dropped this person unceremoniously on the floor, and regarded Sulpicia herself now, warily. “Careful, domina,” the man told her forthrightly. “Think the poison went in through his skin, so mind where you touch the young lord, right?” He took a bottle from inside his own toga’s folds carefully now, with two fingers, and set it more cautiously on Sulpicia’s desk.
“Ianthe,” Alexander said, raising his head, making eye-contact with the man.
“Already sent a man for the priestess of Hecate. She’ll be here inside twenty minutes, if I know Flavius.”
Priestess of Hecate? Sulpicia blinked.
Alexander heaved himself upright, and Sulpicia looked from him to the bundle on the floor. Saw long, dark hair streaming out of the folds of the toga. Her eyebrows rose, and she gave Alexander a less friendly look. “Who is she?” Sulpicia asked, her heart twinging suddenly.
“Jocasta. Informant.” Alexander’s shaking hands found the bottom of his tunic, and he pulled it up and over his head. The thick wool had been a very good thing; it had concealed that his amulet now glowed almost blindingly with magic. And that his back and shoulders were almost scarlet, as if with sunburn . “She’s . . . a whore. But . . . I didn’t . . . didn’t sleep with her.” He caught her hand now, pressing her fingers tightly with his own, and she could feel the tremors wracking him as he slowly listed back down onto their sleeping couch, face-first. “Haven’t . . . with anyone else. Not since you.” He turned his head to the side, trying to meet her eyes, and Sulpicia leaned in closer, so she could make out words among his mumbling. “Love my family. Love Ti’s spirit. Love your mind, Via. Love you.”
He closed his eyes, and Sulpicia, her mind whirling, rose. Unable to make sense of half of what she’d just heard, she seized her stola from the bed—she’d never bothered putting it back over her tunic—and a pitcher of wine. Water won’t do it. Water doesn’t clean oil worth a damn. Poured the wine into the soft wool, and started scrubbing at his back, as carefully as she could, trying to avoid touching his skin, or any of the folds of the cloth. If it came in through the skin, through the oil that’s making his skin shine, and has left him as red as if stained with beet-juice, then . . . I need to get it off of him. Before any more of it goes through into his body.
Within twenty minutes, more people entered the room. More of the strange, cold-eyed men. All older, usually with scars that spoke of old military service. And a woman in a peplos, in spite of the Februarius chill. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, she entered the room, looking at first timid . . . and then straightening her back and lifting her chin as if she were a queen. Picked up the bottle when it was pointed out to her, and sniffed it, once. “Aconite,” she muttered. “Wolfsbane. Someone knew their art fairly well.” She knelt and checked the unconscious woman on the floor, her face a mask of concentration. “This is the poisoner? Strange that she’d be affected by her own brew.”
“It’s possible that she didn’t know what she was using,” one of the men replied curtly. “Is she alive?”
“Barely. Get me a brazier with coals. I need to brew antidotes. In the meantime, elevate her feet with some cushions and get her a blanket.” Firm, authoritative tone, and then the woman moved over to examine Alexander. Her eyebrows rose. “Very good thinking,” she complimented Sulpicia calmly. “You’ve taken most of the poison off his skin. Are your hands tingling?”
“A little,” Sulpicia admitted.
“Wash your hands in wine, then in vinegar, then in water, and then throw all of the fluids straight into the lavatory. No sense you getting ill, as well.” She checked Alexander’s pulse with impersonal fingers, and peeled back one of his eyelids—at which point he awoke, groaning a bit. “You’re in better shape than you have any right to be, considering the strength of the dose in that bottle—ah.” As he sat up, the amulet against his chest once more appeared, its glow diminished, but still present. “Sekhmet appears to have protected you. You should give her thanks for your life.”
“It’s been cold all day,” Alexander muttered shakily. “Since dawn.”
“Didn’t Lord Tiberius have a matching one, my lord?” Two men entered the room, carrying a brazier with coals, setting it down nearby, and the woman turned away to root through the bag she’d carried into the room, coming up with a strange, bifurcated root, which she quickly peeled and chopped, muttering under her breath as she did.
“He does,” Alexander confirmed, wrapping his fingers around the amulet. “You think . . . something could have . . . happened to him, too?” He looked dazed. “Coordinated attack?”
“Doubtful,” one of the cold-eyed men rep
lied. “If something happened to him, it’s coincidence, my lord. You have any orders for us?”
Sulpicia helped Alexander sit up as the woman in the peplos brewed something foul-smelling from the root in the pot. He leaned against her unashamed, and managed to raise his head again. “Get someone to Jocasta’s house. Check to see . . . if her sister’s still there. Or if anyone else is watching the place. Doubt . . . doubt she’d do this on her own. Or even . . . or even knowingly.”
One of the men saluted and left immediately, his boots thudding on the stairs. Another man prompted, “And the brothel, dominus? Quite a few people saw you leave. Quite a bit worse for wear.”
“So long as I’m out in public tomorrow . . . will just . . . add to my reputation. . . as a reprobate. . . . but have to make sure. . . Jocasta lives.” Alexander doubled over again, retching, but as much as he heaved, nothing came up. Sulpicia could feel every spasm wrack him with all the strength in his body. Finally, weakly, he added, “Don’t . . . need a reputation . . . as a killer of women . . . dose her first, Ianthe.”
“You took more of the poison than she did,” Ianthe replied tersely.
“And Sekhmet’s . . . little gift . . . is doing more . . . than I ever thought it would. Help her. I need to know . . . who’s behind this.”
Sulpicia stroked his sweat-soaked hair. Gave him water to drink, which he almost immediately brought back up. Rubbed his back, a piece of cloth over her hand, trying to help him breathe. And watched as Ianthe, clearly the priestess of Hecate, took a carefully-measured dose of the brew she’d concocted. Let it cool a little, and then ordered two of the men in the room with them, “I need a reed about nine inches long, and a funnel. Get them from the man downstairs who runs the bar. When he comes back with it, you will need to hold her sitting up. Use the sheath of your knife to prop her jaws open. And I’ll need more light.”
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