He Is Worthy

by Lisa Henry

  Senna wondered if that was possible. Was that the way love worked? But he never doubted the depth of Lucan and Junia’s love. It had been stronger, in the end, than pain and fear. That was worth something, Senna thought, or maybe it was worth nothing at all. He couldn’t tell anymore.

  Lucan never implicated her. Over twenty deaths, from senators to slaves, and Junia could so easily have been among them. Might have been, if Senna hadn’t come back to Rome to bow and scrape and beg for ways to prove his loyalty, his family’s loyalty. For Junia, not for himself. So he came when he was summoned, he went where he was told, and he did what he was asked.

  Back when she could still bring herself to look at him, Junia had screamed at Senna that his ambition made her sick.

  Stoicism, cowardice, ambition . . . they all manifested the same way. Even Senna wasn’t sure anymore which one guided him the most.

  Titus knew. Titus, who had gathered up the shattered remains of Junia’s life, and was still gathering up Senna’s. Every few weeks, Senna met Titus in this shithole of an apartment in this shithole that was the Transtiberina, and every few weeks Titus promised that Senna had done the only thing he could.

  Axios, Corbulo had said.

  Unlike Lucan, Corbulo was innocent. His only crime was his popularity.

  Axios: he is worthy.

  A bald-faced lie, but it was the only one Corbulo could have told that day. It was the only one that would have protected his family. Senna understood that. It was why it was better that Junia didn’t speak to him, that he met Titus in secret. Distance protected them all.

  “Is she well?” he asked his brother-in-law.

  Titus nodded. “She is well. The baby is well. He is old enough to travel now.”

  “Good,” Senna said, a rush of relief washing over him. “You need to be gone as soon as you can.”

  “Two days,” Titus said. “My uncle in Greece will find a house for us.” He frowned. “Will you tell me what you’re planning, Senna?”

  “No.”

  “Does Felix know?”

  Senna’s secretary knew most of his secrets, but not this one. “No.”

  Titus was silent.

  “I would like . . .” Senna left the thought unfinished. He shook his head and lifted up his cup again. “Fuck it all. Our fates are written in the stars. Crying about it won’t change a thing.”

  Not for him, not for Lucan, not for Junia and Titus.

  Not for anyone.

  “It’s good-bye, then,” he said at last.

  Titus looked away.

  Senna forced a smile. “Do me a favor, Titus. Travel quickly, keep my sister safe, and don’t look back.”

  Senna received another invitation to the Golden House within the week. He went early, as requested. It was still light when he left his house on the Caelian Hill. He closed his eyes as his litter bearers jostled, struggling to find their rhythm. At the bottom of the hill, where the street met a wider thoroughfare, his litter bearers turned toward the Palatine Hill. Senna kept the curtains of the litter closed against the noise and bustle of the city.

  The Golden House was massive, a fitting monument to Nero’s self-aggrandizement. When it was finished, if such a glorious architectural wonder could ever be truly said to be finished, it would cover a third of Rome. What the fire had razed, Nero had reclaimed.

  Coincidence.

  Just coincidence.

  When Senna’s litter bearers deposited him outside the grotto, he was met by an unctuous imperial slave. “Novius Senna, please follow me.” The slave bobbed his head. “Tigellinus awaits.”

  And those, Senna thought, were probably the last words ever heard by better men than himself. Gaius Ophonius Tigellinus, co-head of the Praetorian Guard, was safer to know as a friend than an enemy, but only marginally. He was cruel and vicious, and it amused him to inflict pain on others. Tigellinus was the voice in Nero’s ear, whispering at him to do what he wanted, to go further than he had previously dared, to be monstrous.

  Senna followed the slave.

  They passed the entrance to the grotto, crossed a garden, cut through a shaded colonnade, and climbed a set of shallow steps that led up into an artfully fashioned grove of trees. The trees were carved from marble. Their leaves, cut from thin sheets of gold and silver, tinkled like chimes in the breeze. It was the sort of spectacle Senna would have applauded once. Now he hardly noticed it.

  His attention was on the bound slave.

  One of Nero’s boys, although this one looked older than Nero preferred. The lean musculature belonged to a young man, not an adolescent.

  The boy lifted his head as Senna approached. Senna saw a flash of green eyes before Tigellinus kicked the boy lightly on the flank to remind him of his place. Green eyes, hair the color of ripe barley, and dark leather straps that crossed back and forth over his pale skin.

  “Ah, Senna!” Tigellinus smiled.

  Senna clasped Tigellinus’s forearm, tearing his gaze from the bound slave. “Tigellinus. Good to see you again.”

  Tigellinus smiled knowingly. “Do you like the look of this one?”

  Senna flushed. “I haven’t seen one bound like that before. Is he a fighter?”

  Tigellinus’s smile grew. “No.”

  Senna’s mouth was dry. He looked at the slave again.

  The slave was on his knees, bent over so his forehead touched the ground. His arms were pulled behind his back, his wrists bound. The leather wound from his wrists up to above his elbows. His arms strained against the bonds, his flesh swelling between the leather strips. His wrists touched; his elbows almost did. Senna bet it burned like fire across his shoulders, through his chest.

  A loop of leather hung loose around the slave’s throat, tied like a noose, the end brushing the ground.

  His legs were strapped ankle to knee. Again, the juxtaposition of leather and pale skin caught Senna’s eye. The slave’s legs were pulled apart, keeping him open, keeping him off balance. The muscles in his thighs and ass trembled with the strain of holding himself in position. Senna wondered if he’d feel those straining muscles working on his cock if he fucked the boy.

  Jupiter, he was a thing of beauty.

  Tigellinus laughed. “He has a certain appeal, doesn’t he? I didn’t think he’d last a night, but he’s proved me wrong, haven’t you, Canis?”

  Dog.

  “Yes, master,” the slave moaned. The muscles in his back undulated.

  Senna’s heart thumped. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted to fuck someone so much. It made no sense to take pleasure in the slave’s subjugation when his own was just as complete, if not as blatant. It was the blatant that made his breath catch in his throat: the leather bindings, the trembling muscles, and the boy’s struggle to endure.

  A woman scurried into the artificial grove, holding out a bag.

  “Ah!” Tigellinus reached in. “Marble, good. Nice and heavy.”

  Senna’s eyes widened. Shit, that was bigger than a cock. It belonged on a statue of Priapus, or a fucking horse.

  Tigellinus tested the weight of it in his hand. He caught Senna’s gaze. “Do you know Marcinus?”

  What did Marcinus have to do with a marble dildo? Nothing, probably. Senna tried to concentrate on Tigellinus’s face, not that fist holding the dildo. Not the shivering slave.

  “Ah, Lepidus Marcinus? The magistrate?” A dull, unimportant man if Senna remembered. A bit pompous, a bit of a moralist.

  “He is making noises,” Tigellinus said. He held the dildo out to the woman, who produced a vial of oil and drizzled it over the cold marble.

  “Noises,” Senna repeated, his stomach clenching.

  “About what he considers to be the emperor’s moral laxity.” Tigellinus shook his head, as though the accusations were baseless. As though he wasn’t the man who was always goading Nero into further infamies. As though he wasn’t about to take the thing in his hand and shove it into a bound, unwilling body.

  Senna averted his eyes as
Tigellinus moved behind the slave.

  “An unfortunate situation,” Tigellinus said.

  Lepidus Marcinus’s, or the slave’s?

  Senna fixed his gaze on the fluttering gold and silver leaves, tinkling and chiming together. When the breeze caught them, they made music. They burned in the sunlight.

  “Something will need to be done,” Tigellinus said.

  “Yes,” said Senna.

  The bound slave cried out suddenly.

  “Push back,” Tigellinus said, clicking his tongue impatiently.

  Senna looked.

  The boy was writhing in his bonds like a snake trying to shed its skin. The marble dildo was obscenely large, protruding from between his lean buttocks. He couldn’t take it, surely. He rocked back and forth, whimpering, his forehead knocking against the ground. His pale, lean body shone with sweat.

  “You must deliver a message to him,” Tigellinus said, the tendons in his wrist cording as he applied more force to the dildo.

  The slave sobbed as the marble slid farther into his body.

  Senna felt light-headed. He swiped his tongue over his dry lips and reined in his thoughts. Tigellinus. Marcinus. Not the boy. Don’t look at the boy.

  “Will the message to Marcinus be the usual?”

  You no longer have the friendship of the emperor. Senna was tired of being the herald of death. How long would it be until one of Nero’s enemies—and the number of them must have been growing daily—killed him in a dark street? There was a time he would have welcomed it. He would have thanked the man and wished him well. A clean, blameless exit from an untenable existence.

  Except now he had a fucking plan, didn’t he? He’d done what was wrong for long enough. Junia and Titus were safe. It was time to do what was right.

  “You will take it,” Tigellinus said.

  Senna fought an absurd urge to laugh. Which one of them was Tigellinus talking to? Both of them were getting fucked by the man, one way or another.

  Tigellinus ran a hand down the boy’s trembling flank. “Good.”

  The boy panted and moaned.

  Senna shifted uncomfortably. He told himself he didn’t enjoy pointless cruelty, not even against slaves. His father had raised him to treat slaves fairly. They weren’t cheap, after all, especially the pretty ones. Why buy them just to sacrifice them to strange pleasures? To use a slave to the point of injury or death made bad economic sense.

  There had been a time when Nero had been good to the slaves, when he had made laws to protect them against cruel masters. Not anymore. Not for a long time.

  This boy was proof of that.

  Senna didn’t want to watch, but he couldn’t help it. He also couldn’t help the way his cock hardened as the boy shivered in his bonds. There wasn’t much difference between a moan of pain and a moan of pleasure, and the sounds that the boy made as Tigellinus pushed the dildo into his body could have been either.

  They weren’t, but Senna told himself they could have been.

  It disgusted him that he wanted to fuck the slave.

  “Good boy,” Tigellinus said in a gentle tone that surprised Senna more than the man’s brutality. Tigellinus moved his hand down the boy’s spine, his fingers pushing at every knot.

  The boy arched his back into the touch and whimpered. Senna’s breath caught in his throat at the sound, and his balls tightened.

  “Keep it in,” Tigellinus told him, “until the show.”

  Nero loved theater in the same way that children loved to dress in costumes and play act. Senna found it difficult to watch, and even more difficult to laugh when the emperor, dressed in a bear skin complete with bronze claws, leapt onto his helpless prey in the silver and gold forest.

  A small audience urged him on, shrieking with delight at his growls and roars, and Senna wondered how many of them were acting as well.

  Tigellinus, his face red with wine and laughter, leaned in close to Senna. “The message to Marcinus. You will deliver it tomorrow, before he goes to the Senate.”

  “As you wish,” Senna said.

  Tigellinus smiled.

  Senna knew it pleased the man, a middle-ranking equite, to lord it over a patrician like Senna. Tigellinus probably thought that every order he gave Senna was a massive blow to his pride, but Senna wasn’t proud. That had died with Lucan and the others.

  Senna’s father had been a senator, his uncle governor of Hispania Lusitania, and his great-uncle a consul during the reign of Tiberius. Lucius Novius Senna came from a line of great men. Senna’s ancestors had been building Rome when Tigellinus’s had been struggling to build fire. Tigellinus’s ancestors were turnip farmers and goat fuckers. Senna had seen that scrawled on a wall in the Forum once. It had been gone by morning, and rightly so. It was an insult to every turnip farmer and goat fucker who had ever lived.

  Senna laughed when the rest of the audience did, and tried not to remember that Nero had once been his friend. They’d been young, full of poetry and big ideas. Nero had wanted to change the world.

  Nero pulled on the leash, snapping the slave’s head back.

  Senna met the boy’s gaze and saw a hundred things before his head dropped down again, a hundred different emotions that swirled in his guts, lodging there like a bitter accusation. Jupiter, how could a single glance say so much? The slave might as well have leaned down and whispered in his ear, Why are you laughing, you fucking animal?

  Or maybe that was his conscience. Senna wasn’t sure he recognized the sound of it anymore.

  Senna watched as Nero dug his bronze claws into the pale flesh of the slave’s throat. Crimson blood welled. Senna watched the blood because he didn’t dare look away, and he didn’t want to watch Nero’s bearskin-clad ass pound back and forth as he fucked the slave.

  Senna shifted, adjusting the fall of his toga to cover an erection that sickened him.

  Nero had loved a girl once. A slave. What had happened to her? She’d been pretty and clever. Did Nero ever think of her when he used slaves this way?

  The boy was unconscious before Nero finished.

  Afterward, when Nero dropped onto the ground between Tigellinus and Senna and wiped his sweaty face, he was restless and out of sorts.

  “A marvelous display!” Tigellinus crowed.

  Nero wrinkled his nose and sighed. “I am a little bit tired of your German, Tigellinus.”

  Senna watched him tap his bronze claws against the ground. They were bloody.

  “He’s too old,” Nero said. “Don’t you think, Senna?” He scraped a claw up Senna’s forearm, painting a thin trail of the slave’s blood on Senna’s skin.

  Senna’s flesh crawled, but he flashed a smile. “I suppose so.”

  Nero beamed, the smile transforming his unremarkable face. “Did you like it? Was it fun?”

  You’re a tyrant, Senna wanted to say. You’re a monster. You’re everything they scream in the streets and worse, and I fucking hate you. I look at you and I want to take a knife and plunge it in your heart. I’d do it now, if I thought I could manage it before the Praetorians killed me.

  He laughed instead. “It was amazing. You always put on such shows for your friends, when really we’ve done little to deserve your generosity.”

  Nero flushed with happiness. Strange that after all this time, flattery could still please him. “You’ve always been a worthy friend, Senna!”

  Juno’s left tit, Senna’s own hypocrisy made him want to vomit up every mouthful of the expensive Falernian he’d guzzled just to get through this fucking night.

  Instead he clasped Nero’s proffered hand and let the emperor pull him into a brotherly embrace. His first in months, and the watching Praetorians bristled. Where was a knife when Senna needed one? He smiled instead, and leaned into the embrace.

  Nero stank of fur, sweat, wine, cum, and the blood of the German slave.

  Senna left the Golden House after Nero’s show and took his litter to a house on the Pincian Hill. A slave admitted him and fetched his master. Th
e magistrate Marcinus offered Senna a drink. A drink, when they both knew exactly why he was here at such an hour.

  “You have a message for me, Novius Senna?” the old man asked finally.

  “Yes.”

  The frescoes on the wall reminded him of a different time: pastoral scenes, crops and harvests and cattle and fowl. Marcinus was old enough to remember when a man’s worth was judged by the land he owned and cultivated for the benefit of Rome, not for his depravities.

  Senna’s gaze traveled from the frescoes to the woman standing in the doorway.

  Marcinus smiled. When he spoke, there was a hint of a challenge in his voice. “You may speak in front of my wife, Lucius.”

  Lucius. The sound of Marcinus speaking his praenomen sent a jolt through his body. He remembered too late that Marcinus and his father had been friends, that the familiarity of the frescoes was something more than nostalgia for a certain style. He’d played in this room as a child.

  If Marcinus thought an old association or innocence would prevent Senna from delivering his message, he was mistaken. Senna had crossed that line a year ago in Cenchreae. The memory hardened his resolve. He looked Marcinus in the face.

  “You no longer have the friendship of the emperor,” he said, and left the house with the cries of the old man’s wife echoing in his skull.

  So that was done.

  In the morning, Marcinus would be dead. How he chose to do it was his own business. A hot bath and a sharp blade would be Senna’s choice. He’d thought about it. So had everyone, probably. These were black days.

  Senna told himself he could go straight home now, to his house on the Caelian Hill, but instead he returned to the Golden House. His face was known there, and the guards admitted him back inside. He went to the gardens first. The cool air brought him out in gooseflesh. His nerves wound tighter with every step.

  A single green-eyed glance. What if he’d imagined the challenge in it? What if this slave wasn’t the one he needed?

  One look and I knew, Lucan had said years ago. If that was true of love, why not of hate?

  The German slave wasn’t in the silver grove. It was empty. The artificial leaves gleamed in the moonlight.