by Vox Day
Indeed, the fall of Clusius has been the talk of the city. I regret that I cannot recall the man’s name, but last night I hosted several of my friends to dinner, including Quintus Falconius, whom you may recall has long been an admirer of yours, and a libation was made in honor of the bout. I thought it was rather well phrased. “In the West and in the East the name of Clusius shall be known to posterity, and because of Clusius, the name of Montanus shall live on.” Montanus was already a champion, of course, but he may well find himself presented with the wooden sword at the end of the season thanks to the noble death of Silicus Clusius.
That is all my news, sister mine, and I beg you to write to me soon and assure me that all is well with Father, Mother, and little Severina. If you are not permitted to return until after the harvest festival, then I shall come to you.
Your affectionate brother,
M. Severus Tertius
Half-blind with tears that were more rage than sorrow, Severa stormed out of her room and down the marble stairs toward the courtyard, the last place she had heard her father’s voice since he’d returned from the city the day before. He was not there, but she saw her younger sister playing with a kitten in the shade of a wide-branched tree.
“Have you seen Father?” she demanded.
“What’s wrong, Severa?” Severina was only twelve years old and entirely absorbed with her cats. She showed signs of one day boasting their mother’s famous beauty, and her eyes were large and dreamy, betraying a tranquil nature that was decidedly uncharacteristic of the women of House Severus. Or, for that matter, the men.
“Everything!” Severa snapped. “And it’s all Father’s fault!”
The kitten batted at a leaf that was falling, then pounced upon it once it reached the ground, and her sister erupted into peals of laughter. “What are you doing, silly kitty-kit-kit? Do you think it’s a bird?”
“Severina, do you know where Father is?” Severa demanded from behind gritted teeth. Sometimes, it took all of her willpower not to slap the dreaminess right out of her sister’s eyes. Or strangle one of her wretched cats. “I really need to speak with him.”
“Oh, he’s in the library with one of the scribes. Maybe some of the barbarians too.” Severina giggled. “Feronia jumped up on the table and knocked over one of the ink pots. Her front paws were all black from the ink, and she made the cutest little kitty prints all over the parchment! I thought Father was going to be ever so furious with her, but he just laughed and said I should call her Feronia Scriptoria! Isn’t that funny?”
“You’re funny,” said Severa, her rage abating momentarily because of the smile that adorned her sister’s pretty face. It was so charming it was almost contagious. She leaned over and kissed Severina on the nose. “Be sure her paws are clean before you bring her back into the house.”
“I shall!” her sister promised cheerfully, before racing off in pursuit of the wayward kitten. “Come back here, you naughty baby!”
Severa laughed and shook her head. Seeing her sister chasing her cat reminded her that it was not all that long ago when the estate’s kittens and puppies were her foremost concerns in life. She looked back over her shoulder at the courtyard as she reached the top of the steps that led to the front door. There was a tranquil beauty here that she had been too young and restless to perceive at the time, but she could remember how happy she was here when she was Severina’s age, running through the fields and orchards, living each day as it came and never thinking about tomorrow. She could still appreciate the natural beauty now, but it no longer touched her soul. She simply had to return to the stinking, sinful, man-made splendor of Amorr, and in order to do that, she first had to confront her father. Her ruthless and murderous father.
She found him in the library still, dictating a letter to one of his small army of scribes. Upon seeing her enter the room, he stopped his dictation, and with a single gesture sent the elderly man scuttling unceremoniously from the room. She did not trust her voice, so she did not speak. Instead, she simply placed the letter on the table the scribe had left behind him.
He picked it up. Aulus Severus was a tall, spare man, and his white eyebrows were the only hair that remained on his head. He was not entirely bald, but every morning one of his bodyslaves shaved the stubble from the rear quarter of his scalp as well as his face. His face was large and bony, with the deep-set eyes of an ascetic or a monk sworn to one of the more rigid orders. His expression was calm, in direct contrast to most of his family. He was famous for seldom losing his temper or raising his voice. On the other hand, he was seldom seen to smile, except occasionally at his daughters. His skin was unblemished by the sun, as befitted a man who was at his best in the Senate or the scriptorium.
Not a spot of color showed on his cheeks as he glanced at the letter in her hand and nodded.
“I was aware Tertius was writing to you. I assume he is well.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out, Father?” Severa was so angry that she found it hard to decide where to start with him. “Did you really think someone wouldn’t tell me!”
“I might ask you that very same question, my dear.” He looked directly at her.
Despite her fury, she discovered to her chagrin that she could not bear to meet his serenely icy gaze. It was like trying to outstare a statue. She looked away.
“I assume you are referring to the death of the young gladiator from the Blue stable.”
“Clusius!” she shouted. “His name was Silicus Clusius. He was brave and he was beautiful and I loved him! I loved him, Father! And you had him killed! I know it, and you’ll never convince me otherwise even if you swear on the Tree of the Immaculate himself!”
“Why would I deny it?” Her father looked genuinely mystified. “Of course I had the poor lad killed. What else did you expect?”
Severa simply stared at him, mute with shock and astonishment. She had imagined and re-imagined this conversation over and over again in her head after reading Tertius’s letter, but never had she pictured it proceeding in this fashion. She had not imagined that he would freely admit to killing the young man she had loved without showing any more remorse than a cat killing a songbird.
“What did I expect? I don’t know! I suppose I expected you would be angry with me. I expected you would be disappointed in me! I can’t even say I was surprised when you interfered and swept me away from my life and my friends and my family in the city. But I never expected that my own father could ever sink so low as to murder a man his daughter loved!”
Her father didn’t react angrily to her words, he didn’t even look the slightest bit sorrowful. He merely sighed, as if she was just another tedious client, and ran his hand over his bald head.
“Oh, I am sorry, Father—am I boring you? Do you order so many murders each day that you find it tiresome to be called to account for one too minor to recall?” She stared at him challengingly, and this time, she did not look away.
Nor did he, until finally the faintest whisper of a smile seemed to touch his lips.
“You are a very beautiful young woman, Severa. You have your mother’s beauty and her passion too. I have no doubt you think you are a woman grown now, ready for love. But you are as untamed and as innocent of the ways of the world as your little sister’s cats.”
He tapped the letter and shook his head. “I hoped it would not be necessary to talk to you about your behavior. I hoped you would understand the error of your ways and the senseless danger into which you placed yourself, and the harm you could have done to our House. But most of all, I wished to spare you pain.”
“To spare me pain!” Severa shouted at him. “You killed a brave and beautiful man, the man I loved, and you’re going to tell me you murdered him to spare me pain? I don’t even…I can’t…” She ended with a wordless shriek, too angry and indignant to even think of what she wanted to say. She clutched at her hair, then buried her face in her hands. It was too obscene for words! It was abhorrent! It was grotesque!
> “Severa,” her father said softly.
She felt his hand caress her shoulder, and she blindly slapped it away.
“Don’t touch me!”
“Severa, my dear, I’m truly sorry.”
She raised her tear-stained face to look up at him and shook her head.
“No, you’re not. You just did what you always do: You went ahead and did whatever you wanted to, because you can always pretend that you didn’t do it for you, you did it for the family, or the House, or the City, or the Senate. It’s always for someone else. But somehow whatever you do is always just what you want! My poor Clusius got in the way of your plans for me, so of course he had to die. They might all call you Patronus because everyone in the Senate bows down before you, but you don’t fool me, Father. You’re every bit as selfish and self-serving as Bibulus or Sarmentus or any of those parasites at Virro’s table you despise. You just hide it better!”
To her surprise, he didn’t even blink at her angry words. He didn’t raise his head, flare his nostrils, or betray any other sign of irritation with her. For the first time since she’d finished reading the letter, she began to wonder if perhaps she had missed something important. Anger, she was ready for. Defensiveness, she could handle. But this unconcerned and disdainful calm unsettled her.
“Very well.” Her father sighed. “My dear, you leave me no choice. Am I correct in assuming you kept the gladiator’s letters to you?”
Severa hesitated. She sensed a trap closing in on her, but for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what it might be. Father already knew she had been exchanging letters with Clusius. And she knew that, except in her dreams, she hadn’t ever so much as kissed those full, enticing lips, much less run her hands over that magnificent, chiseled body. She decided to tell the truth.
“I have them.”
“And did you never stop to ask yourself where a young fighting man—a slave—would have learned to read, much less to write with such a neat hand? A Thursian slave, no less.”
Severa froze. It felt as if an icy hand had suddenly gripped her heart. She forced herself to swallow.
Her father continued, still speaking in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “You could not have been expected to recognize any of the allusions in his letters, of course. They come from a compendium of verse not fit for a young woman, and as such, they were not included in your education. But surely you have at least heard of the Amores, the Ars Amatoria, and the Dilectiloquium. If I were to read them to you now, I can assure you that you would recognize certain delicate turns of phrase, certain flowery expressions, all carefully selected to feed the fires of passion in a young woman’s heart.”
“You’re saying Clusius didn’t write his letters to me?”
No, that was impossible! She had seen him blow kisses to her, caught her breath as he winked at her. He had even worn the scrap of silk she sent him as a talisman of love and good luck on his arm! She had seen it with her own two eyes. How could he have done that if he hadn’t truly been corresponding with her? “I don’t believe you. You’re lying! I know you are!”
Her father reached behind him and withdrew a slender scroll from the wooden case behind him. “I am not lying to you, Severa. It is only that there is more to this situation than you imagine. Things are not always as simple as they seem. Read this.”
The letter was only a few lines long, addressed in a shockingly crude hand to one of her father’s scribes. She read it in an instant, her hand over her mouth.
To D. Aulapor, in the household of A. Severus Patronus
The slave named S. Clusius can’t no more read nor write than me. We got no fighter in the stables who can do neither. M. Ladrus is writing this down for me, same as he does for everyone in the Blues.
M. Ladrus for Pullus Mucro
Weaponsmaster
Stabulum Hibernum
Underneath the name the wolfshead insignia of the Blues was stamped, across which a large X had been scrawled.
Severa handed the scroll back to her father. She suddenly felt very hollow, very tired, and she could not bring herself to meet his eyes again. It wasn’t merely that Clusius couldn’t have written his letters, the crudeness of the gladiatorial scribe’s writing made it obvious that her erstwhile lover couldn’t have even dictated them.
“Why?” she asked dully. “I don’t understand. He knew me. He looked at me. He even wore my token the last time I saw him fight, one that I sent him myself.”
Her father nodded. Now she understood why he had been so calm and patient with her, why he hadn’t asked her any questions or angrily confronted her about her secret lover after whisking her away from the city. He had known the truth all along. She was still a virgin, which was his only real concern. Her secret love affair was nothing more than a dream, a puppet show she had mistaken for the real world. The love between her and her beautiful gladiator had never truly existed at all, except in her imagination.
“You were deceived, my dear. I’m not sure of the intentions of those who wrote you those letters and used the young lad. That night when you ran away…they may have been planning to take you and hold you for ransom, either for monetary gain or to neutralize me concerning an important matter in the Senate. They may have thought to weaken the House in the eyes of the public by making my daughter the butt of an infamous scandal about which the whole city would talk for weeks, if not months. Or perhaps they simply intended to kill you as a warning because they were not able to strike directly at me.”
Severa gasped, horrified by the deadly vista of evil to which he had opened her eyes. Never for one moment had she entertained the notion that the beautiful young gladiator might not be genuinely enamored of her, or that she could be putting herself, or House Severus itself, in any danger.
“I didn’t know,” she told him defensively.
“Yes, I am aware of that. You were foolish and disobedient, Severa, but it was not entirely your fault. I knew very nearly from the start, and yet I permitted it to continue nevertheless. Aulapor told me that you were writing to an inappropriate young man, and he gave me a copy of one of the letters from the youth in question. It was immediately apparent to both of us that no unlettered gladiator could possibly have written it. That was why I gave you your head. I was hoping to discover who was attempting to use you to strike at the House.”
“To strike at you, you mean. So you used me!” She pushed herself away from him. “You knew it was a lie, and you didn’t tell me!”
“You would not have been half so convincing had you known you were not actually writing to the young man. Your mother even noticed the change in your behavior. She approached me about it before you even sent him that scrap of silk.”
“But you could have told me something!”
He reached out and grasped her shoulders. “Listen to me, Severa. You know I am the first man in the Senate. Aside from the Sanctiff, I may be the most powerful man in the City. Now that the Sanctiff is gone and no new one is yet in his place, that makes me the most powerful man in all the Empire. Do you know the saying, ‘With great power comes great responsibility’?”
She nodded reluctantly.
“Well, hatred and envy and danger also follow come with responsibility. Amorr is a great city riven by powerful factions. A man can smile at you in the Senate in the morning and plot your death in the evening. The Houses Martial wage a secret war amongst themselves that has lasted for centuries, with the right to rule Amorr as the prize. Now, I have a vision for Amorr, one that will sustain it and assure its greatness for another four hundred years. But there are those who oppose that vision and will stop at nothing to prevent it.”
“But what senator would oppose that? Those disloyal to the city?”
“No, and therein lies the problem. My enemies believe the city will remain great simply because it is already great, that the key to success in the future lies in repeating what was done in the past. Nothing could be further from the truth! My enemies are Andronicus, Cassianu
s, and Valerius, all great Houses, but they are blind, obedient slaves to the rigid traditions of the past. None of them are willing to recognize that Amorr needs to transform itself before it is overwhelmed by the growing power of the allied cities. They distinguish between the City and the Empire, and in doing so they fail to realize that the two must eventually become one. They possess all the strengths and virtues of the Old Amorrans but fail to recognize that the world has changed. Their strengths are now weaknesses, and their virtue has become vice. It is their very loyalty to the City, admirable as that may be, that now threatens its long-term survival.”
Severa frowned. “Why does this have anything to do with me?”
“It has everything to do with all of us, Severa. With me, with you, with your children, and with your children’s children! Either the city will admit the allies to full citizenship or they will find common purpose with the provinces and one day swallow us whole. One or the other will happen. It is inevitable. There are too many provincials and too few Amorrans. If we cannot find a way to make them Amorrans, then they will destroy Amorr.
“When I was consul of the legions, I led five legions into Cynothicum. Five years later, Andronicus Caudinus became consul of the legions, and his first order of business was to march a legion into Cynothicum. When Regulus and Aulan are consuls, I don’t want them to be marching the same legions into the same provinces trying to suppress the same rebellions. Because one day, our legions are going to be defeated, and the next, there will be provincial armies marching on Amorr.”
“That will never happen!” Severa scoffed.
“It can and it will, if I don’t act to stop it. And that’s only the provinces, my dear. God forbid our allies ever turn against us and join them. And yet, men such as Andronicus Aquila and Valerius Magnus turn up their noble patrician noses and refuse to acknowledge the men of the allied cities as our equals or permit them their place in the Empire they so desire. And, I would say, the place they deserve.”