by Lynne Gentry
In one corner of the spacious room a slave waved a plumed fan. In another corner his faithful bodyguard stacked heavy stone pavers. Under cover of darkness, he and Kaeso had stolen the stones from one of his mother-in-law’s extensive garden paths. Oh, how he hated that his father’s gambling debts had forced him to forfeit his family’s home and move in with his wife’s mother.
Maximus inhaled deeply, pressed his back to the floor, and then bent his knees. “Place the stones here, Kaeso.” He patted his chest at the indentation just below his breastbone. “I must work on strengthening my projection.”
His bodyguard’s eyes flitted between him and the stack of pavers. “These stones are heavier than they look, master.” Muscles rippled beneath the sheen of Kaeso’s soot-colored skin. “If you are crushed to death and I am forced to serve Mistress Hortensia, I shall follow you into the depths of Hades and make certain you are unable to recite a single word in your next life.”
The tall, broad-shouldered, shiny piece of marble scowling down at him had been with Maximus since his mother killed herself after his noble birth. When Maximus reached the age of needing a playmate, Kaeso had been purchased to become the young master’s personal slave and companion. Thirty-five years later faint traces of the slave’s North African heritage remained in his accent. Maximus had learned that Kaeso had been cut from his mother’s womb by a raiding Roman war party and forced to serve the imperial troops patrolling the southern frontier until he was ten. Poor Kaeso had been angry about the injustice ever since.
Maximus found it easy to forgive Kaeso’s ill temper, for he too suffered from a life of forced service. Had he been master of his own life, he would have joined a theater troupe years ago and traveled the world with his beautiful wife. Instead, his marriage had saddled him with an ambitious mother-in-law intent on his rise in public office. He prayed to the gods that Hortensia would not live forever. Then he and his lovely Aeliana could do as they pleased.
Maximus waved his servant forward and patted his bare chest again. “The stones, Kaeso. Add one at a time if you fear me so fragile, but if I’m to be heard by those watching from the theater’s cheap seats I must strengthen my voice.”
“Here’s to your last breath.” Kaeso straddled his chest, and then slowly lowered the paver.
Air whooshed from Maximus’s lungs. “Oh.” He fought the idiotic tremors of panic and quickly set to work enunciating the drills his acting teacher had given him. Executing the last run of rhyming words had limbered his tongue to perfection when he heard the distinctive click of a woman’s heels upon the marbled hallway. He waved his hands. “The stone, Kaeso. Quickly.”
“Galerius Maximus.” Hortensia breezed into the room, a foul wind that singed the fine hairs upon his chest. She strode to his side and peered down her nose. “Whatever are you doing casting about on my fine carpets like some sort of plebeian?” She snapped her fingers. “Aeliana, come talk sense to your husband before he exposes himself as an utter fool and shames my house.”
Maximus scrambled to stand, intent on impressing Aeliana to root for him in these regular duels with her mother. “I’m quite capable of standing on my own two feet.” He smoothed his loincloth.
“That remains to be seen.” Hortensia’s gaze traveled from his hairless chest to the stone in Kaeso’s hands and then on to the pile in the corner. “Are those the new garden pavers I had imported from Egypt?”
Heat flushed Maximus’s cheeks. “We’ll put them back when I’ve completed my exercises. I promise.”
She was not amused. “Does your foolish behavior have anything to do with that despicable actor . . . ?” She snapped her fingers as if to jar her memory. “What’s his name?”
“Cato,” Aeliana whispered.
Hortensia cast a glare at her daughter. “What do you know of the theater?”
Aeliana became suddenly very interested in her shoes, dainty silk affairs adorned with expensive seed pearls. “No more than you, Mother.”
Hortensia would never lower herself by attending the theater, but Maximus guessed his mother-in-law’s sudden interest in the impressive stage artist meant she already knew what he’d been up to. “Well, does it, Maximus?”
“No,” he proclaimed boldly, though the lie twisted his tongue and his chest felt as if he still supported a garden paver.
“You were never a good liar, son-in-law.” Hortensia turned to her daughter. “Which could be a good thing for you, Aeliana. Unlike me, you shall know when your husband decides to take his physical comfort in the bed of a harlot.”
Maximus hated how his beautiful, pregnant wife always melded into the draperies rather than stand up to her mother. “Surely you have not come to my quarters simply to check on my fidelity to your daughter.” He hadn’t meant for his gaze to sweep the ceiling, but it had. And before he could take the motion back, Hortensia had caught a glimpse of his disapproval of her constant intrusion.
A slow smile spread across his mother-in-law’s lips. Then, like a buzzard circling carrion, she swooped in and began to peck him apart. “For someone who comes from such a noble bloodline, you are a scrawny, insignificant disappointment.” Her razor-sharp gaze scraped the stunted length of his body. “Fortunately, you are not stupid. If you were, I would have nothing to work with.” She produced a folded piece of parchment sealed with a wax stamp bearing the emblem of royalty. “It has taken me all morning to arrange this opportunity.” She handed him the missive and tapped it with a claw-like nail. “Read it.”
Maximus looked to Aeliana for a clue. His wife’s quickly lowered eyes told him the letter did not contain good news. He slid a quivering finger along the seal.
Galerius Maximus is hereby appointed
Proconsul of Carthage.
Appointment effective immediately.
Terms of service shall include but not exceed one year.
Report to the first available ship sailing for Africa.
Restore the favor of the gods in the province of Tunisia.
Execute anyone who refuses to worship at the sacred temples.
Stop the plague by eliminating the Christians who spread it.
By order of Publius Licinius Valerianus Augustus, Emperor of Rome.
MAXIMUS’S HEART hammered his chest. “What have you done, mother-in-law?”
“I have put an end to your ridiculous pursuit of the theater.” Hortensia’s nostrils flared. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out about your bawdy theater actor and your secret training sessions in my stables? Servants talk.” Her eyes were hard as paver stones. “A son-in-law with a reputation of prancing naked about the stage is not what I purchased with my daughter’s very generous dowry.”
“I will not do it, Hortensia.” Maximus wadded the parchment and threw it across the room. “Africa resides in the bowels of Hades.”
She leaned in close enough for him to catch the clayish scent of the henna she used to smother the gray sprouting from her head like the snakes of Medusa. “Listen to me, you wormy slug, you will go. Or I shall make certain you never return to see your child.”
His eyes darted to Aeliana, but she knew better than to meet his gaze. “You can’t keep us apart.”
Hortensia laughed in the face of his belligerence. “There’s no end to what I can and will do. Your future is already arranged. I’m counting on the southern sun of Africa to burn color into those pasty cheeks and add backbone to that soft body of yours. Because I expect you to return ready to do whatever it takes to assume the throne.” She wheeled. “Come, Aeliana. The future proconsul of Carthage has to pack.”
His wife put her hand to her large belly and mouthed I’m sorry, then hurriedly waddled after her mother.
12
WE’VE ASKED EVERYONE WHO left the church to reconsider.” Barek followed Cyprian down another dark, lonely alley. So far both of them had refrained from stating the obvious. No one was coming to their aid.
“Not everyone.” Cyprian paused beneath a wooden sign carved in the shape of a l
arge tooth and reviewed his list once again, holding it at an angle to take advantage of the splinter of moonlight. A gust of wind whipped the jagged points of the tooth against the tenement building. “According to one of the tenants, we’ll find your old landlord if we turn left here.”
Barek scanned their surroundings. Unlike the stunning transformation in Maggie’s appearance, a blossoming that had robbed him of sleep these past few nights, his old neighborhood had decayed since his family abandoned their flat above the dye shop and moved into Cyprian’s villa in the posh part of town. Many of the shops and homes were empty. But if he closed his eyes, he could still smell the foul aroma of crushed snail shells clinging to his father’s robe and hear his mother humming her sweet songs of the Lord’s deliverance as her slender fingers worked the loom. How he missed them. And oh how his mother would enjoy seeing Maggie fill out a silk stola rather than trip over the hem as she had playing dress-up as a child.
Barek shoved his failure to protect all of them in with his guilt for betraying Cyprian. “Metras lived in one of the lower apartments because of his bad leg.” Barek’s empty belly had been howling since sunset. Sweat trickled down his back. Traipsing about in hooded cloaks and begging for help that would never come was perhaps God’s way of giving him a taste of the punishment he deserved. “The old stonemason is the last name on our list, right?”
Cyprian glanced at their carefully reconstructed record. “He is.”
Barek’s father believed God kept the roll books, thus eliminating his need to record any believer’s name. Had Caecilianus known his son’s treachery would force Cyprian to reconstruct the roll, he might have left something more tangible. Thus, when Titus proposed dividing the tasks and decided to devote his time to finding out what he could about the new proconsul while Cyprian rallied the church, they all quickly realized there had been no reliable record of whom to rally. Cyprian had questioned Barek for hours, urging him to recall every person who’d ever attended the church gatherings in his home.
Sketchy list in hand, Barek and Cyprian had spent the past two days knocking on the doors of frightened people, all of whom had sided with Felicissimus in the church split. Barek barely had time to state his business before those who’d lapsed in faith would announce, “Your parents are gone and have taken my faith in the church to their graves. What’s left for us now? As for me and my house, we’ll put our faith in the slave trader’s writs of libellus.”
“Felicissimus had a pocketful of those worthless papers,” Barek argued each time, all the while knowing the scowling faces glaring at him had procured their writs from Barek himself. “All the paper in the empire did not stop a Roman sword from piercing the traitor’s heart.”
Barek’s arguments had gone unheeded. So far, not one person had changed his mind.
If he and Cyprian failed to muster some help, how would they manage the big job of converting the senator’s home into a new hospital? Much as it pained Barek to admit it, Maggie was working hard, harder than he expected. She’d assembled a breathing tent similar to the ones her mother used to make, but so far Eggie had not regained his health. While Barek certainly didn’t want the cocky stowaway to die, he worried that once Eggie recovered he would seek work at the docks. It wouldn’t be long before Eggie told someone about his miraculous recovery. Word would get out and the house of Cicero would be swamped with more measles and typhoid cases than their inexperienced crew could handle.
After a couple of days of pounding the pavement, Cyprian and Barek had drawn a thick black mark through every name . . . but Metras. “What good is an old man?” Barek asked above the scrape of the wooden tooth sign on the stucco.
“That ‘old man,’ as you call him, can work both of us under the table.” Cyprian raised his mask to block the stench of chamber pots emptied nightly upon the narrow streets and headed off down the first alley past the dentist shop.
Barek swallowed the reprimand without comment and hurried to catch up. Cyprian had lost everything because of him: Both of his wives. His daughter. His home. His influence. And for a while, even a bit of his faith. He needed the support, and Barek owed it to him to give him everything he had.
Barek stopped outside a door of warped planks lashed together with leather strips. “This is it.”
“Are you certain?”
He nodded toward a small cross hanging on an oil lamp.
Cyprian’s eyes met his with a weariness Barek could hardly stomach. “That’s the best sign we’ve seen all day.”
Barek held Cyprian back. “Let me knock, just in case.”
“Metras is a loyal ally.”
“Did you not think the very same thing of Felicissimus and myself?” Barek waited until Cyprian was safely concealed in the shadows, then rapped on the door of a slum apartment. The door opened a crack. Barek lowered his mask so he wouldn’t look like a robber. “Metras?”
Gnarled fingers curled around the wood and two rheumy eyes cautiously peered into the alley. “What do you want?”
“It’s Barek.”
“I know who you are, boy. Used to help you and your father crush snails and harvest the purple tint from them.” The door opened wide. A spare, stoop-shouldered man leaned on a cane. Metras hadn’t worked in the quarries since a slab of rock slipped from the wench ropes and crushed his leg. His long beard had faded to the color of limestone dust, and years of working in the sun had chiseled deep crevices into his stoic face. “Can’t believe you’re the one who split the church over those worthless pieces of paper.” Metras squared up his body and jabbed his cane into the center of Barek’s chest. “Your mother would be ashamed.”
“Listen, you may not want to help me, and I can’t blame you, but”—Barek whistled Cyprian forward with their all-clear signal—“Magdalena is in trouble.”
“I wouldn’t trust a word you said if I hadn’t heard it from several others.”
“Then you know Magdalena did not kill the proconsul,” Barek said.
The old man’s shrunken frame made it easy to see into his single-room home. “I’m smarter than I look, boy.” Women and children crowded in behind Metras, peering out at Barek with what he could see was disdain. “The healer couldn’t any more kill someone than your sweet mother could turn away the sick. They both had too much heart.”
“My friend.” Cyprian stepped from the shadows, glancing around.
“Bishop.” They shook hands. “Come in.”
Cyprian surprised Barek and ducked beneath the low lintel. “You coming, Barek?”
“Am I welcome?” Barek asked.
“Long as you don’t try to sell me anything, boy,” Metras said.
“I’m done with that.”
“Come on then.”
Barek stepped inside the cramped little room. Women and children did their best to shuffle themselves into the farthest corner.
Cyprian didn’t appear the least bit put off by the humble surroundings. “We’re setting up a new hospital. Without Magdalena, we don’t have enough help.”
“Heard the soldiers destroyed your place. I’m sorry about that.” Metras shifted his weight to his good leg. “Not easy to lose everything.”
“A house is easily replaced, but without a place to treat the sick, I fear what will become of our city,” Cyprian said apologetically, almost as if what had happened had been his fault, not Barek’s. “I won’t lie to you, Metras. What I’m asking is dangerous.”
Metras’s grip on his cane whitened his knuckles. “Not much safe this side of heaven, is there, Bishop?” Several children with concerned eyes backed tighter into the corner. “Who’ll take care of these widows and orphans?”
“Bring them along,” Cyprian said without hesitation. “We’ll make room.”
Metras studied the offer for a few moments. The cloudy fog in his eyes made it impossible to know what was going on in his bald head. Finally a slow smile pushed through his leathery wrinkles. He shuffled forward. “I think it best if we come at night.”
Cyprian clasped the old man’s shoulder. “Come whenever you think it safe, brother. Can you find the home of Titus Cicero?”
Metras gave a brief nod. “Give me a day or two to get things squared away.”
They shook hands and Barek felt a strange surge of relief. Which made no sense. Metras was far from agile. How much assistance could a cripple offer? It was more likely someone would have to take care of him. Yet Barek couldn’t help but admire an old man willing to put not only his comfort, but also his life in jeopardy for what he believed.
“Why did you call him ‘brother’?” Barek asked once they were on their way. “His station is far beneath yours.”
Cyprian stopped and gripped Barek’s shoulders, his fingers digging in as if to root the point he intended to make. “You are not the only one who has made mistakes.” Cyprian’s eyes were intent. “Hear me well: we will not survive this struggle if we do not rely upon each other. Metras will stick closer than a brother.”
Barek and Cyprian hadn’t traveled a block, navigating the dark slums solely by the light of the full moon, when they spotted a small soldier patrol armed with torches and coming their way.
“Quick!” Cyprian whispered.
They drew their hoods and ducked out of sight. Praying the thrumming of his heart would not give them away, Barek dared not move. The rhythmic plink of metal studs on the cobblestone streets came closer, then suddenly stopped. The faces of the soldiers registered suspicion, and their bodies readied for action. Barek held his breath. Had the shadowed alcove of the apartment building obscured their presence, or could they be seen from this angle? He pressed his back tightly against the stucco.
“Halt!” a soldier shouted. The loud crunching sound of hobnail boots thundered past them and faded down the narrow alley.
They had not been seen. All they had to do now was wait. Once the patrols finished roughing up whomever they’d caught breaking curfew, he and Cyprian would slip out and go in the opposite direction. Relief quietly seeped from Barek’s lips.