Chapter 8
The medicus at Nero’s domus bandaged me, but I decided I’d seek Marcianus to finish patching me up. Nero’s medicus wrinkled his well-bred nose at having to touch a gladiator, but I trusted Marcianus to heal me competently and cheerfully.
A search was made for the dancing girl, which resulted in nothing. Her bodyguard, likewise, had disappeared from the front gate.
I was glad. I did not like the idea of an assassin lurking in Rome but neither did I want to see the beautiful woman face a gruesome death.
“She’ll be far beyond the city walls by now,” Cassia said as we walked home, Livius’s guard Albanus trailing us.
Albanus had pounded at the gates when the Praetorians had responded to the commotion within, unhappy he couldn’t rush inside to protect us. Not for our sakes, I guessed—he didn’t want to have to explain to Livius why we’d been murdered in Nero’s home.
“Gone with all that gold,” I finished. “I wonder if Drusus escaped.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Cassia said tiredly.
She drooped under the weight of her bag, but I had to tug it away from her before she’d relinquish it. She protested because of my injury, but I pointed out that I had two arms, and a slight cut would not stop me. If the blade had been poisoned, I’d have been felled by now.
Cassia was not happy with my reasoning but she finally let me carry the bag.
Livius was still at our apartment, to my surprise—I’d thought he’d have better things to do than wait for us. Cassia explained what happened, and Livius agreed that the assassin and her guard had likely escaped. With so much money, they could go far.
Livius sensed Cassia’s exhaustion, and he departed, wishing us a joyous Saturnalia. Albanus followed him closely down the street while I watched from our balcony, then they were gone.
Cassia had sunk to her stool by the time I went back inside, and I poured us wine. I gulped mine, hoping Livius would remember his promise to renew our supply.
“A reward was out of the question, I suppose,” Cassia said glumly when I sat down across from her.
“No one has remembered to pay us for this job, I agree.” I’d ceased expecting them to.
“The princeps might eventually pay us for our services.” Cassia opened her tablet and reached for a stylus to make her notes for the afternoon. “But who knows how long that will be?”
I couldn’t say. I finished my wine, left Cassia bent over her writings, and departed to seek Marcianus.
I found him at the Circus Gai, patching up Regulus, who’d taken a hit to his thigh, though he’d won his bout this afternoon. Another gladiator with his arm in a sling, his bare torso heavily abraded, leaned against the wall, his face wan.
“Thought you weren’t fighting.” Regulus jerked his chin at my bandage, while Marcianus’s brows rose in consternation.
“What happened to you?” Marcianus put one last stitch in Regulus’s leg, while Regulus gritted his teeth, then he dropped the needle and turned to me.
“Assassin threw a knife at the princeps,” I said. “I decided to stop it with my shoulder.”
Both Marcianus and Regulus looked gratifyingly amazed. The other injured gladiator glanced my way, momentarily distracted from his pain.
“A tale I look forward to hearing.” Marcianus carefully unwound the soiled bandage, tutted at the way the wound had been left to gape, and fetched his needle.
“Leonidas will have such a big head, he’ll be able to stop dozens of swords with it,” Regulus stated.
The other gladiator barked a laugh.
I remained silent as Marcianus stitched the wound, keeping myself from grunting when he stabbed the needled repeatedly through my flesh. He smeared an ointment on the cut then replaced my bandage with a blood-free one.
Instead of regaling them with the story when Marcianus finished, and I asked where I could find Aemil.
Aemil barely glanced at me when I entered the spolarium, the place where they dragged the dead. He’d lost one of his newer gladiators, and he was out of temper.
“He was promising, very promising.” Aemil wore a scowl, his fingers twitching as though he wanted to ball his scarred hands and punch something. “I spent months training him, and money, too much money. It will be a long time before I recoup it.”
He avoided meeting my gaze, but I saw the moisture in his mismatched eyes.
I knew I’d only be snarled at if I brought up the fee he’d promised me for leading the parade, so I remained silent. Aemil guessed why I was there, however.
“I don’t have time for you right now, Leonidas. And no money for you either. Come back after Saturnalia.”
He turned abruptly away, striding across the blood-soaked floor to stand over the gladiator who’d been stretched out on his back. The young man’s arms were folded over his chest, his eyes closed. Aemil bowed his head, shoulders slumping.
I left him to grieve.
“Are you certain you wish to part with it?” the goldsmith called Decimus asked me.
He looked over what I’d brought him, his practiced eye summing up its price.
I nodded, pretending to be indifferent. I’d been able to smuggle it out of the apartment after I’d returned from seeing Marcianus, as Cassia had been absorbed in her tablets when I’d once more departed.
“A collector will pay much for it,” I told him.
“I agree.” Decimus put the item aside and opened a dark cloth on his table to reveal what I’d asked him to make.
The pin, in the form of a cluster of three small leaves, was exquisite, each leaf hammered to the thinness of silk. The pin would go well with the gold wire earrings Priscus had given Cassia as a reward for her help.
“I must ask once more if you are certain,” Decimus said as my gaze lingered on the beauty of the worked gold. “She is only a woman. She’ll take a gift like this and vanish into the wind, on to the next man who might give her even more.”
Cassia could not legally leave me no matter what she wished, but that was not why I silently disagreed with the man.
She’d go if she truly wanted to. Cassia was clever enough to find a way. But she hadn’t, not in the year since I’d been freed. She could have somehow disentangled herself from the bargain we’d been forced to make with our unknown benefactor, but instead she’d remained to assist me.
Or I might be assisting her . I wasn’t certain anymore.
When she’d gazed at Drusus’s gold and imagined where it could take us, she’d clearly said that whenever we left Rome, we’d depart together.
“If this will pay for it, then I will take pin and go,” I said, gesturing to the item I’d left.
Decimus shook his head as though questioning my wisdom, but he wrapped the pin in the cloth once more and slid it into a pouch, closing and tying the drawstrings.
I wrenched my gaze from the rudis I’d laid before him, making myself take the bag then turn and leave his shop.
It was the only thing I could think of that had any value.
There was the bronze hand with the small gemstones Priscus had given me at the same time he’d bestowed the earrings on Cassia, but that had been a gift.
Also, Cassia might have noticed if I’d lifted the hand from the shelf where it had reposed since earlier this year.
The rudis was mine absolutely. I wasn’t wrong when I said a collector would pay a large sum for it.
It was a symbol of my freedom, but in truth it was only a wooden sword. It would bring a large price only because it had belonged to the famous Leonidas.
I told myself, as I walked from the street of the gold workers and made my way to the Quirinal, that my actual freedom was symbol enough.
As I neared the wine shop, a group of youths charged down our street.
“Io, Saturnalia!” the leader shouted.
His followers chorused it in response. Passers-by stopped to take up the cry, cheering on the youths.
I stepped quickly into our stairwell, in case one of the young men decided to use the opportunity to lift the pouch from my belt. With what I’d gone through to obtain this pin, I’d have to chase anyone who stole it and pound it out of them.
I shut the door on the noise and ascended to the rooms above. Cassia was just hanging up the drab woolen cloak she wore when the weather was inclement. She poured wine and seated herself, looking pleased.
“Livius sent the wine,” she said. “His man, Junius, brought it, and also told me that Drusus slipped away from the city. Probably fleeing to his villa, or much farther than that, if he is wise.”
“I am glad we were able to stop a murder,” I said, hanging up my own cloak and taking my stool. “But also that there will be no extra executions this Saturnalia.”
I thought of the dead gladiator in the spolarium, amid the blood of other men and beasts who’d lost their lives today, and Aemil, his head bent in sorrow.
“Our princeps has no heir,” Cassia said, then shuddered. “I hate to think of what would happen if an assassin did succeed. Poppaea has a son by her first marriage, but he hasn’t been named the heir. There would be chaos.”
“The assassin went for Poppaea, not the princeps,” I pointed out. I drank deeply of the wine Cassia had poured for me, savoring its smoothness.
“Drusus was trying to hurt him by taking away someone he loved,” Cassia said. “A cruel plan. Drusus wanted the princeps to suffer, not necessarily die a clean death.”
“Drusus must hate him, then.” I took another sip of wine, rapidly losing interest in Drusus’s troubles. “Or, he might have been angry at Poppaea herself. She comes from the same area where his villa is.”
“No, Drusus is from a town north of Rome—he built the villa at Baiae when he grew wealthy enough to. I doubt he knew Poppaea, whose father was only a quaestor.” Cassia ran her finger along a neat line of words inside her wax tablet.
“Drusus’s son was executed years ago. Apparently, he was one of a group of plotters to put the princeps’ stepbrother Britannicus in power.
Drusus was spared, as the magistrates ruled he had no knowledge of the plot, but he never forgave the princeps. ”