“Nonsense. A physician is always welcome in a patrician’s household. I can say I heard someone was ill or hurt, but perhaps I was sent to the wrong home. The lady will then talk about her own aches and pains or faulty digestion without compunction.”
Marcianus chuckled, as though we’d find this amusing. Cassia smiled politely but I could see she was annoyed with his insistence.
“He will go with you,” I declared. “Or I will.”
Cassia opened her mouth to argue, but she took in the hard set to my jaw and subsided. “Very well. I agree that Nonus Marcianus will be more inconspicuous.”
“I excel at being inconspicuous.” Marcianus leaped to his feet. “We should go at once. Ajax might have been targeted specifically, but if gladiators are the true quarry, then they must all be accounted for.”
“There are other ludi in Rome are there not?” Cassia asked, her worry returning. “Perhaps a warning should be sent to them.”
“Aemil will do so,” Marcianus said. “And if he does not, I will. Rufus’s wife lives in an insula on the Aventine, Leonidas. Go toward the river on the street that runs in front of my house—the insula is beyond where an arch of the Aqua Appia intersects the road. I’ve walked home with Rufus a few times and said good night to him on his doorstep.”
I wanted to reason that Marcianus would be better to visit Rufus if the two had walked from the ludus together, and I should stay with Cassia.
But she was right that a hulking gladiator would be obvious at the villa, while she would be able to slip into the servants’ area and out again with the family being none the wiser. Marcianus, while a quiet and modest man, had a firmness about him that few argued with.
“There and straight back,” I told the two of them. “We will meet again at Marcianus’s and I will help deliver Ajax to Aemil.”
“Excellent.” Marcianus drained his wine and thumped the cup to the table. “Shall we, my dear? I obtained some new mathematical treatises from Athens that might interest you. I dabble in geometry, but some of it has quite fascinating applications to medicine. We can discuss them on the way if you like.”
Cassia brightened. She loved to read, and it would be a treat for her to converse about civilized matters with a learned man. If Cassia had been male, she’d have been a sought-after scribe and tutor by now, who’d have curated a library of scrolls for some fortunate patrician. She’d have been much happier. I saw that in her face as she regarded Marcianus.
The three of us left the apartment together, trudging down the stairs to the street. The wine shop was doing brisk business, the wine merchant lifting an amphora into a hand cart for a burly slave who would trundle it to his master.
The wine merchant, a slightly built, bald man with thick dark eyebrows, nodded to me as I passed. He seldom spoke to us but quietly accepted our presence and our rent.
I parted ways with Cassia and Marcianus at the crossroads shrine where the Alta Semita and Vicus Salutis met, I to make my way to the Aventine, and they to travel across the Campus Martius to the far side of the river.
I decided, but did not tell them, that I would hasten through my visit to Rufus’s wife and venture to the villa to keep my eye on them. I could stay out of sight but be on hand to rescue them if needed.
Marcianus bade me a breezy farewell. Cassia sent me a suspicious glance when I waved them off without argument, then hurried after Marcianus, already asking him about the treatises he’d read.
At the bottom of the hill I turned to walk behind the Forum Augusti, its great wall shielding the colonnaded building from the shabby street. An archway led to the forum for those who wished to enter it, but I wanted to avoid the crowds that would be there as well as in the Forum Romanum.
I strode through the Carinae and the low valley in the shadow of the Palatine, glancing at the hill and its several domii on top as I went.
I had not heard from theprincepssince my last adventure in his opulent home, but I was neither surprised nor uneasy that he’d not sent for me since. Nero’s focus fixed and then moved on, his obsessions changing from month to month.
I continued between the Palatine and Caelian hills, past the end of the Circus Maximus, and so to the Aventine.
The lower slopes of this hill, like most in Rome, were covered with cheap insulae and shops, the shops now thronged with freedmen and slaves buying supplies and food for the day.
I followed Marcianus’s directions, passing the fountain of the three fish, then his own place. One shutter of his house was open, and I glimpsed Marcia fluttering about inside.
I wondered briefly if Marcianus saw Marcia as anything but an efficient assistant and unofficial apprentice. Marcianus was not a man of bodily appetites—at least he was not obvious about it—reserving his interests for books, medicine, and languages. But I wondered.
The street narrowed a few buildings past Marcianus’s, bending to make room for the pillars of the aqueduct soaring above me.
The insula past this intersection was tall, five stories at least, with two shops on the ground floor, one selling baskets, the other metal boxes and copper vessels. The coppersmith sat at his bench, his hammer striking metal in even strokes, clanking like an out-of-tune bell.
The basketmaker’s shop was much more quiet; he and his wife and daughter frowned at the reeds in their hands as they wove them with dexterity.
I paused on the basketmaker’s doorstep and addressed the man. “I’m looking for a woman called Chryseis.”
The basket weaver regarded me blankly as though he didn’t understand my words. His wife answered for him, in a heavy accent. “Thatone. She’s been shouting at everyone all day, snarling and swearing out of the window. Why do you wanther?”
“She’s the wife of a friend,” I extemporized.
