Never good at deciding what to say, I took myself to the baths instead.
The baths I’d recently began frequenting were about forty paces up the Quirinal Hill from our lodgings. They were not as immense as the public baths of Agrippa on the Campus Martius or the complex Nero had recently opened near the Pantheon, but they suited me. There was a charge to enter, oneas, which I paid over to the man at the front doors.
The baths were small but sumptuous, with high arched ceilings and one large mosaic depicting Neptune among strange sea creatures, another Bacchus and his maenads.
Residents of the Quirinal, including senators and praetors, frequented this bath. They frowned on plebs joining them, but I’d discovered they didn’t mind sharing this space with a former famous gladiator. I kept my distance and occasionally suggested routines for the younger men who exercised next to me in the gymnasium. For the most part, people left me alone.
Women were allowed in this bathhouse, though they had separate changing rooms. Today as I handed my strigil to an attendant after I’d been rubbed with oil and sand, a procession paraded past the courtyard on its way to the caldarium.
Procession was the only way to describe it. Two tall, solidly built men—obviously bodyguards—led the way, and two more brought up the rear.
Lady’s maids in plain but luxurious tunics bore boxes and bags for shoes, clothing, cosmetics, hairbrushes, jewelry. They surrounded a woman in layers of red and blue silk, her head covered with a shimmering cloth. I imagined a grandly appointed litter waiting for her outside.
Her voice came to me as she strolled. “Slowly, pests. I shall not run to keep up with you. If I have to run, you’ll be out on the streets.” She laughed, the tone rich and musical, but the words were sincere.
The bodyguards immediately paused, and the attendant women took smaller steps, only one daring to laugh with her, but nervously.
“A moment.” The woman in silk had caught sight of me. I couldn’t see much of her through the folds of her palla, but her dark eyes skewered me. “Who is that?”
The women began to babble that they didn’t know, but one of the male attendants leaned to her. “Leonidas the Spartan,” I heard him say.
“Oh, yes?” The woman gave me such a long stare that my skin prickled. I wore a loincloth only, but I might be naked for the lurid interest of her gaze. “Such richness in a lowly bath house. But enough.” She clapped her hands, gold bracelets jingling. “Stop dawdling, toads. I have much to do today.”
She set off at a brisk pace, and her maids and bodyguards scurried to keep themselves around her.
I signaled the attendant to begin scraping, and he sent me a knowing grin. “Fortunate man. She is very rich.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Severina Casellius, married to one Tertius Vestalis Felix, an old man who doesn’t care what his wife gets up to. She surrounds herself with gladiators and pays them well, from what I hear. You might have a chance to make some coin.”
Severina Casellius was Domitiana’s daughter, the woman Cassia and I speculated about having killed Ajax. Her bodyguards were massive, and she liked to have gladiators and others at her home.
I watched Severina until she was out of sight while the attendant flicked dirt and oil from my skin.
I remembered now where I’d heard the name Tertius Vestalis Felix. Cassia had told me he was Severina’s husband, and Gallus had indicated that the same man was planning to build a warehouse in the Emporium. The building site would give Severina or her servants an excuse to be in the area, and perhaps gain access to Chryseis’s warehouse, where I’d found the feather from Rufus’s helmet.
I wanted to get closer to Severina and discover if our speculations had merit, but I realized I would have to make it seem her idea. A woman like that would not respond well to demands.
Once the attendant finished, I strode to the frigidarium. After a swim, I pulled on my tunic, and on a whim, headed for the caldarium into which Severina’s party had disappeared.
Three of the four bodyguards stood in the arched doorway, forming a wall of muscle, not letting anyone in, not even the slave who fetched and carried towels.
The fourth, a big man with a shaved head and beaked nose, stepped forward out of a niche where he’d been watching over Severina in the caldarium. He folded his arms as he faced me, saying nothing.
I looked the guard over, met his gaze without flinching, then turned and departed.
* * *
Days passed,and we approached the Ides of the month. Aemil kept his gladiators locked in at night, none to be allowed out on pain of death, and he meant it. The gate guards, who had sometimes let us slip away without Aemil being the wiser were threatened until they were too terrified to do anything but obey. So Septimius told me, the large man’s eyes tight.
No more gladiators were found cut into bits, none dead at all. When no more excitement came from these events, Rome forgot and found new things to talk about.
I managed to persuade Aemil to allow Merope and her family to perform at the double funeral for Ajax and Rufus. He did it grudgingly, not wanting to make too much fuss.
“If he has to have a grand funeral for those two, he will be expected to do so for every gladiator he loses,” Nonus Marcianus told me after I’d finished speaking to a snarling Aemil. “He doesn’t like losing them at all.”
True, Aemil did everything he could to keep his gladiators alive. He was hard on us in training, because once we were released onto the arena floor, he had no more control. He had to watch us die with the rest of the crowd.
