I stepped in front of him. “You’ll never reach home alive. Stay until daylight.”
Not that I wished Hesiodos in my home, but if he were murdered on the streets, our benefactor would not be happy.
Hesiodos’s expression became even more pained. “I have plenty of protection.”
Without further explanation, he marched out of the apartment’s door and down the stairs, unbolting and flinging open the street door. He slammed that shut, but I had to climb down after him to bolt it again.
When I returned, Cassia had seated herself at the table and was busily scratching at a wax tablet with her stylus. I removed a shutter that closed off our makeshift balcony—the roof of the wine shop below—and stepped out to watch Hesiodos.
Two men I hadn’t noted before fell into step with him, hands on weapons. They were guards, not thieves, and kept close to Hesiodos until they faded into the darkness. I could not see who the men were, only their shadowy outlines, but Hesiodos was likely correct that he’d reach home unscathed.
I stepped back into the apartment and replaced the shutter. Our L-shaped abode was, if anything, neater than when I’d left it earlier this evening. Cassia always tidied before she went to bed, though her pallet was still folded against the wall. She must have been awake when word came to her of my arrest, and she’d not been to bed since.
“Nero was in the popina.” My voice scratched, and I reached for the water jug, pouring a trickle into a cup.
Cassia ceased writing to gaze at me, lips parted. “Oh dear.”
I seated myself tiredly, glad I was in a place I could stretch out my legs and be somewhat comfortable. I told Cassia the entire tale, leaving nothing out. She listened, occasionally jotting notes as I spoke.
My lack of sleep soon began to beat on my brain, and I nearly fell from the stool in my lethargy. I would have been happy to collapse onto the floor and begin snoring, but Cassia would not like anything so untidy as a former gladiator sprawled across the stones.
I started to drag myself up, surprised when a light hand landed on my arm. Cassia, who didn’t much like to touch anyone, helped me rise and then guided me to my pallet.
I landed face down on my bunk’s soft bedding, a far cry from the hard slab in the vigiles’s cell. My body relaxed, my eyes closing. Sleep hit me in seconds.
Safe, I heard a whisper. You are safe now.
I realized the voice was Cassia’s. She settled a blanket across my legs and moved softly away, the brush of her passing easing the harshness of my night.
It seemed no time at all had passed when Cassia was shaking me awake again.
Sunlight poured through the high window above my bed and leaked through cracks in the shutters to the balcony. The front door was propped open to let in air, bringing with it the usual sounds of the morning street.
I lay quietly, basking in the ordinariness of the moment. I breathed in the scent of fresh bread from the baker’s, heard the shouts of those who headed out to fetch water or lined up to buy wine from the shop below.
“Gallus will expect you soon,” Cassia said.
The cold dread I’d shaken off since I’d come home suddenly returned. The remembered fears about my new venture swooped at me like crows around carrion.
I ate the bread Cassia put before me without tasting it then woodenly took my cloak from her and marched down the stairs to the street. Rome was waking around me, people streaming to the forums and basilicas for the day’s business. I scarcely saw them as I let them propel me along through the valley between the hills, the cool April breeze unable to blow away the thick scents of the city.
Warehouses began to spring up as I trudged along the Tiber on the other side of the Circus Maximus. Not long later, I paused to gaze at the giant Porticus Aemilia, a massive warehouse with fifty barrel-vaulted halls that climbed the hill from the river. Whenever I came to the Emporium, I always stopped to admire this building and its amazing design, first constructed more than two hundred years ago.
A smallish man with curling dark hair touched with gray stopped next to me and studied the Porticus with me. His tunic was fine linen but wrinkled, and the toga he struggled to hold on to slid from his shoulder to pool in mud next to him.
“An ambitious undertaking,” the man said to me without greeting. “Our ancestors were brilliant men, Leonidas. Not that my ancestors specifically made this building. They were never so skilled.”
I turned to Gnaeus Gallus, my new employer. I tried to bid him a good morning, but my chest constricted and my tongue lay heavy in my mouth. I’d wanted this for so long—a job doing what I’d been trained to—but worry tingled through my fingers and banged in my heart. What if I’d lost any knowledge my former master had given me? It had been years, and between now and then, my mind had focused on surviving and nothing more.
My biggest fear, one I barely admitted to myself, was that I might arrive for work one morning and find Gallus buried under the building he’d begun. Not only would I grieve for Gallus, who I’d come to like, but would my life repeat itself? The possibility made dark spots flicker at the edges of my vision.
It is unlikely, Cassia’s voice sounded in my head. When I’d expressed my trepidation to her, she’d tried to explain the odds of events repeating exactly as before. But gods and curses existed, and such things were possible.
Gallus, oblivious to my wariness, waved an arm at the Porticus. “Ah, well. We can but try to bring ourselves some small acclaim. And if nothing else, we will be paid.” Gallus lifted his toga from the ground and tried to brush off the worst of the mud, then gave up and gestured me onward. “Shall we, my friend?”
The site where Gallus would design and build a new warehouse wasn’t much to look at. The land lay near other warehouses, the closest one owned by a wealthy woman who was a sharp at trade.
The ground was uneven, covered with tufts of dispirited grass attempting to turn green for spring. Here and there I could see the tops of old stones sticking out of slick mud. Gallus had told me that he’d had to drain much of the property, which had delayed his start.
