Page 34 of Brother at Arms

“Indeed.” Livius drained his glass, rang a small bronze bell on the table beside him, and rose when the burly servant returned. “Have wine brought to the garden, and also Cassia. Leonidas would like to see her.”

Cassia lugged a small stack of tablets with her into the peristyle garden. Livius had the servants place a table and several chairs near the pattering marble fountain, which cooled the air wafting among the trimmed, potted trees. Spring flowers dotted the garden, sending their fragrance to us.

Cassia perched neatly on the chair, her sandaled feet in a perfect line. She opened one tablet, leaving the others in a pile stacked beside her, poised to take down whatever I said.

I hadn’t intended to report everything in front of Livius, but he sipped wine and waited for me to speak.

I began with my encounter with the two Parthians at the silk merchants’ offices. I revealed that they’d actually been hunting for Xerxes and that I now realized that someone had been impersonating him. Cassia regarded me sharply when I said this, but she bent her head again to write and did not mention Lucius.

I finished by stating that I’d vowed to find out who’d been pretending to be Xerxes, both because I wanted Arsakes to leave us be and because I wanted a word with that person myself.

I kept silent about my visit to the ludus and my preoccupation with Xerxes’s death, for now. I’d tell Cassia about that when we were alone.

“I am acquainted with silk merchants such as Cassius Tatius,” Livius observed. “They mostly collect themselves in and near the Horrea Agrippina, it is true.”

He leaned back in his chair and stretched out legs half bared by his knee-length tunic. His sandals were of well-tooled leather, and his gold wristbands flashed in the moonlight. His tunic wasn’t silk, but finest linen that draped like silk itself.

“Do any call themselves Xerxes?” Cassia asked him.

“None that I know of. I trade with many merchants of all commodities, up and down the spine of this land and out to the Greek isles and into the mainland—Smyrna and Halicarnassus. Sometimes farther afield—I have agents in Antioch and Tyre. The silk trade is extremely lucrative, and I am not surprised people kill each other over it.”

“You’ve never dealt in silk yourself?” Cassia asked him.

“Not I, my friends. I trade in safer commodities, like pepper and Egyptian marble.” Livius grinned as though he’d made a joke.

“If you hear of a silk trader somewhere who calls himself Xerxes, will you send word?” I asked.

“Of course,” Livius answered at once. “Merchants spend their days devising ways to take my fortune away from me. I would enjoy thwarting a crooked one.”

I thanked him and then went silent, refreshing myself with his good wine. Relating my tale had dried my throat.

Livius declared we could do no more about the problem tonight and turned the conversation to building. He owned a number of properties throughout the city and on the coast at Ostia, mostly commercial buildings in which he rented out space.

His was the warehouse that I’d assisted Gallus to construct. After a wary start, I’d thrown myself into the work and started to enjoy it. Livius bringing up my former master’s death tonight showed I could still be unnerved by it, but thanks to Gallus, I’d managed to separate my past from my present.

Gallus was now working on another construction near the Porticus Liviae that would house shops and eating places. He would call me in when it was time for me to assist him.

When the conversation wound down, Livius insisted we spend the night. It was too late to walk back to the Quirinal through the dangerous streets and there was no guarantee Arsakes would leave Cassia and me alone.

Livius bade Menekrates show me to a cubiculum on the upper floor, a rare privilege for a visitor. I worried about Cassia bunking in the servants’ quarters, but Menekrates assured me—with disapproval—that she would be treated as an honored guest.

The sleeping chamber to which Menekrates took me was the most lavish I’d ever been given. I’d spent nights in domii on Rome’s hills before, a guest of matrons who enjoyed the titillation of being with a gladiator, but I never slept in their chambers. I’d always been shown to the servants’ area or sent to sleep on the floor in a storeroom or back hallway.

This cubiculum had a wide bunk strewn with cushions and colorful bed coverings, a wall painting depicting a view of the bay near Baiae—from the correct perspective of a room on a second floor—and columns of the Egyptian marble Livius had mentioned.

It was a chamber Nero himself wouldn’t have sneered at. A servant in a tunic only slightly less sumptuous than Livius’s told me he’d tend to my needs.

I couldn’t think of any needs, so I requested that he made certain Cassia was well taken care of.

The servant gazed at me with an unmoving expression. “I attend only those on the upper floors,” he informed me. “Those on the lower floors will do their jobs as required.”

Thus rebuking me, he left a lit oil lamp on a low table and departed on silent feet.

I thought I’d lie awake, too unused to the cushions surrounding my body, but I’d walked all day, fought with Arsakes and his fellows, had done the demonstration bout with Regulus, and had drunk plenty of wine.

I sank into slumber, to dream of Xerxes.

I, not Perseus, fought him on his last day, under the pulsing roar of the crowd in the arena. My heart hammered as I faced him, sweat streaking down my face under my helmet.