Page 61 of Brother at Arms

Marcella was fairly ordinary looking, far from the beauties that beckoned to men from lupinari, but I knew what he meant. Marcella had an inner fire that lifted her from the plain. Cassia had the same fire, though she was quieter about it.

“You decided to solve your troubles by following me?” I asked.

“I arrived tonight, just before the gates were shut.” Lucius lifted his hands, as though ready to fend me off. “I thought to come here, but then I saw you in a popina, having wine with a rough-looking fellow. I decided to wait and discover what you were up to, but you only went home and locked everything up tight. Your wine merchant downstairs was in the street, and I didn’t want him to see me and fear more amphorae would be broken. So, I thought I’d speak to you in the morning. Then out you come after dark to stride off who knew where. Of course, I had to follow.”

“I heard you behind me,” I said. “You were clumsy.”

“Yes, well, I’m not used to being stealthy. You went to the Emporium with the tough man you’d spoken with before. And then you approached Mihrdat, one of the wealthiest and most dangerous silk merchants in the business.” Lucius sounded aghast.

“You know him?” I asked.

“Everyone in the trade knows him. He has warehouses from here to Antioch, and caravans that go as far as Barigaza, south of the Scythian lands, even all the way to Seres, if you believe the rumors. We never did business with him. Too risky.”

“We.” Cassia gave him a sharp stare. “You and …?”

“Oh.” Lucius flushed. “You know. My business associates.”

“He doesn’t mean Herminius,” Arsakes put in from the bunk.

“No.” Cassia fixed Lucius with her assessing gaze, and Lucius turned even more scarlet. “He means Xerxes. You were smuggling the silk together, weren’t you?”

Chapter 20

How Cassia knew this, when Lucius had denied having spoken to Xerxes in many years, I had no idea, but Lucius began to sweat.

“Perhaps you should answer the lady,” Marcianus said, quietly stern. “With the truth.”

“Yes, yes, all right.” Lucius waved his hands about. “You are correct. Xerxes—Manius—and I stayed in contact with each other after we were separated. Not at first, but once I heard that he’d become a gladiator, and a good one, I asked someone who was traveling to Rome to take him a message, telling him something only Manius and I would know, so he’d believe it came from me. He sent word back, and we started a regular communication. Though I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t know he’d died.” Lucius sent me a stricken glance. “I’d been away in the east so long. I was devastated when I learned he was gone.”

“His messages would have stopped coming,” I pointed out.

“True, but I wouldn’t have realized that, because I’d gone farther into Parthia by then, almost to the mountains on the edge of it. I thought the messages simply hadn’t reached me in the few years I’d been wandering between oases. When I returned to Antioch, I contacted him, saying I was ready to start our silk importation again. But I had no reply. Then Herminius sent me off once more, making me his administrator and prompting Fulvius to start conspiring against me. When I realized Herminius no longer trusted me and wanted me arrested or simply killed, I decided to come to Rome and look for Xerxes. And then I found out he was long dead.”

Lucius sank down onto the stool, as though his legs would no longer support him, and buried his face in his hands. Marcia, next to him, regarded him with compassion.

As did I. Lucius’s sorrow seemed genuine. While I already knew Lucius was a good liar, I believed that Xerxes’s death had stunned him.

“How did you two decide to go into the silk trade together?” Cassia asked into the silence.

Lucius lifted his head and studied each of us in turn. “Whatever I say cannot go beyond this room,” he warned.

“We would never betray you,” Marcianus answered readily. Cassia nodded, and I gave him a nod as well. Arsakes said nothing, but I would make certain he did not repeat what Lucius told us.

“I was taught how to read and write once I belonged to Herminius, which is one reason he sent me on longer and longer journeys,” Lucius said. “I could read manifests, sign for shipments, and collect and record payments. My brother never learned his letters, but I sent him notes a scribe could read out to him. When we were boys, we devised a code so that our master did not always know what we were talking about. I started using the same code in the messages, and Manius caught on and began using it back. One day he mentioned that if I could send him a portion of the silk I was trading, he could fetch a high price for it and split the profit with me.”

“He asked you to steal it?” Cassia asked in surprise.

“No, not exactly.” Lucius’s eyes flickered. “I had the contacts, you see. When I negotiated with the traders on the Syrian coasts, I could make side deals with them to pick up silk bolts on my own. I sent these to Rome via a Parthian trader who didn’t mind making a bit extra on the side himself. Manius would pay this Parthian upon delivery, and the Parthian would leave the silk in the Porticus Aemilia. Manius would then inform a Roman merchant it was there, and that merchant would have the silk sold on to the matrons Manius knew, and they’d split the profits. Then Manius would send me my cut, and we’d start all over again.”

“Well thought out,” Cassia said. “You purchased the silk instead of stealing it and simply bypassed the trade rules and the taxes.”

“Something like that. We didn’t intend to stock entire warehouses—it was a few bolts at a time.”

A few bolts of silk imported from the far reaches of the east could bring in far more than Lucius could earn as a trader’s assistant and Xerxes could make in prize money. Even after paying the Parthian and the Roman silk merchant, they’d still bring in enough wealth to make their lives very comfortable.

In theory, at least. Xerxes had never made any show of having money. He might have carefully hoarded his profits to buy his way out of the ludus, or he might have given the funds to Marcella. I wished he’d told me all this so I could make certain she’d received the money if he’d stashed it away somewhere.

“Manius was wonderful to work with,” Lucius said wistfully. “Uncomplicated and focused. He could entice coin out of the most tight-fisted matron on the Esquiline.”