Page 76 of Brother at Arms

For what? So Aulus could make more money? He’d committed murder to protect his illegal smuggling business—both offenses would send him to the executioner. A pity the swordsman could only cut off his head once.

Panic assailed me next. Cassia had been with me when I’d first come to speak to Cassius Tatius, and Aulus would have realized by now that she was more to me than a slave who could conveniently take notes. Once Hadrianus returned to Samorix, Cassia would be alone. The wine merchant did his best, but he couldn’t protect her.

Aulus would find Cassia and kill her, then he’d hunt for Lucius and dispatch him too.

I could do nothing. Frustration flooded me, as well as anguish. Cassia shouldn’t die because of me and my connection to Xerxes. I should have sent Lucius far from us when he’d first turned up and left well enough alone.

But no, I was still mourning Xerxes and determined to take my revenge on the man who’d caused him to die.

I hated my inability to move. I wanted to spring up, rush to Cassia, then find Aulus and fling him into the nearest pit.

More anguish came to me, not only for Cassia’s safety, but because I’d never see her again. I wanted to touch her face, feel her cool hands clasped over mine, tell her goodbye.

She’d been good to me from the day I’d met her, puzzled whenever I questioned her as to why she bothered. We take care of each other, she’d say, and I needed that with all my strength.

I wanted to see her one more time, to tell her what she meant to me.

I prayed to any god who would listen to let that happen.

I don’t know how many hours went by, or if only one did, when the door opened again. Light stabbed into my eyes, but I couldn’t turn my head away or even lower my eyelids to shut it out. It was only a pinprick from an oil lamp, but it seemed a blazing aurora to me.

Aulus tramped down the stairs, grumbling when my inert body impeded his progress. He set the lamp down and climbed over me, kicking me in the process. I only knew this because my body moved sidewise as his foot contacted my side.

He seized me under the arms and dragged me the rest of the way down the stairs. Aulus dropped me at the bottom, my head thumping on the stone of the cellar floor. I smelled the bright tang of blood and knew it had come from my skull.

Aulus retrieved the light and set it on the floor in the middle of the cellar. Earth walls loomed above us, reinforced with brick. The patterns were old, showing that this had been built before the time of Augustus. Gallus could have told me exactly when.

Aulus hefted me up once more and dragged me onward, one of my sandals coming off in the process.

I knew he was taking me to the drain—I could hear the sewer rushing past beneath us.

The Cloaca Maxima was fed by waters from every fountain in and around the Forum, the fountains in turn supplied by aqueducts that constantly poured water into the city. Fountains overflowed into the streets, the unceasing water seeking drains that channeled into great Cloaca. A marvel of engineering, Marcianus had told me, fascinated by it.

I did not want to acquaint myself with Rome’s main sewer firsthand. Water from all the latrines flowed into it too.

I couldn’t move to fight Aulus, so I willed myself to become too heavy to lift. I imagined myself as a boulder, a great huge one in the middle of a building site, a challenge for the architectus and his crew to dislodge.

Aulus struggled, grunting in frustration.

“Cursed gladiators,” he muttered. “So stupid, all of you. Should be expunged from the face of the earth.”

He didn’t care that he’d murdered Xerxes. My rage grew, erasing fear. He’d seen Xerxes as an obstacle, as he now viewed me, one to be removed from his path.

I was going to kill him.

Aulus pulled me closer to the noisome smell that flowed from the sewer. He had to drop me to wrestle with the grate, an iron grid that, from its lack of rust, was fairly new.

As I lay waiting to be pushed to my doom, I found I could contract my muscles slightly. I wasn’t certain how that would help me, but I clenched and released my abdomen, then my thighs, then my upper arms.

I could only move one of these areas at a time, as though my body only had the strength for a single set of muscles at any given moment. I wondered if the time I’d lain alone on the stairs had been enough to let the poison begin to wane.

Of course, Aulus could always dose me with more or simply stab me to death. He seemed happy to stick knives into people.

After much growling and cursing, Aulus scraped the grating from the gaping hole in the floor. The rush of water grew louder.

Aulus grabbed me by the arms and pulled me toward the drain. I knew the poison was wearing off then, because the scrape of my back, still healing from Nero’s beating, against the stone hurt.

He’d have to lay me down alongside the drain in order to roll me into it, to avoid falling into the hole himself.