Daughters of Rome Read online

  “Centurion,” Cornelia said abruptly. “I owe you an apology.”

  His profile was rigid. “Your dealings with Prefect Proculus are none of my concern, Lady.”

  “No, they are not!” She came to a halt before the pillars of the Basilica Aemilia. “How dare you? That is not what I meant.”

  “Lady, I—”

  A cart came rattling past, the driver swearing at his mules. The wheels sent out a splash of mud, and they both leaped back. Densus let out a few soldier oaths before remembering himself. “I’m sorry, Lady.”

  “It’s nothing.” She brushed a spatter of mud off her sleeve.

  They continued through the Forum Romanum, past the Basilica Aemilia. A pair of prostitutes in saffron wigs and dark robes called giggling to Densus, but he glared them into silence.

  “I owe you an apology for the way I spoke to you when I visited your sickbed.” Cornelia kept her eyes trained on the street ahead. “I should not have screamed like that. And I shouldn’t have ignored you at Otho’s banquet after the games, when you tried to address me. It was very wrong.”

  “I failed to protect your husband.”

  “That was not your fault.” Cornelia felt her cheeks heat, remembering how she’d screamed at him in his sickroom. She’d been shrill, shrill and graceless as any fishwife. In a way it was worse than having him see her get pawed by that drunken lout of a prefect. She had an excuse for that, even if Drusus Densus didn’t know it. But there was no excuse at all for a member of the Cornelii to behave like a pleb.

  “You have no need to apologize, Lady.”

  “Then we won’t speak of it again.”

  They walked in silence. Densus offered his hand as help across a wide gutter. Cornelia dropped it as soon as she could. The sight of his red cloak and crested Praetorian helmet sickened her. She still couldn’t see a Praetorian without a pang of nausea rising in her throat.

  That’s not his fault either.

  The words meant nothing. She might have owed him the apology, but she couldn’t mean it.

  “You’ve recovered from your wounds?” She kept her voice cordial, formal.

  “Yes, Lady.”

  “I am glad the Emperor rewarded your faithfulness.” She avoided his helping hand at her elbow as they crossed an overflowing gutter.

  “I wish he hadn’t.”

  “Centurion?”

  “The Praetorian Guard isn’t much these days,” he said shortly. “You know what my duties are, Lady? Mostly I fetch women for Prefect Proculus.”

  Cornelia flushed. They had turned onto the lower slope of the Palatine Hill—the house was only a few short blocks away—

  “He’s a bad one,” said Densus. “Hope you know that.”

  Cornelia walked faster. A few short blocks were not short enough. “I’ll thank you not to—”

  “I’ll say it plain, Lady.” He swung around, jaw set. “Maybe you’re looking to protect your family. Maybe you’re needing another husband. Maybe you’re lonely. Not my business.”

  “It is not—” Cornelia started furiously, but Densus’s voice had a parade-ground crack that overran hers.

  “Prefect Proculus has a new woman every night, common whores and patrician ladies alike—”

  Cornelia clamped her teeth on the nausea in her throat, feeling those rubbery lips sucking on her neck.

  “He doesn’t remember their names in the morning, Lady, never mind whatever he’s promised them,” Densus went on doggedly. “And he never wants the same one twice, no matter how much they beg. He just laughs and says they’re persistent bitches, if you’ll pardon me, and calls for another—”

  No. Cornelia felt the nausea rising like a tide. No. Be marble.

  “So whatever you’re looking for, safety or company or status, find a better man than that. I’d tell my own sister the same thing, and I got to know Senator Piso well enough so I reckon he’d want me telling you too—”

  Hearing that name did it—her husband’s name in her ears, with another man’s marks on her neck. Cornelia turned and vomited into the gutter, throwing up over and over, clawing feverishly at her neck. She staggered, and Densus’s hand touched her shoulder.

  “Lady—”

  “No! Stop telling me you’re sorry!” Cornelia wrenched away from his hand, dragging a hand across her mouth. She felt foul and soiled, shaking and useless. Only pieces of marble left, and she clutched after them. Don’t judge me, she thought disjointedly toward Piso. Don’t judge me, I do it for you—but she wouldn’t say that to this common soldier. You don’t speak for my husband, Densus.

  “I can find my own way from here.” Cornelia drew herself up, meeting the steady chestnut eyes level with her own. “Good afternoon, Centurion.”

  She turned and toiled up the paved slope, past a mansion with vulgar blue marble columns, toward the ornate house of the Cornelii, which she’d left as a bride and reentered as a widow. I do this for you, Piso. She dragged in deep breaths of cold air as the heaviness returned to her limbs. Galatea in reverse, trembling flesh willing itself back into cold marble.

  She turned just once at the gate of the Cornelii house as the slaves opened the door, seeing Densus back at the foot of the slope, waiting to make sure she got home safely. His concern meant nothing, nothing at all.

  Cornelia looked down at her stained dress and back up at the steward. “An accident with the gutters,” she told him. “Please inform Lady Tullia I am going to the bathhouse at once.”

  Vitellius’s brother would want to hear the latest news that she had gotten from the Prefect.

  YOU’RE late,” Llyn ap Caradoc greeted Diana.

  “You said midday.” She blinked.

  “Midday yesterday.”

  “It was raining yesterday.”

  “Chariots run in the rain.”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  She made the journey every day, learning to bless the rain that had once more descended on Rome. With the skies opening again, though much more gently than before, her father shut himself up in his workroom all day with chisels and blocks of marble, and everyone else was far too busy to track Diana’s comings and goings. The Emperor and his army were gone, and Marcella with them; Tullia obsessed endlessly about the mud on her floors; Cornelia shut herself up writing letters all day. Diana was free.

  She bribed one of her father’s slaves to take her every afternoon to the horse farm just outside the city, dashing up the muddy slope on foot so she arrived warm and breathless and soaked. She grinned as she came striding into the stables, slicking her wet hair back from her face with both hands, and Llyn would be waiting to toss her four bridles.

  He taught her to drive with a quartet of placid mismatched geldings. “They’re slow,” Diana objected the first time she saw them.

  “You’ll graduate up to something faster.” Llyn tossed her a battered leather helmet. “If you’re any good.” It took just one short afternoon before he dropped the courteous “Lady.” Cornelia would have been appalled, but Diana didn’t mind it. Polite titles weren’t necessary with Llyn—his oblique shell already kept everyone at a distance.

  “I want to learn how to drive a chariot,” she’d told him frankly before he slipped out of the Emperor’s box at the games. “Will you teach me?”

  “Why do you want to learn?” he’d asked, looking down at her. “You can’t race.”

  “No.” Diana had corrected him. “I won’t race, because women aren’t allowed to. But that doesn’t mean I can’t. I’ll know I can do it, even if no one else does.” She folded her arms across her breasts, peering up at him determinedly. “Look, I’ll sleep with you if you’ll teach me.”

  “No need to go that far,” he said mildly. “Come tomorrow.” She didn’t know why he agreed, and she didn’t care. She was learning to drive at last, like a proper charioteer.

  He taught her how to keep her balance in the low-slung chariot, how to strap the heavy reins about her waist, how to brace her weight against the pull of the horse
s. She learned how much strength it took to guide a team around a hairpin turn at all, much less keep them close to the spina, and was mortified when she careened off the track in a shower of mud on her first try.

  “Again,” called Llyn. He paced the mud beside the track with his hands clasped behind him, calling instructions as the rain dripped off the ends of his hair and the black dog sat at his feet. He looked exactly the same standing in a pool of mud as he looked standing in the Emperor’s box under golden sunlight: calm, contained, aloof. Diana decided she’d be alarmed if his expression ever changed.

  “Racing’s dangerous,” he warned her the first time she crashed a turn, as he impersonally bandaged her scraped arms. “You break your neck, I’ll not make excuses to your family.”

  “Dump my body at the Blues stable,” Diana suggested absently, inspecting a bloody scrape on her knee. “With any luck, we could pin a murder on them.”

  Her elbows and knees turned into patches of scabs, her thighs were chafed red from being crushed against the front of the chariot, and she had a permanent belt of black bruises about her waist from the knotted reins. She stepped down from her chariot at the end of those long afternoons hardly able to stand, her arms trembling under the weight of the harness when she unhitched the geldings and staggered off home.

  “Oh, my beauties, I’m getting good,” she whispered when she visited her Anemoi at the Reds faction stables. The four stallions pushed their red noses eagerly into her hands, knowing her well by now. “I wish I could drive you in a real race.” She dreamed of it sometimes, dreamed of wearing a red tunic embroidered in gold flames about the neck as she stood in a chariot crowned by a fire god’s painted head, sending her four red winds streaking ahead to victory. Getting the victory palm, that simple branch that weighed nothing in the hand, but meant everything.

  Of course she knew she’d never drive the Anemoi, or have a victory palm. Young men of the patrician class sometimes raced in the circuses, if their families didn’t shunt them into the legions or the Senate or anything more exalted—but never a woman, not of any class.

  But at least she could drive.

  “Surely I can handle a faster team by now,” she cajoled Llyn.

  “You’re too small to hold a faster team.”

  “But I’m strong now. Feel!” She took his hand between hers and squeezed with all her might. Even through the leather gloves, her hands had grown hard as horn. As hard as Llyn’s.

  “I’ll think about it,” Llyn allowed with a faint smile. Diana took it with a grain of hope as she led the geldings back to the barn. She put them away one by one and glanced into the next stall. “Pomona’s lying down.”

  “Pomona?” Llyn called from the end of the barn where he was hanging up the harness.

  “Just because you don’t name your horses doesn’t mean I can’t. The bay mare with the white face—is she ready to foal already?”

  He came in his silent long-legged stride, unlatching the stall and squatting down by the pregnant mare. She flicked her ears at him as he ran a hand over the swollen belly. “Looks like it.”

  Diana glanced at the sky outside, already darkening toward dusk. She usually went home after her training, but she came to the stall door and folded her arms along the top. “Can I help?”

  “Catch her head. She keeps trying to get up.”

  Diana came into the stall and knelt in the straw, taking hold of the mare’s nose. “Sshh,” she soothed as Llyn stripped off his tunic and arm rings and felt expertly inside the mare.

  “Feels like the foal’s turned wrong,” he said. “She’s always had trouble foaling. Hold her while I straighten things out in here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Diana gave a little salute, and he smiled at her. She settled by the mare, murmuring wordlessly.

  “Ah . . .” Another moment of patient fishing. “That should do it. Let’s let her push.”

  He cleaned his arm in a bucket of water and pulled his tunic back over his head. He was marked all over with old scars—a slash across the left arm, a crater on one shoulder, a healed spear thrust marking his brown ribs. Strange to remember he had spent his youth killing Romans and fighting battles as his father’s right arm. I’m glad he got captured—otherwise I’d never have the Anemoi or learn to drive, Diana reflected. Better not tell him that, though.

  They waited in comfortable silence, Diana chewing a straw, Llyn with his arms folded across his chest. “You shouldn’t be here at night.” He glanced at the darkening sky outside the barn door. “Your family wouldn’t like it. My father was rumored to eat young maidens for dinner once the sun went down, and now that he’s gone I’ve probably inherited the reputation.”

  “I’m not worried,” she smiled. “How long will it take her to push that foal out?”

  “Not long.” Llyn ran a hard hand over the mare’s nose, outstretched by his leg on the straw. “Maybe you’re not worried about your family, but I’d rather not have my house and horses confiscated by an outraged father who claims I ravaged his daughter before feeding her to a Druid.”

  “My father doesn’t get outraged about anything except broken chisels,” Diana said. “Anyway, I haven’t got any virtue left to ravage.”

  “Some charioteer, I suppose.” He shook his head. “You Roman ladies. Not a real warrior in your whole city, so you fall all over any substitute you can find.”

  “Give me a little credit, O great leader of rebels,” Diana snorted. “It wasn’t any charioteer, just some sweaty Praetorian of Otho’s. Stank like a brewery and didn’t last long enough to boil an egg.”

  “Ah.” A slight pause. “I trust your family had him thrown to the lions?”

  “Oh, my family doesn’t know. It wasn’t their business.” She’d gone looking for Piso’s head after the Othonian uprising, and a Praetorian guard had somehow ended up with it. She’d had to buy it off him, and he hadn’t wanted money. “It was a matter of honor, sort of,” Diana temporized, seeing Llyn’s glance. She didn’t know why she was telling him when no one else in the family knew, but she went on. “My decision. So it didn’t concern my family.”

  They’d only fuss, and why should they? Piso’s shade was laid to rest, and Cornelia had her peace of mind back. Well worth it all around. “Do Druids really eat people?” Diana asked.

  “With mistletoe sprigs. Look—it’s happening.”

  The foal came slithering into the world, miles of leg and sticky tufts of mane. “That’s a fine little colt you’ve got,” Diana said as Llyn rubbed him dry with a wisp of hay. “A chestnut, too. I’ll be wanting him for the Reds soon.”

  “Let him dry off first.”

  The little colt looked around with wide eyes as his mother nosed him. “This might even be better than the races,” Diana said, smiling.

  “It’s the part I like best.” Llyn squatted back on his heels. The little colt struggled, trying to get his legs under him, and the mare nudged him encouragingly. In half an hour he was up, wobbly but standing, and his fluffy coat was drying. “Definitely a chestnut,” said Diana.

  Llyn rose. “Better leave him to his mother.”

  They wandered outside, the black dog tagging behind. It was full dark now, and a fine warm night. The stars were finally free of rain clouds, and Llyn tilted his head up to stare at them. Diana wondered if they looked any different from the stars he grew up with.

  She touched his arm. “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Her father didn’t notice how late she was to dinner, but then he never did. Diana supposed he was an odd sort of father, but she reckoned herself for a strange daughter. They were really more like sire and filly than father and daughter—blood ties and a certain fondness, but certainly they would neither have dreamed of interfering in each others’ lives. Strange or not, it suited them both.

  “There’s been a battle,” her father said vaguely, his pale hair gray with stone dust after a day in his studio. “Somewhere around Bedriacum, they’re saying.”

  “
Really?” Diana said, wondering without much interest where Bedriacum was, and skipped upstairs to count her bruises. She looked in her polished mirror and didn’t see the silken Cornelia Quarta of the Cornelii, courted by half of Rome. She saw a girl in an old woolen tunic hacked off at the knee, hair bundled into a careless horse tail down her back, freckles across her nose and bruises up and down her arms. A girl who longed not for a husband but for the grudging praise of a rebel chief turned tamer of horses. She looked in the mirror, and she saw a charioteer.

  Eleven

  FORTY thousand dead.

  However many times Marcella began her account of the battle of Bedriacum, it started with those words. Forty thousand dead. Later she learned that the number was nowhere near so high—perhaps ten thousand, but not forty. No one knew for sure. But forty thousand was the number that resounded in her mind, the number that the gasping messenger brought to Emperor Otho.

  Forty thousand dead.

  She sat quiet in a storm of shouting voices and shrill laughter, reviewing her notes.

  Vitellius was not present with his army, still some distance behind with reinforcements. His commanders launched a daybreak attack upon Placentia, where Emperor Otho’s commander was camped with three cohorts of Praetorian Guards. The Praetorians fought like madmen and the attack was repulsed.

  Like madmen—florid words, not fit for a cool and sober history. But Marcella had seen the Praetorians come like gods of war from the field to report to their Emperor in Bedriacum some miles away. A trio of officers had made the report, giddy and triumphant. One of them was Centurion Drusus Densus.

  “The Vitellians are running, Caesar,” the chief centurion had crowed. “We sent them off with their tails between their legs—”

  “Ha!” Otho slapped the arm of his chair in delight. He had not traveled light on this campaign; in a rude soldier’s tent he sat ensconced in his own gilded chair from the Domus Aurea, a silver flagon of his favorite wine to hand, his own barber to shave him twice a day, and his own musicians to provide entertainment. The musicians were silent, fingers twitching on their lyre strings, eager as the rest of Otho’s considerable entourage to hear the rest of the Praetorian report. Marcella stood at the back with the few other women who had wheedled their husbands or lovers into taking them along, craning her neck for a better view.