Author’s note:  I’ve tried to choose English equivalents to most Latin phrases, but some words have no simple equivalents in our culture.  For that reason, a highly informal and probably inaccurate glossary of the Latin I’ve felt compelled to use can be found here.  I speak not a word of Latin, so all the gross and egregious grammatical errors, especially in regards to word endings, are my own.

“Slave with bad master wants good master.  Slave with good master wants to be free.”

--Antebellum slave saying

Major e longinquo reverentia. -- "From a greater distance, all seems more respectable."

--Cornelius Tacitus,annals 1,47

Romans

By

Parhelion

 

The First Scroll

 

It was almost a year after my noble Mistress died when my even nobler Master, Senator L.[ucius] Claudius Lupis Nero, patrician and flamen, sent for me.  I’d wondered how long he could last, playing Vestal Virgin rather than Roman priest.

I’d had plenty of warning, of course.  I, L. Claudius Lupis Victorianus, then Archippos the slave, was a part of the small household my Master had established for refuge from his lady wife’s notable temperament and his adopted son’s persistent excesses.  In point of fact, I was my Master’s literary secretary, but I would also attend to his dressing some mornings.  Typical of his behavior, he would rather squander the time of an expensive slave-secretary than pay for enough cheap help for me to get some rest while he was clothed.  One slave to attend to the toga, one to curl hair, one to care for the feet:  none of the usual Senatorial staffing for my noble Master.  He kept just enough of a familia urbana that he wouldn’t have to do a lick of work and not one slave more.  Knowing him, he didn’t want the toil of disciplining the extra bodies.  But given this particular eccentricity of his, even though I was only supposed to be his man-of-all-scribal-sweat, I’d already seen his naked body stir under my touch.

I doubt his morning erections were a specific tribute to me.  By A.U.C. 828 [ed. Note: 75 A.D.] I was well past such boyish beauty as I’d ever had.  But my summons wasn’t about beauty anyhow.  It wasn’t about the usual slave’s duty of bending over and spreading on command for the Master, either.  Noble Lucius considered himself a philosopher, so our meeting had to be about philosophy.  Since I was a slave, it also had to be about money.

When I attended him early that winter evening in his library, he was seated in the comfort of his curved-back chair rather than behind his Greek desk, which meant we were going to have a casual little chat.  Most of his furnishings were in the Greek style, all crafted in the boring but tasteful ancient Ionian manner.  His curly brown hair was coifed in academic fashion, too, and his toga was of the more-Roman-than-thou kind that screams of secret Greek preferences.  Only his body, both in its huge, deceptive fatness and its dangerous, hidden muscularity, was truly, imperially, Roman.

“Noble Master?”  His dark eyes shifted a little, gauging how close to the sand I was rowing that particular evening.  There’s at least one strain of the ancient patrician Claudii in his obscure branch of the clan, one strain more than most of the Senatorial class has these days, so he managed to look suspicious without losing his gravitas.

“Archippos.”  He fell silent.  He examined me.  At last, he grunted.

“Master.”

Another, different grunt.  Then he cleared his throat.  Finally, realizing that he was stalling and it showed, he glared at me.

I let myself grin at him.  Even before I was sold as a foreign slave in Rome, the first good beating from the slave-breaker, of the kind that leaves you spitting, snottering, and pissing blood, had taught me not to grin.  But noble Lucius was smart enough to spot the grin behind the demure look I’d worked up as a substitute.  Soon after I’d come into his household he’d ordered me to go back to using whatever expressions I’d employed while free, since he’d rather be ambushed from the front than from behind.  So he’d said to me all those years ago, and time had proven him sincere.  Thus, being the dutiful slave that I was, I fell in with his preferences on that particular evening and inquired, with a pleasurable consciousness of satire, “Is there some special duty that my Master desires of me?”

The eyes squeezed shut.  “I can’t do this,” he muttered.  He could, of course, he just didn’t want to do it in front of me.  Eheu, the goddess Fortune frowned on him, since he wanted to do it with me.  All of his servants were male, most of them were old, and several were freedmen.  That meant I was the most succulent piece of slave-flesh available in the household, not considering that tale-carrying little puff-adder Narmer, which even my Master was not desperate enough to do.

I wasn’t exactly weeping for him, but I also didn’t want his approach dragging on for days.  I dropped onto my knees, taking care not to bang them on the nice, new mosaic-work Minerva, and put one hand on his foot.  Then I bowed my forehead against the back of my hand, making sure not to cut myself on the silver lunulae on his sandals.  I didn’t try to seem seductive, though.  Neither of us believed in wasting time on blatant lies.

He looked sour.  “You anticipate me.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Given the evidence I have provided you with, I am not surprised.  Very well.  What sort of tip would be a reasonable recompense for your not sulking, or do I need to seek release elsewhere?  And would you cease this ridiculously atypical groveling?  For once, I would prefer your affecting the insolence of a slave born to my household.  Now is not the time to suddenly learn proper deference.”

I felt myself relax a little inside.  Stupid, since I had known after the past few years what his attitude would be.  Noble Lucius wouldn’t endure the indignity of flogging a disobedient slave, let alone lowering himself to the sweaty labor of raping a reluctant one.  Even appointing another slave to do either job was too much bother for him.  I’d gone hungry, I’d been confined, and I’d felt the rod’s stripes just as I had as a boy, but I’d not known the sharp-teethed kisses of the lash since I’d entered his household.  So I pulled myself together and stood up.  Having, as I wrote previously, considered the matter, I named a price.  It was much too high, of course.

O putative reader, lower your brows.  Over their banquet tables, Romans say that all slaves are either grasping or spendthrifts and never ask why.  Some slaves spend every tiny coin on small pleasures that can ease the raw pain of the always-chafing yoke across their shoulders, but I had a Master who wouldn’t steal the tips he held in trust for me.  Some day I might be able to bargain for my freedom, and I wanted that day to be soon.

This particular evening we dickered over a different ware.  As I wrote, my Master considered himself a philosopher.  He certainly didn’t need to deal with a slave but, as a would-be Epicurean, he claimed to like a quiet life.  My late and formerly noble father’s household proved that heavy doses of the lash will also lead to a quiet life, but I can attest that such quiet lacks the edge of ease my Master preferred.  The philosophical man foregoes the immediate, violent pleasure for that slow, sedate pleasure which will last.  So noble Lucius believed.  For my part, I trusted in his actual indolence to back up his assumed principles.

“Satisfactory,” he said, once we’d agreed.  “Add the sum to your peculium, unless you wish for the cash now?”

I turned up a hand at him.  One of my Master’s clients was his business agent, but I kept the household books.  “No, Master.  This particular money I’m saving up.”

He didn’t ask for what or why.  There are a lot of words I could use to describe him, but stupid is not one of them.  Instead he narrowed his eyes to slits and sighed out about an amphora’s worth of air.  You’d think he was about to jump into the cold pool at the baths, not sow his seed on me.

“My Master could seek out the services of one who is paid,” I said, observing, not suggesting.

Noble Lucius shuddered, a tiny twitch across his entire bulk.  “The pimps douse them in scent.  And then they smile at you, both pimps and whores,” he murmured.

He had me there.  I gestured that he should stand up.  Then I helped him off with his toga.  Trust noble Lucius to don his toga to proposition a slave.

“Besides, the last thing I want is to become preoccupied with someone else’s misused possession.”

“Then much better for my Master to find ease here, where there is no chance of infatuation.”

“If that’s more of your idea of satire, don’t bother.  We know each other too well by now for such nonsense.”  He left it cloudy as to whether ‘such nonsense’ was satire or infatuation.  Probably he meant both. 

While we talked, I’d finished unwinding his toga and folded it up, so he’d have it clean for tomorrow morning’s audience with his clients.  Now I only had to tackle the girdle, the tunic, the loincloth, and then him.

By the time I got the loincloth off of him, he was offering me greetings again.  No way could I miss the rising flesh, given that I was still on my knees from undoing his sandals.  I rubbed my lips together and tried to remember all the various pointers I’d gotten by bribing one of the slave-staff over at our friendly neighborhood brothel.  Then, taking a deep breath, parting my lips, I leaned forward.

“Stand up.”

Surprised, I looked up at him.  Before I could stop it, I felt one brow arch up.

“Get up, I say.”  Noble Lucius was being brusque, but the little signs I’d learned to read amidst his gravitas told me he was feeling petulant, not annoyed.

I flipped over a hand and stood up.  He was the Master, and it was his peculium.

“Take off your tunic.”

By Pollux, buggering.  I should have asked for a bigger tip; this was going to hurt.  Well, at least I’d had the sense to make sure there was an oil flask full and ready to hand in both his library and his winter retiring room.

But, no.  When I’d stripped down and stood naked before him, he reached out and cupped me with up-curved fingers like I was some raving boy-beauty on an antique wine-bowl back home in Thracia.  Not surprisingly, my bird was as demurely nested in his hand as if it belonged to one of those long-dead, too-shy schoolboys.  I tilted my head at him inquiringly, wondering if I was about to be offered a hoop or a pet rooster to cooperate.  This was all very old fashioned; right, my Master was being the noble student of the Greek philosophers again.  It wasn’t staff-suckling or ass-piercing he wanted, but between-the-thighs.  I asked, “Do you want me to bend over your desk?”

“Not unless you want the ornamentation of its edge tooled into your skin.  The couch, rather.”

“Yes, Master.”  I snagged his second-best oil-flask from where I’d stowed it in the scroll cabinet behind a pile of wax tablets.

He ceased scowling at me and combing his fingers through the thatch on his chest long enough to say, “I see you anticipated me yet again.”

“Not meaning to presume, of course.”  The precautionary statement came with the force of unthinking habit as I busied myself rubbing oil between my legs.  Thank the household gods, noble Lucius hated scent.  It was bad enough being mounted without roses or violets being involved.  As it was, I only had to suppress the impulse to look for an oil-scraper and instead look to see if he wanted his erection anointed.  But he merely pointed towards the other side of the room.  So I put down his flask on the stone flags, went over to the arm of the couch, bent over, and braced myself.  I heard his big feet pad up behind me.  And then he’d thrust himself between my thighs and was riding me. 

Maybe, if I had still been the citizen youth I once was, I would have been deeply humiliated.  Or maybe not.  My natal sire’s family was – O, say it quietly - of ancient Theban and Macedonian stock, noble allies of the Roman conquerors, and our customs were conservative.  A few years back I might have been encouraged to take an older lover of political use to our family, someone like, say, Senator L. Claudius Lupis Nero, if I could have caught that big a fish.

Instead I was his fish although not currently impaled on his hook.  He worked against me, the heavy, hairy gut chafing my buttocks, his large hands firm but not bruising on my hips, his shaft sliding back and forth between my slick thighs.  From the soft grunts escaping him, this was providing what he needed.  My nose itched, but if I freed a hand to scratch it I’d probably fall over.  His thrusts were strong enough for that, no surprise.  My thoughts drifted back towards the two copies of his latest epistle to a guest-friend in the Campania I had to finish before supper.  Abruptly an arm wrapped around my chest, pulling me upright, and another wrapped around my belly.  I heard him swallow a groan and then he spent, body warm against my back, breath hot across my shoulder, seed sticky against my thighs.  Now I really wanted that oil-scraper.

He stood, pressed against me, breathing heavily.  His hand lightly skimmed my shaft again, which was pesky but not, to my surprise, repellent.  “Archippos.”  He’d considered saying something else, I could tell, but what could it be?  Not an endearment, not an accolade, certainly not his thanks.  He was the Master, I was the slave, and neither of us played poet’s games, so that was that.  He settled for letting me loose.

I got a cloth and went to where he stood, eyes almost shut.  I was going to towel him off briskly, but for some reason I patted at him gently.  He slowly blinked, and then the corners of his lips pulled back just a little.  “Make sure you light all three lamps when you do your copying this evening.  If you strain your eyes, no one profits.”

Between and behind my own thighs, I was being brisk with the cloth, but at that command I paused.  Open flames and I were not friends.  Hoping to stall for a while, I said, “Yes, Master.  With your permission, I’ll go wash now.”  He liked his human property scrubbed and polished, always.  Another eccentricity, but it did serve to keep the fleas down.

He grunted, one of the more amiable ones.  Seemingly, he was feeling better, as well he should.

After dressing him once more – in the usual domestic garb of two tunics, this time – and donning my own plain tunic, I wandered out towards the bathhouse to finish cleaning up, still mulling over how I felt.  My path took me through the kitchen where Imhotep, who doubled as both major-domo and head chef, was busy pitting olives.  He’d often do some menial chore like that to sooth himself when he was upset.  I sat down at a stool by the kitchen counter.

Imhotep was a freedman and supposedly as high above my lowly station as the Forum above the Tiber.  But he was always kind to me.  “Archippos.  How did it go?”

“Fine.”  I wasn’t surprised he knew.  There are no secrets among the servants in a small household.

“Excellent.  He will be more peaceful, and you will cease being nervous.”

“I wasn’t nervous.”

Imhotep giggled at me, but he was from Alexandria and could get away with it.  Then he offered me some of the olives, which I took and ate, before he said, “Stuffed mullet for dinner, which is good.  For once, He will have a proper appetite.”

My noble Master normally ate enough to supply a small legionary outpost.  I’d noticed no possibility of restocking that border fort with his leftovers these past few days.  “He’s been off his feed?”

“You cannot tell, I know, but yes.  The Heir joins us at the late dinner tonight and that is always upsetting to Him.”

I grimaced.  L. Claudius Lupis Flavianus, offspring of my Master’s deceased wife Julia, was my Master’s adopted son and a character right out of a Satire against dissipation.  The first husband of my Mistress had been a very, very close crony of the late Nero, as was she; my Master had married the widow Julia in part to escape the First Senator’s forcible pruning of obscure branches of the Claudii.  Unless it was to preserve his family name, I wasn’t sure why my Master had then adopted Flavianus, since he seemed to think Flavianus strongly took after his father-of-birth.  As a slave, I had no opinion of L. Claudius Lupis Flavianus, but my non-existent opinion agreed with my Master’s. 

“I’m going out to the bathhouse to sluice down.  May I borrow an oil-lamp?”

“Of course.  You may want to check your tunic for stains, as well.  He will want you available to read for his guests.”

Eu.  More extra duties.  I would need to rush my copying, and for such a pleasant reason, too.  Serving Flavianus was an even less lovely chore than hosting my Master’s semen.

Maybe I would have been less grudging in my  non-existent opinions if I had known then just what gruesome fun Fortune had saved up for Flavianus.  But I don’t think so.

By dinnertime, I’d finished my cleansing, completed my copying, and even found time to get out to the vestibule so that Decipor, the doorkeeper, could slip his chain off its collar hook and trot back to the bathhouse for a scrub before the Master’s guests arrived.  In any decent, traditional household the doorkeeper is permanently neck-collared and chained to the doorpost, but Decipor had to help out on other jobs around the place from time to time just like the rest of us, so he needed mobility.  He was back in time to cringe properly for the Heir, though.

His reward was an idle observation from Flavianus just as the fricasseed chicken came in. “Decipor is looking rather plump, Father.  Should you be feeding him so much?”

Pretty cocky, that criticism.  Flavianus had been the one who palmed off Decipor on this household in the first place, as a cheaper alternative to either freeing his birth father’s aging slave-playmate or finding Decipor lighter duties.  Decipor had arrived soon after I did, and I still remember how noble Lucius merely grunted, purchased an inconspicuous camp-stool, an even more inconspicuous collar with a hook, and left Decipor alone to spend most mornings drowsing in the sun after he’d finished sweeping out the vestibule.  It had been one of my first bits of evidence that Fortune was done with pissing on me and would now settle for spitting, instead.

Noble Lucius pinned Flavianus with a wide-eyed stare, which meant he was either bored or irritated, or possibly both.  “I am still capable of governing my own household, my son,” he murmured.  Yes, both.  He turned to the second guest, a young equestrian from a rich and rising family of grain merchants.  “Good Vibius Pupina, I believe you will find this fowl well prepared.  My client Aegyptius” – that was Imhotep, to other Roman citizens – “is an adequate cook.”

The equestrian youth assessed the chicken dubiously, which meant he had completely misunderstood my Master’s understatement.  It figured.  Handsome Flavianus had obviously sought out the youth’s company for the sake of his wealth and beauty, not his brains.  Even I could see the youth was exquisite.  For that matter, so were both the slaves who’d been brought along to attend to our guest’s shoes, sandals, and feet.  Narmer, who’d been demoted for the evening to carrying trays in from the kitchen, kept shooting the prettily-garbed pair jealous looks.  Narmer was a fool.  They may have been displayed enticingly, but they also had that brittle air of slaves with sore backs and buttocks.

“I know you can manage your household.  After all, you’ve already addressed the problem I meant to remedy for you this evening.”  Flavianus waved a languid, explanatory hand at his sandal boys, a hand that just missed illegally including his young friend.  No male freeborn Roman Citizen can use any other male freeborn Roman citizen, of course, so to imply the possibility was a gross insult.  But having now tasted his chicken, the equestrian was ignoring conversation in favor of consumption.  “I would have chosen Narmer myself although I suppose Archippos will do.”  But he threw his head back in negation.  “Really, it’s rather eccentric.  I know that, as flamen Quirinalis, you can’t remarry, Father, but must you exclude all females from your household?”

Narmer had simpered, but he wiped it off fast when I caught his eye.  Somebody had been carrying tales again.  I’d wondered where he’d been when we’d needed those extra walnuts cracked at the last minute out in the kitchen.

Now my Master looked sleepy.  “Thank you for your concern, young Flavianus.  As usual, we will rub along here in our old-fashioned way.”

“I don’t know why you insisted on selling the house you shared with my mother, the Lady Julia, after she died.  She had done it up beautifully, lovely furnishings, charming staff.  So suitable.”  For him to inherit, Flavianus meant.  “I wish you would let me assist you with these matters.  I’m sure you took a loss on some of those slaves you freed.  Their tithes can’t be covering everything.”

“You have your own estates to worry about, Flavianus.”  There was the plantation Flavianus had inherited from his birth father, formerly belonging to an equestrian executed by Nero, the villa outside of Stabaie that had mysteriously been purchased right after Flavianus’ term as a vigintiviri supervising the City mints, the—

“But should the flamen Quirinalis even be troubling himself with these private affairs?  The complications that must arise.”

“My sacred duties and their attendant prohibitions have made it inadvisable for me to hold higher public office, it is true.”  And that was just why he’d become flamen Quirinalis, as he himself had once told me after returning from a long political banquet where spilled wine led to spilled blood.  As a proof of his foresight, the decision worked well.  If any other Claudii Lupae besides the ones in this room had survived the imperial temper-tantrums of the past few decades, I had yet to meet them.

“There, you see?”  Flavianus pressed on.  “Such concerns only waste that span of days the gods have measured out to you.”

My Master grunted, visibly bored.  He selected his dish of chicken from the tray on the table, sniffed the odor, and chose one piece to sample.

“I can take this burden from your shoulders, Father.  My clients are capable, my slaves discreet--you could concentrate on your studies and rites.”

Slowly the tongue lapped out, and even more slowly retreated with its morsel.  Considering, noble Lucius chewed.  Flavianus waited, plucked eyebrows lowered, for my Master’s decision.  Suddenly, noble Lucius stabbed a finger out towards the wall, almost prodding Narmer in the ribs.  “You.  Go tell Aegyptius that he was correct about the number of onions.”

Narmer scuttled off and Flavianus looked exasperated for the heartbeat it took him to plaster his civilized smile over the cracks in his composure.  But Flavianus was not the type to give up, which was the Roman citizen in him rising to the surface.  “Noble Father, you live like a priest of the Republic, piously--” he gauged my Master’s expression and veered smoothly “—philosophically.  All the City knows you obey every prohibition of Quirinus.  You never vary from your routines.  For that matter, you rarely leave this house except to visit the baths, the Senate, and the sacred sites.  Do you truly think you have the acumen and the knowledge of current affairs needed to properly tend your legacy from my mother, the Lady Julia?”

Noble Lucius paused over devouring his chicken.  “No, I do not.”  His gaze tracked up from the food to Flavianus like a catapult winching towards its target.  “That is one reason I have clients.  Tending to them demands only the acumen and the knowledge to judge men.”  For a moment, his eyes were predatory, ruthless.  Then they turned to me in my corner and I was surprised by their softening, if not by their amusement.  “Archippos, read for our edification.”

For the enlightenment of his guests, he’d selected his copy of one of the Satires of Q. Horatius Flaccus Horace, the one about recouping wealth:

Another plan: suppose a man of wealth
Has but one son, and that in weakly health;
Creep round the Father, lest the court you pay
To childless widowers your game betray…

My voice was smooth and neutral as I read, of course.  I couldn’t afford the enmity of a patrician, not even one like Flavianus.  But I still enjoyed myself.

Later that evening, when I brought my Master my two clean copies of his letter to review in his winter retiring room, he read them over carefully and then nodded satisfaction.  “One copy to the records cabinet, one to the messenger, as usual.”

“Yes, Master.”

His lips pushed out and then pulled in, a sign he was thinking.  “This afternoon did help me to concentrate while I dealt with Flavianus and his latest little scheme.”

“Yes, Master.”  There was a certain compensation in knowing that my humiliation had been partially for the sake of frustrating Flavianus, I had to admit.

He’d owned me long enough to read my feelings without my having to speak the disrespectful words.  For the second time that day, the corners of his lips tucked back.  “Extinguish the lamp, then off to your pallet, Archippos.”

My work for the day was done, and I could actually get some rest.  Not bothering to yes-Master him again, I grinned instead, bowed, warily pinched out the wicks curled into their small bronze lamp, and left him.  I didn’t bother with chewing over the events of the day.  Brooding on one’s own time is a luxury of the free and of slaves who don’t mean to survive.  Instead I slept, and it did me all the good that was available.

 

The Second Scroll

 

That second time, my Master lasted three months, until a particularly maddening meeting of the Collegium Pontificum wore him down.  After that, he made it through a month and might have made it through two if not for Flavianus sending him a request to purchase Narmer back.  The little idiot was delighted at the prospect, and so I was forced to report to noble Lucius.  Bad enough, but Flavianus also wanted to send over another slave in payment.  Just what we needed, a replacement informant in the household.  Instead Lucius bought Linus, a solid, quiet, literate Cypriot, from one of his clients, but he came out the poorer on the deal. 

That same afternoon, he couldn’t seem to decide between the rival delights of lecturing, courting, and mounting me.  I finally got satiric enough about his behaving like a school-master that he sent me off to be locked inside an empty storage room with water but no bread, only to later relent and have me summoned back to polish off his dinner.  By some coincidence his appetite had failed him, and there was enough cold ham left over to make up for the food I’d missed.  When my meal was done he’d settled on mounting, and after that day he seemed to finally give up on training to be a vestal virgin.

My peculium was now rising at a nice, brisk clip, but my Master’s agent, L. Claudius Naso, known to one and all as Big-Nose, didn’t question the total when he reviewed the household accounts.  Imhotep had probably talked to him.  Imhotep had probably talked to a couple of his fellow clients although not about my duties, just my future.  Ireneus, who’d been a Centurion in my Master’s Legion and was now my tutor at body-guarding and stick-fighting, started throwing in the occasional caution or suggestion for when I was freed and had to change my tactics.  Slaves, having no honor, can do a few things that freedmen can’t, as long as no citizen gets killed.  On the other hand, a freedman uses a virtuous blade rather than a degenerate staff, being more before the City than just a tool that thinks.  I tried not to consider what any of this meant.  Anticipation executes more slaves than crucifixion ever has.  In fact, the one often seems to lead to the other.

I had one other matter not to think about.  Around the close of the campaigning season, the familia was always very busy as preparations got underway for the winter rites that needed the presence of the noble flamen Lucius.  These months were the one season of the year when my Master changed his set routines and lumbered around the City at unpredictable intervals, and to the rest of my work I had to add extra escort duties.  There hadn’t been much spare time for sweet-talk, and, now that I finally saw my peculium bulging, I didn’t want to divert money for other purposes.  In short, no girls for young Archippos.

Not that my fast would usually have mattered, but one evening my Master paused during sex in a way he sometimes did when he was tired, seating me across his lap.  You’d think I’d be too heavy for him, but no.  He sat stroking me like I was some beloved boy, catching his breath before levering me over a handy piece of furniture and finishing.  I was dividing my attention between wondering if there’d be any of the pastries from dessert left over and vaguely enjoying the firm, fat fingers kneading into the aching muscles of my thighs, when it finally got through to me that I’d gone erect.

Well, it wasn’t like I could run away.  I stared off into space and tried to think of Thracia.  Of course right then was the one time that those memories, which could be depended on to ruin my most peaceful moments, slipped away from me.  Although the fact that noble Lucius had just run a hand across my erection might have had something to do with my forgetfulness.

Noble Lucius grunted, amused.  I scowled at him before I could catch myself.  To my surprise, he responded by stroking my penis.  That made it my turn to grunt.

He didn’t actually ask, which would have been a gross breach of his dignity.  There was merely a casual pause as he waited.  I was weary, very weary, and aroused past argument.  If he wanted to view my release as another sign of his mastery, rather than a dubious sexual practice for a free-born citizen, it wasn’t my place to argue with him.  I looped one arm across his shoulders, rested my face against my own shoulder, and closed my eyes.

His large hand, even with sword calluses softened by his years as a flamen, didn’t feel like it belonged to a woman.  Too strong, too knowing, but I found myself working my hips in time with his touch.  My skin had flushed, my breathing hitched, my buttocks tensed.  One part of me wanted to ask him to caress me just there, below the recessed hood on a certain special spot, but requests were right out.  But what he did instead to the tip of me with his forefinger-- When his whole fist enveloped me, stroking my shaft hard, sliding skin from top to base, my breath left me with a guttural noise.

“Quiet.  Don’t speak.”  His husky, deep-pitched murmur gave a command I could whole-heartedly obey.  His free arm had wrapped around my lower back and that big hand was splayed out across my hip, fingers slowly caressing.  Beneath me, his own legs tensed and shuddered, which shifted his shaft against my thighs.  I didn’t rub against him with intent, not quite. But I wasn’t surprised when the hand on my hip suddenly gripped hard as he ground against me, his other hand frantic and rough on me.  My eyes flew open as I spent, to see his face twisted far away from gravitas.  I’m not even sure I was entirely done when he clamped down with his fingers and growled, his own moment rushing upon him. 

While cleaning up afterwards, I noticed five red marks, the imprints of his fingers, slowly darkening on my hip where he’d clutched at me.  That was the first time he’d ever bruised me without meaning to, and I don’t think he was pleased.  Neither was I, but I didn’t add it to the debit list in my mental ledger, either. 

Still, I wasn’t inclined to loiter and consider what had happened, even when it happened again, and again, and yet again, until it became a dark and private pleasure amidst my set duties.  I enjoyed reading some of the authors my Master set me to annotating for his own purposes, which was no betrayal of my own desires.  Neither was this, or so I told myself as the months rolled by, on the occasions when, captive in his hot, tight grip, I couldn’t not think about it.

Perhaps my situation made me more sympathetic than I might otherwise have been when I ran into Narmer while fetching back my Master’s copy of Catullus from the household of Flavianus.

I was standing, waiting, in the library, wondering how a room so crowded with expensive furnishings could somehow seem so empty, when he came in.  Narmer was now as prettily dressed as those attendants he’d envied.  Unlike them, though, he had a glossy, satisfied look.  “Archippos.”

“Narmer.  You look well.”

He smiled.  “I told you that you worried over nothing.”

“So I see.” I had wondered out loud about what would happen when Narmer was older and Flavianus got bored, but my effort at undermining had been fairly shallow, I admit.  Narmer had tried tattling on me to my Master a few times even after it sunk in that much of the mischief I was up to was at the command of noble Lucius.  That was my first clue he was an informant; he was one of those characters who, once they start carrying tales to a Master, couldn’t stop.

“I have your scroll.  I’m literary secretary here.”

O, was he, now?  The position in this household must be an easy job, then.  No wonder the library looked unloved.  “Then the noble Senator’s Catullus is in appropriate company.”  Would he catch my jab?

No, he smiled.  “The best.  See what we have.”  He took me around the room and opened all the scroll cabinets, intent on proving to me how much superior to the collection of noble Lucius this one was.  He succeeded, too.

“And here are our latest additions, Ptolemy’s Life of the God Alexander, and all the works of Quintus Rufus, including his Geographia.”

I made the figs, not bothering to hide that I was impressed.  “Avert envy!  Is everything in this household so refined?”

“O, yes.”  He almost glowed.  “No as-pinching or shaving of talents here.  Everything done just so.” 

That had the sound of a quote and I didn’t have to guess of whom.  I’d taken the Catullus from its box, picked up a set of book dowels, and was rolling it out to make sure that it was dry and clean before I tight-rolled and tied it.  About ten poems in, I spotted several different sets of finger-marks across the papyrus, in grease.  I quirked my lips but didn’t say anything.

When I glanced up, though, Narmer was slightly flushed.  “There’s to be another copy made, a gift for the Master’s noble Father--” he trailed off, then resumed.  “It’s not quite done.”

I looked back down to hide my eyes.  Eu.  For the cost of any of the lesser items he’d shown me, they could have gotten five or six far better copies of Catullus made and had them finished a week ago.  “I’m sure the Senator will be pleased,” I said, being careful to sound pleasant.

Narmer almost wiggled like a puppy in his relief.  “Good, good.  Would you like to come out to the kitchen for something to eat?”  He recollected himself and added piously, “As a representative of your noble Master, of course.”

Would I?  There’s no place like a kitchen to get the sense of a household.  I accepted and followed Narmer through the public rooms, making sure to keep my head down and my footsteps soft, like those of the other slaves we passed.  My eyes were busy moving, though.  In the kitchen the food was good, but some of the staff were thin for kitchen workers and the place was quiet.  That could be due to my presence, but I thought not.  I didn’t linger long.

When I got out the front gate – the door-keeper of Flavianus was duly chained and did not look at all plump – I waited until I was part of the crowd, well away from the sacred doorpost of Flavianus to whistle.  So, that was why noble Lucius had loaned out one of his precious scrolls to his Heir.  I’d wondered.

As the years had gone by, I’d come, reluctantly, to love Rome.  The tumult, men and women from every tribe and condition swirling through the streets past shops selling any good I could want or imagine, all of city life from brutal to sweet,  had cast its spell on me.  But today I only kept enough attention on the City to make sure that no passer-by enriched himself at the cost of the library of Lucius or the thin purse of Archippos.  Behind my mouth I was already arranging the words I knew I would soon be saying to my Master.

He was newly returned from the grove of Robigo when I entered, and was still wearing both his toga and his priestly mantle.  “Well?” he muttered.

I gestured for him to lean over.  He did, and I removed his apex, the sacred hat that proved him a flamen.  With a covert gesture, as I turned to put it onto its stand, I checked that the rod of myrtle wood sticking up from its top was secure.  Once, the short, rounded-off rod had loosened while noble Lucius was leading a state rite of Quirinus, wobbling up and down with cheerful lewdness until Dionysus, one of his slave-escorts, had snickered.  Even noble Lucius had to break out the lash for that one as an alternative to sale.  The fact that Dionysus was still around, biting his lips on humorous occasions, rather than in the mines somewhere, helped confirm a long-held suspicion of mine.  It seemed my Master viewed his priestly position with a certain – philosophical detachment.  I kept that thought to myself.  Whatever his religious views, noble Lucius took his duties to the City very seriously indeed.  I’d made sure myself, since then, that the apex was properly cared for.

Turned away from noble Lucius, I said, “Rejoice.  Your Heir is well, my Master.  He prospers.  His library has become a marvelous thing, and there are new wall paintings in his Atrium and Dining Hall.”

When I turned back his lips were pursed slightly.  “I rejoice.  How much did the library make you marvel?”

I named a figure in denarii, a pretty marvelous one.

 Noble Lucius said, dryly, “Indeed, a marvel.  How pleasing that Flavianus has at last taken an interest in learning.”

“It seems he wishes only to imitate his noble Father.  Narmer cares for his library.”

For just a moment noble Lucius closed his eyes.  “And the art?”

“Also marvelous, perhaps even more marvelous.  All your noble Heir’s many new furnishings made me marvel.”

“You amaze me.”

“My Master will be pleased to know that the growing familia of noble Flavianus is eager to preserve these works of wonder.  Some of the new slaves--” my tone was also dry, but I didn’t try to change it, “—were marvelous as well.”

For a moment our eyes met as equals, not shocking under those circumstances.  Some philosophers claim there can be no division between men in the pursuit of wisdom, and we were sharing a neat little puzzle.  Where was Flavianus getting all these funds?

Noble Lucius worked his lips in and out a single time.  “Perhaps L. Claudius Naso may also rejoice to hear of these marvels.”

Silently, I bowed.  Silently, I left him.

Later that afternoon, about the tenth hour, Big-Nose ordered in a plate of bread and onions and had it left close to my elbow where I could serve myself while he pretended not to notice.  “So, how’s the Senator taking your news?”

“He’s always interested to hear how his son prospers.”  Literally true, that.  The last time such sudden prosperity had blossomed in the household of Flavianus, back when I was just old enough to catch wind of what was going on, the Parthians had been involved.  Apollo knows what good they thought they could get out of bribing Flavianus, but he could have a persuasive way about him when he bothered.  Since there was nothing for Flavianus to actually betray, the gambit hadn’t quite been illegal or immoral, merely undignified.  But that had been three years ago, and it had only been two months gone that Lucius had waved for me to stay in the room while Big-Nose had reported the latest rumors of the City about Flavianus.  Seemingly, most of the legacy from my late and noble Mistress to Flavianus had gone towards paying off money-lenders, and the rest he’d run through fast.  There shouldn’t have been anything left over for fancy paintings, pretty boys and girls, and books bought only to one-up his noble Father.

“Yes, I’d wager the Senator is interested.  I’ll cast the net a little wider.”  That would be wide, all right.  Big-Nose had business partners and guest friends in the Greek, Jewish, and Parthian communities in Rome, more of a marvel than the library of Flavianus since the three groups all hated each other.

“You do that.  He really wants to know.”  I snorted.  “As for me, I’m not sure if I should hear what it’s all about this time.  There’s a whole lot of new gold in that household, both on the walls and on the hoof.  Whatever’s going on must stink like the great sewer.”

“Better watch yourself, then, lad.   Flavianus isn’t stupid, unless you compare him to the Senator.  He’ll hear you’ve been poking around his household and draw conclusions.  You’re a much easier target to hit than his Father.”  Funny, that, when you considered our relative sizes.  I let my silence make the crack for me, since it was of a kind I hadn’t been able to speak out loud for years.  Big-Nose’s lips quirked and he added, “Avoid Flavianus.  Don’t die without your freedom.  The rest of the familia would never hear the end of it.”

I swallowed and picked up a piece of bread to hide my reaction.  Maybe that’s why I also said, “One thing I don’t get.”

“Only one?”

“You who hear and the harpies, together, in an alley.  One thing in particular.  Noble Lucius isn’t stupid.  He knows what to look for in a boy slave.  That knack must work with citizen youths, too.  Why’d he suddenly lose the talent and adopt Flavianus?  And now that he has, why doesn’t he yank the reins tight?  Noble Lucius is paterfamilias, after all.  Under law, he owns everything Flavianus owns, the lands, the slaves--”

Big-Nose’s features went so still that, for a moment, it seemed he’d gotten a gift of gravitas to go along with the cash when my Master had freed him.  “Maybe you don’t need to know.”

“Maybe.”

“But maybe you do, too.  Just keep it in mind that your testimony’s only legal under torture.  This, someday, someone might want to hear.”

I felt my skin prickle, but it was too late to back the cart up now.  I nodded.

“You know that the Senator married for political reasons, because the late Mistress had a lot of influence with Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus.  Well, she didn’t have the influence just because her first husband was Nero’s very good friend.  She had her influence because of Flavianus and who his real father was.  The Mistress and Nero went way back, you see.  Given that, he thought it appropriate that Flavianius be adopted by another Claudii, if not by himself.  Appropriate, and funny, too.”  Big-Nose shook his head slowly.  “I don’t think the Senator wants his heir too close.  Only close enough to keep an eye on, not within dagger’s reach.  Can you blame him?”

It was a struggle to keep my face still.  Vespatian might now be firmly in the saddle of the Senate as First Senator, but certain clan-branches of the Claudii still seemed to evoke fountains of blood from the earth of this city.  When I’d thought that Flavianus took after his father of birth, I’d been thinking something worse than I knew.

I was up early the next day, of course, and had my daily scrub and brought the ledgers up to date while my Master was still sleeping.  Then I dressed him, and he ate his morning bread, fruit, and eggs while I read his correspondence to him.  When I was done taking the notes of his responses, he pursed his lips, and said, “That letter from G. Plinius Secundus will need to be answered in greater detail, but not until after I’ve seen my clients.  Are they ready?”  Since nothing would get him to rise before he must, he held his morning interviews late enough that his clients could attend him during an early lunch break.  Those who, for financial reasons, had need could also dance attendance on a second patron earlier in the day.  Such behavior was plebian, but so were many of his clients.  I nodded, he sighed, and we went.

With a grunt, my Master seated himself on the bench in the atrium, prepared to receive his daily ration of reverence.  Unlike most patrons, he didn’t need a slave to prompt him with his client’s names.  Not only was his memory good, but there weren’t overwhelming numbers of faces to be remembered.  He avoided taking on clients, part of his Epicurean principles about avoiding entanglements.  Still, he had more of them than you would expect from his disinterest in politics.  Probably it was his combination of gravitas and cunning:  if you wanted Ulysses in a chalk-bright Roman toga, you couldn’t do better than noble Lucius.  Several rich equestrians, lower-level officials, and freedman merchants would come and do him homage just so that they could borrow the sharp edge of his wits every now and then.  And the little tips and favors they offered in return didn’t hurt the household ledgers.

I was off to one side with the small bags containing the daily gift of a patron to his clients.  I’d respectfully hand one over to each client in turn after he’d stepped forward and greeted my Master.  The job had all my attention.  Mixing up the bags, giving money to some wealthy grain merchant and a token coin folded within a graceful little note about the latest scheme to avoid officialdom to one of my Master’s freedmen, could have serious consequences, not the least for me.  It was one of the few errors he’d take the rod to me over, and I almost couldn’t blame him.  But he’d only ever had to whip me once, largely because my pride had stung as badly as my back and I didn’t make the same mistake twice.

Noble Lucius had been terse before and verbose after he’d wielded the whip, no great surprise.  “Clientage is an archaic survival from the days when the plebeians depended on patricians, and not on the City, for their sustenance and protection.  But now the relationship is merely coarse trade.  The client seeks the patron’s fiscal support and political influence.  The patron wishes the show of a good attendance about the City and the personal service it is his right to demand from his clients.  Wits complain about the paucity of the patron’s funding, the vulgar scramble for his gifts, the gaudy display of the daily ceremonies of greeting and attendance.”

I composed myself to patience as noble Lucius told me all about what I already knew.  Experience had taught me my Master could lecture me on anything from women’s hairstyles through Etruscan curse-spells to Egyptian grain prices before expounding his philosophical conclusions.  And then there would usually be questions.  Often the discourses were entertaining, sometimes just annoying.  Only in the past year or two had I started to realize my Master’s words carried more of a burden of meaning than recording them can convey.

Noble Lucius’s eyes shifted behind narrowed lids.  “In the early Republic, a patrician was as much Father to his clients as to his children and slaves.  Now one might as well lead a street gang.  Worse; the members of a street gang usually respect their leader.”

Maybe, some other time, I might have made some crack about his archaic behavior.  Just now my back stung and I was silent.

His forefinger was tracing little circles on his desk, a sure sign he was upset about something.  At least he wasn’t being petulant about my blunder.  “In our own time, when the patron cares only for show or unction, the clientage of freeborn citizens is a mockery and the mandatory clientage of the patron’s freed slaves is either a matter of unpaid labor from them or unearned gifts to them.  A floor held up by rotten beams must be supported to carry real weight.”  His forefinger stilled, and then he laced his hands over his belly.  “This is why you must take care with these details of the daily attendance.”

“Yes, Master.  Bleeding back, orders kept.”  That had been one of my late sire’s favorite sayings.

“Archippos--” Whatever else he was going to say, he changed his mind.  “Go.  Have those stripes seen to, rest, and consider my words.”

That had been shortly after his wife had died, and not long before his shaft had first risen to receive my morning greetings.  Soon thereafter I would have more to consider about the rights of a Master than the client-service of the slaves he’d freed.  Not that being freed did anything but convert the Master’s natural right to the Patron’s sloppy self-indulgence.  As the old Roman saw about bottoming went, a calumny for the freeborn, a necessity for the slave, and a duty for the client-freedman.  And such considerations were no way to keep my attention on my present job.

Most of the citizens clients vaguely acknowledged me, some haughtily ignored me, and a few of them greeted me.  Big-Nose smiled faintly, murmured “nothing yet,” and tapped the famous nose, Irenius grinned and faked a blow at my shoulder that I slid off with a grin of my own, and Imhotep smiled sweetly before hurrying off to do some marketing in the shops built onto my Master’s house.  Two of the freedmen merchants who’d still been slaves when I’d been bought inquired at some length after my health.  One, I knew, had no off-spring but young daughters.  He was probably searching for fellow freedmen with influence to marry them and might be noting me for possible future consideration.  I quashed that thought.  An equestrian who suspected me of dallying with one of his female slaves glowered at me; I took care to be respectful in return.

When he’d been greeted by everyone down to the lowliest ancient freedman, noble Lucius dismissed his clients.  Strictly speaking, for the sake of his prestige he should have taken them along as he did his morning rounds so that the City could marvel at the magnificence of his train.  However, he claimed he couldn’t stand being followed around by a mob.  My suspicion was that he couldn’t stand being reminded that most of the City liked to walk faster than he did.

My Master went marching off, with half our small household in his wake, to take his noble bath, leaving me behind to get more work done.  I went into his library and checked the wax tablet he’d left me.  Look, a copy of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, to be annotated with noble Lucius’s notes.  What a surprise, I was to sniff around Draco’s shop and see when the first new papyri of the season was said to be arriving via Oestia.  And, of course, I was to check that his night lamp burned properly.  He thought it might be clogged.

I put the tablet back down and sighed.  Every day, without fail, my Master found some excuse for me to handle flame.  He’d laced his fingers over his stomach the one time I’d asked him why and then said, “Hate it, so long as you endure it.” 

That shut me up.  He knew.  Before hearing his little saying, I hadn’t been sure he’d known of my fear since it didn’t spring from anything I’d endured as a slave.  It had been a part of me when we first met, on that day when, each year now, I sacrifice to Fortune.  Will you, O putative Reader, believe me when I write that I now know the goddess beamed brightly that day?  O, she was pissing as well, but she did it with a smile.

Even on this day, when I write and see wrinkled hands before me, I clearly remember standing, naked, on a platform under the hot canvas tent that sheltered rare items while the chatter of commerce rose and fell around me, sweating the chalk off my feet while the buyers stopped and examined me briefly, and then passed on.  I was better off than so many others.  I was a Hellene, used to stripping for the Gymnasium and the games in front of the People.  Once the heir of wealth, I was taught to do more than harvest corn or handle cattle.  I was my sire’s son, used to crushing down what I felt and concentrating on survival.  Maybe that was how I’d survived what killed my family in the very end.  I couldn’t remember--the choking panic started to rise up, helped along by the fact that I was just then being handled by some tough-bodied plebian who was complaining about my price.

“He doesn’t have the looks to be worth that much.”

The dealer’s attendant, a bored-looking freedman, turned a hand up.  “As you can see from his neck scroll, Alexandros, he’s literate, numerate, speaks Latin, and has some education in the classics.  That ups the price.”

I didn’t recognize the plebian as the pimp’s agent he was, which was good.  It might have paralyzed me.  Of course, looking back now, I realize he was only taking a try on the off-chance of getting an unexpected bargain.  At the time, half-dazed, I began to recite.

It was Homer, the Odyssey.  Even then, past whippings had taught me to stay away from anything, like the entire Illiad, which might be misheard as commentary on my current situation.  Of course, past whippings had also taught me that diplomacy was “sneaking and sniveling”, that complaints about injustice to my father were – nothing I needed to remember.  I was better off reciting, so on to the sailor’s encounter with the Kyklops.

The plebian snorted rudely and strode on.  The dealer’s man, thinking I was trying to help myself and helping him by doing it, patted me amiably on the loin before he followed.  Even now, I remember how badly I wanted to strike him down.  Doggedly, I kept reciting.  How often had I stood before my own pedant, as he thoughtfully kept the beat with rod against palm, doing this?  My Master has never had to explain the uses of literature to me.

My memory was good, very good.  Although my voice felt rusty from disuse, I talked on, now with eyes shut.  I’d almost managed to lose myself with sly Odysseus amidst the sheep, when a woman’s voice, mild and golden, said, “He does go on so.”

“It’s Homer.”  The deep male voice was pitched to a grim note.  Obviously annoyed, but at her, his surroundings, or the fact that he was shopping, I couldn’t tell.

“I know that.”  Now her tone was sharp, too, and a small hand prodded at me.

“I don’t like buying public merchandise.”

“You don’t like buying anything, Lucius.”

Go away, I said silently, go away.  It was no good.  They wouldn’t go away.  The whole world knew that Romans wouldn’t go away.

There was a grunt.  “You said we were only here so you could view this flute player your friend speaks of so highly.  This boy isn’t him.  He’s foreign.”

“With those fair looks, that touch of red in the hair?  He’s Macedonian, I’d wager.”

“Yes, that is what his scroll says, I had noticed.”

I was nothing but an excuse for their quarrel.  Without thinking, I opened my eyes, to see an attractive blond matron confronting a huge, overweight man in a Senator’s toga wearing a ridiculous hat with a piece of wood sticking out the top of it.  Go away, you fat face-fucker.

As if he could hear me, the brown eyes suddenly rose to meet my own.  They narrowed to slits and glinted.  I wanted to flinch, but I kept talking.  Noble Lucius said, “He’s--”  Whatever else he was going to say, he swallowed and substituted another grunt for.  I wish I’d known his vocabulary of noises back then, because I’ve always wondered which grunt it was.

“He’s literate, and you’re the one who always goes on about that, noble husband.”  She turned and stuck out an imperious finger to halt another attendant hurrying by.  “You.  How much for this one?”

Noble Lucius opened his mouth, probably to point out that my price was also on my scroll.  To my horror, I felt myself roll up my eyes in exasperation towards the roof of the tent.  When I’d snapped them back down, he’d closed his mouth again and his own eyes were, if anything, narrower than before.

Thus I came into my noble Mistress’s household.  Having made her point, whatever it was, by buying me, she promptly forgot about me.  Her steward, finding that I could cast accounts, set me to doing so.  I was underfed by the standards I was used to, overworked, harried, and occasionally beaten.  But I hadn’t felt the lash until the day I was set to refilling oil on the great lamp stand during an early banquet.  Whatever had killed my family must have had something to do with fire because, when I saw all those flames close up, I froze. 

“You, there!  Boy!  What are you gaping at?”  The snide words belonged to Flavianus.

Unnerved, I let the oil flask slip from my fingers and shatter on the mosaic floor.  At least it didn’t splash over any of the guests, so I was only lashed, not strangled, by the household’s slave-enforcer for their entertainment.

I’d thought the flail couldn’t be much worse than the rod.  I was wrong, very wrong.

I don’t think my Master was pleased, when he heard about the public spectacle.  Supposedly, I was to be sent to join the Mistress’s familia rustica, to spend the rest of my life with the other male field-hands, working without surcease and sleeping in chains.  But instead I spent my recuperation standing up and reading, endlessly reading, to noble Lucius.

One day he abruptly interrupted me to ask, “What do you think?”

What did I think?  I thought I wanted to sit down, but my ass was still too torn up for that to help my feet. “Very interesting, Master.”

He snorted.

So I added, “Imaginative, although his argument would be more convincing if he’d ever actually met a Persian.”  Just send me away, would you?

“Vah.  Keep going.”

It culminated in one more quarrel.  I squatted in the corridor outside, arms wrapped around my knees.  I had too much sense of my own survival not to listen although I didn’t particularly want to.

My Master’s voice:  “I’ve told you, with the assassination of the Emperor, matters are different.  We can’t afford anything that will draw attention, including your temper.  Flogging is usually unnecessary and always, especially in public, a disgrace.”

“O, now that you’re safe, matters--” She broke it off.  “Fine.  Give me his price and get him out of my sight.  Add him to that stuffy little Greek retreat of yours.  It needs a few boys to be in best Hellenic style, anyhow.”  Out in the corridor, I shuddered, half-cold, half-sick.

But he never summoned me for anything worse than copying out Hesiodos and Cato, or tending his night lamp, until a year after my Mistress died.  And there I would not let my thoughts wander.  They wandered all together too much recently, and sometimes I feared I knew why.  Taking a deep breath, I reached for the scroll box holding Lucretius.

 

The Third Scroll

 

It took Big-Nose over a week to find the news we needed, and he had to pull in half his friends to help him do it, and tap some strange casks of information as well.  Even Irenius told me later, over a meal of bread, salt, melted cheese, and strong red wine at a neighborhood tavern, that he’d spent two days following some charioteer from the Green faction around.  Not that it kept him from giving me my four-times-a-week dose of lumps at stick practice, mind you.

As for me, if you think I have an epic tale of intrigue, of standing silently, eavesdropping on political plotting at palace banquets, of strapping the shoulder armor onto sweating gladiators about to stride from shadow onto sunlit sand and die, forget it.  I spent most of my time with Big-Nose, casting and recasting accounts based on the information we’d get in dribs and drabs from his contacts, and then bringing them back to the house for noble Lucius to grunt over.  O, and I spent hours on two different days dealing with the high-nosed public slaves who kept the City records, which involved passing over coins of my Master that would have been much better off in my peculium, I’m sure.

But by the end of eight days the picture was clear.  Big-Nose pushed back a pile of slates and went to look out over the court garden.  He was staring at my Master’s famous miniature shrubbery but I don’t think he really saw the plants.  I think he didn’t want to look noble Lucius in the eyes.

I put down my stylus, suppressed a sigh, and reached for the plate of nuts and raisins on the library table just to have something to do.  I know I didn’t want to look noble Lucius in the eyes.

My Master was silent, brooding over the letter we’d just been discussing from a prefect who was a member of the same clan-branch as the brother-by-marriage of one of Noble Lucius’s equestrian clients.

I cleared my throat.  “We could be mistaken.”

“No.”  His tone was flat.  I’d have been much more pleased if it was petulant or annoyed.  “Flavianus has been marching down this road his whole life.  It is hardly surprising that he’s reached this particular mile-stone.”  He rolled up the letter as he spoke.  “The words formed by all these letters are clear.  He’s a murderer.”

Big-Nose turned around.  “It’s a neat scheme.  If all the folks who put him in their wills died of sickness, someone might think of poison. If they all died in the streets, ambush.  Fire--” he broke that off.  To anyone who lives in the City, arson is not something entertaining to contemplate.

“He never uses the same technique for his ambushes twice in a row.  At least that much of my lectures about Legion tactics sank in.”  Noble Lucius sat looking like Vesuvius brooding over the bay.

Big-Nose and I exchanged glances.  My turn.  “Neat work not making his whole profit off of legacies, too.  The robberies, the fire-sales and looting--”

The papyrus suddenly crumpled in my Master’s hand, but his voice was conversational.  “Do you actually think it a consolation to consider that there is real intelligence in him?  Better blunt Brutus than sly Octavian.”

I saw Big-Nose wince and I’m sure I did too.  That was the kind of political opinion you just didn’t share.  I couldn’t tell my Master to keep quiet, so I did the best I could.  “There’s green-olive salad and ewe’s cheese, along with some of Imhotep’s coriander sausage, for lunch.”

His chin jerked up, almost the width of a dagger edge, and his eyes narrowed.  Then, to my surprise, his lips tucked back a little.  “Yes.  You will stay, good L. Naso?”

“Thank you, noble sir.”

I couldn’t say my Master ate with an appetite, but the food did seem to calm him down.  As he would from time to time, he passed me some of Imhotep’s sausage from off his plate and I didn’t hesitate.  Whichever household slaves won the dicing for leftovers back in the kitchen wouldn’t hesitate, either.  The dish was too good for that.  After the meal we returned to the library and talked strategy.

Noble Lucius scowled.  “I can try and bring Flavianus back under control, but I thought I’d succeeded at that the last time.  And there’s no predicting the result of a court trial.  It’s either the First Senator or having Flavianus ambushed, somehow.  Neither option appeals.  I’ll need to speak with him, even if it puts him on his guard.”

Big-nose nodded.  “Do you want to talk to one of the henchmen first?”

“Yes.”  Noble Lucius closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers across his noble gut.  “That trio of his freedmen.”

“The ones Sergius just interviewed again?  They’ll be nervous now, and they’re dangerous.  I have them pegged for the sword’s edge.”

“As do I.  But that means they’ll be the ones who know what I need.”

“We can have them picked up by Irenius and some of the boys--”

“No.”  The eyes had narrowed to slits.  “I don’t want them any more scared than they are, I don’t want a fight, and I don’t want witnesses.  I’ll go.”

If I hadn’t been so busy gaping at him, I’d have protested without thinking.  So it’s just as well that I was astonished although I don’t think my Master would have been unfair enough to do more than shut me up for a day’s worth of boredom.  Noble Lucius never went out to meet others, unless the others had many names and long titles.  Others came to meet him.

Big-Nose was nodding, as if going down to the Suburbia to talk with assassins was something noble Lucius did every day and twice on Thursdays.  I got my mouth open to ask, “Your escort, my Master?”

“You, L. Naso, five hand-picked men.  He travels best who travels swiftest.”

When it came to Suburbia, he travels best who travels with a Praetorian Legion, in my opinion.  “Yes, Master.” 

“And see if Scipio knows where Flavianus is right now.”  That was the inconspicuous client with a huge family of inconspicuous relatives who’d been set to keeping an eye on Flavianus.

Big-Nose got up and went out, probably to sort out the bodyguard from his and our slaves and freedmen, and get the messenger running to Scipio.  I finally kicked my mind into moving and said, “You’ll attract attention in Suburbia, my Master.”  Now, that was an understatement.  I must be learning rhetoric.

“I’ll be disguised.”

O, a disguise.  I didn’t say a word, but I didn’t even try and stop my eyes from rolling up towards the ceiling.  He didn’t comment, either, just got up and headed towards a clothes chest in one of the storage rooms.  Off with his senatorial tunics and the indoor shoes with their lunulae.  They’d have brought a nice price in Suburbia.  On with two gaudy tunics and a pair of outdoor shoes more suitable to a freedman pawnbroker.  The quality was right, at least; he had to show some signs of wealth or no one would ever believe he could be that fat.

“Your apex, my Master?”  This I had to see.  Removing the sacred hat outdoors was forbidden, and I wondered if he’d finally prove my opinion of his piety beyond doubt.  No.  Instead, without bothering to reply, he pulled out one of those ridiculous broad-brimmed, high-peaked hats that invalids wear and put it on over the apex.  He looked--audibly not muttering to myself, I made a bundle of a proper patrician’s tunic and shoes, in case we had to deal with officialdom.  But the rusty red cloak was too much to bear.  I told the wall, “It’s a pity that I’ll probably be killed today, defending the honor of the familia.  I’d love to hear the reaction in the Forum when my Master’s corpse is discovered in this garb.”

“Vah.”  He paused in pinning the cloak on over his tunics.  “If I am somehow killed, don’t do anything rash.  You are freed in my will and I have so informed all the clients but Flavianus.  Live to fight another battle.”

The blood roared in my ears.  I didn’t even know what I felt.  But my voice took care of the problem for me.  I heard myself say, “If you’d like to negotiate an earlier date, Master, my peculium--”

“—isn’t big enough yet, as you well know.  But we’ll discuss this again.”  I opened my mouth and he continued, “You’re only trying to be annoying, and your timing is terrible.  Keep quiet.”

I kept.  If I went on talking, he was perfectly capable of locking me up and going out on his own, just to be petulant.  Then he’d get killed and I’d have to wear that stupid freedman’s cap at his funeral.  And then I’d also have to deal with Flavianus.  As he said, neither alternative pleased.  I wanted my Master to free me himself, so I could see his face, see--Before I could decide exactly what look it was I wanted to see on his face, our escort arrived and it was time to go.

Usually noble Lucius had just two modes of travel:  slow with a ridiculously large amount of company, as when he marched in religious processions, or slower with a ridiculously small amount of company, as when he lumbered off towards the baths.  Today I found out there was a third alternative, fast as a mountain bear coming for your throat.  We descended from our patrician perch on the Palatine and made our ways past the public crowds, the public baths, the public circus, and the public toilets into Suburbia.  Suburbia could use more of the lattermost.  It’s a rough part of the City, full of rickety seven-story tenements that take every opportunity to collapse, impoverished plebeians on the dole galore, resident-foreigners of weird customs and weirder religions, and enough criminals that I was glad to be in the company of a group with daggers and staffs of their own.

We’d rounded a baker’s, of the sort where the bread was more chalk and soil than wheat, and were heading for the second-hand fish-skin market, when Scipio’s messenger caught up with us.  He raced up and our escort parted ranks.  Then he leaned in close to my Master.  “He’s out, noble Senator, Sir.  Master says really sorry, they lost him.”

Noble Lucius just grunted and gestured for me to tip.  I doubled the usual amount since the poor guy was heading back through Suburbia.  He swallowed the coins, which was probably the best thing he could have done.  If the locals still got the money from him, he’d be past using it anyhow.  Then we got going again, along the slightly zigzag path that the pedestrians forced upon us.  At least there weren’t piles of garbage to avoid.  I think the dogs ate them.  I hope the dogs ate them.

We had a good description of the place we wanted.  The small building had been a stable, then storage, and then squatted in until the three freedmen had taken it over for their private clubhouse.  The fact that they could keep the space to themselves said something about them.  When we got to the mouth of the man-and-a-half-width alley that ended in the clubhouse, though, Noble Lucius took one look and his eyes narrowed.  “Where is everyone?”

I glanced around.  He was right.  Even this small alley should have had people in it, and there weren’t enough passers-by in the street around us, either.  That was the way Suburbia worked, swarming hordes and so forth.  From the way our escort tensed and shifted, they agreed the quiet was odd.

My Master looked around the dirty stone and concrete walls once more, and then his nostrils flared.  I saw his eyes narrow.  “Archippos.  Come with me.”  He turned to his men.  “Keep watch.  You know the signals if we need you.”

Silently I followed him.  This was another compromise between protection and witnesses, and a bad one in my opinion.  But I’d seen enough by that time in my life to know when and when not to jostle the arm of the man giving orders.

I tried the outside door before I let him pass.  It was unlocked and let onto a tiny room, which had another door on the opposite side into a roofed-over space between the walls of several adjoining tenements.  There were holes in the roof and the walls were stained.  And, coming from the far room, there was also a smell.  I looked at my Master.  He looked at me.  Keeping our footsteps light, we crossed to the far doorway.

Certain questions I’ll always be tempted to ponder.  It’s obvious, in retrospect, that if my Master could watch Flavianus, Flavianus could watch my Master.  I’ve always assumed he intended to set up an ambush and went down to give his men instructions.  But did they balk and did he threaten them?  And, with all the slaves available to him, why did Flavianus bring Narmer, and Narmer alone, to that meeting?  Did he somehow think that Narmer’s infatuation would ward him against the bored professionalism of the City torturers if matters somehow ended up in court?  Most mysterious, why was Flavianus so careless?  Did he really think his handsome face, or Roman custom, would work forever on freedmen that he must have ordered beaten time and again as slaves?  Perhaps this is why we seek new gods these days, to have answers to unknowable questions.

Enough answer for me back then to stare at a bloody mess, the likes of which I hadn’t seen for years.  My Master broke from our stillness first, but I was hard on his heels.  He went to Flavianus, still spread by his bindings out across the table, but I could see it was a lost battle.  So I left his son to my Master and went to check on Narmer, huddled in his corner with the flies.  To my surprise, Narmer opened his eyes and looked up at me.  He was better off than I’d thought, much better off than his Master, merely having been stabbed, not tortured.  In a conversational tone, clear except for the pauses when he’d try to breathe around something liquid, he said, “Master kept making a noise.”

“Keep quiet.” His gut had been breeched.  Hopeless.

“After they left.  Like a dog, hurting.  On and on.  So I killed him with the knife.”

I felt my eyes pull open so wide I must have looked like a maddened horse.  “Merda!”  Narmer stared up at me, confused, and then closed his own eyes and went back to the hard work of dying.

I turned from him, still squatting on my heels, towards my Master.  The tension across his huge body, the pallor of his stony features, told me he’d heard what Narmer had to say.  Or maybe he was tense and pale because of what he leaned over with red hands and arms, a gory wreck that had once been a man and his son.  Let that be the case, I begged the small gods who might listen to a slave.  Otherwise Flavianus would have legally died by the blow of his own slave, and every other slave he owned, in his house, on his estates and plantations, and in the workshops of the cities, would be crucified.  That was the unbending law of the City, and every time it was enforced in those days citizens assembled, rioted, and wept at the pathos.  The slaves still died, though.

My Master met my eyes, expression like concrete.  “Flavianus is yet living.  His blood flows.”  How could he tell in that mess?  “But he dies in pain.”  He took a deep breath.  “Nothing will save him.  I am paterfamilias.  His life and death are mine.”  As I watched, afraid to move for fear of stopping him, he reached out one fat hand for the cheap iron knife that must have done so much of the damage.  With the skill honed by years of sacrifices, decades of Roman war, he sliced it deftly across the neck of what lay bound upon that table.

I heard and saw nothing to give the lie to his words.  My Master swore he killed Flavianus and, even today, even under torture, I could not swear otherwise.  When I turned back to check Narmer again, he, too, was dead.  In his crime and his death, he was still upstaged by his master, L. Claudius Lupis Flavianus.

The rest is a yet-told tale of the City, and I will not bother to tell it again here, except to be glad I’d brought along proper patrician garb even if we had to burn those clothes afterwards.  When he spoke with the praetors and officials, the gravitas of noble Lucius was perfect.  I was free to watch their questions, his answers, and their ire, disgust, and admiration at his story.  They ignored me.  I was a slave, and my testimony could be summoned as needed by the rack.  So I’d been left in a corner to myself, the flies, and Narmer.  But I was content to have it so.  Narmer’s last words had been left to lie with Narmer, too.

Noble Lucius summoned in his men and sent them out again around the City, to take care of what needed to be done.  I thought he should take charge of affairs himself and use the cunning wits I knew so well to find the three men who’d murdered his son, but he seemed content to leave that in the hands of the state.  All he wanted was to return to his own house, and that he wanted now.

We went home and used the bathhouse, my Master and I, sluicing each other with water that ran red, then pink, then clear, until we felt clean.  Even though none of it was my specific duty, I dressed him and chivvied him into the dining hall, served him and watched him disguise ignoring his food with rearrangement, and padded after him into his library.  I was furious with myself, furious with him, and could not force myself to leave his side.  If you had asked me why the anger, I couldn’t have told you.  Now I know, but then I couldn’t use the words I needed to understand.  Instead, after an hour or so of reading Plato, of all philosophers, out loud, I lost patience.  Clearing my throat, I asked, “Does my Master wish some – sleep?”

He looked up at me and raised both his eyebrows a hair’s width.  That indicated surprise.

“My noble Master might be relaxed by getting some – sleep.”  Was I going to have to make a gesture like some prostitute in the streets to get through to him?

“Yes, I will sleep.”  His lips twisted very slightly.  “Or not.”  But he did push himself up onto his feet and lumber into his retiring room.  The hour was so late that I could barely see in the dim light from the court, but I didn’t want to see much anyhow.  What I had in mind, I was still uneasy enough about to appreciate the dim.

The first time I’d actually done it, months ago, he’d half-protested.  I’d fixed him then with a bitter eye, and asked, “Does my Master know what a professional charges in bribes to teach this technique?”  That silenced him; he had a Roman respect for money, even a slave’s money.

By now I had the technique down.  By now my skill was due to more than money.  The act had become like the dancing or the wrestling of my youth, not just another chore, which was the root of my unease.  If he’d just upped his tunic, shifted his loincloth, pushed me to my knees, and fucked my mouth, it would have been one thing.  But even when a night that rough had happened, he hadn’t been raping me.  He had wanted – we had both wanted – a nameless other towards which we’d been battling.  We’d had to settle then for fierce pleasure.  I’d had to settle since for trying to forget and then, when that failed, pretending I would someday forget how good it could be.

This night, I couldn’t even pretend.  He’d stop me while I was attempting to get his clothing off and pull me close, run his hands up and down my back and arms, stroke my face and loins, coax with the tips of his fingers, kiss me. The interruptions should have been exasperating, and they were, but they also fired my blood.

I pulled back, his loincloth in my hands.  “If my Master would just hold still--” I got onto my knees, “—it would then be easier to get my work done.”  After that I had to keep quiet because I had a mouth full of noble Lucius to deal with.

“Insolent.  Always insolent.”  From the tone in his deep voice, the way he was sliding his fingers through my hair, you’d think insolence was something that upped my value.  The fingers fell to my shoulders and kneaded rhythmically which felt good enough that it was almost distracting.  I made a noise and shifted my tongue, twisted my grip on the base of him, ran my free hand around his side to where the buttock meets the thigh, knuckled in hard.  He grunted in return. He throbbed inside my mouth.

When he pulled me loose I should have been pleased not to have the final chore of swallowing the bitterness of his seed.  Instead I glared at him in the gloom.  Yet another interruption, when I’d been – what?  He’d tugged me to my feet and was fumbling with my tunic.  I pushed his hands out of the way, and then endured his caresses while I stripped.  Aroused as I already was, this wasn’t making it any easier to concentrate.  Then he was pushing me down on the sleeping couch, into the easiest position – O, that.

Yes.

At least he didn’t want me quiet and shrinking, or trying to squirm away beneath him while he worked up my ass, while he made as free with his grunts and huffs as he usually was with his antithesii and enumerations.  I made as much noise as he did while he rode me, heavy above and hard within, hands hot and urgent below me and on me.  Noble Lucius just had to have his tribute before he’d take his own pleasure, but I fought for a while.  I wasn’t sure if it was against him or by his side, but I battled.  I lost, in best Theban style.  I spent, making more noise than was fitting, then took my revenge by forcing even more noise from him.  I’d be sore but so would he, and the pleasure made nothing matter but our flesh together if only for those moments.

Afterwards I felt too tired, or too something, to move, so I laid there telling myself I was merely catching my breath.  His breathing settled from pants to huffs, and then from huffs to the quiet, deep susurrations that had grown so familiar I sometimes heard them at night in my own alcove, in my dreams.  Just as I was about to roll back off the couch and onto my feet, he spoke.

My Master constantly talked to me, and often even talked with me, but that night he spoke to me as if I were Minos, judge of the dead.  It made my skin prickle, but I listened, intent.  The words weren’t much, in and of themselves.  I needed all the slave-skill I’d learned, of reading feelings behind his gravitas, to hear what he was truly saying.

“This was the first man’s blood I have worn on my hands since I was Legate of the Seventh Claudia, master of soldiers and natives in Moecia.  Since I have been flamen, nothing but cattle, sheep, and dogs have died for my duties.”  I’d seen his hand gesture and blood spill from the black puppy each year, to guard the crops from blight and the people from hunger.  I suspected how much store he put into the power of such rites:  none.  “I did not wish to carry the pain of any more dead souls.  Carrying the live ones is hard enough labor.”

Maybe a dutiful slave would have kept silent then, caressed him back into his Epicurean peace.  Not me.  I snorted, and felt him stiffen.  “Men will be mastered.  Rough on them if it’s always by men who wish for mastery.”

His new silence had a quality I recognized, of fuming.  Good:  no surcease.  He could keep working while in pain like the rest of us.  When he spoke, his voice had dropped to an irritated growl.  “Better for the mastered if the mastery is firm and proficient.  I make more than my share of mistakes.  Only Fortune averted the blow if all of the natives, soldiers, and settlements I judged for this or that infraction deserved their punishments.  You came from that countryside.  One of the towns I fired could have been yours.”

He’d never brought up how I’d been enslaved before.  Noble Lucius didn’t ask the bare handful of us who’d started out free about our stories.  I think he considered such questions rude.  That meant he must be feeling more than usually petulant, so I enjoyed being able to contradict him.  “My Master, I was not born in Moecia.”

His big hands tensed against my chest.  “Vah.  Your placard in the slave market said you were spoil from one of the suppressed rebellions in Moecia Superior during the succession of Vespasian, and of Macedonian blood.”

“The Macedonian blood part is true, if you ignore the Theban and Roman strains.  But my sire was a Roman citizen, and my mother was pure Roman, daughter of an impoverished equestrian who’d married her off to a provincial to help clear his secret debts.  My sire ruled Chalcaesis in Thracia and was wealthy.”

 Lucius grunted as if I had kicked him in the stomach, and then muttered something, half under his breath, that sounded like, “Public merchandise.”  His tone was calm, though, when he asked “How came you, then, into the hands of the slave-dealers?”

“I was told the new ruler had sold me.  I do not know if it was true.”

“That can be discovered.  Go on.”

Fear, pain, and blood.  How could all the horror be reduced to a few words in the night?  Seven years of slavery was my shield.  My old life was just another stage tragedy, some poor knock-off by a third-rate Roman playwright of The Trojan Women.  Much as I would have dryly summarized such a play after reading it at the book dealers to my Master, I told my tale to the great warm bulk beside me in the thickening dark.

“There’d been street-battles with the partisans of Aulus Vitellius for days.  We’d heard that they were led by one of my uncles, so my father sent my brothers out into the agora to speak with him.  Me, the youngest, he kept back at the palace, but my pedant took me up onto the wall, so I could see the dignity of my brothers and contrast it with the posturings of the people.  He was right about the contrast; the mob tore them to bits.  After that, the people had smelt blood.”

“Did they overrun the palace?”

“No.  It dragged on.”  The metallic stink of armor and fear, the sound of women wailing, lost skirmishes, always death.   “We weren’t overrun until the last of the troops went over to the rebels a fortnight later.  Then they came.  My father had killed himself, but the mob got the women.”  My mother.  “I don’t understand why they didn’t kill me.  The palace had been fired.”  Had I run, fought, stood staring like a fool?  I didn’t know; the end of that scroll was forever lost, torn away.  “I don’t remember.  I was struck down at some point, a blow to the head.”

“It is hard not to know.”

“Yes.” 

Silence, then, “Any man can be broken.  It’s easy, I’ve found, so easy as to be meaningless.”  One hand touched my hip in the dark, traced a scar I couldn’t remember getting.  “As soon blame a sword for shattering on stone.  Such is the way of the world.”

He wasn’t getting free with that.  “Not everyone rests on such thoughts, my Master.  The people had their reasons.  My father was not disciplined in his harshness.  And to pay the tributes demanded by all sides in the civil war, he had enslaved many--”  I could say no more, but only let nature speak for me.  Noble Lucius was silent too.  Only his hands spoke for him.

 

The Fourth Scroll

 

When I had done, noble Lucius took in a deep breath.  Then he said, “Light the lamp, Archippos.”

I got up from the couch, crossed to my own alcove with the sureness taught by a hundred dark nights, and got a taper that I lit from the small lamp I kept burning in a corner, banked by bricks, well away from my pallet.  By the faint light of the wick I padded back across the room to the lamp by his couch, hanging from the ceiling on its chains.  When I lit its twin wicks, the features of the bronze Pan seemed to first frown and then smile at me.  A small draft was teasing the flames.  I wanted to look away, but made myself stare steadily at Pan’s face, instead.

Behind me, my Master said, “True Roman discipline lies in facing what you most fear.”

I turned back to him.  For safety’s sake, I should have looked down as I asked my question, but I did not.  “Then my Master will visit his late son’s house tomorrow and restore order to a household of which he is paterfamilias?”

During the brief silence that followed, the wavering flames of the oil lamp threw shadows across my Master’s features, making his eyes glint and darken in turn.  As I waited for his reaction my heart pounded hard, but, strangely, not with fear.

He spoke, voice low.  “Archippos, you know I hate rhetorical questions.”  Then he laughed, brief as Roman snow.  “Hate it, so long as you endure it.”  Then, “Dress, Archippos, don your cloak, and get your staff.  We go to visit the house of Flavianus.”  He frowned.  “You’d better wash your face first.”

It was past the third hour of the night, and we were going to cross half of the City, as neat a recipe for getting killed as I could imagine.  Trust noble Lucius to press his luck.  I tried remonstrating with him but it was like reasoning with Cato about Carthage.  I did manage to get him to take Linus and Mithradates with us to carry the torches, but that was as far as he went.  So we had to settle for moving fast again.  My master puffed but he didn’t complain; he’d been born and raised in Rome during the bad days and knew more about her fangs than any of us.  Only twice did we have trouble, and once was from a small group of drunken resident-foreigners we three slaves drove off with a hard charge, shouting and waving our staffs.  The vigils, my Master took care of for us.  His toga with its Senatorial stripes, together with the ever-annoying apex, was all that was needed.  True, it would be all over the Forum in the morning that noble Lucius had actually been seen out in the third hour of the night his son was murdered, but that was tomorrow.  We were living tonight.

When we came to the house of Flavianus, it was burning. 

The vigils had matters well in hand, and the remaining members of the household were herded off to one side under the care of some of my master’s clients.  When the party of noble Lucius came trotting, or, in one case, puffing, up, Big-Nose excused himself from an expostulating clot of officials, came over, and said calmly, “Either my runner’s faster than I thought, or you’d already decided to come here.”

Noble Lucius pulled himself upright and glared.  I could tell he wanted to bellow, but his breath was so short just then he’d sound like a fool if he tried.

Big-Nose rubbed his lips, probably to hide a smile.  “The three of them were hidden in the house when we arrived.  Seems they knew right where to find all of Flavianus’s stashed valuables, but hadn’t made it back out the gate.”

“Hardly a surprise.”  The corners of my Master’s lips twisted a little.  “Go on.”

“They’d still had enough time to knock around the slaves.  The household staff ended up deciding we were much the better bet.  As paterfamilias, you now own a hairdresser who should be on the stage.  What a pantomime.”  Big-Nose made dramatic gestures of someone listening, someone hiding, his eyes wide with mock fear.

“You didn’t get them.”

“No, Senator.  They’d also found a nice cache of incendiaries and we were too busy with their idea of defense to drag them down.  They went out over the roof.  I’m sorry.”  He took a deep breath.  “Although I wonder where the flammables came from; it was effective stuff, military grade.”

“I wonder as well.”  Gravitas or no gravitas, the voice of noble Lucias was grim.

“They didn’t get to take their golden hoard with them.  That, we have.  If they think to make it out of the City--” Big-Nose snorted “—they still need a lot of cash.  And we got the scrolls and codexes out of the library.”

Holding up both hands, noble Lucius closed his eyes.  His lips worked in and out as he stood there amidst the chaos, his clients and we three slaves warding the crowds away from him.  Big-Nose turned away and softly gave some instructions to his own men about moving furniture and valuables.  After a long pause, noble Lucius opened his eyes and said, “The Parthians.  Some of the incendiaries must have been three years old.” He’d lowered his voice, but Big-Nose and I had leaned in and could hear.  “It’s a wonder, given Flavianus’s predilections, the whole City hasn’t burned by now.” 

Then, in a louder voice, noble Lucius said, “They will have moved on to some other household scheduled to be robbed before everything went wrong.  Given the sustained idiocy of this day, it is safe to assume they are desperate for money.  Heus!”  The last word was a shout, and his men all paused in what they were doing to see what he wanted.  Noble Lucius surveyed his assembled clients and slaves.  “L. Naso, will you find and speak with the praetor?  And if you will escort the remaining staff to my house, S. Scipio?”  Quickly he told his men to go and they went, fanning out across the districts of the City to hunt for our quarry.  But I noticed he kept back one name from the list of the friends of Flavianus for himself.  Then he, I, his other two slaves, and a man of Big-Nose’s went back into the night in search of the house of V. Pupina Coepis.

We found the house, but not the help I was hoping for.  There’s an old saying of the City: never a vigil when you want one, but three when you’re drunk and in need of a piss.  The saying held true that night.  I don’t know where the extra squads out in search of the murderous villains were.  They can’t have all been at the fire, but they weren’t around the nice neighborhood on the Quirinal in which the equestrian house of Vibius was located, either.  It was as quiet as Rome ever gets there, with only a few distant voices, the constant nighttime noise of rumbling carts restocking the City during their legal hours of transit, and the omnipresent barking dog breaking the silence. 

When I rapped on the gate with my staff, no one answered.  The dog was joined by a second dog, both frantically enjoying their late-night labor.  I rapped again, but while we were waiting for an answer, noble Lucius grunted. 

“Do you smell that?”

I sniffed.  Was that a faint extra whiff of smoke?  “Yes.  Try the horse gate?”

“Go. We’ll follow.”

None of the shops built along the side of the house we passed were lit, not even the baker’s, but I thought I saw lamps in a few of the apartments upstairs.  That is, I hoped what I saw was only lamps.  When we came to the horse gate of the main house, it was half open.  Noble Lucius narrowed his eyes, which glinted in the light of the torches, at the sight and then sniffed again.  The smell of smoke was much stronger.  He turned to Linus. “Arouse the tenants and then the neighbors.  You, this side of the house.  Mithradates, the other.  Felix, find and bring the watch.  Hurry.”  When noble Lucius gave orders in that tone of voice even free-born obeyed.  His own slaves ran, taking the torches with them.

He pitched his voice low in the resulting dark.  “If our trio has any sense they’ve fled, but be careful nonetheless.”  With a few brisk tugs – why was I not surprised he could handle his own clothes when he had to? – he pulled his toga around and over his shoulder and then yanked, both freeing his arm and rearranging the garment for street-fighting.  Then he produced a knife.

I snorted, and took a better grip on my staff.  “They’re scum.  We’d better watch out for swords.”  Long blades weren’t supposed to be carried inside the old walls of the City, but criminals seemed to be remarkably unconcerned by that law.

“Don’t feed gammon to an old dog.”  Without another word, he heaved the gate inwards with his shoulder, slamming it against the wall, and leapt through the opening with a speed that belied his bulk. Cursing under my breath, I followed.

The horse in the small stable was restless.  You could hear it stamping.  Noble Lucius paused for a moment, gestured me forward, and eased into the stable to check.  I examined the passage and peered cautiously out into the moonlit court.  Nothing moving that I could see.  No noise, either, not so good because the reek of smoke was now unmistakable and somewhere I could hear sounds of burning. 

When my Master ghosted up next to me, I knew without asking he’d left the stall unlatched behind him and the horse untethered.  “One horse, still in its saddle, which means--” he started, then stiffened and pointed up.  Across the court, in the upper apartments, a light that wasn’t a lamp showed, and smoke in abundance.  “That tears it.”  His voice was grim.  “Through the main apartments, arouse anyone left, and then await me in the vestibule.  Break the chain on the doorkeeper, too.  Go.”

I went, figuring out what I’d use on that chain.  But when I found the doorkeeper, he was dead.  And I’d found a lot more than him.

It may be of interest to you, putative reader, that the doorkeeper, like Decipor, wore only a hooked collar, and he seems to have done something noble and died for it.  Because of that, when I arrived, the children of the house were still alive.

As near as I can sort it out, they’d been awoken by the fire and gone straight for the atrium to empty out the family shrine.  There’s such a thing as too much family piety, but try telling that to the offspring of a rising family of the new gentry.  They’d been interrupted by two of the three men we were seeking.  When I came in, one thug was arising from the doorkeeper’s body, his knife wet, and one was heading for the girls, naked sword in hand, laughing at the masks of the ancestors the boy was brandishing at him.  Bad choice of weapons, boy.  But at least the thug didn’t bother with him when, hearing my footsteps running towards the screams, he came with his friend to greet me.

I wonder why I didn’t hesitate.  My one and only life was now forfeit for the sake of some upper-class Romans youngsters I’d never even met.  No, that’s an idiotic question.  I’d been under the thumb of noble Lucius for eight years.  All that constant posturing about duty and gravitas and debate about stoical-virtue-versus-epicurean-virtue had obviously worn me down.

Two of them, both with blades, and me with my staff:  I could do this, sure.  I feinted and the smaller one, the man with the short-sword, laughed.  So I kicked my shoe off into his groin.  Hem, cheap wooden-soled slave shoe, match that one, citizen.  I missed, of course, but he turned aside momentarily from the oncoming missile and I managed to get a jab into the ribs of the bigger one, the thug with a knife.  He swore and danced back, so I whirled back around, losing the other shoe, in time to block a cut from the swordsman.

I don’t even want to think about how long I could have kept up this nonsense, but I didn’t have to.  Through the archway burst the allied cavalry, or, rather, the young equestrian Vibius, fresh from a night on the town interrupted by the news of his good friend Flavianus’s murder.  He was in a fine position to be skewered by the knifeman when he pulled up short and stared, but someone from the family, don’t ask me who because I won’t tell, hurled a vase from the family shrine.  A moment of chaos, some very expensive and sacred pottery fragments, and I hit the sword arm of the shorter thug hard.  With a clang, the mosaic floor took its first sword slash of the night and the equestrian had punched the knife man in the jaw.  I think he must have had a set of boxer’s knuckles on.  I hope he had a set of knuckles on, because I don’t want to think about what kind of fist it would take to send a man reeling like that. 

As for me, I had come around with my staff and gotten the sword arm again.  Maybe I should have gone for the head, but the sword skittered away from the swordsman’s grip, which was all I could ask for right then.  It was especially appealing because now the equestrian had somehow confiscated the other thug’s knife and was closing on my disarmed swordsman with the air of someone who knows how to use a blade.  That was one thug I could ignore for a moment.  I turned my attention to the second, larger thug, the one without a pointy weapon but with a broken jaw.

That’s the problem with taking your eye off of some people. They get ideas.  What he’d, in fact, gotten was a torch from one of the ceremonial wall-sconces.  He thrust with the torch like he was going to reheat the last squab at a vulgar freedman’s drunken feast, and I back-stepped, trying to get enough room to take advantage of my staff’s greater reach.  He moved in, jabbed again, saw me start to swing, and brought the torch up to parry.  Something, maybe a wet hand, betrayed him.  The torch squirted out of his grip and kept going.  I half saw it coming and tried to pull up short and block, but too late.  The torch hit me right in the face.

Looking back, that was when Fortune had fun with all my silent, snide comments about constant bathing, no scents, and simple garments.  If there had been any grease, oil, or fancy ribbons in my hair, I would have been burning brighter than the house.  As it was, my face had turned enough to save my eyes, and the flame merely seared my face before the torch bounced off and hit the stone tiles.  That, and left some spatters of burning pitch behind as souvenirs.

There’s a roaring shock when you’re badly hurt that feels nothing like agony.  You just know agony is coming, and that’s all you know.  At that point, whatever your body does has nothing to do with you.  What my body did was the harvest of a thousand oil lamps tended with gritted teeth.  I brought my arms up, around, and down, in a maneuver I was never able afterwards to believe I pulled off in such pain, to catch the thug hard in the temple with my staff.  Even over all the screaming, shouting, and burning I heard the crack.  I’m pretty sure one of the screams came from me.  Another came from the other thug, who the equestrian had finally managed to skewer in the gut.

I was too busy smacking myself in the face with a tunic wet in the atrium pool, and then dropping it and leaping about, swearing, to bother telling my citizen-ally that he was wasting his time in scooping up the sword and turning back to hack at my late opponent.  Nobody stands up and fights with a caved-in temple.  But all my exercise did bring the family back into my tearing field of vision.  I stopped.

“Run!  Save yourselves!”  It came out a screech.  I must have been a sight.  The older girl let out a screech herself.  The younger only nodded, hitched up her tunic, grabbed the hand of her sister and the shoulder of her little brother - who was still clutching the family masks - and left.  She went in the right direction, too, out towards the street.

The equestrian was finally done butchering our two friends and stopped to check his handiwork.  Both dead, which I could have told him without the close examination.  Then he stood up, stared past me, and then whirled.  To give him credit, he paused before following the others out to shake me hard by the upper arm.  “Boy!  Come along!  This house is finished!”

I turned my head to check.  Sure enough, smoke was now pouring through the archway into the atrium.  Where in Hades was noble Lucius?  I couldn’t leave without him.  I turned back and said to the equestrian, “Go tell my Master, passer-by, that here, obedient to his orders, I lie.”  No, that wasn’t quite right--

The equestrian stared at me as if he thought I would be the next to run wild.  Obviously, he wouldn’t know a classic Greek literary reference if it bit him in the ass.  As I’d thought before, beauty, not brains.  Good thing I was valued for my brains, not beauty.  I swayed as the last shock wore off and the agony really set in.  If what I was feeling was any clue, any last beauty I’d owned was now gone.

Giving me up for a lost cause, the equestrian let go and left.  As he went, I heard the clattering sounds of his hobnailed shoes speed up, so that, by the time he hit the vestibule, he was running.

I started towards the inner courtyard again, feeling a bit dazed.  Then, shaking my head – which hurt – I went back to scoop up the wet tunic and my staff.  Even now, I don’t know what I meant to do with them.  By that point, nothing human could have challenged the fire.  I hadn’t even made it into the inner court when I heard the crashing sound of one of the wings collapsing, and a fierce red glow and flare of smoke let me know that time was short.  Like an idiot, I was still standing there trying to think, when out of the smoke burst several crouched figures in slave’s tunics followed by the bulk of my master bellowing at them through the fold of his toga pulled across his mouth.  Blackened with smoke and covered in ashes, he looked like the attendant at the games, masked as Charun, who crushes the skulls of the dead and drags them away.  Spotting me, he emitted another bellow, grabbed my arm, and off to Hades we went.  No, out the front gate we went, following all the others.

Outside was tumult.  The neighbors and more vigils had rallied with fire-hooks and axes, poles and bucket brigades, intent on keeping the fire from spreading outwards into the neighborhood and on through the City.  My equestrian had his family under his care and was remonstrating with one of those praetors who seem to appear during crises especially to get in the way.  Noble Lucius looked around him, let out a grunt audible even over all the noise, and pulled me away through the crowd.  I guess he wasn’t inclined to deal with officialdom for the third time that night.

Even though it was Rome after dark, nobody came near us.  I would have thought that, obviously injured as I was, we would have made a good target.  But our trip through the streets went without trouble.  Maybe it was my face, or the odor of smoke, or the speed with which we moved, or the noises that noble Lucius kept making.  They made me understand where his clan-branch got its name.  He was snarling. 

Between his arm and my staff I managed to keep up, but I needed his support.  Although there would never be a question in the minds of the City Fathers, by the time we’d made it back to my Master’s house you could have been forgiven for wondering who was attending on who.

I rapped a tattoo with my staff in the usual signal against the gate and Decipor, clutching a torch, opened it.  Almost instinctively I flinched back from the flame and noble Lucius tightened his grip on my arm.  Decipor, getting a good look at my features, gaped.  Then, realizing that our Master was regarding him with narrowed eyes, he bowed low and swung the gate open.

As we entered, he said, “My noble Master, the rest of your household awaits you in the court.”  He paused.  “It was the only place we could think of to put them until you arrived.”

Noble Lucius turned and glared at Decipor who, forgetting himself, turned hands up in apology.  Without a word, my Master whirled and strode across the vestibule, the atrium, and on into the peristylum.  Dazed, I followed him. The court was a mess, reeking of smoke, overflowing with the thirty or forty surviving members of Flavianus’s modest bachelor establishment.  Some great yokel who appeared to be a sedan-chair carrier, I noted from the distance of pain, was about to step on one of my Master’s prized miniature pines.

My Master’s head swiveled slowly as he surveyed them, some standing at attention under his eyes, some huddled under the porches against the courtyard walls, some milling about amidst the shrubbery in shock, as unprepossessing a group of speaking tools as could be imagined.  I saw his gaze pause for a moment on a pair of charming young maids clutching piles of worn clothing they’d rescued from Apollo knows where, and pause again on two slave boys you would have called pretty if they hadn’t been sniveling.   When his eyes shut, I didn’t need to be the Sybil to know what he was thinking.  What, by Jupiter, was he going to do with them all?  Then he opened his eyes and turned them onto me, still with the same question to be read behind them, if you knew how.  The cool night breeze plucked at my raw and weeping face, and I shuddered.

He scowled.  “Archippos, get those burns attended to.”  He’d taken his first step.  Then noble Lucius turned to his new mob of a familia urbana, took a deep breath, and bellowed with the brass lungs of a Roman priest, “All of you, keep quiet!  Those with injuries, join the man on my right.  Any with medical craft, join that group as well.  As for the rest of you, who is supposed to be in charge of this chaos?”

I left him to it.  I passed out.  Imhotep tells me noble Lucius caught me as I fell, and kept me by him as he took command of this new half-century of his small legion.

O, and the third murderer?  I wish noble Lucius hadn’t been in such a hurry.  He’d grabbed the knife closest to hand when we left the house and, unlike normal knives, his sacrificial blades had to be cleaned three times with salt, wine laced with valerian, and water fetched from the sacred spring of Juturna, by him.  He complained for days.

 

The Fifth Scroll

 

It was about four months later when my Master summoned me for another little chat, long enough for my burns to have started healing, leaving me with an interesting piebald complexion that would take years to fade.  Not that my uglification had put off noble Lucius.  If anything, since our encounter with the wrath of Hestia, I had spent more time providing him with recreation than ever before.  He’d even keep me with him afterwards to warm his sleeping couch, or so he said.  I actually think I served as a charm against the furies that pursued him in his sleep.  A few times his hands running wearily up and down my back had let me know I’d kicked him awake with my own visions in the dark, so I didn’t begrudge him his extra consolations. 

In any case, I put aside my work annotating yet another copy of On the Nature of Things for one of his philosopher friends with no reluctance, and then blew out the lamp I’d lit to ease my eyes on a grey afternoon.  Oddly, the flames were nothing now.  Some part of me felt that Hestia had taken her long-delayed sacrifice and become as much a friend to me as she can be to any man.

I walked briskly across the court to my Master’s new quarters.  Noble Lucius had rebuilt the empty storage rooms at the end of the court into a private retreat and moved his library and sleeping chambers there, so that he wouldn’t constantly be interrupted by every slave in the place, or be interrupting the household’s duties and entertainments with his nerve-racking presence.  My own pallet and small-chest had followed his furniture into his new quarters, which amused me, considering the occasional boring days I had spent locked up in those rooms as a sullen young slave.

When I entered he dismissed Lepedorous, our expanded household’s steward, and Clementine, the fresh copyist.   As they left, they both gave me the shadow of a nod by which one senior slave acknowledges another, perhaps with a touch more deference than usual.  I nodded back, but my attention was all on noble Lucius and I could tell that his was on me.  The soft sound of slave feet on stone faded away, and it grew quiet enough to hear faint, undecipherable chatter drifting in from the kitchen across the courtyard.  There he stood, considering me, broad fat face set like concrete.

“Archippos.”  He said it again.  “Archippos.”  The second time there was something in the way he spoke my name I didn’t recognize.  I frowned.  He hesitated for several heartbeats, his lips pushing in and out, before he stretched out an arm towards me.  I felt my expression smooth out.  Now we were back on the road I knew.

I took his hand and drew him into his day retiring room.  Within, I reached out my hands again to undress him, but, to my surprise, he clasped them with his own and brought them back down to my sides.

“Quiet,” he murmured.  I cocked my head at him inquiringly.  It was something he hadn’t said to me in such circumstances for a while.  When he stepped forward and started undressing me, I turned a hand up in my mind.  Noble Lucius being moody was one of the pillars of my world.  No reason he should be any different today.

But the day was different.  After I was unclad, he had me sit on the bed couch, which was odd.  Then he stripped off his own clothing, which was odder but promising.  He stood staring at me intently for a while, and I smiled at him seductively.  It wasn’t a lie, these days.  That was when he went over and picked up the flask that now stood on the table by his sleeping couch.  When he poured some oil out into his palm, I got back up and sauntered towards him.  I was pleased when he set the flask down, reached out, took me into his oily grip and worked me, an enjoyable prelude to the main event, a fine skirmish before the battle.  I wrapped my own hand around him, felt him pulse in my grip, and grinned lazily.

“Wait.”  He turned me loose and went back to the table.  What was he up to now?  More oil for my ass, probably.  Good.  He was big, fat, seamed with scars, and covered with hair, but my body wasn’t stupid.  I was hungry and he was a banquet.  Reaching down, I grasped my penis and stroked hard.  Anticipation made the pleasure sharp.  Its thrum radiated outwards from my groin and I felt the muscles of my legs quiver.  That distracted me, so his next move took me by surprise.

When he bent over his folded arms, head lowered and hips up in the position of offering, I was so stunned that for several heartbeats I merely stared at him.  He turned his head back over his shoulder to give me a narrow-eyed glare.  “Take care.”  He did mean me to—I licked my lips.  My pulse broke from a trot into a run.  I found I was on him, hands eager to the point of roughness, finding his ring and making sure he really meant to take my passage with urgent, oily fingers.  When I shoved into him he didn’t say a word.  He just huffed out a harsh breath like the Roman he was.

Venus victorious, even to remember it, wrong though it may have been.  His great body, both soft and hard, working against me, enveloping me, swaddling me tight in hot flesh.  I knew this was only a whim of the hunger, my shaft in his ass, my arms around his hips, me fucking him for a change.  But it was more.  I rode him.  Not Archippos was I then, but Arclupus, master of the Roman wolf, a wolf who sheltered rather than rended.  The priest of Quirinus, divine Romulus defender, had sacrificed himself to me. 

Noble Lucius was grunting softly with his pleasure beneath me.  Scent of familiar, fresh sweat, his skin’s salty taste, the chafe of his fur against my hands and thighs, the heft of his swollen shaft in my hand:  all of it helped heat my own shaft to bursting.  I spent, I came, and when he felt me grind against him, gripping him so hard it left bruises, the noise he made was of dark pleasure.

I eased out of him, panting, pulling away and then reaching out almost blindly to rediscover what I knew still awaited me.  He was well along, and when I wrapped my hand around him again, his own joined mine.  It only took a few strokes, three strokes, before he stiffened, groaned, and spilled out.  His seed on my hand, mine in him; it meant nothing but everything.

Afterwards, even though my body felt as wrung out as laundry spread to dry in sunlight, I forced myself upright and found the cloth.  My repletion was so complete that I feared it.  Then I came to him, where he had painfully straightened himself and now stood, and slung an arm around his great chest just for the sake of feeling him close.

Noble Lucias bent his head against my shoulder.  I couldn’t see his face. “We will not do this again.  But I will yearn.”

He’d talked this way about his using me all the other times, too, so his words were only—no.  This time he was right.  This was too much.  My mounting him, slave upon Master-- 

I found I was stroking a hand through his hair and stopped, not wishing to pile impropriety upon violation.  We had wandered into dangerous enough territory together as it was, and, even in my Master’s household, the slave usually ended up taking the brunt of the punishment for trespassing.  Feeling my stillness, he nodded his head against me and pushed gently away.  While I scrubbed at myself, then cleaned and dressed him, he kept caressing me almost absently, his expression heavy with gravitas.  When I had finished, he leaned forward and pressed his lips briefly against mine in the old Greek style.  Even before he stepped back and scowled, I think I knew.

“Archippos.  When we returned from our adventures in Suburbia, I’d been forcibly reminded of my postponed duty.  As I have told you, you are to be freed by my will.  However, you remained enslaved.  Since vindicta could not be proven properly before the evaluating council, I had thought to await your thirtieth birthday to free you, as is otherwise required to grant full citizenship.”  He grunted. “No, I will speak truth.  It was both for my pleasure and to my dishonor that I delayed.  I should have earlier let you choose between old and a Roman citizen, or young and a resident-foreigner, or offered to present to the council some legal farrago that might be deemed sufficient cause for vindicta.”  The eyes between the narrow slits of eyelids seemed very bright.  “In any case, when I was invited to dine with the First Senator this past week, I spoke of you to him.  As it happened, he’d been very much struck by the account he’d heard of you from his son Domitian’s friend, the young equestrian V. Pupina Coepis, whom you have already twice met.”

Although I felt as though someone was pummeling me – that bitch Fortune again, no doubt – I managed to nod.

“He was even more interested in what my agents had confirmed about your birth, and about your informal and illicit sale as a slave by a rebellious Tyrant not even a citizen himself.  I had great hopes of winning you full liberty in law before your thirtieth year with that tale, but the First Senator can surpass my hopes and intends to.”  He narrowed his eyes.   “In four days I will bring you to him, and he will reaffirm your free birth, iura ingenuitatis, by his power as Master of the City.”

I gaped at him.  After shutting my mouth, I was about to speak when I realized I had no idea of how to address him.  Master?  Patron?  Neither:  soon he wouldn’t be my Master, but he wouldn’t be my Patron, either.  Until these next four days passed I was his slave.  But then, by the implacable force of Roman law, I would never have been anything but a freeborn citizen, son of my sire, the client of my own family’s patrons—

“Do you need some wine?”

--and no freeborn male citizen may use another freeborn male citizen.  It is infamous. 

 I cleared my throat.  “No, just a proper title for you.”

I’d stymied him.  Why?  He made a sort of deep huffling noise before continuing.  “Given the total disarray of your patron clan in the City, and given the fact that, with the death of my son, my family line again faces extinction,” he sucked in about an amphora of air and then pushed it out again, “I would also like to adopt you as my heir.”

By Pollux.  Now I had to sit down.  Not done in the presence of the Master, of course, but crucify that.  I sank back onto his sleeping couch and blinked for a while.  His offer of compensation was a resolution straight out of one of those stupid comedies by Plautus, at which both noble Lucius and I liked to jeer.  Fortune had puckered up her lips and delivered a truly juicy one.

 Lucius handed me a cup of Falernian red, and I was so stunned I took it from his hand and drained it without thinking.  Then, startled again, I stared up at him.  He returned my look, the corners of his lips tucked tight, and said dryly, “I’m glad to see your free-born habits have not completely atrophied.  Whatever you decide, you’ll need them.”

There was no going back and in no way did I want to.  All I had to choose was whether to cut clean away or to keep carrying the burden of these past eight years.   Lucius stood waiting, saying nothing, giving me the time I needed.  He looked – resigned.   My eyes narrowed.  He’d already chosen what I was going to say.  Typical.  “With deepest gratitude, Lucius Claudius Lupis Nero, I accept.”

The eyes shot open wide.  Ecce, I knew it.  He’d thought I’d refuse.  Serve him right that I didn’t.

Then he snorted.  “This won’t exactly be a road paved with gold.  As you have every reason to know,” his lips twisted, “if, as a free agent, you accept adoption you will again fall under my power as paterfamilias.  Also, the First Senator has commented that you may wish to embark upon your military service as a Tribune before you serve your vigintiviri.  He is kind enough to suggest one of his own old Legions, the Fifth Macedonica, as appropriate.”   Lucius considered and grunted dubiously.  “I’d imagine he thinks they’ll kill you off if you’re not quite up to being a Roman patrician.”  His eyes narrowed to slits.  “As one who has been falsely held as a slave, your life among your peers will be unpleasant.  You will have to prove yourself a hundred times over, well within your capacities, but bitterly hard.  Your path will be even rougher if news of my - self-indulgence – has gotten around the City.  I don’t think it has, but they may still suspect.”

My lips twisted into something that wasn’t quite a grin.  “So?  In any case it’ll be a different and lesser Hades than the one I’ve grown used to.”

His chin jerked up.  “You don’t need to worry.  By the time you return I will be my own Master.”

I took a deep breath and swallowed hard.  When I felt my face settle into the proper gravitas, only then for the first time did I say the words.  “Yes, Father.”  I could, and perhaps should, have left the other words unsaid.  But I was rebellious long before I was a slave and would carry that burden as well.  “Your touch never called forth the larvae that tormented me in the dark.”

His face went still.  Then, for just a moment, his lips tucked back into a hint of a smile.  Recalling himself, he pressed them tight together before he parted them to murmur, “At least you can deal with the slave women before you leave.  Free them, marry them off, something.”

It figured.  Now that he finally had proper staffing, the fat face-fu – my noble Father had come up with yet another extra job, with all its attendant duties, that he could drop onto my head.  I gave him a look to let him know what I thought of his latest ingenious notion, and said, “Yes, Father.”

“Eheu.”  Again he almost smiled.  “You are a dreadful slave.”  His brown eyes darkened, were steady on mine.  “But you will be a noble son.”  Without another word, he held out his hand for the only decent gesture left to us.  I bowed and kissed the back of his knuckles, as a son pays reverent tribute to his paterfamilias.  He squeezed my hand hard, and then let me go.  Other than in receiving that salute, he never touched me again.

If ever, during the decades that followed, something behind his dark eyes wished for aught else from Fortune, in the name of piety may that something be forgotten.  May my own secret desires be forgotten as well, walled up within the urn of his ashes. 

Soon enough these scrolls will also be ashes, so I may finish as I began, with the truth.  For my loss amidst the gains of that day, and bitter loss it was, I was gifted with a peculium of words.  What I could never say in decency, in honor, or in tribute to my Master, I shall write of my Father instead.  Senator L. Claudius Lupis Nero, patrician and flamen, was a big, fat butt-fucking pain.  Even so, I loved him.  I love him still, and shall love him until Death quiets my tongue, loosens my hand, and darkens my mind.

Thus I, Senator L. Claudius Lupis Victorianus, patrician and twice Council, offer this account scribed in my own hand, to be burnt upon the altar of sacrifice along with three doves before divine ANTINOVS.  Here are my secrets recounted in such a way that any man of this world could understand them, given in payment for the safety of my second son, and his son, and all the children, and women, and slaves, and animals of the household during their sojourn in Egypt.  If you do exist, Divine One, take these doves as well, and if I err in my knowledge of a true Roman’s final fate, bring me again to my Father so that we may rejoice in our ignorance together.

It is finished.

---

 

My special gratitude to Dusk Darkling for the rigorous beta.

Go to the index of the Latin used in this story

Return to the archive