“I’ll have you flogged, dwarf.” Gallus stamped off in a whirl of perfumed linen.

“You know the funny thing?” Hercules turned his cynical gaze back to Arius. “Sometimes I think you are immortal. Imagine that.”

Arius drew a circle in the sand of the courtyard with his foot. His shoulder ached sharply where a leopard had clawed him to the bone in his last fight.

“Arius the God.” Hercules smiled down at the nameless dog. “Funny, hey girl?”

She whined and attacked a leather glove.

Sixteen

THEA

BRUNDISIUM, A. D. 91

DEAD?” I spun around. “Lady Julia—she’s dead?” “That’s what I heard.” Penelope wrinkled a sympathetic nose. “She’s taken the last ferry.”

“But . . . how?” I asked. “She was only twenty-three or four. Not so old. How did it happen?” Two of the laundresses had gathered close in the atrium to hear, and a new lyre player from Corinth.

“Well—” Penelope shrugged. “One hears it was a fever. But I heard it might have been suicide. She stabbed herself in the stomach—”

“She stabbed herself in the stomach, all right, but not for a suicide.” One of the laundresses lowered her voice. “She had a mite of trouble, if you know what I mean, and she tried to cut it out.”

A murmur of speculation. I turned away and walked to the center of the atrium where a hard winter rain was running off the roof gutters into the little blue-tiled pool in the middle. Dead. Lady Julia was dead. I leaned my forehead against the marble pillar, breathing in the smells of fish and tar that the rain brought from the harbor. I hadn’t known Lady Julia, but I’d caught her eyes once on a bright morning by the shrine of Juno, on her wedding day, and I’d looked at her gold-embroidered robes and flame silk veil and silver-shackled arms, and wondered why I pitied her. Even more strangely, her pale little three-cornered face had turned and found mine, and I saw that she’d envied me. Me, a sunburned slave girl who carried fans and scrubbed floors. She’d envied me. Why?

Well, we all knew why, didn’t we? Or thought we did. We heard the rumors, even in Brundisium. I remembered her, pale and drained beneath the red veil as she walked into her uncle’s arms for the ritual bride theft . . . and I saw the bridegroom who had to use both hands to wrench her away.

“So she died aborting a child,” I said, very calm. “Whose child? The Emperor’s?”

“Oh, ugh.” The lyre player wrinkled her pretty nose. “Her own uncle?”

“You shouldn’t repeat foul gossip,” said Penelope severely. “The Emperor is brokenhearted, so they say. But that’s no cause to repeat anything filthy.” She retreated in high dudgeon.

“Brokenhearted,” I wondered aloud. “But over a niece, or a mistress?”

“I heard she was his mistress sure enough,” one of the laundresses shrugged. “And he’s mad with guilt now, because he made her get rid of the child.”