“Aren’t you? Your mother said you always wanted to be a gladiator.”

“Wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be.” Vix hesitated. “People—they die hard.”

Vix’s head drooped wearily, and it trembled on Paulinus’s tongue to tell the boy he wouldn’t be fighting in any more arenas if Fortuna favored their plan that night. But they’d kept the secret too well to spread it now.

“Cheer up, young Vix.” Nessus wandered past in old scuffed sandals, dull-eyed and vague-faced, fingering a little gold chain about his neck that had once belonged to Ganymede. “The stars all say the Emperor will be dead by tonight’s moonrise, and then all your troubles are over.”

“Not him. He won’t die today.” Vix lobbed another stone, viciously. “He’ll die old, in a nice soft feather bed with a cup of wine in his hand. Bastard.”

“You’ll die old, too,” said Nessus, indifferent. “Driving a chariot too fast because even when you’re an old general with a devoted legion that calls you Vercingetorix the Red, you’ll still like fast horses and fast fights. You’ll die fast, too, though you’ll hang on long enough for your officers to crowd around you and weep. There’s a woman who will weep for you, too, though she won’t be able to show it. An arch will be built in your honor, and afterward your men will toast your memory on enough wine to float your funeral barge down to Pluto, and swear there was never a man like you. How’s that for a death, young Vercingetorix? Not that you believe me anyway, because you don’t believe in the stars.”

“You’re nuts,” Vix muttered.

“Do I get a prediction, too?” Paulinus called after Nessus, but the astrologer had already drifted away: a fading ghost down the silent, echoing hallways.

LEPIDA

I came to Marcus’s house for a last attempt to persuade him to remarry me—I hadn’t slept with him for years, but it was worth a try. But he wasn’t there. “Gone to the Capitoline Library, Domina. He left orders we were not to allow you—”

“Allow?” Five minutes of my tongue brought the slaves into a more submissive mood; they’d obeyed me too long as mistress to be shed of the habit yet. I wandered inside, flopping moodily on a blue-cushioned couch in the atrium. Poky quiet house. No one had ever made assignations in the corners here, or giggled over risqué jokes, or even drunk too much wine. And I was no longer mistress of this poky little house. No longer Lady Lepida Pollia, the senator’s wife. Oh, I laughed it off as best I could—“Really, I was so tired of dreary old Marcus, you can’t imagine!”—but people whispered about the speed with which Marcus had disposed of me after thirteen years of marriage . . . and so soon after Domitian had disposed of me as well. Marcus hadn’t charged me with adultery—I’d kept my mouth shut about Paulinus, and so far Marcus had kept his word—but all those fat Roman matrons jealous of my success took any chance they could to whisper. And one or two of my lovers had found themselves inexplicably busy these past weeks, wary that I was looking for a new husband.