I wrote no more letters. What good would it do? Even if Arius somehow got one, he’d never be able to come to me. I’d never get to Rome, because Larcius loathed both the city and the stuck-up wife who spent his money in a vast house on the Aventine, and he’d made his nest in Brundisium instead. So I stayed in Brundisium, too, singing and smiling, entertaining the occasional nice young patrician, getting belated news of my lover’s fights and breathing easier every time he beat the impossible odds again.

Forget him.

That’s what I prayed every night, even now. Oh, God, let me forget. Let me forget. It’s easier that way. It’s easier to forget and stop the aching.

But God, the cosmic joker, had said No. Never forget. Know everything about him, down to the bottom of his soul. Have the knowledge, when you can’t have him. Have the memories, when you can’t have him. Have a son with his smile, when you can’t have him.

And He was just, because I’d known all along that to love a man more than God is to play with fire.

APPALLING place, isn’t it?” Arius shrugged as Gallus twitched the curtains shut on the ox-drawn palanquin. He’d been to Germania before, during his first provincial tour after he’d sheared Lepida Pollia bald and Gallus had judged it wise to leave the city for a time. Five years later it looked the same: cold and crude and new. Wind-lashed huts clung to barren hillsides, and in the valleys the Roman towns looked bright and garish. Shackled tribesmen worked fields full of icy mud, turning flat accusing eyes on Arius when he passed.

“They’re a sullen people, these Germans.” Gallus snuggled deeper into his furs. He had made such a killing on Arius’s last tour of the provinces that he had judged it time for another. “Absolute barbarians—just like you, dear boy. Don’t try to run away again, will you? I’ll shackle you if I have to.”

Arius had tried running away, during that first tour. His face and his gladiator tattoo had given him away within five miles, and after that Gallus kept him watched whenever they left Italy. He didn’t try running anymore. Not much to run for.

He fought four bouts through the arenas of Germania that winter, taking on champions in wolf skins and champions in horned helmets, and he left them all dead. After his bouts Gallus rented his presence out at dinner parties where he met governors and legates, charioteers and senators, painted patrician women who took him eagerly to bed and soft-eyed boy tribunes who tried to do the same. But he liked to duck out of the stifling banquet halls into the dark frosty gardens, looking up at the roof of stars that seemed much bigger and sharper than they ever did through the haze and smoke of Rome. Germania. Gaul a little to the left, and Britannia a little to the left of that.