Cleopatra’s Daughter

following its brother, and as it ran toward us, Gallia’s screams rang out like a whistle. Then, suddenly, the massive bull staggered, and from the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a blond man with a bow and arrow on the balcony of an adjacent building. A second arrow pierced the air, then a third and a fourth. The bull bellowed with rage, turning to see where the attack was coming from. In those precious moments, a soldier leapt forward and speared the beast with his metal pilum.

The bull collapsed at Julia’s feet, and when I looked up again to see the blond bowman, he was gone. But men were still shouting in front of us, and two of Octavian’s guards leapt over the bull and dragged us away from the building. Above our heads, the first bull was roaming the balconies.

A crowd of shouting merchants were warning anyone inside the building to flee. The bull didn’t understand its confinement, and in its anger it was pushing its horns into the rails and ramming the walls again and again. Then there was a terrible crack, and the bull looked up as if it sensed what was about to happen. The balcony gave way, and in a shower of concrete the bull fell to its death where Julia and I had been standing. There was a moment of shocked silence from the crowd, then a sound like thunder rumbled above us as the upper stories began to crumble.

“Go!” one of the guards shouted, and the men ran with us before we could be engulfed in dust and debris. When we stopped to look behind us, the upper floor of the apartment building was gone.

Julia began to shake. Our tunics were covered in dust, and merchants from across the Forum Boarium were running to see what had happened. “The man on the balcony….” She trembled. “He saved our lives.”

We looked to the apartment balcony where the bowman had been standing, and one of the guards approached the building. As he reached the door, he stepped back quickly. “Gaius, Livius, take a look at this!”

We followed the men to the door.

Fastened with the same type of arrow that was used to fell the bull, an actum had been posted about the mistreatment of slaves on the Aventine. At the bottom of the sheet of papyrus, written in hasty lettering, the rebel had added:

So long as freedmen and slaves are forced to live in buildings made of thin brick walls and concrete mixed with more water than lime, there will be deaths, and those deaths stain Caesar’s hands.

There was a frenzy of excitement as people around us realized who the archer must have been. The guards Octavian had sent with us burst into the building and raced up the stairs.

Julia gripped my hand. “Do you think he’s still up there?”

“No,” Gallia said. “He’s probably long gone.”

“But what could he be doing here?” I asked.

“Many men keep several apartments,” Gallia said. “This could be his third or fourth home.”

When the guards returned, they were carrying bottles of ink and a copy of the same actum that was posted on the door. The eldest of the guards introduced himself as Livius. His short gray hair exposed the hard, chiseled planes of his face. He looked first at Julia, then at me. “What did you see when those arrows killed the bull?”

Julia hesitated. “A … a man on the balcony.”

“And what did this man look like?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

Livius’s eyes bored into mine.

“I couldn’t tell either,” I added swiftly. “A bull was headed right for us!”

“Why?” Gallia asked. “What has the landlord said?”

“He tells us he’s never seen the tenant in that room.”

“But someone must have rented it!” I exclaimed.

Livius smiled slowly. “He says that money simply appears whenever the rent is due, and that men don’t ask questions in the Forum Boarium.”

“That’s true,” Gallia offered.

“It may be true,” Livius returned hotly, “but no man is invisible. Someone has seen him. Someone in that building. And when Caesar hears of this,” he warned, crumpling the Red Eagle’s actum in his hand, “the men he sends won’t be interested in excuses.”

We began the walk back to the Palatine, and Julia whispered, “Marcellus and Alexander will never believe this. I told them they should have come with us instead of going to the Circus!” Her fear had turned to excitement with the appearance of the actum, and even though our shopping trip was aborted, she remained in high spirits. “We’ll return tomorrow,” she promised gaily. “And we can show them where we were almost killed!”

“There may have been people who died inside that building,” I chided.

“And there would have been two more if the Red Eagle hadn’t saved us!”

When we returned to Octavia’s villa, Julia wanted everyone to know how we had almost lost our lives, and that evening in the triclinium, she repeated the story. “That’s when the Red Eagle saved us,” she said breathlessly.

Her father lowered the scroll in his hands. “What?”

Julia looked uneasily at me before turning to Octavian. “It was him. He shot the bull just as it was coming toward us. Didn’t the guards tell you?”

I could see that Livia was growing enraged, but Octavian remained perfectly calm. “And how do you know it was the rebel?” he asked evenly.

“Because the same kind of arrow was used to hold the actum to the door.”

Marcellus whispered severely, “Stop talking.”

But Octavian was already on his feet. Obviously the guards hadn’t told him. When they’d reported finding the Red Eagle’s apartment, they had failed to mention the fact that the rebel had saved Julia and me. Octavian seated himself on Julia’s couch and put his arm tenderly around her shoulders. “So he saved you.”

“From death,” she said. “Right, Selene?”

I nodded.

“And did you get a chance to look at him?”

I could see Alexander and Marcellus holding their breaths.

“I … I don’t know.”

“This is very important,” Octavian said gently. “See if you can remember.”

Julia frowned. “Yes. Yes, I did. He had flaxen hair and strong arms.”

Octavian stood. “Thank you,” he said. “Tomorrow, buy whatever silks you would like.”

Julia grinned, clearly proud of herself.

That evening, in the privacy of my chamber, I railed against Julia’s foolishness. “What’s the matter with her?”

My brother sat on his couch and shook his head.

“A man’s life is at stake!” I cried.

“And it may be someone she loves.” He leaned forward, and his voice dropped low. “Marcellus wasn’t at the Circus this afternoon.”

“What do you mean?”

“We went together, then he asked whether I wanted to have a little fun. I thought maybe he meant he was going to visit the fornices, so I told him no, but he was gone for so long even Juba and the Praetorians couldn’t find him.”

“None of them?”

“Only seven were with us.”

“So what did they do when he returned?”

Alexander gave me a long look. “They warned him that if he ever did that again, our trips to the Circus would be finished.”

“They must have been furious. But where did he say he went?”

My brother turned up his palms, and I noticed how large his hands had grown. He was taller than me now. Women had begun to stare at him in the streets, and Julia liked to run her fingers through his hair and ask for his opinion on her tunics. I wondered what kind of husband he’d make, but couldn’t bear the thought of being apart from him. What if Octavian decided to send him back to Egypt and keep me in Rome? Or, worse, send us to