“My husband struggles to find favor with the senate. The foreign wars go badly, and he is shunted aside on the course of military commands. He seeks possible avenues elsewhere.”
“Politics? The gods?”
“The conditions are as changeable as this autumnal weather. Sunny one moment. Tinkling with rain the next.”
“And no man can predict the weather.”
Ilithyia giggled and took Lucretia’s hand.
“No one man.” she whispered. “But perhaps ten
Lucretia frowned.
“There are men in Rome, a select group of men to be sure, but a group that falls open to newcomers when death claims a new member. Men who consult the books of prophecies past to divine future course.”
“And your husband has a guide to posterities yet unknown?”
“He may yet gain one, should he be well considered.”
“What books?”
“There are books, in Rome. Kept by the priests of the Capitoline, collating oracles and predictions from all over the known world, all to the greater good of Rome. Catalogues of prophecy.”
“I have heard of them,” Lucretia said.
“Then you must know only few may consult them.”
Lucretia laughed, feeling the weight of her journey lifted by such humor.
“If the priests of the Capitoline Hill truly had books foretelling futures, would we not already know what tomorrow holds?”
“We are citizens of Rome, the greatest Republic that the world has ever seen!”
“But it would still be a blessing to know if the day yet holds rain.”
IV
The hillside was cloaked with cypress trees, old and young, reaching to the sky like tall, green fingers. Below, the streets and houses of Neapolis stretched toward the distant sea. Above, the slopes continued ever higher, as the hill became the dark, ashen mountain that loomed above Neapolis like a permanent shadow.
The scent of pine wafted. As the trees bowed in the wind, they sometimes revealed the bright white of stone memorials, glimpsed for the briefest of moments before the limbs sprung back into place.
Slaves placed cypress branches against the stack of dry wood, while others carefully slipped rolls of cinnamon or cassia wood into the gaps between the logs and straw. They set final, greener branches against the sides, putting the workmanlike bonfire kindling out of sight, creating the impression of a green, growing altar in the middle of the hillside forest. With each gust of wind, the branches shifted slightly, making it seem as if the altar could breathe.
The slaves turned to other activities. They swept the ground clear of pebbles. They fiddled with the line of lit torches, deliberately incongruous in the daylight, that stretched toward the road into Neapolis. And they studiously ignored the men who were picking through a pile of outsized, burnished armor.
“We are to be attired as warriors of the north, it seems. Cimbri, perhaps, or Teutones,” Varro said.
“And these warriors from the north, they wear helmets such as these?” Spartacus mused.
“I believe so.”
“Believe? No wonder the gods did not favor them.”
“Your meaning?” Varro asked.
Without warning, Spartacus leapt at the tall Roman, grabbing his newly donned helmet by one of its prominent horns. Varro stumbled backward in surprise, but Spartacus had him in a firm grip, dragging his helmeted head down into the dust as if he were wrestling an ox.
Varro hit the ground with a whoosh of air, and did not even attempt to struggle from the hold, instead raising the two fingers of submission.
The slaves with brushes and torches looked up momentarily from their labors, and then returned to work as if the fight had never happened.
“The horns serve no purpose,” Spartacus said coldly. “There is no way for you to employ them in combat, and even if you did, they are blunt to the point of futility. But to an opponent, they offer secure purchase. Absent the defence of your sword-arm from the front, these horns offer your foe a handle by which to drag you down.”
“Very well!” Varro protested in an anguished growl. “Your point is made. Let me go.”
Spartacus climbed nimbly to his feet, holding out a hand to help up his friend.
“The costumes are chosen for us,” Varro said. “I cannot choose my armor.”
“Indeed,” Spartacus agreed. “But you can choose how to wear it.”
He drew his sword from its scabbard and carefully began sawing through the leather chin strap.
“Have you lost mind?” Varro asked, scraping the worst of the black Neapolitan dirt from his frame.
“I do not wish to enter battle unprotected,” Spartacus said calmly. “But I can aid its removal if pulled with sufficient force.”
He held it up for Varro to see. A neat nick in the chinstrap left it only half as wide as it once was.
“I suggest you do the same,” Spartacus continued.
Varro nodded, unsmiling, with the calculation of a man in search of any advantage.
“You are cunning, Thracian,” he said. “No ordinary man would think to win victory by losing that which is to protect him.”
“My only thought, to stay alive,” Spartacus said.
Their fellow slaves from House Batiatus, the swarthy Galatian Cycnus and the jet-black Numidian Bebryx, watched their chatter sullenly.
“You would do well to listen to the Champion of Capua,” Varro said to them quietly. “Or die with closed ears.”
Bebryx sucked thoughtfully on his teeth, peeling them back from his lips with a contemptuous smack. Cycnus also said nothing, fussing instead with the straps of his armor.
“Please yourselves,” Varro said with a shrug. “But mark well our opponents.”
He jerked his head across the clearing toward a second group of gladiators, picking through a pile of antique Roman swords and shields. The others followed his direction.
“Why are there but three of them and four of us?” Cycnus asked.
“Their fourth marches in the procession itself,” Varro explained. “The freedman Timarchides, friend to the deceased.”
“Does this mark advantage?” Spartacus asked.
“A freedman will not seek true danger. He has too much to lose.”
“Strike him with flat of sword and see honor restored?” Cycnus suggested with a grin.
Bebryx sucked on his teeth again, and looked away at the trees warily, as if expecting the wood itself to come for him.
“But he is a freedman,” Spartacus said, “in a house of gladiators.”
“What is your meaning, Thracian?” Varro asked.
“He is not a weak-willed patrician, thinking of wine and the next banquet,” Spartacus said. “He is a gladiator so proficient that he received the wooden sword. We fight a man skilled enough to
“Oh,” Varro said quietly. “Fuck.”
Batiatus wore black. The unfamiliar color kept taking him by surprise, as if there were a fly on his arm or a mosquito at his neck. He looked around him at the Neapolitan villa, so oddly like the one he had left behind in
