The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(30)

I laughed. “I suppose something about you had to be delicate.”

I took my cloak from her and swung it over my head, settling it on my shoulders and fastening the round brooch pin at my throat. Sorcha’s directives notwithstanding, I was dressed that day for travel, in my suede leggings and tunic. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the bronze wall mirror, I felt instantly better. Not so Roman after all, I thought. Sorcha could wear the palla for us both. And I doubted Caesar would mind at all.

Once I left the townhouse, I began to breathe a little freer and discovered I was finding it easier each time I was in the city to find my way around. Even without a spectral Gaulish chieftain to guide me through the streets, I thought, wincing a bit at the memory of that wild, delirious ride as I passed the narrow laneway that led to the house where Arviragus had been imprisoned. I wondered if Caesar had been told of his old enemy’s “death” yet—from excess drink, of course. I hoped that Junius, the gruff old soldier assigned as Arviragus’s guard, had been convincing in his lie. It couldn’t have been that hard. Anyone who’d seen the Gaulish chieftain in recent years likely would have believed such a story without question.

The truth was something else entirely. The last I’d heard of him, Arviragus was relishing his freedom on the island of Corsica. Kallista’s fellow Amazons had accepted him into their tribe, rescinding their threat to kill him if any of the girls who’d joined us to retake the ludus failed to return home. In fact, some of them had returned to Corsica. I understood why.

Rome—as Elka had so recently reminded me—wasn’t for everyone.

The sky over the city that day was overcast and promising more rain, with banks of tumbled, dark gray clouds lowering on the distant hills in the east. I hitched my cloak up and tugged the cowl forward around my face, just another body swimming in the flow of people trundling up and down the city streets like salmon in a stream, all of us just struggling to get to where we were going. But after the previous night’s affair—where I’d been stared at openly by Antony and Octavia’s rich friends like I was some sort of exotic sea creature delicacy—I found myself reveling in the anonymity of the crowd.

I walked north along the twisting streets, dodging ox carts and slave-borne curtained litters, until I reached the Campus Martius. The Theatrum Pompeii—the same venue where Cai had so recently won his first gladiatorial victory—had an attached structure called a curia that was used sometimes as a meeting place for the senate. I’d learned from Kronos that it was where Caesar and the other senators would gather to discuss the affairs of the Republic that day. It wasn’t yet midday when I arrived, and I didn’t want to seem as if I were loitering—unwanted attention from the city’s patrolling vigiles was the last thing I needed—so, instead, I strolled over to the theater itself.

There weren’t supposed to be any games scheduled for that day, and so I couldn’t quite understand why I could see through the colonnade to where a group of gladiators was standing about inside the theater vomitorium, but I craned my neck to see if Cai was one of them. He wasn’t. I didn’t recognize any of the men, to be truthful, but I certainly noticed how very many weapons they carried and how tense they seemed. They weren’t equipped for arena fighting, though. They wore no heavy armor or padding, and there wasn’t a single net or trident or spear among them. Just knives and swords. Close-quarters weaponry. Not one of them even bore a shield, so there was no identifying them by ludus markings.

But ludus colors . . . that was another thing.

I realized then that, beneath a variety of light armor and molded leather, all of the men were dressed in identical black tunics. The gladiator uniform of Pontius Aquila’s Ludus Saturnus. Those men were sworn to the Sons of Dis. My stomach clenched in a tight knot, and the day went even colder all around me. I already knew that after his disgrace, Aquila had been desperate for money. For the last several months, I’d kept one ear half-cocked listening for any news of him, and so I knew that he’d been forced to sell half of his stake in his Ludus Saturnus. I struggled now to remember just who it was that he’d sold it to, and a name floated to the surface of my memory—a young senator named Marcus Junius Brutus. I’d seen him sitting in the elite seats at the Circus Maximus on a few occasions but had never met him in person and knew little of the man beyond his status as a politician. I suppose that the fact that I’d never heard anything ill spoken about him was notable as far as politicians went.

The gladiators likely belonged to him, I thought. Not Aquila. And the Theatrum Pompeii was a place where gladiatorial games were presented. So there was no reason to wonder at the presence of his gladiators. And no reason to worry. They were probably just using the facility for practice.

I was, as Elka said, jumping at shadows. I shook my head, angry with myself for letting Pontius Aquila occupy so much space in the vault of my skull—still—and turned my back on the gathering of men. I went, instead, over to the nearby market stalls to browse the food and wares and distract myself until the senate members began to gather.

The markets of Rome were one of the things that reminded me of home. Some of the food smells and many of the colors and textures of the fabrics on display were unfamiliar, but the cheerful noise and the bustling chaos—men and women haggling, and children running wild between the stalls—were exactly the same. I lingered over bolts of bright linen and strings of amber and glass beads. I settled on a honeycake. Then the senators began to arrive, drifting through the streets in pairs and groups, all serious faces and superior airs, ignoring—and, it seemed, mostly ignored by—the plebs. That was something I was learning. The common folk of Rome seemed to think the senate was mostly something to be tolerated rather than lauded. Had my kingly father gone about comporting himself the way these men did, I thought, his head would have been off and nailed to a doorpost in short order. Instead, Virico had treated chieftains and freemen alike with courtesy and familiarity and had remained king because of it. But in Rome, power and status ruled. Harshly.