Arena by John Jakes Page A

Cassius,” she called. “I meant it all.”
    Propping up Serenus as best I could, I spat on the ground and turned my back.
    We had barely reached a low gate in the rear wall when a cry went up in the courtyard. “Ho!
    Everyone stay where you are!”
    “Down here, quickly,” Serenus panted. He indicated a thick clump of shrubs adjoining the gate.
    “They’ll make only a cursory search of the grounds. As soon as they’re inside, we can leave.”
    Search they did, but not overly hard, as he’d predicted. One vigile tramped by swinging his tallow lantern. Then stern male voices clamored inside the brothel. Serenus stood up with a groan and I helped him toward the gate.
    A bad night’s work. The love I’d foolishly imagined Acte felt was false, I’d struck the Emperor himself, and by now I was probably being hunted by Fabius as a fugitive, my life forfeit if I was caught.
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Chapter V
    BY A DEVIOUSroute we at last reached the entrance of a splendid house of soft black tufa stone enriched with golden travertine. The house sat almost at the apex of the Esquiline Hill. The view was breathtaking.
    Not only the thoroughfares below, the Flavia Victoria and the other squalid streets roundabout, already swarming, but the other six hills and even the distant blue mountains could be seen across the plain. Guiding my companion when he faltered, I had long since abandoned worry over punishment at the school. I was far too late to creep back unobserved. What would come, would come. Instead of fretting, I relished the sharper, sweeter air of these heights crowded with elegant homes. Up here one day I too would dwell, I told myself. I would be a rich eques. But how close I’d come to turning aside from that shining goal because of the false words of Acte!
    “Sir,” I said, “you have a magnificent house. I assume there are servants on the premises to tend your wound.”
    “There had better be,” Serenus grumbled, whey-faced. “The house is not mine, though. It’s Seneca’s.”
    “The philosopher? The Imperial adviser?”
    “The same. We’d go to my home, but it’s further away. Knock loudly. And hurry. I seem to have Page 21

    struggled this far with a pit in my side only to die bleeding while you talk and goggle.”
    I rapped at the entrance as he bade. Momentarily a slave arrived. The man’s expression of surliness changed to one of deference as soon as Serenus threw back the cloak with which he’d concealed his features during our journey down back alleys.
    “Wine and bread and linen!” Serenus yelled, shoving inside. “And tell your master to meet us in the tablinium. Young man, give me your arm again.”
    We passed between elegant columns of Luna marble into the atrium, which was richly furnished.
    Serenus limped badly, clutching his side. At each step his wound rained bright droplets of blood onto the tiles.
    Brazen tritons sprayed water into the atrium pool. A magpie chattered in a cage. The air was fragrant with the smell of green plants floating on the water’s surface.
    A moment later we entered the tablinium, a sparsely furnished room at the atrium’s rear. In this room of the house the master customarily received his clients. Slaves bustled in and out fetching basins and ewers and jars of ointment. Clumsily Serenus settled onto a bench and lifted away the bloodied mess of his cloak and toga, revealing a long gash running parallel with his pale ribs. To me the wound looked more gory than deep.
    Serenus gulped a mug of wine and swatted at a slave’s head. “Not so hard, not so hard! Apply the dressing if you must, but don’t tear me apart doing it.” He twisted his head in my direction.
    “Have you never been inside a residence like this, young man? You gawk like a yokel. Why worry about offending? You’ve struck the Princeps himself. You can hardly do anything worse.”
    He spoke not in reproof but with a sort of weary mirth. He was a spare, sturdy man in his late forties,