The King's Gambit(24)

“Men don’t have to be intelligent or capable or of good character to play an important role in the high affairs of state. It is quite sufficient to be bad and dangerous.” These were strange words from a half-dressed woman speaking privily in the night to a man who was not her husband. I was willing to overlook the oddness of the situation in order to stay with her longer.

“And I?” I asked. “Am I one of these men of promise?”

She stepped closer, just as I had hoped. “Oh, yes. You have everything they spoke of tonight: ability, birth, loyalty … there is no position you can’t achieve.”

“In time,” I said. “These things must be accomplished slowly, in regular succession.”

“If you are content to have it so,” she said. “Bold men are not afraid to speed the process.”

I could see where this was leading. “Bold men have been beheaded in recent years, or been hurled from the Tar-peian Rock or dragged by the hook into the Tiber.”

She smiled, but it was a smile of scorn. “The same has been the fate of the timid. The difference is that the bolder ones staked their lives on something worth having. Pompey and Crassus haven’t waited on seniority and the ladder of office. They are Consuls now.”

“Hortalus has been more careful,” I said, “and he’ll die in bed. Not those two.”

Her smile went away. “I misjudged you, Decius Caecilius. I had thought you made of better material.” She stepped very close, the tips of her breasts just brushing my tunic. “You might have spent this night with me. Now I think you had best spend it alone, as you deserve. Only the best deserve the best.”

I summoned up my remaining shreds of dignity and said, “All the bolder souls have left or passed out. I had better take my leave as well. Some of them are undoubtedly more deserving of the best.” Her face froze as I walked past her.

Outside, it was dark as only a moonless night in Rome can be dark. I knew it would be more than tactless to go back inside and ask for a torch or lantern. Besides, while a light would make walking easier, it would make it even more dangerous than usual. The thieves who lurked everywhere were always on the lookout for those staggering home full of wine. A light would draw them like moths. It would be preferable to risk stumbling or stepping into unpleasant substances. I did a great deal of both before I reached home and collapsed exhausted into bed, worn out by one of the longest, strangest days of my life.





4


MORNING CAME, AS USUAL, FAR TOO early. I will never understand how we came to think it a good idea to rise while it is still dark. I think our moralists find it virtuous because it is so unpleasant. They always speak approvingly of beginning work at “gray dawn,” as if that were somehow superior to a bright blue morning. Perhaps it reminds them of campaigning in the field, where soldiers are awakened an hour before dawn. I never saw any good in that, either. Only an idiot would fight at such an hour. The reason soldiers are roused at such an hour is that most centurions are cruel and brutal men who enjoy seeing their underlings suffer. Because of that, Senators, praetors and Consuls rise when they cannot even see to dress themselves and feel thereby more virtuous than those who prefer to start the business of the day only after they are fully awake. I wonder how many wars we have lost because the Senators who planned them were nodding off in the dim, early light of dawn.

Nonetheless, I was up and hearing the vigile’s report while still yawning and trying to force some breakfast into my fatigue-paralyzed stomach. Mercifully, there had not been a single murder in my district that night. You have to live in the Subura to understand how glad that made me. Especially considering that it might have been my own murder that was reported. All the way home the night before, I had thought I heard the faintest of footsteps behind me. My condition and the darkness of the night were sufficient to make the most skeptical see ghosts, though, so I might have had the whole city to myself.

After the vigiles I received my clients. There was also another visitor, a very tall, strikingly handsome young man dressed in the sort of blue tunic favored by sailors. He smiled when I greeted him, exposing perfect teeth and an attitude friendly but just short of insolence.

“I come from Macro,” he said. “He told me to speak with you privately.”

My clients looked him over suspiciously. “Speak your piece openly, boy,” said Burrus, my old soldier. “Our patron was assaulted a short time ago, and we’d not have it happen again.”

The youth threw back his head and laughed loudly. “Then you need have no fear of me, old man. I never have to attack a man twice.”