“Julia, have you bankrupted us buying this thing?”
“I didn’t buy it,” she said. “A team of men delivered it this morning. It’s a good thing this district is full of metal workers. We had to borrow a pry bar just to get it open.”
“But who sent it?” Even as I asked, I was relieved that Julia had taken the trouble to fetch a pry bar instead of employing one of her usual expedients, like using one of my swords.
“The deliverymen said they were hired by a man named Farbus to deliver this from a warehouse near the Forum. My grandmother has a steward named Farbus. Perhaps this is a gift from her.” She meant Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar. The old dragon disliked me, but she doted on Julia.
“I suppose it could be,” I acknowledged. “Caesar left several buildings full of art works from when he was refurbishing the house of the Pontifex Maximus and the house of the Vestals. She knows how much entertaining we’ll have to do when I stand for the praetorship, and she may want to dress up the house.” It was like her to let me know how little she thought of my personal taste.
Julia dragged her attention away from the beautiful statue. “Are you serious about danger of attack?”
“I seldom joke about personal danger. I am going to double bar the gate and station a lookout on the roof.”
“My, you are serious. Are you going to be here at the house for the duration?”
“I won’t let some pack of thugs make me a prisoner in my own home. This is just to secure the noncombatants, you and the household staff. I have some work to do here; then I will go right back out again.”
She rolled her eyes upward. “You are going to be a hero again. Spare me!”
I grabbed her and planted a kiss on her mouth. “I’m no hero. The streets are so confused right now that it will be easy to escape anyone who’s after me. I’ve been doing this all my life, dear. Trust me.”
“The last time I trusted you, you ended up with that German princess.”
I winced. I had fondly hoped Julia wouldn’t learn of that, but no such luck. “We weren’t married then. Besides, the woman was trying to kill me.”
She shook her head in disgust. “The things men find attractive in barbarian women! Go, play with your weapons. I’ll warn everyone not to open the doors to strangers.”
I took refuge in my study, where Hermes already had my arms chest open and its contents laid out. The law against bearing arms within the pomerium was about to suffer some bending.
“You’d better begin by wearing this, for starters,” Hermes said, holding up a sleeveless, waist-length vest of mail. It was one of twenty such defenses given to Caesar as a present from a Gallic chieftain, and Caesar in turn had passed some of them on to his favored officers. The Gauls invented mail, that ingenious armor of interlinked iron rings that is fiexible as cloth and stronger than plates of bronze. My regular, legionary mail shirt was knee length, with short sleeves and shoulder straps that gave a double thickness on that vulnerable area, and it weighed more than thirty pounds. This vest was made of links one-?fth the size of those on legionary armor, and it weighed less than five pounds.
A hard-cast spear would pass right through it, but it was just the thing for stopping a dagger in the street. It would even resist the thrust of a short sword, if the attacker didn’t get his full weight behind it. It shone with silver plating, which was as much practical as decorative. It needed no oiling and would not stain my clothes with rust and the inevitable grime that always adheres to iron armor.
“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “I’ve always avoided going around as if I were afraid of my fellow citizens.”
“That’s just who might want to kill you,” he pointed out. “Be reasonable. Wear it under your tunic and nobody will know you have it on unless you get killed, and then what do you care who knows?”
“You’ve convinced me.” I stripped, put on a thin tunic of the sort I usually wore for exercising, then slipped the steel vest over my head. It was exquisitely tailored so that it tapered at the waist and rested neatly atop my hip bones, feeling even lighter than it was. Then I put on my usual tunic, and the armor was invisible. I belted it with several turns of narrow leather straps, wound back and forth through heavy brass rings, charioteer-style. This gave me a secure place to tuck my sheathed dagger and my caestus, the spiked bronze knuckle bar worn by boxers, minus the elaborate strapping the boxers use.
“Do you want to pack a sword?” Hermes asked, holding out the light, wasp-waisted arena sword I sometimes carried in preference to the broad, heavy gladius.