Wrath of Rome (Book Two of the Dominium Dei Trilogy) Read online

  “Welcome, Helena, you look lovely,” Domitian said as the staff began serving supper. “The chef has prepared a feast for us tonight. The first course features a delicately seasoned tongue paired with my favorite wine from Cappadocia.”

  With horror Helena understood they were to eat the tongue of her beloved, and she immediately felt the acid of her stomach race up her throat. It was all she could do to not vomit, and she doubted she would be able to stop herself for long.

  On cue two servants brought in a beautifully decorated amphora. It had an ornate black-and-red design and two handles. With great pomp and ceremony, the servants unsealed the top.

  “My wine comes straight from the vine, untouched by human hands, the nectar of the gods,” Domitian told her, and then nodded to one of the servants.

  The wine taster dipped a very small imperial cup that resembled a ladle into the amphora, sipped the wine and swallowed. Helena got the distinct impression that this display of approval was in fact intended to signal to Domitian that the amphora had not been tampered with in transit and that his wine was not poisoned.

  “To a successful execution,” he toasted after their cups were filled. He greedily gulped down his cup, then held it out for more.

  Presently the flaming tongue arrived, delivered by a servant from the private kitchen they called Julius, which was the kind of name rich Romans reserved for their pets. The African servant’s hands were trembling as he delivered the sizzling dish. The sound and smell were too much for Helena, and she quickly covered her mouth with a cloth and gave up her fig appetizer.

  “I beg you pardon, Your Excellency.”

  Domitian smiled. “Now you have more room for the tongue.”

  Even Domitia could see beyond her own suffering to lay a soft hand on her back for comfort.

  Domitian did the honors of slicing the tongue in half, one portion for himself and the other half to be divided equally between Domitia and Helena.

  I cannot do this, Helena thought as she watched him spear a slice and shove it into his mouth, smacking his cruel lips in satisfaction. I cannot breathe. I must die.

  “Really, you must try some,” he said, waving another piece of tongue before her face. “Or must I give your slice of heaven to Sirius?” He motioned to Julius, who looked visibly shaken, and said, “Bring me my Pharaoh Hound. I have a treat for him.”

  Julius looked terrified and said nothing, only nodded and walked away.

  A minute later it was the Praetorian prefect who returned with a grim expression.

  “Wrong dog, Secundus,” Domitian told him. “Where is my Sirius?”

  “We seem to have a problem, Your Excellency. It appears the imperial Pharaoh Hound was attacked by an animal of some sort, his body found by a drain this morning outside the Senate.”

  Helena could see shock and sadness in Domitian’s eyes for a fleeting second, only to be quickly replaced by rage. “And where was his walker, Julius, when he was attacked?”

  The Praetorian, Secundus, paused, glancing at Helena and Domitia. “Yes, perhaps I can explain in a private audience with His Excellency.”

  “No,” said Domitian, swallowing another chunk of tongue. “You shall explain it to me right here, right now.”

  “It appears there was a bit of a mix-up at the Coliseum today, Your Excellency. Even the Master of the Games was not aware of it. I only found out now, after piecing together several disparate reports.”

  Domitian chased his chunk of tongue down with another sip of his Cappadocian wine. “What sort of mix-up?”

  Secundus cranked his neck just a bit and said, “The propmasters decided to salvage some of the armor used for the production of Chiron’s execution, so they went into the Gate of Death and began to strip the corpse.”

  Helena thought she was going to die. Please, Jupiter, make it end.

  “Upon removal of the armor, one of the propmasters noticed a tattoo on the shoulder of the corpse.”

  Helena stopped breathing. Athanasius had no tattoo that she knew of, unless they had cruelly branded him for show.

  “This tattoo was of the third cohort of the Praetorian. One of our own, sir.”

  Domitian’s eyes seemed to pop as the truth began to sink in. “What are you telling me, Secundus?”

  “It appears that the man executed was not, in fact, Athanasius of Athens but the imperial interrogator sent to torture him in prison. Somehow the villain overcame him and cut out his tongue.”

  Domitian stood up, shaking. “You mean to tell me that Chiron has escaped and I have been feasting on the tongue of one of my own officials?”

  Helena was elated inside. Athanasius alive? Escaped?

  “No, sir,” Secundus said quickly, and she became subdued again. “I am only the messenger here, Your Excellency, and would never even consider bringing what I am about to tell you unless I knew for certain other parties were aware and that it will not remain a secret for long.”

  Domitian spoke in as low and cruel a voice now as Helena had ever heard him. “The Prefect of my Praetorian will tell me this secret immediately or die.”

  “Caesar’s personal physicians, who know so clearly your love for the imperial Pharaoh Hound, examined him carefully in hopes of determining what sort of beast could kill such a divine animal, in order that Caesar could hunt the beast himself. It was my hope to have the beast ready for you before having to present this tragedy.” Secundus swallowed hard. “Upon close examination, Your Excellency, your physicians found a half-digested tongue inside the animal’s stomach, and its own cut off cleanly.”

  Domitian looked confused. “You are telling me that the monster who cut off my hound’s tongue then forced him to eat it?”

  “No, Your Excellency. Based on the eyewitness account of your servant Julius, your sharp-eyed Sirius spotted and detained a man dressed as a Tribune outside the Senate late last night. By the time Julius ran after him, chasing the yelps, he found only the Tribune, who said the dog had run off. In hindsight, it appears this Tribune was none other than Athanasius, and that he used the tongue of your interrogator to lure the dog and then kill him. He then passed along the dog’s tongue to your servant Julius as that of Athanasius’s, and the kitchen prepared it for you tonight.

  Helena was in a daze. The Empress Domitia’s mouth was open, desperately trying to keep its corners from turning up in a smirk.

  Domitian suddenly fell over and began to wretch on the floor, sinking to his knees in the puddle and crying out, “Sirius! My Sirius! What have they done to you! Minerva, save me!”

  Helena quickly got up and hoped to excuse herself from this scene. But Caesar pointed an accusing finger at her that made her freeze in terror.

  “You!” he screamed at her. “And you, Secundus! Rest assured that this clown Athanasius, this amusement, this half-wit who calls himself Chiron, will suffer more than he ever imagined. Secundus, I want you to fetch me the Master of the Games. Ludlumus will answer for this. And round up the generals. The armies of Rome will search the far corners of the empire to hunt down Athanasius and bring his head to me on a silver platter.”

  “At your orders, Your Excellency,” said Secundus, who vanished quickly.

  Slowly Domitian rose to his feet, the bottom of his toga stained with the bits of vomit and tongue, and walked over to her and looked her in the eye. “Your beloved Athanasius couldn’t die with honor in the arena, could he? Couldn’t take the status that Ludlumus gave him as Chiron—a far better station than any playwright deserved—and thank the gods for making him more immortal than his forgettable comedies? No, he had to poke us in the eye and shake a fist at the gods. He had to mock us with this travesty, and in so doing merely tell us he is still alive and that our retribution was not too harsh but too light. You and I, Helena, will have to remedy that. I will see you in my bedchamber shortly.”

  With that Caesar turned his back on her and Domitia and stalked out to meet with his generals. Helena looked at the empress, whose expression of horror only
further worried her as to what more divine misfortune could possibly befall her and Athanasius.

  III

  Much like Athanasius himself, his hometown of Corinth straddled two different worlds. The Greek city was built on the Isthmus of Corinth, that narrow stretch of land that joins the Peloponnesus to the mainland of Greece, about halfway between Athens and Sparta. The well-to-do city had two main ports, one on the Corinthian Gulf, which served the trade routes of the western empire, and one on the Saronic Gulf, serving the trade routes of the eastern empire. As such it was at the crossroads of trade, culture and religion.

  The Pegasus had docked in the port city of Lechaion in the Corinthian Gulf. By nightfall it would be departing from the port city of Kenchreai on the Saronic Gulf on the other side of the isthmus. In between was the Diolkos, the overland stone ramp that connected the two ports after centuries of costly attempts to dig out a canal had failed. The Pegasus would be rolled across the isthmus on logs, as the ancient Egyptians had rolled blocks of granite to make their pyramids. The journey was a good 43 stadia and would take ten hours.

  That’s how long Athanasius had to warn his family and escape before anybody knew the tribune interrogator was missing when he failed to show up in Kenchreai.

  As he walked down the gangway and around the harbor crates and cranes, Athanasius knew he was defying Marcus’s instructions by visiting his family estate outside the city, just as he did when he went to Maximus. But a growing fear for the safety of his family had been gnawing him for days. He had to warn them, help them escape. There were thousands of islands in Greece, far away from the big ocean traffic, where he could lose himself, just like his forefather, the original Vasiliki, who had killed some ancient general who had taken his sister as a sex slave and then hid out in the Minoan city of Vasiliki in Crete. When he returned to public life, friends and strangers called him by his new name. He could do that, maybe someday get Helena to join him, after Domitian was finally dead.

  He thought of his mother and two older sisters and two younger brothers and their families. More than two dozen nieces and nephews in all. How in the world could he protect them all or get them all out of Corinth? It seemed impossible. Whatever the case, he resolved to be steadfast and firm and demand the family flee. His plan was clear: to send them back to the islands from whence they came.

  Even from the harbor he could see Corinth’s acropolis in the distance, where the great Temple of Aphrodite once stood before an earthquake leveled it. Now there were several smaller temples dedicated to the goddess in the city, each with statues boasting the face of Helena. The first one greeted him and all visitors to the harbor as he walked toward the taxi station. The sight aroused both pride and anguish. He had hoped to return in triumph with Helena and the success of Opus Gloria.

  Athanasius hailed a cisium at the station, put his sack of belongings in the compartment under the seat and told the taxi driver to take him to town, where he would switch to another cab. The cisiarri yanked the reins on his two mules, and the open carriage with two wheels started down the limestone Lechaion Way south toward the town.

  They drove along the colonnade of Corinthian columns and pulled up to the Roman arch near the Perine Fountain. He got out, paid the driver and walked through the agora of public buildings and shops, passing the tribunal bema from which Paul the Apostle spoke to his parents’ generation in Corinth some 20 years before he was born.

  Athanasius headed straight toward his favorite temple of Aphrodite next to the city’s theater, which could seat 18,000 and where he used to spend so much of his youth and staged his first play. Almost a hundred years before he was born, the Greek geographer Strabo boasted that the city’s famous Temple of Aphrodite employed more than one thousand prostitutes. Athanasius recalled only about 300 growing up, less in number than the days of the year, which wreaked havoc with the math of a peculiar contest of religiosity among the local Greek boys that stirred quite the resentment among local Jewish and Christian girls.

  He also recalled some tension with the Christian community in Corinth, mostly because the Apostle Paul had lived in the city for almost two years. Here he wrote his infamous Book of Romans, which was about as controversial as John’s Book of Revelation. All Athanasius remembered as a child were the jokes about the Corinthians simply being Corinthians in response to the apostle’s call for stricter sexual mores. His mother and father knew a couple who were Paul’s right-hand leaders, a woman named Priscilla and her husband Aquila. His father thought it blasphemous that the new superstition allowed such lofty status for a woman. His mother, meanwhile, never got over how swiftly the superstition could carry her friend off to the far corners of the earth with this crazy evangelist.

  Athanasius listened carefully to the conversations in the air as he walked through the public squares. No news yet about his death except that it was anticipated. He stopped off at the theater with a statue of himself, the hometown boy. He had hoped to bring Helena here to meet his family and show her that she wasn’t the only one to get statues in her honor. He had also hoped to impress his cousins by presenting Aphrodite herself in the flesh.

  Helena’s statue was in front of the Temple of Aphrodite. There she was, a fifteen-foot-tall Helena in stone representing the goddess Aphrodite. Athanasius stood before her, thinking about the model for the even larger version in the works back in Rome and if it would ever see the light of day now that she was linked to him, the notorious Chiron.

  “Now there’s a handful,” said a voice, and he turned to see a stranger.

  Athanasius looked him over, and then around, worried about spies and assassins waiting for him. It was possible that news of his escape from Rome had outraced the Pegasus to reach Domitian’s informants here in Corinth.

  He decided it was best to simply get out of town, before some cousin or childhood friend recognized him. “Isn’t she?” he told the stranger and walked away.

  He hailed another cab, driven by a young man with smooth, dark features and a fixed smile for tourists. “Where to, Tribune?”

  “The Argos Farms,” he said, naming a neighboring farm past his family’s estate. He would double back on foot to reach his home, cut through the groves to the stables in back and avoid the front drive off the main road.

  The driver nodded. “That’s a good twelve stadia outside town. It will take us an hour.”

  “I’ll pay you for your way back too.”

  “At your service, Tribune.”

  Athanasius climbed in and off they went, leaving the statue of Helena and tourists behind. He was headed home.

  • • •

  Corinth and its outskirts had changed some since Athanasius last saw his hometown four years ago. The Romans were upgrading public buildings, and the roads were vastly improved. He doubted it would take even an hour to reach home, and he was right: Sooner than he expected they approached his family’s estate outside town.

  As they drove past his childhood home, Athanasius did his best to avoid looking at the two Corinthian pillars that marked the entrance to the long, winding gravel path lined with cypress trees to the villa. But something caused the cab’s mules to skip a step, and Athanasius looked ahead to see traffic coming their way.

  “We may have to pull over to let the caravan pass,” the driver told him. “Perhaps they come from the Argos Farms?”

  Athanasius couldn’t afford to find out. Any member of the Argos family or their workers might recognize him, sitting in the open carriage in a tribune’s uniform no less.

  “Cut down the path ahead,” Athanasius ordered.

  “What path?”

  “I’ll show you.” Athanasius decided to use the back road to the family tannery. The tannery road started at the northwest side of the property, a few minutes from the east gates. He would use it to quietly reach the estate. “Hurry!”

  The mules kicked up and they went about half a stade before a narrow dirt path, barely visible, appeared between the trees. “Here?” the driver asked
.

  “Yes,” said Athanasius, and tried to will the mules to speed up.

  They turned onto the path and slipped into the trees just as the first of the wagons from the caravan passed by on the road behind them, affording whoever was looking a view of the carriage’s backside.

  They took a long path past the family’s fly-infested and odorous tannery, which was kept a good distance away not only from town but from the Vasiliki estate, and finally rounded a cool glade and entered the sunny grove behind the family villa. Athanasius could see the stables below, and for a moment he was a boy again. He could picture old Perseus the stable hand, showing him how to properly saddle a horse or milk a goat. Such a different life it was, his childhood. As was his life now. So different had it turned out than expected.

  “Athanasius!” called a voice, startling him and perking the ears of the driver.

  It was Demetrius, his old friend and son of Perseus, coming out of the stables and waving his hands wildly.

  “Demetrius!” Athanasius shouted, and climbed down from the carriage to give big Demetrius a hug and stop him from talking too much until the driver left. “You’re even bigger than I remember. Where’s your father?”

  Demetrius looked down. “He died not long after your father.” Then he looked at the driver who lifted the seat in the carriage to remove Athanasius’s pack. “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Helena, your bride. The whole family is inside waiting for you. Your mother has prepared quite the feast. Everybody is coming over.”

  “What are you talking about, Demetrius?”

  “The message you sent your mother about your arrival today. What’s with the Roman get-up? Is this one of your jokes?”

  “I sent no message,” Athanasius said, yanking his sword out of its hilt as he spun around and stabbed the driver in the stomach. The dagger in the driver’s hand, lifted in the air to stab Athanasius in the back, fell to the ground with the body.