The two intruders had lost all interest in me and were focused on the one man in the room who might foil their escape. Their mission had failed; the door to the street held their only salvation. Everyone in the room knew it. The two men faced off against Betto.
“You’re a young wisp of a soldier, ain’t you,” the taller one asked. “But we’re a generous pair, we are, and not too proud to admit we’ve come to the wrong house. Stand aside, let us pass and you’ll be bothered no more by us.”
“Wrong house, came to the wrong house,” Flavius Betto mumbled.
“YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT YOU CAME TO THE WRONG HOUSE!” he screamed. Everyone jumped. The intruders took a step back. Then, as if to himself, in little more than a whisper, Betto said, “I knew I should have taken the roasted corn. I took the apple, and now Ceres spites me for my choice. Typical.”
“What are you on about?” the man called Quintus asked cautiously. The two assassins took a step away from each other. Betto answered by sidestepping to his right, moving between the killers and their only means of escape.
“My lunch, you thick-skulled clodpate. You interrupted my lunch.”
“Now, now. No need for insults.”
“Yes. Yes, there is need for that and more. But enough talk.” Betto drew his puglio. His eyes were wild and bulging. “Put your knives on the ground, and follow them with your asses. Alexander, get to the house. Raise the alarm.”
I couldn’t do it. It was the right thing to do: what use was I in a fight? But I couldn’t leave him. Two against one; what if I returned to find Betto dead on my schoolroom floor, murdered because I had abandoned him even as he fought to save me? I scrambled on all floors, not to freedom but to the teaching wall behind my table. The pigskin of white paint lay where I had left it, full and unused. Bless my laziness, I thought as I grabbed the neck and tried its weight. Gods, it was heavy.
The tall one, the one with a bit of apple still clinging to his cheek said, “Very brave, ain’t he, Lucas? Doesn’t even draw his sword. Now why do you suppose he ain’t even drawing his sword?” They were moving further apart, flanking Betto left and right.
“Because my aim is much better with this.” I heard a grunt, but by the time I looked toward the sound, the one called Quintus was down, Betto’s knife sunk hilt-deep in his chest. While my protector was throwing his weapon, I saw the remaining assassin toss his own dagger in the air to grab it by the blade; he was bending his arm back to throw. I rose as the knife was released, knocking the legionary aside, holding my shield of pigskin before me. The knife sliced into the heavy sack right where Betto’s neck had been half an instant before.
“You should have seen him,” Betto said. “He was a man possessed.”
Crassus was home from the senate and had assembled the stunned household outside the front of the house. Tertulla had insisted, not wanting to get any paint on the mosaic floor of the atrium. The surviving assassin was trussed and harmless, most of his face and chest splattered white. Malchus had drawn his gladius; the blade against the assassin’s spine impressed upon him the need for stillness. “After the sack stopped this villain’s blade,” Betto continued like a proud father, “the teacher bellowed like a bull and came right at that poor bugger, swinging his pigskin like he was at the Olympics. The bag must’ve weighed sixty pounds! He spun round on one foot and that sack whistled through the air. It clopped the bastard right in the head, as anyone can plainly see.”
I remembered none of this: the assassins came into the schoolroom, Betto’s apple hit one of them, and the next thing I recalled was Crassus asking if I was all right, here outside the house. I do not know how I came to be standing here, though Betto and Malchus assured me they were with me, their new hero, every step of the way.
Crassus stilled any further chatter with a raised hand. He addressed the captive. “I do not know what chain of events has brought you into my home,” he said in a calm voice, a disinterested voice. “You may have been a good man cursed by ill luck or lived your entire life outside the law. I do not know and I cannot care. Whatever choices pushed your life along its unfortunate path, they are of no consequence now, for your actions have reduced my choice to one. There are many ways a man may die — look at me — and here I have some leeway. Answer truthfully and I will give you a death you do not deserve, one reserved for men of honor. Lie to me and before we speak of death again we will speak of pain. And so I ask you, who hired you?”
“I never saw him,” Lucas said, working to control his fear. His eyes scanned the people encircling him. “He’s not in this lot, I can tell you.”
Suddenly, Tessa turned sharply in her chair, causing one of the daisies she always wore in her pinned up braids to fall to the table. “Where’s Nestor?” she asked.
A second later, his stern voice a thin skin unable to hide the stab of betrayal, Crassus asked, “And where is Pio?”
Cook, still flushed and breathing heavily from his run through the house from the kitchen, raised his hand. “He left early this morning, dominus. Didn’t say why. Said he’d be home before dark.”
Before Crassus dismissed us, he instructed Malchus to execute the assassin and arrange to have his body and that of his partner thrown in the Tiber. There was neither ice nor heat in his voice, no hint that these sounds strung together in a certain order meant a man would die. It was the first time I saw the unbending steel at my master’s core.
“ Dominus, Malchus said, “shall we keep this one alive till Pio returns? Just in case?”
“No. Give him a quick death. I was foolish to think this poisonous cake would only have one layer. Whoever hired these men put more than one face between the coin and the knife. Send word to Boaz. I want Nestor found.”
True to his word, shortly before supper the Spaniard passed through the gates. He appeared genuinely stunned to be met by drawn swords and a quick escorted march to Crassus. Pio earnestly claimed he’d been to the temple of the Vestals to pray for his family as he had every month since he’d arrived in Rome. Crassus accepted the alibi, but without joy.
Nestor was gone, yet remained: in the sullen bark of our master’s sharpened tongue, in the despair and sorrow that hung like weights from poor Pio’s eyes, in the shame bore by the rest of us, knowing we served in the house of an apostate. The big Spaniard became lethargic, despondent, and the house sank into dark waters; we moved sluggishly, unable to talk to one another, afraid to meet the eye of either Pio or our master. Everyone knew that Crassus would not let the matter rest; his reputation had been sullied. Nestor, property of M. Licinius Crassus, by running away had in effect, stolen himself from his master. Boaz’s men were searching throughout the city, and they knew where and how to look: each carried an image of the fugitive and a purse heavy enough to animate the most reluctant tongue. The law of furtum hastened the inevitable: to conceal a runaway was the same as theft, and theft could result in flogging or worse: consignment to the aggrieved with freedom forfeit.
Three days after Nestor’s disappearance, young Marcus and I were sitting on the rim of the peristyle’s fountain, building papyrus boats to see whose design would stay afloat the longest. A shadow came across the sun and I looked up, shading my eyes to see Pio looming over me. His huge hands cradled a bunch of flowers, which I assumed he was going to arrange at the shrine of the house gods in the atrium. Yet his demeanor struck me more like a mourner making a gravesite offering. He stood there, immobile yet tense, a bear sniffing out prey. His eyes rested on me like dead coals, staring down at me; no, not at me, through me. Spray from the fountain blew our way and Marcus laughed. I almost hushed him, as if to warn him of imminent danger. Pio glanced his way, then turned and walked away, allowing me to exhale.