you? Was he trying to stop you from rescuing your son?”
Priscus gave me a gentle smile. “I invented the assassin. A plausible reason, I thought, to hire a former gladiator to protect me. I could not tell anyone the true reason. They only knew I was worried.”
I went over the journey in my head, understanding now why Priscus had been indifferent about being in the open. Even so, I’d had the prickle in my shoulder blades that told me of a watcher the entire distance, and I’d definitely been attacked in Rome.
Before I could answer, the young man who tended the door rushed inside.
“Sir,” he blurted.
I’d witnessed more than one dominus beat a slave who dared interrupt or even enter a room without being summoned, but Priscus only waited for the lad to speak.
“I heard word from the port, sir,” the boy went on, eyes wide. “The sailors what held our young man—all dead, sir. Every one of them.”
Chapter 9
Priscus half-rose at the lad’s announcement, and Decimus gaped in shock. “How?” the younger man demanded.
“Don’t know,” the door slave said. “They were found laid out on the dock, every one of them with their throat cut.”
As though they’d been executed, I thought.
Decimus swallowed, color leaving his face. “A few were kind to me.”
Priscus sank to his seat, laying a hand on his son’s arm. “I counted more than a dozen, in the end. All murdered?”
The door lad nodded. “Seems so.”
Priscus turned to me, as though I could explain. “How could so many be killed, on a deserted dock?”
“With twice as many armed men than the sailors,” I said. “Well organized. Like soldiers.”
“Hmm. I reported the ship to the harbor authorities, but the crew would have been arrested, not simply executed in place.” Priscus seemed less perturbed than his son, but he lightly tapped the table, his focus in the distance. “I had thought to linger here for a time, but I believe we should return to Rome. Leonidas, would you be so good as to guard us on the way?”
The journey from Ostia, which we began the morning after the slave’s announcement of the sailors’ murders, took less time than the journey down. Priscus wanted to keep a faster pace, with fewer rest stops.
Decimus was clearly not recovered, but he sat his horse competently and never complained. A resilient young man. Priscus’s servants doted on him, which was plain as we went along. He barely had to mention he was thirsty before they fell over themselves offering him a wineskin.
We reached Rome and Priscus’s large house on the Esquiline a few hours before nightfall. Priscus’s scribe, Kephalos, duly handed Cassia a pouch of coins, which disappeared inside her robes.
Cassia’s step was lighter as we traversed the streets toward home. We stepped against a wall as a procession came through, the tinny sound of jingling bells brushing the air. A priestess of Isis, with a cobra on her arm walked sedately along, her eyes on the snake, while the crowd melted out of her way.
The first thing Cassia did when we reached the apartment, after removing her cloak and shaking the dust from her shoes, was to pour out the money we’d received and count it.
I rubbed my close-cropped hair, finding it coated with dust. In spite of the December chill, I smelled of sweat and the road.
“I’m for the baths,” I told Cassia as she whispered numbers. Her stylus flashed as did the beads of the abacus she seemed to have acquired.
Cassia nodded at me, not taking her attention from her figures. I think this was the happiest I’d seen her since she’d been thrust into my life.
I had to pay a quarter of an as, the smallest copper coin, which Cassia had pushed at me before I left, to enter a bathhouse on the Quirinal, not far from our apartment. These were not a huge complex like the baths built by Agrippa or the ones Nero was currently having constructed. This bathhouse had a modest tepidarium, a larger caldarium, and even bigger frigidarium. I had to pay another as to buy a strigil—the one I’d used in the past years was still at the ludus, with the rest of my meager belongings I hadn’t bothered to collect.
The strigil was cheap and thin, but it would do. I stripped down, paid an attendant to look after my clothes, and went to the small yard to work up a sweat.
Men and women crowded to watch me, curious as to what sort