The Bow of Heaven - Book I: The Other Al - By Andrew Levkoff Page 0,41
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 Pío?”
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 Pío 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. Pío 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 Pío’s eyes, in the shame bore by the rest of us, knowing we served in the