The Bow of Heaven - Book I: The Other Al - By Andrew Levkoff Page 0,74

And hoist Alexander up beside her!”

“Nestor, how good of you to remind me of your continued presence in my house. Step up and stand beside the healer.” Nestor did as he was told, persuaded by the butt of Betto’s gladius in his back. “The sight of you has offended my eyes from the day you were branded. Why I have suffered your employment for so long is a mystery. Perhaps out of some lingering respect for Pío. No matter. Your impudence has settled your fate.

“Sabina, your blameless daughter has suffered enough on this day. For her sake, I will be merciful. You will not die on Roman soil, which I trust will please you. I am sending you home. Just last week I concluded negotiations for a silver mine near Laurion. There you will spend the rest of your days in contemplation of your sins.”

“No!” The scream came from behind us. Livia had returned and was standing at the far end of the peristyle, behind one of the arcade columns.

Sabina cried, “Mercy, dominus. Kill me here. Kill me now. I offer you my throat,” she said, tilting her head back. “I beg of you, do not send me to the mines.”

“Do you want your daughter to keep you company? No? Then do not speak again. You will go, but you will not travel alone. That fugitivus will go with you,” Crassus said, flicking a finger at Nestor. “We are done here.”

***

When her mother and father arrived at the estate, they found that Crassus had prepared Tessa as if she were his own daughter. She lay in state on a funeral couch in the atrium, surrounded by the flowers she had nurtured with her own hands. Incense burned at each corner of the lectus. There followed a day of prayers and mourning, then Crassus, who would not have her sent to the grave pits on the eastern slope of the Esquiline, paid instead for the expense of having the young girl cremated. Tessa’s parents returned to Ostia, but not before they fell at the feet of their benefactor. He bid them rise, assuring them that he grieved with them. He instructed me to slip a purse heavy with coins into the father’s hand as they set out for the journey home.

Chapter XXII

70 BCE - Fall, Baiae

Year of the consulship of

Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus

“I don’t hate him, sweet,” Crassus said. “It isn’t hatred to wish he had tripped and fallen beneath one of his Hispanic war-wagons. That’s not hatred, is it, Alexander?”

“It isn’t undying love, dominus.” I stood against one of the portico’s scalloped columns which was half-draped in waxy ivy. The sun was turning the leaves green-gold.

“What use are you to me if you won’t agree with me?” Crassus said.

“None whatsoever,” I replied. “I shall have myself thrashed directly after you’ve supped.”

“Hush! Both of you! I’m trying to enjoy the sunset,” Tertulla said.

Crassus, now forty-five, leaned on the outer wall of the portico wrapped in a large Egyptian towel dyed in patterns of apricot and lemon. Perspiration glistened on the golden hairs of his tanned arms. Tertulla stood behind him, reaching up to massage his exposed shoulders. After his successful but arduous campaign against the rebellious slave Spartacus that ended the year before, his features had taken on the hard, weathered look that only combat can press through the flesh and into the soul of a man. “Columba,” he whispered, reaching behind to pull her curves more tightly against his back. “My dove.”

After a languorous interlude that sent my eyes to the horizon to count the colors of the darkening sky, Crassus broke their embrace to lean far out over the balustrade, turning his eyes toward Bauli, just two miles to the south. “I can’t see it,” he said. Pompeius’ villa was hidden by the intervening hillside. “It’s smaller, isn’t it?”

Tertulla slapped his rump. “Miniscule. Like his balls.”

“And much farther down the slope,” I added.

Tertulla laughed. “All right, Alexander, from now on if there is any massaging to be done, be it to hubris or parts more accessible,” she said, continuing to press her fingers over her husband’s oiled shoulders, “then I shall see to its administration.” As she worked, evoking another grunt of pleasure, her own towel gradually came undone. She slid her left hand under his arm, slipped it through the opening in his wrap and brought it down across his chest, letting it come to rest where the fine hairs of his lower abdomen started