Broken Chariots Page 6

  “Is that... a door?” she said, lifting her bulging eyes to meet Leontius’.

  The gladiator hung his head in shame. “Yes...”

  “This sketch is not the work of an artist, but an architect,” Belbus said, clearly expecting Ursa to share in his disapproval. “It’s a house.”

  “It’s a villa!” Leontius shouted, head in his hands.

  “Call it whatever you want, it’s bleeding you dry.”

  “I know it is.”

  Ursa was at a loss for words. “You’re building a house in the shape of an Achilles’ Heel?”

  “He said he could do it!” Leontius exclaimed, lifting his head to point at the drawing. The confident brute was gone, replaced by a panicking child who’d waded a little too deep in the water and didn’t know how to get the ground back under his feet. “I told him my idea...”

  “That you wanted a house in the shape of a human heel,” Ursa reiterated.

  Leontius glared. “Not a human heel.”

  “Fine. A semi-divine heel. Semantics.”

  Leontius waggled a finger. “Not semantics. Mortal and demigod are not the same thing.”

  Ursa shrugged.

  Leontius went on: “Anyway, I told him my idea and he said he could do it.” He pointed to the sketch. “See, the arrow acts as a support to keep the heel raised. It’s deceptively strong. Stairs go up the inside, along the arch of the foot. I was going to have a window cut into the back of the heel with a view over the Tiber from my bed.”

  “That’s what they’re building out there!” Ursa said, solving what was, for her, a years-long mystery.

  “Yes, except they keep running into problems, so instead of a glorious villa shaped like the heel of Achilles that people would venture from far and wide to see, it looks like the ruins of a besieged tower.”

  She hesitated before saying, “I mean, the irony can’t have been lost on you...”

  “Now you’ve done it...” Belbus mumbled, looking away.

  Leontius almost boiled over with anger. “Of course it wasn’t lost on me! That was the whole point. I had an idea about...” He sighed and collapsed into himself. “About how you own your weakness, and by owning it you become stronger, and about how maybe you can take your greatest weakness and make it your greatest strength...”

  Ursa raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Okay, so it wasn’t lost on you...”

  “How could it be lost on me?!”

  “Well, yes. I mean, it’s not exactly subtle...”

  “What part of me looks subtle to you?” he said, staring at her without guile.

  She looked over the giant, muscle-bound gladiator. “I take your point.”

  Leontius deflated again. “Serves me bloody well right for trying to get a little high minded.”

  He hung his head low and shook it back and forth.

  Ursa’s heart went out to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I take back what I said about the irony being lost on you.”

  There was silence for a few moments after that.

  Ursa could see Belbus’ mouth twitching. A little smile tugging at his lips. His mind was working. He was thinking about saying something. Thinking again. Thinking a third time. A fourth.

  Finally, he opened his palms and ducked a little. “I’m not going to say I told you so...”

  Leontius’ head snapped up, a look in his eyes so withering it would have flattened a barley field. “Yes you are. Of course you are. That’s why you came here. I know you’ve been holding those vultures at bay. I see them circling overhead. You don’t think I see them? These are your friends I’m talking about here. I’ve seen what they do to people who don’t pay up. I’d rather take my chances bound and blindfolded in the arena...”

  “I’m not the one who decided to borrow money from them,” Belbus said, calm but firm. “In fact, I expressly told you not to.”

  Leontius held a hand out, as if to stop a trotting horse. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what you’ve done for me, Belbus. What you continue to do. You have a word to them on my behalf and they don’t come hunting for me. I know it. I know if it wasn’t for you, I’d be hanging by my ribcage somewhere or getting sodomised by a red-hot poker...”

  Ursa grimaced.

  Leontius took a breath. “Except it’s a temporary solution. It’s always temporary because I’ll never be able to get ahead of it. Not ever. Construction has stopped and the interest keeps mounting and I’m never going to be able to pay it back. Now, you’re going to blackmail me. This is you coming to collect. To keep the wolves from the door a little longer, you’re going to blackmail me into racing again. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything that you’ve done for me, Belbus, but I don’t fucking appreciate this. Not one bit.”

  Belbus went to say something, then paused. Considered it. Then he spoke:

  “Only it’s not a temporary solution.”

  Leontius’ ears pricked up.

  “You mean... pay them off? All of it?”

  Belbus nodded. “All of it.”

  “You are aware how much I owe these guys?”

  “I’m aware.”

  “But... how? Even if I race against Pistrus, there’s no way...”

  “You don’t have to beat him,” Belbus said, leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner.

  Leontius leaned in too.

  So did Ursa.

  “You don’t have to beat him... because Pistrus is going to throw the race.”

  *

  Belbus led her up the stairs and out the door and into the bustling streets of Rome. A river of people and wagons and hooved animals flowed in each direction. Dust and din. The beating heart of empire.

  Ursa stood there, squinting as her eyes readjusted to the glare, while Belbus popped an opium tablet and sighed with relief. For the first time in a long time, she pitied him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “About...”

  His jaw tightened. He didn’t like that she knew about the crash, but the cat was out of the bag now.

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  He knit his brows at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you sure this isn’t bearing on the plan in any way? You’re not trying to get revenge?”

  “I’m trying to get paid, alright. You want to get paid?”

  She bit her tongue. “Of course.”

  “Good, then let’s do that.” He sighed. “I’m sorry I snapped at you in there.”

  She smiled. “It’s alright.”

  “I want you to go check on Agnina. Make sure you’re not being followed.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Where are you going?”

  He gestured to the door, as though it were obvious. “Back inside. I’ve got a date with a landlady.”

  Belbus flashed a grin at her, then re-entered the tavern, leaving Ursa standing alone on a busy street.

  “Everyone’s getting laid but me,” she said.

  It was at that moment the barmaid emerged, dumping a bucket of soapy wash-water into the gutter. She saw Ursa and froze. Then she smiled. Blushed, even. She hooked a tress of brown hair behind her ear, then went and set the bucket down by the door. She dried her hands with a rag tucked into her belt.

  “I am finished work for the night,” the barmaid said to Ursa, with a strange accent she couldn’t quite place. “Would you care to accompany me home? I live not far.”

  Ursa was surprised. “You’re a forward little thing, aren’t you?”

  The barmaid shrugged. “I know what I want.”

  “Fair enough, I suppose. Usually there’s a little back-and-forth first, y’know? My name’s so-and-so...”

  “Life is too short for such things.”

  “Is that right?” Ursa studied her a moment. “You always take strangers home with you?”

  The barmaid shook her head. “No.”

  There was a lull. She could tell Ursa needed more convincing.

  “I am Seve
rina,” the barmaid said.

  “Severina, huh?” Ursa realised her mouth was dry. “I’m Ursa.”

  “There you go. Now we are not strangers.”

  Ursa continued squinting in the daylight for a while. She looked down the busy street one way, then the other. She supposed she could check on the little one later.

  “Alright,” she said, hitching up her belt.

  The barmaid smiled, and started leading the way home.

  Ursa lingered a moment, watching her hips sway side to side as she walked. She nodded approvingly - “When in Rome,” she said to herself - then followed after.

  Part III - Dying in the Desert

  The brothel-keeper had a villa near the centre of Rome. It wasn’t shaped like an Achilles’ Heel and it was more or less finished.

  When Belbus mentioned this off-handedly - more to himself than his host - she gave him a strange look.

  “How odd,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her. “Most people say, ‘Oh, look, you can see the Colosseum from here,’ or, ‘Gee, isn’t that Arch of Titus something?’ Even if it does have that blasted Jewish symbol carved into it...”

  She was talking about the menorah. Belbus thought about telling her it was meant to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem, not to celebrate its people, but he let it pass.

  “...No, you say it isn’t shaped like an Achilles’ Heel - an absurd notion - and that it is more or less finished. Tell me, why would I live, let alone entertain, in a house that was still under construction? I assume by ‘more or less’, you are referring to these incompetent boobs.”

  Vipera gestured with a many-ringed finger to the slaves redressing her marble rail on one of the floor’s viewing balconies. When one of them noticed, he grinned and waved.

  Belbus waved back, trying to be friendly. Vipera shot daggers at him.

  “Don’t encourage them!” she hissed. Then she turned and headed for a far corner, apparently expecting him to follow. “Not a lick of Latin between them. I tell you, it’s hard to find good help...”

  The matronly brothel-keeper continued talking as she moved away, dark green robes trailing on the mosaic-tiled floor behind her.

  Belbus gave the slave a raised-brow look to say, “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.” He then promptly followed his host, as if he and the slave were in this tyranny together, side by side. In one sense, it was true, but in many other senses, it was not.

  However bad his life got, Belbus was a free man; forever and always. No one could take that away from him. No one. Unless he fell afoul of slavers or the law or into debt (all of which were likely), he would remain a free man. Even then, his subjugation would be, in a sense, by his own choosing; a consequence of being able to do as he wished. To travel. To break the law. To borrow money and refuse to pay it back.

  Belbus was free to make anything of himself. Go anywhere. Be anyone. He was free to manifest his own reality, whether through indolence or with blood and sweat and tears. Free to pursue an ambition by any means necessary, as long as he could get away with it, or live with himself thereafter.

  Yet freedom, as he well knew, had its downsides. Freedom meant he was responsible. Responsible for his actions. For how he reacted to what the world threw at him. For his failure to achieve those dreams that plagued his waking and sleeping hours. For all the ways in which he had so exhaustively fucked up his life.

  Still, he couldn’t imagine trading autonomy for the blamelessness of a slave.

  Vipera led him to a balcony offering a breathtaking view of the capital. The Roman skyline never ceased to amaze him, but only from a height or from a distance. From ground level, where he usually found himself, mired in the grit and clamour, it was hard to see anything beautiful about the Eternal City. It was a big part of the reason he was excited to get away. Get some distance. He knew that, theoretically, there was something special about living in the centre of the known world. When all this was over, he might be able to appreciate it better from the outside. From his quiet country villa. Just him and his horses and, well... that was precisely why he’d come to visit Madam Vipera this morning.

  There was a gilded tray waiting on the marble rail with two pitchers and two cups. The cups had already been filled. Vipera handed him a vessel of diluted wine and took her own. He nodded his thanks. They sipped.

  Belbus set his cup down and laid his palms flatwise on the smooth, polished marble. Gazed out over the rooftops of the city. Smoke rose from hearthfires and workshops. The commotion of the dusty streets below was pleasantly distant.

  He could get used to this, he thought. By Jove, he could get used to this.

  He realised Vipera was still talking.

  “Most people come here and fawn over my tiles, or my opulent drapes, or at Trajan’s Column down the way and how the sun hits it just so when it sets...”

  The madam had her hips against the rail and was surveying Rome like a queen. Belbus fought the urge to roll his eyes. She was still on this?

  “But not you,” Vipera said, genuinely offended. “No, you contrast my magnificent, towering abode with what it is not, and then make a passive-aggressive comment on the repairs being undertaken, as if to accuse me of living in squalor...”

  Belbus held a hand up in surrender. “I’ll admit, it was a foolish thing to say. I meant no harm by it. It’s just that I’ve come from speaking to someone about their unfinished house and the conversation lingered yet in my mind.”

  She studied him warily. “You don’t mean that eyesore on the other side of the river, do you? Is that what they’re going for? An Achilles’ Heel? Ugh. Must be new money...”

  Belbus gulped. “Uh, no... must be a coincidence. The friend I speak of is from Ostia.”

  He took a sip of wine to mask his unease.

  “And what in blazes happened to your eye?” she said, frustrated he hadn’t volunteered the information.

  Belbus remembered the patch. “Oh. Uh, nothing. A cart went by. Flicked a stone up at me. Got me right in the eye. Doctor said I should keep this on for a few days.”

  Vipera wrinkled her nose at his foolishness. Went on: “I mean, Jove, what has happened to standards in this city? Suddenly anyone with a bit of money in their pocket thinks they can come along and add to the tapestry of Rome? The greatest empire in the history of the world and some upstart thinks he can contribute to the architecture of this hallowed ground with that? I swear, this city has gone to the dogs.”

  It took Belbus a moment to realise she was talking about the Achilles’ Heel again.

  Vipera scowled at the city, then shook her head, as if realising scowling wasn’t going to do any good.

  “Can I presume why you’ve come?” she said, turning to face her guest.

  Belbus smiled sheepishly. “You can.”

  She looked at him down her nose, which was made easier by the fact of her being slightly taller than him, or of Belbus carrying himself in the hunched way that he did.

  Vipera wasn’t quite old enough to be his mother, though she wasn’t far off. In any case, with the amount of makeup she had plastered to her face and neck, she didn’t look it. She didn’t look any age. She had an otherworldly kind of beauty, one that transcended the linear flow of time which Belbus and his fellow mortals foolishly fell prey to. An Olympian summering in Rome, perhaps, or at least the bastard daughter of one. That imperious sneer never quite left her face. Her shoulders never sagged. Her back never rounded. Her chin never dipped below level. Her blond hair was not allowed to flow freely, but was instead coiled tight to the back of her head, held firm with all kinds of pins and netting. He imagined that the pendants hanging from her neck and from her ear and the rings on her fingers and toes would weigh more than she did if removed from her person.

  “You don’t approve?” the bookie guessed.

  “I think it is a fool’s errand. I think, if I were a betting woman, I know where I’d lay my money.”

  “That’s the thing about odds..
. sometimes they’re misleading. Sometimes you hit the jackpot.”

  “Sometimes you go broke,” she said, “and end up with nothing.”

  “I’d rather end up with nothing than try nothing.”

  Vipera snorted. “Spoken like someone with nothing to lose.”

  Belbus furrowed his brow.

  She clarified, “It’s easy when you’re poor. I know. I was poor. I worked my way up from nothing, and my choices were infinitely easier then.”

  “When you had nothing?”

  She nodded. “It’s a shorter fall on the way up. You reach a certain point... all of a sudden, the drop will kill you.”

  “And you’re at that point?”

  Vipera chuckled. “Oh, you sweet, naive child...”

  Belbus scrunched his face. Instantly, he knew how Ursa felt when he condescended to her. He would have vowed never to do so again, but he was in enough trouble with the gods as it was.

  She caressed the side of her cup with a finger. “...I passed that point a long time ago.”

  “You think you couldn’t handle being poor again?”

  “I think if I had to, I could. But I wouldn’t want to. The fall doesn’t kill you on its own. You kill yourself when you hit the bottom.” She sipped her wine. Watched him closely. “Sometimes, it’s better not to know what’s on the other side. The happiest people in the world are the people who know the least about the world.”

  Belbus recalled a line from Ecclesiastes: “With much wisdom comes much sorrow.”

  He looked down into his wine. “You’re saying you’re not happy?”

  Another chortle from the brothel-keeper. Belbus made a note that if this whole business with the Equirria didn’t pan out, he might find work as a comedian in the theatre. Good to know.

  “I’m saying that Spaniard over there is happier than I am.” She gestured back to the slave, who noticed them looking and waved once more.

  Again, Belbus gave a smile and a wave back. Again, Vipera glared at him. He did his best to look apologetic.

  “His compatriots don’t look so happy,” the bookie noted.