He Is Worthy Read online

  They were small. Powerless. Hopeless.

  Aenor tried not to whimper as Ratface fastened his chains to the boy in front of him and led them outside.

  The sunlight blinded him. Aenor lifted an arm to shield his eyes, and the heavy chains rattled. He walked into the boy in front of him before he realized he’d stopped. They knocked together like skittles, and Ratface laughed.

  They walked. Aenor winced at the noise, at the light.

  The boy in front of Aenor started to cry. He was small, with skin the color of pitch. He was repeating something over and over, a word Aenor did not know. A god, maybe, or perhaps a parent or a sibling.

  No. Don’t.

  Aenor watched his feet as he walked, and the feet of the boy in front of him. He stole glimpses of the sunlit world.

  A road that crested a hill.

  A bottleneck of pedestrian traffic in a large covered marketplace.

  A red-roofed building with an arched colonnade.

  Plastered walls covered in graffiti and slogans.

  A temple.

  Aenor stared wide-eyed at a sculpted god, and it stared back at him. The painted orbs of its eyes seemed to see nothing and everything. His head was adorned with garlands of wilting flowers. Aenor didn’t know the Roman gods, but he was afraid of them. He had pleaded with them before.

  “Placet,” he had said over and over in the beginning. Please. Please. Please.

  The Roman gods were deaf to him, then and now.

  “Placet,” he murmured as he passed, but the god in the temple portico stared straight ahead.

  Aenor’s muscles ached. The boy in front of him stumbled. Aenor tried to sidestep him, and was pulled back by the length of chain around his neck. He struggled to keep his balance, struggled not to cry out.

  In front of him, the boy kept repeating his secret, sacred word.

  Tears stung Aenor’s eyes. He wanted to reach out for the boy’s hand, but couldn’t.

  Aenor looked up again as they passed through a gate into an arched passageway. A pair of soldiers closed the gate behind them.

  “Here’s a fine litter of pups!” one of the soldiers called out, and they laughed.

  “Too fine for you!” Ratface returned with a sneer.

  After the sunlight and the bustle, it seemed cold and quiet in the passageway. The boy in front of Aenor sobbed as they were led farther into the darkness. Aenor’s guts twisted. What if the boy knew something he didn’t? What if this was the way to the arena? Aenor didn’t want to die for the sport of Romans. He didn’t want to die at all. He just wanted to go home.

  Home. The thought was as sharp as a blade, and Aenor flinched.

  No. That was never going to happen. He was a slave now. Maybe the Clean Man would be a kind master. Such men existed. Even in Castra Vetera, Aenor had seen fat, pampered slaves. He had heard of slaves who were freed by their masters. He had heard of ex-slaves who were rich. Perhaps being sold to the Clean Man was a good thing. It had to be better than Ratface’s cell.

  Ratface led them out into the sunlight again. This time they were surrounded by fine buildings and gardens. Ratface led them toward one of the nearer buildings. A man waited for them at the door. The Clean Man.

  The Clean Man glanced at the slaves, and then shook his head at Ratface. “Tell your master I expect better stock next time.”

  Ratface sneered. “Tell your master to keep his hair on!”

  He began to unchain the slaves.

  Aenor kept his gaze down. The Clean Man was a slave. A clean slave. A well-dressed slave. Maybe their new master treated all his slaves so well.

  Aenor rolled his shoulders as the weight of the chain slid off him. Hope, uncertain and shy, flared in his chest.

  He had seen collared slaves before in Colonia. He had seen tattooed slaves as well, and branded slaves, their master’s initials burned into their faces. The Clean Man bore no marks that Aenor’s quick gaze could find, and wore no collar around his neck. Maybe it didn’t have to be bad. Maybe they wouldn’t make him feel like an animal.

  The Clean Man opened the doors of the building, and a cloud of steam billowed out.

  Aenor’s eyes widened as the Clean Man ushered them inside. A small group of slaves met them, stripped their ragged clothes from them, and set about them with coarse sponges and buckets of hot water. Aenor closed his eyes, embarrassed at the rivulets of dirty water that ran off his skin. He knelt when the man washing him put pressure on his shoulders. The man dunked his head in a steaming bucket. Aenor yelped at the heat, but the man held him there. When he finally released him, Aenor saw through the dripping tendrils of his hair that the water was now dark gray. He was filthy. He submitted patiently to the rest of the man’s ministrations, sitting quietly while the man took to the planes of his face with a gleaming razor and pumice stone.

  The man tugged Aenor’s hair over the edge of the razor, the ragged, wet locks dropping to the floor. When the man stepped away, Aenor raised a hand to his bare neck. His hair was shorter than he’d worn it since childhood. It curled around the nape of his neck. It felt strange.

  “This one is done,” the man said.

  The Clean Man looked him up and down, and clicked his tongue. “Hmmm. We will see. Send him to wait. Check him.”

  Aenor, naked, was pushed toward another door.

  He shivered.

  Too many hands, too many people keeping him moving, too many different faces and places. The man who had washed him shot him a narrow look as they hurried along a passageway. “You understand me?”

  “You talk slow, I understand,” Aenor said, anxious to obey.

  Trade, he knew. Numbers and orders and prices, he knew. This, whatever this was, he didn’t know, and he was afraid of punishment.

  “You follow,” the man said. “You do what I say.”

  Aenor nodded.

  “In here,” the man said, pulling Aenor into a small room.

  Another man was already in there. The master? No. Aenor looked at the frayed hem of his tunic, at the scars across his knuckles. This was not a rich man.

  “We check him,” the first man said.

  The second man grinned slowly. He said something in an accent too thick for Aenor to understand. Except for that one word.

  No. No. No.

  The word was close enough. Fuck you! Aenor had screamed in Latin at the legionaries who’d captured him. Tete futue! He knew the obscenity well enough to recognize its conjugation even through the thick accent of the burly slave who was now advancing on him. And, even if he hadn’t, the big man leered and mimed the action.

  He was going to be fucked.

  No. Tuisto, no.

  The big man grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him around, and pushed him down onto the floor. Aenor whimpered and struggled as the man behind him slid a thick finger into the crease of his ass. The second man, the one who had so carefully shaved his face, caught Aenor around the wrists and jerked him roughly forward. The man behind him kicked his legs apart and knelt between them.

  Aenor choked on his own sobs. He tried to twist away, and the man behind him growled and reached down to grab his balls.

  “You want move?” the man demanded in his strange accent. He tightened his grip. “You want move?”

  Aenor whimpered and shook his head.

  The man kept a firm grip on Aenor’s balls as his probing finger returned to the crease of his ass. Aenor sucked in a panicked breath as the man’s dry finger breached him. It stung. The man pushed his finger inside Aenor’s passage, muttered something, and pulled it out again.

  He used the same word Ratface had to describe Aenor to the Clean Man back at the warehouse. This time, Aenor could hazard a guess: virgin. Ratface’s examination had never been quite so thorough, though.

  The big man moved away.

  The other man released his grip on Aenor’s wrists. “Up. Get up.”

  Aenor, trembling, wasn’t sure his legs would hold him.

  “Up!” the man barked
.

  Aenor struggled to his feet. He backed away from the men into the corner of the room, his gaze fixed on the floor, his hands held in front of his genitals. A shudder ran through him and he squeezed his eyes shut.

  There was a place, a secret place that Aenor’s people knew, where the scattered helmets and spears of lost Roman legions moldered in the earth. Aenor had seen it. He had held a helmet in his hands, marveled at the weight of it, and spat on the bones of the man it came from. It was easy to hate Rome in the Teutoburg Forest. It was easy to feel strong.

  Not here. Here he was weak. Here he was going to be bent over for Romans, fucked by them.

  “And what do we have here?” came a voice from the entranceway. It was a rich man’s voice. A proper Roman accent. The master.

  Aenor opened his eyes.

  The man wore a long blue tunic shot through with silver threads. He wasn’t tall, but he was handsome. A patrician nose, lips inclined to thinness, and sharp eyes. His neatly cut hair was beginning to turn gray. He wore gold rings on his fingers.

  “Do you have Latin?” the master asked him.

  Aenor’s voice cracked in his throat. “S-some.”

  The burly slave moved quickly. He slapped Aenor’s face. “Dominus.”

  Aenor blinked away the sudden tears. “Some, Dominus.”

  The master didn’t smile. “What are you?”

  “Bructeri, Dominus.”

  “German,” the master said. “How old are you?”

  His voice shook. “Nineteen, Dominus.”

  The master frowned. “Nineteen?” He raised his voice. “Callistus!”

  Aenor shrank back.

  The Clean Man appeared in the doorway. “Dominus?”

  “This one is nineteen!”

  The Clean Man gazed at Aenor for a moment. “He doesn’t look it, Dominus. And he’s a virgin.”

  The burly slave nodded eagerly in agreement, and Aenor’s face burned.

  “I’ll take him,” the master said. “But I expect better in the future.”

  “Yes, Dominus,” the Clean Man said.

  The master sighed, narrowing his eyes at Aenor. “And make him . . .” He waved his hand. “He’s too old for pretty. Make him look strong. He’s hardly a keeper, but I’m sure he can put on a good show.”

  “Yes, Dominus.”

  Aenor closed his eyes again.

  There was a place . . . a clearing surrounded by trees. A place that still whispered of victory. A place where Aenor had held a Roman helmet in his grasp and laughed as hot blood had coursed through his veins. He was strong in that place.

  He searched for it in his memory, invoked it by its secret name, but couldn’t find it. It was lost to him now.

  It was Rome’s turn to laugh.

  Perfumed blossoms trickled down from the ivory fretwork of the ceiling. The massive dining room was a masterpiece of engineering. Its burnished gold wall panels were inlaid with pearls and precious stones. Musicians and dancers occupied the deep arches set around the walls. The circular floor rotated slowly, providing the diners with a changing view: a moving tableau of diverting scenes.

  Aenor, blue swirls painted on his skin and a bronze torque fastened around his throat, was given a wooden sword. A man dressed as a Roman soldier—maybe he was one, Aenor didn’t know—fought him. It wasn’t much of a fight. Aenor’s hands were shaking too much, and everyone was laughing at him, cheering, whistling. If the man hadn’t knocked him down, he would have fallen anyway.

  On a raised platform in the center of the room, a man in purple reclined on a couch. He was young, round-faced, with a double-chin and a beard. Nero. The most powerful man in the world. Aenor’s master reclined next to the emperor, smiling and pointing when Aenor was knocked down. Sharing a joke.

  The wooden sword clattered away.

  Aenor pressed his forehead to the ground and squeezed his eyes shut.

  Two hundred Romans, turning slowly under a shower of blossoms, ate and drank and laughed as the soldier raped him.

  Rome showed only her squalor at night. Her public buildings and temples were sunk in darkness, and only the crowded apartment blocks and wine shops were illuminated. It was late, but the Transtiberina was still awake. Rome’s most notorious neighborhood—worse, even, than the Subura—seemed a fitting place to meet.

  Senna sat with his back against the wall and thought of Cenchreae. The wine took him back there more often than not, but Senna didn’t stop drinking it. He had grown to like the sting of guilt.

  Titus sat opposite, framed by the doorway to the balcony. The moonlight played over his scruffy hair and caught in his beard. He was as hairy as a bear, or a barbarian.

  “Is your brother coming home?” Senna asked.

  “Why would he be coming home?”

  Senna shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought he hated the army.”

  Titus snorted. “Maybe. Probably, but it’s the best place for him.”

  Senna leaned down to pick up his cup from the floor. “Why’s that?”

  “You know Quintus. He runs his mouth off. Better to do it in Africa than here.”

  Senna swallowed a mouthful of thin wine. It was as bitter as vinegar. “Huh. The curse of youth.”

  “You talk like an old man.”

  “Do I?” Senna laughed.

  Titus didn’t. He reached for his own cup, swilling the wine around. “I worry, Senna. I’m not the only one.”

  Senna tilted his cup back again and emptied it. The wine stung his throat. “I think you probably are.”

  “I’m not,” Titus said. “You’re different. Since Corbulo.”

  Senna refilled his cup and looked around. The room was empty except for the stools they sat on and a sagging bed left by the previous tenants. Its mattress, stained and probably infested with fleas, was the reason they’d chosen the stools. And they’d chosen this dank room on the third floor of a filthy Transtiberina apartment block because it was easier. Easier to talk freely, to meet without scrutiny. Easier to be themselves in a slum than in their own homes.

  Senna’s thoughts drifted away from the Transtiberina and back to Cenchreae. The Aegean, so blue. Sails on the horizon. The rage that had overcome him in the wine shop.

  Axios.

  “Everything is different because of Corbulo,” Senna said.

  Titus shrugged again. “Do you really believe that?”

  “I told a hero of the empire to kill himself. Of course it’s fucking different.”

  “You’ve told more than a few men to kill themselves.” There was no censure in Titus’s voice.

  “But Corbulo was the first one I knew without a doubt was innocent.”

  The words hung starkly between them.

  Titus sighed.

  Senna frowned at the floor. “At dinner last night, a boy recited the Pharsalia.”

  Lucan’s poem. How many nights had they all sat around together—Senna, Titus, Junia, and Nero—listening to Lucan tease words out of the air? It felt like a lifetime ago.

  The Pharsalia was Lucan’s greatest work. When Senna had heard it at dinner, he’d thought it was a sick joke. He could remember hearing Lucan recite it himself, years ago now, when the dedication to the emperor—Rome is greater by these civil wars, because it resulted in you—didn’t make him want to choke. There was irony there that Lucan had never intended—poor, clever, reckless Lucan. Listening to a prepubescent boy with gold-dusted skin and the voice of a nightingale breathe life into the ashes of Lucan’s stark, beautiful words, Senna had wanted to laugh. It was a fucking joke.

  Everyone had been thinking it, but nobody was stupid enough to even smile.

  If it wasn’t a joke, if it was actually a tribute to the genius of a man Nero had executed, that was somehow worse. Not that Lucan was innocent. The conspiracy against Nero was just the sort of mad scheme he would have thrown himself behind wholeheartedly. That was Lucan all the way: a champion for heroism and lost causes. It came through strongly in the Pharsalia: The winning cau
se pleased the gods, but the losing cause pleased Cato. Lucan might have hoped to be just as resolute as that old hero of the Republic, in his own way, when the tide turned against him.

  It wasn’t the boy’s voice Senna had heard the night before, it was Lucan’s.

  Senna had been in Syria when Lucan died, picking lice out of his hair and snapping orders at clumsy recruits pale with homesickness. The distance had saved him.

  Lucan had probably intended to be as proud as Cato at the end, but nobody had tortured Cato. Fuck. Lucan had implicated almost everybody, even his own mother. It still brought Senna out in a cold sweat some nights, thinking about what they must have done to Lucan to make that happen. Wondering how close he’d come to screaming Junia’s name.

  Senna wondered that every day. He wondered it now as he watched Titus in the moonlight.

  “The Pharsalia,” Titus said at last. “Can you still see the things Lucan painted with his words?”

  Senna quirked his mouth into a smile. “You never flattered him so much when he was alive.”

  Titus snorted. “I was jealous. I wanted to be a poet as well.”

  Titus had been jealous of more than Lucan’s poetry, but Junia had only ever had eyes for Lucan. Senna had tried to dissuade her, to push her toward big, shy Titus instead, but his sister was stubborn, always stubborn. She only wanted the slender, handsome poet.

  Senna’s smile faded. He grimaced at the taste of the wine. “Junia doesn’t speak to me.”

  Titus didn’t say anything.

  Senna sighed and leaned his back against the wall again. “I don’t blame her. She thinks I’m Nero’s creature.” He closed his eyes. “I am.”

  “Junia has always dealt in absolutes,” Titus said at last. “She’s the most pigheaded girl I’ve ever known. I looked at Junia and was glad my sisters were older. She would have driven me mad.”

  “She did,” Senna said. “She always did.”

  Because you’re my little sister, Senna had told her a hundred times. Because he’s my best friend! And later, with increasing concern: Because he’s already married. But seeing them together, Lucan and Junia, it was impossible not to see that they fitted.

  One look and I knew, Lucan had confessed.