His flicker of initiative spent, Plautus Bonosus leaned sideways on his bench, propped on one hand, and waited for the emissaries from the Imperial Precinct to come and tell the Senators what they were about to think.
It turned out to be a little more complex than that, however. Murder, even in Sarantium, could sometimes be a surprise.
In the better neighbourhoods of the City it had become fashionable in the previous generation to add enclosed balconies to the second and third storeys of houses or apartments. Reaching out over the narrow streets, these sun rooms now had the ironic, if predictable, effect of almost completely blocking the sunlight, all in the name of status and in order to afford the womenfolk of the better families a chance to view the street life through beaded curtains or sometimes extravagant window openings, without themselves suffering the indignity of being observed.
Under the Emperor Apius, the Urban Prefect had passed an ordinance forbidding such structures to project more than a certain distance from the building walls, and had followed this up by tearing down a number of solaria that violated the new law. Needless to say, this did not happen on the streets where the genuinely wealthy and influential kept their city homes. The power of one patrician to complain tended to be offset by the ability of another to bribe or intimidate. Private measures, of course, could not be entirely forestalled, and some regrettable incidents had unfortunately taken place over the years, even in the best neigh-bourhoods.
IN ONE SUCH STREET, lined with uniformly handsome brick façades and with no shortage of lanterns set in the exterior walls to offer expensive lighting at night, a man now sits in a flagrantly oversized solarium, alternately watching the street below and the exquisitely slow, graceful movements of a woman as she plaits and coils her hair in the bedroom behind him.
Her lack of self-consciousness, he thinks, is an honour of sorts extended to him. Sitting unclothed on the edge of the bed, she displays her body in a sequence of curves and recesses: uplifted arm, smooth hollow of arm, honey-coloured amplitude of breast and hip, and the lightly downed place between her thighs where he has been welcomed in the night just past.
The night a messenger came to report an Emperor dead.
As it happens, he is wrong about one thing: her absorbed, unembarrassed nakedness has more to do with self-directed ease than any particular emotion or feeling associated with him at this moment. She is not, after all, unused to having her body seen by men. He knows this, but prefers, at times, to forget it.
He watches her, smiling slightly. He has a smooth-shaven, round face with a soft chin and grey, observant eyes. Not a handsome or an arresting man, he projects a genial, uncontentious, open manner. This is, of course, useful.
Her dark brown hair, he notes, has become tinged with red through the course of the summer. He wonders when she’s had occasion to be outside enough for that to happen, then realizes the colour might be artificial. He doesn’t ask. He is not inclined to probe the details of what she does when they are not together in this apartment he has bought for her on a carefully chosen street.
That reminds him of why he is here just now. He looks away from the woman on the bed—her name is Aliana— and back out through the beaded curtains over the street. Some movement, for the morning is advanced and the news will have run through Sarantium by now.
The doorway he is watching remains closed. There are two guards outside it, but there always are. He knows the names of these two, and the others, and their backgrounds. Details of this sort can sometimes matter. Indeed, they tend to matter. He is careful in such things, and less genial than might appear to the unsubtle.
A man had entered through that doorway, his bearing urgent with tidings, just before sunrise. He had watched this by the light of the exterior torches, and had noted the livery. He had smiled then. Gesius the Chancellor had chosen to make his move. The game was begun, indeed. The man in the solarium expects to win it but is experienced enough in the ways of power in the world, already, to know that he might not. His name is Petrus.
‘You are tired of me,’ the woman says, ending a silence. Her voice is low, amused. The careful movements of her arms, attending to her hair, do not cease. ‘Alas, the day has come.’
‘That day will never come,’ the man says calmly, also amused. This is a game they play, from within the entirely improbable certainty of their relationship. He does not turn from watching the doorway now, however.
‘I will be on the street again, at the mercy of the factions. A toy for the wildest partisans with their barbarian ways. A cast-aside actress, disgraced and abandoned, past my best years.’
She was twenty in the year when the Emperor Apius died. The man has seen thirty-one summers; not young, but it was said of him—before and after that year—that he was one of those who had never been young.
‘I’d give it two days,’ he murmurs, ‘before some infatuated scion of the Names, or a rising merchant in silk or Ispahani spice won your fickle heart with jewellery and a private bathhouse.’
‘A private bathhouse,’ she agrees, ‘would be a considerable lure.’
He glances over, smiling. She’d known he would, and has managed, not at all by chance, to be posed in profile, both arms uplifted in her hair, her head turned towards him, dark eyes wide. She has been on the stage since she was seven years old. She holds the pose a moment, then laughs.
The soft-featured man, clad only in a dove-grey tunic with no undergarments in the aftermath of lovemaking, shakes his head. His own sand-coloured hair is thinning a little but not yet grey. ‘Our beloved Emperor is dead, no heir in sight, Sarantium in mortal peril, and you idly torment a grieving and troubled man.’
‘May I come and do it some more?’ she asks.
She sees him actually hesitate. That surprises and even excites her, in truth: a measure of his need of her, that even on this morning . . .
But in that instant there comes a sequence of sounds from the street below. A lock turning, a heavy door opening and closing, hurried voices, too loud, and then another, flat with command. The man by the beaded curtain turns quickly and looks out again.
The woman pauses then, weighing many things at this moment in her life. But the real decision, in truth, has been made some time ago. She trusts him, and herself, amazingly. She drapes her body—a kind of defending—in the bed linen before saying to his now-intent profile, from which the customary genial expression has entirely gone, ‘What is he wearing?’
He ought not to have been, the man will decide much later, nearly so surprised by the question and what she—very deliberately—revealed with it. Her attraction for him, from the beginning, has resided at least as much in wit and perception as in her beauty and the gifts that drew Sarantines to the theatre every night she performed, alternately aroused and then driven to shouts of laughter and applause.
He is astonished, though, and surprise is rare for him. He is not a man accustomed to allowing things to disconcert him. This happens to be one matter he has not confided in her, however. And, as it turns out, what the silver-haired man in the still-shaded street has elected to wear as he steps from his home into the view of the world, on a morning fraught with magnitude, matters very much.
Petrus looks back at the woman. Even now he turns away from the street to her, and both of them will remember that, after. He sees that she’s covered herself, that she is a little bit afraid, though would surely deny it. Very little escapes him. He is moved, both by the implications of her voicing the question and by the presence of her fear.
‘You knew?’ he asks quietly.
‘You were extremely specific about this apartment,’ she murmurs, ‘the requirement of a solarium over this particular street. It was not hard to note which doorways could be watched from here. And the theatre or the Blues’ banqueting hall are sources of information on Imperial manoeuvrings