Mistress of Rome by Kate Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

The marble felt wonderfully cool against his back as he slid down by the wall and uncorked the flagon. Now here was a place a man could get drunk in peace. Who cared if his head ached the next morning? He was going to die, anyway. He took a long swallow of wine.
    A soft scrape from the far corner froze him sober. He rose noiselessly, stealing along the edge of the pool.
    Another soft sound. He lunged into the dark and caught hold of a wrist. “Don’t move. Or I’ll kill you.” The demon snapped on its leash. “Who are you?”
    “I’m Thea,” said a polite female voice. “Do you always start conversations this way?”
    Her wrist was narrow and smooth, easily circled by his hand. He dropped it, stepped back—and realized his fingers were sticky. “You’re bleeding.”
    “Yes,” the voice agreed. “Quite a lot. The blue bowl’s got a good inch on the bottom. I think I cut too deep this time.”
    He wondered if she was drunk. “Who are you?”
    “Thea,” she repeated. “You can’t see my hand, but it’s extended for a proper shake. The unbloodied hand, that is.”
    Her narrow hand was callused across the palm: a slave’s hand. “Cut yourself?” he asked.
    “Yes, I cut myself,” she returned agreeably. “I do that, rather often. My wrists look like your back.”
    He started.
    “It’s Arius, isn’t it? A Roman name on a Briton. ‘Thea,’ though—that’s a Greek name on a Jew. Sorry, I’ll be quiet now. I imagine you just want to sit in some dark corner and get drunk.”
    He sat, propping his back against the wall, and drank off the rest of the wine in a few swallows. His eyes were used to the darkness now. He could make out a dim profile, a straight nose, a shadowy cable of hair, a wrist flexed over the bowl. She was singing something softly in an odd tongue.
    “She’ma Yisroel, Adonai Aloujanou, Adonai echod.” Her voice slid around the marble walls of the bathhouse; a warm, melodious alto. He closed his eyes as the strange music trailed off into silence.
    “Arius?”
    “What?”
    “Are you going to lose tomorrow?”
    “Yes.”
    “Pity. I’ll have to watch. I get dragged to all the games,” she added, “and I hate them. Hate them, hate them, hate them.”
    He imagined he could hear her blood sliding down the side of that blue bowl. “Yes.”
    “You, too? I thought so. You’re no Belleraphon, drinking up the applause.”
    So dark. It could have been the beginning of the world. “What am I, then?”
    “Barbarian,” she sang softly. “Barbarian, barbarian, barbarian. Where did you come from, Barbarian?”
    “Brigantia.” With fumbled amazement he heard the wine-slowed words uncoil. “In Britannia, but we call it Albion. Far to the north. Mountains by the sea.” He could still see the mountains, pressed up against the night like a dark wild song.
    “Family?”
    “Two brothers. My mother died young. My father . . .”
    “He was a great chieftain?” she prompted.
    “A smith. He believed in iron and bronze, not fighting. My brothers taught me to fight. Brought me up on stories of Vercingetorix.”
    “Who?”
    “Vercingetorix. A Gallic chieftain—nearly defeated Julius Caesar. Hero of my childhood.”
    “How did he die?”
    Arius smiled without amusement. “In the arena.”
    “Oh.” There was a little silence. “What else?”
    “There was—there was a Roman fort. Nearby. We paid tribute—cattle, grain, iron. My brothers, they liked to raid the Romans. They got cocky, killed a few sentries. The Romans killed them.”
    The arrows, the advancing shields, the screaming men and screaming horses . . . Madoc falling beneath a circle of stabbing spears, Tar-cox trampled by a tribune on a tall horse.
    “And you?”
    “I was thirteen. Stupid. Made a stand over my brothers’ bodies instead of running to warn my father. Thought I was Vercingetorix the Invincible. Romans captured me, of course. My father, killed. The village, burned. The rest of us . . . sold.”
    The smoke,