A Cruel Arithmetic

"When love and survival sit down at the same table, one of them must eat the other."

Servius announced the Saturnalia Games over a dish of honeyed dormice, with his mouth full, and with such evident relish that it was some moments before Claudia understood that her life had just been sentenced.

It was the evening of the first frost. A fire of cedar logs burned in the dining room of the Tullo villa, and the long table, spread with linen, glittered with silver dishes and wine jugs of green Alexandrian glass. Only three persons dined that night: the Senator, reclining at the head of the couch like a bloated emperor with a napkin tucked beneath his chins; his oldest crony, the fat banker Pollio, who laughed at every word Servius spoke before he had finished speaking it; and Claudia, upright at her husband's side, her hands folded in her lap, her plate untouched. The smell of the roasting meats turned her stomach. She had been breathing through her mouth for the last hour, and smiling.

"The nineteenth of December," Servius said, pointing a greasy finger at the vaulted ceiling. "The third night of Saturnalia. The finest festival of the Roman year, when the slaves sit at table and the masters wait on them, and the whole city goes mad with wine." He chuckled, and a strand of dormouse hung from his lip. "I mean to give them something better than wine, Pollio. I mean to give them a spectacle that will be talked about in the Senate House until the Ides of March."

"The Kavanu?" Pollio asked eagerly.

"The Kavanu. The black general." Servius wiped his mouth. "Three weeks of whipping and the bastard still stands. Three weeks! I have broken bulls in less time. So I shall have him fight the iron bear, the great grey brute that Cornelius sold me with the horses, and I shall have him fight it in the arena before two hundred guests with his hands chained, and when the beast is done with him, and he lies there with his entrails in his lap, begging, begging, begging for a clean death…"

He turned. Beneath the heavy lids, his little eyes shone with a moist and horrible affection.

"Then my little doll shall give it to him."

The fire cracked. In the corner a slave boy, forgetting himself, let a silver ladle clatter on the tiles, and was cuffed so hard by the steward that the sound seemed to hang in the air for several heartbeats afterward.

"I, Servius?" Claudia heard herself say.

Her voice was very small. It emerged from her throat in precisely the tone that her husband had trained her to produce, a timid, soft, faintly breathless flutter, as of a bird caught in a hand. She even managed to lower her lashes. Behind them the world had narrowed to a point of white light.

"You, my pet!" He seized her wrist and squeezed until the bones shifted. "Who better? Who has laid the lash upon him night after night with such mercy and such skill? Let the whole Senate see how my wife has learned to serve Rome. Let them see that a daughter of the Claudii can put down a savage with her own hand. A blade, my dear, a short blade, straight through the heart. I shall have a special dagger made. With a handle of ivory." He beamed at Pollio. "She will be a legend."

"A legend indeed," Pollio breathed.

"Thank you, Servius," Claudia said softly. "I am honoured."

She sat quite still under the heat of his grip, with the strange cold ringing silence in her ears, and heard her own voice thanking him again, and again, in a calm clear tone, until at last he laughed and released her and turned back to his dormice.

Three weeks, she thought. In three weeks, the man she loved would be dragged into the arena in chains, and she would be given a knife.

And in four months, perhaps five, no corset or silk in Rome would hide what she carried.

…

She did not sleep that night.

She lay on her back in the great bed, with Servius snoring beside her, the heavy odour of wine rising off his skin, and counted the carved rosettes on the ceiling until the lamp burned out and the dark fell like a lid. She had never been afraid of the dark. In her girlhood she had learned that darkness was a kind of friend, a cloak under which a clever girl could think in peace. And she thought, slowly, systematically, with the terrible clarity that comes to those who have nothing left but their minds, from first principles, as one reasons through a proof.

She had a husband who would kill the child if he knew. That was the first fact.

She had a lover who would die in three weeks, in a great and public and hideous manner, unless something intervened. That was the second.

She had a belly that would begin to show before the spring. That was the third, and it was a fact with a clock in it.

What did she want? She laid the question gently in the dark, as she might lay a coin on a table, and examined it from every angle. She wanted to live. She wanted the child to live. She wanted, absurdly, in the helpless child's part of her that she had thought long dead, for Jabari to live, and to be free, and to go home under the southern sun to his hills and his horses and the great river that she had traced in the dust with her fingers. She wanted her husband to die in some slow and shameful way.

She could not have everything. She had learned that at sixteen. The only question was what she was willing to pay.

If he fights the bear, he dies, said the cold voice. Even if he kills it. Servius has twenty guards and the hooks. If he is somehow spared, he will be killed another way, another night. He will never leave this house alive, so long as Servius lives.

And Servius will not die before December.

Therefore Jabari must leave this house dead.

She sat up very slowly in the dark.

It came whole to her, the way a tune comes: not as a thought but as a shape. A man who dies in public, before two hundred witnesses, under his wife's own hand. A body that is carried out. A body that no one thinks to count again. And somewhere in that terrible dark arithmetic, a gap between death and death, a narrow door through which a living man could be carried out into the night.

A heart that stops, she thought, and starts again.

It was a mad idea. It was probably an impossible one. Such potions were the stuff of poetry and old wives' tales: the sleeper of Epidaurus, the drug of Medea, the death-like slumber that Circe was said to lay upon wandering sailors. But there were women in the Subura who sold remedies that no doctor in the Palatine would admit to knowing. She had heard them whispered of in the baths. And she knew, as she knew nothing else in the world, that it was the only plan she had.

She knew something else, too. She knew what it would cost.

For if Jabari were to leave the house believing himself dead, the old fox must also believe it. And a man cannot be made to die convincingly if he has been told in advance that he will live. Not by her, not before two hundred pairs of eyes. He would meet her gaze across the sand, and in his eyes, those terrible honest eyes that had never learned to lie, there would be a flicker, a pause, a light. Servius would see it. Servius had spent his life studying the faces of men about to be hurt.

So he must not be told. He must go into that arena believing she had betrayed him. He must take the dagger believing it was real.

Claudia pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until colored lights burst behind her lids.

…

"You have been quiet tonight," Jabari said.

It was the next night, and the cold in the cell was so bitter that the water seeping down the walls had frozen into lace. They sat side by side on the stone ledge with her cloak spread over both their knees. He had pulled her in against his side, not holding her, only letting her lean, in the manner of a man making room for a tired child, and she could feel the great slow thud of his heart against her shoulder, and the faint dry rasp of his breathing, and the heat of him radiating through the thin wool.

"I am tired."

"You are lying." He said it without heat. "You say that every night now, when you are afraid. I have begun to hear it in your voice. A little flatter than the truth. Like a coin of poor silver."

She smiled at that, because it was true, and because for a moment she could not trust herself to speak. The torch on the far wall had burned low. In the dim gold light she studied his profile, the broad forehead, the heavy curve of the lip, the old white scar that crossed the bridge of his nose, and tried to fix every line of it in her memory, as one learns a poem before a long journey.

"Tell me about the river," she said.

He turned his head. "The Omo?"

"No. Yours. The one that runs past the city. The one you said was brown in the dry season, and silver in the rains."

For a moment he said nothing. When he spoke, his voice had changed. It had slowed and deepened, the harsh edges worn off it like stone under water. "It is called the Mahali. It means, in my mother's tongue, the place where one comes home." His eyes were far away. "In the evenings, when the heat breaks, the women go down to wash the cloth and sing. You can hear them from the walls. They sing the same songs their mothers sang. At dusk the whole valley turns the colour of copper, and the herds come down to drink, and the little boys ride the cattle bareback into the shallows, screaming, and nobody tells them to stop."

His throat moved.

"I have not seen it in two years. I will not see it again. But I carry it, here." He touched his temple. "It is the one place they cannot chain."

Claudia closed her eyes.

Tell him, said something in her heart, wildly. Tell him now. Tell him everything. He is the cleverest man you have ever met. Perhaps he will think of something you have not. Perhaps together, the two of you—

But she knew precisely what he would think of. He would think of the guards, and the keys, and the stairs. He would think of his ten dead thousand, and of the traitor who had opened the gates, and of the doom that falls upon every man who trusts the wrong woman. And he would turn his face, once, toward her, and she would see in it the shadow of the one question that she could not answer. And what of the child, Claudia? What kind of man is born into this world with a father in chains and a mother who sold him?

"Jabari," she said.

"Mm."

"Whatever happens." Her voice was quite steady. She was proud of that, afterward. "Whatever you see me do. Whatever you hear. Will you remember that I…"

She stopped. The sentence broke in the middle like a dry twig.

He looked down at her. The firelight made a sculpture of his face, all hollows and ridges, and his eyes, black and unfathomable, searched hers with a slow, grave concentration that frightened her more than any look he had ever given her in anger.

"Claudia," he said quietly. "What are you planning?"

"Nothing."

"You are lying again."

"I am a Roman noblewoman," she said, and smiled, and it was the old smile, the practiced, fragile, obedient one that she had sworn never to use on him again. "I am always planning something."

He did not answer. He only went on looking at her, and in the long silence she felt the whole weight of what she was about to do press down upon her like a stone: the inescapable certainty that she would break this man's heart, and that she would do it with her own hand, in front of the world.

At last he turned his face away. He laid his head back against the pillar and closed his eyes, and after a time his arm came round her shoulders and drew her against his chest, and his chin rested lightly on her hair. He asked her nothing more that night. She thought it was mercy. She did not understand until much later that it was something closer to a general's silence, the kind that falls on a man who has already guessed far more of the enemy's plan than he has any wish to say aloud.

…

The Subura at night was a city beneath the city.

Lucrezia led the way through the narrow alleys with her cloak drawn over her white head and her stick tapping on the cobbles, and Claudia followed, hooded, in the plainest tunic she owned, with a small knife strapped to her forearm and the half-sun pressed close against her breastbone. It was past midnight on the fourth day after the dinner. The sky was low and smoky, the air thick with the stench of fish and lamp-oil and frying onions, and every doorway seemed to contain a pair of watching eyes. A drunken legionary reeled past singing. Somewhere a woman screamed, shrilly, then laughed. From the upper windows of the tenements, mean wooden warrens leaning at crazy angles over the lanes, came the thin wail of infants and the slap of wet clothes on stone.

She had never been in this place before. She had passed above it all her life, in her litter, in her silks, breathing perfumed air, and it had never once crossed her mind that beneath her feet the whole of Rome was seething like a pot.

"Here," Lucrezia whispered.

The stall stood at the end of a blind alley, under an archway so low that Claudia had to stoop. A small brazier glowed within. The walls were hung with bunches of drying herbs, with the skins of snakes, the dried feet of birds, long ropes of garlic and clusters of withered berries, and from the rafters, in little wicker cages, dozens of tiny bright eyes blinked down at her out of the smoke. Owls. They shifted on their perches, and the air filled with a soft, dry, whispering rustle, like the turning of pages.

In the midst of it, on a three-legged stool, sat the oldest woman Claudia had ever seen.

She was so small and so bent that she seemed hardly more than a heap of shawls, her face a map of wrinkles from which two eyes looked out, one dark and bright as a bird's, the other clouded over with the milky blue film of blindness. A pipe hung from her mouth. Her hands, resting on her knees, were knotted like roots.

"Sabina," Lucrezia said, in a low reverent tone. "The herbwife."

The old woman did not look up. She drew on her pipe and exhaled a long slow ribbon of smoke.

"Ah," she said, in a voice like dry leaves. "A lady. And a good one, from the smell of her. Silk under the wool, and violets in the hair." The good eye rose, slowly, and fixed upon Claudia. "You have not come for a love-philtre. You have too much sense. And you have not come to be rid of a babe; you carry it too proudly."

Claudia drew in a sharp breath.

"Do not be alarmed, child," said the herbwife. "A woman who has sold remedies in this street for fifty years learns to read the way a girl holds her belly. I could tell you the sex, if you liked. Come in out of the cold. Sit." She waved the pipe at a stool. "Tell old Sabina what you want, and we shall see whether it is a thing that can be sold."

Claudia sat. She was aware of the glittering eyes of the owls, of the warm rank smell of the brazier, of the fierce pulse hammering in her throat. All the way through the maze of alleys she had been rehearsing a careful phrase, a delicate euphemism, a Latin so oblique that no one could ever repeat it in a court. Now, in the smoky dark, with that single bright eye upon her, it seemed suddenly ridiculous.

She leaned forward.

"Mother," she said quietly. "Have you any draught that can make a heart stop… and yet be made to beat again?"

The pipe stopped halfway to the old woman's mouth.

For a long time Sabina said nothing. The brazier crackled. Overhead an owl let out a low interrogative hoot. The herbwife's good eye moved slowly across Claudia's face, the cheekbones, the thin set lips, the dark eyes shining with a terror she could not quite hide, and something in the old crumpled features altered, very subtly, like water settling after a stone.

"Ah," she said at last, softly. "Now that, my lady, is a question."