The Sleep Without Dreams

"To cheat death, one must first learn to pay in its own coin."

The herbwife took her time answering.

She smoked in silence for the better part of a quarter hour, with the owls rustling above her and the brazier ticking softly as it cooled, and Claudia, who had been taught from girlhood that a woman who fidgets has already lost the negotiation, sat with her hands pressed flat against her knees and did not move. It was Lucrezia who could not bear it. The old servant shifted in the doorway, wringing the hem of her cloak, and twice drew breath to speak, and twice caught the herbwife's blind white eye turning on her like a lantern, and closed her mouth again.

"A heart that stops and starts again," Sabina said at last, in her dry, whispering, leaf-rustle voice. "Do you know how many women have come under this arch and asked me for that, in fifty years? None. A hundred have asked me for the other kind, the kind that stops and never starts. Husbands, mostly. A few fathers. One mother-in-law, may the gods rest her, who was a thoroughly disagreeable woman." She took the pipe out of her mouth. "But never the first kind. Tell me, lady, who is it for?"

"A man."

"A man who is to be believed dead."

"By a great many people. Some of them very observant."

"Ah." The good eye gleamed. "And it must be done before them. Not behind a curtain, not in a bed. With the eyes of the whole world upon him."

Claudia hesitated. Then she nodded.

"That is a harder thing," said Sabina, "and an uglier one." She laid the pipe on her knee and began to count on her knotted fingers, slowly, one after another, as if reciting a lesson she had learned in girlhood. "There is a sleep that comes to men who drink the milk of the white hellebore, if the dose is wicked and the heart is weak. There is another that comes from the root of mandrake, when it is dug at the dark of the moon. And there is a third, much rarer, that I buy from the Egyptian sailors at Ostia for the price of a good horse, the dried liver of a little fish from the Red Sea that puffs itself up like a bladder when it is angry. Each of these will kill a man. But if they are blended in the right proportion by a hand that knows what it is doing…" The old woman's mouth pursed. "Then, my lady, he lies down as if struck by lightning. The breath goes thin as a thread. The pulse goes under the skin like a fish into deep water, so deep that a physician with his fingers on the wrist will swear he is gone. The flesh grows cold. The eyes fix. You could prick him with a needle, and he would not stir."

Lucrezia touched two fingers to her brow, the old gesture against evil.

"And afterwards?" Claudia asked. Her voice was perfectly level. "How long?"

"Six hours, perhaps seven, for a man of ordinary build. More if he is large. More if he is fed upon wine before." Sabina leaned back, and the shawls shifted around her like drifts of grey snow. "Then the heart comes back by itself, if it was strong to begin with. Slowly. With great pain. Like a foot waking from sleep, but all through the body. He will vomit. He will tremble. He may rave for a day. And during that time, child, he must be kept warm. Do you understand me? Warm, and wrapped, and fed hot wine with honey, because a heart that has lain so close to the river will not come back across it in the cold. If you leave him on a stone in winter, he will wake the next day for one breath only, and then he will lie down and never rise again. And there is no cure for that."

"It will be December."

"I know what month it is." The old woman gave a short dry cackle. "I am blind in one eye, lady, not in the head."

Claudia looked down at her hands.

They were calm, beautifully calm; two pale long-fingered hands resting on a rough grey tunic. She wondered distantly whether they were really her hands at all. Beneath the wool the half-sun lay against her breast, and beneath that, deep under the ribs, something else lay, something small as a seed and strong as a fist, that would not let her pretend that she did not understand what the old woman was telling her.

"And if the dose is wrong?"

"Too little, and he stirs on the pyre. Too much…" Sabina shrugged. "Then you have done my other trade, for a very large price, and I shall be sorry to hear of it." She tilted her head. "How big is he? Tell me what he weighs. His years. Whether he drinks. Whether he has been starved, or beaten, or burned, or whipped. Tell me everything, lady, for this is not a thing that can be bought like a pot of salve. I must know the man."

And Claudia, who had sworn not one hour ago in the freezing dark that she would speak of Jabari to no one, found herself telling it. His size, his age, the number of days without water. The wounds scarred and the wounds open. The strength of his breath at night. She spoke in a low even voice, as a physician speaks of a patient, and the old woman listened with her one bright eye half shut, nodding slowly, now and then interrupting with a sharp question. And somewhere in the middle of it all, in the soft herbal dark, Claudia realized that she was describing every detail of his body from memory, down to the pale sickle scar on his left hip, and that the herbwife had long since stopped asking about the dose.

"You love him," Sabina said, when she had finished.

It was not a question. Claudia did not answer.

"Ah well. I have seen worse reasons to hold a man's life in a flask." The old woman bent, with a grunt, and began to rummage in a chest at her feet. "I will tell you one thing for nothing, as one old woman to a young one. You have chosen a hard road. At the end of it you will be asked a question, and the question will be this: would you rather be loved, or be alive? And there will be no third answer."

"I have already been asked."

"And?"

Claudia lifted her head. In the red light of the brazier her face looked suddenly very young and very old at once.

"I mean to be alive," she said. "I mean for him to be alive. If he is to hate me for it, then let him hate me. I would rather he lived to do it."

The herbwife regarded her for a long moment. Then she drew a small stoppered flask of dark glass from the chest, no longer than a finger, and turned it slowly in the light.

"It will cost you your pearls," she said.

…

The matter of the arena she dealt with the following evening, over a dish of boiled hare.

She did it with the greatest delicacy, for she had never yet contradicted Servius to his face, and had no intention of beginning now. She waited until the wine had been poured twice and the old man's cheeks had turned the colour of boiled beef. Then she laid down her knife, and sighed, and put her hand lightly upon his sleeve.

"Servius, I have been thinking."

"Eh? That is not a habit I encourage in women."

"I know, my lord. Forgive me. But I cannot sleep for thinking of the Games." She lowered her lashes. "It is only that I am so afraid I shall fail you."

He turned, with the faint, squinting, predatory interest that he always showed when he sensed a weakness. "Fail me? How?"

"The bear, Servius." She shivered, delicately. "I have heard such terrible things about the iron bear. They say it can tear a man apart in a moment. If the black general were mauled before I was brought forward, if he should die under its claws before I could strike him, then the whole Senate would see a beast do what a wife was meant to do. All your preparations would be wasted. And I… I should be shamed before the world. I should not be the lady who tamed the wolf. I should be merely a woman who stood and watched."

She let a tremor into her voice, and a drop of moisture gather on her lower lashes.

"I should so like to do it properly. For you."

The fat face before her had gone slack with shifting calculations. Claudia held her breath, held her small damp smile in place, and watched the greed and vanity move across his features one after another like clouds across a hill.

"Hm," said Servius. "Hm, hm. You may have something there, my dear."

"If the bear were to fight others first," she murmured. "The lesser captives. The ones that matter nothing. Let them provide the sport. And then, when the crowd is at its wildest, when the sand is red, let the great one be brought out alone, standing, in his chains, and let me meet him with the dagger before them all. On the steps of the dais, where Pollio and the others may see every stroke. He would be in his strength. He would be proud. And I…" She smiled, and it was a shy, terrible, perfect smile. "I would be the one to humble him."

"By Jove," said Servius softly.

Slowly, a great sloppy grin spread over his face.

"By Jove, my little doll. You have the soul of a Roman after all." He pulled her into the stale cloud of his breath and kissed her wetly on the temple. "That is far better. It is much better! The crowd will adore it. And the Kavanu, standing, proud, to the very last moment, and then my wife…" He clapped his hands. "Steward! Wine! The good Falernian! I wish to drink to the lady of the house!"

Claudia accepted the cup with downcast eyes, and drank to her husband's health, and tasted nothing. The wine was thick and sweet, and in her mind she saw two other men, nameless men she had passed in the dungeons without learning their names, whose bodies were now bought and paid for by her cleverness. She did not let herself look at them. She set the thought carefully aside, in the cold locked room where she kept everything she was not yet ready to pay for, and shut the door.

There is always a price, she thought. I did not make the world.

But she drank her wine very slowly, and for the rest of the night she could not taste anything at all.

…

The dagger was made by a Greek named Philon, who had spent thirty years in the workshops behind the Theatre of Pompey fashioning swords that did not cut and cups that did not spill.

He was a round, quiet, ink-stained little man with a squint and a wooden leg, and he received Claudia's freedman in his cluttered back room with the stiff dignity of an artist asked for a commission he does not understand. Quintus Aelius, standing in the doorway with his hat in his hands, was himself a modest and unobtrusive figure: a spare, balding man in his fifties with a clerk's stoop, who had served the Marcellus house in a hundred small invisible ways for twenty years and had been freed for it in her father's will. He had been the one hand in all of Rome that Claudia had never once doubted. She sent him now on an errand that no clerk should have been asked to run, and he had gone without a word of protest, and had come back with an answer.

"He says it can be done, lady," he reported that evening, in a murmur, in the shadow of the peristyle. "A hollow handle of ivory, a blade of blunted bronze that slides back into the hilt at the lightest pressure. At the base, a pouch of pig's blood, bound with a thin sheet of gut. When the blade presses in, the gut bursts, and the blood runs down the steel, and the handle takes the stroke." He coughed discreetly. "It is a trick much used in the Greek tragedies, my lady, for the death of kings. The audience swears it sees the steel go in. Philon asks four hundred sesterces and a promise that he shall not be asked why."

"He may have six hundred," said Claudia. "And a promise that he shall be asked nothing, ever."

Quintus bowed. For a moment he seemed about to withdraw. Then he hesitated.

"My lady… the other matter. The one I was not to speak of."

"Yes?"

"I have found them." His voice dropped still lower. "There is a tavern on the Tiber wharf, near the Emporium, that belongs to a Syrian who asks no questions of his guests. A dozen of the southerners drink there. Men from the Nile, the cataracts, the far lands beyond Meroë. Dockers, mostly, and caravan guards, and a handful who say nothing at all." He swallowed. "One of them is a very tall man, lady. Grey in the beard. He has a scar across his mouth and he does not drink. The others speak of him with a particular kind of silence. His name, they say, is Zuberi."

Claudia closed her eyes.

The lieutenant who held the east gate, Jabari had told her, one night in the dark, stirring the dust with a finger. The only one of my captains who cut his way out. If any of them lives, it will be Zuberi. He is as stubborn as a mule, and he will not leave Rome while I am breathing.

She had asked the question lightly, carelessly, as she asked all her questions, in the guise of idle curiosity. He had answered without suspicion. And she had gone on, with her cold smile, to the next thing, and stored the answer away where she stored all her weapons.

Forgive me, she thought.

"You must not approach him," she said, opening her eyes. "He would take you for a Roman spy. He might kill you. Send word by a stranger, a child, a beggar, anything. And let the message be only this." She drew the end of her veil through her fingers, slowly. "On the third night of Saturnalia, at the second watch, a body will be thrown on the Esquiline field behind the potters' kilns. The Mahali does not run dry."

Quintus frowned. "The Mahali, my lady?"

"It is the name of a river." She felt her mouth try to smile, and fail. "It means the place where one comes home. If the man is who you say, he will know the word. No Roman has ever heard it spoken aloud."

…

The night before the Games was the last night she spent beneath the villa in the old way.

She had decided to go, though every nerve in her body shrieked against it. The flask of dark glass was hidden in the folds of her bedchamber curtains, three days' cold wait from its use; the ivory dagger would be delivered in the morning; the stage was set, down to the last painted cloth. There was nothing more to prepare. And yet she could no more have stayed in her bed that night than she could have flown. She took the keys from the sleeping jailer's belt for what she knew, with the cold foreknowledge of a woman reading her own epitaph, would be the last time.

Jabari was awake.

He was always awake, now. She had stopped being surprised by it. He sat with his back to the pillar and his chains hanging loose from his wrists, and when the gate opened he lifted his head and looked at her, and for once he did not smile. A change had come over him in the last days, a deepening, a gathering, like the stillness before a storm. His face in the guttering light was calm. But there was something in the set of his shoulders, something in the way his hands lay quiet on his knees, that she had seen once before on a summer night in the garden, in an old falcon looking down from its perch at a sparrow it had decided not to eat.

She sat down beside him, in the usual place. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

They did not speak for a long time.

There was a great deal that she wanted to say. She had composed it all on the way down the stairs: something light, something brave, something that would let him know without telling him. But the words had drained away, and she was left with only the weight of his arm against hers, and the steady slow beating of his heart, and the knowledge, so enormous that she could scarcely breathe around it, that this was one of the last times she would ever feel it.

Tomorrow you will hate me, she thought. Tomorrow you will look at me over a dagger and believe that I have sold you.

And it will be the best thing I have ever done for you.

"Claudia."

His voice came out of the dark above her head, quiet and very even.

"Yes?"

"I want you to listen." His hand found her chin and lifted it, gently, until she was looking into those black, unfathomable eyes. He did not ask what she meant to do. He did not say her name again. He looked at her for a very long time, so long that the torch behind him burned lower and the shadows on the walls crept in and the sound of the dripping water seemed to measure out the whole of eternity, and what he saw in her face she would never know.

"Whatever you are going to do," Jabari said at last, "I will not blame you."

Her breath stopped.

"I have known since the first night that you were a woman who does what she must. It is the thing I…" He broke off. The corner of his mouth moved, a ghost of the old crooked smile. "It is the thing I knew you for. I do not ask you to be gentle. I only ask you not to be afraid."

"I am not afraid," she lied.

"No." His thumb passed once, very softly, along the line of her cheekbone. "But know this, matron. Whatever you do tomorrow, whatever I see and whatever I believe, I am a man who remembers."

She wanted to throw her arms around his neck. She wanted to tell him all of it, now, at the last, and let the walls fall down. Instead, she sat perfectly still and let him take her face in both his hands and kiss her brow, slowly, as one marks a seal on a letter that will not be opened for many years.

Then she rose, and picked up the iron ring, and went up the black stairs without looking back.