The Last Execution

"Mercy is the cruelest of all the masks, because it is the only one the condemned will thank you for."

On the third night of Saturnalia, the whole of Rome had gone mad with wine, and the Tullo villa had gone mad with it, only a little more expensively.

The festival had begun three days earlier, as it did every year, with the sacrifice at the temple of Saturn and the cry of Io Saturnalia! that rolled from the Capitoline to the Aventine and down into the narrowest lanes of the Subura. Since then the city had turned itself upside down. The law courts were shut, the schools were shut, and no war could lawfully be declared. Masters waited at table upon their slaves, and slaves, in felt caps of liberty, sprawled on the couches of the great and called for wine in loud voices, and in every street, at every crossroads, someone was singing, gambling, tumbling into a fountain, or being sick behind a pillar. The air smelled of burning pine, of roasting pork, of cheap wine spilt over hot stone. It was said that on those nights even the gods looked away. And at the Tullo estate on the Palatine, where Servius had been elected by the votes of his two hundred guests the Lord of Misrule, and wore a paper crown set crookedly on his bald head and a purple robe he had stolen from the wardrobe of a dead praetor, the gods had very good reason to.

The underground arena had been transformed.

Gone were the black smoke and the bare stone of the earlier spectacles. Garlands of ivy and bay hung from the pillars. Hundreds of oil lamps in bronze stands lit the vast semicircular bowl with a hot, golden, wavering glare, and braziers burned at every aisle against the winter damp, so that the whole place glowed like the inside of a furnace. The tiered benches were crowded to the rafters with senators in their felt caps and their wives in a shimmer of silks and jewels, with merchants and bankers, with young officers flushed from the wine, with half-drunk poets declaiming to nobody. Slaves darted between the rows with trays of honeyed cakes. Somewhere in the far corner a flute shrilled, and a woman shrieked with laughter, and the roar of the crowd rose and fell like surf.

Claudia sat on the highest dais, on a throne of carved cedar draped in leopard skin, at her husband's right hand.

She wore white. It was Servius's whim: a stola of white silk, plain as a shroud, for the lady of mercy, he said, and a veil of white gauze over her dark hair, so that in the hot glow of the lamps she seemed to float above the crowd like a candle in a window. In her lap, wrapped in a fold of the silk, lay a dagger with an ivory handle. It was lighter than she had expected. Her fingers had closed around it a dozen times that evening, to test the weight, and each time she had felt the faint tension in the hilt, the delicate, deceitful give of a mechanism no thicker than a lie.

Remember to breathe, she told herself. Smile. Look at nothing. Be the doll.

"Gaze upon it, my love!" Servius shouted in her ear, in a gust of wine and sweat. He flung out an arm, nearly knocking the paper crown from his head. "Look how they come to see you! The whole Senate! I tell you, Pollio, I have never been so proud!"

"Nor I, Servius," she said, and smiled with all her teeth.

…

The first act was the bear.

They were brought out in chains from the iron gate at the far end of the pit, two tall Kavanu men, young, stripped to the waist, their bronze skin shining in the lamplight with the oil that the slaves had rubbed over them for the crowd. Claudia had seen them before. She had passed them every night for nine weeks in the dim passage of the dungeon, huddled against the wall with their knees drawn up, speaking softly to each other in their own language. She had never learned their names. She learned them now, because the crowd had been told, because a herald in a purple cloak was bawling them out over the din in a high ridiculous voice, as if introducing two gentlemen to a dinner party.

Tendaji. Mosi.

They were not warriors, she thought. Not the way he was. They were boys. One of them could not have been more than nineteen, with the narrow, bewildered face of a youth who has been dragged from a thing he does not understand into one that is worse. As the iron collar was struck from his neck and he stumbled forward onto the sand, his eyes rose to the dais, and passed over the glittering rows, over the paper crown, over Servius, and came to rest on her, and stayed there, uncomprehending, as if waiting for her to do something.

She held his gaze. She did not look away. She would not allow herself that mercy.

This is the price, she told herself. You knew it was the price. Look at it.

The bear came out of the dark at the other end of the pit, a vast grey shadow shambling on its hind legs, its great head swaying from side to side. Someone had starved it for a week. It stood in the lamplight, huge as a wall, blinking, and then it dropped to all fours and charged.

The crowd screamed with delight.

She would remember very little of what followed, afterwards, except fragments. A cry that was not human. The sound a body makes when it strikes a wooden barrier. A woman beside her, a senator's wife, laughing, laughing so hard that she dropped a glass of wine in her lap and went on laughing as it ran down her silks. The second boy, Mosi, snatching a broken spear from the sand and flinging himself at the beast's flank in a frenzy of terror, and the great paw swinging once, almost lazily, and the lamp-lit blood splashing high on the ivy-wreathed wall. She kept her eyes open. She sat in the white silk with her hands folded over the dagger and looked at all of it, every moment, with the fixed and perfect smile of a doll, while somewhere beneath the smile something small and cold and furious stood up inside her and began to count.

Tendaji. Mosi. Tendaji. Mosi.

She would say the names again, after. She would say them for the rest of her life.

…

"And now," roared the herald, when the sand had been raked and the lamps trimmed and the crowd had finally quieted to a sticky, panting hush, "the Lord of Saturnalia presents the last, the greatest, the most terrible of his offerings! The captive of the Omo Valley! The Black Lion of the Kavanu! The slayer of eight Roman soldiers and four beasts of the pit! Let him be brought forth, to be judged by the hand of the lady Claudia Marcellina, the pride of the house of Tullo!"

A great shout went up. The iron gate rolled open.

He walked out alone.

There was no guard beside him, not at the first. They had chained his wrists in front, with a short heavy link, and his ankles in irons that clanked at every step, and his hair had been combed and oiled and bound back in a single braid. He wore a loincloth, nothing more. His back, still crisscrossed by the faint lines of old scars and the shallow clean cuts of the flint, gleamed bronze in the glare. He walked slowly. He did not limp. He crossed the whole breadth of that bloody sand with his head up and his shoulders square, as a king walks into a temple, and the noise of the crowd sank away before him as a tide sinks from a rock.

Claudia felt her stomach turn over.

She had thought herself prepared. She had spent weeks arming herself with ice. But she had not been prepared for the look of him in the open, in the hard bright light, among the lamps and the garlands, a thing from a different world; nor for the fact that he would not look at her. He looked at the whole assembled might of Rome, ranked in jewels and silk. He looked at Servius. He looked at the bear's blood on the sand. And then, and only then, he raised his eyes to the dais and let them settle, at last, on her face.

She did not flinch.

She held it perfectly, the mask she had worn for six years, smooth and white and pitiless, with no more feeling in it than a statue in a niche. She let him see exactly what he expected to see: the obedient wife, the cold creature, the Roman noblewoman who has taken a lover to her bed and her husband's whip to his back, and now, with the indifference of her kind, will drive in the knife. She gave him nothing. Not a flicker. Not a breath. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and it took everything she possessed.

And in the black Kavanu eyes, across forty paces of blood-soaked sand, she saw something change.

It was only for an instant. It was not anger, as she had feared; it was not pain. It was a kind of terrible stillness, a long, level, measuring look, as though he were reading a message he had already half guessed. Then it was gone, and the face was as expressionless as her own.

"Bring him to the steps!" Servius bellowed.

They led him up. Two guards in steel caps hauled on the chains, and he came to the foot of the dais and stood there, a head taller than any man on the sand, with the lamplight gilding the long muscles of his shoulders. Servius, on his throne, rocked with laughter. He leaned over, beaming, to peer down into that scarred still face.

"Well, beast," he crowed. "Well, my fine black lion! Have you anything to say, before my lady puts you down?"

"No," said Jabari.

"No? No curse? No prayer to your savage gods?"

"I have already said it," said Jabari, in his deep Latin. "Though not to you."

The Senator frowned, puzzled, and looked at his wife. Claudia rose.

She did it slowly, her white skirts falling in graceful folds, as she had practised for three weeks before the mirror. The silence in the arena was now so complete that she could hear the sputter of the lamps, the faint creak of the benches, the dull animal pulse of two hundred people holding their breath. She came down the three marble steps with the dagger in her right hand and a silver cup in her left. At the bottom, she stopped, one step above him, so that their eyes were nearly level.

"Mercy, my lord," she said, in her small clear voice, to the crowd. "The old custom. The condemned shall be given the last cup."

A low murmur of delight rippled through the benches. Even Servius clapped. It was an old Roman gesture, and an affecting one, the gracious lady offering the dying man a final comfort before the blade, and it had been exactly designed to be so. She had mixed the wine with her own hands that afternoon, in the privacy of her bedchamber, with the little dark flask from Sabina and a cup of the finest Falernian, and had watched the black dregs vanish into the red. She had counted the drops. She had counted them three times.

She held the cup out to him. It trembled very slightly, and she cursed her fingers for it.

Jabari looked down at the wine.

He looked at it for a long time, long enough for the first whisper of unease to stir in the benches. Then he raised his bound hands, and his chained fingers closed over hers around the stem, and the heat of his skin went through her like a blow. For one wild moment she thought he would speak. She thought he would say her name, there, before two hundred witnesses; she thought he would pull her against him and snap her neck in his chains. She would almost have welcomed it.

"Is it poison, matron?" he asked quietly. Only she could hear.

"It is mercy," Claudia said.

He gazed at her.

"So it is," said Jabari, and drank.

He drank it all, in a single draught, with his eyes locked on hers over the rim, and when the cup was empty he lowered it and said something in his own tongue, low and soft, three or four liquid syllables that she did not understand. Then he set the cup back in her hand. His fingers lingered on hers, just for the breath of a moment, and let go.

"Kneel!" screamed Servius, delirious. "Make him kneel!"

The guards drove their staves into the backs of his knees. He did not fall. He went down slowly, with a kind of grave courtesy, onto the stone, and lifted his face to her, and the lamps shone in his eyes like two black wells.

Claudia raised the dagger.

Now.

Now, now, now.

It was not hard. That was what she would never forgive herself for afterwards. She did it just as Philon had instructed, in one swift clean stroke, the point striking at the angle he had shown her, just beneath the left collarbone where the heart lay under the muscle, with the whole weight of her shoulder behind it. She felt the blade give. She felt, for the barest instant, a faint dragging catch, as of bronze scoring along bone before the hilt swallowed it, and then the thin bladder of gut burst against her fingers, hot and wet. And a great bright jet of red sprang out over her hand and the white silk of her gown and ran down the steel and down the ivory hilt, and the crowd drew in its breath in one vast moaning gasp.

Jabari's eyes widened.

He did not cry out. He looked down at the blood, and then up again at her, and she watched the understanding pass across his face, slowly, a dreadful tide. He saw her pale composed face. He saw the white silk reddening to the elbow. He saw that she did not blink. And she watched his black eyes go cold and flat and distant, as if a door had closed far back within them and a bolt shot home.

That's it, she thought. That is the last look he will ever give you. Take it. Keep it.

"Claudia," he said.

It was not a plea. It was hardly even a word. It came out of him on a long expiring breath, hollow and strange, and as the last of the wine reached his blood she saw his pupils spread, black and huge, and his great shoulders slump. He swayed. His chained hands fell open on the stone. And then, with a slow heavy inevitability, like a tree that has been cut through at the root, the Black Lion of the Kavanu tipped sideways, and struck the sand of the Tullo arena with a sound that echoed round the bowl, and lay still.

…

For a heartbeat there was no sound at all.

Then the arena exploded.

The roar that went up was like nothing she had ever heard. It shook the vault, shook the lamps in their stands, shook the very bones of her. Two hundred Roman nobles were on their feet, screaming, stamping, flinging their caps in the air, tearing the garlands from the pillars. A wine jug shattered. A woman wept for joy. Pollio, bellowing, clambered up on his bench and thumped his chest with both fists, and at the foot of the dais the guards had begun to chant, "Lady! Lady! Lady!" in a ragged, thunderous, delirious rhythm, and the paper crown toppled from Servius's head, and he did not notice.

"My doll!" he yelled. He had seized her by the shoulders, soaked in sweat, reeking, tears streaming from his squinting eyes. "My little doll! By all the gods, I have never seen such a thing! You were magnificent! You were superb! You were born for this!"

She smiled. She heard herself say that she was only glad to have pleased him. She felt the hot blood stiffening on her fingers and did not look down.

"Look at him!" Servius laughed, shaking her. "Look at the great beast! He's gone down like a cow!"

She did look.

He lay as he had fallen, sprawled on his side in the lamplight, one arm flung wide, the chains pooled around him like snakes. The blood had spread in a dark fan across his chest and over the sand. His face was slack, the eyes half open, the lips parted. And that was the moment when the worst fear of all came to her, in the middle of the roaring, with a force that made her knees almost give way. He is not breathing. He is not breathing. What if she gave me the wrong measure? What if I miscounted the drops?

"Doctor!" Servius bawled, lurching up. "Hermes, you dog, get over here and tell us he's dead! I want it certified! I want the Senate to hear it!"

The house physician came trotting from the corner, a thin balding Greek slave, red-eyed from the wine, with his bag clutched to his chest. Claudia watched him cross the sand. He knelt by the body, set two fingers beneath the angle of the jaw, then on the wrist, then on the chest, with a perfunctory, impatient, slightly tipsy air. He frowned. He bent lower. He held his cheek close to the parted lips, and she watched the long seconds stretch, and thought with perfect, merciless clarity: If he finds it, we are both dead.

"Well?" Servius snapped.

Claudia swayed on her feet.

"Oh!" she cried. Her hand flew to her brow. "Oh, Servius, I… I feel… the blood…"

She crumpled, with the grace of long practice, into his arms, and the whole arena lurched toward her with an anxious sigh. Servius gave a yelp of alarm. He dropped his staff, gathered her up in his fat sweaty arms, and bellowed for water, for wine, for a fan, for the devil to take the doctor, and in the confusion no one saw the physician look up, his hands still resting on the great still chest. He glanced at the dagger, which had fallen from her fingers. He glanced at the bloody sand. And then, with a great shrug of drunken weariness, he got to his feet.

"Dead, my lord," he said. "Stone cold. A clean stroke through the heart."

The roar swelled again.

"Throw him on the midden!" Servius screamed over her shoulder, shaking his fist at the guards. "On the Esquiline! With the dead cats! Let the crows have him and the dogs have what's left! And somebody pick up the lady's knife! It's to be mounted in the hall!"

She had closed her eyes, and so she did not see them drag him away.

She heard it, though. She heard the clank of the chains, the grunts of the guards, the rasp of a heavy body hauled across the sand and flung on a cart. She heard a wheel creak. And as the sound of it dwindled away into the roaring dark of the passage, she kept her eyes shut tight and her face pressed into her husband's sour shoulder, and thought: Please. Please, Sabina. Please, gods. Please.

It was only later, as she was being led to her chamber on the arm of her laughing husband, past the lamps and the garlands and the cheering rows, that the full weight of what she had done fell upon her. She had given no sign. She had said no word. There had been no signal, no token, nothing at all to tell him it was a lie. She had stood in front of two hundred Romans and driven a knife into the man she loved, and sent him out into a winter night without a word of warning, and if the herbwife's measure were wrong, or the cart were late, or the tall grey-bearded man in the Syrian's tavern had not heard, or had not believed, or had not come…

Behind her, Servius was singing. His laughter echoed down the long marble corridor. And Claudia Marcellina, walking in white silk stained red to the elbow, understood with sudden terrible clarity that she had just wagered the whole of her heart on a stranger's mercy and a dead man's pulse, with nothing in the world to guarantee that she would ever see either again.