The Invitation

"There are letters that take a week to write and a night to regret, and one line that takes a lifetime to prepare."

She decided on the road, in the grey hour before the dawn, with a mud-spattered boy of the Praetorian post asleep on the bench opposite and the wheels of the carriage drumming over the old stones of the Appian Way.

She had not been sleeping. She had not been sleeping for eleven days. She had lain awake through the nights in the great bed in the Tullo villa with her eyes open to the dark, listening to the house settle round her, turning the matter over and over like a stone in a stream; and when at last the answer came it was not as a flash but as a slow settling of silt, until the bottom of the pool lay clear. She saw it all quite plainly. The war could not be won. The army in Africa was bleeding in the sand, and the treasury in Rome was empty, and the Senate, which had screamed for vengeance in June, was by October already muttering about terms. A young general who would not lose could not defeat a king who would not be beaten. It would drag on. It would go on for years. And somewhere in that long grinding stalemate, as certain as the setting of the sun, there would come a day when two men met across a field with swords in their hands, and the one who lived would be the one she had not meant to make an orphan.

It must be stopped, she thought. And there is only one person in the world who can stop it.

She did not tell herself what she was feeling. She was too practised for that. She told herself that it was policy. She told herself that a regent has a duty to the realm, that a mother has a duty to her son, that a wise woman uses the instruments that fall to her hand. These were all true. They were the sort of truths that hold a roof up. And beneath them, in the cold dark place where she kept the things she had no name for, a small hard bright thing turned slowly and would not be still, and whispered: You wish to see him.

She did not listen.

…

The council met in the Emperor's bedchamber, because the Emperor could no longer be moved.

It was a close, hot, stinking room on the upper floor of the old palace, smelling of camphor and sickness, with the shutters nailed closed against the evil air and a dozen lamps burning on the walls. The old man lay on a great bed under a canopy of gilded eagles, an enormous swollen yellow-faced figure with his mouth sagging open and one hand trembling on the coverlet. Around him sat the heads of the great houses, grave and bald and wrapped in white, in a circle of ivory chairs. General Marcus. Senator Lucius, narrow-faced and clever. The venerable Metellus, who had at last been permitted to die of old age, and whose place was taken by his bright-eyed grandson. They looked, in the lamplight, like a conference of waxworks.

Claudia stood at the foot of the bed in a dark cloak, with her hands folded, and spoke for exactly four minutes.

She did not argue. She did not plead. She laid before them, one after another, the figures: the cost of the war in gold and in lives, the tax revenues lost with the burning of the coast, the grain prices in the Subura, the rumours in the Forum. She told them that the army of the south had fought nine battles and won none. She told them that the Dux, brilliant as he was, was one man, and that no one man could do the work of five. She said that a prudent state tries a different weapon when the first has failed.

"Diplomacy," Lucius said, with a thin sour smile. "With a barbarian who has burned six of our cities."

"With a king," said Claudia, "who has not burned a single temple."

There was a pause.

"I have read every report from the south," she went on quietly. "The Tyrant has spared every priest. He has spared every woman and child who surrendered. He has taken the grain of the garrisons, and the gold of the treasuries, and the lives of those who held a spear against him, and nothing else. A man who fights in that way is not a savage. He is a general with a purpose. And a purpose, my lords, can be bargained with."

"And what do you imagine this purpose to be?"

"I do not know." That was true, and she let them hear it. "That is why I mean to ask him."

"Yourself?"

"Who else? I am the one who has read the dispatches. I am the one who commands the loyalty of the Dux." She looked slowly round the circle. "And I am a woman. A king who has been at war for ten years does not expect to be sent a woman. He will not know what to make of it. It will, I think, make him curious. It will also, perhaps, make him careless."

General Marcus coughed.

"My lady," he said hoarsely, "if I may. The risk to your person—"

"Is mine."

"But if the barbarian were to…"

"Then the Senate will have lost an elderly widow, General, and gained a most useful casus belli." She smiled at him, a small, tired, charming smile, and she saw him flush to the roots of his hair. "I do not think you will find that a tragic exchange."

Nobody laughed. But in the silence that followed, one by one, the old men began to nod.

It was done in an hour. The Emperor, roused by a physician with a vial of smelling-salts, was shown the decree and made a feeble sound that was taken as assent. The seals were affixed. A secretary wrote out a safe-conduct on a sheet of fine vellum, with an escort of five hundred Praetorians, and a ship of the imperial fleet was ordered to Ostia. And Claudia, bowing her head to the sleeping giant on the bed, turned and went down the long marble stair of the palace into the cold bright morning, where her carriage waited.

She had gone only a dozen steps when she realised that her hands were shaking.

…

Kito was brought to her at dusk, in the library, by Quintus.

He had been kept for eleven days in a cellar room of the Tullo house, with a pallet and a window and plenty of food, and he looked rather better for it. The grey pallor had left his face. He wore a clean wool tunic, and his chain had been struck off, and he stood quite calmly in the lamplight with his crippled hand tucked against his chest and his head a little on one side, like a bird that has seen a hawk and has decided not to run.

"You wish me to carry a message," he said.

"How did you know?"

"One does not feed a prisoner so well for nothing, lady."

She almost smiled. "You are right. I wish you to go home. A ship will take you to Carthage. From Carthage you will be given a horse and a pass through the Roman lines. You will find your way, I think, to the army of the south." She paused. "I wish you to give him this."

She took the letter from the desk and held it out.

It was very small. It was a single folded square of papyrus no bigger than the palm of her hand, closed with a plain seal of unmarked black wax. It had taken her three nights to write. She had written it, torn it up, and written it again; she had covered a dozen sheets with drafts, long ones, short ones, formal ones, tender ones, a letter that begged, a letter that threatened, a letter that explained. She had burned them all in the brazier. In the end she had known that none of them would serve. A man who had been given the Lady of Mercy's knife in the heart would read a long letter from the same hand as a long lie. There was only one thing that would reach him. It was short, and it was true, and it hurt her to write.

Kito did not take it at once. He stood looking at the little square in her fingers.

"He will not read it as you hope," he said.

"What do I hope?"

"That he will be moved." The drummer's dark eyes were sad and clear. "I have known him twenty years, lady. I am one of the few who saw him after the cart. He was a different man. Before, they say, he laughed. Afterward he was silent for a year." His voice was very low. "He will read this as a man reads a letter from the woman who killed him. He will read it for the lie."

"Then let him look for it."

"He will find one. He is a clever man."

"Yes," said Claudia, and her voice did not tremble. "I know."

"And then?"

"And then he will come, I think. If only to see my face."

Kito looked at her a moment longer. Then, slowly, he put out his good hand and took the letter, and slipped it inside his tunic, against his breast. He bowed, a short grave bow from the neck.

"You are a very dangerous woman," he said softly.

"So I have been told."

"I think—" He hesitated. "I think that he will come, lady. I do not know whether it is a kindness to say it. But I have seen him look at the sea, in the evenings, with a face I cannot describe. Whatever you did to him, he has not stopped looking."

He went out. The door closed. She stood by the desk with her hands on the cedar and listened to the sound of his uneven footsteps dying away on the marble, and a long time passed before she could breathe.

…

Phoebe was waiting for her in the garden.

It was after midnight, and the moon had risen, and the paths glimmered like strips of silver. The old Greek woman sat on the bench under the fig tree with a shawl drawn over her grey head. She was thirty-nine, now. Her fair hair was shot through with grey, and there were lines about her mouth that had not been there on the night of the wedding, and she sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the dark water of the fountain, looking, in the moonlight, like a statue of patience.

"You are going to Africa," she said.

Claudia stopped on the path. "Who told you?"

"The kitchens. The kitchens always know." Phoebe did not turn her head. "They say you are taking a hundred slaves, and sixty chests, and a litter of white wool. They say you are going to treat with the Tyrant."

"It is the Senate's will."

"It is your will."

Claudia made no answer. She came and sat down on the bench, at the other end, and for a while the two women sat in silence, side by side in the moonlight, with the cool scent of jasmine rising from the borders and the water falling softly in the basin. A moth beat against the lamp on the wall. The night was very still.

"I have been thinking," Phoebe said at last. "For some time. About the night of the storm."

"Phoebe—"

"I have never asked you whose he was. I did not wish to know. I thought: it makes no difference. I held the child and he looked at me, and he had a man's eyes, and I did not ask." Her voice was very quiet. "But when the news came about the Tyrant, I began to think. And when I heard that the lady Claudia was sailing south herself, in the dead of autumn, on a ship of the fleet, to look at an enemy's face…" She turned her head slowly. Her pale grey eyes held Claudia's, and there was no accusation in them, only a vast quiet pity. "I thought: she is going to the man whose son she gave away."

The moth fell from the lamp and lay fluttering on the flagstones.

Claudia said nothing for so long that the water in the fountain seemed to grow loud. Then she drew a long breath, and let it go, and said, very low, "Yes."

"Does he know?"

"No."

"Will you tell him?"

"I do not know."

"Will you tell the boy?"

"Never." The word came out sharp and hard. "Never, Phoebe. You know why. He is a Roman general, he has a wife, a name, an army that adores him. If he knew that his father was the man he is fighting, that his mother was…" She stopped. "It would destroy him."

"It may destroy him in any case."

"Not if I stop this war."

"And if you cannot?" Phoebe's voice was low and unsparing. "If you go to the man you wronged, with a lie in your mouth, and a smile on your face, and a purpose in your heart you will not name even to yourself…" She shook her head. "I do not know what you intend. But I watched you with the Senator for twenty years. I know the look you wear when you have decided what must be done. It is the look of a person standing at the edge of a river, planning how to build the bridge." She hesitated. "And I think, lady, that there is nothing at the other end of this one that you will be able to bear."

Claudia stood up.

She looked down at the old woman on the bench. In the moonlight the white face was as sad and kind and weary as a saint's. She wanted, absurdly, to kneel. She wanted to lay her head in that lap, and cry, and be forgiven. She wanted it with a longing so fierce that she nearly did.

"You were right to say I have not changed," she said instead, in a flat cold voice. "I am what I am. Look after Livia."

"I always have."

"Yes." She turned away. "I know."

…

In the library, by the light of a single lamp, Kito's letter lay for a moment on the corner of the desk where she had left it, before he took it away.

She had written it that afternoon, in the quiet, with a steady hand, on a square of Egyptian papyrus, in plain black ink. It was a single line, no longer than a breath. It bore no address and no name. At the bottom of the sheet, where a name would have been, she had drawn a small crooked sign, hardly bigger than a grain of rice: a winding line, with three short strokes through it, like teeth.

There is a truth you must hear, before one more drop of blood is spilled.