Marcus frowned. “Are you speaking of being made dictator, sir? I don’t think . . . it would be difficult for me to argue . . .”
The general squeezed the decurion’s shoulder. “I know. There would be howls of protest that there’s no crisis for such power to be granted to one man. I only ask for my term to be extended. The Senate may well break with precedent given the circumstances.”
The Aemilian’s grimace deepened. Such a request was unlikely to be granted.
Camillus did not seem to notice his unease. “You must also break the news that Vel Mastarna is now king. He is no ordinary ruler. We must be wary.” He clapped Marcus on the back. “I have faith in your ability to gain your father’s support. It’s time you thought to your future as well. You’re thirty and have served in the army with distinction for ten years. You should stand for election as a military tribune. Your war record rivals mine at your age. And when I add my support and my friends’ to those of Aemilius’s, you’ll be sure to be elected this winter. I will help you canvas votes.”
Marcus straightened. Pinna smiled, recognizing his pride. The promise of advancement was seductive. Her Wolf knew how to stroke a man’s ego while feeding his ambition.
“And tell no one in camp of what Artile has said. I wish to know the Senate’s decision before I raise the men’s hopes.”
Artile twisted each ring on his fingers in turn. “Please, Furius Camillus. Without you at my side, I might be executed when I set foot in Rome.”
Her Wolf adjusted his balteus so the lanyard lay precisely on the diagonal across his chest. Then he placed his helmet on his head, buckling it beneath his bearded chin. “I’ll send a message to the Senate that you have ambassadorial status. As such, your presence is safeguarded.” He glared at the seer. “I face ridicule for putting my faith and support behind you. Our fates are now joined, priest. You better not be wrong.”
ELEVEN
Pinna savored the times she could massage the general, but he was not the only soldier she tended. Every day she would call on Claudius Drusus to change his dressings.
The knight’s body had been rent from shoulder to groin by Vel Mastarna in the Battle of Blood and Hail. When Marcus had ridden through the retreating Roman troops to find his best friend, he’d thought Drusus was dead at the feet of the Etruscan. It was a miracle that the Claudian had survived.
She could not forget seeing Marcus return to the camp with Drusus slumped in front of him on his horse. The decurion had been fraught as he begged her to save his friend.
Death hovered over Drusus, ready to steal his breath. Marcus stayed almost as close, visiting him whenever free from his duties. His vigil made him pale and drawn as he also recovered from the injury to his forearm sustained in the conflict.
In truth, the wounded Drusus should have been sent home to be cared for by his family. Instead Marcus insisted a warrior would want to die on a camp cot rather than in a soft bed. “You’re the one who has the most to lose if he dies, Pinna,” he said. “He lives, or I will tell Camillus that you were a whore.”
The wound was gruesome. She thought there wouldn’t be honey enough to soothe it or wax enough to seal the bindings. Every day she checked for pus or blackened, dying flesh. The length of the gash was such that it was unlikely some part of it would fail to be infected.
The cut was not the only damage that had been inflicted. His shoulder had been dislocated, his collarbone smashed, and some of his ribs broken. The pain kept him immobile. Drusus’s groans were pitiful each time he shifted on his pallet. She hated how he strove to stifle his moans when she wiped away encrusted blood. She would have preferred him to voice his agony. The restraint of sound seemed only to emphasize his torment.
Before the battle, hating him had become a habit. She knew Drusus loathed her, too, for he had once raped her. Although, as a prostitute, she could not assert he’d committed such a crime. That did not mean she didn’t have power over him. The knowledge that she could reveal his baseness to her Wolf made him nervous and bitter. There would only be contempt for a man who needed to force himself upon a whore. And Drusus longed for the general’s admiration. He couldn’t afford for Pinna to provide a reason to Camillus to overlook him for promotion. And so, until the battle, they’d been locked in a tense struggle, each balancing the secret of the other and fearing exposure.
The night in the lupanaria still haunted her—a nightmare from which she would often wake in panic. How Drusus had clamped his hand over her face as he’d abused her, making her feel like nothing, filling her with terror that she might suffocate.
Yet her disgust for the russet-haired Claudian had now receded. His anguish touched her. Where once he’d been menacing, he now was vulnerable.
The fever came on the second night. As evening fell, his temperature rose. His skin burned to the touch, and he groaned with both the hurt of the slashed skin and the soreness in his bones. When she peeled back the bandages, she was dismayed to see the section of the wound on his hip was seeping, the skin around the knots swollen and red. She implored Mater Matuta to save him.
In his delirium, he clasped her hand, his fingers bands of iron, his voice rasping and low. She bent her ear close to his mouth.
“Don’t leave me, Caecilia.”
She frowned. In his confusion, he thought she was the love of his youth. A love that was dangerous and forbidden.
Drusus’s call to the traitoress brought memories flooding back of when she’d first met him. Not the brutal encounter in the lupanaria but a year earlier. Back to a night where ghouls squabbled with ghosts for space in the graveyard of the Campus Martius.
Seeking shelter from a storm, she’d spied Drusus lurking in the sepulcher of his Claudian family. Marcus had been with him. She’d been astonished to watch Drusus engrave a curse onto a defixio lead sheet, then hammer it into the wall. Black magic was the practice of women and the weak minded, not of rich warriors. And when Marcus had read the curse aloud, she’d stifled disbelief to hear it was Vel Mastarna’s destruction that Drusus sought.
Pinna’s confusion doubled when Marcus departed from the tomb. Alone in the dark, the Claudian was not finished invoking the spirits. Weeping, he’d engraved a love spell on a second defixio. It was an enchantment to regain the love of a girl who’d chosen an enemy.
Pinna’s knowledge gave her power. Wasn’t the knight also traitorous for loving Aemilia Caeciliana? And a death penalty awaited those who used the dark arts to kill a man. What kind of warrior resorted to magic instead of using a sword? She’d threatened to display both defixios on the speakers’ platform in the Forum, but Drusus had paid her to keep silent. Yet when he later stumbled upon her in the brothel, he’d not believed she would continue to keep her promise.