Page 107 of Firebird
“Have you not all heard, and some of you here seen with your own eyes, Caesar’s most recent humiliation? That he took Otho’s new bride in front of all the nobles of Rome? Have you not witnessed yourself in recent years, for those who were there, how he raped other Romans’ wives and daughters?”
I held my fingers up one at a time as I named them.
“Clarissa Media Nocte Isthmus. Leta Chrysocolla Evander. Phaedra Amethystus Opius. Sylva Sapphirus Thetis.”
I glanced toward Gaius on the last. She was the daughter of his cousin, now a ghost of the proud woman she was.
“And do not forget that Leta took her own life rather than live with the violation done to her. Now these women,Romanwomen, must hide themselves in shame and fear that he may choose them again for his sport or his manipulative games to control us.”
I scoffed and looked from man to man, ensuring they were listening. They were.
“Trust me, gentlemen, he’s not simply putting the men in placewho have offended them with these tactics. He’s making sure each and every one of you know that he can destroy you by destroying those you love if you do not doexactlywhat he wants.”
I paused and held Horatius’s hard gaze. He was the only Griseo in the senate, a tribune elected by the people because of his renown in the gladiator arenas. He would’ve heard of but not seen these atrocities. But he’d experienced others.
“And this is how he treatsnobles. Let us not forget the barbarity with which he treats the plebeians and the slaves.”
My heart lurched at the thought of Malina, but I kept my focus.
“I have a story to tell you. The other day when I met with Trajan and Gaius in the forum, I noticed a man in half-skin staked to a wall. Dead.” I glanced at Trajan, who frowned, for I hadn’t yet told him of my discovery. “I put my man Koska to work. You may know he helps me on war campaigns, but he’s also a wealth of information and knows how to find it.”
I’d let my voice even out and lower to a calm timbre. Gaius stepped forward, his face etched with concern.
“The man, a dragon of the Amethystus house, who’d been killed for his crime in half-skin, had apparently fallen for the butcher’s daughter. She was a plebeian and not a noble. He decided to defy Caesar’s law that nobles must not marry outside their class and secretly married her anyway. Not only that but he also got his young wife with child. This was reported to his legatus, General Sabinus.”
I stepped closer to them, hands clasped at my back.
“His crimes of marrying the woman he loved from a lower class and getting her with child may have been forgiven if he’d promised to kill the child at birth or send it to the faraway gladiator pits on the other side of the empire and divorce his young bride quietly. But this man did something worse.”
“He planned a coup,” said Appius, his voice rusty with emotion.
I nodded to him. “He did. He confided in his brothers, the soldiershe was closest to in his regiment under General Sabinus. But one of them lost his courage and reported it to Sabinus, and he took no time to tell Caesar, who gave the order to stake the man. All of his soldier brothers were killed too and dumped in the Tiber River, no rites or gods’ blessings for any of them.”
“His name was Vincentus. I would honor him now if only in a silent prayer that his soul finds its way to the underworld.”
Thick silence fell over us all, only the light trickle of the fountain making any sound. As for me, I did send a prayer to the gods for Vincentus and his wife. It was Horatius who spoke up first.
“What happened to his pregnant wife?”
I turned to him. “She took her own life with her husband’s gladius.”
Someone cursed and another hissed at the pity of it.
“Hear me now, gentlemen. This is only one instance, and I haven’t even mentioned his increasing taxes he’s enforced on nobles and merchants alike. If you believe his orgies and his carnivorous rites are all he is capable of, you are wrong. If you believe the laws he’s enacted with his puppets, the consuls, have put Rome in a sad state, I promise you now they are only a prelude of what is to come. Stories like those of Vincentus will be commonplace by the time my uncle is done. But I for one would rather go the way of Vincentus than to watch us continue to be crushed and choked in the tyrant’s fist.”
For a solid minute, no one spoke as they let my decree sink in. Because I knew with all my heart that my uncle was just getting started. Debauchery and violence and degradation were what made him happiest. He wouldn’t stop until he was crammed fat with it all. And Rome would be a hell on earth.
Appius was the first to speak. “Then we will be the liberators of Rome.” He turned to look at his fellow senators, his deep voice resonating across the terrace. “We will take the risk and sacrifice our lives if necessary.”
“Hear, hear!” called Horatius. Though a senator, he was built tall and strong, and I was glad to have him on our side.
Others joined in, nodding and agreeing with “hear, hear.”
Gaius beamed at me with pride, and I was struck for a moment with a memory of my father when he would look at me that way. A maudlin thread tightened around my gut with my realization that I had no family left. Except Malina.
Malina.My heart ached and cracked at the thought of her now.
Gods, protect her.
