Vonones swore bitterly. The clerks and deputy scattered like quail from the eight-foot apparition with bloody claws. The injured handler writhed on the ground with his hands pressed against his torn abdomen. His fellows sprang up from their own duties. One ran for a net.
Vonones uncoiled his whip in a fluid arc behind him. The ostrich cocked its right leg again. It stood sideways to Vonones, but one black eye glittered at him with cold purpose.
The lash snaked out and around the bird's left ankle. Setting himself, Vonones yanked back on the whipstaff. He might no longer have the shoulder muscles of his younger days, but the weight he had put on was finally an advantage to him. The ostrich flopped back onto the ground. Handlers leaped onto it from three sides.
Vonones dropped the whip when he was sure the bird had been immobilized. He backed away, breathing hard and dusting his hands. A pair of litter bearers belatedly stepped between their master and the commotion that had been a threat moments before.
"That's all right," Vonones muttered, thankful that he was still good enough to make such bodyguards superfluous. "That's all right." He felt better for the incident. It had given him an opportunity to exorcise the helpless terror caused by the lizard-ape's escape. It was uncertainty that melted a man's nerves, not simply danger. It was a relief to return to familiar tasks and familiar dangers. He turned to where his men were seeing to the injured slave's wounds. More expense…
The main gate of the compound began to swing open. The deputy manager ran toward it, shouting. Vonones himself snarled toward the gatekeepers: "Not while we're unloading a shipment, damn you! I'll have you all fed to the crocodiles if so much as a rabbit escapes!"
A column of horsemen in glittering armor rode through the gateway four abreast. The deputy dodged out of their way, but the newcomers made no attempt on their part to avoid him.
There were twenty horsemen in the troop. All but their tribune were huge men whose hair was red or blond where it spilled from beneath their helmets. They dismounted. Every fourth man acted as horseholder while the remainder kept their hands on their weapons.
The officer in charge-a tribune named Lacerta whom Vonones knew by reputation-wore a breastplate of gilded bronze. In low relief upon it was molded a scene of nymphs yearning upward toward the figure of Jupiter enthroned. "You," said Lacerta, pointing toward Vonones. "Do you speak Latin, boy? Go fetch the merchant Vonones."
"I speak Latin," said Vonones. He drew himself to his full height, although he was even then no taller than the Italian-born tribune. Vonones was twice the tribune's age as well; boy was purely from the assumption that the man in leggings and a coarse tunic had to be a slave. At that, an aristocrat like Lacerta might have used the same form of address for a man whom he knew to be the compound's owner. "And I am Gaius Claudius Vonones." He wiped his damp hands on his thighs.
"You're wanted," Lacerta said with a quick one-fingered gesture over his shoulder and out the gate. He frowned. "Get a horse, will you? You'll slow us up too much if we have to tie you to one of the saddles and let you run."
The troop of horsemen would have silenced a human crowd, but it had little effect on the compound's normal cacophony. Even the handlers were forced back to their normal duties by the nervous uproar of the beasts. Three men carried the blood-splashed ostrich to the corral and flung it inside with its fellows. The deputy manager and his clerks hovered between a desire to hear what was going on and a well-founded fear of being noticed. The Germanic horsemen glared about them with pale eyes and disdain for what they saw.
"I am a Roman citizen!" Vonones blurted. He managed to keep his back straight when he heard Lacerta's command, but his voice shook. He was imagining himself alone on an island. Every time his heart beat, the surf washed the shore a little higher.
"A Roman citizen, merchant?" the tribune said in an amused tone. He gestured daintily toward the big men he commanded. "These aren't, you know. And since the one whose orders we obey is divine, I don't suppose he's going to be much swayed by the fact that you became a Roman citizen when your master struck off your chains."
Amusement hardened into a sneer as frigid as the eyes of the armored Germans. "Don't try my patience, freedman. You've the count of ten to get a horse."
Lacerta leaned slightly forward and tapped the god enthroned on his breastplate. "Our lord Domitian told me to bring you alive. But I'm not sure that he'd really care."
Chapter Six
Lycon's bedroom had a window on the light shaft of the apartment house, but it faced west and was six stories beneath the roofline. Lycon stretched, letting his fingers play in the pool of sunlight that had finally reached the bed. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was used to night work and its corollary, sleeping by day. As he grew older, he required increasingly longer periods of recuperation-and a day and a night like the recent chase would have wrung anyone to exhaustion.
The door was closed, but Zoe must have heard the bronze bed creaking as her husband stretched himself on it, and she looked in to see if Lycon were awake. She was nursing their youngest, Glauce, who at three months of age was older than either of the couple's three previous daughters had lived to be-or two of the boys, for that matter. Still, they had two sons to survive infancy-Perses, who could be heard bouncing his ball in the next room, and Alexandros, who was as fine a young lad as a father could wish to have.
"Well, don't hang back there, Zoe," Lycon said, bleary-eyed. He thumped the bed beside him. "Come, let's have a look at you and our little one." Glauce had been born during his absence, and the beastcatcher had forgotten her name for the moment.
Zoe flashed a distracted smile as she lay down beside him. There was an aura of nervousness about her, and she half-heartedly returned Lycon's kiss. Now that he was sober enough to recall it, Lycon realized that Zoe had also been acting oddly last night when he arrived home after stopping over in Ostia to reminisce and forget recent events with Vulpes and a few cronies. He continued to smile, while his belly tightened at the suspicion that Zoe might have taken a lover during his constant absences. If she had, he could not blame her-but neither would he forgive her.
"I told the boys to play outside so they wouldn't disturb you," Zoe said, keeping her eyes on the baby. "But Perses came in saying he was hungry, and I thought I'd better feed them. It's midday."
Lycon yawned and caressed her generous hips. Zoe had put on more weight than he had during their fifteen years of marriage-but by Herakles, she still was the stuff of his dreams on nights when he slept in the mud of another continent, and if he had some rival here in Rome for her love, he would soon learn his name-and then there would be no rival.