Killer

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.

"No, no," Lycon told her. "I could have got up any time. It just felt so good to lie in for a change. No responsibilities. No beasts stalking me in turn. It's good to be home."

Home was Zoe and their children. It pleased Lycon that he could afford an apartment-quite a nice apartment, too: spacious and only one flight up. Vonones might have far more wealth, but Vonones had neither wife nor acknowledged children, and Lycon sensed that his friend envied him for this. As consciousness cut through Lycon's hangover, he decided he was a fool to suspect Zoe of infidelity. True, he might not be the best of husbands and fathers, but Zoe had known that before they were married.

Zoe rocked the baby back and forth as though the motion would settle the correct words onto her own tongue. "Perhaps you'd like something to eat now, also. Just a second and I'll bring some bread…"

Lycon's arm anchored her as effortlessly as he would have immobilized a gazelle while it was being trussed-though there was little enough of the gazelle in Zoe's figure these days. "Here, just sit by me a minute, Zoe," he said mildly. "I'll be going to the bath in a little while, I suppose, and I may get something to eat there."

He paused, thinking over what Zoe had said a moment before and correlating that with dimly remembered scraps of conversation he had overheard while he dozed. "Alexandros isn't at school, then, today?"

Zoe turned her body away from her husband, placing Glauce against her other breast. "Well, Alexandros hasn't been going to school for some time now-for twenty days." Zoe spoke into the infant's fluffy hair. "There was trouble. You know, the whippings they get if Sempronianus doesn't like their recitations?"

"Alexandros is going to need an education, if we're going to get him into the Civil Service, Zoe," Lycon said-almost gladly. It was a relief to understand now the reason for his wife's unease. Nothing here a good belting couldn't solve.

"I know, Lycon, I…"

"Or maybe you'd like me to start taking him with me on hunting trips, is that it?" Lycon went on, knowing that Zoe loathed that idea. She had already lost too many children-and most of her life with her husband. "I'd thought that, hadn't I? But no, it would be too dangerous. We owed him something better."

The beastcatcher swung himself off the bed. Despite his words, he had not raised his voice. A long-cherished dream was now unexpectedly within his reach; Lycon was already envisioning Alexandros at his side, watching lions group about their watering hole.

He pressed home his next point, already only for rhetoric. "Do you think cadging a ticket for the dole and picking up what he can in the way of petty theft is a better way of life?"

"I said," Zoe continued firmly, "that when you got home we'd find him another schoolmaster. I…"

"And just what is wrong with Sempronianus?" Lycon demanded in triumph. "He's the best I could afford."

Lycon continued to fume in Zoe's silence. "All right, he caned the boys-but none of the masters are going to suffer fools gladly. It's a tough world out there, Zoe, just as tough in the offices on the Palatine as it is for some unlettered dolt like me-beating through the reeds on the Nile. We won't do the boy any favors to teach him that if he whines, he won't have to do anything he doesn't want to do. I wish you'd waited for me to get back."

Zoe swallowed and sat up to face him. "Do you remember Rachel-on the fourth floor? Their Moises goes to Sempronianus too. Rachel, she… Moises told her that sometimes there are boys who are being caned for mistakes every day, every time they recite, no matter how well they do. And then Sempronianus takes them alone into one of the massage cubicles-the class meets in the Baths of Naevius. Afterward… that boy doesn't have trouble with his recitations for a week or so."

Lycon's lips were dry. They would not form the words. He dampened them very carefully with the tip of his tongue. His tongue seemed dry as well. "Go on," he said without emotion, as he reached for his boots.

"Alexandros won't go to class anymore. And I won't make him go."

"Well, well," murmured Lycon, as he laced onto his feet the army pattern footgear he had worn in from the field. Normally he switched to lighter sandals whenever he was going to spend any length of time in a civilized area. "Who's the slave you were sending to school with Alexandros? Geta? I'll want him along."

"Lycon," Zoe began, "I just thought it might be better if we found Alexandros another schoolmaster."

Lycon stamped his foot and enjoyed the sound. Hobnails were a detriment to a man walking on slimy pavement. The iron skidded instead of biting as it did in soil-or in flesh.

"Zoe," the beastcatcher said, in a voice as hard as the iron he had just ground against the floor, "I've just decided that Alexandros will be better off with me in the field than he will be here in Rome learning to recite Homer. I think I'm going to discuss that with Master Sempronianus. I'm certain he will agree."

"Lycon!" Zoe pleaded, as she rose and stepped toward him with her free hand outstretched. "You mustn't do anything hasty!"

"I'm not going to do anything hasty," Lycon promised, his tone a confirmation of her worst fears.

Perses stared open-mouthed as his father strode out of the bedchamber. Lycon's household was small; the four slaves were barely the minimum staff that respectability demanded for a man at his level of success. The slaves had ducked out of sight in healthy fear of meeting their master in his present state of mind. Perses' nurse reached out toward the three-year-old boy, bleated when she saw Lycon coming from the bedroom, and bolted back into the kitchen without her charge.

Lycon's walking staff was iron-shod hickory, and as big around as the beastcatcher's own powerful wrists. He snatched it with one hand, while he jerked open the door to the stairwell with the other. The family's doorkeeper was cowering in his alcove.

Vonones stood on the landing with his hand raised to knock. He looked terrified. The two men blocking the stairs behind him were soldiers.

"Lycon, thank the Light I've caught you at home," the dealer gasped.

"Whatever it is, it can wait!" snapped Lycon as he started to push past. Zoe and one of the female servants were in the main room, wailing like mourners.

"It can't wait," Vonones said.