Rome's Executioner Read Free Page B

provided any satisfaction, exercise or excitement; but this morning that too had been an anti-climax.
    Vespasian shot at the prone form of the stag in irritation; the arrow passed through its neck and skewered it to the forest floor. He immediately chided himself for acting out of pique and failing to show due respect for the creature that had so bravely tried to evade him for the last hour. He pushed his way through the undergrowth and, after muttering a perfunctory prayer of thanks to Diana, goddess of hunting, over the dead animal he took out his knife and began to eviscerate the still warm body. He consoled himself with the thought that his four years in the army were over; March was coming to an end and the sea lanes were reopening after winter, his replacement would arrive soon. Soon he would be going back to Rome with the prospect of advancement, a junior magistrate’s post, one of the Vigintiviri and also, as importantly, the prospect of seeing Caenis, Antonia’s secretary. She flickered before his eyes as he worked his blade in and out of the stag’s belly; her delicate, moist lips, her sparkling blue eyes so full of love and grief as she had said goodbye to him; her lithe body, naked before him in the dim light of a single oil lamp on the one and only night that they had slept together. He wanted to hold her again, to smell and taste her, to have her for his own; but how could that be? She was still a slave and, according to the law, could not be manumitted until she was at least thirty. He worked his blade harder and faster as he contemplated the futility of the situation. Even if she were freed he could never marry her as he had dreamed of doing with the naivety of a sixteen-year-old; someone of his position, with his ambition, could never take a freedwoman as a wife. He could, however, keep her as his mistress, but then how would that be for the woman whom he would take as his wife? She would just have to live with it, he decided as he pulled the last scrapings of offal from the carcass.
    ‘I could have put a dozen arrows in you in the time that I’ve been sitting here.’
    Vespasian started and spun round, cutting his thumb on the knife in the process. Magnus sat on a horse, twenty paces away, grinning as he levelled his hunting bow at him.
    ‘Hades, you gave me a fright,’ Vespasian exclaimed, shaking his injured hand.
    ‘You’d have had more of a fright if I’d been a Thracian rebel and shot this arrow up your arse, sir.’
    ‘Yes, well, you’re not and you didn’t,’ Vespasian said, calming down slightly and sucking the mixture of his and the stag’s blood from his thumb. ‘Why were you creeping up on me anyway?’
    ‘I weren’t creeping sir, I rode and I was making as much noise as a century of new recruits saying goodbye to their mothers.’ Magnus lowered the bow. ‘You were just too lost in your own world to notice, and, if I may point out the obvious, sir, that’s how you get to be dead.’
    ‘Yes, I know, it was stupid of me, but I’ve got a lot on my mind, Magnus,’ Vespasian admitted, rising to his feet.
    ‘Well, you’re going to have a lot more on your mind very soon.’
    ‘How so?’
    ‘You’ve got a visitor: your brother arrived at the garrison late this morning.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You heard.’
    ‘What’s Sabinus doing here?’
    ‘Now how would I know that? But I would hazard a guess that he ain’t come all this way just for a nice brotherly chat. He told me to come and find you as quickly as possible so let’s get going. Where’s your horse?’
    By the time they had found Vespasian’s hunting slaves and strapped his kill on to his horse it was well into the afternoon. The thickly overcast sky had brought an early dusk to the forest floor and they were forced to lead their horses for fear of them stumbling in the fading light. Vespasian walked next to Magnus, contemplating what could have brought his brother hundreds of miles to talk to him, and started to assume