Page 2 of Brother at Arms

But I was acquainted with someone who could.

I found myself at the base of the Quirinal, barely recalling how I came to be there. I passed through the Vicus Laci Fundani and took the lane that led to a wine shop and my apartment above it.

Cassia glanced up in surprise when I lumbered into the small room and slammed the door. The long shutters, which leaned against the wall where I’d set them this morning, rattled. A cooling breeze blew through the open windows, stirring Cassia’s hair and the papyrus she currently read.

“You’ve not been gone long.” She made a note in a wax tablet at her elbow, likely recording the time I’d come in. “Did you see the banker?”

I dimly recalled my second errand, to meet a banker in the Forum and deliver a written message from Cassia.

She’d explained about investing the funds I’d earned assisting Gallus the architectus this past year, but I hadn’t understood much of what she’d said. My attention had wandered when she’d started using words like venture and returns.

“No.” I stood in the middle of the L-shaped room, flexing my hands, then moved swiftly to the table we used as an altar to the ancestors.

The small papyrus roll that held Xerxes’s name, which Cassia had taught me to read, remained in the same position as it had this morning. Unmoved, untouched. If Xerxes’s shade wandered Rome, the paper with his name hadn’t responded.

Cassia rose from behind the table, her long tunic, held primly closed at both shoulders, whispering as she came to me.

“What happened? Did the banker refuse to deal with us?”

I wasn’t certain whether she’d believe me or scoff at me—not that Cassia ever scoffed—but I drew a breath and faced her.

“I saw Xerxes.”

Cassia’s perplexed expression became a careful blank. She studied me in her quiet way, her eyes masking her thoughts.

Cassia glanced at the scroll she’d written herself and placed on our makeshift altar to honor Xerxes next to her father.

“Xerxes died,” she said gently.

I gave her a terse nod. “I saw his ghost. Or thought I did.”

I wandered from the altar and sank to a stool, my head in my hands.

Cassia didn’t follow. She stood very still, as though trying to decide what to do with the large and morose gladiator in the middle of her room.

Her quiet voice came to me. “After my father passed, he appeared to me in many places. The road outside the villa, on the way to Rome, here in the streets.” Cassia’s soft footsteps sounded on the stone floor, and a cool hand touched my shoulder. “We so want to see them that our eyes perceive what is not there. As though they are imprinted on us, and we can’t not see them.”

What Cassia said was wise, but I could not surrender to the explanation.

“This was different,” I insisted. “He was so alive. So real. Walked like Xerxes, looked about him like Xerxes. He was in the crowd, not floating through it like a ghost. People bumped into him.”

Cassia resumed her seat at the table and opened another tablet. “There are several possibilities.” She marked the wax with her stylus as she spoke. “One is that you so longed to see Xerxes that your eyes placed him in front of you. Another is that you saw a ghost, which I very much doubt. The third, and most likely possibility, is that you glimpsed a living person who looked remarkably like him.” Cassia jotted down her suggestions and frowned over them.

I raised my head. “Someone who looked exactly like him.”

“Did Xerxes have sons? Besides the lads with Marcella?” Cassia had met the five children Xerxes had left at Marcella’s farm outside the city.

“None old enough to be this man,” I said.

“Did he have other family? Brothers, cousins?”

“Xerxes never spoke of his family.” I pulled my stool to the table to watch her write. She’d taught me some letters, but I didn’t recognize the ones she used now. Cassia often made notes in Greek, her native tongue.

“He’d been a slave,” Cassia prompted.

“On a farm.” I recalled what little Xerxes had told me about his past. He’d been a man concerned only about the present, and that, not very much. “Early mornings, smelly beasts, too much work. I don’t know if he was born on that farm or sold there—he never said. When Aemil was recruiting for his ludus, the farmer sold Xerxes to him. He wasn’t called Xerxes until after he came to the ludus. The name was Aemil’s idea.”

“Do you know who this farmer was?”