II: Safe Passage

Barely an hour out of Rome, Quintus began to regret his decision to hire a covered farm wagon that had been built for service, not comfort. Each jolt of the wheels over uneven ground sent hard shocks through the wagon frame and into his bones. He could not imagine how the Gaul looked so relaxed, lounging against a hay bale in the farthest corner of the wagon. He appeared nearly asleep, his head nodding forward and his hair falling in thick blond tangles over his broad shoulders. He was bare-chested—altogether too bare for Quintus’s liking.

Himself, Quintus had resolved to stay awake as long as he could. They might have left Rome unchallenged, but he was keenly aware of the danger he and Lucia were in. While Pompey had courted the favor of the Sanguine court, Gaius Julius Caesar had shown only contempt for the nocturnal citizens of Rome and their way of life. He had already appointed that drunk puppet of his as the People’s Tribune, and the first proposal Antony laid before the Senate was one outlawing the consumption of human blood by any Roman citizen. Once Caesar took full control of the city, Quintus had no doubt that more laws would follow, laws guaranteeing the extermination of the Sanguine. The Sanguine might have become indolent, abandoning their warring and their blood-mongering, but it was simply too dangerous for Caesar to permit the existence of an immortal people allied with his enemy.

Then, of course, there was the danger present in this very cart. Gwynn, for all his pretended devotion to Lucia, was still a Gaul captured from his homeland and made a slave to a people he despised. Doubtless he would betray them at the first opportunity.

Lucia spoke, and, startled, Quintus did not catch her words at first.

“Come to Egypt with us,” she repeated.

He shook his head and looked quickly away from her. Fleeing for her life in the middle of the night, she yet looked more beautiful as ever, with alabaster skin and rose petals lips, shining eyes and masses of curls of a deeper, richer red than her scarlet traveling cloak. Looking at her was like being struck in the gut, a reminder of why he’d had to distance himself from her in the first place.

“Quintus.”

“I have responsibilities,” he murmured, staring at the gray dawn through a small tear in the canvas covering the wagon body. “Someone has to help Pompey fight for the Republic.”

“Soldiers fight, but you are no soldier.” She leaned forward intently. “You used to be a poet, do you remember? A statesman, a man of words. That was the man I married. Do you remember?”

Quintus held himself still, fighting the tension spider-webbing through his veins. “Sometimes men of words must become men of action. Don’t try and dissuade me, Lucia. My mind’s made up.”

She turned away, stony-faced.

Frustration ate at his insides. Why she played these games, as if she still cared for him, he couldn’t fathom. She should loathe him for all he’d done to her.

The tiny hairs on the back of Quintus’s neck lifted. He glanced at Gwynn and found the big Gaul staring openly at him from under heavy eyelids. He held the stare until Quintus gave in and looked away angrily.

“I would buy you a dozen new slaves,” he said suddenly, in Greek, “if you would leave this one behind and not take him to Egypt with you.”

Without looking, he felt the weight of Lucia’s gaze return to him. The Gaul’s irritation was tangible, the bitter scent of suspicion rising on the air. He had mastered the language of the Romans well enough, but knew nothing of the Greek tongue. For Quintus, it was one more reminder of the savage he truly was.

Lucia’s eyes were bright green, revealing none of her thoughts. Still, she spoke in Greek. “Why would you ask me such a thing?”

“You must have considered the possibility that your Gallic pet will want his freedom. I know him well enough to know he is heartless, that he will have no qualms in using you to gain that freedom.”

“He will not betray us, Quintus.” Lucia sighed. “He loves me, and I love him. Do you remember at least what love is?”

“Love is found in poetry, and only there. It will not tether him to you, certainly not at the cost of his liberty.”

“He already has it. He is free. I freed him.”

“You did what?”

“He hired himself out to the butcher and brought me the price I asked for his release.”

“In less than one year? What price did you ask, a copper? Two?” He stared at her in disbelief and creeping fury. “It was a very stupid decision, Lucia.”

“You gave him to me. It was my stupid decision to make.”

Anger made his stomach churn, his fangs descending silently from twin sheaths and biting into the inside of his lip, the taste of blood on his tongue. The Sanguine hunger, always accompanying rage, began to burn in his bones. “Why is he still here then?”

She looked at him again with a look of tired resignment. “We love each other,” she said, in Latin again, and shifted to sit nearer the Gaul, slipping her tiny hand into the his much larger one. Gwynn tightened his fingers around her, his gaze inscrutable on Quintus.

_____________________________

Quintus had loved Lucia Acilius for as long as he could remember. They had been friends since she found him, nine years old and too pretty for a boy, thrashed by a group of older boys and left scuffed and scraped in a mud pit on the side of the road by the Acilius house. Lucia had only been six years old but already lovely, round-cheeked and bright-eyed, her hair a mass of tight red curls that bounced on her shoulders when she skipped. Another child might have run on past the boy in the mud, but even then Lucia had the biggest heart of anyone Quintus had ever known. Without saying a word, she descended into the mud and helped him out, and brought him to her nursemaid to clean and stitch.

At first Quintus saw Lucia as a younger sister, a pretty thing to be petted and brought presents. He had few friends, however, due to his decidedly less than masculine softness, his attraction to all things beautiful. Lucia soon moved into the position of chief companion and co-conspirator. As Quintus passed from childhood into his early teenage years, it was only Lucia who knew of his passion for words, only she who understood how the music of rhyme and verse lured him.

In turn, Lucia confided in Quintus her fear that she would never be allowed to find love. It was the way of marriage; once she reached a suitable age, it was only to be expected that her parents would give her to a man of their choosing, whether he be young or old, cruel or kind. But Quintus vowed that Lucia would never suffer at the hands of a man, that he would be the only man to possess her. And because his family was well-respected, because Quintus was stubborn, it came to be.

They married the winter Lucia turned seventeen, when Quintus was twenty. Soon after during the festival of Lupercalia, Lucia held her hand out to be struck by the leather februa thong, that she might have luck and conceive a child. The februa did its intended work, and two months later she became pregnant. But the februa did not safeguard her delivery, and after two full days of labor, Lucia birthed a stillborn son. The lost son was not the worst of it; Lucia had lost far too much blood during her ordeal, and the physicians reported her unlikely to last through the night.

For the ill and the dying in Rome, there was yet one hope left to them. On the Argiletum, there stood a demure temple devoted to Bacchus and tended by seven elder Sanguine priests. It was these priests who safeguarded the secret rites of the Sanguine, and the ways in which a mortal man might become an immortal spirit of darkness. If the ailing individual had a fat enough purse, and if the elder looked into his soul and found him worthy, he might be granted entrance into this second life.

Quintus knew little of the Sanguine, only rumors of cold-eyed men and woman of immeasurable strength, and nighttime rituals involving the consumption of human blood. All these things brought a shudder to his flesh, but when he knew Lucia would die, he called for a litter and brought her at once to the temple.

They were met by an elder who looked no older than thirty years, his face long and smooth and white, his eyes shining like bright blue jewels from under his cowl. While Quintus stuttered and fumbled for his money belt, the vampire took Lucia into his arms. He stared down at her with an unreadable gaze.

“Dulcis parvulus,” he murmured. “Do you want to be one of us? Walking under the light of stars and moon but never sun, eating the sins of mortal men and bearing the burden of their fear and hate? Is this what you want?”

“Please,” Quintus said, in sudden terror of Lucia’s answer. “She can’t speak well, she’s too weak. Whatever price you name—”

The elder held up his hand to stop him. “Lucia Acilius, answer me.”

For a moment it had seemed she couldn’t, hanging still and pale in his arms. At last she opened her eyes, moaned, and tried to speak, her lips moving but no more than a whisper of a sound passing between them. The elder leaned close, listening.

When he straightened, he looked back at Quintus. “She will enter into the Dark Life only if you chose to accompany her. Else, she had rather wait for you in Elysium.”

“I will go with her wherever she goes.”

“It is no light decision. Those who chose carelessly may find themselves locked in an eternity of hell.”

Quintus didn’t know how to explain it. This was Lucia. This was his one love, his heart’s only desire. The only dark path was the one he walked without her.

“If the fold of the Sanguine will have me,” he said, “I will enter this life with her.”

For another moment the priest studied him, and then nodded. “Come,” he said, and still carrying Lucia, led him into the shadows deep within the temple.

So Quintus and Lucia both became vampires in a single night, to live from then on in darkness, drinking the blood of the mortals who presented themselves willingly at the temple, and when new laws were passed, surviving on the blood of oxen from butchers.

But for all the newness of life and each other, neither could quite forget that great loss they had suffered as mortals, the death of their son. Day by day, Quintus felt the distance broadening between them. Their speech together became awkward, and the understanding they had once shared felt shattered at some point neither could recall. When they lay in bed together, they did not touch, and at last Quintus moved himself into a new bedroom where he could sleep through the day without the strain of a distant lover beside him.

Unable to bear the silence any longer, Quintus made plans to leave Rome. Caesar and the Thirteen Legion were fighting the savages in Gaul, claiming the land for Rome. The promise of an undiscovered wilderness drew Quintus as once poetry had drawn him; what better place to renew his spirit than an untamed land of magic and hemlocks, tribal chieftains with blue painted faces?

He left Lucia with all of his money, arrangements made with several butchers to keep her supplied with the finest oxen blood, a dozen of Egypt’s finest guardsmen to protect her. He had left Lucia in Rome, and went to Gaul to forget himself.

Perhaps he had forgotten too well. Well enough that he had left himself vulnerable to a dangerous Gallic warrior who made him feel things he had never felt before. He had betrayed Lucia; he did not think he would ever lose the guilt of that betrayal.