Mistress of Rome Read Online Free PDF

front of the crowd. “Look, there they are!”
    I peered over Pollio’s shoulder. The shrine of Juno, goddess of marriage—and the tall ruddy-cheeked young man beside the priest must be the bridegroom. He was in high spirits, jostling and joking with his attendants. “He’s handsome,” Lepida announced. “Fat, though. Don’t you think?”
    Marcus looked amused. “The Flavians tend toward heaviness,” he said mildly. “A family trait.”
    “Oh. Well, he’s not really fat, is he? Just imposing .”
    The blast of Imperial trumpets brazened in our ears. Servants in Imperial livery began to wind past. The Praetorian Guard lined the road in their ceremonial breastplates and red plumes, making way for the bride. “Is that Lady Julia?” Lepida craned her neck.
    I studied the Emperor’s niece curiously—the one who supposedly wanted to be a Vestal Virgin. She was very small, her hair straw-pale, her figure straight and childlike in the white robe. The flaming bridal veil drew all the color out of her face. Her pale lips were smiling, but she didn’t really look—well, bridal.
    “She doesn’t have the complexion for red,” my mistress said, too softly for her betrothed to hear. “Her skin’s like an unripe cheese. I’ll look much better at my wedding.”
    The bridal pair joined hands at the shrine, speaking the ritual words: Quando tu Gaius, ego Gaia. They exchanged the ritual cake, the rings. The marriage contracts were signed. The priest intoned prayers, and a bellowing white bull gave its blood in a gout over the marble steps as a sacrifice to Juno. Usually Imperial weddings were conducted more privately, but Emperor Domitian was a lover of public pomp. So was the public.
    “She should smile,” Lepida criticized. “No one wants to see a bride looking like a corpse on her own wedding day.”
    Before the procession, the groom had to wrest his bride from her mother’s arms in symbolic theft. Lady Julia’s mother was dead; her uncle stood in for her. She folded the red veil back over her pale hair and walked meekly into his arms. As the bridegroom used both hands to jerk her away, my gaze shifted to the Emperor.
    He was a tall man, vigorous and well made, a little more than twice my age, reflecting back the sun in his gold-embroidered purple cloak and golden circlet. Thickset Flavian shoulders that would run to fat in his old age. Ruddy cheeks and broad, friendly features.
    My eyes shifted back to his niece, huddled in the arm of her new husband. I felt sorry for her. A slave feeling sorry for a princess—I don’t know why. Then her eyes shifted, falling for a moment on mine, and in the instant before I dropped my gaze to the ground I saw that on the day of her own wedding—a bright and beautiful spring day when the whole world stretched before her—Lady Julia Flavia felt lost and terrified and alone.
    “Well, that’s that!” Pollio clapped his hands, and I jumped. “We’d better go on to the arena. The first show is very splendid, I assure you. I found a dozen of the strangest striped horses from an African trader; he called them zebras—”
    On Senator Norbanus’s suggestion, we took a hired litter on a shortcut through Mars Street. I trotted behind on foot while Lepida squeezed in beside her betrothed, hanging on his every word, looking up at him through long black lashes. A spider reeling in the fly.
    Pollio was still droning on about how clever he had been to buy twenty tigers at a bargain price from India when the litter was forced to pull up short. A huge cart blocked the road, ironbound and padlocked, and a litter borne by six golden-haired Greeks. As we watched, a gate barred like a prison swung open and a team of men marched out. Armor gleamed beneath their purple cloaks as they climbed into the wagon, and their faces were somber under their helmets. Gladiators, on their way to the Colosseum.
    “Gallus’s fighters.” Pollio twitched back the curtains for a better look, frowning.