Lawyers in Hell by Janet Morris, Chris Morris

stood amid the rose garden, appropriately spattered in rain and framed by floodwaters.
    “I’ll scour up another one,” Julius said.  “We’ll get something.  That fool Memmius lost a raft of them into the bay.  They come on the market.”
    “It took a century to get her!” Augustus said.
    “And our alternatives?” Julius said … and noticed, oddly enough, that Dante Alighieri had come out of the house, ahead of two Scorpion Guards in hot pursuit.
    The scholarly little Italian was no athlete.  They had him before he reached the gate.  And Cicero didn’t even notice.  The two Mesopotamian bruisers got to the gate first, snagged the little poet up, each by an arm, and carried him off, screaming … which did get Cicero’s attention.  The genteel old man cast a look that way, raised an eyebrow, and looked at Julius.
    “One of the houseguests,” Julius said.  “Late.  You wouldn’t know him.  A poet.  Quite fond of Vergilius.  Based a lot on him.”
    “Ah,” Cicero said.  “Does he give recitals?”
    “For a select few,” Julius said.  “Of course – our friends are invited.  We can ask Vergilius himself.  If you’d be interested.”
    “A traditional fellow?  None of this Beat poetry.”
    “Oh, absolutely traditional,” Julius said.  “Best of the new Old School.  Cheer up, nephew.  We’ll find another Praxiteles.  ‘Prometheus and his Vulture,’ maybe.”
    “Not funny,” Augustus said.  “I love that statue.  The old goat is aiming this straight at me.  And where did I deserve it?”
    “Your adopted brothers owe you one,” Julius said.  “Let’s get this thing signed, get ink dry on the line and get that statue moved, the roses dug, and the whole transaction done today, before something worse happens.  Galba.”
    “Master.”
    “Tell Niccolo.  The bushes could stand thinning as is.  Tell him we can’t wait for the weather.”
    The house door shut, on Dante and his problems.
    “All right, all right,” Augustus said, downcast.  “I’ll sign it.  Damn him.”
    *
    It was a damned downpour.  Niccolo was soaked to the skin and had no help.  Dante, damn him to a nether circle of hell, was sitting warm and dry in the basement and they daren’t let him out until it all had blown over.  So Niccolo Machiavelli got the job of pruning, wrapping, then digging up ten prickly, man-high rose trees, shaping and wrapping their rootballs – the damned roots moved when insulted, and stabbed you if you hung on.  Then, solo, in the rain and cursing Dante all the way, he turned the ten thorny, muddy, burlapped bundles over to the armored, uniformed bevy of regulation legion engineers, who showed up with a noisy truck and a small flatbed load of timbers, regular legionaries, and chain.
    Niccolo wrapped himself in spare burlap and slogged over to the shelter of the portico, ordering a passing servant to fetch him a mocha latte.  “Grandissimo.  And very hot.”
    Then he tucked up in a chair, unwilling to hose off twice.  He’d have work to do when the engineers had their go.  If something was going to go wrong, if somehow they ended up missing a rosebush and in technical violation of the agreement, giving the old lecher a way to wiggle – well, Niccolo Machiavelli wasn’t going to let that happen.  They didn’t have mocha lattes in the nether circles of hell.  They didn’t have a lot of things, and Niccolo, who’d had his personal dose of dungeon life, didn’t intend to let anybody screw up.
    Besides, they’d gotten a rumor of what one of Erra’s Seven had done to a complainant in court.
    No.  Niccolo wasn’t going to go there.  Niccolo wasn’t going to make a mistake.
    Boards thumped and boomed down off the truck.  The legion engineers, likewise dripping wet, supervising a handful of legionaries, poor sods, who hammered down the disturbed earth and laid planks.  Then while Machiavelli shivered under the portico, and huddled in dry burlap, being