The Queen's Handmaid by Tracy L. Higley Page A

like a city unto itself, and they paused before descending for Varius to point out its highlights—the Via Sacra winding through basilicas and the Temple of Vesta, the Curia Julia where the Senate would meet once the building was finished.
    “They’ve been at it for years now, but it was Julius Caesar who began the project, and it seems to have fallen off since his death. Perhaps the new Caesar will finish it. Or perhaps when he has his way, there will be no need for a Senate at all.”
    “If the Curia is not finished, where do they meet now?” Octavia had mentioned that the Senate would convene to vote on Herod’s request. Would it be somewhere below?
    “In the Theatre of Pompey, some distance from here. It’s a magnificent theater, with a large quadriporticus behind for strolling and shopping before and after the dramas, and there is a curia in the rear where the Senate meets.” Varius led her down the path toward the Forum. “It was on those steps where Julius Caesar met his end.”
    They descended the path, then the steps that led into the Forum as the sun also lowered behind the western end of the Forum, bathing the white marble forest in a pinkish hue. She hurried Varius along, concerned about the setting sun and Octavia left so long alone. But she wished to linger, to take in every moment of it—the way the stones felt under her feet, the breeze that went from cool and feathery on the hill to warm and humid as they descended, the light falling on Varius’s dark hair and handsome features.
    The Forum still boasted crowds, and they jostled through, Varius pulling her along to make her purchases. She sniffed the perfumes in tiny amphorae he waved under her nose before making her choice, tasted the olives he bought and placed into her mouth.
    Near the western end of the Forum, the Curia Julia’s marble went from pink to gold, blinding the eyes. They turned to face the length they had traversed. It had grown cooler, and Lydia rubbed her arms to fight the chill.
    Varius circled her shoulders with his arm and pulled her against the heat of his body, saying nothing.
    She was content to experience this moment, bathed in gold itself, this sense of belonging, of being important to someone—a man—in a way she had never felt.
    Except Samuel.
    A stab of something—guilt?—lessened the warmth in her heart. She pushed it away.
    Varius pointed to a raised platform nearby. “The Rostra. Where speakers spout their rhetoric. It’s where Marc Antony gave his funeral speech for Julius Caesar. Got the Roman mob so whipped up, they burned down the homes of Brutus and Cassius and chased them from the city.”
    Was there a note of jealousy in Varius’s voice at the effectiveness of Marc Antony’s recitations?
    “And just a couple of years ago, when Marc Antony had finally had enough of Cicero’s meddling, he had the man killed and then hung his severed head and right hand there on the Rostra.”
    Lydia shuddered. “His right hand?”
    Varius smiled. “To signify his pen and the words it had produced, I suppose. It was not enough for Antony’s last wife, Fulvia, though. She came and pulled out his tongue, then jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin to condemn his speeches as well.” He shrugged. “Perhaps I shall suffer a similar fate.”
    Lydia forced her gaze from the gruesome memories of the platform and lifted it to the Palatine. The Forum lay in gloomy dusk. “It is time for me to return.”
    They talked little on the walk back. Lydia’s heart was full of the closeness of Varius, but her mind churned with the symbols of death and violence she had seen today. What kind of city was this Rome, so intent on power and strength to find its place in the world?
    Varius left her outside Antony’s home, perhaps reluctant to be seen with her.
    She delivered the purchases to Octavia, who thankfully was in the bedchamber of her youngest, stroking the sleeping child’s hair with a peaceful, if somber, expression.
    In the