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No one questioned.
Perhaps people talked, but their talk reached neither the men who listened for Augustus Caesar nor the ears of the tavern. And no one questioned. The Aventine was crowded and in all but the finest houses in Rome bedding down together was hardly unheard of; so no one questioned. Those who might were too scared of Vorena the Younger to do so where she might hear, and it was well-known that the Vorenii had ears everywhere.
They were feared and respected in equal measures - Vorena the Elder of the temple, who was beautiful and benevolent unless you looked too close and saw the steel in her eye, and silent Vorena the Younger who might be worth untold fortunes to the man brave enough to marry her. And Vorenus the Younger, who was a bastard and not his father's own son, who was supposed cousin to the strange and pompous Aeneas, who could read and write, and in two languages at that, and who was himself under the formidable protection of Titus Pullo.
Titus Pullo was officially the head of the Collegia in the Aventine. Not bad, he said, for a man whose mother was a slave. There were greater triumphs to his name, it was rumoured, but only Vorenus the Elder knew what they were, and Vorenus the Elder was dead.
The fact that he was sometimes seen in the tavern was mere coincidence. Vorenus the Elder died of his injuries on his return from Alexandria, the people said, loudly and often. Especially when Caesar's spies were thought to be around. Vorenus the Elder was a good man, they said, because they cannot be made to lie much: The man who looks like Vorenus the Elder? You're seeing ghosts, mate. That's Pullo's guardian spirit. Don't trouble yourself with that.
Amongst the Vorenii it was thought that, for a dead man, Vorenus the Elder ate enough and gave enough orders.
Pullo confused the people. A man of his recent good fortune, and still no heir, why he ought marry, and marry well. There was no shortage of daughters and sisters the men of the Collegia of the Aventine (and even the rest of the city) would be willing to give, and two dead loves or no, Pullo was these days an influential man. Some said he had the ear of Augustus Caesar himself.
Some said, surely the best would be to marry Vorena the Younger, but they never say it more than once. For whether or not Pullo has the ear of Augustus, he once had the tongue of Memio out of his own head with his teeth, and no one's likely to forget that. He says now that Vorenus the Elder is dead, he is the father of Vorena the Younger (when it comes to marriage), of Vorena the Elder, of Vorenus the Younger, of Aeneas, of the Vorenii. He is the Patriarch. If anyone wishes to propose he enter an incestuous marriage ... well, they know the stories, don't they. Those who think Greek are treated Greek, like.
Around the Aventine, mothers tell children with noisy mouths, "if you don't shush that tongue Titus Pullo will bite it out", and "rumour only runs so fast because it's fleeing from Pullo".
The man who looks the way they remember Vorenus the Elder to have looked is seen seldom far from the tavern. He's known to dwell upstairs, with the Vorenii, with Pullo; he drinks little and speaks little, but for a ghost or a stranger or a dead man he seems uncommon content with his lot most time. It is known - but never spoken - that any man who crosses him in any way will feel the full weight of Pullo's wrath. No one would ever wish to test this.
As to the occupants of the room above the tavern, they seemed to get along. They slept in the same bed, but they did not copulate. They were not Greeks, after all, and they were men, not man and boy. And there was a world of pleasures that could be imparted with a rough hand and some oil. This was what the people did not know, and should not suspect.
March came, and just past the ides fell the Liberalia.
The people of Rome loved and respected Augustus Caesar, but he was not a man of the people the way his predecessor had been; there were mutterings that his faith, for example, was less than convincing. Mark Antony, the traitor, the Gyppo-lover, had nonetheless put on the wolf skins in his heyday, had streaked through the streets thrashing young girls. He had drunk with the best of them and he had held his own. Even Julius Caesar - of whom, hero-worship or not, no one was sure what they were meant to think anymore - had taken to the spirit of it the way a leader should, the way a supposed great-great-grandchild of Venus herself should be.
In contrast to this revelry, Augustus Caesar's perfunctory libations and his wife's refusal to join the more frenzied dancers was almost an insult to the plebs.
In the Aventine, however, they still knew how to honour Bacchus. Pullo insisted upon it. He said he had a great debt owed to the gods, to all the gods, and he had even planned to sacrifice a wolf, though due to their relative scarcity he was forced to settle for not one or two but six white oxen and half a flock of doves. The narrow streets of the Aventine were sticky with wine and the doors to his tavern stood open for a week as the Aventine rang with IO, IO, IO and the rhythmic drumbeat of many feet.
The week after the Liberalia was very quiet.
Business went on as usual, for business must, but it was muffled. The dust on the streets still sent up the heady reek of unwatered wine, whenever it was stirred underfoot, and the buildings seemed to sigh and sway with the collective might of a very bad hangover.
Pullo, as master of these revels, was struck hard by their aftermath, and was thus not best pleased when a light tap on his bed chamber door became to his wine-worsened head a thunderous din.
"Fuck off," he told the knocker, rolling to show his back to the door, but they knocked again.
"I'll - " said the man who was absolutely not Vorenus the Elder, but whom for the sake of speed shall be known by his name. After all, Vorenus the Elder was, officially at least, as dead as Antony, as dead as Caesar.
"No, no," Pullo rolled up and onto his feet, as naked as a newborn, and opened the door. "What do you - " he changed volume quickly as his head began to vibrate, "- Aeneas, I told you not to wake me, you little shit."
"There's a man come from Caesar," Aeneas said, his pompous little voice tinged with the loathing he still expressed (unwisely) towards the man whose political games had killed his mother and step-father. "He wants - "
"Well he can wait, can't he?" Pullo growled, putting both hands to his face. "Cack. I feel like I've been stoned."
"Don't keep him waiting," Vorenus advised, and Pullo sagged, his resolve punctured.
"I'll be back soon," he warned, pulling on the nearest tunic to him. It was very old, marked with the eagle, and unsuitable for an audience with anyone but a slave. Vorenus raised his eyebrows.
"He says it's of some importance - " Aeneas added, and Pullo flung a loose stone at him irritably.
"Quiet, you." He placed his hand on Vorenus's shoulder, bending at the waist, and Vorenus placed his hand over it for a moment. Then Pullo was out, off towards the steps, Aeneas trailing in his wake.
Mid-morning found Pullo still missing - off in the home of the First Citizen - and Aeneas loitering in the market instead of making himself useful with the tavern's takings and taxes as he ought. The boy, not yet eleven, came to an abrupt halt in the mouth of a narrow alley as a hand grabbed him by his thick black hair.
"Ow! Get off me!"
"There's someone who's going to pay me a lot of money to see you," his captor said with a grim smile, a knife already pricking Aeneas's throat in eager anticipation of bloodshed, "or at least, your head."
"Then they'll have to wait their turn," Vorenus said, poking his own knife against the main's kidneys. "Let him go."
"I merely sought to - "
"Let him go. Are you deaf?" Vorenus prodded harder and his captive captor made the decision to keep his renal system imperforated. "Aeneas, home. Now."
The boy took off without being told a second time - an event which happened so rarely it was worthy of celebration - and Vorenus locked his forearm across the would-be murderer's throat. "Now," he said, shifting the knife for comfort's sake, "that was not wise. This boy is the property of Titus Pullo and under his protection. What's your interest in his head, hm?"
The murderer choked. "There's a five thousand dinarii reward for the head of Caesarion-"
Vorenus tightened his grip. "Caesarion died in Egypt at Pullo's hand. Everyone knows that."
"Bollocks did he. He lives on here in Rome. Caesar knows."
Vorenus drew a bead of blood from the man's midriff. "Caesar is mistaken."
"And Vorenus the Eld- urk - " the man's voice cut out as Vorenus pulled his arm across his throat so hard that the air burst from his mouth.
"Mistaken," Vorenus hissed, and his knife flashed in and twisted up through the would-be murderer's guts. Blood fountained down over his hand and arm as he pulled it back and the could-have-been bounty-hunter became so much heavy dead meat weighing itself against Vorenus's body. The cooling corpse slid down the front of his chest and thudded into the loose stones below his feet.
When he got back to the tavern his daughter gave him a nod towards the roof; Aeneas must have run there. In the wine-scented darkness there were few men - the Liberalia had taken a heavy toll - but another boy a few years older than Aeneas sat alone, a sword across his knees.
"Salve, father," he said, standing.
"Salve -" There was, Vorenus thought, a small victory there. He was not the father of Vorenus the Younger, but perhaps he was more a father to him than he had thought he would be at first.
"There's a rumour," Lucius said, sitting back down. He'd become tall almost without Vorenus noticing, and taciturn, in the manner of all the Vorenii. They did not waste words, unlike, it seemed, the people of the Aventine who couldn't still their wagging tongues for an eighth of an hour.
"There's always a rumour," Vorenus said. He wiped his bloody hand on his tunic and nodded towards the steps.
Upstairs, his not-son said, "This one's about you, you and Titus Pullo."
"Is that so?" Vorenus removed his tunic and spat on the bloodstains, rubbing them together over fine dust.
"The people say you lived - "
"That," Vorenus said, almost smiling, "is not true, and they should know better than to say so."
His son who was not his son continued, searching slowly for the right words. He was not much of a talker, Vorenus the Younger; not like Aeneas.
Aeneas, who could keep up a steady stream of complaints for a whole day if he was so moved, each one more wordy and haughty than the last. It often took a box around the ears to keep him quiet. Vorenus occasionally wondered if the boy got this trait from his mother, but she was a woman of well-chosen words and keen public appearance. Whatever Vorenus might have privately thought of her, he could not have faulted her that; and so it must be the fault of the father's blood, and that, Vorenus found, made him smile.
"They say Caesarion did not die in Egypt. They say Titus Pullo brought him back here to raise an emperor to depose Augustus Caesar."
"Why would Pullo do that?" Vorenus asked quietly. "He's Caesar's man. Loyal. The kind of loyal that money cannot buy. And who would want to get rid of Augustus Caesar? Everyone loves him. These people talk ... they talk from their rectums." He rubbed the dust deeper into the drying stains. "What else do they say? These loose-tongued idiots."
"They say," Lucius licked his lips, "they say he's - Caesarion's - Pullo's boy."
"There," Vorenus said, "rumour is both stupid and dangerous. Does Aeneas look like Julius Caesar to you?"
"I don't know, father, I never saw him."
"There are busts, his face is on coins. Does Aeneas look like them?" Vorenus finished his work on his tunic. The stains looked old now, as though they had been scrubbed for years, as though they had been ruining the cloth for a long time.
"No, but I don't look like you, and I am my father's son," Lucius said pointedly and somewhat impertinently. Vorenus gave him a weighty look.
"Pullo's boy," Vorenus said firmly, "is Pullo's boy. He is Pullo's boy by an Egyptian woman and he is nothing to do with Caesar, you understand?"
"Yes."
"I just had to stick a man," Vorenus continued, showing his tunic to Lucius, "who believed those rumours. He was trying to take your cousin's head back to Caesar for a reward that only exists because of those rumours -" Vorenus pointed in the approximate direction of the house of the Julii, "- have made it to the ears of the First Citizen."
Lucius looked uncomfortable. "He's not my cousin."
Vorenus put the blood-and-dust besmirched tunic back on. "Aeneas is Pullo's boy. Therefore, he is your cousin." He looked briefly troubled, and added, "Sure, Pullo and I are not brothers by blood - "
"No," Lucius said, and by his tone Vorenus knew that was his point.
"- but you are not my son by blood and you still call me father," Vorenus pointed out.
"Yes, father," Lucius all but sighed.
"So we must put a stop to these rumours."
"Yes, father."
"Go and find where Aeneas has run to," Vorenus concluded, patting his son-who-was-not-his-son awkwardly on the shoulder.
There was a rumble of patrons leaving below, and the sound of heavy doors being drawn shut - unusual in the centre of the day. "Pullo is returned, then," Lucius said as he left.
Pullo was returned, and the tavern empty of all but slaves and family. Vorenus came down to the tables and frowned his confusion before his question. "What did he want, then?"
"Advice," Pullo said, sounding reasonably satisfied that this was the depth of what Caesar required of him.
Vorenus exchanged a look with his younger daughter. Pullo's advice was not something most could imagine any of noble birth seeking. It was not bad advice, but its giver was a lifelong soldier and a man of simple pleasures, and it showed in his advice. His idea of a strategy was typically to distract someone before he head-butted them.
"We have a problem," Vorenus said, and Pullo stopped with his cup half-way to his mouth.
"Problem with what?"
"Aeneas."
Pullo made a sound like an unhappy bear. "Not again."
"No, no, this time it isn't his fault." Vorenus hesitated. "As far as I know it isn't his fault."
"What's the problem, then?" Pullo took a drink.
"Someone has started to put it about that he's ... well, that he's the son of Julius Caesar. I had to rescue him from a bounty-hunter this morning -"
Pullo sprayed a mouthful of water over the table and set his cup down hard with a bang. He swore loudly, blasphemed for good measure, and looked about him. "Where is he now?"
"Aeneas or the bounty-hunter?" Vorenus kept his calm, his voice low and steady. Now that Pullo was here to lose his temper, there was no need for him to do so, and one of them had to remain calm. Near-death and age had mellowed Vorenus more effectively than he knew.
"Both." Pullo rubbed his face. "This is bad business."
"Bad, and convenient that he came when you were gone," Vorenus observed. The boy Aeneas answered his father's question for him by appearing at the top of the steps with his cousin. He seemed unshaken, but then, in Alexandria, he had been at risk of assassination quite regularly, and he had been raised to treat such impudences against his royal and sacred person as a minor inconvenience rather than a weeping matter.
Pullo stared at his son with a mixture of relief and anger written all over his face. "Have you been talking too much about Egypt, boy?"
Mutely Aeneas shook his head, his eyes wide. It was a new trick intended to endear him, which sometimes worked with the older women of the Aventine, but which usually earned him a clip around the head from either Pullo or Vorenus, and he'd only ever tried it on Vorena the Younger once.
"Have you?" Vorenus asked. Aeneas had only had a few months, nearly a year, of viewing Pullo as any sort of authority and only less than that of knowing him as his own father, but he knew Vorenus as a man to listen to from his youngest days in the palace at Alexandria. Sometimes it helped to back up Pullo's edicts with the boy.
"I have not," Aeneas squawked indignantly. "I gave you my word! Are you calling my honour into question?"
Unfortunately this set Lucius off sniggering at the notion of this little foreigner with his airs and accent - which was fading away - having any honour to defend.
"Stop that," Vorenus said sternly. Aeneas and Lucius - separated by a hand's length in height - glared at each other, but the latter stopped sniggering and the former didn't launch into a speech. Vorenus counted this a success.
"Somehow word has got about," Vorenus said heavily.
"Caesar will keep offering this reward, then," Pullo offered, looked at his son's head speculatively until Aeneas swallowed nervously. He ruffled Aeneas's hair rather distractedly. "Can't have you stayin' here."
"He'll know if you leave the city," Vorenus said, addressing himself to Pullo. The rest of his family - those who were there, Vorena the Younger and Lucius - could see what he was about to suggest, the way a man standing at the shoreline can see ships coming from many miles away.
"You can't go either," Lucius said.
"Who makes the decisions here?" Vorenus snapped.
His son who was not his son pointed at Pullo. "You're dead, father. Dead men don't make decisions."
Pullo choked on air, staring at Vorenus's face to see if he was going to lose his temper, but whatever quarrel might have come in the close, midday stuffiness of the tavern was diverted by Aeneas saying in a petulant voice, "I don't want to leave."
"It'll be an adventure," Pullo said, kindly, putting his huge rough hand on Aeneas's shoulder as the boy came over to him.
"I'm sick of adventures," Aeneas said hotly, pulling away, "they're always full of bad food and hard sleeping and long walks and I want to stay here."
"Well you can't - " Pullo began, equally hotly, but Vorenus cut him off.
"Aeneas, it isn't safe for anyone if you stay here. Think of the danger you bring to your cousins, to your father. What do you think Caesar would do to Pullo if he found he had been protecting you?" He did his best to make a good argument, but of all the Vorenii the head of the family was the most troubled by language. He knew how senators and generals and emperors and queens spoke; he had dined - very briefly and awkwardly - once with the First Family of Rome, with the mother of Caesar and with the young Caesar himself, and he'd seen how easily words came to them. But it was surely a matter of blood, and Vorenus the Elder had no success in persuasion with words.
Still he turned back to Pullo and said, "I'll take him north, to Gaul. Caesar's not expecting the dead to start walking, is he?"
But it was Lucius who replied, "Won't he expect that? The rumours that concern my cousin here speak of you too."
This was apparently the first Pullo had heard of it, and he started, hard. "That's not fucking good."
"I don't want to go to Gaul," Aeneas grumbled, aware that the conversation was moving away from him and what he desired.
"Shut up," cried Pullo and both the men of the Vorenii at once. Aeneas stared sulkily at the floor but mercifully kept his mouth tight shut.
"If we both go - " Pullo suggested, sounding quite desperate for a moment. He was on his feet now, sweat on his face from the closed doors and the stuffy midday heat.
"Pullo, you have to remain here or the Aventine will fall into chaos and the collegia will take to fighting again - " Vorenus pointed out, but as he said it he knew their third in command could and would hold the peace for as long as was needed. He had once suggested to Vorena the Younger that she marry the man, so they would be assured of his loyalty, but she had given him such a look as Medusa might have given and never mentioned it again.
Pullo was evidently thinking the same thing. "There's no reason why I shouldn't leave the city on business," he said quietly, "and to find my wife's family and pay them respects by giving them a slave boy." There was a glint in his eye.
"What's he talking about?" Aeneas whined.
"You know how your Uncle Vorenus is 'dead'," Lucius said, looking like he would much rather just have kicked his cousin instead.
"Yes - it is a subterfuge intended to distract - " Aeneas began. Wherever he used too long words his Gyppo accent got stronger, Vorenus noticed, and both his tendency to verbosity and his foreign cadence must be curtailed.
"It's like that," Lucius said, "shut up." He still looked a lot like he wanted to kick his cousin.
The next morning, they decided, they would leave the city early and begin travelling towards Gaul. What they were to do when they got there, Pullo seemed uncertain, and Vorenus could find no argument for or against his son's somewhat snide assertion that they might as well sail a fishing boat across the Mare Britannica and go and live with the savages. He might have added something about Vorenus's hair making him a native already, but Pullo had already slapped him silent and told him to apologise by then.
The doors to the tavern were thrown open again before the day had gone far into the afternoon, and, slowly, sun-tired men who had left slaves minding stalls came back into the cooler darkness for wine and water and shade. Vorenus sat at the back of the room, on the last few steps, and watched his younger daughter shuffle money from the hands of slaves as they served the men of the Aventine. He tried for several hours - as the sun dipped outside and Pullo remained absent doing whatever in the name and sight of Jupiter Pullo thought was fucking necessary to effect an unnoticed escape from Rome - to make himself think of the place as his safe home that he would shortly be leaving once again.
It was not a successful self-hypnosis; what with one thing and another and his years fighting for various factions of Rome, he had spent little time in the city he was nominally a full citizen of. It was familiar, but so were the bushes and shrines of the Appalachian Way, and the cool echoing corridors of the palace at Alexandria and the oppressively hot souk that surrounded it, and the freezing forests of Gaul with their wolves and their woad-covered savages.
He had seen and grown used to more of the world than he ever might have expected and now he was old and ... for some reason the idea of settling down in one spot was not so very dear to him as it had been. Niobe was gone, and his children had learned to be self-sufficient.
He toyed with the shamefully tempting thought - as he sat on the steps, Old Man Vorenus - that his one remaining duty, Vorena the Younger's marriage, might equally well be handled by Lucius as by Pullo or him.
Meanwhile, Aeneas sulked and skulked about the building and made such a nuisance of himself in the kitchen that the major domo (a freedman, a Greek, he doubled as a cook; the Vorenii and Pullo were not so very rich as to have a full complement of slaves, after all) begged leave to discipline the boy and Vorenus gave it without hesitation.
Come nightfall the tavern filled up, men drinking their profits instead of returning to wives, eating their profits in the tavern instead of in the street from the cheaper vendors. Vorenus got off the steps at last and went upstairs. The lamps were unlit and Aeneas and Lucius lay slumbering under thin moonlight, their indistinct shapes barely grey in the darkness. Vorenus returned to his own bedchamber (this was the luxury wealth afforded him: he did not have to share a room with his son) and lay down.
He lay listening to the sounds of the tavern below. He had not been alone in the dark for long before a dark figure whose breathing was as familiar as his own entered, too. Vorenus sat up, but he did not ask where Pullo had been; it was best that he didn't know, all things considered.
Pullo did not reek of wine as he sometimes did, for he must have come straight to the bed instead of waiting to drink, and eat, but he was evidently well-pleased with his afternoon's work and expressed it as was his wont. He rolled onto the bed like a log, naked as a beast, and threw his arms around Vorenus as though Vorenus were a woman.
"Well," Pullo said in a satisfied voice, "that's all sorted."
"Get off," Vorenus complained, "you have your shoulder in my face."
"Sorry." Pullo shuffled down but did not release him. Instead he pressed his rough, not-quite-shaven face against Vorenus's clean-shaven one (the habit of remaining presentable as a Centurion should never really left him) and after a momentary hesitation he gave an awkward and uncertain kiss to Vorenus's cheek - but not his mouth.
Vorenus objected more than a little at being treated like a woman - though he had not said, as much he felt that there need be no association between ... between sharing a marital bed with his dear friend and being his fucking wife. Bad enough that circumstance dictated he remain close to hearth like a woman and let Pullo make all the public decisions, like a woman, without being as well passive and offering little but his consent to the act.
He turned his head and kissed back more firmly on Pullo's mouth. It had not yet ceased to be strange but it had never, had he thought on it, been unwanted. Sure, Pullo's mouth tasted much different than the two women Vorenus had else kissed like this, and kissing Pullo was often more like combat than comfort, all hard teeth and scraped skin and more penetrative tongues than he had understood kissing to involve, but Pullo was not a woman either. It was hard to know who should concede ground, who should press and who should accept. Vorenus wondered if such things had ever troubled the immoral Athenians.
He did not ponder this long when locked in an embrace that was half-struggle, when he was struck more by the urgency of Pullo's breath and the warmth of his mouth. As long as they both lay side on, as long as they faced each other and swapped saliva like this, no one was dominating anyone else. No one was losing face.
When Pullo heaved himself above Vorenus like a storm-cloud and his bulk more or less pinned Vorenus down, that was a different matter. As when he stretched himself across Pullo in the half-awake grey light of predawn - a different matter.
For now there was little more than the wet grind of two mouths, four lips, against each other. The moonlight, what there was of it between the high slum buildings, shone into the rooms at the other side of the building where Aeneas and Lucius slept. Though it was quite dark in here, Vorenus could see in his mind, with the eyes of the soul, how the hair upon his chest and the hair upon Pullo's, greying both, laced together like the fingers on two lovers' hands.
"Last night in a bed," Pullo muttered against Vorenus's cheek, his breath hot as desert wind and his hands as heavy as millstones on Vorenus's shoulder, "might as well make the most of it."
And with a sighing of night air he had reached over Vorenus to the oil jar and dipped his hand in it before Vorenus could yay or nay. It was not perfumed oil - both men had drawn the line at such an expense and frivolity - but it was still sweet-smelling and fine and probably shouldn't have been wasted on such an unnecessary pleasure. At least, these were the thoughts of Vorenus. It was possible that Pullo did not think pleasure unnecessary; his conduct had always suggested a brute hedonism which Vorenus found himself unable to emulate. A man should be, if not moderate, then at least in control of his passions, rather than controlled by them - and though Pullo perhaps seemed happier Vorenus could at least believe himself more righteous by his own philosophy.
Of course, he thought like this, but there he was now kissing Pullo again, deep as a well spring, his mouth digging further into Pullo's as the oil on that man's hand dried on his abdomen. It was, however, a pleasant hypocrisy.
Pullo's skin against his was both comforting (late in the night when perhaps Vorenus woke missing his wife or fearing the cold advance of death) and rousing (now, when heat called to heat and tumescence to tumescence); Vorenus set his hand to the small of Pullo's back where muscles curved in instead of out. Pullo failed to take the hint and simply groped at his hip, tugging them closer together.
And their - Pullo would have said "verpa", Vorenus "phalli" - rested beside each other like cattle in a narrow passageway, rubbing shoulders, skin on skin. Vorenus assisted them in their closeness, pressing them together with a hand even as Pullo crushed that arm between their chests.
It took Pullo less time to recognise this friction than it did for him to uncover other subtle physical hints Vorenus had used; soon his hand and Pullo's both held together erect ... go with "cocks", it's Pullo's word, but it's his house now, too ... their fingers overlapping. It might be hard to say which was more intimate, the soft skin of cocks rubbing against each other (aided by the rocking motion of their hips) or the simple touch of hand on hand, but Vorenus was no longer thinking in sentences.
"Yes," Pullo said in a half-snarl by Vorenus's face.
Vorenus turned his head and smothered Pullo's mouth with a much messier, wetter kiss than before; all his concentration spent on the interplay of hand and hips and cocks and sweat. Pullo mumbled something into Vorenus's mouth, against his teeth, but it was at least indistinct. It might have been an endearment, an encouragement, or a curse - Vorenus didn't want to know which.
His hips and hand took up all of his mind now, as he tried to keep them in time with both each other and with Pullo's - his mouth was unguarded now, and safest pressed against Pullo's. Vorenus could feel his legs both tight as the laces on straining armour and loose and soft as warm putty at once, but most of all he could feel the friction: his own hand fitting about his cock like it was made to go there, as it always had, and the almost-identical (but thicker, and hairier) mass of Pullo's beside it, and here and there the sudden slip of Pullo's calloused fingers. Three species of fricative touch all working to bring to his tongue a bubbling blend of hail and blasphemy; Vorenus wisely drove his tongue further into Pullo's willing, loose mouth before he could risk offending the gods again.
Awkward and uncomfortable or not, Vorenus still let loose his seed over them both, and after a sticky, fraught period when his cock began to hurt and Pullo would not stop moving, his bedfellow joined him in this release.
Fortunately he was too tired to have time for melancholy, and the next morning dawned bright and clear, almost the minute he slept.
Aeneas was stubborn to wake, clinging to sleep until Lucius quite gleefully threatened to tip water over him, when suddenly Aeneas was very much awake and the tavern rang with angry words in a foreign tongue and Lucius's mocking laughter.
They breakfasted at the tavern's empty tables for the last time, and Vorena the Younger simply sighed when Vorenus bid her farewell, though she did offer up her cheek for Pullo to kiss when he asked it of her.
Lucius came to them clad in a travelling cloak.
"No," Vorenus said more sharply than he had intended. But he was backed by Pullo.
"Hey now, lad, you can't come too. We draw enough attention as is." He laid an easy, fatherly hand on Lucius's shoulder, and Vorenus glanced down at Aeneas. He knew he would never be able to make such relaxed, affectionate gestures to any youth, never mind the one who bore his name. Aeneas was picking his nose and seemed unmoved by the affair.
"Give my love to your sister," Vorenus attempted, addressing himself to both his children, and both merely stared at him. "Lucius, while we are away - "
"He's not in charge," Vorena the Younger said, and her voice sounded far hoarser than he recalled it.
"He is to oversee your marriage. Or devotion to a temple," Vorenus said firmly. "You are too old to be unmarried like this."
"Who's she going to marry?" Lucius seemed delighted by the prospect of finally being able to boss his sister. Vorena the Younger herself seemed more than a little infuriated by this.
"Flavius Hemio," Vorenus said decisively, aware that his daughter's eyes blazed like coals.
"He's older than you." Vorena sounded disgusted.
Vorenus marvelled that she had found her tongue at all. "It's a prudent match. Pullo, back me up - "
Pullo gave Vorena the Younger a wry smile and said, "It's for the best, sweetheart."
She scowled and walked away to the kitchens. The set of her shoulders was uncertain - Vorenus had no idea if she would obey or not, but Pullo prodded him in the back with his elbow and nodded to the door. "We best get going. You take care, Lucius."
They met no opposition or even interest at the city gate - people coming in were of far more interest, and while Aeneas with his roped wrists looked every inch the slave, Pullo and Vorenus were quite plainly citizens. They dressed like citizens, they walked like citizens, they wore the iron rings of citizens, and the gate guards at the north didn't care enough to recognise faces that were not on horseback or topped with a helmet.
They were barely a mile up the road before Aeneas started demanding to be untied and Pullo had to belt him with the end of the rope.
"Shut up. We're all but in earshot of the fucking city. Have patience."
The sky was so clear and blue and bright that it almost hurt to look at and the miles to Gaul were many; they might, far enough from Rome, acquire horses and ride on. Vorenus didn't think much of his adopted son's plan for sailing to Britannia, and Aeneas thought the idea truly unspeakable, but Pullo had taken it into his heart with a kind of determination that had seemed unlikely to dissolve.
In the coldish light of the early morning they fell into step without thinking, one of Vorenus's steps, of Pullo's, equal to two of Aeneas's would-be strides. Their fellow-travellers paid them little attention, though a girl driving geese smiled at Aeneas with a kind of softness that made Pullo raise his eyebrows and nudge Vorenus too hard in the ribs.
"Eh? Just like his old man," Pullo said proudly.
Vorenus said nothing, but raised his eyebrows in return and shook his head.