Cleopatra's Moon (25 page)

“How did you know it was me?” I asked. I had been so proud of my slave-girl disguise!

“I need to know why you would do something so dangerous,” Juba said between clenched teeth.

I shrugged, not answering. He stepped closer. “Do you not have any idea the risks you take leaving the Palatine? A young girl on her own, without a male escort?”

“I am not so young,” I shot back. “Besides, I have this.” I released the mantle to show him the bronze placard announcing me as a slave in Caesar’s house.

Juba rubbed his left ear. “I am glad to see you taking some precautions, but Cleopatra Selene! You must trust me on this. It is not safe for you.”

When I did not respond, he asked, “Where are you going in this ridiculous disguise?”

“To the Subura.”

“What? This cannot be so! Why would you go to the dirtiest, poorest, most dangerous district in all Rome?”

“Are you done now?” I asked. “I wish to go on.”

Juba sighed. “I am going with you, then.”

“No, you are not! I do not need your so-called protection!”

He chuckled while shaking his head, as if trying to cover his anger. “Nonetheless, I cannot in good conscience let you roam by yourself.”

“You may do whatever you wish,” I replied, starting to walk. It would likely be easy enough to lose him in the crowds.

I walked behind him through the tree-filled valley between the Palatine and Caelian Hills, on our way to the teeming center of the city. I watched as people nodded to Juba or greeted him, and I bristled at my
invisibility. It was one thing to be invisible by choice; it was quite another to be invisible because people thought I was his slave.

The streets of Rome were busier than ever. Thanks to the flood of wealth from Rome’s conquered lands, the city roared with the sounds of new construction and foreign slaves. Scaffolds teetered precariously along half-built walls as workmen scurried up and down the wooden beams like ants on a feeding frenzy. Carpenters banged, sawed, and called out to one another in hoarse voices. Loose tiles, hammers, and crumbling bricks rained down on hapless crowds, so those who dared step outside rushed past building sites with arms overhead for protection. The air was thick with wood and plaster dust. A tumult of voices — in Latin, Greek, Celt, Iberian, Persian, and others — clamored to be heard over the din.

“Why don’t we cut through the Argiletum?” Juba asked, turning and bending to speak into my ear so that I could hear him. I willed myself not to shiver at the feel of his warm breath. I had thought that my dalliance with Marcellus would have burned away the attraction I felt for him. It had not.

I nodded, though I thought I should still go straight to the Subura. I did not want to be late for the priestess’s agents. But, if I were honest, I did not want to leave Juba’s company either. We turned toward the street of booksellers and cobblers. I would just accompany him for a few minutes.

Juba smiled sheepishly as he pointed to a small, dusty bookshop at the end of the crowded lane. “Let us stop in there. Just for a minute. I want to see if they have my new book.”

“You wrote another one?”

He nodded. “It is called
Omoioteles
.”

“
Equivalences
? Equivalences of what?” I asked, puzzled by the book’s Greek title.

“Language,” he replied. “In it I prove the Greek origin of the Latin language.”

Again I thought how much Juba would have loved our Library in Alexandria. Even in the Argiletum — which was less hectic than the
main throughways — the noise discouraged conversation. People called out greetings, sellers hawked cheaply copied scrolls, cobblers banged mallets on leather.

Like most Roman shops, the dusty bookshop had little light, so it took a moment for our eyes to adjust. He sought out the bookseller, a portly man in a threadbare toga, while I wound my way around the pigeonhole stacks of scrolls, breathing in the familiar, reedy scent of old papyrus.

A flash of sunlight from the front, and then a voice. “Juba, darling, I thought I saw you come in here!”

“Vistillia,” he said, smiling. “How nice to see you.”

Curious, I inspected the woman, whose richly dressed attendant followed meekly behind. The woman was draped in an elegant
tunica
and
stola
of the finest, thinnest aquamarine linen, a new favorite import from my beloved, ransacked Egypt. She wore pearls in her ears and on her wrists. Even though she was clearly not a young woman, the force of her beauty, confidence, and sensuality was undeniable. I felt a surge of jealousy. Was this one of the older married women Juba dallied with?

“How silly to look for your own book in a store such as this when it is well known that the best houses in Rome already have a copy,” she said, smiling up at him. “I myself have three!”

Juba smiled back, looking slightly embarrassed.

“I heard that you visited Cecelia Metella’s villa recently,” she said with an exaggerated pout. “And yet you have not visited me in some time! You will have to make this up to me!”

Juba murmured an answer that I could not hear. The woman moved closer and placed her hand on his arm in a very intimate way. The sight of her pressing her breasts “innocently” against him incensed me.

Without thinking, I blurted, “Oh, master,” in a singsong voice. “I believe I have found the other scroll you were looking for.”

Juba looked at me, confused. The woman turned her painted face in my direction. “Master?” she cried. “You did not tell me you purchased your own slave girl!”

“I … I …,” Juba stammered.

“Yes, here it is,” I interrupted, grabbing the nearest scroll. “Cato the Elder’s speech on Roman piety. You know the one — where he rails against unfaithful
wives
, blaming them for the undoing of Roman morality.”

The woman stared at me, then laughed. “Oh, how funny. But Cato wrote no such thing! That sour old coot just wrote about farming, didn’t he?” she said, turning to Juba.

Juba glared at me. “Cleopatra Sel —”

“Cleopatra!” the woman squealed. “You named your slave girl
Cleopatra
? In Caesar’s own compound! That is just hysterical, darling. But what a fitting name for your little pleasure slave.”

My mouth dropped open in dismay. She thought I was … that I was his … ?

The woman came over to me and removed the covering from my head. “Ah. Now I understand why you named her thus. She really does look like the statue of that wicked queen.”

She must have been referring to the statue of Mother that Julius Caesar had erected in the Temple of Venus Genetrix in the Forum of Caesar. Octavianus, mysteriously, had not seen fit to topple it, perhaps because he dared not destroy anything related to his adopted father. Whenever I was able to slip away to the small temple, I spent many hours staring into the marble face that Caesar and my father loved and all Rome feared.

“Tell me,” she continued. “Does she perform as well as one might think with a whore’s name like that?”

I felt my cheeks grow red. Glancing at Juba, I saw that he was trying to suppress a smile. He was enjoying my humiliation! How dare he? The woman turned her back to me and faced Juba again. But I could not let the insult pass.

I tapped the woman on the shoulder. “I should clarify,
Domina
,” I said with exaggerated innocence and respect. “I am not his ‘little
pleasure slave,’ as you so eloquently put it.” I leaned forward as if we were exchanging important secret information. “For
that
kind of work, my master prefers the boys in the baths.”

With one final smirk in Juba’s direction, I tossed the scroll back into a basket and stomped out of the little bookshop.

I watched my rope-sandaled feet as I hopped from raised stone to raised stone so that I could cross the road without sinking into the nauseating stew that sluiced down the lane. A man yelled, “Move it! Move it!” forcing us to make way for a mule team hauling a massive slab of marble on a metal sledge.

The crowd grumbled and cursed. According to Roman law, no delivery carts were allowed within the city during daylight hours because of the way they tied up the already overcrowded roads. But if you were rich enough, you could get away with anything. My stomach dropped when I saw the hieroglyphs running alongside the top of the marble as it passed me. I wondered which sacred temple in Egypt the Romans had ransacked so that a rich senator on the Esquiline could redecorate his mansion.

Once in the Subura, I headed for the central courtyard fountain across from the clothes cleaners, where I had been instructed to wait for the priestess’s agents. I sat on the rim of the fountain while women and slaves of all ages and nationalities gathered water from the fountain’s greenish spouts. The smell of urine was so overpowering, I wondered for a moment whether the fountain spewed waste instead of water.

Then I remembered how the cleaners bleached their fabric. A pair of Roman men reached under their tunics and relieved themselves into the oversized terra-cotta
pythoi
right outside the cleaners’ stall. Two slaves dragged one of the urine-filled vessels inside. I shivered with distaste, knowing what was next. They would pour the fresh urine into a low vat, where they stomped and worked the fabric with their feet, using the liquid to bleach the cloth a pristine white. I looked at the weeping, ulcerated sores on the slaves’ feet and ankles and shuddered.

“It’s enough to make you never want to wear white again, isn’t it?” a voice said in my ear.

I jumped. Juba! “How did you find me here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Wasn’t too hard. I knew you were headed to the Subura.”

“I’m surprised your lady friend let you leave her side so quickly.”

He grinned. “It was easy enough. I told her that my slave could not get away with such insolence and that I needed to catch you so that I could beat you.” I must have looked surprised, for his expression changed. “A joke,” he said. “I do not beat slaves. Oh, and very nicely done,” he added with a smirk. “I was looking for a way to avoid her not-so-subtle invitations. Though now I fear I shall be dodging invitations from her
husband
too!”

I tried not to laugh. “I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not. So why did you follow me?”

“I told you, it is unsafe. Somebody must watch over you.”

“Gods, Juba! I have been taking care of myself for a long time. I do not need your protection.”

“But why come here of all places?”

“I am meeting someone.”

“
Here
? Who in the world would you meet here?” he asked, stepping around me to rinse his hands in the trickle of one of the fountain’s grimy, algae-covered spouts.

Somebody touched my shoulder — a man, smelling of wine and grease. His tattered brown tunic sported rings of sweat stains under his arms and fleshy chin.

“How much?” he asked, grinning and showing brown teeth.

“Excuse me?” Could this be the contact I was supposed to meet? How would I know?

He pointed with his head to a tavern and its adjoining row of abandoned stalls covered in dirty draping. “How much? One of them stalls is free. I could pay you two
sesterci
.”

I stared at the man, still uncomprehending.

“A bargainer, eh? Well, you’re young and clean.” He reached for his tattered coin bag under his belt. “I’ll go up to one
denarius
, but not an
as
more!”

“She’s not for sale,” Juba said irritably.

The man looked from Juba to me. “You sure about that? I likes ‘em young.”

I stood up, my face burning, my fists clenching. “How dare you, you ignorant, unwashed, uneducated, poor excuse of a man!”

“
Pax, pax
,” Juba said, grabbing my arm and walking me away to the other side of the fountain. “Remember where we are — you don’t want to incite the man to violence.”

I looked back. The man had disappeared into the crowds. Another man pushed his way out of one of the curtained stalls he had pointed to, adjusting the belt of his tunic.

“Gods!” I muttered. “Why would that man think that I was a prostitute?”

“Because you weren’t doing anything but sitting pretty,” Juba said. “What?”

“The women at the fountain are collecting water or washing things. They are busy, preoccupied, working. But you sat facing out, appearing to all the world as if you were on display.”

“But that is outrageous!” I cried. “I was just waiting….”

“That is life in the Subura. Come on, let’s go someplace else. I’ve heard one of the stalls around here has the best stuffed chickpea pancakes around.”

“No,” I said. “I have to wait.”

“Who are you waiting for?” he asked. “You never told me.” I looked around without answering. “Why can’t you tell me?” Juba asked.

Suddenly, I thought,
What if the person would not or could not approach me while Juba stood near
? “I really wish you would leave,” I said.

“Gods, Cleopatra Selene. Please do not be subtle on my account,” he said with a laugh. “But I cannot leave now because I am curious. Who
is this mystery person you have come to meet?” He grinned and crossed his arms.

When I again did not respond, his expression changed. “Wait, you are not meeting a
lover
here, are you? Is that why you want me to leave so badly?” He stepped closer. “It’s not Marcellus, is it? But why would you meet him here? But if not him, then who is it?”

I continued ignoring him. Let him think I had a lover. Better that than discovering the truth.

“Are you mad?” Juba said. “You cannot …”

“Of course I can. Why do you continue to see me as a child?”

His face registered shock and surprise and something else I could not read. “But … I thought … I wanted to …” He paused. “How serious is it?”

Whatever I was going to say was drowned out by the shouts of a group of soldiers who had rumbled into the fountain square.

“There!” an officer said, and the men — thundering in their hobnailed boots — spread out and encircled a group of people. Women screamed. Chickens squawked and ruffled their feathers in outrage. Men cursed in Latin, Persian, Gallic, and other unfamiliar tongues.

“What’s happening?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” Juba said.

“Got ‘em!” one of the soldiers announced.

The crowd parted as people scurried away in a panic. The soldiers held a struggling old woman and a young man with a shaved head in their grip. I gasped. My two fellow initiates from the Temple! They must have been the ones I was sent to meet.

“Did you get the one from Caesar’s house?” yelled the officer.

“It’s this one!” answered the soldier, holding on to the struggling young man.

“No, you idiot!” the officer hissed. “They were meeting someone from the
inside
! That’s who Caesar wants us to bring back — the traitor from his
house!”