Raptor (150 page)

“This woman Melania,” he said with relish, “is a wealthy widow come from somewhere in the provinces. But she is more than just a middle-aged woman indulging herself at the expense of her late, rich husband. She comes to us with a mission, a vocation, perhaps a divine inspiration. What she is building there on the Esquiline she intends to be the most elegant—and most expensive—house of assignation ever seen since the legendary days of Babylon.”

“Eheu, the mystery woman is only a lena?” said Praefectus Liberius. “Has she applied for a license, then?”

“I did not call her house a lupanar,” said Symmachus, chuckling. “The word is inadequate. And so would be the word ‘lena’ to describe the widow Melania. I have met her, a most gracious and distinguished lady, and she did me the honor of showing me about the establishment. To require a tabularius to issue a license for such a place would be like insisting that King Theodoric’s palaces be licensed.”

“Still, a commercial enterprise…” grumbled Liberius, ever concerned with fees and taxes.

Symmachus ignored him. “The house, for all its richness, is small, a jewel box. Only one, ahem, client will be admitted each night. And no client will be admitted until he has sat down in an antechamber face to face with Caia Melania herself. She will closely interrogate him—not only asking his name and rank and status and character and his capacity to pay her exorbitant prices—but also his tastes and preferences and most intimate inclinations. Even his previous experience of women—respectable women and not so.”

“Impudent prurience, I should call that,” said Boethius. “What decent man would discuss his wife, or even his concubines, with a pandering bawd? What is the point of her interrogation?”

Symmachus winked and laid a finger alongside his nose. “Not until Melania shall have appraised the applicant and thoroughly taken his measure—not until then will she give some secret signal to a hidden servant. There are doors all about that antechamber. One of them will open. In the doorway will be standing the one woman in all the world of whom that man shall have dreamt, for whom he shall have yearned, all his life long. That is what Caia Melania promises, and I am inclined to believe her. Eheu, my friends, what I would give to be a stripling of sixty again! Or even a youth of seventy. I should be the first in that antechamber.”

Another senator laughed and said, “Go anyway, you imperishable old satyr. Take along your evil little Bacchus and let him perform in your stead.”

There was more laughter, and more of that kind of banter, and much more speculation—as to where Melania might be procuring her “dream women”—but I paid little heed. I had seen lupanares in my time. Jewel-box pretensions this one might have, but it would be just another house full of whores, and the Caia Vidua Melania just another mercenary old lena.

Then Symmachus changed the subject of conversation, saying more soberly, “I am troubled by a recent occurrence, and I should like to know if I am alone in finding it worrisome. Yesterday came a messenger bearing a missive from the king. Theodoric’s compliments, and would I please lend my support in the Senate to the proposed statute setting stricter limits to the moneylenders’ rates of interest.”

“That troubles you?” said Liberius. “It is a worthwhile measure, from what I hear.”

“Of course it is,” said Symmachus. “What bothers me is that Theodoric sent me the identical message more than a month ago, and I lent my support to the statute by making a lengthy speech, and the proposal will easily pass when it comes to the vote. I had already so advised the king. Boethius, you know that. So why is Theodoric repeating himself?”

There was a short silence. Then someone said charitably, “Well, older men can be forgetful…”

Symmachus snorted. “I am older than Theodoric. I am not yet forgetting to redrape my toga modestly when I emerge from a latrina. I am certainly not forgetting the whereabouts of major legislation.”

“Well…” someone else said, also charitably, “a king does have more things to keep in mind than even we senators do.”

“True,” said Boethius, ever the loyal supporter of his king. “And one matter weighing heavily on Theodoric’s mind these days is the lingering illness of his queen. He is much distracted. I notice it. Cassiodorus notices it. We do what we can to prevent his manifesting too many lapses of attention, but sometimes he sends out messages without consulting us. We trust that he will be himself again as soon as Audefleda is well.”

“If Theodoric, even at his age, is being deprived of conjugal intercourse,” said a medicus, “he could be suffering a congestion of his animal spirits. It is well known that the normal ducts are constipated by prolonged sexual abstinence. That could account for all manner of derangements.”

“Then,” spoke up a brash young nobleman, “let us invite the king to come south to Rome. Until his Audefleda is again fit for service, he can frequent the lady Melania’s new lupanar.
That
ought to unclog his ducts.”

Some of the other younger men laughed uproariously at that, but the elder guests angrily rebuked the impertinence, and the name of Melania was not mentioned again that night.

But, over the following months, I kept hearing that name, from one after another of my male friends and associates. These were men of substance, men mostly about my own age and of rank at least equal to my own, men usually of dignified reticence. Now they spoke in voices of wonder, without being prompted, of the fantastic women they had enjoyed at the house on the Esquiline Hill.

“A gray-eyed Cherkess girl, of contortions simply unbelievable…”

“An Ethiope, black as midnight, but like the sun coming up for me…”

“An Armenian, each breast exactly as big as her head…”

“A pale Polan, just eight years old. The Polanie females are only good as children, you understand, because they grow grossly fat at puberty…”

“A Sarmatian, fierce, wild, insatiable. I think she must have been an Amazon…”

“However, the real prize of Melania’s collection, so I hear, she has not yet found the proper man for. Or perhaps the man rich and profligate enough to pay for it. A female creature of genuine rarity, I am told. Every man in Rome is avid to know what it is, and prays he will be the fortunate claimant of it.”

“A beautiful virgin, Saio Thorn, a girl of the people called Seres,” said my speculator Ewig, who knew everything furtive that went on in Rome. “Brought hither under close wraps and kept hidden ever since. A girl who is pale
yellow
all over, if you can credit such a thing.”

“I can,” I murmured. “Pale peach-colored is more accurate.”

Ewig gave me a look. “If you know things like that, Saio Thorn, perhaps you are the man the virgin is being reserved for.”

Well, as the long-ago St. Damian monks were the first to remark, curiosity has always been my chief besetting vice.

“Ewig,” I said, “you are acquainted with the artisans who worked on that house. I believe it is no immense edifice. Find out what you can about the plan and arrangement of it, and let me know.”

So, on a summer evening, I presented myself at the house on the Esquiline Hill, and an only fairly pretty maid ushered me into the antechamber. It was circular and spacious, and in the old warrior’s way I scanned it with a single glance. There was a pink marble table in the center of the room, with pink marble benches on either side of it, no other furnishings. Caia Melania was half sitting, half reclining on the bench facing me and the door through which I had entered. In the curved wall behind her were five other doors, all closed. At one end of the marble table stood a shallow crystal bowl full of just-picked peaches, every one perfect and unblemished, flecked with dewdrops, and atop them lay a tiny red-gold knife. At the other end of the table stood a much bigger, deeper crystal bowl of water in which lazily swam some small fish, also peach-colored, undulating filmy, veil-like fins and tails.

Apparently pink, or peach, was Melania’s favorite color, this day anyway, because her samite stola was of the same hue. As reported, she was no young woman, but a matron only eight or ten years younger than myself. For her age, though, she was strikingly handsome—well shaped but slender—and I could see the winsome girl she would once have been. Now, through her golden hair, time’s tremulous old finger had scribbled a few locks of silver, and down her ivory-translucent cheeks had scrawled a line here and there. But her blue eyes were large and lustrous, her lips still pink and unwithered; she needed no cosmetic plastering or coloring, and wore none.

She made a curt gesture and I took the bench across from her, sitting rectitudinously upright. Without a greeting, without a smile, without ceremony, she began her interrogation. As I had been warned, there were many questions, but—though her voice was pleasant enough—she asked them only in a somewhat perfunctory manner, making me suspect that she must already have done a very thorough investigation of each applicant before he ever walked through her street door. When she got to the questions about my tastes and proclivities, but still seemed little interested, I interrupted the inquisition to remark lightly:

“I take it, Caia Melania, that you have already judged me unqualified for the one famously invaluable gem in your jewel box.”

She raised an eyebrow, sat back a little and regarded me coolly. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, I have answered your every question with utmost honesty. Clearly I do not pretend to be a patricius or anything of the sort. And you must have surmised by now that neither am I one of Rome’s leading lechers.”

“So you believe you do not deserve the best in this house?”

“It is your house. You decide. Do I?”

“Take a look and see.”

She had somehow given her secret signal, for one of the doors behind her swung silently open, and the girl of the Seres stood there. As I had discovered years before, the females of that race grow no concealing escutcheon tuft, and this one’s gown of transparent goose-summer fabric concealed nothing either. Every pretty feature was unabashedly presented for my admiration, and she had clearly practiced at posing her peach-flesh body in a fetching attitude.

I said, “That is the rarity? The prize of your collection? For me? I had hardly dared hope. Really, I am overwhelmed.” And I gave the lie to that by yawning elaborately.

The girl in the doorway looked hurt, and Melania said tartly, “You do not
sound
exactly overwhelmed.”

I cocked my head and said judiciously, “I think… when you were her age, Caia Melania, you must have been much more beautiful.”

She blinked and almost flinched, but snapped, “I am not for hire. The Seres girl is. Are you telling me that you could
resist
her?”

“Yes. I have tried to abide by one of the sayings of the poet Martial.” Pedantically I quoted, ” ‘To have lived so as to look back with pleasure on one’s life is to have lived twice.’ So, you see, much earlier in my life I made sure to enjoy a girl of the Seres. Now I have my memories, my second life, so to speak. I suggest that you save this girl for someone less jaded, someone more callow—”

Melania said through her teeth, “She is reserved for one man alone.”

“And I am that man? Why me?”

Now she looked slightly disconcerted. “I mean… a virgin is a once-only thing. Should you decline this opportunity, and some other man qualify…”

I nodded. “He would have the once-only. You are right. Eheu, but risks do abound in this world.”

Melania glanced at the Seres girl, who was now glumly pouting, then gave me another long regard. She evidently decided that my air of world-weariness was only my attempt to disguise a foolishly puerile nervousness. So she made a visible effort to contain her own impatience and, to put me more at ease, said, “Perhaps I have seemed to hurry you, Saio Thorn.” She gestured and the door closed on the girl. “Let us simply sit and talk leisurely for a bit. Here, share one of these plump peaches with me.”

She took up the miniature gold knife, but politely waited for me to pick out a peach from the bowl and hand it to her. With scrupulous care, she sliced the dewy fruit in half, flicked aside the pit and pushed my half across the table toward me. Pointedly, I did not touch it until she took a bite of her half, which she did with seemingly unfeigned enjoyment. She smiled and munched and said moistly, “Delicious. It is one of those peaches that you almost drink rather than eat.”

At which, I picked up my half. But I held it over the crystal fishbowl and gave it one powerful squeeze that wrung all its juice and pulp into the water. Almost on the instant, the several fish began flirting about in agitation, and one rolled over and came to the water’s surface belly-up. I looked from it to Melania, who had gone very white and wide-eyed. She started shakily to stand, but I shook my head and rapped on the table, a signal of my own. All five of the doors behind her opened, and in each stood one of the soldiers I had brought, a bare sword in his hand. They waited for my signal to advance, but I only sat and waited too, until the woman spoke.

“I thought I had planned so perfectly,” she said, with just a hint of tremor in her voice. “I thought I had prepared so painstakingly. You could not possibly have known who I was. I have been exceedingly careful never to be seen in public in Rome. Yet you knew even before you got here to the house. How?”

“I knew fairly well what to expect, not whom,” I said. “I myself once laid a very similar trap for a man. I did not have such alluringly exotic bait—and, for that matter, not such patience as you have shown—but the general design was familiar. Also, I have had some experience of administering poisons. The girl is a venefica, is she not?”

The woman nodded dejectedly.

“And just in case I spurned her”—I picked up the little fruit knife—“one side of the blade was coated with poison, but only the one side, is that right?” She nodded again. “How would I have died? In convulsions, so you could watch and laugh? Or paralyzed numb and dumb, so you could tell me
why
I was dying? Or—?”

“No,” she interrupted. “Instantly, painlessly, mercifully. Just like that.” She indicated the bowl, where all the fish were now floating upside down.