The Golden Slave (9 page)

She bit her lip and looked away. “It would be too easy to find out who had helped you. I dare not stay.”

He leaned forward, taking her hands. “But what am I to you? Why should you help me at all, then?”

She jerked free, angrily. “I am a Greek,” she snapped. “My grandfather was a free man. None of this concerns
you!”

Eodan shook his head in wonderment. But indeed, he thought in the darkling Northern part of his soul, this was brought on when I invoked the Powers; she is a part of my weird.

He dared ask no further. There was too much awe about her. Had he indeed let a vessel of Power touch him, and lived?

“Freedom, freedom,” said Phryne. “In a barbarous land, in sod huts and stinking leather clothes, with not a book or a harp for a thousand miles ... oh, truly, I shall be free!” Her laughter rattled. Eodan made the sign against trolldom.

“Well, quickly,” she said. “I could not be taken for any peasant girl, so I must be a boy. There are the shears.”

She crouched before him and waited. He took the long crow’s-wing-colored tresses in his hands, feeling that he offended some spirit of loveliness. But―He cropped away until there were only ragged bangs falling over her brow and her ears could be seen. She looked in a mirror and sighed. “Gather them up,” she said. “When we make a fire, I will offer them to Hecate.”

She pointed to the clothes. “Now, put that on! Do not stand there gawping!” With a movement as of defiance, she undid her girdle, threw it on the floor and stepped from her gown. Indeed she was beautiful, thought Eodan. Her womanness did not flaunt itself, bursting through its clothes like Cordelia’s; it waited cool among shadows for one discoverer. He grunted some apology when she glared, turned his back, and fumbled on the garments laid out for him―a gray, patched woolen tunic, scuffed sandals, a felt hat and a long wool cloak. He picked up the heavy purse, slung a sword next to his skin and put a knife in the rope belt.

As he took up his staff, he saw Phryne clad like him. The baggy cloth would hide the shape of her body; she must hope the dirty old cape would shield slim legs and high-arched feet. She was turning from the shelf of books. She had run her fingers over the scrolls, just once, and tears lay in her eyes.

“Come,” she said. “We have only till morning; then they will start to hunt us.”

 
VII

To Eodan, Rome had been two things. First was the city of the Cimbrian dream, all golden roofs above white colonnades, shimmering against a sky forever blue. Then was the avenue of the triumph, where he bent his weary head lest the hurled muck take him in the eyes, and thereafter the slave pens and finally a stumbling in chains, one dawn, out onto the Latin Way. Neither was of this earth.

Now he entered Rome herself, and he saw just a little of a city that toiled and played and sang and dickered and laughed, plotted, feasted, sacrificed, lied, swindled, and stood by friends―a city of men and women and children like any others, built by men’s hands and guarded by men’s bodies. He had thought Rome was walled, but he found as he trudged through hours of buildings that she eternally outgrew her walls, as though she were a snake casting skin, so that the old gates stood open in the midst of a brawling traffic. He had thought of Romans as divided into iron-sheathed rankers, piggish man-traders, and one woman who shuddered in his arms; but he saw a gang of children playing ball in the dust, a leathery smith in a clangorous tiny shop and a limping man who cried out the roasted nuts he bore for sale in panniers slung from a yoke. He saw Romans spread their wares in flimsy booths while a temple gleamed purity above them. He saw a Roman matron, in clothes no better than his, who scolded her small boy for being reckless about passing horse-carts. He saw a young girl weeping, for some reason he never knew, and he saw two young men, merry with wine, stop to rumple the ears of an itinerant dog.

It growled about him, the heavy sound of laden wheels, echoing between grimy brick walls. A haze hung in the air, smoke and dust, tinged with garlic, cooked meat, new bread, perfume, horse dung, sewage, garbage, human sweat. Folk milled about, shouting, waving their arms, chaffering, thrusting a way past the crowds, somehow, anyhow. Once Phryne was whirled from Eodan in such an eddy. He gasped with terror, knowing he was indeed lost without her. She found her way back to him, but thereafter he held her wrist.

They threaded their way toward the Esquiline Gate. “We must find an inn,” Phryne said; she had to shout through the noise. “The house is on the Viminal Hill, but we could not go there clad as we are, nor before dark in any case.”

Eodan nodded dumbly. He let her lead him under the portal. A distance beyond it was a shabby district of tall wooden tenements, where the streets were slimy with refuse and the landless, workless scourings of war and debt crouched in their rags waiting for the next dole. He was too tired even to feel anger at the shouts from tooth-rotten mouths. “Hail, peasant! A son of the soil, there are straws in his hair! Aha, will you not lend us that pretty boy for a while? No, he will not―they’re a hard-fisted lot, these farmers. Cisalpine Gauls for certain, see the ox look about ‘em. But then where are their Gaulish breeches? Ha, ha, lost their breeches, did they―now was it at dice or what?”

Phryne, gone pale with wrath, led Eodan through twisted alleys until they found an inn. The landlord sat outside, yawning and picking his teeth with a thumbnail. “We would have a room for ourselves,” she said. “Half a sesterce,” said the landlord. “Half a sesterce for this flea pit? One copper as!” cried Phryne. They haggled while Eodan shuffled his feet and looked about.

When at last he was alone with her, in a windowless box of a room, he said, “The night winds take you, girl, what do we care for a copper more or less? I feel a fool every place we stop, listening to you!”

“I wonder what they would have thought of two people who did not bargain?” purred Phryne. “That they were in a suspicious haste to get off the streets?”

It was too murky to read her face, but he had come to know that tone. He could almost have traced out the quirk of her mouth and the mockery of her eyes. “Oh, well, you rescued me again,” he said. “I am a blundering dolt. What shall we do next, captain, sir?”

“You have a wit like a bludgeon,” she said. “Be quiet and let me think.” She threw herself on a pile of moldy straw and looked up at a ceiling hidden as much by grime as by dimness.

Eodan hunched among the stinks and choked down his wrath. She had saved him too often, in the days that lay behind. Her right to badger him was earned.

He could have guided the first wild gallop himself, out of the estate and down ringing dirt roads to the south. When they reached a stream, they had dismounted and led their horses several miles northerly in its channel, slipping and stumbling while the dark hours fled them; but he would have done that, too, to cover his trail. They found another road at last and went mercilessly along it toward the Latin Way; the horses were ready to fall down by sunrise. Eodan would have turned them loose then and gone ahead on foot; Phryne had made him, unwillingly, lead them into a brushy ravine and kill them. But that was not a thought Eodan might never have had―it was another trail-covering, after all, and a chance to sacrifice for luck. She had told him to offer the beasts to Hermes, whom he did not know, but he felt any god would have been pleased.

No, he thought, thus far he could have come without her. He might even have gone for many miles, sleeping by day and walking by night. But when he blundered into a sheep-fold, and the dogs flew at him and the shepherds came to club him for a thief, he could not have fobbed them off with so ready a tale as Phryne had. He could never have passed himself for a harmless man when they bought bread and wine on the way; he would have had to steal his food, with all the risks. He reckoned himself brave, but he had gone chill when she chattered merrily with a wagoner chance-met at an inn; yet it ended with two days of riding on a load of barley while the blisters on their soles eased. (He recalled seeing in the first dawn how her feet bled from the river stones; but she had said nothing.) She saved him having to answer any questions at all in his accent when she remarked calmly that her poor brother was a mute. The last two days, with houses and villages grown so thick they dared not sleep out in the grass like vagabonds, she had gotten rooms for them. (Formerly they had lain side by side, wrapped in their cloaks, looking up at a sky frosty with stars, and she had told him unbelievable things that the wise Greeks thought about heaven, until he begged her to spare his whirling head. Then she laughed very softly and said he knew the stars themselves better than she.) And now in Rome―Yes, surely she belonged to his weird, for he saw now how moonstruck had been his notion of entering Rome alone.

Nonetheless, at the few times weariness or wariness had not forbidden them to speak freely, she was apt to be curt with him. He wondered how he offended her. Once he asked, and she said for him to cease plaguing her with foolish questions.

She stirred on the straw. “I will go out and buy us better clothing,” she said. “After sunset I will take you to Flavius’ house. I know a way we can get in. But then it must be you who leads, for I have no more plans in me.”

“I have none,” he said. “I will trust in whatever gods are willing to guide us.”

“If they guide us not to our doom,” she said.

“That may well be. But if so, what can we do to stop it?” Eodan shrugged. “I had thought we might steal Hwicca from the house―buy boy’s dress for her too, Phryne―and then if we could all get on a ship bound somewhere―”

The girl sighed and left. Eodan stretched himself out and went to sleep.

She came back with cloaks and tunics of better stuff than they wore, a lamp and a jug of hot water and a basin borrowed from the innkeeper. Once again he submitted to her razor. When she was done, she gestured curtly at a loaf of bread and a cheese. “Eat,” she said. “You may need your strength.”

He had been tearing at it for some time when he noticed that she sat unmoving. “Will you not have some?” he asked.

Her tone was far-off, as if she had small care for what was to happen to them. “I have no appetite.”

“But you, too―”

“Let me alone!” she flared.

Presently they were out again upon the street. It was sunset time and the crowds had thinned, so they moved quickly over mucked cobbles. “It is as well to get into a better part of the city before dark,” muttered Phryne. “There could be robbers out.”

Eodan lifted his staff. “I would give much for a good fight,” he said.

Phryne looked at him, his eyes two beads above her own. “I understand,” she said. Her fingers stroked lightly over his arm. “It will not be long now, Eodan.”

The tightness in his breast grew with every pace. As dusk settled over the city, he found himself climbing a wide well-paved road up the Viminal Hill, so that he could gaze down across roofs and roofs and roofs, here and there a last pale gleam of temple marble, hazy blue fading into black in the east, and many lit windows making an eldritch earthbound star-sky, farther than a man could see. Faintly to him came smoke, a sound of wheels or tired feet, a distant hail that quivered upon still air. Once a horseman went by, casting the two plebeians an incurious glance.

Hwicca, thought Eodan. Hwicca, I have not seen you for a thousand years. I am going to see you tonight.

Though all the earth stood up to bar my way, I will hold you again tonight.

The darkness thickened, until at last he heard his footfalls hollow on unseen stones, until the houses on either side were little more than black blocks. His heart beat so loudly that he could almost not hear Phryne’s final words: “We have found it.” But he felt with unwonted keenness how her hand clenched about his.

They stood before a sheer ten-foot wall. “The house lies within a garden,” she whispered. “No one watches the rear ... guests come in at the other side ... there is a gate, but it would be locked now. If you can raise me to the top, I will tie my belt to a bough I know and you can follow.”

Eodan made a cup of his hands. She stepped up, in a single flowing movement, caught at his head to steady herself and murmured, “Now.” He lifted her carefully, but aware of her leg sliding along his cheek. Then she had scrambled to the top, and he felt his way past rough plaster until he found the cord she let down. He climbed it hand over hand.

“Where is your staff?” hissed Phryne. “Down below,” he said. “Have the gods maddened you, to mark your own path? Back and get it!” she snapped.

When at last they stood in the garden, Eodan peered through the crooked branches of a tree. No lights showed on this side. He guessed, from remembering the villa, that kitchen and slave quarters were at this end, but there would be a separate corridor on one side that the owners used. Phryne led him to such a door. It creaked beneath her touch. She halted, and time stretched horribly while they waited.

“No one heard,” she sighed. “Come.”

Two hanging lamps gave just enough light for them to see down the hall. “To the atrium,” whispered Phryne. “Nobody seems to be there. But the Cimbrian girl stayed here―” She stopped in front of a door and touched it with hands that shook. “Here, Eodan.” He saw her mouth writhe, as if in pain. “O Eodan, the Unknown God grant she be here!”

He found himself suddenly, coldly his own master. His fingers were quite steady on the latchstring. The door opened upon darkness ... no, there was a window at the end, broader than most Italian windows; he had a glimpse of gray-blue night crossed with a flowering vine and one trembling star.