Shadow of Ararat

THE DE’ORELIO RESIDENCE, THE CITY OF ROME

Delicate voices greeted Thyatis as she descended the stairs from the upper chambers of Anastasia’s mansion. Below, in the atrium, a choir of young slaves was singing to welcome the visitors to the party. The hall of the Poseidon was thronged with people, their voices and “the tinkle of glass and plates rising up like a cloud above them. Thankfully, none of the notables of the city^-the bankers, the senators, the Legion officers, their wives, concubines, mistresses, or catamites-paid her the least attention. Anastasia’s handmaidens had labored over her for much of the afternoon. Her hair was a sweeping red-gold cloud around her face, tied back near the end with a deep-violet silk tie that trailed down her back. Careful pigments had been applied, bringing forth her lips, her eyes, and the line of her cheekbones.

She wore a new gown, this one modeled upon the silk masterpiece Anastasia had worn that first day. The finest linen, with a gauze drape of silk above it, in a deep green with subtle gold and blue hues. Tiny gold slippers were carefully tied to her feet, with delicate copper wires ornamenting and outlining the curve of her calves. A lapis and dark-gold necklace lay between her breasts. By dexterous sleight of hand, she had secreted her throwing knife and a garrote upon her person without the notice of the slaves who had dressed her. Their solid presence lent her the calmness of mind to navigate the crowd, which spilled down the steps beyond the sea-green hall, through the inner garden, and out into the great garden at the back of the house. Weaving through the chattering throng, she deftly avoided the servants rushing in and out of the kitchen, bearing great platters of candied figs, iced sherbets, sliced up portions of roast on silver skewers, and sugar-coated wrens in aspic.

The trees of the great garden were ablaze with hanging lanterns, and torches were placed along the walkways. Here the younger set of the party had gathered in a brightly attired throng around the ornamental pools. Wine flowed freely from the amphorae carried by the house slaves. Two young men dressed as gladiators, patrician by the cut of their hair and the softness of their hands, brushed past Thyatis on either side. One wayward hand caressed her right breast. Her hand was lightning quick, trapping his thumb as it trailed away. There was a twist and a pop, and the noble youth stumbled into his friend, speechless in pain. Thyatis glided on, ignoring whispered suggestions from the young men and women loitering in the shadows under the pear trees. Beyond the ornamental pool lay a secluded glen in the garden, surrounded by high hedges and trellises of rose and hyacinth. Settled within the glen, Anastasia’s gardeners had labored for years to build a Pythagorean maze.

Beyond sight of the house and its merry windows, filled with people and lights, Thyatis relaxed. In the gloom under the waxing moonlight she stepped carefully through the passages in the maze. Around her, softly, came cries and groans. More than once she stepped over half-sheltered couples on the walkway. At last she found the center of the geometry, and there, next to a tiny marble pool surmounted by a bronze faun, were two facing benches. In her time in the house of her mistress, Thyatis had come here often to escape the subtle tensions among the household as well as the training that Anastasia had placed her under.

Finding the bench by feel in the darkness, Thyatis sat, sighing in relief. The sandals were very pretty, but her feet were not used to their tight confinement. She unwound the golden cords from her feet and carefully set them aside. She gently rubbed her feet, hissing in pain at the unexpected blisters. In the quiet darkness, her thoughts fluttered about her head like night moths.

Perhaps I should just leave the city and go far away, somewhere without all this…

“I think the same thing, often. Almost every day.” The voice was low and deep.

Thyatis froze, then slowly turned. All but invisible in the darkness, a figure sat at the other end of the bench. The hairs on the nape of her neck prickled up and her nostrils flared. She accounted herself uncommonly aware, yet this man had been sitting no more than three feet from her since she had reached the center of the maze and she had not noticed him at all.

“My apologies,” she said, “I did not think that I had spoken aloud.”

“No matter,” he replied, -his deep voice easy and tinged with weariness. “If my presence ruins the solitude, I will betake myself away.” He moved on the bench, swinging one leg over. Gravel crunched under a boot.

“No,” she said, surprising herself, “you do not… intrude. There are too many people here for me to be comfortable in the house, or on the lawn.”

He laughed-a rich sound like river water. “I hate crowds. Particularly ones like this, filled with all of the people you always see and all of the ones you cannot stand seeing again. The bickering and little games over who has more of this, or more of that. Ah, and the hostess, the dear Lady. A matron of great stature in the… community, and of unquenchable appetite.”

Unseen, Thyatis smiled. “You know her, then,” she said.

“For years! She has always wanted me to be one of her retinue of promising young men. Do your feet hurt?”

Thyatis blinked. “Ah, they’re sore from the sandals., They’re new and… I’m not used’to them.” I

“May I?” came his quiet voice. In the darkness, Thyatis felt two hands, strong and broad, touch her right foot, perched on the edge of the bench. “I have some training in the temple, I can make the pain go away.”

“You sound young for a priest,” she said, but she swung around as well, placing both of her feet on the bench. Gentle fingers brushed over her toes and slid along her instep.

“When I was younger, I showed some talent for the arts of Asklepios,” he said “so I was enrolled by my mother. I think that she wanted me to avoid the fate of government service that had taken my father. That plan was a failure, 1 fear. I spend all of my time now on things relating to the Offices.” The laugh came again, a pleasant burr in the gloom. Thyatis leaned back against the thick leaves of the hedge. His hands rolled and kneaded her tired muscles.

“This feels wonderful,” she said, her voice languid. “Working for the Lady is equally diverting. At first you are told that you will be doing one thing, a thing that you enjoy and show promise and skill at, then the next day another, something that you detest. She is maddening much of the time.”

“And gracious and serene the next,” he said. “I hope you did not take offense at my description of her before.”

“No!” Now she laughed. “All too accurate. She is not happy unless all things around her are in their proper place. The properness, or the placement, may change from day to day… Ow!”

The hands paused, then gently probed the aching spot. There was a soft noise, like the hum of a bee, and for a moment a light sparked between his hand and her foot. Thyatis gasped at the tingling shock that traveled through her foot, up her leg, and to the top of her head. In the brief light she caught an image of long dark hair, a small beard, and a strong nose. Then there was darkness, even more complete than before.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice a whisper. “You injured your foot long ago? A cut, or stepping on something sharp?”

“Yes. I was in the stableyard and stepped on a horse nail. It was driven all the way through the bottom of my foot.” By iron control, she kept from shuddering at the memory of the long days that she had lain in a fever afterward. “Pay it no mind.”

“Let me finish what your body started,” he said, his voice even..

“How so? It has been healed for years.”

A well-trimmed fingernail traced the old wound and then up the back of her calf to her knee. Thyatis hissed at his touch. It tingled through more than her leg.

“See?” he said. “There is still a knot here of old injury. If you will allow it, I can make it go away. You will notice the difference, I assure you. Old wounds linger, even when you cannot see them, disturbing the balance of the body. Odd headaches, dizzy spells, shortness of breath…”

Thyatis was quiet for a long time and she drew her knees up to her chest. The priest settled back against the opposite hedge in companionable silence. Even the prospect of a healing magic filled her with dread. Giving up control of her body, particularly to a stranger, even a well-spoken one, was unthinkable. The feel of his hands now reminded her all too much of Anastasia’s caresses. At last, with an odd trepidation, she said, “No, thank you. I do not feel it… proper.”

“No matter, lady, such things are personal.”

I am not a lady, she started to say, but the warm orange light of a lantern now spilled into the little clearing around the pool and the faun. Thyatis blinked and picked up her shoes. The priest, now illuminated, squinted up at the slender figure holding the half-shuttered lantern.

“Ai, Krista, it has been awhile since I’ve had the pleasure of your company.”

“My lord,” answered Anastasia’s handservant, bowing deeply. “My mistress sent me to find you. The dinner is almost ready to be served. She begs your indulgence in joining her at repast.“

The young man shook his head in dismay but got up all the same. In the light of the lantern, Thyatis saw that he was tall, with a clean-limbed form, and long dark hair tied back in a fillet. He was dressed in the robes of a philosopher, though he looked more like an athlete. He began to turn to Thyatis, reaching out a hand to assist her up, but Krista slid into the space between them instead. She smiled prettily. “Please, my lord, we mustn’t be late.”

The priest frowned but allowed himself to be led away. Even as they passed the entrance to the little grotto, Krista was telling him a long story about the candied fruits at the feast. The lantern light flickered on the hedges, then faded away. Darkness crept back in, and the thin moon shone down once more, picking silver highlights off of the faun.

Thyatis considered the shoes in her hands, then sat them down on the gravel and began the laborious process of lacing them back up.

Even with nearly a hundred slaves stationed along the walls with fans stirring the air, and all of the windows in the house thrown open, the dining hall was almost unbearably hot. Thyatis stood in an alcove off the passage from the kitchen to the series of chambers that held the throng of dinner guests. From her vantage behind a curtain, she could see the main room, where Anastasia and her coterie of male admirers spilled off a reef of couches. Among them, the young priest was set in the place of honor at the hostess’s side. While Thyatis watched, the mistress of the house was making a messy job of feeding him jellied eels. Their laughter rose above the din of the other guests. Thyatis turned away, shaking her head.

“There you are!” Krista stormed into the little alcove, carrying a copper platter burdened with fresh-cut fruit arranged in the shape of a map of Achaea. Her pert features were filled with anger. “You’re supposed to be out there, with the mistress, entertaining!”

Thyatis glanced back out through the break in the curtain. “I think the Lady is doing just fine all by herself,” she said in a very dry voice.

Krista shifted the platter onto a ledge and rubbed her shoulder.

“The mistress is not supposed to be doing that, you are,” she hissed. “You’re supposed to be the. mysterious niece with a gorgeous dress and plenty to put in it. It should be you being clumsy with the jellied eels and bending over a lot to pick them up.”

“Me?” Thyatis said. “I’m dreadful, as the past three weeks have shown, at being coy and alluring. To quote you, I’m dense and have no sense of rhythm.”

“I’m a slave, you lackwit! I can get the Prince into bed, but I surely can’t marry him, now can I?” Krista was spitting mad and the drape of her tunic kept getting out of line. Irritated beyond measure, she slid the shoulder strap back into place again.

Thyatis stared at her in puzzlement. “The Prince?” Krista rolled her eyes and carefully drew back the curtain, pointing through to the dining chamber and Anasta-sia’s couch.

“Him, you cow, the one that you were in the garden with. You know, for a moment I thought that you had some real flair for this, getting him alone before hardly anyone even knew that he was at the party. But you didn’t even know who he was…” Krista sat down on a little stool pushed up against the wall, her face a picture of despair.

“Minerva preserve us, you’re so… so… I don’t even know what. We show you and show you-but you just don’t care!” Krista picked one of the little plums cut into the shape of a tiny Greek temple and began nibbling at it. “This is not going to work well at all.”

Thyatis was still staring out into the dining chamber, her mouth hanging open. She turned back to Krista with a look of astonishment on her face. “That’s the Prince? The one that the Lady has been maneuvering for weeks to get to this party so that I can be paraded in front of him like a prize milk cow?”

Krista nodded, saying, “That’s one way to put it.”

“He’s a priest!” Outrage filled Thyatis“ voice. ”I’m supposed to seduce a priest? That’s illegal! They’ll lock me up in some pit in the ground and starve me to death.“

“Quiet! That only happens to Vestals!” Krista whispered around another of the plums. “Your duty to the mistress is to do whatever she commands. You may be her ‘ward’ and a member of her family, but you still work for her. Tonight that means that you attract, and hold, the attentions of that young man out there, who will, if things go as the mistress foresees, someday become Emperor. Then you would be Empress, if you manage to get him to marry you, which will be a chore and a half, I can see.”

“I don’t want to be Empress, you fiat-chested conniving little wretch! I want to go back to doing the job I was doing before, the one I liked!”

“Well, Miss Too-good-to-do-the-work, you owe the mistress as big a debt as anyone, so I suggest that you fix your hair, paste a nice smile on your fat peasant face, and get out there before the mistress winds up in an orgy with that bevy of young boys out of boredom waiting for you to show up. Otherwise you’ll be on the block again, with a hundred strangers measuring your body with their eyes!”

Thyatis’ eyes narrowed and her forearm was a blur ending in Krista pinned to the wall of the alcove. Thyatis leaned close, her teeth bared in a smile.

“Remember what I do for a living, little girl?” she whispered. “Don’t threaten me with talk of debts or my past again, or you’ll be in the Cloaca Maxima, facedown, with a ticket to the river.” Almost gently, she released Krista from the arm lock and put her upright. “Here’s your tray. Don’t drop it.”

Krista frowned and straightened her tunic. For a moment

Thyatis thought the smaller woman would attack her, but then the moment passed and Krista shook her head.

“You and the mistress can discuss it,” said Krista, her eyes flashing. Then she left.

There was a wicker box of wine jugs on the floor of the alcove. Thyatis bent down and tugged one free of the straw wrappings. She pried the wax seal off of the top with a fingernail and took a very long draft. It was thick, resinated Greek wine. She took a second pull on the bottle, then put it aside. She checked her hair, straightened her gown, and made sure that all of the arm bangles and bracelets were still in place. Finally ready, she pulled aside the curtain and stepped back out into the corridor.

Entertain the Prince, she thought. Attract the Prince. Right.