Night of the Wolf (40 page)

He had been lonely then. As he made his way through the overgrown bushes and cypress to her side he thought,
And I’m lonely now.

She wasn’t very big, a little less than life-size. He remembered looking up at her face in his youth, but now he was larger than she was. He looked down at the top of her head. He put one arm around her slender waist and rested his cheek on the cold, marble hair. He recalled the woman in the arena and remembered where he’d seen her face before—in the deserted temple where he’d found the plum, a reflection in the basin of water.

A big old carp rose, took a fly on the surface, and vanished into the coiling waterweed. Dragonflies danced among papyrus clumps gone wild along the edges of the pool. A green frog, a very small one, jumped on the statue’s foot, the one over the water. Wonder of wonders, a green snake, marked with long black lines along its back, paused and studied him with catlike amber eyes, pupils slit in the bright sunlight, then eased into the water and vanished into the murky depths.

He saw her face looking up at him from the water, eyes closed, her body slender, white, rose-tipped breasts, dark pubic triangle softly furred. Yes, that was what the dense, curly mound looked like, the fur of a kitten.

The hand around the waist of the statue sought and seemed to feel the texture of a moist, ripe peach. He didn’t care to put what his hand was feeling, a patch of moss perhaps, to the test. The sun shining over his shoulder mirrored by the water suddenly shattered as the frog leaped from the statue’s foot into the gold-leaf disc. Pleasure leaped in his body, tightened his loins almost painfully, then shot away like an arrow loosed from a bow into the light, the air, and the silence, leaving him drenched with perspiration and feeling weak. His lone goddess of desire supported him upright and kept him from falling to his knees in prayer, supplication, or despair.

Fulvia was delighted. She oohed and aahed over Dryas, offered her money, jewels, slave attendants of her own, a villa in Baiae, whatever she could possibly imagine.

Dryas was disgusted and depressed. She believed none of Fulvia’s promises and felt her situation hopeless. She’d heard enough to know that Caesar was in the audience that had watched her this morning. She hadn’t even known which one he was. How could she kill him if she couldn’t even recognize him? She wasn’t at all sure how to find out what she needed to know to complete her mission.

All Dryas asked for was a bath and some food. She hoped Fulvia, with her flood of chatter and exultation, would go away. She did.

Dryas accepted the sauna steam bath; her people enjoyed it, also. The tepiderium surprised her. What luxury. Why did a people with access to such comfort and beauty want to bother with thrill-seeking behavior such as she’d been involved in this morning? Or go running around trying to bully others as they had the people of Gaul? What a waste of time for them.

Fulvia’s maids applied perfumed oil to Dryas’ body. The perfume stung the cuts on her ankle; they opened and began to bleed, as did the ones on her hand. The sight of her blood brought on immoderate—or what she considered immoderate—behavior among the women.

They flew around, crying out in an undignified manner. Their screeching annoyed Dryas, but she was well mannered. She was, after all, a guest, albeit an unwilling one. Among tribes whose tradition of hospitality went back time out of mind, the guest had an obligation of courtesy to the host, an obligation to accede to any reasonable request. She did not vent her annoyance on the guiltless maids, but promised to cooperate with the physician when he came.

The women draped her in a loose muslin gown and sent for Philo.

Philo met Lucius in the atrium. To Philo, he looked dour and unhappy.

“Where did they take her?” Lucius asked.

“Nowhere, she’s in the baths. Antye sent for me. Seems the boar got her on the ankle. Fulvia told them to treat her like fine crystal. They are in mortal terror of their mistress’s wrath. Antye called me to check on what are probably a few scratches. I saw the woman when she came back from the fight. By this evening, she’ll have every tongue in Rome wagging. Caesar and Cleopatra had to borrow a bedroom before he could leave for the Senate. That jade’s trick she pulled just before she dove for cover ruined every man in sight.” He chuckled. “Antony even forgot he had a hangover.”

Lucius made a gurgling sound. “No! No! Don’t take another step. Don’t move. Don’t do anything till I get back.” He danced around wildly. “I need . . . I need . . . I don’t know what I need . . . a disguise of some kind. Can I be your assistant? Can I be a bath attendant? What can I be?”

“Oh, no, not you, too!”

“Yes, yes, yes!” Lucius danced up and down.

“Octus!” Philo called.

Octus appeared.

“A tunic: old, worn, holes and patches. Is there something like that in the vicinity?” Philo asked.

Octus nodded and, in a few moments, returned with a garment.

“It’s not very attractive, but it will do nicely. Thank you,” Philo said, and offered it to Lucius.

“Now I’ll get over her.” He said this confidently as he donned the tunic in a tiring room off the baths.

Philo nodded. “Yes, sometimes when we get a close look at something we have admired from afar, we find it doesn’t live up to our expectations. Flaws hidden by distance appear more glaring and we see a coarseness. The very thing that made such an impact from a remote perspective repels us as too extreme when we approach and try to embrace it.”

“Ah, yes,” Lucius said. “Let’s get going. I want to see what she really looks like.”

“I thought that’s what I said,” Philo answered.

“No, no, you didn’t. Or maybe you did when I untangle it, but right now—”

“Be quiet,” Philo said. “You’re a servant.” He opened the door.

The filtered daylight from a skylight was not such as to flatter any woman. But Dryas was impervious to it. In fact, she looked to Lucius’ eyes rather like some captive earth spirit.

The maids had washed, pomaded, and braided the ebony hair around a strange, spiked, copper crown. At close range, he could see how fair her skin was, rather like the finest, grainless marble. Not cold as marble would be, but brushed with rose, about the same pink color as the rose of Pistum with its gift of the double spring. He remembered the long canes twined at the Basilian country villa. Now, in the cool air and bright sunlight, they would just be beginning to bloom. The long, cruel vines would be alight with buds and flowers and the air would be drenched with their fragrance.

She was seated in a chair, one of those rather spare things the Greeks favored with a curved back and slender legs. The chair and the damp muslin gown hid none of the secrets of her body, but rather lent a slight softness to its outline. They created a seductive sense that one, stretching out a hand to bare her nakedness, would find something of the joy the eye finds in a landscape beautiful already in the morning mist, but becoming even more lovely in the new sunlight.

She was simply woman, without artifice, without embellishment, without pretense, without desire, even. Woman as she is, as God created her, born as much to quench lust as to create it. As ready to cradle a child to her breast, or a man searching for that burning delight touched with the mystery of creation between her thighs, and to share her delight in union with him, even as he brought his fire to rouse hers.

As Philo closed the door behind him, she looked at them.

Yes, he’d thought so this morning, her eyes were blue. Blue like the plum he picked up in the temple, blue as lapis polished as a gem, blue as the Aegean Sea in summer, blue and framed by dark lashes.

And, what was worse, she saw him. She had no filter between herself and others. He had his; he had not seen Lucrese as a human being, only as one of the household slaves, until her lover died.

But this woman had none, and he saw her eyes follow him as he and Philo approached the chair. The scar along his back pulled. He was barefoot. He’d discarded his sandals when he donned the worn tunic, and his scar troubled him more when he had not even the light support of a winter legionary boot.

She saw the limp, the worn clothing, the bowed head. He was a little afraid she might recognize him from this morning’s fight, though he’d sat to the left of Antony and Caesar. He hoped she hadn’t gotten a good look at his face.

He knew all of the evidence said “servant” to her, and not a particularly important one at that, but still she saw him and looked past the worn clothing, the limp, and the subservient air.

They reached her chair. He went down on one knee beside it and lifted her leg by the heel and calf, holding it up so Philo could see the shallow lacerations left by the boar’s teeth.

She reached out and rested one hand on his shoulder. He looked up and met her eyes. Shock went through him like a bolt of lightning and, for a moment, they were alone together.

Yes, she saw him, and he saw himself through her eyes. She saw a servant, a young man with a limp, dressed as one who labors for his keep, one young but without much hope of ever attaining any better life. Yet struggling along as well as he could with the few small gifts he had been given: youth, straightly imprisoned in a house where it would never be allowed to grow and, at last, blossom into confident, generous, talented manhood; a human spirit, born to take wing to love, to hope, to achieve, lost to all the good it might do for itself and others, born only to be driven down into darkness and be utterly destroyed.

He felt her sadness and, oddly, her thirst for justice, and he knew with an all-pervading certainty that she was his and had been in the past, his, and he had loved her for all time and would do so again. In life or death, he would yield her to no one. No, not to Caesar or Rome or even the very immortal gods themselves.

Then Philo was smearing an ointment on the ankle and reassuring Antye and the other women that the few scratches were nothing to worry about. Lucius replaced her foot on the floor and she lifted the hand on his shoulder and looked away.

He knew he got to his feet and left the room, but he didn’t remember doing so. Nor could he ever recall the path he took to return to the deserted garden where his image of womanhood resided. He walked among the deep green of the overgrown cypress and the weed-choked yet somehow fecund pond blessed by the mother of all life who presided over it. He knew she had transmuted his desire from stone to flesh and sent him to look on her and she to gaze into his eyes.

The wolf also bathed, a rite he recognized as important among these Romans. He also allowed Felex’s “maids” to dress him. They were as adept at male haberdashery as female, and he entered the atrium at dusk every inch a proper Roman. He then asked Felex why he was to be lodged here and not as Amborux’s guest.

“Oh, my dear, that would never do. A connection between the Arch Druid of Gaul and Amborux, a highly regarded Roman senator and citizen, might be useful at home, but it would never do here in Rome. So we are his stand-ins, you might say. He couldn’t ignore a request from that direction, most unwise even with Gaul ostensibly under the Roman heel. They still have much too much prestige among the people, these Druid fellows, and while I’m sure they’re perfectly nice people, the Romans don’t approve of them at all.”

“Mmm,” Maeniel said. “I see.” He did. He saw more than Felex wanted him to see.

“I don’t want to be offensive, but we’re having a little dinner tonight for some other senators of our acquaintance. You are used to Roman etiquette?”

“Recline, support myself on left arm, use first three fingers of right hand to pick up food. Don’t slobber, fart, belch, snivel, spit, or scratch. Don’t get drunk or start fights, discuss religion or politics, or tell off-color jokes when women are present—or grope the waitresses or waiters for that matter. Compliment the food, even if it isn’t good, and don’t hog the best dish . . . share. And,” he took a deep breath, “wash before and after.”

Felex blinked at him. “Yes, oh my, yes. I do believe that covers everything.”

“Fine,” Maeniel said.

“Don’t mention Amborux in the same sentence with Druids. Actually, you probably better not mention either one of them at all.”

“That goes without saying,” Maeniel promised.

In a few moments, a model of Roman rectitude marched in, Marcus Junius Brutus, followed by an unhappy Antony.

“Caesar’s sons,” Felex said, driving an elbow into Maeniel’s ribs.

“Aren’t they a little old?” Maeniel commented.

“Well, you know, my dear, they aren’t his real sons, but Brutus is his heir and Antony is heir apparent,” Manilius told him.

“Mmm,” Maeniel said. He was happier when they went in to dinner.

Antony and Brutus reclined at opposite tables. They eyed each other like a pair of wolves ready to undertake a disagreement over status. Maeniel had often been either a participant or bystander at such events and was surprised to note Manilius and Felex chose to pretend nothing was happening. He’d noted in the past that humans were not uniformly truthful with themselves or others, but this represented an astonishing degree of self-delusion.

The house was, as Lucius had noted, resolutely Greek and the dinner table no less.

Dinner began with a magnificent salad of octopus mixed with bitter greens in oil, dressed with a bit of lemon and more than a bit of oil. The sweet curlicues of tender meat were lightly peppered and salted and, as was more usual in Greece, bread was supplied to sop up the remaining oil and lemon.

Antony and Brutus eyed each other over the salad and, when both their fingers fell at the same moment on the same tentacle, they almost snarled at each other.

Had they been wolves, Maeniel thought, then thought again, No! They were no different from wolves. They even smelled like a pair who wanted, but didn’t quite dare, to begin a confrontation, yet. Only when one or the other was sure he might win would this individual force the issue, and neither of them had reached that point yet. No, the only difference between this pair and wolves was that, among wolves, all would accept the change and go on much as before. While among humans, the consequences for the loser would likely be far more drastic.