The King's Gambit (13 page)

Minutes after I had thus armed myself, Cato came in to tell me that a woman awaited outside. I ignored his reproachful look as I hurried out to join her. We had to wait for an immense hay-wagon to rumble and screech its way by before we could speak.

"Please come with me, sir," she said. She was veiled, but nothing could disguise that insinuating voice or the snakelike way her body moved. There was sufficient moonlight, reflected from the whitewashed walls, to see fairly well.

I had flattered myself that I knew every street in Rome, but she soon had me in an unfamiliar area only a few minutes' walk from my door. Truthfully, no person may truly know all of Rome. The city is large, and areas are leveled by fires or land-speculators and rebuilt along new lines. This was an area of
insulae
, the new type of housing that had come into use as the expanding city crowded up against its ancient walls and there was no way to expand except upward. Five, six, even seven stories high towered these structures. The well-to-do had their apartments on the ground floor, where there was running water. The upper floors were occupied by the poor.These buildings had an unnerving habit of collapsing abruptly because of shoddy materials and inferior workmanship. The Censors kept passing laws regulating building standards, which the contractors persisted in flouting.

The faint light disappeared as we entered this district, for the
insulae
were so tall, and the streets so narrow, that the moon could only cast its rays from directly overhead, a period of only a few minutes each night.

Perhaps I should explain that in those days we had three types of streets in Rome. The
itinera
were only wide enough for people on foot. The
acta
were called "one-cart" streets because they were just wide enough to permit vehicular traffic. The
viae
were known as "two-cart" streets because it was possible for carts to pass one another on them. In those days, there were precisely two
viae
in all of Rome, the Via Sacra and the Via Nova, neither of which served the Subura. It is not much better now. Our Roman roads are the marvel of the whole world, but they begin outside the city gates. The streets of Rome are nothing more than our old rustic paths paved over. Visitors from Alexandria are always shocked.

Twice we saw wealthy men returning from late dinner parties, accompanied by torch-bearing slaves and bodyguards gripping wooden clubs in scar-knuckled fists. I sighed enviously, wishing that I were rich enough to own such an establishment. Not that I would have taken them on this night's mission.

Abruptly, I felt Chrysis grip my arm and draw me into a recessed doorway. She must have had cat's eyes to find the door, or to see me, for that matter. She scratched at the door, and from inside I could hear bolts being drawn. It opened and light flooded the street. Framed in the light stood Claudia.

"Come in, my dears," she said, her voice a low purr that set my blood racing.

I stepped inside and Chrysis closed and rebolted the door. To my eyes, accustomed to the gloom outside, the light was dazzling at first. Lamps stood everywhere, some of them sporting seven or eight wicks, all of them burning perfumed oil. To make the best use of the limited space available in an
insula
, the apartment was not laid out like a conventional house, but instead had a single large room off the street entrance, with a few smaller rooms opening off the main one.

"Welcome, Decius," Claudia said. She stood by a bronze statue of Priapus. The god's immense phallus jutted forth, gleaming in the lamplight. Such statues ordinarily stood in gardens, but since the god was depicted in the act of lubricating his outsized member with oil from a pitcher, it was obvious that it was intended to be erotic rather than fructifying.

"I rejoice to hear you welcome me," I said. "After our last encounter, I despaired of hearing such words from your lips."

She laughed musically. It did not sound forced, but it did sound practiced. "You must learn that I am not always to be taken so seriously. We women lack the reserve and control wielded by you men. We are more at the mercy of our emotions and express them freely. Aristotle himself says so, so it must be true." Again the musical laugh.

"You sounded most sincere at the time," I said, admiring her dress and makeup. She had made dramatic use of cosmetics, knowing that she was to be viewed by lamplight. She was lightly wrapped in a Greek gown pinned at the shoulders with jeweled brooches. Her breasts moved freely beneath it, showing that she wore no
strophium
.

"I usually do," she said, enigmatically. "Come, sit by me and let me make up for my hard words of a few nights ago." She took my hand and led me to a side of the room that was furnished in the eastern fashion, with thick cushions on the floor near a low table of chased bronze. We sat, and Chrysis came from one of the side rooms bearing a tray of delicacies, a pitcher of wine and several small goblets.

"How do you like my little hideaway?" Claudia asked me as Chrysis filled the goblets. "Even Publius doesn't know about it."

"Unique," I said. I had been studying the decorations, and they were indeed not what one would expect to find in the apartment of a patrician lady. Nor of a plebeian lady, either, for that matter. The frescoes on the walls, exquisitely rendered by one of the better Greek artists, depicted couples and groups performing intercourse in every imaginable position. The couples were not always of opposite sex, and one astonishing scene depicted a woman entertaining three men simultaneously. This sort of decor was quite common in brothels, although seldom of such high quality. It was not unknown in the bedrooms of the more uninhibited bachelors. It was not at all common in the main room of houses, respectable or otherwise. We Romans are seldom shocked, except by the doings of our women.

"Yes, isn't it? I have decided that since life is terribly brief, there is little point in stinting oneself on its pleasures. Besides, I love to shock people."

"I am shocked, Claudia," I assured her. "Generations of ancestrial Claudians are shocked as well."

She made an impatient face. "That's another thing. Why should we conduct ourselves to please a lot of dead people? Anyway, most of my ancestors were scandalous when they were alive, so why should their being dead make them such paragons of righteousness?"

"I am sure I do not know," I told her. She handed me one of the small goblets.

"This is the rarest wine of Cos. It dates from the Consulate of Aemilius Paullus and Terentius Varro, and it would be a crime to water it." I accepted the goblet from her hand and sipped at it. Ordinarily, we regard drinking unmixed wine as barbarous, but we make an exception for exceptionally rare wines, drunk in small quantities. It was indeed rich, so full-flavored that even a small sip filled the senses with the ancient grapes of sunny Cos. It had a strange, bitter undertaste. At the time, I thought that it might be from the evil that cursed the year of its making. Paullus and Varro had been the Consuls whose army had met Hannibal at Cannae. The wily Carthaginian had chosen to fight on a day when the incompetent Varro was in command, and the Roman army had been all but annihilated by the much smaller mercenary force commanded by Hannibal, the most brilliant general who ever lived. It was the blackest day in Rome's history, and there were still some Romans who would touch nothing made during that Consulate.

"I am rather glad it has fallen out this way, Decius," Claudia told me, "in spite of our misunderstanding. Isn't this much better than meeting in a house full of overfed and drunken politicians?"

"I couldn't agree more."

"You are the first man I have invited to my little refuge from the sordid world." This, at least, I was happy to hear.

"I trust that you will remain discreet," I said.

"As long as it suits me," she said. "No longer than hat."

"Yet I urge you to be cautious. Periods of license are always followed by periods of reaction, when the Senate and People reassert their virtue by persecuting those who were not discreet in their debaucheries. The Censors love to publicly condemn highborn men and women who have lived too loosely."

"Oh, yes," she said, bitterness in her voice. "Especially women. Women who live to please themselves disgrace their husbands, don't they? Men don't dishonor their wives. Well, Decius, let me adopt the sibylline mantle and show you the future. Someday, my brother Publius will be the greatest man in Rome. No man, whatever his office, will dare to condemn me to my face then, and I care not at all for what is said behind my back."

Truthfully, in that moment she resembled a sibyl. The exaggerated cosmetics she wore made her face a hierophantic mask, but I hoped that this was a mere effect of the light. The prospect of Publius Claudius wielding real power in Rome was horrifying in the extreme.

She relaxed from the rigid pose. "But we are being too serious. I did not invite you here to argue. I will make a bargain with you: If you will refrain from passing judgment on my chosen means of relaxation, I will not bore you with predictions of my own or my brother's future prominence."

"Agreed," I said. Indeed, it seemed a fine idea. My mind had entered an odd state, free-floating and detached, in that degree of preternatural receptiveness which the more lurid Epicurean philosophers agree is the best for indulging in pleasure, without the distractions of everyday life or the fears of future consequences. "Let us carve this night from the fabric of our lives and hold it separate forever."

"I could not have put it better. Chrysis, perform for us."

I had all but forgotten the girl, and was a bit surprised to see her sitting on a cushion, sipping from a goblet, as if she were an equal. This was yet another indication of her uncertain status. She rose and went into one of the other chambers, to return holding a coiled rope. One end of this she affixed to a bronze ring set into one wall of the room. She stretched it across the room and fastened it to another ring in the wall opposite. It was not taut, about four feet from the floor. It was only about the thickness of a man's smallest finger.

"Chrysis has so many talents," Claudia whispered, leaning close so that our shoulders touched. "She has been a professional tumbler, among other things." What other things? I thought. But then my attention was taken once more by Chrysis. Her hand went to her shoulder and her dress fell to pool around her bare feet. She stood dressed only in the briefest of loincloths and her body was almost that of an adolescent boy. Only her large nipples and the rondure of her buttocks attested to her sex. I found this androgyny strangely stirring. It was especially strange since I had the utterly feminine Claudia so near me. I decided that it was an effect of the rare wine, and I sipped more of it.

With an adroit leap, Chrysis sprang onto the rope and crouched with her knees deeply bent, her arms spread for balance. Slowly, she straightened until she was standing, one foot poised delicately before the other. Then she began to bend backward, her hair falling to touch the rope as her spine bent like a full-drawn bow. Her hands touched the rope and her pelvis arched upward like, it seemed to me, that of a woman offering herself to a god. The image, bizarre as it was, seemed pleasing at the time.

Her feet kicked free of the rope and she was standing on her hands. Slowly,
she raised her head and bent her spine until the soles of her feet rested
against the back of her head. Then, impossibly, her feet slid past her ears and
continued downward until her toes dangled an inch or two above the rope. Her
body was now bent backward into a near-circle. I could scarcely believe that a
human spine could be so flexible. "She can play the double flute in that
position," Claudia whispered. "She can play a harp with her toes and shoot a bow with her feet."

"A many-talented girl," I murmured. Unbidden through my mind went lascivious images of other possibilities of which such a body might be capable. Claudia could read my expression.

"Perhaps later we can have her demonstrate the talents she never uses for public performances."

I turned to her, managing to shake off a bit of Chrysis's spell. "I am not interested in her," I lied. "I am only interested in you."

She leaned even closer. "Why be so quick to dispose of one of us?"

I was not certain of her meaning, but then my mind was playing tricks, disoriented by wine, the unexpected surroundings and the seemingly impossible things Chrysis was doing. One can watch a single improbability without losing equilibrium. Several, either simultaneously or in succession, unsettle the brain.

Chrysis performed a backward somersault from the rope and launched into a series of back handsprings, each time touching the floor so lightly that even these violent exertions were accomplished in the eerie silence that seemed to accompany all her movements. Then she stood before us, her legs spread wide, bending backward until her face appeared between her knees, as if she had been beheaded and now gripped her head between her legs like a ball. Her hands grasped her ankles. Slowly her head turned and her tongue snaked out to slide upward along her thigh. Her head twisted intricately and she straightened, but now a long strip of white dangled from her mouth. Somehow, she had unknotted her loincloth with her teeth and stripped it off as she whipped her spine back into a more normal position. Now she stood before us dressed only in a fine sheen of sweat. There could be no doubt of her gender now, her smoothshaven pubis gleaming before us like a pearl. She spat out the loincloth and smiled proudly as she bowed.

I applauded vigorously, the sound of my hands clapping seeming to come from far away. Claudia applauded as well; then she leaned closer and my arms went around her as her lips spread against mine. Our tongues met as our hands explored one another; then she drew back with a look of consternation.

"What's this?" I couldn't guess what she meant; then her hands rummaged in my tunic and came out with the dagger and the
caestus.
For no good reason, I collapsed into laughter.

"Dangerous place, Rome," I gasped. "Especially at night."