The Uncertain Hour (12 page)

But all that changed irrevocably in Prusa. It was
her
he needed, not just anybody. It was
her
body, and her body alone, that he craved. In her arms, he soon found it almost inconceivable that he had ever managed to perform sexually in anybody else’s. Every detail of her body seemed to have emerged fully formed from the workshop of his imagination. More than anything else, it was her smile, the mere thought of which, in the sleepless hours before the dawn of a new day would find him pacing the floor in anticipation of their next meeting, would bring him to tumescence. Like the Christians, who were said to confess their sins to their priest in return for absolution in their god’s name, their lovemaking felt like a form of confession, and he emerged from it each time in the serene confidence that his priestess had peered into his soul and found evidence of his every weakness, his every act of dishonesty and deceit, his every unwholesome impulse. Far from absolving him, however, she delighted in each discovery of his degradation, she was charmed and flattered by it, because each was a tribute and a prayer to her power and beauty.

She was always there at the saffron fields when he arrived, because she knew how arousing he found it to be observed upon his approach. Still fifty paces away, he found himself stiffening, and he often took her where she stood, leaning against the embankment, without so much as a word passing between them. Indeed, it was not until their third day together that he even saw her naked body, and when he did it reinforced everything he thought he already knew about her. Hers was not like any female form he had ever seen. Far from the Roman ideal of plump, rounded curves and soft, yielding surfeit, she was all angles and hard surfaces. With almost no fat to cushion them, the tight muscles of her abdomen and buttocks crowded and throbbed against her skin. Her breasts were small, hard, and pointed, her nipples like tiny, rough-edged pebbles, her hip bones jutting scimitars. Her pubic mound was a clenched fist. She seemed to him like the demon goddess of some arcane Eastern cult, ever ready to demand the sacrifice of flesh from her worshipers.

When their time together was limited—and she never bothered to explain the circumstances that dictated her timetable—they would make love twice, the first time at his furious, incontinent pace, the second at hers, far slower and more deliberate. If they had an entire afternoon together, they went at it three, four times, he glorying in his gathering exhaustion, she unchanging and inexhaustible, as if even his most titanic effort—even had he been able to move mountains or summon earthquakes on her behalf—were a matter of mere mortal busy-work, perceived in all its self-importance from the heights of Olympus. She climaxed as often as he did—she made very certain of that—but it was never accompanied by loud frenzy or followed by languor. Instead, while he lay still prone and panting, she would stretch out on her back, cradling her head in the palms of her hands, and direct her gaze skyward, her eyes darting back and forth, like a philosopher pondering an issue of great moment. At such times, he learned better than to interrupt her thoughts. Once, when he had sought awkwardly to express the emotion that was pressing painfully against his ribcage, she had turned upon him the most chastening of scowls.

“Words are for speaking the truth, Governor,” she’d said coolly. “If you insist on loving me, you are far more likely to express it honestly in your silence.”

He never learned more about her personal history than he had on their first walk together, nor did she ask him any but the most superficial questions about himself, his history, his ambitions. He could not say whether her cool detachment was a form of self-defense or a proclamation of invulnerability. He knew that he was at fault in this—that a more experienced man would not require such things to be explained to him—and his lack of insight made him feel blundering and stupid in her company, but she still made no concession to his confessional urges. That she was unhappy in her marriage, or at least infinitely bored, was a given; that she despised barracks and provincial existence was equally evident; but concerning what she might reasonably expect from the rest of her life, or what she would change if she could, she never spoke at all. Was her marriage childless by choice, accident, or nature? Who were her other lovers, her friends? If asked, she pretended not to hear, or changed the subject, or responded with some irrelevancy. And as for her expectations of him, or of any potential advantage a centurion’s wife might derive from her liaison with the most powerful man in the province, she was as silent on that score as if he were merely a figment of her imagination, as he sometimes felt himself, with perverse, submissive gratitude, to be.

So it came as some surprise, not long before he was due at last to return to Nicomedia, that she arrived bearing a gift wrapped in muslin.

“What’s this?” he asked as he unwrapped it.

“Keepsake,” she shrugged.

It was a ladle, some eighteen inches in length, of the most translucent, transcendent myrrhine, yellow-green with veins of purple and white. As he slowly turned it in his hands, the purple veins grew fiery in the sunlight, the white alternately milky and tinged with bloody red. The craftsmanship was flawless, the crystal polished to an icelike sheen. Although Petronius had no expertise in such matters, he knew immediately that it was a priceless artifact of some ancient Eastern campaign, for nothing so beautiful had ever been made by Roman or even Greek artisans.

“Where did you get this?” he asked incredulously.

“Aulus picked it up years ago at a bazaar in Arrabona. He thought it was pretty, and he passed it on to me to serve wine at drinking parties.”

“It’s worth a fortune. Did you know that?”

She shrugged again. “I’ve already given it to you. I can’t ask you to buy it from me now.”

“Won’t he miss it?”

“He misses everything, but he won’t miss that.”

As he cradled it gingerly in his hands, Petronius considered what a perfect, typical gift it actually was, coming from her. It was of immense value—undoubtedly worth enough to change her life forever, had she chosen to sell it—and yet she had given it to him so casually, as if, for foolish, sentimental reasons, he were overestimating its significance. It was the way she gave Petronius everything. It meant nothing to her; whether or not she grasped how much it meant to him—and he was never quite sure that she did, despite the fact that he made no effort to conceal his dependence on her charity—his avidity for every crumb she threw him was a source of endless, titillated amusement to her. That, needless to say, only made him more greedy of her.

What did she feel for him? Petronius told himself that he did not care, so long as they were together, but it was a lie so transparent that he could not maintain it even to one so beguiled as himself. He must know, but she was consummately evasive. Perhaps, despite her protestations, she was really waiting for him to declare himself first? That he must not do, though his enslavement must have been so perfectly evident that such a declaration would surely have been redundant. In her presence, scanning her face for any sign of weakness and parsing her words for a confession of any sort, he felt like a small child among adults who do not wish their conversation to be understood; he felt that she must be saying
something
, or concealing
something
. At times, he felt that she was merely interested in his power and wealth, and would continue to seduce him with her opacity until she had obtained what she wanted; at others, it seemed equally plausible that she needed him as much as he had come to need her, but that, as someone whose entire existence theretofore had depended upon the whims of selfish men, she could not bring herself to throw herself upon his mercy, lest it prove no more merciful than the others’. He could not know, and he began to wonder how he could attach her to him. He was prepared, of course, to make the wildest promises, and to keep every one of them, but he could not do so until she asked for them.

As the day of his unavoidable return to Nicomedia approached, however, his resolve began to crumble. He could not leave without some token of commitment from her. And finally, on the eve of his departure, as they lay together in the gorse, he abandoned the last tattered shreds of his scruples.

She stared into his eyes and stroked his cheek with her knuckles, a quizzical smile playing on her lips, as she considered her response. The air was faintly laced with lavender and cherry blossom, and the bees busied themselves loudly in the fruit trees. At last, she said: “Is it really so important for you to hear me say it?”

“It is.”

“Why?”

“I live in fear of losing you.”

“So if I say I love you, that means we are bound together forever? Is that what you believe, Governor?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“You’ll have to wait, then. You need a clearer head than that to love me.”

The very day after his return to Nicomedia, word came from the west that every province of Anatolia was to contribute a cohort to reinforcing the eastern frontier, where the war in Armenia was threatening to resume. Without hesitation, and despite its patent unfitness for combat, Petronius volunteered the ninth cohort of the Fourth Scythian legion, and within days her husband had been marched off to muster at Caesarea Mazaca.

NEREUS WAS AT
his side with a towel the moment Petronius lifted his head from the water table.

The plunge had not helped; if anything, his head seemed even tighter and emptier than before, and for a brief moment he felt wholly inadequate to the task before him. He had felt the pull of these memories growing stronger every moment as the evening progressed. Was it, he wondered, the loss of blood that made him so vulnerable to them, or the imminence of their extinction? He knew it to be quite true from his experience on the battlefield that men see their entire lives unfold before them in the moments before death, yet it was not by any means his entire life that he was reliving in these transitory visions. He had scarcely had a thought to spare this evening for his parents, his childhood, his lost friends or the men he had killed in battle. No, these memories were more like the coded dreams of a man troubled by an unresolved problem. They conveyed a simple message, a sibylline instruction not at all difficult to decode, if only—as she had suggested all those years ago—he could manage to clear his head. Just then, sensitive as always to his mood, Melissa rested her cool hand against the small of his back beneath the blanket, and his confusion resolved itself into something lesser, something more familiar, like Proteus subdued by Menelaus.

“You appear to harbor a special bitterness against Seneca, Lu-cilius,” Anicius was saying. He had dropped his voice, in acknowledgment of the fact that Lucilius had, for some reason, decided to cross the line between idle gossip and character assassination, and that his every utterance in this new, uncharted territory was both irrevocable and chargeable against him.

“You know, I think you’re right, Anicius. I do feel quite bitterly about him. I’m not sure I even realized it until just now.”

“The bitterness of a friendship betrayed?” Martialis suggested. Lucilius nodded thoughtfully before responding.

“In a sense. That is, he never said a word against me, as far as I know, or acted in the least way against my interests. In that sense, he was utterly loyal—as was only wise, seeing as I was one of the few who stuck by him in his exile. What he betrayed, I think, was the tenor of our friendship. It began in mentorship, but he never really allowed it to outgrow that. He always had to be the sage, always had to teach. Even when I was at the height of my profession and he had been laid low by his own conniving, it was always a one-sided arrangement with him—he lectured, I listened. Even with all his hypocrisies laid bare before the world—his fawning and flattering, his cupidity, his status-consciousness, all the rest—he never once dropped the act before me, never once acknowledged me as someone who might be of help. It was always ‘See the great Stoic in adversity! You, too, Lucilius, could learn to bear your misfortunes as well as I if you followed my example.’ Somehow, though, now that our situations were reversed, my successes were symbols of worldliness, my service to the state an unworthy distraction from the study of philosophy, my acquaintance with powerful men a sure sign of unbridled ambition. Everything was grist for his mill. It was all he had left, his so-called integrity, and he clung to it even when it was nothing but a tattered old rag, and shoved it in my face at every opportunity. You could hardly call it a friendship at the end.”

“And yet you allowed him to think himself your friend to the end?” Martialis offered.

“I
was
his friend—it was he who was not mine.”

“That can’t be right. There cannot be one friend only, any more than a bird can fly with one wing. If he is not your friend, you cannot be his. It is impossible.”

“You may be right, Martialis. Perhaps it was not friendship by then. You know, Seneca once wrote that one should consider oneself alone in the presence of a friend. What he intended, of course, was that one should feel free to say anything in the presence of a friend, as if one were alone with one’s own thoughts. But what he really meant without realizing it was that one should feel free, as he did, to talk and talk in the presence of a friend as if there were no one else in the room. His only concept of friendship—and especially toward the end, when his wits were frayed with worry and despair—was in the abstract, as a philosophical conundrum. I had this idea that I would set myself up before him, right in his very face, and provide an alternate example, the very model of a loyal, silent companion who was always available, always present, never critical or judgmental. I wanted to show him how a real friend acts, and yet never have to tell him. If I’d had to say ‘See what I am doing, Lucius. This is how a real friend behaves,’ it would have defeated the whole purpose. I wanted him to figure it out for himself.”