Linus was becoming impatient. He was a merchant, and therefore a man of decisions. He flicked a finger in the direction of Lucanus, and said, “Master Keptah, this boy is no doubt a Greek? That golden hair, that white flesh, those blue eyes, the contour of his features — they are charming and Grecian.”
“Have you seen many of him in Greece?” asked Keptah, affecting surprise. “No. The Greeks are a race of small stature and of a dark complexion. They worshiped fairness, because of these things, and have immortalized them in their statues. Be certain that the ideal of men does not resemble themselves, but only their dreams. Nevertheless, this boy is a Greek, though without doubt his ancestors ranged into Greece from the cold regions of the North, or Gaul, where the men wear skins of beasts and the horns of animals, and live in the primeval forests. Is he not of considerable beauty, but of a childish manliness also?”
Lucanus could not understand his mentor and teacher, and was indignant and humiliated. He now not only feared and disliked Linus, but he detested him.
Keptah’s manner of speaking, as if Lucanus were not human and could be discussed as one discussed horses or fine dogs, assured Linus that the boy was indeed a slave, and the servant of Keptah. “A beautiful boy,” he said, with hushed fondness. “And what is his name, Master Keptah, and his age?”
Keptah sipped at his wine, closing his eyes in reverence. Linus waited. His jewels glistened in the blue shadows of the wineshop. “His age,” said Keptah, “is thirteen, though he is large of stature, as all the heathen are large. But he is graceful, is he not?”
Linus was more pleased than ever. The boy was thirteen years old, therefore he had not reached puberty. The old senator in Rome was forgotten. There were patrician ladies, jaded with their husbands and lovers, ladies of great wealth, who would find it piquant to bring this boy to puberty and then to their beds, there to initiate his innocence into the arts of love. It was not impossible that they would pay two thousand sesterces for such a treasure to beguile their ennui. A dissolute wife of a most distinguished Augustale, for instance, now in her forties, who had a penchant for such boys! She would be fascinated with his beauty, and would not be able to resist his purchase. Linus leaned confidentially towards Keptah and said in a low voice which did not escape the ears of Lucanus:
“The noble tribune is a man notable, as you have said, for his thrift. You remain with him for virtuous reasons, such as loyalty and devotion to his family. This boy is not one of his slaves?”
“No,” said Keptah. “In a way of speaking, he belongs to me. The tribune has assigned him into my hands, as a reward for what you have kindly called my virtues.”
Lucanus’ lips parted again with fresh indignation, then winced at Keptah’s pinch. Linus was beaming. “Perhaps, Keptah, we can come to a certain agreement. I have clients in Rome who would cherish this boy.”
“Truly?” said Keptah. “A senator, perhaps, or a lady who has explored many delights and is bored.” He turned to Lucanus and said affectionately, “Would you like to go to Rome, Lucanus?”
“No,” said Lucanus. But Linus was saying to him peremptorily, snapping his fingers, “Rise, boy! I wish to examine you further.”
Lucanus, incredulous at a tone never directed at him before, and outraged, clutched the side of his chair and glared at Keptah. And Keptah, elusive and unreadable as only he could be, returned the glare with dark somberness and said nothing. It was that expression which confused Lucanus completely, and made him stand up less in obedience to Linus’ command than in the first movement of flight. The face of Keptah did not change; he flung one long and emaciated arm over the back of his chair, and the folds of the pale gray linen fell from that arm like cloth falling over the outlines of bone.
Linus approached Lucanus, and the other merchants, including the students and scholars in the inn, gave their frank attention and curiosity to the boy. By Venus! thought a Roman dealer in oils and perfumes, there is truly the young Adonis himself, with hair like the sun and eyes as blue as the northern winter sky! He is like a statue, with the sweet sternness of youth in his face and the delicate severity of innocence in his mouth. And what a brow that is, like massive marble, and his feet are arched like small bridges, and his height surely comes from the gods.
Linus himself was surprised at Lucanus’ stature, and a little suspicious. But the boy’s short white tunic was bordered with the pale purple of preadolescence, and it was evident to Linus’ shrewd eyes, after a moment’s scrutiny, that, in spite of the stature and the breadth of the shoulders, the boy was truly very young. Lucanus started violently when Linus stretched out his swarthy hand and lifted his tunic, and then felt of his buttocks. The blue eyes flashed in rage, yet a new pride kept him still now and as rigid as stone. “Ah,” murmured Linus, thoughtfully. “I had a caliph in mind, rich as Croesus — if the buttocks were softer and more rounded. But this is evidently the fetus of a man, not a plaything for a gentleman of Persia.” He handled Lucanus with the rough interest of a man inspecting a fine animal offered for sale.
Lucanus, in spite of the confusion and rage which roared in his mind, became aware, for the first time in his life, of profound and unspeakable evil and all loathsomeness. He heard Linus’ murmurous words as the inspection continued, and his white flesh prickled and became cold, and he could not have moved, any more than the marble he resembled could have moved of its own volition. But his heart quivered and his spirit sickened with this horror. He perceived depths never known to him before, and abysses, and the hot black obscenities of the human spirit. These he had never encountered in the home of the virtuous tribune, nor had dreamt of them. Nor was he fully aware of the implications, nor did he understand them completely. He was like a child who, running laughing to a green and hidden grotto, comes upon a scene of licentiousness and, while not fully comprehending, is impressed that here is something wanton and shameful, and is terrified.
The searching, pinching and pushing hands of Linus had a monstrous hypnotic effect on the young boy. He felt himself degraded, and helpless to repel the degradation; he felt his humanity insulted, his integrity assaulted. Yet, like a voiceless victim, he had no power to resist. He could only stare sightlessly at Keptah and feel nausea at this incredible betrayal, and the fire of ignominy and furious anger in his breast.
Linus, smiling whitely, flung himself back into his chair. “Five hundred gold pieces,” he said to Keptah. He removed a purse from the big gold disks that formed the girdle about his narrow waist. He poured out a shining mound of coins. “Let us be brief. You will understand, Master, that I cannot escort this boy through the streets in the daylight.” He coughed, and grinned at the cryptic physician. “There has been some slight trouble before with the accursed soldiers of the proconsul, and I do not wish to encounter them again. Here are one hundred sesterces. Deliver the boy to me tonight at the inn on the Road of the Maidens, and you shall receive the remaining four hundred pieces.”
All of the flesh of Lucanus was stinging as though it had been seared with flame, and the pulses in his temples throbbed visibly. One of the merchants cried, “Five hundred sesterces! It is robbery, Master. I myself offer one thousand.” He half rose from his chair, eagerly.
Then Keptah spoke quietly. “The boy is not for sale.”
Linus colored darkly, and leaned towards him. “Not for sale?” he repeated. “This slave is not for sale — for a fortune? Are you mad?”
“One thousand sesterces!” shouted the other merchant, approaching the table.
The others in the wineshop applauded, whistled, protested, laughed. Hearing the commotion, the shopkeeper ran into the room, carrying a tray of fresh hot pastries. Keptah crooked a finger at him, and said, “My good Sura, you will please go to the next street, at once, and tell the young captain, Sextus, that Keptah, physician to the noble tribune, Diodorus, requests his presence immediately.”
The shopkeeper bowed, and ran into the street. Linus sprang to his feet, swearing. He shook his fist under Keptah’s imm
ovable nose. The others fell silent, gaping. “You accursed Egyptian!” shouted Linus. “I shall have your throat cut!” He shook with fury, and his servants came to him at once, their knives in their hands.
Keptah was not disturbed. “I am not an Egyptian, my good man of many abominable and unknown bloods. Nor am I a man who desires the blood of another. Hasten, and leave at once, before the captain arrives with his men. You have not understood. This boy is the apple of the proconsul’s eye, and he is as a son, and born free in the household of Diodorus.”
The others rushed out of the wineshop in trepidation, not wishing to be present when the soldiers arrived, and fearful of brutality. Linus was left alone with his servants. He looked at Lucanus, and his lean hands made unconscious grasping movements, as if he would seize him and bear him away at once. His breath came harshly. Then he whirled, and his rich garments of crimson and green blew about him. He left the inn like the wind, his servants racing after him. Keptah and Lucanus were alone. The boy sat down slowly, and his white face streamed with beads of sweat, and his eyes were bitter-cold and filled his eye sockets with wrathful color.
Keptah unconcernedly picked up a bunch of dates and chewed them with appreciation. The pile of gold coins lay on the table, and twinkled in the blue gloom. Keptah’s attention came to them, and he smiled. “The rascally merchant did not stay to pay his bill,” he remarked. “Nevertheless, he generously left this money, and I shall pay his bill from it and keep the rest. No doubt he graciously intended it so, and I am not a man to refuse such a gift.”
“How dared you!” cried Lucanus, and now he was very young again, and close to tears. “You are not only a liar, Keptah, but you are a thief and a scoundrel!” He wept, and rubbed away the tears with the backs of his hands. Keptah studied him thoughtfully. Finally he put down the bunch of dates, and his face changed sternly and his enigmatic eyes were chill and remote.
“You betrayed me!” sobbed the boy. “You shamed and degraded me! And I thought you were my friend as well as my teacher.”
“Listen to me, Lucanus,” said Keptah, in a hard and quiet tone, and Lucanus dropped his hands from his eyes and stared at the physician.
“You are no longer a child, for you have seen and heard and felt evil,” said the physician. “It is good that you have known it, for a knowledge of evil brings manhood, and aversion. You are now armed.” He moved a few of the coins with a thin finger.
“You were born into freedom in a virtuous household, where the slaves are treated with kindness. Never have you seen them treated cruelly, but only with justice. This is most unusual; the household of Diodorus is not the normal household.”
A fierce cold flash darted from under his hooded lids. “You were shamed, your humanity treated ignominiously, your dignity as a man insulted. You have seen the scars on the hands of your father, who was once a slave, and, like a child, you have accepted them serenely, as a child, and commonplace. Have you ever asked your father what it means to be a slave, to be treated as less than a man, less, even, than a valuable horse or a good dog? Have you asked him of his own young ignominy, his own shame, his own bitterness, when his humanness was debased? Do you know what it is like to be a slave?”
Lucanus was very still. A glistening tear or two remained on his pale cheeks. Then he said in a low voice, “No. No. Forgive me. I did not understand. I was a child, and I did not understand. You have taught me.”
Keptah smiled sadly. “Learning comes with tears and grief and pain. That is just, for man cannot understand God when he is young and happy and ignorant. He can only know God through sorrow, his own sorrow and the agony and sorrows of others.”
“No man henceforth will be a slave in my eyes, but a man of dignity, and I shall hate slavery with all my heart and soul,” said Lucanus, in a trembling voice.
Keptah put his hand on the boy’s shoulder gently. “I exposed you to evil so that you would no longer be defenseless. I exposed you to the vile air of slavery so that never again will you countenance it. And now here is our good Sextus, with his two good soldiers. Ah, Sextus, please wait for a moment and drink some of this excellent wine with us. We have been annoyed by a despicable person, and we are in some danger. We desire your escort. Our asses are tied up at a little distance, and are no doubt somewhat impatient, the poor beasts.”
“What rascality have you blown up now?” asked the young captain, with good humor, and some cynicism. He poured himself a goblet of wine and drank it down quickly, and Keptah’s mouth twisted in reproof. “You drink that wine as if it were not distilled from the grapes of heaven itself,” he said, “and as if it were only the cheap red wine from your barracks.”
Sextus smacked his lips, considered, and inclined his helmeted head to one side. “It has no particularly excellent flavor,” he said. “You are a mountebank, Keptah.” He winked at Lucanus. Then he was concerned at the pallor of the boy. “Is the child ill?” he asked.
“Very ill,” said Keptah, rising. “But he will not die of it.”
He was timidly approached by the shopkeeper, and he grandly counted out his bill, and Linus’, and left an extra gold piece as a gratuity. The shopkeeper was delighted. “Good Master,” he said, “I am sorry that you were disturbed. It will not happen again.”
“Do not make rash promises,” said Keptah. “This has been a most enlightening afternoon.” He filled his pouch with the remaining gold pieces. “And now, Lucanus, let us go.”
Chapter Seven
Diodorus Cyrinus awoke to three dismal awarenesses: The husband of Aurelia’s older sister, the Senator Carvilius Ulpian, was an unwelcome come guest in the house. He had arrived last night, and was patronizingly affectionate, and he had apparently forgotten that though he was a member of a very noble and ancient family he had married Cornelia for her money. This money had not only assisted him in becoming a senator (by bribery only, Diodorus would say savagely) but had enabled him to indulge his passion for Egyptian art. He had heard of some excellent vases and small statues dating back to the Second Dynasty, and was on his way to Egypt to negotiate for them. The second miserable fact facing Diodorus this morning was that this was the day of the month when he had to meet with Syrian magistrates in the Hall of Justice, and to hear the complaints of local nobles and landowners and chieftains, about the taxes exacted from the province, and especially from themselves, and to listen to the reports of the rascally tax collectors, whom Diodorus hated more than he hated any other breed of man. To Diodorus a tax collector, though apparently necessary in these degenerate days, was scurvier than the dirtiest jackal, and had something of the jackal’s habits, upon which Diodorus would dwell in a loud voice in the company of the officials, and in the lewder phrases of the military. This invariably cheered the victims of the tax collectors.
The third misery was that he had a headache. He knew these headaches, which tormented him usually on this particular day, and all Keptah’s arts could barely relieve them. He had awakened with the dastardly sudden flash of light before his eyes, then the following nausea, then the sharp cleavage of vision and the temporary dimming of sight, and then the accursed one-sided headache. The fact that Keptah could learnedly tell him it was a migraine, and that Hippocrates had written a long and exact treatise on it, did not abate one retching, one hammer stroke on the left side of his head, or one sensation that death was at hand and not unwelcome. “May Hades swallow your Hippocrates!” he would say wrathfully to Keptah. “No, no more of your stinking effusions and your potions!” He would invariably submit to both the effusions and the potions, and then would triumphantly vomit before Keptah and glare at him accusingly. The migraine would not forsake him until evening. He had only to leave Antioch on the way home and it was gone, except for a not unpleasant weakness which anticipated Aurelia’s loving ministrations and concern. Basking under these, he would say to Keptah, “You see, a woman’s hands are wiser than any physician, you mountebank.” To which Keptah would only smile. He had once told Diodorus that the headaches were
his protest against the magistrates and the tax collectors, whom he detested, but Diodorus had been so enraged at this insinuation of womanishness that Keptah never repeated the indiscretion. Diodorus, the virtuous Roman, believed a responsible household rose before dawn. The senator did not rise at dawn, and Aurelia, who had affection even for her brother-in-law, would not permit the slaves their usual noisy and ebullient assault on pillar and floor and wall with mops and brooms until the senator had called for his breakfast in bed. This, to the tribune, was heaping degradation on degradation. A dirty house and breakfast in bed! It was typical of modern Rome, of course. The senator’s retinue, pampered slaves and secretaries (he was always writing letters even when he was visiting Diodorus — ‘making certain that his clients will not forget to keep his coffers filled during his absence’), were invariably assigned the best rooms in the quarters of the household slaves. He usually brought two beautiful young slave women with him, which increased Diodorus’ rage, and the tribune would cloister the girls grimly. “There will be no orgies in this house!” he would say to the indulgently smiling senator, who was always surprised that the pretty slave girls in this barbarous household never caught the master’s eye.
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