Master of the Revels

by Nicole Galland

  She was in a corner by herself, also writing on a tablet; between us, impeding my direct access to her, were both Thalia (quietly reciting a speech by Demosthenes) and Arria (reading a bilingual edition of Menander’s play The Curmudgeon, which she admired because the slave characters were wise and sensible).

  Livia, the most advanced student in age and ability, had been assigned to devise her own composition and write it onto a tablet. She set about this with such enthusiasm that I could not get her attention, for she glanced up only after she’d filled the tablet and had to look around for another one.

  After Julia had finished reciting her Odyssey chapter, the teacher gave her a counting board and some math problems to solve. He checked on my copying (I was scolded for poor handwriting), then turned his attention to Livia.

  “Livia Saturnina,” he said.

  “Teacher!” she said affectionately, glancing up.

  “What are you writing?”

  “Teacher, I am writing about Aristarchus of Samos and his heliocentric theory of the cosmos.”

  “That is not a theory.”

  “Hypothesis,” she corrected herself.

  “It is not a hypothesis either. It is nonsense. Confine your philosophy to Aristotle.”

  “I am not convinced it is nonsense, Teacher, but in any case, I am merely using it as subject matter to write a poem,” she replied. “It’s about the passage of time. In dactylic hexameter, like Virgil.”

  “Let me see it,” said the teacher. She handed up the tablet to him. He studied it for the duration of one breath, then declared, sounding weary, “Livia, this is unreadable.”

  “No, Teacher, it isn’t,” she rejoined, preening. “I’m also practicing the Caesar cipher, encrypting the poem as I write it. If you wish to know the actual words, in plain Latin, you must count backward three letters of the alphabet from what is written, and that will be the real letter.”

  Wow, not bad, I thought.

  The teacher returned the tablet to her, his expression one of long-suffering wonderment. “If only your brother had your intellect,” he said almost sadly, and moved on to listen to Thalia’s recitation. Livia frowned.

  I put down the stylus and walked closer to her.

  “You have a brother?” I asked quietly.

  “Yes, an older brother,” said Livia in a deliberately dismissive voice. “He is studying in Athens for a few years, as young men of good breeding his age do. They say he is quite clever.” She pointedly returned her attention to her writing.

  “We need to speak about tomorrow’s undertaking,” I whispered, glancing toward the teacher.

  “Later,” she said. “Perhaps at lunch.”

  But she kept writing through lunch. I was ravenous by then—Romans don’t do breakfast, and I’d fasted before being Sent. The cheese and olives tasted like manna; I gobbled them down even faster than Tristan would. Back in class, I tried twice to get a moment with her, but she was bent to her work and tersely brushed me off. When the teacher dismissed us, the four young women dispersed in different directions; I followed Livia into the colonnade.

  “Now, mistress—”

  “Here’s Vilicus,” she said, gesturing to the approaching steward.

  “This is important—”

  “That’s why we’ll get to it when the time is right.”

  Vilicus is not a name, it’s Latin for “estate steward,” but it’s all she ever called him so I’ll do the same here. While I sat on a stool by the door of the office, Livia and Vilicus read correspondence regarding property leases, reviewed the yields of wheat for the season, and disbursed payments for the week—the donkey driver, the biga driver, the water carrier, the latrine cleaner (okay, think on that: a free man cleaned latrines for a living while an unpaid slave taught the Odyssey and mathematics).

  After the ledger had been closed, Livia looked up and called out toward the quiet courtyard: “Bath time!” Across the way, I heard three female voices, like a call-and-response, cry out, “Hooray! Bath time!”

  “Now we talk,” I said.

  “When the time’s right.” She smiled back.

  Throughout the Roman Empire, nearly everybody bathes. The furnaces were lit each midday, not only to heat the air and water of the baths, but also to send heat under the suspended floor of the tepidarium—the warm room—adjacent to it.

  I spent the next hour trying to corner Livia into a conversation, as we moved from the changing rooms to the warm room to the hot room into the baths themselves, then a cold plunge, and then back to the warm room to recover. She shut me down at every turn, giving her attention to the girls. They spent the whole hour regaling one another with stories of the cute boys who worked around the compound, imagining who did what to whom behind which fountain. I tried yet again, back in the dressing vestibule: “It is a long ride, mistress, for somebody not used to traveling—”

  “I am fearless of travel,” she said, “like the greatest heroes of old.” Leaning toward me on the marble bench, she whispered, “I was just trying to set a good example for my sister. You can see she is impulsive, and I don’t like to encourage her.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, mistress, but there is also the matter of—”

  “Come,” she said in a louder voice, sitting up and collecting the others with a gesture. “No time to tarry.”

  (Side note: All the water in both hot and cold baths was fresh, fed into the system from the River Gela. This was the same tributary that provided running water in the kitchens and carried away the waste from all three latrines. The whole system works better than my condo’s plumbing.)

  Supper was, sorry about this, grilled pig’s uterus in fish sauce, do not skimp on the pepper. Livia continued to dismiss me; the girls had run out of gossip at last, so were now debating whether Odysseus, Hercules, or Aeneas would make a better lover and why. Livia upped the stakes by suggesting Orpheus—who literally journeyed to Hell and back out of love for his wife—beat them all. (Throughout all this, my inner Tristan was telling me I should refuse to travel with Livia if she wouldn’t talk out details with me for tomorrow, but I was pretty sure she’d just go without me if I tried stonewalling.)

  After supper, bedtime. Arria and Thalia—adding Jason and all the Argonauts to their list of ideal lovers—shook out the straw mattresses on each bed to add loft; brought jugs of water and basins from the kitchens to rinse the sisters’ feet clean; cleared these away and returned with clean chamber pots; latched the shutters closed in the front room to keep out the night air. After removing all the adornments from their mistresses’ hair and changing each sister into her nightclothes, they doused the chandeliers, banked and covered the fire in the brazier, and were finally done with their day’s work. The three of us crowded together onto one of the narrow beds for sleep.

  “Good night, new slave,” said Livia cheerfully, as she settled under her blankets. “Tomorrow, we ride!”

  I fell asleep to the whispered giggles of the girls debating if it would be better to sleep with a hero right before he left on his journey or right after he returned from it.

  Mountain dawns are chilly, even in summer. Arria and Thalia had risen and dressed early; they’d been moving in and out of the room for some quarter hour, emptying the chamber pots, stoking the fire, bringing water and towels into the room. Arria, with a quiet grunt of discomfort, stretched up to open the shutters, letting in the cool light of sunrise. With a little moan of complaint about sore legs, the sisters were awake. They splashed water on their faces from the basins Arria and Thalia held, blankets still wrapped around their shoulders. I dressed myself as each attendant dressed her mistress.

  Once the sisters had gone to the shrine for morning supplications, the bevy wanted to repeat their run, despite the stiffness from yesterday’s exertions (if you can call three minutes an exertion). As Livia explained, the stiffness was novel, so they enjoyed it. We donned the mammalare and significantly shortened subligar and went back to the palaestra, where the girls admired
one another’s legs before we began to jog again. This time, Livia and Thalia got nearly all the way around the chariot race once before giving up. There was still great self-deprecating hilarity and whispered fantasies about which local youths might someday reap the benefit of being clutched between the girls’ shapely strong thighs. I was never this kind of teenage girl, but I had friends who were. These young Romans were more relentless than even the horniest of my classmates.

  As we were changing back into our tunics in the room, I asked Livia how soon we could ride down to Sophiana to intercept the mosaic wagon.

  “The moment we receive word,” Livia said. “I sent a messenger yesterday, instructing the workshop to release a homing pigeon to us when the wagon was on its way.”

  “But if we start toward them after they’ve already started toward us,” I said, “they might reach the bridge before us. We should rather go down there as soon as possible to prevent Quintus ever having the chance—”

  “But if we go down there too soon, it will look suspicious, us skulking around,” she said.

  “Which is why I was intending to do this on my own,” I said. “I’ve been trained to skulk around invisibly.”

  She waved this away. “The homing pigeon will give us plenty of notice,” she insisted blithely. And then, less blithely, with her sidewise warning look: “And to protect myself from you if you are dishonest, I should not set out alone with you until the last possible moment anyhow, for my own safety.”

  “If I’m dishonest, you should not set out with me at all,” I corrected. But she was the only witch I knew of in this under-populated DTAP—my only means of being Homed—so she held all the cards.

  All that day, we waited for the homing pigeon. Nothing came. In late afternoon, after school and bath were done, Livia sent a watchman up the hill to look down for signs of the wagon itself, in case something happened to the pigeon.

  By dinner, she was losing her sense of humor. She summoned the blacksmith to bind an iron anklet around my right leg. It was small, but let’s be clear: it was iron, and it marked me as a slave of the estate. I didn’t like her anxious smile as she said, “That will turn out to be a nuisance for you only if you turn out to be a liar.”

  “I realize that, mistress,” I said. “I’m not a liar.”

  “Excellent, then we’ll see the results of your not-lying very soon, shouldn’t we?”

  The third day, we repeated the morning ritual, including the run in the palaestra. The subligar had been trimmed again, to well above the knee—Livia now believed the shorter, the better, and ordered them back to the seamstress. The four girls would not stop jabbering about which of them was going to end up with the shortest subligar and how fast she would therefore be able to run and whom she would be able to squeeze. I smiled stoically, trying to suppress my own memories of that age, which consisted mostly of braces, new glasses, and bony elbows.

  Also, I tried (but failed) to suppress thoughts of Tristan, who was the most recent person, Romans excepted, to take an interest in regarding my body. I felt queasy from the pain of missing him. But hindsight made me even queasier—what a batshit-insane idea it had been, Sending untrained, hypomanic Robin after him, probably straight into some trap Gráinne had laid. I’m sure even if things go flawlessly, he will never forgive me for sending his baby sister into danger.

  That day again, there was no wagon. I begged Livia to send a messenger to Sophiana to learn the reason for the delay, but she said no: knowing why they were delayed wouldn’t cause them to not be delayed, and she had a shortage of servants as it was.

  Finally, blessed be Apollo, on the fourth day, the homing pigeon arrived. Rufus, the brusque courtyard servant who had pulled me from the pool, came to tell us this as we were exiting the Orpheus room for lunch. Livia’s face lit up and her eyebrows raised expectantly. “Excellent,” she said. “Rufus, tell the grooms to saddle up two horses. We travelers are off to Sophiana.” Then she glanced at me, squeezed my hand, and grinned.

  It took several minutes to reach the entry gate, that’s how enormous the place is. You can trace this on the map: from Livia’s rooms (on the north) we turned right along the courtyard, with its fountain, shrine, exotic plantings, and fauna—I had grown fond of a drowsy peacock and peahen—past a latrine (odorless) and then into a large roofed passageway, a room about ten yards square, bridging the primary courtyard to another one just inside the entrance.

  I had not been this far west yet, since I’d been practically sewn to Livia’s hip. The compound was stunning throughout and relentlessly overwhelming visually, so for my sanity I’d stopped trying to take note of all the artwork, since it was literally directly underfoot. This courtyard was paved marble, with a fountain sprouting from the center of it: Neptune riding a dolphin, the water gurgling out of the dolphin’s blowhole. Beyond the fountain was one of the most astounding entrance gates I’ve ever seen—larger than many medieval city gates and infinitely fancier. The niches between its arches contained fountains fashioned as gargling mermaids. Livia walked past all of this grandeur without regard, waving casually at the guards.

  “We shall be back by supper!” she promised over her shoulder as she skipped by them, her decorated whorl of hair bouncing precariously. Although we were high up in fairly rugged territory, the road that led to the gate showed signs of regular traffic. “Look, slave Melia, that is where we’re traveling to,” said Livia grandly, gesturing down the slope before us.

  Well out of sight, eight miles to the south, lay the settlement of Philosophiana, where traders, officers, and artisans lodged when they had business with Livia’s father. The River Gela, after sauntering past the western flank of the estate, led toward this settlement. Large trees shaded its water and pools; at irregular intervals, the water was funneled off for irrigation into the wheat fields that made up most of the descending landscape between here and the village. A road ran parallel to the river’s course. At one point—out of sight to us yet—it crossed over the river on a single-arch bridge “with parapets so low as to be useless,” said Livia as we waited for the horses. “In other words—”

  “An accident waiting to happen,” I said.

  The bridge was five miles down. I could have run that distance on my own, but I wasn’t on my own, and I couldn’t ditch her. Ditching the only person who can Home you is universally contraindicated.

  “If we travel hard, we might reach the bridge before the cart does, although we have farther to go,” I said.

  “Then let’s travel hard,” said Livia, cheery. “That’s what a hero would do.”

  It was not normal for women to ride unescorted in this DTAP, but nobody in residence, not even Vilicus, seemed to have the authority to tell Livia she could not do as she liked. She didn’t even use psy-ops magic. She was an entitled young woman who could have been a terrible brat given her status, but she happened to be wired otherwise. She was smiling and friendly to everyone, and everyone—the tutor, the steward, the cook, the grooms, the resident veterinarian, the chicken-minder, the seamstress—liked her. In what seemed like a minute, we were astride large chestnut mares, in deep four-horned saddles that snugged our legs in place.

  The countryside was bright, warm, and dry and the roads well maintained. The compound was central to Sicily’s trade routes and ports, and all roads led nearby it.

  We hustled the horses along for about forty minutes, alternating gaits to sustain their energy. The river was a bowshot to our left, hidden from direct view by the trees growing along it. Livia was a good rider, although she could not entirely hide her edginess about traveling in a party of only two females.

  At the end of a long trot, she slowed her horse to a walk and pointed about a hundred feet ahead, to a flock of sheep moving laconically in our direction, flanked by two shepherds and their dogs. “Where the trees thin out, just past them,” she said. “That’s the bridge.”

  We dismounted and led the horses past the flock and then down the bank to a shaded spot near the bri
dge. The deck of the bridge was just a broad stone roadway, about ten feet wide and thirty across.

  The occasional bleating faded up the hill behind us. We waited in the stillness. It was peaceful and beautiful, but we were like arrows ready to let fly from a bow, and we spent the next quarter hour tense and wary.

  Finally, from the far side of the river, we heard men’s voices talking and the creaking sounds of a freighted wagon. It came into view, pulled by a couple of donkeys. Two men were riding alongside it. One was a good-looking young man with a dark complexion—this must be Hanno Gisgon, the designer from Carthage. The other was scowling and broad-shouldered, with classic Sicilian coloring. I recognized him: Arturo Quince, DOer. A Blevins recruit.

  “I can’t let Quintus see me,” I whispered to Livia, and she nodded.

  “I shall put upon you a spell of being unnoticeable. But all the same, stay back as far as you can.”

  We waited there, in the shadow of the bridge, as they approached.

  “But I have told you, brother, I am not commissioned for a wall,” Hanno Gisgon was saying, sounding amused. “Only for the one floor. And anyhow, the mosaic is prepared already, we have now only the tediousness of cementing the tesserae in place.”

  “But, brother, you have purchased those wondrous glass tiles!” said Quince.

  “Yes, because you are so smooth of the tongue,” said the mosaicist, laughing. “I would not be surprised if you make a profit somehow from my buying them. It was an indulgence that you were too eager to see me indulge in.”

  “Are they not the most beautiful—”

  “Beautiful,” agreed the mosaicist, overlapping. “But not useful.”

  This conversation dovetailed with what I knew about the DEDE: if Quince was successful and destroyed the mosaic, he would then coax Hanno to create a completely new design incorporating the glass tiles they were discussing.