by Rice, Anne
“I have no more stamina for it,” I said, and reached in my purse again.
At once, my new slave Flavius put his hand out gently to prevent me.
He glared at the merchant with great authority and fearless contempt.
“For a man with one leg!” said Flavius between his teeth. “You thief! You charge my Mistress that, here in Antioch, where slaves are so plentiful the ships take them on to Rome, for it’s the only way to cut their losses!”
I was quite impressed. All had gone so well. The darkness flowed back away from me, and there seemed for the moment a divine meaning in the warmth of the sun.
“You cheat my Mistress and you know it! You’re the scum of the Earth!” he went on. “Madam, do we ever purchase from this scoundrel again? I advise never!”
The slave trader broke into an inane smile, a hideous grimace of cowardice and stupidity, bowed and gave me back a third of what I’d given him.
I could hardly keep from another burst of laughing. I had to fetch the mantle from the ground again. Flavius did it. This time, I knotted it properly in front.
I looked at the gold which had been returned, scooped it up, entrusted it to Flavius and off we went.
When we had plunged into the thick crowd in the center of the Forum I did laugh and laugh at the whole affair.
“Well, Flavius, you’re protecting me already, saving me money, giving me excellent advice. If there were more men like you in Rome, the world might be better for it.”
He was choked up. He couldn’t talk. It was an effort to whisper:
“Lady, you have on trust my body and soul forever.”
I went up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. I realized that his nakedness, the filth of the loincloth, all this was a disgrace he bore without a sign of protest.
“Here,” I said, giving him some money. “Take the girls home, put them to work, then you go to the baths. Get clean. Get Roman clean. Have a boy if you want. Have two. Then buy fine clothes for yourself, not slave clothes, mind you, but clothes that you would buy for a rich young Roman Master!”
“Madam, please hide that purse!” he said as he took the coins. “And what is my Mistress’s name? To whom shall I say I belong, if asked.”
“To Pandora of Athens,” I said. “Though you shall have to fill me in on the current state of my birthplace, because I have never actually been there. But a Greek name serves me well. Now, go. See, the girls watch!”
Lots of people were watching. Oh, this red silk! And Flavius was such a splendid figure of a male.
I kissed him again, and whispered in his ear, calculatingly, devil that I am, “I need you, Flavius.”
He looked down at me, awestruck. “I am yours forever, Madam,” he whispered.
“Are you sure you can’t do with me in bed!”
“Oh, believe me, I have tried!” he confessed, flushing again.
I made my hand into a fist and punched his muscular arm.
“Very well,” I said.
The damsels had already risen, at my gesture. They knew I sent him to them.
I gave him my key, the directions to my house, described the particularities of its gate, and the old bronze lion fountain right inside the gate.
“And you, Madam?” he asked. “You’re going in the crowd unaccompanied? Madam, the purse is huge! It’s full of gold.”
“Wait till you see the gold in the house,” I said. “Appoint yourself the only one who can open chests, and then hide them in obvious places. Replace all the furniture I’ve smashed in my … my solitude. There are many pieces stored in rooms above.”
“Gold in the house!” He was alarmed. “Chests of gold!”
“Now, don’t worry about me,” I said. “I know where to seek help now. And if you betray me, if you steal my legacy and I find my house ruined when I return, I suppose I shall have deserved it Cover up the chests of gold with carpets. The place has heaps of little Persian carpets. Look upstairs. And tend to the Shrine!”
“I shall do everything you ask and more.”
“So I thought. A man who cannot lie cannot steal. Now the sun is intolerable here. Go to the girls. They wait.”
I turned.
He caught me by coming round in front of me.
“Madam, there is something I must tell you.”
“What!” I said with an ominous face. “Not that you’re a eunuch,” I said. “Eunuchs don’t grow muscles in their arms and legs like that.”
“No,” he said. Then he took on a sudden gravity. “Ovid, you spoke of Ovid. Ovid is dead. Ovid died two years ago in the wretched town of Tomis on the upper rim of the Black Sea. It was a miserable choice of exile, a barbarian outpost.”
“No one told me this. What a revolting silence.” I threw up my hands over my face. The mantle fell. He retrieved it. I scarce noticed. “I had so prayed that Tiberius would let Ovid come back to Rome!” I told myself I had no time to stop for this. “Ovid. No time to weep for him now …”
“His books are no doubt plentiful here,” Flavius said. “They are very easily found in Athens.”
“Good, perhaps you will have time to find some for me. Now, I’m off; pins or tumbled braids or sliding mantle, I do not care. And don’t look so worried. When you leave the house, just lock up the girls and the gold.”
When I finally turned around he was making his way rather gracefully towards the girls. The sun rippled prettily on his well-muscled back. His hair was curly and brown, rather like my own. He stopped for one moment when a vendor attacked him with an armful of cheaply made tunics, cloaks and whatnot, more than likely stolen goods, full of dye that would run in the first rain, but who knows? He bought a tunic hastily and slipped it over his head, and purchasing a red sash, tied it around his waist.
Such a transformation. The tunic went halfway to his knees. That must have been a great relief to him, to have on something clean. I should have thought of this before I left him. Stupid.
I admired him. Naked or clothed, you can’t carry such beauty and dignity unless you have been cherished. He wore the raiment of the affection bestowed on him and inscribed in the art of his ivory leg.
In our brief encounter, a bond had been forged forever.
He greeted the girls. With his arms around them, he guided them out of the crowd.
I went straight to the Temple of Isis, and thereby, unwittingly, took the first firm step towards a larcenous immortality, an inglorious and unearned supernature, a never ending and utterly useless doom.
5
As soon as I entered the Temple Compound I was received by several rich Roman women, who welcomed me generously. They were all properly painted with white on their arms and their faces, well-drawn eyebrows, lip color—all the details of which I’d made a hash that morning.
I explained that though I had means, I was on my own. They were for helping me in every way. When they heard I had been actually initiated in Rome, they were in awe.
“Thank Mother Isis they didn’t discover you and execute you,” said one of the Roman women.
“Go in and see the Priestess,” they said. Many of them had not yet undergone the secret ceremonies and were waiting to be called by the goddess for this momentous event.
There were many other women here, some Egyptian, some Babylonian perhaps. I could only guess. Jewels and silks were the order of the day. Fancy painted gold borders lined their mantles; some wore simple dresses.
But it seemed to me that all of them spoke Greek.
I couldn’t bring myself to enter the Temple. I looked up and saw in my mind our crucified Priests in Rome.
“Thank God you were not identified,” said one. “Quite a few people fled to Alexandria,” said another.
“I raised no protest,” I said dismally.
There came a chorus of sympathy. “How could you, under Tiberius? Believe me, every one who could escaped.”
“Don’t be laden with misery,” said a young blue-eyed Greek woman, very properly dressed.
“I�
��d fallen away from the worship,” I said.
Again came a comforting round of soft voices.
“Go in now,” said one woman, “and ask to pray in the very sanctuary of Our Mother. You are an initiate. Most of us here are not.”
I nodded.
I went up the steps of the Temple and entered inside it.
I paused to shake from my mantle the mundane, that is, all the trivia I had discussed. My mind was focused upon the goddess, and desperate to believe in her. I loathed my hypocrisy, that I used this Temple and this worship, but then it didn’t seem significant. My despair of the three nights had penetrated too deep.
What a shock awaited me as I found myself inside.
The Temple was far more ancient than our Temple in Rome, and Egyptian paintings covered its walls. A shiver at once went through me. The columns were in the Egyptian style, not fluted but smoothly round, and brightly painted in orange, and rising to giant lotus leaves at the capitals. The smell of the incense was overpowering and I could hear music emanating from the Sanctuary. I could hear the thin notes of the lyre, and of the wires of the sistrum being plucked, and I could hear a litany being chanted.
But this was a thoroughly Egyptian place, which enveloped me as firmly as my blood dreams. I almost fainted.
The dreams came back—the deep paralytic sense of being in some secret Sanctuary in Egypt, my soul swallowed within another body!
The Priestess came to me. This too was a shock.
In Rome, her dress would have been purely Roman, and she might have worn a small exotic headdress, a little cap to her shoulders, perhaps.
But this woman wore Egyptian clothes of pleated linen, in the old style, and she wore a magnificent Egyptian headdress and wig, the broad mass of long black braids falling down stiffly over her shoulders. She looked as extravagant perhaps as Cleopatra had ever looked, for all I knew.
I had only heard stories of Julius Caesar’s love of Cleopatra, then her affair with Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s death. All that was before my birth.
But I knew that Cleopatra’s fabulous entrance into Rome had much affrighted the old Roman sense of morality. I had always known the old Roman families feared Egyptian magic. In the recent punitive Roman massacre, which I’ve described, there was a lot of shouting about license and lust; but beneath it, there had been an unspoken fear of the mystery and the power hidden behind the Temple doors.
And now as I gazed at this Priestess, at her painted eyes, I felt in my soul this fear. I knew it. Of course this woman seemed to have stepped from the dreams, but it was not that which struck me so much, for after all, what are dreams? This was an Egyptian woman—wholly alien and inscrutable to me.
My Isis had been Greco-Roman. Even her statue in the Roman Sanctuary had been clothed in a gorgeously draped Greek dress and her hair had been done softly in the old Greek style, with waves around her face. She had held her sistrum and an urn. She had been a Romanized goddess.
Perhaps the same had happened with the goddess Cybele in Rome. Rome swallowed things and made them Roman.
In a very few centuries, though I had no thought of it then—how could I—Rome would swallow and shape the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, and make of his Christians the Roman Catholic church.
I suppose you are familiar with the modern expression, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
But here, in this reddish gloom, among flickering lights and a deeper muskier incense than I had ever smelled, I resented my timidity in silence. Then the dreams did descend, like so many veils lowered one by one to enclose me. In a flash I saw the beautiful Queen weeping. No. She screamed. Cried for help.
“Get away from me,” I whispered to the air around me. “Fly from me, all things that are impure and evil. Get away from me as I enter the house of my Blessed Mother.”
The Priestess took me in hand. I heard voices from my dream in violent argument. I strained to clear my vision, to see the worshipers coming and going towards the Sanctuary to meditate or to make sacrifice, to ask for some favor. I tried to realize it was a big busy crowd, very little different from Rome.
But the touch of the Priestess enfeebled me. Her painted eyes struck terror. Her broad necklace caused me to blink my eyes. Row upon row of flat stones.
I was taken into a private apartment of the Temple by her, offered a sumptuous couch. I lay back exhausted. “Fly from me, all things evil,” I whispered. “Including dreams.”
The Priestess sat beside me and enfolded me in her silken arms. I looked up into a mask!
“Talk to me, suffering one,” she said in Latin with a thick accent. “Speak all that must come forth.”
Suddenly—uncontrollably—I poured out my whole family story, the annihilation of my family, my guilt, my travails.
“What if I was the cause of my family’s downfall—my worship at the Temple of Isis? What if Tiberius had remembered it? What have I done? The Priests were crucified and I did nothing. What does Mother Isis want of me? I want to die.”
“That she does not want of you,” said the Priestess, staring at me. Her eyes were huge, or was it the paint? No, I could see the whites of her eyes, so glistening and pure. Her painted mouth let loose words like a tiny breeze in a monotone.
I was fast becoming delirious and totally unreasonable. I murmured what I could about my initiation, what details I could tell a Priestess, for all these things were highly secret, you know, but I confirmed for her that I had been reborn in the rites.
All the stored-up weakness in me was cut loose in a flood.
Then I lay down my guilt. I confessed that I had, early on, left the Cult of Isis, that in recent years, I had walked only in the public processions to the sea, when the goddess was carried to the shore to bless the ships. Isis, the goddess of Navigation. I had not lived a life of devotion.
I had done nothing when the Priests of Isis were crucified, except speak out with many others behind the Emperor’s back. There had been a solidarity between me and those Romans who thought Tiberius was a monster, but we had not raised our voices in defense of Isis. My Father had told me to remain silent So I had. This was the same Father who had told me to live.
I turned over and slipped down off this couch and I lay on the tiled floor. I don’t know why. I pressed my cheek to the cold tile. I liked the coldness against my face. I was in a state of madness, but not an uncontrollable state. I lay staring.
I knew one thing. I wanted to get out of this Temple! I didn’t like it. No, this had been a very bad idea.
I hated myself suddenly for having become so vulnerable to this woman, whatever sort she was, and the atmosphere of the blood dreams beckoned to me.
I opened my eyes. The Priestess bent over me. I saw the weeping Queen of my nightmares. I turned away and shut my eyes.
“Be at peace,” she said in her calculated and perfected voice. “You did nothing wrong,” said the Priestess.
It seemed preposterous that such a voice should issue from such a painted face and form, but the voice was definite.
“First,” the Priestess said, “you must understand that Mother Isis forgives anything. She is the Mother of Mercy.” Then she said, “You have been more fully initiated by your description than most here or anywhere. You made a long fast. You bathed in the sacred blood of the bull. You must have drunk the potion. You dreamed and saw yourself reborn.”
“Yes,” I said, trying to revive the old ecstasy, the priceless gift of belief in something. “Yes. I saw the stars and great fields of flowers, such fields …”
It was no good. I was scared of this woman and I wanted to get out of there. I’d go home and confess all this to Flavius and make him let me weep on his shoulder.
“I am not pious by nature,” I confessed. “I was young. I loved the free women who went there, the women who slept with whom they chose, the whores of Rome, the keepers of the houses of pleasure, I liked women who thought for themselves, and followed the goings-on of the Empire.”
“You ca
n enjoy such company here as well,” said the Priestess, without batting an eye. “And don’t fear that your old ties to the Temple caused your downfall in Rome. We have plenty of news to confirm that the highborn were not persecuted by Tiberius when he destroyed the Temple. It is always the poor who suffer: the street whore and the simple weaver, the hairdresser, the bricklayer. No noble family was persecuted in the name of Isis. You know that. Some women fled to Alexandria because they would not give up the worship, but they were never in danger.”
The dreams approached. “Oh, Mother of God,” I whispered.
The Priestess went on talking.
“You, like Mother Isis, have been the victim of tragedy. And you, like Mother Isis, must take strength and walk alone, as Isis did when her husband, Osiris, was skin. Who helped her when she searched all over Egypt for the body of her murdered husband, Osiris? She walked alone. She is the greatest of the goddesses. When she recovered the body of her husband, Osiris, and could find no organ of generation for him with which she might be impregnated, she drew the semen right from his spirit. Thus, the god Horus was born of a woman and a god. It was the power of Isis who drew the spirit from the dead man. It is Isis who tricked the god Ra into revealing his name.”
That was the old tale all right.
I looked away from the Priestess. I was unable to look at her decorated face! Surely she felt my revulsion. I must not hurt her. She meant well. It wasn’t her fault that she looked to me like a monster. Why in hell had I come here!
I lay dazed. The room had a soft golden light coming mainly through its three doors, and they were cut Egyptian-style, these doors, wider at the base than at the top, and I let this light make a blur of my vision. I asked the light to do this.
I felt the Priestess’s hand. Such silken warmth. So lovely, her touch, her sweetness.
“Do you believe all of it!” I suddenly whispered.
She completely ignored this question. Her painted mask gave forth the creed.