by Crystal King
“You’ll get your safe passage.” Apicius flicked a hand at Sotas.
Sotas responded before the boy could, sliding out the knife in his belt and raising it to Pallas’s neck. He was deft, cutting the throat and twisting the boy down to the ground in one movement, directing the gush of blood across the floor. I watched the blood pooling on the tiles around Pallas’s crumpled body. It wasn’t the boy who deserved to die. He would have been as much of a victim if he had refused the task. The person who deserved to die was the woman who had motivated his actions.
Apicius seemed to be of the same mind. “Come, Sotas. And you too, Thrasius. We have another matter to attend to.” He led us out of the kitchen, past Vatia, unconscious in Rúan’s lap with Balsamea and the other slaves trying desperately to stop the furious flow of blood from her arm.
“She won’t live,” Apicius said as he strode through the corridor away from the kitchen. “I once watched Caesar Augustus order a man to die by asp. They tied him to a board and let snakes crawl all over him. After he’d been bitten several times they took the asps away. Then they made shallow cuts all over the man’s body. After the asp bites, a man will no longer hold his blood. Death is swift and painful.”
Sotas and I were silent. I knew Sotas thought very fondly of Vatia. She was a dear friend who always had kind words for him. As for me, I could not imagine Vatia being absent from my kitchen. By the blood of Apollo! Only the day before I had convinced Apicius to give her a raise in her peculium. It was a small increase, but for Vatia it meant she had been that much closer to earning her freedom.
We stopped in front of Popilla’s chambers. Apicius didn’t knock. He pushed on the door but it was locked. He didn’t need to motion to Sotas. Sotas steeled himself, then slammed one shoulder against the door. It gave way on the first try.
Apicius stormed into the room. Popilla sat on the couch in the corner reading a scroll. She looked up at her son. Her slaves took one look at Apicius and rushed out of the room.
“Get up or I’ll have Sotas get you up.”
Popilla’s eyes held concern as she set aside the scroll. “What is wrong, my son?” Her voice was syrupy. “Did you really need to break down my door?”
“Get up!” Apicius roared, causing the veins in his neck and forehead to bulge.
Popilla stood in a hurry. I wondered if she had ever seen her son so angry. I know I hadn’t. I had no idea he was capable of such wrath.
Her voice shook. “What’s wrong?” she asked again, even though it was plain she knew the answer. She looked at me, her eyes pleading. I could only scowl.
“Kneel, you lying, conniving bitch of a woman. Kneel.” Apicius signaled Sotas to come forward.
Popilla dropped to the floor, wincing with the crunch that sounded from one knee as she landed. Sotas moved to stand behind her.
“You have betrayed me, Mother.” Apicius glanced at Sotas, who grasped her by the hair and pulled her head back.
“What do you mean? What have I done?” she wailed.
Apicius looked like a madman. “Tell her,” he said to me, not taking his eyes off his mother, who was raking Sotas’s hands with her fingers.
Looking at this gorgon of a woman, I knew true hatred. I was so angry that for a moment I found it hard to speak. When I did, it was with a vitriol I had never before known. “Vatia is dying from the bite of an asp. You meant for that snake to kill me. And now a boy, the slave Pallas, has died for helping you make the attempt. You promised him freedom, but you gave him only lies.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about!”
“You were named by the boy,” Apicius said simply.
“What boy? I have not spoken to any boy.”
Apicius paused. Then I noticed a small box under Popilla’s couch. I crossed the room to retrieve it.
The box had air holes like those one would buy at the market for snake offerings to the god of healing, Asclepius. Inside was a rolled-up scroll. I handed it to Apicius.
“My son, you must listen to me,” Popilla spluttered. Her hands pulled on the arm by which Sotas held her hair.
My master unrolled the scroll and read it. A vein on his neck began to pulse. He handed it to me. “It’s a curse. Make sure this is destroyed.”
Suddenly, he tore the snake box from me and threw it at his mother. It hit her in the chest and she screamed. Sotas pulled her head back farther.
“I am exercising my rights as the paterfamilias, Mother,” Apicius said. “With your actions you have destroyed your worth. You are my property and I do with you what I will.”
“No!” Her howl was piercing and I resisted covering my ears.
Apicius looked at Sotas. Like he had with Pallas, Sotas drew the blood-stained knife across Popilla’s throat.
I turned away before she hit the floor.
• • •
That night, Apicius had Pallas’s and Popilla’s bodies weighted with rocks and taken out to sea. Vatia died within the hour. While the other slaves made preparations for her cremation, I took the scroll my master had asked me to destroy and set it on fire without opening it. I feared the evil Popilla had captured within its folds.
A heaviness overtook the villa. Rúan wandered around directionless, inconsolable. Aelia took Apicata and visited friends in Pompeii for weeks. The slaves spoke little and obeyed without question. It was not unheard of for a patrician to exercise his rights as paterfamilias against a family member but it was far from common. Usually when a patrician had a family member killed for his or her actions it was a sibling or a spouse, not an elderly matron. It made us wonder, if Apicius was angry enough that he would kill his mother, what would happen to the rest of us?
I dealt with their deaths in a different way. I became jumpy. I think that I thought the ghost of Popilla was still among us. Balsamea noticed and she spoke to me one day when we were preparing the evening meal.
“You need to let go,” she said in a soft voice. “She is in the Underworld.”
Confused, I put down my knife and looked into her dark eyes, almost hidden by the folds of her skin.
“Let go of your fear, Thrasius. No one will try to kill you now,” she said.
I smiled despite myself. She was right. Since Popilla’s death I had become even more nervous—about snakes, about my food being poisoned, about whether someone might jump out from a hidden corner. I even threw out the knife box and kept my knives visible and within reach.
“I know, I know. But once burned by the fire, won’t you go out of your way to make sure you are never burned again?”
She smiled. “Yes, but how can you be burned if there is no fire?”
I didn’t respond. I picked up the knife and a partially chopped head of lettuce and with careful precision slipped the blade through the leaves.
A crow cawed at the window as the lettuce fell in half. In that small, seemingly unimportant moment, I thought I caught a faint smell of smoke.
PART III
3 C.E.
BEETS
Chop leeks, coriander, (mix with) cumin, raisins, and flour. Put the mixture in the middle (of the beet leaves); tie up and (boil). Serve in a sauce of liquamen, oil, and vinegar.
—Book 3.11, Vegetable Dishes
On Cookery, Apicius
CHAPTER 7
My relationship with Passia bloomed slowly over many months of comfortable conversation and subtle flirting. I thought often back to that evening when she touched me in my cubiculum, and longed to have a moment like that again. But despite my desire, I did not push her. She was a strong woman, with many ideas and opinions, but there was a part of her that was distrustful.
One unusually hot night in early June, after I had dismissed the kitchen slaves, I invited her to join me in a little library in the back of the house. “I want to show you something,” I told her.
The library shelves were empty but the floor was haphazardly covered with baskets full of scrolls and parchment. Apicius had finally decided it was time to move the
family from Baiae to Rome and the domus was in disarray from the packing.
On the empty desk I rolled out the scroll that I had been working on for weeks.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Look and tell me what you think it is.” I had been teaching her to read, and while I was excited about my project, I didn’t want to ruin a perfect teaching moment.
“Sss . . . auce for cr, cr, craane, duck, or chick, chicken.”
I was proud of her progress. At the last Saturnalia, after we listened to Apicata read to us about the great goddess Diana, Passia asked me to teach her. “I’m sad,” she said, “that a child can read such beautiful words and I cannot.” From that night on we practiced every evening after the slaves had finished the cena and Apicata was asleep.
“Keep going, you are doing well.”
“Pepper, dr, dri, dried onion, cumin, love, love, love . . .” She fought to say the word lovage.
In our practice, I would have helped her finish the word, but at that moment, hearing her say what I was feeling was almost too much for me to bear.
“Lovage!” She smiled at me, her eyes glittering in the lamplight.
My heart filled to bursting. “Yes,” I managed, not trusting myself to say more. I wanted desperately to take her in my arms then and pull her to me.
“It’s a recipe.” She unrolled the scroll further. “Oh, Thrasius, are these all recipes?”
I took a breath. “Yes. I thought that I would make a book of them. So many of Apicius’s clients keep asking for recipes for their own cooks.”
“What a wonderful idea. Dominus Apicius will be very pleased.”
“I hope that is so.” I looked down at the scroll, which contained many hours of hard work. I had been testing and perfecting the recipes over the past year, painstakingly writing down the results and making changes here and there until I was sure of each dish. While it was true that Apicius’s clients wanted the recipes, I thought of this book as my own true legacy. When I died, my food would live on. I savored the idea of someone making my recipes hundreds of years later.
“Would you take a walk on the beach with me? It will be our last chance.”
By the gods! I warmed with the thought of walking next to her on the shore. We had walked the beach many times, but never by moonlight. And she was right. There were no beaches in Rome. I would miss the sea and the sand.
“I would like that very much.” I hoped she couldn’t hear my heart hammering against my ribs.
The marble stairs to the beach were well lit by the bright light of the full moon. At the bottom we stopped to remove our sandals, leaving them on the platform that led back up to the domus. The sand felt good beneath my toes.
In my mind I said a prayer of thanks to Venus, my hope rising.
We reached the shore and together walked south, toward the great pier on the farthest end of the beach, brightly lit by dozens of torches. The salt water licked our toes with each long reach up the sand. In the distance, closer to town, several fires had been lit; the beach was a favorite place for parties after tourists had spent their day soaking and gossiping in the famous Baiae mineral baths.
“When will you show your recipe book to Dominus?”
“I’m not sure,” I confessed. “When I have the courage. I don’t know if he will like the idea of telling the world how to cook in his style.”
She giggled. “Ahh, but his ego will have the better of him. If you write it all down, there will be no doubt of a recipe’s origin. If not, one of Apicius’s clients could tell their cooks to try to copy you. I think that he will be quite pleased with your book.”
Suddenly she reached over and took my hand, squeezing it. “I can’t wait until I can read it all by myself.”
I knew I must be smiling like a fool but did not care. I squeezed her hand back as we walked. “It won’t be long. You are a fast learner.”
She moved closer to me. I put my arm around her, marveling at the smoothness of her skin.
“Thrasius . . .”
“Passia?”
She paused, and I realized that she was gathering her courage to speak. “That night, in your cubiculum, I . . .”
I took her hands and held them together between my own. “It’s all right, Passia. You don’t have to say anything.”
“You surprised me,” she blurted out.
“I surprised myself. It took everything I had not to keep you there with me.”
She leaned forward until our faces were close. “I know.”
There was nothing to do but kiss her, with all the passion I had harbored from the moment when she first appeared in the kitchen on the day of my arrival. Her lips were soft, and sweet like fresh Iberian honey. I ran my hands along her back and up into the tangle of her hair. My thumbs stroked the flesh of her neck and cheeks, and when they pulled away, her lips.
We fell into the sand, twining together our summer-tanned limbs. Our hands roamed up and down the length of each other, slowly removing each article of clothing. I delighted in feeling the way the measure of my passion made my skin tingle with desire from head to toe.
“Apicius always says you are the answer to his prayers. I think he is wrong. I think you are the answer to mine,” she whispered in my ear before I entered her and we both cried aloud. The sound was washed away by the crash of waves beyond us.
• • •
The next morning, I woke to Apicata shouting in my ear.
“Thrasius, get up. Get up!”
Something soft and giving slapped me across the back, forcing me to disentangle myself from the blanket. On the next fall of the pillow against my head, I snatched it away from the wielder.
“All right, Apicata! I’m up!” I squinted and saw the six-year-old smiling with satisfaction. Through the window behind her I saw the first peach shades of sunrise breaking apart the blue night. By Jove, she was up early!
Then I noticed Passia standing in the doorway. The memories of the night before came flooding back to me. She had returned with me to my cubiculum and we had made love until deep into the night. When I fell asleep she must have slipped out to return to her pallet at the end of Apicata’s bed. Her smile told me everything I needed to know. It had not been a dream.
“Come on. We don’t have much time. Get up!” Apicata clapped her hands loudly for additional effect. That’s what Passia did to waken her from a nap. “Please, will you take me to the market today? I want to say good-bye to Prokopton!” In my haze it took me a minute to remember we were leaving for Rome that day. “I made sure I got up early. Rúan let me tie up one of the roosters outside my bedroom window.”
I sighed. I had heard the bird. Her alarm worked like a blessed augury, and I remembered thinking to myself I would have that bird roasted at the first opportunity, then I fell back asleep.
“I don’t think we have time,” I protested.
“If you hurry, you will,” Passia said. “I’ll let Aelia know and I’ll tell Rúan he’s in charge of preparing breakfast this morning. But don’t dally. Apicius will want you to help greet clients.”
“All right. We can go to the market,” I told Apicata.
Apicata cheered. “Can we get some honey ice while we’re there?”
“We’ll see.” I hoped she would forget by the time we reached the market. Honey ice would cause her to dawdle.
I took a deep breath and thought about the day ahead. Today was the last day we would have in the beautiful sea-swept Baiae villa for some time and it made my heart ache to think of it. I loved Baiae. I loved the water, the little market, the sound of the bells that tolled when ships entered the harbor. I was excited about the opportunities in Rome but it was hard for me to fathom living there.
As it was unlikely Apicius would return to the villa before next spring, the salutatio would be long. Apicius had many clients and political supporters in Baiae. There were still many who wanted a last audience so they could secure future visiting rights to Apicius’s new domus on the rich and
exclusive Palatine Hill. Apicius was likely to be irritable and impatient to be on the road, not to entertain a long line of guests.
• • •
The walk to the market filled me with conflicting emotions. So many things had gone well for me since I’d come to Baiae from Maximus’s villa in Pompeii. Apicius increasingly turned to me for advice on his affairs, even outside the kitchen. Aelia and Apicata had become as close as family. The kitchen slaves respected me and worked hard to gain both my favor and Apicius’s. My love for Passia had bloomed in the sun of this festive town. Truly, I thought, I had found a form of Elysium here in Baiae, made all the more sweet by the fact that at any time it could have been swept away—as a slave nothing was guaranteed. I had years before I turned thirty-five, the age at which I could legally receive my freedom. Apicius could die the next day and I could be back on the block again.
Baiae was beautiful, the clay and brick buildings shining in the dawn sunlight. The breeze carried the scents of jasmine and the sea. Apicata raced ahead of me, her dark curls bouncing against the back of her blue tunica. In her fist she carried a handful of violets and periwinkles picked from the side of the path near the villa. She was determined to give Prokopton a gift, and I suspected he would have an even larger one to give back to her.
Prokopton was a merchant who specialized in everything nonedible. Whatever you needed he always seemed to have on hand or, if not, could readily procure. Over the last three years, I had purchased cooking utensils, everyday pottery, silver serving platters, and even furniture from Prokopton. Apicata loved the big bear of a man. He always had small toys to share with the girl, whom he called “little bird.” After we moved to Rome, I kept the pet name for her; it was fitting.
That morning Prokopton gave Apicata a tiny wooden wind-up bird, a gift that shocked me. The bird was most likely quite costly. It was delicate, with wings that moved and legs that carried it forward. Feathers had been carefully painted on in a rainbow of hues. Due to their rareness, wind-ups were not for children. They were entertainment pieces meant for the adult table and could often sell for many thousand denarii.