Curses and Smoke

by Vicky Alvear Shecter

  Titurius’s eyes widened. “No!” He lunged at Tag just as Tag drove the nail as hard as he could into the metal.

  Tag did not remember much of what had happened after that, as Titurius had almost beaten him to death. Pontius had pulled him off. “The master were going to kill ye,” the overseer said later. “No doubt about it.”

  “So why didn’t he?”

  “Because the tablet said he would die right off if he killed anybody else in the household. Including you. It were simple — he didn’t want to die.”

  “So why didn’t he sell me, then?”

  Pontius admitted that he had wanted to. “But a priest the master consulted told him ye had to stay part of the household to contain the magic.”

  Now doubt wormed through Tag’s insides. Maybe he should have told Lucia about the curse tablet. She was as much a victim of the curse as her father, because the school had begun to fail after her mother’s death, prompting Titurius to try to make a rich match for his daughter. But it seemed cruel to point out to her that one consequence of her mother’s curse was that she was being married off to the highest bidder.

  He sighed and stared at the flame from the boat-shaped little lamp she’d brought, following the flickering light as it danced over the contours of her body. Despite himself, he couldn’t stop stealing looks at the way her tunica revealed the curves of her breasts and hips, or the way the fabric had hitched up her legs as she lay on her side. He longed to brush his fingertips along her warm, silky skin….

  He needed to stop torturing himself. But he drank her in with his eyes as if he were dying of thirst. As he followed the line of her neck up to her mouth, he sucked in a breath. Her eyes were open, and she was staring at him.

  She opened her arms to him and everything inside him dropped. Gods, he needed to go. This was too dangerous. He needed to be the strong one, but how could he?

  “Lucia,” he whispered. “I should return to the —”

  He stopped, mesmerized. She leaned up, her tunica sliding partway down her shoulder, exposing honey-smooth skin. The scent of her warm body surrounded him as she brought her lips to the base of his throat. He closed his eyes as she trailed soft kisses upward, his breath loud in his ears. When she pressed her mouth to his, he grabbed a fistful of her long, wavy hair and brought her hard against him.

  After a time, he leaned up on one elbow, forcing himself from her. He could not catch his breath, and she was not making it any easier by running her hands up and down his body.

  “I need to … I should go,” he croaked.

  “No, stay with me,” she whispered.

  He groaned. “We cannot, Lucia, you know that.” The consequences were too great. He pulled away a little more and took another shuddering breath.

  She sighed and closed her eyes. “I want to be with you,” she whispered.

  He swallowed. “We cannot take the risk,” he said. “You know this.”

  “Let’s run away, Tag. We’ll disappear where no one will ever find us. We’ll live free, together.”

  He touched his forehead to hers, surprised at the sudden lump in his throat. “There is nothing more in this life that I would want,” he whispered.

  “Let’s dream together and make it come true,” she said, snuggling into him.

  And despite the ache in his body and soul, after a time he slept too, holding her close against him.

  She awoke in the dark, aware of Tag’s deep, rhythmic breathing. The sky was still black, but she didn’t know for how much longer. She’d better return to her cubiculum. Carefully, she extracted herself from beneath the arm he’d flung over her, and he rolled onto his back. How much younger he looked in sleep, more like the boy she remembered.

  Her gaze traveled over his barely clothed body, and she fought the impulse to run her hands down the length of his lean, carved torso. But that would be cruel. He’d been right to stop them from going further, and it wouldn’t be fair to wake him in such a manner. And yet her fingers itched to feel the smooth warmth of his chest and abdomen.

  Her eyes pricked and grew hot as she stared at him, trying to imagine leaving him to marry Vitulus. How would she bear it? Maybe they really could run away together. Maybe it was possible. But inside, she knew she had no sense of what it would take to live outside the compound, no sense of how they could disappear so that he wouldn’t be recaptured and punished as a runaway slave and her reputation ruined forever.

  With a sigh, she gave him a soft kiss on the mouth. He muttered what sounded like her name as she pulled away. With one last longing look, she backed out of the enclosure and slapped her thigh for Minos, who stretched first his front, then his back paws at her feet.

  “Home,” she ordered. She grabbed his collar for guidance through the inky darkness.

  Just as they neared the wall leading back to their compound, she released his collar. She expected him to race toward the house, but he froze, one paw up, as something rustled in the undergrowth. “Come on, boy,” she whispered. “No time for hunting. We need to keep going.” She moved ahead through the brush.

  Then Minos, with a loud whine of excitement, launched himself through her legs at whatever creature he’d spotted. The force of his lunge sent her flying and she landed hard, rolling her ankle. “Gods, Minos!” But the dog was gone.

  When Lucia tried to stand, she gasped, then cursed under her breath at the pain. Well, she had no other choice but to push through it. She had to get back before Metrodona discovered she hadn’t slept in her bed. At the sound of her limping gait, Minos came crashing through the brush, smiling and wagging his tail.

  “Bad boy,” she said crossly. “Look what you’ve done.” But the dog continued grinning. “Home,” she repeated, sighing. Minos stayed nearby as she hobbled. The sky was turning purple.

  Once in her own bed, she heard the first stirrings of slaves rising to their predawn work. Thank you, Diana, for helping me return to my room undetected. She prayed for sleep.

  It did not come. She stared up at the low ceiling of her cubiculum in a daze. How could one day contain so many horrible events — learning the truth about her mother’s suicide and her baby sisters’ exposures; having her best friend’s husband dismiss and belittle her in front of everyone; and now turning her ankle in the dark….

  The worst was thinking about her abandoned sisters. She knew exposure was practiced, but no one ever admitted to it. And now, her own father? Had his grief over his lost son so warped him that he would throw away daughters until he got the new boy he wanted? And poor Mater — used like a brood mare. Now that she recalled it, her mother did always seem pregnant, and always tired and worried too.

  What about the babies? She covered her eyes against the image of her newborn sister, waving her little arms, all alone on a rubbish heap outside the city. Did wild animals get her? What about slave traders, who often searched for abandoned infants to rear for sale later? What if a brothel owner took her? That very moment, all of her little sisters could be enduring abuse worse than death across town or in some foreign hovel, simply because of what her father wished.

  Gods, if she had known, could she have put a stop to it? Could she have joined forces with her mother to convince her father to accept what the gods had given them? Could she have found the means to recover the babes and pay someone to care for them until he softened?

  Everybody had lied to her. Everybody. Even her mother. Tag was the only one who had told her the truth.

  * * *

  Someone was shaking her. “Puella? Lucia? Are you unwell?”

  She opened her eyes. Metrodona. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” her old nurse said, the loose skin under her chin waggling. “I call for the healer next if you don’t wake up this time. It is very late in the morning!”

  “Oh.” Lucia threw off her blanket and stood, forgetting about her ankle, then fell back on her bed with a cry of pain.

  “What … what is this?” Metrodona asked with wide eyes, inspectin
g her swollen flesh. “When did you do this? You had no such injury when you went to sleep!”

  Lucia stared dumbly down at her foot. Should she just say she fell when she used the latrina in the middle of the night? But then Metrodona would grill her about why she hadn’t woken her. Without thinking, she blurted, “It must have happened while I slept.”

  “What do you mean?” Metrodona said. “That is impossible.” The old woman’s eyes widened. “Unless you were visited by a daemon! Have you angered a daemon?”

  Lucia suppressed a smile and widened her eyes, glad she had accidentally hit on one of her nursemaid’s endless superstitions. “I don’t know,” she said, adding a small quaver of fear to her voice. “It happened in a dream.”

  Metrodona came closer. “A dream? Tell me.”

  “I dreamt that Minos and I were running through the woods in the dark, and he saw a rat and darted through my legs to pounce on it. I fell hard,” she said, screwing up her expression as if trying to recall a fading image.

  “Where were you headed in your dream, child? And why were you hurrying? I must speak with the dream interpreter, and he will need to know this!”

  “I was running through the woods back to … to my body,” she said. “In the dream, I saw myself sleeping in my cubiculum, and I was rushing to join myself because something terrible was going to happen.”

  Metrodona put a knobby hand up to her mouth.

  Lucia forced an expression of fear on her face. “Metrodona,” she said quietly, “do you think it means something?”

  “Of course it does! It is very rare for both worlds to combine like this.” Her eyes lit up. “The rat! What color was it?”

  “Gray. Maybe black,” Lucia said. “The creature moved fast.”

  “Oh! Oh, my. I am sure the interpreter will have a lot to say about this!” She shifted her weight from foot to foot.

  “If you want to head to the marketplace now to find him, you may,” Lucia said. “I won’t need you — I won’t be going anywhere today.”

  “Yes, yes. But first let us get the medicus to look at your ankle. I will help you with your morning ablutions and then get the healer, yes?”

  Lucia nodded, hoping it would be the younger one.

  He got hit three times during the blocking exercise. By Quintus. The man who couldn’t hit an ox if it was trussed up and stuffed and painted red. He had to focus.

  Yet Lucia’s comment about running away together had lodged in his mind like a splinter. He couldn’t shake it. He’d thought about running away before, of course, but always dismissed it. Runaway slaves were branded and beaten to within an inch of their lives if they were caught. But the idea of running away with Lucia, of living a life they chose together, had grabbed him by the throat and wouldn’t let go.

  A house slave came to speak to Pontius. “Tag!” the overseer called. “Yer needed in the main house!”

  Quintus looked at him and laughed. “Eheu. That is one guilty look. What’d you do, boy? Besides abandoning your post last night, anyway.”

  Frozen in fear, Tag said nothing.

  Quintus stepped close. “I did not report to your master that you ran off from attending me last night,” he said in a low voice, “if that is what you are worried about.”

  Tag blinked. “I did not run off. You fell asleep in your host’s home. I needed to be back here to attend to my duties as healer.”

  Quintus waved his hand. “Still, whatever it is, I will back you with Titurius if you need it.”

  Tag looked at the patrician, wondering at this sudden “solidarity.”

  “I am not as terrible as you think I am,” Quintus continued. “Truly. You might be surprised.”

  “Tag!” yelled Pontius. “What are ye waitin’ fer?”

  “Er … thank you, Dominus,” Tag said to Quintus and moved away. He dropped the wooden gladius, then grabbed his tunic and shrugged into it as he jogged after the house slave. His heart pounded with worry. If someone had told Titurius about the time he spent with his daughter, it would all be over. Seeing Lucia, training to win his freedom, everything.

  He caught up with the house slave. “Where am I needed?” he asked.

  “Women’s quarters,” he said. “The young domina has been hurt.”

  “Hurt? What do you mean?” Had her father found out and beaten her?

  The man shrugged. “It’s all I was told.”

  The house slave steered him into a small side garden where Damocles stood talking to Metrodona. Castor dug in the dirt at his feet. No Titurius. Tag released a breath.

  “The younger healer is here,” called the slave as he turned and left.

  “Ah, finally,” Damocles said. “I sent for you some time ago.”

  Castor ran to Tag, grinning, waving an imaginary sword. “Did you hurt someone today?”

  “No, Castor,” he said. Turning to his father, he asked, “What has happened?”

  “Lucia turned her ankle,” Damocles said, moving aside to reveal her sitting on a stone bench. She smiled shyly at him. His chest swelled with relief. He moved toward Lucia, but Damocles grabbed his son’s arm and, with surprising strength, dragged him far enough out of earshot that they could speak in private.

  “You told her about her mother?” he hissed under his breath. “Why would you do such a thing, son? The master made us all swear she was never to know what really happened!”

  “She has a right to know,” Tag whispered back.

  “She has been demanding I tell her everything. She wants to know who gave her mother the poison —”

  Tag blanched.

  “She wants to know if all of the infants were really alive at birth. She wants to know who took the babies to the rubbish piles outside the gates! And all manner of things we can’t know, like if the babies really died or if some slave trader picked them up. This is a horrible thing for a girl to have to consider right before she gets married! If Dominus finds out she knows, neither of us will survive.”

  If Dominus finds out about a lot of things, Tag thought, none of them would survive.

  “What are you two discussing?” Metrodona called out. “My mistress is waiting!”

  “Just poultices, Glykeria,” Damocles called.

  Tag blinked. Glykeria? Wasn’t that Lucia’s mother’s attendant? The old woman had died soon after her mistress took her own life. How could his father be so lucid one moment and then make a mistake like that in the next?

  They moved back to the women. “Tag will treat the ankle, Cassia,” Damocles continued, calling Lucia by her mother’s name. Tag and Lucia exchanged a look. “I have to get back to the cook’s child, who is having trouble breathing.” He turned and walked away.

  Castor grabbed Tag’s hand. “Can I stay with you instead of following your apa?” he asked. “I don’t like it anymore when he thinks I am you.”

  Tag closed his eyes for a moment. “Yes, you can stay.”

  When he approached Lucia, she smiled up at him again, her cheeks flushing. Warmth washed over him, but there was something else too — a fierce wanting that ground and twisted his gut so hard he could barely breathe.

  Castor, it seemed, was also mesmerized. “I like your lights,” the child blurted.

  Lucia blinked and looked at the boy. “What?”

  “The ones in your eyes that dance when you smile,” he said, flushing to the tips of his ears. “I want to marry you when I’m growed up.”

  Metrodona boxed the side of his head gently. “Stupid boy!” she huffed. “You are a slave. Ladies can’t marry slaves. Now stop your nonsense and let the medicus check her ankle!”

  “Right,” Tag said, watching Lucia gently brush the hair off the little boy’s forehead, the child wriggling in pleasure. “How did it happen?”

  Metrodona rattled off the story Lucia had concocted, and he tried to act suitably impressed. But inside, he hated the idea of her making her way through the woods in the dark all alone. She should have woken him.

  Lucia turned to h
er nurse. “Metrodona, go to the market to talk to the dream interpreter now. I am anxious to hear what he says.” She nodded toward Tag and Castor. “The healers here will take care of me.”

  Castor pulled on Tag’s hand, whispering with awe, “She called me a healer too.”

  Tag squeezed his hand. “May I see the injury?” he asked after Metrodona left, moving faster than he’d ever seen the old woman move before.

  As Lucia extended her ankle, he bent on one knee and cradled her heel. It looked terrible, swollen and purple. Could it be broken?

  “Were you able to — in this dream,” he added for Castor’s sake, “were you able to put any weight on it after the fall?”

  She nodded. “It hurt, but I could still walk on it.”

  “Can you put any weight on it now?” he asked. She stood, but he could see her jaw clench in pain. He bade her sit again.

  “How are we going to treat it?” Castor asked, looking up at him. Tag caught the “we” and exchanged a smile with Lucia.

  “First we will need cool clay dug up near the cistern, for cooling the injury,” he said. “Then we will need the leeches to bleed the injured area to further reduce the swelling —”

  “No leeches!” Lucia cried. “Please!”

  “Fine. I’ll make some small cuts instead. We will also need linen bandages to wrap the foot for support,” he added. “But let’s start with the cool clay first,” he said, turning to Castor. “Have the gardener dig some up near the cistern. Tell the cook to mix mustard powder into it, then bring it to me. After I bleed her, we will cover the ankle in the mixture. Do you understand?”

  Castor nodded, gave Lucia a shy grin, and flew out of the small garden.

  Tag watched him go, then turned to Lucia. Was he really alone with her? Inside her own home?

  “I would have walked you back,” he said under his breath, pretending to continue examining her foot.

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”