‘If you need money to pay this debt, why not ask your father for it?’ Beric said.
Glaucus shrugged, still half laughing. ‘My father has certain economies. Look at the way he buys his own slaves, and so does Nigellus out of his commission. Certain economies, and I am one of them.’
‘The Lady Poppaea your mother, then.’ All the household knew how the Lady Poppaea adored and spoiled her son.
‘Mother never has any money,’ said Glaucus, with engaging frankness. ‘Father pays her bills. He even keeps her jewels when she is not wearing them.’ His pleasant voice hardened a little. ‘I did not come here to be cross-questioned. Will you do it?’
‘No,’ Beric said. ‘I will not.’
Glaucus was clearly surprised. ‘You’ll not get more than an aurum,’ he said.
‘It is in my heart that I do not want your aurum.’
‘Oh, come now.’ Glaucus tried another laugh, but it sounded a little uneasy in the heavy silence of the nearing storm. ‘My father can get another mare, and he will not miss the money. If he was not so mean, I should not have to bother with this sort of game. You are not going to pull a long face and be righteous about it, are you?’
‘No.’ Beric shook his head. ‘It is only that I will not do it.’ He was puzzled by his own determination. He owed no loyalty to Publius Piso. ‘If you would cheat your father, let you do it with your own hands,’ he heard himself say.
An odd change came over Glaucus’s handsome face. It seemed to grow sharper and older before the slave’s eyes. ‘Who are you to take that tone with me?’ he asked softly.
‘You are a slave. Had you forgotten that? A slave! There is no right or wrong for a slave, save the will of his master.’
Beric said levelly, ‘But you are not my master.’
Glaucus looked at him a moment in silence, his eyes narrowed like a cat’s before it spits. ‘Not yet,’ he said, still more softly. ‘No, not yet; but who knows what the fates hold in store for us?’ It was unmistakably a threat. He thrust off from the manger against which he had been leaning all this while, and strolled towards the stable door, beyond which the day had suddenly darkened to the colour of a bruise; and then turned to face Beric once more. From somewhere a long way off came a low mutter of thunder which seemed to intensify rather than break the silence between them. As it died away, suddenly and most unexpectedly Glaucus flung back his head and laughed. ‘Never look so solemn, you young idiot; I did but seek to test you; and I am rejoiced to find you so far above reproach. Take that for your honesty,’ and slipping a hand into the many-folded silken girdle, he tossed a sesterce to Beric’s feet, and lounged out.
But the laughter had not rung true, and Beric, standing beside Venetia, with the sesterce lying untouched at his feet, and staring after him, knew that Glaucus was lying, and, what was far more dangerous, that Glaucus knew he knew. He had seen behind the pleasant mask of Glaucus and for a moment made Glaucus see behind it too, and that was the thing of all others that Glaucus would never forgive.
Again the thunder muttered; nearer this time, and Venetia, who hated thunder, began to snort and shiver.
VII
THE DARK DAYS
GLAUCUS did not forgive. There were many small and indefinable ways of making life wretched for a slave, especially a slave who had been born free, and he used them all, with a delicate skill. They did not at first amount to very much, though they added a good deal to Beric’s unhappiness; but Beric had an uneasy feeling that the son of the house was merely keeping his hand in until the chance of some bigger hurt came his way.
Presently Hippias hobbled back to his horses and Beric returned to his work in the house. And the house was a busy place in these days, with the wedding so near. There was a ceaseless coming and going of merchants and jewellers and lawyers, and Lucilla’s friends were for ever arriving to talk about the wedding and be shown Lucilla’s new clothes and jewels, and going away again, chattering together like a flock of many-coloured birds. Nigellus wore a permanently harassed expression, and the cook, who was a Campanian and excitable, was almost off his head. The Lady Poppaea passed several times a day from purring contentment to tears and tantrums, and the master of the house fussed and fumed so that his usual pink turned to purple, and when he had to go away for a few days unexpectedly, on business, his entire household heaved sighs of relief.
The day after he left, Beric encountered the Lady Lucilla in the shadowed colonnade of the inner court. All afternoon the garden had been full of girls, laughing and chattering, gay in their pretty flower-coloured tunics, playing little idle games with a hollow golden ball engraved with Greek dancers, eating honeyed apricots and admiring the bride’s new bracelets. But now they were all gone, and in the cool of the evening the shadowed court seemed very quiet, with only the drowsy crooning of the coral-footed stock-doves to break the stillness. He was surprised to see that although it would soon be dinner-time, the Lady Lucilla had changed into an old tunic and bunched her hair out of the way with a riband.
‘Oh, Beric,’ she said as soon as she saw him, ‘now I need not send for you. I am tired of talking about clothes, and I noticed this afternoon that with all this excitement nobody has remembered to pick the figs on the terrace, so I am going to pick them now. Go you and fetch a basket, and come and help me.’
‘Yes, my Lady.’ Beric touched palm to forehead, and went quickly to do her bidding.
On the way back he met Glaucus, who raised an eyebrow at the sight of the big willow basket he carried, and demanded to know what he did with it.
‘It is for figs,’ Beric told him. ‘The Lady Lucilla has bidden me to help her gather the figs on the terrace.’
‘The Lady Lucilla is a great deal too fond of slaves’ company,’ said Glaucus. ‘I must remember to speak to Valarius about it,’ and he walked on. Beric looked after him for a moment, with a frown deepening between his eyes, then continued on his way.
He found Lucilla waiting for him by the fig tree which grew against the blank wall of the slaves’ quarters, at one end of the terrace, and they set to work, searching for the figs among the cool, many-fingered leaves. For a while they picked in silence, though once or twice Beric caught Lucilla glancing at him sideways, as though she had something she wanted to say and she was not sure how to begin. The silence lasted until he climbed on to the flat coping of the parapet to reach some figs on the topmost branches, and then she said quickly: ‘Oh, Beric, do be careful! If you slip you will be in the Forum in a score of pieces before you stop rolling!’
‘I shall not slip,’ Beric said, turning with a hand on a knotted branch to look out and down. Far below him lay the Forum area, the heart of Rome, with its pillared and porticoed buildings, its triumphal arches and towering statues, all seeming at that distance like some exquisite toy carved from old ivory and peopled with many-coloured atomies; the hills rising from it amethyst-shadowed in the evening light, the Palatine with its palaces, the Capitoline with its temples, the green pomegranate gardens of the Esquiline. ‘You might as well be a bird—an eagle, up here,’ he said.
‘Yes, I expect you might; but oh, please be careful!’ Lucilla begged. ‘Finish picking those figs and then come down.’
Beric turned his back on Rome, and busied himself with gathering the figs he had come for and passing them down to her. Then he jumped down himself, with the last few still in his hand. ‘See, they are the best on the tree,’ he said, holding them out to show her.
She took one of them, its sun-warm purple skin splitting to show the pink flesh inside, and began to eat it. ‘In nine days I shall be a married woman, and it will be beneath my dignity to eat figs warm off the tree,’ she said, a little regretfully.
‘Yes, my Lady.’ Beric added the rest of the fruit to those in the basket, and looked up again. ‘It is in my heart that I hope you will be very happy.’
Lucilla looked at him almost wonderingly, with the half-eaten fig in her hand. ‘You said that as though you really cared,’ she said.
‘So few people do. They are too busy being pleased that Father has arranged such a good match for me.’
Beric began to stutter. ‘I—I do care, my Lady. You have been kind to me, and I—would do anything, so that you should be happy.’
‘I—think I shall be,’ said the Lady Lucilla, and suddenly she smiled. ‘I like Valarius. I have liked him ever since I can remember, and he likes me; and he is kind and just. And if you like the husband your father chooses for you, and he likes you——’ She finished the fig and licked her fingers; and then, as Beric remained silent, she asked: ‘How are the marriages made in Britain?’
‘Sometimes they are made between our fathers, but usually it is just that when a young man has slain his first wolf, and is free to marry, he looks among the maidens of the Tribe, and when he finds the right one, if she be willing, he goes to her father and asks for the maiden; and unless something stands in the way, there is a feast, and the maiden’s father gives the young man his best spear, and he takes the maiden home to his own hut, to be his woman.’
‘It sounds nice for the maiden,’ said Lucilla, with a half sigh. ‘Sometimes it happens so with us, too, but not often. Almost always it is our fathers who choose. And if Father had chosen me a husband of my own age, it might have been someone like Glaucus, who would have been unkind to me because I am not pretty like Claudia and Dometella.’
Beric looked up from adding a last fig to the basket, and their eyes met in quick understanding. So she also had suffered at Glaucus’s hands.
‘Beric,’ Lucilla said suddenly. ‘Beric——’
And he knew that he had been right; there was something she wanted to say to him.
‘Yes, my Lady?’
‘Beric, when I go to Valarius’s house, would you like to come with me? Father has given me Aglæa, my nurse, and I think—I am sure—that he would give you to me, if I asked him.’
Beric could not answer at once. To escape from Glaucus, to go with the Lady Lucilla, who treated him as a human being, and be part of her household and Valarius’s, who was kind and just and not for ever selling his slaves, it seemed a thing too good to be true.
‘Would you like that, Beric?’ Lucilla said. ‘If you would, I will ask my father when he comes home.’
‘Oh, my Lady, I would like it—I would!’ Beric took the plump sticky hand she held out to him, and bent, and laid it to his forehead.
For three days Beric carried his little newly-lit hope with him. It lay down with him at night, and sounded in the first twittering of sparrows under the eaves that woke him each morning. A year ago nothing but the hope of freedom could have meant so much to him; but now freedom had drawn so far away that the hope of a kind master almost satisfied his need for hoping.
Towards the evening of the third day the master of the house returned home, with a great deal of shouting and fuss, a great running to and fro of slaves. When it had all died down a little, and Publius Piso had disappeared into the bath-house to soak off the dust of the journey, the household set about the usual preparations for dinner. Presently Beric took freshly filled lamps into the dining-room, for the evenings were beginning to draw in, and though dinner still began in broad daylight, it was growing dusk before the end, and on his way back across the atrium he met the Lady Lucilla. She was just coming in from the colonnade, with her hands full of little thornless yellow roses, and the white kitten, half grown now, weaving and winding around her; and at sight of him she checked, smiling.
‘I am going to ask Father after dinner,’ she said.
Beric said, ‘Yes, my Lady,’ suddenly breathless, now that his hopes were so near to their testing time.
‘It will be all right,’ Lucilla told him. ‘I am sure that it will be all right. When Father has had a bath and a good dinner, he will be in a good mood. Always he is like that when he has just got home from a journey. And see, I am going to make him a wreath, as though it were for a feast; and that will help.’
Before Beric’s inner eye rose a vision of Publius Piso’s round pink face under the wreath of yellow roses slipping, as his wreaths always did, slightly over one ear.
His eyes met the Lady Lucilla’s, and he knew that she was seeing the same thing. They began to laugh, and they were still laughing, a few moments later, when Glaucus strolled in, remarking silkily, ‘Gossiping with the slaves as usual, I see, Lucilla.’
The laughter went from both of them on the instant; Beric drew back, standing rigidly to attention as he waited to be dismissed, and Lucilla turned on her brother with a small defiant flounce. ‘I was telling Beric that after dinner I am going to ask Father to give him to me.’
Glaucus sank on to a couch piled with gay embroideries, and smiled up to them. ‘I had a feeling something of that sort was in the wind. You are too late, my sweet sister; I have just been closeted with our revered father in the bath-house. He is in a most melting mood, and he has given Beric to me.’
There was a stunned silence. Beric, licking his suddenly dry lips, felt as though he had just taken a blow between the eyes; and yet he knew that deep within him, he had expected something like this to happen.
Lucilla was the first to speak. ‘I do not believe you,’ she said.
‘As you please. But it is perfectly true. Ask Father.’
‘I shall! And if it is indeed true, I shall beg him to unmake the gift. He does not know—he does not understand——’
‘Do,’ Glaucus said lightly. ‘It will not do you the least good. You know how Father prides himself on being a man of his word.’
‘Glaucus,’ his sister said. ‘Why did you do it? You do not really want Beric.’
‘Oh, but I do. I want a charioteer, for one thing, and Beric handles the team well; I watched him bring them back from exercise the other day. Automedan is hopeless with horses, and I am tired of driving myself everywhere, as though I could not afford a charioteer.’
‘As though Father could not afford a charioteer, you mean!’
‘Very well, as though Father couldn’t afford a charioteer.’
‘It is funny how people always think that we are so lucky to have you in the family,’ Lucilla said, with a quiet, white intensity. ‘You were a horrible boy, and you are a horrible man!’
One by one, now that they were useless, the little yellow roses dropped from her hands to the tessellated floor, and the white kitten began to play with them.
Glaucus made her a small mocking bow, then turned to Beric, where he stood among the fallen ruins of his hopes. For a long moment their gaze met and seemed to lock; and again Glaucus’s eyes narrowed like a cat’s. ‘Get back to your work,’ he said.
Beric turned, with the accustomed obeisance, and strode away, all but colliding with the Lady Poppaea, who had just come down from her chamber, her evening toilet complete. The heavy scent of jessamine flowers that always floated about her sickened him—he was to hate the scent of jessamine ever after—as he brushed past her without a word.
She squawked like a startled hen; and behind him as he blundered out into the colonnade, he heard her voice upraised. ‘Really! He might have knocked me down! I shall tell your father he must get rid of him—he must get rid of him at once!’ And Glaucus’s amused reply, ‘Ah, but he is no longer Father’s to get rid of. Father has just given him to me, and I fancy he is not pleased about it.’
Long after the other slaves were asleep that night, Beric lay wakeful in his blanket in the long dormitory, staring into the darkness, sick and battered with longing for his own people. His own people, he thought, bitterly; but he had no people. He had thought of the Tribe as his own people, and the Tribe had cast him out; he had thought of the Romans as his own people, and the Romans had made him a slave; a thing to be bought and sold like a chariot pony but with less fellow feeling than most men had for their chariot ponies. He had no people, no belonging place. It had been so little that he had hoped for; only that he might be the Lady Lucilla’s slave in a kinder household than this, and get away from Glaucus, whom he hate
d, and who hated him. And instead, he was become Glaucus’s slave. Out of the darkness he seemed to see Glaucus’s face with the pleasant mask fallen from it, the eyes narrowing like an angry cat’s as they looked at him.
On the next pallet, Hippias began to mutter in his sleep, as he did sometimes, and a new uneasiness was stirred in Beric, on the old groom’s account … .
All next day, and all the day after, Beric looked out for a chance to speak with the Lady Lucilla alone, but it was not until the third morning that he found it. That morning Glaucus went out early, with Automedan his body-slave in attendance, to meet a friend at the gymnasium, and a little later Beric learned by overhearing the loud complaints of the Lady Poppaea, who it seemed had wanted to speak to her daughter about something, that the Lady Lucilla had gone down to the temple of Sylvan Pan, without asking leave, and taking only Aglæa, her old nurse, with her.
Beric knew the little temple of Sylvan Pan in the vale between the Viminal and the Esquiline. It was a temple that few people visited nowadays, for the gods of Greece and Rome were falling into disuse, and the gods of Egypt and Persia taking their places. Jupiter and Mars and the like were safe, of course, because they were a national habit, and so the people still sacrificed to them even when they no longer believed in them; but the lesser gods were suffering. People had almost forgotten Pan, and the little temple was fading and falling into ill repair, and the garden in which it stood becoming a flowering wilderness. But for some reason, perhaps for that very reason, the Lady Lucilla liked it, and would sometimes slip down there to talk to the one old saffron-robed attendant priest, and put a sesterce in his bowl, and watch the goldcrests that nested in the osiers and overgrown arbutus of the garden. Beric had been her escort on several such visits, for though the place was quite near her home, it was also near to the Suburra, the teeming slums of Rome, that thrust up the vale towards it in a long tongue, and so she was not really supposed to go unattended.
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