скачать книгу бесплатно
Rab paused and gazed at the ceiling. ‘My father was a man called Junon. Before his death he was...a pomegranate farmer.’
Atia exhaled. A nobody, then. A glorious, unassailable nobody. ‘Come then, Rab, son of Junon, farmer of pomegranates,’ she said. ‘We must prepare you for your performance.’
She glanced over his shoulder at the guards. ‘Please await us outside.’
The three men exchanged looks and Atia knew she had just made a grave error. The guards would certainly notify her father of the unusual command. Atia would have to devise some story to explain it. But not now. Now was about preparing Rab to preserve his own life. With Fortuna’s favour, he might even earn his freedom.
‘If my father senses insincerity in your apology tonight, he will punish you further,’ she said. ‘You must believe me in this, for I have seen it before. He demands a moving performance.’
‘He wants theatre?’
Atia sighed. ‘All banquets are political and all politics are theatrical,’ she said.
‘You speak in knots,’ he said.
‘Just give me your best apology and let us see if it will suffice.’
Rab cleared his throat. ‘Honourable Governor Magnus Atius Severus of Arabia Petraea, I, Rab, son of Junon, do beg your forgiveness for the harm done to your person by my camel and I pledge my loyalty to Rome. Good?’
‘Beyond terrible.’
Rab frowned.
‘Your words are too terse and your demeanour far too proud. Just look at how you hold yourself. In that toga, I might have mistaken you for Augustus himself.’
A sly smile spread across Rab’s face and he puffed out his chest comically.
‘It is not a compliment,’ Atia warned. ‘You must hunch your shoulders and hang your head low. Do not appear comfortable in that garment. Appear as if you feel unworthy of it.’
Rab gave a dismissive grunt.
‘I do not think you understand what is at stake,’ Atia said. ‘My father wishes to humiliate you and receive your submission. If he is not satisfied, he will pursue other means.’
‘What means?’
‘He will take a finger, Rab. Or a toe. He will have you disrobed, or thrust your arm into the snake charmer’s basket. I have seen all these things happen to slaves and prisoners who have come before my father at banquets. He likes to put on an entertaining show.’
The colour left his cheeks. He paced away from her, his silence betraying his fear. Good, Atia thought. He should be afraid. Only the gods knew what manner of humiliation her father planned for him.
‘And as for the nature of your apology,’ she continued, ‘you must make it as detailed and elaborate as possible. Sorry is not enough—you must fawn and you must beg.’
She watched him cringe. ‘You must bury your true feelings deep. Watch me now and listen closely.’
Atia dropped to her knees and assumed her most miserable expression. ‘Honourable Legatus Augusti Pro Praetore Magnus Atius Severus,’ she said. ‘I come to this banquet in the manner of a lowly dog. I am embarrassed, ashamed, contrite. I sit on your couches, I eat your oysters, I avail myself of your endless generosity, yet I deserve none of this.’ Atia sat back on her heels. ‘Do you see? Now continue where I left off.’
Rab gave his shoulders an exaggerated hunch. ‘Honourable Governor, I stand before you as a beggar, a sand-scratcher, a worm. A fly on the back of the world’s ugliest toad. The stinking excrement of the lowliest jackal in the foulest—’
‘Perhaps a bit less description,’ Atia interrupted, suppressing a grin.
Rab nodded gravely. ‘Only two days ago, my camel did the unthinkable. The mindless beast thrust out his wretched leg and crushed your own. It was a crime for which both beast and owner deserve the worst of punishments. And yet you, Honourable Governor, in your magnificent mercy, have allowed us to live.’
‘Better,’ said Atia. ‘Now drop to your knees.’
Rab dropped to his knees before her and she felt a wave of heat pulse through her body. Now they were kneeling before one another with half-an-arm’s length between them. The bubbling in her stomach returned with new force.
She gulped a breath and willed herself to focus. ‘You must speak your apology with great humility,’ she advised. ‘Ideally, you must begin to cry, but only if you can produce real tears.’
‘It will be difficult enough to hide my disgust.’
‘You must not simply hide your disgust, you must swallow it whole,’ said Atia, ‘and after your apology, you must declare your loyalty to Rome...with thunderous enthusiasm.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘You wish for me to raise a cheer, then? Summon the trumpets?’
She frowned. His arrogance was exasperating. He certainly did not comport himself like the son of a pomegranate farmer.
‘Senatus Populus Que Romanus,’ he was saying now. ‘I have come here to pronounce my loyalty to Rome. First I shall perform a Roman salute, followed by a prayer to Magna Mater. Then I shall recite a few lines from the Aeneid.’ He arched a brow and it was all she could do not to laugh.
‘You will say none of those things—lest my father throw you to the lions!’
‘Just the lions?’ He was making light of her advice, but his words had grown edges. Beneath all his bluster, she knew he was afraid.
‘After your apology, you should straighten your posture and lift your chin thusly.’ She tilted her head so that her face gazed up at his. ‘Then passionately declare your loyalty to Rome.’
‘I am beginning to understand the nature of this drama,’ he said.
‘And that is?’
‘A debased, uncivilised Nabataean man is transformed by his submission to Rome.’
She did not deny it.
‘And if I do not wish to be your father’s performer?’
‘You risk losing more than your dignity,’ she said.
Rab exhaled mightily, then rose to his feet. ‘I declare my complete and undying loyalty to Rome,’ he said, his rich, gravely voice resounding against the marble. ‘For Rome’s greatest Governor has lifted me from squalor and shown me mercy.’
‘Bravo,’ she said, feeling unreasonably happy. ‘You have learned the dance.’
He flashed a begrudging grin and extended his hand down to her and when she rose to her feet it was as if they were really dancing.
‘If Fortuna wills it, you will walk free tomorrow,’ she said. If Fortuna willed it, this would be the last time they would ever speak again.
‘You do me a kindness,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘I find it...tedious to watch other people suffer.’
‘I am grateful to you,’ he said. She noticed that he had not released her hand. She glanced at the floor, unsure of how to respond. ‘Truly,’ he said, willing her to look at him again. ‘I owe you a debt.’
Atia blinked. Obviously he was trying to win her favour again. What prisoner ever expressed gratitude to his captor?
‘Yes, that is it,’ she said. ‘That is the tone of sincerity you must strive to convey.’
He lowered his voice. ‘It is not a tone. I am sincere.’
What a strange thing for him to say. But of course you are not sincere, she wished to tell him. You are a prisoner. You will say anything to engineer your escape.
‘When you stand before my father tonight you must work hard to veil your thoughts,’ she said. Meanwhile, her own thoughts had begun to run riot.
‘You appear to know quite a lot about the veiling of thoughts,’ he observed. He squeezed her hand. There was very little distance between them now. She could smell his clean olive scent.
‘Yes, I believe I am something of an expert in that particular skill,’ she admitted.
She had been veiling her thoughts all her life, in truth—from a father who used her, from husbands who despised her, even from her own awareness. Thoughts were dangerous, because they always led to pain. ‘If my thoughts are concealed, they cannot be used against me,’ she said.
‘And yet perhaps you are not so very adept at concealment as you think,’ he whispered. She glanced at his lips, the bottom lip so much larger than the top, like a pillow upon which she might lay her secrets.
‘I am extremely adept,’ she countered. She had meant the statement as a kind of jest, but the words came out thick and heavy.
‘Can you guess my thoughts in this moment?’ he asked.
‘No, I am afraid I cannot.’
His lips were so close. It was as if he wished to kiss her. ‘I am thinking that you are very beautiful.’
His breath washed over her, bathing her skin with sensation. It flooded down her limbs, making her feel relaxed and alert all at once. What had he said? That she was beautiful?
Beautiful?
She froze. She was many things, but beautiful she was not. Something was amiss.
She stepped backwards. He was watching her closely, his eyes smouldering with...with that look. That very well-crafted, remarkably believable approximation of desire. Something was very, very amiss.
He tilted his head back to take in the length of her body and his eyes fixed on the belt of her tunic—the place where she had stored the key to his cell.
And there it was—a glimpse of the truth. His mind was not on her—of course it was not. Had she forgotten how her terrible hooked nose made her completely undesirable? Nay, he was thinking of the key. He did not desire her. He desired escape.
She took another step backwards. And to think that she had tried to tutor him in the art of performance! What a fool she had been. She had almost been taken in by him, had waited for his kiss, had longed for it, even. How could she have forgotten herself in such a way?
‘Do you think me that naive?’ she asked.
‘Apologies, I do not underst—’
‘Guards!’ she called.
Chapter Five (#u85ab3ff7-4d66-5940-be0d-c34aa7fb2cbd)
Atia tipped the vial into her goblet and watched two cloudy drops mix with her wine.
‘How many for you, Lydia?’ she asked her friend.
‘Only one, dear,’ said Lydia, glancing at the door. ‘And be quick.’
Just beyond the small bedroom, every bored patrician in Bostra had gathered. They milled about the column-lined courtyard of her father’s large villa, trading compliments and spoiling for gossip.
‘You are making me look bad,’ said Atia, tipping a single drop of the poppy tears into Lydia’s goblet, then a third into her own. She swirled the liquid inside her glass and thought of the moment that afternoon when she realised Rab had been lying to her. The tears will wash away the pain, she told herself.
It was a long-practised refrain—a phrase she had invented in the days after her first marriage, almost eighteen years ago now. She had been only twelve years old at the time—a full two years younger than the proper age for a Roman marriage.
It had been a trying time. After her mother’s death, her father had been eager to rid his doma of his three daughters. Her eldest sister had refused to marry, so he had sent her to serve at a temple in distant Crete. He had rewarded a military ally with the hand of Atia’s second-eldest sister, who had inherited the beauty of their mother.
He had had more difficulty finding a husband for Atia. ‘Your nose is a problem,’ he had told her. ‘No man wishes to pass such a thing along to his children.’ Eventually, however, her father had found a beneficial match in the person of an elderly Senator—a political ally with a taste for young girls.
The tears will wash away the pain, Atia would always tell herself when she heard the heavy treading of the Senator’s sandals on the marble floor outside her bedchamber. She would quickly tip the vial to her lips and, when he turned her over and laid his wrinkled stomach across her back, she would close her eyes and find peace.
‘Come, Atia,’ urged Lydia. ‘Before we are missed.’ Atia tipped one last teardrop into her goblet and the two women slipped back into the courtyard. They followed a crowded walkway to the dining room, where they stretched out at opposite ends of a lounging couch surrounded by tables full of delicacies.
Lydia raised her goblet. ‘To Arabia Petraea.’
‘To Arabia Petraea,’ Atia repeated, then took another long sip of her wine.
It was a sly joke the two women shared, for neither had wished to come to Rome’s easternmost province. Lydia had followed her husband here three years ago. A lesser tribune in Trajan’s Second Legion, the womanising commander had survived the change of administration from Trajan to Hadrian thanks in no small part to the wise counsel of his wife.
‘What troubles you, Atia?’ Lydia asked now, casting a wary eye on her husband. The old lecher had cornered a young Greek woman and was shamelessly caressing her cheek.
‘Nothing at all, my darling,’ Atia said, because her troubles seemed insignificant in comparison to the humiliation Lydia currently suffered.
‘Come now, I can see that something worries you,’ Lydia prodded. She reached for a fig. ‘Beyond the usual worries, of course.’
Atia sifted through her catalogue of worries to find one suitable to discuss publicly. Her stomach twisted as she envisioned burning ghutrahs and starving prisoners and innocent Nabataeans doomed to die. She wondered if her own death would come before all of them.
‘You are familiar with the science of astrology?’ she asked her friend.
‘Of course, my dear,’ replied Lydia. ‘We recently hosted Dorotheus of Sidon at our villa in Gadara. A wretched man, but his astrological treatise is quite famous.’
‘Did I ever tell you that an astrologer once predicted the day of my death?’
‘Really? But you must know that such predictions are impossible. Astrology is a general science.’
‘Of course,’ said Atia. She plucked an olive from a plate and gazed at it.
There was a long silence. ‘Now you have made me curious,’ asked Lydia, also gazing at the olive. ‘What day did he give you?’
‘It was a she, not a he—a very old woman in the Subura slum,’ said Atia.
‘And?’
‘I cannot recall the exact date she gave,’ Atia lied. In forty days. Atia popped the olive into her mouth and swallowed it whole. ‘She only said it would take place in my thirtieth year.’
