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“Is there anything you can’t do?” he asked.
“You are very easily impressed,” she said, “that or you haven’t been around many mothers with babies. Though when I think about it that seems odd since your mother has a house full of them.”
“I haven’t been here long,” Marcus said.
“Really?” Annia said. “I thought you were born and raised here.”
“Off and on,” Marcus said. “But I joined the service as soon as I could, a bit before my seventeenth year. I finished my twentieth year in the service this year and came home to plan what I will do next.”
“And what will that be?” Annia asked, hoping in spite of herself that it would be something close by.
Ironically, this man—who had come to her private abode with an armed guard to take her baby—made her feel safe.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Now, tell me which sheep you want to start with.”
Annia turned her attention back to the sheep. It was clear he did not want to talk about his future plans.
Was it because there was a woman involved? Was he promised in marriage to someone?
It made sense. He was young and handsome enough to land any woman he wanted. His parents probably had the perfect young woman picked out for him.
Why should she care? She shouldn’t. But she did. She would like to know that this man, whose company she was beginning to enjoy, was not thinking about another woman.
Stop this foolishness. You will never remarry. You don’t want to. You aren’t interested in men. Marriage was the most miserable state you’ve ever experienced. You were forced to be with a man who didn’t love you, who said you looked like an elf, not a woman, who kept you only for your dowry.
She shook off that downhill spiral of thoughts, shed her stola and marched down to the stream clothed only in her tunic.
She found a sandbar and positioned herself on it.
“All right,” she said, “send in the first victim.”
Marcus walked into the pen and chose the closest sheep.
He positioned himself behind the dirty sheep and pushed her forward.
She circled back around behind him.
He tried it again.
The sheep circled around behind him.
He looked up to see Annia laughing at him.
“You think this amusing?” he yelled, positioning himself behind the sheep once again.
His yelling had an unintended effect. The startled sheep surged forward. He bolted with her, and all the other sheep followed.
The sheep lopped along wildly in the opposite direction from the stream.
“You make a poor sheepdog,” Annia said, laughing until tears streamed down her cheeks.
He ran to catch up with the sheep and tried herding them as if he were a sheepdog, barking orders behind them, “Move, go, go.” Finally steering them all back into the pen so he could start all over again and perhaps get it right.
Once inside the pen, he looked over at Annia, who was still laughing. “I think I can do it now,” he said, laughing with her.
This time, he was careful to position himself behind one sheep and slam the gate quickly behind himself before the other two escaped.
When the sheep made it into the stream, Annia wrestled her down into the deeper water, careful to hold her shaggy fleece so that she didn’t float away. Annia scrubbed the filthy coat as best she could, then guided the flailing sheep safely to the shore. She watched Marcus try to herd the sheep into her pen.
He ran like a crazy man, whooping and clapping to herd her.
When the sheep was safely fastened in her pen, he looked up at Annia.
“How did I do?” he asked.
“Very well,” she said. “I’ll make a sheep farmer out of you yet.” He really seemed to care what she thought. It made her happy.
“Just what I’ve always wanted to do,” Marcus said, “grow up and be a sheep farmer.”
She laughed, and he brought the next sheep out.
When all three sheep were washed and ready, Lucia, trailed by Julius, arrived at the pen with newly sharpened shears.
“I hate to send you back in again, but I forgot something. Can I get you to go back and get some old cloths to pat them dry?” Annia asked.
“I’m happy to,” Lucia said. “Going back and forth keeps Julius busy. He likes going on errands. It keeps him from straying.”
Lucia’s happy smile brought yet another pang to Annia’s heart.
She missed her boys.
Would she ever see them again?
Before she was divorced and sent away, the boys, at ten and six, were jolly, joyful things, always getting into scrapes in the back garden, trying to catch some bird or small animal for their make-believe wild jungle.
They’d heard of the wild jungle from some of the slaves. The boys had worked hard to make their own.
Tears smarted in Annia’s eyes.
Marcus noticed. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, wiping the stray tear from her cheek. “Just missing my boys.”
“Your boys,” Marcus said, “they mean a lot to you.”
“The world,” Annia said.
Marcus thought of the brown-eyed child peering at him from the window at the top floor of the villa of Galerius Janius earlier this morning.
The child was loyal to his mother, that was clear.
There was nothing Marcus would love more than reuniting Annia with her two boys. His father might be right. Perhaps God called His people to help others, but only one at a time.
Right now he had to make a plan to get Janius off their trail. As soon as they finished shearing the sheep.
“You start with three shears down the belly,” Annia said after she had wrestled the first sheep to her back and wedged the sheep’s head securely between her legs.
Quickly and expertly, she sheared. “See?” she said. “First, you hold the skin taut with your left hand, and three quick shears, and you are finished with the belly.”
She held up the wool for him to examine, then tossed it beside her.
“This is the tricky part,” she said, and gingerly sheared between the sheep’s legs.
“Next, you roll her over a bit, and three more shears gets the back leg, then the tail, the neck and the shoulder.”
She cut expertly, and very soon there was a pile of wool beside her. After she laid the sheep down one more time and sheared up the back, she checked the sheep’s face for leftover hair, and the task was complete.
She made it look so easy and even fun that he wanted to try it. He wasn’t certain why, but suddenly it seemed important to him to please her.
She helped him out, but it wasn’t as easy as it looked.
“Look,” she said, flipping the sheep to its back, “now you stand over her, and secure her head between your legs, like this.”
She placed her hands on Marcus’s legs, parting them just enough for the sheep’s head, and then pulled the sheep between them, and with her sure hands squeezed his knees back together around the sheep’s head.
“See,” she said, looking up at him, “it’s easy.”
He tried to focus on the sheep. It wasn’t easy.
When she looked up at him to see that he understood how to hold the sheep, he opened his eyes wide and nodded. “Yes,” he said, a little too eagerly, “I get it.”
He could smell the sweet scent of her hair. Was that lavender?
He had forgotten the fragrant pleasure of women who smelled good. In Rome, the custom was a daily bath. Sadly, this was not true in the rest of the empire, and the smells of dirty human bodies had sickened him time and again as he traveled through crowded conquered cities.
But this sweet smell, sweet touch... This might be what he had returned to Rome for.
But no, he thought. She has three children, she is divorced—she is not what I planned.
Perhaps planning was not the answer.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had so enjoyed a morning. Watching Annia shear the sheep was something he would never forget.
She was a small woman, but she was strong and agile, made obvious by the way she was able to hold the sheep down to shear them.
The sound of barking dogs cut through his ruminations.
He checked Annia and was relieved to see that she was so busy with her shearing that she had heard nothing.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “We need bags for the wool.”
She nodded her approval without looking up, and he left.
The hair on the back of his neck was raised. The barking of the dogs did not sound normal.
Usually, they barked and were silenced by the slave as soon as the visitor entered the house.
But this time, he heard the dogs chasing someone through the villa, barking madly. The sound was coming closer. Marcus pulled out his gladius and ran.
He ran inside the walled garden and slammed the outer door securely behind him. He stood guarding it.
The only entrance to the back fields was through this wooden door. A stone wall surrounded all of their fields, built by his great-great-grandfather during a time when the empire was not yet an empire and fields were not secure from foreign invaders.
No one would get past him and through to Annia and her baby. No one.
A clatter of footsteps on the stone-and-marble floors, then soft padding as the intruders, followed by the slaves and barking dogs, hit the grassy garden.
“Stop. Stop, I say.” Marcus could hear two of the house slaves yelling at the top of their lungs, in hot pursuit of someone.
The first thing in his line of vision was a young boy, no older than ten, chased by barking, slathering hounds, followed close behind by a group of panting house slaves.
The boy feinted to the right and left and lost them around a curve of rosemary hedge. Marcus had to admire the boy’s skill.
Who was he? He looked so familiar.
No. It couldn’t be.
The boy caught sight of him, and ran at him, teeth bared, fists raised, ready for the kill.
Marcus dropped his gladius and held his hands out to catch the boy.
But the boy was more clever than that.
He pulled a knife from his belt, and now Marcus had to somehow wrestle the knife away from the boy without cutting himself or the boy in the process.
The slave that grabbed the boy from behind was unprepared for the blade, but the boy did not wish to waste it on the slave.
He aimed and threw, and had Marcus not looked up from the slave’s hands to the boy’s arm, he might have been hit squarely between the eyes.
The boy’s skill was undeniable.
Marcus ducked, and the knife pinged into the wooden door, quivering.
The slaves had the boy on the ground now, and would have made short work of him.
“Stop,” Marcus said. “Let him go.”
“Let him go?”
