The Golden Slave - Poul William Anderson (most interesting books to read .TXT) 📗

But no one understood the words.

At sundown the lamps were lit with those sulfur-tipped sticks Eodan still thought a rash risk of Fire's anger. The villa glowed with a hundred small suns of its own. He stood in the garden with Mopsus. "I must go in now and help feed my fellows," he said.

"So, so. A good feed tonight. A good feed. My granddaughter used to live for Floralia night—or was it my daughter, she was a baby too, once ... I wonder, though, why Mistress hasn't asked any high-born guests. It isn't like Mistress not to have fun when she can."

Eodan shrugged. He had seen Cordelia often enough, seated on a couch or borne in a litter, but his world had been far from here, even in the house; she rarely entered the kitchen or the stables. She was only a task his little maidservant must finish before joining him under the olive trees.

He went back into the villa. At its rear were the rooms where the household's male property ate and slept. As he passed out of the kitchen toward those chambers, he saw Phryne.

The lamp that she held turned her pale skin to gold. He moved forward, smiling, a little tipsy, meaning only to explain himself to her. She lifted her hand. "Stop."

"I'm not about to touch you," he flared.

"Good!" Her mouth twisted upward. He had seldom heard so whetted a voice. "I was sent to fetch you. Come."

She turned about and walked quickly toward the atrium. He followed. "But Phryne, what is this?"

Her fist clenched. "You do not know?"

He halted and said harshly, "If I am about to be sent back to the barracks—"

She looked over her shoulder. Tears stood in her eyes. "Oh, not that," she said. "Be not afraid of that. Be glad! You are about to be honored and pleasured."

"What?"

"In fact, the highest honor and the noblest pleasure of which you are capable." She stamped her foot, caught her breath and strode on. He followed in bewilderment.

They crossed an open peristyle, where the first stars mirrored themselves shakenly in a mosaic pool. Beyond was a door inlaid with ivory, Venus twining arms about beautiful Adonis. A Nubian with a sword stood on guard. Eodan had seen him about—a huge man, cat-footed, but betrayed by his smooth cheeks and high voice.

Phryne knocked on the door. "Go in," she said. "Go on in."

Someone giggled, down in the flickering darkness of the corridor. Eodan pushed his way through, and the door swung shut behind him.

He stood in a long room, marble-floored, richly strewn with rugs and with expensive furnishings. Many lamps hung from the ceiling, till the air seemed as full of soft light as of incense. The window was trellised with climbing roses.

A table bore wine and carefully prepared food for two. But there was only one broad couch beside it.

Cordelia was stretched out on the couch. Light rippled along her gown. It was of the sheerest silk; her flesh seemed to glow through. She sat up, smiling, so that her copious breasts were thrust at him. "Hail, Cimbrian," she said.

Eodan gaped. The blood roared in his temples.

She stood up, took a big two-handled silver cup and walked across to him. Her gait was a challenge. When she stood before him he could look down the loose open front of her dress. "Will you not drink with me?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, in his own tongue, for Latin had no such simple way of agreeing. He took the goblet and hoisted it in hands that shook. He was no judge of wine, nor would he have cared tonight, but he noticed dimly that this was smooth and strong.

"I have watched you go about," said Cordelia. "I wanted to thank you for your—services—but it seemed best to let your wound heal first. And then today I saw you lift a cask I would have set two men to carry. I am very glad of that."

He handed her back the cup, still mute. "All of it?" she laughed. "But I wanted to share it with you. As a pledge of friendship. Now we must pour another."

Her thigh brushed his as she turned. He gulped for air. "Come," she said, took his hand and led him to the couch.

The flask gurgled as she poured from it. "My husband was wrong to set a king to work in his fields," she went on. "For I will not believe you were anything less than a king of your people. Perhaps we two can reach a better understanding—for a while ..." She looked up at him, slantwise. "It will depend on you, largely." She lifted the beaker again. "To our tomorrows. May they be better than our yesterdays."

They drank in turn. She sat down and drew him beside her. "I have tried and tried to pronounce that barbarous name of yours," she said. "I will give you another. Hercules? Perhaps!"

Suddenly her mouth was hot upon his.

She stood up, breathing heavily. "I meant to eat first," she said, quick slurred words through curling sweet smoke. "It would be leisurely, civilized, with much fine play. But that would be wrong with you, I see that now." She reached out her arms. "Take off your tunic. Take off my gown. Let us keep the Floralia."

Much later, when the wine and the food were gone, the lamps burned out and the first thin gray creeping into the eastern sky, she ruffled his hair and smiled sleepily. "I will surely call you Hercules."

After festival time, the latifundium went back into harness. Up in the villa there was the measured pace of days—housework, garden work, much dawdling until some overseer went by, backbiting gossip, petty intrigues for women and position, sometimes after dark a furtive Asiatic ritual of magic or mystery. A womanish world. Eodan considered himself well out of it.

But riding through the fields, where the sun and the whip blistered a hundred naked backs and all a man's dreams finally narrowed to the day's hoeing and the night's shackled sleep, Eodan wondered with a chill how he had remained himself even for those few months he served. Winter had helped—days on end where he sat idle with the others, dozing, cracking fleas, once or twice knocking a tooth out of someone who offered him loathsome consolations.... Nevertheless, he searched himself as no Cimbrian had done before and knew that his servile time had indeed touched him. He went more warily through life, slowly learning how to guard his words. He would never again live wholly in the moment's joy; he would always be thinking beyond—where would the next attack come from, or how should he himself attack?

Even when Cordelia taught him some new pleasure—and she had given her life to such arts—a part of him wondered how long this would endure. For the rest, however, it had been a good month, or whatever time had passed. He had the name of bodyguard, though only the surly Nubian was allowed to bear weapons. He accompanied her on impulsive journeys about the countryside, organized hunts in the forests for her to watch, matched himself in athletic exhibitions with the brawnier slaves from this and surrounding farms. A few times she even sent him on errands of two or three days, as to a town to arrange for certain supplies. He thought of using the chance to escape—but no, he knew too little of Italy; they would snare him and tie him up to die. Wait a little longer, make careful plans, or even win freedom for himself and Hwicca within this Roman world. It was not impossible, given patience.... Meanwhile, aloneness with a blooded horse, among hazy hills and through woods where only dryads and charcoal burners dwelt, was a gift to him, almost like being free again.

Now he was coming back from such a trip. He rode at an easy mile-eating pace, soothed by hoof-plop and saddle-squeak, the breeze in his face amid the clean summery odor of his mount. He was richly clad; his tunic, cloak, and boots were of simple cut and muted color, but he liked the sensuous fabrics. His hair fluttered in the light wind, and he sat straight as a lancer; and, when he saw the villa itself, dark against a sky turning pink and gold with sunset, he was close to letting out a Cimbrian whoop. After all—Cordelia! He checked the noise and merely grinned instead, but he set the horse to a gallop, and they came ringing and snorting into the rear courtyard.

"Hoy-ah!" Eodan jumped to the flagstones, tossed his reins at a stableboy and strode quickly toward the garden gate. The shortest way to the atrium was through the roses.

As he passed into their fragrance, he stopped. Phryne was alone between the walls, gathering a few early blooms. A great cloud of hot bronze lifted far, dizzyingly far above her head; the sky beyond it was taking on the color of her eyes.

"Hail," he said.

She straightened herself. The plain white stola fell in severe folds, but could not hide a deerlike grace. She had not Cordelia's opulence, and she barely reached to his heart; yet it came to him that he had never thought of her as boyish, nor as just a little bit of a thing.

Her face, all soft curves and a few pert, nearly rakish angles, stiffened. She turned as if to go, but resolve came back; she continued her work, ignoring him.

He did not know why, unless it was that his small journey had given certain unseen chain-galls time to heal, but he went toward her and said, "Phryne, if I have wronged you, how can I mend it unless you tell me what I did?"

Her back was turned, her head bent. Under the softly piled black hair, he saw that her nape was still almost childish. Somehow that filled him with tenderness. She said, so low he could scarcely hear it, "You have not harmed me."

"Then why have you circled so wide of me? You never answered when I greeted you in passing. You have said