speak.”
“Fools. They imagine soft words and friendliness will make them rich.”
“Is that why you’re a slave to the school? For riches?”
“Can you suggest a better reason? But I’m no slave. I bound myself voluntarily.”
Changing the subject, she glanced about the cell and noticed the empty niche. “Where’s your god? The rest have one.”
“Tell me which of the gods is most reliable and I’ll put his statue there.”
A curious light, a mixture of amusement and pity, filled her dark eyes. “Then the stories are true after all. You’re quite as strange and bitter as they make out.”
I hauled back the curtain on the dark, whispering hall. “Get out, no rule requires me to endure lectures from a whore.”
I spoke harshly because, for a moment, I’d found myself wanting her, and it hurt to discover she was an imperious bitch free with opinions about everyone’s state except her own. She did not stir. She reached for the wine jar and drank a little, with surprising grace.
“Did you hear me, woman? I said leave.”
She shook her head.
“You refuse?”
“I refuse. Perhaps I deserve your contempt for selling my body. But I’m also a human being. I mean to be civilly treated.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Acte, the world doesn’t turn on civility, but on copper coins and the whims of the boy on the Palatine.”
She leaped up. “I don’t believe that. The gods will protect and help any who appeal to them.”
“No doubt they help you pull up your hem several times every night.”
She leaped at me across the dim cell, cattish and quick. Her nails tore a trail down my cheek. I seized her wrists and held her, laughing. She spewed out a string of street oaths surprising even from one of her profession. Soon her anger turned to tears. I couldn’t help puzzling. One instant, she behaved like the lowest harridan, the next like a girl-child barely old enough to know the difference between men and women.
Fighting her off, I said, “I repeat, Acte, you’re free to leave. I picked you only because Xenophon laid these marks on my back. I’m in no mood for sermons on the gods. Cassius the Cur, as you call him, can only growl.”
“Certainly I’ll go,” she said acidly. “I expect you’re a Greek at heart anyway. Outwardly you’re dark and mannish, but secretly you probably prefer plump little boys who —”
With a knotted fist I struck her, spun her onto the stone couch where she lay gasping. Her gown Page 13
tangled around her hips. Her breasts rose in sharp thrusts under the material.
“I’ll show you who’s Greek and who’s not, whore!”
I flung off my waistcloth, dropped and pinned her hands on the blanket. Though she was agile and strong, it was not enough. I hurt her at first. She beat her fists against my shoulders and cried out.
Suddenly her tinted mouth was very close, breathing out a sweet scent. I lost my stomach for such coward’s work. The rest of it was gentle enough, but neither of us took any pleasure. At the end, when I went for the wine jar, she sat up wearily, her breasts gleaming like rubies at the ends, a moment before she covered them. She set about adjusting a boxwood comb that had come loose from her dark hair. Dumbly I offered the wine. She drank, then searched my face.
“Thank you, Cassius. They have no right to call you names.”
“Oh? Am I a more tender lover than you’re accustomed to in your trade?”
“Don’t say it with such a sneer.”
“Answer, my question.”
With a sad look she murmured, “Yes, you are.”
Glowering at the empty niche where no god was worth to stand, I wondered what had stopped me when I wanted to hurt her. The touch of her flanks had been painfully sweet. Abruptly I recalled Syrax and our wild scheme. It seemed wild no longer.
“The rest of them, any of them,” Acte said at last, “would have finished it roughly. The way you began it. Even that Syrian provincial with the ring in his ear —” A shudder