Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) Read Online Free PDF

thrushes braised with honey and poppy seeds, and the silver cradles of shellfish from the Fulvia district. The sweetened wine had been replaced by a Greek wine of Karia, chilled with splintered ice from the villa’s ice well, and heady with myrrh, aloes, and oil of cinnamon.
    The myrtle fans of the slaves brushed off the heaviness of the evening air. Boys, chosen for their looks, poured the drink into the goblets, each of which was decorated with gold.
    Aside from the dancers, and the attendant slaves, there were no women.
    For the one woman seated at the end of her master’s couch did not count as a woman at all.
    “Oh, Julus, you miser. Lend her to me. You said you would.” (This, fat Drusus, scrubbing his mouth with a napkin now as greasy as his face.)
    “No, dear Drusus. I think I never did.”
    “But you did. For my bodyguard. She can teach the others how to fight.”
    They laughed.
    “What does Jula Victrix say?” asked another of the guests, a bald and sweating man prone to fondling the wine boys.
    Jula looked in his direction. She spoke frankly and emptily, “I am my master’s property.” Nothing was really expected of her here, but obedience, docility—and her own essential show. She was a tamed leopard on a chain, trained to take food at table like a human being.
    The bald man chuckled now. “True. She’s made the wretch richer even than he was.”
    The others made no comment. The gracious dining-room, with its mosaic floor and painted walls, was no place to talk crudely of money.
    But then Drusus mildly offered, “Myself also, let it be said. I bet on Julus’s Jula, as always, and as always I won.”
    “Once she lost me sesterces without number,” said the bald man. He chewed some meat and said, “I never did believe in a woman gladiator. By Minerva, women weren’t meant to do such things.”
    Julus said, “Come now, Stirius. You see they can. Besides, any legionary could tell you as much. In Gallia and Hispania the women will put up a fight like she-bears. In the Tin Isles they ride into battle in chariots. The men have to run to keep up with them.”
    “Harsher and more cruel than any man,” agreed the other, the scholarly guest known as the Scroll.
    “Are you harsh and cruel, Jula?” asked oil-greasy Drusus.
    The gladiatrix looked at him with her lowered eyes, and away.
    This flirtatious carping did not generally last long, though sometimes it occurred in patches. But the wine, with its mix of scent and narcotic, (diluted occasionally by water, or the effusions of roses) blurred the edges of their discourse. They would get on to other matters soon. The dancers would be pulled on to the couches, or the wine boys, if Julus allowed it.
    The bellaria was being brought in and laid out on separate ivory tables, to engage the eyes of the feasters, saffron pastries, and pomegranates, cakes decorated by white flowers, and twisted sweets of honey.
    A couple of Julus’s male gladiators couched across from the diners. Their table, like the others, was of patterned citrus wood. They were served from the same dishes. Yet, unlike Jula, they had been kept a little apart and already shown off, their muscles and teeth admired.
    The dancers finished. They glided from the central floor, over the tesserae of maenads. Stirius caught one and she sank beside him, doll-like and compliant. (Jula noted Drusus and Julus exchange a surreptitious nod. It seemed they had been betting too on which their companion would choose, boy or girl.)
    That Stirius missed. Instead he had an observation.
    “Now
this
is a woman.”
    His hand detached itself from his wine cup and slipped the dancer’s tunic from her shoulder, revealing most of a round young breast.
    “But your gladiator woman,” said Stirius, “gives no evidence of that.
Is
she a female?”
    Jula had met such questions before. In the arenaher breasts were bound to steady them, and so hidden, just as her red spiked hair, once she had been seen and identified in