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

the processional Pompa, was covered by her secutor’s helmet.
    Now she did nothing, but under her leveled lowered eyelids, she took in the person of Stirius.
    Such faces had come before her belonging to armed adversaries. Ones usually that she found easy to kill. But this time, (obviously) not.
    Her master waved his arm, indicating the messy meat dishes should be cleared to make way for the bellaria. That was all. But as slaves swarmed between the tables whisking things up, mopping over spills, Stirius lay along his couch, one hand on the dancer’s waist, staring, perhaps noting that his coarse remarks, too, were being cleared from the dinner.
    What did he want, the bald man who had lost money on her? So many lost money at the games. Any victory was always unlucky for some.
    A third wine came with the dessert. It was a swarthy and terrible wine, meant to be much diluted, and sipped.
    The scholarly Scroll had interrupted the proceedings, insisting on reading to them all a tale he had come across in one of his books.
    Julus indulged him. The Scroll was wealthy and influential and, by some distant relationship through marriage, had connections to the young emperor in Rome. The tale anyway was lewd. It concerned girls who fled gods and were changed into animals, trees, or rivers, which, in each case, the god in question then still ravished.
    They’ll let me go soon, then I can sleep
.
    She had eaten little. This sort of food was not her normal fare, nor did she greatly like it. Given her always as a reward, titbit or feast were meaningless, of course.For she had no choice but to attempt to please, to
fight
well. She had wanted to live from the first—unlike the Ethiopian, who determined not to.
    I am like Playful
, she thought.
    Playful was the old lioness. Kept now at the town’s expense, after years of her successful slaughterings of those criminals and lesser swordsmen sent against her. Playful had been “freed,” was popular, and might be visited in her cage below the arena. In the Pompa, too, Playful was walked on leash, with flowers around her neck.
    That then, Jula’s fate? To survive and gain freedom—the ultimate reward for her inevitable struggles—to live at the whim and expense of Stagna Maris … in a cage?
    But she would not live. No. Her expectancy of life was, at the most, seven years. The majority did not last even so long.
    And they would never free her. As if they guessed that unlike Playful in this one thing, if ever set free—she would be gone, gone for ever, although she did not know to where.
    But where did any man or any woman go?
    We vanish
, she thought.
We disappear
.
    Strange thoughts. The Ethiopian had done this to her. Had he cursed her truly? And would it claim her, his curse?
    Her wounds, which all night had ached and stung as if biting at her under her actor’s draped gown, had been quite severe. They might have killed her, if the surgeons were not so skilled. (They hurt less now—the wine.)
    So why think of this? … the other country …
    Stop thinking of this.
    Yes, the wine was very strong, and through the blur of it, thickening like the smoke of the lamps, the torches round the villa walls, the guests’ faces, bulbous and distorted,like fish swimming in water and seen through an amber lens—
    Jula heard rain falling hard against the house. Yet through the columns, in the summer courtyard, the night was still and close and silent.
    Despite the open court, the air was too thin in this room. Drained by these Roman men, this master-race, it had no substance for her heavy leaden barbarian lungs to take hold of. So she did not pull at it any more, simply let it whisper in as it would.
    Bald Stirius was rubbing his hands over the body of the dancer. Drusus had had the leftovers of the peacock brought back, was selecting what he would take home with him.
    Fishes, swimming … to the sea—
    Out on the floor, they were fighting
The Iliad
now. Bizarrely, with no sound at all, mouths