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."
V
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 me no word in weeks."
Her voice rose a little but shook: "Well, some women may be glad of
your pawing. I was not!"
Eodan felt himself flush, as deeply as the western sky. He responded
clumsily, "Why have you given me no chance to say what I meant? It was
wrong of me to--to kiss you. I ask your pardon. But I was driven; there
was a Power in that place--and did I hurt you so much?"
Then she looked up at him and said in a tone heavy with unshed tears:
"It was chiefly yourself you harmed."
Eodan looked away. For a moment he trod from her, up and down a
graveled path that mumbled beneath his feet. The bronze cloud cooled
toward newly blown roses. In the west, just above the crumbling
vine-covered wall, he could see a green streak, unutterably clear.
Somewhere a cow lowed; otherwise it was very quiet.
Eodan said at last, slowly, word by word, as he hammered it into shape
within himself: "I understand. But you do not understand me. They say
you are still a maiden. Well, you have called a curse on me for doing
something of which you have no knowledge."
Phryne's fingers clenched about a rose stalk. The thorns bit. She
stared at the bright blood drops, wiped them on her gown in a blind
fashion and said through unfirm lips: "Perhaps it is true. I thought
one thing of you. When you did something else, _that_ is how you hurt
me. But perhaps I have indeed not understood."
"I am not wont to speak of these matters," he told her, with effort.
"Among the Cimbri, it was not so--so twisted together. Wives did not
betray their husbands. Husbands--well--a man is otherwise than a
woman. He has other needs. I was driven by the Powers of earth; the
Bull was within me that day, Phryne. And more than that--Can you
understand how it felt to hear you tell what has--has become of my
wife, the mother of my son, whom she killed to keep him free? Can you
understand how I would turn for any--what is the word?--any comfort
that you could give--or anyone could--Do you see?" he pleaded, facing
her with his hands outspread.
She rubbed her eyes. "I see," she whispered.
He doubled up one fist and smote it softly into the other palm, again
and again. "It would help Hwicca not a bit if I let the Bull roar
within me so loud I could think of nothing else," he said. "Indeed it
was a new thought to me, this you bring forth--that what is between a
man and his wife, for good or ill, can in any way be changed by whether
he sleeps alone or not when she is gone."
"I am not so sure of that," she answered. "No man will say it is true
of her!" When she lifted her face, he saw it was streaked with silent
tears. "But I could be wrong. I do know little of these matters."
Eodan said, with a sad smile tugging up one corner of his mouth,
"Between the time I wed Hwicca and the time a year afterward, when we
came to the Raudian field, I touched no other woman. It was not that I
lacked the chance, but only that none seemed worth the time I could be
with her. Will you believe that?"
She nodded dumbly.
"Well, then." Eodan held out his hand, in the manner he had learned
from the Romans. "Shall we be friends?"
She caught it tightly. Sunset smoldered to dusk. He could see her as
little more than a paler shadow.
She said at last, in a tone gone remote from sorrow, "I would not
have you think, Eodan, that I ever condemned you because of some dead
philosopher's thoughts on chastity. It was that I believed your case
was like mine. I have been lonely too, now and then. But I see it was
a false hope. No man, no woman ever has the same destiny; we are all
pursued by our private Furies. Help me remember that, Eodan!"