Page 29 of Enslaved
“Do you suppose they have Nubians? Can I purchase the services of a maleanda female?”
“A good thing I served oysters tonight,” Marcus said dryly. He had looked forward to spending the evening with his brother, but now that it was here, he would have rather stayed home a thousandfold. He thought fleetingly of the lovely creature he had ordered to his couch. His taste for a coarse and lewd prostitute diminished by the minute.
Petrius chose a mime theatre. It was a roaring farce where a lover was surprised by the return of a jealous husband and forced to hide beneath the bed. Then it showed his great suffering as the husband performed numerous sex acts with his wife upon the very couch the lover hid beneath.
The language was exceedingly gross. The posturing of the actors and actresses was indescribably vulgar. All was accompanied by loud music and florid dancing. The theatre was packed with men, most of them Roman soldiers, but also merchants and a vast number of the youth of Aquae Sulis.
Marcus was bored to death, but was thankful that Petrius laughed throughout. His brother’s only discontent was that at the interval they did not enliven the audience with a bear or bull baiting.
The play seemed to go on interminably, with the grossest parts receiving the loudest applause. Finally, it was over, and as they filed out of the theatre, Marcus searched his mind for an excuse not to visit a brothel tonight.
“You should see the fornices that have sprung up outside Circus Maximus. Bawds solicit from morning ’til night.”
“That’s because the sadistic pleasures of the games raise sexual excitement to a high pitch,” Marcus explained, hiding the distaste he felt.
“Every bakery and cookshop owner in Rome now keeps slave girls for sexual purposes to entertain their customers. Females can be had for two pennies.”
“We are behind times here in Aquae Sulis,” Marcus said, silently thanking the gods that it was so, and wondering why it was that Rome was losing her glory as she became more degenerate.
They took a litter to the seamiest street in Aquae Sulis, where Magnus took his brother into a fornice that catered to depraved appetites. He paid five gold sesterces to the whoremaster, then bid Petrius goodnight. He said, grinning, “I must be getting old. The chariot races today used up all my excess energy and dawn comes early.”
“Indulge, brother, you can sleep when you’re dead!” Petrius insisted. “Or could it be your seraglio of female slaves that draws you home? Come to think of it, you have been distracted all evening. I shall return to see what the great attraction is.”
Marcus laughed. “Come anytime, Petrius. My villa is yours while you are in Aquae Sulis.”
“I accept your generosity. I prefer to sleep at the barracks with my men as they need watching, but I just might avail myself of your peristyle and your private bath.”
Relief swept over Marcus as he made his escape. Tomorrow would be a long, hard day, dominated by lessons of vicious swordplay. Then he grimaced. Marcus wasn’t deceiving himself for one minute. The strong lure that drew him home to his villa was a fascinating female who called herself Lady Diana.
Though she dreaded the arrival of the brute whose orders held her captive, Diana was enthralled as she gazed about the general’s sleeping chamber. It was so large it must have taken up one whole side of the villa. The shutters were open to reveal glazed windows, which surprised her. Hadn’t the early castles and watchtowers built centuries after the Romans left Britain used hides to cover arrow slits?
The longest wall boasted a marble hearth. Above it the entire wall was painted in a fresco. Diana went over to study it and saw that the figures depicted on the plaster were Roman gods and goddesses, most of whom were naked! Diana was fascinated; she had never seen nude bodies depicted in art before.
The dominant god at the top, gripping a golden thunderbolt, had to be Jupiter. The female below him and to his right, whose belly was swollen with child, had to be Juno, the goddess of women and childbirth. There were many others Diana did not recognize.
At the lower left of the wall was a feast, a drunken feast by the way the limbs of the bodies were wrapped about each other! Diana blushed and decided the artist was depicting Bacchus; the feast a Bacchanalia. The male bodies were magnificent with broad backs and chests, all heavily muscled with limbs like treetrunks. The females were grossly overweight with large breasts, bellies, and thighs.
Only one female had a lithe body. She stood in a grove of trees with her hand upon a stag. She had golden hair, long bare legs, and one bared breast. The entire fresco was most disturbing. She lowered her eyes to the marble fireplace, which was black with gold veins. Beside the hearth was a huge saucer-shaped bronze brazier. Diana puzzled over its use.
Then her eyes fell upon the bed, which dominated the room. It was massive and sat high upon a platform with steps up to the dais. She supposed it could be termed a four-poster, except the posts were ceiling-high Roman columns whose tops were decorated by curled rams’ horns. The bed itself was covered with animal skins whose fur was deep-piled and glossy. On top of the furs were a dozen pillows and cushions embroidered in black, gold, and purple. It, too, was disturbing. She deliberately turned her back upon it.
In an alcove toward the back of the chamber was an ebony desk and a massive chair to go with it. There were parchments and papers with what looked and felt like heavy linen content, but the things that filled Diana with awe were the wooden and wax tablets and styluses. She ran her fingers over them reverently. She had read of such things, but never dreamed she would ever actually get to see and touch them.
Behind the desk, maps were displayed upon the wall. Three were of Bath, or Aquae Sulis as it was called. She studied them and saw that one map showed how it used to look, one how it looked at the present time, and the third showed improvements that were planned. She traced her fingertip along the Roman road known as the Fosse Way. Another, larger map, encompassed Northern England and parts of Scotland, while at least four maps depicted Wales.
The moment Diana saw the book scrolls, all her attention became focused upon them. Obviously he read the Greek philosophers. Here were Homer and Sophocles translated into Latin by someone called Suetonius. She selected a leather box holding a scroll of Satires by Horace and, unrolling it, read at random.
“And when your lust is hot, surely
if a maid or pageboy’s handy to attack
you won’t choose to grin and bear it?
I won’t! I like a cheap and easy love!”
Diana let the scroll reroll itself. What a disgusting philosophy! She found a history about Julius Caesar when Rome was a republic rather than an empire. She sat down in the great ebony chair and began to read. She became so absorbed, she lost track of time.
Suddenly, she heard a man’s deep voice. My God, he was come!
