Cassia took a smaller street, this one filled with shops whose awnings were propped open. The vendors sold anything from oranges and lemons to fresh-pressed oil to the baskets to carry the comestibles in. We passed a popina doling out bread and pottage, and my stomach growled, accustomed to being filled soon after I woke.
I halted. “Is there food at our lodgings?”
Cassia realized after a few steps I wasn’t following and turned back. “No, nothing to eat there.”
“Then we should buy it.” I waved vaguely at the vegetable seller whose counter was piled with fresh greens from the farms open to winter sunshine. “You can prepare me breakfast. And have some yourself,” I added. It was not my way to starve a servant.
“Oh.” Cassia paused in confusion. “I don’t cook.”
I blinked at her. “No?”
“No.”
We regarded each other a few moments. I noted that her nose wasn’t perfectly straight.
“Maybe you didn’t cook for your mistress,” I ventured. “But you belong to me now. I need meals, not my hair dressed.” I touched my head, close-shaved to keep me from bothering with vermin or having my hair grabbed in a bout.
I had thought to make her laugh, but she studied me in all seriousness. “I mean I don’t know how to cook. Or dress hair.”
My puzzlement grew. “Never mind. We can eat what the popina sells.”
Cassia glanced, mystified, at the eating shop, with its customers leaning on the stone counter, the man behind it ladling out grainy soup from copper bowls sunk into that counter, kept hot by pots of burning wood beneath them.
“Do you have coin?” I prompted. “To buy us something?”
Her brow furrowed. “Any coin is in our lodgings. And there is not much of it.”
I was growing impatient with this single-minded personage. I’d taken my meals outside the ludus plenty of times when I’d done guarding jobs. I’d preferred to eat at the ludus, because our food was much better, but I sometimes had no choice.
“Then we will go to our rooms, and decide what to do. You can sweep up and set the table, or whatever it is a person does in a house.”
“I don’t know much about cleaning either.”
I foresaw a future where I took out the slop buckets and fetched water while this swathed creature reclined on a dining couch, munching grapes while she observed my labors.
“I thought you were my servant,” I said. “What sort of slave are you, if you can’t cook, clean, or fetch and carry?”
A courtesan, was the answer. One to keep the gladiator tamed while his benefactor decided what to do with my obligation to him.
Cassia lifted her chin. “I am a scribe.”
Her answer surprised me to silence. A scribe? The gods must be laughing at me. Leonidas, the champion of the empire, left alone on the streets with no money and no food, and the only one sent to assist him was an unworldly scribe.
My hand throbbed where it clutched the sword. Cassia had turned away and continued along the quiet street as I stared in disbelief.
“A scribe?” The words scraped out of me as I strode after her. “Why do I need a scribe?”
Cassia halted at a plain door next to a shop whose customers lined up to take away amphoras of wine. She opened the door to reveal a stone staircase that rose into shadows.
She began to ascend, but I put my hand on her shoulder and drew her back, not wanting her to walk alone into who knew what kind of rooms with who knew what kind of person waiting. Rome was not a safe place.
Cassia skittered from my touch like a bug from a boot, eyes enormous. While she hugged the wall, trying to catch her breath, I went past her and climbed the stairs.
Above I found a single, L-shaped room that stretched from the front of the building to the back, with a stone pallet built into a wall under a window. The shorter end of the L opened onto the roof of the wine shop below, wooden shutters leaning against the wall to close off the balcony in the evening.
The room held a table and two rough-hewn stools. A shelf, empty, had been fastened to one wall, but looked as though it would tumble down from any heavy tread on the stairs. That was all.
Cassia entered behind me, her footsteps light. From somewhere within the folds of her robes, she retrieved a wax tablet, the kind with wooden covers that folded in two, protecting