Joanna, left me staring at it while she went to seek her mistress. I had the feeling once again of standing on fishes, of waves moving beneath my feet, of the world reeling toward something I couldn’t see.
“My husband’s enthrallment with Roman mosaics has no beginning and no end,” Phasaelis said. I’d not seen her enter. I smoothed the folds of my pale yellow tunic and touched the amber bead at my neck, struck, as I’d been before, by the sight of her. She wore a brilliant blue robe and a string of pearls across her forehead. Her toenails were painted with camphire.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, letting my eyes sweep once more across the sea floor.
“Soon we will not have a tile left that hasn’t been turned into an animal, a bird, or a fish.”
“Does it concern the tetrarch that he’s violating the Jewish law against graven images?” I don’t know what made me ask such a thing. Maybe it came from my own brush with fear when I’d drawn the image of myself inside my incantation bowl. Whatever prompted it, my question was ill-thought.
She released a high, chirruping laugh. “It would concern him only if he were caught. Though a Jew himself, he cares little for Jewish customs. It is Rome he lusts for.”
“And you? You have no fears for him?”
“Should a host of Zealots drag my husband through the streets for breaking this law, it would not arouse the slightest care in me as long as they left the mosaics undamaged. I, too, find them beautiful. I would miss them more than I would miss Antipas.”
Her eyes snapped brightly. I tried to read her face. Beneath her easy indifference and her lighthearted dismissal of her husband lay something blistering.
She said, “Even as the fever scourged the city and his subjects were dying, he commissioned a new mosaic. It will be even more flagrant than the rest of them. The artisan himself is afraid to create it.”
I could think of only one reason for such trepidation. “It will depict a human form?”
She smiled. “A face, yes. A woman’s face.”
* * *
? ? ?
WE DESCENDED THE STEPS onto the portico, then another set to the baths. A frail cloud of dampness floated up to us, the smell of wet stone and perfumed oils. “Have you taken the Roman baths before?” Phasaelis asked.
I shook my head.
“I take them weekly. It’s an elaborate and time-consuming ritual. They say the Romans indulge in them daily. If that’s the case, one wonders when they found time to conquer the earth.”
In the changing room, we stripped naked except for towels, and I followed Phasaelis to the tepidarium, where the air flickered with lamps in high niches. We dipped in a pool of tepid water, then lay on stone-top tables while two female attendants thrashed our arms and legs with olive branches and rubbed oil into our backs, kneading us like balls of dough. This odd ministration caused me to leave my body and sit on a little ledge just above my head, free of fret and fear.
In the next room, however, I came hurtling back into myself. The hot vapors of the caldarium were so profuse, I struggled to breathe. We had entered the torments of Gehenna. I sat on the hard, slick floor, gripping my towel and rocking to and fro to keep myself from fleeing. Phasaelis, meanwhile, walked placidly through the mist unclothed, her hair falling around her knees, her breasts full as muskmelons. My own body, though fifteen, was still thin and boyish, my breasts like two brown figs. My forehead throbbed and my belly pitched. I don’t know how long I waited through that small enduring, only that it made what came next a paradise.
The most spacious of the bathing rooms, the frigidarium had curved bright walls with wide arches and bays bordered with vine-painted columns. Entering, I threw off my towel and plunged into the cold pool, then reclined on the bench that wrapped about the walls, sipping water and eating pomegranate seeds.
“It’s here that Antipas intends to place his new mosaic,” Phasaelis said. She pointed to the tiles in the center of