one?” said Betto. I held up my hand to keep his lips from raining further alienation down upon us.
The old man said, “No one with four big men looking for him.” He squinted at Betto. “Three, anyways.”
I reached into my purse and tossed an aureus on the table; we all listened to the lovely, dull clunk of its contact with the wood. It lay there silently, but each of us understood its secret language: “Look at me,” it sighed, “isn’t gold the most enchanting and wondrous of all colors?”
“First one of them I’ve seen all week,” said the balneator, leaving the coin where it had come to rest, but eyeing it greedily. “He’ll get lonely, he will.” I placed a second precisely on top of the first. Apparently, a bargain had been struck. The old man looked up with the gentle, querying interest of a librarian, and at the same time, without taking his eyes off mine, deftly swept the gold from the table and into his tunic, neatly circumventing the receipts box.
“Tribune Gaius Cato?” I said.
“Try the calidarium. He’ll be the one with the most food at hand. Nipples the size of my fist. Go through the changing area, past the tepidarium and the massage rooms, then across the palaestra. Mind the large frigidarium; it’s empty for cleaning. The small one’s still available…though I don’t suppose that’s of any interest to you gentlemen. The calidarium is at the back, next to the toilets.”
We went through into the crowded changing room where I did my best to ignore a man and woman who appeared to be changing vigorously and simultaneously at close quarters. Slaves guarded the cubbyholes where patrons had stored their belongings; in fact, there appeared to be more attendants than bathers. We were just about to pass into the spacious tepidarium when I heard a laugh and stopped short. I told the others to go find the tribune and walked out through the colonnade onto the palaestra. The large courtyard was open to the sky, at one moment lit brilliantly by the early afternoon sun, thrown into shadow the next by passing clouds. To my right was the empty swimming pool; its painted concrete bottom was quite deep. To my left, half a dozen men were lifting dumbbells and several more were wrestling on the packed earth. At the far end of the courtyard, nearest the street entrance, two games of trigon were in progress, but it was the one being played by three bare-breasted women that drew my attention. I might not have noticed had it not been for a shaft of sunlight that momentarily illuminated one of the players. There was only one woman I knew with hair that shade of red.
“Livia?” I asked incredulously, walking briskly toward them.
“Ow!” she cried, distracted by me and hit hard by the ball thrown by the young lady to her left. She rubbed her right shoulder, realized who had called her name and exclaimed, “Alexander! What are you doing here?” Her arms crossed almost involuntarily, pressing against her breasts.
“Oh, Livvy, I am so sorry. Shall I count those three points? No, of course not. Why are you covering your…oh.” The girl who trotted up to see if “Livvy” was all right was no slave. A Roman woman could exude just as much of the aura of power and privilege as a Roman man, even one who looked to be no more than seventeen. This one’s dark brown hair was threaded with gold links to hold it aloft. Her nails and toes were painted and obviously pampered; around her throat she wore a fine necklace with a gold and lapis Egyptian ankh. The two attendants from the game ran up and wrapped both women in thin linen towels, which somehow made their practically naked state even more immodest.
The third player trotted by, heading for the anointing room. “I’ve got to go anyway,” she called. “Thanks for the game!”
“Hey! I want a rematch next week,” Livia’s new acquaintance called back, waving. Then she turned to me and in that same silken voice of authority said, “I am Caecilia Metella, but my friends call me Cornelia.”
“I recognize you, mistress. My master is well-acquainted with your father and holds him in high regard. However—”
“However?”
I was furious, but could not speak my mind before the daughter of senator Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica. A hundred reprimands came spilling to the very tip of my braced and trembling tongue. I do not know what