love for me. Here is how he demonstrated it: he threw Caesar from his home and chose the whip for me rather than the cross. Granted, it was a peculiar display of affection, but affection nonetheless. Did I love him for it in return? No, but Pan’s hoof, he knew me too well. In truth, I did not want to die, and I had no choice but to be grateful to my master that the kiss of the lorum was all that I suffered. That tickled him, no doubt. I took solace in the knowledge that though he would never treat me as an equal, he often treated me as a man. For a Roman slave, that was something.
By the way, if your predilection for lurid details has not been satisfied by this abbreviated version of these gruesome goings on, and you slaver for the original and more explicit accounting, the Serapeum will have copies of the first set of scrolls of this sad chronicle. Providing that ancient temple and repository of knowledge still stands.
Just before my sentence was carried out, Livia ran up to me and kissed me briefly on the mouth, her eyes shimmering. She also called me stupid, which stirred as much hope in my breast as her caress. Unfortunately, there shortly came proof that doused that anemic, yet emboldened flame: before I had risen from my sick bed after my ordeal, I discovered she was gone, and without a word of parting! Dominus had allowed her, at the last moment, to accompany Baltus, the pompous but competent medicus who had treated my wounds, along with a dozen men and several women from our own fledgling clinic and medical school to travel to the House of Life in Memphis to learn all they could of that ancient civilization’s healing art. Livia, it seemed, had been granted permission to set aside her duties as seamstress to follow in the footsteps of her disgraced mother. She intended to become a healer. The excruciating irony of this tale is that with Crassus’ blessing and funding, it was I who had established our school of medicine, of which there were almost none in plague-ridden Rome, ravaged as it was by the rose-spotted fever and again every summer by the rage of the Dog Star. (Editor’s note: typhoid fever and malaria.)
I learned of her departure three days into my recuperation. They had kept me drugged with opium-laced wine to keep me still and on my stomach. When I came to my senses, I found lady Tertulla by my side with Baltus’ replacement standing close by, a florid and overheated physician who annoyed me by rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, keeping his less than immaculate fingers interlaced over his belly.
“Domina,” I croaked. Crassus’ wife, then thirty-eight, was almost as lovely a first vision upon waking as Livia would have been. Her dark curls were laced with periwinkles, the same color as her peplos, which was o’er-draped by a white palla of such fine material it appeared as if she sat in a cloud. She smelled of verbena.
Tertulla took my hand and said, “My fine, brave fool. Is there much pain?”
“Where is Livia, domina?
“I am so sorry this happened.” Romans tend to crush conversation with the wide wheels of their own thoughts. “You know my husband had no choice in this matter?”
“I am thankful for his lenience.”
“You acted exactly as I would have done, Alexander, and more bravely, too. Would that I had been there in your stead.” She laid a gentle hand on my blanketed shoulder. “The repercussions,” she said, glancing down the length of my back, “would have been contained. Caesar is a disgrace. Politics makes his presence necessary, but I will do all I can to keep him from our home in the future. Of course we can never admit it publicly, but dominus and I will always be in your debt for protecting one of our familia.”
“It was very good of you to be here upon my waking, my lady, but I should very much like to speak with Livia.”
“She sat by you, in this very chair, day and night.”
“Might you summon her, my lady?”
“She’s gone,” the fat doctor interrupted.
“Gaius Flavius!” Tertulla snapped.
“Gone? What do you mean, gone? Gone where?”
“You need to rest,” they both said at the same time. Flavius wiped his brow with a hairless forearm.
I forced myself to a sitting position, buds of perspiration blooming almost as rapidly upon me as they