Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,40

same loyalty from me. Your house will become my house, and sacred to me. What happens within your walls will remain within your walls. I speak of virtue and kindness in my Master because this is proper to say. Let me say no more.”

Sublime old-Greek morality.

“Write more, hurry!” said the slave merchant.

“Be quiet,” I told him. “He’s written quite enough.”

The handsome brown-haired slave, this enticingly beautiful one-legged man, had fallen into some deep pit of woe and looked towards the distant Forum, flash of figures back and forth over the mouth of the street.

“What would I do as a free man?” he said to me, looking up at me from a position of utter careless loneliness. “Copy all day for a pittance at the booksellers? Write letters for coins? My Master risked his own life to save me from that boar. In battle I served under Tiberius in Illyricum, where with some fifteen legions he put down all revolts. I chopped the head off a man to save my Master. What am I now?”

I was filled with pain.

“What am I now?” he repeated the question.

“If I were free, I would live hand to mouth, and when I slept in some filthy tenement, my ivory leg would be severed and stolen!”

I gasped and put my hand to my lips.

His eyes filled with tears as he looked at me, and his voice became all the more softer, yet sharply articulate:

“Oh, I could teach philosophy beneath the arches out there, you know, prattle on about Diogenes, and pretend that I liked wearing rags, as do his followers these days. What a circus out there, have you seen it? I have never seen so many philosophers in my life as in this city! Take a look when you go back. You know what it takes to teach philosophy here? You have to lie. You have to fling meaningless words as fast as you can at young people, and brood when you can’t answer, and make up nonsense and ascribe it to the old Stoics.”

He broke off, and tried to gain command of himself.

I was almost in tears as I looked down at him.

“But you see, I have no skill at lying,” he said. “That has been my undoing with you, Great Lady.”

I was shattered inside, my wounds silently opened. The nerve which had carried me out of confinement was ebbing away. But surely he saw my tears.

He looked towards the Forum again.

“I dream of an honorable Master or Mistress, a house with honor. Can a slave through the contemplation of honor thereby have honor? The law says not. So any slave called to testify in a court trial must be tortured, for he has no honor! But reason says otherwise. I have learned and I can teach both bravery and honor. And yes, all of this tablet is true. I didn’t have time or opportunity to temper its boastful style.”

He bowed his head and looked again towards the Forum, as though towards the lost world. He drew himself up in the chair, for bravery’s sake. Again, he tried to stand.

“No, sit,” I said.

“Madam,” he said, “if you seek my services for a house of ill repute, let me tell you now . . . if it is to torture and force young girls such as those you just purchased, if you order me to advertise their charms abroad, I won’t do it. It is as dishonorable to me as to steal or to lie. Why do you want me?”

The tears were halted, merely resting between him and his vision of the world around him. His face was serene.

“Do I look as if I am a whore?” I asked him with shock. “Yea gods, I wore all my best clothes. I’m doing my best to look revoltingly respectable in all these fancy silks! Do you see cruelty in my eyes? Can’t you believe that it is perhaps the tempered soul that survives grief? One need not fight on a battlefield to have courage.”

“No, Madam, no!” he said. He was so very sorry.

“Then why fling these insults at me now?” I said, full of hurt. “And no, I agree with you, what you’ve written there, our Roman poets are not the equals of the Greeks. I don’t know our destiny as an Empire and this weighs as heavily on me as it ever did on my Father and his Father! Why? I don’t know!” I turned as if to go, but I had really no intention of going! His insults