She waved imperiously to the hairdresser as Mussolini bowed and backed himself from the room. "Leave me, Penelope," Theodora said. "I may want you later, for a touch-up."
She was surveying herself critically in the hand-mirror as the chamberlain and the hairdresser disappeared together.
Instead of ushering the woman properly into Theodora's presence, Benito stood in the reception court and waved the visitor through. He clacked shut the slatted wooden door loudly, but Theodora knew he would hover near it, listening to whatever went on in the bedroom.
That was desirable. The chamberlain would keep away all lesser servants and would provide a warning if Sulla himself approached.
And she had nothing to hide from Benito, who had been her go-between in the only part of the business which she might wish to conceal from others.
The visitor who entered Theodora's bedroom was short, swarthy; plain even without the pockmarks sprinkled across the nose and right cheek. She had survived that disease and presumably childbirth as well, but her features were more youthful than the look in her eyes.
Well, appearance was not a trustworthy guide to age in this place.
"Lady?" said the visitor. Her fingers played tremulously with the knotted fringe of her shawl, but she kept her voice clear, albeit respectful.
"You have business with me, then?" Theodora asked dully. She squeezed all emotion but mild distaste from her voice so as to give away nothing.
"I didn't come until I had something to offer you," said the older woman softly. She laced her fingers together, but her thumbs continued to toy with her drab garment, "The caravan that just arrived, it - a friend of mine in it, he's procured a gift for you, lady. From - not here."
Her tongue dabbed her lips, not so much a nervous gesture as a practical one, moistening the dry skin so that it would pass the next syllables flawlessly.
"A couch, lady," she concluded.
"A couch?" Theodora repeated, surprised out of her pose of nonchalance. She had expected an elixir, possibly, or an amulet. Not a couch...
Instead of answering the implied question, the visitor looked at her thumbs and said "Lady, they tell me you might be able to help me find my child."
"Who tells you?"
"Lady," said the visitor, raising her steadfast eyes to Theodora's fury. "I would do anything to get my child back. The couch I offer you will serve your needs."
Theodora had been an empress in life, while here she was in name and appearance wife to a dictator of unbridled power. She had learned haughtiness
"as she struggled to eminence from her beginnings as a child prostitute, and it was with regal grandeur that she rose and sneered at the other woman, "What do you know of my needs?"
"Lady," the visitor repeated, "the couch will serve your needs."
Theodora rested her left palm lightly on the lathe-turned bar of the chair back, but her sweat marked the bronze slickly. In this place there were few children and no infants, she had thought, until the morning a cry in the street outside had driven her to the door half-dressed -
And reminded that this place was Hell.
"It wasn't his fault that he was here," continued the visitor as if making a prayer of contrition. "I brought him, the innocent, because I loved him too much..."
"He should not have been..." whispered Theodora as her mind stared in horror at its memory of the child she had carried to term while she was an actress.
Its face, uglier than a monkey's and smeared with blood - her blood - had scrunched up as the brat wailed. It was a boy, but that didn't matter: she would have paid her doorman an extra gold solidus to drop the infant over the seawall in a weighted bag whichever its sex. She had never in her whole existence hated a thing as much.
Until she heard the wail of the child in the street: this woman's child.
"I have no reason to believe you," Theodora said in a distant tone as her mind began to recover.
"What can a couch do?" She walked -toward -the one on which she slept, a mattress of firm horsehair on a low frame of curly maple.
Movement gave her an excuse for breaking eye contact with her visitor.
Theodora had become empress - and died in that rank - because she fought, no matter what the odds or the means she had to use to even them. She had not lost that ruthless will when Fate placed her here. Benito had his instructions within minutes ... and by that night, he had shown his mistress a tiny hand, to prove those instructions had been carried out.
Death was not necessarily final here; but thus far, it had proved final enough for Theodora's purpose. No infant had bawled outside her window since.
That permitted her to hope that the cries in her mind would one day be stilled as well.
"Lady," said her visitor softly, "I will have the couch brought to you. All I ask is that when you succeed, you return my child to me."
The dead did not come back in this Pompeii. At least Theodora could hope so.
Aloud she said, "If the couch has the virtue you claim for it, woman, I will - use my authority to have your brat located. If the couch - "
Theodora shuddered and broke off, shocked by a leering recollection of the one to whom she had been married in life.
"My husband was a demon," she blurted, trying to dear the thought by spilling it out in words to this nonentity. "Justinian, the emperor. I think that's why I came to be here. My - my life was hard, but not so very evil.... Except for wedding a demon."
"Lady," said the visitor with a gentle smile, "they thought that of Solomon, too; many did. He was quick-minded and so shy that he covered it with pride hugely greater than that of other men.
But Solomon was a man. Lady; I knew him. And your husband was a man. Men aren't demons."
"No, but demons can wear the faces of men," replied Theodora in a ragged voice, for the face in her mind, was again that other own squawling infant.
She shook herself, empress again and a dictator's wife. "Go on, then," she said clearly and with open disdain. "If you care so much about your child, then - provide me with this couch that suits my needs and get him back."
The cries echoed in Theodora's mind as her visitor bowed deeply and left the room.
In the kitchen located in the other front corner of the house, Apicius worked with something closer to happiness than he had managed to achieve for - who knew how long? Not that he had any real confidence in the way things would turn out; but the situation was so unusual - even for here - that he couldn't help feeling at least a little hopeful.
Hopeful enough to keep a pot of seasoned water simmering on the range while he began to crush the available spices in his mortar: pepper, mint, rue; a little vinegar to moisten it; cumin, coriander -
"Wak!" screeched a voice at the grated window. "Laser root! Laser root! Said I would, wawk! Said I would!"
The parrot, a large blue and red Macaw, squirmed through the grating with the grace of tumbler executing a trick. For a moment he paused with his body in the kitchen, left leg clutching something to his gorgeous scarlet breast and the other clawed foot gripping a bar. Then the parrot hopped so that his tail, red and blue and as long as his body, cleared the bars.
"Wak!" he repeated as he landed on the counter in front of Apicius. "Laser root!"
His left foot opened and dropped a scrap of something vegetable onto the tiled counter.
There were gods. And they had found him, Marcus Gabius Apicius, even in this place.
"You let me go," the bird squawked. "I bring you laser root from caravan. Wawk! Laser root!"
Apicius picked up the bit of root with a care that he would not have wasted on the most delicately-worked gold filigree. He sniffed, still afraid to believe.