It really was what the parrot had promised; Cyrenean laser - silphium to the Greeks - and of first quality besides. Laser was the king of spices, and the one spice which Apicius had been unable to locate throughout his bleak sojourn in this Underworld.
The bird strutted down the counter, clicking his beak and preening himself.
When he turned, he flicked up his beautiful tail to keep from singeing it in the fire beneath the pot of seasoned water. "Said I would," he muttered. "Said I would."
Apicius had thought he was being a fool - his master would have been furious if matters had not worked out, and Sulla's fury was never something to discount. But the parrot had spoken to him, real speech and not just the miming of syllables.
The parrot had promised to bring laser root from the caravan which had just arrived to pick up the shipment of drugs that Apicius knew his master had procured.
Men could eat and drink on this island, and the food passed through them in normal enough fashion - the smell of the houses open privy, here beside the kitchen range, was proof enough of that. But meals didn't have a real savor.
Even the ignorant commons knew that, while to educated palates like those of Apicius and his master; well ... one might as well have been eating sawdust.
Pine sawdust, reeking of turpentine.
Now, with the crucial spice which had been missing, it was possible that Apicius could construct a truly perfect dish. If he could burst that dam of frustration, his whole existence here took on new meaning.
The parrot dipped his torso over the edge of the counter, balancing himself with a flick of his tail which nearly avoided the leeks and coriander waiting for a later stage in the meal's preparation. "Well," he said as he hung upside down. "Well. I go to Hollywood. Beautiful! Beautiful!"
He hopped upright again and spread his wings, twisting his head so that he could see the way they took the sun through the grated window. The feathers of the parrot's head and shoulders were orange-red and separated from the royal blue of his wingtips by a band of yellow as pure and distinct as the decoration of an Egyptian tomb.
"Well!" repeated the bird. "I go - "
Apicius, flawless in his timing here as in any other phase of cooking, shot out his hand.
"Wawk!"
The bird's beak was an ivory white above and black beneath. It looked powerful enough to disjoint a man's hand, and it was certainly capable of drawing blood. Apicius pinned the halves safely closed with his index and middle finger while his thumb clamped firmly around the lustrous throat.
"But our bargain!" cried the parrot, its shrieks muffled but surprisingly distinct. Its wings buffeted Apicius' wrists, but the cook was holding his captive out at arm's length where its struggles could do no real harm.
"But our - "
Apicius snapped the bird's body in a quick are while his fingers kept its neck from rotating normally.
"Wak!"
Humming to himself, Apicius set the gorgeous corpse down on the counter and fed some more kindling to the fire. He wanted the seasoned water to be at a full boil before he scalded the parrot. Quite an unusual creature, that one.
But while the laser root was necessary to the preparation - so was the full-flavored meat around which the entree was designed.
Additional primping could add nothing to Theodora's . toilet by the time she heard Sulla return to the house. She was ready - almost too ready: the muscles of her lower belly had, by working against themselves, brought her to a state of almost unbearable lubricity.
As Benito greeted his master with his usual slobbery exaggeration, Theodora stepped once more to the new couch and touched it with a thrill of hope. The couch was like nothing she had ever seen before; and, now that it had been delivered to her bedroom, she found it easy to believe that a piece of furniture had the virtue which the stranger had claimed for this one.
In shape, the couch was normal enough - a low frame with a mattress. The coverlet of silk, striped red and yellow on a blue ground, came from Theodora's original bed, as did the down-filled cushion at the head.
But the mattress was sprung instead of being stuffed like the one it replaced, and there were additional springs of coiled steel in the bedframe where the other had rigid wooden slats.
Details like that shouldn't have mattered. In her youth, Theodora and her partners had reached climax often enough while standing in an alley or even bending over the starting gate after a horse race, roughly. screened by a dozen or so happy men awaiting their turn.
Here, though, everything mattered. And perhaps this one detail, resiliance instead of softness beneath the buttocks or thighs, meeting and then redoubling the gentle shock of the thrust - It should work. Theodora had been so close, so many times and in so many ways, that she knew this would be the final step to the heights of splendid orgasm.
With a smile that could have meant anything but weakness of purpose, Theodora strode to the bedroom door to greet her husband.
Sulla had just entered the reception court. Servants bowed obsequiously in front of the walls painted with false columns, and Mussolini continued to babble in terrified cheerfulness despite the obvious attempts of his master to brush him away.
Sulla's Luck had paused at the ornately carven marble table beside the ornamental pond, waiting for the Dictator to free himself from the rancid emptiness of his chamberlain. There was a faint smile on the face of Sulla's Luck. By now, the expression was as familiar to Theodora as the ache of failed climax - and almost as unpleasant.
Good evening, little heart," called Theodora from her doorway. "May I speak with you for a moment?"
Sulla turned, scowling. His mouth was poised to say something devastating enough to silence Benito. He saw his wife, and his eyes lost their distraction while the planes of his face cleared.
The only make-up which Theodora wore was the rouge which turned her lips into a Cupid's-bow of brilliant carmine. Her outer tunic was of black silk with a rippled pattern which echoed her hair and set off the perfect white of her skin.
Her undertunic was silk as well, but diaphanous. Theodora stood with her left arm raised on the door jamb and her right hip shot out so that only the toes of that gilded slipper touched the mosiac floor. Her right hand rested on her hipbone aid it tugged the upper tunic just high enough to hint at her pubic triangle as well as displaying the marvelously-detailed muscles of her dancers' thighs.
"I - " said the Dictator. No one else spoke or moved, though Theodora glimpsed the cook, Apicius, poised at the kitchen door like a squirrel frozen in uncertainty as to which way to jump.
Sulla turned.
His Luck shrugged and smiled more broadly. "Who knows?" said Sulla s Luck to the question that need not be spoken to be asked. "So long as one tries, there's hope."
"Begone, then," Sulla barked to his retainers as he stepped toward the bedroom with a haste he had not shown in ages, as time was reckoned here.
Apicius hopped back into the kitchen to lower the fire beneath his braising pan. The rest of the servants would wait and titter hopefully, in comers of the reception court and leaning over the rail of the loggia above, but the Dictator cared as little about that as Theodora did.
She closed the door as Sulla stepped past her, but she eluded his grasp with a band and a pirouette which made his face darken at what he thought was ill-timed coquetry. He had already Shrugged off his toga and flung it to the top of a clothes press.
"First, little heart," the woman whispered huskily as she guided Sulla to the new couch, "let me show you what came with your caravan."
"What?" said the Dictator in amazement. Emotion left his face again as his mind grappled coldly with the new data and decided how to respond. "I was just at the warehouse. Why haven't I been informed?"