'I knew it would be. Only a child herself, such slender hips.' Electra shook her head. A tendril of hair fell across her face. Her image, captured just so in the mirror, was suddenly too beautiful to look at.
'Where was this?' she said.
'In a small town. A day or two from Rome.'
'The town where Sextus Roscius came from — Ameria, is that the name?'
'Yes, it was in Ameria.'
'She dreamed of going there. Ah, I think she must have liked that, the fresh air, the animals, and trees.'
I thought of the tale Felix and Chrestus had told me, and felt almost sick. 'Yes, quite a lovely little town.'
'And now? Where is she now?'
'Elena died. Not long after the birth. It was the birth that killed her.'
'Ah, well. She chose it then. She wanted to have his child so badly.' She turned her shoulder to me, making sure I couldn't see her in the mirror. How long had it been since Electra had allowed a man to see her weep? After a moment she turned back and laid her head against the pillows. Her cheeks were dry, but her eyes glistened. Her voice was hard. 'You might have lied to me. Did you consider that?'
'Yes.' Now it was I who lowered my eyes, not out of shame but because I was afraid she would see the whole truth.
'You lied to me before. You lied about the slave boy being yours. So why not this time?'
'Because you deserve the truth.'
'Do I? Am I that awful? Why not mercy instead? You might have told me Elena was happy and alive, with a healthy baby at her breast. How would I have known it was a lie? Instead you told me the truth. What good is truth to me? Truth is like a punishment. Do I really deserve it? Does it give you pleasure?' Tears streamed from her eyes.
'Forgive me,' I said. She turned away and said nothing.
I left the House of Swans, pushing past the grinning whores and tense-lipped, leering customers who lingered in the vestibule. The host veered by, smiling like a grotesque mask from a comedy. In the street I stopped to catch my breath. A moment later he came running after me, shouting and clenching his fists.
'What did you do to her? Why is she crying like that? Crying and refusing to stop. She's too old to cry and get away with it, even with her looks. Her eyes will puff up and she'll be useless for the rest of the day. What sort of man are you, anyway? There's something indecent about you, unnatural. Don't bother to come back. Go to another place. Find another man's girls to play your little games.' He stormed back into the house.
A little way down the road, close enough to have heard everything, stood the cool noble who had left before me, surrounded by a pair of bodyguards and a small retinue; he must have been at least a minor magistrate. The whole company guffawed and grinned as I passed by. Their master gave me a thin, condescending smile, the kind of look a powerful man gives to an inferior to acknowledge that despite the gulf between them the gods have given them the same appetites.
I stopped and stared at him, long and hard enough that he finally stopped smiling. I imagined him broken-jawed, bent over, and bleeding, shocked by an avalanche of pain. One of the guards growled at me like a hound sniffing invisible threats. I clenched my fists inside my tunic, bit my tongue so hard it bled, stared straight ahead, and forced myself to keep walking.
I walked until I longed to stop walking, through crowded squares where I felt a total stranger, past taverns I could not stand to enter. The illusion of invisibility descended on me again, but with it there was no sense of strength or freedom, only emptiness. Rome became a city of endless squalor, shrieking babies, the stench of raw onions and rotted meat, the grime of unwashed paving stones. I watched a legless beggar drag himself across the street while a pack of children followed behind, pelting him with pebbles and taunting him with insults.
The sun descended. I felt a gnawing in the pit of my stomach, but I could not stand to eat. The air became thin and cool in the gathering twilight. I found myself before the entrance to the Baths of Pallacina, that favoured haunt of the late Sextus Roscius.
'Busy day,' said the young attendant as he took my clothing. 'Hardly any business at all the past few days — too hot for it. No hurry this evening. We'll be staying open late to make up for the loss.' He returned with a drying cloth. I took it from him and said something to distract him while I draped the towel over my left arm, making sure it concealed my knife. Even naked I had no intention of going unarmed. I stepped into the caldarium, and he shut the door behind me.
The fading sunset cast a strange orange glow through the high window. An attendant with a burning taper lit a single lamp recessed in one wall, then was called away before he could light the others. The room was so dim and the steam on the water so thick that the score or so of men who lounged about the pool were as indistinct as shadows, like statues seen through a dull orange mist- I lowered myself into the water slowly, bit by bit, hardly able to tolerate the heat, until the swirling water lapped at my throat. Around me men groaned as if they were in pain or ecstasy. I groaned with them, merging into the obscurity of the warmth and vapour. The glow from the window railed by imperceptible degrees. The attendant never returned to ignite the lamps, but no one complained or shouted for light. The darkness and the heat were like lovers whom no one dared to separate.
The lamp sputtered. The flame leaped up and then grew small, leaving the room even darker than before. Water lapped quietly against tile, men breathed in sighs and soft groans. I looked about and saw nothing but vapour, featureless and infinite except for the single point of light cast by the lamp, like the glow of a lighthouse on a faraway hilltop. Shapes bobbed in the distance like floating islands or monsters of the deep prowling the surface.
I sank deeper in the water, until I could feel the breath from my nostrils swirl against the surface. I narrowed my eyes, stared across the gulf of mist at the flickering flame, and for a while I seemed almost to dream without shutting my eyes. I thought of no one and nothing. I was a dreaming man, a floating, moss-covered island in a humid sea, a boy playing at fantasy, a child in the womb.
Against the background of mist, one of the shapes drew nearer — a head floating on the water. It approached, and stopped; approached and stopped again, each time accompanied by the almost imperceptible sound of flesh parting water, followed by me advancing caress of tiny waves against my cheeks.
He drew so near that I could almost make out his face, outlined by long, dark hair. He rose a bit, just enough so that I glimpsed broad shoulders and a strong neck. He seemed to be smiling, but in that light I might have imagined anything.
Then he slowly sank beneath the water with a soft fuming of bubbles and a swirl of mist — Atlantis sinking into the sea. The surface of the pool closed over him and the water merged into the mist, undisturbed. He had vanished.
I felt something brush against the calf of my leg, like an eel slithering through the water.
My heart began to pound. My chest grew; tight. I had wandered the city for hours, so blindly that the clumsiest assassin could have followed me and I never would have known it. I turned and reached for the towel on the edge of the pool, and the knife concealed beneath it. Just as my hand closed on the hilt, the water boiled and splashed behind me. He touched my shoulder.
I whirled about in the water, splashing, slipping against the floor of the pool. I reached out blindly and seized him by the hair, then brought the blade to his throat.
He cursed aloud. Behind me I heard the curious murmur of the crowd, like a blind beast stirred from its sleep.
'Hands!' I shouted. 'Out of the water!' The surrounding murmur turned to a commotion. On either side of me two hands leaped out of the water like snapping fish, empty and blameless. I pulled my blade away from his throat. I must have cut him; a thin dark line marked the indent of the blade, and beneath it was a smeared trickle of blood. I was finally close enough to see his face — not Magnus at all, just a harmless young man with startled eyes and gritted teeth.