I took a long sip of wine. The mood in the room had changed completely. My visitors' frosty suspicion had melted into trust. The com-forting cadence of philosophic discourse was familiar ground, as I suspected it would be.
"But just as a name is not a thing, so appearance is not existence," I went on. "Consider: two visitors come to my home. At first glance, they appear to be a man and a woman, and this is clearly the impression they wish to give. But on closer scrutiny this is only an impression, not the truth; thus do my senses tell me and my powers of logic deduce. Questions follow: if the man is not a man, and the woman is not a woman, then what are they? Who are they? Why do they wish to be perceived as something they are not? Who are they trying to fool, and why? And why do they come to the house of Gordianus the Finder?"
"And do you know the answers to all these questions?" rasped my visitor in the stola.
"I think so, to most of them, anyway. Though some things about your companion still puzzle me…" I looked at the little man, who smiled in a way I couldn't account for, until I realized that he was smiling not at me but at someone behind me.
I turned to see my daughter, Diana, in the doorway.
Her posture was tentative, as if she had merely paused to have a look into the room and would move on at any moment. She wore the long-sleeved gown that children of both sexes wear, but at thirteen she was already beginning to fill the garment in ways unmistakably feminine. Her dark blue gown merged with the dimness of the hallway, so that her face, lit up by the brazier, seemed to hover in the air. Her skin, which had the creamy texture and the rosy glow that my visitor's painted cheeks so crudely mimicked, made the darkness of her long eyelashes and her thick eyebrows all the more pronounced. The flames caught the highlights of her long black hair, which was parted in the middle and fell down her shoulders. Her brown eyes peered at us curiously and with a hint of amusement. How like her mother she had always been, and how more like her she became every day! Sometimes it seemed to me that I had nothing to do with creating her, so completely was she cast in Bethesda's image.
She smiled faintly and began to move on. "Diana," I called, "come here for a moment."
She stepped into the room, wearing that mysterious smile she in-herited from her mother. "Yes, Papa?"
"We have visitors, Diana."
"Yes, Papa, I know. I saw Belbo let them in at the front door. I was on my way to tell Mother, but I thought I'd have a closer look first." "A closer look?"
She gave me a bemused, exasperated look, such as Bethesda gives me when I belabor the obvious. "Well, Papa! It's not every day that a eunuch and a man dressed as a woman come calling on you, is it?"
She looked at my visitors and smiled sweetly.
They didn't smile back, but instead looked glumly at each other. "I told you that the pretense was worthless. Even a child saw through it!" grumbled the old man in the stola, no longer disguising his voice or his Alexandrian accent. He wearily pushed back the mantle from his head. His silver hair was pulled back from his face and knotted at the back of his neck. His forehead was wrinkled and covered with spots. The folds of flesh hanging from his chin quivered and he suddenly looked ridiculous, an unhappy old man with painted cheeks and painted eyes.
The eunuch in the toga covered his mouth and giggled tipsily. "But you look so pretty in makeup!"
"Enough of that!" growled the old Egyptian. His mouth settled in a deep frown and his jowls drooped as he stared bleakly into the flames, his eyes full of despair.
Chapter Two
This is my daughter, Gordiana, whom we call Diana." I took her soft, smooth hand in mine. "Diana, we are honored by the presence of Dio of Alexandria: philosopher, teacher, esteemed member of the Academy, and currently the chief ambassador to Rome from the people of Egypt."
With the unstudied dignity of a distinguished man used to being formally introduced and hearing his titles recited, Dio stood, clasping his hands before him, pulling his shoulders back. His self-possession seemed peculiarly at odds with his strange costume; with his painted face and his feminine garments he looked like the priest of some eastern cult-which was precisely what his companion turned out to be.
"And this," said Dio, gesturing to the little eunuch, who likewise stood, though a bit tipsily, "is Trygonion, a priest at the Temple of Cybele here in Rome."
The eunuch took a little bow and pulled off his hat, from which tumbled a mass of pale yellow hair. The color was a bleached, unnatural shade of blond. He ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head to untangle the curls.
"A philosopher… and a gallus!" Diana said wonderingly. The last word gave me a start. Gallus is the Latin term for a castrated priest of the Great Mother, Cybele. All the galli are foreigners, since by law no Roman can become one. The word is pious in the mouths of the goddess's adherents, but others sometimes use it as a vulgar epithet ("You filthy gallus!"); the idea of men becoming eunuchs, even in the service of the divine, remains foreign and repulsive to most Romans. I couldn't remember ever having taught the word to Diana, but then she is always coming out with things I never taught her. She learns them from her mother, I suspect.
"Yes," Dio said ruefully, "puzzle that, Gordianus: what could a philosopher and a gallus possibly have in common-the man who lives by reason, and the man whose life is the surrender of all reason? Ha! Circumstances make strange bedmates. The more desperate the circumstances, the odder the bedmates." He cast a sidelong, gloomy glance at the eunuch, then suddenly looked doubtful. "I do not intend this metaphor literally, of course. You do have this phrase in Latin, yes? About circumstances and bedmates?"
"Something close enough."
He nodded, satisfied that he had made himself understood. His Latin was in fact impeccable, though his accent was distinctly Alexandrian, with the particular inflections of those born in Egypt whose ancestry and primary tongue are Greek. Hearing him speak freely, I now recalled his voice from many years ago. It had grown coarser with age, but was undeniably the same voice I had listened to so attentively on the steps outside the temple of Serapis in Alexandria when I was a young man, eager to learn all I could about the world. Dio's voice took me far back in memory and far away from Rome.
Introductions finished, we sat, except for Diana, who excused herself and left the room, no doubt to go tell her mother.
Dio cleared his throat. "You remember me, then?"
"Teacher," I said, for that was what I had always called him in Alexandria, and it now felt awkward to call him by his name, though I was long past the age of deference, "of course I remember you. You'd be a hard man to forget!"
"I had thought, after so many years… And then, when they told me your name, how could I know for sure that it was the same Gordianus whom I had known so long ago? To be sure, the name is unusual, and also they seemed to think that you had been to Alexandria as a young man, and what they said of you sounded like the tree that would have grown from the sapling-this expression you have also, yes? And I have used the correct tenses? Good. Still, with so much danger around me, so many betrayals-you understand why I could not come to you openly? Why I hesitated to reveal myself to you? Why I had to be suspicious even of your very fine wine?" He looked at me uneasily and chewed a fingernail. "Even when I saw you, I was not quite sure that you were the Gordianus I had known in Alexandria. Time changes us all, and you wear a sort of disguise as well, you know."
He gestured to something on my face. I touched my chin and realized that he meant my beard.
I smiled. "Yes, I was clean-shaven back then. Alexandria is too hot for beards, and I was too young to grow a decent one anyway. Or do you mean all the gray among the black? Gray hair and wrinkles are a kind of involuntary disguise, I suppose, worn by anyone who lives long enough."