Steven Saylor - A Mist of Prophecies

Davus knocked. We waited. I told him to knock again. The sun was well up. Apparently Cytheris and her household kept late hours. I was not surprised.

Finally a puffy-eyed young woman opened the door. She was strikingly beautiful and strikingly unkempt, with her auburn hair hanging unpinned and tangled and her sleeping tunica pulled off one shoulder. Her informality revealed much about the household. Women like Cytheris were rare: a slave from a foreign land who had managed, by cunning and beauty, to become an independent, successful freedwoman. Finding herself in Rome without blood relations, it was natural that she should surround herself with slaves who were almost as much friends as servants, companions whom she could trust and confide in and to whom she gave a far greater latitude than a haughty mistress like Antonia (or Fulvia or Terentia) would ever allow. Such slaves would share to some degree in their mistress's notorious debauchery; they would stay up late with her and likewise sleep late, and think nothing of answering the door in dishabille.

The woman who answered the door looked Davus up and down, eyeing him rather as he had eyed the stuffed dates at Antonia's house. Though her hazel eyes eventually settled on me, acknowledging that the senior of the callers was more likely the one in charge, she seemed not really to see me, and certainly not with the riveting attention she had devoted to Davus, as if I were not a man but the shadow of one. Thus do we become more and more invisible as we grow older, until people fail to see us even when they look straight at us.

And yet… Cassandra had seen me. To her, I had not been invisible; to her I was still a vivid presence, a man of flesh and blood, vital, robust, existing in the moment, teeming with life and sensation. No wonder I had been so vulnerable to her; no wonder I had fallen so completely under her spell…

My thoughts, wandering, were drawn back to the moment by the young woman's laughter, which was sharp but not cruel. "You look like you could use a drink!" she said, evidence that I was visible to her after all-a gray, glum-looking man in a toga.

"I'll leave it to your mistress to decide whether she'll offer me one," I snapped.

"My mistress?" She raised an eyebrow. Suddenly I knew that I was talking to Cytheris herself. She saw the moment of realization on my face and laughed again. Then her expression became more serious. "You're Gordianus, aren't you? I saw you at the funeral. I saw this one, too…"

"This is Davus, my son-in-law."

"Married, then?" She said the word as if it were a challenge, not a disappointment. "You'd both better come inside. My neighbors are endlessly fascinated by everyone who comes to this door; they've probably already seen you and run off to spread more gossip about me. Their own lives must be frightfully boring, don't you think, for them to be so fascinated by a simple girl from Alexandria?"

She swept us inside, slammed the door shut behind her, then led us through a small atrium and down a short hallway. The rooms we passed were small but exquisitely furnished. Dominating the little garden at the center of the house was a statue of Venus on a pedestal, only slightly smaller than life-size. At each of the garden's four corners were statues of satyrs in states of rampant excitement, partially concealed amid shrubbery as if they were lurking and stalking the goddess of love. Was this how Cytheris viewed herself and her suitors?

"You're wondering why I answered the door myself," she said breezily. "You Romans, always so strict about that sort of thing, so insistent on decorum! But really, if you knew what I've put the poor slaves through over the last two nights! It's only fair to let them sleep a bit late this morning. Or is it still morning?" She stopped beside the Venus and squinted up at the sun.

I looked around the garden and saw the aftermath of a drunken party. Chairs and little tripod tables were scattered about, some lying on their sides. Wine cups were abandoned here and there; flies buzzed above the crimson dregs. Various musical instruments-tambourines, rattles, flutes, and lyres-were piled helter-skelter against a wall. On the ground beneath one of the lurking satyrs, half-hidden amid the shrubbery, lay a handsome young slave, snoring softly.

"It's this one's job to answer the door," said Cytheris, walking up to him. I thought she was going to give him a kick, but instead she looked down at him with a doting smile. "Such a sweet little faun. Even his snore is sweet, don't you think?" Then she did give him a kick, but gently, prodding him with her foot until he finally stirred and rose groggily to his feet, brushing leaves from his curly black hair. He saw that his mistress had company and without being told gathered three chairs and set them in the shade, then disappeared into the house, blinking and rubbing his eyes.

"Bring the best Falernian, Chrysippus!" Cytheris called after him. "Not the cheap swill I served to that rowdy gang of actors and mimes who were here last night."

She smiled and indicated that we should sit, then finally took a good look at me. I felt a bit uncomfortable under her scrutiny. "Yes," she said, "now I see what it was that Cassandra saw in you. 'It's his eyes, Cytheris,' she said to me once. 'He has the most extraordinary eyes-like a wise old king in a legend.' "

Did I stiffen? Did my face turn red? Cytheris looked from me to Davus and back and pursed her lips. "Oh, dear, was that indiscreet of me?" she said. "You must tell me right away whether I can speak to you candidly or not. I'm not the sort to hold my tongue unless I'm asked to. Perhaps you should send your frowning son-in-law out of earshot for a while-though that would be a pity."

"No, Davus can stay. There's no point in concealing anything about Cassandra… now that she's dead. That's why I've come to you. You must have known her quite well if she told you about herself… and me."

She looked at me sidelong. "As you say, now that she's dead, there's no point in hiding anything, is there? To whom else have you spoken about her?"

"I've been calling on the women who came to her funeral: Terentia, Fulvia, Antonia…"

"Ha! You're not likely to discover anything important about Cassandra from any of those hens, unless it was one of them who murdered her." A frown pulled at her lips, but she brightened when Chrysippus reappeared bearing a pitcher and three cups. I had no craving for wine, but only a fool would pass up an offer of good Falernian, especially in such hard times. The dark flavor played upon my tongue and filled my head like a warm, comforting mist.

"Terentia and Fulvia think Cassandra was a true seeress. They were both quite in awe of her," I said.

"But not Antonia?"

"Antonia has a very different opinion. She thinks Cassandra was an impostor."

"And Cassandra's spells of prophecy?"

"Merely part of an act."

Cytheris smiled. "Antonia is no fool, no matter what her dear husband says."

"Antonia was right about Cassandra?"

Cytheris considered her answer before she spoke. "Up to a point."

I frowned. Cytheris smiled. She seemed to enjoy my puzzlement. Her smile widened into a yawn, and she stretched her arms above her head. The movement caused her torso to shift in a most intriguing way beneath the loose tunica. Even her most casual movements were marked by a dancer's gracefulness. I would have cursed her condescending smile except that it made her even more remarkably beautiful. I looked at the stone satyrs lurking in the corners, gazing with lust upon the goddess they would never touch, and felt a stab of sympathy for them.

"Shall I explain?" she said.

"I'd be grateful if you would."

"Where to begin? Back in Alexandria, I suppose. That's where I met her, when we were both hardly more than children. I was born to a slave mother; but early on someone saw in me a talent for dancing, and I was sold to the master of a mime troupe-not just any troupe, but the oldest and most famous in Alexandria. The master liked to say that his ancestors had entertained Alexander the Great. People in Alexandria are always making claims like that. Still, the troupe could trace its history back for generations. I was taught to dance and mime and recite by some of the finest performers in Alexandria, and that means the finest in the world."