Steven Saylor - A Mist of Prophecies

Cassandra gave a lurch so violent that I almost fell from the narrow bed. She struck my nose with her elbow.

I rolled away, covering my face. I jumped to my feet and looked back. Cassandra remained on the bed, her head rolling, her trunk twisting, her limbs flailing. The effect was uncanny, as if every part of her had become a separate animal with a will of its own. Her eyes rolled upward, showing only white.

Suddenly, she sat bolt upright. I thought the spell was over. Then she fell back on the bed, arching her spine and convulsing. I had never seen anything like it. The fit she had suffered outside the Temple of Vesta had been nothing like this.

Something Meto had once said came back to me: He was always afraid he might swallow his tongue. He's told me I must be prepared to put something in his mouth if his fits should ever recur…

Meto had been talking about Caesar. I seemed to hear his voice in my ear: "Put something in her mouth!" I jumped and looked over my shoulder, thinking for a moment that Meto was actually in the room. Anything seemed possible. A god was passing through Cassandra. The very air around me seemed to shudder and spark with intimations of the supernatural.

I remembered the leather baton I had noticed once before, the first time I came to see her. I reached under the mattress and found it almost at once, as if an invisible hand guided me to it.

I clambered atop Cassandra, holding her down with my weight. I tried to pin her wrists with one hand so that I could force the biting stick between her teeth, but she was too strong. As soon as I managed to contain one part of her, another part broke free. The bed itself seemed to come alive, pitching up and down and banging against the wall. From down the hall I heard someone shout, "For Venus's sake, you two, keep it down in there!"

As suddenly as it had begun, the seizure ended. Beneath me, her body went limp. The change was so abrupt that for a moment I thought she might be dead. I pushed myself up and looked down at her, my heart in my throat. Then I saw her chest rise as she drew a deep breath. Her eyelids flickered. It seemed to me that the passage of the god had forced her spirit out of her, and for a moment, after the god passed through, there was no animation in her at all. Gradually reentering her body, her spirit seemed confused, uncertain it had returned to the right place.

She blinked and opened her eyes. She seemed not to recognize me.

"Cassandra," I whispered, reaching out to wipe flecks of foam from her lips. I brushed my fingers against her cheek. She reached up to cover my hand with hers. Her grip was as weak as a child's.

"Gordianus?" she said.

"I'm here, Cassandra. Are you all right? Do you need anything?"

She closed her eyes. I felt a stab of fear, but she was only resting. She reached up and pulled me against her, embracing me, humming the lullaby she had been humming before, rocking me gently as if I were the one who needed comforting.

Where had she been? What had she seen? After that day, I understood the fascination she inspired in the rich and powerful women who thought they could harness for their own ends the power that coursed through Cassandra.

Later that day, when I returned to my house, everyone noticed my split lip, including Bethesda, who at dinner was in better spirits than she had been in for quite a while and in a mood to gently scold me.

"Run afoul of some ruffians in the Forum, Husband?" she asked.

"No, Wife."

"A brawl in some shady tavern, then?"

"Of course not."

She raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps a beautiful woman gave you a slap for getting fresh with her?"

My face grew hot. "Something like that."

Bethesda smiled and told Mopsus to bring her more stewed leeks, the latest cure in which she had vested her hopes. She seemed satisfied to allow the cause of my swollen lip to remain a mystery, but I noticed that Diana, reclining on one elbow beside Davus on their dining couch, had fixed me with a darkly questioning gaze.

Among those meetings with Cassandra that blur together in my memory, another incident stands out, not least because it occurred on the last day we met in her room in the Subura. It was the last day we would be alone together; the last time we would make love.

I had no way of knowing that at the time. Had I known, would I have held her more tightly, made love to her more passionately? That hardly seems possible. I fear I might have done the opposite, become remote and drawn away from her-doing as many men do when they realize they must lose the thing they love, looking for a shortcut around their suffering. They push away the thing they love before it can be snatched from them.

I never had to confront that dilemma; I never saw what was coming.

It was a warm early afternoon, the day before the Nones of Sextilis. Not a breeze stirred in all of Rome. A stifling haze had settled over the city. Cassandra's room in the Subura was like a heated cubicle at the baths. Warmth radiated from the walls. A shaft of sunlight entered through the high window and struck the opposite wall, so thick with motes of dust that it seemed a solid thing, a strangely glowing beam lodged above our heads.

I had thought the heat would stifle our lovemaking, but it had the opposite effect, acting on us like a drug. The normal limitations on my body melted away. I transcended myself. I entered a state of rapture so complete I no longer knew where or who I was. Afterward, I felt as light and insubstantial as one of those motes of dust riding the sunbeam above our heads.

A delicious lethargy overcame me. I felt heavy, solid, inert. My limbs turned to lead. Even a finger was too heavy to lift. I seemed to dream, yet the images conjured by Somnus slipped away before I could apprehend them, like shadows glimpsed from the corner of one's eye. I neither slept nor woke.

Slowly, gradually, I heard voices.

They seemed to come from somewhere above me, muffled by distance. Two men were speaking. Their words were indistinct, but I could tell that their discussion was heated. "Keep your voice down!" one of them said, loud enough for me to hear.

I knew that voice.

I stirred. I seemed to be waking from a dream. For a long moment, I thought the voices had been part of that dream. Then I heard them again. They came from the room above. Partly I heard them through the floor, but mostly from the high window, which must have been directly below a window of the room above.

I sensed that Cassandra was gone even before I reached for her and found the place beside me empty. The spot was still warm from her body.

The speakers in the room above lowered their voices. I heard them now only as a murmur. Surely I had only imagined that I recognized one of those voices…

I got out of bed, reached for my loincloth and stepped into it, then put on my tunic. I stepped past the curtain that covered Cassandra's doorway, into the hallway beyond. Around a bend, past other curtained doorways, I came to a flight of wooden steps. I took them slowly, trying to make no noise. Even so, the very last step before I arrived at the next floor made a loud creak. The murmur of voices that came from the room at the end of the hall abruptly ceased.

I took another step. The floorboard creaked. From the room at the end of the hall there came only silence. I stood motionless for a long time. Then I heard a voice, the one I had recognized before, say quite distinctly, "Do you think that's him?"

"It must be," said the other man. With a start, I recognized his voice as well.

I had to be mistaken. My imagination was running away with me. To prove it I walked steadily down the hallway, heedless of creaking floorboards. I confronted a curtain much like the curtain that covered Cassandra's doorway.

I stared at the curtain. From beyond came only silence-or rather, not quite silence, but the sound of men breathing. Did I only imagine that, or could they hear me breathing as well?