Elodie Harper - The Wolf Den

“Right.” Gallus looks uncomfortable. Amara feels irritated by his awkwardness. She’s had sex with the man at least twice, surely a brief conversation is not too taxing. “Does Beronice talk about me much?”

She studies him, trying to work out if it’s a trick question. Perhaps he wants to discover if Beronice has exposed his financial dishonesty towards Felix. But she can see nothing in his face other than hopefulness. Amara relents. “She loves you.”

“Well,” he says, looking smug. “I knew that .” He saunters back to the door.

She retreats into the cell, amused in spite of herself. Victoria and Dido will enjoy that story later. The walls surrounding her are covered in the same predictable attitude. Gallus is hardly alone. She runs her fingers over the scratches. I fucked loads of girls here! She remembers the man who scrawled that message; he had been keen to tell her how she compared to her friends. He works at the laundry. What’s his name again? She should remember it; he visits regularly. Amara realizes she knows exactly what sort of blow job the man likes, but not what he’s called.

She scans the walls, reading all the familiar phrases. Hey Fabia! That one makes her wince, thinking of how little life changes. On 15th June, Hermeros, Phileterus and Caphisus fucked here . She is happy to have missed that particular night – handling a group of men is usually hideous. She passes on to happier messages. Hail, Victoria the Conqueror! Victoria, Unconquered! The praise makes her smile. She wouldn’t be surprised if Victoria dictated it herself. Amara squats on the floor, looking for her favourite scrawl. An anonymous act of rebellion half-hidden at the base of the bed. Felix takes it up the arse for 5 asses . She wonders what happened to the woman who wrote it.

Another message catches her eye, its letters large and jagged. I FUCKED . She stares at it. The words look like an act of physical aggression, a reminder of her own powerlessness. She opens her father’s bag, searching for the broken stylus she once picked up in the street. It has already come in useful. She used it to draw a bird in her own cell the other day, a small act of defiance against the endless fucking and sucking that hems her in. She walks over to the message, starts to gouge into the stone, her hand shaking with anger. A man’s profile takes shape, the letters of the boast becoming his forehead, transforming his own words into a slave brand.

She steps back to look at her picture. But all her rage was spent in the carving, and now it’s done, she finds that staring at a branded face doesn’t make her feel better. Victoria will probably hate it. She flops down on the floor. How long is it since she left the Palaestra? One hour? Two? The day feels endless.

Amara leans back against the stone bed. At home, she would have had actual books to read: her father’s medical texts, natural history, poetry – verses of idealized love, rather than the crude variety now splattered all over her walls. She starts to recite Odysseus’s meeting with Nausicaa from memory, but the sound of her own voice makes her feel even lonelier. She remembers singing a version of that story for her parents. Amara closes her eyes. She holds her arms out, imagining the shape of her old lyre, moves her fingers over the non-existent strings.

“First door on the left!” It’s Gallus. He is warning her to expect company as much as giving directions to the customer. She scrambles to her feet. A stranger appears in the doorway, making the cell even darker. Amara smiles at him, tilting her head the way Victoria does, letting her cloak slip off one shoulder.

“You’d better be worth the money,” he says.

Amara hurries to draw the curtain behind them both. “But of course,” she says in a husky voice that nobody in Aphidnai would recognize. She lets the cloak drop to the floor, waits to see the impact her body has on him. Then she beckons the strange man over to the bed, unsure if her feeling of light-headedness is due to dread or relief from boredom.

The noise grows, like the buzz from a hive, the deeper they push into the crowd. It isn’t an official market day at the Forum but, as always, various chancers have arrived here early with their wares bundled up in blankets to spread on the pavement. Gallus and Amara weave between the makeshift stalls, heading for the towering bulk of Apollo’s Temple. At the steps to the god’s sanctuary, a salesman is beating on a copper pot, bellowing out its price. Several more metal pots and jars, in varying sizes, are stacked in piles by his feet.

It takes Amara a while to recognize the woman she is here to meet. Marcella looks more formidable in her clothes. Her red hair is no longer smudging her skin. Instead, the curls are piled up neatly on her head. She looks at Amara with sharper eyes than she did at the baths. Amara knows she cuts a much shabbier figure in the full glare of the marketplace. She is afraid she looks like what she is: a prostitute working for a loan shark.

“Is this the steward?” Marcella nods at Gallus. He looks even more disreputable than usual, having tipped an absurd amount of oil into his hair. It’s a style he’s newly copied from Felix, but where the boss achieves an air of slicked-back menace, Gallus looks more like he got soaked in the street by a slave slopping out an upstairs room.

“Yeah.” Gallus sidesteps to avoid an ironmonger shoving past with his tray. Amara worries he might start a row, but he catches her eyes and thinks better of it. Felix made it clear that Amara was to be in charge of the business side of this deal, a role reversal neither Amara nor Gallus quite know how to navigate.

“We brought some surety.” Another woman, standing just behind Marcella, steps forwards. She must be Fulvia, the younger sister. Blonde as her name, she is thin and fragile-looking. When the copper seller starts clanging his pot again, she flinches.

“Let’s see.” Amara holds out her hand before Marcella can intervene. Fulvia is clearly the weaker of the two. She smells of need and desperation. Amara tries not to imagine why she might want the money. Fulvia unwinds a long rope of amber beads from her neck, placing it carefully into Amara’s palm. The stones are perfectly round, a couple shot through with twisted, sparkling strands. It is years since she has touched anything this valuable.

“It more than covers the loan,” Marcella says.

She’s correct, but Amara is not going to concede the point. “Not the interest though.” She gestures at Gallus to hand her Felix’s wax tablets. “This is my master’s proposal.” She gives the tablets to Marcella. “And here’s the money.” Gallus fumbles at his belt for the purse, nearly dropping it. Amara snatches it before it falls, handing it to Fulvia while her sister pores over the agreement. As Amara anticipated, the feel of the money in her hands has a physical effect on Fulvia. She looks close to tears.

“This rate is very steep,” Marcella says, frowning. “I’ll be paying almost double the value of the loan!”

“We can be flexible about the time period,” Amara says, unsure if Felix will agree but eager to seal the deal. She can persuade him to extend the repayments later, she tells herself. Just as long as Marcella signs.

“Marcella, please,” Fulvia begs. “Please think about what he’ll do if I don’t have the money.”

“But this is too much!” Marcella hisses back. “You’re risking mother’s necklace and all for a rate that’s going to punch a giant hole in my accounts.”