about the ripped out, broken heart of my life. I just looked at him, and then, for the first time since my capture, I had a flash of second sight—more than sight. I could smell the sea, and hear the sound of wind in a sail, feel the pitch of the boat. Joseph was there with someone else—someone I couldn’t see, someone I sensed he was helping.
“Take me with you,” I heard myself saying. “Take me to Judea. Buy me from Domitia Tertia. You have influence with her. She will sell me to please you. And I will do whatever you want. Anything. Just take me with you out of Rome.”
He looked at me intently; when he did not squint, his eyes were appealing, their expression gentle. I looked away so he couldn’t read my face. I regretted my outburst. Now he would tell Domitia Tertia I was desperate to escape.
“You give me no reason why I should do such a thing,” he said at last. When I didn’t answer he added, “and you greatly overestimate my powers. I am an old friend of Domitia Tertia’s and an investor. I sometimes give her financial advice. But I don’t tell her how to run her business. I never interfere between her and one of her girls.”
Then I did something that, given my profession, you may be surprised to know I had never done before. I turned my face to him and looked up through my lashes. I drew on all my fire and concentrated it in my eyes. I called on the waters to well and make them shine. I held him with my eyes, for just the right space of time, and then I spoke softly, so softly he had to lean into me and breathe my scent.
“Never?”
He closed his eyes and took me in through his pores.
“Never,” he sighed, and opened his eyes again. “But I will tell you what I will do. I will buy you a night of rest, and I will come and lend you scrolls from my library.”
“I do not read,” I said proudly. “Reading destroys the memory.”
“Nonsense!” he growled. “I see you must have been in training with the druids. I didn’t know they taught women. It is an unfortunate bias on their part. If your literature is only in your head, it can be destroyed with your people. Listen, I will teach you to read Greek and as much Latin as necessary. I will come every day when I am in Rome.”
“How about Hebrew?”
He squinted at me again. “Greek first.”
“You never did answer my questions,” I reminded him. “Are you a Jew? And if you are, what are you doing here at the Vine and Fig Tree?”
“Don’t tell me you’re a proselyte,” he groaned.
“Answer my questions, please.”
“All right, all right. I am a Jew, yes, and of a prominent family. I hold an inherited seat on the Sanhedrin. But does that mean that I must be ignorant of the great ideas and literatures of the world? Because I have read Plato and Aristotle does that make me a gentile? Because I must do business in Rome, am I a collaborator?”
He was arguing with someone—but clearly not with me. Maybe with someone like my beloved, someone he’d like to dismiss as a Galilean peasant.
“And the rest of my question?”
“What am I doing in a Roman whorehouse? Come, show me to your room, and I will answer you.”
Well, maybe it was a dumb question. What is any man doing in a whorehouse?
Despite my status as a probationer, I was pretty seasoned by now, a quick learner, everyone said. But that night my native shamelessness faltered. This man knew something of my people. He knew what a free Celt looked like—I was glad I had given up my imitation woad and resumed the whore’s toga. More inhibiting still, this man might have stood beside my beloved in the Temple of Jerusalem. To my dismay, my hands began to shake again as I undressed; then my whole body trembled uncontrollably with a sudden chill.
Still fully clothed, Joseph came and put his arms around me. His touch was as gentle as his eyes. He murmured comforting words—in Hebrew, a language I had never heard except in my beloved’s voice. I couldn’t help it; I broke down and wept.
“There, there,” he soothed, and he put me to bed. “You have known sorrow. I have known sorrow. We will not speak of it,” he said in Aramaic. “Not tonight. Tonight you will rest. I will stay with you until you sleep. Rest now, Maeve Rhuad.”
I closed my eyes and hoped he would think I was sleeping. His kindness was too much. I didn’t want to trust anyone. I didn’t want to love anyone. I didn’t want anyone to love me. Not here. Not now. Not this way.
I must have fallen asleep; I did not hear him go. I woke much later when the house was finally dark and quiet, my favorite cat, a golden tabby named Olivia, purring next to my heart.
Joseph, whom my fellow whores called Uncle Joseph, was as good as his word. He came every day for an hour before we went to the baths to give me lessons in written Greek. The letters amazed me; they were so tiny and precise, moving in lines from left to right, each word so small compared to the amount of space it would take to write the same thing in ogham. But then Celts modeled ogham after the flight of birds—the whole sky for a scroll. Greek looked more like the scratch of small bird feet.
At my insistence, Joseph began to teach me the Hebrew alphabet, too, which went in the opposite direction. “Backwards!” he muttered. “A stubborn and stiff-necked people, our God calls us. We always have to be different.” The Hebrew letters were easier for me to remember, because they came from living things, like gimmel, or camel, shaped like the strange humped beasts my beloved had described for me. Though I was still wary of the written word, I looked forward to the distraction of my lessons with Joseph, the brusque impersonality with which he taught that covered, for the most part, the unnerving tenderness he had shown me on the first night we met. Nor did he ever go upstairs with me again. I knew he’d dined several times with Domitia Tertia, but he kept away from the whores’ parlor. I didn’t know what to make of his eschewing my bed, but I confess I was relieved. I did not want to ask myself why.
Then, one morning, Joseph didn’t show up for lessons. I noticed that I was mildly disconsolate, but I didn’t have much time to wonder about his absence. Just as I was heading back upstairs, Bonia came to summon me to Domitia Tertia’s private chamber, a place I had never been before, the secret center of The Vine and Fig Tree.
The domina received me reclining on a couch, which was where wealthy Romans generally were when they were not walking around the Forum or soaking in the baths. Behind her a mosaic depicted a scene I did not recognize. I did not know Greek or Roman stories. (Uncle Joseph had insisted we begin by reading Plato, as he found me utterly lacking in any rational philosophical foundation. The poets and playwrights could wait.) The mosaic featured a severe yet also seductive woman, not unlike Domitia Tertia—or one of my mothers. She stood on an island; stylized waves lapped the shore. She was surrounded by animals—lions, wolves, and a whole herd of pigs. The mosaic evoked a sense of wildness, remoteness. In fact, it made me homesick.
“You
