is it, Joseph? What’s wrong?”
“Maeve, she’s already sold you.”
“What?” I felt as though the hard floor gave way, I was falling. “How can that be? If she’s sold me, why am I here?”
“You were sick, Maeve. Remember? That was her agreement. She’d keep you till you were strong enough to walk.”
“But who? Who?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. Maybe couldn’t tell me. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect she’s being blackmailed. She saved you, you know.”
“Saved me?”
“Runaway slaves are as good as dead. You must know that, Maeve. That’s why she denied knowing you, don’t you see? She told me she let the aedile think you were a priestess. Then she made some kind of a deal and had you smuggled back here. She won’t tell me more than that. It was a generous act, and she’s now furious with herself. It goes against her grain to risk herself for someone else. You owe her your life.”
I looked at him blankly. My life? What life? I could see nothing but that empty sickening space that had no end; that held no air.
“Joseph, save me. Save me.” My voice was flat in the void.
“Ah, Maeve, Maeve, if only I could. If only I could have taught you more. Listen to me. You must hold fast to philosophy now. Remember as much as you can.”
I could hear his desperation. He couldn’t bear to be helpless to help me. “Remember your Plato, Maeve. ‘If a man, fixing his attention on these and the like difficulties, does away with the idea of things and will not admit that every individual thing has its own determinate idea which is always one and the same, he will have nothing on which his mind can rest; and so he will utterly destroy his reasoning…’”
Joseph went on quoting, but all I could hear were fragments of a poem, my beloved’s voice raised in lamentation when he told the story of his people’s exile from Jerusalem. ‘How deserted she sits…all night long she is weeping…she never thought to end like this.’
“Ah, Maeve, dear Maeve, how I could have loved—” He stopped himself. “It’s better I go now. If I find out where you are.… No. No promises. But I will do what I can. Meanwhile, remember what Aristotle said, ‘Hope is a waking dream.’”
“A dream? Joseph, this is a nightmare.”
“I’m sorry, Maeve.”
And he was gone.
That night, my last night at the Vine and Fig Tree, I tossed and turned and woke again and again from restless sleep shouting: “I’m alive, Esus, I’m alive. Wait for me. Wait!” Lying awake between nightmares, I tried to console myself. He must know, deep inside he must know or how could he have come to me in my vision, blocking the way to the country of death, offering me the choice of life? I tried to send myself to him in my dreams as once long ago on Tir na mBan my dreams had taken me to him in the Temple of Jerusalem. But now, awake or asleep, all I could see of him were his feet, his beautiful feet, dusty and bleeding, as he walked over rocks and rubble of some dry, dead land.
Finally old Nona came and held me in her arms. Or maybe it was Anna the Prophetess of whom I had once dreamed so vividly, Anna whose words had come to me that rainy night on Mona when I loosed my beloved’s chains.
“There, there, my little dove,” she crooned, and I could sense my bird form, feel my swift bird’s heart beating in her palm.
After that I must have slept deeply for a while. I woke to cold dawn light and the sound of voices in the corridor.
“I won’t have it.” I recognized Bonia’s angry tones. “The domina said she is to go quietly before the rest of them are awake. We don’t want a lot of wailing, red-eyed whores. We don’t want the house in an uproar.”
“Well, that’s exactly what you’ll get if you don’t let them see her. Tears now or later. Take your pick.”
“No, Bone. Domitia just wants her to disappear. The others will get the message; they’ll be too frightened to make a fuss.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“Well, no matter what you think, those are her orders. How can you even question them?”
“Just because I worship Domitia doesn’t mean I worship every decision she makes.”
“Hmph! Some devotee you are. You’re fickle, that’s what. The girl has gotten to you. Admit it. How, I don’t know. Magic, sorcery. You can’t trust the keltoi.”
“She’s gotten to you, too, Bonia. Why else are you so upset? She’s gotten to everyone. She’s changed the whole place. I told you what I saw that day at the temple, the day of the races.” He lowered his voice. “Ever since then—”
“And I told you to stow that rubbish. The domina is right about those cults. Look what happened. How I wish they’d never gone to the Isia.”
“I’m going to wake the others,” announced Bone.
“If the domina finds out, on your head be it.”
Bonia came in to get me ready. There wasn’t much to it. She’d brought me a clean plain tunic with my accumulated tips sown into a pouch.
“Find a good hiding place for that,” she advised. “Most houses don’t have a bank for slaves and they’re always stealing from each other.”
“Where am I going, Bonia?” I asked listlessly and hopelessly.
“No one knows. You’re lucky to be alive. Remember that.”
She had also brought me bread and wine.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid, girl. You can’t be sure when you’ll eat again. I told you!” She couldn’t contain herself anymore. “I told you the first day you were here, it doesn’t get any better than the Vine and Fig Tree. Now you’re going to find out.” She brushed a tear from her eye as if she was trying to punch herself out. “Come on, then. It’s time.”
The other whores were huddled in the courtyard, shivering and red-eyed.
“Red,” wailed Berta. “We forgive you. We know you did it for love.”
“That is such a crock,” wept Dido.
“Red,” Succula flung herself at me. “I hate you.”
“I know,” I said, trying not to cry, as old Nona elbowed her way into our whores’ huddle with her tear scalpel. “I love you, too.”
Olivia the cat rubbed against my legs. I picked her up and buried my face in her fur. The cat embodied the Vine and Fig Tree, soft, feline, female, warm—everything I was about to lose.
“Strip
