my flesh. I made no sound, and after my first flinch, no movement. I had learned a thing or two at druid school and distracted myself from the pain by reciting in my head from Invasions, the beginning of the story cycles first year students learn by heart.
I barely noticed when the woman tired and turned the whip over to someone else. Soon I stopped waiting for the lashes to end. The rhythmic lines of poetry came to life, and I was on the battlefield with blood and pain all around and the death crows screaming overhead. At last someone carried me off the field, dead or alive, I didn’t know or care.
When I woke up, lying on my stomach in a dark, cold place, still naked, except for a thin blanket someone had thrown over me, I knew I was alive. Being dead could not hurt this much. My back was inflamed and at the same time stiff and immobile. I pulled my thighs and knees up under my belly, and then I slowly sat up. The blanket stuck to the wounds on my back. Suddenly I felt so helpless and alone, I broke down and wept.
I was still weeping when a woman came in with a torch, which she set in a holder. I could see now that I was in a storage room full of oil jugs and grain sacks. The woman, a lower rank slave in a plain tunic, knelt next to me and handed me a flask of wine laced with something else, drugs for the pain, I hoped. She waited while I took a drink. Then lightly—so lightly—she touched my shoulder, rose and disappeared, returning with a basin of scalding water. With her hands and some kind of knife perhaps—I couldn’t see—she removed the blanket and began to bathe my wounds—an excruciating relief. When she had thoroughly washed me; she rubbed a soothing salve all over my back. Last she pulled out from her tunic some fresh bread that she pressed into my hands. Only after she had left did it dawn on me that she had never spoken a word.
I must have slept again. When I woke there was a little light coming in through small barred upper windows. I could see and hear feet passing by outside. As I had guessed, I was in a basement storeroom. Just before I mounted the slave block, I had been stowed in the back of a fish shop. Perhaps the bitch was planning to sell me again, now that she’d had the satisfaction of beating me. With these wounds on my back—the mark of a recalcitrant slave—I’d be sold to the salt mines, anyway.
The slave who’d tended me last night had left me a slop bucket. As I got up to use it, I heard the sound of a door being unbolted, opened, then bolted again. In a moment the woman appeared, carrying a pitcher and a basin. She had straight black hair streaked with grey, pulled back tightly from a sallow face that had the shuttered look common among low-ranking slaves. She did not greet me, but kept her eyes averted till I was done with the bucket. Then with gestures she asked to see my back.
“That salve you rubbed on me helped,” I said. “Thank you.”
She didn’t answer, just went on tending the wounds.
“I guess you must have been told not to speak to me.”
Her hands halted their ministrations, and she clenched them.
“What is it?” I turned towards her.
She looked at me directly. Then she pointed to her mouth and shook her head.
“You can’t speak?” I asked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
She shrugged; then she tried to turn my back to her again.
“Wait,” I twisted around. “May I ask you some questions? Can you answer yes or no?”
She looked wary but nodded.
“Am I still in…” What was the bitch’s name? “The house of Paulina Claudii?”
She nodded.
“Do you know what she intends to do with me?”
Just then we both heard the door open. The woman gestured for me to be quiet and almost roughly turned me around and began to rub in the salve.
“Boca!” At what was apparently her name (Mouth!) the mute woman’s hands began to tremble. “I told you to fetch me as soon as she recovered consciousness.”
Boca rose, and I turned around. There was Paulina dressed only in a shift and shawl (in other words in her undergarments). I was still naked, but I made no attempt to shield myself, nor did I stand. I just gazed at her with the insolent nonchalance I had learned from the cats at the Vine and Fig Tree.
“Has she been trying to get information out of you, Boca?”
Boca gestured incomprehensibly. Paulina slapped her.
“You’re perfectly capable of answering yes or no.”
Boca shook her head, keeping her eyes lowered.
“It’s amazing how someone with her tongue cut out can still lie.”
Boca flinched, anticipating another blow, but Paulina abruptly lost interest in her.
“Your duties here are done. Go back to the kitchens.”
Boca practically ran for the door, and Paulina and I were alone together for the first time since our encounter in the vomitorium.
“Well, aren’t you going to ask me anything?” she demanded.
I shrugged.
“You better find your tongue before you lose it.”
“Is that why you cut Boca’s out, because she wouldn’t answer your questions?”
She looked confused for a moment; she had already forgotten who Boca was, since she had no need of her at the moment.
“Never mind about her. I can have your tongue cut out if I want. I can do anything I want with any part of your body. So you better show me proper respect.”
It took all my self-control not to laugh. Instead I bit my lip and continued to stare at her. Suddenly she heaved a sigh and flopped down on a sack of grain, as if it were a reclining couch.
“I can see it’s going to take more than one beating to teach you your place. Too bad it wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be.”
She pouted and idly began to trace patterns in the dust on the floor. I found this shift of mood curious.
“What will I do with you now?” she wondered—a bit like a child who has begged for a puppy and now discovers it has to be fed, groomed, and housebroken.
“Oh,” she said, looking up from her dust doodles, “you have one of those whore anklets.”
I had forgotten I still had it, a gift from Succula. Paulina reached out, accustomed to taking what she wanted. I was about to slap her hand, when she withdrew it.
“There’s no point. No one ever even sees a respectable matron’s ankles. And besides you look rather luscious sitting there with nothing on but your slutty little bauble.” She paused for a moment considering. “I think I’ll let you keep it as a sign that you’re still a whore, my own personal whore.”
“Is that to be my official position in your household, domina?” I asked, my tone cool and professional.
“No,
