style="font-size:15px;"> After she inspected my teeth, she searched my head for lice. “He’s gotten better about cleaning them up,” she spoke to herself. “Or maybe this one kept herself clean. Would have been a shame to shave this head. And as red below as above. That could be popular.”
“I’ll come around if you set her out,” said one man. “I like them picante.”
“I haven’t quite made up my mind. You there,” she said to Pug Face, “show us how clean you think she is. Wait, let me have a look at you first.”
To the crowd’s delight, she inspected his mouth as thoroughly as she had mine. Then she gestured for him to lift his tunic and with an apparently practiced eye she appraised his prick. Pug Face bore it all with an ingratiating grin. He wanted a sale. Badly.
“I just need to be sure, because I’ve no doubt you’ve sampled her. All right. Now put your mouth where your money is.” To me she said, “Bend over.”
I gave her another blank stare, but this time she wasn’t playing. She grabbed my hair and forced my head down. I lost my balance and ended up on all fours. Before I knew it, his snout was buried in me. Given my position, nose to the ground, ankles bound, there was only one path of resistance open to me. I took it.
It was long; it was loud, both redolent and resonant. The crowd applauded, and Pug Face surfaced sputtering, holding his nose with one hand while he felt around for his whip with the other.
“There are men in this town who will pay good money to be humiliated like that,” mused the woman. “O.K., I’ll take her.”
“An excellent choice, Domina.” Pug Face recovered instantly. “A girl with rare talents. Because you are such a good customer, I’ll let you have her for one hundred and fifty denarii.”
“One hundred and ten, take it or leave it.”
“Domina, you would not make a pauper of me, take food out of my children’s mouths. One hundred and forty.”
They went on with their obligatory haggling. The morning market was closing up. The entertainment was over. Men moved off towards the baths; women went home with their purchases. Ignored for a merciful moment, I tried to stand again, but I found I was too dizzy. If my stomach had not been empty, I would have vomited. The midday sun beat down and rose up from the stones, glared off the buildings. Nothing in my life had prepared me for this moment. Nothing. Not incest, not childbirth, not exile or shipwreck. Not even watching my beloved disappear in the mists on the other side of the Menai Straits. Esus. Esus. Would I ever see him again? I had never doubted until this moment.
“Red, a word to the wise. Unless you’re sailing on a ship or seasoning a broth, salt water is of no use whatsoever. Dry up. If there’s one thing men can’t stand, it’s a whore with leaky eyes. They get enough of that at home.”
I didn’t know the word whore, not in any of the five languages I spoke. Didn’t even have the concept. I was named for an infamous warrior queen who had thirty men a day, if she chose. If she chose.
“Stand up.” She put a strong hand under my arm and pulled me to my feet. Pug Face undid my shackles, then lifted the plaque from my neck. “And don’t you dare faint on me,” she added. “If there’s anything I hate more than weepers, it’s fainters.”
She put her arm around me as I stepped down from the block. Her touch was kinder than her face or voice. It confused me.
“Can you walk?” she demanded. “I’m open for business in three hours. You’ve got a lot to learn. Fast. Bone,” she called, and an enormous eunuch hove into view. “Take her other arm. Let’s go.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Pug Face muttered behind us. I heard him spit, and a blob landed next to my foot. Before I could even think of retaliating the woman grabbed my chin and locked my face into forward position.
“You’re going to have to get used to scum, Red,” my new captor told me.
“My name,” I began, but I couldn’t get it past the lump in my throat.
“Is whatever the clientele decide to call you,” she finished for me.
With that she and the giant eunuch led me out of the relatively open spaces of the Forum through the crowded squalor of the notorious Subura and then up hill to Mons Esquilinus.
Maybe you are relieved to know that I was forced into prostitution. Sold. No choice. Some people insist there is no evidence that I was a whore at all; they are eager to save my reputation—which implies that they think there is something wrong with being a whore. It is true that his official chroniclers never called me a whore, just a crazy bitch, or in polite language “a woman infested by seven demons.” (We’ll get to that part later.) Everyone seems to agree that I was saved, cleansed by his healing (asexual) touch and that I went on to become an important, if unacknowledged, disciple.
There is more to the story or I wouldn’t be telling it. And I hope you will discover, if you don’t already know, the difference between a stereotype and an archetype. Stereotypes are flat, one-dimensional, like the donkey you blindly pin the tail on. Archetypes are rich, lush, juicy. Sometimes they go underground, submerge in mist and myth, like the Loch Ness Monster. But I am here to tell you:
You can’t keep a good archetype down.
I didn’t know any of that yet. As I said, I didn’t even know what a whore was, but I must have had a premonition. I knew I was fucked.
“Don’t think you’ll get much out of this one today,” the hulk said, as we turned from a street into an alley where it was a squeeze to walk three abreast. At least here there was some respite from the garishly painted statues and frescoes that assaulted my eyes. You may be accustomed to thinking of the ancient world as full of white columns and torsos missing arms and busts with chipped noses. That’s only because the paint doesn’t last. Think Las Vegas and you’ll be closer to the Rome of my day. “If I was you, I’d clean her up—she stinks of fish—feed her up, and let her sleep for a day.”
“Well, you’re not me, and I don’t pay you to think.”
“You don’t pay me at all, O my mistress and O the delight—“
“Cut the crap, Bone,” she waved away his words with her free hand. “You know I offered you and Bonia manumission years ago, and you wouldn’t take it.”
“Mistress, you have my balls. I can never leave you.”
“I didn’t whip you into that sacrificial frenzy. You know how I feel about those hysterical eastern cults. And manumission or no manumission, with your tips and your side rackets, you’re wealthier than I am.”
“Nevertheless, you are my goddess, my Cybele.”
“Then
