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Against Rome |
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Back to Chapter 2 | Sections ii, iii, iv of this chapter Samples: III. Aemilia Tertia, Rome, 218 B.C. i Aemilia
Tertia had run deep into the small maze of storerooms behind the kitchen, where
she found a stack of grain bags. The tiny space behind them offered just enough
room for her small body. Dodging slaves, she threw herself into the narrow
refuge and lay trying to slow her agitated breathing and quell the awful
trembling. The storeroom was dim, though not dark—she couldn’t have stood
the dark, not after all those nights with Tata—and she settled down to
her jumbled thoughts. Surely Secunda couldn’t find her here. Her
sisters, Aemilia Prima and Aemilia Secunda, were complete opposites of each
other—Prima self-absorbed and distant to a little sister, Secunda—Secunda
was another matter all together. Aemilia
Tertia was eleven, Prima fifteen, and Secunda thirteen. Aemilia
Tertia trembled in the gloom of the storeroom, her thoughts were a tangle of
shadowy memories hidden behind sharp emotions much as she was hidden behind the
grain. It was not only Secunda, but also Tata. Last night had not been
the first—oh, not the first by far. And so far Tata had not thrown her
out to survive in the streets, though she was deathly afraid that he might. Or
that Mama might. Something
moved on the stack of grain bags in front of her. A spider. Small, brown,
exceptionally ugly—and so many legs! She hated spiders, all sorts of bugs, but
spiders most of all. Without
a thought, she smashed it with the heel of her hand. She
lay there thinking about it, wiping her hand on her tunic when she couldn’t
get it all off on the grain sacks. She’d killed the spider even though it had
done nothing to her, was in fact trying to move away from her when her hand came
down upon it. Killed it dead, and wiped its smashed remains on her tunic. She
felt a little remorse, then. It was little. So was she. It had done no harm. Nor
had she, neither to Secunda nor to Tata. When
her breathing had stilled and she had lain exhausted for a miserable long time,
she finally raised herself up to peep over the grain sacks. The kitchen servants
had certainly seen her terrified dash through their domain and knew that she lay
now concealed. But they had seen these things before, and like slaves
everywhere, they went about their work with only the occasional quick glance in
her direction. One
of the girls, a little Gaul a bit younger than Aemilia Tertia named Andastra,
Nemain’s daughter, ground the ingredients for a sauce in a big mortar of
coarse stone, her face pinched up in deep concentration, for as Aemilia Tertia
knew, she was slow and had trouble learning even simple tasks. Aemilia Tertia
liked Andastra, and sometimes the two played together, Aemilia Tertia playing
the Mama, with Andastra as the child. A
few feet from Andastra, a Syrian boy sat turning a small pig on a spit over the
fire, his face perpetually red from this duty. He mumbled to himself as he
worked, but Aemilia Tertia had never been able to make out what he was saying.
Perhaps it was in another language? Other
slaves chopped vegetables, knives thumping against cutting boards; washed
utensils, clattering against the basin; carried heavy amphorae to and from the
stack of them leaning in one corner. The smell of roasting pork and fresh bread
permeated the small complex of rooms that constituted the Aemilius Paullus
kitchen. But Aemilia Tertia was too frightened to be hungry. Nemain
came into the kitchen, all long blonde braids and smiles, bent over Andastra and
gave her daughter a quick kiss. Andastra smiled up at her mother but did not
stop grinding with her pestle. Nemain caressed the girl’s hair, spoke quietly
again, and left the kitchen. When
Aemilia Tertia emerged from hiding, none of them took particular notice. She
climbed out from behind the grain sacks, peering all around for any sight of the
hated one. First, she scanned the kitchen itself. Then she moved to the doorway
that led into the long hall to the atrium. From there, she could see the length
of the hall. It was dim, its plastered walls painted mostly dark blue and lit
only from the rooms that let onto it, many of them windowless. The hall was
furnished with several pieces of her father’s erotic statuary and lined with
slim pillars, but there was little that Secunda could hide behind. Aemilia
Tertia slipped out of the kitchen, moving from door to pillar to door, finding
as many shadows as she could, checking all around her with each quick move. At last she gained the relative safety of her own sleeping cubicle. Her room was small, befitting a child. Two ladder-backed chairs stood piled high with dolls, childish needlework, and several scrolls, heaped there during her play that afternoon. A chest on one wall stood open to reveal all of her clothing neatly folded and stacked by Nemain. Although she was the daughter of a rich man, her belongings had a Spartan simplicity. Against another wall, a narrow bed suitable for a child lay empty—yet so full of emotions that she could barely manage to look at it: a simple wooden frame bearing a down-stuffed mattress on a webbing of leather straps. Two delicate woolen blankets heaped over a down pillow completed it. You’d not think the bed could hold two people. Next section of III. Aemilia Tertia, Rome, 218 B.C. Back to Top
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