House Of The Vestals

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Book: Read House Of The Vestals for Free Online
Authors: Steven Saylor
suspect he'll tacitly admit his guilt and settle for the smaller figure."
    "Small justice for a meaningless murder."
    I nodded. "And small recompense for the destruction of so much talent. But such is the only justice that Roman law allows, when a citizen kills a slave."
    A heavy silence descended on the garden. His insight vindicated, Eco turned his attention to the leather ball. He tossed it in the air, caught it, and nodded thoughtfully, pleased at the way it fit his hand.
    "Ah, but Eco, as I was saying, there is another gift for you." He looked at me expectantly. "It's here." I patted the sack of silver. "No longer shall I teach you in my own stumbling way how to read and write. You shall have a proper tutor, who will come every morning to teach you both Latin and Greek. He will be stern, and you will suffer, but when he is done you will read and write better than I do. A boy as clever as you deserves no less."
    Eco's smile was radiant. I have never seen a boy toss a ball so high.
     
    The story is almost done, except for one final outcome.
    Much later that night, I lay in bed with Bethesda with nothing to separate us but that gossamer veil shot through with silver threads. For a few fleeting moments I was completely satisfied with life and the universe. In my relaxation, without meaning to, I mumbled aloud what I was thinking. "Perhaps I should adopt the boy…"
    "And why not?" Bethesda demanded, imperious even when half asleep. "What more proof do you want from him? Eco could not be more like your son even if he were made of your own flesh and blood."
    And of course she was right.

THE TALE OF THE TREASURE HOUSE
    "Tell me a story, Bethesda."
    It was the hottest night of the hottest summer I could ever remember in Rome. I had pulled my sleeping couch out into the peristyle amid the yew trees and poppies so as to catch any breeze that might happen to pass over the Esquiline Hill. Overhead the sky was moonless and full of stars. Still, sleep would not come.
    Bethesda lay on her own divan nearby. We might have lain together, but it was simply too hot to press flesh against flesh. She sighed. "An hour ago you asked me to sing you a song, Master. An hour before that you asked me to wash your feet with a wet cloth."
    "Yes, and the song was sweet and the cloth was cool. But I still can't sleep. Neither can you. So tell me a story."
    She touched the back of her hand to her lips and yawned. Her black hair glistened in the starlight. Her linen sleeping gown clung like gossamer to the supple lines of her body. Even yawning, she was beautiful-far too beautiful a slave to be owned by a common man like myself, I've often thought. Fortune smiled on me when I found her in that Alexandrian slave market ten years ago. Was it I who selected Bethesda, or she who selected me?
    "Why don't you tell a story?" Bethesda suggested. "You love to talk about your work."
    "Now you're wanting me to put you to sleep. You always find it boring when I talk about my work."
    "Not true," she protested sleepily. "Tell me again how you helped Cicero in resolving the matter of the Woman of Arretium. Everyone down at the market still talks about it, how Gordianus the Finder must be the cleverest man in Rome to have found the solution to such a sordid affair."
    "What a schemer you are, Bethesda, thinking you can flatter me into being your storyteller. You are my slave and I order you to tell me a story!"
    She ignored me. "Or tell me again about the case of Sextus Roscius," she said. "Before that, great Cicero had never defended a man charged with murder, much less a man accused of killing his own father. How he needed the help of Gordianus the Finder! To think it would end with you killing a giant who came out of the Cloaca Maxima while Cicero was giving his speech in the Forum!"
    "I would hate to have you for my biographer, Bethesda. The man was not exactly a giant, it was not exactly I who killed him, and while it happened in the public latrine behind the Shrine

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