"If you would be so kind, Xanthus, perhaps you might handle the negotiations? For a... percentage?"
Xanthus' eyes gleamed. Adflicta compressed her lips. No Roman lady of quality wanted to have it whispered, "Her husband is in trade!"
"Of course. Say... ten percent?"
The conversation devolved into a haggling war over percentage points. Charlie regained control of his shuddering pulse and tried to inch past along the edge of the room, since the dining couches were between him and the storeroom where cleaning supplies were kept. The thump of the crutch, however, caught his master's attention.
"What are you doing in here?" Xanthus' brows had twitched down.
His guest glanced up. Judging by the pinched look around Caelerus' nostrils and mouth, Charlie's appearance and smell clearly disgusted him. Xanthus' sons squirmed in eager anticipation.
"I am returning this to the privy," he said carefully, to be sure he got the Latin verb tenses correct, "and I am searching for a brush to scrub the dock, Master, as you ordered."
"While I'm eating? Idiot! I want that bucket scrubbed out, slave, clean enough to drink from. It stinks. Then after you've scrubbed the dock, get to your other chores. Lucius tells me the privy is clogged. Clean it."
"Yes, Domine." He had to clench his teeth to keep from growling it out.
Xanthus eyed him suspiciously. "Use that tone again, slave..." He left the threat hanging.
Xanthus had decided shortly after acquiring him that Charlie was a "bad" slave who merited constant correction. Well, by Roman definitions, Charlie was a bad slave. Not even Charlie debated that.
Charlie forced himself to whisper humbly, "Yes, Domine."
"That's better. Proving even the stupidest of slaves can learn, under proper stimulation." The Lycian gave a short, hard bark of laughter before turning away. His guest grinned.
It would be so simple to break Xanthus' neck...
It took him fifteen minutes of cautious maneuvering through the villa to retrieve a coil of rope and a crude brush made of some kind of prickly plant fibers. He'd never been much of a botanist—hell, he'd never been much of anything, when it came to formal classroom learning—so he didn't have the slightest idea what it was made from. Whatever it was, it made a lousy scrub brush.
He hobbled out to the river again and lowered the bucket into it, then hauled it back up to the dock and used a lot of elbow grease to clean out the slime. What I'd give for a lousy bar of soap.... But soap—greasy stuff made from goat's fat and wood ashes in Pompeiian factories—was expensive. Slaves weren't allotted soap to scrub out shit buckets. When that chore was finally done, Charlie began dragging up bucketfuls of water. He sloshed them across the mossy dock and got down on hands and knees.
Xanthus' dock was a large one, built—as was Xanthus' villa—between the old Servian Wall and the frantic activity of the Porticus Aemilia. Not the most fashionable part of town, certainly, but close enough to holy places and luxury villas on the Aventine Hill that tongues still wagged.
Xanthus Imbros Brutus, although rich, was after all a foreigner. A citizen, yes, but born in Lycia, which Charlie had finally gathered was somewhere in modern Turkey—hell and gone from the power center at Rome. Worse, it was whispered one of Xanthus' ancestors had helped murder the divine Julius Caesar.
Those whispers in high society galled Charlie's master, galled as much as the fact that some of the family had cowardly fled to Lycia in the aftermath of a murder that had occurred more than a century previously, rather than face the mobs. Romans were nothing if not incredible snobs. And Charlie—not just a slave, but a barbarian one—was on the very bottom of the pecking order. Xanthus' temper was infamous when some slight or insult from a social superior—or worse, an inferior—sent him into a towering rage.
Charlie dreaded those days.
On hands and knees in the gathering darkness of evening, Charlie paused for breath and eased aching shoulders. He glanced to the north, where the Bridge of Probus spanned the Tiber, then up the hillside, where the imposing edifice of the Temple of Juno Regina stood bathed in rust-colored light. Charlie had never seen the inside and had stopped wondering, long ago. He was just grateful both structures helped block the view of the great Circus beyond.
A feeling of relief touched him as the sun sank behind distant buildings, leaving Charlie in lengthening shadow. Not only was he just getting comfortable with the drop in temperature, twilight would hide many sins, like rest stops for breath. He set to work again and skinned knuckles on rough stone. Charlie cursed under his breath and kept going. He fiercely ignored aching pain that gradually made itself felt in his rope-bruised back and shoulders.
The smell of cooking food floated across the river from the elegant villas built on the Janiculum hill directly across the Tiber. The Janiculum wasn't precisely part of Rome proper, but a fashionable suburb for those who couldn't afford the really high-rent districts. Charlie's belly rumbled emptily. The scent of real food flooded his mouth with saliva. The scrub brush rasped against wet, mossy stone in a monotonous rhythm broken only when Charlie paused to slosh rinse water. Twilight deepened until Charlie scrubbed more by feel than by sight.
When he finally reached the end of the dock and the spine-cracking job, Charlie allowed himself to pause for breath. Stars speckled a velvet-black sky like a dusting of sugar on licorice. Charlie's belly rumbled again, demanding nourishment. He wiped sweat off his face with the back of one arm and swallowed down the saliva, telling his belly that was the best he could do at the moment. He stared into the night sky, captured by his own random thoughts. Sugar on licorice... . It'd been four years since he'd tasted sugar.
Four years was a long time to eat nothing but heartlessly plain gruel and whatever meat he managed to trap in snares along the riverbank. Over on the Janiculum, the black hulk of an amphitheater which could be flooded for mock naval battles blotted out the stars. The Colosseum—the Flavian amphitheater—(which Charlie bet was still under construction, as he'd heard no gossip about its opening) would shift the gladiatorial combats away from the Circus Maximus, but he was given to understand the "naval" battles would continue on the Janiculum hill. The old saw (even Charlie had heard it) about flooding the Colosseum had turned out to be just that: an old saw.
Charlie glared at the dark amphitheater on the Janiculum through narrowed eyes, remembering the stink of blood in the water and the crack of timbers as miniature warships rammed one another. He had fought there, too, and survived, sometimes only because he knew how to swim.
"Someday," he growled at the dark, murmuring river, "someday, I will kill you, Jésus Carreras."
He turned his back on the river, the Janiculum, his whole past. Carreras was so far beyond Charlie's revenge, it didn't bear thinking about. He hobbled back up the path, so tired he couldn't even find strength to curse at the thought of the rest of the chores waiting for him. He skirted the dinner party, which was in full swing, complete with musicians and a dancer. Xanthus' sons listened, wide-eyed, to the off-color jokes and bawdy songs. Adflicta had already retired for the night.
Charlie replaced the slop bucket in the privy, then cleaned that, having to light a lamp to provide enough light to unclog the water pipes. At last water from Rome's aqueducts began to flow again. The accumulated mess rinsed away, pouring down the outflow into the sewers. Charlie knew he stank of shit and urine and his own body sweat. There'd be no time tonight for a bath, either. So he cleaned hands, arms, and body as best he could, scrubbing with the brush he'd used on the dock.