Then, just before he left her alone, he turned back. "Please lock the gate after me, little mistress," he said, and there was real worry darkening his eyes. "I would feel better."
"All right," she said. "If you insist."
She followed him to the gate and locked it after him. She watched him until he was out of sight, then turned and surveyed her new home.
She wanted to sing or dance. She could hardly believe the way her life had turned.
But rather than celebrating, she had better get herself to work. She did not have the slaves another woman might have to clean this place. She must do as much of it as she could by herself, until Faro returned to help her.
The first and easiest thing was to scrub the walls and floor of the three rooms they would be using first: the kitchen, the bathing-room, and the mistress's bedroom.
This task would be the easiest, because she would be using conjured soap, sponges, and water. There would be no need to carry and mop up water, rinse sponges, or deal with the same sloppy mess that a slave would need to. In place of mops, she would tie conjured sponges to the ends of sticks, with no worry about whether they wore out. It didn't matter; she could always conjure more.
It was amazing, the amount of filth that came pouring off the walls as she conjured soapy water to cover them and scrubbed with her impromptu mops. When she banished the water and soap, the dirt remained on the floor, in the form of dry dust, easy to sweep away. She dealt with the filthy floors the same way, except that she swept most of the dirty water out the door before banishing it.
It was hard work, but no harder than she was used to. She thought wryly as she scrubbed the walls and floor, putting good effort and muscle into the work, that such chores could serve as adjuncts to training. Certainly after a few days of this, her back, shoulders and arms would have had a thorough workout. Her efforts to clean her prior residence had improved her physical vigor; she had thought that to be an incidental benefit, until she started throwing rods in the arena.
But these activities were, of course, for men. Even though there were plenty of women too poor to afford more than one slave for chores, none of them would ever admit it. It was not fitting for a woman to perform menial chores, publicly. Xylina could not afford to be seen doing so, and therefore the courtyard would have to wait until Faro had time to deal with it. Dirt went out into the back gardens, where no eye would see her doing the work of a slave.
An amazing amount of time passed before she realized it. Faro still had not returned by mid-afternoon, so she gleaned the last wild vegetables from the garden and made a kind of meal of them. While she ate, she gave thought to how best she could lease out Faro's services, for although her old home had paid for part of this new one, there was still a debt of real gold to be discharged, and at the moment Faro's size and skill were all she had to earn that gold.
The surest, quickest way to discharge that debt would be to send him right back to the arena, but she had considered that idea and discarded it without a second thought. He had saved her life; she would not gamble his.
So, one way to capitalize on their new-and probably short-lived-notoriety would be to trade on the obvious and the invisible. The obvious was Faro's size and strength; the invisible, his skills. There would probably be any number of women who would pay to see the hulking brute write a letter. It would, in fact, be a considerable novelty, like a talking horse.
At least it would for a while. Long enough, she hoped, to be able to buy seed for the garden, food for their meals, and to make small payments on her debt.
And then what?
Well, she might let him pursue that idea of hiring his services to the men of the quarter. Or-perhaps there might be more gold in novelty. Perhaps other, wealthier women would pay to have Faro discourse with them at parties and the like. Would he be willing to do recitations? She had no doubt he could memorize any kind of poetry or prose, and he was probably familiar with the works of some of the philosophers. The question was, would he be willing to play the role of the educated freak? This plan would need his cooperation; it would come to nothing if he sat in a sullen silence and would not perform.
And speaking of performing-what of the theater? Could she, perhaps, put on some kind of extravaganza for paid ticket holders? Could she have him make a recitation while hoisting weights above his head or something of the sort? A silly idea, perhaps, but sillier ideas had succeeded in the past.
She finally tired by late afternoon, and banished the last of her cleaning conjurations. She wandered through the rooms of her house, admiring the work she had done, noting how much more still needed to be done. Her path brought her out eventually to the outer court and the gate. She had not been paying a great deal of attention to anything other than the things she knew needed repairing, calculating how much could be done by Faro under her direction, and how much each repair would cost. The westering sun cast long, dark shadows across the court; the overshadowing walls on either side made it very dark. She was considering conjuring lights for the evening when a hint of movement where there should not have been any made her freeze.
It was that which saved her life. She glanced down, and a rush of mingled fear and horror galvanized her, knotting her stomach and sending a thrill of cold up her spine. The adder, coiled and waiting almost at her feet, poised to strike, hesitated. Xylina did not.
Reacting quickly, she conjured a waist-high plate of metal between her and the serpent. The adder struck at the same instant, and hit the metal plate.
Xylina pushed the plate over onto the snake in the moment when it lay stretched out and vulnerable. Then, powered by hysterical energy, she conjured another massive weight of material right on top of it, flattening the creature against the ground. This was definitely not the time to charitably abolish her conjurations.
She sat down abruptly on the broken masonry surrounding one of the half-dead trees, her energy leaving her. She gasped for breath, as if she had been running. Her knees were weak and her stomach had turned to water. She was grateful now for the setting sun, the heavy shadows in the courtyard, that hid her from anyone looking in.
Her mind was completely blank, and she simply sat where she was, shaking, until full dusk. Then she banished her conjurations, and stared at the flattened remains of the deadly adder.
There were no snakes in the city. Not even in the temple of the Oracle, whose symbol was a serpent. A small army of vermin-catcher slaves, accompanied by their terriers and ferrets, kept the city free of rats, snakes, and even helped keep the mouse population within bounds. There were no snakes in the city; there had been no snake-holes anywhere in the courtyard.
Someone must have brought it here and set it loose.
Someone wanted her dead.
But who? And almost as importantly, why?
• Chapter 4
Xylina gazed at the wreck of her garden. The sun, directly overhead, illuminated the damage pitilessly. Healthy young plants, carefully nurtured from seed and watered by hand, had been uprooted and scattered across their beds. Young vegetables had been partially devoured. Something-or someone-had gotten into it while she and Faro had been out, and had destroyed all the tender young plants, leaving them to wilt in the sun. By the time the two of them had returned, it was too late to save any of them. They would have to be planted over again from seedlings rather than seed, or else they wouldn't mature before the first frost. It had been almost too late when they planted the seeds, though luck had been with them, and the plants had grown quickly.