“You begin to prove your value already. Did Vinius buy you?”
“I was among the gifts given to the envoys. Titus Vinius asked for me personally and the others acceded willingly, since they thought me to be by far the least valuable of the presents.”
“A pardonable mistake. Did he acquire Freda the same way?”
He looked at her with a smirk. She glared back. “No, she was given to him by a Suebian chieftain named Nasua a few months later.”
“Why?” I asked him. “And who are the Suebi?”
“They are an eastern tribe who arrived on the Rhine about the time of that embassy. As to why, the German chiefs are great gift givers, and they are always trying to outdo each other in generosity. Nasua leads jointly with his brother, Cimberius. It seems Cimberius sent a splendid, jeweled goblet to the Roman Proconsul, so Nasua presented Freda to Vinius in front of all the chiefs and dignitaries. He said she was a captive princess of some tribe far in the interior, but I think she is just some cow tender’s daughter he had tired of.”
Freda snarled something and boxed him alongside the head hard enough to send him staggering several steps.
“What did she say?” I asked him. “It sounded uncommonly vile.”
He grinned, exposing many gaps. “She told me how pleased she is to be the property of so handsome and noble a Roman as yourself, sir.”
“And I was almost beginning to believe what you said. But tell me this: Why have you never sued to have your freedom returned? If your father was a citizen of Massilia and you were taken captive by raiders from across the Rhine, then your slavery is unlawful and may be set aside.”
He shrugged. “My mother was just a concubine. My father had a legitimate son by his Greek wife and never acknowledged me. There is little point in suing. Freedom is a greatly overrated commodity, anyway. For most of us it just means freedom to starve.”
I got up as Hermes returned with the lamps. While he arranged them inside the tent, I watched Freda watching me. No fear there, just a coolly fierce calculation.
“There you go,” Hermes announced as he came out. “It’s lit up like a forge in there.”
“You and Molon make yourselves comfortable out here,” I told them. “Freda, come with me.” I ducked through the doorway and sat on the edge of my cot. The ropes creaked beneath me as I tugged at the laces of my boots. Freda came in. “Close the flap behind you,” I told her. She did so, a slightly contemptuous twist marring the perfect beauty of her lips. In the distance I heard a trumpet call; a lonely sound, even in a crowded legionary camp.
With my boots off I lay back, lacing my fingers behind my head. It gave me a casual look and concealed their trembling from her. “Come closer,” I said. The tent was not a large one. A single step brought her within inches of where I lay.
“What do you want?” she asked in a tone that said she knew very well what I wanted.
“Take your clothes off,” I told her, keeping my voice amazingly steady. She hesitated, radiating defiance. “Freda,” I said patiently, “there are three men before whom a woman should never be ashamed to undress: her husband, her physician, and her owner. Now get out of that barbaric costume.”
With an even more extreme curl to her lip, she reached up and unfastened the fibula that held her hide tunic at the left shoulder. The swell of her breast kept it from falling and she tugged it down to her waist. Then she had to push it past the broad curvature of her hips. Beyond that resistance, it fell to puddle around her ankles.
The sight of a barbarian woman’s body can be shocking to one of refined sensibilities. Highborn Roman women carefully remove every strand of hair that appears from their scalps on down. They often have even their slaves given similar treatment. Even Gallic men depilate themselves except for their scalps and upper lips. Germans think it best not to interfere with nature in these matters. Unlike many Roman men, I do not find a woman repellant in her naturally hirsute state. Rather the contrary, in fact, and never more so than in Freda’s case. She looked like a raw young animal, not a polished marble statue.
“Turn around,” I said, my voice barely betraying the sudden dryness of my mouth.
“Whatever my master wishes,” she said, making a slow half turn. Her great, golden mane covered her to the cleft of her buttocks.
“Raise your hair,” I told her. She gathered the mass of tresses atop her head and held it there with both hands, standing with her weight on one leg in the classic pose of the Aphrodite Kallipygia. She was a picture of youth, strength, and grace; a magnificent young beast perfect in every detail, including a flawless skin.
“All right, you can put your clothes back on.”
She whirled and let her hair drop. “What?” It was the first genuine feeling I had been able to elicit from her.
“I’ve seen what I wanted to see. Put your tunic back on. Or leave it off, if you’d rather sleep that way.”
She stooped and picked up her furry tunic. “You are easily satisfied.”
“Titus Vinius did not beat you, Freda,” I said. “Why was that?”
“I pleased him,” she said, fastening the fibula at her shoulder.
“Don’t be absurd,” I said. “That vicious bastard beat anything that came within reach of his vinestock. You don’t have a mark on your skin. Tell me why this is so.”
She sank down onto the pallet recently occupied by the now-banished Hermes. “Men sometimes find their pleasures in strange practices. Especially men who have great power over lesser men. Sometimes, such men like to be beaten themselves.” She smiled at me sweetly. “They like to be humiliated and degraded by women. By slave women best of all.”
By Hercules, I thought, these Germans are far more sophisticated than I had imagined!
“And you performed these, ah, services for Titus Vinius?”
“Whenever he wished. And he never laid a hand or a stick on me, although he sometimes spoke roughly to me in front of others. He said that he had to do this for the sake of appearances. He always begged my forgiveness afterward and wanted to be punished for it.”
Well, well, Titus Vinius, I thought. What an odd person you’ve turned out to be. I’d known politicians who didn’t have as many strange quirks.
“You always obliged him?” I asked.
“Of course. I am a slave, after all.”
“So you are. Go to sleep, Freda, I have a lot to think about.”
She studied me incredulously for a few moments, then she lay down, pillowing her head on her bent arm. She closed her eyes, but whether she slept or not I could not tell. I snuffed out the lamps and lay back.
It had not been easy. I had longed to take her in both hands and bury my face in that fabulous hair, but I knew I would be lost if I did that. She might be a barbarian slave, but she knew her own power and I would be acknowledging that power by following my natural inclinations.
Whatever else I was, I was not going to be another Titus Vinius.
8
My first stop the next morning was the smithy. The smith, like many of the legion’s artisans, was a soldier who earned himself extra pay and exemption from fatigue by practicing a necessary craft. Luckily, repairing the lock on Vinius’s chest and crafting a key for it was not beyond his level of skill. I stood close while he did the work and paid him a couple of sesterces for the effort. It was not strictly necessary to pay him, but it is always a mistake to take such persons for granted. I might need to have my horse shod some day and it would be done more expeditiously if the man remembered me fondly.
I left the chest inside the great tent of the praetorium, where it would be about as safe as it could be under the circumstances. Then I went to speak with the men most immediately concerned with the success of my mission. I found them under heavy guard in a pit excavated next to the tent in which the standards were kept. It was twenty feet on a side and twelve feet deep. A contubernium stood around its periphery facing inward, each man with a sheaf of javelins to go with his pilum. One of the guards had a white band painted around the lower rim of his helmet, signifying that he was the decurion.