Bethesda walked past me, cutting a wide swathe around the corpse of the cat and averting her eyes from the wall. 'You must be quite hungry,' she said. Her voice was strangely calm and matter-of-fact.
'Very hungry,' I admitted. I followed her to the back of the house, into the pantry.
She lifted the lid from a pot and pulled out a whole fish, flipping it onto the table where it gave off a strong smell in the warm, still air. Beside it lay a handful of fresh herbs, an onion, some grape leaves. 'You see,' Bethesda said, 'I had just come back from the market.'
‘When did they come? How many of them?'
Two men.' She reached for a knife and brought it down on the fish, chopping the head off with a single, clean stroke. 'They came twice. First they came late this morning. I did as you've always said, I kept the door locked and bolted and talked to them through the httle window. I told them you were gone and probably would not be back until very late. They wouldn't say who they were. They said they would come back.'
I watched as she cleaned the fish, using her fingernails and the sharp tip of the knife. Her hands were extraordinarily nimble.
'Later I went to the market. I was able to get the fish very cheap. The day was so hot, the market was dusty, the man was afraid it would spoil before he could sell it. Fresh fish from the river. I finished my shopping and came up the hill. The door was closed, the latch was in place. I checked for that, as you always say to.'
She began to chop the herbs, bringing the blade down hard and fast. I thought of the old shopkeeper's wife.
'But the day was so Very hot, and so still. No wind from the garden at all. I could barely stay awake. I left the door open. Only for a little while, I thought, but I guess I forgot. I was so sleepy I went to my room to lie down. I don't know if I slept or not, but after a while I heard them in the vestibule. Somehow I knew it was the same men. I heard them talking low; then there was a loud noise, like a table overturned. They started shouting, calling your name, yelling obscenities. I hid in my room. I could hear them tramping through the house, turning over furniture, throwing things against the walls. They came into my room. You always imagine you can hide if you have to, but of course they found me right away.'
'And then what?' My heart raced in my chest.
'Not what you think.' She reached up to wipe a tear from her eye. 'The onion,' she said. I saw the bruise that circled her wrist like a bracelet, left by a strong man's grip.
'But they hurt you.'
'They pushed me. They hit me a few times. One of them held me from the back. They made me watch.' She stared down at the table. Her voice became grim. 'I had been squabbling with Bast all day. She was crazy from the smell of the fish. One of them found her in the kitchen and brought her to the vestibule. She bit him and scratched his face. He threw her against the wall. Then he pulled out a knife.' She looked up from her work. 'They wrote something. With the blood. They said it was for you, and that you shouldn't forget it. What does it say? Is it a curse?' 'No. A threat. It doesn't make sense.'
'It has to do with the young slave who came yesterday, doesn't it? The new client, the parricide?'
'Perhaps, though I can't see how. Cicero sent for me only yesterday. It wasn't until today that I started stirring up trouble — yet they must already have been on their way here, even before I spoke with the shopkeeper and his wife…. How did you escape from them?'
'The same way I got away from you just now. With my teeth. The big one holding me was quite a coward. He squealed like a pig.'
'What did they look like?'
She shrugged. 'Bodyguards, gladiators. Fighters. Big men. Ugly.'
'And one of them had a limp.' I spoke the words as a certainty, but Bethesda shook her head.
'No. No limp. I watched them both walk away the first time.'
'You're sure. No limp?'
'The one who held me I didn't really see. But the one who wrote was very big, and blond, a giant. His face was bleeding from where Bast had scratched him. I hope he carries a scar.' She flipped the fish back into the pot, sprinkled it with the herbs and covered it all with grape leaves. She poured in water from an urn, put the pot over the fire, and stooped to tend the flame. I noticed that her hands had begun to shake.
'Men like that,' she said, 'would not be satisfied with killing a cat, do you think?'
'No. I think they might not.'
She nodded. 'The door was still open. I knew I had to get away while the blond giant was still busy smearing letters on the wall, so I bit the man holding me as hard as I could, here.' She indicated the thickest part of her forearm. 'I slipped from his arms and ran out the door. They followed me. But they stopped suddenly as they were passing between the neighbours' walls. I could hear them behind me, making disgusted noises, snorting like pigs.'
'That would be when they stepped in the pile of excrement.'
‘Yes. Imagine men who could smear their hands in cat's blood, turned into squeamish matrons from a bit of shit on their sandals? Romans!' The word came out of her mouth like venom. Only a native Alexandrian can pronounce the name of the world's capital with such withering disgust.
'I lost myself in the street, until I thought they must be gone. But when I came back to the foot of the pathway I was afraid to come up. I went into the tavern across the street instead. I know a woman who cooks there, from seeing her in the market. She let me hide in one of the empty rooms upstairs, until I saw you coming home. She lent me a lamp. I called out from below, to warn you before you reached the house, but you didn't hear.' She gazed into the fire. 'Will they come back?'
'Not tonight,' I assured her, having no idea whether they would or not.
Having eaten, I longed for sleep, but Bethesda would not let me rest until the corpse had been disposed of.
Romans have never worshipped animals as gods. Nor are they sentimental about household creatures. How could it be otherwise with a race that esteems human life so very little? Beneath the numbing apathy of their masters, the slaves of Rome, imported from all over the earth, but especially from the East, often lose whatever notions of sacred life they may have acquired as children in faraway lands. But Bethesda retained a sense of decorum and awe in the face of an animal's death, and in her way she grieved for Bast.
She insisted that I build a pyre in the centre of the garden. She took a dress from her wardrobe, a fine gown of white linen which I had given her only a year before. I winced as I watched her rip the seams to form a single winding sheet. She wrapped the broken body in thickness after thickness, until no more blood would soak through to stain the outermost cloth. She laid the bundle onto the pyre and muttered something to herself as she watched the flames leap up. In the still air the smoke rose straight upwards, blotting out the stars.
I longed for sleep. I ordered her to join me, but she refused to come until the floor had been washed clean of blood. She knelt beside a pail of heated water and scrubbed far into the night. I convinced her to leave the message on the wall untouched, though she clearly thought that leaving it was an invitation to all manner of magical disaster.
She would not allow me to extinguish a single lamp or candle. I fell asleep in a house with every room alight. At some point Bethesda finished her scrubbing and joined me, but her presence brought me no comfort. All through the night she kept rising to check the bolts on the doors and windows, to refill the lamps and replenish the candles.
I slept in fits and starts. I dreamed. Over endless miles of barren waste I rode a white steed, unable to remember when or how I had departed, unable to reach any destination. In the middle of the night I woke, feeling already weary from a long, unpleasant journey.
15