“A nymph of beauty rare and untouched, appearing handmaiden of Venus. The Greek swine shit six thousand sesterces for her as if fortune nests untouched up ass.”
Lucretia gasped. “Six thousand!”
Batiatus matched her gasp with a groan, and shuddered into the slave girl’s mouth. He breathed out slowly, holding her in place for a moment, and then he slowly uncurled his hand from her hair. Flavia raised her head, wiped her mouth discreetly and adjusted her master’s tunic. Then she bent to his feet once more and began massaging them in the tepid water.
“Ashur makes enquiry towards this Greek. Hieronymus his name. The man has powerful friends in very high places. Rumors stir the air in marketplace that Capua will see him host one of them in coming weeks.”
“Rumors uttered into weary ear by every feebleminded fool who knocks upon door,” Lucretia snapped.
“Even fools may light upon truth on occasion.” Batiatus stood up, splashing water on the floor. He padded about the small room barefoot and gestured with his cup.
“The odor of future coin reaches nostril, Lucretia. A man free to part with six thousand for one black-haired cunt must be willing to part with a great deal more for extravagances beyond it. The House of Batiatus profits from the indulgences of men such as this. We have but to offer magnificent spectacle and coin will flow to us in a torrent. And who better to tempt brimming purse than the slayer of Theokoles, whose fame now reaches Rome itself?”
“Crixus fought Theokoles as well,” Lucretia said, drawing her robe about her. “He yet lives to return to glory.”
Batiatus snorted. “He is a shell of the behemoth that used to stride into the arena. Spartacus hauls in the crowd like fish into net. And we will use him to land the extravagant Greek. Make preparations for his invitation to ludus. We will whet his appetite for blood.”
“A thing requiring great expense,” Lucretia said waspishly, stung by her husband’s ready dismissal of Crixus, who before his recent injuries had frequently shared her bed.
“A worthy expenditure when the reward to reap is great. I will speak with Doctore to gauge if the Thracian’s training in the new style becomes him.”
“Spartacus is untrustworthy, Quintus,” Lucretia protested. “With his wife dead, what will bind him to our purpose?”
“His gratitude for what I have done for him,” Batiatus said. “I brought him his wife. True, she lived but a moment before dying in his arms, but she was yet his wife, delivered as promised. For granting him presence in her last moment, I earn his gratitude. The man holds honor close to chest despite wild Thracian blood running within. Whatever I desire of him, he will repay with loyal duty.”
“Crixus is a man to place trust in as he has proved countless times,” Lucretia persisted. “He has delivered much to this house and dreams only of reclaiming victory in its name. He lives to please us, Batiatus.”
“I will hear no more of Crixus! The man lies injured with wounds that will forever diminish fighting skill. He will not be fit to take to sand before Saturnalia, if ever again. I will decide who fights for this house, Lucretia. I am its paterfamilias and its lanista.”
Lucretia realized she had overstepped the mark.
“You are right, Quintus. I do not mean to question judgement.”
Batiatus bent over her, smiling.
“And I do not mean to snap at you. Foundation of this house rests upon shoulders of devoted wife just as much as myself. Spare no coin. Perfume every slave and lay out the richest spread of food. When this shit-eating Greek enters our house he will collapse under weight of stimulating delicacies. And upon his sating, we will display the titans of the arena that reside under roof. Hieronymus will depart with voice singing of the marvels of the House of Batiatus.”
“To send song alighting the ears of Roman friends in exalted positions,” Lucretia said. She smiled like a cat.
“Our thoughts are as one.” Batiatus kissed his wife on the mouth and then spread his arms expansively.
“Fetch Orontes to return and display only his best wares,” he declared. “The wife of Batiatus shall shine like the brightest star in sky.”
III
For the next several days a procession of pack mules, litters and carts made their slow way up to the heights above Capua to call upon the House of Batiatus. The cellars were stocked to bursting with amphorae, some shipped in from the Mamertinum vineyards in Sicily, unloaded at Neapolis and brought north. There was even a jar of the famous Opimian vintage, over fifty years old and considered the finest wine ever pressed.
This, Batiatus fussed over like an old man with a young bride, for it had cost him the equivalent of three slaves. He kept it not in the cellars below, but instead in his office, in a cool corner, and while he was seated at his desk going over the household accounts, sometimes he would stare at it, and, depending on what his books told him, would either feel a ripple of pleasurable anticipation at the thought of his first mouthful, or would gnaw his thumb in a spasm of momentary doubt.
Most of the time, in truth, the doubt would prevail, for it could not be denied that the ludus was sliding heavily into debt with such preparations and expensive purchases. Batiatus alternated between beseeching the gods to bring the Roman visitor or visitors, whoever he, she, or they might be, not only to Capua but to the very doors of his villa, and cursing the self-same gods for teasing him with rumor, even as they withheld the fabled visitor-or visitors-from the city gates.
Lucretia, meanwhile, had brought in contractors to lay a mosaic floor about the pillars of the peristylium, and another pool had been dug there also, the water piped in from a spring beyond the house, as cool and fresh as though it had sprung from the slopes of Olympus. The walls of the peristylium had been faced with travertine marble, hauled at enormous cost from the quarries outside Rome itself, and every slave had been outfitted with new clothing which stood folded in heavy chests in their quarters below, the chests to remain closed upon pain of a flogging.
Day after day, Batiatus frequented the forum of Capua, in the hope of running into the Greek Hieronymus again with an air of casual happenstance, but he saw nothing of him. The market buzzed with rumors of his extravagances, and the land agents that Batiatus knew were all willing to divulge that great tracts of property had been bought and paid for in Capua itself.
Demolition work was going on at a series of insulae which had defaced the outskirts of the city for decades, but when Batiatus tried to identify the buyer the trail went cold with suspicious rapidity. There was talk of Roman money changers, a consortium of noblemen from the Palatine, but it proved impossible to delve deeper. This was not just discretion on the part of the agents, but a kind of fear. The most that Batiatus could discover was that someone of great power was involved, someone high up in the cursus honorum. Not even the local magistrates would say more, no matter how much Falernian he poured down their throats.
As a last resort, Batiatus found himself, much to his own disgust, courting the Syrian slaver, Albanus. He invited the man to dinner, fixed a grin on his face, and had a pair of pretty slave girls wait on his guest in revealing garments while the two men reclined in the triclinium. Lucretia did not attend: she sent her apologies, prettily worded and voiced by Naevia. Albanus did not seem to mind, but reclined on his couch to be fed by Flavia like a baby bird, whilst Batiatus plied him with wine and questions, the temper in him brimming higher with every wasted moment.
“The dark haired girl, Athenais-indulge me with her story, good Albanus. Such a beauty must have one for the telling,” Batiatus said, wincing at the taste of the wine. It was a very ordinary vintage from Praetutium, though Albanus seemed to relish it. The slaver fancied himself something of an expert, and grew boring on the subject. Southern Italy had been known to the Greeks as Oenotria, land of wines, for centuries, and Albanus knew many of the local grapes.