“There you are!” he says, his face lighting up. “I knew I’d find you.” His joy and the lack of effort he makes to hide it warm her like wine.
“I bet you say that to all the women at the Vinalia.” She laughs.
“You know that’s not true, Timarete.”
The switch to Greek, as always, hits her harder. “Rusticus is a generous master,” she says. “Letting you wander about a wine festival at will.”
“He is generous. But only to a point. I have an hour, that’s all.”
Amara cannot look away from his face. She thinks about her prayer to Venus Aphrodite. May I know love’s power, if never its sweetness. Perhaps the goddess is punishing her for her arrogance. “Let’s not waste it then,” she says, reaching out to him.
They walk hand in hand through the crowd, not saying anything at first, not even sure where they are going, carried along on a current of shared happiness. “I’ve been to The Sparrow three times since I last saw you,” he says. “That’s every evening I’ve had off. The barman told me you usually only visit during the day.”
“But you kept coming?”
“Of course! A small chance of seeing you is better than none.”
The thought of Menander waiting for her just over the road, while she is powerless to join him, is almost too painful. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” she says.
“Does your master give you any time off for the games? I think he must do; the first game in July is traditionally for slaves too.”
“July?” Amara asks, horrified at the thought of a date so far in the future.
“Can’t you wait that long for me?”
She knows he is teasing her. He has the same air of confidence she remembers at their first meeting when he claimed the lamp in her hands as his own. She smiles, not wanting to give him everything at once. “I expect so.”
They reach the end of the Forum. A musician is playing a slow, melancholy tune on a lyre. Amara watches, imagining the vibration of the strings under her own fingers. “I used to play,” she says. “My father liked me to sing in the evenings. Though only in private,” she adds, hoping he will understand that in Greece, unlike Pompeii, she came from a respectable house.
“Why don’t you ask him to let you borrow it?” Amara laughs, thinking he is joking. “Why not?” he presses. “It’s the Vinalia. You should be free to demand what you like.”
Amara is spared from answering when she spots Dido, now standing alone. Beronice and Gallus are nowhere to be seen. “There’s my friend,” she says, pointing. “We should join her.”
“I remember her,” he says. “She has a beautiful voice.”
Amara introduces them both again. She is pleased to see Dido pretend not to remember Menander. He would never guess they have both spent more hours poring over his name and character than priests divining entrails on an altar. “Where’s Nicandrus?” she asks.
“He only had a few minutes to spare; he just came to give me these.”
The musician on the lyre begins a jauntier song. A couple beside them cheer and start dancing. Dido sways to the music, holding her roses.
“I have to leave soon too.” Menander looks at Amara. “Will you have one dance with me?”
“I’m not sure I know how.” She thinks of a family wedding she attended back home, the childhood glee of spinning round and round with her cousins. “I’ve only ever danced with women.”
He takes both her hands and pulls her closer to the lyre. “Everybody’s drunk,” he says. “We can make it up.” She hesitates, but the clapping, the twirling, the stamping, are infectious. Amara and Menander link arms, turn, stop and clap, faster and faster, over and over, until she collapses against him in laughter. The musician ends his tune with a flourish, holding out the lyre and bowing.
“Ask him now,” Menander says. “I want to see you play before I leave.”
She looks at the lyre with longing but shakes her head. “I can’t.”
Menander lets go of her and heads over to the musician. She sees him greet the man then turn back and gesture towards her. They have an urgent exchange. The musician nods and beckons her over.
“How could I refuse such a request,” the musician says to her in Greek, as she approaches. Amara looks at Menander, wondering what he can have said. “Of course you must play.” He hands over his instrument.
For a moment, Amara feels nothing but panic. Her mind is blank, she cannot remember a tune, cannot remember how to play a note. She looks up and sees people staring, curious, waiting to hear what she will perform. Dido is watching too. “Sing with me!” Amara calls to her, desperation in her voice.
Dido hurries over. “What are you doing?” she whispers. “We can’t sing here!”
“What about that love song Salvius taught us?” Amara’s cheeks are burning at the prospect of handing back the lyre, unplayed.
“I don’t think I can remember it,” Dido says, but Amara has already started strumming the strings with the plectrum. The first notes strike her as shockingly discordant. It’s an unfamiliar instrument, with seven strings, not ten, and it takes her a while to work out which chords will recreate the Campanian folk song. She is concentrating so hard on getting the music right that she forgets about the crowd, even about Menander. With every touch to the strings, her confidence grows a little, and the music sounds a little sweeter. She launches into the first verse. To her relief, Dido joins her.
The crowd clap and several sing along, prompting them to remember the words. She is conscious of Menander smiling, nodding encouragement, but it’s hard to keep sight of him with dancers swirling and stamping past her. Instead, she looks at Dido. The performance has lent her the confidence of a stranger. She is holding herself with a boldness she never manages walking the streets. Amara catches her eye, and they start to sing to one another. It becomes a conversation, the passing of a look, a gesture, a feeling, even as they sing the same words. They repeat the song, but this time Amara stays silent when Dido sings the role of the shepherd, and understanding her, Dido leaves the role of the woman to Amara. They tell the story as a duet, playing up the comic element, Dido ever more pleading, Amara increasingly absurd in her proud rejection. At the end, Dido feigns collapse of a broken heart, sending a ripple of laughter through the small crowd.
Amara laughs too, looking for Menander, hoping to find his approval. She cannot see him. His absence jolts her, but she is too caught up in the moment for sadness to swallow her. Two young men at the front are clapping and chanting, demanding another song. Others join in. Amara looks at the crowd, at the faces watching her. It is a power she has never felt before, this sense that she might shape the expectations of others, hold their desires in check, or release them. She bows.
“We are celebrating the goddess of love,” she says, her voice loud. “Perhaps you would allow us to sing a hymn to our mistress, Aphrodite?” She makes no effort to hide her foreign accent, deliberately calling Venus by her Greek title. The two men at the front yell their approval, and Amara turns to Dido, speaking quietly. “If I sang a verse to you in Greek, line by line, would you be able to sing it back to me?”
“I think so.”
Amara strikes the lyre with the plectrum, the chords swift and insistent. The notes take her back almost instantly to Chremes’s house, and the way he watched her in the lamplight with the greed of a fox waiting for its prey to falter. This was not a song she learnt as a child. The memory is bitter. Amara imagines herself back at the feet of the painted Venus, breathes in, remembers the feel of the myrtle crushed beneath her fingers, its sweet scent.