Aurelia: Summer 176
My soldier, Cassius, meets me beneath the rafters of the physician’s stall, his dented and tarnished bronze helmet tucked under one bare arm. Neither Neptune nor Jupiter honored my prayers to conjure up a storm that would keep his legion near the city. My eyes still burn from watching the flames last night, the shadows they cast on the figurines of our household gods. My wrist still stings; it is still singed red from reaching forward to dust those fires with dried and crushed herbs in my midnight prayers. Today, Cassius leaves Rome.
I will miss his eyes, with their shimmer of gold in them, like the gods kissed his eyelids in the night and left their beauty there. I will miss his kisses, and the kindness in his smile. The way his voice softens when we are alone. I will miss his courage and strength. I will miss the freedom I found in his arms.
“We could run away,” I suggest. Despite the danger of our forbidden passions, I would choose to love him even if Janus, the god of two faces, presented me with the same choice time and again.Â
Cassius will not agree. We would both be damned. The daughter of generations of patricians that claim a connection to Romulus himself should know better. But for Cassius, I would risk divine wrath. The gods did not lift a finger to keep him in Rome. They did not flood the field of Mars to prevent the legions from mustering there. They did nothing to let me keep him.
“They’d crucify me,” he says. Cassius rests calloused fingertips on my shoulder, then pulls his hand away. He might be flogged for speaking to me. To touch is forbidden. I am grateful the physician was called to help another, away from his stall. I am grateful the physician trusts me to mind his herbs and poultices—another forbidden arrangement. If Mother or my uncle knew I did not visit the temples each day but came instead to learn the healing arts, they would have sold me in marriage to the first bidder. And if they knew that, in these most recent days gone by, I secreted away with my low-born lover, they might have him tossed into a pool of lamprey eels.
In the warm air, the herbal aromas mingle and smell like a day at the temple. They make me feel lightheaded. I lean into Cassius. The leather strips from his epaulet hang almost to his elbow. He smells of leather. It is a rich aroma that masks the odors of the streets beyond.
“I know.” I whisper it, like it’s a secret I don’t want my ancestors to hear. Like I could keep anything from them. I am grateful my mother is not so religious. She doesn’t trust auguries and believes the priests invent their sacred messages. I would lose myself if she found out about my soldier.Â
Two women argue in the street over who should get a blue veil. One woman with a low, rasping voice, declares it should be hers because she picked it up first. The other woman, whose voice sounds like bells, claims it should be hers because she is willing to pay more denarii. I can hear the merchant plead with them to be civil-tongued. But there is delight that bubbles in his tone, like the women fight over him and not the scarf. I would leave the physician’s stall to tell them to shut it like I was born here, like I was a low plebeian, like I was one of them, but I do not want to lose my last moments with Cassius.
He cannot touch me, but I can touch him. I can do whatever I like to him, so long as impropriety does not beget gossip, and while none would know me here, even my street clothes are too fine for a plebeian.Â
Cassius's crimson cape is soft in places, rough in others, where weeks of mud and blood have hardened the fabric into a stoic shield. There is a tear at the hem he would not let me mend. Cassius likes to tell the story of how a spear pinned his cape to the ground, how he would have been ripe for the killing in his last battle. How a brute of a barbarian charged at him, battle ax held high. How he ducked and sliced the man’s Achilles’ tendon at the last moment against the blaring of bone-chilling carnyx horns from the attacking foes. How the brute fell at his feet. How Cassius, with a turn of his wrist, dispatched the warrior with his gladius. The rip does nothing to endanger his life. I let him keep his war story and lament only that he would seek to gather more.
Cassius closes his fingers around mine, his hand warm like the sun. I tell him this must be his last campaign. He does not answer. We both know he cannot, unless he lies to me. And then if he dies, Nemesis might keep his spirit from entering Elysium. He would be doomed to wander the Underworld, a nobody. Worse than a nobody. A ghost of a man whose word was not to be believed.
A crowd draws attention on the corner. I press my lips to Cassius's. The herb bundles rustle and rattle around us, a warning from the gods perhaps. I should be within my family’s villa, reclining and drinking wine, picking the freshest fig from a bounty of fruit and tasting its sweetness. I should be practicing the lyre. I should be commissioning a new gown or jewels, or any useless action. The notion of doing so while Cassius leaves sours my stomach like I drank too much wine the night before.
He kisses me once more, pulling my body to his. Hang the risk of crucifixion. His armor hurts against my chest, but I endure it. Better physical discomfort than dwelling on the pain within my chest, the flood of agony in my heart when I think these might be our last intimacies. I trace my fingers over his jaw. It is morning and his cheek is smooth. I cannot watch him leave. I turn away and pretend to busy myself with the mortar and pestle. I know when he is beyond my reach. The scent of leather dissipates. The scrape of his sandal on the cobbles is quieter than a whisper, then gone. I hear only my own ragged breath in my throat before the sounds of the street rush around me like a veil.
Only after I am certain Cassius is out of sight, only after the herbs in the mortar are reduced to a fine dust, do I glance up. The pestle rings against the mortar’s rim when I release it. I peel the tattered curtain back; Helios hides behind soot-footed clouds. All my world is in shadow in Cassius's absence, all Rome mired in darkness.
The physician returns and rambles about the patient he is called to heal. The physician’s face is lined. A frown carves dimples near the corners of his mouth. His nose is saddled with pocked skin. He is strong, but also has a rotund stomach thanks to a rich diet. The patient has a broken arm, with the bone poking through the skin. Three years ago, when I began studying the healing arts, such news wrenched my insides into intertwining knots. The physician suggested then that I become a Vestal Virgin instead, and heal through prayer and burnt offerings. It was only my haughty insistence and plenty of coin that convinced him to teach me in the first place. When we first met, he would not look me in the eye when he spoke to me. It took many moons before he began to speak to me more like a daughter or niece than a noble lady.
Today I wonder if I should have gone to Vesta’s temple instead. Perhaps Vesta would have honored my prayers and kept Cassius home. But then, if I took him as my lover and was discovered, I would be buried alive. I lick my lips and taste my soldier’s lingering kiss. The physician passes me a clean mortar and pestle filled with herbs and tells me to grind them. While I rock the pestle back and forth to grind the horsetail and comfrey, the physician pours in oil until the mixture forms a muddy poultice. We press it into an empty ceramic vial and the physician packs bandages and sticks that have been stripped of their bark into a bag. He bids me to come with him. This will require more than two hands.
Eager for distraction, I follow out of his stall, and leave behind the heady aromas of the herbs, trading them for the stench of the city and its people. Every now and then, I trace the streets behind us with my eyes, like I can see my soldier’s footprints there, leading away from the stall, away from Rome, out of the city and over mountains and a sea to the northernmost reaches of the empire. Cassius goes to Britannia, and I may never see him alive again.
***
I pull up the hood of my plain brown traveling cloak and follow the physician through winding streets paved in stones, dirt, mud, urine. So different from the flower petals that dust the forum like large flakes of snow after a triumph or return of Caesar from war. These streets are narrow and dark, and the people in them match the filth I try to dodge with every step. I cradle the poultice like an egg. The physician provides more information as we walk: There was a brawl not over coin, but over a particular prostitute. The attacker has long gone—else, the physician says, I would have had to stay behind. The two men were in their cups all through the night, and finished a flagon of wine between them. The attacker lunged at the now injured man and knocked him back onto the stone floor, then launched onto the man like a cat upon a mouse.
 “How sordid,” I say.
The physician stops short, and I do too. He turns to face me, and not for the first time, I think his eyebrows might crawl right to the crown of his head. “Perhaps you should not accompany me after all, Domina,” he says.
“Nonsense. And do not call me that,” I warn with a smile. I do not want him to think I will have him beaten. None would stop me. I could not beat a patrician man with my own hands, but I could have a slave beat a plebeian—even a useful one like a physician. Of course, I do not have a slave for such a purpose, but the physician does not know that. I am not bloodthirsty. I walk around to step ahead of him. He does not argue against this small propriety.
I hear his sandals scuff on the stone to catch up. “You being you, and our destination being a brothel—what would your mother, or worse, your uncle say?”
“You worry more than a nursemaid. I am in disguise.” Despite the warm weather, I wear a cloak with a simple tunic beneath it; Vita, my slave, has my silk tunic and stola. I would not wear such fine garments in the physician’s employ. I ask which way to go. He knows better than to suggest he lead, but instead directs me in a loud whisper. None will question my walking ahead of him, for none would presume I am under his tutelage. Women cannot be doctors. Soothsayers and poisoners and midwives, but not doctors.
The street narrows at the brothel door. The door is painted red. Not blood red like a soldier’s cape, but red. I am surprised it is not green, the color worn by prostitutes to mark their trade, though many of the women lingering outside the door are draped in jade, juniper, and olive veils. I am grateful for the distraction, for the brothel, for men who brawl. My soldier has no need to walk these streets, through that door, into the arms of a prostitute, so these roads are not covered in his invisible sandal-prints. I am free from the ache of his absence, for now. I know when I cross that threshold, my focus must be centered on the physician and his patient.
Never have I set foot in a brothel. The inside reflects my imagination: Tables to one side where men drink and pet the women they will buy later or have bought for later, curtained or beaded doorways on the other side that lead to private rooms where even now men grunt and women cry out, and in the center a table where the madam tallies her profits. The place smells of sweat and the oils the ladies daub on their skin to hide the odor of so many bodies. The only difference from my imagination is the writhing, bloodied man on that table. All instruments of calculation are stacked on the floor in the corner: an abacus, a pile of wax tablets, a cup with a few styluses sticking out like a sad and sparse bouquet of flowers.
The broken-armed man is young, younger than my soldier, but old enough to be a man. He looks the same age my brother was when he died: eighteen summers. I did not see my brother die, but I imagined him, in his armor, sickness spewing from his mouth, his plumed helmet shed, his limbs tangled in sweat-soaked bed linens and bile. I have not sought his spirit under the full moon, for fear his visage would mirror my imagination. The man in the brothel writhes and moans. He cradles his arm to his chest. Blood blooms across his toga.
The physician rounds the table and removes from his case a short stick, a few rolls of bandages, a few rags, and some longer sticks. He calls for water. An older woman with a wig of green and blue curls—who I think must be the madam—fetches a bowl. The physician works fast to set the bone. He presses the short piece of wood between the man’s remaining teeth. An ache drops from my neck to my tailbone at the sound of the arm setting in place. I own that pain now, in my own bones. I staunch the flow of blood with a clean rag. The physician sews and tells me to apply the poultice. I do so. The man’s skin is slick and crimson. The physician fashions a splint for the arm—two pieces of wood I hold on either side while he wraps bandage after bandage around the arm. The physician sweats. Beads of perspiration hide in the cracks and crevices of his wizened face. My own perspiration slips down my spine. The broken man’s eyes flutter; he loses consciousness. The short stick is loose between his jaws, which rest slackened. I ask the physician if he has perished, though I do not sense his spirit free from his body. The physician points to the rise and fall of the man’s chest.
While the physician and I clean our hands and wrists of the man’s blood, the madam first tries to negotiate a lower rate by giving the physician an hour with her finest girl or boy. He declines; she pays the physician with a delicate jingle of coin from hand to hand and a grumble about how much this cost her.Â
“Perhaps you might search him for money,” the physician says with a nod toward his patient. “Or you could take your case to the courts.” The physician bustles me out of the brothel, as though the longer I remain within its walls, the more likely he is to be found and punished by my family.
I help the physician carry his supplies back from the brothel. He seems tired, perhaps from setting the bone, perhaps from escorting me to and from a place we both know I should never have set foot.Â
He waves me down the street. “Go, go, Domina. If you were seen here…”Â
We return to his stall. Vita meets me there and I slip behind the curtained area to don my finer attire. Â
Cassius could not take away all my secrets.Â
Before returning to my litter, still a few streets away, we pause. I never allow my litter bearers to follow through the forum where they might spy me with the physician. The litter would be in the way, full as the narrow streets are with people. Vita brushes me with bunches of lavender to chase away the smell of the poor and wretched of Rome. The seeds tickle my skin. I cannot help but breathe into the depths of my chest when the aroma of the lavender floats up to my nose. Vita arranges my veil. She presses into my hand a pouch of frankincense to mimic the scents of altars.
We leave behind the graffitied walls and trace a winding path through the forum. When we arrive home, my uncle is beating one of his slaves. The screams are muffled. We do not wonder what the slave did; it is likely he did nothing wrong. My uncle’s blood runs hot, he often says. His slave, a eunuch called Aristos with a shaved head marked with a tattoo of my uncle’s name, lies in the fetal position. His back is bloodied. My uncle has been at it with the whip for some time. Vita is safe. She is mine and mine alone, and I will not see her skin mottled with bruises or ridged with scars.
We skirt the courtyard, avert our eyes. One lash snaps harder than the last over Aristos’s back. My uncle will not tire soon, even though the side of his paunchy face is drenched in sweat. I pull my veil over my mouth and walk faster. My father, who died of the same sickness as my brother, would never have stood for such useless violence. I have not called his spirit to stay his brother’s hand, because such intervention would only invite more violence from my uncle.Â
The farther we get from the beating, the easier I breathe, at least until my chest tightens with unreleased sobs. My rooms are far enough away from the courtyard that I can be free from the slave’s screams, my uncle’s grunts, and the crack of his whip. My rooms are the quietest in the villa. But in this quiet, there is no distraction from the pain of Cassius leaving for Britannia. I release tears, and with those rivers of agony, I release him. A daughter of a good, noble family could never marry a plebeian soldier. Curled with my knees to my chest, with Vita rubbing my back and trying to soothe me with shushes one might offer an infant, I give Cassius up. No more longing for a life with a man I have no right to love. No more clandestine visits to the lower city, to the physician, either. I shall be a good daughter. I shall be a good patrician. I shall be dutiful.
