Arria lunged behind the door just as the guard opened it, pressing herself into the corner as an entourage of women swept into the barracks on a perfumed breeze. They were followed by a cluster of guards, the ringmaster among them, along with Master Brutus himself, whom Arria recognised by his gaudy, gold-trimmed toga.
‘Gladiators,’ Brutus said, ‘Governor Secundus sends his gratitude for your performance tonight.’ He gestured to the women with a bejewelled hand. ‘You have already received your allotted wine and here are your promised women. You will be rewarded similarly for a performance of equal merit at the Festival of Artemis this spring.’
One of the guards began to unlock the Beast’s cell, and Brutus gestured to a blue-eyed woman with a nest of yellow hair atop her head. ‘Here she is, Beast. Long blonde hair, blue eyes. Just as you requested.’
‘Whence does she hail?’ asked the Beast.
Brutus nudged the woman. ‘You heard him. Where do you come from?’
‘Germania.’
The Beast gave a nod and the guard let her into his cell.
‘And the second woman?’ Brutus asked the Beast.
‘Do not want a second.’
‘You do not want a second woman?’ Brutus laughed. ‘Then you are a fool.’
Arria watched the chosen woman float into the Beast’s cell. She wore a flowing white-linen tunic and matching long shawl which she let fall to the floor just as the gate clanked shut. She must have been from far in the north, thought Arria, for her eyes were a startling blue and her hair was as yellow as wheat. She was beautiful.
But the Beast did not even look at her. He reached for a flagon of wine and guzzled it, then offered it to the woman without meeting her gaze.
She accepted it eagerly, taking a long draught herself.
If Arria was going to run, it had to be now, while the entourage of guards and women made its way deeper into the barracks. Unfortunately, she could not bring her legs to move.
She could only watch in quiet awe as the yellow-haired woman removed her tunic, revealing a landscape of dips and curves. She was the kind of woman Arria would never be—fleshy and abundant. Lovely as a bowl of fruit.
Arria was studying the woman so closely that she did not notice the guards turning back towards the door. ‘They are yours for two hours,’ announced Brutus.
Arria cowered in the shadows as Brutus and the guards exited and the door to the barracks closed with a slam.
And that was that. She had missed her chance to escape. Now she would have to wait two hours and pray that she could keep herself concealed as the men and women...as they...
From somewhere further down the hall came a long, ecstatic moan.
Oh, gods.
The Beast’s cell was only steps away from where Arria squatted. Arria could see his muscular figure sitting at the end of his raised bed. His head was stooped. He was studying the floor, though the German woman stood only a breath away from him, her body exposed, her tunic in a pool at her feet. ‘You are handsome, Gladiator,’ she told him.
‘Do not call me Gladiator.’
‘Beast?’
He shook his head.
‘What shall I call you, then?’
The Beast paused, looked up. ‘Call me Husband.’
Call him Husband? What a strange request. Arria closed her eyes. She should not be watching this. Whatever this was. A ritual of some kind? A fantasy? Arria’s sense of propriety was duelling mightily with her curiosity and she sensed her curiosity quickly gaining ground.
Why should she not watch? It had been a night of firsts, after all: her first pit fight, her first discussion with a gladiator and now, it seemed, her first real lesson in the act of love. She might as well watch, for this first lesson was also likely to be her last. Propriety be damned. She opened her eyes.
‘It is well, ah, Husband,’ the woman said. She reached up to her golden bun and pulled out a comb. Her hair tumbled on to her shoulders in a curtain of yellow silk. She shook it hard and the strands danced in the torchlight like shiny ribbons.
The Beast stared up at her, his head cocked in contemplation. ‘I shall not kiss your lips, understood?’
The woman shrugged her assent.
‘May I have the comb?’ he asked.
She placed the comb in his palm. He reached beneath his bed to produce a small brazier pan full of coals. He moistened a single tine of the comb with the tip of his tongue, then dipped the small instrument into the black residue of the pan.
‘May I adorn your face?’ he asked.
The woman nodded. He stood and touched the blackened tine to her chin, gently dabbing the coal stain into a mark of Venus. He dipped the comb into the coals once more and thickened the mark, then leaned backwards to behold his work. ‘Perfect,’ he said.
He returned to sitting and reached again for the jug of wine. He took a long draught, never taking his eyes off the woman’s face. ‘Rhiannon,’ he whispered. He might have been a sculptor naming his bust—his lusty, lifelike bust that seemed to have been polished by the very hands of Venus.
‘Will you not make love to me, Husband?’ she asked in soft, melting Latin.
The Beast sighed, then bowed his bald head so that it came to rest against her smooth white belly. ‘Ah, Rhiannon,’ he said. ‘Wife.’ He reached to the woman’s hips and pulled her closer, burying his face in the creamy white flesh of her stomach.
He sat there for a long while, his head resting against her stomach, as if she were some familiar, domestic goddess and he had come to offer his daily prayers. And then he did begin to pray, or so it seemed, for a torrent of words sprang from his lips. They were strange, tangled words—words so full of breathy desire that they might as well have been kisses themselves.
Arria had no idea what language he spoke, but she could feel what he was saying in her very bones. He was speaking of love and lust, of sweetness and yearning, of things that Arria had never known. They were words so lovely, they might have been birds, or tiny fishes swimming beneath some invisible wave of emotion that Arria could sense was about to crash.
And then it did. He rose to his feet to face the naked woman, speared his fingers through her hair, and lavished her neck with the hungriest, most passionate kiss Arria had ever witnessed.
His mouth rioted down the long column, biting and tasting and sucking in a torrent of urgency and lust. He gripped the woman by the waist and pulled her against him, and Arria had to brace her shoulder against the low wall to keep her own legs from buckling beneath her.
And then, just when she thought the wave had dissipated, just when the bruising neck kisses had subsided into soft, tender caresses, he bent to take one of the woman’s breasts into his mouth.
Blessed, sweet Minerva.
A strange heat invaded Arria’s bones—pleasurable, radiant, alarming. He released the woman’s nipple and followed a winding path down her belly, festooning it with small kisses, until he was sitting once again on the bed before her and his lips came to a halt at the soft curly mass atop her Venus mound.
Was he going to...? Arria covered her eyes, then peeked between her fingers. Yes, he was going to. Arria watched in fascination as his tongue slipped into the woman’s sacred opening.
‘Oh,’ the woman sighed and Arria felt another disconcerting wave of heat. The woman arched her back, gripping the Beast’s naked skull as he began to move his mouth around her folds, kissing and sucking and...licking. It was the most forbidden thing Arria had ever seen in all her life. The woman began to whimper and Arria noticed her own breaths growing short.
What could it feel like to be kissed in such a way? In such a place? She strained to imagine it and found herself growing warmer still. She watched his hands slide slowly from the woman’s hips to her backside, which he squeezed and caressed as he continued to pleasure her with his tongue.
Arria could not look away. She could not close her ears, even as the woman’s moans transformed from soft sighs into low, rhythmic groans of the sort that Arria occasionally heard outside the baths. The woman’s arms stiffened. Her body shuddered. Her moans crescendoed as her whole body convulsed and Arria felt a shiver ripple across her own skin.
Slowly, the woman’s breaths subsided. She was still whimpering when he pressed his head against her stomach once more and hugged her close. He was breathing her in—deep, gulping breaths whose exhales sounded like sighs.
If the woman had been a goddess, he might have been her truest acolyte. But Arria knew she was even more than that to him. She was his beloved wife.
The cruel, hardened gladiator had disappeared. The monster that had taken life with cold efficiency had retreated to some faraway arena and in his place was a man—a gentle, loving man who seemed to overflow with tenderness.
At last he raised his head and stared up at the woman. ‘Wife,’ he said. In a single motion, he stood and guided her on to the bed and Arria noticed an alarming protrusion inside his loincloth. He closed his eyes and began to speak again: husky, lilting words that made Arria’s heart beat faster still.
What was he saying to the woman? What lavish words of passion were trilling off his well-used tongue? He stretched out on to the bed beside her and placed a series of small kisses down her arm. Leaning closer, he continued to whisper—a never-ending stream of small words strung together like kites.
They were words of love—Arria was sure of it. The kinds of words she imagined passing between a husband and a wife. The kinds of words, Arria realised, that she was certain never to hear.
Slowly, he arched over the woman, leaning on his arms as he kicked off his kilt and deftly untied his own loincloth. His taut, muscled form made a kind of arch above the woman’s prone body, dwarfing her in size and strength. Arria tried to imagine what it would feel like to lie beneath such a titan and an unfamiliar muscle deep inside her flexed with yearning.
His loincloth dropped to the floor. Arria stared, then looked away. She looked again, blinked. She told herself to breathe. It was nothing that she had not seen before, after all. Practically every corner of Ephesus was etched with some depiction of male desire or another. The images were common as clay: they were painted on walls and chiselled above doors, not to mention their prominence in statues and mosaics. Such figures even functioned as signposts, helpfully pointing the way to bars and brothels.
Why was it, then, that she could not take her eyes off his? Perhaps it was because she had never seen one in the flesh. She had always gone early to the baths, long before the patrician matrons arrived with their male slaves. And she had never even dreamed of lingering into the ‘trysting hour,’ or so was called the middle of the day when the women’s and men’s hours overlapped.
Now she wished she had lingered at the baths, if only to observe the variety of male forms, for she was sure she had nothing by which to compare him. Were the images lying, then? Did they universally under-represent the immensity of a man’s desire in its fully engorged state?
A small quake rumbled through her. She should not be watching them. It was indecent. Surely she was incurring the wrath of one god or another. But how could she not watch as he slowly settled his desire between the woman’s thighs?
Arria’s throat felt dry.
He took the lobe of the woman’s ear in his lips and began to suck. Suddenly, the woman gasped and Arria saw her hips rock upwards. The Beast was pushing himself into her. They had joined.
Arria gulped, looked away. She felt herself flush with the shame of a spy. Or perhaps it was another kind of shame pumping so much heat into her cheeks.
She sat back against the wall and closed her eyes. Other sounds of lovemaking filled the stony barracks. They made a strange, stirring kind of music that seemed to collapse time. When the chorus of gasps and moans began to diminish, Arria dared to glance at the two lovers once again.
The Beast was posed on his side, his stony expression transformed into a wistful smile. He appeared to be playing with the woman’s hair. ‘Fy nghariad,’ he said, and the words were so sweet and mysterious that Arria could do nothing but sigh.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked suddenly. Arria held her breath as she watched his eyes search across the darkness.
‘I heard nothing,’ said the woman. ‘Probably a mouse.’
The woman was right, in a sense. Arria was a kind of mouse. A large, skinny, lonesome mouse who lingered in the shadows relishing her crumbs.
She had been relishing crumbs all her life, in truth. The first crumb had come when she was fourteen—the usual age of marriage for a Roman woman. One evening, her father had invited a fellow lictor to dine with them—a handsome, ambitious young man named Marcus. When Marcus pulled her into an alcove after the meal, her heart had begun to pound. He was so very handsome and he wore his earnest goodness like a fine mantle. She remembered thinking that he would make a splendid husband. ‘Arria, I want to ask you...’ he had begun saying, then hesitated. ‘I want to tell you that I wish to pursue marriage...’ Another hesitation.
Remembering that moment still made her insides dance, then turn to stone. ‘I wish to pursue marriage...’ he repeated, ‘with your friend Octavia. Would you counsel me, Arria? You are so amenable. How is it that I may win her affection?’
After that night, Arria had retreated into her weaving and the Greek and Latin lessons that her family had still been able to afford. ‘There is time,’ her mother assured her. ‘But you must go out more. Join your friends at the festivals. Come with me to the market. And hold your head high when you walk. A towering lion will never notice a cowering mouse.’
But Arria did not want a towering lion; she wanted a soft, baying sheep: a man who was gentle and kind—someone who would respect her tender heart.
The second crumb came a full year later. By then her youngest brother had returned from the army without a leg and her eldest brother not at all. Overcome with grief, Arria’s father had lost his job and begun to gamble away Arria’s dowry.
One day in the marketplace, a greying man spotted Arria puzzling over a tower of onions. ‘They may appear wilted and old,’ he chirped, ‘but just beneath the skin they are young again.’ Arria had been charmed and when he invited her family to break bread in his home, they went eagerly.
But the man’s wealth had been modest and when he learned of the diminished size of Arria’s dowry, his wrinkled grin became a wrinkled frown.
A year later, after her father lost the remaining half of her dowry to a fellow gambler called Verrucosus, the man had offered to return his winnings for a single night with Arria.
‘She is a lovely woman, your daughter,’ Arria had overheard Verrucosus tell her father. ‘So young and unsullied.’
It was her father’s endless begging that finally convinced Arria to accept the offer. ‘You can redeem me, Daughter, and thus save yourself.’
She remembered the faint smell of urine when she arrived at Verrucosus’s room and the flies buzzing over the thin reed mat that was to serve as the bed where she would lose her maidenhood.
Verrucosus emerged from a corner reeking of pomegranate wine, his face decorated with warts. When he moved to embrace her with his sticky hands, she whirled out of his grasp and out the door.
As it happened, Verrucosus was the kind of man who embellished his anger with lies. ‘Oh, I had her,’ he bragged all around the city. ‘And I can tell you that she is as cold and hard as a slab of marble.’
The gossip spread with the speed of arrows. ‘He does not speak truth,’ Arria assured her friends, but she could see that they did not wish to associate with a woman whose family had been brought so very low.
‘Your beauty alone will attract a husband,’ her mother continued to assure her. ‘And your skills and education are beyond what would be expected from...’
‘From a pauper?’ Arria asked.
She was nineteen by that time. Most of her friends had already borne their first children. She tried to believe her mother’s words. She was beautiful and worthy and as long as she believed it, the world would, too.
But she did not believe it. She was poor and without a dowry, and rumoured to be impure. How could she hold her head above so much shame and disgrace? How could she be desired by any man?
Thus she fashioned a third crumb for herself. She told herself she was, in fact, fortunate that no man wanted her. Indeed, she was blessed to be free of a husband. Men were careless and inconstant, after all—prone to gambling and drink. Her father and brother were burden enough. She could not even imagine what she would do with a husband.
She fed herself this crumb in moments of yearning—moments such as this one, as she observed the intertwined limbs of the Beast and the woman he had pretended to be his wife. No pleasure of the flesh could be worth the burden of matrimony, though to be fair this particular couple was not married at all. And they had shared something beautiful.
In that instant, Arria realised that she was tired of crumbs. She wanted the whole pie and now it was too late. Somewhere in the course of her life, she had managed to miss one of its greatest pleasures. The opportunity for love and passion had passed her by.
And now she would be invisible for the rest of her life.