I nodded. "You say that I came only to ask after Cassandra, not you and Milo, but that's not entirely true. Would you take it amiss if I asked you a personal question?"

"Ask and find out."

"Why are you still married to Milo? You didn't go with him to Massilia; you stayed here, with no prospect of his ever returning to you. Why not divorce him so that you might remarry?"

She snorted, and for a moment I thought I had offended her. But her exasperation was with her fate, not with me. Like many people burdened with regrets, she was not averse to voicing her bitterness to a relative stranger. "One divorce has pretty much become the standard these days, hasn't it? Among the fashionable set, I mean. But two divorces-well, that begins to look a bit careless, don't you think? My first husband divorced me as a sort of punishment for cuckolding him. That wasn't a problem with Milo. Milo rather liked being cuckolded, I think. It gave him an excuse to vent his rage. It… stimulated him. He was never such a tiger in bed as he was right after catching me with another man. So strong. So… violent. I'm afraid I rather developed a taste for that sort of thing."

She readjusted her sling, and hissed. "But I digress. I stayed married to Milo because it was the respectable thing to do. Believe it or not, that still matters to me. I am Sulla's daughter. I won't have people saying I abandoned my husband simply because he ran into a bit of trouble."

A murder conviction and lifelong exile hardly seemed to me to be a "bit of trouble," but my standards differed from those of Fausta in many matters. "Or could it be," I said, "that in the long run you had faith in Milo? That you could foresee a time when he might return to Rome in triumph, beheading his enemies as your father beheaded his, making himself the first man in Rome and yourself the first among women?" Such a thing might actually come to pass, I realized with a chill. Whether Caesar or Pompey eventually returned, in the meantime Milo and Caelius might pull off their mad scheme and make themselves masters of Rome. Such a thing would never happen without the spilling of much blood.

She made a derisive sound deep in her throat. "Don't compare Milo to my father! He knew how to make this town come to heel, instead of letting the she-wolf bite him in the ass. We shall never see his like again-not in Caesar, not in Pompey, certainly not in Milo. The best I can hope for"-she hesitated, but a sudden burst of emotion was too much for her to contain-"the best I can hope for is to become Milo's widow. People shall pity me then. And respect me! They shall say, 'Poor Fausta! She suffered greatly from her second marriage. But she stood by that fool to the very end, didn't she? She proved her mettle. She was truly Sulla's daughter!' "

I considered this for a long moment, wishing I could see her face more clearly. But the light from outside was growing stronger as the morning drew on, casting her features even deeper into shadow. "I don't quite understand," I confessed.

"I wouldn't expect you to. You're not one of those who count-not one of us."

"Not a noble, you mean?"

She shook her head. "Not a woman!" She stood, indicating that the interview was at an end.

In the hallway, she drew back into a shadowy corner. Again I noticed her slight limp. Birria appeared, to show us out. He curled his lip and from under his bristling brow gave her a look that seemed to border on madness, until I realized it was lasciviousness I saw in his eyes. I looked at Fausta. Despite the shadows, I saw what she had been deliberately concealing by sitting against the light-a bruised, black crescent beneath one of her eyes.

I looked back at Birria and matched his glare with my own. "Fausta," I said, "do you need our help?"

"What do you mean?"

"You limp. Your arm is in a sling."

She shrugged. "It's nothing, really. Certainly nothing to concern you. A small accident. I'm a bit clumsy sometimes."

"I find that hard to believe of Sulla's daughter."

"What you believe is of no consequence, Finder. Go now. And, Birria, after you've shown these two out… come straight back to me."

He gave her a snarling grin, but it was the crooked smile she flashed back at him that made my blood run cold. I turned and walked quickly to the front door, not waiting for Birria to lead the way. In the foyer I paused for a moment to gaze at the marble bust of Sulla and to wonder at the curious events it must have witnessed in that house.

XIII

The sixth time I saw Cassandra-and the seventh and eighth and ninth and all the other times before her death-are jumbled in my mind. Even the exact number of times eludes me. My memories of those meetings blur together, as the heated flesh of two lovers becomes blurred in the act of love, so that the lover cannot tell where his own body ends and that of the beloved begins.

After the first time we made love, we arranged to meet again in her room in the Subura, at a specific time, on a specific day. Thus our pattern was set. These arrangements were determined by Cassandra, partly, I think, to coincide with her mornings at the public baths, for I always found her fresh and clean, but also, I assumed, to make sure that Rupa would not be there when I came. Was he her lover? Her slave? A relative? I didn't know. She never told me. I never asked.

What did we talk about in the spells between lovemaking? Nothing remotely to do with our complicated circumstances; nothing that might impinge upon the special world the two of us created in that room. I think I did speak sometimes of Diana and Davus, and Hieronymus, and Androcles and Mopsus, especially if one of them had just done something to frustrate me or to make me laugh. And I told her about Meto and the heartbreak I felt at losing him. But I never spoke of Bethesda or Bethesda's illness. And Cassandra never spoke of Rupa or about her visits to the houses of the highborn and well-to-do women of Rome, nor did she tell me where she came from.

I didn't care; I didn't want her history, and I had no thought of the future. I wanted from her the thing that she gave me in that room, the joining of two bodies that filled the present moment to miraculous perfection. I expected nothing else from her. She seemed to expect nothing else from me.

She stirred in me sensations of youth almost forgotten. In flashes I imagined myself a young wanderer in Alexandria again. I was the young man I once had been, in love with the power of his own body; in love for the first time with the body of another; in awe of the extraordinary pleasures those two bodies could share and naive enough to think that no one else on earth had ever experienced sensations so exquisite. In Cassandra's room, time and space lost all meaning. Together we conjured a kind of sorcery.

What did Cassandra see in me? Long ago I had accepted that the attractions of women would always be a puzzle to me; best to accept the inexplicable without question when it worked in my favor. Still, looking at my face one day in a mirror of polished silver-the last time I looked in that mirror, for soon after I sold it to get a few sesterces to feed the household-I saw a gray bearded man whose face was lined with worries, and I wondered what Cassandra could find attractive in that weathered countenance. I gazed for a long time in that mirror. I squinted, I blurred my eyes, I looked sidelong, but I couldn't catch even a fleeting glimpse of the man I became when I was with her.

There was some advantage in appearing so unlikely a lover. No one in my household suspected. When I reappeared after being gone for hours at a time, Diana, if she noticed, might chide me for going out without Davus to protect me. Hieronymus might ask what news I brought from the chin-waggers in the Forum. Bethesda, calling from her bed, might ask why I had failed to bring her the latest impossible-to-find item she had decided might cure her. They were scolding, or curious, or complaining, but not suspicious.