Chapter XXII: The Lady of the House
In the populous list of ills women must endure, shame comes written in the darkest ink.
Lucia Vita Servia is a petite sort with wide hips and an ample bosom. Her large eyes, far too blue for Roman tastes, stem from ages-old Gallic blood, the kind tainting many a provincial household in the Alps.
Welletrix, a reedy Helvetian sent home by her brother some years past, stands at the threshold of her room holding a steaming mug.
“May I come in?” he asks, and when she nods, he enters and places the mulled cider beside her. “Niko thought you might need something to help you sleep,”
“Does he have anything to turn back time?” she asks.
Welle’s lips spread, displaying a rare smile reserved only for those he likes. His stern gray attention drifts to the side tables and chairs near the door before climbing the wardrobe, a wooden behemoth sitting in the room’s center.
The gleaming monster, built by her great-grandfather, boasts sedate marquetry on its doors, yet a gaudy silver medallion around its center glass knob. Within it are her weekly stola, five for every workday, dozens of colorful palla, and a collection of ornate fibulae, gilded combs, and various bits of modest jewelry.
“I don’t think the boys will be able to move this thing,” he says.
Vita laughs at his referring to the housemen as boys. Upon his arrival, the pre-teen pair looked like children, but after four years under his dictatorial command, stocky Caeso now boasts a face full of stubble, while lean Optus stands taller than most.
“You think my brother will catch them moving my things?”
Welle considers the question.
“Not today, he’s overseeing tonight’s procession,”
She pushes the balls of her hands into her eyes.
“Has he asked for me?”
“Multiple times.” His face softens. “But you’ve done enough,”
“I’ve done nothing,” she pouts. “It was you who had her washed, dressed, and arranged for the Vestals,”
“It was the least I could do,” he says.
“At least she had the courtesy to request a quick procession,” says Vita, following his gaze to her painted toes.
“You didn’t?” he accuses as she tucks them under her stola. “Lady Vita, holding on to anything of hers will stoke your brother’s anger,”
“How was I to know he would return?” she says.
Welle shakes his head. “I suppose things could be worse,”
“Yes,” she agrees. “My father could’ve returned upright rather than in an urn,”
He paces by the loft staircase and runs a discerning finger over one of its steps. He scowls at the dust without complaint, yet his furrowing brow concerns her. “Let’s not speak of your father,” he says. “If the past leaves our feet unsoiled, then new shoes are in order,”
Vita adores his turn of phrases. No wonder Welle got on so well with Planus Caesar, her brother’s oldest friend whose entertaining observations remain lauded throughout the lakes.
“Everything I’ve built here,” she says, on thoughts of her brother, “will vanish the moment Skipio enters the offices in Comum,”
“Come spring,” says Welle, leaning against the wardrobe. “I don’t see how Lord Skipio can oversee the public works and tend to the business,”
“My brother is formidable,” she tells him. “Caesar sent him home for a reason,”
Welle approaches, his brow still bent.
“Then you must fight for your place,”
“Roman law holds no place for me,”
“Rome no longer governs these mountains,”
“If my brother and his peers are back, that’s likely to change,”
Welle lowers his voice. “Even if Comum becomes a Roman colony again, you still have that writ in your arsenal-”
“-Don’t speak of that,” she snaps.
He retreats and then bows. “Forgive me, I overstep,”
“No, I’m sorry.” Vita reaches for him. “I will carry my shame to the grave or to the day my brother tries marrying me off to one of his war buddies,”
Her friendly overture produces no new words from him.
“Oh please, Welletrix, speak freely with me,” she begs. “I couldn’t bear it if you went back to never speaking your thoughts,”
Welle’s first few months under their roof found him silent until her infamous rebellion. When the chasm between her and mother spread like a vulture’s wings on the wind, the house staff got lazy—except for Niko.
Given her brother’s old room next door, the blond Helvetian cut his hair to his shoulders and took control of the household as if born to it.
“For all of your brother’s brutality,” he finally obliges. “His sympathy for the lesser station of women is steadfast,”
Vita stares at him.
“Was my brother that cruel in war?”
“Lord Skipio was a vicious soldier,” he replies. “Yet out of uniform, he’s a merciful man,”
“Out of uniform?” She lifts the warm mug and savors its heady tang. “You clearly haven’t read Virgil Pontius’ diaries,”
“I’ve read every installment, thank you,” he says grimly.
Vita laughs. “You’re such a prude, Welle,”
“All sex does is make you dirty,” he says. “In my experience, it takes longer to clean up than it does for a lover to make a mess of you,”
It is her last night in this room, and she cannot sleep.
Sweat builds beneath her breasts as worry governs with feverish abandon. She kicks her covers away and pulls off her nightdress. Cool air soothes her skin but does little to ebb the anxiety.
Vita pads to the dying lampstand by the stairs, wool socks bunching at her ankles. Weak light dances within its wick hole, where a fibrous nubbin burns. Taking the lamp by its horse-head handle, she upsets what little oil remains inside, dousing the tiny flame.
“Vulcan’s cock,” she hisses.
She descends the narrow steps to her lower chambers with the lamp in one hand and the wall against the other. Muscle memory guides her first to a hanging robe. She slides open the oak door until the metal wheel within its overhead track chirps—she then pushes it aside in slow increments.
The brazier in their inner yard casts an orange glow over the hall’s woodsy frescos. It’s strangely quiet without the nightbirds, most gone with the changing leaves. She laments that their gushing fountain will also go silent when the aperture over it gets covered for winter.
Beside a column in the peristyle sits a tall pot of lavender-scented oil bought in Genua by Skipio. She prefers their usual lilac beeswax, in short supply with the colder months upon them. A peculiar sound beckons from the kitchen, its shadowy entrance impervious to the firelight.
Metal strikes the floor, forcing her back a step.
She checks the clock, two jars hanging one over the other by golden chains. The blue ceramic jar on top has an etching of twelve golden maidens holding hands around its belly. In it is twelve hours of water, put there at sunset by Niko, who will refill it at dawn. Water bleeds from a hole in its side, one drop for every second, and fills the jar beneath, its glass marked with lines.
It’s the eighth hour since sunset, and Niko clears out of the kitchen by the third hour, meaning Nerio and Pax, their whorish house cats, are clearly at their nightly games. She grumbles moving forward, hoping to intercede before they topple another pot.
The empty kitchen feels warm, though the oven slumbers. A fish jumps in the floor pool near the far porch, one of Niko’s tasty catches. Behind her, a manly growl comes with the sound of an open slap.
She enters the stores, where the air reeks of milled grain and hanging herbs. A step down is the sunken room with racks of wine barrels, shelves of aging cheese, and standing jugs of olive oil set against the stone walls.
Across its earthen floor, dull light reveals a hole minus its wooden cover, there to keep the cats from getting at the larder’s hanging meats and steeping cheese. Dugout steps lead down, where flickering light reveals the felines sitting like bread loaves on the bottom stair, their ears up and eyes watching.
Chains rattle. Skin strikes skin, this time hard enough to elicit a grunt.
Skipio’s bestial laughter follows the druid’s feral giggle.
Metal drags over stone before her brother yelps in pain. A fist strikes, jangling chains as shadows hop fiercely on the steps.
Vita advances until a familiar rhythm of slapping bodies comes on a song of grunts and short breaths. She bends over and peers into the open space, her eyes drawn first to a standing torch near the concrete pad.
In the light stands Skipio, his taut globes bouncing as he thrusts.
“How’s this marriage working for you now, druid?” he whispers in Greek.
The skinny Gaul hangs by his wrists with his filthy feet curling around the back of her brother’s knees. He kicks his black curly head back, boxing her brother’s nose.
Skipio howls, yanking the man down with enough force to tear the chain manacles from the ceiling. On the floor, he wraps his arm around the narrow man’s neck, holding him steady as he rams harder into his backside.
Vita hurries back to the kitchen, her breath stolen. She struggles to inhale while her heart drums steadily. Memories of her father consume her as late autumn grass tugs at her socks.
The fountain’s frigid shower douses her head as she crosses through its watery curtain. No one will find her here—not even him…
“Vita?” A figure appears beyond the water. “What are you doing under there?” Her brother’s voice demands. “There’s no thunder raging outside, but here you are, hiding from it like you did when we were kids,”
She hugs her knees and prays for Diana to whisk her away to the moon—but like so many times beneath Vitus, the goddess ignores her pleas.
“You’re a woman now,” her brother scolds. “Get out of there and stop acting like a child,”
Rage drives her from the water, and he stares up at her silently, his nightly robe inside out and untied. She gazes down from the fountain’s ledge and mourns the stick-figure boy she knew as a girl. A rutting beast stands before her now, a burly lout whose smooth head shines like his father’s sins.
Vita brings a hand across his face, stinging her fingers.
Before he can utter another word, she flees to her room, sliding the door shut and latching it. Scrambling up the stairs, she crawls to the piss bowl to loudly empty her stomach.
Her brother breaks his fast in the second hour past dawn.
Between bites of pancetta-topped bread, he attempts engagement with a fool’s audacity, driving Vita to the kitchen where Niko, possessing the only chair among his staff, quickly offers it up with a bowl of honey and curds.
The kitchen mavens, Hosta and Vibia, trade knowing glances while standing over their puls, conjuring the cause of Vita’s vexation. Caeso and Optio scarf down their buckwheat cakes until Welle arrives and delivers a dual thump to their heads.
“Get the yard cleared of those incense sticks from last night,” he orders.
The men scarf up the last few flat cakes before clearing out as Welle plucks a puffy rye wheel from the basket and, to Niko’s dismay, slathers it with cow’s milk butter. His attention finds Vita before moving to the women.
“The midday tubers aren’t getting peeled with you two bitch’s mulling about minding everyone’s business but your own,” he scolds, driving them away.
*
Mother’s apartment proves too spacious for her meager furnishings.
Green mountains and grassy hills cover the walls from floor to ceiling, and while she dislikes the countryside murals, she adores the snowy floor tiles and the center mosaic of a flowering tree in a Grecian red border.
Remnants of Mother linger, most notably her prayer altar, a marble wall niche beside the balcony. Walnut-shell votives clutter its shelf, beeswax still in their half-shells. They surround a stone carving of Fortuna, with a baby boy and girl nursing at her breasts.
Her thin, narrow mattress drapes pitifully upon her mother’s ornate double bed frame. Inadequacy chases her to the desk chair, where she unrolls a sheet of vellum and takes up a quill.
Before its tip marks paper, Skipio barges in with his lips tight.
“How dare you come in here—”
“—How dare you move in here,” he counters. “Her ashes are still warm,”
Vita tempers herself. “I’m sorry your mother is dead—”
“—Our mother!” He snatches the feather from her grasp. “You didn’t even come to the procession last night,”
“You’re not a little boy anymore,” she rises and walks to him. “You cannot just barge into a woman’s space like a willful tot,”
Green eyes narrow as the feather-pen points.
“You’ve become a nasty and vile woman, Vita Servia,”
“And you’re a nasty and vile rapist, Skipio Servius.” She snatches back her pen and returns to her seat. “Close my door as you leave,”
After a moment, he says, “It’s not rape if he’s willing,”
“Whatever you say, Romulus—”
“—It’s not like that,”
“Isn’t it?” she faces him. “He dragged a poor Sabine woman from her homeland, and when she had no other alternative but to acquiesce, he called it a marriage.”
Skipio folds his arms.
“There are two sides to every coin, Vita,”
“Forgive me if both sides come up Ravishment or Roman,”
“What in Tartarus are we even talking about?”
“I don’t know, now get your boorish ass out of my room.”
His mouth falls open as she turns back to her blank vellum.
Suddenly, a shadow darkens her desktop.
“You’re right, Vita.” Remorse clouds his eyes. “I’m an unbridled lout, and for that, I’m sorry.”
She sets down her pen.
“Admitting such is the first step to stopping,”
Skipio kneels and wraps his fingers around the armrest of her chair.
His manly visage turns boyish.
“I don’t think I’ll ever change, Vita.”
Such adorableness doesn’t sway her.
“Then kiss me and go,”
“Fine,” he nods. “But first, help me understand why you’re acting this way,”
“No,” she declares. “I can’t and won’t,”
“We’re not strangers,” he pleads, bewildered. “I know it’s been a few years,”
“Fifteen years,” Vita says to his face. “You were gone a decade before Vitus dragged you off to fight in Caesar’s wars. We’ve been apart for as long you’ve been alive, and I barely recognize the man kneeling before me,”
Skipio absorbs her words near moment before speaking.
“We’re standing where the lazy eight of infinity crosses itself.” He gently takes her chin and gently turns her. “The loop we’ve traveled apart made us strangers, so let’s stay together in the loop ahead,”
“Together until you leave again,” she sighs.
“I’m home to stay.” He kisses her arm. “You’re all I have left, Vita,”
“I want us to be a family,” she says, “but I’ll not abide questions about my distance from mother.”
“As much as that pains me to hear,” says Skipio, standing. “I’ll honor your edict,”
“Thank you,” she says, as he walks to the door.
“Come to the study with me?” he asks. “I wish to review our finances,”
Vita swallows—this is the moment she’s been dreading.
“I’ve got scrolls for you to review,” she forces a smile. “Let me change, and I’ll have Niko bring us some wine,”
“Listen,” he says. “I won’t invade your gynaeceum, or this dorm, ever again,”
“I appreciate that, brother,” she tells him.
“I won’t come up here at all, unless called,” he says, lingering in the hall.
Unsure of this new territory, she cannot comment.
“You need a bigger mattress,” he says at the door.
Grinning, she nods at him. “I’ll meet you in the study,”
Skipio points in agreement, as he often did as a boy, and his loud trot down the stairwell brings Vita a comfort she hasn’t felt since his return.