Glory and the Lightning (12 page)

Thargelia saw and savored her favorite’s helplessness, and she gloated and even smiled. The smile was hideous. What would this beauty be like after long flogging and torture? She envisioned Aspasia covered with blood, that exquisite body reduced to bleeding tatters, that face obliterated, those wondrous eyes blind with agony and death. She, Thargelia, would be avenged, and by a lift of her hand. She longed for the moments of destruction. She would watch in rapture. She felt no compassion for this maiden who had so humiliated and betrayed her.

Aspasia looked again at Cleo and she was sick with pity and regret. The gorgeous chamber appeared to swim before her eyes in a kaleidoscope of shifting and confusing colors, brightening, waning, fleeing, returning. Cleo gazed up piteously into Aspasia’s eyes, imploring help, and then her little hand reached desperately for Aspasia’s tunic and clung to it, winding her fingers in it. Contrition seized Aspasia so that her own eyes filled with tears. She would probably die, but nothing must harm this child. The very sight of the childish body, the faith in the round face, the small feet peering from beneath her tunic, the abjectness of her posture, moved Aspasia enormously. She said, as softly as a mother speaks to her little one, “Speak, Cleo. Tell the Lady Thargelia what transpired last night.”

Cleo hesitated and Aspasia could not bear the sight of her countenance, for she saw that Cleo was not only afraid for herself but for her friend. “Speak,” she repeated, “and all will be well.”

Reassured, but not looking away from the one she adored, Cleo spoke in a half whisper. “You said, Aspasia, that you wished to worship Artemis under the moon. So you requested me to lie in your bed, with my dark hair covered, and arrange my bed clothes so it would seem I lay in my own. You then left me, and I fell asleep. You awakened me before dawn and I returned to my bed.”

Ah, the sweet one is prudent even at her age, thought Aspasia. She will not repeat my promises of vileness to her. She placed her hand on Cleo’s bent head and looked at Thargelia. “That is all,” she said. “The girl is innocent of any wrong. If wrong there had been it was my doing, and my indiscretion. But I desired to look upon the moon. I was restless.”

“You are often restless, Aspasia,” said Thargelia, and laughed aloud in derision. Then she paused and regarded the girl with renewed love and hatred. Her intuition told her that she had heard the truth, and also lies. She looked down at Cleo, kneeling before her and weeping and she said, “You may leave us, child. I am no longer angry with you, for you have been victim and not transgressor. Go to your bed.”

Cleo stood up slowly, wiping her tears with the palms of her hands, like an infant. Her lips quivered. She looked at Thargelia and then at Aspasia, and Aspasia smiled with reassurance, bent and kissed the girl then pushed her towards the curtain. Cleo fled, scampering, her feet slapping on rug and marble.

“Are you not ashamed,” said Thargelia, “that you corrupted that child?”

“I did not corrupt her,” Aspasia replied. “She told you the truth. As I have told you the truth.”

“All of the truth, Aspasia?”

Though it did not seem possible that Aspasia could pale more she did so. She could only say, “Cleo and I have told you the truth.”

“You lie,” said Thargelia, calmly. “What of Thalias? You met him in the moonlight and for a purpose that I know. Do you deny this?”

Aspasia shut her eyes for a moment. Before she could speak Thargelia said, “He left me at midnight. He thought I slept. He did not return for some time. I believed he had gone to the latrines, or had strolled in the gardens, for the night was hot and the moon high.” This was not true, but Thargelia was determined to know the whole of her mortification.

“You seduced my slave, Aspasia,” said Thargelia. “He is young, and foolish, and you have been taught arts. Because of your infamy he will die, and painfully, and I will force you to be present to see what you have done.”

Aspasia could not control herself. “He has been found?” she cried in a loud voice.

Thargelia did not answer for a moment, and then she said, “Yes. He attempted to board a vessel in the harbor, and was taken into custody. I heard but a short time ago. He will be delivered to this house in the morning. Prepare yourself for an interesting spectacle, Aspasia. Thalias is strong, but he will shriek for mercy and death. I can assure you of that, though he is a man.”

Aspasia was young and so still possessed considerable credulity. Moreover, Thargelia had never lied to her before. She looked about her wildly, as if seeking succor. She was filled with despair. Then she sank to her knees before Thargelia and clasped her hands convulsively. Her beautiful white face was lifted and twinkled with sweat.

“Spare him,” she said. “I alone am guilty. I seduced him because the heat of my desire was too much for me and had to be relieved. Any man would have sufficed. As you have said of Cleo, he, too, was my victim. You have taught us that men are seized with irrepressible passions which they cannot control, and that any woman to them then is desirable. I have also been taught the arts of seduction, and he is not experienced as I am, and not intelligent. It was a moment’s madness to him, only. He is not guilty. He is only a man.”

Thargelia’s face twisted until it was extremely ugly, and the cosmetics on her face increased her wrinkles. Her dyed golden hair was a travesty. She saw her beloved Thalias in those round white arms; she saw him kissing that adorable breast. She saw him enter that body, and could hear his gaspings. They would be more delirious than in her own bed, for he had been embracing youth and divine loveliness. All that the girl was had been tended since her birth, and she had had a glorious destiny, which was now lost. Pain seized Thargelia then, pain for herself, pain for Thalias and even pain for this wanton, Aspasia, whom she had loved like an only daughter, and whose prospects had been destroyed. Thargelia rarely had wept in all her life but now she was taken with a desperate desire to weep. She controlled herself.

“How did Thalias flee?” she asked.

“I gave him the last of my mother’s money.” Then courage returned to Aspasia. “I told him to flee. I am not sorry, except that he will suffer for it. I wish he had escaped to safety! I should have that to remember with joy.”

“Do not mourn,” said Thargelia, with answering passion and fresh mortification. “He has not been taken, as yet. When he is I will send him only to the fields, for his punishment, in chains so that he cannot run again. Does that comfort you?”

Aspasia stood up and for the first time she regarded the mistress with loathing. “Then you have lied to me,” she said. “And I trusted you.”

Thargelia mocked her. “‘Then you have lied to me, and I trusted you.’ Go to your bed, Aspasia. I will consider your fate tonight. I assure you it will not be a happy one. I may send you into the kitchens or the fields. I may have you flogged to death, or your beauty destroyed forever. You will know in the morning.”

Aspasia knew that she had nothing to lose now. “I am not a slave,” she said. “I was born free and am free. You can do nothing unlawful against a free woman, no matter your wrath. In the eyes of the laws of Miletus I have done little wrong, nothing to merit extreme punishment.”

Thargelia had risen in dismissal of the maiden. Now she stopped and looked at the girl with contempt. “Do you think the law in Miletus will be concerned with the fate I mete out to a mere chit in my care, who has induced a slave to flee—a capital crime in itself? Ponder on that, insolent one.”

“Let me go, tonight,” said Aspasia. “We will see each other no more.”

“Where will you go, you fool? On foot, with only the peplos on your body, and no money? Or would you sell yourself into slavery, which is all you deserve? Or become a public whore?”

“I know not what I shall do,” said Aspasia, with the bursting wildness and recklessness of youth. “It is enough for me to go. I have long been rebellious of the fate you have designed for me. At least I will escape that, and with joy.”

Thargelia considered. She said, “The fate you so despise was a fate of power and wealth and comfort and adoration and cosseting, the mistress of a selected and distinguished man. You would prefer the streets of Miletus and its noisome alleys and squalid dwellings, and the encounters with brutes of the ports and the slaughterhouses and the manufactories and the sea—for a handful of drachmas or a little bread and wine?”

Aspasia could not speak for a moment. Then she said, “I would be free to make my own fate, to live or to die.”

“You speak like one born an imbecile,” said Thargelia. “Go to your chamber. You have not interested me. I may set you, penniless and without even a cloak, on the streets of Miletus tomorrow. There you may use the arts you have been taught for a crust of bread.”

“I may go to my father, for my mother told me his name,” said Aspasia, who was quaking with an internal coldness. “For pity’s sake, he may harbor me.”

Thargelia laughed long and scornfully, throwing back her head so that the cords in her throat were prominent and ugly in the lamplight. “Audacious fool!” she cried. “He wished to destroy you, for you were female, and your mother saved you! You have known this. He would deny he is your father, for what man likes to confess that he has begotten a girl? He would do this—if he were alive.”

“He is dead?” said Aspasia, her voice shaking.

“Go to. You never knew him. Certainly he is dead. He died but four months ago, of a fever. But you need not believe me. You will discover this tomorrow, perhaps, when I put you on the streets of Miletus.”

She made an imperious gesture of dismissal, and Aspasia, still holding high her incomparable head, retired. Thargelia threw herself upon the bed and gave herself up to weeping, for her own anguish, for Thalias and Aspasia.

CHAPTER 7

In spite of the thick black kohl Thargelia’s eyes were swollen and red in the morning, when she consulted Echion, who had listened with deep interest to the story she had told him. His mouth watered and he had to keep swallowing and his eyes had glistened. He wanted to say to Thargelia, “Give me the maiden, as a servant in my small house, or the tender of my garden, or my cook.” But discretion warned him. So he shrugged.

He said, “Having lost her virginity she is now worthless.”

Thargelia thought. She said, “We know the arts of deception so that even a wanton can simulate virginity.”

“With the aid of a chicken’s blood,” laughed Echion, “and some clever simulations and cries of pain.”

“It is true that men are fools and believe what they wish to believe,” said Thargelia. “They always believe women, which is not perspicacious of them. They think women are too stupid to deceive effectually.”

“Ah,” said Echion, with an arch look.

He added, “The maiden is young and helpless. You can do with her what you will.”

Being a cynic, he did not know that Thargelia had spent the night in pain pondering this very matter and that she had been desperately seeking for a way not to destroy Aspasia, but to save her. But it must be done with expedition. She could not remain in this house, under Thargelia’s eye, to be a reminder of betrayal and shame. So this morning she had sent a slave to discover what foreign men of distinction had come from the vessels on affairs in Miletus, or on their way to Greece. The slave had not as yet returned.

“There is a possibility that she is still a virgin,” said Echion, as if seriously considering. “After all, it is not easy to violate a virgin, and the man was a slave and may have been frightened, or, at the last, she may have struggled. Let me examine her in discreet privacy.”

Thargelia narrowed her eyes at him. “I am certain she is no longer a virgin. I am experienced in these things.” She laughed abruptly. “If Aspasia were still virgin she would not be after leaving you, Echion. Let us understand each other.” They laughed together.

There had been many Greek and Ionian men who had been allowed to glimpse Aspasia in this house, without her knowledge. They also trusted Thargelia. To give them a violated hetaira, when they desired only a virgin, would be reprehensible and dangerous. (Many had ardently desired Aspasia and had offered Thargelia the most enormous sums, but she had been too loath, like a mother, to part with the girl as yet, and Aspasia had not completed her schooling.) Worst of all, Aspasia had been deflowered by a mean slave, a thing, and that was unpardonable.

Thargelia gave orders that Aspasia was to be enlightened in the art of simulating virginity, and at once and with all dispatch. Even foreign men, men from the East, were entitled to a kind deception, for they were notable for riches and extolled virginity in women more even than did the Ionians and the Greeks.

Aspasia at first resisted the information and the instructions. Then, as she was not a fool, she acceded. She was still pale and listless and full of pain for herself, and even for Thargelia, who had been as a mother to her. To her joy, however, she was permitted to resume her classes, for Thargelia wanted no scandal in her house, and Aspasia saw that little Cleo was not to be punished in any manner. For that Aspasia was deeply grateful, and she loved Thargelia again, if with reluctance and resentment. She, herself, was not to be punished severely, it would seem, though she understood that she could not long remain in this house, her home, suddenly dear to her. She wondered about her fate, and shrank from the unknown.

Thalias had not been caught, and again Aspasia was overjoyed. He was a rascal and would contrive to exist. She had no doubt of that. He knew the ways of the world, and was dexterous in many fashions. Aspasia envied him and again thought of the cruel restrictions on women which made them dependent on the whims of men. They had no status except as virtuous matrons or whores and to Aspasia each was undesirable. She said to herself, We have no position except as slaves, and she was angrily rebellious again and in revolt.

The slave Thargelia had sent to the port returned in a state of excitement. A Persian gentleman, accompanied by a rich retinue, had arrived that morning, and was now the guest of a famous man in Miletus, one Cadmus, who had long desired Aspasia. Thargelia was both elated and troubled. She could not offend Cadmus, but the Persian gentleman, Al Taliph, must be engaged. It was reputed that he was a familiar of Xerxes, himself, and enormously wealthy, so Aspasia would bring a great price. Cadmus, though rich, could not meet the price, as he had discovered to his regret a few months ago. Thargelia did not love the Persians, but a satrap like Al Taliph could be endured, and it was stupid to remember the Persian assaults on Greece. Xerxes, she thought, had been a noble gentleman after all.