The River God's Vengeance(40)

“Julia, Asklepiodes specializes in wounds suffered by men whose profession it is to infiict such wounds. The special conditions of a woman’s fertility are the domain of witches and midwives, not physicians and surgeons.”

“I know that,” she said. “It should tell you how desperate I am. I spoke with him mainly because he is such a sweet and reassuring man, and it is not his profession to be so, as you point out. He told me that time was the best remedy, but he did recommend an Alexandrian woman named Demetria”—I was about to object, but she silenced me—”and no, she is not some country wise woman. He assures me that she is a highly educated physician and philosopher who has studied at the Museum. Alexandrians are much more liberal in these matters than we are. I intend to seek her out tomorrow.”

“Well,” I said reluctantly, “if Asklepiodes recommends her, she must be acceptable. See her if you will, but I think he was right the first time. You just need to give it some time; you’ll see. Remember the family you’ve married into. We Caecilians became so powerful by outnumbering everybody else.”

She turned over and placed her head on my chest. “All right,” she said sleepily. “I promise not to worry for a while. But I’m still going to see Demetria tomorrow.”

If she said anything more, I do not remember it because I was sound asleep in another instant.





7


I DIDN’T EVEN GET AS FAR AS the Temple of Ceres the next morning.

“Aedile!” The shouter was a man I recognized, a freedman from the staff of Publius Syrus, the famous actor and playwright. “Please come to the theater! My patron says that it is an emergency!” The man was quite excited, but then he was a Greek, and his master was a Greek-Syrian, and all Greeks are excitable people. They invented philosophy just to get themselves under control.

The previous year I had contracted with Syrus to provide the theatricals for my upcoming Games. The first Games of the calendar year were to be the Megalensian Games, celebrated the next month. These were not nearly as lavish as the really big celebrations of the fall, the Roman Games and the Plebeian Games. But I was determined to make the first spectacles as splendid as possible to set the tone for my aedileship.

“What is the problem?” I asked. “I have a great many duties to—”

“It can’t wait!” he yelled, cutting me off. “You have to come at once!”

“Don’t talk to the Aedile like that, you jumped-up foreign catamite!” Hermes shouted at him.

“No, Hermes, we’d better go,” I said. “I can’t risk anything spoiling my show.”

So we followed the man down toward the Sublician Bridge. Near the bridge towered the giant theater erected a few years before by Aemilius Scaurus during his aedileship. At this time there were two theaters in Rome worth the name: the Aemilian and the Theater of Pompey. Pompey’s was built on the Campus Martius and was made of stone. The Aemilian was made of wood.

I had chosen the Aemilian for a number of reasons. Pompey’s theater had been damaged during his triumphal games when his elephants stampeded; then he burned a town onstage, and the proscenium caught fire and the damage was not yet repaired. Also, it was far from the City center and seated perhaps forty thousand spectators. The Aemilian was a far shorter walk for most citizens, it held eighty thousand people, and, best of all, it wasn’t built by Pompey. I didn’t want people watching my games and thinking about Pompey.

And just because it was built of wood instead of marble doesn’t mean it was not splendid. The vast, semicircular structure shone all over with paint and gilding, which I had had renewed. It was decorated with mosaics in semiprecious stones, amber, and tortoise shell, each arch of its upper galleries displaying a fine statue. It was equipped with huge awnings against the sun and a system of fountains that would spray a fine, perfumed mist over the audience in hot weather. These latter features would not be required for the Megalensian Games, but I would definitely need them for the Apollinarian Games, which were celebrated in the hottest days of summer.

As we entered the cavernous building, we were struck by the powerful smells of fresh paint, turpentine, pitch, and fresh-cut wood. Like all large, wooden structures that are open to the sky, the theater required constant maintenance. And, like all others of its sort, it made constant noise, an almost musical chorus of groans, creaks, and squeaks as changing temperature and every buffet of wind made the whole structure move, timber fiexing against timber, boards stretching and pulling against nails, the huge masts that would support the awning whipping back and forth as if they wanted to go to sea like all the other masts.