Out of the Waters Read Free Page A

appropriate response to impertinent questions.
    The dreadfully long line of mules seemed to have passed. Another patron might have made a hundred mules do, leading them around behind the stage and exchanging their loads for fresh goods. Saxa’s wealth made that unnecessary.
    The actor draped in a gilded lion skin raised his hands, one of which held a glittering club. Hedia thought he was supposed to be Hercules, but she hadn’t paid much attention. She had always found life to hold quite enough drama without inventing things to put on stage.
    â€œAs a sign of my prowess!” the actor boomed. He seemed a weedy little fellow, despite his armor and the lion skin, but his voice filled the hollow of the theater. “I raise these pillars to mark my conquest!”
    On cue, a pair of gilded “hills” began to rise from the basement, through trap doors in the stage. Hedia frowned: bizarrely, monkeys were tethered in niches in the steep cones. The animals had been dusted with gold also, but in between bouts of angry chittering they were trying to chew their fur clean.
    â€œIn later years, another conqueror and god will come to this strait!” said the actor. “He too will bring the whole world beneath his beneficent rule before he returns to the heavens; but greater than I, he will found a line of succession. Each of his descendents will be more magnificent than his predecessor. Hail Caesar, and hail to your mighty house!”
    A monkey shrieked and made a full-armed gesture. Something splattered the ornate shield displayed on a frame beside the actor.
    Hedia blinked, uncertain of what she had just seen. Oh by Venus! The little beast is throwing its own feces! she realized. She started to whoop with laughter, not because what had happened was particularly funny but because its unexpectedness had broken the shell of fear that had enclosed Hedia since last night’s dream.
    She stifled the laughter into what she hoped would pass for a coughing fit. She was horrified at herself. The incident would embarrass Saxa if he noticed it, and to have had his own wife leading the seeming mockery would shrivel his soul.
    Hedia reached over and this time gripped Saxa’s hand firmly. The last thing she wanted to do was to hurt the gentle man who had, very likely, saved her life: he had married her when the relatives of her first husband, Gaius Calpurnius Latus, were claiming she had poisoned him.
    Maybe some of the relatives had believed that. Latus had been an unpleasant man with unpleasant tastes; one of his partners—particularly the sort of boys he favored—might well have poisoned him. Hedia wasn’t the sort, though if someone had brained Latus with a statuette …
    She realized she was grinning at the thought; she softened her expression instantly.
    Most likely Latus had died of a perfectly ordinary fever, as thousands did every year across the empire. He had been a wealthy man, however, and if his widow was executed for his murder, that wealth would be distributed among his surviving relatives—some of whom were well-connected politically.
    Hedia knew that if matters had continued in the direction they were going, she would probably have been strangled by the public executioner—though in the entrance of the family home, in deference to her noble status. Instead, Saxa—a distant cousin of Latus—had asked her to marry him. Saxa’s wealth and unblemished reputation immediately made the threat of prosecution vanish.
    Hedia continued to caress her husband’s hand. He glanced halfway toward her, then faced the stage again. He didn’t pull away, though he seemed puzzled.
    Hedia had never understood why Saxa had married her. Despite his relationship to Latus, they hadn’t moved in the same circles. She was as attractive as any woman in Carce, and she was more—talented, one might say—than most highly paid professionals, but that couldn’t have been