The flask gurgled as she poured from it. "My husband was wrong to set a king to work in his fields," she went on. "For I will not believe you were anything less than a king of your people. Perhaps we two can reach a better understanding--for a while ..." She looked up at him, slantwise. "It will depend on you, largely." She lifted the beaker again. "To our tomorrows. May they be better than our yesterdays." They drank in turn. She sat down and drew him beside her. "I have tried and tried to pronounce that barbarous name of yours," she said. "I will give you another. Hercules? Perhaps!" Suddenly her mouth was hot upon his. She stood up, breathing heavily. "I meant to eat first," she said, quick slurred words through curling sweet smoke. "It would be leisurely, civilized, with much fine play. But that would be wrong with you, I see that now." She reached out her arms. "Take off your tunic. Take off my gown. Let us keep the Floralia." Much later, when the wine and the food were gone, the lamps burned out and the first thin gray creeping into the eastern sky, she ruffled his hair and smiled sleepily. "I will surely call you Hercules." V After festival time, the latifundium went back into harness. Up in the villa there was the measured pace of days--housework, garden work, much dawdling until some overseer went by, backbiting gossip, petty intrigues for women and position, sometimes after dark a furtive Asiatic ritual of magic or mystery. A womanish world. Eodan considered himself well out of it. But riding through the fields, where the sun and the whip blistered a hundred naked backs and all a man's dreams finally narrowed to the day's hoeing and the night's shackled sleep, Eodan wondered with a chill how he had remained himself even for those few months he served. Winter had helped--days on end where he sat idle with the others, dozing, cracking fleas, once or twice knocking a tooth out of someone who offered him loathsome consolations.... Nevertheless, he searched himself as no Cimbrian had done before and knew that his servile time had indeed touched him. He went more warily through life, slowly learning how to guard his words. He would never again live wholly in the moment's joy; he would always be thinking beyond--where would the next attack come from, or how should he himself attack?