She pointed to the clothes. "Now, put that on! Do not stand there
gawping!" With a movement as of defiance, she undid her girdle, threw
it on the floor and stepped from her gown. Indeed she was beautiful,
thought Eodan. Her womanness did not flaunt itself, bursting through
its clothes like Cordelia's; it waited cool among shadows for one
discoverer. He grunted some apology when she glared, turned his back,
and fumbled on the garments laid out for him--a gray, patched woolen
tunic, scuffed sandals, a felt hat and a long wool cloak. He picked up
the heavy purse, slung a sword next to his skin and put a knife in the
rope belt.
As he took up his staff, he saw Phryne clad like him. The baggy cloth
would hide the shape of her body; she must hope the dirty old cape
would shield slim legs and high-arched feet. She was turning from the
shelf of books. She had run her fingers over the scrolls, just once,
and tears lay in her eyes.
"Come," she said. "We have only till morning; then they will start to
hunt us."
VII
To Eodan, Rome had been two things. First was the city of the Cimbrian
dream, all golden roofs above white colonnades, shimmering against a
sky forever blue. Then was the avenue of the triumph, where he bent his
weary head lest the hurled muck take him in the eyes, and thereafter
the slave pens and finally a stumbling in chains, one dawn, out onto
the Latin Way. Neither was of this earth.
Now he entered Rome herself, and he saw just a little of a city that
toiled and played and sang and dickered and laughed, plotted, feasted,
sacrificed, lied, swindled, and stood by friends--a city of men and
women and children like any others, built by men's hands and guarded
by men's bodies. He had thought Rome was walled, but he found as he
trudged through hours of buildings that she eternally outgrew her
walls, as though she were a snake casting skin, so that the old gates
stood open in the midst of a brawling traffic. He had thought of
Romans as divided into iron-sheathed rankers, piggish man-traders, and
one woman who shuddered in his arms; but he saw a gang of children
playing ball in the dust, a leathery smith in a clangorous tiny shop
and a limping man who cried out the roasted nuts he bore for sale in
panniers slung from a yoke. He saw Romans spread their wares in flimsy
booths while a temple gleamed purity above them. He saw a Roman matron,
in clothes no better than his, who scolded her small boy for being
reckless about passing horse-carts. He saw a young girl weeping, for
some reason he never knew, and he saw two young men, merry with wine,
stop to rumple the ears of an itinerant dog.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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