Out of the Waters Read Online Free

Alphena had been looking toward Publius Corylus, who sat at the edge of the knights’ section. He was a striking young man, taller than most citizens of Carce. His hair was buttery blond. His father had been a soldier, so the boy probably had Celtic blood. Soldiers couldn’t marry, but informal arrangements on the frontiers were regularized on retirement, for those who survived to retire. Acknowledged offspring became legitimate and, in Corylus’ case, joined the ranks of the Knights of Carce to whom his father had been raised.
    A very striking boy. Spending the afternoon with him would be a good way to climb out of this swamp of disquiet .…
    Hedia’s face hardened for an instant before she consciously smoothed it back to aristocratic calm. She could appreciate better than most why Alphena found the boy attractive, but she was by law the girl’s mother and she took her duties seriously. Hedia would do whatever was necessary to keep Alphena a virgin until the girl was safely married; and marriage, for the daughter of Senator Gaius Alphenus Saxa, meant an alliance with another senatorial house.
    After that, well.… After that, Alphena’s behavior would be a matter for negotiation between husband and wife. Nothing to do with the girl’s stepmother.
    Hedia had never pretended to be a wife who embodied all the virtues of ancient Carce, but she had never failed to do her duty as she saw it. She would not fail in her duties now, neither to her husband nor to the girl to whom she was now mother. She would not fail for so long as she lived.
    Trumpets and horns which curved around the player’s body sounded harshly together. A military procession was entering from the other side of the stage.
    As long as I live …, Hedia thought. She remembered Latus screaming and her own swollen throat; and she smiled with polite courtesy, because it was her duty now to smile.
    *   *   *
    T HE ANTICS OF THE MONKEYS had amused Alphena, so she regretted it when they and their gilded perches slipped down into the sub-floors beneath the stage. Were there really monkeys on the Pillars of Hercules?
    Varus will know . She glanced toward her brother, but Saxa and Hedia were seated in the way. It didn’t really matter anyway.
    Corylus would know if the monkeys were authentic too; or anyway, he might know.…
    Alphena realized she was staring toward her brother’s friend in the audience. She scowled, furious with herself and with Corylus also. He was so—
    She drew her eyes away with a quick intake of breath. Corylus was enough of a scholar to impress Varus, who was a good judge of that sort of thing, and enough of an athlete to impress Lenatus, the ex-soldier whom Saxa had hired as family trainer and manager of the small gymnasium in Saxa’s town house. His swordsmanship impressed Alphena too.
    The actors marching across the long stage were supposed to be soldiers, or at least some of them were. Alphena eyed the hodgepodge of equipment with a critical eye.
    Most of the helmets had been worn by the City Watch before becoming so battered they’d been replaced, but there were also gladiatorial helmets and various examples from the legions and the non-citizen cavalry squadrons. The remainder, a good quarter of the total, was odds and ends of foreign gear in leather, bronze, and iron. The impresario in charge of this mime seemed to have found it cheaper to buy real castoffs than it would have been to manufacture dummies.
    The shields were wicker, though, covered in linen and painted with what for all Alphena knew really were Lusitanian tribal symbols. She sneered. The shields had to be fakes because actors wouldn’t have been able to handle the real thing. The shield of a legionary of Carce was three thick layers of laminated wood and weighed forty pounds. The barbarians on the other side of the frontier generally used bull hide contraptions, less effective but even larger and