Free Pandora by Anne Rice Page A

on my Father’s plan.”
    I still wondered. Would they deal honestly with me? What about now that they had seen me play the whore with the boy? They were such religious men.
    “You’re headed to a great city,” Jacob said. “It couldn’t be a better place. Your Father has Greek friends there!”
    “How could it be better than Alexandria?” I said.
    “Oh, it is far and away better,” Jacob said. “Let me talk to my Father before I talk to you further.”
    We had put out to sea. The land was going away. Egypt. It was growing dark.
    “Don’t be afraid,” Jacob said. “You look as though you are terrified.”
    “I’m not afraid,” I said. “It’s only that I have to lie in my bed and think and remember and dream.” Ilooked at him, as he shyly looked away. “I held the boy like a Mother, against me, night after night.”
    This was about the biggest lie I’ve told in my life.
    “He was a child in my arms.” Some child! “And now I fear nightmares. You must tell me—what is our destination? What is our fate?”

3
    NTIOCH ,” said Jacob, “Antioch on the Orontes. Greek friends of your Father await you. And they are friends with Germanicus. Perhaps in time . . . but they will be loyal to you. You are to be married to a Greek of breeding and means.”
    Married! To a Greek, a provincial Greek? A Greek in Asia! I stifled my laughter and my tears. That was not going to happen to me. Poor man! If he really was a provincial Greek, he was going to have to experience the conquest of Rome all over again.
    We sailed on, from port to port. I mulled all this over.
    It was nauseating trivia like this which of course protected me from my full and inevitable grief and shock over what happened. Worry about whether your dress is properly girdled. Don’t see your Father lying dead with his own dagger in his chest.
    As for Antioch, I had been far too embroiled in the life of Rome to know or hear much about this city. If Tiberius had stationed his “heir,” Germanicus, thereto get him away from Roman popularity, then I thought: Antioch must be the end of the civilized world.
    Why in the name of the gods had I not run away in Alexandria, I thought? Alexandria was the greatest city in the Empire, next to Rome. It was a young city, built by Alexander, for whom it was named, but it Was a marvelous port. No one would ever dare raze the Temple of Isis in Alexandria. Isis was an Egyptian goddess, wife of the powerful Osiris.
    But what had that to do with things? I must have been plotting in the back of my mind already, but I didn’t allow any conscious plot to surface and blemish my highborn Roman moral character.
    I quietly thanked my Hebrew guardians for this intelligence, for keeping it even from the young Roman Marcellus, the other man they had rescued from the Emperor’s assassins, and I asked for frank answers to my questions regarding my brothers.
    “All taken by surprise,” said Jacob. “The
Delatores
, those spies of the Praetorian Guard, are so swift. And your Father had so many sons. It was your eldest brother’s slaves who jumped the wall at their Master’s command and ran to warn your Father.”
    Antony. I hope you shed their blood. I know you fought with your last breath. And my niece, my little niece Flora, had she run screaming from them, or did they do it with mercy? The Praetorian Guard doing anything with mercy! Stupid to even think so.
    I didn’t say anything aloud. Just sighed.
    After all, when they looked at me, these twoJewish merchants beheld the body and face of a woman; naturally my protectors should think a woman was inside of me. The disparity between outward appearances and inner disposition had disturbed me all my life. Why disturb Jacob and David? On to Antioch.
    But I had no intention of living in any old-fashioned Greek family, if such still existed in the Greek city of Antioch, a family in which women lived apart from the men, and wove wool all day, never going out, having no part