Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [105]
She spent a day sitting in the kitchens, nibbling at the numerous leftovers that the Greek cook, Denisius, kept insisting that she help him finish off. He was a huge and jolly man with a ruddy complexion beneath his thick greying beard, and a bellowing laugh that was heard more and more as the day progressed and the level in the bottle of wine beside his stove sank lower and lower.
ln the kitchens, too, she met Dorcas, the beautiful young housemaid, who combed Vicki’s tangled and dirty hair between scampering off to run errands, and talked to Vicki about the year she spent with the master and the mistress in Gaul before coming to Byzantium. There was Tobias, too, the huge and bronzed North African Adonis, his bald head and smooth, ebony skin reminding Vicki of a man on the ship to Dido. Tobias didn’t say much and smiled even less frequently, but Dorcas adored him and the feeling seemed to be mutual.
There were others, too, that she encountered. Friendly and cheerful house boys and valets. Cocksure and stunningly beautiful handmaidens. Food servants and domestics. And there was Praelius, the studious Thracian scribe who taught the classics to Jocelyn’s two daughters by her previous marriage.
This morning, however, the kitchens were all but deserted, except for one glum-looking woman whom Vicki had not met the previous day.
‘Hello, said Vicki brightly. ‘I should introduce myself...’
‘I know who you are,’ said the woman. ‘The talk of the halls has been of little else since your arrival.’
Nice to develop a reputation without trying, Vicki reflected.
‘My name is Felicia, she said. ‘Handmaiden to the praefectus’s wives. Or at least, I was.’
‘Why?’ asked Vicki, noting the past tense. ‘What happened?’
‘I did a favour for a general. Take the advice of one who has bitter experience in life and remember never to do favours for anyone, young Briton,’ Felicia said woefully and then explained the awful events to which she had been party.
‘I’m sure Jocelyn will forget it all eventually,’ Vicki argued.
‘I do not worry about my lady’s displeasure, Felicia said.
‘The praefectus’s wife is foolish and empty-headed. She is not the problem.’
‘Then who?’
Felicia began to cry ‘You are not wise in the ways of Byzantium, Vicki,’ she said. ‘General Gaius Calaphilus used me to further his own position. Like a simpleton, and for the wicked love of money, I allowed myself to be so used.’
‘So, what’s the problem?’ asked Vicki.
‘Simply that I am likely to become the next victim of the general’s purges.’
Vicki didn’t quite follow the logic of this, but she was in no position to argue with Felicia.
‘Already, rumours are rife about a terror like the wrath of the gods to be unfolded upon the enemies of the state this night. And I shall be amongst the victims of them... Woe, woe and thrice woe,’ she wailed, helplessly. ‘Who shall save the little people and give them their deliverance from the vengeance of powerful and ambitious men?’
For once in her life, Vicki was completely stumped for an answer.
Fortunately, however, as the two young women looked at each other in anguish, a passionate voice reached out to them across the kitchens.
‘Deliverance is a state of mind,’ said Dorcas, stepping from the shadows, having clearly overheard much of the girls’
conversation. ‘Yet it is also an attainable goal.’
As if Vicki hadn’t had enough surprises in the last few days, this was an unexpected turn of events. ‘How so?’
‘Through escape,’ Dorcas replied. ‘I have a cunning plan to leave this benighted place. I have a route. I have friends who will help and I have a destination whereupon to travel.
What I need are two willing accomplices. Are you with me?’
Neither Vicki nor Felicia needed to be asked twice.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Culture Bunker, Part Eight –
Just Another Greek Tragedy
And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the