Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [161]
She was young, he noticed, with large brown eyes and a slightly frightened look; but something in her quiet, serious manner made him think she would be reliable.
“You’ll find you are treated kindly here,” he said, and turned his attention back to the plans.
Two days later he returned to Sarum and it was nearly a month before he was back at Aquae Sulis. He had forgotten the existence of the slave girl, but when in the evening he saw her again, he remembered their conversation.
“You are Anenclita, whose real name is Naomi,” he said, and saw that she blushed a little.
The next evening when she entered he put down his work and talked to her kindly. Was she contented? Did she have enough to eat? She nodded and answered in very passable Latin that she did. She was a pretty, dark little thing, he observed, with a soft skin and a trace of childish down still on her cheeks. But in her large brown eyes there was something sad and reserved.
He learned that she had been separated from her family almost at once and had been bought by an official who was travelling to northern Gaul. The rest of the story was as he had expected. After a year, the official had returned home and sold her to a merchant who had taken her to Londinium and in turn sold her to the trader who had passed through Aquae Sulis.
“And do you hope to return to Judaea one day?” he asked idly, not thinking it likely that she would.
“Oh yes,” she replied, with a new urgency. “That is the land where people worship the true God.”
He stared at her in surprise, and then remembered that if she came from the province of Judaea, she must be one of the Jews, who unlike the Romans, believed in only one god.
“You do not worship Apollo, or Minerva, or any of the Roman gods?” he asked curiously.
She looked at the ground, obviously afraid that she might anger him, but still shook her head.
He shrugged.
Like all right-thinking Romans, Porteus was comfortable with the official pantheon of gods. There were gods to suit every temperament and every activity. It was a broadly-based, accommodating system. He, for instance, had experienced no difficulty in worshipping at the family shrine of Tosutigus, since it was clear that the family’s god Nodens was none other than Mars in a Celtic guise, and Tosutigus had had no objection to his adding a Roman statue to stand on the little altar beside the shrine’s original occupant. Similarly, at the new spa he had discovered that, as well as Sulis Minerva, the Celtic sun god was worshipped in the surrounding region, and so he had commissioned a fine gorgon’s head to stand in a niche near the main bath – a bearded Celtic head surrounded by a magnificent flaming halo which the Roman workers immediately identified as Apollo. The Roman pantheon of gods seemed to him so eminently reasonable that he had never been able to understand the passion of those in the eastern provinces to limit their own gods to only one.
As the days went by, he fell into the habit of calling the young slave girl to him in the evening, and questioning her about her life and her religion. After a hard day’s work, it seemed to him a pleasant way to pass the time.
As a young man and a student, he had of course been aware of some of the mystery religions of the east. There were the Jews,