To Love Again - Bertrice Small [84]
She felt absolutely nothing as he reamed her vigorously. She was as cold as ice. Finally Casia, her own performance concluded, knelt by Cailin’s head and softly instructed her, “You must always let a man believe you are feeling passion such as you have never felt before, even when you are not. Thrash your head back and forth. Good! Now moan, and claw at his back.” She smiled up at Jovian as Cailin complied. “She is an apt pupil, my lord.”
I am dead, Cailin thought, and this is Hades. But it was not. For several weeks she was instructed in the erotic arts, and to her own surprise, she seemed to excel in them. Finally came the day when Cailin and the trio of young Northmen brought Jovian’s playlet fully to life before his delighted eyes. Two days later they performed a dress rehearsal before all the residents of Villa Maxima. Afterward both Cailin and Jovian were congratulated, Jovian for his creative abilities and Cailin for her acrobatically inclined performance.
“Next week,” Jovian said enthusiastically. “We begin our performances next week. There is just enough time to let our special clients know that something extraordinary will be happening. Oh, my brother! We are going to be rich!”
The Virgin and the Barbarians was an immediate success. Never had anything like it been seen in the history of Constantinople. It was all going exactly as Jovian had predicted it would. Phocas, in a rare show of excitement, could scarcely contain his glee over the thousands of gold solidi piling up in their strongbox. Twice weekly the playlet was performed before several hundred guests, each paying five gold solidi apiece to view the performance.
One night Jovian sought out his elder brother and told him excitedly, “The empress’s brother has come, and General Aspar with him! I have seated them in the first row for the best viewing. The gods! I knew I was right! I am going to start designing another playlet, Phocas.”
“I wonder if this is as fascinating as the rumors insist,” Prince Basilicus murmured to his companion. The prince was an elegant man with fair skin, black hair, and deep brown eyes. Cultured and educated, it was unusual to find him in such an atmosphere, particularly given his public piety and his circle of religious friends. “I am going to be sorry that I allowed you to drag me here tonight, Aspar.”
The general chuckled. “You are too serious, Basilicus.”
“And I should be more like you? A lover of plays and public spectacles, Aspar? If you weren’t the finest general the empire has ever seen, you would not be tolerated by the court.”
“If I were not the finest general the empire has ever seen,” Aspar said quietly, “your sister, Verina, would not be empress.”
The prince laughed. “It is true,” he admitted. “You made Leo emperor even as you chose Marcian before him. You would be emperor yourself were it not for my friends in the church. They fear you, Aspar.”
“They are fools, then,” was the reply. “Thank God for my lack of orthodoxy, Basilicus. I should rather be an emperor-maker than an emperor. That is why your friends really fear me. They do not understand why I choose to be as I choose to be. Besides, times have changed. Byzantium needs a great general more than she needs a great emperor right now; and the days are long past when a single man could be both.”
“Your modesty touches me,” the prince said ironically. “My God! Is that Senator Romanus’s wife with that muscle-bound boy? It is!”
Aspar chuckled. “We probably know half the people in this room, Basilicus. Look, over there. There is Bishop Andronicus, and just look whom he is with. It is Casia, one of the finest courtesans Villa Maxima has to offer. I have enjoyed several evenings in her company. She is a charming and a most talented girl. Would you like to meet her one day? I do not think I dare intrude upon the bishop tonight, however.”
The room was totally filled now. Naked young boys and girls