Warning: this fic deals with mature topics. Please do not keep reading unless you are comfortable with dark fics. TWs are tagged, but it includes implied rape and prostitution. The rating is 18+. // Summary: Some things are done for love, and some for coin.
One: A Little Maid of Rome
Nineteen. Twelve. Fourteen. Eight. Twenty-five. Three. Eleven.
This is how it begins: with the smallest girl in Lupa Silvia's scholae tagging along to a taverna with Diantha, the eldest. Dido is nine and Diantha is twenty-two, and anyone who looks at them would know them for sisters, though they are not.
See, says Diantha, scorn in her voice. You could be like them if you hadn't been raised in the scholae. You have much to be grateful for.
The taverna girls are bare-breasted, their nipples painted red. They have gold chains that glint in the sunlight, and dark eyes that swallow up the shadows along the Aventine. Don't stare so much, says Diantha. Remember who we are, Dido.
Diantha is there to meet her boyfriend, a blue-eyed man who used to be in the army and now is an enforcer on the Aventine. He does not have eyes for anyone except for Diantha. His name is Iskander, and he pats Dido on the head and gives her a sweet.
Dido sits with two slaves shelling walnuts while Diantha goes upstairs with him, and swings her feet on the bench before a gray kitten hops into her lap.
Some things are done for love, chick, and some for coin, the cook says, turning Dido's attention from a big man grunting in the corner over a girl with sad eyes. Don't look.
The sad-eyed girl straightens her tunic and sits down at the table as though nothing has happened. Pop, pop, crack. Her knuckles are skinned and there is a fresh bruise along her jaw. What are you looking at? she hisses at Dido.
When Diantha and Iskander emerge from upstairs, it is nearly dusk, and Iskander hires them a litter. He and Diantha do not want to let go of each another's hands. Dido sits in the litter with the gray kitten, and cannot make out their whispers.
Some things are done for love, chick, and some for coin.
When Diantha climbs inside the litter, she smells of yeast and wine, and she lets Dido fall asleep in her lap.
Thirteen. Seven. Twenty. Five. Fourteen.
When Dido is twelve, Diantha disappears from the scholae. Dido looks for her everywhere, and asks everyone. But no one will tell her anything.
It's better not to know. Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answers to. Sura is one of the scholae's best courtesans, or she was, before a client put her eye out. Lupa keeps her on because Sura still brings custom, though the other girls whisper it is because she is a Pythia, and can see both future and past with the dead eye.
But Sura does not frighten Dido.
I see such things for you, Dido, she whispers, her voice low and musical as a newly strung cithara. Light, and darkness... like two sides of the same coin.
Do you know where Diantha is? Dido pleads. As Sura turns her face away, a tear falls from the dead eye.
Three. Twelve. Eighteen. Seven. Three. Three. Six.
It's none of your concern, Dido. Do I not give you enough to fill your days with? Lupa taps her stylus on the table in irritation. Diantha has left us. That is all you need to know.
But she wouldn't leave without saying goodbye. Dido hates the petulance in her tone, she hates how she sounds like a child. She wants, and does not want, to be a woman. A courtesan like her mother, celebrated throughout the Republic. But what did that ever get a woman besides sorrow behind painted lids and coins to pay the ferryman?
Dido wears silks, not gold chains and rouge. She speaks six languages, and knows the lines of all the great poets. She will never stand in the shadows of the Coliseum, her body a coin, between her legs the road to Elysium.
Fifteen. Four. Eight. Twelve. Seventeen. Nineteen.
Lupa will not let Dido out of the scholae, not until she stops asking about Diantha. By that time, her first moon blood has come, and more serious training is required. She is needed in the scholae, now. She is a woman, and women do not run barefoot in the street, or climb plane trees.
Diantha did. But Diantha is gone, now, faded into the dust and silence like the little idol of Pandora she kept at the household shrine. She opened the box...
One night, just after Volturnalia, when the moon is red and round as a pomegranate, the entire scholae is woken by someone pounding at the door. Dido almost does not recognize Iskander when she sees him, for he looks like a man grown old before his time.
Diantha! he howls, sobbing on the step, and in the lantern's light Lupa's face is monstrous and strange, like a mask from a Greek tragedy.
Get you gone! Lupa points, and from the shadows, Dido sees the guards coming. Iskander tears at his tunic and hair, he fights them tooth and nail.
Diantha! he shouts. Where is she?
She has left the scholae, Lupa says, smooth and soft, her voice seductive. Dido can see Iskander's resolve begin to crumble before the woman who has enchanted poets and senators alike, and whose machinations made empires rise and fall. You will not find her here. Go, now.
Come, little one. Sura is in the hall, and she draws Dido away from the step before she can run into the street and after Iskander, all the way to the Aventine, where he will be found in a ditch come dawn, his pockets slit and his throat cut.
Thirty. Six. Twenty-two. Eleven. Seventeen. Seven.
The years pass, and Dido grows more beautiful. Sometimes she can see Diantha when she looks in the glass, and sometimes a stranger's face. She learns how to please a man with conversation, and all the arts of love. Yet, she does not care.
There is a hole inside of her whenever she thinks of Diantha's hand in hers, or of the plane trees, or of the sea.
But one night, Dido slips from her cage and goes down to the Aventine, where the taverna still stands, among the cramped and towering insulae. She asks for the old cook at the back door, and a boy cutting his fingernails with a long knife says, Who are you?
I am Diantha's sister, says Dido, and something in the boy's face goes slack and sad at the mention of the name. Diantha, who loved Iskander.
It is then that she learns of Iskander's fate, and takes her own into her hands.
The boy's hands are rough and callused, he is the cook's grandson, who works at the taverna and runs messages for soldiers and senators. Someday I will join the Legion, he says, and see the might of Rome.
She returns to the Aventine again and again, she cannot stay away. The boy's name is Titus, it tastes like sunlight in her mouth. When he presses Dido up against the stone wall of the taverna, he says, I do not wish to force you.
If there is love, what of it? She walks home, in her head a song, not knowing which path she trods, only that on the morrow Titus will buy her from the scholae, and take her by the hand, and together they will sail from Rome in a boat made of plane tree and pitch to the ends of the Republic, and beyond all mortal ken.
Dido has forgotten that her body is a coin.
They find her lying on the steps of the scholae come morning, and Lupa Silivia locks her in the storeroom.
We will not speak of this, nor tell anyone. When you come out of this room, you will be Xanthe, trained as a courtesan in Athens. Oh, do not cry. This is what you were born to do. If not for the love of your mother, I should not have kept you...
Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Fifty. One. One. One.
Before Xanthe can make her debut, Lupa Silvia sells the scholae to another woman, Lena, a retired courtesan. Lupa Silvia takes most of the girls, save one.
Take this one, she is of no use to me anymore, Lupa Silivia says of Xanthe, who feels as though she has been slapped in the face. Just like her mother.
I will never let a man hurt any of you again, Lena vows, but Xanthe knows it is a promise Lena cannot keep.
Some do it for love, the old cook at the taverna had said, all those years ago. And some for coin. But she forgot to say that some do it for hate, or for pain.
She never sees Titus again.
Thirteen. Seven. Five. Three. One.
