Read Online The Blood of the Martyrs by Naomi Mitchison - Free Book Online

beginnings of a beard, to whom everyone was paying so much attention. It was fairly obvious that it was this young man who was to be danced to and glanced at, and Manasses did his best. In the end the young man beckoned him up, gave him a piece of gold and then explained very seriously that in one movement he had not interpreted the music as he should have. To Manasses’s great surprise, the young man rose, throwing aside a most beautiful purple cloak, clapped his hands for the musicians and proceeded to give his own interpretation of the passage. He certainly danced well for an amateur, allowing himself to be clasped in the most realistic way by the Bacchus, who was overacting through sheer nervousness, and everyone applauded tremendously, including Manasses.
    Walking back to the couch, the young man stopped and fondled the kneeling Manasses, who thought he had the usual Gentile or Roman smell of overeating. ‘I hope theboy is being seriously trained,’ he said. Someone else said, ‘Not so well as he would be at the Palace!’ And then the host began, ‘Oh—allow me—if I might offer him as a small gift—the honour would be mine—’ It only then occurred to Manasses that the young man was Nero Caesar, the new Emperor.
    Manasses did not mind being given to Nero, so long as Josias was included, and they were sent off to the Palace, where, as a matter of fact, he only saw the Emperor half a dozen times. He was one of several hundred slaves, many of whom were dancers, actors, acrobats or musicians. Sometimes he was part of the background for the great dancer Paris, who did him the honour of kicking him one day. Usually he had to entertain the more important slaves or freedmen; he trusted no one and was sometimes nasty to Josias, who, in turn, grew sullen. And he got to know some useful things about poisons. Also he got to know by sight the Emperor’s mistress, beautiful, discreet Claudia Acté, the Greek freedwoman, a little older than the boy Nero, approved of by his friends but not by his mother.
    One evening there was a row. Old Pallas, the financial secretary, was beating up a girl who didn’t want to sleep with him, and, if you knew what he was like, you couldn’t blame her, but still she’d been sent in by her Madam, and she was a slave, so she didn’t have any choice. But she kept on screaming that she was a dancer and not a whore, and he kept on answering the way that sort of man answers that sort of woman, and at last he got in a kick that knocked her out, and there she lay, bleeding a little, and Pallas stalked out. Some of the slaves had been watching behind the curtains, but they weren’t going to interfere. The girl groaned a bit and flopped her hands, but it was none of their business to pick her up. It was a kind of passage room, that you went through if you didn’t want to go through the public courts, and by and by Claudia Acté slipped in, with a veil over her head and shoulders. She saw the girl on the floor and went straight and knelt beside her and lifted her head, and spoke to her in Greek. Then she looked up and saw the slaves in the doorway and called sharply, ‘Here, one of you, come and help me!’
    Most of them just dissolved away, for they were more afraid of Pallas than of Acté, and anyhow why should they help? But it came to Manasses that he was a Jew and therefore braver than these Greeks and Bithynians, and besides he had once believed in the Kingdom and all that went with it, so he came. Acté asked him where the girl could be put safely, and Manasses thought of an attic where there would probably be an old mattress; they carried her there between them and for the moment he did not care if Pallas was told. Then he got water and some rags to wash her. When he came back, Acté was holding the girl’s hand and praying, her eyes shut. Manasses listened and heard words of the kind he knew and a name he used to