Read Online The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene by Frank G. Slaughter - Free Book Online Page A

the table, she brushed her hair until it shone like molten copper. Next, she tied over her hair a white silken shawl that she planned to wear while dancing.
    Suddenly the door from the corridor opened and a girl came into the room. At the sight of Mary, she stopped short and frowned. “Who are you?” she demanded abruptly.
    The girl was older and her figure more generously curved, but it was her costume that startled Mary, for she wore a loose robe wrapped around her body with careless grace, cut from the same gossamer stuff Mary had seen hanging from the racks. Beneath this revealing garment the visitor seemed to be wearing only a small girdle of gold held in place by delicate chains of gold drawn about her hips.
    “Are you deaf?” the newcomer demanded shortly. “Or don’t you understand Greek?”
    “You startled me,” Mary said politely, finding her voice. “I am Mary of Magdala.”
    “The girl who is to dance tonight? The nomenclator told me there was a peasant girl here, but you are hardly what I expected.” She came closer and touched the palla. “Why haven’t you undressed? They will be calling for you as soon as I finish.” Without waiting for an answer, she sat down at the dressing table, elbowing Mary unceremoniously aside.
    “I am dressed already,” Mary protested as the newcomer began to paint her lips with carmine from one of the jars, laying on the scarlet dye with a small brush.
    “In that?” The other girl put down the brush. “They will laugh you out of the room. Or maybe not.” She stood up and peremptorily untied the ribbon about Mary’s waist. Skillfully she adjusted the narrow bands beneath the younger girl’s breasts and tied the ends again. When Mary looked into the mirror she saw with startled eyes that the silken fabric now clung intimately to the upper half of her body. Stooping, the other girl also set the folds of the stola artfully, creasing the fabric so that it fell in many tiny pleats from the waist in front, but clung snugly to the curves of her hips. “I was not one of the vestiplica —pleaters of togas, in case you do not know the Roman word—for nothing,” she said with some pride. “That is much better.”
    “You must be a dancer, too?” Mary said.
    “I am a slave,” the girl flung over her shoulder. “They call me Thetis.”
    “Do you dance in—in that, Thetis?”
    The slave girl stood up and smoothed the transparent fabric over her hips. “For a while. When the men are drunk enough they like to snatch at your robe while you are dancing. Look here.” She came closer so that Mary could see how the fabric was held at her shoulder and waist by tiny silver clips, fragile and easy to loosen. “One good pull and the clips open,” she explained. “The garment unwinds without tearing. This bombyx is costly; it can be woven only by experts.”
    “And you dance naked? Before men?”
    Thetis laughed. “Has no man seen you thus?”
    “Never!” Mary cried in horror. “Not even Demetrius, my foster father.”
    “Then you must be a virgin.”
    Rich color stained Mary’s cheeks. “Of course! I am only eighteen.”
    Thetis laughed harshly. “I was sold as a slave at twelve, and I gave birth at fourteen. Listen, little one,” she said earnestly. “This is an evil place. Go back to Magdala and marry some nice Jew and bear him beautiful children. Believe me, the Jews are the only decent people I ever met.”
    “But all Romans are not evil,” Mary protested.
    “All I ever knew,” Thetis said matter-of-factly. “Wait until you know what it is to be pawed by a fat man stinking of wine. Like your King Herod Antipas.” She threw up her head and listened. “That is my music.” And adjusting the golden chains about her hips with a lithe movement, she opened the door to the triclinium and shot through it. A sudden burst of sound greeted her, maudlin shouts, the crash of an overturned goblet, then the door swung shut, leaving the small room unnaturally