From The Last Girls of Pompeii

CHAPTER ONE

      It was too early for the birds.

      So why had she awakened? Except for the soft, rhythmic breathing of her slave, Sura, sleeping at the foot of her bed, everything was quiet. Silence lay over the villa as thickly as the August heat. Nothing was stirring. But Julia was sure something had. Had she heard some tiny noise? Or perhaps she had felt something. Her eyes, now accustomed to the darkness of the room, fell on the water glass beside her bed. That was it! An infinitesimally small rattling sound. And yes, the surface of the water in the glass was trembling ever so slightly. She watched it closely for several seconds. What made it do this? Why, in the middle of the night, would water begin to shiver? Throughout this long and torturously hot summer, there had been unexplained tremors—slight ones that came up through the tiles of the floor or the paving stones of the street. Her mother claimed that the gods were angry. No, not the gods, just one in particular, Venus, the deity of the household of Cornelius Petreius and of the entire city.

      Quietly Julia slipped her feet to the floor and walked across the tile, which felt cool compared to the air. She did not want to wake Sura. She opened one shutter just a bit and peered down into the garden. The slender columns surrounding it were bathed in moonlight. To Julia they looked like spirits, fragile and feminine like the young virgin priestesses who guarded the shrine of the vestals. There was a long rectangular pool filled by the water that flowed from the Venus fountain at the head of the garden. One of Rome’s finest sculptors had made it for her mother and father when they were first married and moved into the villa. The figure was that of the goddess reclining on a large shell that overflowed gently with water. Her mother had insisted that the sound of water must be quiet. “Water must slip and not spout,” Herminia Petreia had pronounced.

      “What are you looking at?” a voice from behind Julia asked.

      It was her slave, Sura. Julia instinctively used her right hand to grab her left arm, which was much smaller and hung limply at her side. This was just a startled reaction, not embarrassment. Sura had known her since birth. If anyone was accustomed to seeing the withered arm, it was Sura.

      “Sura. I thought I was so quiet. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

      “It is too hot to sleep, mistress.”

      “I know.” Then Julia nodded her head toward the pool. “Look how the reflection of the moon in the water trembles on this windless night.”

      “Hmm,” was all that Sura said as she leaned forward to look. Her straight black hair swung like a curtain over one eye. So long and so straight. Julia envied her hair. She knew it was ridiculous to envy a slave, but she did nonetheless. Sura, at almost sixteen, was four years older than Julia. She was very pretty, and her eyes, like those of so many people from Thrace, were a soft green with flecks of gold.

      Julia’s hair was curly and uncontrollable. Her best feature were her dark eyes, which at first glance seemed almost black but were actually the deep blue of a night sky. Her worst feature, of course, was her left arm. Nearly as small as a baby’s, it had never grown properly. But even though it was weak with barely any muscle, Julia had learned to do everything any girl her age could do with two arms. She could write and draw and even pluck the strings of a lyre. If it was just a question of usefulness, the arm wouldn’t matter. But it wasn’t as simple as that. The arm was not just different. It was ugly, and people stared at it. One hundred years ago, in the time of the Republic, she knew a deformity like hers had been referred to as the Curse of Venus. Julia was never exactly sure why a goddess of beauty would do such a thing, curse a family that worshipped her. She was grateful that her parents had never used this term in front of her. It was awful to be thought of as a cursed creature; it made her feel slightly less than human. Although it was hard to have been born flawed into a family that worshipped the goddess of beauty, Julia had wondered countless times what would have happened if she had been born during the harsher times of the Republic or to another family, one not so accepting of a deformity.

      Once when she was very young, she had wondered aloud about this, and her older sister Cornelia had replied in the voice of great authority that she seemed to have been born with. “You would have been put out on a hillside to die. Simple as that!” Unfortunately for Cornelia, their mother had overheard. In a flash she had raced into the garden and delivered a solid slap to Cornelia, before folding Julia into her arms and nearly smothering her with kisses. Julia remembered Cornelia’s stunned face. Julia was stunned, too. It was the only time Herminia had ever slapped one of her daughters.

      But Julia knew that there was a great deal of truth in what Cornelia had said. Although times had changed, even now people tended to think of those born with deformities as something separate and apart. Not marriageable, for the gods would forbid that such flaws should be perpetuated. Ironically, however, once a deformed creature was brought into the world, people often believed that its defects gave special powers, sometimes frightening ones—especially if the deformed child was female. This belief was one reason why so many such infant girls were abandoned and left to die. Those who survived often became either priestesses or seers who with their powers could glimpse the future, interpret the past, and decipher the many hidden messages, signs, and omens that wove through the daily lives of ordinary people.

      “It’s true, Mother, you know it,” Cornelia had protested, touching the red mark on her face. “She would have been left to die.”

      Herminia glared at her oldest daughter and nervously fingered the amber pendant of Cupid that hung around her neck. This was a habit she had when she grew agitated, as if she were invoking this god of love, the son of Venus, to come to her, be it to handle an unruly child or a stubborn husband. “If you don’t want me to beat you like a slave, Cornelia, you shall never say such a thing again.”

       From her mother’s arms, Julia had peeked triumphantly at Cornelia. Seeing Cornelia slapped was almost worth being born with a withered arm, she thought briefly. Almost, but not really.