The Wine of Reunion

"Twenty years is long enough for a man to forget a woman's voice, and not nearly long enough to forget the silence she left in it."

The oasis lay in a cup of the dunes like a green jewel set in yellow gold, and she saw it first as a smudge of darkness on the horizon, trembling in the heat.

They had been riding for six days. The imperial galley had put her ashore at Carthage in a squall, and from there the journey had been all dust and glare and the long swaying monotony of the litter, five hundred Praetorians in their gilded breastplates marching on either side, and the empty desert opening out ahead like a sheet of beaten brass. She had not spoken for most of it. She had lain among the cushions with her eyes half shut and her hands clasped under her cloak, listening to the creak of the poles and the soft padding of the bearers' feet, and had counted. Not the miles. The days since a ragged drummer had slipped his hand into his tunic and walked out of a Roman library with a scrap of papyrus against his heart. Seventeen. Seventeen days, and no answer.

Then on the sixth evening a rider had come out of the sand.

He had come alone, on a rangy grey pony, with a white cloth drawn over the lower half of his face, and he had reined in before the vanguard and sat there motionless as the Praetorians levelled their spears. He had not spoken. He had only taken from his belt a small round object and held it up so that the setting sun struck it. A disc of bronze, no bigger than a coin, stamped with the figure of a sun. Then he had turned the pony and ridden slowly back into the dunes, and the officer of the escort, a trembling, perspiring young tribune, had turned to the litter and said in a hoarse voice, "Lady. I think we are to follow."

So they followed. And now, in the hot violet dusk of the seventh day, with the first stars pricking out over the sand, the great tents of the oasis rose before them out of the haze, hundreds of them, white and black and striped, in rank after silent rank; and between the tents, on the sand, on the ridges, on the lip of every dune, motionless in the twilight, sat the army of the south.

She had never seen so many men in one place. They sat their ponies in absolute silence, in their white cloaks, with their spears upright against the sky, and as the litter passed they turned their heads, all together, like a field of dark flowers following the sun. Nobody shouted. Nobody jeered. She felt the weight of those thousands of eyes on the curtain, and for the first time since she had left Rome a thin cold finger of fear touched the back of her neck.

They know who I am, she thought. Every one of them.

…

They had pitched a tent for her in the middle of the camp.

It was a large square pavilion of unbleached wool, open on one side to the evening air, hung inside with rugs of red and indigo and furnished with a low table, two cushioned benches, and a brass lamp on a tripod. A pitcher of wine stood on the table, with two plain cups of clay. There was nothing else. No guards stood at the door. When she asked the Praetorian tribune where her escort was to lodge, a tall silent man in a white cloak, who had appeared out of the dusk at her elbow, answered in perfect Latin that the Romans would be welcome to a camp a mile to the north, with water and food, and that the lady would be safe.

"Safe," said the tribune, with a dry mouth. "I cannot…"

"It is all right, Tribune," said Claudia. She did not look at him. "Go."

She stood alone in the middle of the tent, in her dark blue travelling gown, with the cloak still about her shoulders, and listened to the sounds of the camp fading into the night. The wind whispered in the canvas. A horse stamped. Far off, a single drum began to beat, low and slow, and was answered from another quarter, and another, until the whole dark vault of the desert seemed to throb like a heart.

She went to the mirror.

It was a small thing, a polished bronze oval propped on the table, brought by her maid, and she hardly knew why she had packed it. Her face looked back at her out of the lamplight, thin, pale, composed, a woman of forty-two with a few fine threads of silver at her temples and a faint network of lines at the corners of the eyes. She looked tired. She looked, she thought, like someone's aunt. She had not worn a single jewel on the road, except for the fine plain chain of silver that lay in the hollow of her throat, from which nothing hung. She touched it with her fingers. It was warm.

What are you doing? she asked the woman in the glass. What do you think you are doing?

The woman in the glass said nothing. She only looked back, with enormous dark eyes, and a mouth that was beginning, very slightly, to shake.

She set her hands on the table and stood quite still, breathing, until it stopped.

…

He had meant to be late.

He had planned it in the cold, calculated way in which he planned everything, sitting on a rock at the edge of the camp in the last light with his chin on his fist and his eyes on the sunset. An hour, perhaps. Two. Let her wait. Let her sit alone in a tent in the middle of an enemy army and listen to the drums and wonder. It was a trick as old as warfare, and it had been used against greater men than a Roman widow. He had sat on the rock, and watched the sun go down, and told himself that he was not afraid.

At the end of the first quarter hour he rose and began to walk.

He went through the camp slowly, in a plain brown cloak without insignia, with Zuberi trudging silently at his shoulder and the men rising as he passed. They did not speak. They had learned to read him, in twenty years, as sailors read the sea, and they understood that this night was not for speech. He walked between the rows of tents with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the ground, and he thought about nothing at all. He thought about the weight of his own feet. He thought about the cold sand beneath his sandals. He thought about the letter, which lay folded in the pouch at his belt, worn already at the creases from being taken out and read, taken out and read, in the nine days since the drummer had put it into his hand.

There is a truth you must hear.

He had not believed it. He had sat in his tent that night and laughed, a short rough ugly sound, and thrown the thing into the fire. And then he had got up and drawn it out again, and smoothed it flat on his knee, and looked at the sign at the bottom, the little crooked river, and had sat there for a very long time.

She could not have known the name. That was what had undone him. She could not have known unless she had listened, those nights, in the dark, with her head on his shoulder; unless she had remembered every word. He had told her, in the stillness of a dungeon, a thing he had never told another living soul, and she had kept it all those years, like a coin in her pocket, and now she had spent it.

She is a clever woman, he had said to Zuberi, flatly. She knows how to find the one door in a wall.

And you will go through it?

I will go, he said, to see what is behind it.

He stopped at the edge of the light.

The tent stood before him, its open front glowing with warm lamplight, and in the doorway, with her back to him, stood a woman looking out over the dunes. She was in a gown of dark blue wool. Her hair was dressed in the Roman fashion, coiled low on the neck. She was holding the tent-pole with one hand, lightly, as a person does who has been standing a long time. He saw the line of her shoulders. He saw the slight forward lean of the head. And something in his chest, which he had thought dead and buried and long since covered with stone, rose up in him all at once and struck against his ribs like a fist.

He walked forward. She heard him. She turned.

…

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

She had thought that she would not know him. She had told herself so, in the glass, with a bitter sort of comfort: twenty years, she had said, twenty years of sun and war and sorrow, he will have grown old, he will be a stranger. It was not so. It was not so at all. The man who stood in the lamplight before her had silver in his beard, and deep lines scored from nose to mouth, and a white scar that ran like a seam along the collarbone and vanished under the neck of his tunic, and she knew him from the crown of his braided head to the soles of his plain brown sandals, as she would have known him in the dark, in a crowd, in the womb of the world. It was the walk. It was the shoulders. It was the great slow stillness that came before the beginning of any movement. And it was the eyes. They were black, and steady, and as deep as wells, and they rested on her face with an expression that she could not read, and had read in a hundred nights, and would have given the world to understand.

"Claudia," Jabari said.

His voice was lower. Rougher. It had a gravel in it that was new. But it said her name in the old way, the old careful grinding Latin, with the weight on the first syllable, and she felt it go through her as a blade goes through silk.

"Jabari."

"You have not changed."

"That is a lie."

"Yes." The corner of his mouth moved. "I am out of practice at courtesy. I have been among soldiers."

She laughed. It escaped before she could prevent it, a small breathless sound, and she saw his eyes flicker. They stood there, in the warm light, three paces apart, with the whole of a lost life between them like a river in flood. Behind her the drum beat on, steady, deep. In front of her, in the pouch at his belt, she saw the corner of a square of papyrus, and below it, at the open neck of his tunic, a thin leather cord, and swinging from the cord, small and dark and unmistakable in the lamplight, a curved piece of ebony bound in copper.

He saw her see it.

Neither of them said a word.

"Come in," she said, at last, very quietly. "Sit. You have come a long way."

"I have come about three hundred paces."

"Then it is I who have come far." She turned and went in, and he followed, and the heavy flap of the tent swung closed behind them.

…

The wine was red. She poured it herself.

She stood at the low table with the clay jug in her hands, and he sat on the bench opposite, with his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped between them, watching. She had always had beautiful hands. He noted it with a distant, ironical clarity, as one remarks upon a fact in a book. They were long and white and cool, and they did not shake. She filled one cup to the brim, and the other, and set them on the table between them. And then she stopped, and lifted her eyes, and looked at him.

The silence stretched.

"Is it poison, matron?" Jabari said.

It was spoken softly. It was spoken with no weight at all, a casual, almost courteous inquiry. But she went white to the lips. He saw the blood leave her face, saw the long throat move as she swallowed; and he knew, with a flat bitter satisfaction, that he had meant to hurt her, and had succeeded, and that it gave him nothing.

"It is wine," she said.

"I have heard that before."

"Then let me show you."

She picked up the cup nearest her and drank, deeply, with her eyes on his over the rim. She drank half of it. She set it down. A little colour came back into her face. Then she took the second cup, and held it out to him across the table, and said in a voice that was neither pleading nor proud, "I have no more to give you than this, Jabari. Drink, or do not. I will not mind."

He took it.

It was cool in his hand. The clay was rough. He lifted it and drank, a single steady swallow, and set it down, and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. It was good wine. It tasted of dark fruit and smoke and sunlight, and it burned a little in the throat. Whatever she was, whatever she meant, she had not poisoned it. He sat there and felt it settle in his stomach and thought, with weary irony: You do not know that. You have never known that. You did not know it the last time.

"Why have you come?" he said.

"You read my letter."

"I read a line. A line from a woman who once stood on marble steps with a knife in her hand and put it into me." His voice did not rise. "I came to hear what you thought you could say."

"Do you want me to say it now?"

"No." He leaned back, and his face in the lamp-glow was all shadows. "Not yet. First I want to look at you. I have been wondering for twenty years what I would see."

"And what do you see?"

"A Roman lady," said Jabari, slowly. "In a good gown. With an escort of five hundred. With the ear of the Senate, and the ring of the Emperor, and a name that is spoken in the barracks in the same breath as the gods'. A woman who has won." He paused. "And she has put on her best chain, and left the pendant at home."

Her hand went to her throat.

It was an instinctive gesture, quick and unthinking. She felt the cold links under her fingers. She saw his black eyes follow it, and fixed her own on the lamp, and said nothing. The silence lengthened. The drum outside throbbed on, and the wind sighed in the canvas, and far away in the dark a horse whinnied and was hushed.

"I gave it away," she said.

"To whom?"

"To someone who needed it more."

"Hm." He considered her. "A pretty answer. Very smooth. You have grown good at them." A faint, cold smile touched his mouth. "I remember a night when you could not tell a lie without your throat going red. Do you remember? You said you were tired, and I told you your voice was flat. Like poor silver."

"I remember."

"You have since had it hammered."

"I have since had to."

She had risen. She did not know when. She stood at the end of the table in the light of the lamp, with her hands at her sides and her chin raised, and she looked at him with enormous brown eyes in which, he saw, there was a sheen of tears that did not fall. It was a masterpiece. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It was the face she had worn in the arena, perfectly composed, perfectly lovely, and perfectly unreadable, and he knew, with the cold certainty of a man who has been burned once and does not mean to be burned again, that every drop of it was an art.

She came around the table.

He did not move. He sat on the cushioned bench with his hands on his knees and watched her approach, step by step, her gown whispering, her hair gleaming. She stopped before him. She stood so close that he could smell the faint sweet violet of her hair, and under it the warm human scent of her skin, which he had last breathed in a stone cell, twenty years ago, with a chain on his wrist. She looked down at him. Then she knelt.

She put out her hand, slowly, and laid two fingers on the line of his scar.

It was the touch of a physician. It was the touch of a lover. It travelled, light as a feather, along the seam of the old wound, from the base of the throat across the ridge of the collarbone and down to the edge of the cloth, and where her fingertips passed the skin shivered and went hot. He felt it in his belly. He felt it in his spine. He felt, absurdly, the hot sting of his eyes. And he sat quite motionless, with his jaw clenched, and a pulse leaping in his throat, and did not take her hand away.

"It healed badly," she murmured.

"I was told the blade was blunt."

"It was meant to be."

His eyes closed. For an instant. A fraction of a breath. Then he opened them, and they were black and bright and dangerous, and he took her wrist in his hand and removed it from his skin with a slow, almost gentle firmness, and held it between them in the lamplight.

"Do not," Jabari said.

"I only—"

"I know what you only." His thumb rested on the inside of her wrist, on the thin skin over the pulse, exactly where it had rested once in the dark. It was going very fast. "You have come across the sea to be kind to me. I am grateful. I should like to be able to believe it."

"You can."

"Can I?" He lifted his head, and the black eyes met hers, and she saw in them a thing that stopped her heart: not hatred, not cold, but a long exhausted tenderness, so raw, so naked, so quietly unbearable that it was worse than either. "Listen to me, Claudia Marcellina. The last time I looked into those eyes, I stopped breathing. I do not mean that I wished to. I mean that I stopped. My heart, my lungs, everything. I lay on a heap of dead cats in the snow for six hours, and I was dead. And every day since, I have asked myself what it was I saw in them, in the last moment, before the dark. And do you know what the answer is?"

"What?" she whispered.

"Nothing," said Jabari. "Nothing at all. That is how well you do it." He released her wrist. He rose, and stood over her, a tall figure in the lamplight, with his shadow thrown huge across the wool. "I thank you for the wine. I will hear what you have to say, since you have come so far to say it. But I will tell you this now, so that there is no misunderstanding between us." His voice was very quiet. "This time, I will not let those eyes deceive me again."