The morning air just seemed to stand still around her. Three weeks ago, some rain clouds and heavy breezes had come driving in from the sea, making the oaks and olive trees shake their heads in the rain. But not anymore, the silence this morning again was broken only by the faint clatter of the gladiators' swords and shields and a flock of sheep being driven out from a farm beyond the gorge. The day was likely to be hotter than yesterday, perhaps in more senses than one.Walking up from the wheatfields, Lydia could see very few people moving, and only two or three birds in the azure blue sky. With some apples and oranges inside a rough sack in one hand and a big pot of creamy milk in the other, fresh from her patron's cows, she was pacing back towards the house; the fruit was for both the house slaves and the gladiators, the milk for the common slaves only. Her hands ached slightly from bending and tugging on those teats but she brushed it off her mind; she had become quite used  to milking cows occasionally over the last few years.<br/><br/>Coming between the bushes and brambles on the path up to her Sir's buildings she thought about the events coming up tonight and in the next few days. The house was being decorated with hunting trophies, flowers and garlands, the fighter athletes would be training, one or other of them might even die upon the hot sand, but she knew that she herself and the other girls might have to show off their bodies in quite intimate ways as well. During the eighteen months she had spent in this patrician’s household, Lydia had had to marshal her body to perform for entertainment together with the other slavegirls now and then. Their Lord had ordered her to tease and fondle the pretty Persian girl a few times, this had been in private, just to watch them. Afterwards he had slept with Amethyst, who was nice but also seemed to feel a little shy in front of the housefolk. It was something Lydia could understand from her own years as a slave, ever since her family had been ripped apart and she herself, her mother and the others sold like meat, she knew the sense of uprootedness that was common to so many owned serving people. She still felt young, but also older than her barely twenty-five years, and she was looking for love and ways ahead in this sunburnt grid of valleys and ridges, while also knowing what it took to survive here. Sometimes those searches seemed to lead on to just more defeats, but Lydia was not one to give in, she had never really known how to give in, and unlike some slaves she had not lost her awareness of justice, though she’d think twice before actually voicing such thoughts before free people,<br/><br/>She came round a couple of busts and altars to the side of the house and stepped down a stairway the top of which was hidden behind some bushes, down to the cellar level where she and her likes were kept. A warren of magazine rooms and corridors surrounded the slaves’ lodgings proper, but the stair she had taken was the only one leading directly out of the house from there, without leading up to the ground floor. At night the top of the stairwell could be shuttered with an iron grille to prevent the girls or the gladiators from escaping.<br/><br/>It felt a bit cooler down here, but the air just smelled stale, and there was a definite whiff of wine and beer in here too, she hadn’t sensed that when she went outside two hours earlier. She realized that someone must have had a bit of fun here, one or more of the gladiators and one of the girls, but what, or how much, had happened was not something she had to bother about as long as it didn’t hurt how they, male and female owned slaves, would be performing over the next few days. For now, she just proceeded to the rustic slave kitchen and placed some of the foodstuffs in order there.<br/>