<strong>"Slaves, welcome to Rome."</strong><br/><br/>The call rings out from the rim of the harbor.  The quays there are white marble.  Their white is soiled by traffic, groomed clean by the lick of wind and water, soiled again.  The ships pour in, fat ships with brimming cargoes, their quantities countless - countless fistfuls shoved into the mouth of Roman earth, as it devours the world.<br/><br/>The white marble quays grasp the ocean.  Her blue glass is restless in that grasp.  It pulls in her tides and her treasures like a rapist.  The docks are livid with activity.  One cannot hear the tide over the raised voices.  Only the tide of trade rules here, declaring its dominion over heaven and sea and earth by drowning them all out.<br/><br/>This is Ostia.<br/><br/>This is the maw of Rome.<br/><br/><strong>"Get moving, slaves."</strong><br/><br/>The call of the handlers leading the last shipment of human chattel onto the docks is drown out by the rattle of chains as the captive procession marches from below decks and down the plank.  Less than a minute later, the same call from a different throat, commanding a different ship, sounds out.  A minute after that, another ship will come.<br/><br/>By then, that first shipment has been assembled on the docks.  A lone captive is separated, and four handlers lead her away from the others.  Her fellow captives, slouching hawkers by their crates of wares, staring domestics in their drab gowns, chattering urchins; all watch her led away as she is marched the length of the docks to the far northern rim of the city.  They might wonder where she is going.<br/><br/>Where she is going, is a mystery.<br/><br/>The path to this mystery is a narrow, wending trail cutting through the sawtoothed brush of an abandoned lot.  Even with the sea close enough to blanket this place in its indigo lullaby, the land here grows dry.  Lean grasses stand stiff, their colors fading, around little lagoons of wild flowers and weeds.  Life buzzes here, but it is insect and elusive - all too anxious.<br/><br/>This sharp patch of wilderness seems brittle, as if something is just about to happen here.  The path through it is like a crack in an old jug.  The four handlers and their one slave move through it as fast as possible.<br/><br/>At the end of the path, a formation of limestone has its broad brow pressed to the sea.  Furrows seam its regal, weathered surface with grave lines.  It seems to be listening.<br/><br/>It seems the path should end here.  The slavers mill about for a moment, trying to believe otherwise - trying to remember the instructions they were given on how to go further.<br/><br/>When at last they feel too foolish to stay in place, they take a step of faith into one of the darker creases of the stone.<br/><br/>There, defined such that the eye can scarce hold its edges for long, is a crooked chain of stair steps, leading up the rock.<br/><br/>The handlers make their way up it.<br/><br/>At the end of the invisible staircase, there is a chasm in the summit of the limestone formation.  Across the chasm's narrow span, a wall has been laid.  The stones of the wall sag with age, crumbling slowly toward collapse.  It gives the curvature of the wall the appearance of a conspiratorial grin - a square doorway is open off-center in the wall, like a missing tooth.  Above it, a sign painted onto driftwood with pearly shellac and garish, purple letters hangs like a winking eye.<br/><br/><strong>"The Cellar of Mysteries"</strong><br/><br/>This is the place.<br/><br/><hr/><br/>Inside the<strong>Cellar of Mysteries</strong>, there is a constant war being fought:  Torchlight against a crouching, hungry dim.<br/><br/>Today, the torchlight is winning.<br/><br/>Sconces studding every open space of plaster wall fountain out a rosy, dancing light over the large, sunken common area and four alcoves of a main tavern room.  A great tiara of them hangs above the bar, spraying fire from its old iron band, showering the room with light.  Everything is warm like a good handshake is warm, and everything at least pretends to be illuminated.<br/><br/>The Cellar of Mysteries is expecting guests today.<br/><br/>Under the fuming ring of light above the bar, four shelves cram bottles together with small paintings on tablets.  The paintings are all portraits of people; their colorful brushstrokes all glisten like fresh smiles.  All the people in them look happy.<br/><br/>Their artist, Verona a woman with braided hair and a face like a misused grain sack, leans on the bar.  She does not look happy.  She looks like she has never had a happy day in her life.  The many rings on her fingers click as she nervously twiddles them.<br/><br/>Verona does her best to look the woman at her bar in the eye.<br/><br/>But the woman at the bar is looking right back at her.  If that woman was not a muscled, feline masterwork of sinew and softness, the look she gives Verona would make it hard enough.  Even if she did not have a bow and golden arrows strapped to leopard skins that barely cover what would surely be a glorious, oiled nudity in dark skin.  Even if she did not stand like a queen with a death warrant at her fingertips.<br/><br/>The look the woman gives Verona is the same look cats have in their eyes when a bird is dying in their mouths.<br/><br/>So Verona talks to the woman's waist.  That waist is like teak wood, carved into smooth and deadly narrowness.  Still, it is better than her look.<br/><br/>"You're overdue as it is." Verona croaks.<br/><br/>"Tell me when the next slave shipment is coming in."  The woman says, voice like a gold razor.<br/><br/>"I'm not paid to answer your questions."  Verona sneers.  "I don't even know why we tolerate your presence."<br/><br/>"You are not paid enough to cover the doctor's bills you would incur by not answering."<br/><br/>Verona squints at her - or at her large teats at least, hugged by their leopard pelt.  "Are you threatening me?"<br/><br/>"Do you feel threatened?"<br/><br/>Verona purses her lips.<br/><br/>"I hope you do, for your sake."<br/><br/>Verona's lips tremble.  She turns her head and yells to the common room.  "Marissa!"<br/><br/>Across the room, by an oven set into the wall, a large man looks around at the call.  He is a great, bushy clump of a man - a poorly shaved sunbear mated with a bale of hay.  He is stripped to the loincloth and boots, and his pink skin is running with sweat from the heat of the stove.  He is not Marissa, however, and so he turns back to what he was doing.<br/><br/>He is Leo the Frank, bouncer of the Cellar of Mysteries, and so he was cooking.<br/><br/>In front of Leo, on a cutting board the size of a pool table, are vegetables of all kinds, assembled in a fragrant calamity with cured meats and phials of seasoning.  Leo arranges the knife in his hand against a particularly plump and glorious green cucumber.  He begins to chop, talking in German to pupils who are only there in his mind.<br/><br/><strong>"For such a mild taste, the cucumber still has a powerful presence in the dishes that include it."</strong>Leo chops with blinding speed and stellar accuracy.  The hands that do the work bear the lumps, cracks and ruddiness of hands that have chopped just as efficiently into human adversaries.  Leo is cutting the slices translucently fine.<strong>"Consider the carrot as a good parallel.  So for this dish, where the cucumber's presence is only to soften, not to flavor, the overall taste, we need to slice them very, very, <em>very</em>, very, very lean."</strong><br/><br/>"Marissa!"  Verona calls out again.<br/><br/>In one of the alcoves, a man ceases to pretend to be sleeping.  He cracks one narrow eye open in his round bronze dish of a face, a frown making the rat-tail of his mustache bend down, but he does not drop his feet from where they are laying on a table full of accounting tablets, and he does not move the fur-clad lump of his body.  He too is not Marissa, and he is the very opposite of Leo - quiet where Leo is loud, compact where Leo explodes into size, reserved and uninterested.<br/><br/>He has a hard face, hard alcoholic breath and remarkably soft hands.  That makes him Lop Dan, accountant and scribe.<br/><br/>Lop Dan goes back to what he is always doing:  Pretending to be asleep.<br/><br/>"Marissa!  Jupiter skullfuck you for a toad, girl - get over here."<br/><br/>With a huff, a lean, fair girl in the alcove farthest from the bar slaps down the pieces of the Backgammon game she was playing by herself.  She glowers up from beneath a tumult of dark hair, her expression as fixed and severe as the flock of dolls - little girls, centaurs, a fox in a toga, a bee woman - that form a staring assemblage in the booth around her.  Then she lets the pieces fall from her hands as she hangs her head in her dirty palms.  Her tight, youthful body heaves with a flurry of world-weary sighs below its dirty togas.<br/><br/>"From my distress," she grumbles in her native Greek.  "Let buffeting winds bear it and all care away."<br/><br/>"Marissa!"  Verona sounds as though she burned her hand.<br/><br/>The girl grabs her tangled hair and shakes her head and curses inwardly to all her dolls - even the bad one with the "X" shaped eyes she stuck in the corner for being bad - and she whines, because she is Marissa.<br/><br/>"Coming!" Marissa roars.<br/><br/>She stomps over to the bar.  Marissa looks at the woman, then looks away shyly.  Then she looks back, eyes bright with anticipation, as if expecting to find the woman looking.  When she finds the woman is not, Marissa resumes her cloudy countenance.  She spits a word at Verona through lips pushed into a prune.  The word is what it usually is:<br/><br/>"What?"<br/><br/>Verona and Marissa fume at each other, glower grappling with glower, as the sublime, dark woman at the bar pays no heed.  Neither side wins, so Verona replies tersely.<br/><br/>"When is the new shipment of slaves coming?"<br/><br/>Marissa looks blankly at her, still seething.<br/><br/>"Marissa," Verona says in a pedantic tone that begins to soar to a tea kettle's pitch.  "You are the quartermaster here, and so it is your responsibility to know when the shipments arrive," and by now, she is nearly screaming, "that means millet, mustard, ouzo, parchment, and, yes, slaves, so when is the next damn shipment of slaves due to arrive?"<br/><br/>The four slave handlers walk into the door with their single cargo:<br/><br/>The shackled girl in their midst is visibly striking in the way good music is striking.  Every aspect of her flows together, symphonic, to add to the sum of her beauty.  And when looked upon - when the eye and flesh and mind of the looker laurels her with the fantasies, comparisons and reflections that immediately come to them upon seeing her - that beauty becomes more than its sum.<br/><br/>The girl - the woman, for she is eighteen and has the bearing of a hunting cat about her - is a walking moment of awe.<br/><br/>Black hair frames her face, falling to her collar.  Her supple limbs pour from the chains that wrap all about them.  Her contours bulge against the filthy scrap of a garment that runs from her neck to just below her sex.  Her skin radiates strength and silken texture.  Only the radiance of her blue eyes could compare favorably.<br/><br/>Before those blue eyes raise from the floor, the dusky woman at the bar speaks to Verona.<br/><br/>"I am on my way."<br/><br/>And with that, she slips up one of the two staircases that flank the bar - the one leading up, as opposed to the one leading deeper down in the Cellar.<br/><br/>Verona gapes for the two seconds it takes for her to slip soundlessly into lingering memory.  She looks back to find Marissa staring indignantly, as if each moment spent standing in her presence was a drop of poison in her ear.<br/><br/>"Myrine has been going at me for two whole days about this slave shipment," she hisses to Marissa.  "On and on about 'when are the boats from Brundisium due,' 'when are the SH slaves coming in,' 'when is the new slave shipment today,' and the moment she sees the girl, she's off like it was nothing."<br/><br/>Marissa rolls her eyes.  "Alright, well, do you need me to answer any more obvious questions - like what the color of your dress is or whether our wine has alcohol in it - or can I go back to what I was doing?"<br/><br/>Verona waves her away and waves over the handlers.  At that moment, from the stairs leading up, steps a man in an extremely clean toga with an exquisitely clean smile.  His venerable features seem to be stamped with an authentic declaration of friendliness - of more than friendliness; of kindness, enthusiasm and confident concern.  Out lunges his hand in salute as he walks up to stand beside Verona, glorious and sage.<br/><br/>Even the coarsest of the slavers feels a smile touch their lips to see him.  They know instantly who this man is, for this man has devoted his life so that it could not be otherwise.  They are nearly as honored to be in his presence as he seems to be in theirs.<br/><br/>This is Catulus.<br/><br/>"Gentlemen, good day."<br/><br/>"Good day, Consul." Says a slaver with a black eye and a Thracian accent to match his intricate, formidable armor.<br/><br/>"We appreciate the delivery on such short notice and such specific conditions."  Catulus responds cordially, looking from one man to the other.  "Given our high standards here, we decided we could have no other girl but this one."<br/><br/>Verona sneers and shoots a look at the stairs Myrine disappeared up.<br/><br/>"And what standards would those be, Consul?"  The slaver asks, looking around at the dusky peeling of the plaster, the lonely tables and squirts of Greek graffiti that crawl on floor and walls.<br/><br/>"So high, I am lamentably not at liberty to discuss them."  Catulus notes.  He concludes his point with the presentation of a sack to the palm of the slaver.  The sack is small and cheap, but its jingling, heavy contents are clearly not.<br/><br/>The slaver nods, handing the chains bound about the girl to Verona.<br/><br/>" 'Cellar of Mysteries,'" the slaver repeats as he produces the ownership papers for Catulus to take.  "You, like, put on plays and dramas and such?  Myths and pornography and the like?"<br/><br/>"Something like that." Catulus nods with a smile.  "Thank you, gentleman, for this girl.  I am sure she will make our long-term guests here very happy."<br/><br/>The slaver looks dubious, and shuffles his men backward.  One dark-encrusted finger taps the swelling rim of his black eye.  "She's more trouble than she's worth.  Don't know what kind of master or lady would get a monster like that to be a kitten in bed."<br/><br/>"We serve a very unusual breed of boarder here." Verona notes dryly.  Catulus smiles and waves.<br/><br/>The slavers leave the chained girl, and leave the Cellar of Mystery.<br/><br/>Quiet and the rumble of the many torches crush in.  The sound of chopping rises and falls from the other side of the room.  The sound of someone pretending to snore joins it.  Backgammon pieces and dice click.<br/><br/>Catulus watches the door to the Cellar close on its own.  His smile spreads as he looks about the room; Verona's lips fall just as fast.<br/><br/>"Alright, Heroes."  Catulus calls to the alcoves and staircases of the Cellar - to the war of torchlight and dim.  "You can come out now."