Zoe rocked the baby back and forth as though the motion would settle the correct words onto her own tongue. “Perhaps you’d like something to eat now, also. Just a second and I’ll bring some bread . . .”
Lycon’s arm anchored her as effortlessly as he would have immobilized a gazelle while it was being trussed—though there was little enough of the gazelle in Zoe’s figure these days. “Here, just sit by me a minute, Zoe,” he said mildly. “I’ll be going to the bath in a little while, I suppose, and I may get something to eat there.”
He paused, thinking over what Zoe had said a moment before and correlating that with dimly remembered scraps of conversation he had overheard while he dozed. “Alexandros isn’t at school, then, today?”
Zoe turned her body away from her husband, placing Glauce against her other breast. “Well, Alexandros hasn’t been going to school for some time now—for twenty days.” Zoe spoke into the infant’s fluffy hair. “There was trouble. You know, the whippings they get if Sempronianus doesn’t like their recitations?”
“Alexandros is going to need an education, if we’re going to get him into the Civil Service, Zoe,” Lycon said—almost gladly. It was a relief to understand now the reason for his wife’s unease. Nothing here a good belting couldn’t solve.
“I know, Lycon, I . . .”
“Or maybe you’d like me to start taking him with me on hunting trips, is that it?” Lycon went on, knowing that Zoe loathed that idea. She had already lost too many children—and most of her life with her husband. “I’d thought that, hadn’t I? But no, it would be too dangerous. We owed him something better.”
The beastcatcher swung himself off the bed. Despite his words, he had not raised his voice. A long-cherished dream was now unexpectedly within his reach; Lycon was already envisioning Alexandros at his side, watching lions group about their watering hole.
He pressed home his next point, already only for rhetoric. “Do you think cadging a ticket for the dole and picking up what he can in the way of petty theft is a better way of life?”
“I said,” Zoe continued firmly, “that when you got home we’d find him another schoolmaster. I . . .”
“And just what is wrong with Sempronianus?” Lycon demanded in triumph. “He’s the best I could afford.”
Lycon continued to fume in Zoe’s silence. “All right, he caned the boys—but none of the masters are going to suffer fools gladly. It’s a tough world out there, Zoe, just as tough in the offices on the Palatine as it is for some unlettered dolt like me—beating through the reeds on the Nile. We won’t do the boy any favors to teach him that if he whines, he won’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do. I wish you’d waited for me to get back.”
Zoe swallowed and sat up to face him. “Do you remember Rachel—on the fourth floor? Their Moises goes to Sempronianus too. Rachel, she . . . Moises told her that sometimes there are boys who are being caned for mistakes every day, every time they recite, no matter how well they do. And then Sempronianus takes them alone into one of the massage cubicles—the class meets in the Baths of Naevius. Afterward . . . that boy doesn’t have trouble with his recitations for a week or so.”
Lycon’s lips were dry. They would not form the words. He dampened them very carefully with the tip of his tongue. His tongue seemed dry as well. “Go on,” he said without emotion, as he reached for his boots.
“Alexandros won’t go to class anymore. And I won’t make him go.”
“Well, well,” murmured Lycon, as he laced onto his feet the army pattern footgear he had worn in from the field. Normally he switched to lighter sandals whenever he was going to spend any length of time in a civilized area. “Who’s the slave you were sending to school with Alexandros? Geta? I’ll want him along.”
“Lycon,” Zoe began, “I just thought it might be better if we found Alexandros another schoolmaster.”
Lycon stamped his foot and enjoyed the sound. Hobnails were a detriment to a man walking on slimy pavement. The iron skidded instead of biting as it did in soil—or in flesh.