REVOLUTION: NOVELLA-IN-PROGRESS

REVOLUTION

A SHORT NOVEL (IN-PROGRESS)

SILLA-COEEL LELLA

(PEN-NAME)

. . . From Chapter II:

"How beautiful!

Quintus had not noticed the girl's arrival.

The master of the house was in the garden.

He had already been shaved and had bathed, and was dressed in the spotless white toga required of all proper Roman gentlemen.

But, unlike most of his patrician-born counterparts, rather than lolling about in one of the comfortable couches scattered her and there, he had elected, as usual, to sit upright.

Ostensibly, Quintus Horatius Flaccus was at breakfast.

In reality, he sat, instead, frowning over a pile of scrolls that cluttered his ubiquitous writing desk, while the platters his slaves had carried in lay unnoticed on a side-table, the fresh, hot loaf of wheaten bread beginning to grow cold.

"How beautiful!" Daniella repeated.

In the center of the garden stood a fountain graced by a statue made of stone.

"My Muse," Horatius explained absently,"Aphrodite. I'm glad she doesn't shock you.

--Hebrews, he had heard, were not accustomed to figurative Art. "This is nothing, though. You should see my country place." He described the large farm in the Sabine Hills, with it comfortable stone-hearthed lodge, terraced gardens, cypress trees, weeping willows, and reflection pond where long-necked swans glided dreamily beneath a cloudless azure sky.

"Sounds idyllic. You must be rich to afford all that."

Horatius ignored her impertinence."It was a gift from Maecenas."

"Are you and Maecenas lovers?"

He looked up. "You ask too many questions, young lady." For a newly freed slave. "But, no. No, we're not--. Not at this time." His devotion for the old man was deep and permanent, and carried far more significance than any boy-girl infatuation could possibly sustain.

What he felt for this girl was a problem, though. By the gods, despite all his self-sacrificing abstinence in her case, how he'd love to take her to his bed.

"If you don't talk, God won't hear" the Hebrew quoted from some unknown source.

Horatius tapped his pen. "Isn't that somewhat impious, my dear?"

"Probably. But isn't it true?"

"I've always understood that your people take their religion very seriously."

"For all the good it does us," the girl nodded glumly. "It doesn't let us make statues, though," she added.

"And you like statues, don't you." It wasn't a question. I'll show you statues tomorrow, Quintus thought. Statues of the very Gods!. He wondered how the naive red-haired beauty would react to the sight of sculpted monuments to the male form. Quintus, curb your dirty mind! "Well, your God must have been watching over you last night."

"You think He rescued me from you?"

"From my evil designs? Perhaps. Or perhaps he supplied you with the right words to bring me to my senses." Quintus was indulging in rhetoric. His own wisdom had prevailed last night.

"Perhaps She did," Daniella replied. "Isn't that like a Muse?"

"Somewhat; the difference being, that the Muse usually inspires a poet to take leave of his senses.

"For instance, what am I going to do with you? You're altogether too precocious for your own good. You'll get yourself into trouble, someday." I can't send her back to her family. She'd just be bored. She'd stagnate, or, even worse, they'd marry her off to some shmo who'll keep her bald-headed and pregnant.

The Roman was lecturing her! The last time someone lectured her, was her Uncle Judah. Daniella hated it when people criticized her.

For some reason, this time, it didn't seem to bother her.