Saturnalia by John Maddox Roberts

this sudden coyness concerning poison?” But I was already talking to her back. She stepped delicately to her mat and pirouetted as gracefully as a dancer, then settled on it as gently as a cloud. I couldn’t do that without my knees popping like sticks in a fire.
    “The subject is closed, Senator. Now leave. Unless you want your fortune told?” Now she showed a hint of a smile. I wondered if she were badgering me.
    “Why not?”
    “Then come sit here.” She gestured to the mat before her as graciously as a queen offering a seat to the Roman ambassador. I sank onto the reeds, trying not to make too awkwarda job of it. We were almost knee to knee. She reached behind her and brought out a wide oval tray of very ancient design, made of hammered bronze with hundreds of curious little figures chased on its surface. I knew the work to be Etruscan. She balanced it across our knees and picked up a bronze bowl with a lid and handed it to me. Then she took off the lid.
    “Shake this thirteen times, circling to the left, then pour it onto the tray.”
    The bowl contained a multitude of tiny objects and I did as I was bidden, rotating the bowl violently in leftward circles thirteen times. Then I upended it and the things inside tumbled out. There were stones and feathers and a great many tiny bones; the reedlike bones of birds and the knucklebones of sheep. I recognized the skulls of a hawk and a serpent, and the yellow fang of a lion old enough to have been killed by Hercules. She studied these, muttering under her breath in a language I did not recognize. The light coming in over the door curtain seemed to dim, and a cold breeze touched me.
    “You are rooted to Rome, but you spend much time away,” she said. “Your woman is high-placed.”
    “What other sort of woman would I have?” I said, disappointed. “And what senator doesn’t spend half his time away from Rome?”
    Furia smiled slyly. “She is higher than you. And there is something about her that you fear.” This took me aback. Julia was patrician. But fear her? Then I remembered what there was about Julia that I feared; I feared her uncle, Julius Caesar.
    “Go on.”
    “Oh, you want a special fortune told?” Now her smile was openly malicious. She gathered up her things and replaced them in the pot and covered them. Then she put awaythe tray. “Very well. But remember that you requested this.”
    Now she settled herself and her face went blank, hieratic, like the face of an Asian priestess.
    “Give me something to hold that is yours. Have you something that has belonged to you for a long time?”
    All I had with me were my clothes, a small purse, my sandals, and the dagger I usually hid in my tunic when I went out during uncertain times. I took out the dagger.
    “Will this do?”
    Her eyes glowed eerily. “Perfectly. I won’t have to use a knife of my own.” That sounded ominous. She took the dagger and held it for a moment.
    “You’ve killed with this.”
    “Only to preserve my own life,” I said.
    “You needn’t justify yourself to me. I don’t care if you murdered your wife with it. Give me your right hand.”
    I held it out. She took it and gazed into my palm for a long time and then, before I could pull it back, she slashed the tip of the blade across the fleshy pad at the base of the thumb. The blade was so sharp that I felt no pain, just a thrum like a plucked lyre string that went all through my body. I made to jerk my hand away.
    “Be still!” she hissed, and it was as if I was rooted to the spot. I had lost all power of motion. Swiftly, she drew the blade across her own palm, then she gripped our two hands together, with the hilt of my dagger between them. The bone grip grew slick with blood.
    I was almost beyond astonishment, but she further amazed me. She raised her free hand to the neck of her gown and jerked it down, baring her left breast. It was larger than I would have expected, even on so Junoesque a woman, full and slightly