Last time: Adam, Ani, and Sara found themselves stuck in a closet. Ani left the closet… Without her clothes.
New here? Start below to get caught up.
Chapter 7 Part 2
Sara stared at Adam in disbelief.
“Did she really just do that?” she asked.
Adam’s response was unexpected. He began to remove his clothes as well, as if under a spell.
“When in Rome,” Adam said.
“Adam, quit it, you don’t have to…”
Again, before she could finish, he had also exited the room.
Outside, Adam found himself next to Ani, trying not to stare, neither at her nor any of the other dozen or so nude patrons.
“Adam, this is a fully intact bathhouse,” Ani whispered, looking at the complex mosaicked floor. A fresco on the wall depicted multiple figures. One had to be Dionysus. Another, possibly Persephone. She was transfixed.
Looking around, Adam noticed how the room was constructed. Solid volcanic rock with buttresses. He tried to recall if he’d seen any evidence of that at the modern dig site. The ceiling was high. He didn’t feel like he would hit his head as he had in the closet. They’d need to find a definitive exit. Several doors lined the room. Soon enough, he noticed a female bather walk towards a door opposite them.
“There,” Adam whispered. “Follow her and see if you can’t find some clothes.”
“Ok. You stay here. I’ll be back.”
At that moment, Adam realized he couldn’t just stand there. Half of the patrons were clearly looking at them. A man in the pool raised an eyebrow and gave him an impressed nod. Oh dear.
Without a better option, he stepped into the pool and sat on a platform against the edge. The water was uncomfortably warm.
The man across from him said something he didn’t understand.
“No Greek,” he responded, lifting his hands.
“Naughty, Naughty, my friend,” the man said in perfect Latin. Adam hadn’t been great at Latin, and it had been 20 years since he’d studied it seriously. But he understood that as well as the man’s body language.
“When in Rome,” he responded in his best effort. It probably made absolutely no sense to the man, neither in grammar nor context, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
The man looked at him, confused, and then seemed to lose interest.
Back in the room, Sara whispered to herself, “My friends are idiots.”
Trying hard to think clearly, she looked around in the dim light. There were lots of towels. She took a stack down from the shelf furthest towards the back and shoved her now packed and wrapped bag against the wall. She paused. How would she get it back? This wouldn’t work. Instead she wrapped the entire thing in a towel. It looked like a very round bundle, but it would have to do.
She picked up Adam and Ani’s discarded clothes and stopped to think. She couldn’t reasonably take multiple bundles with her. She wrapped them as well and set them on the back shelf. If the clothes were found, they’d hopefully be long gone.
Pausing, she steeled herself and stripped to her underwear. She paused briefly before pulling her bra straps down below her arms.
For a moment, she was frozen. This was absolutely insane. A dream seemed most likely, but she couldn’t rule out that they were all dead. Either way, she admired Ani for her ability to just go with it. She’d said to herself for years she needed to plan less and do more. She’d have to do it now.
“Idiots,” she said again before wrapping herself in a towel. She grabbed her bundle and stepped out.
Outside, she was astounded by how powerful the steam was. It was as intense as any steam room she’d been in. What struck her most was the nudity. Nude men and women lounged about. The frescoes on the walls featured nude figures. Somehow, the robed figures wandering around with pitchers and cups made it even more stark.
A man in the pool looked at her and smirked; he looked knowingly at another figure in the pool, a figure she quickly realized was Adam.
With horror, she realized what the man thought. Two women in a closet with a man. She cringed and somehow blushed even more than she had been. How was Adam so casually sitting in the pool? What if someone tried to speak to him?
She also quickly realized that she was the only one wearing a towel. The man continued to smile at her. She did her best to walk confidently towards the door on the opposite wall and ignore the stare. On her way, she dropped a towel next to Adam and gave him a kick in the shoulder. Moron.
Adam quickly jumped out of the pool and dried himself off. Together, they walked towards the door and, upon entering the next room, found Ani standing in front of one of the female servants. The woman’s hood was pulled down, and she stared at Ani, her jaw set in tension.
“You are not members here, and you are not welcome,” the woman said to Ani.
“But we ardth members… We be guests of the main one,” she responded, knowing her speech was stilted and formal.
Sara understood none of it, but did notice that the woman looked a bit confused.
Ani, meanwhile, was doing her best to speak Koine Greek, a language she read, but had never heard spoken.
The woman tried again, “You are not members. I know all the members. How did you get in here?”
“When in Rome,” Adam said hopefully in Latin, re-using his phrase from the bath.
The woman stared at him.
Sara rage-whispered, “Stop fucking saying that. It’s weird. We’re not in Rome, and you’re butchering the grammar.”
The woman looked beyond flustered and switched to Latin, “Is Latin better? Please leave. At this point, you are drawing attention.”
“We shan’t leave, and the leader who invited us will hear of it. We are his guests, step aside, and we shall retrieve our clothes.” Ani replied in Latin. While not a spoken language for her, she at least knew the grammar better.
The woman gave her a skeptical look, “You are not guests of the leader nor of the bathhouse or His servants who hide here. ”
“But we are guests; see, my friend here is a gladiator in the circus, no? And his assistant.”
Sara elbowed Ani, handing her a towel, and said to Ani in English, “We want to leave; she clearly wants us to leave. What exactly is there to discuss?”
The woman looked at Sara as if trying to decipher her statement. It was almost as if she was working out how to translate English. Either way, she seemed to understand the intent.
The woman looked from Ani to Sara to Adam. Adam looked on sheepishly, realizing his size was a problem. His 6’4” frame barely fit in the low ceiling of the hallway. He towered over both Ani and the smaller woman. He smiled under the assumption he was being spoken about.
Her eyes narrowed, her tone getting icy, “Who are you really?”
“Performers. In the circus, but for a more discerning audience. Hence our invitation here,” Ani lied.
The woman appraised them again.
“Yes. Discerning. Say what you want, you must leave. Would you like my assistance in finding your clothing?”
Sara nudged Ani as if to remind her of the towel, and she quickly covered herself. “But of course.”
“Follow me. I am Lusine.”
Lusine. Ani couldn’t believe her luck. Another Armenian? While she could speak Latin, a spark of hope ignited in her. Hope lit by thousands of hours of Sunday school and countless conversations with Armenian clerics in the ‘Old Armenian’ dialect of Grabar. She decided to try.
She spoke in the familiar cadence of the ancient language. “Lusine? Armenian? You are far from home, are you not?”
The woman eyed her, responding easily in what was clearly her mother tongue. “My family is prominent in Constantinople. Are you Armenian?”
“But of course! I am Ani. My two friends are Assyrian. We are also far from home.”
“They don’t look Assyrian, and Ani is a strange name for an Armenian.” Lusine looked at both Adam and Sara as if trying to decipher their origin. Otherwise, that was all the woman had to say. She turned and quickly led them down a hall. A stupid risk. Ani knew she was out of her depth. The conversation turning into a language she truly spoke had given her extra confidence.
They soon found themselves in a room with several sets of clothing. Lusine quickly picked up a tunic and handed it to Adam.
“As I said, I don’t know how you got here unless you walked in nude, and I believe that would have been noted by the sentries.”
“You have sentries?” Ani asked.
“I don’t know who you are and where you are from,” said Lusine, “And although your Armenian is passable and your Latin mostly understandable, I suggest that you wait until you understand where you find yourself before using your talents. I may be more observant than most, but if you don’t know why a pagan bathhouse would need guards in the current state of the Roman Empire, then you must be dumber than your speech suggests.”
Wow, that stings, Ani said to herself. But the woman wasn’t wrong. Talents? What talents?
Sara pulled Ani’s arm. “Care to let us in the conversation?”
“She’s got us dead to rights. Adam is rather large, and while his size makes sense as a circus performer, someone would have mentioned him to the staff upon arrival. Plus, he doesn’t have any clothes.”
“Is she going to help us?” Sara asked.
“It appears so.”
Lusine waited for the three to cinch up the loose robes. As if making conversation, she asked, “That’s not Assyrian. What language does she speak? It is not one I have heard before.”
“Saxon,” Ani blurted out, hoping that this woman of apparently many languages didn’t happen to know that one.
Luckily, she was right, and Lusine replied, “I see we’re finally being truthful. Maybe your friends can tell all of these Goth mercenaries in the city to move along to another place.”
Once the trio was prepared, Lusine led them to the door. She opened it and unceremoniously shoved the team into the street.
“Please go and garner attention somewhere else. If you find yourselves in dire need, you can contact the Way. Just look for a shepherd’s staff. If you see one, you will likely find one of us who will help you.”
“The Way? As in Christians?” Ani asked.
The woman looked left and right as if trying to note if anyone had overheard before responding, “We are of The Way, as He intended. I am of House of Lydia, and we keep the true faith. Christians as you call them have been tempted and have fallen. We pity them, but also must protect ourselves. As I said, we will assist. For now, I suggest you head back to the circus from whence you came.”
With that, she closed the door behind her.
