He dared ask no further. There was too much awe about her. Had he indeed let a vessel of Power touch him, and lived?
"Freedom, freedom," said Phryne. "In a barbarous land, in sod huts and stinking leather clothes, with not a book or a harp for a thousand miles ... oh, truly, I shall be free!" Her laughter rattled. Eodan made the sign against trolldom.
"Well, quickly," she said. "I could not be taken for any peasant girl, so I must be a boy. There are the shears."
She crouched before him and waited. He took the long crow's-wing-colored tresses in his hands, feeling that he offended some spirit of loveliness. But—He cropped away until there were only ragged bangs falling over her brow and her ears could be seen. She looked in a mirror and sighed. "Gather them up," she said. "When we make a fire, I will offer them to Hecate."
She pointed to the clothes. "Now, put that on! Do not stand there gawping!" With a movement as of defiance, she undid her girdle, threw it on the floor and stepped from her gown. Indeed she was beautiful, thought Eodan. Her womanness did not flaunt itself, bursting through its clothes like Cordelia's; it waited cool among shadows for one discoverer. He grunted some apology when she glared, turned his back, and fumbled on the garments laid out for him—a gray, patched woolen tunic, scuffed sandals, a felt hat and a long wool cloak. He picked up the heavy purse, slung a sword next to his skin and put a knife in the rope belt.
As he took up his staff, he saw Phryne clad like him. The baggy cloth would hide the shape of her body; she must hope the dirty old cape would shield slim legs and high-arched feet. She was turning from the shelf of books. She had run her fingers over the scrolls, just once, and tears lay in her eyes.
"Come," she said. "We have only till morning; then they will start to hunt us."
[VII]
To Eodan, Rome had been two things. First was the city of the Cimbrian dream, all golden roofs above white colonnades, shimmering against a sky forever blue. Then was the avenue of the triumph, where he bent his weary head lest the hurled muck take him in the eyes, and thereafter the slave pens and finally a stumbling in chains, one dawn, out onto the Latin Way. Neither was of this earth.