Fabiola - Part Four

The young man, Gallus, watched the strange girl at a distance. The girl who insisted on wearing a soldier's robe over her white, wool-embroidered linen dress. Even from there, leaning against one of the arched columns of High Priest's Road, nestled among the fruit vendors, he could see the curls of Fabiola's hair peaking out from under her loose head scarf. Although she'd never looked at him, and perhaps did not even know he existed, Gallus could imagine returning to those intense brown eyes.
 
He took note of her leisurely walking pace as she moved closer and closer towards him, and examined her gestures for signs of who she was below those folds of cloth and beneath that soft, tan skin. Would her hand always feel so warm? Would she notice him? She seemed to notice everything else around her, as her eyes moved slowly and carefully from objects to persons to the open windows above the busy street. The modest, silent girl he coveted at dinner and fantasied about at night had opened herself now. In this moment of revelation, he could see that something about the old beggar woman had troubled her. Thoughtful yet alert, she strolled by him, oblivious.
 
Fabiola, meanwhile, flanked by her anxious servants, was thinking about property. She was thinking about money. It reminded her of stories that she'd heard at dinner regarding the man across the sea who had submit himself to fatal torture in order to erase all debts. What a strange thing to have done, she thought. This seemingly endless debt won't be paid until the wandering gods themselves collapse from exhaustion, destroying Fortune. Before that day, man will continue to prey upon man. And bodies will continue to disembark from ships docked along a river silted with the hopeless, penniless dead.
 
It was in thinking such thoughts that Fabiola decided that she was going to sneak out of her room that night and see how those bodies lived.