Fabiola - Part Six

The beds were slabs of chiseled stone decorated and made comfortable with tasseled pillows. Fabiola could make that much out through the edges of the smoke-stained doorway curtains as she groped her way along the dark hallway of the brothel. She could hear the people in the rooms. Heavy breathing, tell-tale moans, and rhythmic slaps. Gallus, her prey, had disappeared somewhere in this maze.
  
It suddenly occurred to her to wonder if her father had ever taken a boy. Her brother hadn't. Gallus, the young man from dinner clearly hadn't. But she knew from overheard conversations that men often took boys. They spoke openly in front of the invisible Fabiola, joking about the softness of a boy's skin, boasting of having made one a woman.  The elders would change the subject when it came up or if one of the priests came into the room. Or the men would turn on their own to describing the women who earn and their encounters with servants. Fabiola knew what men thought of the women in this building. She felt it too, even if it made her uncomfortable. They couldn't control themselves, these women; they needed men and enjoyed their taste. Those who weren't ravenous for men were simply lazy. This is what Fabiola had been told a hundred times; it was the assumption behind everything that was said. It was the reason that Fabiola hated being called a whore for the way she dressed.
  
Very few of the women in the brothel seemed to be enjoying much of anything. Fabiola stopped to gaze through one of the curtains of an occupied room. There was a man with long hair and a scar across his back, a soldier, with a soldier's body. He was on his knees, entering a woman from behind. The woman wasn't lifting her leg for display as in the lamp, nor was she looking back with joy. Instead she rested the side of her head on a pillow, moaning and breathing absently while the man alternated between slow and fast movements, grunting to himself. Fabiola could see the drug at work in her eyes. And while part of Fabiola pitied the woman, whatever her reason for earning, there was a part of her who at this moment remembered the feeling of finger tips on stone and wondered what it felt like to be alone with a man in a room.
  
Continuing along the hallway, passing women waiting to ply their trade and rooms occupied with heat and sweat, Fabiola did her best to look through the crack of each curtain, trying to find Gallus. She didn't even know his name, and it bothered her to know that he was here, but she was determined. She was determined because he was here, and because she didn't know his name.
  
Eventually, having reached the end of the hallway, she again heard Gallus' voice. Forceful, yet assured, he was speaking--of all things--about the wanderers in the sky. As Fabiola slowly approached his curtain, she heard also the laughter and purring voices of the two women Gallus had taken with him into the brothel. She was afraid to look into the room. So Fabiola stood silently, as invisible to Gallus as she assumed she had been at dinner. There, in the shadows, she listened as closely as she could manage.