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Sophia Wildwood
Final Assignment
Arsinoe felt her feet pounding on
the hard dirt path as she ran, his words still echoing in her mind. She
remembered the look on his face when she, without warning, jumped up and bolted
out the door. She ran toward the docks, back the way that they had come. Gaius’
face appeared as if it were in front of her. He had a kind face, she thought. Yes, he was kind and
intelligent, I don’t doubt him and that’s the problem. This has taken its toll
on me already… to go farther would push me past my limits. Caesar may deserve
everything coming to him, but I cannot kill my relative.
Arsinoe
wanted to run back to the gaming house. She wanted to go back to Gaius and tell
him everything, about her mother, her father, about Caesar. She wanted him to
listen, to abandon his plan. But he would never; the plan was all he had. He’ll
make a new one, I know it, and he will find another slave to carry out his
plan. Suddenly, Arsinoe was tired, so
tired, with a deep pressure so like the one that drove her out of the gaming
house. The pressure that came on after the father and his little daughter
entered and she remembered what it was like before her mother had died. Tears
had come to her eyes.
“What’s
wrong?” Gaius had said and she never replied, she just got up, running out the
door, into the streets.
Arsinoe
reached the docks just as the last rays of sun had dipped across the Tiber.
Using a forgotten rope cast across a ship waiting to be loaded, Arsinoe climbed
into the bowels of one of a hundred boats taking Roman goods to other
provinces. She settled in a small chest and closed the top… No one will find
me here and in a week I will be somewhere else, somewhere I can remove my
collar, somewhere I can live.
