Ignoring her, Domitian slid another profiterole onto a plate and offered it to her.
Sarita was so annoyed with him she almost refused out of principle. But the profiteroles were so good, and it wasn’t their fault she was annoyed with him. It seemed unfair to take out her anger on them so she took the plate, muttering a very short “Thank you.”
“De nada,” Domitian murmured, watching her cut off a large piece of profiterole and pop it in her mouth.
In her irritation, she wasn’t paying much attention to what she was doing and the piece was much larger than she’d intended. Not dangerously so, but it meant a lot of chewing and moving food around in her mouth before swallowing to be sure she didn’t choke. The entire time she did, Sarita glared at Domitian.
“I do not understand your distress,” he said as he watched her chew. “You said that Dressler had explained about the nanos and our being immortal and such.”
Sarita swallowed the food in her mouth, took a drink of wine from the bottle to clear her throat, and then nodded. “Yes. Immortal. But I was thinking—you know—a hundred years old, maybe two . . . not two thousand!”
“Two thousand, two hundred and—”
“Oh my God!” The words exploded from Sarita’s mouth and her eyes went as big as saucers. “Two thousand years?”
“Two thousand, two hundred and—”
“In Egypt?” She interrupted his second attempt to give her his exact age.
“Si. I lived in Egypt two thousand, two hundred and—”
“So you wore those little white skirts and stuff?”
“What I wore was a shendyt not a skirt,” he said stiffly.
“If that means little white skirt, that’s what I’m talking about,” she said with a grin and then started to raise the bottle to her lips again, but stopped as a thought occurred to her. “Were you still there when the Romans took over?”
“Si.”
“Oh God!” Sarita gulped down some more wine, and then lowered the bottle to say, “Please don’t tell me you had to trade in your skirt for those ridiculous long togas and those silly-looking leafy things they wore on their heads.”
“I fear so,” Domitian said with amusement as she raised the bottle again for another chug. “Although as a gladiator, I had to wear a subligaculum and—”
“Oh my God! You were a gladiator?” she asked the minute she could get the bottle down and swallow what she’d taken in. “Oh, I bet you were super hot as a gladiator.”
“Er . . .” Domitian said, unsure how to respond to that. He had a healthy ego, but it seemed kind of egotistical to agree with her that he had looked hot in his subligaculum.
“Tell me what it was like?”
“Wearing a sublig—?”
“No, no,” she interrupted. “What was it like being a gladiator?”
Domitian shrugged. “Up early, good food, hard training, the most amazing massages I have enjoyed in my life, and—”
“Wait, wait,” Sarita said with a frown. “You’re a vampire.”
“Immortal,” he corrected stiffly.
“Whatever,” she said, waving one hand. “But as a gladiator you’d have to be out in the sun all—”
“No. I can control minds, remember?” he said gently. “I just made sure our doctores always placed me in the shade for practice.”
“Doctors decided where you would fight?” Sarita asked with surprise.
“Not doctors, doctores,” Domitian corrected her gently. “It is what the trainers were called.”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Okay, so you got to train in the shade, but you couldn’t gladiate in the shade. That would have been out in the coliseum, in the open.”
“Si, but each gladiator only had to fight three or four times a year, five at the most,” he said with a shrug.
“What?” she gasped with disbelief.
Grinning Domitian nodded. “Si. The rest of the time it was just good food, training, massages, baths, and willing women. Life was good.”
“Hmm. Sure,” Sarita muttered, suddenly seeming annoyed. “If that’s all you want from life.”
“I was young then,” Domitian said with amusement. “It was all I wanted from life.”
“Um, no,” she said dryly. “You said Rome conquered Egypt in 30 b.c., so if you were born in 260 b.c. you were . . . er, let’s see, we have to go backward, right, so two hundred and thirty minus thirty . . . two hundred and thirty years old,” she said, and then arched an eyebrow at him. “Two hundred and thirty years old is not young.”
“Actually, I was only one hundred and fifty. I was a gladiator in 110 b.c. while I still enjoyed food and sex,” he explained. “And it was in Rome, not Egypt that I was a gladiator.”
“Oh,” Sarita frowned. “For some reason I thought you were born in Egypt.”
“I was. My family was from Egypt, and I lived and worked there for my first thirty years.”
“Worked as what?” she asked curiously.
“I was trained to be a sesh—a scribe,” Domitian explained. “That was what my mother wanted me to be, and I did try, but it was terribly boring to me and when I was about twenty-five I ran off to be a soldier. I thought that would surely be more interesting, and it was at times, but in peacetime it was just hard labor, helping to move stones for pyramids and such. I only stayed with it for five years or so.”
“Really? You helped build a pyramid?” Sarita asked with fascination.
Domitian smiled faintly at the question. “I think calling what I did ‘helping to build a pyramid’ a bit of an overstatement. I helped move a few large blocks, but that was about it, and it was backbreaking work, even for an immortal,” he assured her. “Anyway, I soon grew tired of that and landed in Ostia, where I was a urinatores for a decade.”
“Er, what is a urinator?” Sarita asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Urinatores,” he said on a laugh. “A salvage diver. We dove down as far as thirty meters with nothing but a diving bell with air trapped in it that we could breathe out of as we worked. Once it ran out we had to surface and trap fresh air to go back down. A dangerous job for mortals, but not for me, which is why I made out so well monetarily.”
“From there I landed in China where I ended up becoming a praegustator for a decade for Emperor Qin Shi Huang. I pretasted food to test it for poison,” Domitian explained, and then added, “Another very dangerous job had I been mortal since the emperor wasn’t well liked. But I was immortal, so . . .” He shrugged. “I was well paid while there, which is part of the reason I stayed a full decade, but it was also because I found I quite liked food.”
“You didn’t like it before that?” she asked with amusement.
“Oh, yes. Well, sometimes. Soldiers did not exactly eat gourmet meals, and I was not much of a cook myself so my time as a urinatores was not very educational in that regard, but the emperor had proper cooks and he did like his food. And so did I. The food there was new and different. I decided I wanted to travel around and try food from other cultures. So, despite being offered a great deal of coin to stay, I left and started my wandering, looking to try different foods and such. At least until I started to lose my taste for food.”
“When was that?” she asked at once.
Domitian sighed and thought back. “I guess it started when I was about a hundred and eighty or so. I began to eat less and less frequently, and five years later at the celebration of Ptolemy XII’s accession was the last time I actually enjoyed food.”
“And the last time you had sex,” she said.
Domitian nodded. “The two appetites often dwindle away together.”
“Why?” she asked at once.
Domitian shrugged helplessly. “It happens to all immortals eventually. I actually held on to my appetites longer than some of my kind. I think because I traveled around and tried various and exotic foods.”
“And various and exotic women?” she suggested sourly.