The galley maid stopped and caught her breath. Gaia seized the opportunity to send her back to the galley. She recomposed herself and stated calmly, "As I said, superstition and foolishness. And in any event, it won't matter to YOU, because you will be in this house under curfew anyway." With that, she ended the conversation.
After the morning meal, Gaia sent the girls off with the manservant to the village. She didn't care what they did there, she just wanted all of them, and Cassia in particular, out of her hair, even if it would just be for a few hours. The house and its vineyards had been built by a successful shipping merchant, but he had died childless and the house had passed to his brother. His brother was a wastrel and a fool and openly criticized the emperor. When the emperor removed himself from Rome a few years before and set up residence on the Island of Capri, the brother wisely fled, abandoning the house. The Emperor, having been informed that its owner had been disloyal and was now a fugitive, seized the property for the empire. It was intended to be given as a reward to some loyal Senator or general, but none wanted a smallish estate on the remote island of little value and so it had been forgotten and relegated to the charge of one of the emperor's stewards. The steward, in turn, used the vineyard to keep the royal palace on Capri stocked with wine and offered the house for rent to visiting Senators and other dignitaries, allowing him to skim the rental payments for his own pocket.
The services of Gaia and her staff were included with the lease, and Gaia was generally left to manage the place on her own. She was a shrewd but effective manager and was well liked by her staff of servants. Technically, she and the household staff were slaves; property of the emperor. But beyond the title, they were generally left alone; slavery held no heavy yoke for her, and she had managed to amass enough coin to purchase her own freedom. She hadn't done so because that would mean being displaced from the house which, although small compared to the great mansions of Rome, was something of a grand dame here in remote Anacapri. The only way a free Gaia would have a house of her own would be to marry, and living with some fisherman or shop keeper in a cramped apartment down by the quay held zero appeal to Gaia.
Over the years, Gaia had seen her share of spoiled daughters of senators and wealthy merchants come and go. They were always the same: entitled and whiny and petulant. Cassia was no different and Gaia could not be rid of her soon enough. Gaia had to admit that the girl was pretty, and her handmaidens were each beautiful in their own way. That, Gaia thought, would be trouble. A trio like that was going to be attracting the wrong sort of attention from the men in town and she would no doubt have her hands full chasing off the tomcats who would soon be lurking around in the shadows, hoping for a chance to sneak off with one of the girls. Ugh. This was going to be a trying couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, in the village, Cassia was bored out of her mind. She had to admit that the island was breathtakingly beautiful, but there was nothing at all to do. The village was little more than a small collection of shops; shops which offered little variety. Wine and dried fish seemed to be the main staple of the food vendors and the rest of the shops seemed to be intended solely for trade between the wine merchants from the highlands and the fishing village below. There were few goods available from the mainland.
Even the public baths had been something of a disappointment; they were much smaller and nowhere near as ornate as the ones in the mainland cities. Fresh water was something of a precious commodity on the island, so there was only a single bathing pool and it was crowded with younger girls. Cassia's handmaidens barely had room to wash their domina, let alone attend to her properly. Ligeia attempted to stroke Cassia's pussy discretely under the water, but the splashing and crowding of the other bathers ruined Cassia's mood. They contented themselves by watching some of the younger girls play with each other's bodies while Athalia and Ligeia allowed Cassia to probe their anuses with her fingers.
The young girls were not yet adept at making love to one another. Their ministrations were more exploratory and experimental. One would touch the other and then pull away in a fit of bashful shame. They embraced, but didn't kiss. One sat on the edge of the pool and allowed her companion touch and stroke her pussy; a pussy that was barely covered with the first velvety hairs of adolescence. The girl gave her friend a tentative kiss on the tender spot below her friend's navel while casually running her fingers up and down the length of her young opening. But when she bent her head to kiss lower, the sitting girl became bashful again and snapped her legs shut. She slipped back into the water and her friend held her close, trying to reassure her. They were joined by several more young girls and a fit of squealing and giggling broke out as they each took turns trying out various touches and caresses on one another, sometimes teasing the ones who were overly shy, and sometimes egging them on to be more bold.
It reminded Cassia of her own younger days, playing and experimenting with Athalia. It was sweet to see these young girls just beginning to know their bodies. She wanted to watch them, awkward and clumsy, as they learned for themselves the art of pleasure, just as she herself had done. As they watched the scene, Cassia felt Athalia tighten and grip her finger with her rectal muscles. Cassia wondered if Athalia was thinking the same thoughts. She swirled her finger around inside the servant girl in a silent signal that her mood was becoming more receptive. But before it progressed any further, the group of young girls broke up their play. They'd had enough for one day and they all got up to leave the baths in unison. Once again, the mood was interrupted. Cassia withdrew her digits from her servants and kissed each of them on the back of the neck before she, too, withdrew from the bath.
By mid-afternoon, the girls found themselves in a dingy wine tavern. It had a solitary stone wall, likely the remnant of some earlier structure that had collapsed sometime in antiquity. It was covered with a garish painting of Bacchus being entertained by satyrs done in a crude, almost amateurish style. The rest of the tavern was made of wood and straw and looked as if a stiff breeze would erase all memory of the place in seconds. The ceiling was low and it reeked of oily smoke and the body odor of the many vineyard workers who gathered there in the middle part of the day to wait out the heat.
Cassia tore a chunk off of her loaf of panis rusticus, a kind of tough, cheap bread made from bran, and bit through the hard crust. She washed it down with a swig of new wine. "What we need," she began "Is to find out more about this Sabine legend. Surely, there must be someone in this village who will talk to us about it." Cassia had prodded Athalia to ask several other women at the baths and a shopkeeper or two about the legend of the evil sorceress, but the villagers were wary of the strangers and wouldn't give her more than a warning to beware the wolf witch and her demons. One shop keeper had even gone so far as to intimate that, if the wolf-witch had marked Athalia's master (he had nodded toward Cassia when he said it), there was nothing to be done -- her soul was as good as lost.
Ligeia, who had traveled for much of her life, had grown tired of the story. She had heard many such tales of monsters and witches and devils and they always seemed to come from backwards little villages with simple, uneducated villagers. The more remote and poor the village, the more fantastic the tales of monsters and witches were. She decided that people in such far-flung rural outposts merely needed some means of entertaining themselves, and scaring the crap out of the children was as amusing as anything else. "Oh, Domina," she said, biting into a wedge of pressato, a kind of hand-pressed cheese made from sheep's milk. "You should just forget about it. It's just some silly tale they tell their children to make them behave. There must be other diversions to be had here."
"Yes," Athalia agreed. She was tired of pestering the locals about a silly story and the reactions she was getting from some of them had unsettled her. She wanted to drop the subject. "We don't need stupid children's tales to have fun."
"Oh, it's no tale for children," came a woman's voice from behind Cassia. The voice was deep and rich and held a foreign accent unfamiliar to Cassia. Cassia turned around in a startle, and saw a lone figure in a hooded cape sitting at the next table with her back to Cassia and her entourage.
"What?" demanded Cassia. "What did you just say?"
The woman turned slowly around and lowered the hood of her cape. Her skin had a ruddy tone and her eyes were a bright, crystal blue. Her hair was as black as coals. The woman took a long draft from her cup of wine and repeated, "I said, it's no tale for children. You're not from here. You are wealthy enough to have servants and yet you are not at the palace. That tells me that you are in hiding." Cassia's manservant bodyguard suddenly took an interest in the conversation. His hand went automatically to the hilt of his truncheon. The woman saw this out of the corner of her eye, but she remained calm and perfectly still. She looked Cassia and her handmaidens over carefully, and then aid, "What would you like to know about Sabine, the wolf-queen of Capri?"
"Is it true that she captures children and eats them?" blurted Athalia.
"Is it true that her demons are made of the lifeless bodies of those drowned at sea?" inquired Ligeia?
The woman didn't answer either question. Instead, she locked eyes with Cassia. The corners of her mouth pulled ever so slightly into the merest trace of a smile. "What about you? What do you wish to know of the wolf-queen?"
"I want to know when I can see this witch for myself," said Cassia.
