The course of Honor

"You are quite right," agreed Caenis, though Vespasian had not said it. "I shall need somewhere of my own to live."

Without any hesitation he asked her, "Want to come here?"

She was dumbfounded.

Caenis wanted to live with Vespasian more than anything.

"No, Titus. No, thank you. No."

It was unbelievable even a man could be so crass. Damn it, she had thought Vespasian relatively humane. She sat up abruptly, hugging her knees. She could not bear this.

"Why not?" he demanded stubbornly.

Caenis resisted the temptation to wrench away from him, to walk out and never come back. She compressed her anger, though she had no inhibitions about letting it show: "Dear heart, I'll never catch a rich senator if they all know I'm living with you! And how, in Juno's name, am I expected to get you sensibly married off? Besides, if I come here while you are single, what is to happen to me afterward? Oh you bastard, you absolute bastard; you know all this!" He had an aggravating habit of merely looking intrigued when somebody completely lost control. "I do hope you have noticed," Caenis went on coolly, fighting down her temper as she spoke, "how rare it is for me to call you names."

He said nothing. There was no doubt; he had noticed. He knew he had punished her beyond reasonable limits.

Still he persisted, as if it were in some way relevant. "Caenis—do you think my career will ever come to anything?"

More tolerant with the apparent change of subject, she answered at once: "Certainly. You know I do."

He sighed slowly. "If I thought not . . ." Perhaps fortunately, he did not finish. "Once, when I was a lad, my father took an augury that his second son would be something really special. This was a long time ago—and I won't tell you what I'm supposed to become! My grandmother burst her girdle laughing. Told my father he was going dreamy. Said he should be ashamed to act the dunce in front of his own mother!"

Caenis laughed. "I like the sound of your old granny!"

"My old granny"—Vespasian chuckled—"would not have liked the sound of you! She would have known you were after my cash."

Giggling, because he was so poor it was ludicrous, she turned around to him slightly, as she did so feeling his mighty hand spread companionably on her back. His eyes seemed unusually still. "Titus, you don't need superstitious permission. You won't fail. You can be whatever you want."

His palm moved methodically along her spine. She tried to ignore the goose pimples. He was doing it on purpose, to tease her, and to calm her down. "Hah! Going to encourage me? Live out your ambitions through me like the crazed crows of the imperial family? Are you a schemer, lass? A palace puppeteer?"

Hurt again, she dropped her head onto her knees. "You are not mine to manipulate! Oh, you'll take your aedileship next time around, and everything will be easier for you after that. But I hope—"

He had scrambled up close, wrapping his arms around her, knees and all. Eagerly he demanded, "What? What do you hope? Caenis, tell me your hope!"

"That when you are grizzled and famous," she mumbled against his shoulder, "you may still sometimes remember munching a sausage in a pantry with a bad-tempered slave."

"Oh, my dear lass!"

When someone touched him on a nerve, he was utterly soft. If Caenis had owned the confidence of a Veronica, she would have realized she could easily bring him to tears. Instead he pretended to be smiling, then drew her back down with him; a man of his build needed exercise, and making love to women was an easy way to get it.

Besides, he wanted to make another memory for their old age.

* * *

It was not long afterward that he made his next trip to Reate. His mother still lived there at the family home. He was a good son; Caenis was used to him visiting his mother. She never went with him; she knew that she and his mother would never meet.

A woman of both force and tact, Vespasia Polla probably did not like the sound of Caenis either; she would never waste her breath saying so. She was one of the few people who knew how, and when, to persuade her stubborn younger son to settle into something he really did not want to do. He had loved his grandmother Tertulla; he liked to please his mother. Throughout his life he would be a man who nursed a serious regard for the women who were close to him.

He was affectionate with his mistress. And, Caenis knew, one day he would be loyal to his wife.

SIXTEEN

As soon as she saw his face she understood everything.

He had come to her at home in Antonia's house, unexpected and unannounced, while she thought him still at Reate. She went through the motions; Caenis after all was a first-class secretary. She had been trained to behave with aplomb in any social emergency.

"Titus! You're back in Rome."

"I'm back," he stated somberly. "Oh, Caenis!"

It was all perfectly obvious from his face.

* * *

The scene fixed itself in her memory as if she were some hapless insect being slowly trapped in the bark of a stone pine, transfixed under a sluggish ooze of amber for the next two thousand years. There it all was: the woven rug in faded shades of crimson and blue at her feet, folded under at one far corner; the Greek black-figure vases displayed on the sideboard; the list she had been checking, which fell from her hand as she rose at his entrance; the pin on the shoulder of her dress that worked loose and scratched her if she moved but which she could not spare concentration to refasten. The chandelier had creaked on its ceiling-chain as he carefully closed the door.

There was nothing unusual in his expression itself. He always frowned in that grim way; people laughed at him, but there was nothing he could do to change it. She recognized the horror only because every plane of that face had set rigid in misery.

Her voice sounded remarkably ordinary. "Whatever's the matter? Tell me."

He came right up to her. Apparently it felt inappropriate to kiss her. She did not want to be kissed—then she wanted it desperately. For a moment he placed both hands on her shoulders; meeting her stare, he let his arms drop.

"You guess. A suitable woman has agreed to be my wife."

Caenis wanted to fight. She could never win. There was no enemy. She heard herself saying in a low respectable voice, "Quite right. Dear me; what took so long? Yes. You must. Well! . . . Rich I hope?"

Vespasian was drawing her to a couch, where he made her sit, taking a place beside her, holding her hand—not so much to console her, for he would realize from her resistance that she could hardly bear to be touched, but as if he himself needed to grip some part of her in order to go on. "The rich ones," he confided grayly, "seemed curiously slow to take me up. She is not. Do you really want to hear?"

Caenis closed her eyes. For some quaint reason she seemed to nod her head. "Other people are bound to tell me. I would rather have it from you."

"Well. Someone from Ferentium. Father in the financial service; not quite a provincial, but she should understand my difficulties. Her father had to appear before a Board of Arbitration to establish her right to the full citizenship, but I think it went through on the nod . . ." He was using the tone that on other subjects had been his vehicle for asking her advice. He fell silent.

"Good character?" Caenis encouraged drily.

He answered like a man under examination in the Senate on some imperial informer's wild charge of impropriety: "Oh; all right!" He relented. He sighed. He forced himself to be less offhand. "No; let's be fair—a decent woman."

"You've seen her?"

"Yes."

"Slept with her?" Caenis demanded.

"No," Vespasian answered patiently. Really it could not matter anymore, yet Caenis was glad of that. "I had better tell you; she has been someone's mistress—Statilius Capella, a senator from Africa—"

Gods, she was nothing! Caenis snapped, "Excellent! A senator? Decent of you both to leave one free for the rest of us. . . ." She took back her hand and stood up, pacing the room.

"Caenis, don't."

He followed her, as she ought to have known that he would. She wanted to crouch in some dark place like a hurt beast. There was this dreadful need to be civilized. There was this appalling obligation: not to hurt him. She had no escape.

"Caenis, I'm desperately sorry. Don't be brave and bitter. Scream at me if you like, rant, rave, beat my chest with your fists, cry; cry all you want, and I'll probably join in. . . ." It was hideous; he was frantic.

Caenis let him take her into his arms.

"Titus, hush. It was brave of you to come. I appreciate your honesty. You don't have to dread a scene."

She stood there, not responding, but leaning patiently up against him until, helpless, he let her go. "Shall I leave you now?"

It was over. Everything was over.

"Wait a moment; please." Her numb brain reminded her to make everything absolutely clear. "You know I shall not see you again."

"No."

He would not create difficulties. Nor would she, come to that. There was only one kind of discipline for either of them now.

"Not even acknowledge you; it's best. . . . What are your plans?" she asked more gently.

"Oh—aedile, praetor, then start angling for an army post." His tone was more harsh than she had ever heard it. "The cursus honorum stretches idyllically away!"

"Titus? Oh love, what is it?" Caenis had to ask.

It was Vespasian's turn to move away. He stood rigid, that face still as drained of color as it was of permitted emotion. He was quite obviously deeply upset.

For the first and only time he said curtly, "You were right all along. We should never have done this."

There was nothing she could safely reply.

She held him; what else could she do?

"Stupidity."

"Never say that. Don't devalue it." She folded her arms around him, rocking slightly, with her face against his, though safely turned away.

She was surprised to hear anyone else so bitter: "Was it worth this?"

And, "Yes!" Caenis bellowed gloriously: Vespasian winced.

By then they were laughing together, painfully verging on tears.

"Oh, Titus, Titus; don't. I am supposed to make the fuss, not you. Ah, you great softhearted wretch, how dare you be upset? Be a monster, damn you—be a man—be typical!"

Ruefully he laid his forehead against hers. "I'm doing my best."

"Not good enough. Are you short of cash?"

He was thunderstruck. "Oh, Jupiter! What a ludicrous question!" He had drawn back; she had steadied him; he had lost his temper; it would be all right. "In the first place, I'm always running short, and in the second, lass, spare yourself that. You are not obliged to worry anymore about me and my filthy bank account."

Caenis decided she would worry about just whomsoever in Hades she chose. "Never mind that. Listen. I have ten thousand sesterces; Antonia's legacy. I can't spend it, it's my insurance, and I don't want to trust it to a strongbox in the Forum to be fiddled away by some obnoxious Eastern banker who swarms around his abacus trying for a kiss when all I want is a decent rate of interest. . . ." She was running out of breath.

"No, Caenis. Caenis; not your savings—"

"Yes! Borrow it; use it for your good. Enhance your state; buy some support. It won't achieve much, but it's a gesture: Somebody believes in you."

"It's a wicked gamble," he scoffed.

"A shrewd investment," Caenis quipped back. "I want you to have it; no one else in Rome is worth it. If I can't have you, then by the Good Goddess I'll help to make you—you owe me that!"

He buried his face in his hands. His voice was very quiet. "I will send you the interest—and I will pay you back."

"Perhaps!" Caenis barked, more like herself.

"If you need it, just ask me."

Since she was never intending to speak to him, that would be difficult. "Titus—I must return this to you."

The bangle he had given her to celebrate her freedom was on her arm now; he had bought her occasional trinkets since—pins, a shell necklace, an ivory comb—but her only other good pieces were gifts from Antonia. Antonia's presents had been of impressive antique workmanship, set with garnets, opals, tourmalines. Caenis' gold bangle was to her still the most beautiful thing she had ever owned.

Vespasian was furious at her offer. "No, damn it!"

"Is it paid for?" she insisted. He never answered that.

"Caenis, that's yours; yours from me; yours to keep. If you don't want it, all right, get rid of it, but don't tell me, and don't try to antagonize me by handing it back!"

She assumed he had forgotten how both their names were engraved inside. Doggedly she pulled off the bangle and gestured to the lettering: "Don't you mind?"

"No."

"You may one day."

He folded his arms grimly. "Shall I really?"

Caenis slowly replaced her gift, with a feeling of relief. He laid his hand there briefly, where the gold burned on the fine skin of her arm. Their eyes met. She whispered, "I'd like you to go now."

"Are you all right?"

"Don't worry. Are you all right?"

Another question he refused to answer. So he was not all right; she was learning his language. She had after all been the star of her cipher class.

People were supposed to quarrel. Quarreling made it bearable. Here they were, nursing one another through; something would have to be done; she, of course, would have to be the one who did it. "Just go—go now!"

Men so liked to drag things out. "I'll never forget you."

"Men always say that." How touching, thought Caenis, forced beyond the bounds of charity again, to be the romantic blossom a man chooses to remember from his youth.

Vespasian argued anxiously, "Women say they'll never forgive."

She was brisk. "Not me."

"No. Thanks, Caenis."

"Titus."

She stood quietly, with the humility a woman was expected to show, while Vespasian gently kissed her cheek to say good-bye.

But at that, in her one gesture of absolute defiance, Antonia Caenis blazed with the love she was never permitted to acknowledge, as she seized him and kissed him back: fiercely and furiously, full on the mouth, intending that the man should know exactly how she felt.

All things considered, he took it very well. She thought the bastard smiled at her, in fact. So, with a regretful little smile from him, Caenis was left.

And even then, she did not cry.

* * *

The woman was called Flavia Domitilla. Veronica told her.

"Capella's mistress," she announced angrily. Caenis had been right; people did so want her to have to know. "Capella's nothing; I don't know why she bothered. Come to that, she's nobody herself. Her father actually had to appear before a tribunal to disprove some claim that she was born a slave—"

"She won't be a slave," Caenis commented quietly.

"I thought your high-and-mighty Flavians like to parade themselves as a respectable family?"

Veronica fell silent. She finally realized that even where a mistress had always known disaster would be unavoidable, she might prefer to be abandoned for a person who was somebody.

Once or twice in Rome, Caenis saw Vespasian's wife. She was neither beautiful nor fashionable; rather too dark, and bony-looking (thought Caenis, who was in that respect quite well made). Flavia Domitilla seemed neither happy nor unhappy. Still, she became the mother of a daughter and two sons; the elder boy was a charmer, people said. As far as Caenis knew, the woman's husband treated her with good humor and respect. Perhaps he loved her; possibly she loved him. These were things that in Roman society remained private between a man and his wife.

Marriage certainly helped his career. Flavius Vespasianus ran again for aedile; though he only scraped into sixth place on the list that did not matter; since there were six vacancies. Two years later, at the age of thirty, he became eligible for the rank of praetor. At those elections Caenis almost missed finding his name in the Gazette; he had romped home, the first time he ran, right at the head of the list.

PART THREE

THE HERO OF BRITAIN

When the Caesars were Caligula and Claudius

SEVENTEEN

Almost three-quarters of a century afterward, in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, the historian Suetonius had to mention Antonia Caenis in one of his essays on the Caesars. The Emperor Domitian had once been rude to her, which illustrated perfectly Domitian's defective character, for it was accepted that being rude to Caenis was the act of a charmless boor. In another way too, the freedwoman and secretary of Antonia the Younger was impossible for a historian to overlook.

Caenis would have liked to know, during the next fifteen or twenty years, that she was working her way into the end of a paragraph in the work of a chronicler whose titles included not just The Lives of the Caesars but Famous Prostitutes, and as a particular highlight the slim volume Greek Terms of Abuse. She would have liked to own a dictionary of Terms of Abuse herself—in order, for one thing, to express more fluently her views about historians.

What were twenty years to a literary biographer? The period from one mad emperor, through another who was merely inconsistent and undignified, and on to yet another madman: undisciplined men with monstrous wives, a handful of territorial adventures, a lively set of poisonings and stabbings on stairways, a financial scandal here and a legal outrage there, ambition, greed, corruption, lust—just technical ingredients. Useless to rise up booming like a cow over its lost calf because a historian, who needs to move on his narrative slickly to the next cogent point (or the next racy scandal), has slid over in the second half of a sentence the whole dismal, humdrum, suffering course of the best years of some woman's life.

Caenis knew better than to hope her story would become the triumph of the obscure. She did not suppose it would even be told.

* * *

So, once Vespasian had left her, she sat and listened to the silence of Antonia's slowly dying house. No one here even knew of her devastating blow.

This silence seemed to stretch ahead for the rest of her life. She might die young. Plenty did. Or she might last another forty years. There was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing expected of her; nothing for her to expect. All her duties to Antonia were done. There was nothing else.

She considered the alternatives. She could set herself up in a pretty salon for the gentry—music and good conversation, raffish elegance and fairly clean sheets. She could live chastely in single state, being sour and strict with her own slaves. She could pool resources to buy a lock-up shop with some skinny freedman: marry him, and snap at him, and struggle. She could in fact marry anyone in the Empire she liked, except the six hundred men who were members of the Senate. Augustus had debarred those from marrying freedwomen; he decently allowed the senators anybody else, though he obviously preferred them to stick to one another's sisters, daughters, and aunts. (Caenis had always reckoned that otherwise there was not much chance for some of the senatorial sisters, daughters, and aunts.) Vespasian had not even managed that; his new wife's father was only a knight.

She could jump off a bridge. Useless; she swam too well.

She could simply go on, as she had always known she must.

* * *

So she went on. Her patroness would have expected it. More important, she expected it of herself.

Afterward, she was proud of her tenacity, and glad. Glad because having lived her own life she could value all the more the rewards she eventually did win; glad too because it made her braver when she realized that she had to give them back.

Her first action now was to find somewhere new to live. Born in a palace, she went to live in a slum. Caenis, who had spent her happiest years in the most select private house in Rome, exchanged it for two rooms and a scullery on the squalling fifth floor of an unspeakable tenement. She remained perfectly calm about it. This was her own choice: She was short of ready cash; she avoided obligations; it was her own. She could have done better; she had endured worse. She remained calm even though for the privilege of living here on her own she was paying an unbelievable rent. As a ploy to forget a lost lover, the irritation this flagrant rent caused her was ideal.

She lived among the grueling goat paths that bordered the Via Appia in the Twelfth District. It was a dense plebeian settlement, added to the ancient city environs by Augustus. Her own block had been destroyed by fire, then rebuilt by landlords with an eye to future compensation, when it all collapsed again. They had invested little in the fabric, and there was even less chance they would pay for improvement or simple maintenance.

To find her apartment she turned off the narrow hubbub of the Via Appia, down a pitted side road just wide enough for two wheeled vehicles to sidle past one another in the night, and into a lane where a single handcart might squeeze; there she lived high above a yard bordered by flaking tenements. All the blocks looked the same, and all the apartments inside them were arranged identically. The first week she forgot her way home three times; no point asking directions; in this rabbit warren street names were unknown. Panic-stricken, she chose markers: the fountain with three conch shells where in due course she recognized the women washing one end or another of their recalcitrant children, the corner where the sharp smell from the tannery caught the back of her throat, the midden, the tired walnut tree, the local market.

Life held its compensations; in Rome there would always be mullet and oysters. There were cold meats and hot pies. She could bathe every day. She could escape to the theater. She could sink her teeth into the sweet golden flesh of a luxurious nectarine. . . .

The ground floor of her tenement was leased to a wineshop and a furrier, and used also by a morning nursery school. Whenever she came in or went out the vintner winked at her, the furrier whistled, but the schoolmaster only stared. For some time Caenis foolishly supposed the schoolmaster's nature was more refined than the others'.

Everybody hated the landlord. Not simply because of his outrageous rents. He was a seedy, leery capitalist who preyed on the lower levels of society while pretending to render favors in providing desperate folk with a roof over their heads; all his roofs leaked. He lived on the first floor. Although in subletting her apartment he had made great play to Caenis of the fact that her rent would include the provision of stair-sweepers, porters, and water-carriers, these functions were in fact all delegated to one African slave called Musa, who had a bad leg. The landlord's name was Eumolpus. In Roman tradition he was almost certainly not the owner of the ground lease for the building, nor even the principal mortgagee.

On the second floor lived a retired ex-centurion, whom nobody ever saw, and his middle-aged mistress, who fluffed about her balcony like a peachy powder-sponge. Caenis won her confidence and found her a lonely woman who lived in terror that the centurion would die and leave her penniless. In the end she worried herself to death first; the centurion was heartbroken, and Caenis had to help him with the funeral.

On the third floor lived two separate families of equestrian rank who were enduring temporary shortages of funds. These good people felt no necessity to pass the time of day.

On the fourth floor lived four brothers all engaged in running a second-rate gymnasium for third-rate gladiators. They constantly quarreled with various strangers who rushed up from the street to complain when slops were sluiced from their windows onto clothes and heads. The law took a strong line on flinging down slops; however, in the Twelfth District, law took second place to huge men with brutal tempers who trained gladiators.

On the fifth floor at the front lived Caenis.

At the back were several other ladies on their own. Eumolpus said he liked female tenants because they were quiet, and keen to pay their rent. Caenis soon worked out that Eumolpus was disappointed if they paid up in minted coin rather than by taking him to bed; she herself stoically paid him in coin, to his visible distress. The other ladies who shared her landing kept households that constantly ran out of flour or oil or salt. One or two could be abusive, but on the whole they were a feckless, bleary, harmless group. Most were caring for infants of the tousled, gravy-faced sort who were put out for long periods on the stairways playing with surprisingly expensive toys while their mothers, who did a lot of entertaining, entertained.

On the sixth and seventh floors above lived innumerable groups of people in several sad generations, crowded many to a room. To these belonged swarthy men with set faces who broke roads, stoked furnaces, and unbunged the sewers. With them lived weary, bowed, meticulously clean women, who looked sixty but were probably not yet thirty, women who embroidered marvelous scarves, threaded cheap beads, and stood at street corners silently offering penny packets of sunflower seeds for sale. Some of these families disappeared abruptly sometimes; others seemed to have existed in that place for many decades. They spoke strange languages, when they spoke at all, and occasionally burst into wondrous song. With them, more than anyone, Caenis felt a dark affinity.

* * *

One of the painters from the Palace decorated her apartment with purloined paint. "I've sealed up the walls with new plaster as best I could," he told her cheerfully. "Hardly soundproof, but it might hold back the bugs." Caenis swallowed. "I take it you're familiar with the mouse?" She had seen the mouse.

There had been much mention locally of Doris, the previous tenant of her rooms. Apparently this Doris had been a very peculiar girl. Caenis made no comment; she was peculiar herself—and probably proud of it. The oddest thing Doris appeared to have done was to rush screaming from the apartment when she first saw the mouse, threatening to take Eumolpus to court. Foolish people sometimes did that. It was very expensive; landlords learn the art of litigation with their mothers' milk.

When Caenis first saw the mouse she walked quietly onto her balcony until it went away. She stopped up its hole with depilatory wax, then watched in horrified fascination as it chewed its way straight out. Burrius, the painter, brought her some poison, which he said came from the private cabinet of the late Empress Livia; the mouse dropped dead before it had time to jump back from the saucer where Caenis had laid the bait.

She had her few rooms painted the color of mature honeysuckle flowers, a thin dry gold through which the pale plaster beneath seemed to gleam.

"Want an erotic fresco in the bedroom?" offered Burrius. "Satyrs with gigantic phalluses? Get your men in the mood? Nice?"

"Nice; but no thanks," returned Caenis drily. "I'm having a rest from moody men."

"That's very sad!" commiserated Burrius. Like everyone, he knew her history.

Caenis laughed. She bore no grudges against men. She regarded her past as fortunate. "The saddest part about it is the fact I do agree with you it's sad."

Burrius thought about that. Any casual painter tries his luck. "I don't suppose—"

"Quite right," agreed Caenis mildly. "Don't suppose!"

* * *

Despite her own occasional depression and the constant amazement of her friends, Antonia Caenis lived in the Twelfth District for over three years. She was surrounded by life at its most varied, life at a level to which she dismally believed she belonged. Luckily she had never been afraid to be alone.

She was sometimes afraid of going mad.

"People who see the risk," Veronica assured her, "never manage to go mad, however hard they try."

Caenis simply recognized that she thought now, as she always had thought: Life was hard; life was foul; but if you were too poor and too unimportant to have hopes of a heroic eternity in the Elysian fields, you must make the bitter best of it, for life was all there was.

It was toward the end of the first year, when madness still seemed a vague possibility, that something happened that could well have tipped a less robust person into that long slide down into the desolate pit. She was walking in her self-contained way along the Via Appia toward home. She had been to see Claudia Antonia, the daughter of Antonia's son Claudius by one of his enforced marriages. As his mother's freedwoman, a client of the Claudian family, Caenis was helping informally with the young girl's education.

Returning home, her slaveboy ambled with her. Veronica had taken on the wistful little girl Caenis had owned in Antonia's house, whose regret at the loss of Vespasian's bribing coppers had grown too much to bear. So now Caenis had instead this boy, Jason, a dim but cheerful child, constantly ravenous, who carried up her water, carried down her rubbish, and on trips out loafed along behind her with a meat pie in one hand and a truncheon slipping through his belt. He was supposed to be her bodyguard. Looking after Jason occupied much of her mind.

It was a wild day at the end of spring. After a long spell of wet weather the streets were choked with mire. Picking her way to try to avoid taking in squelchy sandalfuls of mud, Caenis soon noticed irritably that the hem of her dress and mantle had been heavily splashed by less careful passers-by. At the crossroads where she would turn off the main highway she found herself in the middle of a curious crowd. The source of the commotion was not the normal dog fight or stall-holders' argument.

The Twelfth District was being visited by the Emperor.

* * *

By this time Caligula had developed the startling mania for which he would become a legend. The previous year he had suffered a devastating illness. Rumors ran riot about what form this took—epilepsy, perhaps, or some inflammation of the brain brought on by stress. Whatever it was, once he recovered he had changed fully into the monster that had been merely foreshadowed before. He was ready to test his power to the limit—and there was no limit.

He killed his rival, Gemellus. Son of Livilla, Antonia's disgraced daughter and according to scandalmongers son of Sejanus too, Gemellus had been pushed aside by the Senate in the euphoria that greeted Caligula's accession. Although Caligula had formally adopted him as a gesture assuring the family succession, his generosity soon gave way to suspicion and contempt. His own illness caused him to accuse Gemellus of plotting to seize power. He complained that Gemellus was afraid of being poisoned—a wise enough fear—and that he constantly stank of antidotes (Gemellus was a hypochondriac, who regularly took linctus for a cough).

Caligula had Gemellus executed. A military tribune sliced off his head with a sword. There was no antidote for that, as Caligula remarked.

Shortly afterward Macro, the commander of the Guards, was impeached for pandering his wife to Caligula, then forced to commit suicide. He had possibly conspired with Gemellus while the Emperor was ill—and had certainly reminded his protégé once too often of services rendered.

The Emperor then declared himself a living god. Caenis thought privately that Caligula's claim to be Capitoline Jove did founder on the fact that it was reported he regularly slept with his own three sisters. Caligula's sisters were a frightful trio. The real Capitoline Jove would have better taste.

* * *

Even before Caenis saw him on the Via Appia, she realized it was Caligula from the sneering presence of the Praetorian Guard, strutting like spurred fighting cocks in their glittering breastplates and stiff red helmet sprouts. The tradespeople craning their necks were suitably wary, more of the Guards' dismal reputation than the man at their center who was so incongruously dressed up as Jupiter. Caenis instantly recognized his high forehead and balding head. Hard to tell what the people made of that false curling beard, the bracelets, the face paint and the stage thunderbolt; it was an insult to their intelligence, yet they seemed to respond with good-humored sympathy. They stared at Caligula not because he was demented, but simply because he was the Emperor. Apparently they accepted his mania as matter-of-factly as they accepted the local cooper's spastic child and the pastry cook who saw cockatrices biting his legs when he was drunk.

Jupiter was enough in command of his senses to have noticed that conditions in the Twelfth District were scruffy. He was now enjoying himself, having a divine rant. The gracious god had been struck by the filth in the road and pavements, and to the delight of the populace, he was venting his fury on the officer who held public responsibility for cleaning the streets. Berating this man at Olympian length, Jove paused long enough to restick a corner of his beard that had in the heat of the moment come unglued, then ordered his soldiers, "Fill up the folds of his toga with this mud!"

Caenis stood appalled. It was a terrible humiliation for an aedile—and she immediately recognized this one: Vespasian.

Evil with malice, the Praetorians set to. Gleefully seizing potsherds from the clogged gutters, they began to scoop up mud and load it into the heavy folds of the aedile's toga. He knew what he had done—and he knew the risks of offending a mad emperor. He stood meekly enough, arms outspread and head bowed before the rattling of the tinsel thunderbolt. It was a disgrace, but a light punishment. In a different moment of Caligula's caprice he could as easily have called for an executioner.

The crowd cheered. Caligula acknowledged the applause and passed on. The Praetorians reluctantly abandoned their sport and followed him.

Left behind, Vespasian folded his arms to support the strange weight of his filthy garments. The crowd stilled. He made no attempt to shake free the clods.

"Well, citizens"—his voice carried grimly; people began to shuffle amid their mirth—"we all know the system. Shovels out!"

They all knew the system. In the ten days it would take him to arrange official contractors to do the work at their expense, each piece of pavement would be transformed by its frontager, rather than face a fine to pay the contractors; then the aedile would move on to harry the next district; in another two weeks all the mud and debris and donkey droppings would be back. The problem was not entirely his fault; the hallowed system had a great deal to do with it. Faced with their own responsibilities, the crowd diplomatically melted away.

It had begun to rain. Jason started to dart across the road, but Caenis trapped him with a firm grip on the scruff of his neck. "Wait, sunshine!" Absently he began to pick at the loaf she intended for lunch.

Caenis stood absolutely still. Nonetheless she had been found by the aedile's temperate stare. He was shaking off his personal slaves as they fussed around his ruined clothes. Across the five-yard width of the Via Appia her quiet eyes locked onto his. Vespasian had the grace to blush.

And then, allowing his muck-encumbered toga to be plucked away by his dithering slaves, he broke into what she knew was his rarest and richest grin. He made no move to cross the street; neither did she. Very slowly, in disapproval of his public disgrace, Caenis shook her head. Then she spun neatly on the ball of her foot. Slim and straight, with one hand gripping the elbow of her youthful bodyguard, she slipped across the highway and disappeared into the impenetrable warren of streets on the other side.

Flavius Vespasianus made no attempt to follow her.

EIGHTEEN

She had tried to forget. She had tried to stabilize her life. Now she was plunged once again into turmoil and loss. The worst part was how, even while the familiar wash of panic set her heart banging, she recognized that simply to see Vespasian had lit her life. All her being sang with happiness.

Yet Caenis refused to feed on tragic foolishness. She knew she must reject such stupid joy at the mere glimpse of some man smiling at her in the street.

* * *

Watching Vespasian take his native soil so curiously to his bosom had delayed her beyond the time when she usually reached home. Midday: the tiny children who sat on cut-down benches under the street awning and chanted their lessons so automatically, while their great eyes wandered from their master to any distraction, had now finished their sad torture and scampered home. Their desultory master was starting to furl the leather awning on a pole.

The furrier had drawn and bolted his shutters, then retreated up the ladder to the backbreaking loft above his workshop, where he lived with his family. The wineshop was still open; wineshops rarely closed. However, the three old men who habitually sat there had decided to drain the earthenware tumblers over which they had been dreaming for the previous two hours, and go home to whichever bent little wife or brawling, sprawling daughter normally provided them with lunch.

Jason set off at once up the five flights of stone stairs. Caenis stayed behind, for somebody was waiting in the wineshop, wanting her to write a letter about a will. Since she had her stylus case with her, she sat down at a stained table. The task was swiftly done.

Caenis looked ruefully at the handful of coppers she had earned. "Just enough for a jug of my new Campanian!" consoled the vintner. "Steel yourself for the stairs!"

Campanian his brutal red ink never was, but for once she agreed cheerfully to being bamboozled. The vintner took a tumbler himself; he liked any excuse. The schoolmaster had now come in for what was obviously his regular midday tipple, so with blissful expansiveness she offered him a drink too. Caenis had never lost her slave's habit of sharing whatever she might have with those she regarded as her equals in low fortune. The vintner carried off his tot into the curtained nook behind the counter, leaving customers to plunder an amphora for themselves and deposit the money in a dish.

Caenis and the schoolmaster sat for a while in silence. Caenis was lost in her thoughts. The schoolmaster leaned forward, twisting his winecup between both hands. He was obviously shy. He did not on this occasion feel able to stare at her.

A well-trained secretary does not gaze silently into the distance for long. Caenis roused herself and dutifully asked the man how he enjoyed his work. He replied in gruff monosyllables. He looked about forty, but that was because he had badly thinning hair; he grew the rest longer to compensate, but instead of appearing intellectual as he may have hoped, he merely looked badly groomed. He seemed unhappy and unhealthy—someone who regularly drank too much and ate too little, and who paid no attention to personal hygiene, exercise, or sleep. It was well known that immediately after parents paid their fees he spent heavily; then toward the end of each term he ran out of cash. How he kept discipline remained a mystery, for he seemed too indolent to use his staff and too dull to hold the attention otherwise.

"Personally," suggested Caenis, who had been wanting to tackle this subject ever since she arrived, "I believe it is time traditional schoolroom methods were challenged. Don't you agree?"

She knew the traditional method was how he taught: The children recited their letters and numbers over and over, without illustration, without variety, a dreary daily singsong through one or another alphabet. "I was educated at the Palace; they wanted quick results. I have to say that when the Palace needs good secretaries its methods of obtaining them are excellent."

She herself had been blessed with inspired teachers. Every time she went by the nursery here, the sad, bored, patient eyes of these children caused her distress.

Caenis had the rare gift of remembering what it was like to be a child. She wanted to explain to the schoolteacher how half his class were aimlessly repeating by rote what they had learned long before, though they did not understand it while the rest knew nothing at all but had the knack of joining in a second after the others spoke. None of them ever progressed. She wanted to encourage the man to devise some rapport with his charges. She wanted to convince him that he must be interested in what he was doing, so the children would be interested too. . . .

Most men are not keen to hear they are bad at their work. The schoolmaster changed the subject. He lifted her hand and placed it under his grubby tunic, upon his private parts.

* * *

Caenis could not immediately accept what was happening.

Shock transfixed her. She could not bear it. She sprang up; the wine jug flew from the bench; she was furious.

Partly, she was furious with herself. She had forgotten people were not neighborly. Her time with Vespasian had made her too safe. Once so sensitive, she had just issued an invitation without a thought of how it could be misinterpreted.

She felt ill with dismay. She was imaginative enough to realize her response would damage a soul that was already inadequate, but really there were times when an intelligent woman, with burdens of her own, needed to think of herself. Without a word spoken on either side the schoolmaster got to his feet and blundered from the shop. She saw the scorn in his eyes. She realized he had now brutally defined her—for himself, and probably half the neighborhood: tense, teasing, frigid, mentally odd.

She was more angry then, because she saw how easily men might deprive a woman in her circumstances of her self-esteem and her public confidence. It was true she carried within her a great pain. Even so, she knew she lived her life more vividly and with greater good humor than most people around her.

Thanks to that, she was able to put aside all thought of this schoolmaster, his solitary world, his misplaced contempt, before she gained the third flight of stairs to her room. By then she was remembering only a face that was alive with sardonic intelligence. She was exulting in the frank, straightforward, enduring friendliness of a man who had been her lover, a man she had once loved.

Caenis would always have the courage to be true to herself; at her lowest ebb, she now possessed the gift of a joyous past.

Sanely, she went on with her life.

NINETEEN

When the Emperor's uncle Claudius married Valeria Messalina—this sad jest was entirely a whim of Caligula's—Caenis was privileged to attend. Messalina came of impeccable family, she was wealthy, she was exquisite—and she looked about nineteen. Claudius was forty-seven.

Teenaged brides were common in patrician society; it gave a man the chance to train up the child in his own house his own way, which is what men sometimes imagine they want. For a person so susceptible to women as Claudius, though, this girl was a disaster. He fell head over heels in love, before he had spoken to her twice. The sly cat would run rings around him. Still, that too is what some men want.

"I should be grateful if you felt able to come, Caenis," he had faltered. "A man at his wedding needs the support of his family and friends. Of course, I will have the Emperor. . . ."

Caenis gave him one of her looks. "Sir, your nephew the Emperor may stand as your family, though I doubt whether in this matter he has acted as one of your friends!"

She always spoke to Claudius firmly and extremely frankly. He permitted it. In all other respects Caenis treated him as her patron, a courtesy that few members of his late mother's household would ever emulate.

When he had realized, many months after everybody else had noticed, that Caenis was no longer Vespasian's mistress, Tiberius Claudius had enquired tentatively whether she would like to become one of his mistresses instead, but Caenis had dealt frankly and firmly with that too.

"I shall come to your wedding, sir," she promised. "For your daughter's sake, for your mother's—and as one of your good friends."

They both knew; there were not many of those.

* * *

Going to a wedding attended also by the Emperor won Caenis a certain amount of prestige in the Twelfth District. Another event at about the same time lent even more crazy color to her reputation. This was a visit to her apartment by Veronica. That girl surely knew how to make herself useful. Every man in the block now treated Caenis with awe. The vintner and furrier became positively chummy, longing for another glimpse of her dazzling friend. Caenis did not point out that Veronica had no energy to spare for walking up five flights of stairs and so was unlikely to repeat their treat.

She never understood why Caenis did it. Least of all for a steep rent. Paying money to a man for anything was a concept Veronica found ridiculous.

Veronica herself had decided with the advent of Caligula that sharing the Palace with an emperor was not for her. For one thing, she was disgusted by the imperial bordello he devised. Having finely decorated a suite of rooms at the Palace, he threw them open to all comers, offering loans to the men who visited and shamelessly listing the income as donations to the imperial treasury. With such competition, how was a simple girl expected to make her way?

Veronica had acted with alacrity. She understood that senators did not want compulsory brothels at the Palace, where Caligula's idea of adding insult to the Senate—which he now passionately hated—was that they should be forced to bring their wives. A man enjoying offside relaxation wanted a different face than the one at home. Veronica purchased her freedom, skipped the Palace, and began to offer an establishment that was equally expensive without the political disadvantages and the risks. At Veronica's there were no wives.

She did not, of course, pay rent. She occupied a prestigious mansion, which she looked after for an octogenarian ex-consul who never visited Rome. The consul paid all the bills, and when he died he left Veronica the house. Meanwhile her success was assured. She let it be known that no one need apply who commanded less than a hundred million sesterces; rather than be thought too poor to attend her salon, clients flocked in.

Veronica repeatedly asked Caenis to live with her. Caenis always refused. She did, however, go there sometimes in the evening. She liked Veronica's house for the same reasons as the elderly gentlemen of conservative opinions who treated it like a military dining club: The place was warm, the cooks were excellent, the women were civilized, and the sanitation worked.

Caenis came to be regarded as a kind of inky-fingered duenna. Her connections were respectable, and when she felt like it (not invariably) she made people laugh. She never slept with men, though for three years Veronica tenaciously shoveled men her way. If necessary, Caenis slid them off elsewhere. It was not always necessary. Many were grateful that she made no demands. Some men who patronize exclusive salons are frightened they cannot live up to expectations (Veronica agreed tartly that most could not). For them, talking to Caenis was polite and safe.

Caenis herself did not altogether appreciate the arrangement. The men Veronica thought suitable for her all fell into a certain type: recent widowers with far too much to say now about their previously neglected wives, or bachelors so trying that their loneliness was all too understandable. The other thing they had in common, Caenis soon noticed, was that none of them was a man whom Veronica wanted to have to entertain herself. Being a convenience sometimes rankled.

She put up with the situation. Caenis never lost her sense of humor entirely.

Sometimes there was political talk. Veronica discouraged this. Treason could lead to trouble, and if things became too heated men lost their tempers and stormed off without wanting a girl, which reduced her income. Caenis, who only went there for something to eat and companionship, rather enjoyed the politics.

On one occasion she thought Veronica would have a seizure; someone openly raised the question of disposing of the Emperor.

Caenis noted that there was not the shocked silence that anyone who lived outside Rome would expect. By now Caligula had worn the purple for four years; he had also dressed up in silken robes encrusted with gemstones, theatrical costumes, elaborate military uniforms (usually with the breastplate of Alexander, which he claimed he had stolen from the hero's tomb), and rather ordinary women's dresses in colors that did not suit his pasty face. His behavior had been odd, baffling, and exorbitantly expensive. While staying at Antonia's villa at Bauli, he dreamed up a plan to defy the old prophecy that he could as soon become Emperor as ride dry-shod over the sea at Baiae: He built a three-mile bridge of galleys, turfed it over, and for two days trundled in a chariot to and fro across the Gulf; several people cheering his entourage were knocked into the sea and drowned. He had bankrupted the Treasury with his constant Games and circuses; he brought business to a standstill and even canceled the rites of mourning so no one had an excuse not to attend his shows. His cruelties extended from the execution of his own cousin King Ptolemy of Mauretania (who had offended him at a gladiatorial display by winning the crowd's applause for an elegant purple cloak), to dispatching common criminals in batches, without even a glance at the charge sheet, in order to feed their carcasses to his panthers and lions. He blighted trade with fierce taxation. He chained up the granaries when the populace was starving. No one forgot how he had worried his grandmother to death.

People were now looking back fondly to the golden age of Augustus, a man who in retrospect had genuinely seemed to want to do right. People remembered that even under Tiberius the city and the provinces were efficiently run. After four years there was a slow groundswell of understanding in Rome that Caligula must be removed. He was still not yet thirty. People felt tired just thinking how long they might have to endure him if nothing was done. Needless to say, most people hoped somebody else would volunteer to risk doing it.

There had been one plot, apparently brewed by his sister Agrippina. Drusilla, to whom he was most deeply attached, had died suddenly; her death caused a florid outburst of grief in the Emperor, who proclaimed Drusilla a goddess, established a cult for her, ordered public mourning on a scale that was disaster for small traders, and then fled to the country to soak himself in misery (mitigated by occasional gambling bouts).

Afterward the position of the surviving sisters, Agrippina and Livilla, had declined. While accompanying their brother on a visit to Germany they found themselves accused—probably rightly—of plotting with Lepidus, Drusilla's widower. He was executed and they were exiled, but first Agrippina was compelled to bring the cremated remains of Lepidus, who was allegedly her lover, back to Rome in a casket—a grim parody of her mother returning from Syria with the relics of the dead hero Germanicus. The Senate had had to frame its reaction cautiously, and since the plot had been put down, there was only one tactful course: One of the praetors issued congratulations to the Emperor on his expedition, then denounced Lepidus and suggested that his ashes should be denied the family mausoleum and cast out unburied.

The praetor concerned was Flavius Vespasianus.

* * *

When plotting came up in conversation it was Caenis herself who said quietly, "There will always be the convention that the Senate creates the Emperor—then cannot be seen doing away with him."

There were senators in the room. Mostly they followed the pattern of slow, somber, self-opinionated men in late middle age. Now, after feeding on swan cunningly presented as porpoise, turbot in aspic, and suckling pig served with two wine sauces reduced to a delicate glaze, they were lying on their couches holding back belches while pontificating bitterly on the world's decline. They thought this was daring enough.

Caenis felt disinclined to let them get away with it. "It will be," she suggested, "some disgusted individual who dares to plunge in the knife." Veronica closed her eyes, gleaming silver with mercury. Caenis refused to take the hint. "Then the Senate, to excuse its own cowardice, will execute that individual for his courage."

She fell silent, having noticed with more interest than usual that her leg was touching the leg of the man to her left. It had been an accident, but she ignored what had happened, and so did he. He was Lucius Anicius, a knight who had made a fortune in charioteers; not her type at all. He spent a lot of time with the Praetorian Guards and was, Caenis realized afterward, probably the one person present who was fully aware of the burning hatred felt for Caligula by their current commander, Cassius Chaerea. Caligula was always giving obscene watchwords to Chaerea, a decent, proper man who had to pass them on straightfaced to the rest of the Guard.

Anicius said, seeming to take her part, "The question seems to be, not whether a plot will succeed—but which one it will be." Agreeing, people laughed and listed some of them: Aemilius Regulus, an unknown from Spain; a senator called Vinicianus who had been friendly with the dead Lepidus; Chaerea, the much-humiliated commander of the Praetorian Guard; members of the Emperor's own household, particularly his freedman Callistus. . . . Those were the acknowledged plotters. Any moment someone here would be revealing the secret ones.

Caenis saw Veronica signal to her waitresses to bring in towering platters of fruit. In a crisis she always ordered the dessert. Peeling it kept troublemakers quiet.

"Personally," mused Veronica, to lighten the atmosphere, "I think Incitatus is the only one who comes out of this reign at all well."

Incitatus was Caligula's racehorse. He lived in his own house with a marble stable, purple horse blankets, jeweled saddlery, and troops of slaves to attend to his every need. There was a rumor that Caligula intended to award Incitatus a consulship.

Caenis, who held there was no reason to believe Incitatus would do any worse than some of the legitimate candidates for consul, now relented and helped Veronica out. "Io! Incitatus is modest, hospitable, kind to his slaves—and rises above the glamour to run his heart out on the track. Have a pomegranate and don't worry!" As she called cheerfully across the table, she finally shifted her leg. Lucius Anicius plundered the cornucopia, nodding for some wine. The wine at Veronica's was tolerable, and her stewards had a knack of warming it pleasantly with herbs, but for good professional reasons she discouraged too much drink. While he waited for the rather slow service, Anicius helped Caenis to a handful of grapes.

People were now talking about the Emperor's military deeds in Germany. This was simple scandal, so Caenis saw Veronica relax. Caligula had rattled about Europe in spectacular battle dress, fleecing the good burghers of Lugdunum in Gaul at compulsory auctions of Palace furniture, throwing his uncle Claudius fully clad into the Rhine, taking hostages from a primary school, then chasing them like fugitives up a road, and finally marching home with a bunch of "German" prisoners of war who turned out to be just tall bemused Gauls with their hair and beards dyed red.

"I do feel," Caenis observed in an undertone to Anicius, "that a man who owes his position to the adoration of the army was unwise to take the field unless he could live up to the gallantry the army expects!"

"Oh yes; he's a bully—but also a complete coward." Anicius poured wine for her from the flagon he had captured. He had not bothered to grab the water jug, so they tilted their cups together, and like hardened drinkers took it neat. They drank in silence, cynically observing the rest with hooded eyes.

By now the older men were lathering themselves into fine indignation over the Emperor's Ovation, a kind of secondary Triumph that he had been awarded for the British affair. After showing himself in Germany, Caligula had assembled a huge invasion force and fleet, announcing his intention of seizing the island that Julius Caesar had failed to keep. He accepted homage from a British princeling who had been exiled for arguing with his Celtic papa, and then announced Britain's surrender without even setting foot in the place.

Returning home, the Emperor abused the Senate roundly for omitting to vote him a full Triumph. It was a vicious circle; his express orders had been that they must not.

"Antonia Caenis, I'll tell you an amusing story about Britain," muttered Anicius. "In a minute."

A praetor had smoothed things over by suggesting that special Games be held to celebrate the Emperor's German campaign. This was all the more creditable to the praetor since as holder of that office he would be expected to help pay for the Games himself. He had no money, Caenis knew; it was Vespasian. He then gratified the Emperor by thanking him before the full Senate for his graciousness, simply because Caligula had invited him to dine at the Palace.

Caenis heard this praetor's name being scoffed at without a pang. "Poor lad!" she commented drily. "Dinner is going to test him a bit. He tends to nod off; Olympian Jove won't like it if he dozes over the ambrosia."

Everyone laughed.

Veronica, who was not a sentimentalist, remarked briskly, "I daresay if his eyes start to droop, his wife will give him a kick!" And without looking again at Caenis, she signaled to her waitresses to start clearing the tables and let in the Spanish dancing girls.

Caenis hated Spanish dancers. She groaned in disgust. "Oh, Juno! Not the tambourines and castanets!"

It was a cliché to have girls from Gades to entertain your dinner guests. That never prevented their popularity, sweeping the floor with their handsome hair, while furiously clicking and clattering.

She knew what would happen next. Veronica was already bestowing her charm on the man at her side; he was faintly pink, thrilled at being singled out, but forgetting the premium he would have to pay. Soon there would be other pairings and disappearings, with or without the dancers whose moral reputation ranked only slightly above Syrian flute girls (who at least could play). Then Caenis would be left here to preside over noncombatants, taking charge in Veronica's place while tiresome men tirelessly talked.

For once a surge of resentment swept her. "Lucius Anicius, your funny story would be kind."

Assenting suavely, he stabbed his knife into a peach. "They are trying to keep this dark. Apparently the conquest of Britain involved much more than giving houseroom to some British king's delinquent boy. God-on-earth conquered the Ocean."

Caenis gazed at him over the rim of her cup. "I heard God-on-earth built a lighthouse," she offered.

"True." Anicius was leering at the dancing girls. "Very public-spirited in that wild part of the world—No; I think you'll like this: I'm told he paraded all his soldiers on the beach, and commanded them to gather seashells in their helmets and tunic skirts. He's brought it all back to the Capitol in chests, and presented it to the Senate as a tribute of the sea."

Caenis flashed her teeth against the cup. "Cowries and cuttlefish, winkles and whelks? Imagine the smell! Oh yes," she agreed slowly. "Oh, I like that very much."

"Good!" responded Anicius, returning his attention lazily to her. He was the sort of man who spent a great deal of time wrestling and playing handball at the baths; he was built like a barrack wall. "This must be the first time I've seduced a woman by talking politics."

Caenis, who had enjoyed dressing for this evening more than she had done for a long time, tidied the folds of her gown with a well-manicured fingernail; for a moment she dipped her ochered eyes—then raised them and held his look. "Is that what you are doing?"

"Am I not?"

"Oh yes, I think so," she murmured, though he was not her type at all. "Lord, why me?" she asked.

She had wondered if he had instructions from Veronica, though if so his next reply was far too blunt. He laughed. "Lady, why not?"

She laid her hand formally upon his iron fist as he helped her rise and led her from the room.

* * *

She had chosen well. She knew a disaster would end her confidence for good, but there was no danger of that. Anicius used his women with a vigor that bordered on force; Caenis, in wild mood, took and was taken with a spirit that matched his. It was over very quickly; she was glad of that.

She conducted herself irreproachably. She avoided disgrace; she was free. No stranger would realize how detached she wanted to remain. Only when she thought herself awake alone afterward did she creep against a wall and give way to the relief of deep, convulsing, almost silent sobs.

After she was still Lucius Anicius moved. It hardly mattered. She had no desire to see the man again; nor would he expect to seek her out. "Too much wine?" He was curt, but not rude.

In a moment Caenis said quietly, "No. Sorry."

"Feeling all right?"

"Wonderful, lord!"

"What is the lady thinking then?"

Drained of all feeling, Caenis spoke candidly, with her head against the wall. "That the saddest part of this stupid reign must be a decent man reduced to flattering a political grotesque." The name of the praetor Vespasianus remained unsaid.

She heard Anicius move again. Not without instinct, he asked wryly, "Do I take it we have just crossed your Rubicon?" Then, when she did not answer, he proved she had chosen someone more generous than she had thought, he whistled softly. "Why me?"

Allowing her to fling it back to him—"Why not?"

* * *

After four mad years the Emperor Gaius, nicknamed Caligula, was to die during the Augustan Games in the Portico of the Danaids on the Palatine. The plot was so open, conspirators called out and wished each other luck as they took their seats. A mime was produced, which involved the death of a king and his daughter, with the use of much stage blood. Retiring for lunch, the Emperor declined to follow his uncle Claudius down the alley lined with imperial slaves, but paused to greet a group of young boys practicing to sing for him later, then took a shortcut down one of the covered passages. There Cassius Chaerea, the Guards commander, came to ask for the day's password, and was given the usual obscene answer. Chaerea drew his sword and stabbed Caligula, after which the group he had organized rushed in to finish off their victim before his special cohort of German bodyguards, shut out from the corridor, could burst in to save him. The conspirators then fled through the nearby House of Livia.

Chaos broke out. The German bodyguards ran amok and killed three senators. A group of Praetorian Guards invaded the imperial quarters, discovered Caesonia, the Emperor's wife, murdered her, and dashed out the brains of Drusilla, her infant child. The Senate gathered on the Capitol, which was defensible, having had the forethought to take with them the State and Military Treasuries so they could pay their way out of trouble. The mob milled about in the Forum below, where they were harangued by men from noble families who wanted to claim they had not been involved in the plot.

The Senate briefly fancied that the Republic might be restored, though individual members were acutely aware that would threaten their personal power. But then an odd accident intervened. Some soldiers, cheerily looting the Palace, found the last remaining adult male of the imperial family hiding behind a curtain, and for a joke proclaimed him Emperor.

The poor soul they seized on was Claudius, the son whom Antonia had always called ridiculous.

TWENTY

The imperial freedman Narcissus could not remember who this woman was.

"Well," she cried, with more irony than most people were using nowadays. "A new Emperor; a new Chief Secretary!" He was the most important man on Claudius' staff; he was expected to recognize everyone.

She had probably touched thirty. She had neither the flounces nor the necklaces of some citizen's matronly wife, yet despite all the spear-carriers, cloak and footwear attendants, name-takers and doorkeepers, she had got into his office, brushing off the paraphernalia of delay as carelessly as a naiad paddling through foam; she knew palaces. He wondered: One of us?

"Narcissus." Yes. And she knew she had floored him. "Little did I imagine that one day I should find you in an office as big as a wrestling hall, with a desk like Aphrodite's bedstead and a ruby signet ring. Come to that, which of us foresaw clownish Claudius' being shouldered through the streets by the Praetorian Guards? Did somebody in the Praetorians get up with a headache, or did they only get the headache after they realized what they had done?"

Narcissus, who had shared some interesting conversations in the last few weeks, made no answer while he went on sizing her up. Quality clothes—sage-green linen, evenly dyed and belted in with simple cords; a modest stole; gold on her arm; a pair of shoulder brooches, with very good garnets in antique metalwork. A stately walk; a gloss of hair folded back neatly from a vividly reminiscent face; that rapid gaze. He was certain he knew her. He knew those searching eyes.

Since he had not asked her to sit, she stood. His stern act rebounded; the freedman felt himself rebuked. He cleared his throat and signaled her to a stool.

Damn it; he definitely knew that air of haughty rebellion as she declined.

"It has been a long time," she derided him gently. "I used to think you were wonderful." Her eyes had a teasing gleam that must be new. "Easily the most intelligent man that I had ever known . . . So this elevation of yours is not, O my master, entirely unexpected." She had excellent manners; she was graciously helping him out now. "You always said I was the quickest child you ever taught—but I should never get anywhere until my handwriting was neat."

Of course!

Twenty years ago. He remembered now; he had a meticulous brain with a long reach. Thin as a strip of wind, and that morose, wounded stare that ripped into you like teasel hooks. Oh, he remembered this one; he used to start explaining something difficult, but before he was halfway through the logic, she would be up and asking questions on a point he hadn't intended to cover for another hour. The only thing that ever really held her back was that she understood the end of the lesson before her leaping brain had properly learned the steps along the way.

The others all hated her. Because she found everything so effortless—but most of all because, in a dull world, that ferocious scrap was bound to be any teacher's favorite.

"Caenis!" exclaimed the freedman Narcissus.

Then all the whifflers and fly-swatters who cluttered up his office leaned back in alarm from the roar as the Emperor's Chief Secretary laughed.

* * *

She would never be a beauty, but working for Antonia had turned her out immaculate. Fastidious, austere, sinfully clever—and probably still furious underneath.

They surveyed one another, smiling; neither was giving anything away.

"Want a favor, miss?"

"Do you one, sir."

These days, that was a pleasant change.

Caenis had worked out that an emperor whose popularity among the establishment was so shaky must be looking for new men. To cope, Claudius was setting up an organization at the Palace from the trusted ex-slaves of his own household: his mother's freedman Pallas at the Treasury, Caligula's man Callistus as Secretary of Petitions, and this fellow who had once been her own teacher, Narcissus, as the overall head of administration. Putting the Empire in the hands of his freedmen would never be approved by the patricians, but it would work. The Emperor's freedmen had a vested interest in keeping their patron on the throne.

With a new emperor the convention was that every senior post in provincial government and the army would be looked at afresh. Many officials would be changed. Narcissus was now in charge of that. So Caenis knew Narcissus would be recruiting the new men.

He was magnificently able. Wary to the point of seeming sinister, he would certainly use his grand position to his own advantage, but he could be relied on to enjoy organizing the Empire. He had dedication and flair. Quite likely a Greek in origin, he spoke with the extremely cultured voice of a foreigner who had the ear to overcome his oiliness; his Latin was better than that of most senators, and his Greek impeccable. He must be hated too.

"What favor, and why?" he demanded. He had always been testy.

"You sound just like a woman, Chief Secretary!"

"It's the job, dear. Organizing fools all day. Don't mess with me," he commanded. "What's his name?"

They were speaking now in low, familiar voices, people who had once worked together as slaves. No point in further delay. "Flavius Vespasianus," she said crisply. "His brother is a commanding legate in the army on the Rhine." There was a slight pause. "This one's brighter and more thorough," Caenis claimed. She still remembered the criteria Narcissus applied when judging people.

The Emperor's freedman pursed his lips and stared up at the ceiling high above his head. It was decorated with rotund cherubs and fauns surrounded by exquisite bouquets of flowers. Caligula had extended the Palace to take in the Temple of Castor and Pollux as his vestibule. At the same time some superb redecoration had been done. The Chief Secretary had allocated himself a showpiece suite. Well; he had an excuse. This was where ambassadors would soon be homing in from all over the world.

"Lover?" grilled the freedman nastily.

"No," Caenis replied, keeping her tone level. She had come prepared for his direct methods. "Was my lover, I admit. It's not at all relevant; you will find out when you check."

He laughed. So far there were not many people who gave him credit for cautiousness. And there would never again be many who dared stand up to him. "She wants him back!" Narcissus tried her, with that terrible grisly grin.

"No. Married. Haven't seen him for years."

"Years! You owe him money, girl?"

"Freedman, you taught me better than that!" Careful herself, she declined to confess that the debt owed was from Vespasian to her. He had never managed to repay the loan (although he kept his word and sent her interest via an embarrassed accountant once a year).

Narcissus hauled himself upright and moved to a carved chest behind his chair; she noticed that the padded braid on his tunic was a good handspan deep, stiffening out the neck and hem. As he turned away she recognized the signs; he wanted one of his special lists. Here it came, and he was running his split pen-nib down the names with a secretive air that told her he always knew his way about these characters much better than he wanted to reveal. He glanced up sharply as she craned her neck, searching for telltale notches beside the names. "You haven't seen this!"

"No, sir," she simpered, enjoying herself hugely.

"Flavius Vespasianus . . . Titus, would that be?"

"Titus," she agreed, more awkwardly than she had hoped.

"Titus," he repeated; he had always been an aggravating man. "Hmm. Military service in Thrace, kept his nose clean—"

"He liked the army," Caenis interrupted quickly.

"And how did the army like him?" Narcissus barked. "Quaestor in Cyrenaica and Crete; produced a good report. Must be bloody good, if they acknowledged it! Aedile . . ." It was all there. He stared for a moment, then scoffed; evidently he had a record of that business with the mud. "Praetor at first attempt. What's this—it was he who made that speech when Caligula sent his sister home with the ashes of her lover? For plotting against the Emperor Lepidus should be denied public burial? I could call that crawling! I don't want him if his judgment is flawed—"

"No choice," Caenis defended Vespasian.

"It looks inept."

"Expedient. Caligula had taken command of the situation. The Senate had to support him or go down with the conspirators. Besides, who would want that wretch Agrippina to succeed in a plot?"

"Who would want Agrippina as an enemy, Caenis?" After the sharp retort Narcissus let it go. "Brother of Sabinus . . . I know the brother; he waffles, but he's all right." He laid down the list abruptly and looked at her. "Difficult."

"Narcissus, the man is good."

"It's not his turn."

"He has no money, no reputation, and no famous ancestors. You condemn him, Narcissus; it will never be his turn!"

Narcissus gave her his vile laugh. "Keep your wig on! I'll look at him. There's plenty for a good man to do." That was interesting. "Come and see me this evening; ask them in the outer office for the map to find my house."

Caenis chuckled. How like the old fusspot to arrange for a map. "Your house? Don't you want a suite here, three steps from the Emperor?"

To her, since they knew one another well and from a different time, Narcissus made the admission in a low voice: "Of course! And only two steps from his interfering bloody wife. But sometimes I shall want to be unavailable. Besides, woman," said the Emperor's Chief Secretary, "I prefer to keep a private corner to entertain my own friends."

* * *

His idea of a private corner boded well for his friends.

Narcissus, who was to make himself the master of four million sesterces, the richest man in Rome, lived even at that stage in a house of distinctive opulence. Deft slaves silently slipped about. Caenis permitted a houseboy to lift off her outdoor shoes. She eased herself into a sleekly tasseled mound of swansdown cushions, accepted a sweetmeat, toyed with honeyed wine.

"Nice!" she teased Narcissus skeptically.

He gave her a look. Even before he spoke she guessed he had made inquiries about where and how she lived herself. "Better than your musty eggcup off the Via Appia. Do you know that Claudius never sold his mother's house? I pointed out that you've been polishing his daughter's shorthand without a salary." Claudia Antonia was now to be married, so any education she needed would be of a different kind. "He agrees; I've earmarked you half a wing."

She had forgotten how hard he worked. Nor had she reckoned on his establishing his kitchen cabinet so speedily.

"I can't go back to Antonia's house. It would break my heart. Besides, who gets the other half of the wing?"

"Agrippina; she's being allowed back from exile." As Caenis exploded with disgust, Narcissus rushed on, "We'll find you some cash, then, and you can find your own place."

"I want a nice apartment with a fig tree and a female landlady who's too embarrassed to ask for a high rent."

"I interviewed your man."

Their eyes clashed. Caenis snapped, "Not mine!"

"Sorry, I forgot! He wasn't what I expected; we had an interesting chat. Has an infant son, did you know? Poor little sprat came into the world in a back bedroom not much better than the flea-trap you lurk in yourself: Titus."

Caenis wondered what sort of chat. "What?"

"Vespasian's son." As a family the Flavians still lacked inspiration when it came to naming their boys. "You might have mentioned the son, Caenis."

"Why? So what have you offered his obviously virile papa?"

"Nothing yet. It's up to my man."

Caenis made herself more comfortable among the swansdown, and to assist her task of trying out all his sweetmeats, she commandeered their little silver plate. In such matters Narcissus had excellent Greek taste. The honeyed balls were packed all over with sesame seeds: twice the fun—eating them first, then hours of extra pleasure picking your teeth. "What we may offer him," Narcissus said carefully, "would hardly be a hammock in the sun."

"Something going on?" Caenis rapped back at once.

The Empire stretched from Africa to Gaul, from Farther Spain to Syria. Decades ago, when Varus lost three legions in the traumatic massacre in Germany, Augustus had decreed this far was enough. For thirty-five years now the policy had been to contain military effort within Rome's existing boundaries. Trying to expand would involve vast tracts of territory, small profit for a large outlay, and no particular prestige. There remained only one possibility that might be tempting for an emperor who needed a mad rapid exploit to confirm his position at a time when the legions were not even sure who he was and the Senate was tolerating him only until they thought of somebody to hoist up in his place.

Narcissus watched her working it out; he was proud of her.

"You're not serious, freedman! Not another crack at Britain?"

The island beyond the edge of the known world. It hummed with mystery; there was talk of deposits of silver and gold; Julius Caesar had been there, though he had had the sense to back off hastily; the great British King Conubelinus, who for years had preserved stability in the south and was tolerant of trade with Rome, had recently died, leaving a nest of ambitious, more hostile sons.

And the stores were already in the warehouses in Gaul; the plans worked up and filed; the triremes built.

Narcissus shrugged. "Thanks to Caligula all the logistical work has been done. There's even a glorious new lighthouse to beacon the way. Does he shrink in the wet, your Sabine friend? Will he frighten at blue men and druids' spells?"

"He can cope. Especially if there's a salary."

"Oh, I do like an army full of men who need the money! So reliable and keen." The freedman's voice suddenly dropped. After all, she had once been his favorite. "What do you want, miss? Shall I tell him you spoke to me?"

"No!" Caenis was horrified.

"Want to hear that he's happy and well?"

"No."

"I see. Sulking? Wants him miserable and off-color instead."

She lost her temper. "I just want him to be given his chance! I want a man who has real talent, and energy, and the will to serve, to stop being hampered by the snobberies of the system—"

"Caenis! You predicate a society in which a man rises through merit!" Narcissus broke in with a shocked voice. She was still wondering whether to deflate him for "predicate" when he gave her an evil grin: bad teeth—a poor diet in infancy exaggerated lately by luxuries for which his constitution was ill prepared. He held out a warning hand. "Excuse me; I have another guest." For one dreadful moment she thought it would be Vespasian himself.

It was not. Shuffling apologetically, it was the emperor.

* * *

The slave who had showed him in was asking whether to light the lamps. Narcissus declined. "Leave them there for the moment. It's good to sit quietly at dusk among friends."

Caenis wondered whether she should leave. It seemed easier to sit tight. She noticed that here in his own house, even for the Emperor, Narcissus did not rise. Claudius, that white hair and the limp instantly recognizable despite the half-light that had fallen while she and Narcissus talked, found himself a couch with touching informality.

"Antonia Caenis, let me introduce you to my patron—"

"I know your patron," she interrupted quickly. Despite everything, Claudius might possibly not remember her; he drank heavily, and his recollection for faces was notoriously bad. "I am his mother's freedwoman; he is my patron too."

The Emperor nodded to her with that helpless quirk of the head.

They all sat, as Narcissus had suggested, quietly in the twilight. It was then for the first time that Caenis realized she was part of something new. Some strain that she had always known was lifting from Rome. By chance she belonged to the private household that was so unexpectedly governing the world. Narcissus, who approved of her, would bring her into this Emperor's tight-knit circle to watch, and if she wanted, to help.

Narcissus was saying openly to the Emperor, as if Caenis were already acknowledged as a colleague, "I left you the list to consider for army legates. You might give thought to Vespasianus. He could suit the Second Augusta. They're at Argentoratum now; ideal candidates for your British scheme."

Argentoratum was one of the big military bases on the Rhine. Caenis knew the legions there had been fractious for years. It would be useful to pull them out of their secure site, where they fraternized too closely with the locals and were apt to forget they owed allegiance to Rome. In other respects the legions in Germany were first-class. It would be a good command.

Claudius had turned to her. "I know Vespasianus, don't I?"

She reminded him quietly, "You met him, sir; at your mother's house."

"Yes . . . oh yes." He had taken on his wandering air. Oddly, it seemed to be settled at that. The freedman winked at her.

"If you take to him," Narcissus mentioned to Claudius after a time, "he has a boy we may educate with your own." Suddenly Caenis understood why he had been so interested in Vespasian's son.

Messalina had crowned the Emperor's astonishing rise to power by presenting Claudius with a male heir just twenty-two days after he accepted the throne. It would be seven years before the little prince went formally to school; Narcissus must be making long-term plans. With one Caesar barely pinned into his gown of woven gold, he was already plotting the school curriculum to produce a dynasty.

* * *

Narcissus himself handed out wine. Caenis had withdrawn into herself, winded by a vision of Vespasian with a baby on his arm. She was also having some difficulty hanging on to the dish of sweetmeats; Claudius was addicted to food.

"To the Emperor!" murmured Narcissus, the civil servant at his most wickedly urbane. Claudius ducked his head, not fooled by it.

"To good government!" Caenis staunchly returned. She grinned at Narcissus, aware that she had for once embarrassed him. "Sorry. I forgot to tell you; I'm a secret republican."

"Forgot to tell you, Narcissus," mused Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, with the slight melancholy of a man sitting quietly at dusk among his friends. "I am a secret republican myself!"

And as they all sat eating Greek sweetmeats, they laughed.

It was a new world, a new order, staffed by people with like minds. Caenis could hardly believe it; she was part of this.

* * *

She had an interview with her landlord later that week. Eumolpus came into her room without knocking, as she knew he did when he thought she was out.

"Ah!" exclaimed Caenis quietly, and had the satisfaction of seeing the slimy bastard jump.

He stared at her so, the tendons set in the back of her neck. His provocative eyes lingered on her skin and on the subtle folds of her dark-red dress. The dress had loosely draped sleeves, fastened to the elbow five times along each arm. "Always so smart! I do like that dress, Caenis. Those with the little buttons are the most seductive kind; a man always imagines them being very slowly unfastened one by one for him. . . ."

"Actually," Caenis crushed him, "these are purely decoration—permanently sewn up." She could hardly bear to be in the same room. "So glad you called; I can serve you my notice. I shall not charge you," smiled Caenis gently, "for all the painting and shoring up of your walls and woodwork I have had done—though I may suggest to the incoming tenant that she changes the lock!"

And in answer to the gratifying curiosity she had caused, "I am fortunate," she said modestly. "The new Emperor has offered me a suite in his mother's house."

It was a lie, because she would never accept the offer of returning to the House of Livia. And this was the only time Caenis, who was no snob, ever used her connections so publicly.

She did it on behalf of all the struggling women down the years who endured invasions of their privacy and acts against their person from men whose only advantage was the possession of property. She did it for them, and she did it for the bitter, barefoot slavey she had once been herself.

She was fortunate now. Emperors would come and go. But as Narcissus so shrewdly deduced, Antonia Caenis would in many ways be bitter and barefoot all her life.

TWENTY-ONE

Narcissus went to Britain himself.

In fact, he almost went to Britain by himself; all the more ludicrous, since according to his plan he should have been nursing things along in Rome.

The plan was: The troops would sail over, establish a foothold, batter the heads of a few southern tribesmen, then invite the Emperor to join them for finishing off the by now groggy tribes; afterward he would push off home as Claudius Britannicus, leaving the army to pin down as much territory as they could without serious expense, loss of face or loss of life.

It was a perfectly sound plan. Once Narcissus wound the machinery into action, like some solemn donkey toiling at a plod around his eternally creaking water screw, the plan worked pretty well. Once, that is, he got himself to Gaul and moved the invasion force.

* * *

The troops refused to go.

"That was not in the Daily Gazette!" Caenis exclaimed, when she saw Narcissus after he returned to Rome. She had found him at his house, which had been redecorated meanwhile with a great deal of Carrara marble and flagrant use of gold leaf; all rather wearing on the eyes.

"It seemed to us," returned the freedman, meaning it seemed to him, but he possessed a shrewd degree of modesty, "that it would be ill advised to let it be known too widely how four of the Emperor's best legions, forty thousand of the finest, in the peak of condition, all flush with their recent bonus for the Emperor's accession and looking up to a general (Aulus Plautius) against whom no troops could possibly hold a grievance—utterly decent all-around sort of chap—as I say, four spanking legions had trudged their way through Gaul, to camp at Gesoriacum (pig of a hole; just a dot on the map), only to sit on their beds looking out of their tents, staring boot-faced at the sea."

"I understand," suggested Caenis gently, "that the Gallic Strait is very rough."

Narcissus, who had been across in both directions, shuddered wordlessly. It was accepted by cultivated people that the thirty-odd miles between Britain and Gaul formed the wildest stretch of water in the world. That was the main reason, as the legionaries had advised their general frankly, why they did not want to go.

"I told them," said Narcissus, "I thought they had a point."

Caenis slowly sucked a red-rimmed peach between her teeth. "You told them!" she repeated thoughtfully, imagining the scene.

Fortunately Aulus Plautius was a rare specimen: a general who never panicked. Faced with a polite though stubborn mutiny, he had written to the Emperor for advice. The Emperor sent the head of his secretariat to represent his views. So Narcissus had dragged himself seven hundred miles overland across Europe from Massilia, which was itself five hundred miles from Rome by sea.

"You told them—oh, of course!"

Caenis rolled onto her back on the healthily plump crimson quilting that covered the visitors' couches in Narcissus' grand reception room. "Now let me be quite sure I understand this: You, my fellow-freedman, have no standing in the army. Soldiers, let's be honest, despise you as a stylus-pushing bureaucrat. So you climb on a military rostrum—the tribunal, that's the word?—in a huge new transit base at the far edge of the world. In the poker-faced presence of this exemplary general Plautius, his four legionary commanders"—including Sabinus and Vespasian—"and all their stiff-necked officers—who presumably had already been trying very hard for weeks to make the soldiers go?—you address forty thousand hard-bitten, foul-mouthed, filthy-tempered rankers, some of them bearing the scars of twenty years and all of them trained to the teeth? Tell me, Narcissus; was this well received? Didn't they laugh?"

Narcissus smiled. "They laughed," he agreed. Caenis removed the peach stone, now clean as a whistle, from her needle-sharp front teeth, and smiled at him. "It reminded them of the Saturnalia," he admitted, rather sheepishly.

Caenis thought of the jolly winter carnival, when in good-humored households the slaves and their masters all changed places for a day. She tried to draw favorable comparisons, but instead she heard in her head forty thousand ribald voices as they cried, "Io Saturnalia!" like the terrifying roar in unison of the crowd at the races in the Circus Maximus; it was her turn to grimace. "Yes; I see. And then they went?"

"And then," boasted Narcissus, "they were so surprised, they went."

Caenis scrambled around onto her front with her chin in her hands as she listened like an eager child. "And was that when you went yourself?"

"It was blowing a gale, Caenis; credit me with sense! I waited in Gesoriacum for my man."

Still he could describe it: the wind so ominously cold; the heavy sky; the sails that snapped to and fro overhead unpredictably; the rowers anxious; the soldiers huddling on the verge of panic and the commanders trying pallidly to look calm. As the transports moved out from the shelter of the Gallic coast, a force of truly bleak water had rolled under them, sinister as pewter, with a nasty yellow tinge. Then the storm rose. Energy surged through the channel from one bloated ocean to another as it never did in the land-locked seas at home, while the gale blew them back upon themselves as if the great god Oceanus were calmly clearing his domain with the flat of a mighty hand.

"Then they saw the great green light."

"Dear gods! What was that?"

"We have no idea. It was tactfully passed off to the troops as a meteor heading east—Jupiter's sign that he had countermanded Oceanus and blessed our enterprise. At any rate, the wind completely changed. The boats made headway, then were dragged by the tow of the tide and reached the other side. It all added to the pantomime."

The army had landed unopposed. The months of delay during the mutiny had caused the British tribes to pack up away from the clifftops and go home. There was no need to hack ashore. The legions beached at a new harbor where, since Caesar's day, the sea had burst a channel to create the Isle of Thanet. The whole fleet anchored safely in a sandy creek, where they found the oysters that were to become famous throughout the Roman world. They named the place Rutupiae. They dug in; the invasion was under way.

Caenis realized it would be no sinecure. No one knew what to expect. That difficult coastline just out of sight from Gaul was by now fairly well known to traders, but traders for their own reasons gave nothing away. Little of the interior had ever been explored. Even Julius Caesar, a century before, had thought Britain was no place for a wise general to delay. He had created what was supposed to be a client kingdom paying tribute to Rome, but no one ever put the theory to the test. Britain remained hopelessly mysterious, shrouded in bad weather, an implausible shape on an old Phoenician map. It was a refuge for druids who had been dispossessed from Gaul with their secrecy, their political intrigue, their shocking rites of human sacrifice. Now the powerful princes in the southeast hated the recognized Roman threat; in the southwest were dark tribes living in spectacular hilltop fortresses who had alliances of trade, kinship, and common interest with the Celts in western Gaul, who had themselves been brutally defeated by Rome in Julius Caesar's time. One thing was certain; there would be fierce hostility.

Yet Narcissus argued that the odds must be favorable. The four legions he was sending had the Emperor's personal interest and support. Their commander was experienced. The Roman army was one of the best supplied and organized ever in the world. This was a professional army, with its own colonies, contractors, burial clubs, savings banks. The men were magnificently organized, equipped, and exercised; trained to run, ride, swim, leap, fence, wrestle; even trained to use their heads. They owned a time-tested book of tactics; in any situation everyone knew what he was expected to do. In a wilderness like Britain the legions were prepared to build their own roads as they marched, to dig ditches and canals, to throw up frontier walls and fortresses, to dredge rivers and harbors, to colonize towns. Once they found the precious metals, they would run the mines. Men in the ranks were trained for every kind of specialized work. Whatever they might possibly want they either carried with them or could make once they arrived. They had javelins, swords, daggers, laminated shields, field artillery of many sorts. They wore bronze-tipped leather stomach guards, articulated plate armor or chain mail, shoulder plates, leg protectors, heavy-duty helmets, and the most efficient boots in the world. Against them stood brave but disorganized tribesmen, naked, almost barefoot, armed with stones and a few unwieldy swords.

Caenis suggested in a dry voice, "So it was easy?"

"No." Narcissus sighed. "Caratacus and Togodumnus, two shaggy British princes, nearly beat three crack Roman legions in their first fight."

* * *

He went back to the beginning.

"They got there, sick but safe. Landed in the east. Found the natives—a stiff fight—overnight. I hope a girl so well read as I tried to make you realizes that not many Roman battles take more than one day. The hero of the hour was . . ."

Caenis sat up. "Who?"

"Hosidius Geta."

"Who?"

"One of the legionary legates. Brilliant chap."

"Well done, Hosidius!" Caenis said mockingly.

Narcissus released a tetchy laugh. "Oh, your lad did well enough."

From Rutupiae three legions had moved out westward, thousands of horny feet in studded boots tamping down the chalk of an ancient Downland track. Eventually, from a high ridge above the River Medway, they had glimpsed the gray skein of the River Tamesis and beyond it, the marshes that guarded the heartland of their main opposition, the Catuvellauni tribe. Skirmishers began to harry the legions, but were beaten off. At the Medway, Togodumnus and Caratacus stood. The ford was too narrow, the ground too spongy to cross under attack. Any bridge there had ever been had disappeared.

Aulus Plautius prepared to cross the river.

On the far bank the warriors in checkered trousers and bare chests watched. Roman standard-bearers marched meaningfully to the approach, where they planted their eagles firmly on a knoll. Ranks of infantry moved from the ridge, then stood guard while men with poles tested the softness of the ground. Cavalry wheeled toward the ford, then circled back abortively, plashing through the shallows to the general's command point. Sometimes a horse, sucked into the hocks among the silt, reared in panic as it tried to regain firmer ground.

Behind the Britons sprawled a careless jumble of campsites where levies from different tribes had parked just as they arrived, confident that their attackers would be caught fast in a bottleneck. Farther off still were their horses and chariots. Not until they heard the first screams from the hamstrung horses did they realize that the Romans' Batavian auxiliaries had already come across.

Silently and without fuss, almost unnoticed even by their own army, the Batavians had slipped down the north side of the escarpment, entered the deep water far away to the right, and swum to the western bank. They were attached to the Fourteenth Gemina; they were one of the many groups of native specialists who were taken into the Roman legions to give them a chance of achieving citizenship and to let the army exploit their unique skills. These Batavians came from the area around the estuary of the Rhine; they were famous boatmen and pilots—and this detachment had been trained to swim, with their horses alongside, in their full weight of equipment.

They went straight for the chariot park and put the British horses out of action. At the roar when the tribesmen realized what was happening, the Batavians melted away.

On the Roman bank it was the two legions commanded by the Flavian brothers, Sabinus and Vespasian, who then made the move. Order materialized from the diversionary exercise. Screened by mounted auxiliaries—a line of cavalry upstream to break the force of the water and another lower down to catch any baggage that floated off—the soldiers began to swarm across the march while the Britons were unscrambling their chariots. The Britons hurled themselves upon this bridgehead. Vespasian and Sabinus held them off until dusk.

The third legion under Hosidius Geta went across in the dark.

The battle continued almost all the next day. In the end, Hosidius Geta's legion forced a wedge into the crammed ranks of half-naked warriors. Geta himself was surrounded but cut a swath free and broke out. His legion wheeled around to encircle the enemy, and the day and the province were won. The British forces broke and galloped north. Picking off stragglers and gathering up their own casualties, the Romans made after them. But the Britons had crossed the river where it widened; by the time pursuit arrived the tide had turned and flooded back up the estuary to form an impassable brackish lake.

Some Batavians swam the river, but they grew careless, lost their way among the marshes, and were cut apart by Caratacus. The general Aulus Plautius pitched camp on the south bank of the Tamesis, while pontoons were towed from Rutupiae to build a temporary bridge. The legions waited two months for the Emperor and the elephants to come from Rome.

"That was when you went?" demanded Caenis triumphantly.

Narcissus confirmed at last, "That was when I went across."

"What was it like?"

"Densely populated farmland with some forest in between. Wattle huts, mostly round, surrounded by tiny square fields with built-up boundary banks. Cattle, dogs everywhere, the best wheat outside Africa."

"And the blue men?"

"Extraordinary!" Narcissus exclaimed.

"Are the women blue?"

"No. And really, not many of the men. The women," Narcissus thought it appropriate to tell her, "were very tall, tawny as lions, and apparently more outspoken and single-minded even than you. Thank the gods we couldn't understand them! The ones we met were of course mostly princesses and queens."

"I suppose," Caenis said, glowering, "commanding officers abroad may have to have a lot of dealings with fierce barbarian queens?"

"Not," commented Narcissus, "if they have any sense!"

* * *

From what he had been telling her she gathered that the eastern sector of the country was by now subdued. One of the chieftains was believed to have died of wounds after the Battle of the Medway, though his brother Caratacus escaped into the west. Claudius had entered the Catuvellaunian citadel at Camulodunum, which he inaugurated as the Roman provincial capital.

"Useless," Narcissus moaned. "Too far east. Have to change it when we can. Still, he enjoyed himself."

"How long did you stay?"

"Sixteen days."

"What happened then?"

"Various kings surrendered and were laden with loans and gifts. Aulus Plautius was named first provincial governor. We sailed home. I left my man pottering round Gaul on his own."

"And that's it?"

"No, woman," Narcissus rebuked her. "That is by no means it."

He reckoned it would take them fifty years. Aulus Plautius would start now, planting a network of military forts, graveling roads, opening the ironworks in the southeast. Wine, oil, glass, perishable goods, would all go north in massive quantities; hides, hunting dogs, jet, oysters, grain, start trickling south. The legions—the Twentieth, Ninth, and Fourteenth—would establish bases in the east, the north, the middle west. But so far they had barely scratched a toehold; that was clear. In the south the Second Legion faced a major task.

Narcissus asked dourly, "I suppose you want to hear about your man?"

"Is there," Caenis enquired innocently, "anything to hear?"

She must know, since she knew Vespasian, there would be.

"With that one"—Narcissus stretched—"it is entirely up to him."

She said baldly, "I always told him that."

* * *

"This is between the two of us." Narcissus loved his secrecy. It usually meant what he had to say would be astounding half the world within a week. "My man really takes to him. Sent him into the south on his own—a free hand. He reports to the Governor, but his orders come direct from Claudius. There's an odd friendly king, Cogidumnus, on the coast, who for some reason has offered the Second Augusta a safe base. From there they can have the run of the southwest: the most ferocious tribes; dozens of hill forts bristling with nasty-tempered settlers slinging stones; some of the most fabulous defensive earthworks in the world. Somewhere in all that is more iron, plus the silver, the copper, the tin, and possibly the gold. The southwest, you realize, is where Rome really wants to be. The Second Augusta, in the command of your man, will be there for three years. I think we can assume that if he manages this, Vespasian will be made."

"Will he manage?"

"What do you think?"

"I hope he does," taunted Caenis, with her occasional abrupt habit of not thinking before she spoke. "The old skinflint owes me ten thousand sesterces!"

It was Narcissus who blushed now. Vespasian was notorious for never having any money, but this glimpse of his bedroom habits was too startling to be believed.

"I had hoped," returned the freedman tartly, "I had taught you never to lend!" He was looking faintly worried as he tried to make her out. Since he had known her as a girl, someone, perhaps even Vespasian himself, had turned this one into a tease. "I would have found him myself in the end, you know, Caenis; he was always on my list."

"Does that mean you agree with me?"

"Oh, he's outstanding," said Narcissus tersely. Then, unable to resist his nagging anxiety, "I'll give you ten thousand; it seems fair, and that tightfisted miser will never pay you back." Curious, when she did not answer he felt compelled to insist, "You'll laugh if he does."

Caenis laughed now. " ‘Never lend if you need repayment; never give where you want a return.' Now who told me that? Oh, Narcissus, believe me, if ever he does repay me there is no question about it—I shall cry!"

TWENTY-TWO

By the time the last squadrons of auxiliary soldiers had left the Field of Mars, the magistrates were just approaching the Capitol. The long procession snaked through the Flaminian Circus, and entered the city through the Triumphal Gate, which was opened especially for the day. Following the Via Triumphalis, it wound past the theaters in the Ninth District to give as many folk as possible a decent view, made a complete circuit to the right around the Palatine, included the Circus Maximus, turned left at the Caelian Hill, took the Sacred Way into the Forum, passed along the southern side, then ascended Capitol Hill by the steep approach of the Clivus Capitolinus, up to the Temple of Jupiter at the heart of the Citadel. So Rome saw the army; the army saw most of Rome.

Everything moved at a dismal crawl. The whole city was at a standstill. The noise was incredible. The spectacle took the best part of a day.

Vespasian said, years afterward in the procession he shared with Titus for the capture of Jerusalem, that asking for a Triumph (it was customary to ask) was the act of an old fool.

* * *

There had already been the expected Triumph for Britain, when Claudius came home. The Senate could only vote one Triumph for any campaign. Strictly speaking, this later event was an Ovation for his returning commander in chief: a secondary thing. No one cared; everyone called it a Triumph just the same.

Earlier, in the real Triumph, the Emperor had done himself proud. He adopted the name Britannicus for himself and for his infant son. The senators who had gone with him to Britain were honored in suitable ways, while collars and crowns and headless spears for valor were handed out among the army like beechnuts at a wedding; Messalina rode in a special covered carriage right into the Citadel; there was all the pomp and racket that a conqueror might expect. All the provincial governors had been invited home to witness their new Emperor's status and power.

So Caenis had seen Antonia's ridiculous son received by Senate and people in triumph. His appearance was the high spot of a memorable day. Claudius came, in his circular chariot drawn by pure white steeds, as the military victor to beg the city's welcome home, and as a religious representative interceding for that city with its gods as chief priest for the day. He wore a flowered tunic and toga all of purple, richly decorated with patterns and deep borders of gold. In one hand the staff of Jupiter, an ivory scepter with a gold eagle at its head; in the other a symbolic laurel bough. Upon his head a laurel wreath; held above him by a public slave, the solid weight of the Etruscan chaplet of oak leaves and ribbons in pure gold, brought to him from the statue of Capitoline Jove, the Crown of Triumph that was too heavy for a mortal man to wear. In the chariot rode his infant children, Octavia and Britannicus.

But that was all three years ago. Everyone had said at the time how disappointing it was that most of the army needed to stay behind in the new province to contain the dangerous British tribes, and that although Hosidius Geta came home for the Triumph, it was the general, and some of the other commanders, that they really wanted to see.

Well; the great names were here today.

Rome could take another holiday. Claudius, who was a fair man, wanted this to be his general's day. Aulus Plautius would have in his own right the procession, the acclaim, the sacred ceremonies at the fulfilment of his vows, all the honors and all the feasts. The Emperor trotted out in person to congratulate him, and as they rode back into Rome together, Claudius surrendered to Aulus Plautius the place of honor on the right. The name of that dignified, diffident, subsequently scarce-remembered man was hailed by his soldiers and by the populace all along the route, acclaimed over and over to the skies.

But even before the street sweepers had sluiced the pavements clean at dawn, while the shopkeepers were still garlanding their porticoes with flowers, another name resounded through Rome.

"Io Triumphe!" cried the people and the soldiers. "Hail Claudius! Hail Plautius!" and "Hail Vespasian!"

* * *

Veronica had managed to rent a balcony that overlooked the processional route. It cost so much that Caenis felt churlish for wanting to refuse her invitation. So she went, and took the picnic: some cold Lucanian salami, bread, stuffed eggs, and pickled fish. She was not sure whether this choice made her a sentimentalist, or stupid, or ludicrously brave.

It was bound to be a long hot day. There were eight of them on a balcony that would comfortably seat three. Elbows kept knocking the plant pots down into the crowd below. Veronica regimented everyone endlessly. She had allocated them all broad-brimmed hats against the sun, and parsley crowns for when they grew tired of keeping on their hats. She had brought deep baskets of rosebuds for hurling at the parade, and to complete the chaos vast quantities of jugs of wine. "Just be grateful," cried Veronica, who was a hostess of the most considerate kind, "the price for the balcony includes the lavatory downstairs!"

The city was in turmoil long before there was anything to see. People had to arrive early in order to squeeze through the streets. This meant standing or sitting about getting sillier and louder, while far away Aulus Plautius was still reviewing his troops. The pickpockets were putting in gallant work.

At the Field of Mars further honors were announced, this time by Plautius himself. There were batons for the legionary commanders, more headless spears for soldiers who were valiant in battle, coronets for every man who saved a colleague's life, harness medals for the cavalry, armlets for some, and a bounty in cash for everyone. The legions and their individual cohorts all adopted commemorative standard-discs. And then there was a special award, one that Hosidius Geta had already won (most unusual since neither man had been a consul yet): the granting of full triumphal honors—the right to wear his triumphal wreath at festivals and to have his statue in bronze erected in the Forum of Augustus—to Flavius Vespasianus for his masterly campaign in the southwest.

All this delayed the march for hours.

* * *

The procession marshaled in traditional form. This saved the need to issue programs and helped the sculptors to record things accurately after the event. Caenis knew the procedure by heart; the order of a Triumph had always been a favorite subject for dictation tests. It was:

First: The Civic Escort

Caenis popularly pointed out this was a good time to eat the picnic, while everyone was bored. With reasonable tolerance for sickness, bad manners, and the distant funerals of rich provincial aunts, most of the knights and many representatives of the people turned up; it took some time getting them all past.

Second: Flutes

Very pleasant. In the first Triumph there had been trumpets at this point; some of the trumpets had gone out of tune in the heat. It needed a good ear to notice, but Caenis had winced. Flutes were much more amenable.

Third: The Spoils of War

While this lengthy part of the parade was going by, people in the crowd had a chance to give sticky melon slices to their children and soothe babies who were suffering from heatstroke.

Born aloft by stout lads in laurel wreaths came yet more trophies seized in battle: armor, weapons, dragonesque embossed shields, wonderful light wicker chariots—followed by treasure: huge twisted golden torques and enameled harnesses and gear—then representations of places where the army had fought: models and pictures of fortresses, towns, and islands; living statues of weed-shrouded river gods, all with their outlandish names painted on boards: Camulodunum, Caesaromagus, Durnovaria, Vectis Insula, and the warlike tribes too: the Catuvellauni, the Trinovantes, and Vespasian's wild opponents in the west: the Dubonni, Durotriges, Belgae, and Dumnonii, against whom he fought his thirty battles and from whom he wrested twenty savage hilltop settlements.

This strange stuff left people so confused and argumentative that Veronica made them all change stools.

Fourth: The White Ram Prepared for Sacrifice

With gilded horns, trailing garlands, and scarlet ribbons, the magnificent beast was escorted by a string of priests, all bearing implements and sacred vessels, with strong wafts of incense, and accompanied by cymbals, triangles, and flutes. Veronica's party had by then drunk most of the wine, but the lull while the religious throng intoned its way past provided a good opportunity to open up what remained.

Fifth: The Principal Captives

No one knew the names of these British captives, since Togodumnus was dead and Caratacus still remained at large. Still, captives there were, and some were duly tattooed with vigorous patterns in blue woad. They had long limbs, white skin, light hair, and pale eyes in blue or gray. Among the sky-scraping buildings, the forests of statues and the roar of thousands of Romans in raucous holiday mood, they looked apprehensive and bemused. Veronica threw them a few stuffed dates, but they only shied away.

Sixth: The Commander in Chief's Escort of Lictors

More elegant than ever, though today without the axes they normally carried among their official bundles of staffs. All in red. A splendid show.

Seventh: Lyre Players and Dancers

Exulting over the vanquished enemy. Extremely tiring to do, but fun to watch.

Eighth: The Victorious General

Aulus Plautius, a surprisingly small man, looking worried by the capering of his huge white horse; he wore magisterial robes and a heavy myrtle wreath. He was extremely popular. At his side:

Ninth: The Emperor Claudius Britannicus

Caenis by now had a splitting headache.

Tenth: —

"I'm terribly sorry," Caenis murmured in apology, as she clambered over knees and baskets with the embarrassment and relief a woman feels after she has brought herself to the point of saying what she has been too shy to mention for three-quarters of an hour. "I just can't wait any longer. It must be the excitement. Tell me what I miss. Veronica, where's this famous lavatory of yours?"

Tenth: The Chief Officers of the Conquering Legions

Caenis took her time.

Even so, she badly misjudged it.

* * *

When she finally returned the noise was at its height. The spectators, swaying fearlessly on scaffolds, could hardly contain themselves as before the legions in full dress parade filled the streets, one by one drawn in chariots at their head they came: the four famous legates who commanded them.

The cheers had become frantic. People were scrambling up pillars to try to find a better view. The air was thick with flung flowers. Everyone was on their feet. Veronica, scarlet-faced with exertion, was jumping up and down in hysteria. She was clapping her hands and flinging violets and roses, then olives from the picnic, as every new legate passed.

Caenis, returning, was manhandled joyously by the others in their group back over wine jars and fallen chairs to her previous place at the front. Veronica mouthed something; Caenis grappled in the picnic case for tasty morsels to calm everybody down. While she was away the legates of the legio XIV Gemina, the legio IX Hispana, and the legio XX Valeria had all come by at a snail-pace crawl. Now away at the Capitol, Aulus Plautius, supported by the Emperor, began the last long climb up the Gemonian Steps, which by tradition he had to do on his knees; behind them the whole tail of the procession suddenly clogged up, faltered, swayed, and shuddered temporarily to a halt.

A standard-bearer in his fanged bearskin, who was forced to stop, planted the tripod feet of a legionary eagle on the tufa pavement where they skidded awkwardly; the silver-winged eagle lurched as he adjusted his aching fingers on the handle grip. Attached to the pole, which was garlanded with greenery, were two triangular emblem plates: Pegasus and Capricorn, which had been the symbol of the Emperor Augustus; above them was displayed the legion's number and name. Behind the standard that must always mark his position for his men, the legate of the legio II Augusta came to a standstill, rocking gently on his heels as he rested his hands on the front rim of his ceremonial chariot.

"Vespasian!" the crowds roared, bursting their lungs at this marvelous stroke of luck. The Hero of Britain, Flavius Vespasianus, folded his arms while he waited, and nodded absently to the crowd. The Hero of Britain: twelve feet away from Caenis, immediately below.

* * *

Hoarse with anguished adulation, Veronica clutched her throat.

"Io Triumphe! My darling, will you look at him—the Hero! Your lovely Sabine friend!"

Caenis had never seen her Sabine friend in uniform before.

He gleamed with bronze and glittered with buckles and medals in chased enamelware. Four honorary batons were tucked under one great arm. Much of him was hidden beneath breastplate and greaves and the heavy scarlet swirls of his commanding officer's cloak. His hair looked thinner, and the strong distinctive neck was invisible beneath the knotted wisp of a regulation scarf, but nothing could disguise the bend of that nose or the glorious upward angle of his chin. The wreath that he should have been wearing with such pride had dipped casually over one ear.

Someone had thrown a froth of rose petals, which were clinging to his shoulder clasp. He was brushing them off; they drifted languidly as far as the hem of his woollen cloak. All around him was ecstasy; trumpet blasts; cheers and screams. He stayed utterly himself. He glanced back at his officers, turning up his eyes to heaven at the delay while he gave the young men behind, who were grinning back, an amiable frown. He thrust out his lower lip. He reached for his chin with the back of his hand as if he wanted to stifle a yawn. Caenis smiled. Anyone who knew him could recognize that the Hero of Britain was seriously bored.

Veronica was squealing with despair. "Oh, Juno! There's nothing left to throw—"

Snatching it off, she tossed down her limp parsley crown; Caenis leaned a little over the balustrade, laughing, as she watched the dark sorry skein twist slightly before it bumped past his tunic skirt and landed on the top of the legate's ornamented greave, like something slightly unpleasant marring the silver gilt below his sturdy knee. Vespasian flexed one leg to flick it off. He glanced down.

Then he looked up.

* * *

Caenis realized the world was very sad.

She supposed he saw a balcony like all the others he had passed, crammed with vulgar people screeching and waving stupid hats. She could tell at once that he had noticed her, standing silent at the front, for his face automatically cleared. A woman in a white dress. He used to say white made her seem invisible; he liked her best in blue.

It was six years since Caligula was assassinated by Chaerea. The man below had spent a year and a half in Germany while Narcissus organized the landing force, then nearly four in Britain, and almost twelve months handing over the Second to his successor, before making his way back to Rome. He would be thirty-eight on 17 November. Caenis was—whatever age she was. She had a fair idea: the same as he. Even a little older perhaps. Yet she looked down at Vespasian with a clear, unashamed gaze, for she kept the comfortable habit of still thinking herself a girl, standing at the eager threshold of life. (Sometimes Caenis made herself wonder how long this habit could go on.)

Everything passes.

Feeling nothing so much as mournful regret, Caenis could see that Vespasian felt touched by a similar moment himself. He looked thoughtful, and a little melancholy.

He had everything now. It would be easy to feel jealous—yet so much less tiring at her age to be conventionally tolerant instead! She had always known he would be famous. She had once asked him to remember her, when he was. It did not seem important anymore. Yet she knew he did remember. The quiet recollection flickered in his face; she permitted a pale acknowledgment to answer in her own. She was glad that she had known the man, glad too that she had seen him come to this.

Old friends. Two people who knew nothing now of each other's lives, nor ever would, nor even wanted to. Two people merely happy, amid a clamor that was disturbing to them both, to recognize some stillness and calm in an old familiar face.

He was still looking up.

"Do something!" squeaked Veronica. Then in horror, "Caenis, don't do that!" Caenis had something from the picnic ready at hand.

His face lit.

"Caenis—no!"

Vespasian, expectant, lifted his chin. Caenis leaned out, held his eye for a second and a half, then lobbed her gift. "Io Vespasiane!"

She had thrown it straight at him; he trapped it against his brilliant armor with one wrist. It was half a Lucanian salami. Veronica collapsed.

Somebody pulled Caenis back before she fell. Laughing, laughing with him, she struggled to keep to her feet so she could see.

The procession jerked. The chariot moved. The crowd were acclaiming him; his business was with the crowd.

"Io Vespasiane! Triumphe Io!"

After him his officers stiffly marched past. Then after them the whole street became dappled with the reflected light that flashed off the armor of Vespasian's marching troops.

Veronica whimpered, "O Juno, Caenis. Oh my heart! What did he do?"

Caenis, though she realized she must be white as theatrical chalk, managed to speak complaisantly enough. "Tucked it under his elbow, in a bundle with his batons—saving it for later, I daresay!"

"Did he smile? Did he wave? Did you see what he did with my crown?"

"Always was a surly bastard," Caenis said.

"Turn around here!" commanded Veronica, above a new wave of commotion from the crowd. "What else?"

"He saluted," Caenis said, in a faint voice that her friend could hardly catch above the row. "Actually, I think he saluted me."

There was nothing for it; Caenis turned around.

Then Veronica could see that all the kohl with which Caenis had earlier that morning outlined those great cynical eyes was now streaking down her face. Caenis was by nature incompetent with cosmetics, but Veronica had done her best to train her, so she was not as bad as that. She was crying.

Veronica still thought Caenis had never enjoyed much of a life. Which was why, since she understood these things, she spoke quite gently, explaining to her friend in simple terms the sterner points of military etiquette: "Darling, be fair. What choice did he have? You can't expect Vespasian, the Hero of Britain, to salute a Lucanian sausage!" Veronica said.

PART FOUR

BRITANNICUS

When the Caesars were Claudius and Nero But not Britannicus

TWENTY-THREE

They had fourteen years, almost, of the new order under Claudius.

It was a long time for any government; long enough, at any rate, for people to forget what things were like before. As long as it took for the child Britannicus, who had been born at the moment when his father was propelled so quaintly to the throne, to arrive within sight of his coming-of-age.

Fourteen years. Then Claudius ate a dish of mushrooms that disagreed with him so violently, he died. But what happened to Britannicus had begun some years before. It started with his mother.

By the time Narcissus called the secret conference about Valeria Messalina, Britannicus was seven. He had been familiar with crowds all his life; while he was small Claudius loved to hold him up in the amphitheater and cry, "Good luck to you, my boy!" The audience always roared it back with enthusiasm; Britannicus was popular. He became tall for his age, showing character and quick wits. The Claudians were in general a good-looking family (Caenis believed a few more snub noses and squints might have produced more sensible Claudians). Even the Emperor himself, in repose, stopped slobbering and twitching and looked a handsome man. His wife, Messalina, possessed captivating looks; their son became an attractive child. Good luck he never possessed, however.

If Messalina had not captivated Callistus, Pallas, or Narcissus it was only because she never tried. She preferred Mnester, the ballet dancer, for a time; afterward a parade of young knights, senators, gladiators, soldiers, ambassadors even, then finally Gaius Silius, a consul-elect at an impressively youthful age who was, as Veronica said, the best-looking man in Rome.

Caenis reflected, "I suppose she feels there is no point being an empress unless you can pick and choose."

Veronica winced and peered at her sideways, not sure how much Caenis knew. "Darling, Messalina is not choosy at all!"

Caenis nodded; she knew.

Whether, as people besotted by her crimes wanted afterward to recall, Messalina really did leave the Palace at night disguised in a blond wig to offer her fine body to all comers at a common brothel was to some extent irrelevant. Her behavior was bad enough to make people believe it. Her bored trifling with noblemen, then her infatuation with Silius and the dangerous farce to which it led, were true, and enough to bring about her fall. If satirical poets and salacious biographers wanted to be bawdy about an empress, it would be good news for booksellers. It was not so good for Octavia and Britannicus. But they were Antonia's grandchildren; in their family tradition, unless they became monsters themselves, life would deal monstrously with them.

Messalina's affair with Gaius Silius was too dangerous. Lovers alone might have been overlooked; revolution could not be. When the Empress actually persuaded Silius to divorce his noble wife—to which he with logic and some spirit responded by asking the Empress to divorce her husband in return—Narcissus had little choice but to act. He summoned the Emperor's committed friends to a meeting at his own house. Caenis now realized the full value of this house: It was wonderfully comfortable, packed with pleasing works of art; he had Alexandrian flutists, there were flatfish in marble pools, the kitchen never closed, and the water was always warm. It was an ideal place to plot.

"As a woman am I invited on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief?" Caenis demanded of Narcissus scathingly. He did not deny it. He knew she was truculent and outspoken, but blisteringly loyal to Antonia's family. He knew too that she despised Messalina but probably understood her.

It was Narcissus himself, still with his old pinched oriental nose but nowadays distinctly fleshy otherwise, who set out the situation for the rest: "It's quite clear Messalina has been waiting for our man's visit to Ostia. He's gone off to inaugurate his new harbor. This evening, while Claudius is safely out of Rome, she will marry Silius. You can't blame him—tangling with the Empress is dangerous enough; he may as well risk everything on the throw. So he marries Messalina, in full form; he adopts Britannicus, and they grapple for the throne."

Callistus, who as Secretary of Petitions spent his whole life stating the obvious to people who did not want to hear it, said at once, "That's the end of us!"

No one answered. For some, that was not entirely the point. It would be the end of them, and their man—and all their work.

Pallas, Antonia's old messenger, shifted suddenly on his couch, exclaiming in exasperation, "I still can't believe it can go so far and poor besotted Claudius has not the slightest idea."

After a moment Narcissus murmured, almost in embarrassment for their man, "You know Claudius." And when no one answered that either, "Well; he has a great deal on his mind."

It was true. Claudius as Emperor had produced the energy and concentration that only a true eccentric ever shows. In the year his wife tried to divorce him (Romans were always divorcing their wives; it struck Caenis irreverently that while it was discourteous of Messalina not to mention to her husband her plans for that afternoon, at least taking the initiative herself made a change)—in that year, Claudius was preoccupied with his administrative duties as Censor, easing the penalties for debt, issuing edicts about snakebites and against unruly behavior in the theater, then finishing construction of his splendid aqueducts, which brought the clear water of the Caerulean springs fifty miles from the mountains across the Campagna on arches that were in some places a hundred feet high. He had continued to write scholarly histories. He involved himself in the internal affairs of Armenia and Germany; then, in a speech whose political diplomacy would have astonished those who had judged him inadequate in his youth, he persuaded the Senate to open its ranks to some long-standing allies from Gaul. He survived an assassination attempt without losing his nerve. He gave time to his pet schemes: He revived the College of Soothsayers and introduced three new letters into the official alphabet.

It was the eighth centenary of the traditional founding of Rome. Claudius inaugurated the Ludi Saecularii, the ancient commemorative Games. They were supposed to be held only once every hundred years so no one would attend who had ever seen them before; in fact Augustus had held them too, but that was a mere technicality. This time there was a Trojan Pageant in the Circus at which young boys from leading families performed intricate feats of horsemanship while their parents and grandparents chewed off their nails expecting tantrums, broken legs, and trampled heads. On this occasion Britannicus led one of the dressage teams. The other was taken by Domitius Ahenobarbus, the son of Claudius' niece Agrippina. He was three years older and far more confident, so of course he came off best; although Britannicus conducted himself with the gravity of a tiny Aeneas in the field, as soon as the dimple-kneed imperial infant reached home it ended in tears.

Claudius did all this, and no one had ever suggested he was too busy to pay attention to his wife. Everyone else knew; she was too busy for him.

* * *

Caenis spoke, since no one else would risk it: "Claudius believes his pretty darling is matchless in bed and a perfect mother—faithful, devoted, clever, helpful and sweet. Whatever you do, remember he believes that because it is what he wants to believe."

Various freedmen wriggled and scratched themselves, sensing some general criticism of their sex.

She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. She addressed herself to Narcissus, partly because she knew and understood him best, and partly because his colleagues were arguing for caution, frightened that interference would have unpleasant results for themselves. "Show him that they are stealing his throne—he believes himself the best man to hold it now. Perhaps he is. His ignorance of Messalina's antics makes it easier; the truth will be devastating, and he is a vain man. She can work him; ensure that she never gets the chance. Work him yourselves. . . ."She used the plural, though she guessed that this would be one man's work. "What will affect Claudius most will be the fact that she has thrown up their marriage in his face."

It struck Narcissus that Caenis was not, as it had turned out, telling them the woman's point of view but the man's. He glanced at Callistus and Pallas for support, failed to find it, then rehearsed what he could say: "Yes . . . ‘Sir, do you know you are divorced?' " He ended with a gesture, open-palmed like an acrobat. The effect was sinister.

"That poor besotted bastard!" Callistus commented.

* * *

Going home afterward, Caenis reflected privately how Claudius had a graceful knack of choosing whom to trust as his friends. His wives were disasters, and though all four of those, including Messalina, had been chosen for him by his relatives, Caenis doubted he would do better for himself. In marriage a man looked for a boost to his bank account, adornment for his home, and a submissive sexual partner. It would be a man of rare intelligence who realized he might so much more wisely share his household with a friend.

That was a long night.

The sharp clear morning with its indigo sky had become the blazing autumn afternoon when Narcissus came to Caenis at Antonia's house. She had never seen anyone so completely exhausted. He owned a home that ran with peaceful decorum, yet she saw on this one occasion that to return to his good-tempered battalions of servants would be to remain unbearably alone. He had passed beyond his private strength. His competence was all used up.

"Freedman, rest. I will send word; I will watch."

She dismissed all her own slaves. Then she herself attended to the shutters, poured water for him to wash his hands and face, mixed wine with honey which he proved too tired to drink, took his shoes, set the cushions around him, and laid the rug over him while he slept.

Caenis stayed in the room.

"Thank you," he said briefly when he woke.

He lay on his back for a long while, the rug flung aside now so she could see his hands interlaced limply on his chest. Narcissus' hands were unusually small. She had noticed that when she was fourteen and secretly in love with him in a frightening physical way, as a girl will be with a teacher who concentrates her mind. They had come a long way since then.

He was thinking. From a nearby reclining chair Caenis silently watched; it was an intimacy few would ever share with him. The olive-skinned face was hollow-cheeked in rare relaxation, although he knew she was there. His eyes were frantic with thought and dark with melancholy; their gaze fluttered about the ceiling, from bead-and-dart cornice to the plaster molding that had been smoked to an oily gloss by lamps, and on to the solid ball from which hung the delicate bronze swansnecks of an unlit chandelier. He saw nothing.

People blamed the man for personal ambition. Yet his gratitude to Claudius would always come from a full heart. He regretted his patron's weaknesses, but appreciated the man's strengths and did so completely without cynicism. There was love there. He would be glad that he had saved the day (Caenis recognized from his stillness how he must have done that), but Narcissus would not really exult. He would feel for his man's tragedy as Claudius himself, understandably, could not bear to feel.

Sensing some shift in the focus of his reverie, Caenis asked gently, "Well?"

"I have watched a heart break." He closed his eyes.

Finally he spoke again. "How does a man react? While returning from a journey in all innocence, he meets the stark news that his wife has taken a lover—many lovers—there is incontrovertible proof. Now she has left him without a word and been married, in front of witnesses: banquet, bridal regalia, sacrifices, new marital bed. All this is common knowledge in the city, from the Senate and the army down to the sleaziest barbershops and waterfront booths. His clean white pearl has been rolled in a night-soil cart. His betrayal is a barrack-room byword. Caenis, what should he do?"

He turned on his elbow and stared at her.

"What happened?" she asked again in her calm, quiet way.

"He said very little. I don't suppose he ever will. The story was so fantastic, he realized it must be true. As we approached Rome on his return from Ostia, Messalina was celebrating the marriage with a mock grape harvest at the Gardens of Lucullus. Hair flowing in the breeze, treading vats, waving Bacchic wands—everyone disgustingly drunk. You can imagine the scene."

There was a fastidious pause. The gardens had once belonged to Asinius Gallus; Messalina accused him of adultery with a woman of whom she was jealous, then compelled him to judicial suicide; it was the easiest way to wrest away the man from his gardens, which he had refused to sell. "Her party vanished; most of them were picked up later by the Guards. She walked—walked!—the whole length of the city almost alone, then started out toward Ostia in a garden-rubbish cart. She took the Chief Vestal Virgin to help argue her case, and sent for the children to soften his heart."

"Poor mites!"

Caenis imagined them brought by panic-stricken maids, presented to a silent father more or less in the public street, glimpsing their mother distraught, terrified by wild faces and the charged atmosphere—then taken home to an empty palace with no one to explain. Britannicus was seven, Octavia not much more than a year older. Caenis would go and see them when she could.

Narcissus went on in that terrible dull tone, "Vitellius was there, but he couldn't bring himself to say much." That was Lucius Vitellius, Vespasian's old patron. He was the Emperor's closest adviser, almost his only friend.

"So who had to tell him?"

"I stuck with him wherever he went. Rode in his carriage, talked to him constantly. My instinct was to remain in the background—" Caenis violently shook her head. Narcissus agreed: "No. Wrong. So; when she found us—which frankly I wasn't expecting—I managed to outface her temporarily with the plain fact of the wedding and a charge sheet of her crimes. She decided to cry a lot—bad mistake; no chance to speak to him. As soon as I could, I sent the Vestal packing, had the children removed, opened up Silius' house. I showed Claudius how it was stuffed with his own things—his household slaves, the masks of the Caesars, his family heirlooms; oh, he was angry then. So I got him to the Praetorian Camp. . . ." By now his voice was dragging with suppressed reluctance to relive that sorry night. "For a time I seem to have taken command of the Guards myself. Sometimes, Caenis, I think we live in an old wives' tale! The Guards rallied; I believe I made some sort of speech. By the time we had him sat down to his dinner in the Palace the situation was stable, with most of the conspirators tried and hanged."

"And the woman?"

"The woman executed. Run through with a tribune's sword."

Caenis swallowed, saw his face, then for his sake asked in a neutral tone, "On whose orders?"

"On the Emperor's orders," said Narcissus. He sighed. "Or so I had to say."

* * *

After a silence, Narcissus confided, as if he could hardly bear it but had to share this with someone, "You know, he called for her at dinner. Truly, I had told him she was dead. He never asked me how. Then later he wondered aloud where she was. He was drunk." That was not unusual. Claudius was also extremely forgetful, whether for convenience or not. " ‘That poor unfortunate woman,' he called her."

"So she was," Caenis said. Knowing her strict good sense, Narcissus looked surprised. "They have too much," Caenis decreed savagely. "These ladies. Taking risks, shocking society, is the only challenge left for them. Yet compared with us they know nothing; nobody has taught them self-respect or self-discipline. So I do pity her. Besides, I am a party to this. I must take the responsibility of a witness, you know; I went to the poor woman's wedding!"

The events of the night were so wrapped up in his thoughts that it took Narcissus a moment to remember that apart from the wedding to Silius, there had once been another grim farce with Messalina wearing her saffron shoes and vermilion veil in front of witnesses.

* * *

He was ready to go.

"Thanks, Caenis." On his feet, he was staring at her in an odd way. "There is something I want to ask you." He rubbed his eyes, so shy of making the request that Caenis was embarrassed by the fact that she thought she had guessed what it was.

Narcissus was not effeminate. She believed he had mistresses, though they flitted in and out of his life, leaving no substantial mark. He was too serious now to be offering such a liaison to her. He needed her to confide in; he would not surrender that for some fleeting dalliance.

He was thinking how to put it.

"I can look after the Empire," Narcissus said in that flat, tired voice. "I need somebody to look after the Emperor."

Caenis breathed. It was not what she had prepared herself to hear. Those sharp wits of her childhood still betrayed her into difficulty.

In her surprise she became more vicious than she liked. "I always knew a state servant resembled a pimp! All that pestering and being pestered; all that soiled money changing hands on the backstairs!"

"You are quite right; if I could save him by fixing him up I would!" Narcissus replied patiently, though he was still so weary he could hardly stand. "He told the Guards, he had been so unfortunate with his wives he was determined to live single all his life; they could kill him if he changed his mind. Well, the Guards may, or they may not—but he has already demanded a shortlist from Pallas, Callistus, and me, so unless I can call up some generous and discreet alternative, we can reckon the next matrimonial disaster is well on its way."

They were not exactly quarreling, so an answer was required. For once he had astonished her. He assumed that Caenis would want to do this for Rome—not at the expense of her personal interests; rather, he did not realize she might have hopes or ambitions otherwise.

"Oh, I am grateful for your flattery; a girl needs a bit of that! But looking after an emperor," declared Caenis, comparatively mildly for her, "is something for which I am unqualified."

"An emperor could do a lot worse."

"Oh, he will!" she returned drably. "We both know that."

She would not move. It was his own fault; he had taught her to reach rapid judgments, then bravely stick to them.

So Narcissus braced himself for the burdens of the Empire, the Emperor, and the Emperor's new wife, whoever she turned out to be. He did wonder (Caenis had not entirely lost her sensitivity) whether, if he ever needed it, Caenis would look after him. On the whole he preferred not to ask. He knew he sank too much of himself into his work for the question to be fair. Besides, he also knew his capabilities. Taking care of an empire was straightforward enough, but taking responsibility for Caenis required a special kind of man.

She had always been his favorite, and he wanted the best for her. He still thought even an emperor could do worse.

TWENTY-FOUR

The search for a new wife for Claudius was conducted on brisk official lines. His Chief Ministers each selected a candidate, whose merits they set out in elaborate position papers, which were debated at a formal meeting with the Emperor in the chair. This system seemed no worse than granting free rein to the ludicrous eccentricities of personal taste.

Narcissus supported: Candidate A, Aelia Paetina; married to Claudius once before, she was the mother of his daughter Claudia Antonia—the sound, no-nonsense, known-quantity candidate.

Callistus supported: Candidate B, Lollia Paulina; an extremely beautiful woman, she had married Caligula briefly, though under duress—the brilliant and popular candidate. She was fabulously wealthy too. Lest anyone doubt it, when she went to a dinner party covered in jewels she took the bills of sale to prove what her gemstones had cost.

Pallas supported: Candidate C, Agrippina; Claudius' niece. She was Caligula's sister, one of the famous three—the underhand, dangerous, dark-horse candidate. She had a son, Domitius Ahenobarbus, so she had proved her fertility. Her ambitions for that son were likely to be ferocious—but then Claudius had a son of his own, Britannicus.

It was illegal for an uncle to marry his niece, so Claudius did just that.

"That's the trouble with formal meetings." Narcissus sighed despondently. "Either no decision at all, or the worst choice on the Chairman's casting vote."

* * *

It was when Agrippina married Claudius, as a sense of impending doom depressed her, that Caenis deliberately made a decision that surprised some of her friends. There was a knight she knew privately, Marius Pomponius Gallus, a good-tempered, decent, thoroughly amusing man. Narcissus had introduced them. For several years past Marius had been asking her to marry him. Quite suddenly, Caenis agreed. He had in fact asked her the first time they went to bed. This burst of initial enthusiasm later faded to a good-mannered routine; he was more startled than anyone when she did say yes. But he received the news stoically, and they began to look for dinner bowls and napkin sets.

A couple of years later, luckily before Agrippina really made her presence felt, Flavius Vespasianus was elected to a consulship. That same year, still intending to marry Caenis, Marius Pomponius Gallus unexpectedly died.

It all seemed sadly unimportant. Caenis knew she could have turned Marius into a bridegroom—quite a keen one—if she had wanted; she realized that what she had really been looking forward to most was a home of her own instead of the inelegant apartments where she had lived ever since Antonia died. She wanted peace and permanence, and on a long lease. So with the help of Narcissus, who was generous with money and time, she found a site and had built for herself a substantial, tasteful house, which she would own until she died.

Her new home lay just outside the northeast city boundary, on the Via Nomentana. The site was not well chosen, since it was right beside the huge Praetorian Camp, built for the Guards by Sejanus. The location caused her constant teasing from her friends. Still, she was spared from enduring neighbors. And there would never be burglaries or riots.

Narcissus had given her a steward: Aglaus. Caenis first inspected Aglaus in the wild garden at Narcissus' own private house. She knew better than to accept a gift from a minister of state sight unseen.

Narcissus' gardens, though enclosed on all sides by the wings of his mansion, were as spacious and well designed as any public park. The noise of the city was muffled by trees. Songbirds clustered in the bushes and bounced about the gutters of the house; there were white doves basking on the pantiles of the roof. The wild garden was full of water: rectangular pools where stone nymphs with calm, regular faces looked down into the reeds among whose wiry clumps moved contemplative fish; fountains everywhere; and streams that wriggled through casual arrangements of shrubs to splash into shell-shaped porphyry bowls. Sometimes at night little candles were set afloat like stars in these bowls. At every turn stood a bench or seat; every bench had a pleasing view.

There was another more conventional garden, with neat borders set with hedges of trimmed rosemary, grave statues of the imperial family that studded formal acanthus beds, and cypress trees bristling at intervals like a military guard along the fine-grained gravel paths. That was a place to take foreign ambassadors. This was for friends.

Caenis and Narcissus relaxed on a stone seat among the arching fronds of an abutilon, with their feet on the edge of a pond. It was late in the year. Caenis was still in mourning. She wrapped her head in a dignified white mantle and hoped to impress her new slave. They watched him approach: not quite in his twenties, short as all Palace slaves were and slightly rickety, a lean face with a blue chin. He had a way of looking at people too directly, which Caenis recognized; he was brave to the verge of revolt. If he chose, he would do his work well in a defiant, offhand way; handled wrongly he was at an age where he could soon be written off as insubordinate and sold to a lupin-seller.

Narcissus let him stand.

"This is Antonia Caenis, an important freedwoman of the imperial family."

No sign of recognition; he was definitely surly. She let him see her weighing him up, then spoke in her calm, trained voice. "Aglaus, isn't it? What's his work like, Narcissus?"

"He's lazy, sly, and insolent," Narcissus replied cheerfully. "They all are nowadays. Don't expect our standards anymore." He was well aware Caenis would think the belligerent lad worth saving: so like herself at the same age.

"Tell me, Aglaus; are you ambitious?"

"Yes, madam." He spoke with the weary indifference of someone giving the answers he knows to be correct.

Caenis pinched her mouth. "Then you have a rare choice. I need a steward. Your chance to be in charge."

Now the lad put his shoulders back and began to act on his own behalf. Obviously he had thought this through. "The penalty, I suppose, is a mistress who knows all the dodges herself? Safe enough if I know before I start! I suppose madam will have a front door with a bronze seahorse knocker, and closed shutters shading all her rooms?"

This was rather quaint for Caenis, but she understood what he meant. "Naturally! Dried flowers, tiny portions at table, all the servants creeping around in soft felt shoes."

Narcissus gave vent to his awful laugh.

"Men visiting?" interrogated the slave. He certainly had a cheek.

"Not often," she returned placidly, retreating from the thought of Marius.

"Women, then?"

"Not if I can help it. And unless you ask my permission, neither will you! Nor do I want smooth-faced altar boys from the Temple of Ganymede loitering around my kitchen door."

His impertinence, far from enraging her, was winning her interest. She could not bear people in her home who lacked character. He was deliberately trying out how far he could go, his lip curling into a sneer that would do well for suppressing butchers who overcharged. "Keep leaky lapdogs? Tame ducks? Crocodiles?"

"No," Caenis responded briefly. "Whose interview is this?"

"Mine, I hope." Aglaus was forthright. "You can sell me; I'll be stuck."

Caenis turned to Narcissus dispassionately. "No harm in spirit, but will he be polite to my friends?"

"Yes, madam!" said the slave, smirking. She guessed he did not want to work for a woman; she did not blame him for that, since with the rare exception of Antonia, neither did she.

The chance of responsibility was tantalizing him. He declared, "I'll risk it. I'll take the post."

"Will you, by Jupiter!" Narcissus exclaimed.

Caenis shushed him. "Oh, I'll give him a trial. Thank you, Aglaus."

He saluted her politely enough now. "Antonia Caenis."

"Caenis will do. Just Caenis." She would never change.

"Well; Lady Caenis then."

Narcissus nodded tetchily to dismiss him.

Both Caenis and Narcissus smiled, suddenly remembering old times.

"Seems ideal to me," the freedman told her. "You'll squabble, but the fellow will adore you."

Caenis said drily, "I'm not sure adoration is a commodity I recognize, or even want."

There was a small silence. She needed to ask Narcissus about Marius' will; he was giving her time to start.

It was at that point she became aware, and Narcissus must have noticed too, that hasty footsteps were approaching from the house. Someone had clattered down the informal stone steps behind them, skidded under a small palm tree that leaned across one of the paved areas, and was now striding through the long arch of trellis where in summer the honeysuckle formed a sweet approach to this nook where Narcissus liked to sit. Someone who knew Narcissus well enough to come straight out here unannounced. Someone thoroughly agitated. A man whose heavy step Caenis had instantly recognized.

She settled her mantle more closely around her face. The man arrived. Narcissus looked up. His visitor flung himself onto a second bench. He began to speak; saw someone there; recognized her; checked himself quietly. "Sorry. No one told me I was disturbing you. I'll come back." He was already on his feet.

It was Flavius Vespasianus, minus his troop of ceremonial lictors, but otherwise in full consular robes.

* * *

Normally everything gave way for a city magistrate. Even the Chief Secretary became faultlessly polite. "Consul! I know this lady has something to discuss with me, but she will not object to waiting; shall I ask her to withdraw?"

Vespasian muttered in his abrupt way, "Thanks. No need."

"Is this private?" Narcissus worried.

Vespasian flopped down again on the other bench. That old frown bit deeply into his brow. Now that he had accustomed himself to the situation, he resented its disturbing anyone else. "No. Stop flapping, Narcissus. If the lady wants me to go she'll tell me to skip over the Styx, and if she wants to leave herself she'll up and disappear."

So true! Caenis looked at the pool.

Narcissus was sufficiently shy of private relationships to be embarrassed by this meeting; until now he had somehow prevented any such confrontation with what he thought was exquisite tact. He was feeling far more uncomfortable than either of the other two. Blushing, he asked the Consul whatever was wrong. Vespasian wrenched off a branch from a nearby shrub, and began tearing it to shreds.

"Oh, these accursed imperial women! First we come home from the back of beyond to find Messalina picking off every friend or colleague Claudius owns, then you and Pallas set him up with another scheming, suspicious, incestuous Julian cow who decides to make it her business to run the Empire. . . ." This description of the Augusta, as Agrippina now styled herself, exactly fitted Narcissus' own opinion, Caenis knew.

He murmured fussily, "Consul, you are under stress."

"Stress! Narcissus, the woman's impossible. I have to deal with her so long as Claudius leaves her loose. Oh, I'll stick out my term, but she must know what I think."

"She knows what you said when Caligula accused her of adultery and conspiracy!" Narcissus reprimanded him.

"So we're permanent enemies! When my time's up as Consul I'll have to leave the court."

"Sounds wise!"

"Sounds unjust!"

Narcissus shrugged in that slightly oriental way. "Yes. Still, serenity and leisure on your country estate—it's a Roman ideal. You'll be balloted soon for a provincial governorship. Enjoy yourself meanwhile. Weed your vines, or whatever you have; keep your head down and keep your temper. A good man—best out of the way."

The Consul was still furious. "I'll have nothing!"

Narcissus suddenly sat up. "No, sir! On my list you have an honest wife and three healthy children, the army's acclaim, the Senate's respect, and the liking of a great many private citizens. Your funds may be low—"

This was not the best way to calm Vespasian down. He hurled what was left of the branch into the pond, slightly splashing the edge of her white funereal dress, so Caenis pulled back her feet to protect it. She only ever owned one. There were few people Caenis thought worth wearing mourning for.

"Low? Low? Listen," Vespasian raged. "I've thought about this! She's going to block my appointment; I know it. Anyway, if I do get a province, I'll need to mortgage my estate just to be able to live in the proper style, even abroad. Is this right? My children were born into beggary; we have no family silver on the table, and Domitian's just made his poor little entrance in an attic over Pomegranate Street." He was well into his stride. Domitian was his second son, born at the end of October. There was a daughter too. "I shall be a governor who runs mule trains and dabbles in franchises for fish—a trader in tuna, a fiddler with flounders, a man permanently after his percentage on cuttlefish and cubes of cod! Your lady friend can stop twitching and laugh if she likes."

Caenis, who had been sinking deeper into herself, realized abruptly that she was the audience for whom his last flamboyant outburst had been played.

Vespasian had at first been ignoring her as deliberately as she was ignoring him; suddenly he turned and addressed her directly with that disconcerting drop in his tone: "Hello, Caenis!"

"Hello," she said.

It was the first time they had spoken for nearly thirteen years.

* * *

The Chief Secretary, whose very inexperience made him a sentimentalist, noticed at once that the Consul stopped frowning. Vespasian's mood had clarified like a wax tablet melting for reuse. Even so, it seemed that these two wanted to say nothing more to one another.

Sucking his lower lip, the Consul challenged the freedman again: "Well! If you're so sure it's going to be all right, which province will I get?"

"Africa," replied Narcissus. Vespasian whistled; Caenis stirred: Africa was the prize.

"Thought it was supposed to be a lottery?"

"Oh it is, Consul! Never let anybody tell you otherwise." Repenting his frankness, Narcissus told him carefully, "You must keep up your state."

"Oh thanks!" Vespasian was scathing, but looked preoccupied; Caenis knew he would be trying to work out just how the lottery was fiddled. So was she. "Ask your gloomy visitor if she needs her savings yet?"

Narcissus merely looked demure, but when Caenis continued to stare into the pool in silence, he felt obliged to clear his throat and ask, "Do you, Caenis?"

Caenis replied quietly, to Narcissus, "No."

"Generous friends!" rapped Narcissus to Vespasian.

He commented tersely, to Narcissus, "Yes." Then he burst out at Caenis herself. "Always in white these days! You look terrible in white." Caenis was damned if at this time of her life she was going to start letting men tell her what she ought to wear. He detected the thought. "Sorry. Impertinent. You'll have to forgive me; I've known you a long time."

"No, Consul." He was startled. So was she; yet she continued without mercy: "You knew me," Caenis told him bluntly, "for a short while, a very long time ago!"

She shot to her feet, tight-lipped, and walked away to another part of the garden by herself.

There was a tense silence. Narcissus had no idea what he ought to do. "Shall I—"

"Leave her!" Vespasian whipped toward him. "So long as she gets angry," he explained clearly, as if it were important that in future Narcissus understood this, "she's all right." There was another pause. Vespasian was staring the way Caenis had gone.

Narcissus muttered, "I'll—"

"No. I'll go."

"Then I had better explain why she's—"

"No need," said Vespasian. "I know. Of course I know."

* * *

Her feelings had nothing to do with Vespasian being there.

She sat on a seat beside the dripping fronds of a monumental fern, breathing hard, with one hand to her head. It was all too much. Marius dead, and now his stupid will . . . He had left her precisely half as much again as he had left to each of his freedmen: enough to embarrass his family, yet a harshly unequal gesture for a woman who had been prepared to become his wife. She wanted to refuse the legacy, as any heir was entitled to do. His cautiousness was so insulting.

She sat, thinking about this, and thinking too about Marius. She still knew he was a comparatively decent man. He had not understood what he had done.

Someone was coming for her. She heard the footsteps, while trying to ignore them.

"Caenis?" Her Sabine friend.

He waited, on the other side of the fern, to let her readjust. Probably afraid she had been crying. Left to herself she probably would have been. People never knew when to leave you to yourself.

"Your old Greek nanny panicked."

"I'll come." Caenis sat forward, intending to rise, but Vespasian was on the narrow path, sticky with fallen leaves. He was blocking her way.

"Don't get up." He stayed there; so she stayed on the seat. "You're wanting advice?"

Caenis said nothing. Obviously Narcissus had told him everything. Politicians were so arrogant about other people's private affairs.

Vespasian risked it: "Share your troubles with a friendly magistrate. I won't charge," he chivvied, as she still sat stony-faced. He was more heavily built and a great deal more pompous nowadays. "Though you might consider a drop in the interest on my loan." She still said nothing. He went on, with the natural complaisant assumption that no one in good society would ever be deliberately rude, "Tell me to mind my own business if you like—"

"Mind your own business, Consul!" Caenis roared.

She turned away bitterly.

But all he said was, "Don't be daft, lass!" then came and sat beside her on the bench. Caenis was probably forty. Even in the country, nobody was ever going to call her "lass" again.

"Don't fight."

"Don't interfere!"

"Look; Caenis—"

"Leave me alone!"

"I can't; I promised your lady a long time ago—I had heard you were planning to get married. I'm so sorry." Caenis once again spun to her feet. He snapped: "Oh, sit down, you short-tempered shrike, and listen to me!"

Marius would never have called her names. Nor, she knew, would she ever in fact have married him. This stranger knew her better than Marius would ever have done.

"Come on; come back."

Although she did not storm off, she huddled away, shrouding herself in the white robe he so hated. He sighed. Then, speaking formally as a magistrate he told her, "Listen then. It's quite simple. Legally the choice is yours. But unless you feel very strongly, my advice is to keep quiet. The man is dead; you can't get back at him. Taking a stand is fine in principle, but you'll be the one who ends up feeling wretched. If you reject his miserable legacy, you'll stir up more bad feeling than if you meekly accept and spend it all on a new hat." Caenis had the grace to nod. His voice softened. "There's a knee here you can sit on if you want to have a cry." She ignored that. After a moment he demanded sourly, "Whatever did you want to get married for anyway?"

"Oh, the usual reasons!" Caenis flared. "Bed, board, someone to bully—and a half-decent companion for my old age!"

Vespasian laughed.

She whirled back toward him so at last he could see just how colorless she was, and her despair. He was truly appalled. Whatever she was intending to hurl at him died on the instant.

In fact they had frightened one another.

Yet he was not Rome's Consul for nothing. His face went blank. He turned the situation at once. He stood up. "Yes; quite right. Better go back. That oily-chinned old woman of a freedman will think something's going on."

So they went back.

"Get your advice?" Narcissus fluffed.

"Yes."

"Will you take it?"

"Probably."

"There!" Narcissus exclaimed, like the nanny Vespasian had called him; Vespasian, to his credit, openly winced.

Unable to bear any more of this, Caenis was determined to go home. Narcissus embraced her as he usually did when she left. He said to Vespasian (so Caenis began to wonder just how many conversations about her these two had held), "I'll have to fix her up with a nice tolerant widower; somebody brave, someone the Empire owes a favor to—"

Caenis broke free. "Oh, you brass-necked cretin! Being saddled with a half-baked widower is not what I require at all."

Even Vespasian crackled, "Great gods, Narcissus—leave the poor girl alone!"

For a second she felt they were haggling over her, as Vespasian had once done with Antonia. They talked across her, about her, at her, with men's knowing air. They liked to flatter themselves they could help in her business affairs. They liked to fidget when she showed distress. Because they were men they were competitive. Neither wanted her. Neither wanted to know anything of her private aches. But neither wanted the other to show he knew her best.

Vespasian held out his hand. In front of Narcissus, she really had no choice; Caenis gave him her own. A Consul probably shook hands with hundreds of people every day. But not crushing most of them in such a deliberate grip. "Antonia Caenis."

When he spoke her name she had to look away.

* * *

After she had gone, Narcissus agitated primly, "Thanks. Anything happen?"

"We had a brief but bloody fight." Vespasian was staring at him. "Nothing unusual."

"Actually, I was afraid that seeing you might upset her."

Some grim jest twitched at one corner of the Consul's mouth.

"She's all right," he said. Helpless, Narcissus realized the full extent of the mistake he had made. "She's used to it," Vespasian stated drably. Then, after the faintest pause, "No doubt one day I'll get used to it myself."

TWENTY-FIVE

Claudius had married Agrippina on the New Year's Day immediately following Messalina's death. On that occasion Caenis made an excuse not to attend the wedding. She could not in conscience offer her support.

On the day Claudius was married, Lucius Silanus, who had been betrothed for years to the Emperor's infant daughter, Octavia, accepted the inevitable and committed suicide (a heavy hint that he was in disgrace had been dropped when he was struck off as praetor with only one day of the magistracy left to serve). Agrippina's son by her previous marriage, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, was betrothed to Octavia instead.

At Agrippina's urging, Ahenobarbus was soon also adopted by Claudius. This raised some eyebrows. No outsider had ever been adopted into the patrician Claudian house, and besides, the Emperor had a son of his own; the adoption unnecessarily supplanted Britannicus. As a newcomer to the family Ahenobarbus took a Claudian surname; now he was called Nero.

One of the arguments used by Pallas to secure Nero's adoption was that Claudius ought to arrange a protector for his own boy. Ironically, from then on, even during his father's lifetime, Britannicus was treated at the Palace as an unwelcome guest of doubtful parentage; any slaves or freedmen loyal to him were gradually removed, and officers in the army who gave him their allegiance were encouraged to transfer abroad or promoted out of the way. His new brother gave him no support; entirely the opposite.

Next, Claudius agreed that Nero should be declared of age early, and start his public career. He became a consul designate without holding other positions, and was styled Prince of Youth. There was a difficult scene when Britannicus refused to address him by his adopted name. Britannicus was disciplined, his best tutors were dismissed, and he lost even more of his slaves.

At the age of sixteen Nero married Octavia. This made Octavia his sister, his cousin, and his wife; Claudius was both his father and father-in-law. Even by the contorted standards of the Julio-Claudian house it was unusual. Nero arranged celebratory Games in honor of the Emperor, appearing himself in full triumphal robes while Britannicus wore the usual narrow-striped tunic of a boy at school. People in the audience exchanged old-fashioned looks.

There was now a most unfortunate change: Britannicus briefly became popular again. Claudius, who for a long time after Messalina's death had viewed Britannicus with painful reserve, seemed to rediscover his original dislike of Nero, who was indeed regarded as highly unpleasant by all people of style and taste. Instead, the Emperor took to flinging his arms round Britannicus whenever they met, quoting darkly in Greek and exclaiming, "Grow up quickly, my boy, and your father will tell you his plan!"

Britannicus had become a stoical child. He took all this in apparent good part. He had two sensible allies throughout; one was Narcissus. The other, who held no official post, so she could never be dismissed, was his grandmother's freedwoman Antonia Caenis.

* * *

Caenis and Britannicus became good friends. Caenis was well-presented enough to carry a sniff of danger for an adolescent boy, yet ancient enough to be safe; she said she refused to mother him, though when he needed it she always did. Britannicus had been brought up rather primly; she discussed politics with him in a way that sounded treasonous and told him stories that were definitely rude. They played a private game of challenging each other in any situation to find a song from the drama to fit. He had an excellent voice. It was natural that Caenis should be drawn to a child growing up in the Palace so starved of affection yet so good-humored and sane.

She was giving Britannicus secret shorthand coaching so he could catch up with one of the other boys who shared his education. It was while they were practicing, ready to surprise the Other Boy, that the door flung open and someone shot into the room. There was no doubt who it was. It had to be the competitive rival, because Britannicus, with great presence of mind, slipped his notebook down the back of his reading couch and adjusted a vase to hide the water clock by which he had been timing himself. Then he winked at Caenis.

She had never seen him before, but she recognized the Other Boy at once.

Her protégé, Britannicus, was by now as tall as many men, with the same gaunt neck and prominent ears as his father; at thirteen he was going through a gangly, self-conscious phase. Since their mother's death both he and his sister Octavia were understandably solemn and withdrawn. This boy was quite different. Britannicus' friend—they were obviously friends—was a short, square, dynamic tugboat of a boy. He was built with the graceful solidity of an obelisk. He had a thick thatch of tightly curling hair, and though his nose was straighter than his father's, an identical upjerking chin and rectangular brow.

"Aha! New ladylove?" he cried, stopping in surprise. Britannicus blushed; he was old enough to be interested, yet young enough to be terrified of women.

Caenis tried to adopt the air of a sophisticated, extremely expensive witch. "You must be Titus!" she divined coolly. "Titus Flavius Vespasianus, son of Titus, voting tribe Quirina, citizen of Reate."

Both children were deeply impressed.

"This is the face-detector?" Titus demanded of Britannicus eagerly.

Britannicus replied with a nicely suave, secretive smile. He was learning fast; it was wonderful to watch. "Just a friend," he tormented the other, who was bursting with curiosity. "Going to give me a second opinion, I hope."

Caenis endured the odd experience of being eyed appraisingly by Vespasian's teenaged son.

* * *

It turned out that Narcissus was still worrying over his dynasty, pointless though that was beginning to appear. He had called in a physiognomist, someone who would tell Britannicus' fortune from his face. Since Narcissus entered the room almost immediately with this character, Caenis had no opportunity to say to the boys just what she thought of that.

The seer was an overweight greasy Chaldean in a shiny emerald overshirt, his knuckles carbuncled with mysterious scarab rings. He wore bright green laced-up pointed shoes: Caenis had made it her lifelong rule never to trust a man with peculiar footwear.

Narcissus, who knew just what she would think about this business, avoided meeting her eye; he was obviously hoping Caenis would go away. She crossed her ankles calmly, looked dignified, and stayed. When Britannicus noticed how Narcissus was flapping he winked at Caenis again. She had taught him to wink. His upbringing had been first at the hands of slaves hand-picked by Messalina as easy to manipulate, then seedy nominees chosen by Agrippina out of spite; it had been uninspiring, and totally neglected useful social accomplishments. Still, he could sing, and he did; no one would ever be a complete failure while he could sing.

Britannicus was poignantly nervous of having his face read. Narcissus and the physiognomist at last finished fiddling about, setting a stool in the best light. Caenis placed herself behind their reluctant subject, resting her light protective hands on his shoulders and staring belligerently at the Chaldean over the top of the prince's head. Young Titus scrambled over and knelt beside the stool to get a good view of what went on. As Caenis said to them afterward, it was sensible to be nervous of someone who smelled of such a strange mixture of patchouli and onions.

The physiognomist stood in silence, looking at Britannicus from directly in front. He came close, giving the Emperor's son a full blast of his onions, then lifted Britannicus' chin on one finger. At a younger age Britannicus would certainly have bitten him. At thirteen he was, thank the gods, too proud.

The physiognomist stepped back. Caenis and Britannicus stopped holding their breath. The Chaldean turned to Narcissus. "No," he said offhandedly, and prepared to leave.

Even Narcissus seemed nonplussed.

Titus, who was lively as a monkey in a warehouse of soft fruit, was bursting to ask a question, but he was forestalled. Narcissus had not been a bureaucrat for thirty years in order to be baffled by the mysteries of Ur. "No?" he challenged briskly. The pained monosyllable indicated that this verdict was too short, too vague, and much too expensive for the Privy Purse.

"No," repeated the Chaldean. Sensing a proposed abatement in his fee, he condescended to explain: "He will never succeed his father. I presume that is what you wish to know?"

It seemed to Caenis that anyone with the smallest knowledge of Claudian family life—or as much awareness of recent history as could be gleaned from skimming lightly through the obituaries in the Daily Gazette—would be able to make that prophecy.

"Are you sure?" Narcissus was bound to be disappointed.

"Certainly!" The man brushed him aside with an irritation that Caenis quite enjoyed.

He was heading for the door, but Narcissus liked to get his money's worth from specialists. "So what do you expect to happen to him instead?"

A prince learns to put up with impertinence; Britannicus did not move.

The physiognomist gave Narcissus a pitying look. "He will live out his span, sir, as we all must, then as we all must he will die."

"How long is the span?" urged the Chief Secretary harshly.

This time Caenis felt the long-limbed boy tense beneath her hands. At once she stated curtly, "Britannicus prefers not to know!"

The physiognomist seemed to like her firmness; he nodded to the boy. Some things were confidential to the victim, apparently, even when the Privy Purse was footing the bill. Narcissus had to subside.

Only when he reached the door did the man turn back. "Of course," he said, "the other will."

There was a small pause. He had hardly glanced at Titus the whole time. No one liked to risk offending the man again, but when the attendant started to lift the door curtain, so she thought they were going to lose him, Caenis demanded patiently, "Titus will what?"

The Chaldean did not hesitate. "He will succeed his father."

"As what?"

"As whatever his father is or becomes!" Even Caenis was making his hackles rise. "I cannot tell you that, lady, without seeing the father's face."

Caenis laughed. She pointed to her Sabine friend's son, then told the man in ringing tones, "There! Is there no imagination in the Chaldees? Add a nose like a boxer on the brink of retirement, and you have it."

For the first time the man showed that he too could smile. "Ah, that face!" he mocked. (He was not being paid for Titus, let alone his Sabine papa.) "That would be the face of a nobody."

Then at once Caenis wished she had not asked, because although she was certain Vespasian himself would have roared with delight, the poor child kneeling beside Britannicus was bitterly upset. She was so concerned about Titus, it caught her off guard when the Chaldean asked quietly, "And your own face, my lady? Will you not ask?"

Yet she found an answer for him: "Oh, that has been prophesied," said Caenis, with a slight smile. "Of my face one has said, ‘It can never be upon the coinage.' "

"He spoke well!" observed the Chaldean, who obviously appreciated a pointless remark.

TWENTY-SIX

The face-detector was quite right: Britannicus did not succeed his father.

The light that had cheered the early years of Claudius' reign went out with Messalina's death. He allowed Agrippina, who was a strong, strong-willed woman in the single-minded political mold of her family, to govern the Empire. She did it as ruthlessly as she governed Claudius himself. And when Britannicus was in sight of his coming-of-age, Claudius died.

The Emperor's death was not immediately announced. Not until Agrippina, pretending to suffer inconsolable grief, had gathered into her grim clutch all of her husband's natural children—Claudia Antonia, Octavia, and of course Britannicus. Once they had been secured at the Palace, her own son, Nero, was wheeled out in a carriage and presented to the Praetorians as their new Caesar.

Claudius had left a will, but it was never read in public.

* * *

When his father died, the young prince Britannicus was thirteen years and eight months old. He ranked as a child—though not for much longer. That was significant. It was a principle of Roman law that between the ages of seven and fourteen a boy obtained limited legal rights, those at least that were plainly for his benefit and not restricted to needing the approval of his guardian. At fourteen he reached a more specific maturity; then he could marry, vote in local assemblies, become liable for military service, and manage his own property. The milestone of entering public affairs normally came at twenty-five, but by fourteen he was a person of account. Until then, a mere child.

Britannicus' adopted elder brother, his stepmother's son, Nero, had been declared of age before he became Emperor. In Rome the difference was crucial. For four critical months Britannicus was bound to take second place: the natural son, publicly superseded. But once he came of age, enemies of Agrippina and her son would naturally gravitate to his support. Narcissus, who loved Britannicus as his own, and Caenis, who originally knew his sisters better but had always liked the lad, never discussed what might happen to him. For anyone who had lived under Tiberius and Caligula the possibilities were obvious and grim.

Narcissus had problems of his own. Even before Claudius died he had been ill. In a leftover minister from the previous reign an indisposition was clearly convenient; Narcissus' illness was strongly encouraged by Agrippina and her son. He had never expected a quiet retirement. He withdrew to "convalesce" at Sinuessa on the Bay of Naples. But death was his only tactful course.

Caenis, as the Chief Secretary's most discreet associate, escaped such drastic obligations. Before he left Rome, Narcissus gave to her a handsome gift of cash, probably more than she could have expected to receive under his will, if the will of the Chief Secretary of the previous Emperor had ever stood a chance of being honored by the new one. She never saw him again. Within weeks Narcissus had been flung into prison, badly treated, and hastened to his death. It was said to be suicide, but who could tell? And what difference did it make in any case? Caenis missed him even more than she expected.

She tried to keep an eye on Britannicus. She was pleased with the way he was holding his own. At the Festival of Saturnalia in December, two months before his birthday, the young men at court played dice to be King for the Day. Nero won. To a degree this spoiled the point, which was that someone unused to honors, a slave even, should wear the spangled winter crown. But it avoided unpleasantness; Nero had no concept of allowing himself to lose.

At the evening banquet the King for the Day gave out forfeits, most of them innocuous enough. When it came to Britannicus, who was shy in noisy company and also quite unused to heavy drinking bouts, Nero called him to the center of the great dining hall—an ordeal in itself—then commanded him to sing. Undeterred, Britannicus piped up at once with a stalwart rendering of a theatrical lament: " ‘I am cast out from the King my father's house. . . ." He sang well; he possessed a much better voice than Nero, who was so vain of his own talent. Britannicus had the satisfaction of silencing the room.

A few days later something made him dramatically ill.

Caenis went to see him. "Was it something you ate?"

"No," replied Britannicus, who was developing a taut sense of humor. "Something I sang!"

* * *

Without Narcissus they had nowhere to turn for help. Callistus had always been pitifully cautious, and there were clear signs that Nero was on the verge of dismissing him from his post. Pallas was the only one of the senior freedmen who retained any vestige of power, but only because when she thought it might be useful, he had been Agrippina's lover; for that very reason Pallas could not be asked to protect Britannicus.

Caenis felt helpless. She would have brought herself to beg advice from Vespasian, but he was sixty miles away, living quietly at home in Reate with his wife.

She was positive that somebody had tried to poison the prince. The nearer Britannicus came to fourteen, the more danger threatened him. The first attempt might have been amateur, but next time his enemy might realize a violent laxative was hardly the best medium to choose. Whoever it was would try something different.

Then she found out that the famous poisoner Lucusta, who had been in league with the Empress Livia, had been glimpsed visiting the Palace. Caenis made her way to the old stillroom where she and Vespasian had met. As well as ingredients for cosmetics, there had been plenty of more sinister vials there then. It had been said that when Claudius became Emperor he found and destroyed quantities of poisons collected by Caligula. He threw one great chest into the sea; thousands of dead fish were washed ashore.

But even after Caligula had remodeled the Palace area, the little room still existed. Caenis felt no surprise to discover that its low door now refused to open, held fast by an obviously brand-new lock. She told Britannicus. They shared the information with nobody. There was no point.

"Nero's in love," Britannicus explained. "He's flexing his muscles away from his mama."

"Dear me," Caenis responded, as lightly as she could. "He needs lots to eat, much more sleep, no poetry, and private chats with poisoners should definitely be banned. I take it your sister Octavia is not the favored recipient?"

"Well hardly; Octavia is his wife. He would think it improper. Actë—one of her maids. She's very beautiful."

Caenis knew Actë and thought her a pallid little thing, but she did not want to disillusion an adolescent with her own cynicism. Octavia would not take this kindly. She was that rare bloom, an aristocratic girl who was virtuous; in the way of virtuous people she had no idea of standing up for herself.

"But how does the fair Actë affect you?"

"When Agrippina tried to stop the business, she was shut out from Nero's confidence. So guess who suddenly became her protégé instead?"

"Not you?"

"Isn't it horrible? She threatened to plead with the Guards, as Germanicus' daughter, to give the throne to me as my father's natural heir. There was a great deal of screaming domestically, and my popularity with her lad in purple"—Britannicus still never called Nero by his adopted name—"dived in a way that has only been equaled by the speed with which my dinners get thrown up if I eat with him. If I got you an invitation," Britannicus offered shyly, "Caenis, could you bear to come to the Palace tonight?"

"It's your birthday tomorrow, isn't it?"

He blushed that she should have remembered, though in her concern for him she had it engraved on her memory. "Come tonight; tomorrow may be hopelessly formal. . . ." In fact there was little chance of his being given ceremonial for his special day. "Titus will be with me, of course, but I should like to be able to wave at another friendly face."

* * *

And that was why Caenis, in a headache and a brand-new pair of sandals, attended a state banquet as the guest of the grandson of her patroness. As a boy still, Britannicus was not allowed to have female guests at his own couch. So Caenis found herself a place at the far end of the room, where she could at least watch what happened higher up.

The first thing that would strike any stranger was the noise. Anyone who paused to think about it would become dizzy as the buzz of innumerable different conversations rose all around the hall against a constant background clatter of heavy gold and silver tableware, and the busy chinking of spoons on bowls and jugs on cups. The heat, too, quickly became incredible; many people changed into floating chiffon robes. There was soon a fug of perfumed, sweaty bodies vying with the pungent aromas of simmering wine and waxen flowers.

Caenis had brought her own slave, Demetrius, a treasure Aglaus had found for her, an impassive Thracian who doubled quite competently as table attendant and bodyguard. She took off her sandals, then Demetrius washed and dried her feet; he handed her her napkin while, with a fleeting smile, she took her place among her neighbors. As a compliment to her young host she had spent the afternoon being manicured and pedicured at the baths. She was decked in her best finery—her formal violet-colored dress embroidered at its edges with heavy borders of Etruscan meadow flowers, her hair trapped under a fine gold net, all Antonia's brooches, Vespasian's bangle, and some earrings she had borrowed from Veronica, the size of cavalry harness discs; a girl could do no more.

Nero dominated the top table: that unpleasant neck, the chubby jowls, the beardless blond good looks that appeared washed out and gray. His mother, Agrippina, was there, of course, queening it in a tiara and gold silk; and Octavia, the out-of-place teenaged Empress, who hardly spoke. Caenis recognized also Nero's two tutors, such markedly different men: Seneca, who made a decent stab at writing the speeches Nero so woodenly declaimed, and Burrus, the blunt soldier who commanded the Guard. There was no sign of Actë, though people spoke of her. Someone said, "A common girl who bears no grudges—she's ideal!"

Britannicus and various other young sprigs of nobility were consigned to a less luxurious table to one side, in what passed for the old-fashioned, austere way. It was probably a deliberate insult. At other low tables around the arc of the room were all the sycophants, timeservers, and snobs a palace dining room expects.

Everything seemed fairly routine. There were the usual incidents of slaves dropping overloaded dishes so pints of sticky brown liquid sprayed across the central serving floor. A woman fainted in the heat from the lamps and food-warmers and was carried out headfirst. Caenis made the mistake of accepting an hors-d'oeuvre that looked like eggs in fish-pickle relish—fairly safe, she surmised—but which turned out to be anonymous crustaceans, boiled to a fibrous mush and floating in sadly coral-colored grease. On the whole all the food was overcooked, overspiced, and oversalted; then it had stood too long before serving, so none of it was warm. Demetrius did manage to commandeer her a decent artichoke in hot herb sauce; the calf's tongue in fennel cream was genuinely tasty, and the white bread rolls were not unbearably hard. Yet in the strict tradition of large-scale catering, all the meat was carved too thinly and all the vegetables were limp.

Caenis began to long for a plain honey omelette in a bowl she knew was clean.

Most of the time she could not quite see Britannicus. However, she was able to watch the slave who tasted his food. Standing behind Britannicus' couch, this man appeared to be doing a thorough job. He took proper mouthfuls, and chewed them down well before he gave Britannicus anything to eat. The mushrooms that had dispatched the boy's father appeared to have been deleted from the chefs' repertoire.

Nero looked in ghastly good form. He was seventeen, an uncouth age at which most Romans were kept decently out of sight by the parents they oppressed. He did try to demonstrate the rudiments of culture—sculpture, singing, writing poetry, recitation, the harp—but it all turned out too labored. He had no natural artistry. Caenis, who so loved music, was hoping that he would not sing tonight.

The slaves had carried out the serving tables once; they now brought in others with the fruit and the dessert. She risked a dish of custard, mainly because she was attracted by the pretty green glass in which it came; she regretted it at the first curdled mouthful, then listlessly nibbled a pear. She still had a headache, and she wanted to go home.

By this time she was feeling the melancholy irritation of a woman on her own at a party who has realized she is twice the age of most of her fellow guests. This was a young man's court. She had strayed into a world she found shallow and loud. Foolish laughter surrounded her—shrieking girls in off-the-shoulder necklines and youths who were almost too drunk to finish a sentence trying to tell long-winded pointless jokes. One of Veronica's huge earrings was pinching her ear. She even experienced a faint trace of hostility toward her young host.

The attendants, by now red-faced and too harassed even to try to be polite, were carrying out the half-demolished pastry towers; others were sweeping up the litter of stalks and peel and pips. Standards among both diners and attendants were definitely starting to relax.

Nero had poured a formal libation at the start of the meal; there had been wine mixed with honey after each course; now the heavy drinking would start. Short-legged boys, puffing with exertion, struggled in with giant decorated cauldrons of steaming wine infused with cinnamon and herbs. Trays of cups, flagons of cold water, honey to mix—all the apparatus of preparing toasts to the niceties of personal taste, had already appeared. There were amphorae, sooty with age, leaning in rows behind the imperial couch. One or two people took advantage of the lull to leave the room to attend to personal needs. Caenis stayed where she was for the time being; as soon as she could she intended to slip away for home.

There was a pause. Following ancient Roman custom, slaves paraded round the room with the imperial family's household gods. The small bronze statues of dancing lares held up their horns of plenty as gracefully as those in any ordinary home. They were left on the low table immediately in front of the group of youngsters among whom Britannicus dined. Now that the room had cleared somewhat, Caenis could just make him out.

A ruffle of movement, a wave of anticipation, started at the top table, then rolled along each arm of the room, as the flagon-bearers served the first wine. The noise, which was by then making her head throb at every movement, dimmed slightly as people stopped their animated chatter to watch the mixing of their drinks. Skillful slaves poured the hot crimson liquor through funnel-shaped strainers in a hiss of aromatic steam; others followed with the cold water in a practiced routine, providing whatever was required by each diner almost without bothering to listen for the request; sometimes they got it wrong and caused a spat of indignation. There was a certain amount of extraneous activity as people summoned rose water and napkins to wash the final stickiness of the dinner from their hands. One or two women idly poked at ringlets unwinding from their padded towers of hair.

While his taster was occupied with his goblet of wine, Britannicus rose from his couch to wave to Caenis as he had promised, down the length of the room. He looked happier; she smiled. He accepted the goblet, then stayed on his feet—a tall, slight figure with rather too-big ears like his father, but that sweet-natured grin. As the young prince raised his cup to her, she felt her heart warm. She was glad she had come, for his sake.

She noticed Nero pause in his conversation, critical perhaps that the young man should openly salute his grandmother's ex-slave. She shook her head at Britannicus, but he only glanced at his adoptive brother and deliberately rebelled.

The wine was too hot for him. Before he drank, he held out the cup to be topped up with cold water by a waiting slave. At once he took it back, tipped it casually to the watching Emperor, then raised it—formally, between both his long hands—to his lady guest. She had been kind to him, and Britannicus did not forget. Then he drank.

There was nothing she could do. Caenis realized at once. The taster had made no attempt to try it; he would have been warned not to. The poison must be in the cold water.

If she had called out, Britannicus would never have heard her above the din. It was too late anyway. She saw Nero's triumphant half-shadowed glance. She watched the young Octavia notice what was happening, whiten, then grow expressionless as she knew she must. Even Agrippina for an instant showed by her consternation that she had been no party to this.

Britannicus drank.

At the first mouthful he dropped the cup. His whole body convulsed. He stopped breathing. He fell. Britannicus crashed full length across the low table in front of his couch, where the bearers had placed his family's household gods, so when the diners' cacophony stilled in amazement, the dreadful hush was broken by a slowly settling scrape on the tiny marble tiles as the Claudian god of the larder skittered in ever diminishing half circles over the floor, then finally came to rest.

* * *

Everyone stopped talking. Everyone looked at the Emperor.

Slaves had scattered in terror; Britannicus' friends were transfixed. Nero signaled for people to carry his imperial brother from the room. Caenis was already fastening her sandal straps.

Nero said—announced it perfectly coolly—made the claim without a stammer—uttered it without a blush—that Britannicus was epileptic; he had been epileptic all his life; he would soon recover his senses and his sight. Nero ordered the banquet to recommence, which after a short silence it did.

Caenis was already halfway from the room.

As she went she turned back once, to glance at Octavia. The girl sat motionless. There was no lack of courage there. Her brother had been killed by her husband in front of her, and she had to endure it. Nobody would support her if she tried to protest.

Caenis turned away; but before she did she had spotted Vespasian's son, Titus. She noticed the young idiot pick up his friend's skittled winecup, and taste what remained of the dregs.

By the time she found the right anteroom, Britannicus was dead.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Britannicus was dead.

There were people everywhere, none of them with the slightest sense. They had carried him into a salon where one or two slaves of his own and some dilatory Palace attendants were milling about. Caenis felt her new sandals skid on the glistening tessellated floor as she barged through a knot of waiters to come to him. They had him on a couch, his head lolling awkwardly over the edge, arms and legs all akimbo as he had been dropped. Pulling his tunic straight for decency, Caenis took him in her arms.

There was nothing she could do.

So many murders; it had become a way of life. Apart from Antonia, who was close to her heart at this moment, Britannicus was the first Caenis had really known and loved. She realized something now: She had always believed she lived by expecting the worst. That was quite wrong. She had lived in hope. It was the only way she could bear continuing. She and Britannicus had come here tonight in that spirit, because they knew they had no other choice.

Hope is such a foolish thing; Britannicus was dead.