The course of Honor

The Course of Honor

Lindsey Davis

PART ONE

A BAD-TEMPERED SLAVE

Commencing in the autumn of A.D. 31, when the Caesar was Tiberius

ONE

Whatever was that?

The young man arrested his stride. He halted. At his shoulder his brother drew up equally amazed. An incongruous scent was beckoning them. They both sniffed the air.

Incredible! That was a pig's-meat sausage, vigorously frying.

* * *

Everywhere lay silent. The echoes of their own footfalls had whispered and died. No other sign of occupation disturbed the chill, tall, marble-veneered corridors of the staterooms on the Palatine Hill from which the Roman Empire was administered. Under the long-absent Emperor Tiberius these had never offered much of a homely welcome to strangers. Today was worse than ever. Arches that were meant to be guarded stood framed only by forbidding drapes whose heavy pleats had not been disturbed since they were first hung. No one else was here. Only that rich odor of hot meat and spices continued its ravishing assault.

The younger man set off, walking faster. He wheeled around corners and brushed along passages as if he had just discovered the proper route to take until, after a fractional hesitation, he whipped open a small door. Before his brother caught up with him, he ducked his head and strode through.

A furious female slave exploded: "Skip over the Styx; you're not allowed in here!"

Her hair hung in a lank, sorry string. Her face was pasty, a sad contrast to the tinctured ladies at court. Yet despite her grubbiness, she wore her dull frieze dress with courageous style, and although he knew better he threw back at her drily, "Thanks! What an interesting girl! "

* * *

Afterward Caenis could never quite remember which festival it had been. The time of year was certain. Autumn. Autumn, six years before Tiberius died. The year of the fall of Aelius Sejanus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard. Sejanus, who allegedly kept a pack of pet hounds he fed with human blood. Sejanus, who had ruled Rome with a grip of iron for nearly two decades and who wanted to be Emperor.

It could have been the great ten-day series of Games in honor of Augustus. The Augustales, which had been established as a memorial to Rome's first Emperor and were now conducted in honor of the whole Imperial House, would have been an occasion that explained why Antonia had given most of her slaves and freedmen a holiday, including her Chief Secretary, Diadumenus. Even more likely would have been the actual birthday of Augustus, by then a long-established celebration, a week before October began. Thinking of Augustus, the founder of the Empire, could well have stirred Antonia to what she was about to do.

Foolish, at any rate, for anyone to attempt business at the Palace on such a day. On any state holiday the priests of the imperial cult led the city in the duties of religion while senators, citizens, freedmen, and even slaves, from the most privileged librarians to the glistening bathhouse stokers, seized their chance and piled into the temples too. Here on the Palatine the slop-carriers and step-sweepers, the polishers of silver cups and jewel-encrusted bowls, the accountants and secretaries, the chamberlains who vetted visitors, the majordomos who announced their names, the lifters of door curtains and carriers of cushions, had all disappeared hours ago. Sejanus would be lording it at the ceremonies; the Praetorians, who ought to be guarding the Emperor, would be guarding him. Caesar's palace complex, which even during Caesar's long absence from Rome thrummed with occupation every day and rustled with innumerable murmurs of life into the dead of night, for once lay hushed.

So the door flew open. Someone strode in. Caenis looked up. She scowled; the man frowned.

"Here's somebody—Sabinus!" he called back over his great shoulder as he loomed in the low doorway. The fat spattered dangerously beneath the girl's spoon.

"Juno and Minerva—" Caenis coughed, as she was forced back from her pan while the flame lapped sideways across the charcoal brazier in a palely fluttering sheet. "We'll all go up in smoke; will you shut that door!"

A second man, presumably Sabinus, came in. This one wore a senator's broad purple stripe on his toga's edge. "What have you found for us?"

The fat went wild again. "Oh for the gods' sake!" Caenis swore at them, forgetting their rank as she was nearly set alight.

"A bad-tempered slavey with a pan of sausages."

He had the sense at last to close the door.

* * *

They were lost. Caenis guessed it at once. Even the open spaces and temples among the homes of imperial family members above the Circus Maximus were deserted. The public offices on the Forum side of the Palatine were closed. Stupid to come today. With no guards to cross spears in their faces, these two had blundered down a wrong passageway and ended up bemused. Only people who wanted to indulge in sad habits alone were lurking in corners with their furtive pursuits. Only eccentrics and deviants, misers and malcontents; and Caenis.

She was one of the group of girls who worked with Diadumenus, copying correspondence for the lady Antonia. Today he had ordered her to remain quietly out of trouble; later she must go to the House of Livia, where their mistress lived, and ask whether any work was required. Caenis was junior but capable; besides, Diadumenus had really not anticipated that anything significant would occur. In most respects Caenis was, like everyone else, on vacation.

Hence the sausage. She had been enjoying both her solitude—rare for a slave—and the food too. She had scraped together the price by writing letters for other people and picking up lost coins from corridor floors. She had crept in here, sliced the meat evenly, and was cooking it in a pan intended for emulsifying face creams before she ate her treat deliberately, on her own. She craved her sausage with good reason: Her starved frame needed the meat and fat; her deprived senses hankered after nuts, spices, and the luxury of food fiercely hot from a pan. She hated being interrupted.

"Excuse me, sirs; you are not allowed in here."

Warily she tried to camouflage her annoyance. In Rome it was wise to be diplomatic. That applied to everyone. Men who thought they possessed the Emperor's confidence today might be exiled or murdered tomorrow. Men who wanted to survive had to inveigle themselves into the clique surrounding Sejanus. Making friends had been unsafe for years, for the wrong association clung like onion juice under a chef's fingernails. Yet so many promising careers were ending in disaster that today's nobodies might just survive to ride in tomorrow's triumph beneath the laurels and ribbons of the golden Etruscan crown.

For a slavegirl it was always best to appear polite: "Lords, if you are wanting Veronica—"

"Oh, do cheer up!" chaffed the first man abruptly. "We might prefer you."

Caenis gave her pan a rapid shimmy, agitating the spatula. She chortled derisively. "Rich, I hope?" The two men glanced at one another; then, with a similar slow regretful grin, both shook their heads. "No use to me then!"

She saw their veiled embarrassment: traditionalists with good family morals—in public, anyway. Veronica would shake them. Veronica was the one to astonish a stiff-necked senator. She believed that a slavegirl who was vivacious and pretty could do as well for herself as she pleased.

Caenis was too single-minded and intense; she would have to make a life for herself some other way.

"We seem to be lost," explained the cautious man, Sabinus.

"Your footman let you down?" Caenis queried, nodding at his companion.

"My brother," stated the senator; very straight, this senator.

"What's his name?"

"Vespasianus."

"Why no broad stripes too?" she challenged the brother directly. "Not old enough?" Entry to the Senate was at twenty-five; he was probably not long past twenty.

"You sound like my mother: not clever!" he quipped.

Citizens never normally joked with slavegirls about their noble mothers; Caenis stared at him. He had a broad chest, heavy shoulders, a strong neck. A pleasant face, full of character. His chin jutted up; his nose beaked down; his mouth compressed fiercely, though he seemed good-humored. He had steady eyes. She looked away. As a slave, she preferred not to meet such a gaze.

"Not ready for it," he added, glaring at his brother as if it were a matter of family argument.

Against her better judgment she replied, "Or is the Senate not ready for you?" She had already noticed his obstinate roughness, a deliberate refusal to hide his country background and accent; she admired it, though plenty in Rome would call it coarse.

He sensed her interest. If he wanted it (and she reckoned he did), women probably liked him. Caenis resisted the urge.

"You have lost yourselves in Livia's pantry, sir," she informed the other man, Sabinus.

There was a sudden stillness, which she secretly enjoyed. Though the cubbyhole looked like a perfumery, the two men would be wondering whether this was where the famous Empress had mixed up the poisons with which, allegedly, she removed those who stood in her way. Livia was dead now, but the rumors had acquired their own momentum and even grew worse.

The two men were nervously surveying the cosmetic jars. Some were empty, their contents evaporated years before; some had leaked so they sat embedded in a tarry pool. Others remained good: glass flasks of almond oil, soapstone boxes of fine wax and fat, amethystine flagons of pomade, stoppered phials of antimony and extract of seaweed, alabaster pots of red ocher, ash, and chalk. No place for a cook; rather an apothecary. Veronica would give three fingers to discover this little cave of treasures.

There were other containers, which Caenis had considered but carefully left untouched upon the shelves. Some ingredients could have no possible benign use and had convinced her it was true that Livia must have been in league with the famous poisoner Lucusta. She would keep that to herself.

"And what are you doing here?" asked Sabinus, in fascination.

"Cataloguing the cosmetics, sir," Caenis answered demurely, implying otherwise.

"For whom?" growled Vespasianus, with a glint that said he would like to know who had replaced Livia as dangerous.

"Antonia."

He raised an eyebrow. Perhaps he was ambitious after all.

Her elderly mistress was the most admired woman in Rome. The first lesson Diadumenus had drummed into Caenis was that she must avoid speaking to men who might be trying to maneuver themselves into a connection with Antonia. Daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia; Augustus' niece and sister-in-law of Tiberius; mother of the renowned Germanicus (mother too of the peculiar Claudius and the scandalous Livilla); grandmother of Caligula and Gemellus, who were to share the Empire one day. . . . If a woman must be defined by her male relations, the lady Antonia had gathered some plums, even though Caenis privately found them a specked and mildewed crop. Afflicted with these famous men, Antonia was wise, courageous, and not quite worn out by the indignities she had seen. Even the Emperor took her seriously. Even her slavegirls might wield influence.

"I rarely see my mistress," Caenis stated quietly, lest there be any misunderstanding. "I live in the imperial complex here. Her house is too small."

This was true, yet being appointed to work as a copyist for Antonia had been a magical opportunity.

Though born a slave, Caenis was no skivvy. She had been singled out as bright, then given an education in office skills: reading, writing, ciphers and shorthand, discretion, deportment, graceful conversation in a pleasant voice. She had first-class Latin, and better than average Greek. She understood arithmetic and cheerfully grappled with accounts. She could even think, though she kept that to herself, since she did not choose to embarrass other people by showing she was superior. Only her morose adolescence had prevented her being placed in one of the imperial bureaus before this. They did not allow you into a bureau until they were sure you could deal firmly with senators.

* * *

She moved the pan off the brazier and stood up straight to deal with these men now. She had been thoroughly trained. Caenis could melt into backgrounds, yet radiate efficiency. She always sat well, to help her handwriting. She stood without slouching; she walked with confidence; she spoke up clearly: she knew how to show uninvited senators to the door with relentless charm.

Whether this applied to pantry doors remained to be seen.

"Antonia's cook?" Sabinus asked curiously as she moved the pan. Men had no idea.

"Antonia's secretary," she boasted.

"Why the sausage, Antonia's secretary?" asked the brother, still regarding her with that long frowning stare. "Don't they feed you here?"

The way they were hanging around near her food seemed endearingly hopeful. Caenis grinned, though looking down at her pannikin. "Oh, the daily slave ration: nothing good, and never enough."

Sabinus winced. "Sounds like a middle-class lunch!"

She liked this senator more than she expected. He seemed honest and well intentioned. She let herself exclaim, "Well, everything's relative, lord! A rich knight is more cheerful than a poor senator. To be poor but middle class is still better than being a commoner who hardly has the right to pick his nose in the public street. A slave at the Imperial Palace leads a softer life than the free boatman who lives in a flooded shack on the Tiber's bank . . ." Since they did not stop her, she went on rashly: "The power of the Senate has become a delusion; Rome is ruled by the commander of the Praetorian Guard . . ."

She should never have said that aloud.

To distract them, she rushed on: "As for me, I was born in a palace; I have warmth and music, easy work, and opportunity to progress. Perhaps more freedom than a high-born Roman girl with a garnet in each ear who lives penned in her father's house with nothing to do but be married off to some wealthy halfwit who spends all his time trying to escape her for intelligent conversation and unforced sexual favors—even perhaps if he's not an absolute halfwit, some genuine affection—with the likes of Veronica and me!"

She stopped, breathless. A political statement had escaped her; worse, she had betrayed something of herself. She shifted from foot to foot with unease.

The younger man's serious gaze was disturbing her. That was why she muttered, "Oh do stop leering at my sausage! Want a piece?"

There was a shocked pause.

It was unthinkable.

"No; thank you!" said Sabinus hastily, trying to override his brother—no easy task.

Caenis was gruff but generous. Giving up the struggle for privacy, she offered the young knight a slice on the point of her knife; he nipped it off between his fingers at once.

"Mmm! This is good!" Laughing now, he watched her while he munched. His grim face lost all its trouble suddenly. She had assumed anyone in a decent white toga dined daily on peacocks aswim in double sauces, yet he ate with the appetite of any starving scullion she knew. Perhaps all their ready money went on laundry bills for togas. "Give that fool a bit; he wants it, really."

Caenis eyed the senator. Once again she offered her knife; Sabinus gingerly lifted the food. His brother clapped his shoulder heavily, so she caught the gleam of his gold equestrian ring. Then he admitted to Caenis, "His footman, as you say! I clear a path in the street, chase off bailiffs and unattractive women, guard his clothes like a dog at the baths—and I see he gets enough to eat."

She could not tell how much of this was a joke.

By now she found in his face the bright signal that he liked her. She knew the look; she had seen it in men who danced attendance on Veronica. Caenis shrank from it. She found life a burden already. The last thing she needed was fending off some overfriendly hopeful with a broad country accent and no money. "Let me give you directions, lords."

"We'll get the girl into trouble," Sabinus warned.

For the first time his brother smiled at her. It was the tight, rueful smile of a man who understood constraints. She was too wise to smile back. Still chewing, he refused to move. Studying the floor, Caenis ate her own sausage from the knife point, slowly. It was decent pork forcemeat, flavored with myrtle berries, peppercorns, and pine nuts; she had tossed it on the heat in oil strewn with the good end of a leek.

Only two slices remained in the pan. The younger brother, Vespasian, reached for one, then stopped, and reproached her kindly, "You're letting us steal your dinner, lass."

"Oh go on!" she urged him, suddenly shy and cross. It had been giving her pleasure to offer something other than a slavegirl's usual trade.

He looked serious. "I shall repay the debt."

"Perhaps!"

So they had eaten together, she and that big young man with the cheery chin. They ate, while the brother waited; then both licked their fingers and both rapturously sighed. They all laughed.

"Let me show you the way, lords," Caenis murmured, newly subdued as the sunlight of a different world filtered into the bleakness of her own. She led them into the corridor; they walked either side of her while she basked in their presence as she took them toward the public rooms.

"Thanks," they both said, in the offhand way of their rank.

Without answer she spun swiftly on the ball of her loosely slippered foot. She walked away as she had been taught: head up, spine straight, movement unhurried and disciplined. The grime and desolation imposed by her birth became irrelevant; she ignored her gray condition and was herself. She sensed that they had halted, expecting her to look back from the corner; she was afraid to turn, in case she saw them laugh at her.

Neither did. The senator, Flavius Sabinus, accepted their odd adventure quietly enough. As for his brother, he smiled faintly, but he did not mock.

He knew he should not attempt to see her again. Caenis had missed the significance, but he realized at once. It was like him; a swift assessment of the situation followed by his private decision long before any public act. He was due to leave Rome again, due to leave Italy, in fact. But all through his long journey back to Thrace, and afterward, Flavius Vespasianus still thought, What an interesting girl!

TWO

At dusk that same day, Caenis obeyed her instructions from Diadumenus, and went to check whether their mistress required her services. Washed and with her hair combed, she walked quietly, carrying a bound note tablet and her wooden stylus box.

The House of Livia lay adjacent to the Palace, convenient, yet still private when social distance was required. This was—in theory—the famous modest home that Augustus had ensured he kept. It had helped maintain the myth that despite the honors heaped upon him when he accepted the title of Emperor, he had remained an ordinary citizen: the first among equals, as a phrase wryly had it. In this house, it was said, his wife and daughter had worked at their looms to weave the Emperor's garments as Roman women were traditionally supposed to do for their male relatives. Perhaps sometimes, when other matters did not detain them, Livia and Julia really did devote themselves to weaving. Not often enough, in Julia's case. She had still found time to lead a life so debauched it earned her exile and infamy, then finally death by the sword.

Livia's House, for the past two years since the venerable Empress died Antonia's house alone, stood on the southeast corner of the Palatine Hill in an area where notable republicans had once owned houses. Augustus, who was born there, had bought out the other families and made this an exclusive domain of his own. His original private house had been demolished to make way for his great new Temple of Apollo in the Portico of the Danaids, so the Senate had presented him with a replacement next to the temple, with magnificent rooms for entertaining. His wife, Livia, maintained her own modest (though exquisite) house behind the temple. So in effect they had the benefits of a private palace, while still pretending to live in a classically simple Roman home.

Antonia had lived here after she married Livia's popular and heroic son Drusus. When she was widowed at only twenty-seven, she elected to remain in her mother-in-law's house, keeping the room and the bed she had shared with her husband. By then the mother of three children herself, she had the right to avoid being placed in the charge of a guardian; living with Livia preserved her independence while avoiding scandal. It had also enabled her to refuse, for the rest of her life, to remarry. Rare among Roman women, Antonia made her independence permanent.

Livia's House was set against the side of the hill. Means had been provided for secluded access from the administrative palace complex via underground tunnels. Caenis automatically took the covered route. That way she was unlikely to run into the Praetorian Guards. Their job was to protect the Emperor, but with Tiberius away and their commander, Sejanus, usurping all authority, they had become unendurable. Luckily few were on duty today, and none in the underground passages.

She passed the two side branches, then darted down the final stretch, feeling safe. Not even the Guards would normally interfere with Antonia's visitors. But if the mood took them, or if they had been drinking more than usual, they could still be dangerous to a slave. They were the arrogant elite, protected by the mere name of Sejanus, thugs who molested anyone they chose.

As for Sejanus, nobody could touch him. He had risen from the middle rank, a soldier whose ambition was notorious. A man of some charm, he had made himself the friend of the Emperor, who had few close associates otherwise. It was known, though never openly stated, that Sejanus had then become the lover of Livilla, Antonia's daughter, while she was married to the Emperor's son. It was even whispered that he and Livilla had conspired to murder her husband. Worse plots were almost certainly afoot. It was safest not to wonder what they were.

* * *

Shivering slightly, Caenis clanged the bell and waited for admittance, knowing the porter would probably be in holiday mood and slow to respond. Coming via the covered way had brought her to the back entrance near the garden, where the porter would be even lazier than at the main entrance near the Temple of Victory. She hated to stand outside a closed door expecting to be spied on by someone unseen and unheard within. Feeling exposed, she turned her back.

When Antonia's steward had purchased Caenis from the main imperial training school, the process was so discreet it seemed more like an adoption than a business in which title transferred and money changed hands. Antonia herself probably knew nothing about it. The opportunity to work in this high position had not come easily, and once achieved it did not automatically lead to full trust. Caenis easily outstripped the competition in basic secretarial tasks, but Antonia was wary of granting access to her private papers, and rightly so. The girl had remained on probation, little more than a copyist. Her first sign of acceptance was when Diadumenus left her on duty alone today. It marked a vital step forward, Caenis knew that. She was desperate to do well.

A muttering porter finally answered her summons and admitted her. Patiently enduring the delay, she was still reveling in her luck. Through the discreet portals of this comparatively modest house came Roman statesmen and foreign potentates, the scions of satellite countries—Judaea, Commagene, Thrace, Mauretania, Armenia, Parthia—and the eccentric or notorious members of Antonia's own family. Influential Romans, those with a long-term eye on the future, enjoyed Antonia's patronage. Since today was a festival, visitors might have been here this evening, though for once Caenis found the house unusually quiet.

Passing through the peristyle garden and down a short internal corridor, she reached a roofed atrium with a black-and-white-tiled floor at the center of the formal suite. Opposite, a long flight of steps led down from the main door. To either side of her lay public rooms, a reception area and a dining room, both exquisitely decorated with high-quality wall paintings. The private suites and bedrooms lay beyond them and on upper floors, all much smaller rooms.

Her role was to present herself to the usher Maritimus, then if required for dictation she would attend on her mistress in one of the cubicles attached to the receiving room. Tonight Maritimus, who seemed flustered, left her in the receiving room; then for some reason she had to wait. She studied the fine fresco of Io, guarded by Argus, and apprehensively eyeing Mercury as he crept around a large rock to rescue her; he looked like the kind of curly-haired lad-about-town Io's mother had probably warned her about.

Trying to calm herself, Caenis arranged her waxed note tablet and took out a stylus. Normally Diadumenus, as Chief Secretary, would be here to prevent her feeling so exposed. Still, she was familiar with the kind of correspondence required. Antonia owned and managed a vast array of personal property, including estates in Egypt and the East inherited from her father, Mark Antony. At her court she had brought up the princes from far-flung provinces who had been sent to Rome by shrewd royal fathers or simply carried off by the Romans as hostages, and many letters were still written to those who had since returned home. They held no terrors for an able scribe, although this would be the first time Caenis had worked unsupervised with Antonia.

Maritimus, the tetchy usher, bustled in again. "I'm supposed to find Diadumenus. Is there only you? Where's Diadumenus?"

"Given free time for the festival."

"It won't do!" He was sweating.

"It will have to," said Caenis cheerfully, refusing to acknowledge an emergency unless he explained.

Maritimus scowled at her. "She wants to write a letter."

"I can do that." Caenis longed for authority. She enjoyed her new work. She took genuine pleasure in using her skills, and was fascinated by what she saw of Antonia's correspondence. She accepted that she did not yet see it all. Even so, this sense of not being acceptable tonight grated on her. "Will you tell her I'm here?"

"No; she wants Diadumenus. I don't know what's going on, but something's upset her. You can't do this; it's something about her family."

Antonia never talked about her family. She bore that dreadful burden entirely alone.

"I am discreet!" Caenis blazed angrily.

"It's political!" hissed the usher.

"I know how to keep my mouth shut." Any sensible slave did.

It was not enough. Maritimus clucked and bustled off again. Caenis resigned herself to frustration. She wondered what crisis had upset Antonia.

Now she was seeing the world and her own place within it through fresh eyes. Working in a private house felt wonderful. She had already witnessed at close hand how Roman government was conducted. Like most family matters, it was based on short-term loyalties and long-term bad temper, pursued in an atmosphere of spite, greed, and indigestion. Caenis had never had a family; she watched with delight.

Whatever had disturbed her mistress this particular evening, the young secretary already appreciated the background: the Emperor Tiberius, whose famous brother, Drusus, had been Antonia's husband, spent the last years of his bitter reign in depraved exile on the island of Capri; it had come to be accepted in Rome that he would never return here again. He was already over seventy, so the question of a successor was never far away.

Since Augustus had first based his political position upon his family ties with Julius Caesar, ruling Rome had become an inheritable right. Between genuine accidents and the grappling ambition of their fearsome womenfolk, most of the male heirs had gone to their graves. The Emperor's own son, married to Antonia's daughter, Livilla, had died in rather odd circumstances eight years before. By default the choice now fell between Livilla's son, Gemellus, and his cousin Caligula. A fine pair: Caligula, who when barely into his teens had seduced his own sister here in Antonia's house, or Gemellus, who was deeply unpleasant and permanently sickly. But if Tiberius died in the near future, Rome would be left to these two very young boys, while immense power was also being wielded by Sejanus. Maybe Sejanus would prefer another solution.

* * *

Quite quietly and without any warning, Antonia came into the room. Caenis sprang to her feet.

Antonia was nearly seventy, though she still had the round face, soft features, wide-set eyes, and sweet mouth that had made her a famous beauty. Her hair, thinning now, was parted centrally and taken back above her ears to the nape of her neck in a neat, traditional style. Her gown and stole were unobtrusively rich, her earrings and pendants heavy antiques—attributes of extreme wealth and power to which she paid no regard.

"You are Caenis?" The slavegirl nodded. The effect of her mistress's assurance was to make her feel coarse and clumsy. "You are on duty alone? Well, something important has to be done. This cannot wait. We shall have to make the best of it." Her mistress gave her a hard look. A decision occurred. The slavegirl's life took a sudden twist; for indecipherable reasons she was admitted to Antonia's confidence.

Somehow Caenis detected from the first that whatever was to be written had already been thoroughly considered. She had often seen her mistress composing correspondence as she went along; this was different. Now Antonia led her briskly into one of the more private little side rooms then signaled her to a low stool, while she herself continued pacing about, barely able to wait until Caenis had her stylus poised. It was a strange reversal; in Rome the great were seated while their inferiors stood. Caenis had been trained to take shorthand normally while on her feet at the foot of a couch where the dictator reclined.

"This is a letter to the Emperor about Lucius Aelius Sejanus."

Then Caenis understood. The brief formal announcement warned her—and it stunned her. Her mistress was about to expose the man.

Speaking with pain and deliberation, Antonia dictated for Tiberius facts that she hated to acknowledge and that he would hate to hear. She had uncovered a great conspiracy. The sensational story would surprise few in Rome, although few would ever have voiced it, least of all to the Emperor. Here in this sheltered house Antonia's realization of it had been desperately slow to emerge, but those close to her had revealed the plot. She had not taken their word; she made her own investigations. Because of her privileged position she possessed the courage to inform Tiberius, and she supported all her accusations with telling detail. She did not spare even the parts that convicted her own daughter.

She told the Emperor how his friend the Praetorian commander Sejanus had been plotting to gain complete power. His feared position had ensured the allegiance of many senators and many of the imperial freedmen who governed the Empire; leading figures in the army had been bribed. Recent honors had been heaped upon Sejanus, increasing his own ambition and the control he wielded throughout Rome. He had moved in on the Imperial House by marrying one of his relatives, Aelia Paetina, to Antonia's son Claudius, by betrothing his daughter to Claudius' son (though the boy had died), and now after several attempts by persuading the Emperor to agree that he himself might marry Antonia's daughter. But he had already seduced Livilla, then either poisoned her husband or persuaded her to do it, and schemed to ally himself by marriage to the Imperial House in order to legitimize his own position as a future emperor. His own ex-wife, recently divorced, was now prepared to speak as a witness against him.

Sejanus planned to eliminate Caligula, the more prominent of the Emperor's heirs. If the old man refused to die of his own accord, the Guard commander clearly intended to destroy Tiberius himself.

* * *

The dictation completed, Caenis managed to keep her face expressionless. At a brusque nod from Antonia, she fetched the necessary materials from her workbasket and absorbed herself in the letter's careful transcription to a scroll.

Pallas, Antonia's most trusted slave, came into the room, dressed in a traveling cloak and clearly primed to collect the letter. Their mistress motioned him to wait in silence while Caenis completed her task. Newly confident, she copied her notes without mistakes, writing calmly and steadily even though her mouth felt dry and her cheeks flushed. What she was committing to ink and parchment could be a death warrant for all of them.

Antonia read through and signed the letter. Caenis melted wax to seal the scroll. Pallas took charge of it.

"Do not let this fall into other hands," Antonia reminded him, obviously repeating previous instructions. "If you are stopped, say you are traveling to my estate at Bauli. Give the letter only into the Emperor's own hands, then wait in case he wishes to question you."

The messenger left. Pallas was not a type Caenis cared for. He was a Greek from Arcadia, visibly ambitious, whose appeal to Antonia struck her as incongruous. He went on his way with a jaunty step that seemed out of place. But perhaps his carefree manner would disguise the importance of his mission from soldiers and spies.

The two women sat for a moment.

"Remove every trace from your note tablets, Caenis."

Caenis held the tablets above the flame of a lamp to soften the wax a little, then methodically drew the flat end of her stylus through each line of shorthand. Staring at the newly smoothed surface, she said in a low voice, "It is useless, madam. I would have erased the letter in any case, but every document you ever dictate to me remains in my mind."

"Let us hope your loyalty matches your memory," Antonia replied ruefully.

"You may have faith in both, madam."

"That will be fortunate for Rome! You will remain in this house," Antonia stated. "You may speak to no one until these matters are resolved. It is for the safety of Rome and the Emperor, for my safety—and for your own." Faint distaste colored her voice: "Do you have male followers who will look for you?"

"No, madam." Only that morning Caenis had encountered a man who might have troubled her thoughts for many long hours, but tonight had obliterated that. "I have one friend," she went on, matter-of-factly contributing to the discussion. "A garland girl called Veronica. She may come asking about me, but if the door porter says I am working for you, madam, she will be satisfied." Veronica had never taken any interest in Caenis' duties as a scribe.

"Well, I am sorry to have to imprison you here."

"I shall try to endure it, madam," Caenis replied, smiling. She might as well acknowledge what it would mean to be living in Livia's House.

There was nothing for them to do. It would be weeks, if not longer, before Pallas reached the Bay of Naples and the Emperor reacted. The messenger might never get there.

Even if Pallas did reach Capri, from all Caenis had heard there must be a good chance that Tiberius would choose to reject what Antonia was telling him. He was moody and unpredictable, and nobody likes to hear they have been betrayed. Even if Antonia's measured words convinced him, there might be nothing he could do; the Praetorian Guards held absolute power in Rome. Arresting their commander appeared to be impossible. They would defend Sejanus to the last.

His agents were everywhere. Only the unexpectedness of Antonia's action could possibly outwit him.

THREE

For Caenis this was in many ways the most significant period of her life. It all seemed too easy. Everyone looked too happy to welcome her. Caenis, who distrusted smiles, felt off balance for some time.

Living in a private house was wonderful. She had been allocated her own tiny sleeping cubicle instead of sharing with Veronica. She liked both the sense of belonging and the privacy.

Born and bred in the Palace, Caenis could have no country and no relations of her own; she was one of "Caesar's family," but that title just made her imperial property. In some ways it had been good luck. It had spared her the indignity of standing naked in the marketplace shackled among Africans, Syrians, and Gauls, with notes of her good character and health hung around her neck while casual eyes derided her and rough hands pinched her breasts or forced between her thighs. She had escaped long-term insecurity, real filth, savage cruelty, regular sexual abuse. She understood that; she was grateful up to a point.

Of her father she knew nothing; of her mother only that she must have been a slave too. Caenis had presumably stayed with her mother while she was very small; sometimes a smear of memory would catch her on that threshold between waking and shallow sleep. Before she was committed to the nursery where bright brats were taught to write, her mother had pierced her ears, even though all she had to hang there were pebbles on rags of string. She must have supposed her daughter was then ready to receive orbs of gold from susceptible men. There was always that foolish presumption that a slavegirl must look pretty. Caenis never had been; she knew her cleverness was the better bargain, but it made her sad all the same.

She had been clever from the start. As a child frighteningly so. She learned to disguise it, to escape spite in the children's dormitory, then later to use it so a usefully vibrant girl like Veronica would want to be her friend. Though a solitary child, she understood that she needed other people. As she grew older her resentments had dulled, so she neither tormented herself nor worried the overseers by appearing rebellious. But she possessed a keen drive to achieve the best she could.

That was why working for Antonia was so important. Encouraged by the new confidence now placed in her, Caenis began to acquit herself outstandingly. Having once caught Antonia's notice, every opportunity was hers. Straight-backed and calm, she worked as if nothing significant had happened—winning further trust from her mistress for her restrained reaction to events.

Diadumenus, who must have been told what had happened, showed occasional signs of jealousy. He was still Chief Secretary, but Caenis had a special quality to offer. She was a woman, and Antonia at seventy was short of female companionship. Her lady wanted neither a chit she could bully nor a monster who would try to bully her. Antonia needed someone with good sense; someone she could talk to; someone she could trust absolutely. She had found all that, though she did not yet know Caenis well enough to admit it. But they had shared an act of bravado (and of tragedy too, for Antonia had condemned her own daughter). They were now locked in a secret, awaiting the outcome. And if Sejanus discovered that Antonia had denounced him, there would be fatal results for both mistress and slave.

* * *

Life went on. An appearance of normality was crucial. Visitors came and went. For secrecy's sake Caenis was forbidden to approach them but since she was tied to the house she was volunteering for any work she could. This included keeping a diary of visitors. Caenis was a secretary who could remain virtually invisible—while thoroughly inspecting all the persons whose names featured on her lists.

Among Antonia's private friends were wealthy men of consular rank such as Lucius Vitellius and Valerius Asiaticus, who sometimes brought clients of their own. Caenis soon spotted among the names of Vitellius' escort that of Flavius Sabinus, one of the two young men she had directed at the Palace. He currently held the civic post of aedile, so he qualified for an introduction here, although actually gaining admittance had required the patronage of a much more senior senator. This unofficial court circle could be a good place for impoverished new men from the provincial middle class to acquire influence. Here they would be meeting Caligula and Gemellus, the heirs to the Empire. They would mingle with ambassadors. They could even, if they wanted to risk ridicule, make the acquaintance of Claudius, Antonia's surviving son, who because of various disabilities took no part in public life.

The brothers came from Reate; Caenis burrowed it out. Reate was a small town in the Sabine hills—a birthplace Roman snobs would mock. Their family arranged contracts for seasonal labor and had made their money in provincial tax collection. Their father had also been a banker. They would be notables in their own country, though in Rome, among senatorial pedigrees that trailed back to the Golden Age, they must be struggling. Since Sabinus had qualified for the Senate, the family must own estates worth at least a million sesterces, but it was obviously new money, and if it were all tied up in the land she could well believe their day-to-day budget was tight.

With some difficulty, since no one knew or wanted to know anything about him, she discovered from the usher that the younger brother, Vespasian, had returned to his military duties abroad.

* * *

On 17 October a letter came to Antonia, brought by Pallas from Capri. She read it in private, then stayed in her room. Pallas did not reappear.

By nightfall word had run through the household notwithstanding, and the next day the results of Antonia's action became known throughout Rome: To sidestep the Praetorian Guards, the Emperor had called into his confidence past and present commanders of the city police force. One, Macro, had been secretly appointed as the new commander of the Praetorians. He entered Rome incognito and laid plans with Laco, the current Prefect of the Vigiles. After taking elaborate precautions, Macro had persuaded Sejanus to enter the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, where the Senate was meeting—only a few yards from Antonia's house. A letter from the Emperor to the Senate was to be read. Sejanus let himself be persuaded that this would be offering even greater honors to himself.

Once Sejanus had gone inside the Temple, Macro dismissed the escort of Guards, ordering them back to their camp (which ironically Sejanus himself had built for them in the north part of the city). He replaced them with loyal members of the city Vigiles. Macro himself then went to the Praetorian camp to assume command, confine the Guards to barracks, and prevent a riot. Sejanus meanwhile discovered that the letter from Tiberius was a bitter denunciation of himself. Striding from the Temple, he was arrested by Laco, the Prefect of the Vigiles, and hustled off to the state dungeon on the Capitol. The Guards did riot, but they were soon controlled.

Sejanus and his fellow conspirators were executed. The strangled body of Sejanus was dumped on the Gemonian Steps, which led down from the Capitol, where it was abused by the public for three days before being dragged off with hooks and thrown like rubbish into the Tiber. His statues were torn down from the Forum and theaters. His children were killed too, the teenaged daughter being raped first, to spare the public executioner from the crime of killing a virgin. Rome had harsh rules, but they did exist.

Antonia was acclaimed as the savior of Rome and of the Emperor. Praising her role in uncovering the conspiracy, Tiberius offered her the title Augusta, with the formal honors of an empress. This she declined with the modesty her admirers would expect.

From the middle of October until well into November no visitors were admitted to Livia's House. Some normal life continued. A certain amount of correspondence had to be written, and the correct procedures of daily life were grimly observed. Meanwhile Antonia's daughter, Livilla, had been brought to the house and consigned, with the Emperor's permission, to her mother's custody.

Unlike previous errant daughters of the Imperial House, those who merely led scandalous, adulterous lives for their own pleasure but who had refrained from poisoning the sons of emperors or letting themselves be manipulated into damaging the stability of Rome, Livilla was not to be exiled to a remote island or executed by soldiers. She had shamed the rigorous principles of her mother, Antonia, and those of her even more famously strict grandmother Octavia. She had been stupidly deceived by Sejanus. She had defiled the house of Augustus and dishonored her own children, the grandchildren and rightful heirs of the Emperor. Her position saved her from the public executioner, yet her fate was merciless.

Antonia took Livilla into her own house, locked her in a room alone, and left her there until she starved to death.

FOUR

Grief and rejoicing each have their moments, and then fade. The screams and pleas for help from Livilla were reduced to weakening groans, then silence. Those who had been shaken by having to overhear what happened recovered as much as they ever would.

Gradually the House of Livia relaxed, returning like Rome itself to what passed for normal domesticity. Certainly a shadow had been lifted from the Empire, and the city was full of relief.

Years passed. Nightmares ended. Individual lives improved. That was why, when the younger brother of Flavius Sabinus opened the door to a certain office in the administration sector of the Palatine nearly two years later, Caenis was singing.

She was singing quite loudly because she thought there was nobody nearby. Besides, she liked to sing. Livia's House would hardly be the place for it.

She stopped abruptly.

"Hello!" cried Vespasian. "You look very efficient!"

He shouldered himself in. Caenis put on an expression of pious surprise. She had been aware that his posting to Thrace must have ended. She had somehow expected him.

* * *

Men of his status were not supposed to saunter into the imperial suites looking for female scribes. Completely unabashed, Vespasian took a good look around.

Antonia had borrowed a large office for her copy clerks. She ran a frugal household, and was more ruthless in seizing advantages than her sovereign reputation might suggest. Tiberius would once have been mean enough to demand rent even from a widowed relative, but no one had ever told him she was here; he suspected that people deceived him, so inevitably they did. Still, Antonia could act as she liked nowadays. She was the Mother of Rome.

The room had a depressed air. It was cold. It smelled of hibernating animals. The paintwork on the frescoes was faded. In the Emperor's absence large areas of his palace were declining in neglect; unsupervised, the imperial stewards had a slack attitude toward redecorating any quarters they did not wish to lounge in themselves. Caenis, a girl who could get things done, intended to make friends with the prefect of works.

Vespasian prodded at a patch of wall plaster that was effervescing oddly: "Bit rough."

"The whole of Rome is collapsing," Caenis observed. "Why should the Emperor's house be different?"

Tiberius had a desultory approach to public construction; he began a Temple of Augustus and began restoring the Theater of Pompey, but both remained unfinished. He had occupied the Palace only fitfully before retiring from Rome. Vespasian grumbled, "He should build properly. He should build more, build better, encourage others, and set a decent standard."

He turned his critical attention to Caenis.

She showed distinct signs of improvement. She looked clean and neat; Antonia's staff was allowed to attend the women's sessions at the public baths. Her dark hair was knotted at the nape of her neck, and she had acquired a better-quality dress. Although she worked at a rickety table with a fillet of wood to prop up one leg, she occupied her place with an air of grand possessiveness. She had been promoted to be in charge. None of her juniors were present; she stayed here late on purpose, adoring her authority as she read and corrected their work. Faced with somebody she knew, Caenis openly glowed.

The returning tribune absorbed everything; she was sure he had noticed the subtle change in her situation.

"A tyrant of the secretariats!" he teased as he approached. He seemed larger and even fitter than she remembered, deeply tanned by outdoor army life. "That marvelously frightening glint in the eye . . ." Caenis ignored this.

He had wandered right up to her table. Perching on the edge, he went on gazing around as if even a run-down cubbyhole in the Palace were new to him. An oil lamp tilted alarmingly. Caenis leaned down hard with her elbows so the table would not rock over and tip him on the floor. He knew she was doing it, but made no attempt to shift his weight. She folded her hands atop the tablets that she had just finished sorting, to prevent Vespasian (who was craning his head) from reading them.

"Good evening, lord."

Flavius Vespasianus had a rare but wonderful grin. "You're mellowing. Last time I was told to skip over the Styx!"

"The lady Antonia's secretariat respects the privilege of rank." Caenis was now allowed to be as ironic as the person she was addressing would accept. Authority attached to her through the importance of her mistress and the responsibility of her post. Antonia's visitors treated her with deference. "Are you rich yet, tribune?" she taunted.

"I shall never be rich; but I have brought you a present. Don't get excited; it's nothing to wear." He had come completely unattended. There was a rather greasy parcel squashed under his arm.

"Can you eat it?" she giggled unexpectedly.

"I owe you a sausage."

"And this is it? After two years, lord?"

"I had to go to Thrace," he told her gravely. "If I had missed the sea crossing it would have been the end of my career." He spoke as if he had seriously considered missing his ship anyway. Caenis felt an odd flutter. She ignored it stalwartly. He handed her the parcel. "I presume you are a girl who likes pickled fish?" She loved pickled fish. "Manage a stuffed egg?"

"Only one?"

"I ate the other on the way."

Genuinely shocked, she exclaimed before she could stop herself, "In the street, lord?"

"In the street," he returned placidly. For a moment she thought him a real country boy, innocent of his offense; then his gaze danced on her troubled face; he knew. Caenis frowned with a mixture of pleasure and puzzlement. She imagined him shambling through Rome's clamorous streets. Probably he would carry it off. Probably no one even noticed: a knight, a tribune newly released from military service and qualified for the highest administrative posts, all on his own, carrying a parcel, munching a stuffed egg.

"Deplorable," he agreed wickedly. "So—here's a man who pays his debts."

"Outside my experience!"

Her wry comment on the harshness of her moral world made him pause; then he continued, "I've been trying to find you for days. I'm such a permanent fixture the sausage-maker thinks I must be spying on him for his wife. I would have arrived earlier today, but the stuff was wrapped in some second-rate poet's cast-off manuscript. You know how it is—you glimpse one half-good phrase, then an hour goes by with you standing on the same street corner unraveling the paper trying to find the last appalling verse. . . . Well, can we share this?"

Caenis was beginning to feel frightened. Every word he uttered snatched at her sympathy. Alone with her for the first time, he made no effort to be gallant; nor did he fuss. Perhaps he supposed knights and senators were always dropping in with picnics. Those brown eyes knew exactly what he was doing to her. Suddenly he tried to beg for information: "There were some grand events in Rome after I went back to Thrace. Were you aware what lay in store for Sejanus?"

Caenis still regarded Antonia's letter as a matter of confidence. Besides, she was trained to deflect curiosity from strangers. She demanded sternly, "I don't expect you thought to bring any bread?" Then, before he had time to look crestfallen, she reached down and pulled out the flat circular loaf she had been intending to nibble later on her own. "I think we should decamp to the pantry," she said. "I don't want to be caught using my lady's letter to the King of Judaea as a napkin for eating pickled fish!"

* * *

Caenis now owned a plate. "Chipped but not cracked, rather like my heart . . ."

He did not laugh. He had a way of looking noncommittal while he listened, so she could hardly tell whether she amused or astonished him.

It was a different time of year. April. The Emperor still away on Capri. The days lengthening but the Palace lying silent again, lit by myriad oil lamps for no one's benefit.

This time they had the sausage cold. Vespasian sliced it up himself. "I don't like this as much as yours; I should have asked you what to get." It was a smoked Lucanian salami, rather strong on the cumin, not enough savory and rue. Caenis did not complain. It was the only present she had ever received. Veronica would have mocked; Veronica's idea of a present was something sparkly and easy to pawn.

"When you have waited over a year for a debt," Caenis commented benignly, "you make the best of whatever turns up."

After a while he demanded, still chewing, "Are you allowed any free time on your own?"

This was what she wanted to avoid. Being stupidly straightforward, she told him the truth: "Sometimes."

"What do you do with yourself?"

"Tomorrow I am going to see a mime actor."

He looked interested; she groaned inwardly. "I heard you singing. And you like the dancers?"

"I like the flute music. You can lose yourself," she muttered, not wanting to talk about it. She knew better than to entrust her soul to anyone of rank.

"You don't need losing," he chivvied her. "Going with someone nice?"

"Oh yes!" she snapped without thinking. "With myself." She crunched her teeth into a crisp curl of the loaf and pointedly did not look at him. There was a very slight pause.

"No man?"

Better prepared now, she was able to duck the question: "Men are not nice, lord. Sometimes useful, occasionally amusing, hardly ever genuine, and never nice."

"Women are worse; they cost a lot and still let you down." He was teasing. She let it pass.

"Actually, I go by myself because I seriously object when idiots talk to me through the music."

He smiled, because he recognized that was just like her. She was as single-minded as himself. "Who's doing the mime?"

"Blathyllos."

"Any good? I might come too. I don't talk; I always go to sleep. Luckily I never snore."

They could not go to the theater as a couple. They would not be permitted to sit together; even women of his own rank must watch separately. Antonia's slave should not be seen alone with him in any case. But he asked, without hesitation, "Would you meet me afterward?" Absorbing herself in biting a peppercorn from the pickled fish, Caenis tried not to answer. He interpreted her silence his own way. "Where shall I find you?"

Too late; she was committed. Her heart pounded. "A young lord who does not know the theater rendezvous?" she reproved, still foolishly attempting to slither out of this.

"Sheltered upbringing."

"Bit old-fashioned?" There was no escape. The truth had to be stated. She reminded him baldly: "I am somebody else's slave."

"I appreciate that."

Defiance overtook her. "Well then, if you mean it, you could meet me here beforehand. Ask anyone; they will find me."

For the first time the senator's brother seemed uncomfortable. "Who shall I ask for?" His sources of information must be thinner than hers.

She took a deep breath. Giving her name seemed a step she could never revoke. "Caenis," she said awkwardly.

"Caenis?" He tested it out in his strong voice. It was Greek; that was only a convention of slavery. "Caenis!" he exclaimed again, and his speaking her name made everything unbearably intimate.

"Just Caenis," she muttered.

"Just nothing!" he retorted angrily. She guessed he meant she should not denigrate herself. "And listen, Caenis: Always ask a visitor who he is!" He was evidently wanting her to ask his own name. "The most dismal words in the world are ‘Someone called to see you; I don't know who it was. . . . Don't be put at a disadvantage. You can't afford to be pushed into assumptions about anybody's status; you need to know for sure. You have to judge whether a person rates refreshments or only your polished sneer." He stood up. "So in answer to your next question—"

He must have thought she would have forgotten. She interrupted calmly: "Your name is Titus Flavius Vespasianus." He began to grin with delight at once. She recited in her most efficient voice: "Your father was Flavius Sabinus, a citizen of Reate, so your voting tribe is the Quirina; your mother is Vespasia Polla. You wear the gold ring of the knights. Your patron is the elevated Lucius Vitellius, who brings your brother to Antonia's house—"

"Do you speak to my brother?" he interrupted in surprise.

"No, certainly not." She was determined to reach her joke: "You are a second son with no reputation, but respectable, so I need to be polite." Vespasian clenched the corner of his mouth in anticipation; he possessed a rapidly developing sense of humor and liked what he had glimpsed of hers. So Caenis said, knowing how much he would enjoy it, "As for your rating refreshments, lord—I worked out your status the first time we met!"

FIVE

When Vespasian came to get her he held out his hand and swiftly clasped hers. Nobody had ever done that before.

"Hello, Caenis." With the greeting his voice dropped half a tone. Her breath tangled somewhere above her middle ribs as she withdrew her hand with care.

"Hello . . ." She did not know how to address him.

He gazed at her for a moment inscrutably. "Titus," he instructed.

Very few people ever used his personal name. In the offhand Roman way his whole family was named Titus—grandfather, father, brothers, and cousins all the same—so people called him Vespasian, even at home. This intimacy offered to Caenis was the measure of the mistake the man was letting himself make. Presumably he did not realize; Caenis did.

"You look nice."

For once she smiled. Antonia had given her a new dress.

* * *

She had felt compelled to mention him to Antonia.

"Madam, when I go to the theater this evening, I have made an arrangement to meet a gentleman." The statement plunged her into visible difficulty. Doubt was transfiguring her mistress's face.

They had been in a room at Livia's House where the walls were decorated with elegant swags of greenery looped between columns, below a high golden frieze portraying tiny figures in dreamy cityscapes. Antonia reclined in a long sloping chair, while Caenis perched on a low stool with a tablet on her knees. Antonia liked to work hard without distractions, but once they finished, sometimes she kept back her secretary for a few moments of casual talk. It did her good to unbend. She tired more easily nowadays than she wanted to admit. She had lived twice as long as many people and survived more griefs than most.

The old lady stirred. Her well-attended skin had preserved its sweet suppleness until now, but her face had grown thinner, and since Livilla's disgrace despair was beginning to show in the fine creases at the corners of her eyes.

The moment had become awkward.

"Why are you telling me?" Antonia demanded. "Do you wish me to forbid it?"

Caenis was taking an enormous risk. When the Chief Secretary, Diadumenus, had first stipulated that Antonia must be told of any approaches from knights or senators, he had meant approaches on business matters; there ought to be no other kind of commerce with their lady's slaves.

"I prefer to be open, madam."

In other households it was usually understood that other commerce did occur. . . . Not here. Or if here, it never happened openly.

Even after knowing Caenis for several years, Antonia immediately decided her slave had loose morals and would be easy prey for a political shark. It was unfair; Caenis had always been scrupulous.

"You ask me to condone the friendship? How long have you been dealing with this man?"

Caenis said tersely, "I don't deal with him. I don't even know if he expects it."

Antonia moved impatiently. "Come; who is he?"

"Flavius Vespasianus, a knight from Reate. The family is not prominent, though his brother, Sabinus, has been here as a client of Lucius Vitellius. Madam, you asked me long ago if I had male followers, and I told you no."

There was some improvement in Antonia's expression. "So what is this?"

"A slight friendship I struck up with a newcomer to Rome, nothing more." How could it be? The sheer impossibility filled her with dread. "He has been on service abroad and has few friends in Rome."

"Yet he sought you out!"

"I believe that was coincidence."

"You believe nothing of the sort! Is he seeking only your favors, or does he hope for influence?"

"That I do not know," admitted Caenis. "But if I find out what he thinks he is seeking, the sooner I can disillusion him."

Antonia sighed with irritation. "Are you deceiving yourself—or trying to deceive me?" Caenis wisely made no reply. "Have you confided in anybody else? I thought you were friendly with that girl Veronica?"

With a pang of resentment, Caenis finally grasped how nearly her friendship with Veronica had jeopardized her post. She took the opportunity to speak up: "Veronica has a good heart. I do like her, but that does not mean I admire her life. And she has never influenced mine, madam." She smiled reassuringly. "I have never even mentioned Vespasian to Veronica."

"I will not have my staff used by ambitious young men," declared Antonia, though she liked people who stood up to her; she could be weakening.

Caenis decided to show she was shrewd. "I value my position too highly to risk it through foolishness. Besides, madam, if your court is seen as a desirable forum for young men who wish to advance in public life—as it must be—then he and his brother have obtained their entrée anyway. Somebody, their father perhaps, has ensured that they are taken up by Vitellius. Vespasian cannot believe knowing me will improve on that."

Now her mistress seemed amused. "Then, my dear, what does he want?"

"I suppose, what they all want," Caenis decided, so as two women together they laughed and nodded distrustfully. "He will be due for a disappointment! Madam, if he intends to pick my brains for your secrets, I shall certainly give him a sharp answer. I believe he knows that. No—as I told you, I suspect he is just a young man who lacks friends in Rome. I am under no delusions; once he finds his feet in society that will be the end of me."

"You seem to have worked everything out."

"I think a girl in my position has to," Caenis said quietly.

Antonia, who favored Caenis strongly, and who disliked having to involve herself in the private lives of her staff, seemed to tire of the conversation. "Well, you were right to speak to me. I have no wish to deprive you of companionship. But rank must be respected—"

"I am a slave," Caenis agreed quietly. "If he wants a mistress, he has to look elsewhere."

"So long as you accept it. So long as you make him accept it too! Don't let him ask questions." Don't get pregnant, thought Antonia. Don't force me to discipline you; don't betray my trust. "And don't let yourself be hurt."

Squaring up the writing tablets on her knee, Caenis laughed unhappily. "Thank you, madam."

"Caenis, you undervalue yourself!"

In the girl before her Antonia saw what Vespasian must see—that fine, bright, interesting look that marked an intelligent woman, a look that in drawing the eye also lifted the heart. A man with the taste to admire such quality was more dangerous than any philanderer or hustler.

With an angry jerk at the cushions under her back, Antonia conceded, "Ask Athenaïs to find you something decent to wear."

Caenis felt startled. She had been intending to borrow Veronica's best blue gown, since she knew that Veronica had worked herself an invitation to a function that required only a silver anklet and a wisp of gauze.

"Something will be found for you," Antonia brusquely said again.

Then, much as she distrusted other people's support, Caenis understood that in speaking out she had softened Antonia's strict principles. Her mistress would keep her, and indulge her. She had earned more than her lady's goodwill. She had become her favorite.

* * *

Something was found; something wonderful. Athenaïs, who mended Antonia's clothes, carried the garment to her cubicle. Her face split with a shy grin. "Pamphila has screwed up her face and let you have this!" Pamphila was the wardrobe mistress. She always ensured that her own turnout was spectacular, but was not renowned for parting with good things to other slaves.

Caenis whistled, which made Athenaïs giggle. She was deeply in awe of the secretary for being able to read and write, even though Caenis had made it plain since she first entered Antonia's household that to anyone half sensible she was perfectly approachable. Athenaïs immediately made her try on the dress, then squatted on the floor to alter the hem length, frowning with concentration as her nimble fingers flew. She seemed even more excited than Caenis was herself.

"I don't suppose you could persuade Pamphila to find me an undertunic too?"

Athenaïs scoffed. "I don't suppose you would like to try being the person who asked her?"

"No; I know my limits, dear!"

So Caenis came to the pantomime in her own shift, but a gown that had once belonged to the daughter of Mark Antony. It was one that showed its pedigree, in a shade of amber brown, as plain as it had once been expensive. Veronica would think it dull stuff, but Caenis recognized true elegance. It was linen woven through in Tyre with Chinese silk, a material so light she found it fabulous to wear. The dress moved as she moved; it lay soft against the skin, tenderly cool during the heat of the day, then with the evening chill whisperingly warm.

"You look nice," Vespasian remarked. No man had ever said that to Caenis before; none had ever thought he needed to. But he, as usual, was examining her. "You look happy."

For the first time Caenis glimpsed that although exquisite features and fine robes must help, real good looks depended on a glad heart. "Happy?" she quipped. "Well, strolling out with a bankrupt will soon settle that! Shall we walk?" she asked helpfully.

"I do have the price of a litter for my female companion."

"Of course," she murmured. No slave traveled in such style. Teasing him helped cover her unease. "But I was afraid that if you spent your small change now, you might have to miss your intermission honeycake."

"Thanks!" he said, suddenly meeting her halfway. "I do like a girl who grasps the practicalities."

Caenis stated quietly for the second time that week, "I think a girl in my position has to."

They walked.

SIX

To walk through Rome was to bludgeon through one teeming city bazaar. The main time for trade was in the morning before the fabric of the buildings and the air in the streets heated up unbearably, but in Mediterranean tradition, after a long siesta—lunch, nap, a little light lovemaking—businesses gradually reopened for their second, more leisurely session in the afternoon. This was the time at which Caenis and Vespasian set out.

They were starting on the Palatine, where the imperial family and those wealthy enough to imitate them had established their pleasant detached residences along the lower flank, with fine views over the Forum. When they plunged down from the Hill it was to make their way to the Theater of Balbus along the Triumphal Way; their passage was hectic. To the rest of the world the Empire was giving the elegance of planned public buildings in spacious piazzas, wide roads, and new towns built upon geometric street plans that were foursquare as the military forts from which they derived. Rome itself remained an eight-hundred-year-old honeycomb, a traditional maze of tight-cornered streets that clambered up and down the Seven Hills, often no more than inadequate passageways, twisting alleys, aimless double-backs, and crumbling cul-de-sacs. All of these were packed to the bursting point.

"I'm going to lose you," Vespasian muttered. "Better hold my hand."

"Oh no!" In horror Caenis buried her hands under the light folds of her stole. He raised a dour eyebrow; she would not give way.

The press of people in the narrow streets did not deter a man of his sturdiness. Keeping close behind his shoulder, she slipped after him as he moved unhurriedly; he forced a path more courteously than most men of his status ever managed. He checked frequently, though she sensed he was sufficiently alive to her presence to know immediately if they did separate in the crush. Once a water-carrier with two wildly sloshing cauldrons slung on a bowed pole pushed impatiently between them on his way from a public fountain to the upper quarters of an apartment block; she caught at Vespasian's toga, but with one of his abrupt smiles he was already slowing up to wait for her.

Freckles of sunlight flickered on their faces as they reached the smaller streets; these were just wide enough to glimpse the sky far away between corners of the roofs on the six-story blocks whose cramped apartments were piled one upon the other like towers of slipper-limpets on a rock. Everywhere taverns and workshops spilled out in front of them, for by day life was lived in the streets. The pillars of the arcades were garlanded with metalware—bronze flagons and copper jugs with chains through their handles like preposterous necklaces. They stepped around leaning stacks of pottery, then ducked under baskets hung on ropes above their heads. They squeezed past touts with trays of piping-hot meat pies, pressed back under balconies as sedan chairs jostled by, paused to watch a game of checkers on a makeshift board scratched in the dust. Assailed by noise and smells and the shoving of a polyglot humanity that at times carried them along helpless on the tide, at length they reached their destination.

"Show me your ticket!" Caenis commanded. "Then I can look for you—but you mustn't wave." Gravely he produced the ivory disc from which she memorized the number of his seat. "If you still want to see me, I'll wait over there afterward by the fortune-teller's booth. If I leave early I'll send down a message."

"I'll be there," he assented somberly.

* * *

Women sat at the top of the third tier of seats in the theater, after the various ranks of masculine citizens; Caenis had saved up for a ticket, to avoid having to stand on the upper terrace with foreigners and less thrifty slaves. Even from this high perch she soon picked out Vespasian; already the way he moved seemed vividly familiar. Usually she followed a play almost ahead of the actor, but she constantly lost Blathyllos today. Her concentration kept skittering off to the fourteen rows in the first tier, which were reserved for knights.

The art of the tragic pantomime had developed nearly to its peak. Few new plays were written; those shown now comprised part of the communal memory. The mood of the story was conveyed by an orchestra of winds and percussion, while the words, which the audience often knew by heart, were sung by either a small choir or a soloist. Nowadays there was only one actor, who portrayed all the parts; he honed himself for this with a strict regimen of diet and exercise. He presented the action through a combination of mime and dance, where each gesture, each glance, each delicate flexing of a muscle, each precise modulation of a nerve, caught the imagination and through the imagination the heart.

Blathyllos was good. At first he commanded his audience simply by standing still and drawing on their expectation. His slightest movement carried right to the back of the auditorium, and as in all the best theater, it was apparently effortless. He used suspense, horror, confusion, sentiment, and joy. He brought them through heroism and pity, anger and desire, grief and triumph. By the end even Caenis felt wrung. The final applause discovered her blinking, dry-mouthed, momentarily bemused.

When she regained the street she thought for one wild moment that Vespasian would not come. She was waiting, sufficiently far from the main throng of people for him to pick her out, yet near enough to the entrance not to feel threatened by pickpockets or pimps. She saw Vespasian heading in the opposite direction, she was sure. Still highly strung from the drama, she could not believe it. Distraught, she almost began to walk away alone.

He materialized from the dispersing crowd just in time.

"Hello, Caenis!" He must have gone to find two slaves, his own or more likely his brother's, who now followed behind him with cudgels through their belts. "Sorry; have I kept you waiting?"

"It didn't matter," she lied gallantly.

* * *

"Want your fortune told?" Vespasian was glancing at the booth; a man of evil Egyptian aspect, with a red pointed cap and no teeth, popped up like a puppet over the canvas half-door the moment he spoke; evidently able to prophesy customers. "I'll pay for it—are you frightened?" Very little frightened Caenis. She said nothing, and Vespasian egged her on. "Don't you believe in horoscopes? You old skeptic!"

"I know my future: hard work, hard luck, and a hard death at a hard age!" Caenis told him grimly. "I can't do it. You need to say when you were born."

For a moment he did not understand.

Each freeborn Roman citizen, male or female, was registered with the Censor within eight or nine days of birth. A free citizen honored his own birthday and those of his ancestors and family as his happiest private festivals, when his household gods were wreathed with garlands while everyone who owed him respect gave thanks. Important men honored the birthdays of political figures they admired. The birthday of the Emperor was a public festival.

Caenis was a slave; she did not know when her birthday was.

He was quick; no need now to explain.

Pride made her do so anyway; she could be brutal when she chose: "Slavegirls' brats, sir, are not heralded by proud fathers in the Daily Gazette. The fact that I exist is marked only by my standing here before you, blood and bone decked out in a new dress. The modern philosophers may grant me a soul, but nobody—lord, nobody—burdens me with a fate to be foreseen!"

"Ouch!" he remarked. She felt better. He did not apologize; there was no point. Instead he turned to the astrologer in his down-to-earth way. "Here's a challenge, then; can we offer this lass any consolation?"

The man let his eyes glaze with practiced guile. He was draped in unclean scarves that were intended to suggest oriental mystery, though to Caenis they were simply a reflection of the poor standards of hygiene that applied here in the Ninth District. A tinsel zodiac twinkled sporadically on a string above his head. One of the Fish had lost its tail, and the Twins were slowly drifting apart from their heavenly embrace.

"Her face can never be upon the coinage!" the astrologer intoned suddenly in a high-pitched voice. How subtly ambiguous, Caenis thought. The man managed to imply that some uninvited blast of truth had struck him in the midriff, just above whatever he had for dinner. Caenis reckoned this could not be healthy if he did it every day. He wavered; Vespasian chinked some coppers into a grimy hand, which shot out promptly despite the apparent trance. "Her life is kindly; kindly her death. Bones light as charcoal, thin hair . . . she goes to the gods wrapped in purple; Caesar grieves; lost is his lady, his life's true reverse. . . ."

He fell silent, then looked up abruptly, his eyes dark with shock.

Vespasian folded his arms. "Steady on with the treason," he tackled the man jovially, "but if some character's after my turtledove I'd like to be ready for him! What Caesar is this? Not the old goat, I trust. . . ."—meaning Tiberius—"Did you manage to get a glimpse of the laundry label in his cloak?"

Edging away in confusion at having been called his turtledove, Caenis murmured, "Emperors don't have name tags. It's considered unnecessary on the purple, you know."

The astrologer gave Vespasian a nicely judged crazy stare.

* * *

Caenis had fled.

"Shall we walk?" Vespasian offered, as he caught up to her with a sniff.

Wanting to resist being disturbed by the fraudulent predictions of a soiled Egyptian in a dirty Greek blanket, Caenis growled amiably, "As you see, I am already walking. I presupposed you had squandered my fare home on flyblown tidbits and lukewarm wine from every tout." She knew he had kept his seat throughout.

"No need to get tetchy," he complained, catching her elbow to slow her down. Unexpectedly self-conscious, she diminished her cracking pace.

It felt strange to be escorted by other slaves. Caenis was interested to notice that after a natural stare to evaluate what their young master had picked up, Vespasian's bodyguards bore her no obvious grudge. She was a girl doing her best; so good luck to her.

"Did you enjoy the pantomime, lord?"

Although he knew how much she wanted him to share her fierce enjoyment, he made no concessions. "Oh, not bad. I think I stayed awake."

"Not all the time!" she retaliated hotly. Then she realized he was teasing again, so she softened her tone: "As far as I could tell from upstairs you nod alarmingly, but you don't snore. The aediles were going to prod you at one point, but you woke up anyway."

"Hah!" He pretended to cuff her around the ears.

This was a serious social mistake. Caenis became acutely conscious of her position as a slave. She refused the game; she walked straight, staring stiffly ahead. Vespasian gave no sign, but as long as she knew him he never made such a gesture again. His voice was deliberately friendly as he asked, "What about you? Glad you went?"

"Yes; thank you."

"Good."

By mutual agreement they strolled beside the Tiber, across the Agrippan Bridge and into Caesar's Gardens. At dusk the gardens were rather cold, faintly ominous, and clouded at head height with scores of nipping midges. Undeterred, they toured the whole length; there were not many respectable places where a gentleman and someone else's slavegirl could go. Then he walked her home to Livia's House.

On the Palatine there would be sufficient light from flares, but they had to reach it first; one of his slaves had become their lantern-bearer. Even so, the narrow streets were dim, and Caenis began to be afraid Vespasian might risk public familiarity. All he ever did, when builders' wagons or wine merchants' delivery carts trundled dangerously near, was to move her into the shelter of a house portico or close against the shuttered frontage of a shop with a light touch on her arm, at once lifted. She hoped he did not notice how even that raised goose bumps.

He did notice. His question was typically abrupt: "Caenis, will you go to bed with me?"

"Certainly not!" She rapped back her refusal; then, with the issue broached, relief flooded over her.

"You don't like me?"

"I like you far too much!" she found herself explaining briskly.

Vespasian rounded on her, forcing her to stop. "What's that supposed to mean?" He was a big man, extremely blunt, and far superior in rank. She experienced real alarm. His chin was up, his mouth furiously set.

She faced him with a pattering heart. "It means: I cannot afford the risk. I told you; I told you right at the start—I am the property of my mistress, and her approval matters to me. Please come along; people are staring."

He ignored that. He was standing in the road, refusing to move.

"You need to take care of yourself too," Caenis muttered morosely. "Find a rich senator with a decent daughter you can marry. You need a fat landed dowry, and you must become respectable if you want a career." This was true; he acknowledged her wise advice. Duty and propriety compelled a citizen to marry, marry a woman of good background and character, then produce children. The cursus honorum, the official career ladder for senators, depended on it. "I am sorry if there has been a misunderstanding," Caenis concluded in anxious apology.

"Straight question; straight answer. Perfectly understood!" He was not angry, but bitterly hurt. With an unusual flash of spite he demanded, "Got some fellow slave lined up, then? Jealous, is he? Think I'll scare him off?"

"Don't be simple," Caenis rebuked him. "Though I imagine you would; you're frightening me. . . . I will not have a companion even from among the other slaves. I want to be by myself."

He was not yet ready to let her smooth his ruffled crest. "You should have told me you were so scrupulous!"

This time she would not reply; it was up to him whether he chose to see her distress.

Around them began Rome's terrifying transformation into night. Goods had been whisked from pavements; leaves of folding doors were drawn across shop frontages; bolts thumped heavily into sockets, and elaborate padlocks rattled on cold iron chains. Above their heads a woman's thin-wristed arms hooked a cat and a pot of flowers from a window ledge, then slammed the shutter on a shadowy interior. It was now extremely dark. There were no streetlamps, and hardly a chink of light showed where the crowded lodging houses faced the unfriendly streets. The grimmest alleys were emptying. Soon the city would be given over to a lawlessness such that even the vigiles who were supposed to police the various districts were likely to dive into a drinking house rather than answer a call for help.

Vespasian's slave began to shuffle restlessly.

"Please come," Caenis cajoled, concerned for his two guards.

"Well!" he complained crossly. "Why did you bother with me, girl?"

Then Caenis answered with plain honesty, "Because I do like you." In for an as, in for an aureus. "I like you," she admitted, stony-faced, "more than anybody I have ever known."

She could tell that although he stayed where he was, indignant and disappointed in the public thoroughfare, Vespasian was utterly disarmed. Other women may have felt attracted to him, but others were not so direct. Suddenly Caenis recognized that his solid exterior concealed genuine sentiment. He would never be able to resist anyone who confessed to wanting him; she dared not contemplate how warmly he would respond.

That was not for her.

"I suppose," she acknowledged, "this means I shall not see you anymore?"

It was darker; she could not properly make out his face, but she heard his short bitter laugh. "What do you take me for?" She dropped her head, though his voice was already softening. "Oh, lass; don't be so feeble. You know when you have some poor beggar on your hook!"

"Well, why do you bother with me?" she flung back.

He said very quietly, "You know that too."

His stance relaxed; he began to saunter on in silence, pulling her after him with a curt gesture of his head.

* * *

He had brought her to Antonia's house. "Here we are; your palace, lady!" he declaimed mockingly. His guards were loitering discreetly behind the Temple of Victory as he lowered his voice. "Going to give me a kiss?"

"No, I'm not."

She shrank back, but after a brief stare he merely banged on the main door for her. He was persistent, but never aggressive. The porter squinted through his grating, then began the extended process of unfastening locks. In the tiny square of lamplight Caenis saw a gleam in Vespasian's eye as he murmured back at her, "Well then; are you going to let me kiss you?" At once he mimicked her crazily: " ‘No, I'm not!' Well, don't expect me to tussle with you in front of other people. Good night, girl. Dream of me and wonder."

Caenis swallowed. She had no doubt of the energy with which this strong, competent man would take his pleasures—nor his ability to give delight in return. "Wonder what, lord?"

"Wonder—what you missed!"

Looking at him, while trying not to, she felt aware of that.

The house porter was starting to pay attention. She touched Vespasian's hand briefly, and turned to go in. "Good night, Caenis." They were friends again. His voice dropped; once more she felt stricken by its private, benevolent note.

She looked back. Vespasian had started walking down the narrow alley between the house and the temple, which would eventually take him back down into the Forum or to the Circus Maximus; then he also turned. Suddenly smiling, he raised his arm in farewell. She watched him retrace his steps, closely shadowed now by the two guards. Rome at night was dangerous, yet he had a knack of walking without haste so he seemed invulnerable. Lunging toward him from their dreadful alleyways, robbers and bullies would stay their intended ambush and wait for easier prey.

It was how he walked through life: steady and unperturbed, a man who knew his way and who would arrive unscathed.

SEVEN

Veronica knew about the walk in Caesar's Gardens by next day. "Well; you were seen, Caenis!"

People called Rome a place where everything was noticed, and Veronica made it her business to ensure that any snippets about anyone's indiscretions were certainly picked up by her.

"I can assure you," Caenis commented bitterly, "I have done nothing—"

"Glad to hear it," Veronica interrupted. "Make them wait. They enjoy it more if they're keyed up—and if they enjoy themselves there is always a slim chance you might too! He'll bring you a present next time, to make sure."

About to protest that he already had done so, Caenis realized that her powers of rhetoric would not stretch to justifying a Lucanian salami and a parchment of pickled fish.

"He won't," she declared in a tiny saddened voice. "I have decided not to see him again."

This was dismally true. She had wrestled with the problem all night. It was the most anguished decision she had ever engineered.

"Oh yes; I usually do that,"Veronica languidly returned. "But when they turn up with their present, what can you say?"

* * *

Caenis and Veronica had met at the baths. Caenis went every afternoon now, to a woman-only one that was open all day (the mixed ones held women's sessions only in the morning, which was useless). She had a general arrangement to meet Veronica, an arrangement that Veronica kept with surprising regularity. She would arrive laden with trinkets that she had collected from admirers, filling the changing room with wafts of cheap perfume, taking up too many pegs with her baskets and mantles and handkerchiefs and scarves. She gave the impression she led a scatterbrained life, blown hither and yon by chance meetings with her numerous pursuers. In fact, fitting so many men into a regular scheme where the paths of those who minded about the others never crossed had long ago taught Veronica to be supremely organized.

Caenis always spent her first fifteen minutes at the baths bootfaced with bad temper. There was a convention that public baths charged women an as, while men only had to pay half. Caenis did not see why. In her opinion women were cleaner. It was men who used the exercise yards and swimming baths most often; men who stayed longest clattering over court cases with their friends; men who indecently assaulted the bathhouse attendants; men, moreover, who pretended they had left their money at home and tried to sneak in without paying at all. Paying double always made her angry. Veronica liked to arrive after Caenis had been ensconced in the hot-air room in her rope-soled sandals long enough for torpor to set in.

They had nothing in common as bathhouse companions anyway. Caenis wanted value for money. She went through the suite of rooms from the hot steam to the cold plunge with a gritty intent to extract every possible ounce of sensation and stimulus; if she had time she even patted a ball around or swam, which few women other than those of sinister athleticism ever bothered to do. Veronica came to chat. She certainly would not swim at the moment, because her hair had been blonded and the dye would run. In fact she could not even float; she relied on the fine truth that when women with heart's-ease baby faces fall into deep water, there are always eager men on hand to pull them out. Caenis, who lacked this advantage, had taught herself to swim strongly years before.

Veronica looked well with yellow hair. She also looked well with glossy blue-black curls, auburn towers of Celtic plaits, or rolling chestnut waves. If ever she grew old (though it seemed unlikely she would last so long) Veronica would be utterly distinguished once she settled for a smart silvery bun. Of them all, the present yellow crimping perhaps best suited the daintiness of her face.

Her language had never been dainty. "Caenis, don't be such a stupid pen-pushing cow!"

As Caenis had said to Antonia, her old friend had a good heart. "Juno! I spy some terrible spots on your back, Veronica."

A game try.

"Oh, piddle! Give me a scrapedown, love—but don't try to drive me off the racecourse. I said—"

"I heard what you said."

"Yes, but do you listen?" Veronica bawled.

They had known each other since they were ten, and as neither was in a position to bring a body-slave, they had been scraping each other's backs with one borrowed strigil or another ever since. Caenis helped Veronica obliterate her shoulder rash; Veronica, using similarly brutal techniques, helped Caenis shed unsatisfactory men. Most of the men who had ever approached Caenis were hopeless; strong-minded angry girls are curiously attracted to inadequate types. She had not even told Veronica about the very worst. Nor had Veronica, who was softhearted in some respects, ever mentioned that there were several perfectly decent men who regarded Caenis with secret fondness; Veronica thought accepting fondness would be a fatal mistake.

"Darling, this character is completely insignificant. It's taken me half a day even to find out his name." It had taken Caenis herself three weeks of hard effort with the usher Maritimus to extract any information. "Time you were fixed up with someone useful, girl. Why do you always frighten the good ones off? Oh, you don't even intend to look!"

Caenis writhed. "I do; I do! I tell myself an Indian pearl earring or several are just what I need—then I look at the types who might offer, and I curl up. It's not just the thought of their podgy fingers paddling in your private places; most of them are so lacking, Veronica."

"Keep away from men with talent," Veronica barked. "If he falls, you may follow. If he rises, you'll be dropped. Ouch! "

"Sorry. Give me your oil flask. Phew! "

"Deposited as an offering on the altar of love," Veronica muttered.

"It's disgusting."

"It's very expensive."

"It would be—I'll use mine."

As her friend ministered, Veronica lifted her own flask and sniffed at it uncertainly; she had educated views on material items, yet sometimes Caenis managed to shake her confidence.

"It's a pretty bottle," Caenis consoled kindly. It was pink Syrian glass, traced with fine spirals and so delicate it seemed ready to shatter from the very heat of any hand that held it up to admire its translucence. That did not excuse the oil within this fine Syrian product from smelling as if it were concocted from the reproductive glands of a camel.

Wriggling her shoulders Veronica demanded, "Well, failing some old millionaire to tickle your fancy, why refuse your Sabine friend?" She used the term "Sabine" as an insult.

Caenis knew the answer; she had spent all night thinking it up. "Because my Sabine friend has intelligence and good humor; both of those are qualities I like far too much."

Veronica recognized how serious this was. "You're smitten!"

"Oh, I can't risk that."

"No; you can't. That's losing in every way. But if you don't take the poor one and you won't find a rich one, you'd better work damned hard, then pray that your noble lady notices! Antonia may give you your freedom one day—but yours will be a small pension, Caenis, and not even happy memories at this rate. . . ."

She turned around, grabbing at the oil flask, though before she started to dribble the stuff down her friend's own immaculate back she kissed her on the top of her head; she was a demonstrative girl. It was another way in which they had nothing in common.

"Now, the minute he turns up with his present, I want to hear what it is."

* * *

Vespasian did not turn up with his present; he did not turn up at all.

As Caenis gradually realized that the aggravating bastard had reached the same decision as herself, she started to dodge Veronica by taking a swim. Veronica rarely permitted herself to be dodged.

In the end she appeared at the side of the swimming bath, slapped down her rope sandals on the marble rim in a way that indicated she was not intending to go away, then waited for Caenis to surge up to her reluctantly. Caenis stayed in the water, floating on her back. Veronica stretched a fine ankle and splished the surface with one beautiful toe. They gazed at one another for a moment beneath the echoing hollow vault. Women's voices chattered against the pouring of water from jugs in the washing rooms in the background.

"Your friend's bunked off to Reate," Veronica shouted, at her most businesslike. "He's run home to his mother!"

Reate, famous to all Italy as the source of the finest white edible snails, was the Flavian family home. Vespasian's grandfather had settled there, and he himself had been born at Falacrina nearby. Reate was where his mother lived, where both he and his brother owned summer estates, sixty miles east of Rome. No one traveled so far and to such a country area unless they meant to stay.

Veronica usually tried to be kind, for she felt Caenis had never enjoyed much of a life. "Some of them don't know the rules. When you say no, they think you mean it."

Caenis bobbed away from the side of the swimming bath, then paddled gently back. "I did."

"Darling, there's your answer, then!"

Before she back-flipped like some overeager performing dolphin, Caenis added with rueful bitterness, "It's my own fault. When he promised that he would see me again, I forgot the free citizen's prerogative—not to bother to tell the truth to someone else's scabby slave!"

Then Veronica replied with the two things a girl needed her friend to say: "You're not scabby, you're lovely—and your Sabine friend's a fool!"

* * *

Going home to his mother was not the ideal escape. His mother had plans for him.

Flavius Vespasianus had been brought up in a family where women had a voice. The men went about their business in a perfectly capable manner, but they owed their position in society to the women they had married, and those women refused to be ciphers. For instance, though his brother had the same cognomen as their father, Vespasian was named after his mother. Vespasia Polla was not unique in receiving this sign of respect, though many women were denied it.

Vespasian's grandfather had married money; then his father allied himself to social status. While his father was away making a useful fortune as a banker in Helvetia, Vespasian had been brought up by his grandmother Tertulla on her large estate at Cosa on the northwest coast of Italy. Nowadays, with the family established nearer to Rome, his mother had assumed the influence that his grandmother had wielded during his happy childhood in Etruria.

His brother was doing well, as their mother pointed out. Sabinus, who had held the civic post of aedile the year Sejanus fell, had then progressed without difficulty to being elected as a magistrate two years later. By the time he was forty Sabinus would be hoping for a consulship. Meanwhile, Vespasian had reached twenty-five, the year he himself was eligible to stand as a senator, though so far he had done nothing about it. A second son, he had a more easygoing attitude than his brother. He did not want to follow Sabinus into a public career—though he had no clear idea what he hankered for instead. His mother was determined to overcome his restlessness.

She was winning. She could not make him run in the Senate elections the year that he should have, but soon afterward Vespasian let himself agree to return to Rome. Lucius Vitellius was prevailed upon to introduce him to high circles. This brought him into a tight-knit group of four notable families—the Vitellii, the Petronii, the Plautii, and the Pomponii—who all had long-standing ties of marriage and common interest and who were increasingly prominent in government. After Sejanus fell, their importance had increased. Their members were awarded a flock of consulships, and it was generally perceived that they owed at least some of their success to Antonia.

Only foolishness would have allowed a young man who had access to this powerful group to miss his opportunity. Unless he chose to run off to be a traveling lyre player, with a beard and battered sandals, Vespasian was bound to end up dancing attendance at the House of Livia.

"I could bar this upstart!" offered Tyrannus.

Tyrannus was the slave who screened Antonia's guests. It was a post she had virtually invented, for in most Roman homes free access to the householder for people wishing to pay their respects or to submit petitions was traditional, but most households were not headed by women. Modesty forbade such free access to the House of Livia.

"There is no reason to bar him." Caenis felt embarrassed to discover that everyone knew Vespasian had sought an entanglement with her—and that it had not happened.

"I'm on your side, Caenis."

"I do appreciate that. We need not punish him."

"Oh, well—if you put his nose out of joint!"

Hardly likely, thought Caenis, as she braced herself to keep calm during Vespasian's visit.

She refused to hide. He too had no intention of pretending they were strangers. In what amounted to a public situation, they were able to find a wry formality for dealing with one another. So they would pass in corridors as if by accident (though it happened quite often). They would treat one another to exaggerated politeness, inquiring after each other's health. They even stood in the atrium discussing the weather as if there had never been that fierce tug of attraction between them.

Yet remembrance of their old friendship never died either. Caenis liked to let Vespasian see important men respectfully seeking her advice about how to approach Antonia. In return, Vespasian would fold his strong arms in his toga and cheerfully wink at her.

When he was twenty-six his mother finally prevailed. He was elected to the Senate, assuming the title of quaestor, a junior finance official, then given a posting to Crete.

EIGHT

"Hello, Caenis." Her Sabine friend.

The odd thing was, even after so long she felt no more surprise when he turned up again wanting to see her than when he had first stayed away.

It was November. Huddled in her cloak because the Palace was freezing, Caenis drove herself to continue writing until the next period. Even then she looked up only with her eyes, the picture of a secretary too intent to interrupt.

"Senator!" She was shocked. Here was Vespasian's familiar burly figure, uneasily swaddled in formal clothes—brilliant white woollen cloth, with wide new purple bands.

She did know he had been elected to the Senate. Antonia sent her every day to copy the news from the Daily Gazette, which was posted up for the public in the Forum. Caenis had recited the latest list of postings to quaestor while Antonia, who realized the young knight from Reate was no longer an issue, ignored his name with tact.

"Ludicrous, isn't it?" He smiled.

"Is your voting tribe short of candidates?" Caenis jibed with mild offensiveness. Senators elect were entitled to sit on special benches and listen in to the judgments to gain experience; most provincials felt this entitlement was one a prudent man should be seen eagerly taking up. It was late morning; Vespasian had probably come here from the Curia. Bound for Crete, he could only have come to say good-bye.

He hovered just inside the door. This time he passed no comment on the decor, even though the damp plaster had been cleanly reinstated, while the new paint on the dados and frescos still smelled fresh. (Caenis had succeeded in subverting the prefect in charge.)

"You're going to throw me out," said Vespasian unhappily.

"I ought to," she replied with controlled candor. "I owe it to myself."

"Of course you do." At last she lifted her head. He said calmly, "Please don't."

Caenis retorted, "Naturally, sir, I abase myself like an oriental ambassador—on my face, on the floor, at your feet!"

She stayed at her table.

Vespasian quietly crossed the room, accepting her sarcasm, then piled his toga in untidy folds on his knees as he took a low stool in front of her. He watched her with those frank brown eyes; she tilted her head, watching him. She remembered the frown; the energy of his stare; his physical stillness—the dangerous feeling that this man was offering his confidence, and she might without warning find she was sharing hers.

"What can I do for you, senator?" she inquired, honoring him again with his new title, her tone more subdued than the question required.

Vespasian leaned his elbow on her table. The wobbly legs had been stabilized for her by a carpenter, who then polished up the whole piece with beeswax. Caenis folded her hands on the farthermost gleaming edge.

He was making no attempt to explain. First he had decided against seeing her again; well, she didn't want to see him. And now he had decided to come back: well!

He said, "I'm trying to get hold of some notes for a decent shorthand system. The ones in the libraries are not for taking away." This ploy was at least novel. Mad humor danced in his face as Caenis tried to resist laughing too. "When I go abroad, if I'm just trailing around after some self-opinionated governor who doesn't trust me to do anything, I may at least manage to learn taking notes properly."

His year as a quaestor would involve traveling out to one of the foreign provinces to be the governor's finance officer and deputy. Unless they happened to have worked together before and had built up a friendship, governors and their quaestors often despised each other. In any case, she imagined Vespasian might make a prickly subordinate.

Delving into the conical basket in which she carried her equipment to and fro, Caenis produced her own battered reference sheets. She had been taught shorthand and several kinds of ciphering long ago. "This is a list of symbols I once made for myself. If you can read my scribble, take it, please."

When taking notes for her own purposes she wrote so quickly her handwriting could be eccentric, but as he glanced through, he nodded. "Thanks." He was just like her; set a document in his hand, and he was instantly devouring it.

While he was still reading she forced herself to say, "I see the Senate has published next year's postings."

"I've drawn Cyrenaica and Crete."

"Crete will be pleasant. . . . When do you leave?"

"Tomorrow." Immediately he looked up. "Sailing when the seas are closed is traditionally the first test in the job. Sorry. I should have come before this. Stupid!" he added tersely.

Caenis did not reply.

The awkward low seat finally got the better of him. He stood up, stretching, though not yet ready to go. He began to pace about the room.

"I see you had the place cleaned up."

"How did you know it was me?" she demanded. Vespasian let out a little laugh. Caenis blushed. "Well, I finally nudged the prefect of works."

He had been inspecting the new fresco. The painters had wanted to do a gladiatorial scene; painters always did. Instead Caenis had insisted on a soothing panorama of gardens, like the one in Livia's House: cranky trellises laden with creepers in whose shade three-legged herons pecked fruit from funereal urns amid unlikely combinations of flowers.

"What does nudging entail?" Vespasian cracked, looking back over his hefty shoulder with a contempt that startled her.

"Oh—the usual!" When caught off guard Caenis could be a belligerent tease. She glanced down, then up again through her eyelashes. Veronica imbued this gesture with resonant sexuality; Caenis got an eyelash in one eye. "I just took an interest in his work."

Vespasian stared.

To soothe him, while she fiddled with the eyelash she commented that Antonia was unlikely to keep this office once Tiberius either died or came home to Rome. It was years since he decamped to Capri. There he now owned a dozen villas, plus a series of grottoes and bowers that provided a pretty playground for acting out orgiastic fantasies—or so it was said. Some of the terrible stories were probably true.

Sometimes the Emperor did make journeys to mainland Italy and circled Rome like a wary crab, informing the Senate that he intended to visit and yet then fleeing back to his hideaway with the headlong panic of a haunted man. Astrologers had decided that the hour of his leaving Rome had been so inauspicious that returning might be fatal. Caenis scoffed at the idea, but Vespasian folded his arms over his glossy new toga and said, "Not if he really believes the prophecy."

"That I accept," Caenis agreed. "He'd be quite likely to collapse if he heard a rat in the hypocaust, or a spider ran over his foot. You know, Antonia believes that is what happened to her son in Syria."

"Germanicus? I thought he was poisoned."

"He was; but he might have withstood it better if witches had not filled his house with fossils, and feathery monsters, and dead babies under the floorboards, until they frightened him to death." She was philosophical about Tiberius. "So long as the creatures who parade for the Emperor's perversions volunteer, let him stay on his island."

"Is it all true?" Eyes bright, Vespasian had a respectable man's shameless curiosity about the Emperor's fusty sexual habits.

"Worse."

Disturbed, he saw the dismal memories clouding Caenis' face.

She braced herself to cope. She had never expressed her views on Tiberius; it had never been safe. Yet in Vespasian she placed absolute trust. To him she could speak. "I was a child when he last lived here, but those years were very dark. His household existed in dread. He was most intrigued by persuading the aristocracy to commit obscenities, but no slave carried him a cup of wine or was sent to fasten his shoe without the risk of being stripped and subjected to indecency—either by him or the men and women who surrounded him. No one could save you if you attracted attention. Childhood was no protection. Ordinary rape was a kindness compared with the alternatives."

In the schoolroom she herself had been relatively safe. Even so, as a teenager she had always carried her stylus knife so if she ever met trouble she could stab herself and perhaps take one of the Emperor's catamites with her. One of her friends had died of suffocation and shock during an ugly ordeal in the Emperor's underground entertainment room. Caenis would not repeat the details.

Vespasian walked slowly back to where she sat. Leering curiosity had given way to middle-class distaste. His face remained neutral, though Caenis sensed the concealed throb of anger. "Not you, I hope?"

"No," she reassured him somberly, with all the color bleached from her own voice. Simply talking to him had healed her bad memories. "Not me."

She noticed a small nerve jerk in his cheek.

He sat down again. They changed the subject.

They spoke of Crete. They discussed the problems of running a province that was divided between a Mediterranean island and a tract of North Africa; the main advantage for the quaestor was that he could always send his governor to bumble around the other half of the territory while he enjoyed himself.

They spoke of Vespasian's mother. "Is she fabulously pleased with you now?"

"Afraid so!"

They had become confederates. They were talking like two outsiders from society. They talked for the months they had already missed and the period of Vespasian's coming tour; openly and easily, sharing rudeness and laughter, discovery and surprise; until lunchtime, through lunchtime, and into the afternoon. They talked until they were tired.

Then they sat, two friendly companions just leaning their chins on their hands.

There were no sounds of habitation. It was so quiet, they could hear the creak of walls contracting in the winter chill and birdsong—a thrush, perhaps—from a far-off deserted park.

"Oh gods, Caenis; this is no good." He flung out his arm across her table, stretching his hand toward her. "Come here!"

"No!" Caenis exclaimed. She shrank back from him instinctively.

Their eyes locked. His hand dropped. He sighed; so did she.

"All right. I'm sorry."

"You're going away!" she cried.

They sat in silence again, but their encounter had brought them so close, Caenis suddenly confessed with desperate clarity, "I am afraid of what I feel."

She should never have done it. She saw his face set. Men hated any admission of emotion. Men were terrified of the truth.

Not this one.

"So am I," he acknowledged. "But there seems nothing to gain by ignoring it." Fiddling with her sticks of sealing wax, he kept his tone deliberately level. "Are you still asking me to leave you alone?"

"I should," Caenis returned carefully, as she too found herself staring at the edge of the table. "You know I am not."

Though he wanted to disguise it, his gratitude was unmistakable. They both looked up again. Nothing had happened, yet everything had changed. They both smiled a little at their shared sense of helplessness.

Flavius Vespasianus was not a man anyone would expect to hold this kind of conversation. To Caenis he seemed too mature, too good-humored, too cynical to be touched by internal conflict or uncertainty. Yet he was stubbornly himself.

"Hmm! I'm going away," he agreed with a murmur of regret. "What a shame!"

After another pause he threw back his heavy head, his eyes on her all the time. "Oh, lass; I ought to leave you!"

"You must. I need to do my work."

"I don't want to." Yet he was already standing. They persuaded one another into sense; they always would.

Caenis had to finish correcting the copyists' work. She clambered to her feet and came around politely to take her visitor to the door. It was the first time she felt easy standing so near to him. Before he lifted the latch he turned back to her, smiling as he warned, "I'm going away—but I shall be coming back!"

Expecting him to make some more determined move, she was startled when he carefully clasped both her hands in his while he stood, looking at her; making her look at him; keeping her close. Any other man gazing at her so intently would have made some declaration. Not Vespasian. It was illegal and impossible; Caenis accepted that he never would.

Instead, just before he released her he leaned forward and kissed her, very lightly, on the cheek. It was not a lover's kiss. Nor was this formal social statement something a slavegirl would ever expect to receive from a young man of senatorial rank. This was how he must salute his mother and grandmother; how a man of his class would greet a daughter, a sister, or a wife: It was the gesture, between equals, of genuine affection and respect.

PART TWO

ANTONIA CAENIS

When the Caesars were Tiberius and Caligula

NINE

A windswept day in July. A senator, not yet thirty, bronzed from provincial service but today swaddled against the unseasonable gusts in a long brown hooded cloak with a heavy nap, walked into the Imperial Palace. He left his meager escort of slaves at the entrance, then proceeded alone. His pace slowed, more with reminiscence than uncertainty.

Tiberius still lived on Capri. There was, however, an official correspondence bureau here where the young senator conducted some perfunctory business in connection with his end-of-tour report. The secretary in charge, a Greek freedman called Glaucus, dealt with him restlessly; he found quaestors' financial statements thin on detail, loosely written, lackadaisical in style.

"You've missed your date badly with this."

"Sorry. The new man for Crete was held up by wind and weather. I had to wait out there. Not a lot I could do about that." His mildness was even more upsetting than the usual insolence.

Bitterly the secretary unraveled the report. By the stylish standards of this bureau it would be only a draft; Glaucus would work it over furiously before it was copied for the Emperor and filed. Most of the bored young sprats with whom he was forced to deal would never dream of disappointing his lifetime sense of outrage by producing anything remotely adequate. They were intensely competitive, yet had no idea of disciplined hard work.

This one seemed to have grasped the point. If anything, it made Glaucus more venomous. He asked his trick question: Where was the breakdown of expenditure on entertaining distinguished visitors?

"Appendix at the end."

On rare occasions Glaucus was compelled to endure the prospect of a sprat who looked certain to go far.

* * *

Once he was replaced from his debriefing, the ex-quaestor turned deeper into the Palace interior. Strolling through the poorly swept corridors, he passed faded staterooms long commandeered as store-rooms. He took time to reorient himself, but was soon nosing at that measured pace along a familiar route. He found the door he remembered. He knocked slightly; listened; his face cleared in anticipation; he went in.

Caenis was not there.

* * *

Everything had subtly changed. He had expected improvements (more of her "nudging"), yet still felt bemused. The light was muffled by a fug from two charcoal braziers; at last her room was warm. Opposite the door there now reposed a respectable table on marble feet, empty except for a bronze candelabrum in the form of a slim nymph with a look of disheveled surprise.

There were two places on one side of the room; at each sat a neat young female scribe. Their training must be tiptop, and their supervisor obviously kept a strong grip even when she was out. These girls were polite, wary, helpful, nicely spoken little things. They asked his name, though he did not tell them; then they repeated the question, though he still pretended to be deaf. Caenis would be furious with them for letting him get away with it.

He had only just missed her. Her girls, who were called Phania and Melpomene, thought she was dropping in at the Library of Octavia on her way home for lunch with Antonia; afterward her nap, of course (Oh, of course!), then probably to the baths to meet her friend. Phania and Melpomene related all this, without giggling, even though they realized that this must be the man who wrote to Caenis from Crete. Hoping to discover secrets, they offered to take a message; they offered to let him leave a note. He thanked them, but declined both offers, and he was still frowning as he collected his escort and left.

* * *

Rome had its quiet places.

He stepped from the pushing turmoil of the street into one of the dusty gardens that were open to the public, where the street traders' cries immediately dropped to a distant background hum as if a giant door curtain had just swung closed across the garden gate. Even in Rome a man could stand and think.

Then, forcing a path along the Via Triumphalis—the same way he had once strolled to the Theater of Balbus with Caenis at his heels—he came to the great open spaces of the Ninth District, where no one was allowed to live except the caretakers of the public buildings and the priests at the temples and monuments. Plenty of people came this way, but once past the elegant Theater of Marcellus this was another area where the noise dimmed and the pace of daily life pleasantly slowed. On the Field of Mars, returning armies traditionally rested and polished up their trophies before their triumphal entry into Rome. The princes of the Empire and their chief men had established their memorial buildings here: the Theater of Pompey, the Baths of Agrippa, the Pantheon, and the Mausoleum of Augustus.

Here too, in a muted corner of the city between that curve in the river and the dominating double heights of Capitol Hill, stood a series of monumental enclosures, the Porticoes. Cool marble colonnades surrounded squares containing temples or planted groves, their internal walls adorned with magnificent frescoes and their quiet cloisters filled with two centuries of booty from Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. First on the right was the Portico of Octavia, produced by Augustus in honor of his sister; within its Corinthian columns he had deposited half the workshop of the sculptors Pasiteles and Dionysius, plus some of the finest antiques a civilized collector ever managed to loot, including a Venus and a Cupid of Praxiteles. It contained temples to Jupiter and Juno, and schools. This Portico also boasted a superbly endowed public library.

The searcher rested, his feet upon crisply frosted grass, his face upturned to the open sky, creamy as papyrus with the faint threat of rain. He gazed absently at Lysippus' slender group of Alexander and his generals conferring before the Battle of Granicus. Then once again he left his slaves outside, some squatting on their haunches and others lounging out of the wind beside the mighty columns, staring at passers-by.

The reading room was huge: thousands of manuscript rolls set into the walls like doves in a columbarium, guarded by humorless busts of safely dead historians and poets. He noticed a roped-off area where a major reorganization was in hand. Caenis could well be involved with this; she was the sort of girl anybody would ask to help.

He invented an excuse to potter about, enlisting advice from the custodian of maps. "Granicus, sir? Is that somewhere near the Bosphorus? No, here we are—it's on the Sea of Marmora."

"Thanks. Stupid of me. Must have plodded through Alexander's campaigns often enough at school."

A familiar shape on a mapskin arrested him. Caenis had called the island a scrawny goose braised in a swordfish pot: "Somebody interested in Crete?"

"Just been returned, sir." The custodian looked sheepish. "We don't normally loan out the maps."

"Nudged into it, eh?" The custodian pretended not to understand him. "What's that racket over there?"

"Overhauling the main catalogue, sir; quite a task. A lady who is helping reminded us about the two hundred thousand volumes Mark Antony lifted from the Library at Pergamum. Some poor dog must have recorded those! She said, did we realize that Cleopatra was just a girl who liked to curl up with a good read. . . ." He subsided into giggles.

After a worrying pause the senator abruptly grinned too, transfiguring his face. "Sounds like Caenis!" He could hear her voice in his head, deceptive and crisp, as she made the daft comment. "Is she here?"

"Not now."

"Ah."

Another pause.

Eighteen months abroad was nothing to a man who had already lived away from home, doing his military service at a much younger, more impressionable age. Who could say what eighteen months might bring to an ambitious female slave?

He had expected Caenis to make her way. Yet there seemed an odd discrepancy today. He had marked her as a worker. Now she seemed to rely on others, while she merely went flitting from place to place, never needing to lift her pen; for a slave she was taking horribly public risks.

"Speaking of Caenis—I have something of hers I borrowed."

"You could drop in on her at Antonia's house, sir. You might be offered lunch!"

A much longer pause: Antonia's house? Drop in? Lunch?

On rare occasions elderly citizens grew so incapable of managing their own affairs that unscrupulous slaves took over their property and ruled like monarchs in their homes, while the senile patrons were locked away in little rooms and starved. . . . Still, Antonia had family to protect her interests. Her son Claudius, though kept from public life, was an author and antiquarian—perfectly fit to supervise if ever his mother's capacities failed. And not Caenis, surely? Caenis could not be capable of abusing an old woman.

"Thanks!" the senator contented himself with saying sternly in reply.

He went home. He had lunch by himself.

* * *

There were two hundred public bathhouses in Rome. Fortunately, Phania and Melpomene had mentioned which one Caenis used.

He was struggling down the Clivus Tuscus from the main Roman Forum, dragging his tired train of attendants like a magpie's unwieldy tail, when Cornelius Capito came out of the bookshop on the corner, hailed him, and tagged along. By then the baths were in sight, so he stopped to converse as a man was supposed to do. A detachment of Guards came tramping straight up the center of the road, grinding down anyone who meandered in their path; as the grumbling crowds pressed back into the gutters, Vespasian and Capito moved under the awning of a wineshop. Vespasian propped himself on the counter, with its inset jars of red and white beverages; he paid for warmed measures for his acquaintance and himself, then spun a coin to the captain of his slaves so they too ordered a round, glancing at him sideways, unable to believe their luck.

Vespasian's slaves knew now that there was a woman on his mind. They were still not sure if it was any particular one.

Capito gossiped happily of libel actions, charioteers, trade, the elections, his mother-in-law, his gambling debts, his barber's new Gallic pomades. A companion rarely had to answer him; he just liked a body there to spare him the ignominy of talking to himself. . . .

There were two young women standing on the bathhouse steps.

"What's up?" Capito demanded, when his companion's cursory attention dried up altogether. He bore no malice; he was only surprised that Vespasian had troubled himself to loiter so long. The man was affable, but not renowned for chat.

"Wonder if I know that girl?"

Capito came to his shoulder.

One was a blonde, flimsily wrapped in a riveting crimson robe, with parcels spilling around her feet. She was exquisite, and no doubt exquisitely expensive. Cataracts of silver tumbled from her ears, flashing like cymbals in an amphitheater parade; filigree ropes wound over her dramatic chest. She remained barefaced and bareheaded, ignoring passers-by while the bead-sellers, the augurs' bowl boys, the plasterers, pastry chefs, and pensioned-off centurions all longingly stared at her.

"It's Veronica," announced Capito. At once a number of necks craned dangerously among their slaves. "Much sought after, and amenable to being sought! Want an introduction?"

The other debated the offer as long as was polite. His slaves watched him curiously, keen for him to try his luck. They knew that when he chose he never went short. They also knew that he reckoned never to pay.

"Not my type." He stroked his chin. Capito laughed.

Even from halfway down the street, Veronica's companion looked wondrously dignified.

The second girl—hardly a girl now—was wound several times in modest layers of cloth, wrapped around her body and over her head until her shape was completely disguised and her face invisible. Even so, that fine way she stood was all her own. Capito had said nothing about her. Nor did Vespasian. "Thanks, Capito."

With a nod to his escort, he left everyone behind and began to work nearer up the street.

He was waiting for the women to separate, but despite the poor weather they were dawdling on the steps. He stopped, sidestepping under the portico of a butcher's shop, pretending to eye a rack of Spanish hams.

At last: Veronica was being collected by a double sedan chair; behind its opaque talc windows lurked a shadowy figure, no doubt some well-gilded crab. She scrambled aboard. The other woman patiently helped hand in the parcels, then leaned forward to allow herself to be kissed good-bye. As she straightened, her mantle fell back from her head. It was definitely Caenis.

She looked different.

This Caenis had parted her hair in the middle, twisted back interesting loops above her ears with glinting combs, then pinned up all the rest in fantastic braids. With a man's eccentricity he wondered first of all why?—before he realized from the smart, poised, elegant set of her head exactly why: That was how Caenis had been born to look. The real question was: Who paid for her hairdresser?

There was something wrong with her face. The defiant, demon-haunted look had been sharpened up with cosmetics—he could soon get used to that—and there was something else. Caenis had a strong face with a clear expression. He remembered the expression perfectly: the painful mixture of striving and mistrust. It had gone. Something had happened to her. Somebody had changed her. This Caenis looked strangely serene.

She had kept her knack of standing perfectly straight and still. She was trying to lift her mantle again, but blusters of wind constantly snatched the edge from her hand. Vespasian arrived near enough to glimpse coral beads in her ears. What bastard gave her those?

Then something astounding happened.

Caenis turned suddenly, calling to a wizened scrap who skipped out from a pillar with the thong of an oil flask wrapped around her wrist. It almost looked as if she had her own slave, though that should be impossible. A discreet litter drew up; Caenis and her companion hurried in, and at once the steps were folded away, the half-door shut for them and curtains impenetrably pulled.

As Vespasian sprang forward to roar out her name, an unusually solid footman swung smack into his path.

"Now, sir!"

Rome had turned upside down.

"I want a word with that woman—" The chair was already moving off.

"Not that one, sir! Try the racetrack," advised the footman frankly, "or the Temple of Isis. Plenty of nice girls about."

"Thanks!" Vespasian observed civilly, though the girls at the racetrack were definitely not nice and the delicate creatures at the Temple of Isis were quite often not even girls. He let his cloak fall open so it was obvious he was wearing full senatorial fig. "Don't I recognize your passenger?"

"I doubt it!" scoffed the footman, perfectly indifferent to anything less than a consular commander strung around with medals from at least three triumphal campaigns. But he condescended to let a junior senator grease his palm with half a denarius. "That's Caenis," he admitted discreetly.

"Antonia's slave?"

"No, sir," protested the footman, with a smirk that very clearly said, Back off, laddio; she's out of your class! "Antonia's freedwoman!"

There was only one solution now: Laddio backed off; scowled bleakly; and strode home to write Antonia's freedwoman a groveling note.

TEN

Vespasian was brief:

O Lady! A rogue from Crete would very much like to see you!

T.F.V.

He had written to her before.

The letters Vespasian wrote to her from abroad had not been embarrassing effusions. Caenis knew a great deal about love letters, from scribing them for other people. She had been deeply relieved when her own correspondent did not eulogize her as the soul of his heart and the heart of his soul, nor describe her divine eyes as entirely the wrong color, nor spend half a page announcing in gynecological detail the intimacies she could expect upon his return. Juno be praised, he never exclaimed that she was just like his mother. Instead he possessed the gift of apt quotation and a fine eye for the absurd. He told her interesting facts about his province and rude anecdotes about the people with whom he dealt. Years later, when he had earned a wide reputation as a joker, Caenis still thought that none of Vespasian's reported wit was so wickedly funny as the letters that he had written to her as a young man from Crete.

She had expected him to practice his shorthand. In fact, since she had given him her ciphering notes too, he used code. At the back of her reference sheets he had found a system the teenaged Caenis once invented herself: "My Code: By Caenis" was excellent; without the key, it took Caenis herself three weeks to unravel Vespasian's first letter, even though she had once been the star of her cipher class.

She took a long time to reply. Caenis had never written a letter for herself. Vespasian's second arrived before she had answered his first. Yet by the middle of his tour she too had found her style and her length; she settled into speaking directly with the candor that he obviously liked, and learned to enjoy herself. Enjoying herself was almost certainly a mistake, but she no longer cared.

* * *

For reasons she could not explain, Caenis had never mentioned to him that she had gained her freedom.

That year a sense of fatality had afflicted her mistress, Antonia. She was bound to feel the loneliness of a woman whose contemporaries had all gone, many in grim circumstances, which as an elderly lady she remembered more distinctly than her breakfast that morning. She was smitten by an urge to set things in order.

Discussing with Caenis the library that bore Octavia's name, for the first time she had reminisced about her mother. Abandoned by Mark Antony, Octavia had brought up single-handedly not only their own children, but first Antony's by his stormy marriage to Fulvia and, eventually, even his children with Cleopatra. "Not an easy woman, my mother," Antonia had admitted. "Impossible not to admire her—I am sure even my father always did that—but she often seemed reproachful and difficult to like."

This was an intriguing glimpse of the legendary, much-loved sister of Augustus, so famous for her goodness. Caenis ventured curiously, "Do you think if your mother had been less formidable, Mark Antony might have come back from Egypt?"

"Oh no!" Antonia was definite. "Losing a man to a woman is one thing—giving him up to politics is final."

On her birthday Antonia had freed several of her slaves who deserved retirement. Pallas was among them, rewarded by freedom and a large estate in Egypt for his good service with the letter about Sejanus. Diadumenus, the Chief Secretary, took his deserved retirement; Caenis was to be promoted. Antonia had asked her to prepare the manumission documents, which at last gave her the opportunity to speak on her own behalf: "Madam, you know I have been saving since before I came to you. I want to ask to buy my freedom."

Immediately there was a sense of strain.

She had known Antonia would not like it. Her patroness expected to plan her slaves' lives for them; in the Palace there had been much less scope for advancement, but at least matters of business could be broached without irritating anybody else. She watched the old lady trying to be tolerant.

"That will be unnecessary." Reluctantly Antonia explained that Caenis was to be freed one day under her will.

"Madam, I am grateful, but I should hardly enjoy looking forward to your death."

"Oh, I don't enjoy it myself! Now be serious; I cannot let you waste your money."

Caenis sat still. She would pay for her freedom if she had to, but it would take all her resources. She would have nothing at all to live on afterward. She had a bitter grasp of financial needs. Yet she wanted to be free. She had saved what she knew to be a good secretary's price; she was desperate to realize her ambition now. So many disasters might intervene otherwise. A will could be altered; Antonia's heirs might not honor it; the Senate might change the law. Now that citizenship stood within her grasp through her own enterprise, Caenis could not bear to wait.

Antonia understood the situation. A secretary might not command the outrageous price of a handsome driver or a sloe-eyed dancing girl, but Caenis, trained in the imperial school and with such good Greek, was still a prize. The fact that she managed to save her worth indicated strong willpower. Even with the offer of acquiring her freedom for nothing eventually, she would still be prepared for hardship in order to gain it now.

"You have to be thirty years old." Caenis felt younger, but since she did not know her age she bluffed it out. Antonia pursed her mouth, yet let that issue drop. "You are forcing my hand, Caenis!"

Caenis made no reply. There was a long, not entirely amicable silence.

Antonia asked stiffly, "Do you want to get married?" Caenis shuddered. "Do you wish to set up in some business? Run a salon? Open a shop?" Caenis laughed. Antonia breathed; the rings on her gnarled fingers flashed restlessly. "Would you leave me?"

"Not if you would let me stay."

Antonia knew she was beaten.

She sighed. "Don't expect too much," she warned. "A slave is sheltered; a free woman faces more responsibilities than you may realize."

Although Caenis was too sensitive to argue, she lifted her head; she saw Antonia close her eyes momentarily, with a faint smile. They both knew Caenis would glide into responsibility fearlessly. She was ready to be her own woman. To hold her back would condemn her. Anyone who cared for her must sympathize.

"Perhaps you will be good enough," the lady Antonia instructed her, with petulant formality, "to prepare for me another of these documents." Caenis knew her well enough to wait. "You will not be asked to buy your citizenship. Caenis, you are stubborn and independent—but, my dear, this was to be my gift to you and I refuse to forgo that pleasure!"

* * *

So it was now to a distinguished imperial freedwoman that Vespasian had to dispatch his least ruffianly slave. Not only was Antonia's house the highest-ranking private home in Rome; by virtue of their position close to the imperial family, her freedwoman possessed more clout than any tax collector's son. Vespasian would not consider visiting the House of Livia without his own patron, Lucius Vitellius, and he felt wary of making a personal approach to Caenis before he knew how she would react. He was not entirely certain his scab-kneed lad would be admitted.

He was right that here they had no WELCOME sign set into their scrubbed mosaic floor. However, letters addressed to Caenis were always promptly delivered, and Vespasian's slave was permitted to wait for her reply. At ease in her long chair in one of the tasteful reception rooms, with her own slavegirl in attendance for decency's sake, Caenis smiled a little as she dictated it to a thin Greek scribe.

So pleasant to hear from you; so kind of you to remember me. You may visit me here at any time, tomorrow perhaps if you wish. I should very much like to see you!

A.C.

Vespasian decided not to wait until tomorrow.

ELEVEN

The House of Livia, Antonia's house, like any substantial residence in Rome turned inward on courtyards full of quiet sunlight and the soothing splash of fountains. Blank walls faced outward, even though this dwelling possessed the added seclusion of a position on the Palatine. Everything was designed to eliminate the bustle of exterior crowds and to provide, even within the capital, a family haven of strict privacy and peace. The architects had not reckoned with the havoc that the mad Julio-Claudian family could cause in any haven, but for once the defect was not the architects' fault.

There was one courtyard garden, shaded in summer by a fig tree and overhead roses, surrounded by a colonnade. Nobody went there much nowadays. The wicker chairs and folding tables were stored on one side, together with terra-cotta urns of tender bulbs that had been brought under the roof for shelter. Entranced by a neglected sprawl of jasmine, Caenis had made this her private domain. It was a faintly dusty, comfortable place, kept private from formal visitors. She liked to lounge there even late in the day, when the palest sunshine lancing down low over the main pantiles soon made it surprisingly warm. Sometimes after dinner, when Antonia retired early to bed, Caenis sat there in silence in the dark.

Her little slave, a child who lacked any susceptibility to the romance of private thought, usually brought her a bowl of pistachios and a proper table lamp.

* * *

"Hello, Caenis."

There was a lamp being brought but no nuts, and it was not her little slave.

"Who is it?" she gurgled foolishly. Pointless; no one else spoke her name with the solemnity of a religious address. Vespasian's substantial shadow unraveled and shrank down and up the folding doors that led out from the house. "Oh! I had better call my girl."

"You had better not," he retorted calmly. "I've just given her a copper to keep out of the way."

Reaching her, he held aloft his pottery lamp: the same sunny disposition, the same frowning face. Gazing back, where she reclined among cushions, wrapped in a deep-blue robe, Caenis felt herself breaking into a slow, tranquil grin to welcome him.

"Antonia Caenis; Caenis Antonia!" He pronounced it in full as a deliberate compliment, acknowledging her new right to be named after her patroness: that bad-tempered slavey he had first met with the pan of hot sausage, forever now allied to the noble families of Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony.

"Just Caenis." She shrugged. He barked with mirth; she would never change.

He set his lamp on a plinth. "An imperial freedwoman," he marveled. "Smiling on a veranda under the stars." He sat on the edge of a pillar base, holding his head ruefully between his hands. "O elegant and influential young lady! Far, far above a poor provincial bumpkin's reach."

"Never," Caenis told him softly. The dim lamplight wavered on that wonderfully jovial face, so the shadow of his nose hooked in a mad slant over one cheek, while the outline of his chin lapped wildly down into the hollow of his throat.

"Never? Oh, I think in many ways you always were. . . ." She felt like a flattered queen. He said, shining with joy for her, "You look as if your heart could burst with pride. You should have told me you had been made up—I suppose you know I've followed you about all day. I won't tell you the things I was starting to imagine when I saw how you were queening it. Fortunately the Saepta Julia shuts up shop quite late."

The Saepta Julia was the market for jewelry and antiques; Caenis reckoned it was not one of Vespasian's customary haunts. "I thought the Saepta was where a gentleman goes when he wants to waste a great deal of money."

"Spend a lot, anyway," remarked Vespasian lightly. "There you are. With my congratulations. Don't get excited; you can't eat it." Withdrawing his right hand from the fold of his toga, he dropped a small but heavy package into her lap. It was tied with the kind of sleek ribbon that stated that the contents had been purchased at hideous cost.

Deeply troubled, Caenis shook her head. "My word, this does look like a bribe, senator!"

"Sadly for me, I know you can't be bought. Go on."

"What is it?" She was as stubborn as ever.

"New shackles." He waited for her to look. It was a good gold bangle, in strikingly elegant taste, and of first-quality gold. "Since you like to sit in the dark," he said, "I shall have to tell you I had your name engraved inside—so you can't pawn it, and neither can you take it back. Your name, and also," he added bravely, "mine."

There was a very slight pause.

"It's lovely. . . . You can't afford it," she protested. "You know you can't."

"No. A polite girl," Vespasian observed, "would try it on." Caenis obediently did so.

That pillar base was striking up cold through his clothes; he stood up. For a bad moment she thought he was already taking his leave.

"Titus, thank you!"

He was visibly surprised. "You accept my gift?"

"Certainly."

They both knew that with her obstinate streak she might not intend accepting anything else; she wondered if his spirits sank. Without exactly flirting, she found herself enjoying her sense of command.

As she admired the bangle, Caenis lifted her feet from the floor. She was sitting in a silly summer chair that hung like a cradle from a frame. Now she automatically stretched her toes and swung; when she slowed, Vespasian lent a helping hand.

"Welcome home!" she exclaimed belatedly, looking up. "Thank you for writing to me; I enjoyed your letters."

"Thank you too."

"My last to you has probably gone astray."

Nothing ruffled him. "Probably lie in the Cretan quaestors' work box for the next forty years, filed under ‘Too Difficult.' . . . Glad to see me back?"

"Mmm!" The chair spun slightly, so her robe brushed against him before he steadied the basketwork, then pushed the contraption straight again. Lulled by the methodical rhythm of the swing, Caenis murmured, "I have heard that the girls in Crete are famously attractive."

"The girls in Crete," returned Vespasian gravely, "are ravishing. But their fathers are famously fierce."

"I expect people manage."

"I believe people do." He pushed her chair slightly harder than before. "Of course you always get the odd romantic who prefers to save up his initiative for some clever brown eyes he left behind at home. . . . Antonia Caenis," he mused, perhaps changing the subject. "Caenis, in the dark with her shoes off—lovely feet!—Caenis, in a hanging chair. Very rash, young lady, some bad man may tip you out!"

And Vespasian tipped her out himself.

* * *

Her heart stopped.

He caught her, as he meant to do, with one strong arm around her, while the other held back the chair and saved it from banging into her. He brought her close against him, as she immediately realized he would. He turned her into the tiny pool of lamplight so he could search her face while she could see the determination lighting his. As she came into his arms it felt as natural and secure as she had always known it would.

She squealed once, then grew still. "Titus—"

"Caenis—"

They both knew what was going to happen next. They knew Caenis wanted it as much as he.

In the second when she passed from the cold atmosphere of the terrace into the warmth of his embrace she shivered, because she was startled, yet there was never any doubt. She had long ago made her choice. Against his chest she was conscious of his struggle to control his breath; her back arched slightly under the pressure of his arm; she caught his face between both hands, and they moved together into an unfaltering kiss. At her eager response she heard his groan of relief, then afterward as her cheek pressed his, he felt her own shuddering sigh.

"Come to bed with me, Caenis. Oh—" Unable even to wait for her reply, he kissed her again, at demanding length. "Convinced?"

Caenis, who even now did not smile easily, smiled at Vespasian. "Convinced!"

Then he astonished her again; he suddenly held her, not in the great wrestler's hug she expected, but as tenderly as some ceramic almost too delicate to touch, while he muttered against the complicated pleating of her hair. "Oh, Antonia Caenis. . . . Welcome to freedom—and welcome to me!" Then she knew this was a truly sentimental man. She put it from her mind. "Is there somewhere we can go?" He could have taken her then and there, in the dark, among the stored furniture and tubs of desiccated flowers; he was ready, and her need was as urgent as his.

But Caenis possessed a modest comfortable room where, as a freedwoman, she was entitled to entertain her friends. She was proud of her achievements; she took him there.

* * *

It was as she had always expected. This man was her other half. The bungled conjunctions in her previous experience were swept from her memory. The unwelcome clutches that had once seemed to be her only future could be angrily rebuffed. She would never again fall prey to incongruous hangers-on. She need never be coerced by her own insecurity. Now she knew everything. She had found the joy she had tried so hard to believe in.

They were perfectly at ease. They had already established a companionship that ran deep and true. Each took, each gave, with overwhelming honesty, openness, and delight.

When at the end Vespasian rolled over and lay on his back, he covered with one great hand deep brown eyes that were no longer so steady. "Oh, lass!"

Caenis was laughing as she rested her head upon his hammering heart, one arm outflung across his body to the edge of the bed. "Oh yes!"

She felt his breathing start to settle, but he was not asleep, for after a time he drew the coverlet around her and gathered her close. When he spoke his voice sounded subdued, as if he had somehow been caught off guard. "A fine pair, you and I."

Caenis found and kissed his hand. After a moment she confessed, "I wish you had not given me your present."

"Mmm?"

"I did not want a bribe."

By then he was shaking with laughter. "You deserve a present. And you're well worth a bribe! . . . I was certain it would make you say no." His arm tightened around her; his voice steadied. "I won't be shaken off now."

"What?"

"Don't try to send me away."

He knew her at least as well as she knew herself, for that was of course what Caenis had intended to do.

"No," she told him gently, and settled against his shoulder as if for sleep, so he probably assumed his challenge had persuaded her. "While you want me, I shall never do that."

Her intention had been overturned. Quite simply there was no longer any choice. She would not send Vespasian away, because she could not.

Nor could she sleep. She lay with a throbbing brain as she buckled together her resources to cope with the commitment she had made. Impossible to tell whether Vespasian realized how she had withdrawn into herself; she hoped not, for she did not want him to wonder why. There was nothing to be done about it, nothing she even wanted to do. But Caenis recognized now, now when it was far too late, the mistake she had made: She had entered into a contract whose conditions were the exchange of friendship and pleasure on terms that should be utterly businesslike.

And she had given this terrible contract to a man with whom she was inescapably in love.

TWELVE

There was a way around the difficulty. It was perfectly simple: Caenis would make sure Vespasian never knew.

She was his mistress for two years. To be attached to a young senator was useful to her and helpful to him. He took her where a woman without family could not otherwise go, while she introduced him to people a man so obscure might not otherwise meet. The situation never deteriorated into the one-sided disaster it could so easily become. Caenis made up her mind that she could either suffer—and suffer very deeply—or accept for however short a time what could be the most joyful experience of her life. So she tried to stay sweet-tempered, as no doubt he did too, and they were the firmest of friends.

They settled into a tranquil routine. Each was considerate of the other's private life; each gladly set aside time for them to be together. Neither was selfish or quarrelsome. Quiet conversation walking in a garden or sitting in some congenial room meant as much to them as the times they spent in bed. So far as possible they were open about their relationship, though discreet. Neither thought it clever to shock. Whenever they could they went to the theater or listened to speeches; occasionally they dined with sympathetic friends. People liked them; they were an undemanding, easygoing pair. A world of casual couplings and cynical self-interest was perhaps intrigued by the warmth of their steady affection. It never became scandalous.

* * *

Caenis tried to explain to Veronica, but with little success. Veronica dismissed Vespasian as a disastrous unknown. Although Caenis had tried to live by a strict code (men she liked were few enough; best not sleep with men she liked), Veronica's code was even stricter: best not to like men at all.

Quite soon after Vespasian came home from Crete, Caenis met her girl friend, buying garlands on the Sacred Way. Veronica, who was still a slave, did have official duties, though she somehow arranged they should be as light as possible. Some people manage to establish that their contribution at work is merely to move around being pleasant; it is understood that no more is to be expected of them, and it would be pointless to chastise them for being as they are.

Veronica was not foolish. She never forgot she might one day be challenged. She was the slave who ordered the wreaths for the banquets the absent Emperor never gave. So she made sure she was seen from time to time with abundant armfuls of flowers.

It was early morning, the light already bright today as the florists set out their carts and trays, and refreshed their blooms in the public fountains. Men of all ranks were hurrying through the streets to visit their patrons and claim their daily dole—a basket of bread or a small gift of cash—in return for obsequiously paying their respects. There was a scent of new-baked loaves. Tired women draped bedclothes over balconies to air or swilled water across the lava pavements to wash away the rubbish and trickled stains that were the gifts of the previous lawless night.

"Caenis! Caenis, wait!"

Veronica's voice had rung effortlessly above the raucous cries of "Garlands; garlands! Best on the Sacred Way!"; "Fine crowns of roses!"; "Myrtle wreaths; spikenard from India; garlands for your guests!" as the sellers plied their wares. Little boys in sweatshop basements, where the atmosphere swooned with the sickly reek of violets and rose petals, worked through the last hours of darkness, with damp tingling fingers bending stiff stalks into long strings that tonight would adorn fat necks and sagging bosoms. Veronica came early, while the blooms were fresh; she would keep them all day somewhere in deep shade, sprinkling the wreaths with water and standing the glorious bouquets in tubs. "Help me carry these festoons."

Caenis obediently let herself be weighed down under ropes of white and gold, with seven crowns of laurel plonked for convenience on her head; once your arms were full it was the best way to carry crowns. "Come with me out of this racket. I want to step into the Temple of Cybele."

They struggled to the temple on the Palatine. Caenis had no real objection, because it lay almost adjacent to Livia's House, so she could be close to home when it was time to attend on Antonia. Veronica laid out her flowers in the portico, where they would not be crushed, curling the garlands on a gray stone floor like wriggling caterpillars frilled with crisp yellow stripes. Here the background was quiet, with languorous oriental music and intoning priests; occasional triangles and cymbals made them jump. Incense, subversive as a drug, prickled the nerves. It was a place of impersonal mystery; Caenis had always found it faintly seedy, not least because the steps of the Temple of Cybele were a famous pickup point. The annual rites, led by male priests notorious for their frantic dancing, were an occasion for women's unbridled release; it was not to her taste.

Veronica urged with hushed excitement, "Sit by this pillar. You did it then? The bangle!" Caenis wore Vespasian's bangle every day. Veronica twisted it about on her arm, testing the weight. Caenis resisted taking it off; she did not want Veronica's comments on the two names engraved together inside. "You've done well there. It's a good one—"

Caenis said bluntly, "I didn't want this. I wish he knew I took him for the joy of it."

"You know better than to ever tell them that!" Veronica retorted. "Watch yourself."

"I know."

Caenis really did know. She had always been eccentric. She understood what she had done.

Veronica despaired of the girl. She could not bear to witness that look of being quietly reconciled. To Veronica this deliberate facing-up to unpalatable facts, this stoic acceptance of pain even before it occurred, seemed unnecessary. She offered consolations Caenis did not want; she offered self-delusion; she offered dreams: "Don't underestimate yourself, Caenis. You can hold on to that one if you want. Even if he marries—"

"No! When he marries, he goes."

"Oh dear. I see. My poor girl . . . Oh, help! We'd better salute the goddess. That priest with the watery eyes has spotted us."

Veronica always knew what men were doing; he had. At once they saluted the lofty statue through the portals of the temple, making it plain to any slyly watching Corybantes that they required neither mystic intercession with the goddess nor whispered proposals for commerce of a more sensual kind.

Cybele, the oriental matriarch sacred to chastity, who had lured her lover Attis into self-inflicted castration, was not the obvious choice for Veronica's devotion. Perhaps the attraction was that she lacked the patrician smoothness of the Greco-Roman gods. Cybele was blood, and earth, and the knife in the grove—a goddess of the ecstatically anguished scream. Her statue was within the sanctum, enthroned, guarded by lions, and bearing an oriental drum representing the world.

The two women made no attempt to breach protocol by entering the temple, but approached the outdoor altar. Veronica offered to this dark lady a small cluster of violets; then prayed aloud with her own inimitable good cheer: "O Cybele, Mother of the Gods, Lady of Salvation, accept these blossoms. Make me handsome at thirty, rich at forty, and please, lady, dead by fifty! Make me careful, make me cheerful, and (if you must, O Cybele!) make me good."

Caenis produced no offering. But she looked back, glimpsing through the portal the hard face of the goddess from the east who was supposedly friendly to women, and she prayed in her heart. O Cybele, great Idaean Mother, let me not love him more than I can bear! Adding, because she did love him and she recognized in him a man who would be genuinely concerned at her yearning pain, And, O Cybele, don't let him love me!

* * *

Two years was a long time to keep a secret from somebody so close. But she never said.

Well; once.

Once, at the end of a dinner party, when she was tired and at her low time of the month, when she had perhaps in consequence drunk far too much, he muttered something under his breath to her, with his head against her head, something spectacularly rude about one of the other guests, which made her suddenly giggle so much that her tension slithered away like a runnel of sand until, weak with laughter, she let herself exclaim with the force of desperate truth, "Oh, I love you!"

Then she did not know how to cope.

People had probably heard. It was not what she had said that mattered, but what saying it aloud had done to her. The look on Vespasian's own face was so odd, she was forced to apologize, sliding atilt to her feet: "I've had too much wine; I'm embarrassing us. I'll go home—you don't need to come. . . ."

But he came. He came, ambling after her like some great loyal mastiff, nuzzling the back of her neck while she tried to put on her outdoor shoes, towing along when she went for her chair, clambering in with her, to the despair of the slaves who had to carry them both, and then fondling her on the way home almost to the point of highway rape. He came into the house, nibbling her left ear, bribing the porter who did not normally expect to let him indoors so late; he came with her all through the elegant corridors, wrapping her around pillars with tipsy abandon, then growling rumbustiously when she escaped. He came, mad as a clown in some rude Atellan farce, into her room.

Where in darkness and complete silence he seized her, every line of his body melting into hers, and kissed her, absolutely sober, absolutely serious, absolutely still. Terrified, she tried to close her brain to the fact that he understood. She was ashamed to speak; he would not let her. Elated by a passion that seemed to devastate them both, he undressed himself; he undressed her; he brought her to the bed, still without speaking a word, as if what he wanted to say was inexplicable. Then he made love to her as even he never had, befuddled as she was, befuddled as she thought he was, drawing them to ecstasy over and over again. When Caenis slept, perhaps the deepest slumber of her life, for once he was there throughout the night, not even lying at her side, but encircling her with every limb, every inch of him flooding her with abundant companionship.

Vespasian awoke just before dawn; his lifelong habit. Caenis awoke with the change in his breathing, which was, whenever she had the chance, a habit of hers. He kissed her lightly on the forehead.

"I enjoyed that!"

"So did I."

His mouth tightened into the line that she recognized as his most personal smile. "I thought you did!"

* * *

He left the house quietly. They never mentioned the incident afterward. Sometimes she caught Vespasian's eye carefully upon her when she knew he thought her preoccupied, and then, although Caenis was not normally given to frantic gaiety, she would turn on him and pelt him with mimosa blossoms, or snatch the cushions from under his elbow, or tickle his feet.

After they settled down, she always knew when he was watching her again.

THIRTEEN

The Emperor Tiberius died in his seventy-eighth year, at Cape Misenum. He had been riding to Rome, but turned back when his pet snake was discovered dead and half-devoured by ants. Caenis thought any pet doomed to be hand-fed daily by Tiberius would fling itself cheerily to the ants.

Soothsayers decided that if the Emperor entered the city he would be torn apart by the mob. For once their interpretation seemed adept. Tiberius' last years had witnessed a reign of terror during which the appalling cruelties inflicted upon his own family and on members of the Senate were only equaled by the vile debaucheries to which the Emperor subjected himself. Show trials for alleged treason had become commonplace. His absence encouraged wild rumors about his personal habits. Rome viewed him with horror, and his death was greeted with joy.

It was typical of Tiberius' malevolence that since he knew people wanted him to die he had struggled violently to disappoint them. He had tried to disguise his failing strength, and clung so stubbornly to life and power that he even climbed out of bed calling for his dinner after being once pronounced dead. In the end his impatient young heir, Caligula, was widely believed to have assisted his adoptive grandfather into the underworld by applying a pillow to his face.

Caligula was a tall, pale, prematurely balding youth. Caenis had known him slightly when he lived with Antonia before being summoned by Tiberius to Capri, perhaps to be trained as a successor—or simply to let Tiberius gloat over the viper he would be bequeathing to Rome. The young man appeared to have a quicker intelligence than his coheir, Gemellus, was reputedly eager to learn, and had distinguished himself at an early age making formal public speeches, including the funeral oration for his great-grandmother Livia. Yet Tiberius had held reservations about him, and uneasy stories circulated. He was certainly under the influence of Macro, Sejanus' even more brutal successor as chief of the Praetorians, the man who permitted his wife to have an affair with Caligula, and who probably helped him speed Tiberius' death.

Caesars who overstayed their welcome must expect to be hurried along. Even Augustus was supposed to have been poisoned at the end by his famously devoted wife. Of the nine Caesars who ruled Rome during Caenis' lifetime, only one would die of natural causes, quietly succeeded by his own elder son; only one sardonic soul would leave the world joking even at death: "Dear me! I feel I must be turning into a god!"

If Caligula had a sense of humor, it was to prove macabre, and he wanted his divinity in his lifetime. Yet he began discreetly. The Senate was too frightened of the army to protest when he asked to be awarded sole rights as Emperor; the army loved him because since a baby he had been their mascot, and while armies may change their minds or their loyalties, they do not so readily change their mascots. No doubt encouraged by their commander, Macro, he had awarded each of the Praetorian Guards a thousand sesterces, which ensured their loyalty. Two days after Tiberius died, Caligula supplanted his coheir, Gemellus, and assumed in a single decree of the Senate all the powers that Augustus and Tiberius had collected gradually and with modesty.

Rome first hailed his succession as a new golden age. He was the people's pet, their shining star. He was the son of their hero Germanicus, and after twenty years of Tiberius, who terrified and appalled everyone, Rome badly wanted to find good in Germanicus' son. Gemellus was quickly sidelined. At twenty-five Caligula had become lord of the civilized world.

Caenis was to observe that the worst Emperors all began with sanctimoniously proper acts. Caligula, Nero, and also Domitian—though she never saw him rule in his own right—started public life with a show of youthful good behavior. It was as if those whose balance of mind was most vulnerable to excess made a last effort to win real admiration before absolute power sent them off their heads.

People called Caligula deceitful. It was certainly said that when Tiberius had summoned him to Capri, he willingly joined in the foul practices, and he turned himself into Tiberius' agent and spy; this hardly fitted the personable image he first tried to cultivate as Emperor. He had previously acquiesced in silence to the exile and death of his mother, Agrippina, and his two elder brothers. Yet perhaps if he had not done so he might have ended like his brother Nero Caesar, who was forced to commit suicide on a remote island, or his brother Drusus, who was starved in a cellar under the Palace until he choked to death on pieces of flock from his mattress. Perhaps an adolescence spent in such danger and an apprenticeship under Tiberius explained, if they did not excuse, Caligula's unhinged mind.

Under Macro's tutelage he cultivated a pious image at first. Among his first popular actions was a journey to fetch the ashes of his mother and brother from their island prisons for ceremonial interment in the Mausoleum of Augustus; at the same time he renamed the month of September after his father, Germanicus. Even then there were signs of extravagance, for in honoring his sisters, particularly his favorite, Drusilla, he went to extraordinary lengths, giving them the privileges of the Vestal Virgins, allowing them, though women, to watch the Games from the imperial seats, featuring all three on the coinage, and including them in the vow of allegiance that the consuls swore.

He did banish all the painted androgynous perverts who had entertained Tiberius. For a time he set to with political will, reducing taxation, relieving censorship, reinstating the independence of the courts, compensating householders for losses through fire, purging scoundrels from the lists of senators and knights. But Rome was his plaything. There he could soak in baths scented with exotic oils, invent extravagant cuisine, dress in outlandish tunics and footwear, flood the Saepta for naval battles, build his own racetrack, gamble like a fanatic, and indulge in chariot races and theatrical shows to his heart's content. He was a man who had been an underprivileged child, now given a whole city as his personal toy.

His relationship with his grandmother became prickly right at the start. Shortly after his accession the new Emperor sponsored a decree in the Senate to confer upon Antonia all of the honors that had been awarded to the Empress Livia during her lifetime. Antonia had always taken a sour pride in refusing to emulate Livia. She had rejected every title offered by Tiberius, even after she informed him of the dangers of Sejanus. Now it made no difference. Respect for his noble grandmother would enhance Caligula's reputation; the honors were hers. It was as useless to refuse the gifts as to hope the respect was genuine.

Caenis noticed Antonia began to look physically gray. People wondered afterward if Caligula tried to poison her. It was not so. He simply eroded her spirit. She had been responsible for him after Livia died, and she was aware of the danger in overloading him with honors—or even too much responsibility. Antonia felt bound to attempt to restrain him, which inevitably turned him against her.

Caenis found her one day with her face streaming with silent tears. "Never have children!" she said bluntly. "Never marry, and be thankful that you have no family!"

Caenis remained still, allowing Antonia the opportunity to speak. "I have been to see the Emperor. He makes unfortunate friends; he is too easily influenced. But I am accused of interference, of course."

During those first few weeks of his reign she was still the only real influence for good upon Caligula. She alone dared urge restraint. But when she requested a private interview, he offended against all decency by bringing Macro, his unsavory commander of the Guards. It was an insult to his grandmother, and perhaps a threat too. If Caligula had been truly mature he would not have needed to do it. Still, it was now being said openly that Macro was grooming a protégé who would soon need no tutor.

Caenis was furious at the insult to Antonia. "I would have come with you! I am not afraid."

"Perhaps we should all be afraid, Caenis."

Antonia was heavy with despair. Caenis lifted away the mantle she wore outdoors, helped her to her long chair, settled feather-filled cushions under her spine, pursed her mouth in warning to disperse the house slaves who were flitting about in uncertainty.

Antonia sighed wearily. "My grandson Gaius Caligula informs me he can do whatever he likes to anybody. It is effrontery—but it is all too tragically true!" Caenis had never heard her speak with such bitterness. "The fate of everyone in Rome and the Empire rests in his hands. He is not fit. Not even his father could control him—not even Germanicus. And the fools have given him unrestrained power!"

They were silent for some time, Caenis hoping that her patroness would share whatever had occurred; however, Antonia had regained her rigid self-discipline. When she did speak, it was to say in her normal abrupt tone, "You are expecting your friend. Is he here?" When Caenis was with Antonia, Vespasian usually waited in another room. "Call him in!" commanded her mistress, for once surprising her.

He entered quietly, a sturdy figure with all the well-tempered qualities the latest wild crop of Claudians completely lacked.

"Flavius Vespasianus, there is no point lurking in corners. Caenis has the sensitivity of a guardian goose on the Capitol; the girl can hear your footfall three streets away, and I know she has heard your arrival by the way she jumps!"

For a moment the old lady's attention seemed to wander. She had become markedly frail lately, although six months earlier she had been still strong enough to have visited her villa at Bauli, where she had defiantly tackled Tiberius about his treatment of her rakish, debt-ridden protégé Herod Agrippa, walking alongside the Emperor's litter until he acquiesced to her demands for leniency. That spirit seemed to falter lately. Now when she gave Vespasian her hand Antonia held on to his much longer than he expected, gazing at him as if she had forgotten to let go. Her fingers were ridged like the bark of a carob tree. In the end she did release him; then he bent to kiss Caenis on the cheek, though he murmured "Excuse me—" politely to Antonia first.

"Well; I have not seen much of you!" Antonia scolded him; it was slightly unreasonable, since she had always remained impatient of their friendship. "Caenis tells me you are standing for aedile?" This post, as one of the curators of the city, was the next step in the cursus honorum, his upward progress through the various ranks of the senate. "Confident?"

"Not in the least!" Vespasian returned frankly. "Too provincial and too poor."

Antonia considered the point. "Too much the bachelor."

There was a complex array of legal discouragements to the single life, partly hitting a citizen where it hurt most, in his bank box, but also giving precedence to married men and fathers at elections. Not only were bachelors disreputable they were disloyal to their ancestors and the State. Even so, Antonia seemed comparatively indulgent. "Your day will come. Caenis believes in you. Take my word for it; that makes you exceptional!"

Vespasian was standing just behind Caenis' couch, and although public gestures of affection were traditionally improper, he set one hand on her shoulder and kept it there, his thumb moving fitfully against her neck. Old-fashioned as she was, Antonia seemed not to object. Caenis herself peacefully laid her hand upon Vespasian's to still his caress.

After one of the remote pauses that were becoming characteristic, Antonia observed unpredictably to Caenis, "Always favor a man who is tolerant of old ladies; you will be an old lady yourself one day."

Vespasian said nothing. He must know, as Caenis did, that she would have to cope with old age by herself. They were both realistic people.

Antonia was surveying him, while he steadily returned her stare. They were in some subtle way vying with one another. Caenis felt troubled. These were the two people she allowed herself to love; their jealousy of her affection seemed ridiculous.

"I cannot require you to take care of her," Antonia said to him. "You are in no position to make promises."

Despite the critical undertone, he humphed with amusement. "Madam, we both know Caenis. She will insist on taking care of herself."

"Oh, she expects to get her own way," Antonia scoffed. "But sometimes even she will need a friend."

"Caenis will always have more friends than she realizes," Vespasian declared in a low tone.

They were now speaking as if Caenis had left the room. Embarrassed for Vespasian, she wondered why women always imagined that caring for someone gave them the right to interfere.

Then her patroness turned to her with a swift and unusually intense smile. "Forgive me, Caenis; I must leave one person at least who is prepared to overrule you!"

It was an odd scene, which left Caenis puzzled and disturbed.

* * *

Antonia's son Claudius was expected. His visits were rare. The butt of the court for his apparent feeblemindedness, he had been deemed unsuitable for public life—a bitter contrast with his glorious brother, Germanicus. He had retreated into obscure branches of scholarship; he aggravated his mother and tried to keep out of her way.

Anticipating a visit had made Antonia restless. She told Caenis and Vespasian to take themselves off, but before they left the room she suddenly called Vespasian back. "You invited Caenis to your grandmother's villa at Cosa?" He had; Caenis refused to go.

Annoyed that the subject had come up, Caenis stood glaring from the doorway. She had consistently avoided Vespasian's family, for while they probably did not object to his taking a mistress who was highly placed and obviously discreet, dealing with a freedwoman socially would be as difficult for them as for her. His grandmother, the formidable old lady who had brought him up, was dead, yet even now visiting her house seemed indelicate to Caenis.

"Madam—"

"I want you to go," Antonia interrupted her. "Go, and enjoy yourself."

At that moment her son was announced; it would be discourteous to let him find his mother quarreling. Claudius came in, with that vivid shock of white hair and the strange halting gait; he made as if to kiss his mother, thought better of it, started to say something to Caenis, decided against that too, then seated himself, looking immediately more controlled and more at ease. Antonia visibly struggled to disguise her agitation. Their relationship was hopeless. Claudius was too close; with him her normal inflexible courtesy broke down. Then her tension communicated to him, so that in her presence his tic and his stammer grew far worse.

"Caenis is going to Cosa," Antonia said gruffly. "With her friend." It was impossible to rebel against this public instruction. "Do you know Flavius Vespasianus? My son . . ."

In this way it turned out that Vespasian was introduced to Claudius, and by Antonia herself. Although she thought her son ridiculous and ineffectual, he was the grandson of Augustus, after all. The pretense had to be maintained politely that Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus was a useful person for an obscure young senator to know.

FOURTEEN

Caenis could not understand why people regarded traveling as a nuisance. Until she went to Cosa she had never been any distance outside Rome. She found the experience wonderful.

Admittedly it was an uncomfortable journey. First she made her way alone by chair, over the river at the Pons Sublicius, through the Fourteenth District, where the street sellers and other itinerants lived, to the outskirts of the city. Vespasian met her on the Via Aurelia with a two-wheeled conveyance drawn by a pair of unkempt mules.

"Bring cushions," he had warned tersely. It was good advice.

Some people traveled in massive four-wheeled stagecoaches, big enough to take their beds, yet effortlessly dashed along by two pairs of swift and shining steeds. Some owned carriages lined with scarlet silk curtains, decorated with silver filigree, equipped with built-in footrests, wicker food baskets, and fold-down checkerboards to keep them entertained. Even within the city most senators were carried about reclining in litters borne high on the shoulders of fearsomely tall slaves. The Flavian brothers shared a light fly with just room for two people and a wineskin; luggage was tied on the roof with a goat-hair rope. The Sabine territory was supposed to be famous for fine-quality mules. One of theirs, Brimo, was notorious all along the old Salt Road to Reate for his snorting bad temper. The other, though sweeter-natured, was susceptible to bald patches and missing an ear; Brimo had bitten it off.

Caenis discovered that the hazards of traveling made Vespasian unusually bad-tempered. Fortunately he spared her. Caenis was no trouble; Caenis only gazed about, uncomplaining and utterly enthralled.

The first time they stopped to rest she walked by herself a little way into the open countryside, where she simply stood, with her arms wide, soaking in the unimpeded spring sunlight and the peace. They were in Etruria. They had wanted to reach the town of Caere for lunch, but Brimo decided to slack. Instead they had eaten salad and fruit among the soft round tumuli of the Etruscan houses of the dead. To the right were low hills; to the left newly ploughed fields stretched toward the distant twinkle of the sea.

Vespasian, calmer now, came up behind her. He tickled her neck with a great piece of grass; Caenis took no notice.

"Whatever are you doing?"

"Looking at the emptiness—so much sky!" She had never been out of the city before.

Vespasian scratched his ear, amazed.

Cosa was eighty miles north from Rome as the crow flies, more by road. An imperial courier could have covered the distance easily in two days with time to spare for a meal, a bath, and a massage in the mansio; not so the Flavian mules. Trailing at a crawl through Tarquinii, Vespasian muttered that they would all go home by sea.

Cape Cosa unfurled out into the ocean on a stout stem like a bullock's ear. The town lay just to the south, where the peninsula joined the land, with a strange lagoon filled with light as green as bottle glass. Small boys, like Vespasian himself years before, jumped tirelessly into the clear water, then raced back along the mole to jump in again. Cosa was a neat Greek-founded sea town with an unhurried atmosphere. Vespasian's grandmother's estate lay a little way to the east. It was perfectly obvious this would always be his favorite place.

Afterward Caenis rarely spoke of the time she had spent in Cosa. She knew it was their one chance to live together in the same house. She glimpsed Vespasian as he was at home; watched the full span of his day in its regular rhythm from waking before dawn, through correspondence in the morning, lunch and a siesta in bed with her, then a bath and his cheerful dinner at night. She observed the good-humored mistrust between him and his slaves—he expecting to be cheated, they grumbling at his miserliness—yet all somehow rubbing along together loyally for years; if he was mocked by other people, they knew he also mocked himself. People who dealt with him regularly all accepted the man as he was.

He showed Caenis the places that held memories of his childhood, the objects about the house that recalled his grandmother. He was preserving the villa as it had always been. It was his festival place. Here his face lightened; his intensity relaxed. He was visibly happy; and seeing him so made Caenis set aside her own doubts in order to be happy with him.

Most people, Caenis supposed, existed in their hopes for the future; she could never do that. She must live for the present. At least now she would never again be someone with no past. She too would have, if she could bear them, affectionate memories to carry forward to her old age.

* * *

They did go home by sea. Caenis liked sailing even more than traveling overland.

By the time they came into Rome from Ostia it was all she could do to disguise her gathering misery. This was not simply because she had been forced to view so closely all she could never possess. She thought she knew why Vespasian had wanted to take her to Cosa. It was his favorite place; he was arranging for his own memories to include one of Caenis there. With leaden foreboding, she guessed why: Their time together would not last much longer.

She was too depressed even to be surprised when he made a detour with her chair to the apartment where his brother lived. Vespasian lived there too, though he was planning to take rooms of his own before the next elections in order to seem a more substantial candidate; no one would take seriously a man who only lodged in his brother's attic.

Caenis had never been there before. She waited outside in the chair while Vespasian went into the apartment block. The area was rundown but adequate; Caenis recognized the district, somewhere near the Esquiline on the less fashionable side. There was a wonderful parchment and papyrus warehouse nearby where she had been once or twice to order supplies.

He came back. "Step indoors for a moment."

He had opened the half-door and offered his arm for her to clamber out before she had any time to hesitate.

* * *

It appeared Sabinus was not at home. His wife stood waiting in the hall, a short girl about Caenis' age with a round pleasant face that looked understandably concerned. Theirs was a house rather bare of furniture, and what they did have was all rather heavy and old-fashioned, though Caenis guessed that was just Sabinus' somber taste. There were massive red curtains that looked difficult to draw. Though the atmosphere was initially so formal, all the legs of the sidetables and couches had been scuffed by children's toys.

She experienced a sensation that this visit had been prearranged. Afterward she felt certain, though she never found out how Vespasian knew what had happened. They wanted to take her into a side room, but she was already demanding in agitation, "What is it? Titus!"

Sabinus' wife reached for her hand. Caenis felt a sense of despair closing in.

He said, "I wanted to tell you this myself." She knew. He was leaving her. "Lass, I didn't want you to get out of the chair and see the cypress trees standing at the door, the house dressed up in mourning. . . ." She did not know after all. Sometimes the brain is stubbornly slow. She put up one hand, foolishly smoothing her hair. He had to tell her, for even then she did not understand. "Your lady Antonia is dead."

She refused to accept it. She did not move; she could not speak.

"Caenis! Oh my dear . . ."

Caenis closed her eyes. Vespasian was holding open his arms, but although she desperately wanted to bury her face in his shoulder she had to blot him out. She could not afford his comfort. If she gave way now, she would never be brave again—and, Caenis knew, she would certainly have to be brave.

She said, with brutal clarity, to Sabinus' anxious, well-scrubbed wife, "I am alone. That lady was all I ever had!"

Vespasian's arms dropped to his side. It was too late to take the words back.

Sabinus' wife—Caenis had been introduced, but she found she could not now remember the young woman's name—had taken her somewhere, some room, a library perhaps.

"What happened? Was this Caligula?" Caenis asked her.

"We don't think so. Not directly. It appears to have been natural; she was an old lady, after all. But people are not sure. It may have been her own choice." Suicide. "These things are not given out."

"No," Caenis responded dully. "No. They are not."

"Cry if you want to."

But Caenis could not cry.

And then the young woman said, "Don't go home yet; stay and have some lunch. There's nothing to be done. You may as well go home refreshed."

Caenis almost felt amused. She protested grimly, "Your brother-in-law has no right to ask that of you!"

Sabinus' wife looked at her levelly. "He didn't," she said. In that moment Caenis recognized that the wife of Flavius Sabinus was the friend she could never have.

Although eating was almost impossible, she stayed to lunch.

* * *

When she was ready to leave she refused to let Vespasian go with her. She and Sabinus' wife exchanged weak smiles. They had surprised him; they had even perhaps startled themselves. They were enjoying their small revolt against the order inflicted upon women by men. They had weighed one another up; then, sharing that small sad smile, they gave way to the social rules. However, it was his brother's wife, not Vespasian, who hugged Caenis at the door.

By then Caenis was impatient to reach home. Her balance had to some extent stabilized, but she felt as if she would not entirely accept Antonia's loss until she returned to the house. She needed to be alone in her own room there before she could even begin to assess her feelings.

Vespasian looked disturbed, but she had no spare concentration for soothing him. "Caenis, she wanted you to go to Cosa. It was deliberate."

"I should have been with her. Why didn't she know that?"

"You had a special place with your lady. She knew." His hands were heavy on her shoulders; she could not easily escape. His own face was white. "I imagine she could not bear to see you upset."

He could not bear it either; Caenis understood. She finally wrenched free and stood off from him. Grimly she took upon herself the duty of the bereaved to reassure those around them. "I'm sorry for what I said. I have you; of course; I know."

Impassive, he said nothing at first, then dismissed it with, "This is not the time."

Being a man he had failed to see that it was only now, now when she was too deep in some other trouble, that she could ever speak of what she felt for him. Yet he had never flinched from reality, so Caenis told him tersely, "Never lie to me. Tell me the truth, as soon as you must. Don't just hope I will work things out for myself; Titus, don't leave it to me—" She stopped.

"No," he said.

Then as she turned to climb aboard her chair, he suddenly spoke out too. "Your idea of other people's loyalty is as empty as your view of a country landscape. But, Caenis, in the country, just when you think you have the whole world to yourself, you wander into an olive grove and find some old shepherd squatting on his haunches in the shade." He paused. His voice rasped. "Smiling at you, lass."

"The country is your world, not mine," Caenis returned, managing to find a shred of humor for him. "And even a city girl, if she reads any poets at all, knows a shepherd is the last person to trust!"

Despite her pleas, Vespasian insisted on going with her as far as Antonia's house. There was nothing she could do; he marched along with the footman in front of the chair.

Bluntly undeterred, when he left her at the door he said, "Send for me when you need me." Then, since he was a brave man, he cupped her stricken face in his large hands. "Lass; I am here. You know that."

She could not risk flinging her arms around him as she wanted to do, for she must be alone when she started to cry.

"Caenis—"

She had to stop him. She knew that whatever he was going to say would be more than she could bear. "Yes. I know. As my lady said to us, Titus, ‘Sometimes even Caenis will need a friend.' And when I do, you are here. Yes; I know."

FIFTEEN

Flavius Vespasianus was now eligible for the next rank in the Senate. He ran for election—and came nowhere.

Caenis was in a mood to feel guilty over anything; she convinced herself that her position in his life had contributed to his defeat. Some years one bad blow follows another until it becomes impossible to tell how far each has been caused by the depletion of spirits resulting from the rest. Losing Antonia had buffeted her badly; she was physically tired and emotionally drained. However, her need to grieve had really made her so abstracted it left Vespasian free to canvass support. He did all he could. When he failed, his brother told him his approach had been too diffident; he remained a stranger to many in the Senate. He would have to establish himself more strongly and try again next year.

He started to organize straightaway. Caenis watched with reviving fascination as he and Sabinus worked through the entire senatorial list, analyzing the voting, then discussing whom they might sway. They could only use verbal persuasion; they had no money for bribes.

She realized Vespasian was by no means as politically halfhearted as his initial reluctance had implied. She noticed his incisive mind, his thoroughness, his ability both to plan ahead and then to carry the plan through. Not many men could claim such talents. Of the two brothers it was he who possessed the steadier resolution. Once Vespasian did decide to act, his energy was fiercer and his imagination more acute.

So he sat with Sabinus, lists covering a low table, both leaning forward on their stools, endlessly turning over names. Although they had courted patrons, it was always his brother Vespasian really worked with. Men from the Sabine territory had a tradition of public service, and the Flavians were particularly clannish. They kept their political trust within the family.

Caenis was a frequent visitor at the tiny apartment Vespasian now rented; without Antonia she had little to keep her at home. While the men worked, their voices at one constant, thoughtful pitch, she sent away the hesitant skivvy. She served them wine herself, moving about the ill-furnished room in her silent way, drawing the mothy door curtain to deaden the racket from the copper-beater's workshop downstairs, opening the rickety shutters slightly to let in a breeze, which if no less malodorous and hot in such a decrepit neighborhood was at least different air. Then she would curl up by herself on a battered couch, with an old cloak of Vespasian's over her feet, glad of an opportunity in this low period of her life to lose herself in her own thoughts.

It was taking her a long time to recover from Antonia's death. Caenis, who had respected and loved her as a friend, continued to churn with anger that her last weeks had been marred by discord with the new Emperor. She never found out whether Antonia's death had been by her own hand. Other people in the household assumed she had heard the full details; in fact, she preferred not to know.

Claudius had had to speak to her about the will; Antonia had left modest bequests to all her freedwomen, and as her primary heir it fell to her son to distribute the money. He said he would do what he could—but it depended on the Emperor. The House of Livia remained imperial property, and so far there was no suggestion that Antonia's freed clients needed to move on; later it was bound to become convenient that they did so—one more problem that Caenis would need to address.

Though they never discussed his mother, she found herself more at ease with Claudius nowadays. For one thing she had noticed that ever since she was known to be Vespasian's mistress, other men had ceased to make unwelcome advances. She could not tell whether this was due to some masculine code, or whether she had herself ceased to signal that she was vulnerable. Perhaps she simply looked older nowadays.

In time it was confirmed that because of its position on the Palatine, the House of Livia would not be sold, and neither did any of the imperial family want to claim a right to live there. Caenis was able to stay, preparing inventories of the furniture and household goods. This was not for the normal purpose of a sale at the Saepta Julia. Although Caligula had inherited a bulging treasury from the cautious Tiberius, he was running through his funds at an astonishing rate, as he delighted the populace with an almost daily program of theatrical extravagances, public games, and wild-beast spectaculars; presents thrown from the roof of the main courthouse; and gift vouchers left on theater seats. Already there seemed a good chance that if the thought struck he would overturn his grandmother's will and himself carry off her treasures to replenish the Privy Purse.

Caligula had not attended Antonia's funeral. He watched the burning pyre through his dining-room window, joking about it with Macro, the commander of the Guards. Antonia's ashes were placed in the Mausoleum of Augustus but with minimal ceremony.

* * *

"Caenis!" Flavius Sabinus usually took his leave with a word for her. "My wife sends you kind regards."

Caenis had not seen his wife again, nor did she honestly expect to; still the girl took trouble to send her compliments, often accompanied by flowers or some other gift. Her warmth appeared quite genuine.

"This young lady's looking tired!" Sabinus then chided his brother.

Vespasian tucked a solid arm around her waist. "She'll be all right. I've bought her a slab of must-cake—great restorative powers!"

Sabinus smiled at her sadly. He was hardworking and affable; he suspected Caenis needed more than sweetmeats. Once he had put aside his basic disapproval, he felt that his younger brother treated his mistress too casually. It was useless to try to explain that Vespasian's small but careful present meant far more to her than a string of beads snatched from a jeweler's tray with no real thought behind the gift.

"Mmm—come to bed!" murmured Vespasian, kissing her after his brother had gone.

Caenis pierced him with a steely eye. "What about my cake?"

"Well, bring it, of course."

"You'll have crumbs in the covers—"

"I have noticed," Vespasian commented, "that when you and I eat anything there are rarely any crumbs."

The must-cake was splendid, and he was absolutely right; there were no crumbs. Caenis responded with an enthusiasm that in Veronica's scale of values would equate to repaying a pair of Etruscan earrings or a silver collar.

Afterward Vespasian exclaimed, with his wild, wide grin, "Well, lady! That was an occasion to treasure when we are old and incapable!"

He was strong and endlessly healthy; even after he made love with the fervor of a man who regarded this as the most natural and enjoyable way of taking exercise, his rib cage soon rose and fell again in its normal regular rhythm.

Caenis, gasping, thumped his chest. "Oh, I'm speechless!"

"What a change."

"You great ox; you'll never be incapable. You'll still be sending for some girl—or a whole troupe—to liven your afternoons when you're seventy!"

Chortling, he flung back his great head, and for some minutes they lay together in silence before talking more reflectively.

"Wonder if we'll know each other then?"

It was an unfair question; men could be such pigs. Caenis responded drily, "I imagine I shall have died of drudgery long before."

He croaked, mimicking the astrologer at the Theater of Balbus, "Her life is kindly; kindly her death. . . ." He knew well enough that Caenis rejected omens. She had told him: Whatever either of them were to become must lie in themselves. Neither had any advantages, or anyone to help. Life would be only what they chose to make it, grappling within the straitjacket of society. "You were quiet tonight," he suddenly observed. She was less startled that he noticed than that he commented. "What were you thinking about?"

She did not answer.

He usually knew anyway. "Has your lady's house been reoccupied yet? What about Claudius?"

To his own surprise as much as anyone's, Claudius had been selected by Caligula for the honor of sharing the Consulship with his Emperor. Claudius had never held public office of any kind before, since both Augustus and Tiberius openly judged him unsuitable. As Caligula's colleague as well as his uncle, he had been compelled to go to live at the Palace. He was bound to be looking for a way to escape, and his mother's house might partially provide one.