The course of Honor

* * *

Ignoring all the others, she pulled up his eyelids, listened for breathing, massaged him, called to him, pounded several times hard on his chest in a helpless attempt to restart his heart or clear any blockage if he had simply choked. She knew something of what to do; it was part of the lumber of useful information she had been collecting all her life. Now someone who seemed to be a Greek doctor was standing nearby, but he let her act as she wanted and made no effort to correct or encourage her. It was always up to you. Other fools just stood around.

There was nothing to be done, but she worked on, even knowing it was pointless, to avoid having to think. She did her best for Antonia; for Claudius; for Narcissus; for the sweet-natured boy himself. She did it for herself too. In the end she abandoned the attempt and sat, still nursing Britannicus in her arms, her tender fingers smoothing the death-throe grimace from his elfin face. There was nothing to be done.

* * *

People fled; Nero had come.

The young Emperor, swaying slightly, had appeared on the threshold. Everyone except Caenis was terrified. She remembered saying to Antonia that emperors saw too many faces full of fear.

Nero knew he was dead. Oh, Nero knew. He himself must have stood over the poisoner Lucusta after the first bungled attempt, beating her and bullying her to boil down her black ooze until it would work. In his own bedroom Nero had seen the poison instantly kill a pig. He knew. Nobody bothered to say, and, of course, he did not need to ask.

Caenis had never been so angry in her life. She had nothing left; nothing to lose. She was about to fling at him the words that needed saying, however swiftly they condemned her. Once, once if never again, she would tell the ruler of the world that it was not for him to abuse the power of life and death purely to gratify his ambition and cruelty. . . . But then she became aware of someone else: Titus. That boy Titus. Vespasian's son.

He too must have come in, and was half-lying on another couch. At the Emperor's entrance he started to haul himself upright, although he could hardly move. Gods, he was like his father when he set his jaw! He was about to lose his temper. He had to be stopped.

Caenis flung back her head and addressed the Emperor across the width of the room in the iced voice of a trained secretary whose work has been regrettably disturbed by some untidy break in office routine. "An unfortunate occurrence, lord! Please don't disturb yourself. It seems there is no more we can do. Your brother," she stated crisply, using the word "brother" with a whiplash of malice, "is cured of his epilepsy now!"

The lad Titus had become brick red with defiance, bursting with the indiscretion of youth. One leg was bent beneath him on the couch; he was struggling to break free. With any luck he would collapse.

"With permission, lord," Caenis asked the Emperor, though she did not care whether he gave permission or not, "as a client of your family I will attend to the funeral."

"Tonight," Nero said, in his brash voice. "Hasty deaths should be hastily removed."

Titus gagged. The Emperor turned upon him his bloodless gaze.

"Too much wine!" Caenis uttered with contempt. "The young fool's drunk."

Moving with that disgusting cormorant strut, Nero then left his family's female client to tidy up death and drunkenness together.

* * *

Caenis sprang to life. "Demetrius, close the door!" She was already setting down her pointless burden gently and squirming to her feet. "Hot water and salt!" she barked to her slave. "Not from the dining room; be quick, but be discreet. Demetrius, run!"

As she reached him Titus began to slither toward the floor. She caught him under one armpit—this was the moment when all her future nightmares would begin: that painfully familiar Flavian face slipping past her knee, with chaos all around them, while she heard her own voice appealing to him not to die. He was a well-made chunky young man, gripping his stomach in obvious agony. He was too heavy; she had to let him slide to the ground, where she knelt, gathering him against her knees, with one hand supporting his warm head.

"I drank—"

"I know."

He was flopping, semiconscious; in a moment he would be gone. She began to shake him like a maid plumping a pillow; she slapped him; she shouted his name. "Titus! Come along, now; this won't do. Wake up; Titus!"

Demetrius was at her side. Thankfully Aglaus chose his subordinates for their quick response in a crisis. Caenis herself mixed a strong emetic, while Demetrius began the desperate process of hauling Titus upright again. Seating him on the couch seemed to revive him to some degree. He was white-knuckled with pain. His eyes looked opaque. "Come along; drink. Titus, you know you must!"

She held his head, gripping the curly hair at the back of his neck, forcing him to swallow the warm brine. He drank it all. He wanted to live; he was a fighter in the stubborn Flavian mold, and he trusted her instinctively.

"Demetrius, find my litter; bring it in here. Say I'm ill if need be. Nothing to do here until I get him to vomit the poison."

Titus was changing color even as she spoke, from his hectic flush to a dreadful doughy gray. Demetrius met her eyes. She nodded; her slave slipped away.

"Britannicus—"

"Britannicus is gone. I'm so sorry. I know you were his friend. Save your energy; Titus, do try to throw up." He would not need much trying; he had that worried look. "One day," Caenis promised him grimly, "all this will be stopped. One day, Titus; you and I will see a better world."

Then Vespasian's son was violently sick all over her feet.

He was mortified. "Oh, lady, I'm so sorry—"

Her new sandals! But he looked better. "Thanks, sweetheart. Come on; try again. I don't think I liked them anyway, and I certainly don't like them now."

Behind her, she suddenly heard the wailing of the slaves who attended a death to clamor in case there was a hope that the victim might after all wake. People had no sense of discretion. This was the ritual, so they performed it mindlessly. Nobody murdered in this palace was required to be revived. People had no sense.

No one paid any attention to Titus and herself. Just as well. Too close an association with this poisoning would do the Flavians no good.

She had been prepared to thrust chicken feathers down the boy's throat, but by now he was being helplessly ill. Caenis talked to him, willing him through, holding him more kindly now. He no longer seemed conscious of his surroundings, but she tried to make her voice reach his brain and drag him back. She was losing him; she could see that.

"Titus! Titus, come on, my Flavian; you can do better than this."

He groaned. Still talking, she massaged his limp, sweating hands. "What a truly awful banquet; I don't know why I came. Abandoned by my host—Titus, make an effort, please!—the floor show was deplorable, and I had to leave before the decent drinking got under way. . . ." He had nothing more to bring up. Wiping his face, she let him rest with his poor fevered head against her upper arm. Tears splashed onto his cheek; her own tears. "Oh, my darling; don't die, Titus! I can never tell Vespasian that I let him lose his son."

Demetrius was back with her litter and its two frightened bearers. She gave them quiet instructions. They were to take the boy to his father's empty apartment; Demetrius would go to explain, or if there were no servants there he would fetch Aglaus instead to look after the boy.

Titus was wrestling against unconsciousness as they lifted him inside the chair. Just before she closed the half-door Caenis leaned in to tuck her shawl around him. He was shivering uncontrollably; she had never seen anyone so white.

He opened his eyes in a moment of puzzled lucidity. "Do you know my father well?"

"Not anymore," stated Caenis tersely. "And you can tell him from me, I can manage without his offspring being sick in my best new shoes!"

Yet she kissed him, before the bearers began to move off—that old social gesture of affection, the light touch on the cheek. So once again, Titus felt the lady's tears.

Perhaps he had glimpsed that a little of the love she once gave to Britannicus had transferred in that dreadful hour to him. Perhaps, too, he recognized the shadow of another kind of feeling. Within the soft folds of that lady's shawl he shuddered, for as he was carried away from the Palace to the safety of his father's house he understood that he had trespassed among the secrets of a grown-up world. Unimagined aspects of his own existence faced him. With the heartrending clarity of someone who was dangerously ill, he was viewing not merely his father, with whom he had always been on the best of terms, and his mother, whom he loved as he should, but also this lady with whom he was sharing the loss of his friend. Love of Britannicus seemed their special interest, a bond even more private than the fact that she had just saved his life.

But there was something else between them too. She had called him her darling. Then, with a flood of sensation as intense as biting on an unexpected clove, Titus Vespasianus understood her warning and her plea. He realized exactly why, when they spoke about tonight to other people, they would have to make such a joke about him ruining her shoes.

TWENTY-EIGHT

They buried Britannicus in the pouring rain.

Someone with enormous forethought had provided a pyre. Slaves must have been building it before the banquet even began. So a small group of friends cremated the son of Claudius on the Palatine that same night, while Nero watched from his dining room, much as Caligula had once watched Antonia's funeral. It was raining from the start, but when they brought the boy's ashes to the Mausoleum of Augustus in the north of the city, all the heavens opened, and this was taken for a sign of the gods' wrath. For Caenis, the filthy weather merely matched the filthiness of life.

It was a pitiful group that trailed out to the Field of Mars, then through the sodden public walks to the Mausoleum. As they approached, the weather was so bad they could barely make out the exterior, mounded with earth in the Etruscan style, though massively terraced and planted with cypress trees. The bronze statue of Augustus that surmounted the great circular tomb was quite invisible in the murk.

The wind keened eerily in the trees. It was night, the company sparse and deeply depressed. When lightning flashed off the obelisks that guarded the entrance to that dark place, those who had been brave enough to attend the cremation understood that all the new optimistic order was now quite lost. Their unexpected Emperor Claudius had been decreed a god; as they brought his murdered son to the family tomb, that was the final irony.

The mourners descended by the flaring light of torches to deposit the urn in the white marble basement. It took place without eulogy or ceremony. Nero had forbidden a procession. There was no time to bring out the masks of Britannicus' ancestors. People came hurriedly; muttered their farewells; departed into the storm. So they buried the last of the Claudians, the son of a deified emperor, yet murdered in boyhood as so many were, with nobody willing or able to raise a hand in his defense. So they buried Britannicus, in the pouring rain.

* * *

Caenis went home.

She was shaking. She was sneezing. She had no shoes and no shawl; she was drenched. She was entering a state of shock. She had been wet for a long time, since before the cremation, when she washed her feet and the hem of her dress in a fountain, leaving her ruined sandals on the rim. Noticing she had lost her litter, Pallas took her in his own. They did not like one another, but as clients of the same family, decency demanded he did not let her walk across the north of the city weeping and barefoot, in the dark, alone. Caenis was past knowing what had happened to her, and had she known she would not have cared. By next day she was seriously ill.

Caenis was so ill, for so long, that she reached a point of not even understanding who or where she was. Aglaus must have coped. She never really knew. Doctors came, though not often; Aglaus told her afterward that despite any delirium, at the first sniff of poppyseed and cabbage water she had managed to be magnificently rude. Even when she started to recover she could barely find the energy to lie in bed, hoping there would be nothing to decide or do.

Eventually she passed into a stage of being bored yet unable to concentrate, so once again she could only drowse, while occasional tears whimpered down the line of her cheekbone and chin. Even her flute girl was more than she could bear; after a few minutes of the softest music her head hurt. People sent fruit, which she did not eat. People came; she begged not to have to see them because she realized she was too miserable to cope—then when she knew they had gone, she became desolate with loneliness.

Every night, when the delirium returned, there was the dream: young Titus falling to the floor at her feet while she begged him not to die. That dream at least grew so familiar, it seemed almost comforting.

* * *

At last the day arrived when she woke and knew she was much better than the day before.

"You have a visitor," Chloe, her maid, offered, at which for the first time Caenis looked keen to know who.

Then a familiar scathing voice burbled, "Don't worry, it's only me! And don't try to turn me out." It was Veronica. To see her was glorious. "Juno, Caenis; look at you! The rumor's true then, that you had pneumonia?"

"That rumor's not true; I have not had pneumonia, I've still got it."

Veronica dismissed the maid herself. At first she sat beside the bed, so wonderfully sane, with that well-groomed inquisitive face. It was a tall bed, so she soon gave up the wicker chair, which made her crane her slender neck; instead she perched up on the edge of the coverlet, with one slim foot on the step at the side.

Caenis drifted back to the real shore of the world. Her room, which had for so long been a hall of leaping ghosts, assumed its familiar shape: smaller, and even on a wintry afternoon full of light. Once again it became her special place—the great screw-down clothespress in one corner smoothing her own tunics and cloaks, the long Egyptian chest, the wicker chair, her dressing table, which was set with her jumble of knickknack boxes, half-empty cream pots, pin trays, combs, and perfume jars. Though she had lived among them for many days and nights, she greeted her own things now like a traveler returning from a long journey: her silver scarfcase, her sandalwood trinket drawers, her pottery lamps, that ancient rug in warm stripes of cinnabar red and umber, which clashed with the cushions and the crimson counterpane but was so cozy and comforting under her feet while she dressed that she never managed to change it for a newer, harsher one. . . .

"I have brought you some nice barley broth, Caenis; I left it with your cook. Don't for one moment imagine I made it myself, though I did give it a poke with a spoon so my woman would think I know what kitchens are about."

Veronica had wonderful taste in clothes. She had come in a purple so deep-dyed it was certainly illegal; her presence filled the room with vibrant color even before she began to speak in that familiar racy style. They looked at one another, and were at once as they had always been, two women who spoke one language, two women who shared a conspiracy against life.

Veronica said softly, "Love, I met your Sabine friend. He was in the Saepta Julia of all places. I gathered there had been an amount of feeble family debate, and the upshot was they felt a polite Flavian ambassador should call on you. Well; I soon stopped that."

Caenis managed to smile.

"Your old friend the Hero . . ." Veronica went on. She stopped. She was usually so candid, her obvious reluctance felt odd. "Vespasian apologizes. He has had a bereavement—"

"Oh—not the boy?" Caenis could hardly bear to ask.

Veronica patted her hand. "No. No; not the boy. I saw the boy too. A heartbreaker if ever I met one! He has been dangerously poorly—but will live, though he's a disgusting saffron color at the moment."

"He seemed a tough little shoot. Is he yellow? I was terrified," Caenis worried, "that his liver might be damaged."

"Yes. His father was fretting, but their doctor says he will recover. He looks strong. You will have to brace yourself: I found them buying an antique Greek vase painted with a whole ocean, including a hideous octopus—just your type of thing! The object will come by night on an oxcart, and you'll need to build a viewing gallery to hold it. It will have cost the child his life savings, though I dare say the loss will be replenished by discreet paternal hands—assuming Vespasian ever has any money. . . . I mention it so you can have your smile of gracious pleasure ready."

Caenis practiced her gracious smile. Her brain worked only slowly nowadays: "What bereavement?"

Finally Veronica told her, still looking at the counterpane, "I believe, his wife. Flavia Domitilla had for a long while not been in the best of health." Caenis schooled her face. "I deduced that if you wanted, I could arrange for you to meet him," Veronica confessed abruptly, after which she was at last able to look up.

"No thanks."

Caenis hardly paused for consideration. She could not bear it.

Veronica smiled. She was in her way an eccentric woman. "Well!"

"Did he ask you to ask me, Veronica?"

"Yes."

Caenis took a deep breath. "Do you blame me for refusing?"

"I certainly do not. You know my views. The man was a liability from the start. Incidentally, he still has no money. And good gods, it must be nearly twenty years."

"Probably is," Caenis marveled wryly. "See him again? Juno . . ." Veronica let her grumble on. "I filled my life. I had to; it was too long to waste. I was never the docile Penelope type—what, twenty years with nothing to show but a nicely stitched sampler and ruined eyes? Then some raddled old traveler turns up, expecting you to have fed his dog and kept his favorite winecup dusted on the sideboard, and be ready to rub liniment on his scars and listen to his dreadful stories until he drops? Oh, Veronica! Whatever does the silly man expect?"

Veronica thought about it. "Who's Penelope? Do I know her?"

"Oh, in a story. She waited for a hero for twenty years."

"A man wrote that!" Veronica guessed acutely.

Vespasian would be forty-six next November. On the seventeenth: Caenis still remembered his birthday date.

It was indeed nearly twenty years. That dark corridor between rage and simple disappointment, where a bright young girl's uneasy hopes dulled into resignation; her long, tired decline into just another elderly, dowdy, ordinary woman.

It was all far too late. They could never go back. And Caenis would not like to see a man she had once loved so dearly on any lesser understanding now.

* * *

Veronica broke into her reverie to say quietly, "It's an insult. If it makes you feel any better, I told him exactly what I think."

"I'm not insulted."

Caenis imagined that Vespasian would treat Veronica warily. She was not his type, though he would admire her as an artifact. He would not, however, want her to tell him what she thought.

"Credit where credit is due," Veronica admitted, "I do believe he badly wants to thank you for saving his son."

Caenis spread her hands with a watery smile. "Tell him I am thanked. But he knows what I feel about being asked to console widowers."

"I'll soon settle him!" Veronica became brisk. She stood up, shaking her jeweled skirts. "And now, if you can face it, I want to smother you with rugs and take you in my litter to a shoemaker few people can afford, who will measure you for the prettiest and most comfortable pair of new sandals in Rome."

Caenis began to climb shakily out of bed. "That I can face!" She paused, with one bare foot feeling for the step.

Veronica paused too. "This is a gift from me, Caenis."

Caenis did not so easily give up. "And whose was the idea?"

"Ah, that," conceded the friend she had known since she was ten, "I am not supposed to say."

Caenis worked out for herself that Vespasian had made the suggestion, but left Veronica to pay for the shoes.

So, cheered at least by comfortable feet (which any sensible woman valued highly—most of all if she had once been a barefoot slave), Caenis gradually came back into society. There did not seem a lot to come back for.

Veronica had obviously assumed Caenis would behave exactly as she did herself. Next time she came she cried, "Right! Have you seen him yet?"

"No," Caenis answered.

"You are intending to?"

"No."

"Hasn't he asked you again?"

"No. I mean, yes."

"Well, that seems clear!"

"Titus sent the octopus vase with a note from his father saying he'd like to hear my opinion of it. I thanked Titus formally by letter but didn't answer his father's note. Satisfied?"

"He must make new arrangements, Caenis. He strikes me as the dozy, loyal type. The minute he comes to visit you, I want to hear."

Caenis, who was feeling better, quietly quartered herself a pear that a kind friend had sent her from the storeroom of his country estate north of Rome.

Vespasian had gone back to Reate, taking his son.

"He's having a terrible time lately," Veronica told her, persisting doggedly. "He lost his daughter too." Then Caenis was genuinely distressed, for she imagined that Vespasian was a man who would make his daughter a favorite. "Childbirth, I imagine. Teenaged bride; poor little shrimp. She left a baby," warbled Veronica. "Little girl, I believe: yet another Flavia."

Vespasian was a grandfather! The ridiculous old devil was courting her through a third party like a bashful teenage boy. Caenis could accept that he was the type of man to reminisce fondly over his youth, but she had assumed anyone so hardheaded would realize the past should now lie undisturbed.

The fool kept sending her fruit. Sometimes Caenis felt she was the only person in Rome with any tact or sense. And a grandfather: at this news, for the first time since she was ill, she actually began to laugh out loud. Veronica shrieked for a servant; she could tell the poor woman still needed rest.

As Caenis expected, Vespasian never came. Fruit kept arriving in unmarked Sabine baskets for the next six months. She ate the fruit, but never responded. In the end he gave up.

After all, it was nearly twenty years. A woman learns to cope. A woman knows she must.

Until one day, when she has grown accustomed to life's centrifugal drag, suddenly the earth tilts. And an elderly, dowdy, ordinary woman may find herself quite unexpectedly thrown off among the stars.

PART FIVE

A HALF-DECENT COMPANION

When the Caesar was Nero

TWENTY-NINE

The Via Nomentana: sunlit at a lunchtime in September.

A man walked steadily up one side of the road from the city, crossed at the Nomentana Gate, then walked slowly away again. In the main thoroughfare were baths and a public lavatory, and the local street market, its stalls lively with poultry and singing birds. The pale round cheeses looked excellent, and the fish were displayed on moist mats of dark green leaves in patterns of circles and stars; pilchards in basketfuls glittered like well-polished cutlery, crayfish peered out of wicker cages still alive, and gleaming blue-black mussels lay in buckets under the shade of the trestle tables. The man counted three sausage shops.

This was a quiet little nook in the suburbs, cleaner and neater than many parts of Rome. All the shop porticoes carried climbing plants, while window boxes frilled the balconies overhead with carnations and ivy, scillas, rosy balsam, and hot-orange marigolds. House-proud owners had swept any litter from the street; the gutters ran free; some of the pavements still shone wet where they had recently been washed. A pert brown dog sat outside a chandler's looking interested, but made no move to investigate as the man passed again, once more heading for the gate.

Outside the Porta Nomentana no one was about.

This was better than where he lived himself in the Sixth District, the Alta Semita, the high quarter on the slopes of the Quirinal full of people who would like something better. Here there was the Praetorian Camp, to be sure, ringing with its aggressive racket by night and day, but apart from the occasional mausoleum along the main road, there were only isolated market gardens, making the atmosphere open and airy. The man strolling up and down had lived not far away for years though he had not, until now, ever allowed his steady footsteps to bring him here.

He attracted the attention of a fat woman who thought he was up to no good; he was clad in senatorial robes, though for some reason he had turned up here with no escorting slaves. He looked out of place and shifty. The fat woman was pretending to hang rugs over her balcony while she made up her mind whether to send a slave running to summon the Vigiles. She did not know this was just the stubbornly eccentric ex-Consul Vespasian.

Passing the chandler's shop for the third or fourth time, he quickened his step abruptly as if he had made up his mind, and dived out through the gate. A short walk brought him to a mansion that was obviously owned by somebody with money, although unlike his own peeling portal the stepped entrance was not crowned with triumphal insignia. In fact, there was nothing to indicate who lived here.

This house had blank walls facing the Nomentana Road, though their formidable air was relieved by the visible tops of trees in the internal courtyards. Reaching those peristyles and colonnades might not be easy; visitors were greeted by a solid, studded, massive black door. A fierce iron inspection grille took the central position amid much well-oiled furniture—workmanly hinges with massive pinions, lantern hooks, and locks. A tiled fingerplate warned of a crusty watchdog, though no barking began. Two stone tubs of nodding ferns flanked the white marble step, and the knocker took the form of a well-fed bronze dolphin with an encouraging curly grin.

He knocked.

Nothing happened. Indoors no one stirred. There was silence. This must be the time of day when door porters around the Porta Nomentana ate their lunch and sorted out their gambling debts.

He banged again, patiently. On a lattice beside the door there was a nasturtium that suffered badly from blackfly, still dripping where someone had sluiced it down to discourage them. In the distance above the market gardens a skylark was singing its heart out.

Abruptly the porter, with his napkin under his chin, opened the door. He had not bothered to peer through the grille first. Coincidentally, he was followed by a steward with an empty shopping basket, who took over as stewards like to do. The visitor watched them note his senatorial toga and then wonder why he seemed to own no slaves. Nobody owned no slaves at all; they put him down as a careless type who had lost his escort in the Forum crush.

They all three held an interesting conversation in which the unattended senator claimed to be a friend of the lady of the house but refused to give his name, while the steward satirically pretended she was not at home. When they grew bored, the steward admitted she was there, asleep, then threatened to wake her up.

"Mars Ultor!" exclaimed this man who claimed to know her. "Don't do that. Her temper's poisonous if anyone breaks her nap!"

The steward and the porter gazed at each other in surprise; then both agreed that the stranger could be invited in. He knew her; there was no doubt of that.

* * *

Everywhere was spotless. There was a light hall, with a half-length bust of Antonia when young, surrounded by flower petals. Somewhere in the distance a musician was playing a flute. The steward led the visitor across an expensive mosaic floor, around the marbled atrium pool and past several doors opened to allow any breeze to cool the house, then into a feminine sitting room painted in panels of a soft honey-beige with delicate borders of crimson ribboning. Here, apparently, he could wait.

There was a couch, strewn with casual cushions, and two sloping women's chairs. He took the couch but sat so he could watch the door. At his elbow appeared a bronze tripod table with the latest Gazette and a glossy ceramic bowl of fruit. He declined other refreshment but was shown a silver gong to ring if he changed his mind. Once he had gained admittance everything was done with unfussed efficiency. This seemed a comfortable, cheery sort of house: nothing too brash or too opulent, though all chosen with a good eye. The lampstands were rare Etruscan antiques. The slaves were content, their manners businesslike.

He ate two of the apples because they smelled so fresh and good, then after a moment's hesitation stowed the stalks on the rim of a lamp. He decided this was a house where no one would mind if a stranger put his fruit cores in the wrong place.

It was wonderfully restful. He felt liable to doze. With an effort he managed to stay the right side of sleep, to hear any movement outside. So, when the sunlight finally moved around until it fell through the slatted shutters of a bedroom in another part of the house, he did catch the distant tinkle of a light bell, and knew she must be awake.

* * *

Very soon afterward came swift footsteps in the corridor outside.

The door began to open. Outside a familiar voice spoke tersely. He folded his arms. The lady of the house walked in.

She was a middle-aged woman with lucid eyes set in a calm expression. It was deceptive; she was trained to appear tranquil in public. Not tall, not beautiful, she moved with self-contained assurance though her rig was far from ornate: a green-grape gown and a bangle she had owned for years. Her hair, still dark but with fine silver wings above the ears, was rolled simply for an afternoon at home, then speared in place with a couple of wooden combs. A whisk of some clear, pleasant perfume enlivened the room as she entered. Behind her shoulder the steward ogled anxiously.

She had recovered from her illness but seemed quieter than ever before. After the first few seconds Vespasian really did not register that she was older, and heavier, and perhaps her spirit was more tired. She was herself. For him, nothing about her that mattered would ever change. His breathing quickened; his brows knit.

She had obviously guessed who it must be. For old times' sake he rather hoped she would exclaim, "Skip over the Styx; you're not allowed in here!" But age and polite manners overtake everyone.

"Hello, Caenis!"

"Good afternoon, Consul." Caenis insulted him with the title she must know had expired. "Please don't get up."

She could probably tell it had not until that moment struck him that he ought to rise. She was a freedwoman, one of some standing and in her own house; her house, to which she had stubbornly declined to invite him. Her voice sounded steady. It was only in the set of her mouth that an old acquaintance could identify irritation and distaste.

"Aglaus, you should have recognized this gentleman; his statue is in the Forum of Augustus—though perhaps when you're scuttling to and fro you never glance above their noble marble feet. This one is Flavius Vespasianus—the Hero of Britain."

The Hero of Britain twitched his living feet and decided that everything was going to be a great deal more difficult than he had hoped.

There were fairly decent women, Vespasian knew since they had already made the situation plain to him, who would readily tolerate a man of forty-six if his statue stood in the Forum of Augustus and he was entitled to wear a triumphal wreath at public festivals. They would expect him to give them money (he had learned this too from experience) and he believed it was unlikely that any of them would want to stay friends—if that was the correct designation for such types—for as long as twenty years.

It never once occurred to him that Antonia Caenis might no longer be his friend.

Nor after twenty years was he surprised to find her angry; she had been angry all her life—Narcissus had told him that. Resting his chin on one hand, watching her while she briskly dismissed her servant, he noticed changes—particularly in the assured way she moved, here in her home, and the low tenor of her voice as she spoke familiarly to the steward. He noticed too, with an internal burn of excitement, what had not changed about this woman: that her scowl made him smile; that her hard edge made him soft; that merely to sit in her presence for a few moments had brought him peace, and a sense of wellbeing he had not known for years.

That was when he knew he still thought, What an interesting girl!

THIRTY

Caenis had been furious when they told her he was here.

After her nap she was as usual good-tempered, joking with Chloe as the girl massaged her throat: "Rub the oil well in, girl; if the neck's half-decent I may get away with an antique face—strong cheese: intriguingly mature!"

Then Aglaus appeared, looking oddly smug. "Madam, someone came to see you. I don't know his name." She had told him before; he would make a poor secretary.

"A man," Chloe informed her. "He says, a friend!"

People liked Caenis, but she had always limited her friends. Her standards were too high, her patience and her temper both too short. She scoffed, "A brave man, then!"

When she had asked what this brave friend of hers was doing, they said he appeared to be asleep. So then she knew. She tried to stop herself from wondering what he must want.

Now Vespasian was fixing her with that long grim stare of his; Caenis ignored it, finding herself a chair.

Aglaus did his best. "The Hero of Britain! Yes, madam! Another time I'll demand a boot inspection on the step so I can match the feet. . . . Will you want refreshments?"

"Later perhaps."

"Shall I send your woman?"

"No need."

As soon as they were alone she began to settle down.

His face had once been older than his years, so he had grown into his looks. The frown had stayed; the deep wrinkles on the forehead; the steadiness of his eyes when he looked at her.

Caenis felt fragile as a lovelorn girl. To find him here, in her house, plunged her into fluttering formality. "Consul! My word, what an honor. What can we do for you?"

Vespasian hated her when she was arch. "Do you mind?" he felt obliged to inquire. "Should I have made an appointment? Do you mind?"

Without thinking she replied sourly, "Apparently not!"

They were talking in odd jerks. He seemed very quiet. He looked as if he had forgotten how to smile. She felt awkward. A different kind of woman would retreat behind her embroidery, but Caenis had never been one for handicrafts; as a slave she had had no time, and as a freedwoman in the early days no money for the silk.

Despite all he had become, Vespasian was at a loss in this situation. She watched him run his hand over his hair—what was left of it—and though he was far from vain, she could see he wished at this moment that he had not lost quite so much. It was a strangely unsettling gesture. "I still have your money," he reminded her, for something to say. "Need it?"

He had been here no time at all before managing to arouse her indignation: "That's for my old age, Titus—I don't, thanks; not yet!"

The fact that she had automatically called him by his personal name disturbed them both, yet he was laughing a little when he replied, "No. You look glowing."

"The nap, dear!" Caenis snapped. They were already recovering their way of speaking to each other. "And a sensible diet. Lots of fruit. In fact, almost too much to get through—"

"I'm sorry. Still repaying my debts . . . You can always hurl it after me when you send me out through your door with your foot in the small of my back." He was testing her out. Caenis said nothing. "Friends with me?" he cajoled her softly.

They were absolute strangers, Caenis thought bleakly; yet for the sake of the past she nodded, staring into her lap.

Vespasian stood up. It seemed premature; Caenis experienced a thread of disappointment. Still, ex-consuls were much in demand when they visited Rome from the country.

They knew they had failed to make real contact. They both realized this visit had been an error on his part. No point prolonging it.

"Thank you for seeing me."

"My pleasure, lord."

Not until she had risen too and was walking across the room to escort him to the door in her old way, did Vespasian diffidently come to the point: "There's music this afternoon in the theater. I've found out about it. It's a water organ—some newfangled machine Nero's discovered. Might be interesting . . . Were you intending to go?"

I don't want to! Caenis thought.

I don't blame you! answered Vespasian with his eyes. "Afterward," he stated aloud, when she did not reply, "I am invited to dinner at my cousin's house—bringing the guest of my choice."

Caenis guessed that his family was worried about him. A widower, especially one in charge of two young boys, was easy game for well-meaning ladies who wanted to flap. He must be hating it. In fact, he seemed so subdued, she was tempted to worry about his welfare herself. By now they were standing so near to one another that he was able to lift her hand in his, lightly by the fingers as if he were afraid he might offend her. With an effort he asked, "Will I be stepping on anybody's toes if I ask you to go with me?"

He thought he had trapped her with his long, evaluating stare. Her fingers were still balanced on his, held by the faint pressure of his great thumb. Caenis realized just how badly she wanted to go. She reached a rapid, defiant decision: "I would like that. Thank you."

Amazed, the Hero of Britain cleared his throat. A hint of anxiety tightened the corners of his eyes. "And will I?"

"Will you what?" demanded Caenis, whipping back her hand.

"Will I be stepping—"

"Mind your own business," she said, and stalked ahead of him out of the room.

In the hall the steward Aglaus was hovering. Caenis spoke to him calmly. "Aglaus, I shall be going out this afternoon." She laid her hand for a moment on Vespasian's togaed arm as he followed her. "This gentleman is someone I have known for a long time. If ever he comes here he is to be received as a friend of the house. Mind you"—she lifted her hand again—"he's the type who turns up for one or two meals, kicks the cat, spanks the kitchen maids, then disappears again for twenty years."

Being rude was a mistake. Caenis saw it at once; perhaps they both did. For one thing, the steward decided there was something going on. Nobody wanted that.

Aglaus noticed that the Hero of Britain faintly smiled. It was not, therefore, an irreversible error. The fact that Caenis was standing up to Vespasian only made both of them look forward to their outing even more.

* * *

The water organ was amazing. It was played with skill by a lacquered young lady, though anyone could tell that the Emperor was already planning to make this spectacular toy his own specialty. As far as Caenis could judge from her place in the upper gallery, it was a gigantic set of panpipes, partly brass and partly reed, worked by a large beam-lever that forced air into a water box; under pressure it found its way to the pipe chamber and thence to the pipes, released into them by slides, which the musician operated. It was the most complicated instrument she had ever seen and versatile too, though she was uncertain whether she found the thing musical.

When she left, Vespasian was waiting for her, attended by six bearers and his personal two-seater sedan chair. "You're the musician. Tell me what I am supposed to think of that contraption." He said this straight-faced; whether he was serious Caenis no longer knew him well enough to tell.

"Very sonorous!" she exclaimed. "I could see it was keeping you awake."

The dignified person who passed for Flavius Vespasianus nowadays gave her an unexpectedly melting smile.

Dinner at his cousin's was pleasant; she was glad she had gone, for it clearly relieved Vespasian's anxious relations to see him bring someone, whoever it was. Caenis knew how to behave gracefully. Vespasian made her feel at ease, though he was never so fussy it troubled her. Once, when somebody asked after his son Titus, he answered and then shared with Caenis a look, which for all the wrong reasons attracted notice from the others present. Caenis could not detect whether people realized he had known her in the past.

One thing that startled her was the difference between dining out in the old days with Vespasian the struggling young senator, and accompanying him now. Nowadays the consular Vespasian automatically took the place of honor next to his host, in the central position. Moreover, the free couch beside him was immediately given to his guest, whoever she was.

It was a relaxed, respectable party that broke up at an early hour, without excessive drinking. Vespasian then took her home. In the chair he sat across from her. Although they were both content with their evening, neither spoke. It was dark enough for Caenis to watch him, well aware that he was watching her; it was too dark to have to meet his eye.

At her house he ordered the bearers to wait while he himself carried a torch to light her to the door. He rapped on the fat dolphin knocker, then stayed until her porter came.

"Thank you, Caenis. I enjoyed tonight."

She was aching for him to touch her; it was quite ridiculous.

"Yes. Thank you."

Her door was open. The porter had stepped back out of sight. He was normally inquisitive, so Caenis guessed that Aglaus had been lecturing the staff.

"Your door's open," said Vespasian, without moving from the spot. There was a fractional pause. "Good night, Caenis."

Great gods; the man had no idea how to provide gossip for her servants. Nor—though they must be obvious—did he understand the feelings of the lady of the house. The man had no manners. The man had no sense.

"Titus." She walked past him, inclining her head politely, no more.

The porter hesitated, then closed the heavy door. As he was bolting it Caenis told him everyone could go to bed; she would not need her girl. Unusually brisk, her footsteps crossed the hall and strode down the corridor to her room.

Really, she did not know why she was annoyed.

"Damn!" Caenis said to herself. "Damn! Damn him! Damn!"

She had closed her bedroom door quietly enough, rather than have it known throughout the house how she felt; then to relieve her tension she flung open the shutters so all the turmoil of Rome at night flooded the room: the clatter of delivery carts barging one another at the Porta Nomentana, their drovers' shouting at traffic jams, the roar of activity from the Praetorian Camp; then from within the city the shouts, the whoops, the occasional screams, the rancid laughter, the wild soaring of solitary song as a man painless with wine leaned against a wall and admonished the stars.

Dressing to go out had taken her longer than usual—even though Caenis was impatient of fiddling and liked to follow a steady routine. Now preparing for sleep took no time at all. Her elegant white-and-gold gown was already over the back of a chair; she felt spitefully glad she had decided against a brighter color, which she knew Vespasian would prefer. She poured water for herself, one-handedly scrubbing the cosmetics from her face with a sponge. There came a succession of angry sounds at the snapping down of hairpins and brooches; then her bangle clanged on the shelf. The decorative hairstyle that had taken Chloe an hour to create took Caenis two minutes to unwind before she was bending forward to comb the tangled mass with brisk swishing strokes. She stopped muttering, but among all the noise that she had introduced she failed to notice the distant knocking, then a low murmur of voices. In her room, after more vicious combing, she straightened with a great sweep of hair; then one earring chinked.

Aglaus knocked quickly and entered at once, carefully closing the door. Caenis did not encourage anyone to come into her room without permission; something had occurred. "Excuse me, madam; your friend's popped back. . . ."

She understood his haste, and the low voice. Then Vespasian himself opened the door.

Aglaus was shocked. "Oh! Sir! I know there are special rules for heroes, but the lady's in her bedroom in her slip!"

She was perfectly decent, in a good undertunic from neck to floor, yet she felt deeply embarrassed. Vespasian quickly brushed courtesies aside. "Sorry, Caenis. Something I meant to say." Somewhere, perhaps in her own hall, he had shed the heavy folds of his toga. It made him look much more comfortable: the country boy with brown arms and his tunic slouched over his belt.

Aglaus was an excellent steward. He had a fine ear, or eye, or whatever it took, for dealing with visitors just as his lady required. His problems started when Caenis herself did not know what she wanted to do. Scooping up her trail of discarded shoes, shawl, belt, he crossed swiftly and forced the shutters closed, snuffing the outside noise. It gave her time to think. "I'll ask one of the girls—"

Caenis found she was furious, though not with him. "Don't bother. Thanks, Aglaus."

"Right. Well! As things seem to be so informal I expect you can let the gent out for yourself."

"I expect I can," Caenis agreed grimly. "Good night, Aglaus."

He stomped off in a huff.

Then once again they were alone. Because she was so flustered, Caenis began speaking too rapidly: "Vespasian, I never was a proud girl, but I would not from choice receive you in my slippers with my face paint all scrubbed off!"

He stayed where he was, in the center of the room.

"Luckily I had not yet put my teeth away in their silver box and my wig on its stand. . . ." She wished she had not said that, for it made her self-conscious about having her hair loose. She was too old; it looked foolish. It was her own hair really; they were indeed her own teeth. He might not recognize the joke.

She turned away to replace the comb on her dressing shelf, only to hear him approach. She spun back, but it was worse; he had come right behind her, so she turned almost into his arms. Drawing an agitated breath, she stepped away, but was stopped by the shelf behind her. A warm tremor shimmered over her skin.

"You've still got one earring—" Vespasian offered simply, beginning to reach for it.

"I can manage!" She wrenched it off and hurled it to join its fellow with another skedaddling chink. He had lost her goodwill. She wanted him to go.

"Calm down," he appealed, though a gleam in his eyes said frankly that she would not be Caenis unless she were pointlessly ranting, most of the time. He was not the least put out by it. "What's the matter?"

Caenis sighed; she heard Vespasian grunt; they both relaxed. "What did you come to say?" she asked in a quieter tone.

In his aimless, curious way he picked up her bangle. "Did I give you this?"

"You did." She was terse with irritation; their two names were still engraved clearly enough inside.

"Sweet of you to take it out."

"I wear it every day. It's good gold, and I'm fond of it."

He put it down. "It's very plain. Would you like a better one?"

"No."

Now he was at the earrings. "Who gave you those?"

"Marius."

For a moment he needed to think who Marius was; she enjoyed that. He dropped the earrings quickly into a box where they did not belong. Tetchily, Caenis moved them out of the box to a tray. On reflection she remembered that these—gold acorns dangling from rectangles of green glass that could almost pass for emeralds—were a present from Veronica. She decided not to correct herself.

For the first time their eyes really met. She and Vespasian had never been shy with one another; they were shy now.

"I'm frightened to touch you," he admitted, very close and quiet. Frightened or not, she found he was looping up a strand of her hair on one finger to watch the light shimmer along it.

Caenis tossed her head to pull free, but she replied sensibly enough, "I'm not used to you anymore; you're not used to me."

He shrugged. "I'm just the same."

He was so close that Caenis could see the intentions forming in his face; instinctively she put her hands on his shoulders as if to keep him at a distance. His face set.

"You are the Hero of Britain!" she scoffed. Conscience dissolved her. She was at least old enough now to ask directly for what she wanted. She intended him to know it was her choice. Her voice dropped. "Would that Hero accept a kiss from an admirer?"

Vespasian frowned, evaluating the change in her mood.

Without waiting she leaned forward and kissed him—a mere brush of the lips like a moth landing on a sleeper's face in the night. It was really to see what he would do. He closed his eyes briefly, but otherwise hardly moved.

The sensation of their kiss clung with alarming intensity even when she drew away. Vespasian prevented her moving again with one warm hand on her shoulder, his fingers catching in her hair. Caenis could hear the blood in her own veins. He looked desperately sad; at first she thought she had made a terrible mistake.

The mistake was in doubting him. Suddenly she could see how great his self-control had been. She glimpsed the moment when he broke. He began to draw close to kiss her conventionally, but it was too much for him. "Oh, lass!"

Then her cheek banged against his as they hugged one another like people meeting on a quayside after a long separation in far distant countries, two people falling into one another's arms and holding each other tight as if they would never be able to let go.

After a while his breathing eased, and she heard him whisper hoarsely, "What can I say to you?"

Still locked in his embrace, never wanting it to end, Caenis closed her eyes. Buried in the braided edge on his tunic, her face had crumpled. She would not let him see her misery, but he must know; he must be able to feel her shaking. "I suppose the Hero of Britain has a great many women asking to go to bed with him?"

"Some."

"And what about my old friend Vespasian?"

"Poor unimportant beggar—rather less!"

Caenis leaned away so she could look at him. Her face was drawn. His too. "Well, there's an offer here—if he wants it."

She watched the shadows go out of his expression, to be replaced by some tenderness that she could not bear to contemplate. He released her completely, with a small open-palmed gesture, but his hand found hers as at once they walked together to the bed.

THIRTY-ONE

Caenis had begun to believe she could not do it.

Nothing was going to happen. The situation was too important, and she was still standing on her dignity. It was all going wrong. She felt lumped like wood, an unresponsive trunk.

She had accepted it. She was content merely to be with him, content with whatever companionship there inevitably was, and yet despite herself she must have made some sound. Hearing her distress, he stopped. "Sorry."

She realized he had been waiting for her. She kept perfectly still. He was not a man with whom she wanted to pretend.

Being careful to disturb nothing else, Vespasian stretched one arm to the small table at the side of the bed and gradually moved the tiny pottery lamp that gave the only light in the room. She realized, with misgivings, it was the lamp she hated, where a satyr and a faun were doing unspeakable things to each other around the air hole and the wick. She was relieved he left it there.

In the slight increase of light, Vespasian brought his arm back and set his hand on her brow, shading her eyes while he searched for whatever she was thinking. He could not be sure whether, after all, he was entirely welcome. Caenis herself was experiencing belated doubt. Perhaps the truth was that even though she wanted him so badly, she could not bear to admit how she felt. She must be still quarreling with him for leaving her.

"Not doing very well, am I?"

Suddenly he was smiling. The intimate sunny grin he kept for his friends was inviting her to share his self-mockery, and she found it irresistible. She was already reabsorbing the familiar feel, the scent, the size, the warmth, the pleasure of him.

For Caenis he had always been a good-looking man. He had a wonderful face. The interplay of strain and amusement was fascinating; she could watch his concentration at work, then without warning he would brighten into a crackle of shared good humor. All the time those deep, steady eyes were seeking hers. He was a man of such passionate decency. It was impossible to deal with him in her normal mood of prickly resentment.

"It's me," he told her softly. The tension went sliding from her. His straightforwardness reached out to her. "You remember me."

She remembered: her Sabine friend; the second half of her.

She felt her senses afloat at once, almost before he bent his head to kiss her and moved to start making love again. Her body began to answer his. When the moment came, they were together. When the moment came, it was with an intensity that seemed not to have diminished but increased with time, and experience, and their separate knowledge of triumph and loss.

Afterward he stayed with her, in complete silence, for a long while. Even when he was compelled to move from her he would not speak. But he held her; he was still holding her when she plunged abruptly into sleep and when, many hours later, she awoke.

* * *

It was just before dawn. For a short period the hubbub around the city gate had faded as the carters and revelers dispersed to their beds, while the early morning street sounds of bakers and laborers going to their work had yet to begin. Even the sick were sleeping now. In this silent room the lamp had long snuffed itself; there was the faintest shift in the dim quality of the natural light.

Only gradually did Caenis realize that she had woken more comfortable, warmer, more tranquilly rested than usual. Only slowly did she become aware that her pillow was Vespasian's firm chest and that she was trapped in utter security under the weight of his arm across her back and his hand at her breast. She lay motionless, but her eyelashes had been tickling his ribs; she felt his fingers intertwine in her hair, where it grew thickest at the back of her head, softening away any last shreds of tension from her neck. He was awake. He had been awake for perhaps an hour before.

"Titus; you're still here!"

"Mmm."

He always woke in the early hours. At home he would rise and use this time to read or attend to his correspondence without interruptions while others slept. Here he had simply lain still, lost in thought, holding Caenis in his arms.

She snuggled closer, but said dutifully, "I shan't mind if you want to go."

There was no change in the slow motion massaging the tendons of her neck. "Wanted to say good morning to you first."

Then she leaned up on one elbow, looking at him. "Hello, Titus."

"Hello, my lass." In the gray light she could make out nothing of his face, but his voice was full of amusement. "Oh, Caenis! . . . People will think we are mad."

"People," remarked Caenis tartly, "don't think! Thank the gods none of them need know that you bought back my favors with a sack of Sabine apples and half a crate of plums."

"If they find out your weakness, you could be swamped under baskets of soft fruit. . . ." Vespasian sounded unusually dreamy. "Rome soaking up raspberry juice like a must-cake pudding. Trolleyloads of apricots blocking the Sacred Way. Quagmires of quinces, pears piled like the Pannonian Alps—mmm!" He stopped speculating to allow Caenis to kiss him quiet. "Blackberries—mmm! Mulberries—mm-mmm!"

She was still fretting about his public life. "Do you want me to get up with you, Titus?"

His sudden roll caught her unawares as he swept her back against the pillows full length, lying above her in his most sensual embrace. "I said," he said, "I wanted to say good morning to you first."

Then Caenis stopped worrying about his waiting secretary at home; she recognized from his wicked tone that he intended far more than a mere verbal greeting. She stopped worrying about anything, as Vespasian began once again to touch her where she needed to be touched and hold her as she wanted to be held. This time there was no difficulty. He knew as Caenis knew herself that he was, and that he would always be, welcome.

The next time she woke he was no longer with her, but her body and all her spirit sang with the joy of his having been there.

THIRTY-TWO

The noise from the Praetorian Camp was now quite loud even though the whole house was orientated toward its inner courtyards. Light increased the disturbance, as somebody unkind unfastened a shutter. "Morning, madam. Rise and shine!"

Caenis groaned. "No, thanks. Good morning, Aglaus. I shall just lie here, oozing goodwill—"

Her steward frankly whistled. "Goodwill! Things must be worse than I thought." It was the first time Aglaus had been so curious about a guest that he wanted to greet the lady of the house first himself.

"Was somebody up to see to my friend?"

"Naturally. I keep an eye on Heroes in case they pinch the silver. Breakfast out in the peristyle; his suggestion. What an amazing man! I gather we'll be seeing him again."

"I should think we may," Caenis conceded cautiously. Swathed in crumpled counterpane, she sat up.

"Every five minutes, no doubt!" Aglaus quipped freely. "You don't want the breadrolls to go hard; I'll send you a girl."

* * *

The colonnade outside her dining room surrounded a very small courtyard garden that for most of the day lay in heavy shadow, a place of wet, dank greens and elongated spindles of unhealthy creeper, which was sad, though first thing in the morning it was streaming with sunlight. Caenis rarely ate breakfast, so she was surprised today to find that her steward had laid a refectory table with a minor banquet of newly baked bread, cold meat, and cheese. A banquet for two. There were also three lopsided carnations in a vase.

Caenis, who did not enjoy cheekiness so early in the day, bellowed, "Aglaus!" before she noticed somebody sitting on a stool.

A burly figure had his feet in a shrub pot, while he corrected a dictation table with a stylus. When she appeared, he tucked the stylus behind his ear and grinned at her. There was no sign of his secretary, though the man had obviously been here to bring the Flavian correspondence. Vespasian was scribbling away as if her garden was his normal morning workplace. Her Sabine friend was surprisingly well organized.

Aglaus poked his head out of a window, answering her yell. "Leave us in peace, Aglaus," Caenis countermanded herself placidly. The steward smirked at Vespasian—they were already allies—and duly obeyed. "Titus."

"Expected, surely?" Vespasian teased.

"Well, tomorrow perhaps," Caenis tried to appear cool. "Tonight even, if you're desperately keen—or just desperate. Hardly for breakfast."

Vespasian left his work on the stool and took his place on a wooden bench at the table. "Mind?" She joined him, sitting alongside, saying nothing. "Looks good. Plotted it with your man. Notice the ample supply of cold meat."

She had noticed.

They began to eat, Vespasian enjoying himself, Caenis more reluctant. Above them her pet finch chortled in the sunlight in a fine wire cage.

"Well?" she demanded. Vespasian served her cheese, which she did not want; she ate it anyway, in case he had paid for this spread himself.

"Told you; something I wanted to say."

Caenis laughed. "I rather assumed you had done that."

"Sidetracked, lady!" Grinning, he licked his fingers, which were sticky with honey from the rim of his cup, then reached out to lay his hand over hers, winsome with memories of last night. She waited. No one ever rushed him. He resumed his meal. "Does your birdie get the crumbs?"

"If you like."

Vespasian stood up and fed the finch. He chirped back at it for a while, as Caenis went on chewing; she was hungrier than she had thought. Before he sat down again he came closer and kissed her, once, on the cheek, leaning around her from behind. "Hello again."

He returned to his place, checked himself, walked back, thoughtfully kissed her other cheek like a man making everything equal, then smoothed up the hair on the nape of her neck where it was turned over and pinned; automatically she bent her head under his hand so he was able to kiss her lightly all around from just beside one earlobe to the other. Caenis quivered at his enjoyment. Still teasing, he sat down again with a relaxed sigh. "Well! This is exceptionally pleasant."

She could no longer bear the suspense. "Flavius Vespasianus, you have suborned both my steward and my singing bird; this is obviously part of some scheme. Are you asking me to become your mistress again? I can tell you want a favor; you always did feed me first."

He laughed. "Blunt, bold, and up to a point astute!"

It seemed to Caenis that the subject had been fairly thoroughly agreed the night before, and the morning after too. "Oh, love; not after twenty years?" she mocked gently. "The same woman! What is this—sheer laziness, or reluctance to reinvest?"

Vespasian grunted. He was neither offended nor impressed by her frankness. "Set in my ways. And I chose you to last."

"Well, I'm no spring chicken nowadays. You chose me when the hen run was sprightlier."

He grinned wickedly. "Spring chickens are very bland to mature taste. For an old broiler, you can hold your own—I'm a grandfather myself."

"Your daughter died; I'm sorry. Were you very fond of her?"

"Fond of them all. Even Domitian, though he's a bit of a brat. Needs careful handling. And he's on his own a lot. I tend to forget there are more than ten years between him and Titus: separate generations; can't expect them to be as close as Sabinus and me."

It struck Caenis, even then, before she realized just how close young Titus and his father were, that if the elder son kept his reputation for charm and talent, the younger one would spend all his childhood trying to catch up with an impossible goal. Titus was the type to attract a great deal of attention. As an ex-slave, she knew about running life's races from behind.

She felt this conversation was straying from its intended path, though she was still puzzled what it was really supposed to be about. She covered what was left of the food with napkins, then turned her back against the table, lifting her face to the sun.

"How is your brother?"

"Same as ever."

"Just back from abroad?"

"Offered the city prefecture . . . When he was still in Moesia I wrote to him that I intended seeing you. He said—"

"What?"

"He didn't think I should rely on getting anything to eat!"

Caenis was about to chortle, but something in Vespasian's face stopped the laughter in her throat. The brothers must have been discussing more than food.

"Caenis. Caenis, I have done my duty. Good family man, two healthy sons, decent husband—duty done."

For no obvious reason she was shivering.

"There were women?" she asked drily. "Well; I know there were. There is the famous story of the one who squeezed four thousand sesterces out of you."

Veronica had told her: Some floozie declared she was in love with him, persuaded Vespasian into bed, and wheedled the money from him when she left. The story had whistled around Rome not because of that, but because word got out too that when his hard-tried accountant asked ruefully how to show the loss in his ledger, his master had retorted, "Jot it down under ‘Canoodling for Vespasian!' " Since Romans kept their accounts as documents open for public inspection, this bold move meant more heartache for a self-respecting ledger man.

Vespasian looked up cheerfully. "I keep being told that story. I can't even remember what she was like."

They were both thinking of the money Caenis had lent him. She wondered how that showed in the ledger. She damned him without malice: "I suppose you thought she was worth it!"

"Suppose I did!" he admitted, unabashed. "Must have been unusually flush with cash at the time. Anyway," he went on, his tone jarring as it sometimes did, "you were no Vestal Virgin. What about that nasty piece of work Anicius who used to boast he slept with you?"

"Boasted, did he?" Startled, Caenis braved it out.

"Who wouldn't, my darling?" Vespasian caressed her quietly. She caught her breath. "All right," he said. "There were some women. None of them was important. Not like you. You always were. I hope you knew that—I hope you still know it, lass." She stared at the table. "You know perfectly well," he insisted, "that was why I never tried to come."

"Perhaps," she muttered, more subdued than usual. Whatever became of them now, she would never be easy mentioning those years they had spent apart.

It was then that Vespasian proved he was a most amazing man. He waited until she looked up again, then began what was to be the strangest interview of her life.

"Live with me, Caenis," he urged her quietly.

Not all the training in the Palace school could have prepared her for that. Caenis felt her jaw sag. "Live with you?" She was flabbergasted. "Live with you where?"

Much as she knew him, he astonished her. "In my house."

It was unbelievable.

The man sat, amid the ruins of their al fresco breakfast—as he would sit, if she did live with him, every day—gazing at her as peacefully as if he had just asked her to read out the election results from the Gazette. They were sharing a table of the most casual kind. He must know she was happy. She had asked him for nothing. Yet he chose to offer this. "That was what I wanted to say." He was perfectly serious.

Caenis sat in silence while the world rocked, and every assumption on which she had built her bitter life was smashed. Caenis believed: It was impossible to win; it was impossible ever to regain what you had lost; life was unequal; affection was temporary; men took; men left and did not return; women lost, grieved, longed, made do with diminishing faith and fading strength. . . .

With his astounding demand, Vespasian had disproved it all.

"Oh, you can't!" she managed at last to gasp. "A senator and consul—set up house with a freedwoman; not even one of his own? Oh, Titus! Why not just marry again? Take a discreet mistress? Me, if you want; you must know that I would—"

He was expecting this shocked protest from her. He stayed immobile, saying calmly, "Caenis, we were strong-minded enough to follow the rules; we are strong-minded enough to break them. I am asking for you."

"What are you asking?"

"Plain enough; live with me. Share my life; share yours with me."

For a moment she could not bear to let him see her face.

* * *

When she dropped her hands, Caenis started briskly to return their relationship to a normal course: "This is unnecessary. I would be quite content to have some regular arrangement. You don't need to cause social apoplexy. There are women a man sleeps with casually, and women he takes solemnly as his wife; there is no middle way. It's not respectable. It's against the law—"

"It is not. It's against the law to marry you. If I could—I will tell you this now—I would have done it years ago. Now, the snobs won't particularly like it, but I have performed my obligations; I can choose. ‘Somebody to bully and a half-decent companion for your old age.' You said it. Caenis, please; have me."

She tried one last feeble protest: "What about your family?"

"Ah yes; the family!" In that deliberate way he had thought it all through. "Well, Titus is clean and good-tempered around the house, though he does practice the harp sometimes; Domitian is obstreperous, and he's going to need attention. Sabinus seems grumpy, but he's easily led. His wife thinks you are wonderful; always did. You will be one of the family—that is what I intend—so you won't expect good manners. You, however, may be your vinegary self in return. You will have to be in charge. My role as head of the household will be to disappear to the Senate whenever there's a row; you'll have to cope all by yourself, of course. Normal home life with an antique hero—no money, no slaves, dismal food, poor conversation, and endless bickering. I expect you to be a drudge, a nurse, an entertainer, a very sharp accountant, and a provider of much physical comfort for me. . . . I have every confidence in you, Caenis."

Caenis wondered whether this speech, which was not obviously preplanned or overrehearsed, rated applause. She sighed, feeling helpless.

His voice fell to that low, benevolent tone that churned her stomach. "Do you want a promise about how much you mean to me, and what I'll do for you?"

"Don't be disgusting; we're better friends than that!"

He laughed happily.

There was sunshine on her face, birdsong overhead. Someone in the house had begun to rattle a broom around the dining room in the normal daily routine. She rubbed her temples with both hands.

Vespasian offered wryly, "I hope the unusual request speaks for itself."

"Oh, it does! You have noticed that I come with a set of silver knives and the best steward in Rome—"

"It's your wonderful knives I want, of course! Are there matching salad servers too? . . . Will you take me on, then?"

"You and I?"

"You and I. I knew a girl once, Caenis—odd little scrap, fierce as a lion, didn't care who she was rude to, nice girl, very good in bed, a true friend—who said life would be what we made it for ourselves."

For the first time since he fed the finch he got to his feet and came to her, holding out his hands. Caenis was trembling. He always knew how to reduce her to rubble, then say exactly the right thing. "Oh, I have missed you!" declared Vespasian in a low voice; she was lost.

With her hands twined in his, but still seated, Caenis spoke, once, what sooner or later she would have to say. Better now, than in some unrelated quarrel afterward. "I have lived the best years of my life, and lived them without you."

He did not flinch. "Agreed."

"I built my own life."

"Yes."

He drew her to her feet. Coming to him, Caenis said, "I missed you too. I missed you more than you or anybody else will ever understand. I have to tell you this. For the sake of what I have been, what I endured, what I have done. This has to be acknowledged between us now."

Gravely he let her speak; probably he did not fear anything she might say because he knew she would always be just. He did not even agitate for her answer. Perhaps he knew what it would be. Then, because even now Caenis could not bear to let him see her cry, she stayed silent for longer than she wanted. She had to struggle to control herself, but in the end she managed in her calm, trained, competent voice: "If it is what you want, yes; I will come."

His reaction was the last thing she expected: She saw, suddenly, that there were tears in his eyes.

"Titus? Oh, love!"

He was smiling the small pale smile that she had seen once before when he left her, though only now, with blinding recognition, did she finally understand it. She saw him swallow as he recovered himself. "Sentimental old beggar. Excuse me; I really didn't think you would."

Faced with an emergency, Caenis was at once herself: "Frankly, if I had thought that you felt sure of me, I don't suppose I would agree."

Then, as he laughed once more in that delighted way, she remembered. It was Crete all over again. In public life the next step after consul was a provincial governorship.

"You are due for a province. Agrippina can't debar you forever. You will be going abroad!" Life never changed.

Last time she had been fending him off; then they were so young, they had years heaped like treasures in spoilheaps ahead of them. This time she was in his arms; he knew exactly how she felt. This time she could let herself feel his devotion to her—and to let him go now would be unbearable.

Titus Flavius Vespasianus muttered a country curse. "I seem to have explained myself badly; or perhaps my assumptions were impertinent. When I asked you to live with me what I meant was that barring riot or rebellion, where I go I hope you will come too."

Caenis could hardly believe it. "One day you will be Governor of Africa; and I—"

"You will be the Governor's lady," he said. "Of course!"

THIRTY-THREE

Sometimes the most major events take place so quietly. Caenis was to live with Vespasian; it was as simple as that.

There were one or two riffles. There was a brief moment of tension the first time she went to Reate. She had been introduced to the servants, who seemed if anything more docile and pleased to see her than the high-handed experts with whom Aglaus had peopled her own home. In the house she had spotted the marks of long-term financial tension: not quite enough furniture, hangings pushed to last half a decade beyond their natural life, even items that were new all faintly drab as if years of having no money made it feel sinful to invest in anything that was genuinely attractive. Caenis did not mind. She was a woman who enjoyed tackling problems.

She had been sitting quietly with Vespasian. He was smiling at her. He tended to smile a great deal in private now; they were both as light-headed as rapturous young things. Then the door crashed open. (Caenis wondered how often the door hinges in Flavian homes had to be renewed.) The two boys, Titus and Domitian, burst into the room.

"Aha!" From what Vespasian had already told her Caenis knew enough to realize that the mere fact that they were obviously conspiring boded badly.

Their heroic papa had started to look unusually diffident. "Aha!" he retorted, with boisterous fatherly cheer. Then Titus strode across the floor in the full dignity of outraged seventeen, while Domitian ran alongside, a pugnacious six-year-old who was silently egging his elder brother on. It was Titus who had exclaimed. Domitian was running too fast to speak. "Our noble papa—and a lady friend!"

It was plain that they knew her intended position. Vespasian must have made some formal announcement. They had discussed it hotly between themselves. They were bent on demanding that this situation be renegotiated on lines that better suited them. Boys do like to be respectable.

They had not until that moment known who their father's mistress was.

Caenis gracefully turned; her eyebrows arched in apparent mild surprise. Titus stopped. He clapped his hand to his head in frank and blissful amazement. He looked well. Better still, shining with delight. "Oh, but you said you did not know him anymore!"

"We renewed our acquaintance." Caenis smiled. Titus was no longer any threat. He adored her. He always would.

"Come here!" said Vespasian cheerfully to the little one, pulling him into the security of that great arm. "Now watch Titus realize that his old father has snaffled his special turtledove from under his nose."

Since Titus was by now saying nothing, Domitian, who was too young to be sensitive to immediate change, piped up aggressively, "Is this to be my stepmother?" in tones of disgust.

Before Vespasian could speak, Caenis answered the child calmly, "If you are thinking that you would not like it, Domitian, let me tell you at once, I should not like it either. No; I am not," she assured him. "So you don't have to hate me, and I shall not feel obliged to be wicked to you."

The boy stared. They would never be friends, but he knew that temporarily at least Caenis had beaten him.

Vespasian, who evidently fell into the rough-and-tumble category of fathers, engaged Domitian in a minor bout of punch-bag scuffling. Whether this reassured anybody, Caenis could not tell. Certainly Domitian himself wriggled under his father's arm as soon as he could escape, in order to demand of Titus, "What shall we do?"

Pulling the stiff enraged figure from his father, Titus stooped down to fix his brother's eye. "We are going to welcome this lady to our house."

"You said—"

"It was a mistake."

"Does that mean," persisted Domitian, genuinely puzzled, "we have to be polite?"

Titus gripped his brother by one tight fist. He walked the curly-headed tot, who looked much more appealing than he ever was, to where Caenis sat.

"Yes," said Titus, before he gravely kissed her cheek and made Domitian do the same. "It's a democratic vote: two to one against you in the other voting-urn—Father and me."

"You agree with Papa? Why?"

"Little brother, she once saved my life."

"Sweet, aren't they?" grinned their proud father.

Caenis pursed her mouth. "Wonderful! And both so like their papa."

* * *

There was comment on their relationship, at least initially. Veronica said, switching her opinion, as sweetly illogical as ever, "I saw it coming years ago. Now watch yourself, girl; at your time of life this could be an expensive mistake."

"You have to admire him," Caenis told her levelly.

"What—for taking his old mistress back? It stinks! I admire you, for accepting him."

"It shows that I think he's worth it."

"It shows he's a complete worm, and you're a sucker. With no need to put himself out again, he gets himself a treasure—a good manager, clever and amusing, an armful any man would envy—"

"A canteen of cutlery, a good set of Greek bowls, cheap shorthand, and no risk any longer of having ragamuffin children." Caenis spoke with a deliberate lightness that would prove to Veronica that she knew all the implications. Then, more benevolent than Veronica had ever seen her in thirty years, she handed her friend a small object, which she took from a clip on her belt.

"Whatever's that?"

It was an old iron key. From a nation whose ironmasters and brass-founders were of the highest caliber, this was a pitiful specimen. It was two inches long, with a bent stem and missing one of its rusty teeth; it hung from a short piece of twisted leather thong that was greasy and blackened with age; an unsavory toggle, possibly amber but probably some grimmer fossil, was knotted at the farther end.

Caenis explained: "What you have in your hand is a symbolic gesture of the sentimental Sabine kind. I shall never be married with the witnesses and auguries; he won't take me in torchlight procession to his house; his servants will not greet me with fire and salt when I arrive. But there used to be a tradition—most people don't bother anymore—that a Roman ceremonially handed the keys of his house to his bride as a sign that she was now in charge of his domestic affairs."

"So?" demanded Veronica curiously, eyeing askance the grizzly little relic that still lay on her palm.

"That is the key to Vespasian's store-cupboard," Caenis reported. Veronica hastily handed it back.

* * *

Their living together hardly merited public notice. Vespasian had been right. Because he had done all society required, society took a lenient view when he did that which—in theory—ought to be condemned. Besides, almost from the first day their partnership appeared to everyone as they saw it themselves: the inevitable way for Caenis and Vespasian to live. There was no fuss. There were few confrontations. Vespasian now held such a substantial reputation that an act of open eccentricity actually enhanced his position. Rome, which had bound itself in edicts and regulations, admired a man with the self-confidence to stand up for principles of his own in his personal affairs.

Vespasian was still living quietly in country retirement, which helped. He kept his house in Rome, since a consular senator had to appear from time to time, unless he wanted to be reprimanded by the Emperor—or worse. But he spent as much time as possible at Reate, and that suited everyone. His provincial appointment was continually deferred. Nobody told him that the delay was due to the enmity of Agrippina, but he drew the obvious conclusion. He had become more of an outsider than ever, not that he seemed to mind too much. He was still ambitious enough to want the post, but dreaded the expense of it.

The Emperor's mother had enjoyed a brief spell of unprecedented influence, but caused such outrage by her assumption of almost equal powers with Nero and her improper public appearances as his consort that a year after his accession Nero was able to insist that she withdraw from the main Palace complex and take up residence in the House of Livia. This freed Nero to indulge in artistic pursuits, sexual license with male and female conquests, all-day banquets, gladiatorial shows, and a fairly humane political policy encouraged by his mentors, the philosopher Seneca and the Praetorian commander Burrus.

His alleged incest with Agrippina was long past. Eventually his irritation at her cloying mother-love and her dominating ambition reached the point where in the grand Claudian tradition he determined to be rid of her. Exile to a small island seemed insufficient; she had been exiled before, and proved she could survive and return worse than ever. At first he tormented her with lawsuits and encouraged her to take unwanted holidays. It took him four years of such scheming to work up the courage for a serious attack. Then, while Agrippina was staying at Antonia's huge seaside villa at Bauli, he managed to dispose of her—though not without a farcical series of failed attempts. He failed to poison her (she kept taking antidotes), or drown her (when her galley fell to pieces in the Bay of Naples, she swam to safety), or to crush her under a collapsible ceiling (someone had warned her it was there). He stopped being subtle. He simply had her put to the sword: one more of Antonia's grandchildren violently destroyed. But the accusation of matricide was one Nero would find harder to shake off than he first realized.

Freed from Agrippina's jealousy, Vespasian began to spend more time in Rome again, and eventually—though not immediately—he was awarded his province. As Narcissus had long ago promised, he was to be Governor of Africa.

"Of course you're heartbroken, Caenis," Veronica consoled her. "Still, you should get a nice rest from him while he trips off to the hot spots. Will he let you stay in his house while he's away?" She had phrased it tactfully, since she was well aware that the house Caenis owned herself was far more elegant and comfortable.

"I'm going to Africa with him."

Even Veronica, who had seen a great deal of human nature and of life, was nonplussed. "Well! Make sure you keep your lease on your own house—and insist that miser pays your fare."

"No need. As part of the Governor's household, the travel pass for transporting me to Africa will be provided, with the customary bad grace, by the State Treasury. I count as one of the Governor's traveling chests."

"You really know how to make a fool of yourself for a man," Veronica told her frankly.

By the time Caenis and Vespasian reached Africa, their lives had grown into one another inextricably. Their domestic partnership was by then some years old, and their relationship had assumed a solid permanence. They lived together, at the same pace, in the same style, sharing the same debates and humor, locked close in body and thought. They became a single unit, satisfied with one another and with life.

Of Vespasian's governorship in Africa three things were remembered afterward: First, despite the opportunities for profit, Vespasian came home no richer than he went; in fact his credit was used up, and he had been keeping his bank account buoyant by commercial flirtations, mostly involving wet fish. Second, it was grudgingly agreed that his term of office ran with dignity and justice. Third, the only sour incident recorded was when the people of Hadrumetum rioted and pelted him with turnips.

What went unrecorded—perhaps because though just it was not dignified—was how the Governor of Africa cursed the lively temperament of the people of Hadrumetum but managed to capture two of their turnips. He took them home to present to Caenis with his good-humored grin. Caenis, straight-faced, had them made into soup, which the Governor ate with great gusto, particularly since he had not had to pay for it.

THIRTY-FOUR

Nothing lasts.

They had enjoyed fourteen years under Claudius; then there were fourteen years of Nero to be endured. For most of that reign Caenis lived with Vespasian. Although in political terms the time seemed endless to those who did not court the Emperor's favor, for her it flew by.

They had achieved almost a decade of quiet domesticity, which was a long time. It was longer than most marriages survived before death or divorce intervened; it was much longer than many people even hoped to stick things out. Cautious as she was, she had begun to believe she could hope to end her days living like this.

Then, when Flavius Vespasianus was fifty-seven—late for any man to embark on a new phase in his life—he made the mistake of accompanying Nero on his fabled tour of Greece. It was a musical tour. Nero by then had ceased to heed his friends' warnings that stage and arena appearances, whether as a charioteer or a singer, would offend public opinion to a damaging degree. He now saw himself as an artiste; nobody dared to scoff at him openly, while the flatterers who surrounded him encouraged his flight from reality.

Vespasian was cultured. He always knew exactly what entertainment was available in Rome, because he liked Caenis to go. In his own house he had been observed to pause in the atrium for ten minutes at a time if he could hear someone singing, though that was because the person who sang in Vespasian's house was Caenis. He was not smitten with the sound of the lyre; in particular he hated it played badly. So going on an extended foreign tour with Nero was a mistake.

Titus came with them to Greece. By then Titus was twenty-six and he hated the tour with the frustration of a man who had a good ear, and who could himself play well, although unlike the Emperor he would not dream of performing upon a public stage.

Before they went to Africa, Titus had joined the army as a tribune in Germany. Vespasian long cherished a hope that his son would do his military service in Britain, best of all in the Second Augusta, his own legion, or at least the Ninth Hispana, which was commanded by Petilius Cerialis, who had been married to his daughter, Flavia. In the event they were all relieved that Titus started in Germany instead. In Eastern Britain there had been a series of administrative atrocities, which Vespasian described in a short phrase that Caenis chose to interpret as a military term (he probably did learn it in the army, but she guessed it was not a regular expression of command in line of march). Eventually the Queen of the Iceni, outraged by the dispossession of her chief tribesmen from their estates, her own disinheritance as her husband's heir, and the rape of her two teenaged daughters by a Roman finance officer's thugs, swept through the province in a ferocious rebellion. The scale and savagery were appalling. For a time it appeared Britain was completely lost. Three major towns were burned to the ground, thousands of settlers lost their lives, and the Ninth Hispana was ambushed so disastrously that Cerialis and a few rags of cavalry only just escaped alive.

Titus subsequently did lead the German detachments sent to support the decimated British legions during the period of recovery. He became popular in Britain. He and his father exchanged an interesting series of letters on the subject of Empire and provincial government.

By the time they all went to Greece, Titus had done a further stint as a quaestor and formally entered the Senate. He had been married twice, widowed once and once divorced; he had a baby daughter, Julia. He had been practicing as a barrister, though more to make himself a name in Rome than because he was particularly eloquent. His brother, Domitian, was approaching sixteen; during their Greek trip he was left behind at school.

By this time Vespasian himself had become an elder-statesman figure, respected for his military past though still disparaged for his unashamed country background. His brother, Sabinus, was regarded in Rome as the more substantial figure. Sabinus had been Governor of Moesia for seven years (though Moesia was not exactly the best-known province in the Empire) and had been Prefect of the City, a very significant post in Rome, to which he was now appointed for the second time. His wife had died. It was a source of regret to Caenis.

She and Vespasian still lived quietly. These were dark days, reminiscent of the brief dreadful reign of Caligula—but lasting much longer. Nero had begun well as a ruler, under the influence of Seneca and Burrus, though now he had murdered both. Seeking greater extravagance, he had first attempted to strangle, then divorced, then executed his blameless young wife, Octavia. He married his fabulously beautiful mistress, Poppaea, then kicked her to death, probably by accident, while she was pregnant.

"Sort of little mistake anyone could make!" Vespasian groaned. "Whoops! Careless bloody monster! Lass, was there ever a family so extravagant with other people's lives?"

There was worse to come. When Octavia's elder sister, Claudia Antonia, refused to take Poppaea's place as his wife, Nero accused her of rebellion and executed her too. In this way Caenis lost all those to whom she owed a duty as relations of her patroness, Antonia. The Flavians were now in every sense her family.

There was a terrible fire in Rome. Nero was blamed, though few dared breathe the accusation openly. Vespasian and Caenis had been away in the country; they returned to find that after six whole days and nights of conflagration the ancient heart of the city, including many sacred monuments, had been completely swept away, while much elsewhere was seriously damaged. The first outbreak had raged from near the Circus Maximus around the Palatine and Caelian Hills; then a second conflagration began north of the Capitol. Shops, mansions, blocks of modest apartments, and temples were destroyed, and part of the Palace too. Nothing remained there except rubble and ash. The fire had halted at the foot of the Esquiline. Vespasian's mansion on the Quirinal was safe; so too the house that Caenis owned outside the Nomentana Gate.

"That place of yours could be a good investment with so many people homeless!" chortled Vespasian, apparently teasing.

Caenis only smiled. She never discussed with anybody what she would do—or not do—with her house. Vespasian might have asked her to sell it, but even when he himself was reduced to investing in contracts for the supply of Sabine mules in order to fund his public career, he never imposed on her.

Now she wondered if he was gazing at her with particular amusement, though it was hard to tell, for his face often lit sweetly when he stopped what he was doing to look up at her. It had become a habit; she thought nothing of it anymore, merely accepted this as fortune's unexpected gift.

Depressed by the devastation in Rome, they went back to the country. So they missed, and were glad to miss, Nero's retaliation against the Christians whom he chose to blame for starting the fire. Sabinus, who was still City Prefect, saw it: the wholesale massacres in Nero's Circus on the Vatican Plain, the men and women torn apart by wild beasts, the human torches burning all night in the Palace Gardens. He heard the screams; he smelled the pitch and seared human flesh. He possessed the Flavian capacity for intense private feeling. He said little, but was deeply affected.

Nero's rebuilding of Rome typified the contradictions of his reign. The city itself was newly planned, with its monuments restored, while new building regulations specified ways in which private householders must guard against fire. The measures were sensible. The new street plans were elegant (though everyone hated them). Much of the cost was subsidized by the Emperor.

At the same time, this was Nero's opportunity to build the massive new palace complex that he called his Golden House. It enclosed whole farms, vineyards, and a monstrous lake—all in the center of Rome. In fact, the heart of the city was completely taken over by his new residence. The grounds contained a colonnade a third of a mile long. The interior contained a revolving dining room, and other suites, both private and public, of breathtaking magnificence. The decor included some of the most exquisite painted frescoes ever accomplished, with delicate trails of flowers, fauns, cherubs, swags, and latticework, created with meticulous artistry in the freshest colors, and even executed on corridors so tall that it was impossible to pick out the fine detail with the naked eye. There were marble vestibules, ceilings of fretted ivory, lavish use of gold leaf, and incredible encrustations of jewels. Outside the opulent entrance the Forum was dominated by the Colossus, a gilded statue of the Emperor wearing a sunray crown, which was one hundred and twenty feet high.

The total cost of the Palace would be enormous; even more bitterly resented was the fact that to create this phenomenon Nero dispossessed many other landowners, who had already lost their property in the Fire; their anger contributed much to his downfall. When he had created his flagrant affront to the austere Roman tradition, he crowed that at last he could begin to live.

Vespasian said the good thing about the Golden House was that it was so amazing it took your mind off the appalling food and the length of the public dinners, some of which went on from noon to night. Also (said Caenis), it stopped you wondering what potions from the poisoner Lucusta the Emperor might have slipped into your drink.

This Emperor was not mad as Caligula had been mad. He was extravagant, vicious, self-obsessed, murderous, and vain. But Nero was in command of his wits. Caenis judged him the worse for it; he lacked any excuse of delusion or dementia.

It was two years after the Fire that his interests in chariot racing and public singing contests brought Nero to Greece. He was to maintain that only the Greeks appreciated his voice; that bore out many Romans' low opinion of the Greeks. After one abortive attempt to arrange a visit, which he canceled on some whim, he finally arrived to tour the main cities, which sponsored musical events. In fact he also toured those whose contests were not due that year, compelling the festivals to be brought forward to accommodate his appearance, whatever disruption it caused to the formal calendar.

By the time he came home he would have collected more than a thousand victory wreaths, including one for a chariot race in which he fell out and never even completed the course. Nero grew so adept at announcing his own victories that he even put himself down for the competition for heralds—which of course he also won. Greek judges demonstrated a keen understanding of imperial requirements. The Emperor was doing his best. He followed a rigorous professional training program. He lay down with weights on his chest to strengthen his voice. He complied with every rule of etiquette, suffered agonies of stage fright, and awaited the judges' verdicts with a solemnly bowed head even after it had become blatantly apparent what the verdict would always be.

Those who accompanied him entered the spirit too—if they wanted to avoid strict penalties. Everyone of consequence was expected to attend imperial recitals, and once they turned up they were forbidden to leave until the end. Spies were stationed to check not just who was there, but whether they appeared to be enjoying themselves. Caenis endured this better than most; apart from the fact she had a well-trained face, she chatted to the spies about their work. Others were not so adept at survival. Men were arrested climbing out of the stadium over the back wall. Women gave birth. People died; people pretended to have died in order to obtain the relief of being carried out.

It was, therefore, doubly unfortunate when a prominent member of the Emperor's own retinue displayed a clear reluctance to applaud. Sometimes at private functions he got up and left the room. Sometimes he never turned up in the first place. Even in Italy he had already been in trouble when he began to nod at one of Nero's earliest recitals and was only saved by a reprimand from a freedman who generously woke him up with a sharp prod.

But character will out. And at one of Nero's endlessly dreary public recitations in Greece, Vespasian went soundly to sleep.

THIRTY-FIVE

Vespasian was dismissed from court. They had to flee to the hills. As Titus said later, it seemed a drastic way to work up a good suntan ready for the desert.

In fact the situation was desperately serious, and Vespasian became unusually upset. In case he doubted what might happen, Nero had just recalled the great general Corbulo from Armenia, having him greeted the moment he landed in Greece with a suggestion that since he was about to be executed he might want to commit suicide. And that was the reward for too much success.

Faced with a harpist in a huff, Vespasian had tried to restrain himself, but after his disgrace there were splendid scenes outside the audience chamber, culminating with the overwrought Vespasian crying to a supercilious chamberlain, "What can I do? Where shall I go?"

"Oh, go to Hades!" responded the chamberlain. He was having a trying time arranging this tour without ludicrous ex-consuls maddening the imperial musician with sheer bad manners.

Vespasian ruled out Hades; he decided on a family holiday, which he grumbled would be just as bad. Knowing that his unguarded drowsiness had this time placed him in danger of his life—and could have damaged his son too—he whisked Caenis and Titus to a remote mountain village. The village was, however, not so remote that he would be out of reach of the court if anybody wanted him back.

* * *

They had a wonderful holiday, even though Vespasian was daily expecting Nero's order for him to commit suicide. Titus suffered the most, and was given to outbursts of mild frustration at breakfast: "Ah, Greece! Its monuments are fabulous, but its mountain villages are pretty poky! You should have been there with him, Caenis. He never nods off if he knows you're in the top tier keeping an eye on him. For one thing, he keeps turning around to wink at you."

Caenis listened for a moment to the clunk-clunking of the goat bells, the tireless cicadas, the sporadic whistling of shepherds in the distance and, nearer at hand, a few contented hens. "Titus, I am a music-lover! It was a dangerous fiasco, and I am not sure I could have kept my temper with anyone—including your fool of a papa. How fortunate that my uncharacteristic headache had compelled me to stay in my room."

Titus grinned happily. "Well, I knew he wasn't safe. I remember when I took up the harp myself, he told me that from then on I was on my own in life—and by the way, I never want to see another little dish of hard green olives."

"I've just served you some, my darling; eat them and be quiet. Vespasian, your son is teasing you."

Vespasian, who was reading a letter, grunted.

Titus ventured, more cautiously, "Father, I never really understood why you came on the concert tour. It was obviously an exercise in regal self-indulgence. We could have tossed dice on whether Nero offended you mortally, or you him."

Vespasian sniffed this time.

"Playing his part in public life," scoffed Caenis.

"By nodding off?" Titus guffawed. "Well! I'm going for a walk. Yet again." There was not much else to do.

"Give me a kiss, then," Caenis commanded.

Titus was on the point of leaving his couch, when there came a sudden commotion outside the dining room. Before anyone could move, through the doors from the terrace burst a terrified plough-ox that had broken its yoke and run amok. An aimless horn swept a table lamp to the ground with a sickening crash. Caenis, who was not keen on animals even in their proper place, stayed perfectly still. The ox dusted a shelf with the frowsy clump of its tail.

The room was small; the ox was huge. The servants who had been about to clear away breakfast all took to their heels. Caenis noticed that even Titus swallowed. Vespasian looked over the top of his letter; the ox snorted, then dribbled menacingly, as its frantic hooves scrabbled on the tiled floor.

"Hello, boy!" Vespasian greeted him. "Lost your way?"

"Oh, my love," scolded Caenis, "I wish you wouldn't invite your friends for breakfast."

The ox took one step farther into the room; she picked up a spoon, the only implement at hand. She wondered if smacking it hard on the nose would make it go away. They could hear the approaching, panicky voices of the tillers of Greek fields who had lost their angry but valuable animal.

"Dear heart," Caenis murmured seductively to Vespasian, "do tell us what to do."

"Trying to think of a plan," he mused. "Difficult logistics."

"Well, you're the country boy!" Caenis snapped.

"The poor creature's frightened," Titus sympathized.

"I'm frightened," said Caenis, "and I live here, so I take precedence! I'd like to go to my room and do a decent bit of sewing, so perhaps one of you men could be masterful and sort out this incident."

"I've never seen you do sewing," Vespasian commented in wry surprise; then he continued talking amiably to the ox.

The tillers of Greek fields were peering in horror around the shattered doors. The ox filled the room. There was no space to turn it around. The tillers of fields plainly regretted having come to look.

"Shoo!" snarled Caenis crossly to the ox. "Go home."

Then the ox, charmed perhaps by the quality of Flavian repartee, suddenly advanced toward Vespasian, bowed its great head, and sank to one knee as if it were very tired.

The chattering of the tillers of fields dropped to an awestruck hum. Even Caenis and Titus looked impressed.

Titus said, "You have to hand it to him. For the son of a tax collector he knows how to bring a damn great beastie down at his feet!"

Removing an ox backward from a small decorative room requires great skill. It was a skill that the owners of the runaway ox possessed only fragmentarily. The two Flavians provided a rope and offered them much sound advice based on military tactics and higher mathematics. By the time everyone had gone it was lunchtime, and the room was wrecked.

Vespasian finally allowed himself to say, "By the gods, I thought we came out of that rather well."

Titus lay on his back on a bench. "Something to write home to Domitian anyway. I think I might faint now if nobody minds."

"Symbol of power, an ox, you know." Vespasian winked, knowing Caenis would be annoyed.

"You are living in disgrace on a mountaintop, eating fruit," she quipped nastily. "The only powerful thing round here is the smell of manure. Tell me, why is breakfast with the Flavians always so nerve-wracking?"

Since the ox had gone home and she was still holding the spoon, she smacked Vespasian with the spoon instead.

* * *

Not long afterward he was summoned back to the court. Knowing how Caenis felt about breakfast, he waited to tell her until they were at lunch.

"I'm coming with you," she said at once.

"No, you're not. If this means Nero has thought up a suitable way of executing a man who snores through his songs—slow torture by bagpipes, I dare say, or drowning in a water organ—then I'll have to endure it—but no usurping Claudian with his brains in his backside is going to get his hands on my family!"

"In law I'm not your family," Caenis commented quietly. Vespasian often swore, though not so often in front of her, because the Sabines were famously old-fashioned, and in all cultures being old-fashioned means denying women any fun; but he said tersely, "Damn the law."

Caenis nonetheless went with him.

* * *

He was spared strangling with a lyre string.

They found themselves presented with a mansion in which to lodge; they were invited to dine with the Emperor; the chamberlain now greeted them with oozing respect. Vespasian was welcomed by Nero himself with flattery, good wishes, and every sign of amity. Vespasian had dreamed that his family would start to prosper from the day Nero lost a tooth; as they arrived, they passed Nero's dentist with a molar on a little silver dish.

After dinner he was called into conference with the Emperor and his chief advisers, such as they nowadays were. When he emerged he had been offered a new post. He told Caenis at once what it was, and at once she understood what it must mean.

They returned to their donated villa in complete silence. Late as it was, Vespasian sent off a message to bring Titus as soon as possible. All the way home he had gripped her hand tightly in his.

They went into a room where they could sit. The house that Nero had placed at their disposal belonged to some wealthy old man who rarely visited. It was furnished in Roman fashion, but crammed with Greek artifacts. Every room was burdened with sideboards groaning under black-figure bowls and vases, bronzes, and pottery statuettes. There were carpets hung on the walls. Marble gods shared the dining room, while the buffet table used at lunchtime was five hundred years old. It was like living in an art gallery. The very rugs flung over the ivory-legged couches were draped not for comfort but display. Caenis hated it.

Vespasian took a chair; she sat sideways on a couch. This reversal of the normal pattern was typical of the casual way they had always lived. One of their own slaves, sensing late-night discussion, poured them amber resinated wine, unasked. For a long time neither drank. Once they were alone Caenis wished Vespasian would come nearer, but she realized that he wanted to be able to look at her. True to her old training, her face gave little away.

There had been a serious rebellion in Judaea. Vespasian had been offered the province, plus control of a large army, with permission to take Titus on his staff. It was, as he admitted to Caenis at once, partly in recognition of his military talent but mainly because he was too obscure to pose any political threat if a major fighting force were entrusted to his command. The appointment would be for the usual period of three years.

Caenis tried to remember what she knew about Judaea. It was another restless province at the far end of the Empire, which Rome viewed with mixed intrigue and unease. Caligula had once caused a trauma when he devised a plan to destroy the Temple in Jerusalem—a plan fortunately never carried out. The ruling house was riven by domestic squabbles but had been drawn to Rome under Augustus. Caenis herself had known the late King, Herod Agrippa, a close friend of the Emperors Caligula and Claudius, who had helped persuade Claudius to take the throne. He had been brought up in the House of Livia by Antonia, who remained his friend and champion for life. Judaea was now ruled by his son, who had been placed in power by Claudius.

The recent troubles were the product of a rising mood of nationalism, aggravated by a series of Roman officials whose attitude had been unhelpful. Cestius Gallus, then Governor of Syria, had taken in troops to put down the unrest and been dramatically routed at considerable expense of equipment, the capture of an eagle, and unacceptable loss of life. War was now inevitable. Nero feared that war in Judaea boded ill for the rest of the Empire; that was why he had humbled his musical pride. Having already executed the greatest soldier of their age, Domitius Corbulo, for being too successful, Nero realized that Vespasian was the only man he had left who would be capable of taking on the troubles in Judaea.

* * *

After a time they both slowly drank their wine. Caenis went to bed. He did not come to her. He recognized that she would welcome time alone to adjust to her need to be brave. And already he had too much to think about. He could not spare himself to help her.

She saw little of Vespasian or Titus in the following days. They were working incessantly, commissioning their officers, studying maps, scouring the briefs and dispatches that poured in the moment their appointment was officially announced. Titus was to sail to Egypt to collect the Fifteenth Legion from Alexandria. Vespasian would travel overland after crossing the Hellespont, to make his first contact with the Governor of Syria.

Caenis was interested in the problem, and they made no attempt to shut her out. Yet Vespasian and Titus were forming a close association for an enterprise she would only be able to watch from the sidelines. Once they left Greece, theirs would be a life of action, immediacy, and change. Caenis faced three years of suspense, hearing news selectively and long after the event. Once they did leave her she had decided to travel in Greece alone before returning to Italy; she had never been afraid of being by herself. That did not mean she was not lonely now. Even Vespasian's birthday passed with less than usual ceremony.

On the last night she sat with Vespasian and Titus until it grew dark, while they still worked. Then, despairing of acknowledgment, she went quietly to bed. She heard Titus go to his room, striding perhaps more noisily than usual. He called good night in a low voice as he passed her door.

The house that she hated grew silent.

Caenis was in bed. She had been trying to read, for she was unable to sleep, but the scroll now lay still half unrolled on a side table; Narcissus would have had something to say about that. The knock on her door was so gentle, she was still wondering whether she had heard it when Vespasian came in.

"May I? Saw your light. I'm glad you're still awake."

He came and sat on her bed. Shadows from the disturbed lamp raced for a time up the wall. He was weary, subdued, but obviously wanting to talk to her. "All the work is done. I was determined to finish it so my mind was clear—did you think I had forgotten you?"

"No," Caenis lied. Catching the dregs of her resentment, his eyes flickered momentarily. Her self-pity melted away at once.

Smiling, Vespasian told her, "I've just had a novel experience—I've been given some fatherly advice by my son!"

Caenis was as fond of Titus as he of her; sensing they had quarreled, she frowned. "What was that?"

"He said I should put aside the planning and send for you to my room." She stared down at her folded hands. "Boy's a fool,"Vespasian commented. Besides an attractive temperament, Titus had an inquiring mind, a phenomenal memory, less wit but probably more culture than his critical papa. He was loyal, generous, tactful, and spirited—a delightful young man. And no fool.

Nor was his father.

"Antonia Caenis, I don't send for you; I never did and never will—you come of your own accord. You're not some girl to be called for in the afternoon, then used—and paid—and sent away again until the next gracious summons from the old man. Besides"—his voice dropped—"he either has no imagination, or lacks the experience to know." She looked up, her heart pattering. Vespasian seduced her with his eyes. "It's so much more fun trying to persuade you to invite me to stay here with you!"

With a cry of relief, Caenis had already opened her arms.

* * *

They were both older, and so much slower, but some things were the better for that.

Afterward they both lay awake the greater part of the night. The lights were out. They lay close, and still, neither wishing to disturb the other yet each aware from the steadiness of the other's embrace and occasional quiet movements that they were both awake. After many hours, when Caenis was easing the pressure on her arm, Vespasian finally spoke.

"Well, my lady!"

"Well, my general!"

His lips brushed her forehead as she gave him his new title. "I'm coming back. Same as ever. Promise."

She buried her face in the angle of his neck, her hand moving lightly over the familiar lines of his chest, his shoulder, his strong upper arm. It was then he said, "I never thanked you for the sausage; the one at the British parade."

Caenis had forgotten all about that. "Oh, Titus! I was so glad I saw you that day."

He remained silent for so long, her heart raced with anxiety. "That day was very odd, lass. I didn't seem to be myself." He wrapped both arms around her, gripping her tight, then abruptly confessed, "I wanted rather badly to come to you that night."

Caenis felt she had intruded unintentionally on some private anguish.

He was determined to tell her: "I actually walked out from the banquet on the Capitol and stood for a long time in a colonnade, willing myself to go back in. It would have been right," he declared. "Being with you; after the Triumph."

Caenis made a low distressed sound, horrified to remember how at the time she had misinterpreted what he felt—and grateful that she had. To know this then would have been unbearable; it was difficult to tolerate even now. He released her a little, because he knew her so well that he realized even before she started to move that she wanted to kiss him.

So she did, trying to forget that he had made her want to weep.

When she was kissing him, she heard that soft groan of pleasure, no different now than when they were young. She supposed it might be flattery, but even if it were, the fact that he thought her worth flattering warmed her heart.

There was something about kissing Vespasian in the dark, when all the rest of the household thought them sensibly asleep. One thing led rather conveniently to another, one caress demanded more until, both laughing, they acknowledged what they both had been hoping from the start, as with every tenderness but yet the distinctly urgent passion of two people who were parting for a desperately long time, they moved closer than ever together and once again made love.

* * *

"This is perhaps not the moment to ask—"

"Lass, I am always free . . ." said Vespasian politely—though she was quite right; it was not an easy moment—"for a chat with you . . ."

"Whatever did you do with the sausage?"

"Ate it," he responded, after a short pause. "What did you expect?"

"In the street, lord?" Caenis demanded, as she had done once before.

And Vespasian answered, as he had done the first time, "In the street!"

A four-baton general with full triumphal honors and the dignity of nearly sixty years; it seemed impossible that he would ever change.

PART SIX

THE YEAR OF THE FOUR EMPERORS

When the Caesars were Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, And their successor

THIRTY-SIX

Having wintered in Greece, Caenis spent the following spring by herself, traveling north through Dalmatia to Istria. When there seemed nothing to stay for, she returned to Rome.

During this time Vespasian reached Antioch, the chief city of the eastern Empire, where he made his first rendezvous with the new Governor of Syria, Licinius Mucianus (whom he described to Caenis as a bed-hopping wart posted here as an exile rather than a reward) and their ally, King Agrippa of Judaea (whom Vespasian crudely called a shifty bunch of ringlets on the make). He then marched his Fifth and Tenth Legions south to Ptolomais, which lay a short way north of Mount Carmel on the coast. There Titus joined him from Egypt with the Fifteenth. Campaigning began in Galilee, which had been heavily fortified by the rebels; after an easy assault on Gabara, Vespasian tackled Jotapata, a natural stronghold on a precipice where heavy numbers of enemy troops were dug in. He captured Jotapata in July.

He was a born soldier. More from what Titus told her than any indication Vespasian gave himself, Caenis knew that he possessed all the powers of analysis and organization to bring off whatever was required. His talents flourished in the army, where no one cared who a man's ancestors had been, provided he measured up to the current task. Set in charge of the brilliant Roman military machine, he was an ideal leader. Action fired him; he threw his energy and intelligence into the campaign, always accessible to the men, always aware of their mood. His down-to-earth character made him one of them; his competence made him a general they were proud of. It was already obvious how things in Palestine would go.

Caenis sailed to Italy. She traveled across country, pausing at Vespasian's Reate estate. It was on her return to his house in Rome that the notorious incident with Domitian occurred. He was eighteen now. Caenis sympathized with his grudge that his brother had been singled out for special advantage in Judaea; the natural close partnership between Vespasian and Titus had become impossible to conceal. Caenis and Domitian had never liked each other, but she greeted him with more than usual kindness, turning her cheek as usual for his kiss. Domitian curtly offered his hand instead.

Caenis shook hands without a word. She never presumed to demand from other people the compliment Vespasian had chosen to give. She never complained. Yet it was noticed. Domitian would be condemned by the historians on her behalf.

* * *

By the end of his first year Vespasian had subdued most of Galilee. It was at Gamala, while the Romans were pressing a hard siege, that his enthusiasm carried him so far forward that he found himself trapped with only a handful of men at the center of the citadel; they had to fight their way out backward, inching step by step down to safety behind a wall of locked shields. Of course, by the time Caenis heard this it was old news, she realized that. "Don't panic!" he wrote cheerfully. "Eat a decent breakfast and calm down!" Caenis ate breakfast and half her lunch, then panicked and was sick. By now she had found out too about the arrow he had caught in his foot at Jotapata; this did not reassure her. He captured Gamala in October.

Vespasian retired for the winter with two legions, later traveling with Titus inland to Caesarea Philippi for three weeks of state banquets and thanksgiving sacrifice. Caenis was by then missing him dreadfully, for the dark days and bitter weather seemed to emphasize the quietness of their house in Rome and the coldness of her bed. Letters became infrequent due to the closed sea crossing, though at least when they came there were sometimes more than one. Alone in Rome she received fewer social invitations, and lost interest in the theater without his being there too. She wished she had known he would winter at Caesarea, where the climate was pleasant at that time of year and King Agrippa—who had such close family ties to Antonia—was apparently being most hospitable. Despite the sensible discussion she had had with Vespasian in Greece, she would after all have gladly endured a summer on her own in Syria in return for spending time with him now. She wanted more than ever to be there.

It was only gradually that she realized Vespasian and Titus did not quite so badly need her. They were being entertained by King Agrippa in some style. Part of the entertainment comprised his radiant sister, Berenice.

Queen Berenice of Judaea was high-born, courageous, wealthy, and acknowledged throughout the Empire as the most beautiful woman of the age. She was forty, but at the height of her looks. Caenis must be nearly sixty, and had never been a beauty.

"Damn," she accused her mirror mildly.

She trusted him; of course.

* * *

There seemed no alteration in the tone of Vespasian's letters. They had always been more anecdotal than sentimental. (He omitted anecdotes about Queen Berenice.) At the end he always mentioned that he missed Caenis; the statement became as regular as his official military stamp.

He used their correspondence like a man marshaling his thoughts. He summarized for her the strong Roman position in Galilee, and his proposals for taking Judaea, Idumaea, and Peraea next spring before the great effort that would be needed for the siege of Jerusalem; the capture of Jerusalem must be the crown of his campaign. When the Judaeans were not fighting Rome they were fighting one another; Vespasian wondered why the most inhospitable tracts of territory were so endlessly disputed. Perhaps while they were struggling against sun and wind, locusts and famine, it made small difference for the inhabitants to struggle against each other too. Dwellers in richer pastures found peace more convenient. . . .

Suddenly once, as if it were by accident, he began a letter "Oh, Caenis, my dear love—" He had never done that before. In the rest of the letter he sounded wearier than usual, but that was no excuse. She knew then: nobody could ever be trusted.

"Damn!" exclaimed Caenis, not so mildly. She remembered Antonia saying that losing them to women never mattered; it was giving them up to politics that was final. Mark Antony's daughter should have known better, her freedwoman thought, envisioning another exceptional Roman general making a fool of himself with another ravishing foreign queen.

Caenis had intended to return a dignified answer, merely answering what he had asked her about events in Rome, in Gaul, in Spain. It was a complete mistake that she added at the end how keenly she was missing him, a plea that she in turn had always spared Vespasian. It was a mistake, but when she noticed she did not erase it. She felt he owed it to her to accept the truth for once, even though she understood—since she had always been a shrewd woman—that the moment was wrong and the declaration most likely to drive him away.

All his subsequent letters addressed her simply as Antonia Caenis, with the old-fashioned formality he normally used when he wrote. She noticed he was putting in more jokes. She could not decide whether that was good or not. She guessed it was guilt.

* * *

For anyone with an interest in political events whose attention was not dominated by the situation in Palestine, what happened that spring in Rome, in Gaul, in Spain, was fascinating. Nero's fourteen years had clearly reached their convulsive decline. After more than a century of Empire, and of executing their own kin, the Julio-Claudian family had thinned its own ranks to nothing. Nero's only child, a daughter, had died in infancy. There was no alternative heir. Rome hung on the brink of a climactic upheaval, into which this time the whole Empire would be drawn.

It was generally accepted that the lethargy and debauchery of the Senate, the private self-interest of the second-rank knights, the truculence of the mob, and a general decline in traditional values made a return to the Republic impossible. Perhaps the Empire was now too big. It needed an established administration, not subject to constant electoral change, while something in the current Roman character positively sought one guiding figurehead. It took little imagination to see that the next contest for the throne would involve more than murdering an ill-placed relative or suppressing an unwelcome will.

Vespasian suggested to Caenis that they should correspond in her old code. She found he had left the key for her, with one of his secretaries. That he had kept his copy for so many years was oddly reassuring. That he had left it ready merely seemed peculiar.

First there was a rebellion in Gaul. It was led by a man called Julius Vindex, but put down by the Governor of Upper Germany, who had at his disposal an armed frontier force. The worsening situation in Gaul, together with wild rumors circulating in Rome about Nero's Grecian tour, caused many frantic messages from Rome before the Emperor finally dragged himself back to Italy, showing off his trophies and his pretty Greek mantle spangled with golden stars.

Vindex was not in himself a major problem. His most daring personal offense in Nero's eyes, one that the Flavians adored, was that in an open dispatch to the Senate he had accused the Emperor of bad musicianship. But his revolt was important because it revealed widespread unrest in the provinces and heralded how the legions away on remote frontiers were about to take the issue of who governed them into their own hands. Any danger now lay not in the personal ambition of an individual general, as Rome had presumed from Julius Caesar on, but in the spirited resolution of the whole Roman army. The movement that first twitched in Gaul would flare throughout the Empire, gaining impetus in outposts as far-flung as Moesia on the Black Sea, and Egypt, in Spain, in the Balkans, in Britain. The four legions in Syria and three more in Judaea would also be wanting their say. What this contest was to prove once and for all was that an acceptable emperor could be found outside the traditional Claudian family, that he could be created by the army, and created outside Rome.

Vindex rebelled in March. By April a far more significant candidate had arisen: Sulpicius Galba, one of the old breed of aristocrats. He first declared his support for Vindex against Nero, but was subsequently hailed Emperor by his own troops in Spain; acquired the loyalty of the Praetorian Guards, leaving Nero defenseless; then began a long, successful march to claim his position formally in Rome.

In May, Caenis was called from her breakfast by an extraordinary incident. Nero was at the gates of Vespasian's house. He had arrived in the sacred chariot of Jupiter, which he had collected from the majestic Temple of Jove on the Capitol.

Nero's public response to the situation in the provinces had been merely to summon Rome's chief citizens to hear a demonstration of a new kind of water organ, with a lecture by himself about the various models, of which he was by this time an unrivaled connoisseur. (Caenis still did not like them.) Now his vain composure seemed to have cracked. Here he was, hair neatly ranged in a perfect double row of curls, looking as though he did not know what was expected of him next. Caenis had no idea either, though she supposed as a general's lady she must try to be polite.

Three-quarters asleep and halfway through her meal, she paused to collect herself. Aglaus whispered to her discreetly that Nero had been told in a dream the night before to bring the sacred chariot here. Caenis, who still wished breakfasting in Flavian houses could be less alarming, surveyed the Emperor dourly. He was thirty-one, and had the smell of a man who would not see thirty-two. As Antonia's great-grandson, this washed-out wreck could be viewed as her own patron; they both knew she had never recognized that duty.

Ridiculously she remembered Vespasian's mild greeting to the unexpected ox: "Hello, boy! Lost your way?"

"Welcome," she managed instead. "Dear me . . ." She was addressing the imperial charioteer as sweetly as she could at an hour of the morning when she was never at her best. "The house of Flavius Vespasianus lacks adequate stabling for a vehicle so opulent as this! He will be so sorry he was not at home. . . ." Nero was still looking uncertain. "May I suggest, Caesar," Caenis told him in a low confidential tone, "a quick turn around the Circus Maximus, then straight back up to the Temple and give thanks to Jove for the loan? Unless, that is, the gods inspire you otherwise!"

Rather to her surprise, Nero meekly acquiesced.

"I don't think," she suggested cautiously to Aglaus, as they watched their visitor depart, "we ought to excite sir with this nonsense."

"Oh madam! It's just the sort of story sir would like!"

"Exactly," said Caenis. "He'll be sure it is a symbol; he'll keep worrying about what it could mean."

By June, Nero took fright at Galba's approach. He was in serious trouble; the Senate had declared him a public enemy. He fled to the suburban villa of his freedman Phaon, where after some hesitation and some dramatic posturing he committed suicide just as the soldiers came galloping down the road to finish him. He begged his attendants not to let his body be mutilated after death; then one of his freedmen helped him stab himself in the throat. His funeral was arranged at the tomb of the Domitii on the Pincian Hill by Actë, the former slavegirl he had loved in his youth, who had stayed loyal to him through three wives and innumerable affairs: Actë, who had once been described to Caenis as a safe mistress for an emperor because she was a common girl who bore no grudges.

In Judaea the Emperor's death compelled Vespasian to halt his campaign while he waited for the new ruler to confirm or revoke his appointment as commander. Seizing advantage of the unexpected breathing space, a Jewish leader called Simon, Son of Gioras, managed to overrun parts of Judaea and Idumaea, which Vespasian had previously subdued, so all that was to do again: Vespasian grumbled irritably.

Galba took his time over reissuing Vespasian's command. Although they were both old soldiers, Galba was an inbred aristocrat, a homosexual, and a man who had governed Tarraconensian Spain for eight years on the principle (which he openly admitted) of doing as little as possible, so there was nothing for which he could be called to account. Galba and Vespasian lacked common ground. Indeed, Galba was the type of man Vespasian could hardly despise more. He made one or two bad moves. The worst, perhaps, was not giving the Governors of Syria and Judaea much more to keep them occupied.

The following year was what people were to call the Year of the Four Emperors.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Once, afterward, Caenis overheard her freedman Aglaus giving his pet version of that tumultuous pageant of events on which so many historians would break so many pens. It was rather like the actor she had once seen mime a four-minute version of the Aeneid. It amazed an audience because it did seem so complete. It was magnificent. The outrageousness made her want to laugh and cry, but there was no time for either, as well-known events whistled past in his brilliant quick-fire summary. The skill was that one recognized triumphantly all that was included—and forgot what had been left out.

Aglaus was talking to Julia, Titus' daughter. Julia was a vivid little soul, though Caenis preferred Vespasian's elder granddaughter, his daughter's orphan, Flavia. Flavia was a quieter, level-headed young girl, something of a favorite with Sabinus, to whose own grandson she was betrothed. Flavia would never seek a freedman's comments on the Year of the Four Emperors. She talked about it cautiously with Caenis; then in public she stayed silent. Of all his family it was Flavia who shared most acutely her grandfather's sense of morality and duty.

Not so the bubbling Julia. "Tell me the story of the Year of the Four Emperors!"

"No; no; old history, child."

"Oh, it's exciting; tell me!"

"Well . . . all right. I remember," Aglaus began, "the Year of the Four Emperors. I remember it for two reasons. One was that it never stopped being exciting. Also, it was that year my lady gave me my freedom. It seemed to me then that something had gone wrong. She had already told me she had put it in her will. So I imagined she must have fallen ill; some secret woman's business that she didn't want to mention—she was at that age; I kept an eye on her. The way she looked, I really saw myself having to supervise the nurse and bury her. . . . So a freedman! I felt wonderful and terrible all at once."

"Go on; go on! Come to the year!"

"What a year! ‘The Year of the Four Emperors.' Sounds quite organized. One after the other, nose to tail like elephants. No such luck. Utter confusion. Listen: Nero eventually topped himself in June that year before—"

"Do his eyes!"

Aglaus altered his voice to a thrill of horror: "When the centurion rushed into Phaon's villa trying to capture him alive, Nero finally found courage to stab himself, crying, ‘What an artist perishes here!' He died with his eyes glazed, and boggling out of their sockets, so that everyone present was horrified!"

Julia screamed happily. In his everyday voice Aglaus commented, "So! Nero's last song; enter Galba. So old he's frightened he'll drop dead from sheer excitement; hastily names Calpurnius Piso as his successor. Five days later, young Piso murdered; old Galba murdered; enter Otho. Otho is the poor dunce who had been married to Poppaea to cover up Nero's adultery, then packed off for ten years to govern Lusitania while Nero married her anyway; Lusitania is all right if you're very fond of sardines! Otho lasts from January to April. Next, Vitellius decides the legions in Germany need to stretch their legs. They start marching to Rome. We're off: civil war. Otho's nerve seems to crack. Keeps sending for his hairdresser to take his mind off things. Nice thatch; not much under it."

Julia was giggling. Otho's thatch was a joke: it had been a clever wig.

"Vitellius smashes Otho's legions at Bedriacum. Otho decently does himself in; enter Vitellius."

This was Aulus Vitellius, one of the sons of Lucius Vitellius, who had once been a client of Antonia, the close friend and long-term supporter of Claudius, and once patron to Vespasian. But Aulus the son had other loyalties—primarily to himself.

"The German legions storm into Rome. Rome thinks it best to welcome them; they have a serious reputation. Vitellius puts up with it from April to December—not bad for a loose type so drunk he can barely keep upright on the throne. And devious as they come. Your great-uncle Sabinus would be alive today if that bastard Vitellius had accepted the thumbs-down on 1 July. So what now? The legions in Moesia—Where the hell is Moesia? we all wonder, except Sabinus, who once lived there—decide it's their turn to pick a Caesar. They beat up Vitellius' messengers, rip their flags, steal their money, then stick a pin in a list to decide whose name to attach under their silver eagles next. And who does Moesia choose? We know, Julia, don't we?"

Julia giggled hysterically.

* * *

Caenis had known as early as March. She anticipated what would happen, exactly as Titus did. In many ways it was Titus himself who decided events.

They had been expecting Titus home; he was supposed to be coming to intercede with Galba about his father's still unconfirmed command. He never arrived. Caenis stood in the room that servants had opened and aired for him, with his letter in her hand, telling her so guardedly that he had decided not to come. Always polite, still he gave her no reason. She sensed it was one he could not yet formulate. She bent to smooth the coverlet on his newly made bed, while mentally she canceled preparations and plans. As she listened to the silence, she realized that this was not simply a matter of disappointing the butcher and the fishmonger, of removing a pot of scillas from his window ledge and piling his pillows back into the blanket chest. A chill caught her, as she dreaded that because of what he was doing now Titus might never again be able to return to Rome.

He had actually sailed for home; that made it worse. His letter was written from Greece. When Galba had still not forwarded instructions to Judaea by March, with the campaign season at hand Vespasian had sent Titus back to Rome, to bend the knee in homage and ask formally for a new commission, releasing the Flavians to be up and at Jerusalem as they wanted. That was all they wanted, whatever foolish rumors flew about it in Rome afterward.

In fact by the time Titus put to sea, Galba was already two months dead. There had been trouble with the army, because he had promised them a bounty, which it soon became clear he did not intend to pay. Detachments of soldiers, particularly those in Upper Germany, who originally helped quell the Vindex rebellion, refused to take the New Year's Day oath of allegiance to a mean-handed Spanish appointee, and asked the Praetorian Guards to nominate another emperor who would be acceptable to all. Galba's adoption of Piso was intended to reassure them. Instead it antagonized Otho, who had been Galba's most significant supporter and who was not unnaturally expecting the privilege of imperial adoption himself. Hence Otho's bid. Hence Galba's murder. Hence young Titus Flavius Vespasianus, now abruptly yachting on a strange new tack in the eastern Mediterranean.

Titus had reached Greece when he met messengers bringing news of Galba's death. He should have continued his journey to salute Otho instead. His companion, King Agrippa, did indeed go on to Rome. Titus turned back alone. He visited Paphos. There stood a prophetic oracle, which he consulted at length. He spent a long time on his own, lost in thought. Then quite suddenly he sailed back to his father.

Nothing was said. But from that moment Caenis knew what was happening. Aglaus, who had been with her for nearly twenty years, saw the change in her face. It was, as he told Julia, enough to make him believe his mistress might be terminally ill.

There are two ways at least of being brave. In a sudden emergency, when the adrenaline floods, people act with courage because they have no time or no imagination to appreciate how much danger they are in. To have courage in a sudden crisis is comparatively easy. There are obvious and positive things to do. But to remain brave over a long period is a very different matter. To wait and to watch, for month after month, while inevitable tragedy stalks closer, that is the test. That exacts courage of a deliberate, self-wounding kind.

Life was hard. Caenis had always known it. Some people endure that certainty all their lives. If ever they dare think otherwise, life restores their bitter understanding soon enough. Like her steward, Caenis would remember the Year of the Four Emperors. She would remember, because it would be when her shared life with Flavius Vespasianus had to come to a swift, unplanned end.

She was not ill. Her freedman worked that out eventually. Some time at the beginning of that summer it struck Aglaus that the lifeless look on his lady's face was one that of course he recognized: It was the classic expression of an old, exhausted, badly beaten, dismally broken-down slave.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Once Titus had sailed back to Syria there was never any question what he wanted his father to do.

He himself began working toward it immediately. Titus could always attract the friendship of the most unlikely men, so with adept diplomacy he persuaded Licinius Mucianus, the Syrian Governor, who was one of several statesmen who might himself have joined in the free-for-all, to set aside any jealousy he had felt toward Vespasian and abandon his own possible claim for power. The two provincial governors had previously loathed one another with cordial contempt; Titus brought them together. Mucianus joined Titus in urging Vespasian to act.

Spanish troops had reached Galba. Otho was acclaimed by the Praetorian Guards. The German army raised Vitellius; now in Judaea the Fifth, Tenth, and Fifteenth Legions sat in their camps deprived of action, all talking politics. Soldiers should never be allowed to do that. Yet Vespasian held his men in a firm discipline. He made no move; neither did they. Titus and Mucianus continued their private pressure for long hours in Vespasian's tent.

* * *

Otho's reign was so short, only four months, that Vespasian's views on him as a "pea-brained Neronian pimp," which he wrote to Caenis, were soon redundant. When Aulus Vitellius pranced through Gaul to snatch the Empire like a bullying child with a coveted toy, Vespasian grew more angry. Both he and his campaign-hardened soldiers were seized with indignation. Vitellius in his youth had been one of the aristocratic boys who entertained Tiberius in debauchery on Capri. He had raced chariots with Caligula. He was a glutton. He was a drunkard. Now he was being carried toward Rome in extravagant triumph, crossing rivers in barges wreathed with garlands while a huge train of hangers-on made merry at the expense of the populace, looting and terrorizing the countryside. It accorded ill with the Sabine ideal of public service.

Even Vespasian did nothing. Having drawn up his three legions to take the oath of allegiance to their new Emperor Otho, four months later he drew them up again, himself expressionless, and made them take the oath to Vitellius. His behavior on both occasions was exemplary. It was the soldiers, normally so boisterous at accessions, who when called upon to swear their allegiance just stood in their ranks in devastating silence. They stared at Vespasian; Vespasian stared back at them. Their mood was plain. Everyone present could see the commander in Judaea was genuinely moved.

Still he did nothing. He knew that to seize power was the first step only; holding it posed a very different task. He was instinctively modest. He listened to the appeals of his friends; he considered the risks. He remained withdrawn, watchful, apparently calm, although Titus knew, and Caenis could imagine, how the real state of his mind was highly active and alert. Many men know when to act; a few know when to wait. Vespasian let Otho and Vitellius fight it out among themselves.

Otho died well. Lurking in Brixellum he heard how, despite earlier successes and the ill-preparedness of the German troops, his own army had been crushed at Bedriacum. He made the brave decision not to expose his supporters to further bloodshed. After encouraging his staff and making arrangements for their escape, he burned his official correspondence, attended to his private affairs, then retired to his quarters. He drank a glass of cold water, tested the points of two daggers, placed one beneath his pillow, and spent a last quiet night. At dawn he awoke and stabbed himself fatally once. He received an unpretentious funeral and a monument so modest it belied how far his reputation had been redeemed by his courageous death.

Vitellius stood mocking at Otho's simple monument; that summed up Vitellius.

It was in Moesia that three legions who had been hastening to Otho's support heard he was dead; heard that Vitellius was pronounced Emperor by the German legions; rejected the Germans; rejected Vitellius; and without anybody asking them for the favor, decided that Moesia would announce a candidate of its own. The theory was fine; they only had to choose their man.

The legions in Moesia, who happened to include the Third Gallica, a group of stout characters recently sent there from Syria, sat down sensibly with a list of all the Roman governors and senior ex-consuls who might be eligible for their support. One by one they crossed these off as unsuitable. At the end a single name remained. They held a democratic vote. The man's popularity was unanimously confirmed. The legions in Moesia methodically stripped their standards of the plaques that bore the dead Otho's name, then nailed up instead the title of the new Emperor they had chosen for themselves.

His name was:

VESPASIAN

On 1 July, Tiberius Alexander, the Prefect of Egypt, to whom Vespasian had written tentatively sounding out his views, made those views plain. Alexander was an equestrian who had risen to great position; he had started life as a freedman of Antonia's, so he had an inevitable loyalty to those who had enjoyed her patronage. Tiberius Alexander called upon his own legions to hail Vespasian as Emperor.

Meanwhile the legions in Moesia were persuading their neighbors in Pannonia to join their cause; their Pannonian neighbors encouraged the legions in Dalmatia to do the same. One by one provinces and kingdoms followed them—Asia, Achaea, Cappadocia, and Galatia—until a complete crescent surrounding the far end of the Mediterranean had declared for the eastern Emperor. Spain was friendly to Vespasian; Britain too. On the morning of 3 July in Judaea, Vespasian's own soldiers decided of their own accord to stop greeting him as Governor. When he came out from his bedroom his bodyguard exchanged quick glances, saluted him: "Caesar!"; then defied him to put them all on a charge.

Vespasian spoke to them quietly, in his soldierly manner. The word spread: He had accepted the nomination. On the same day, without even waiting for Titus to return from a liaison trip to Syria, he received the oath of allegiance himself from his own delighted troops. It was reported to Caenis that Vespasian had looked pleased but bewildered.

In Rome, Vitellius censored any mention of Vespasian's name. It was pointless; everybody knew. There would be another civil war. If Vespasian lost it he, his two sons, probably his brother, and possibly even his brother's children too, would die. If he died, far away, Caenis would not even attend his funeral.

If he survived, it would be far worse for her.

She believed there was no better man in the Empire to undertake this role. She also knew there would be no question any longer that Vespasian could allow a freedwoman to share his life. Like Nero's Actë, as a common girl who bore no grudges she might be suitable to entertain him occasionally—but only within carefully defined sexual limits. The very qualities that had once brought him back to her, the decent temperament that made him ideal to govern, would inevitably take him from her now. Vespasian would behave as an emperor should. Their fine, equal partnership would be broken. She had received from fortune the greatest gift she could ever expect. She had enjoyed it for longer than a decade; now she had to give it back.

She said to Aglaus, when she granted him his freedom, "I have decided it would be best if I moved back to my own house in the Via Nomentana. Perhaps you could mention it for me to the leaseholder."

Aglaus knew she had continued to pay her ground rent all this time. He had arranged it for her himself. It was supposed never to be mentioned, though Aglaus understood that Vespasian knew. Two men together, Vespasian and Aglaus had quietly agreed: independent, that one. She did not trust her luck. She had had every faith in Vespasian, but none in life.

Aglaus was an excellent steward; he had paid her rent discreetly and refrained from teasing her. Caenis was therefore surprised, even though his new status as a free citizen allowed him greater frankness, when he replied bleakly, "I think you'll want to explain that to the leaseholder yourself."

Not for the first time that year, Caenis went cold.

Aglaus braced himself and told her: "Well, it's not necessary, actually. The lease was acquired by someone else. Vespasian bought it, just before you went to Africa; that was one of the reasons he was so short of cash. He told me, and told me to explain it to you if anything ever happened to him—I don't think the present business was what he really had in mind! He rewrote his will at the same time to provide for you, but he wanted you to have something of your own in case anything went wrong. The estate is yours; it's been yours for years. He bought it, but the deeds are in your name."

Caenis stared. For some reason she suddenly remembered Marius Pomponius Gallus, the man she was supposed to have married, who left her in his will (as Vespasian said at the time) little more than the price of a new hat.

"You had better tell me," she commented coolly, "exactly what you and that old miser have been doing with my rent."

"Bank account in the Forum—also in your name—I can tell you the number; a bit of capital for you, he said." Aglaus smiled. Clearly he felt confident that he possessed legitimate orders from the master of their household. How like a man. "It wasn't just that he thought he might die first. He told me you might one day get tired of him—"

"Hah!" retorted Caenis briskly.

Aglaus only smiled again. He looked tired; he was worried about her. "He wanted you to be secure if you upped and left." Well, she was doing that. There was an aching silence. "May I ask you something, madam? Have you given me my freedom because you think my loyalty to Vespasian is greater than my loyalty to you?"

"No," said Caenis.

She had done, of course. Because he was her gift from Narcissus, she had gone on keeping Aglaus long after she knew he deserved his release. Now, with the world in tumult, she did not blame him if he wanted to throw in his lot with the Emperor he admired; she had decided to allow him the choice. Besides, she wanted to be free herself to act without pressure from his frank sarcasm and disapproving scowl.

"You and the new Emperor seem very close!"

He did look sheepish. With Aglaus this was a rare sight. But he said, speaking in a low voice, with a steadiness he obviously copied from Vespasian, "The new Emperor and I, madam, always had an interest in common."

Caenis ignored that.

Perhaps for the first time she was acknowledging the change in their position. As his patron now, she sought his candid advice: "Are you suggesting I am making a mistake?"

Her freedman's courage grew. "No," Aglaus replied quietly, for he knew better than anybody how high her standards were. "You cannot be an embarrassment to him. We have both lived in that Palace. We know the filthy rules. There is no place for us now with Vespasian. You are right, madam; time to go home."

* * *

Once again, therefore, Caenis was living on her own. At the time when she moved, no one looked askance. Rome was in chaos. There were soldiers everywhere, filling the camps, bunking down in the Porticoes, cluttering up temple forecourts with bivouacs and braziers, billeting themselves willy-nilly on private citizens. Officers dashed about with unnecessary escorts, showing off. By day the streets were full of bored German and Gallic auxiliaries—shaggy lumps in animal skins, peering into shops, jostling passers-by, squabbling over prostitutes, and tripping over the curbstones of the unfamiliar pavements. They swam in the river until they all caught fever and started an epidemic. Every night came sounds of looting. Soon all the best mansions were abandoned and boarded up. There were regular fires. Fleeing from the house of such a prominent man seemed a wise move. In fact, Aglaus asked to come too.

Since she now understood that he thought he had a mission, Caenis did not forbid it. He was wrong, of course; Caenis would look after herself.

* * *

It took six months to conclude the civil war, six months of deprivation in the country and terror in Rome, to bring Vitellius within sight of abdication.

It was during that time Veronica became ill. She knew, as Caenis did, that she would die. Caenis went to see her.

"Well, Veronica: here's some lovely Sabine fruit!"

Pain was sculpted on every line of Veronica's once-exquisite face. Her bones stood out; the flesh had started to shrink. She would not last until Vespasian reached Rome. Her beauty had become a ruin of its former self, clad in the remnants of her vitality like the soft muffling of lichen on fallen stones.

"Oh, thanks! Good of you to come. Talk to me, Caenis. Make me laugh; make me angry; anything to make me forget! Tell me about that dangerous man of yours!"

Caenis had hoped to avoid a confrontation with Veronica. "I'm a freedwoman," she stated crisply. "Vespasian was never mine."

Veronica interpreted this in her own style. "Hah! She's talking about the abundantly equipped Queen of Judaea."

The beautiful Berenice had apparently made all speed to offer Vespasian her most generous support. Handy to own a fleet, Caenis thought. "Leave it!" she warned.

Veronica scoffed. "What, like some dead thing my cat has dropped between us on the tiles, which we pretend we haven't seen? Queen Berenice—the wonder of our age . . . Be wise; ignore it. May not even be true." She changed her tone to a confidential mutter. "Is he coming yet?"

Caenis resisted the request to be drawn into indiscretion. It was easy enough; she knew little. Vespasian rarely wrote to her now. His last brief colorless note merely told her he was well. He said he missed her; she doubted that. She had not replied.

She contented herself with what was, despite all the censorship, common knowledge. "No. He's not coming. Generals we have never heard of, dear, are marching on Italy with legions who worship exotic gods from countries we can hardly find on the map."

"So what's happening?"

"As far as I can understand it—there is no formal news from the east, but Sabinus lets me know what he can—the plan is that Vespasian will sail to Egypt to batten down the winter corn supply that's intended for Italy. Bread is running short already; the profiteers seem to have grasped the point with their usual smart business sense. A general called Antonius Primus is invading northern Italy with all the Balkan legions, while this person Mucianus has crossed the Hellespont and will turn up unexpectedly somewhere on the eastern coast. Primus is nicknamed Beaky and has some kind of criminal record, though that did not deter Nero from giving him a legion, while Mucianus is a silky orator who sleeps with anything that moves, preferably male. Perhaps Vespasian hopes by contrast to appear immaculate."

"Stodgy old bastard! I don't know how you put up with him."

"Here as you know, Vitellius' roughnecks tear Rome apart, and poor Sabinus, who has been elected Prefect of the City yet again, struggles to keep public order and loyally obey the man whom his own brother is opposing. Ludicrous! How wise of you, my darling, to keep indoors."

Veronica had listened with half her attention. "He'll do it, your man. I see that now. This was always what he was waiting for. It's wonderful."

Caenis asked drily, "Bit of a change of heart, dear?"

"I," said Veronica proudly, "am loyal to my Emperor!" Then she pleaded almost, for she knew perfectly well what attitude Caenis was bound to take: "Oh, I'm a drab hag deteriorating on a faded couch, with cold feet and a dying brain—but it warms me to think of you, a Caesar's darling! Caenis, you must do this. You owe it to all the girls in all the Palaces who sleep on flea-ridden pallets on stone ledges in cold cells, and who live by the hope that one day they will rise to a better place. . . ."

Caenis could bear it no longer. Her own girlish dreams of breaking her shackles and stalking some throne room in a damask dress and a tasteless ruby coronet were long dead. All she wanted was to share her daily life with a man whose face brightened when he saw her. She finally told Veronica the truth. "Pensioned off, dear."

"Never!"

They began to argue, which was what Caenis had dreaded.

"Look, Veronica, he and I shared our lives on equal terms, for over ten years. Few wives are as close to their husbands as I was to him. How can I accept less?"

"He took you back."

"He took me back while he was a private citizen."

"Into his house."

"But there's no place for me in his Palace."

"Juno, Caenis; how can you be so stupid—how can you be so calm?"

"Realistic."

"Mad."

Caenis suddenly snapped. She cried out to her friend, whom she would probably not see in any lucid state again, as she had never allowed herself to do before: "Oh, I am not calm, girl! It's the bitterest of ironies, and I am very angry! A freedwoman; oh Juno, Veronica, I would be better as his slave—then at least he could keep me where he lives without public offense. This is impossible. Once I did accept that I had lost him; I learned to exist without him. I'm too old now to face all that anguish again. I'm too tired. I'm too frightened of what it will be like, never again having him there. I haven't any strength to deal with this." Her voice dropped to an even more painful note. "I hope he stays in the East; I hope he never comes. I tell you, I would sooner lose him to Queen Berenice, who married her uncle and sleeps with her brother, than have to see Vespasian in Rome as a stranger!"

Struggling to raise herself on one pitifully thin arm, Veronica complained in bewilderment, "But he cares for you!"

"Of course he does!" Caenis bellowed. "I know it; even he knows. He came back for me after half a lifetime. I was stout, and grayhaired, nasty-tempered and the wrong social class, but back he came. I cannot pretend any longer that the man did not care!"

"You were never stout," murmured her loyal friend.

Caenis careered on heedlessly. "So here I am, just where I was thirty years ago; worse, because I actually know now how he cares! Yet I have to stand back again, knowing what it means. I have to watch his face—oh, his poor sorry face—while that dear good man, the only straightforward honest man that I have ever met, tells me all over again that he must let me go!"

The silence rang through Veronica's house.

Caenis went home.

THIRTY-NINE

The last time Caenis saw Flavius Sabinus there was a violent rainstorm in the streets. It had been a terrible winter, with disastrous floods sweeping across the low ground on the Tiber's left bank. The Prefect of the City came wearily into her quiet room, where the rain could only just be heard outside the windows; she brought him at once to the intimate circle of a hot charcoal brazier to dry off and warm his ancient bones.

It was December in that eventful year. The week before, Caenis had lost a tooth; it was preoccupying her pathetically. As she huddled in a wrap, Sabinus pulled back his cheek to show her a half-row of his own missing, so then they laughed and compared notes on the onset of pains, on the fading of appetites, on the lightness of sleep. Caenis flexed her finger knuckles where they were shiny and sore, probably not with chilblains as she pretended, but rheumatism.

"Came to see how you were, lass." She was tired. She kept waking in the night from her dream about Britannicus and Titus. "Domitian should be keeping an eye on you, but he's far too busy seducing senators' wives."

Vitellius had placed Domitian under house arrest, though he still managed to act like the imperial lad-about-town. His father's rise had gone to Domitian's head, unlike Titus, who was by all accounts taking it sensibly. Titus was to take over as commander in chief in Judaea. He would be responsible for the siege of Jerusalem, though for the time being he remained in Alexandria with the Emperor. Domitian was stuck here with his fussy uncle Sabinus, and no real public role.

Vespasian had no intention of leaving Egypt yet, as far as anyone knew. In his absence his status in Rome steadily grew. News from Italy carried east, but during the winter Vitellius could obtain no intelligence the other way. The silence enhanced Vespasian's mystique. Meanwhile the grain shortage was beginning to tell; when Vespasian came with the wheat ships he would be eagerly welcomed by a starving populace.

The armed struggle that had occupied the previous six months was best not remembered. Rome's casual attitude to dispatching other races was matched by a poignant reverence for the shedding of its own citizens' blood. For legion to fight legion, brother to die at brother's hand, racked Italy and the city both.

"I've been thinking about you," Caenis told Sabinus. "Your position as City Prefect must be dreadful."

It was Rome that wanted Sabinus to continue in his post; for Rome he felt obliged to do it. Sabinus was held in great reverence, greater than his brother, if the truth were told. His first stint of governing the city had been three years; now he had done it for another eight.

"Well. Exciting times!"

In his way he glossed over the problem. He remained a gentle, pleasant, well-respected, well-intentioned man, who was desperately trying to reconcile Vitellius to the inevitable without further bloodshed or disruption in the capital. "I do my best." He stared into the brazier, holding out his hands to the warmth. The red glow gleamed on his troubled face. Any frown, like his restrained smile, brought out a momentary likeness to his famous brother.

"You do wonders. But, Sabinus!"

For an instant Caenis had glimpsed that he was an old man carried on by an outgrown reputation, an old man rightly afraid he was at the verge of losing his grip.

"I know. They listen to me, Caenis; well, I hope they do."

They did—so far.

Rain lashed the small windowpanes in long, beaded diagonal streaks. They talked for a time about the news that was filtering through, particularly about the sack of Cremona. In a display of spectacular generalship, Vespasian's man Antonius Primus had crossed the Pannonian Alps, established his headquarters at Verona, then defeated a large Vitellian army at Bedriacum, the scene of their own victory over Otho; the price was a disastrous siege of Cremona nearby, culminating in an immense fire.

"Is it all true?" Caenis requested. "Tell me it's not."

"Afraid so. Packed for the annual fair. Irresistible. The burning was not ordered by Antonius—I have his word. It began during the siege. He could not be expected to restrain forty thousand men who had just defeated the famous legions from Germany and saw the nearby city as their personal prize."

Caenis was angry. "Murder and rape; rape and murder. Old men and children torn from hand to hand, mocked and assaulted; women and boys violated; four days of carnage. Everything plundered; looters even stealing from themselves. Then the whole city burned! Not a building left standing—just one solitary temple, outside the city walls."

Sabinus looked uneasy. "Civil war; it's brutal and bitter."

"This is what Vespasian has done."

As her passion crackled Vespasian's brother reprimanded her briskly, "No; no! What he will stop, lass. Vitellius is so unpopular that if my brother did not make this claim against him someone else would. You know that. The Empire is sadly adrift. Vespasian is the best man; you must agree. There is more chance of a lasting peace at the end of this with Vespasian and his sons—"

Caenis had relaxed fairly early in the speech, but Sabinus had always talked too much. "Well, then. What happens now, Sabinus?"

"Our troops rest, celebrate the Saturnalia, then march on Rome. I'm talking to Vitellius constantly; he assures me he is ready to abdicate."

"Do you believe him?"

In his innocence Sabinus was shocked that she asked. "I must!"

She did not wish to dishearten him; he was a good man. "Well done, then. So . . . the Emperor Vespasian!" Her tone softened. They had come, they both realized, to the point of his call. "Flavius Sabinus, don't be embarrassed. I understand what must be done. I have been your brother's best supporter all these years; should I offend against his reputation now? You know why I moved back here to my own house."

"You are a good friend to the Flavians."

He felt awkward. They both knew what his brave, clear-principled wife would have said about this.

Caenis reassured him gently, "The Flavians were good friends to me."

So he understood; his brother's mistress would do whatever had to be done. Caenis, the ex-secretary, would behave as she had been trained, with discretion and self-effacement. She would do it, moreover, despite anything his brother himself might say.

Flavius Sabinus leaned back his head and sighed. "This is very sad." Caenis said nothing. "Very sad," he repeated somberly.

He meant it. But for him, as for anyone who cared what happened to Rome, the important thing was a satisfactory resolution to the confusion, culminating in the best man taking charge. It was time to end Claudian vulgarity and scandal, time for Flavian discipline, hard work, and dedication to the public good. Time for Vespasian to be respectable again.

So although Flavius Sabinus honestly felt that what must happen to Caenis was tragic, though he liked her, and his late wife had liked her even more, he felt she had had a good run. His sadness was the type that must be dealt with staunchly, then put aside.

"I have suggested," he told her kindly, "that if you feel uncomfortable in Rome, you might be allowed to live on our grandmother's estate at Cosa."

Caenis drew a sharp breath. "And what does Caesar say to that?"

Sabinus shifted with embarrassment. "No answer yet."

Conflicting emotions battered her. "It is his favorite place!" she protested at last.

Vespasian's brother, who had known her as long as Vespasian himself, looked at her with a trace of Flavian sentiment. They were poor, but they paid their debts. She would be provided for with decent courtesy. And Cosa was a good long way away. "Well. Think about it. I feel sure he will offer, if that is what you would like. Of course, you are quite right about the place. But you," acknowledged the Prefect of the City unexpectedly, "have always been my brother's favorite person."

He was remembering the day when they discovered her, a scrawny fractious solitary girl amid all those incongruous perfume flasks and jars. He was trying not to remember the look he had seen that day upon Vespasian's face.

* * *

In the last days of Vitellius, Flavius Sabinus continually attempted to bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict before Vespasian's two triumphant generals reached Rome.

Antonius Primus had encountered the last remnants of the Vitellian field army without bloodshed. They met at Narnia, sixty miles north of Rome. Caenis knew Narnia; though it was on a different highway, it lay only twenty miles from Reate. The Vitellians had marched down through the Umbrian Hills to meet Primus with standards aloft and banners fluttering—but they kept their swords sheathed. They paraded through the Narnia Gap, right to the point where Primus had drawn up his own men in closed ranks and full battle dress on either side of the road to Rome. In silence the Flavian army parted, then simply closed around the Vitellians until the two groups stood amalgamated into one. In many ways it was the most moving sight of the entire war.

Now Primus was waiting for Mucianus, who had been held up by a Dacian rebellion at their backs, to join him at Ocriculum. They were just forty-five miles, say two days' standard march, from Rome. Rome lay two days away from being sacked by Roman troops. After the destruction of Cremona, the point was not lost.

Vitellius at last agreed to abdicate. He left the Palace and made a suitable speech of renunciation in the Forum. Friends gathered at the house of Flavius Sabinus to congratulate him on the skill with which he had resolved the situation. It was all over—apparently.

However, while attempting to leave the Palatine, Vitellius found all the roads blocked with barricades. Not knowing what else to do, he returned to the Palace. His supporters rallied to him in the night. Rumors of the change quickly spread. As Prefect of the City, Sabinus gave an order confining all troops to barracks; the order was widely ignored. Aware that Mucianus and Primus were so near, he then assembled his family, including his nephew Domitian, and seized Capitol Hill, intending to make a stand until the Flavian generals arrived.

The Capitol, founded by the Roman Kings, then completed under the free Republic, had stood throughout the centuries, whatever else barbarians managed to assault. It had survived Rome's sack by marauding Gallic tribes. It had survived the invasion of Lars Porsenna in times so ancient, no one was certain any longer whether they were history or myth. The citadel had been destroyed once by accident, but never in war. The Flavians seemed pretty safe.

It was the night of 18 December. It was raining again, all night. In the pitch-black no one could tell friend from foe; watchwords went unrecognized or unheard. Even so, the cordon flung around the citadel by Vitellius was so loose that messages from Sabinus passed in and out easily. But then the next day Vitellian soldiers attacked on two sides; some climbed the Hundred Steps from the Clivus Capitolinus, others broke in on the opposite side by way of the Gemonian Steps. What had seemed casual now became desperate. Sabinus' men tore the roof tiles from the temples to hurl down on the attackers' heads and rooted up the statues to form frantic barriers at the gates. At some point during the confusion one side or the other started a fire, which raged through the houses on the lower slopes; then, while all Rome watched in horror, the flames leaped uphill toward the Temple of Jupiter.

The temple was the site for Rome's most solemn religious ceremonies. Here the Senate convened its first meeting of every year. From this temple the statues of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva were carried down into the city and paraded during festivals. To this temple victorious generals brought home their trophies. It was packed with dedicated treasure. The roof was covered with tiles of gilded bronze, the doors were plated with gold, and the peristyle was hung with solemn edicts engraved on ancient bronze plaques. The temple had symbolized Rome's destiny for hundreds of years. It had given poets their famous epithet for the Golden Capitol. It was the heart of the Empire. The Temple of Jupiter on Capitol Hill in Rome was the center of the civilized world. On 19 December in the Year of the Four Emperors, the Temple of Jupiter burnt to the ground.

Many Flavian supporters were killed. Domitian hid in a caretaker's house, then disguised himself as an acolyte of the priests of Isis and escaped across the Tiber. The mother of one of his schoolfriends sheltered him, luckily outwitting his pursuers when they came to her house. Sabinus surrendered. He was dragged in chains before Vitellius. Vitellius came out onto the Palace steps apparently prepared to be lenient, but the mob screamed for blood. Sabinus was stabbed to death, his head sliced off, and his body cast onto the Gemonian Steps.

He had been placed in an impossible position, trying to negotiate with a slippery agent in an ungrateful city. Tragically, he misjudged both. The truest man in Rome, to him Rome gave a traitor's death.

* * *

Horrified, the army of Antonius Primus stirred. Without waiting any longer for Mucianus to join them, they forged straight down the Via Flaminia. They sped the full distance to Rome in a single day. Ambassadors from Vitellius and the Senate were roughly handled, though a deputation of Vestal Virgins was received courteously enough. The remaining Vitellians had no intention of giving way. So three columns of Flavian troops invaded the city. They entered by the Via Flaminia, along the banks of the Tiber, and through the Colline Gate on the Via Salaria—only a few yards from Caenis' house. While citizens sat out on their balconies like spectators at a triumph, cheering first one group, then the other, the two forces rampaged through the streets. The Flavians won—just. Vitellius was hauled from his hiding place in a janitor's kennel, beaten to death, then his body too deposited upon the Gemonian Steps, where Flavius Sabinus had been flung the day before. Vespasian's senior general, Licinius Mucianus, arrived in the nick of time to prevent Primus' men from looting the city. Rome shuddered, and was finally still.

Domitian emerged from hiding and appeared to the victorious Flavian troops; they hailed him Caesar; they carried him in triumph to his father's house. On the whole Caenis felt glad she was no longer there when the exultant youth arrived.

Flavius Sabinus was awarded a state funeral.

* * *

Caenis wrote to Vespasian about his brother. She warned him of the shock that the destruction of the temple had caused in Rome. She reassured him that his younger son was safe. It was 30 December—Titus' birthday; she sent Titus her love. She gave them both her honest good wishes for the Flavian dynasty.

Then, with immense care, Caenis wrote to Vespasian alone:

I have believed since the day I met you that you possessed a great destiny. I cannot wish you—or Rome—any less. I have come with you as far as I may. You must realize I shall never in the future cause you to regret the respect and devotion you showed me in the past. We are, as you once observed, strong-minded enough to follow the rules. You know my heart; you always knew. Together or separate, my love for you will never change. Perhaps you were right when you said once that we should not have given love to one another, but oh, dearest of men, I am so glad that we did!

Even now, Caenis never felt entirely easy writing letters for herself. Still, the regular whisper of her pen across the papyrus carried the resonance of a long-mastered craft, so she worked on to the end with the discipline of which she had always been so proud. In the way of a neat secretary she cleaned the extra ink from the split nib before she laid down her pen.

* * *

Twelve hundred miles away, in Alexandria, the newest Emperor of Rome was entertaining the ambassadors of King Vologaeses of the Parthians. For half a century the Parthians had been Rome's most dedicated enemies. Now the Parthians and this strong new Emperor were at peace. King Vologaeses had offered Vespasian forty thousand Parthian archers—an offer that he was gracefully able to refuse. In Alexandria it was a good moment. They held a lively Egyptian feast to celebrate.

Nobody noticed when among all the racket the Emperor paused in sudden deep stillness, as if he had heard somebody calling him.

FORTY

Vespasian released the wheat ships ahead of him in February of the next year, as soon as they could sail. He himself waited in Alexandria until the better weather was assured. Embassies of senators and knights frightened themselves and were seasick dashing across the Mediterranean under dark skies to court his goodwill. He received them gravely. They were impressed. They were particularly impressed to find him entertaining the fearful Parthians.

Titus returned to Judaea in April. He was Titus Caesar now. The freedman Narcissus had, after all, cultivated his dynasty. Sometimes Caenis wondered whether Narcissus had realized all along; so like the old schemer to have a second plan ready in case the first one failed.

Vespasian had shown Titus the letter from Caenis. He knew how his son would react. He explained to Titus briefly certain social facts of life. Titus said nothing. Neither of them wrote to her. Titus could not bear to. As for his father, he growled that taming an ox by telepathy was easy; women were best handled where you had space to get a rope around their horns.

Titus retorted grimly, "Well—you're the country boy!"

There was unrest in Africa, which had no time for Vespasian; Africa was still in a sense bombarding him with turnips. There was an outbreak of piracy on the Black Sea, which one of his lieutenants sailed to put down. There was civil war in north Britain. There was an extremely serious revolt in Germany, cleared up with good luck and some dash by Vespasian's relative Petilius Cerialis. Though they passed like a dream for Caenis, these were major events that occupied much of Vespasian's attention.

Domitian, whom she never saw nowadays, had acted as his father's representative in Rome. He made a commendable speech to the Senate, though he then found himself struggling to take precedence over Mucianus, who actually held the formal powers of deputy. At first Domitian conducted himself with distinction, though he overstepped the mark during the German revolt, when he tried to coerce Cerialis into a conspiracy—whether against his father or his brother was typically unclear. Cerialis ignored it. Domitian was downgraded. He made himself a patron of the arts instead, a much more suitable way for an Emperor's younger son to waste his time. Vespasian was furious with his political maneuvers, though Titus—more loyal to his brother than Domitian would ever be in return—interceded on his behalf with his usual diplomacy. Mollified, Vespasian embarked for home.

By then the Senate had awarded him in a pack all of the honors and titles that previous Emperors had assembled one by one. At this point Vespasian did not request and was not awarded a Triumph; there was an ancient rule that such honors were reserved for conquest over external enemies, not for shedding Roman blood. There would be one. There would be a Triumph for Jerusalem; that was understood. It would be awarded to Vespasian and Titus together—Titus, who had worked so hard and with such grace to bring his father to the throne, and who would share the burdens of office with him from the start.

So Vespasian was coming.

Waiting for him to arrive, Rome could hardly bear the suspense. In the end crowds flocked out, some journeying many miles to meet him as he traveled up from the south. Behind them, the city lay strangely quiet. Every town on the way erupted when he arrived. In the country whole families lined his route to applaud. Even before they saw him they knew a chapter had closed. Once he appeared, they were surprised to find how good-natured the man was. People supposed becoming Emperor had changed him for the better. Caenis had always told him: People had no sense.

When Vespasian entered Rome the entire city was smothered under garlands and shimmering with incense. Caenis let all her household go to watch him arrive. She stayed at home. There was no longer Veronica to rent a balcony. Besides, any woman in the crowd who hurled her lunch at the Emperor would be strung up on a scaffold by the Praetorian Guard. Aglaus, loyal to the last, kept Caenis company. They could hear the noise in the distance throughout most of the day. Being near the Praetorian Camp made it worse. There was tremendous activity.

She knew Aglaus was frightened of what she would do. Caenis merely spring-cleaned her house.

Toward the end of the afternoon the inevitable equerry turned up. Vespasian had always been considerate. Caenis had understood there would have to be one brief skirmish: the kind gesture of recognition on his part; the formal resignation on hers.

The equerry, poor dog, was the man who had once in Greece advised the disgraced Vespasian to go to Hades. Aglaus enjoyed himself for some time over that; she could hear it going on through a half-open door.

"Must have been a sticky moment when he turned up in his nice new purple toga! What did he say to you?"

"I asked him what he wanted me to do; he said, ‘Oh, go to Hades!'—and he grinned."

"Neat! You'll learn to enjoy that grin. But you're working for him?"

"So far. Today he is refusing to settle new arrangements. Caused a bit of an upset; you can imagine. All those Greek eels with their neat lists hoping to wind their way into his good opinion; every one of them has been put off. They were jumpy anyway about letting Domitian take over the Palace—there's a strong indication already that Papa has torn a strip off his young lordship. . . . Only thing Vespasian has done is cancel the procedure for searching visitors; quite a few Praetorian palpitations at that! He says he wants to consult someone about the rest." Aglaus laughed bitterly, knowing whom Vespasian used to consult on domestic matters. The equerry became more businesslike. "Right. This won't do—better lead me to Antonia Caenis."

"Just Caenis."

The repartee over, Aglaus was at his most unhelpful now. Caenis smiled over the change in his tone as he erected his fences. No one would get past him.

"He wants her," prompted the equerry.

"I shall tell her."

"I must see her."

"She won't see you. Listen; we expected this. You are to say: ‘Antonia's freedwoman thanks the Emperor for remembering her, but she is not free to come.' "

The equerry was none too keen on reporting this rhetoric to a twelve-lictor general with a tricky reputation. "I can't say that!"

"You must. So long as you don't ask him for money he doesn't bite. By the way, regarding money—you always do have to ask him, and when you do he always bites. As for this, tell him straight out—then stand back a bit, just in case."

"Oh, she can't!"

"Yes she can."

"Extraordinary woman!"

Aglaus said, "He's an extraordinary man."

Then it was over.

* * *

Her freedman left her a short time to compose herself, then stumped in. "You all right?" She nodded but did not speak. "Want anything?"

"Leave me alone."

"Yes, madam!" He waited.

"What is it, Aglaus?"

"If you don't need me, I'll go out for a walk. As there's nothing going on here, would you object if later I invited in one of my friends?"

"Do what you like," replied Caenis drably.

She was well aware that as her slave Aglaus had felt free to consort in her kitchen with every kind of unsavory customer. There had never been any disturbances, so she had never stopped him. He spared her the trouble of being asked for permission. Then, when she gave him his freedom, he had married with a promptness that informed her it was an established relationship; three children appeared overnight. She had told him she was annoyed, because if she had known they existed she could have been spoiling them.

Now Caenis barked at him tetchily, "Just do what you like. Rome has a new emperor, and its citizens can play all night."

He returned her sourness with a short puff of laughter. "Fun, isn't it, madam?" Later he went off, with a distinct pang of uncertainty at leaving her alone in the empty house.

He was quite right; there was something Caenis intended to do.

* * *

Once all was silent Caenis rose and walked stiffly to her room. She had always hated fuss, but there was a routine she sometimes followed, so for perhaps an hour she attended to her person as thoroughly as she had previously attacked her home. Even Veronica might have approved.

Her house had its own water supply, so from head to foot she washed off the grime of her day's labor. She bathed twice; Veronica had always held a theory that the first time only moved the dirt about. Slowly, thinking of Veronica, Caenis oiled her still-elastic skin. Years of sitting properly and standing well, combined with regular swimming, had preserved her figure and fine carriage. Her life had turned out much less hard than she had once imagined it must. There had been decent food, rest, time and money enough to nourish both body and soul. She had lived simply from choice, but there was always rose water and almond oil, then later perfumes and unguents that were more exotic, more expensive, more silky to apply, more agreeable and subtle to wear. She used them now, enjoying the tonic of massaged limbs, a face that felt groomed but not sticky or rigid with paint, manicured hands, clean-scented hair.

In other ways, even better ways, life had been generous. She had known contentment and a quiet mind. Whatever happened to her now, never again would she feel that tearing sense of unfulfillment she had struggled against as a young girl. She was born a slave; she won herself the rank of a Roman citizen. She had belonged to a family. Not as a slave; not as a freedwoman: in her own right she had become a Flavian.

From her fastidious wardrobe she chose a light formal gown that always made her feel graceful, which she fastened on the shoulders with two British bluestone brooches. No other jewelry . . . none at all. She held her gold bangle in her hand.

She walked back to the room where Aglaus had left her; on his eventual return he would look for her there. She sat down. It was rather like preparing to take Antonia's dictation. She cleared her mind of all thought and all pain, all prospects of the future, all yearning for the past.

She felt like Cleopatra, bereft of her Mark Antony; Caenis, who herself bore Mark Antony's name, waiting like Cleopatra for the last exulting Roman to stride into her palace and confront her. Cleopatra, robed in a blue that was clearer and deeper than gentians: Cleopatra, defeated, on the day that she died.

FORTY-ONE

Rome: city of light.

Aglaus had found his friend on the Palatine. Now they were striding down from the old administrative Palace, across the eastern end of the Forum, and toward the Quirinal. They walked swiftly, for the city was humming and this was not an occasion for a quiet evening stroll. By now there were few people about. Some took no notice of the two men; others looked after them thoughtfully, as they disappeared unobtrusively, heading for the Viminal Gate.

At the Forum they had paused. They had come on to the Via Sacra, just by the round Temple of Vesta with its little pointed roof and distinctive latticework. Looking to their left down the long southern edge of the Forum, past the Julian courthouse and the massive portico of the Temple of Saturn, they could see at the far end the Tabularium, solid as a harbor wall around the base of the Capitol. Above it, the brow of the hill stood shockingly altered. Gone was the glittering roof of the Temple of Jupiter, gone the Temple itself. All the buildings that clothed the lower flanks of the hill were blackened; some leaned dangerously, others were reduced to occasional half-walls upthrust in stark jags to the evening sky. To the far right beside the prison, deserted and deceptively bathed in sunlight, lay the Gemonian Steps, where the bodies of dead traitors were flung.

Without a word they moved on.

It was the time of the evening that took the breath away. As the dusk fell, there was always this magical moment in Rome, when the tufa blocks of the buildings and the pavements seemed to reflect their own glow, exuding an aureole of mellow golden light, faintly tinged rose, as if that light had been held back like the day's warmth within the city's stones and now slowly released itself. The freedman with the blue chin smiled.

A city of statues. At every crossroad, on every level, before and beside every temple, clustering around every square: faces both men knew so well they normally hardly noticed them became suddenly vivid that evening. Some tranquil eyes stared out over their heads; others followed them. The gods, the generals, the Caesars—impassive noble faces in gilded marble and bronze, soon to be joined by Vespasian's wrinkled brow and blithe expression. Catching Aglaus' thought, his companion smiled faintly too. His expression was ironical.

A city of water. The fountains played only a little sluggishly as the pressure sank after an exceptional draft of millions of gallons had been sucked from the aqueducts into the bathhouses, which took priority. Fountain spray drifted across the deserted streets in a fine haze. Occasionally as they crossed a paved-in conduit they could hear the chuckling of the water that rushed so energetically from the baths toward the mighty caverns of the main sewers.

The Romans were in their houses. After the joyous excitement of their Emperor's long-awaited entry that afternoon, only their litter remained behind in the streets. They were at home, snatching at food, loudly comparing notes on what they had managed to see. Later that night every one of them was to sit down by voting tribe and district to a thanksgiving banquet, the whole city feasting like a big cheerful family presided over by their fatherly Emperor.

Once the Emperor was known to be in residence, the city had relaxed. He would be living, since it existed, in Nero's dreadful Golden House; its hated entrance was opposite them now, studded with gemstones and glittering gold, its approach from the Forum surrounded by a triple colonnade. Nearby stood the mighty bronze Colossus: Nero in a radiate crown, dominating the skyline from every direction.

Something would have to be done about all that, Vespasian had already decreed. The extensive grounds of the Golden House must be restored as soon as possible to public use. For the rest, perhaps the best thing would be to pull it all down, fill in that vast lake, then build over the crater something for all Rome: some wonder to unite the city and excite the world. . . . He and Titus could always live in the old Palace of Tiberius and Caligula. That place of tall cold corridors, rarely used staterooms, abandoned offices. And pantries.

He had asked after Caenis. He had been told what she had said.

At the Golden House, after his baggage was brought in, the Emperor had made a personal sacrifice to his household gods. "Who arranged for my lares to be here?"

Standing beside him, his teenaged granddaughter Flavia raged through her teeth, "Who do you think?"

Caenis.

Afterward Flavia Domitilla interviewed her grandfather just long enough to accept the present he had brought her, then to inform him that in the matter of Caenis he was an unprincipled pig. The Emperor Vespasian would be famous for allowing people to be frank. "Thanks for the opinion!" growled her grandfather to Flavia. "Come and give me a kiss."

"No," said Flavia. He looked at her with mooning eyes. She knew what Caenis would say. So Flavia, who was fiercely fond of her grand-papa, gave him a pecky kiss.

Shaken, the Emperor requested a bedroom—not too fancy and nothing Nero had ever used—where before the banquet that evening he could give his elderly bones a quiet lie-down. Someone with no sense asked if they should provide a girl for him. He stared.

Then the Emperor said, no thanks; he had always preferred to provide his own.

* * *

Aglaus and his friend had reached the Porta Nomentana. They walked more quickly, for here people were standing about looking curious. The Via Nomentana, home to a famous female resident, had been expecting something better than one seedy chamberlain today. In a small crowd outside the Gate there was an air of disappointment, mingled with lingering hope. Aglaus saluted those who greeted him. He seemed harassed and unfriendly. His companion, modestly smothered in an old mulberry-colored cloak with its clasp hanging off by a thread, looked endearingly shy. Behind them a dog barked; then, when Aglaus spun angrily, it scampered away.

Aglaus banged on the door, but although the parade was over the porter had not returned. He swore briefly, then scrambled to get out his own keys. He swiftly unlocked the formidable ironmongery, talking now all the time. He was beginning to feel nervous. The dead silence of the deserted house gave him an unexpected chill.

"Come in. Mind how you step. There may still be water about. You must be entering the cleanest house in Rome; try not to slip on the tiles. Let me relieve you of that terrible cloak. Today all Rome took to the streets, but in this house we polished up our door-furniture and washed our frescoes down. All Rome troops off to cheer, but our lady tucks her skirt in her belt and scrubs out the latrine. We, sir, have rearranged our sideboards, swept our steps, and poked out the nasty desiccated things that were lying in dark crevices under the beds. . . ."

He lowered his voice as they crossed the atrium.

He went first. That way Caenis would have her moment of warning, his companion a moment of grace, and Aglaus his moment of fun.

"Madam?"

He opened the door to its widest extent. Amid the quiet barley-and-buttermilk tones of her house blazed one bright nub of brilliant sapphire blue. Caenis sat upright in a chair opposite the door. She was holding her plain gold bangle between her two hands in her lap. She looked as if she had a headache. Her eyes were closed. She was completely still. Someone drew a scorching breath.

At an involuntary movement, light shivered among the delicate scrolls of embroidery at the neck of her vivid blue robe. To have supposed her anything other than fiercely alive was to misunderstand her completely. She seemed pale, but neat, alert, ready to be marvelously truculent.

"Madam, I'd like to introduce my friend."

She opened her eyes. She looked up. She scowled. Aglaus swallowed. The man behind him frowned.

Caenis assumed the restrained expression of a first-class secretary to whom an ill-timed request had just been made to give priority to an illegible draft many pages long. But before she could say anything, her freedman announced with a clarity that proved he had been practicing: "Antonia Caenis: Here is Titus Flavius Vespasianus, Conqueror of Britain and Hero of Judaea; Vespasianus Caesar Augustus—Consul, Chief Priest, father of his country, and Emperor of Rome!"

Her Sabine friend. She had expected him, of course.

FORTY-TWO

"Hello, Caenis."

Unsmiling, his dark gaze absorbed her.

"Hail Caesar!" Caenis retorted, trying not to let it sound like an insult. He received it quietly enough. After a year of Egyptian flummery, presumably he was used to it.

Caenis saw Aglaus nervously shift his weight.

"Don't worry," Vespasian reassured him, without moving. "The first thing she ever said to me was ‘Skip over the Styx!' " From the front he was completely bald. Still, his character would always come from that light in his eyes and the handsome muscles of his face. "As you see, I'm still here."

"And how long," murmured Aglaus, newly suave, "will your Caesarship be staying?"

His Caesarship pronounced ominously: "As long as it takes."

Aglaus went straight out and closed the door.

* * *

"Don't get up," he said as he paced farther in. "I'm sick of people bobbing about."

She did not get up. "What are you doing here?"

He was taking off his shoes. Slowly he went to a couch. "What are you doing here?"

"I live here."

"You live with me."

"I can't come."

"I've come to fetch you."

"I won't let you."

"Overruled. Privilege of my rank!"

"Not in my house."

"All right." Vespasian eased himself onto the couch, where he reclined on his elbow. "I've brought nothing to eat, since you'll be coming to dinner. Titus sent some Persian slippers; your freedman has those in case you decide to wear them tonight. When you come you'll find a great bale of Tyrian silk, some crystal from Ptolomais, and one or two decent books I found for you in Alexandria. Plus—if you want it—a ravenous appetite for taking you to bed."