A Villa Far From Rome

by Sheila Finch

  “Must you strike down all my plans? Why did you insist on coming with me anyway?”

  He looked at her sternly as a tutor might look at a lazy scholar. “You know very well that a Roman woman doesn’t travel alone anywhere, especially Rome.”

  He was right, of course, though it irked her. Everything in her cried out for confrontation with the emperor. For the last year, that had been all she could think about. Her brothers had scoffed at her plan. Even old Cassia, her nursemaid, one of the few freedmen and slaves still kept on by the family, shook her head. Her mother, filled with grief for her daughter, feared for her safety if she so much as reminded the emperor she was alive. Why were they so certain he wouldn’t welcome her – and his child? Only the Greek, freed by her father before his death, elected to go with her to Rome.

  She looked at the crowded street, and a wave of tiredness and nausea swept over her. “How will we find lodging?”

  “The man who sold us bread at our last stop mentioned a place.”

  They had come to a halt outside one of the small shops, a place of cheap leather belts and dusty boots, sandals even old Cassia would have disdained, piled in unappetizing disarray outside its door. The result looked more as if it had been swept outside like trash rather than goods hoping to entice buyers. But there was a stone stool, apparently for the convenience of customers trying on shoes. Nikolaos helped her sit and lowered the sleeping child into her arms. The sack that represented all that was left of her previous life lay by her feet.

  “Hey!” The shoemaker came running out, waving his arms. “No public loitering!”

  Nikolaos tossed a small coin. The man’s hand snaked out and seized it before it fell.

  “Don’t stay there all day!” the shoemaker grumbled, disappearing back into the darkness inside.

  The Greek strode away.

  Without his presence, she felt suddenly vulnerable, conscious of the stares and the rude gestures aimed her way. The child whimpered and thrashed in her sleep. Antonia held her tighter, her own heart racing. Late afternoon, but the city retained the oppressive heat, and the smells of putrid vegetables and rotten meat were making her feel faint. This was not how she’d remembered Rome. All those years she’d dreamed of a city built of gleaming marble, with wide streets down which bronze-decked chariots dashed, drawn by white horses, beautiful people in their white togas, off to attend banquets and gladiator competitions. And at the end of one of those fine streets would be the emperor’s palace.

  At first she’d been lost in a welter of emotions, confused, ashamed, hurting by turn. Believing the emperor would send for her helped save her from destroying herself once she found out she was with child. Her father blamed her for everything, the child, the debt they had incurred from the emperor’s visit, their own deteriorating future. He’d kept her away from Rome as she grew into girlhood, he told her, for fear something like this would happen. The child was fretful, demanding constant care. The family grew poorer, the vineyards were sold, the servants let go, even the slaves sold off.

  “What’s your price?”

  Startled, she looked up into the red, bloated face of a middle-aged man above a torn and grimy-looking toga.

  “I said, what’s your price? You charging extra for the child?”

  She felt her the heat rising in her cheeks. He leaned over her, blocking her escape. His breath was sour with cheap wine and onions. And behind him she saw three other ragged men, leering, waiting their turn. She screamed. The little girl woke and added her voice to her mother’s.

  The shoemaker hurried out, waving his arms. “No whoring on my premises! Be gone!”

  “I’m no whore – ”

  “No gentlewoman either!” the shoemaker snarled. “What lady travels by foot, alone–”

  One of the ragged men dragged her to her feet, another pulled the wriggling child out of her arms. The fear vanished and something else, something raw flooded through her. Her mind emptied of thought, her body acted by its own will. She snatched up the sack still lying at her feet, swung it – brought it to connect hard with the first man’s head.

  The man screamed, clutching at his eye. “Bitch!”

  Nikolaos was back, pushing the men out of her way. “There will be no more of this!”

  “Traveling with an escaped slave, no doubt!” the man in the soiled toga said.

  “I am a freed man,” Nikolaos said.

  “Show proof, Greek! Where’s your cap?”

  Niko pulled the freedman’s cap out of his tunic and slapped it carelessly on his head.

  “Niko...” But the combined effect of the fear, the anger and the rank smells of the city got her, doubling her over to vomit on the cobblestones.

  The men backed away in exaggerated disgust.

  Nikolaos gave Antonia his cloak to wipe the mess off her mouth and chin.

  “No man sets hand on me without permission!” She was still trembling with shock and anger. “My brothers taught me that. Especially Valentinus. When we were young, he used to wrestle with me – and sometimes I beat him, too.”

  He lifted the child from the street where the man had set her. “We need to get away from here.”

  The room he had found for them in a nearby inn was tiny and dark, up two narrow, rickety flights of wooden stairs. It smelled of candle smoke and the sweat of its previous occupant. The one bed was hardly more than a pallet, scarcely room for herself let alone the child. She was so tired she felt she could sleep standing up. She judged it was the tenth hour from what she remembered of the way the shadows fell outside in the street.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor by the door,” Nikolaos said.

  The proprietor of the inn had given them an oil lamp to light their way. In its sputtering light, she looked at the Greek who had assumed the role of her protector. He was the same age as her father, tall and olive skinned, with a face whose lines suggested sculpture. He’d been an athlete in his youth, a long distance runner, before the Romans took him captive. But the years of hardship had taken their toll on him as well; she was aware for the first time of the stoop that was slowly conquering his proud posture.

  “You’ll be cold, Niko.”

  “I have my cloak.” He’d rinsed it in one of the many public taps with running water in the city. In the heat, it had dried almost instantly.

  The child was weeping now, begging for food. She searched through the sack, already knowing there was little left but dry crusts. Nikolaos left the room. She sat on the uncomfortable bed and took the child into her lap, thinking. How far down the malicious Fates had brought her since the long ago night she’d made the unwise decision to defy her father and spy on the emperor at supper!

  Nikolaos came back, carrying a rough platter with a hunk of fresh bread and some olives, a small jug of wine. She broke off pieces of the bread, dipped them in the wine, and fed them to the child. The Greek took a few olives, a sip of wine. She herself had lost all appetite.

  “There’s a public bath house nearby,” Nikolaos said. “We’ll visit it in the morning.”

  She hadn’t had the chance to bathe since leaving home, Odd though it would seem to have to share the process with strangers, she would be grateful for the warm water.

  “Good. I’ll bathe and put on my clean tunic to see the emperor.”

  “He has a strange reputation.” Niko looked as if he was trying to think how to make something simple for her to understand, something bad.

  “I’m no child, Niko.”

  “Of course not. But I hear the talk about him in the marketplace. They say he’s unpredictable. A god in the morning, a demon at night.”

  “Well, so are many men.”

  “Keep your wits about, you. Don’t trust too quickly.”

  “You worry too much.”

  Later, lying in the darkness, the child beside her, she listened to the sounds of the inn’s other guests quarreling. Something crashed and the walls shook. Someone cried out – a woman’s voice.

  She felt t
he resolve hardening in her heart. No matter what it took, she’d persuade the emperor to acknowledge his child.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Neptune’s temple, when Togidubnus found it, was disappointingly small, at least by comparison with the temple consecrated to Jupiter Capitolinus he’d just passed. A long room with an arched roof supported on stone pillars, elegantly decorated with friezes of sea horses pulling shell chariots, and dolphins sacred to the god of the sea. The colors and gilding the craftsmen had used were admirable. But he was frustrated; he’d expected something much grander. As a resident of an island, a man who’d gone to sea in a fishing boat when he was little more than a tiny lad, he was conscious of the importance of a sea god in a way the citizens of this teeming city were not.

  He shaded his eyes against the dazzling noon sun, measuring the temple’s marble proportions in his head, thinking of the monument he’d like to erect in Noviomagus Regnorum someday. He felt the trickle of sweat under his tunic; he’d forgotten how unbearably hot Rome could be, even in late spring. He exchanged a few small coins with a merchant in the courtyard for a bird to sacrifice and looked around for a priest to perform the ceremony.

  The temple he would build should be sacred to both Neptune and Minerva, in honor of his wife’s allegiance to the old goddess, Sulis, known to the Romans as Minerva. Thinking of Breca, he was suddenly swept with homesickness. He’d been here less than a week and already he yearned for the cool breezes and summer showers of his homeland. Breca wasn’t happy with this new world order under Rome’s thumb. He saw it in the way she clung to the old ways, the old names. He respected her for it, even though he felt she was wrong. Her faithfulness was only one of the qualities that made him love her.

  The other disturbing matter was that he hadn’t seen his son since they’d arrived in Rome several days ago, and he missed the boy’s company. The emperor had been quite taken with the shy, scholarly boy, but he’d sent Amminus off with two other sons of noble families and a tutor. Foolish father! he chided himself. Amminus wasn’t the first son of a tribal chief to be educated in Rome. He too had spent time here when he was a boy – and emerged the better for it, hadn’t he? It was more important today than ever that a boy who would someday be a chief in Britannia become a true Roman.

  Across the courtyard he saw a priest and hailed him. The priest came slowly, folds of his white toga draped over his head to form a hood, every step proclaiming his importance and the low estate of the petitioner waiting with the dove fluttering in his hands. Togidubnus held his impatience in check.

  “For my son’s well-being.”

  The priest took the bird from him with a gesture that suggested he was disdainful of the small size of the offering. As if the whole ceremony bored him, the priest deftly wrung the bird’s neck and fed the still body to the flames in a bronze bowl on a minor altar at the foot of the great steps. He recited the sacred words in a rush.

  This casual observance offended him, even though he didn’t consider himself a pious man. He understood how small and unimportant his tribe was to the Roman Empire. Here he was as poor as any country simpleton come to gawk at the emperor, and he must get used to being treated as such. Once he’d had a chance to lay out his plans for the emperor, things would change for himself and the Britanni.

  He stepped past the priest and mounted the steps to enter the almost deserted temple and light incense at the high altar. Gazing up at the twice life-size statue of the sea god holding his trident aloft, his beard a tangle of kelp, he felt grounded again. He lifted his arms in prayer for a good outcome for his son. It never hurt the outcome of anything to pray to the gods, even when one was not much of a believer.

  That done, he stepped out of the temple’s shade and back into oppressive heat. A flock of pigeons, grey as the stones that littered the Downs outside Noviomagus, clattered up from the steps as he descended to the cobblestone street. In the fierce sun, the flowering trees and shrubs that spilled over low walls glowed scarlet and gold. Shading his eyes with his hand, he squinted up the street to see which way he should go. Surely he should remember the city better than this? It was different from the memory he carried of his days here as a boy at Augustus’s court. An obviously new and unfinished building caught his eye.

  Of course. He’d heard about the devastating fire that had consumed a large part of the city two years ago. Malicious gossip said the emperor had set fire to his own city so he could have the glory of rebuilding it. He refused to give credence to such vile rumors.

  Two men, their togas disheveled as if hastily donned, emerged from a doorway next to the temple. They were laughing and weaving, obviously drunk so early in the day; one bumped against him. He opened his mouth to complain and became aware of the establishment they had just left. A brothel. He didn’t remember Rome having such lax sexual mores – or was it that he’d been too much the raw young provincial to notice? When he’d first planned this journey to the emperor’s court, he hadn’t expected to be yearning for home so quickly. What did that portend for Amminus in this loose city? He consoled himself: They boy would be blessedly oblivious, just as he had been.

  A small animal, bones protruding from dirty matted fur covered in dust, streaked across the street, narrowly missing his foot. Cat? he wondered. Too big for a rat. But surely, in a city as big as Rome, a cat could find prey to hunt. Breca would have taken it in and fed it scraps. He smiled at the thought.

  After a while, his mood lifted. The city itself charmed him again, as it had years ago. He loved the new white temples, the tall buildings housing apartments and inns, the wide straight streets, the bustle and country smells of the markets – ripe cheese, garlic, sausage – the aqueducts bringing fresh mountain water to the city’s flowing fountains, the marble statues and monuments he’d admired as a boy. This is what he wanted for his beloved Britannia: prosperity and the rule of law, Roman law. This was a goal worth giving up some of the old ways.

  A little way past the temple, the road widened into another market square. Next to a stall selling books and leather goods on one side, and one selling meat on the other, he saw a small shop where the owner displayed jewelry, silver brooches and rings, bracelets, hair ornaments for a lady, and he remembered his promise to his wife. He shouldered his way through a throng of customers, many of them slaves shopping for their masters, and studied the glittering array. He thought of Breca’s long hair, still thick and dark, how it ran like silk through his fingers, more precious to him than gold.

  “How much?” He held up his selection, a tiny silver comb inlaid with small motifs of mother-of-pearl.

  The price the shopkeeper asked was more than double the amount he had to spare. Lodging was not cheap in Rome, and he couldn’t be certain how many more days he would need to stay here. He’d like to have enough left over to give Amminus a trifle to spend – he remembered well how it was to be a boy in such city! He shook his head and moved on. Two more shops offering trinkets also were out of his range. The pricking of homesickness he’d felt earlier grew into an ache. He grew tired of the heat and the pushing, shoving crowds, and if he didn’t get back to the palace soon there’d be no time to bathe before the emperor’s banquet.

  Two of the city’s professional whores passed by, one deliberately leaning in and brushing against his arm and laughing at his discomfort. He didn’t see the large man with the tray of trinkets suspended around his neck until he collided with him.

  “Watch your step, barbarian!” the man growled.

  He studied the peddler. “My apology, citizen. My eyes were obviously dazzled.”

  The man who appeared to be older than Togidubnus, had obviously been a strong brute in his day. Even now, the muscles were the first thing Togidubnus noticed, and the incongruity of cheap leather cuffs on both wrists of hands holding a tray of silver pieces. He wore a grimy tunic, no toga, and battered sandals. He took in the man’s broken, badly set nose. And the piercing blue eyes.

  “I seem to know you – but that can’t be.�
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  The old man squinted at him. “The little Britanni? Came back with us from the Fourteenth Gemina – When was it now? Too long!”

  “Gallus?” Memory flooded back. The winter journey over angry seas with the legion returning to Rome after the defeat of Caratacus that had convinced his own father to throw in the family’s lot with Rome, the start of his stay at the court of Augustus. “I thought an old war horse like you would be dead by now!”

  The old man laughed. “The life of a peddler isn’t much better! But is it truly you? Little Fox, we called you, on account of your cunning habit of stealing food from the camp.”

  “I was always hungry as a boy. And you were full of tricks to take your companions’ coins away from them. It’s a wonder nobody killed you!”

  Gallus snorted. “Most people are too stupid to notice they’re being conned. But not such a little Britanni now – You’ve grown long in the limb.”

  “What are you doing now, old friend?”

  The legionary took his elbow, steering him out of the crowd. “Selling trinkets to peasants from the country buys me a cup of cheap wine at the end of the day. What wouldn’t I give for a taste of the honest barley beer your Britanni brewed!”

  “No family?” But he knew the answer. The life of a legionary left little time for a wife and children, even had they been allowed, though Gallus had probably found women enough and maybe left bastards. He thought of all the warriors he’d known, Roman or Britanni, and how hard it was for them to give up the military life when they were too old to march and fight.

  “What brings you to Rome?” Gallus asked.

  “I hope to persuade the emperor of the importance of that tiny corner of his empire that I was born in. I want him to see how it can become the jewel in his crown.”

  Gallus laughed. “Good luck with that! Well, have to keep moving. I haven’t sold much today. Glad to have seen you again, Little Fox.”

  “Wait.” The old man was obviously in need, and he still had to find a gift for Breca. “Let me look at what you’re selling.”