A Villa Far From Rome

by Sheila Finch

  She folded her arms stubbornly and glared at him.

  He sighed. “All right. We’ll go outside. Where do you want to go?”

  “Somewhere I’ve never been.”

  He thought for a moment. “You didn’t like the temple. What if I showed you a real sacred place?”

  Her eyes widened. “Can you do that?”

  “Of course. Get your sandals on and we’ll go. We’ll take Snowmark because it’s too far for you to walk.”

  “And my shell necklace!” she said, running to get it.

  * * *

  She rode in front of Catuarus on Tiber’s gentle brown mare, Snowmark. Gallusina, the donkey Gallus had given them, still wasn’t strong enough yet to carry even one of them on a longer journey, Catu said. His arms were around her waist, holding the reins. Beech loped along beside them. The pale sun warmed their backs and a few lone bees droned by, gathering a late harvest, Catu told her. They followed a wide track away from the villa that slowly narrowed between still-flowering hedgerows.

  “Hawthorn,” he identified it for her. “And that’s cow parsley flowering along the ground below the bushes. And those butterflies? They’re called chalky blues because of their color.”

  “What’s that bird?” She pointed at a small brownish bird that had been sitting on the track ahead of them and shot straight up into the air as they approached uttering a squeaky chirp.

  “Meadow pippet,” he said.

  “It went straight up in the air!”

  “Huh. You should see the skylark do it. She goes higher. And sings better!”

  She turned her head so she could see part of his face. “How did you learn about so many things?”

  “My father taught me. This is our land, he says, and we must take care of it.”

  “Birds sing. Delamira does too. But Ma never sings.”

  “Never?”

  She thought he sounded as if he didn’t believe her.

  “My mother could sing to you sometime, if you like.”

  “Oh, I would like!”

  Then he changed again, as if he were sorry he’d said anything. “Just keep holding on tight so you don’t fall off! I don’t want to have to keep getting down and helping you.”

  At a rise in the land, the trees and hedges opened up and she saw the sea, blue as the glass bowl from Rome that Ma used for best. A flock of brilliantly white seagulls wheeled over the water. And there would be dolphins under the waves.

  “I like it here, Catu. I want to take care of it too.” She leaned back against his chest.

  After they’d been riding a while, they came to a place where the land was marshy, full of reeds and the glint of little pools. It smelled like the sea. He told her that when the tide was high the path disappeared, and most people waited to cross over to the island so they wouldn’t get their feet wet. The tide was running out when they arrived; they could safely continue. Snowmark’s hooves made squelchy sounds as she moved. Beech ran from side to side in front of them splashing through the puddles.

  They rode past a group of the round, wooden houses that the Regni lived in. She’d seen some like that before, nearer the villa, but this was a whole village. Children came to the doorways to peer at them, and one or two women. Catuarus didn’t stop Snowmark or say anything, even when a small boy waved at him, but he waved back. As they approached the largest house in the village, an old man in a long grey robe came to the door and Catuarus stopped.

  She’d seen that old man before. He’d pulled her out of the sea when she’d been looking for dolphins and the waves knocked her over. She pulled on Catuarus’s sleeve, but he wasn’t paying attention to her.

  “Uncle,” Catuarus said.

  “Catuarus,” the old man said. “You’ve brought us a visitor.”

  “I want to show her the holy place, Uncle. Where Sulis is.”

  They spoke in the Old Tongue which she was getting good at now. The old man came all the way out of the house and laid one hand on the horse’s rein. He gazed up at her. She thought he was scary-looking, wearing some kind of heavy neck ring made of silver and copper and set with black shiny stones. But she wasn’t afraid of him. He’d saved her life. Nobody said anything for several moments. The old man nodded.

  “It is right action, Nephew.”

  “Will she speak to us?” Catu asked in a hushed voice.

  “We don’t command Sulis. The goddess chooses her favorites.”

  “Ma says Sulis is just the old name for Minerva,” Lucia said. She was following the exchange very well, missing only a word here and there. She was proud to be able to take part in the conversation.

  For a moment she thought she’d angered the old man. His brow wrinkled, his lips set themselves in a thin line, and he stared at her. She shrank down on Snowmark’s saddle, trying to disappear. He said something rapidly to Catu that she couldn’t follow at all. Catu looked away and fidgeted in the saddle. What could the old man have said to him?

  Catu’s uncle smiled. “The child is right. The goddess has many names. Sulis will be glad to have you visit. She’s chosen you.”

  “What did he mean, Catu?” she asked as the old man went back into his house and they rode on.

  “He thinks you’re all right – for a Roman!” Catu sounded sulky.

  She thought about that. If he thought she was all right – for a Roman – But what had he said before that?

  “Why were you angry? What did he say to you?”

  “I wasn’t angry! Maybe a bit ashamed that I didn’t think of it earlier.”

  “But what –”

  “He said I shouldn’t forget you’re Roman and you could be in danger. Some people around here don’t like Romans very much right now.”

  “But you’re Roman too,” she argued.

  “No! My father and I are Roman citizens. Not Romans.”

  She felt his anger and didn’t push him to explain the difference. “How could I be in danger, Catu?”

  “Stop asking so many questions!”

  They entered a thicket of trees and Catu forgot his anger. He pointed out a place to her where they could gather hazelnuts some day. They came to a stop in front of a low grey stone building with three sides. Catu slipped down from the mare, then helped her. The doorway was just a little bit taller than he was. If Niko were with them, he’d have had to stoop to enter. Beech lay down beside Snowmark with her nose on her paws to wait.

  Catu took her hand and they went inside.

  “It’s not a very big temple,” she said, when her eyes adjusted to the dusk inside.

  “Not a temple. This is one of the special places where we come to talk to Sulis.”

  “I didn’t mean it’s not nice in here.” She took a deep breath. It smelled like the herbs Old Nev used when she was cooking.

  He pointed. “That’s the altar where people put offerings to the Maiden. Flowers and fruit and stuff.”

  She took a step closer. There was a heavy drift of leaves on the stone, as if nobody had been here in a while; they crumbled to dust as she ran her fingers through them. The smooth stone under the dust was warm to her touch and just a bit tingly, like running her hand over prickles. She felt something hard and closed her fingers around it.

  “I found something.” She held her hand out for him to see.

  “A comb. Made for some lady’s hair. That’s silver – all tarnished now. And look here.” He scratched dirt away from the hair-piece, revealing a small, soft stone, dull orange in color. “Amber.”

  “What’s it doing here?” she wondered.

  “Somebody made an offering to Sulis, I suppose.”

  “Do you think I can keep it?”

  He shook his head. “You’d better put it back. It belongs to Sulis now. Somebody gave it to her so she’d do something good for them.”

  She replaced the comb. Then she had an idea. “Can I leave one of the shells from my necklace? Would Sulis like that?”

  When he nodded, she slipped the cord off her neck and held it
out to him. He unknotted one shell from the cord and gave it and the necklace back to her.

  “Do I have to say anything?”

  “You say it in your heart. Sulis hears.”

  She closed her eyes and placed the shell beside the silver comb on the altar.

  He whistled for Beech. He didn’t say anything for a while after they got back onto Snowmark’s saddle and made their way off the island. The western sky was filling with clouds and a cool breeze sprang up, ruffling the reeds in the marsh.

  He said in a gruff voice, “What did you ask Sulis for?”

  “It’s a secret.” She remembered he’d made the necklace for her – four blue-green shells left now – and relented. “I asked for us to be best friends for ever.”

  He grunted.

  That made her nervous. “Everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?”

  “You Romans!” His voice softened. “Things aren’t always all right. Sometimes the good things go away and bad things come in their place. My people are used to that. And then sometimes, if you’re lucky, things go right again. That’s just the way the world is.”

  Was that good or bad? She didn’t understand and didn’t like to ask him.

  “We forgot to ask your Ma to sing,” she said, twisting on the horse’s back to look at him.

  He began to sing in his own language. It was hard to follow, but it was very pretty. Sad too, it made her want to cry. The mare stepped quietly along the path. The rhythmic rise and fall of the warm horse under her was soothing.

  “My uncle told me to be sure to get you home before dark,” Catu said when the song was over.

  She fell asleep against his chest on the way back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  A cold wind rattled the window shutters, waking her. She lay, eyes still closed, reluctant to wake. The blankets were tangled, half on the floor. She shivered. The air in her room was like ice; the furnace hadn’t been working reliably since the workmen had laid a new route for the heat to flow. If Tiberius were here, he’d speak to the architect about that. She opened one eye to the grey light of early afternoon.

  Troublesome thoughts flooded her mind. Tiberius had been gone for over a month and nobody – not even Didius, the tribune left in charge – knew where the centurion and his men were or when they’d be back. Gallus, who heard all the gossip in and around Noviomagus, had no information. There was a problem developing, Gallus had told her, a revolt among the tribes that had started with the new tax but hadn’t stopped there. Tribes that had distrusted each other far longer than Rome had been in Britannia, were joining forces.

  Even someone as little interested as she in politics could see that war would certainly not be good for the Roman community in Noviomagus. Encouraged by the peace that had seemed to be holding, and the grand design visible in Tiberius’s villa, several of the leading families had announced plans to build their own villas outside the town. An uprising would put an end to that. The centurion had no choice but to crush the rebels, Gallus said. She knew the old legionary would have given much to be fighting along with Tiberius.

  At least the old man knew what he wanted to do. She, on the other hand, was unmoored, like a boat floating aimlessly out to sea with no clear journey ahead.

  The Celtic celebration of Yule was only weeks away, but she’d learned her lesson that first year. This Yule would slip by with no celebration. She’d been here long enough that Rome was no longer a constant ache in her heart, but she would never be entirely at home here.

  “Lady,” Delamira said in the doorway. “A stranger stands at your door. He asks for you.”

  “Tell him the king isn’t here.” There was a steady stream of people needing Tiberius to arbitrate their disputes. “And it’s too late in the day to come seeking him, even if he were!”

  “He asks for you by name, Lady.”

  Not a petitioner. She sighed. “Bring him to the audience chamber. I’ll receive him there.”

  When the girl had gone to fetch the stranger, Antonia stood up. There was barely enough light left in the day for the bronze mirror to reveal her untidy hair; she shoved the unruly locks under a comb and pinned them securely. Would there ever be a time when the early darkness of winter night in this island no longer fretted her? She’d thought she was doing better, accepting if not embracing her life here, but Aron’s talk of grapes had unsettled her again. She pulled on a woollen robe.

  A stranger was an inconvenience but also offered the possibility of distraction. Who might it be, asking for her not her husband? Since Gracila’s departure, she had no friends here. She was afraid to spend too much time with Severus’s assistant for fear of the feelings that might develop between them. A sign she was growing older, she thought. When she’d first been charmed by the golden-haired centurion, she hadn’t worried about such things.

  She went down the colonnade, shivering in the gusting wind, to the reception chamber, past the high arched alcove where she’d placed a small statue of Minerva. Voices from the kitchen told her preparations for the evening meal were underway. She heard the architect, venting his usual sour mood on the workers, and glanced to see where he might be so she could avoid him. The low sun pushed through tangled clouds, raising deep shadows on the trampled lawn and torn up garden of the old house; it would soon be dark again; he’d have to let the workers go for the day. Even Severus couldn’t work them all night, though sometimes she suspected he’d like to.

  The Roman stranger waiting for her in the gloomy audience chamber was young, a year or two older than herself, in a legionary’s tunic but with his sword on the left and wearing the distinctive helmet with its protective side flaps and transverse crest. A centurion. There was something oddly familiar about him.

  The centurion narrowed his eyes at her, recovered his manners and bowed his head.

  “Good day to you, Sir, and welcome,” she said politely.

  “You are the Lady Antonia Plautina? Of Pyrgi?”

  She had the strong feeling she ought to know this bronzed stranger. But she didn’t know any centurions other than Marcus Favonius, and it was difficult to see his face under the protective helmet. “I am the wife of Claudius Tiberius Togidubnus, king of the Regni.”

  “Antonia,” he said, removing the centurion’s helmet and setting it on a side table, revealing his complete face. “Don’t you know who I am?”

  She stared at him. “You are – But you can’t be!”

  He laughed and seized her hand in both of his. “Yet I am. Your own brother, Valentinus.”

  “How you’ve changed!”

  “Military life will do that to a man!”

  Valentinus, second oldest of the four Plautinus children, Valentinus who’d taught her to ride and wrestle, and later as the golden days of childhood faded behind her and the family’s fortunes declined, taught her own little daughter to swim.

  “I can’t believe this! What’re you doing here? A centurion?”

  “Believe it,” he said, folding her in his embrace. “I’m to join the Ninth Hispana in the north at Eburacum, but I have official letters to deliver to the garrison in Noviomagus first. I have two days here.”

  “The soldiers are out in the hill country somewhere, putting down rebellion, the centurion and my husband with them. I don’t know when to expect them.”

  “I can’t tell you how I worried what had happened to you after you and the Greek slave left Pyrgi,” he said. “We had no idea you’d gone to Rome! It wasn’t until one of Pater’s old friends in the Senate who sponsored me for the legion found out for me where you were.”

  “I couldn’t stay home any longer. Not after Pater died – because of me.”

  He nodded soberly. “Mater and Titus went south after the villa was sold. I think Mater had relatives in Herculaneum.”

  “They are all well? Mater? And little Titus?”

  “Not so little Titus now! Yes, they are in good health. More than that, one may only trust the gods.” He rummaged in a leather bag
he’d been carrying and pulled something out. “Here. It’s from Mater. She wanted you to have it.”

  Hesitantly, she took the little silk purse he held out to her. Mater had hardly been speaking to her when she left Pyrgi. What would she be sending? She opened it, eyes on her brother for some explanation but getting none.

  Inside was a small gold ring set with a garnet, the stone etched with a picture of a hen and her chicks, a treasure she’d seen her mother wearing in happier times.

  “She sent this for me?”

  “Well, I can hardly wear it, can I?”

  “I don’t understand –”

  “What is there to understand? She knows how much you liked the chickens at Pyrgi.”

  “I thought –” The rejection she’d harbored for so many years was too painful to put into words.

  “That she blamed you for what happened? I think rather that she blamed herself for not preventing it. She’d kept you out of Rome since your tenth birthday, away from the emperor’s eyes, but it wasn’t enough.”

  “I’ll treasure it for ever.” She slipped the ring on her finger. Tears filled her eyes. “Valentinus, I need to know. Why did any of this happen?”

  “Why did Nero decide to ruin our family?” There was bitterness in his voice. “You were too young to know. Gaius Antonius Plautinus, our father, was a powerful opponent in the senate. Nero feared his influence. A visit from the emperor and his full court to a senator’s country home – with a demand to enjoy chariot races in a stadium built specially for him – That’s not something anyone can refuse, even though honoring it pushes the richest family deep into debt. You, little sister, were just a moment’s entertainment, just as Mater feared you might someday be.”

  She’d tried to convince herself the emperor cared for his child if not for her, but she’d known the truth in her heart for a long time now.

  “But he’s building this villa for us, Valentinus.” She was trembling now, so that it was hard to get the words out.

  “I should think it’s obvious why. It’s not meant for you at all! He planned a refuge for himself, for the day that he knew would surely come when his enemies dethroned him. The emperor may have been many things, but fool wasn’t one of them.”