“But you took back the wall!” I cried out, shocked and eager to get some bit of hope back from what he had said. Half my mind was also racing on what this meant for Avitoria. Had the Caledonians been more successful than was rumoured? Could her parents still be alive?
“Yes, and took back the forts Julius Agricola built so many years ago – but at what cost?” he repeated. “And then the Emperor could go on no longer, even though he was being carried for most of the way in a litter, so we returned to Hadrian’s Wall, and Caracalla was sent to continue the conquest.”
I clutched the edge of my bed tightly. What he said next destroyed all my hopes for Avitoria.
“I would not have thought I could feel sorry for a barbarian,” my father went on in a low voice. “But the women and children did not have to be killed. They could have been sold as slaves. Caracalla murdered, looted, burned. . . everything. He did not hold the soldiers back; instead he urged them on. When we went after him, we found nothing, no movement in the whole country. Just columns of smoke from burning bone fires, hanging in the sky. You could smell it—” He broke off, and pushed a tear from his eye. It was the only time I had ever seen him shed a tear. He had not even wept for my mother. Whatever he had seen in the North, it had destroyed his spirit.
“Is the Emperor ill?” I managed to say.
But before he could answer, I heard soldiers calling him again. He jumped up and was gone without a word.
So began a day of restless sleeping, waking, constant whispering and angry hissed passwords in the passages. Caracalla’s and Geta’s men split off from each other, taking possession of different parts of the palace, and scowled at each other if they passed by chance. I did not leave the house; I did not dare leave my father alone. Every so often he came back to my room, threw himself on the bed and slept like the dead. I did not dare wake him. Everything had turned into a nightmare. Julia Domna I no longer saw at all.
It was dawn when I heard a hammering at my door. There was always someone awake at every time of day or night now, and I forced myself to get up from the chair where I was sleeping and answer it. A slave grumbled that there was someone asking for me at the street door.
“For you?” My father frowned. He accompanied me down the stairs.
To my shock, it was Arcturus. He looked pale and exhausted. Snow drifted down around him, making his hair seem grey.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted out.
“Theodora – she’s not well. She has been ill for days, but tonight it is much worse. We need a doctor.”
20.
A Pot of Poison
I turned to my father, wordlessly. He was the doctor, not me.
He was looking at Arcturus, and it was as if he was swiftly calculating in his mind his weight in gold, or his value. He asked him a few questions – not about Theodora, but about himself. Who was his father? Where was his farm? Arcturus answered, briefly and impatient.
“We have to hurry!” Arcturus blurted out finally. “Sir, we need your help. We can pay—”
My father smiled without humour.
“I have never taken a fee for treatment, but I cannot leave the Emperor.” He looked at me, then drew me to one side.
“Do you trust this young man?” he said quietly.
It was an odd question. I looked at him in surprise. “Of course,” I said without thinking.
My father nodded.
“Then you go.”
“Me?” I was shocked. “But I’m not a doctor.”
He was listening to raised voices from inside the palace, and what he heard seemed to make his mind up. He gripped my wrist so hard that I was silent in shock.
“Listen to me, daughter, and do as I tell you. Go and get your medicine chest. Do it swiftly and let no one see you. Get your cloak and dress warmly and take anything of value that you can easily carry. Then go with this young man and do not come back until I summon you. Do you understand?”
“But—” I began.
“Go!” he said, sounding stern but kind. Still, something in his voice scared me.
“But what about you?” I blurted.
He sighed. For a moment, he looked like my father again, the man nothing could shake or trouble, who calmly treated good news just as he treated bad.
“I have given years to serving the Emperor,” he said quietly. “Whether I was right or wrong, the gods will judge. But, if I am a Roman, now is not the time to abandon my duty.”
Then he strode off, following the lights and voices towards the apartments of the Emperor.
I did as he told me, though I was confused and frightened. I ran upstairs and put all my possessions into the silver chest that the Empress had given me. I did not have much. There was a hush all over the palace, but I felt as if no one was asleep. It felt more as if everyone was awake, listening, waiting and watching. I wondered if Caracalla had something planned. As I hurried back through the palace to the door where Arcturus was waiting, I glimpsed a few frightened faces peeping from behind doors. The doors shut as soon as I got close to them.
“What’s happening in there?” Arcturus demanded as I stepped out with him into the snow.
“I don’t know. I hope my father will be all right.”
“Thank you for coming,” he said, and I could hear in his voice that he meant it. “There is no one of our family here but me, and I have no skills in medicine.”
I did not reply. I wished I had his faith in me, but I knew that the small store of medicines I had in the box was not going to work miracles. Only the gods could do that.
Eboracum in the pale light of dawn was menacing and silent. A few men slipped from shadow to shadow, watching us and sometimes following us for a few blocks. A few carts rumbled through the streets, and threw up the filthy melted snow on my cloak. I could hear whispering voices and the clash and jangle of soldiers’ armour. It seemed that the feeling I had sensed in the courtyard, the nervous terror, had spilled out into the city too.
“Like I said, she has been ill for days,” Arcturus told me as we went on. “Low in mood, no appetite.”
“How many days?”
“Since last market day at least. That’s when I arrived, as usual. I could see she was not well, so I stayed. She got worse and worse. I have called in doctors, but nothing they did has worked – they bled her, they gave her medicines. So I thought, perhaps the Emperor’s own doctor. . .”
We reached the house, where a frightened-looking Vitia was standing by the open door ready to welcome us in. A light was burning in the back room, and I went straight in.
As soon as I saw Theodora, lying on her bed, I knew she was far beyond my help. Her lips were pale and dry and her eyes rolled back. Still, I took an oil lamp, knelt down and tried to make her understand me.
“Can you speak, Theodora? What do you feel?”
Vitia came forward timidly.
“She has not been herself. She said she felt sad, then she complained of stomach aches and of tingling in her limbs. She could not sleep, but instead she seemed half asleep in the daytime, slurring her words as if she were drunk – though I know she never touches wine.”
“And she said she could not see properly,” added another girl.
I stood up again. This was too serious for me. If there was to be any chance of saving Theodora, I knew I had to get a proper doctor, one from the palace who would know what they were doing. By now the sun was up, but the city was still oddly quiet. I looked around for Avitoria – she was known at the palace. She was hanging back, in the shadows by the door. I went to her. She looked at me with a strange, almost frightened expression in her eyes. I was not surprised she was afraid. Her mistress was dying.
“Avitoria,” I told her, “go back to the palace with Arcturus and tell my father that we need a proper doctor. He must come, or send someone. The Emperor has a hundred doctors, surely one can be spared to save Theodora. Go!”
She hesitated, then nodded and hurried to the door. Arcturus followed.
<
br /> I watched her go down the steps. As I did so, I thought of the theriac. It was a complex medicine that I did not know how to prepare. It was meant for emperors, and the cost of it was enormous. But it was supposed to be good for anything, and this was an emergency. Once I had thought of the theriac, I knew I could not rest until I had at least tried it.
I went back in to Theodora. There was more daylight now, coming through the high, small window. I measured out a grain of theriac and opened her lips to feed it in. She did not even flinch. In the growing light, I noticed her gums. They did not look normal. There was a blue line along them, almost like the line left by the tide when it goes out.
My heart began beating very fast. I felt that I was on the brink of something, some discovery, but I did not know what it was.
Aware of the girls watching me intently, I began to search the room. I did not really know what I was looking for, but somewhere, somehow, I thought, there had to be some clues.
“What did she eat last night?” I asked.
“Nothing, she had no appetite.”
“She ate nothing at all?”
“The last thing she ate was a pie that Avitoria bought her from the pastry shop, a few days ago,” said Vitia. “But when people are ill from food, that is different, isn’t it?”
“Very different,” I said.
“She had a little ale,” one of the British girls, Regina, said. “Avitoria saw to it, because we were working.”
I looked at the tankard that was on the table. I picked it up and held it in the daylight. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but I thought I could see a little white powder on the rim – and caught the scent of roses.
I turned and ran out of the house, my heart thumping, feeling sick. I went over to the rubbish heap. I searched the snow-covered pile for the dead cat I had seen weeks ago. It was nothing but a few scraps of fur and bone now. Under the bone, something winked and glinted in the dawn light.
I bent to pick it up. It was a cosmetic pot made of gold, inlaid with red glass in the shape of a snake. I recognised it at once. Only one woman in this town had anything so beautiful: Julia Domna, the Empress. The cosmetic pot was the one in which she kept the white lead which she used for lightening her skin.
It can poison, even as far as death. I remembered my father’s words clearly, his towering rage back in Rome, my mother’s exasperation. But even the Empress uses it!
She did. And the last time I had seen this pot was in Avitoria’s hand. Now here it lay, outside her house – and inside, her mistress Theodora lay poisoned and on the brink of death.
*
“Avitoria poisoned Theodora?” you say, shocked.
I nodded. “I think so.”
“But why? She was a kind mistress. She was going to free her in her will!”
“She was – until Julia Domna arrived. The Empress wanted to buy Avitoria from Theodora. I believe Avitoria decided she could not bear being sold away from her home, and lose any chance of reaching her family again. She decided to do something about it. If Theodora died before she could sell her, Avitoria would be free.”
“So, she was a murderess!” you say, full of pious rage. “Of course, you told the Emperor?”
I take a deep breath, and go on.
21.
Emperor’s End
Standing there on the rubbish heap in Eboracum, a thousand thoughts swirled around my head. I knew in my heart that Avitoria had poisoned Theodora. I also knew the punishment for slaves who killed their owner: every slave in the household would be put to death. The girls who were hoping for their freedom tonight would be executed instead, though they had committed no crime.
For the Roman philosophers, there was no question of the right action. I should tell at once. But I was not a Roman philosopher. I was only a girl from the provinces.
I could not do it. I could not tell what I knew.
Yet I knew it was my duty to.
I still had not decided when I stepped down from the rubbish heap, the cosmetic pot clutched in my hand. In the light of dawn, I found myself facing Avitoria. Her eyes went to the glinting pot in my hand. I saw her expression shift. Did she guess what I knew? Should I confront her? I was still so stunned by what I had discovered that I doubted myself. Perhaps I was wrong.
So it was Avitoria who spoke first – and changed everything.
“You have to go,” she blurted out. I saw now that she had tears streaking her face.
“Go, where?” I said blankly.
“Anywhere, away from here!”
“I don’t understand,” I began. “Where is Arcturus?”
“Oh, I didn’t wait for him. I just ran! The Emperor is dead, and Caracalla is killing everyone who was his friend,” she said.
“What? Where is my father?” I gasped.
She hesitated.
“Your father had to escape. He says he will meet you outside the walls of Eboracum. He spoke of a healing spring, east of here. The waters there are sacred to Sulis. He says he will meet you there.”
Then Avitoria was pulling me away from the house. It did not cross my mind to disbelieve her – there was truth in her voice and I knew in my heart it was exactly what Caracalla would do. He hungered like a wolf for power, and once he had it, he would destroy everything that might challenge that power. Geta would be lucky to survive the night, I knew – it would depend on if his mother could protect him. The palace was gone, lost to me. It had vanished like a dream. This was what my dream had foretold: not my death, but the death of Leptis Magna’s most powerful son, the Emperor Septimius Severus.
Avitoria pushed me out into the street, and we went stumbling together, hand in hand, along it. The snow had all turned to dirty water now, and ran along the gutters, down towards the drains. The sun was rising. Soon there would be nowhere for me to hide. My only hope now was to meet my father. We would be penniless, beggars in a foreign land, but at least we would be alive. I stopped as I saw the gates and the guards in front of them.
“How do I get out of the city?” I said, in panic.
“You can cross the river,” Avitoria said.
I realised she was right. In many places there were no walls, there was just the river. There had been laws against building fortified cities, in case they were occupied by enemies who held them against the Empire. Now the enemy was the Empire, I realised. Gaps between emperors loomed like chasms for the ordinary people like us. They were dangerous times.
I could hear cries and clashing swords in the distance. There was confusion, and people were shouting. Some were shouting for Caracalla, others for Geta.
“Go now,” Avitoria hissed at me. “While they are all distracted.”
She took her own cloak from her shoulders, and pushed it into my hands. It was thick, rough, heavy wool.
“You’ll need it more than me. Go!” She squeezed me into a brief, hard hug, then pushed me away.
I knew I had no time to say anything else to her. I ran. I ducked down beside a cart that had stopped by the river, and dropped down to the riverbank. It was muddy and clammy and cold as a frog’s back.
I remembered, then, how I had tried to swim from the shipwreck. My clothes had dragged me down. I tucked my skirts up and stepped into the river, keeping to the shadows. The shock of the cold was like a sword’s blow to my legs. I had to bite my lip to stop myself shouting out. Then I waded out into the water, pushing ice away with my hands.
My legs ached with pain. I could not stop myself shivering and my teeth chattering. I thought I would die of the cold, but I kept wading, and finally, I pulled myself out onto the bank. My legs were like red lumps of marble. I forced myself to rub some blood back into my legs, though all I wanted was to lie down and sleep forever. Then I began walking, clumsily at first, and finally, as my aching legs woke up, running.
I did not take the road. I knew that if anyone came searching for me, it would be the roads they would search first. Instead, I pushed through undergrowth, flinching at every noise
for terror I would wake a wild beast. I did not dare to go too far from the road in case I was lost in the marshes.
That night I spent huddled under a bush, drifting in and out of sleep. If it had not been for Avitoria’s cloak, I think I would have frozen to death. When I woke, I peered out onto the road. Day was dawning and there was no sound of violence from the city. No one seemed to be coming after me, but nor could I see my father.
With no idea what I should do next, I began walking again – away from the city, north, hoping to find the spring. I kept imagining that I heard hoofbeats following me, racing soldiers. I was so frightened that I left the road again, and headed out into the countryside. My legs were humming with exhaustion and I felt light-headed. Snow began to fall again, first lightly and then more and more. The world whirled white ahead of me. I could see nothing, my eyelashes clogged up with ice.
As I stumbled through the snow, I seemed to dream that my mother was walking next to me. I knew it was just a dream, but I let myself enjoy it all the same. I closed my eyes and heard the swish of her dress, the sound of her voice, the distant pleasant home-like sounds of Leptis Magna—
My eyes flew open and I just caught myself as I fell forward. I had been walking in my sleep and I seemed to have climbed a hill. Night was falling and I had caught myself just before I fell face-forward into the snow. I sat down and went to clutch my knees with bruised fingers. That was when I realised I was still holding the snake pot. I knotted it into a corner of the cloak.
I could see far from here. It looked as if the sun was rising in the distance, but I realised that was impossible, for it was setting in the west. I stared at the red light below me, staining the low cloud like blood. It was not the sun. It was a funeral pyre. Soldiers surrounded it, their armour glinting. Golden eagle standards blazed against the bone-fire flames, and the fire cast monstrous shadows onto the snow. Swords clashed on shields, and voices roared. The fire crumpled into ash, and collapsed, like Troy falling into destruction.
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