Gaius, remembering his own desperation when his old tutor had droned on about Plato, felt a sneaking sympathy for the Emperor.
“In any case, he’s the man you’ll have to impress if you want a good posting, and though I’ll miss you, a procuratorship somewhere in one of the older provinces is the logical next step in your career.”
“I’ll miss you, too,” said Gaius quietly. And that was true, but he realized that he would not particularly miss Licinius, or even Julia and the girls. In fact, he thought he would be glad to get away from Britain for a while, to some place where nothing would remind him of Cynric or Eilan.
Gaius finally set out for Rome on the ides of August, attended by a Greek slave called Philo, a gift from Licinius, who swore he could be depended upon to drape a toga decently and send his master out each morning looking like a gentleman. In his saddlebag was the Procurator’s annual report on the economy of the Province, which gave Gaius the status of official courier and carried with it the right to use the military post houses.
The weather held fair, but even so it seemed a weary journey. The further south they traveled the drier the country became—to Gaius’s northern eyes a desert, though the officers at the posting houses laughed to hear him say so and traded stories of Egypt and Palestine, where the desert sands scoured monuments older than Rome. He found himself wishing that like Caesar he could while away the time by writing his memoirs, but even if he waited forty years to do so, he doubted anyone would be interested in reading them.
Even Julia’s chatter would have been welcome, though these days all she seemed able to talk about was the children. But children were what he had married her for, he reminded himself; children, and social standing. And so far everything had gone more or less to plan. Only, as he passed through the endless miles of slave-farmed estates in Gaul, Gaius found himself wondering if this pursuit of rank and position was really worth it. And then they would come to the next inn, or the next villa belonging to one of Licinius’s friends. In the arms of whatever pretty slave girl they sent to warm his bed he could forget both Julia and Eilan, and in the morning he would tell himself that it was only his fatigue that had been speaking, or perhaps a natural anxiety about how he would do in Rome.
Once he reached Rome, it began to rain, heavily and continuously, as if making up for lost time. The kinsman of Licinius with whom he was staying was hospitable enough, but Gaius very quickly became tired of jokes about bringing his British weather with him. And it was not even true, really, for in Britannia there was an honest chill to the rain, but Rome was not so much cold as plagued by a pervasive and pestilent damp. Forever after, Gaius’s memories of that time were linked to the alkaline smell of damp plaster and the reek of wet wool.
Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation of humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.
“And this is your first visit to Rome?” The lady to whom Gaius was talking favored him with a laugh that tinkled like the silver bangles she wore. Exquisitely curled women and elegantly draped men crowded the atrium of Licinius’s cousin, who was giving the party, and conversation hummed like bees in an orchard. “So what do you think of the Mistress of Nations, diadem of the Empire?” Her painted eyelids drooped coquettishly. This was another question Gaius had heard so often he had been forced to memorize an answer.
“I think the splendor of the city far eclipsed by the beauty that adorns it,” he said gallantly. He would have said “might” and “power” if he had been talking to a man.
This earned him another burst of tinkling; then his host rescued him and bore him away to the peristyle, where toga-clad men were grouped like figures on a piece of statuary. He joined them with some relief. Even among the men, there were dangers, but at least he understood them. Roman women produced in him something of the same paralysis he had felt when he first met Julia.