Robert Silverberg

Via Roma

A carriage is waiting for me, by prearrangement, when I disembark at the port in Neapolis after the six-day steamer voyage from Britannia. My father has taken care of all such details for me with his usual efficiency. The driver sees me at once—I am instantly recognizable, great strapping golden-haired barbarian that I am, a giant Nordic pillar towering over this busy throng of small swarthy southern people running to and fro—and cries out to me, “Signore! Signore! Venga qua, signore.”

But I’m immobilized in that luminous October warmth, staring about me in wonder, stunned by the avalanche of unfamiliar sights and smells. My journey from the dank rainy autumnal chill of my native Britannia into this glorious Italian land of endless summer has transported me not merely to another country but, so it seems, to another world. I am overwhelmed by the intense light, the radiant shimmering air, the profusion of unknown tropical-looking trees. By the vast sprawling city stretching before me along the shores of the Bay of Neapolis. By the lush green hills just beyond, brilliantly bespeckled with the white winter villas of the Imperial aristocracy. And then too there is the great dark mountain far off to my right, the mighty volcano, Vesuvius itself, looming above the city like a slumbering god. I imagine that I can make out a faint gray plume of pale smoke curling upward from its summit. Perhaps while I am here the god will awaken and send fiery rivers of red lava down its slopes, as it has done so many times in the immemorial past.

No, that is not to happen. But there will be fire, yes: a fire that utterly consumes the Empire. And I am destined to stand at the very edge of it, on the brink of the conflagration, and be altogether unaware of everything going on about me: poor fool, poor innocent fool from a distant land.

“Signore! Per favore!” My driver jostles his way to my side and tugs impatiently at the sleeve of my robe, an astonishing transgression against propriety. In Britannia I surely would strike any coachman who did that; but this is not Britannia, and customs evidently are very different here. He looks up imploringly. I’m twice his size. In comic Britannic he says, “You no speak Romano, signore? We must leave this place right away. Is very crowded, all the people, the luggage, the everything, I may not remain at the quay once my passenger has been found. It is the law. Capisce, signore? Capisce?”

“Si, si, capisco,” I tell him. Of course I speak Roman. I spent three weeks studying it in preparation for this journey, and it gave me no trouble to learn. What is it, after all, except a mongrelized and truncated kind of bastard Latin? And everyone in the civilized world knows Latin. “Andiamo, si.”

He smiles and nods. “Allora. Andiamo!”

All around us is chaos—newly arrived passengers trying to find transportation to their hotels, families fighting to keep from being separated in the crush, peddlers selling cheap pocket-watches and packets of crudely tinted picture postcards, mangy dogs barking, ragged children with sly eyes moving among us looking for purses to pick. The roaring babble is astonishing. But we are an island of tranquility in the midst of it all, my driver and I. He beckons me into the carriage: a plush seat, leather paneling, glistening brass fittings, but also an inescapable smell of garlic. Two noble auburn horses stand patiently in their traces. A porter comes running up with my luggage and I hear it being thumped into place overhead. And then we are off, gently jouncing down the quay, out into the bustling city, past the marble waterfront palaces of the customs officials and the myriad other agencies of the Imperial government, past temples of Minerva, Neptune, Apollo, and Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and up the winding boulevards toward the district of fashionable hotels on the slopes that lie midway between the sea and the hills. I will be staying at the Tiberius, on Via Roma, a boulevard which I have been told is the grand promenade of the upper city, the place to see and be seen.

We traverse streets that must be two thousand years old. I amuse myself with the thought that Augustus Caesar himself may have ridden through these very streets long ago, or Nero, or perhaps Claudius, the ancient conqueror of my homeland. Once we are away from the port, the buildings are tall and narrow, grim slender tenements of six and seven stories, built side by side with no breathing space between them. Their windows are shuttered against the midday heat, impenetrable, mysterious. Here and there among them are broader, shorter buildings set in small gardens: huge squat structures, gray and bulky, done in the fussy baroque style of two hundred years ago. They are the palatial homes, no doubt, of the mercantile class, the powerful importers and exporters who maintain the real prosperity of Neapolis. If my family lived here, I suppose we would live in one of those.

But we are Britannic, and our fine airy home sits on a great swath of rolling greensward in the sweet Cornish country, and I am only a tourist here, coming forth from my remote insignificant province for my first visit to great Italia, now that the Second War of Reunification is at last over and travel between the far-flung sectors of the Empire is possible again.

I stare at everything in utter fascination, peering so intensely that my eyes begin to ache. The clay pots of dazzling red and orange flowers fastened to the building walls, the gaudy banners on long posts above the shops, the marketplaces piled high with unfamiliar fruits and vegetables in green and purple mounds. Hanging down along the sides of some of the tenement houses are long blurry scrolls on which the dour lithographed portrait of the old Emperor Laureolus is displayed, or of his newly enthroned young grandson and successor, Maxentius Augustus, with patriotic and adoring inscriptions above and below. This is Loyalist territory: the Neapolitans are said to love the Empire more staunchly than the citizens of Urbs Roma itself.

We have reached the Via Roma. A grand boulevard indeed, grander, I would say, than any in Londin or Parisi: a broad carriageway down the middle bordered with the strange, unnaturally glossy shrubs and trees that thrive in this mild climate, and on both sides of the street the dazzling pink and white marble façades of the great hotels, the fine shops, the apartment buildings of the rich. There are sidewalk cafés everywhere, all of them frantically busy. I hear waves of jolly chatter and bursts of rich laughter rising from them as I pass by, and the sound of clinking glasses. The hotel marquees, arrayed one after the next virtually without a break, cry out the history of the Empire, a roster of great Imperial names: the Hadrianus, the Marcus Aurelius, the Augustus, the Maximilianus, the Lucius Agrippa. And at last the Tiberius, neither the grandest nor the least consequential of the lot, a white-fronted building in the Classical Revival style, well situated in a bright district of elegant shops and restaurants.

The desk clerk speaks flawless Britannic. “Your passport, sir?”

He gives it a haughty sniff. Eyes my golden ringlets and long drooping mustachio, compares them with the closer-cropped image of my passport photo, decides that I am indeed myself, Cymbelin Vetruvius Scapulanus of Londin and Caratacus House in Cornwall, and whistles up a facchino to carry my bags upstairs. The suite is splendid, two lofty-ceilinged rooms at the corner of the building, a view of the distant harbor on one side and of the volcano on the other. The porter shows me how to operate my bath, points out my night-light and my cabinet of liqueurs, officiously tidies my bedspread. I tip the boy with a gold solidus—never let it be said that a Scapulanus of Caratacus House is ungenerous—but he pockets it as coolly as if I have tossed him a copper.

When he is gone, I stand a long while at the windows before unpacking, drinking in the sight of the city and the sparkling bay. I have never beheld anything so magnificent: the wide processional avenues, the temples, the amphitheaters, the gleaming palatial towers, the teeming marketplaces. And this is only Neapolis, the second city of Italia! Next to it, our cherished Londin is a mere muddy provincial backwater. What will great Roma be like, if this is Neapolis?

I feel an oddly disconcerting and unfamiliar sensation that I suspect may be an outbreak of humility. I am a rich man’s son, I can trace my ancestry more or less legitimately back to kings of ancient Britain, I have had the benefits of a fine education, with high Cantabrigian honors in history and architecture. But what does any of that matter here? I’m in Italia now, the heartland of the imperishable Empire, and I am nothing but a brawny bumptious Celt from one of the outer edges of the civilized world. These people must think I wear leather kilts at home and rub the grease of pigs into my hair. I can see that I may be going to find myself out of my depth in this land. Which will be a new experience for me; but is that not why I have come here to Italia, to Roma Mater—to open myself to new experiences?

The shops of the Via Roma are closed when I go out for an afternoon stroll, and there is no one to be seen anywhere, except in the crowded cafés and restaurants. In the heat of this place, businesses of all sorts shut down at midday and reopen in the cooler hours of early evening. The windows display an amazing array of merchandise from every part of the Empire, Africa, India, Gallia, Hispania, Britannia, even Hither Asia and the mysterious places beyond it, Khitai and Cipangu, where the little strange-eyed people live: clothing of the latest fashions, antique jewelry, fine shoes, household furnishings, costly objects of all sorts. Here is the grand abundance of Imperium, indeed. With the war finally at an end, shipments of luxury goods must converge constantly on Italia from all its resubjugated provinces.

I walk on and on. Via Roma seems endless, extending infinitely ahead of me, onward to the vanishing point of the horizon. But of course it does have an end: the street’s own name announces its terminal point, Urbs Roma itself, the great capital city. It isn’t true, the thing they always say in Italia, that all roads lead to Roma, but this is one that actually does: I need only keep walking northward and this boulevard will bring me eventually to the city of the Seven Hills. There’s time for that, though. I must begin my conquest of Italia in easy stages: Neapolis and its picturesque environs first, then a gradual advance northward to meet the formidable challenge of the city of the Caesars.

People are emerging from the cafés now. Some of them turn and stare openly at me, the way I might stare at a giraffe or elephant parading in the streets of Londin. Have they never seen a Briton before? Is yellow hair so alien to them? Perhaps it is my height and the breadth of my shoulders that draws their scrutiny, or my golden earring and the heavy Celtic Revival armlet that I affect. They nudge each other, they whisper, they smile.

I return their smiles graciously as I pass by. Good afternoon, fellow Roman citizens, I am tempted to say. But they would probably snicker at my British-accented Latin or my attempts at their colloquial Roman tongue.

There is a message waiting for me at the hotel. My father, bless him, has posted letters of introduction ahead to certain members of the Neapolitan aristocracy whom he has asked to welcome me and ease my entry into Roman society. Before leaving the hotel for my walk I had sent a message announcing my arrival to the people I was meant to meet here, and already there has been a reply. I am invited in the most cordial terms to dine this very evening at the villa of Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus, who according to my father owns half the vineyards between Neapolis and Pompeii and whose brother Cassius was one of the great heroes of the recently concluded war. A carriage will pick me up at the Tiberius at the eighteenth hour.

I am suffused with a strange joy. They are willing to make the visiting barbarian feel welcome on his first night in the mother country. Of course Frontinus ships ten thousand cases of his sweet white wines to my father’s warehouses in Londin every year and that is a far from inconsiderable bit of business. Not that business matters will be mentioned this evening. For one thing I know very little of my father’s commercial dealings; but also, and this is much more to the point, we are patricians, Frontinus and I, and we must behave that way. He is of the ancient Senatorial class, descended from men who made and unmade Caesars a thousand years ago. And I carry the blood of British kings in my veins, or at least my father says I do and my own name—Cymbelin—proclaims it. Caratacus, Cassevelaunus, Tincommius, Togodumnus, Prasutagus: at one time or another I have heard my father claim descent from each of those grand old Celtic chieftains, and Queen Cartamandua of the Brigantes for good measure.

Well, and Cartamandua expediently signed a treaty with the Roman invaders of her country, and sent her fellow monarch Caratacus to Roma in chains. But all that was a long time ago, and we Britons have been pacified and repacified on many occasions since then, and everyone understands that the power and the glory will reside, now and always, in the great city that lies at the other end of the Via Roma from here. Frontinus will be polite to me, I know: if not for the sake of the heroic though unvictorious warriors who are my putative ancestors, then for the ten thousand cases of wine that he means to ship to Londin next year. I will dine well tonight, I will meet significant people, I will be offered easy entree to the great homes of Neapolis and, when I am ready to go there, the capital as well.

I bathe. I shave. I oil my ringlets, and not with the grease of pigs; and I select my clothing with great care, a silken Byzantine tunic and matching neckerchief, fine leggings of scarlet Aegyptian linen, sandals of the best Syrian workmanship. With, of course, my golden earring and my massive armlet to provide that interestingly barbaric touch for which they will value me more highly.

The carriage is waiting when I emerge from the hotel. A Nubian driver in crimson and turquoise; white Arabian horses; the carriage itself is of ebony inlaid with strips of ivory. Worthy, I would think, of an Emperor. But Frontinus is only a wealthy patrician, a mere southerner at that. What do the Caesars ride in, I wonder, if this is the kind of vehicle a Frontinus sends to pick up visiting young men from the backward provinces?

The road winds up into the hills. A cloud has drifted over the city and the early evening sunlight tumbles through it like golden rain. The surface of the bay is ablaze with light. Mysterious gray islands are visible in the distance.

The villa of Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus is set in a park so big it takes us fifteen minutes to reach the house once we are past the colossal iron gate. It is a light and graceful pavilion, the enormous size of which is carefully masked by the elegance of its design, set on the very edge of a lofty slope. There is a look of deceptive fragility about it, as though it would be sensitive to the slightest movements of the atmosphere. The view from its portico runs from Vesuvius in the east to some jutting cape far off down the other shore of the bay. All around it are marvelous shrubs and trees in bloom, and the fragrance they exhale is the fragrance of unthinkable wealth. I begin to wonder how much those ten thousand cases of wine can matter to this man.

Yet Frontinus himself is earthy and amiable, a stocky balding man with an easy grin and an immediately congenial style.

He is there to greet me as I step down from the carriage. “I am Marcello Domiziano,” he tells me, speaking Roman, grinning broadly as he puts out his hand. “Welcome to my house, dear friend Cymbelin!”

Marcello Domiziano. He uses the Roman, not the Latin, form of his name. In the provinces, of course, we pretentiously allow ourselves Latin names, mingling them to some degree with Britannic or Gallic or Teutonic localisms; but here in Italia the only people who have the privilege of going by names in the ancient Latin mode are members of the Senatorial and Imperial families and high military officers, and the rest must employ the modern Roman form. Frontinus rises above his own privilege of rank: I may call him Marcello, the way I would one of his field hands. And he will call me Cymbelin. Very swiftly we are dear friends, or so he wants me to feel, and I have barely arrived.

The gathering is under way already, on a breeze-swept open patio with a terrazzo floor, looking outward toward the city center far below. Fifteen, perhaps twenty people, handsome men, stunning women, everyone laughing and chattering like the people in the sidewalk cafés.

“My daughter, Adriana,” Frontinus says. “Her friend Lucilla, visiting from Roma.”

They are extraordinarily beautiful. The two of them surround me and I am dazzled. I remember once in Gallia, at a great villa somewhere near Nemausus, I was led by my host into the heart of a mirror maze that he had had built for his amusement, and instantly I felt myself toppling dizzily forward, vanishing between the infinitely reduplicated images, and had to pull myself back with an effort, heart pounding, head spinning.

It is like that now, standing between these two girls. Their beauty dazes me, their perfume intoxicates me. Frontinus has moved away, leaving me unsure of which is the daughter and which is the friend; I look from one to the other, confused.

The girl to my left is full-bodied and robust, with sharp features, pale skin, and flaming red hair arrayed close to her skull in tight coils, an antique style that might have been copied from some ancient wall painting. The other, taller, is dark and slender, almost frail, with heavy rows of blue faience beads about her throat and shadowy rings painted beneath her eyes. For all her flimsiness she is very sleek, soft-skinned, with a glossy Aegyptian look about her. The red-haired one must be Frontinus’s daughter, I decide, comparing her sturdy deep-chested frame to his; but no, no, she is the visitor from Roma, for the taller, darker one says, speaking not Roman but Latin, and in a voice smooth as Greek honey, “You do honor to our house, distinguished sir. My father says that you are of royal birth.”

I wonder if I am being mocked. But I see the way she is measuring me with her eyes, running over my length and breadth as though I am a statue in some museum’s hall of kings. The other one is doing the same.

“I carry a royal name, at any rate,” I say. “Cymbelin—you may know him as Cunobelinus, in the history books. Whose son was the warrior king Caratacus, captured and pardoned by the first Emperor Claudius. My father has gone to great pains to have our genealogy traced to their line.”

I smile disarmingly; and I see that they take my meaning precisely. I am describing the foolish pretensions of a rich provincial merchant, nothing more.

“How long ago was that, actually?” asks the redhead, Lucilla.

“The genealogical study?”

“The capturing and pardoning of your great ancestor.”

“Why—” I hesitate. Haven’t I just said that it was in the time of Claudius the First? But she flutters her eyes at me as though she is innocent of any historical information. “About eighteen centuries ago,” I tell her. “When the Empire was still new. Claudius the First was the fourth of the Caesars. The fifth, if you count Julius Caesar as an Emperor. Which I think is the proper thing to do.”

“How precise you are about such things,” Adriana Frontina says, laughing.

“About historical matters, yes. About very little else, I’m afraid.”

“Will you be traveling widely in Italia?” asks Lucilla.

“I’ll want to see the area around Neapolis, of course. Pompeii and the other old ruins, and a few days on the isle of Capreae. Then up to Roma, certainly, and maybe farther north—Etruria, Venetia, even as far up as Mediolanum. Actually, I want to see it all.”

“Perhaps we can tour it together,” Lucilla says. Just like that, bluntly, baldly. And now there is no flutter of innocence whatever in her wide-set, intelligent eyes, only a look of unmistakable mischief.

Of course I have heard that the women of Roma are that way. I am startled, all the same, by her forwardness, and for the moment I can find no reply; and then all the others come flocking around me. Marcellus Frontinus bombards me with introductions, reciting name after name, spilling them forth so quickly that it’s impossible for me to match name to face.

“Enrico Giunio, the Count of Pausylipon, and Countess Emilia. My son, Druso Tiberio, and his friend Ezio. Quintillo Fabio Puteolano. Vitellio di Portofino; his wife, Claudia; their daughter, Crispina. Traiano Gordiano Tertullo, of Capreae—Marco Ulpio Africano—Sabina Metella Arboria—” A blur of names. There is no end to them. One alone out of all of them registers with real impact on me: “My brother, Cassio,” Frontinus says. A slender, olive-skinned man with eyes like bits of polished coal: the great war hero, this is, Cassius Lucius Frontinus! I begin to salute him, but Frontinus rattles out four more introductions before I can. People seem to be materializing out of thin air. To Adriana I whisper, “Has your father invited all of Neapolis here tonight?”

“Only the interesting ones,” she says. “It isn’t every day that a British king visits us.” And giggles.

Swarms of servants—slaves?—move among us, bringing things to eat and drink. I am cautious in the first few rounds, reminding myself that this is only my first day here and that the fatigue of my journey may lead me into embarrassments, but then, to avoid seeming impolite, I select a goblet of wine and a small meat-cake, and hold them without tasting them, occasionally lifting them to my mouth and lowering them again untouched.

The high lords and ladies of Neapolitan society surround me in swirling clusters, peppering me with questions to which they don’t really appear to be expecting answers. Some speak in Roman, some in Latin. How long will I be here? Will I spend my entire time in Neapolis? What has aroused my interest in visiting Italia? Is the economy of Britannia currently flourishing? Does everyone speak only Britannic there, or is Latin widely used also? Is there anything in Britannia that a traveler from Italia would find rewarding to see? How does British food compare with Italian food? Do I think that the current Treaty of Unity will hold? Have I been to Pompeii yet? To the Greek temples at Paestum? On and on. It is a bombardment. I make such replies as I can, but the questions overlap my answers in a highly exhausting way. I am grateful for my stout constitution. Even so, after a time I become so weary that I begin to have trouble understanding their quick, idiomatic Roman, and I revert entirely to the older, purer Latin tongue, hoping it will encourage them to do the same. Some do, some don’t.

Lucilla and Adriana remain close by my side throughout the ordeal, and I am grateful for that also.

These people think of me as a new toy, I realize. The novelty of the hour, to be examined in fascination for a little while and then discarded.

The wind off the bay has turned chilly with the coming of evening, and somehow, almost imperceptibly, the gathering has moved indoors and upstairs, to a huge room overlooking the atrium that will apparently be our banqueting hall.

“Come,” Adriana says. “You must meet Uncle Cassio.”

The famous general is far across the room, standing with arms folded, listening with no show of emotion while his brother and another man carry on what seems to be a fierce argument. He wears a tightly cut khaki uniform and his breast is bedecked with medals and ribbons. The other man, I remember after a moment, is the Count of Pausylipon, whom Frontinus had so casually referred to as “Enrico Giunio.” He is gaunt, tall—nearly as tall as I am—hawk-faced, animated: his expression seems close to apoplectic. Marcello Domiziano is just as excited, neck straining upward, face pushed close to the other’s, arms pinwheeling in emphatic gesticulations. I get the sense that these two have been bitterly snarling and snapping at each other over some great political issue for years.

They are speaking, I gather, of nothing less than the destiny of Roma itself. The Count of Pausylipon appears to be arguing that it is of the highest importance that the Empire should continue to survive as a single political entity—something that I did not think anyone seriously doubted, now that Reunification had been accomplished. “There’s a reason why Roma has lasted so long,” the Count was saying. “It’s not just about power—the power of one city over an entire continent. It’s about stability, coherence, the supremacy of a system that values logic, efficiency, superb engineering, planning. The world is the better for our having ruled it so long. We have brought light where only the darkness of barbarism would have existed otherwise.”

These did not seem to me like controversial propositions. But I could see by the expression on the florid face of Marcello Domiziano and his obvious impatience to respond that there must be some area of strong disagreement between the two men, not in any way apparent to me. And Adriana, leaning close to me as she leads me across the room, whispers something that amidst all the noise I am unable clearly to make out, but which obscures what Marcello Domiziano has just said to the Count.

Despite all the furor going on at his elbow, it appears almost as though the famous general is asleep on his feet—a knack that must be useful during lulls in long battles—except that every few moments, in response, I suppose, to some provocative remark by one combatant or the other, his eyelids widen and a brilliant, baleful glare is emitted by those remarkable coal-bright eyes. I feel hesitant at joining this peculiar little group. But Adriana steers me over to them.

Frontinus cries, “Yes, yes, Cymbelin! Come meet my brother!” He has noticed my hesitation also. But perhaps he would welcome an interruption of the hostilities.

Which I provide. The dispute, the discussion, whatever it is, evaporates the moment I get there, turning into polite vaporous chitchat. The Count, having calmed himself totally, an impressive display of patrician self-control, offers me a lofty, remote nod of acknowledgment, gives Adriana and Lucilla a pat on the shoulder apiece, and excuses himself to go in search of a fresh drink. Frontinus, still a little red in the face but cheerful as ever, commends me to his brother’s attention with an upturned palm. “Our British friend,” he says.

“I am honored, your Excellence,” I say, making a little bow to Cassius Lucius Frontinus.

“Oh, none of that, now,” says Uncle Cassio. “We aren’t in the camp.” He speaks in Latin. His voice is thin and hard, like the edge of a knife, but I sense that he’s trying to be genial.

For a moment I am giddy with awe, simply at finding myself in his presence. I think of this little man—and that is what he is, little, as short as his brother and very much slighter of build—striding untiringly from Dacia to Gallia and back in seven-league boots, putting out the fires of secession everywhere. The indomitable general, the savior of the Empire.

There will be fire of a different sort ablaze in the Empire soon, and I am standing very close to its source. But I have no awareness of that just yet.

Cassius Frontinus surveys me as though measuring me for a uniform. “Tell me, are all you Britons that big?”

“I’m a bit larger than average, actually.”

“A good thing. We came very close to invading you, you know, very early in the war. It wouldn’t have been any picnic, facing a whole army of men your size.”

“Invading Britannia, sir?” Lucilla asks.

“Indeed,” he says, giving the girl a quick chilly smile. “A preemptive strike, when we thought Britannia might be toying with joining the rebellion.”

I blink at him in surprise and some irritation. This is a sore place for us: why is he rubbing it?

Staunchly I say, “That would never have happened, sir. We are Loyalists, you know, we Britons.”

“Yes. Yes, of course you are. But the risk was there, after all. A fifty-fifty chance is the way it seemed to us then. It was a touchy moment. And the High Command thought, let’s send a few legions over there, just to keep them in line. Before your time, I suppose.”

I’m still holding my goblet of wine, still untasted. Now, nervously, I take a deep draught.

Against all propriety I feel impelled to defend my race. With preposterous stiffness I say, “Let me assure you, general, that I am not as young as you may think, and I can tell you that there was never the slightest possibility that Britannia would have gone over to the rebels. None.”

A flicker of—amusement?—annoyance?—in those terrible eyes, now.

“In hindsight, yes, certainly. But it looked quite otherwise to us, for a while, there at the very beginning. Just how old were you when the war broke out, my lad?”

I hate being patronized. I let him see my anger.

“Seventeen, sir. I served in the Twelfth Britannic Legion, under Aelius Titianus Rigisamus. Saw action in Gallia and Lusitania. The Balloon Corps.”

“Ah.” He isn’t expecting that. “Well, then. I’ve misjudged you.”

“My entire nation, I would say. Whatever rumors of British disloyalty you may have heard in that very confused time were nothing but enemy fabrications.”

“Ah, indeed,” says the general. “Indeed.” His tone is benign, but his eyes are brighter and stonier than ever and his jaws barely move as he says the words.

Adriana Frontina, looking horrified at the growing heat of our exchanges, is frantically signaling me with her eyes to get off the subject. Her red-haired friend Lucilla, though, merely seems amused by the little altercation. Marcellus Frontinus has turned aside, probably not coincidentally, and is calling instructions to some servants about getting the banquet under way.

I plunge recklessly onward, nonetheless. “Sir, we Britons are just as Roman as anyone in the Empire. Or do you think we still nurse private national grievances going back to the time of Claudius?”

Cassius Frontinus is silent a moment, studying me with some care.

“Yes,” he says, finally. “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. But that’s beside the point. Everybody who got swept up into the Empire once upon a time and never was able to find their way out again has old grievances buried somewhere, no matter how Roman they claim to be now. The Teutons, the Britons, the Hispaniards, the Frogs, everyone. That’s why we’ve had two nasty breakups of the system in less than a century, wouldn’t you say? But no, boy, I didn’t mean to impugn the loyalty of your people, not in the slightest. This has all been highly unfortunate. A thousand pardons, my friend.”

He glances at my goblet, which I have somehow drained without noticing.

“You need another drink, is that not so? And so do I.” He snaps his fingers at a passing servitor. “Boy! Boy! More wine, over here!”

I have a certain sense that my conversation with the great war hero Cassius Lucius Frontinus has not been a success, and that this might be a good moment to withdraw. I shoot a helpless glance at Adriana, who understands at once and says, “But Cymbelin has taken enough of your time, Uncle. And look, the praefectus urbi has arrived: we really must introduce our guest to him.”

Yes. They really must, before I make a worse botch of things. I bow again and excuse myself, and Adriana takes me by one arm and Lucilla seizes the other, and they sweep me away off to the opposite side of the great hall.

“Was I very horrid?” I ask.

“Uncle likes men who show some spirit,” Adriana says. “In the army nobody dares talk back to him at all.”

“But to be so rude—he the great man that he is, and I just a visitor from the provinces—”

“He was the one that was rude,” says Lucilla hotly. “Calling your people traitors to the Empire! How could he have said any such thing!” And then, in a lower voice, purring directly into my ear: “I’ll take you to Pompeii tomorrow. It won’t be nearly so boring for you there.”

She calls for me at the hotel after breakfast, riding in an extraordinarily grand quadriga, mahogany-trimmed and silk-tasseled and gilded all over, drawn by two magnificent white horses and two gigantic duns. It makes the one that Marcellus Frontinus sent for me the night before seem almost shabby. I had compared that one to the chariot of an Emperor; but no, I was altogether wrong: surely this is closer to the real thing.

“Is this what you traveled down in from Roma?” I ask her.

“Oh, no, I came by train. I borrowed the chariot from Druso Tiberio. He goes in for things of this sort.”

At the party I had had only the briefest of encounters with young Frontinus and was highly unimpressed with him: a soft young man, pomaded and perfumed, three or four golden rings on each hand, languid movements and delicate yawns, distinctly a prince. Shamelessly exchanging melting glances all evening long with his handsome friend Ezio, who seemed as stupid as a gladiator and probably once was one.

“What can a quadriga like this cost?” I ask. “Five million sesterces? Ten million?”

“Very likely even more.”

“And he simply lends it to you for the day?”

“Oh, it’s only his second best one, wouldn’t you know? Druso’s a rich man’s son, after all, very spoiled. Marcello doesn’t deny him a thing. I think it’s terrible, of course.”

“Yes,” I say. “Dreadful.”

If Lucilla picks up the irony in my voice, she gives no sign of it.

“And yet, if he’s willing to lend one of his pretty chariots to his sister’s friend for a day or two—”

“Why not take it, eh?”

“Why not indeed.”

And so off we go down the coast road together, this lovely voluptuous red-haired stranger from Roma and I, riding toward Pompeii in a quadriga that would have brought a blush to the cheek of a Caesar. Traffic parts for us on the highway as though it is the chariot of a Caesar, and the horses streak eastward and then southward with the swiftness of the steeds of Apollo, clipclopping along the wide, beautifully paved road at a startling pace.

Lucilla and I sit chastely far apart, like the well-bred young people that we are, chatting pleasantly but impersonally about the party.

“What was all that about,” she says, “the quarrel that you and Adriana’s uncle were having last night?”

“It wasn’t a quarrel. It was—an unpleasantness.”

“Whatever. Something about the Roman army invading Britannia to make sure you people stayed on our side in the war. I know so little about these things. You weren’t really going to secede, were you?”

We have been speaking Roman, but if we are going to have this discussion I must use a language in which I feel more at home. So I switch to Latin and say, “Actually, I think it was a pretty close thing, though it was cruel of him to say so. Or simply boorish.”

“Military men. They have no manners.”

“It surprised me all the same. To fling it in my face like that—!”

“So it was true?”

“I was only a boy when it was happening, you understand. But yes, I know there was a substantial anti-Imperial faction in Londin fifteen or twenty years ago.”

“Who wanted to restore the Republic, you mean?”

“Who wanted to pull out of the Empire,” I say. “And elect a king of our own blood. If such a thing as our own blood can be said still to exist in any significant way among Britons, after eighteen hundred years as Roman citizens.”

“I see. So they wanted an independent Britannia.”

“They saw a chance for it. This was only about twenty years after the Empire had finished cleaning up the effects of the first collapse, you know. And then suddenly a second civil war seemed likely to begin.”

“That was in the East, wasn’t it?”

I wonder how much she really knows about these matters. More than she is letting on, I suspect. But I have come down from Cantabrigia with honors in history, after all, and I suppose she is trying to give me a chance to be impressive.

“In Syria and Persia, yes, and the back end of India. Just a little frontier rebellion, not even white people that were stirring up the fuss: ten legions could have put the whole thing down. But the Emperor Laureolus was already old and sick—senile, in fact—and no one in the administration was paying attention to the outer provinces, and the legions weren’t sent in until it was too late. So there was a real mess to deal with, all of a sudden. And right in the middle of that, Hispania and Gallia and even silly little Lusitania decided to secede from the Empire again, too. So it was 2563 all over again, a second collapse even more serious than the first one.”

“And Britannia was going to pull out also, this time.”

“That was what the rabble was urging, at any rate. There were some noisy demonstrations in Londin, and posters went up outside the proconsul’s palace telling him to go back to Roma, things like that: ‘Britannia for the Britons!’ Throw the Romans out and bring back the old Celtic monarchy, is what people were yelling. Well, of course, we couldn’t have that, and we shut them up very quickly indeed, and when the war began and our moment came, we fought as bravely as any Romans anywhere.”

“‘We?’” she says.

“The decent people of Britannia. The intelligent people.”

“The propertied people, you mean?”

“Well, of course. We understood how much there was to lose—not just for us, for everyone in Britannia—if the Empire should fall. What’s our best market? Italia! And if Britannia, Gallia, Hispania, and Lusitania managed to secede, Italia would lose its access to the sea. It would be locked up in the middle of Europa with one set of enemies blocking the land route to the east and the other set closing off the ocean to the west. The heart of the Empire would wither. We Britons would have no one to sell our goods to, unless we started shipping them westward to Nova Roma and trying to peddle them to the redskins. The breakup of the Empire would cause a worldwide depression—famine, civil strife, absolute horror everywhere. The worst of the suffering would have fallen on the people who were yelling loudest for secession.”

She gives me an odd look.

“Your own family claims royal Celtic blood, and you have a fancy Celtic name. So it would seem that your people like to look back nostalgically to the golden days of British freedom before the Roman conquest. But even so you helped to put down the secessionist movement in your province.”

Is she mocking me too? I am so little at ease among these Romans.

A trifle woodenly I say, “Not I, personally. I was still only a boy when the anti-Imperial demonstrations were going on. But yes, for all his love of Celtic lore my father has always believed that we had to put the interests of Roman civilization in general ahead of our petty little nationalistic pride. When the war did reach us, Britannia was on the Loyalist side, thanks in good measure to him. And as soon as I was old enough, I joined the legions and did my part for the Empire.”

“You love the Emperor, then?”

“I love the Empire. I believe the Empire is a necessity. As for this particular Emperor that we have now—” I hesitate. I should be careful here. “We have had more capable ones, I suppose.”

Lucilla laughs. “My father thinks that Maxentius is an utter idiot!”

“Actually, so does mine. Well, but Emperors come and go, and some are better than others. What’s important is the survival of the Empire. And for every Nero, there’s a Vespasianus, sooner or later. For every Caracalla, there’s a Titus Gallius. And for every weak and silly Maxentius—”

“Shh,” Lucilla says, pointing to our coachman then to her ears. “We ought to be more cautious. Perhaps we’re saying too much that’s indiscreet, love. We don’t want to do that.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Doing something indiscreet, now—”

“Ah. That’s different.”

“Very different,” she says. And we both laugh.

We are passing virtually under the shadow of great Vesuvius now. Imperceptibly we have moved closer to each other while talking, and gradually I have come to feel the pressure of her warm thigh against mine.

Now, as the chariot takes a sharp turn of the road, she is thrown against me. Ostensibly to steady her, I slip my arm around her shoulders and she nestles her head in the hollow of my neck. My hand comes to rest on the firm globe of her breast. She lets it remain there.

We reach the ruins of Pompeii in time for a late lunch at a luxurious hostelry just at the edge of the excavation zone. Over a meal of grilled fish and glittering white wine we make no pretense of hiding our hunger for one another. I am tempted to suggest that we skip the archaeology and go straight to our room.

But no, no chance of that, a guide that she has hired is waiting for us after lunch, an excitable little bald-headed Greek who is bubbling with eagerness to convey us into the realm of antiquity. So off we go into the torrid Pompeiian afternoon, full of wine and lust, and he marches us up one dry stony street and down the next, showing us the great sights of the city that the volcano engulfed eighteen hundred years ago in the second month of the reign of the Emperor Titus.

It’s terribly fascinating, actually. We modern Romans have the illusion that we still continue to design our cities and houses very much in the style of the ancients; but in fact the changes, however gentle they may have been from one century to the next, have been enormous, and Pompeii—sealed away under volcanic debris eighteen centuries ago and left untouched until its rediscovery just a few decades ago—seems truly antique. Our bubbly Greek shows us the homes of the rich men with their sumptuous paintings and statuary, the baths, the amphitheater, the forum. He takes us into the sweaty little whorehouse, where we see vivid murals of heavy-thighed prostitutes energetically pleasuring their clients, and Lucilla giggles into my ear and lightly tickles the palm of my hand with her fingertip. I’m ready to conclude the tour right then and there, but of course it can’t be done: there is ever so much more to see, our relentless guide declares.

Outside the Temple of Jupiter Lucilla asks me, all innocence, “What gods do you people worship in Britannia? The same that we do?”

“The very same, yes. Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, Mithras, Cybele, all the usual ones, the ones that you have here.”

“Not special prehistoric pagan gods of your own?”

“What do you imagine we are? Savages?”

“Of course, darling! Of course! Great lovely golden-haired savages!”

There is a gleam in her eye. She is teasing, but she means what she says, as well. I know she does.

And she too has hit a vulnerable point; for despite all our Roman airs, we Britons are not really as much like these people as we would like to think, and we do have our own little lingering ancient allegiances. Not I myself, particularly; for such religious needs as I may have, Jupiter and Mercury are quite good enough. But I have friends at home, quite close friends, who sacrifice most sincerely to Branwen and Velaunus, to Rhiannon and Brighida, to Ancasta, to the Matres. And even I have gone—once, at least—to the festival of the Llewnasadh, where they worship Mercury Lugus under his old British name of Llew.

But it is all too foolish, too embarrassing, worshiping those crude old wooden gods in their nests of straw. Not that Apollo and Mercury seem any less absurd to me, or Mithras, or any of the dozens of bizarre Eastern gods that have been going in and out of fashion in Roma for centuries, Baal and Marduk and Jehovah and the rest. They are all equally meaningless to me. And yet there are times when I feel a great vacancy inside of me, as I look up at the stars, wondering how and why they all were made, and not knowing, not having even the first hint.

I don’t want to speak of such things with her. These are private matters.

But her playful question about our local gods has wounded me. I am abashed; I am red-cheeked with shame at my own Britishness, which I have sensed almost from the start is one of the things about me, perhaps the most important thing, that makes me interesting to her.

We leave the ruins, finally.

We return to our hotel. We go to our room. Our suite has a terrace overlooking the excavations, a bedroom painted with murals in the Pompeiian style, a marble bath big enough for six. We undress each other with deliberate lack of haste. Lucilla’s body is strongly built, broad through the hips and shoulders, full in buttock and breast and thigh: to me an extremely beautiful body, but perhaps she inwardly fears that it lacks elegance. Her skin is marvelous, pale as fine silk, with the lightest dusting of charming pink freckles across her chest and the tops of her shoulders, and—an oddity that I find very diverting—her pubic hair is black as night, the starkest possible contrast to the fiery crimson hair higher up.

She sees the direction of my gaze.

“I don’t dye it,” she informs me. “It just came that way, I don’t know why.”

“And this?” I say, placing my finger lightly on the tattoo of a pine tree that runs along the inside of her right thigh. “A birthmark, is it?”

“The priests of Atys put it there, when I was initiated.”

“The Phrygian god?”

“I go to his temple, yes. Now and then. In springtime, usually.”

So she has indeed played a little game with me.

“Atys! A devotee of Atys of Phrygia! Oh, Lucilla, Lucilla! You had the audacity to tell me that you think Britons are savages because some of us worship pagan gods. While all the time you had the mark of Atys on your own skin, right next to your—your—”

“To my what, love? Go on, say its name.”

I say it in Britannic. She repeats it, savoring the word, so strange to her ears, so barbaric.

“Now kiss it,” she says.

“Gladly,” I tell her, and I drop to my knees and do. Then I sweep her up in my great barbaric arms and carry her to the bath, and lower her gently into it, and lie down beside her myself. We soak for a time; and then we wash each other, laughing; and then, still wet, we spring from the tub and race toward the bed. She is looking for savagery, and I give her savagery, all right, hearty barbarian caresses that leave her gasping in unintelligible bursts of no doubt obscene Roman; and what she gives me in return is the subtle and artful Roman manner of loving, tricks going back to Caesar’s time, cunning ripplings of the interior muscles and sly strokes of the fingertips that drive me to the edge of madness; and no sooner have we done with each other than we find ourselves beginning all over again.

“My wild man,” she murmurs. “My Celt!”

From Pompeii we proceed down the coast to Surrentum, a beautiful seaside town set amid groves of orange and lemon trees. We tell our driver to wait for us there for a couple of days, and take the ferry across to the romantic isle of Capreae, playground of Emperors. Lucilla has wired ahead to book a room for us at one of the best hotels, a hilltop place called the Punta Tragara that has, she says, a magnificent view of the harbor. She has been to Capreae before. With whom, I wonder, and how many times.

Lucilla and I lie naked on the terrace of our room, reclining on thick sheepskin mats, enjoying the mild autumn evening. The sky and the sea are the same shade of gray-blue. It’s hard to tell where the boundary lies between the one and the other. Thickly wooded cliffs rise vertically from the water just across from us. Heavy-winged birds swoop through the dusk. In town, far below, the first lights of evening begin to shimmer.

“I don’t even know your name,” I say, after a while.

“Of course you do. It’s Lucilla.”

“You know what I mean. The rest of it.”

“Lucilla Junia Scaevola,” she says.

“Scaevola? Related to the famous Consul Scaevola, by any chance?”

I’m only making idle talk. Scaevola is hardly an uncommon Roman name, of course.

“He’s my uncle Gaius,” she says. “You’ll get to meet him when we go up to Roma. Adriana adores him, and so will you.”

Her casual words leave me thunderstruck. Consul Scaevola’s niece, lying naked here beside me?

Gods! These girls and their famous uncles! Uncle Gaius, Uncle Cassius. I am in heady company. The whole Roman world knows Gaius Junius Scaevola—chosen again and again as Consul, three terms, perhaps four, the most recent time just a couple of years before. By all accounts he’s the second most powerful man in the realm, the great strong figure who stands behind the wobbly young Emperor Maxentius and keeps him propped up. My uncle Gaius, this one says, so very simply and sweetly. I’ll have quite a lot to tell my father when I get back to Cornwall.

Consul Scaevola’s niece rears up above me and dangles her breasts in my face. I kiss their pink patrician tips and she drops down on top of me like one of those fierce swooping birds descending on its prey.

In the cool of the morning we take a long hike up one of the hills behind town to the Villa Jovis, the Imperial palace that has been there since the time of Tiberius. He used to have his enemies thrown from the edge of the cliff there.

Of course we can’t get very close to it, since it’s still in use, occupied by members of the Imperial family whenever they visit Capreae. Nobody seems to be in residence right now but the gates are heavily guarded anyway. We can see it rising grandly from the summit of its hill, an enormous pile of gleaming masonry surrounded by elaborate fortifications.

“I wonder what it’s like in there,” I say. “But I’ll never know, I guess.”

“I’ve been inside it,” Lucilla tells me.

“You have?”

“They claim that some of the rooms and furnishings go all the way back to Tiberius’s reign. There’s an indoor swimming pool with the most absolutely obscene mosaics all around it, and that’s where he’s supposed to have liked to diddle little boys and girls. But I think it’s all mostly a fake put together in medieval times, or even later. The whole place was sacked, you know, when the Byzantines invaded the Western Empire six hundred years ago. It’s pretty certain that they carried the treasures of the early Emperors off to Constantinopolis with them, wouldn’t you think?”

“How did you happen to see it?” I ask. “You were traveling with your uncle, I suppose.”

“With Flavius Rufus, actually.”

“Flavius Rufus?”

“Flavius Caesar. Emperor Maxentius’s third brother. He loves southern Italia. Comes down here all the time.”

“With you?”

“Once in a while. Oh, silly, silly! I was sixteen. We were just friends!”

“And how old are you now?”

“Twenty-one,” she says. Six years younger than I am, then.

“Very close friends, I suppose.”

“Oh, don’t be such a fool, Cymbelin!” There is laughter in her eyes. “You’ll meet him, too, when we’re in Roma.”

“A royal prince?”

“Of course! You’ll meet everyone. The Emperor’s brothers, the Emperor’s sisters, the Emperor himself, if he’s in town. I grew up at court, don’t you realize that? In my uncle’s household. My father died in the war.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Commanded the Augustus Legion, in Syria, Aegyptus, Palaestina. Palaestina’s where he died. You’ve heard of the Siege of Aelia Capitolina? That’s where he was killed, right outside the Temple of the Great Mother just as the city was falling to us. He was standing near some old ruined stone wall that survives from the temple that was there before the present one, and a sniper got him. Cassius Frontinus delivered the funeral oration himself. And afterward my uncle Gaius adopted me, because my mother was dead, too, had killed herself the year before—that’s a long story, a scandal at the court of the old Emperor—”

My head is swimming.

“Anyway, Flavius is like a brother to me. You’ll see. We came down here and I stayed the night in the Villa Jovis. Saw all the naughty mosaics in Tiberius’s swimming pool, swam in it, even—there was a gigantic feast afterward, wild boar from the mountains here, mountains of strawberries and bananas, and you wouldn’t believe how much wine—oh, cheer up, Cymbelin, you didn’t think I was a virgin, did you?”

“That isn’t it. Not at all.”

“Then what is it?”

“The thought that you really know the royals. That you’re still so young and you’ve done so many astonishing things. And also that the man I was arguing with the other night was actually Cassius Lucius Frontinus the famous general, and that you’re the niece of Gaius Junius Scaevola the Consul, and that you’ve been the mistress of the Emperor’s brother, and—don’t you see, Lucilla, how hard all this is for me? How bewildering?”

“My poor confused barbarian!”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that. Even if it’s more or less true.”

“My gorgeous Celt, then. My beautiful blond-haired Briton. That much is all right to say, isn’t it?”

We hire one of the little one-horse carriages that are the only permissible vehicles on Capreae and ride down to the beach to spend the afternoon swimming naked in the warm sea and sunning ourselves on the rocky shore. Though it is late in the day and late also in the year, Lucilla’s flawless skin quickly turns rosy, and she’s hot and glowing when we return to our room.

Two days, two unforgettable nights, on Capreae. Then back to Surrentum, where our charioteer is dutifully waiting for us at the ferry landing, and up to Neapolis again, an all-day drive. I am reluctant to part from her at my hotel, urging her to spend the night with me there, too, but she insists that she must get back to the villa of Frontinus.

“And I?” I say. “What do I do? I have to dine alone, I have to go to bed alone?”

She brushes her lips lightly across mine and laughs. “Did I say that? Of course you’ll come with me to Frontinus’s place! Of course!”

“But he hasn’t invited me to return.”

“What a fool you can be sometimes, Cymbelin. I invite you. I’m Adriana’s guest. And you’re mine. Go upstairs, pack up the rest of your things, tell the hotel you’re checking out. Go on, now!”

And so it is. In Druso Tiberio’s absurdly splendid quadriga we ride back up the hill to the villa of Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus, where I am greeted with apparently unfeigned warmth and no trace of surprise by our jolly host and given a magnificent suite of rooms overlooking the bay. Uncle Cassio is gone, and so are the other house guests who were there on the night of the party, and I am more than welcome.

My rooms just happen to adjoin those of Lucilla. That night, after a feast of exhausting excess at which Druso Tiberio and his gladiator playmate Ezio behave in a truly disgusting way while the elder Frontinus studiedly turns his attention elsewhere, I hear a gentle tapping at my door as I am preparing for bed.

“Yes?”

“It’s me.”

Lucilla. “Gods be thanked! Come in!”

She wears a silken robe so sheer she might as well have been naked. In one hand she carries a little candelabrum, in the other a flask of what appears to be wine. She is still tipsy from dinner, I see. I take the candelabrum from her before she sets herself afire, and then the flask.

“We could invite Adriana in, too,” she says coyly.

“Are you crazy?”

“No. Are you?”

“The two of you—?”

“We’re best friends. We share everything.”

“No,” I say. “Not this.”

“You are provincial, Cymbelin.”

“Yes, I am. And one woman at a time is quite enough for me.”

She seems disappointed. I realize that she has promised to provide me to Adriana for tonight. Well, this is Imperial Italia, where the old traditions of unabashed debauchery evidently are very much alive. But though I speak of myself as Roman, I’m not as Roman as all that, I suppose. Adriana Frontina is extraordinarily beautiful, yes, but so is Lucilla, and Lucilla is all I want just now, and that is that. Simple provincial tastes. No doubt I’ll live to regret my decision; but this night I am unwavering in my mulish simplicity.

Lucilla, disappointed or not, proves passionate enough for two. The night passes in a sleepless haze. We go at each other wildly, feverishly. She teaches me another new trick or two, and claps her hands at her own erotic cleverness. There are no women like this in Britannia: none that are known to me, at any rate.

At dawn we stand together on the balcony of my bedroom, weary with the best of all possible wearinesses, relishing the sweet cool breeze that rises from the bay.

“When do you want to go north?” she asks.

“Whenever you do.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Why not?”

“I warn you, you may be shocked by a few of the things you see going on in Urbs Roma.”

“Then I’ll be shocked, I suppose.”

“You’re very easily shocked, aren’t you, Cymbelin?”

“Not really. Some of this is new to me, that’s all.”

Lucilla chuckles. “I’ll educate you in our ways, never fear. It’ll all get less frightening as you get used to it. You poor darling barbarian.”

“You know I asked you not to—”

“You poor darling Celt, I mean,” Lucilla says. “Come with me to Roma, love. But remember: when in Roma, it’s best to do as the Romans do.”

“I’ll try,” I promise.

Yet another chariot is put at our disposal for the journey: this one Ezio’s, which he drove down in alone from Urbs Roma. He’s going back north next week with Druso Tiberio, and they’ll ride in one of his, but Ezio’s chariot has to be returned to the capital somehow, too. So we take it. It’s not nearly as grand as the one Lucilla and I had just been using, but it’s far more imposing than you would expect someone like Ezio to own. A gift from Druso Tiberio, no doubt.

The whole household turns out to see us off. Marcello Domiziano urges me to think of his villa as his home whenever I am in Neapolis. I invite him to be my family’s guest in Britannia. Adriana gives Lucilla a more than friendly hug—I begin to wonder about them—and kisses me lightly on the cheek. But as I turn away from her I see a smoldering look in her eyes that seems compounded out of fury and regret. I suspect I have made an enemy here. But perhaps the damage can be repaired at a later time: it would be pleasant enough work to attempt it.

Our route north is the Via Roma, and we must descend into town to reach it. Since we have no driver, I will be the charioteer, and Lucilla sits beside me on the box. Our horses, a pair of slender, fiery Arabians, are well matched and need little guidance from me. The day is mild, balmy, soft breezes: yet another bright, sunny, summer-like day here in the eighth month of the year. I think of my homeland, how dark and wet it must be by now.

“Does winter ever reach Italia?” I ask. “Or have the Emperors made special arrangements with the gods?”

“Oh, it gets quite cold, quite wet,” Lucilla assures me. “You’ll see. Not so much down here, but in Roma itself, yes, the winters can be extremely vile. You’ll still be here at the time of the Saturnalia, won’t you?”

That’s still two months away. “I hadn’t really given it much thought. I suppose I will.”

“Then you’ll see how cold it can get. I usually go to someplace like Sicilia or Aegyptus for the winter months, but this year I’m going to stay in Roma.” She snuggles cozily against me. “When the rains come we’ll keep each other warm. Won’t that be nice, Cymbelin?”

“Lovely. On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind seeing Aegyptus, you know. We could take the trip together at the end of the year. The Pyramids, the great temples at Menfe—”

“I have to stay in Italia this winter. In or at least near Roma.”

“You do? Why is that?”

“A family thing,” she says. “It involves my uncle. But I mustn’t talk about it.”

I take the meaning of her words immediately.

“He’s going to be named Consul again, isn’t he? Isn’t he?”

She stiffens and pulls her breath in quickly, and I know that I’ve hit on the truth.

“I mustn’t say,” she replies, after a moment.

“That’s it, though. It has to be. The new year’s Consuls take office on the first of Januarius, and so of course you’ll want to be there for the ceremony. What will this be, the fourth time for him? The fifth, maybe.”

“Please, Cymbelin.”

“Promise me this, at least. We’ll stay around in Roma until he’s sworn in, and then we’ll go to Aegyptus. The middle of January, all right? I can see us now, heading up the Nilus from Alexandria in a barge for two—”

“That’s such a long time from now. I can’t promise anything so far in advance.” She puts her hand gently on my wrist and lets it linger there. “But we’ll have as much fun as we can, won’t we, even if it’s cold and rainy, love?”

I see that there’s no point pressing the issue. Maybe her Januarius is already arranged, and her plans don’t include me: a trip to Africa with one of her Imperial friends, perhaps, young Flavius Caesar or some other member of the royal family. Irrational jealousy momentarily curdles my soul; and then I put all thought of January out of my mind. This is October, and the gloriously beautiful Lucilla Junia Scaevola will share my bed tonight and tomorrow night and so on and on at least until the Saturnalia, if I wish it, and I certainly do, and that should be all that matters to me right now.

We are passing the great hotels of the Via Roma. Their resplendent façades shine in the morning sun. And then we begin to climb up out of town again, into the suburban heights, a string of minor villas and here and there an isolated hill with some venerable estate of the Imperial family sprawling around its summit. After a time we go down the far side of the hills and enter the flat open country beyond, heading through the fertile plains of Campania Felix toward the capital city in the distant north.

We spend our first night in Capua, where Lucilla wants me to see the frescoes in the Mithraeum. I attempt to draw on my letter of credit to pay the hotel bill, but I discover that there will be no charge for our suite: the magic name of Scaevola has opened the way for us. The frescoes are very fine, the god slaying a white bull with a serpent under its feet, and there is a huge amphitheater here, too—the one where Spartacus spurred the revolt of the gladiators—but Lucilla tells me, as I gawk in provincial awe, that the one in Roma is far more impressive. Dinner is brought to us in our room, breast of pheasant and some thick, musky wine, and afterward we soak in the bath a long while and then indulge in the nightly scramble of the passions. I can easily endure this sort of life well through the end of the year and some distance beyond.

Then in the morning it is onward, northward and westward along the Via Roma, which now has become the Via Appia, the ancient military highway along which the Romans marched when they came to conquer their neighbors in southern Italia. This is sleepy agricultural country, broken here and there by the dark cyclopean ruins of dead cities that go back to pre-Roman times, and by hilltop towns of more recent date, though themselves a thousand years old or more. I feel the tremendous weight of history here.

Lucilla chatters away the slow drowsy hours of our drive with talk of her innumerable patrician friends in the capital, Claudio and Traiano and Alessandro and Marco Aureliano and Valeriano and a few dozen more, nearly all of them male, but there are a few female names among them, too, Domitilla, Severina, Giulia, Paolina, Tranquillina. High lords and ladies, I suppose. Sprinkled through the gossip are lighthearted references to members of the Imperial family who seem to be well known to her, close companions, in fact—not just the young Emperor, but his four brothers and three sisters, and assorted Imperial cousins and more distant kin.

I see more clearly than I have ever realized before how vast an establishment the family of our Caesars is, how many idle princes and princesses, each one with a great array of palaces, servitors, lovers and hangers-on. Nor is it only a single family, the cluster of royals who sit atop our world. For of course we have had innumerable dynasties occupying the throne during the nineteen centuries of the Empire, most of them long since extinct but many of the past five hundred years still surviving at least in some collateral line, completely unrelated to each other but all of them nevertheless carrying the great name of Caesar and all staking their claim to the public treasury. A dynasty can be overthrown but somehow the great-great-great-grandnephews, or whatever, of someone whose brother was Emperor long ago can still manage, so it seems, to claim pensions from the public purse down through all the succeeding epochs of time.

It’s clear from the way she talks that Lucilla has been the mistress of Flavius Caesar and very likely also of his older brother, Camillus Caesar, who holds the title of Prince of Constantinopolis, though he lives in Roma; she speaks highly also of a certain Roman count who bears the grand name of Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, and there is a special tone in her voice when she tells me of him that I know comes into women’s voices when they are speaking of a man with whom they have made love.

Jealousy of men I have never even met surges within me. How can she have done so much already, she who is only twenty-one? I try to control my feelings. This is Roma; there is no morality here as I understand the word; I must strive to do as the Romans do, indeed.

Despite myself I try to ask her about this Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, but already she has moved along to a sister of the Emperor whom she’s sure I’ll adore. Severina Floriana is her name. “We went to school together. Next to Adriana, she’s my best friend in the world. She’s absolutely beautiful—dark, sultry, almost Oriental-looking. You’d think she was an Arab. And you’d be right, because her grandmother on her mother’s side came from Syria. A dancing-girl, once upon a time, so the story goes—”

And on and on. I wonder if I am to be offered to Severina Floriana also.

It is the third day of our journey now. As the Via Appia nears the capital we begin to encounter the Imperial tombs, lining the road on both sides. Lucilla seems to know them all and calls them off for me.

“There’s the tomb of Flavius Romulus, the big one on the left—and that one is Claudius IX—and Gaius Martius, there—that’s Cecilia Metella, she lived in the time of Augustus Caesar—Titus Gallius—Constantinus V—Lucius and Arcadius Agrippa, both of them—Heraclius III—Gaius Paulus—Marcus Anastasius—”

The weight of antiquity presses ever more heavily on me.

“What about the earliest ones?” I ask. “Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius—”

“You’ll see the Tomb of Augustus in the city. Tiberius? Nobody seems to remember where he was buried. There are a lot of them in Hadrianus’s tomb overlooking the river, maybe ten of them, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, a whole crowd of dead Emperors in there. And Julius Caesar himself—there’s a great tomb for him right in the middle of the Forum, but the archaeologists say it isn’t really his, it was built six hundred years later—oh, look, Cymbelin—do you see, there? The walls of the city right ahead of us! Roma! Roma!”

And so it is, Urbs Roma, the great mother of cities, the capital of the world, the Imperial metropolis: its white marble-sheathed walls, built and rebuilt so many times, rise suddenly before me. Roma! The boy from the far country, humbled by the grandeur of it all, is shaken to the core. A shiver of awe goes through me so convulsively that it is transmitted through the reins to the horses, one of which glances back at me in what I imagine to be contempt and puzzlement.

Roma the city is like a palimpsest, a scroll that has been written on and cleaned and written on again, and again and again: and all the old texts show through amidst the newest one. Two thousand years of history assail the newcomer’s bedazzled eye in a single glance. Nothing ever gets torn down here, except occasionally for the sake of building something even more grand on its site. Here and there can still be seen the last quaint occasional remnants of the Roma of the Republic—the First Republic, I suppose I should say now—with the marble Roma of Augustus Caesar right atop them, and then the Romas of all the later Caesars, Hadrianus’s Roma and Septimius Severus’s Roma and the Roma of Flavius Romulus, who lived and ruled a thousand years after Severus, and the one that the renowned world-spanning Emperor Trajan VII erected upon all the rest in the great years that followed Flavius’s reuniting of the Eastern and Western Empires. All these are mixed together in the historic center of the city, and then too in a frightful ring surrounding them rise the massive hideous towers of modern times, the dreary office buildings and apartment houses of the Roma of today.

But even they, ugly as they are, are ugly in an awesomely grand Roman way. Roma is nothing if not grand: it excels at everything, even at ugliness.

Lucilla guides me in, calling off the world-famous sights as we pass them one by one: the Baths of Caracalla, the Circus Maximus, the Temple of the Divine Claudius, the Tower of Aemilius Magnus, even the ponderous and malproportioned Arch of Triumph that the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus erected in the year 1952 to mark the short-lived Greek victory in the Civil War, and which the Romans have allowed to remain as an all too visible reminder of the one great defeat in their history. But just at the opposite end of the avenue from it is the Arch of Flavius Romulus, too, five times the size of the Arch of Andronicus, to signify the final defeat of the Greeks after their two centuries of Imperial dominion.

The traffic is stupefying and chaotic. Chariots everywhere, horse-drawn trams, bicycles, and something that Lucilla says is very new, little steam-driven trains that run freely on wheels instead of tracks. There seem to be no rules: each vehicle goes wherever it pleases, nobody giving any signals, each driver attempting to intimidate those about him with gestures and curses. At first I have trouble with this, not because I am easily intimidated but because we Britons are taught early to be courteous to one another on the highways; but quickly I see that I have no choice but to behave as they do. When in Roma, et cetera—the old maxim applies to every aspect of life in the capital.

“Left here. Now right. You see the Colosseum, over there? Bigger than you thought, isn’t it? Turn right, turn right! That’s the Forum down there, and the Capitol up on that hill. But we want to go the other way, over to the Palatine—it’s the hill up there, you see? The one covered with palaces.”

Yes. Enormous Imperial dwellings, two score or even more of them, all higgledy-piggledy, cheek by jowl. Whole mountains of marble must have been leveled to build that incomprehensible maze of splendor.

And we are heading right into the midst of it all. The entrance to the Palatine is well patrolled, hordes of Praetorians everywhere, but they all seem to know Lucilla by sight and they wave us on in. She tries to explain to me which palace is whose, but it’s all a hopeless jumble, and even she isn’t really sure. Underneath what we see, she says, are the original palaces of the early Imperial days, those of Augustus and Tiberius and the Flavians, but of course nearly every Emperor since then has wanted to add his own embellishments and enhancements, and by now the whole hill is a crazyquilt of Imperial magnificence and grandiosity in twenty different styles, including a few very odd Oriental and pseudo-Byzantine structures inserted into the mix in the twenty-fourth century by some of the weirder monarchs of the Decadence. Towers and arcades and pavilions and gazebos and colonnades and domes and basilicas and fountains and peculiar swooping vaults jut out everywhere.

“And the Emperor himself?” I ask her. “Where in all that does he live?”

She waves her hand vaguely toward the middle of the heap. “Oh, he moves around, you know. He never stays in the same place two nights in a row.”

“Why is that? Is he the restless type?”

“Not at all. But Actinius Varro makes him do it.”

“Who?”

“Varro. The Praetorian Prefect. He worries a lot about assassination plots.”

I laugh. “When an Emperor is assassinated, isn’t it usually his own Praetorian Prefect who does it?”

“Usually, yes. But the Emperor always thinks that his prefect is the first completely loyal one, right up till the moment the knife goes into his belly. Not that anyone would want to assassinate a foolish fop like our Maxentius,” she adds.

“If he’s as incompetent as everyone says, wouldn’t that be a good reason for removing him, then?”

“What, and make one of his even more useless brothers Emperor in his place? Oh, no, Cymbelin. I know them all, believe me, and Maxentius is the best of the lot. Long life to him, I say.”

“Indeed. Long life to Emperor Maxentius,” I chime in, and we both enjoy a good laugh.

The particular palace we are heading for is one of the newest on the hill: an ornate, many-winged guest pavilion, much bedizened with eye-dazzling mosaics, brilliant wild splotches of garish yellows and uninhibited scarlets. It had been erected some fifty years before, she tells me, early in the reign of the lunatic Emperor Demetrius, the last Caesar of the Decadence. Lucilla has a little apartment in it, courtesy of her good friend, Prince Flavius Rufus. Apparently a good many non-royal members of the Imperial Roman social set live up here on the Palatine. It’s more convenient for everyone that way, traffic being what it is in Roma and the number of parties being so great.

The beginning of my stay in the capital is Neapolis all over again: there is a glittering social function for me to attend on my very first night. The host, says Lucilla, is none other than the famous Count Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, who is terribly eager to meet me.

“And who is he, exactly?” I ask.

“His grandfather’s brother was Count Valerian Apollinaris. You know who he was?”

“Of course.” One doesn’t need a Cantabrigian education to recognize the name of the architect of the modern Empire, the great five-term Consul of the First War of Reunification. It was Valerian Apollinaris who had dragged the frayed and crumbling Empire out of the sorry era known as the Decadence, put an end to the insurrections in the provinces that had wracked the Empire throughout the troubled twenty-fifth century, restored the authority of the central government, and installed Laureolus Caesar, grandfather of our present Emperor, on the throne. It was Apollinaris who—acting in Laureolus’s name, as an unofficial Caesar standing behind the true one—had instituted the Reign of Terror, that time of brutal discipline that had, for better or for worse, brought the Empire back to some semblance of the greatness that it last had known in the time of Flavius Romulus and the seventh Trajan. And then perished in the Terror himself, along with so many others.

I know nothing of this grand-nephew of his, this Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, except what I’ve heard of him from Lucilla. But she conveys merely by the way she utters his name, his full name every time, that he has followed his ancestor’s path, that he too is a man of great power in the realm.

And indeed it is obvious to me right away, when Lucilla and I arrive at Count Nero Romulus’s Palatine Hill palace, that my guess is correct.

The palace itself is relatively modest: a charming little building on the lower slope of the hill, close to the Forum, that I am told dates from the Renaissance and was originally built for one of the mistresses of Trajan VII. Just as Count Nero Romulus has never bothered to hold the Consulate or any of the other high offices of the realm, Count Nero Romulus doesn’t need a grand edifice to announce his importance. But the guest list at his party says it all.

The current Consul, Aulus Galerius Bassanius, is there. So are two of the Emperor’s brothers, and one of his sisters. And also Lucilla’s uncle, the distinguished and celebrated Gaius Junius Scaevola, four times Consul of Roma and by general report the most powerful man in the Empire next to Emperor Maxentius himself—more powerful than the Emperor, many believe.

Lucilla introduces me to Scaevola first. “My friend Cymbelin Vetruvius Scapulanus from Britannia,” she says, with a grand flourish. “We met at Marcello Domiziano’s house in Neapolis, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Isn’t he splendid, Uncle Gaius?”

What does one say, when one is a mere artless provincial on his first night in the capital and one finds oneself thrust suddenly into the presence of the greatest citizen of the realm?

But I manage not to stammer and blurt and lurch. With reasonable smoothness, in fact, I say, “I could never have imagined, when I set out from Britannia to see the fatherland of the Empire, Consul Scaevola, that I would have the honor to encounter the father of the country himself!”

At which he smiles amiably and says, “I think you rank me too highly, my friend. It’s the Emperor who’s the father of the country, you know. As it says right here.” And pulls a shiny new sestertius piece from his purse and holds it up so I can see the inscriptions around the edge, the cryptic string of abbreviated Imperial titles that all the coinage has carried since time immemorial. “You see?” he says, pointing to the letters on the rim of the coin just above the eyebrows of Caesar Maxentius. “P.P., standing for ‘Pater Patriae.’ There it is. Him, not me. Father of the country.” Then, with a wink to take the sting out of his rebuke, such as it had been, he says, “But I appreciate flattery as much as the next man, maybe even a little more. So thank you, young man. Lucilla’s not being too much trouble for you, is she, now?”

I’m not sure what he means by that. Perhaps nothing.

“Hardly,” I say.

I realize that I’m staring. Scaevola is a gaunt, wiry man of middle height as well, perhaps fifty years old, balding, with his remaining thin strands of hair—red hair, like Lucilla’s—pulled taut across his scalp. His cheekbones are pronounced, his nose is sharp, his chin is strong; his eyes are a very pale, icy gray-blue, the blue of a milky-hued sapphire. He looks astonishingly like Julius Caesar, the famous portrait that is on the ten-denarius postage stamp: that same expression of utterly unstoppable determination that arises out of infinite resources of inner power.

He asks me a few questions about my travels and about my homeland, listens with apparent interest to my replies, wishes me well, and efficiently sends me on my way.

My knees are trembling. My throat is dry.

Now I must meet my host the Count, and he is no easy pudding either. Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius is every bit as imposing as I had come to expect, a suave, burnished-looking man of about forty, tall for a Roman and strongly built, with a dense, flawlessly trimmed black beard, skin of a rich deep tone, dark penetrating eyes. He radiates an aura of wealth, power, self-assurance, and—even I am capable of detecting it—an almost irresistible sensuality.

“Cymbelin,” he says immediately. “A great name, a romantic name, the name of a king. Welcome to my house, Cymbelin of Britannia.” His voice is resonant, a perfectly modulated basso, the voice of an actor, of an opera singer. “We hope to see you here often during your stay in Roma.”

Lucilla, by my side, is staring at him in the most worshipful way. Which should trigger my jealousy; but I confess I feel such awe for him myself that I can scarcely object that she is under his spell.

He rests his hand lightly on my shoulder. “Come. You must meet some of my friends.” And takes me around the room. Introduces me to the incumbent Consul, Galerius Bassanius, who is younger and more frivolously dressed than I would have thought a Consul would be, and to some actors who seem to expect that I would recognize their names, though I don’t and have to dissemble a little, and to a gladiator whose name I do recognize—who wouldn’t, considering that he is the celebrated Marcus Sempronius Diodorus, Marcus the Lion-Slayer?—and then to a few flashy young ladies, with whom I make the appropriate flirtatious banter even though Lucilla has more beauty in her left elbow alone than any one of them does in her entire body.

We pass now through an atrium where a juggler is performing and onward to a second room, just as crowded as the first, where the general conversation has an oddly high-pitched tone and people are standing about in strangely stilted postures. After a moment I understand why.

There are royals in here. Everyone is on best court behavior.

Two princes of the blood, no less. Lucilla has me meet them both.

The first is Camillus Caesar, the Prince of Constantinopolis, eldest of the Emperor’s four brothers. He is plump, lazy-looking, with oily skin and an idle, slouching way of holding himself. If Gaius Junius Scaevola is a Julius Caesar, this man is a Nero. But for all his soft fleshiness I can make out distinct traces of the familiar taut features that mark the royal family: the sharp, fragile, imperious nose, the heroic chin, above all the chilly eyes, blue as Arctic ice, half hidden though they are behind owlish spectacles. It is as if the stern face of old Emperor Laureolus has somehow become embedded in the meaty bulk of this wastrel grandchild of his.

Camillus is too drunk, even this early in the evening, to say very much to me. He gives me a sloppy wave of his chubby hand and loses interest in me immediately.

Onward we go to the next oldest of the royals, Flavius Rufus Caesar. I am braced to dislike him, aware as I am that he has had the privilege of being Lucilla’s lover when she was only sixteen, but in truth he is charming, affable, a very seductive man. About twenty-five, I guess. He too has the family face; but he is lean, agile-looking, quick-eyed, probably quick-witted as well. Since from all I have heard his brother Maxentius is a buffoon and a profligate, it strikes me as a pity that the throne had not descended to Flavius Rufus instead of the other one when their old grandfather finally had shuffled off the scene. But the eldest heir succeeds: it is the ancient rule. With Prince Florus dead three years before his father Laureolus, the throne had gone to Florus’s oldest son Maxentius, and the world might be very different today had not that happened. Or perhaps I am overestimating the younger prince. Had Lucilla not told me Maxentius was the best of the lot?

Flavius Rufus—who plainly knows that I am Lucilla’s current amusement, and who just as plainly isn’t bothered by that—urges me to visit him toward the end of the year at the great Imperial villa at Tibur, a day’s journey outside Roma, where he will be celebrating the Saturnalia with a few hundred of his intimate friends.

“Oh, and bring the redhead, too,” Flavius Rufus says cheerfully. “You won’t forget her, now, will you?”

He blows her a kiss, and gives me a friendly slap on the palm of my hand, and returns to the adulation of his entourage. I am pleased and relieved that our meeting went so well.

Lucilla has saved the best of the family for last, though.

The dearest friend of her childhood, her schoolmate, her honorary kinswoman: the Princess Severina Floriana, sister of the Emperor. Before whom I instantly want to throw myself in utter devotion, she is so overpoweringly beautiful.

As Lucilla had said, Severina Floriana is dark, torrid-looking, exotic. There is no trace of the family features about her—her eyes are glossy black, her nose is a wanton snub, her chin is elegantly rounded—and I know at once that she must not be full sister to the Emperor, that she has to be the child of some subsidiary wife of Maxentius’s father: royals may have but one wife at a time, like the rest of us, but it is well known that often they exchange one wife for another, and sometimes take the first one back later on, and who is to say them nay? If Severina’s mother looked anything like Severina, I can see why the late Prince Florus was tempted to dally with her.

I was glib enough when speaking with Junius Scaevola and Nero Romulus Claudius Palladius, but I am utterly tongue-tied before Severina Floriana. Lucilla and she do all the talking, and I stand to one side, looming awkwardly in silence like an ox that Lucilla has somehow happened to bring to the party. They chatter of Neapolis’s social set, of Adriana, of Druso Tiberio, of a host of people whose names mean nothing to me; they speak of me, too, but what they are talking is the rapid-fire Roman of the capital, so full of slang and unfamiliar pronunciations that I can scarcely understand a thing. Now and again Severina Floriana directs her gaze at me—maybe appraisingly, maybe just out of curiosity at Lucilla’s newest acquisition; I can’t tell which. I try to signal her with my eyes that I would like a chance to get to know her better, but the situation is so complex and I know I am being reckless—how dare I even think of a romance with a royal princess, and how rash, besides, inviting the rage of Lucilla Scaevola by making overtures to her own friend right under her nose—!

In any case I get no acknowledgment from Severina of any of my bold glances.

Lucilla marches me away, eventually. We return to the other room. I am numb.

“I can see that you’re fascinated with her,” Lucilla tells me. “Isn’t that so?”

I make some stammering reply.

“Oh, you can fall in love with her if you like,” Lucilla says airily. “I won’t mind, silly! Everyone falls in love with her, anyway, so why shouldn’t you? She’s amazingly gorgeous, I know. I’d take her to bed myself, if that sort of thing interested me a little more.”

“Lucilla—I—”

“This is Roma, Cymbelin! Stop acting like such a simpleton!”

“I’m here with you. You are the woman I’m here with. I’m absolutely crazy about you.”

“Of course you are. And now you’re going to be obsessed with Severina Floriana for a while. It’s not in the least surprising. Not that you made much of a first impression on her, I suspect, standing there and gawking like that without saying a word, although she doesn’t always ask that a man have a mind, if he’s got a nice enough body. But I think she’s interested. You’ll get your chance during Saturnalia, I promise you that.” And she gives me a look of such joyous wickedness that I feel my brain reeling at the shamelessness of it all.

Roma! Roma! There is no place on Earth like it.

Silently I vow that one day soon I will hold Severina Floriana in my arms. But it is a vow that I was not destined to be able to keep; and now that she is dead I think of her often, with the greatest sadness, recreating her exotic beauty in my mind and imagining myself caressing her the way I might dream of visiting the palace of the Queen of the Moon.

Lucilla gives me a little push toward the middle of the party and I stagger away on my own, wandering from group to group, pretending to a confidence and a sophistication that at this moment is certainly not mine.

There is Nero Romulus in the corner, quietly talking with Gaius Junius Scaevola. The true monarchs of Roma, they are, the men who hold the real Imperial power. But in what way it is divided between them, I can’t even begin to guess.

The Consul, Bassanius, smirking and primping between two male actors who wear heavy makeup. What is he trying to do, reenact the ancient days of Nero and Caligula?

The gladiator, Diodorus, fondling three or four girls at once.

A man I haven’t noticed before, sixty or even seventy years old, with a face like a hatchet blade and skin the color of fine walnut, holding court near the fountain. His clothing, his jewelry, his bearing, his flashing eyes, all proclaim him to be a man of substance and power. “Who’s that?” I ask a passing young man, and get a look of withering scorn. He tells me, in tones that express his wonder at my ignorance, that that is Leontes Atticus, a name that means nothing to me, so that I have to ask a second question, and my informant lets me know, even more contemptuously, that Leontes Atticus is merely the wealthiest man in the Empire. This fierce-eyed parched-looking Greek, I learn, is a shipping magnate who controls more than half the ocean trade with Nova Roma: he takes his fat percentage on most of the rich cargo that comes to us from the savage and strange New World far across the sea.

And so on and on, new guests arriving all the time, a glowing assembly of the great ones of the capital crowding into the room, everyone who is powerful or wealthy or young, or if possible all three at once.

There is fire smoldering in this room tonight. Soon it will burst forth. But who could have known that then? Not I, not I, certainly not I.

Lucilla spends what seems like an hour conversing with Count Nero Romulus, to my great discomfort. There is an easy intimacy about the way they speak to each other that tells me things I’m not eager to know. What I fear is that he is inviting her to spend the night here with him after the party is over. But I am wrong about that. Ultimately Lucilla returns to my side and doesn’t leave it for the rest of the evening.

We dine on fragrant delicacies unknown to me. We drink wines of startling hues and strange piquant flavors. There is dancing; there is a theatrical performance by mimes and jugglers and contortionists; some of the younger guests strip unabashedly naked and splash giddily in the palace pool. I see couples stealing away into the garden, and some who sink into embraces in full view.

“Come,” Lucilla says finally. “I’m becoming bored with this. Let’s go home and amuse each other in privacy, Cymbelin.”

It’s nearly dawn by the time we reach her apartments. We make love until midday, and sink then into a deep sleep that holds us in its grip far into the hours of the afternoon, and beyond them, so that it is dark when we arise.

So it goes for me, then, week after week, autumn in Roma, the season of pleasure. Lucilla and I go everywhere together: the theater, the opera, the gladiatorial contests. We are greeted with deference at the finest restaurants and shown to the best tables. She takes me on a tour of the monuments of the capital—the Senate House, the famous temples, the ancient Imperial tombs. It is a dizzying time for me, a season beyond my wildest fantasies.

Occasionally I catch a glimpse of Severina Floriana at some restaurant, or encounter her at a party. Lucilla goes out of her way to give us a chance to speak to each other, and on a couple of these occasions Severina and I do have conversations that seem to be leading somewhere: she is curious about my life in Britannia, she wants to know my opinion of Roma, she tells me little gossipy tidbits about people on the other side of the room.

Her dark beauty astounds me. We fair-haired Britons rarely see women of her sort. She is a creature from another world, blue highlights in her jet-black hair, eyes like mysterious pools of night, skin of a rich deep hue utterly unlike that of my people, not simply the olive tone that so many citizens of the eastern Roman world have, but something darker, more opulent, with a satiny sheen and texture. Her voice, too, is enchanting, husky without a trace of hoarseness, a low, soft, fluting sound, musical and magnificently controlled.

She knows I desire her. But she playfully keeps our encounters beyond the zone where any such thing can be communicated, short of simply blurting it out. Somehow I grow confident, though, that we will be lovers sooner or later. Which perhaps would have been the case, had there only been time.

On two occasions I see her brother the Emperor, too.

Once is at the opera, in his box: he is formally attired in the traditional Imperial costume, the purple toga, and he acknowledges the salute of the audience with a negligent wave and a smile. Then, a week or two later, he passes through one of the Palatine Hill parties, in casual modern dress this time, with a simple purple stripe across his vest to indicate his high status.

At close range I am able to understand why people speak so slightingly of him. Though he has the Imperial bearing and the Imperial features, the commanding eyes and the nose and the chin and all that, there is something about the eager, uncertain smile of Caesar Maxentius that negates all his Imperial pretensions. He may call himself Caesar, he may call himself Augustus, and Pater Patriae and Pontifex Maximus and all the rest; but when you look at him, I discover to my surprise and dismay, he simpers and fails to return your gaze in any steady way. He should never have been given the throne. His brother Flavius Rufus would have been ever so much more regal.

Still, I have met the Emperor, such as he is. It is not every Briton who can say that; and the number of those who can will grow ever fewer from now on.

I send a message home by wire, every once in a while. Having incredibly good time, could stay here forever but probably won’t. I offer no details. One can hardly say in a telegram that one is living in a little palace a stone’s throw from the Emperor’s official residence, and sleeping with the niece of Gaius Junius Scaevola, and attending parties with people whose names are known throughout the Empire, and hobnobbing with His Imperial Majesty himself once in a while, to boot.

The year is nearing its end, now. The weather has changed, just as Lucilla said it would: the days are darker and of course shorter, the air is cool, rain is frequent. I haven’t brought much of a winter wardrobe with me, and Lucilla’s younger brother, a handsome fellow named Aquila, takes me to his tailor to get me outfitted for the new season. The latest Roman fashions seem strange, even uncouth, to me: but what do I know of Roman fashion? I take Aquila’s praise of my new clothes at face value, and the tailor’s and Lucilla’s also, and hope they’re not all simply having sport with me.

The invitation that Flavius Rufus Caesar extended to Lucilla and me that first night—to spend the Saturnalia at the Imperial villa at Tibur—was, I discover, a genuine one. By the time December arrives I have forgotten all about it; but Lucilla hasn’t, and she tells me, one evening, that we are to leave for Praeneste in the morning. That is a place not far from Roma, where in ancient and medieval times an oracle held forth in the Cave of Destiny until Trajan VII put an end to her privileges. We will stay there for a week or so at the estate of a vastly rich Hispanic merchant named Scipio Lucullo, and then go onward to nearby Tibur for the week of the Saturnalia itself.

Scipio Lucullo’s country estate, even in these bleak days of early winter, is grand beyond my comprehension. The marble halls, the pools and fountains, the delicate outer pavilions, the animal chambers where lions and zebras and giraffes are kept, the collections of statuary and paintings and objects of art, the baths, everything is on an Imperial scale. But there is no Imperial heritage here. Lucullo’s place was built, someone tells me, only five years ago, out of the profits of his gold mines in Nova Roma, ownership of which he attained by scandalous bribery of court officials during the disastrous final days of the reign of old Caesar Laureolus. His own guests, though they don’t disdain his immense hospitality, regard his estate as tawdry and vulgar, I discover.

“I’d be happy to live in such tawdriness,” I tell Lucilla. “Is that a terribly provincial thing to say?”

But she only laughs. “Wait until you see Tibur,” she says.

And indeed I discover the difference between mere showiness and true magnificence when we move along to the famous Imperial villa just as the Saturnalia week is about to begin.

This is, of course, the place that the great Hadrianus built for his country pleasures seventeen centuries ago. In his own time it was, no doubt, a wonder of the world, with its porticos and fountains and reflecting pools, its baths both great and small, its libraries both Greek and Roman, its nymphaeum and triclinium, its temples to all the gods under whose spell Hadrianus fell as he traveled the length and breadth of the Roman world.

But that was seventeen centuries ago; and seventeen centuries of Emperors have added to this place, so that the original villa of Hadrianus, for all its splendor, is only a mere part of the whole, and the totality must surely be the greatest palace in the world, a residence worthy of Jupiter or Apollo. “You can ride all day and not see the whole thing,” Lucilla says to me. “They don’t keep it all open at once, of course. We’ll be staying in the oldest wing, what they still call Hadrianus’s Villa. But all around us you’ll see the parts that Trajan VII added, and Flavius Romulus, and the Khitai Pavilions that Lucius Agrippa built for the little yellow-skinned concubine that he brought back from Asia Ultima. And if there’s time—oh, but there won’t be time, will there—?”

“Why not?” I ask.

She evades my glance. It is my first clue to what is to come.

All day long the great ones of Roma arrive at the Imperial villa for Flavius Rufus’s Saturnalia festival. By now I don’t need to have their names whispered to me. I recognize Atticus the shipping tycoon, and Count Nero Romulus, and Marco Tullio Garofalo, who is the president of the Bank of the Imperium, and Diodorus the gladiator, and the Consul Bassanius, and pudgy, petulant Prince Camillus, and dozens more. Carriages are lined up along the highway, waiting to disgorge their glittering passengers.

One who does not arrive is Gaius Junius Scaevola. It’s unthinkable that he hasn’t been invited; I conclude therefore that my guess about his being named Consul once more for the coming year is correct, and that he has remained in Roma to prepare for taking office. I ask Lucilla if that’s indeed why her uncle isn’t here, and she says, simply, “The holiday season is always a busy time for him. He wasn’t able to get away.”

He is going to be Consul once again! I’m sure of it.

But I’m wrong. The day after our arrival I glance at the morning newspaper, and there are the names of the Consuls for the coming year. His Imperial Majesty has been pleased to designate Publius Lucius Gallienus and Gaius Acacius Aufidius as Consuls of the Realm. They will be sworn into office at noon on the first of Januarius, weather permitting, on the steps of the Capitol building.

Not Scaevola, then. It must be important business of some other kind, then, that keeps him from leaving Roma in the closing days of the year.

And who are these Consuls, Gallienus and Aufidius? For both, it will be their first term in that highest of governmental offices next to that of the Emperor.

“Boyhood friends of Maxentius,” someone tells me, with a dismissive sniff. “Schoolmates of his.”

And someone else says, “Not only don’t we have a real Emperor any more, we aren’t even going to have Consuls now. Just a bunch of lazy children pretending to run the government.”

That seems very close to treasonous, to me—especially considering that this very villa is an Imperial palace, and we are all here as guests of the Emperor’s brother. But these patricians, I have been noticing, are extraordinarily free in their criticisms of the royal family, even while accepting their hospitality.

Which is abundant. There is feasting and theatricals every night, and during the day we are free to avail ourselves of the extensive facilities of the villa, the heated pools, the baths, the libraries, the gambling pavilions, the riding paths. I float dreamily through it all as though I have stumbled into a fairy-tale world, which is indeed precisely what it is.

At the party the third night I finally find the courage to make a mild approach to Severina Floriana. Lucilla has said that she would like to spend the next day resting, since some of the biggest events of the week still lie ahead; and so I invite Severina Floriana to go riding with me after breakfast tomorrow. Once the two of us are alone, off in some remote corner of the property, perhaps I will dare to suggest some more intimate kind of encounter. Perhaps. What I am attempting to arrange, after all, is a dalliance with the Emperor’s sister. Which is such an extraordinary idea that I can scarcely believe I am engaged in such a thing.

She looks amused and, I think, tempted by the suggestion.

But then she tells me that she won’t be here tomorrow. Something has come up, she says, something trifling but nevertheless requiring her immediate attention, and she must return briefly to Urbs Roma in the morning.

“You’ll be coming back here, won’t you?” I ask anxiously.

“Oh, yes, of course. I’ll be gone a day or two at most. I’ll be here for the big party the final night, you can be sure of that!” She gives me a quick impish glance, as though to promise me some special delight for that evening, by way of consolation for this refusal now. And reaches out to touch my hand a moment. A spark as though of electricity passes from her to me. It is all that ever will; I have never forgotten it.

Lucilla remains in our suite the next day, leaving me to roam the villa’s grounds alone. I lounge in the baths, I swim, I inspect the galleries of paintings and sculpture, I drift into the gambling pavilion and lose a few solidi at cards to a couple of languid lordlings.

I notice an odd thing that day. I see none of the people I had previously met at the parties of the Palatine Hill set in Roma. Count Nero Romulus, Leontes Atticus, Prince Flavius Rufus, Prince Camillus, Bassanius, Diodorus—not one of them seems to be around. The place is full of strangers today.

And without Lucilla by my side as I make my increasingly uneasy way among these unknowns, I feel even more of an outsider here than I really am: since I wear no badge proclaiming me to be the guest of Junius Scaevola’s niece, I become in her absence merely a barely civilized outlander who has somehow wangled his way into the villa and is trying with only fair success to pretend to be a well-bred Roman. I imagine that they are laughing at me behind my back, mocking my style of dress, imitating my British accent.

Nor is Lucilla much comfort when I return to our rooms. She is distant, abstracted, moody. She asks me only the most perfunctory questions about how I have spent my day, and then sinks back into lethargy and brooding.

“Are you not feeling well?” I ask her.

“It’s nothing serious, Cymbelin.”

“Have I done something to annoy you?”

“Not at all. It’s just a passing thing,” she says. “These dark winter days—”

But today hasn’t been dark at all. Cool, yes, but the sun has been a thing of glory all day, illuminating the December sky with a bright radiance that makes my British heart ache. Nor is it the bad time of month for her; so I am mystified by Lucilla’s gloomy remoteness. I can see that no probing of mine will produce a useful answer, though. I’ll just have to wait for her mood to change.

At the party that night she is no more ebullient than before. She floats about like a wraith, indifferently greeting people who seem scarcely more familiar to her than they are to me.

“I wonder where everyone is,” I say. “Severina told me she had to go back to Roma to take care of something today. But where’s Prince Camillus? Count Nero Romulus? Have they gone back to Roma, too? And Prince Flavius Rufus—he doesn’t seem to be at his own party.”

Lucilla shrugs. “Oh, they must be here and there, somewhere around. Take me back to the room, will you, Cymbelin? I’m not feeling at all partyish, tonight. There’s a good fellow. I’m sorry to be spoiling the fun like this.”

“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong, Lucilla?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I just feel—I don’t know, a little tired. Low-spirited, maybe. Please. I want to go back to the room.”

She undresses and gets into bed. Facing that party full of strangers without her is too daunting for me, and so I get into bed beside her. I realize, after a moment, that she’s quietly sobbing.

“Hold me, Cymbelin,” she murmurs.

I take her into my arms. Her closeness, her nakedness, arouse me as always, and I tentatively begin to make love to her, but she asks me to stop. So we lie there, trying to fall asleep at this strangely early hour, while distant sounds of laughter and music drift toward us through the frosty night air.

The next day things are worse. She doesn’t want to leave our suite at all. But she tells me to go out without her: makes it quite clear, in fact, that she wants to be alone.

What a strange Saturnalia week this is turning into! How little jollity there is, how much unexplained tension!

But explanations will be coming, soon enough.

At midday, after a dispiriting stroll through the grounds, I return to the room to see whether Lucilla has taken a turn for the better.

Lucilla is gone.

There’s no trace of her. Her closets are empty. She has packed and vanished, without a word to me, without any sort of warning, leaving no message for me, not the slightest clue. I am on my own in the Imperial villa, among strangers.

Things are happening in the capital this day, immense events, a convulsion of the most colossal kind. Of which we who remain at the Imperial villa will remain ignorant all day, though the world has been utterly transformed while we innocently swim and gamble and stroll about the grounds of this most lavish of all Imperial residences.

It had, in fact, begun to happen a couple of days before, when certain of the guests at the villa separately and individually left Tibur and returned to the capital, even though Saturnalia was still going on and the climactic parties had not yet taken place. One by one they had gone back to Roma, not only Severina Floriana but others as well, all those whose absences I had noticed.

What pretexts were used to lure Prince Flavius Rufus, Prince Camillus, and their sister Princess Severina away from the villa may never be known. The two newly appointed Consuls, I was told, had received messages in the Emperor’s hand, summoning them to a meeting at which they would be granted certain high privileges and benefits of their new rank. The outgoing Consul, Bassanius, still was carrying a note ostensibly from the Praetorian Prefect, Actinius Varro, when his body was found, telling him that a conspiracy against the Emperor’s life had been detected and that his presence in Roma was urgently required. The note was a forgery. So it went, one lie or another serving to pry the lordlings and princelings of the Empire away from the pleasures of the Saturnalia at Tibur, just for a single day.

Certain other party guests who returned to Roma, that day and the next, hadn’t needed to be lured. They understood perfectly well what was about to happen and intended to be present at the scene during the events. That group included Count Nero Romulus; Atticus, the ship-owner; the banker Garofalo; the merchant from Hispania, Scipio Lucullo; Diodorus the gladiator; and half a dozen other patricians and men of wealth who were members of the conspiracy. For them the jaunt to Tibur had been a way of inducing a mood of complacency at the capital, for what was there to fear with so many of the most powerful figures of the realm off at the great pleasure dome for a week of delights? But then these key figures took care to return quickly and quietly to Roma when the time to strike had arrived.

On the fatal morning these things occurred, as all the world would shortly learn:

A squadron of Marcus Sempronius Diodorus’s gladiators broke into the mansion of Praetorian Prefect Varro and slew him just before sunrise. The Praetorian Guard then was told that the Emperor had discovered that Varro was plotting against him, and had replaced him as prefect with Diodorus. This fiction was readily enough accepted; Varro had never been popular among his own men and the Praetorians are always willing to accept a change in leadership, since that usually means a distribution of bonuses to insure their loyalty to their new commander.

With the Praetorians neutralized, it was an easy matter for a team of gunmen to penetrate the palace where Emperor Maxentius was staying that night—the Vatican, it was, a palace on the far side of the river in the vicinity of the Mauseoleum of Hadrianus—and break into the royal apartments. The Emperor, his wife, and his children fled in wild panic through the hallways, but were caught and put to death just outside the Imperial baths.

Prince Camillus, who had reached the capital in the small hours of the night, had not yet gone to bed when the conspirators reached his palace on the Forum side of the Palatine. Hearing them slaughtering his guards, the poor fat fool fled through a cellar door and ran for his life toward the Temple of Castor and Pollux, where he hoped to find sanctuary; but his pursuers overtook him and cut him down on the steps of the temple.

As for Prince Flavius Rufus, he awakened to the sound of gunfire and reacted instantly, darting behind his palace to a winery that he kept there. His workmen were not yet done crushing the grapes of the autumn harvest. Jumping into a wooden cart, he ordered them to heap great bunches of grapes on top of him and to wheel him out of the city, concealed in that fashion. He actually succeeded in reaching Neapolis safely a couple of days later and proclaimed himself Emperor, but he was captured and killed soon after—with some help, I have heard, from Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus.

Two younger princes of the royal house still survived—Prince Augustus Caesar, who was sixteen and off in Parisi at the university, and Prince Quintus Fabius, a boy of ten, I think, who dwelled at one of the Imperial residences in Roma. Although Prince Augustus did live long enough to proclaim himself Emperor and actually set out across Gallia with the wild intention of marching on Roma, he was seized and shot in the third day of his reign. Those three days, I suppose, put this young and virtually unknown Augustus into history as the last of all the Emperors of Roma.

What happened to young Quintus Fabius, no one knows for sure. He was the only member of the Imperial family whose body never was found. Some say that he was spirited out of Roma on the day of the murders wearing peasant clothes and is still alive in some remote province. But he has never come forth to claim the throne, so if he is still alive to this day, he lives very quietly and secretively, wherever he may be.

All day long the killing went on. The assassination of Emperors was of course nothing new for Roma, but this time the job was done more thoroughly than ever before, an extirpation of root and branch. Royal blood ran in rivers that day. Not only was the immediate family of the Caesars virtually wiped out, but most of the descendants of older Imperial families were executed, too, I suppose so that they wouldn’t attempt to put themselves forward as Emperors now that the line of Laureolus was essentially extinct. A good many former Consuls, certain members of the priestly ranks, and others suspected of excessive loyalty to the old regime, including two or three dozen carefully selected Senators, met their deaths that day as well.

And at nightfall the new leaders of Roma gathered at the Capitol to proclaim the birth of the Second Republic. Gaius Junius Scaevola would hold the newly devised rank of First Consul for Life—that is to say, Emperor, but under another name—and he would govern the vast entity that we could no longer call the Empire through a Council of the Senate, by which he meant his little circle of wealthy and powerful friends, Atticus and Garofalo and Count Nero Romulus and General Cassius Frontinus and half a dozen others of that sort.

Thus, after nineteen hundred years, was the work of the great Augustus Caesar finally undone.

Augustus himself had pretended that Roma was still a Republic, even while gathering all the highest offices into a single bundle and taking possession of that bundle, thus making himself absolute monarch; and that pretense had lasted down through the ages. I am not a king, Augustus had insisted; I am merely the First Citizen of the realm, who humbly strives, under the guidance of the Senate, to serve the needs of the Roman people. And so it went for all those years, though somehow it became possible for many of the First Citizens to name their own sons as their successors, or else to select some kinsman or friend, even while the ostensible power to choose the Emperor was still in the hands of the Senate. But from now on it would be different. No one would be able to claim the supreme power in Roma merely because he was the son or nephew of someone who had held that power. No more crazy Caligulas, no more vile Neros, no more brutish Caracallas, no more absurd Demetriuses, no more weak and foppish Maxentiuses. Our ruler now would truly be a First Citizen—a Consul, as in the ancient days before the first Augustus—and the trappings of the monarchy would at last be abandoned.

All in a single day, a day of blood and fire. While I lounged in Tibur, at the villa of the Emperors, knowing nothing of what was taking place.

On the morning of the day after the revolution, word comes to the villa of what has occurred in Roma. As it happens, I have slept late that day, after having drunk myself into a stupor the night before to comfort myself for the absence of Lucilla; and the villa is virtually deserted by the time I rouse myself and emerge.

That alone is strange and disconcerting. Where has everyone gone? I find a butler, who tells me the news. Roma is in flames, he says, and the Emperor is dead along with all his family.

“All his family? His brothers and sisters too?”

“Brothers and sisters too. Everyone.”

“The Princess Severina?”

The butler looks at me without sympathy. He is very calm; he might be speaking of the weather, or next week’s chariot races. In the autumn warmth he is as chilly as a winter fog.

“The whole lot, is what I hear. Every last one, and good riddance to them. Scaevola’s the new Emperor. Things will all be very different now, you can be sure of that.”

All this dizzies me. I have to turn away and take seven or eight gasping breaths before I have my equilibrium again. Overnight our world has died and been born anew.

I bathe and dress and eat hurriedly, and arrange somehow for a carriage to take me to Roma. Even in this moment of flux and madness, a purse full of gold will get you what you want. There are no drivers, so I’ll have to find my way on my own, but no matter. Insane though it may be to enter the capital on this day of chaos, Roma pulls me like a magnet. Lucilla must be all right, if her uncle has seized the throne; but I have to know the fate of Severina Floriana.

I see flames on the horizon when I am still an hour’s ride from the city. Gusts of hot wind from the west bring me the scent of smoke: a fine dust of cinders seems to be falling, or am I imagining it? No. I extend my arm and watch a black coating begin to cover it.

It’s supreme folly to go to the capital now.

Should I not turn away, bypass Roma and head for the coast, book passage to Britannia while it’s still possible to escape? No. No. I must go there, whatever the risks. If Scaevola is Emperor, Lucilla will protect me. I will continue on to Roma, I decide. And I do.

The place is a madhouse. The sky streams with fire. On the great hills of the mighty, ancient palaces are burning; their charred marble walls topple like falling mountains. The colossal statue of some early Emperor lies strewn in fragments across the road. People run wildly in the streets, screaming, sobbing. Squads of wild-eyed soldiers rush about amongst them, shouting furiously and incoherently as they try to restore order without having any idea of whose orders to obey. I catch sight of a rivulet of crimson in the gutter and think for a terrible moment that it is blood; but no, no, it is only wine running out of a shattered wineshop, and men are falling on their faces to lap it from the cobblestones.

I abandon my chariot—the streets are too crazy to drive in—and set out on foot. The center of the city is compact enough. But where shall I go? I wonder. To the Palatine? No: everything’s on fire up there. The Capitol? Scaevola will be there, I reason, and—how preposterous this sounds to me now—he can tell me where Lucilla is, and what has become of Severina Floriana.

Of course I get nowhere near the Capitol. The entire governmental district is sealed off by troops. Edicts are posted in the streets, and I pause to read one, and it is then I discover the full extent of the alteration that this night has worked: that the Empire is no more, the Republic of the ancient days has returned. Scaevola now rules, but has the title not of Emperor but of First Consul.

As I stand gaping and dazed in the street that runs past the Forum, I am nearly run down by a speeding chariot. I yell a curse at its driver; but then, to my great amazement, the chariot stops and a familiar ruddy face peers out at me.

“Cymbelin! Good gods, is that you? Get in, man! You can’t stand around out there!”

It’s my robust and jolly host from Neapolis, my father’s friend, Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus. What bad luck for him, I think, that he’s come visiting up here in Roma at a time like this. But I have it all wrong, as usual, and Marcellus Domitianus very quickly spells everything out for me.

He has been in on the plot from the beginning—he and his brother the general, along with Junius Scaevola and Count Nero Romulus, were in fact the ringleaders. It was necessary, they felt, to destroy the Empire in order to save it. The current Emperor was an idle fool, the previous one had been allowed to stay on the throne too long, the whole idea of a quasi-hereditary monarchy had been proved to be a disaster over and over again for centuries, and now was the time to get rid of it once and for all. There was new restlessness in all the provinces and renewed talk of secession. Having just fought and won a Second War of Reunification, General Cassius Frontinus had no desire to launch immediately into a third one, and he had without much difficulty convinced his brother and Scaevola that the Caesars must go. Must in fact be put where they would never have the opportunity of reclaiming the throne.

Ruthless and bloody, yes. But better to scrap the incompetent and profligate royal family, better to toss out the empty, costly pomp of Imperial grandeur, better to bring back, at long last, the Republic. Once again there would be government by merit rather than by reason of birth. Scaevola was respected everywhere; he would know the right things to do to hold things together.

“But to kill them—to murder a whole family—!”

“A clean sweep, that’s what we needed,” Frontinus tells me. “A total break with the past. We can’t have hereditary monarchs in this modern age.”

“All the princes and princesses are dead too, then?”

“So I hear. One or two may actually have gotten away, but they’ll be caught soon enough, you can be sure of that.”

“The Princess Severina Floriana?”

“Can’t say,” Frontinus replies. “Why? Did you know her?”

Color floods to my cheeks. “Not very well, actually. But I couldn’t help wondering—”

“Lucilla will be able to tell you what happened to her. She and the princess were very close friends. You can ask her yourself.”

“I don’t know where Lucilla is. We were at Tibur together this week, at the Imperial villa, and then—when everything started happening—”

“Why, you’ll be seeing Lucilla five minutes from now! She’s at the palace of Count Nero Romulus—you know who he is, don’t you?—and that’s exactly where we’re heading.”

I point toward the Palatine, shrouded in flames and black gusts of smoke behind us.

“Up there?”

Frontinus laughs. “Don’t be silly. Everything’s destroyed on the Palatine. I mean his palace by the river.” We are already past the Forum area. I can see the somber bulk of Hadrianus’s Mausoleum ahead of us, across the river. We halt just on this side of the bridge. “Here we are,” says Frontinus.

I get to see her one last time, then, once we have made our way through the lunatic frenzy of the streets to the security of Nero Romulus’s well-guarded riverfront palace. I hardly recognize her. Lucilla wears no makeup and her clothing is stark and simple—peasant clothing. Her eyes are somber and red-rimmed. Many of her patrician friends have died this night for the sake of the rebirth of Roma.

“So now you know,” she says to me. “Of course I couldn’t tell you a thing about what was being planned.”

It is hard for me to believe that this woman and I were lovers for months, that I am intimately familiar with every inch of her body. Her voice is cool and impersonal, and she has neither kissed me nor smiled at me.

“You knew—all along—what was going to happen?”

“Of course. From the start. At least I got you out of town to a safe place while it was going on.”

“You got Severina to a safe place, too. But you couldn’t keep her there, it seems.”

Her eyes flare with rage, but I see the pain there, too.

“I tried to save her. It wasn’t possible. They all had to die, Cymbelin.”

“Your own childhood friend. And you didn’t even try to warn her.”

“We’re Romans, Cymbelin. It had become necessary to restore the Republic. The royal family had to die.”

“Even the women?”

“All of them. Don’t you think I asked? Begged? No, said Nero Romulus. She’s got to die with them. There’s no choice, he said. I went to my uncle. You don’t know how I fought with him. But nobody can sway his will, nobody at all. No, he said. There’s no way to save her.” Lucilla makes a quick harsh motion with her hand. “I don’t want to talk about this any more. Go away, Cymbelin. I don’t even understand why Marcello brought you here.”

“I was wandering around in the street, not knowing where to go to find you.”

“Me? Why would you want to find me?”

It’s like a blow in the ribs. “Because—because—” I falter and fall still.

“You were a very amusing companion,” she says. “But the time for amusements is over.”

“Amusements!”

Her face is like stone. “Go, Cymbelin. Get yourself back to Britannia, as soon as you can. The bloodshed isn’t finished here. The First Consul doesn’t yet know who’s loyal and who isn’t.”

“Another Reign of Terror, then?”

“We hope not. But it won’t be pretty, all the same. Still, the First Consul wants the Second Republic to get off to the most peaceful possible—”

“The First Consul,” I say, with anger in my voice. “The Second Republic.”

“You don’t like those words?”

“To kill the Emperor—”

“It’s happened before, more times than you can count. This time we’ve killed the whole system. And will replace it at long last with something cleaner and healthier.”

“Maybe so.”

“Go, Cymbelin. We are very busy now.”

And she turns away and leaves the room, as though I am nothing to her, only an inquisitive and annoying stranger. It is all too clear to me now that she had regarded me all along as a mere casual plaything, an amusing barbarian to keep by her side during the autumn season; and now it is winter and she must devote herself to more serious things.

And so I went. The last Emperor had perished and the Republic had come again, and I had slept amidst the luxurious comforts of the Imperial villa while it all was happening. But it has always been that way, hasn’t it? While most of us sleep, an agile few create history in the night.

Now all was made new and strange. The world I had known had been entirely transformed in ways that might not be fully apparent for years—the events of these recent hours would be a matter for historians to examine and debate and assess, long after I had grown old and died—nor would the chaos at the center of the Empire end in a single day, and provincial boys like me were well advised to take themselves back where they belonged.

I no longer had any place here in Roma, anyway. Lucilla was lost to me—she will marry Count Nero Romulus to seal his alliance with her uncle—and whatever dizzying fantasies I might have entertained concerning the Princess Severina Floriana were best forgotten now, or the ache would never leave my soul. All that was done and behind me. The holiday was over. There would be no further tourism for me this year, no ventures into Etruria and Venetia and the other northern regions of Italia. I knew I must leave Roma to the Romans and beat a retreat back to my distant rainy island in the west, having come all too close to the flames that had consumed the Roma of the Emperors, having in fact been somewhat singed by them myself.

Except for the help that Frontinus provided, I suppose I might have had a hard time of it. But he gave me a safe-conduct pass to get me out of the capital, and lent me a chariot and a charioteer; and on the morning of the second day of the Second Republic I found myself on the Via Appia once more, heading south. Ahead of me lay the Via Roma and Neapolis and a ship to take me home.

I looked back only once. Behind me the sky was smudged with black clouds as the fires on the Palatine Hill burned themselves out.

Content

Robert Silverberg
Via Roma