Once he reached Rome, it began to rain, heavily and continuously, as if making up for lost time. The kinsman of Licinius with whom he was staying was hospitable enough, but Gaius very quickly became tired of jokes about bringing his British weather with him. And it was not even true, really, for in Britannia there was an honest chill to the rain, but Rome was not so much cold as plagued by a pervasive and pestilent damp. Forever after, Gaius’s memories of that time were linked to the alkaline smell of damp plaster and the reek of wet wool.
Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation of humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.
“And this is your first visit to Rome?” The lady to whom Gaius was talking favored him with a laugh that tinkled like the silver bangles she wore. Exquisitely curled women and elegantly draped men crowded the atrium of Licinius’s cousin, who was giving the party, and conversation hummed like bees in an orchard. “So what do you think of the Mistress of Nations, diadem of the Empire?” her painted eyelids drooped coquettishly. This was another question Gaius had heard so often he had been forced to memorize an answer.
“I think the splendor of the city far eclipsed by the beauty that adorns it,” he said gallantly. He would have said “might,” and “power,” if he had been talking to a man.
This earned him another burst of tinkling; then his host rescued him and bore him away to the peristyle, where toga-clad men were grouped like figures on a piece of statuary. He joined them with some relief. Even among the men, there were dangers, but at least he understood them. Roman women produced in him something of the same paralysis he had felt when he first met Julia.
But she was straightforward by comparison to the ladies he was meeting now. One or two of them had invited him to bed, but a lively sense of self-preservation had kept him free of such entrapments. Rome attracted the best of everything, and if he needed a woman, there were courtesans who demanded nothing of him but his money, and whose arts could banish anxiety, for a little while.
Moving in Roman society was like leading a cavalry charge across icy ground – exhilarating while it lasted, but you never knew when some treacherous bit would bring you down. Gaius wondered if Julia could have held her own in that company. And as for Eilan -it was like trying to imagine a wild antelope, or perhaps a wildcat, among a herd of high-bred racing mares to picture her here: both were beautiful, but different orders of being entirely.
“I understand that you served under Agricola in Caledonia . . .”
Gaius blinked, realizing that one of the older men was talking to him. He caught the flicker of a broad purple stripe on the tunic and straightened as if he were facing a superior officer, racking his brains to remember the man’s name. Most of his host’s friends were from the equestrian class; he had done well to get a senator here.
“Yes, sir, I had that honor. I had hoped to call upon him here in Rome.”
“I believe that at present he is residing on the family estates in Gaul,” the Senator said neutrally. Marcellus Clodius Malleus, that was his name.
“It is hard to imagine him resting.” Gaius grinned. “I had supposed he would be putting the fear of the gods into the enemies of Rome somewhere on the frontiers or bringing the Pax Romana to one of the provinces.”
“Indeed, one might think so.” The Senator’s manner warmed perceptibly. “But you might be wiser not to say so until you are sure of your company . . .”