A Villa Far From Rome

by Sheila Finch

  Seeing the comfortable villa Gracila lived in with her family had been the impetus to writing the letter. Why should she suffer anything less than a centurion’s family had?

  Niko said, “It’s a risk, reminding Caesar we still exist.”

  “I hate this place! And my child almost drowned here.”

  The Greek shook his head.

  “But Niko – he doesn’t know how bad things are here. He wouldn’t want the child to suffer, surely? What harm does it do to tell him the dreadful situation we’re in, so very, very far away from Rome?”

  He took up the stylus and drew another letter for Lucia to copy. “Unwise.”

  “If you will just stop playing with Lucia –”

  “We’re not playing, Ma,” Lucia said. “I’m learning to make the letters for my name. See?”

  She laid the letter she’d been carrying on the table and put her hand on her daughter’s hair, full of tangles. She combed it with her fingers. Her thoughts slid away from the task. Marcus, the centurion’s name was Marcus Favonius. He was tall – almost as tall as Tiberius – and younger, too. Her heart pounded at the thought. She was so full of contradictory thoughts these days! She wanted to go home. She wanted to stay and learn more about the centurion. The centurion had a woman who’d been kind to her. The house was too small and cold to make staying attractive. It was the terrible climate affecting her, she was certain of it.

  She remembered how the centurion’s eyes had glittered in the lamplight when he spoke to her. He hadn’t shifted his gaze away but stared at her boldly till she felt weak. He’d promised to come back. But he already had a woman. Her body felt oddly hollow, as if it didn’t belong to her.

  “I don’t advise it,” Niko said. “The emperor’s a treacherous man.”

  “You never tire of telling me! But I didn’t ask for something he can’t give me right now. All I want is a little money to make some improvements here.”

  So many improvements would have to be made before this cold place was livable. But Tiberius was spending his money on a temple. If the roof was repaired, and the house warmer, then she could invite guests from Noviomagus.

  “Have you considered your husband’s wishes?”

  “My father did the world a great disservice when he freed you!”

  Niko smiled.

  “Will the emperor come to live with us?” Lucia asked.

  “Of course not. And don’t interrupt your elders!”

  She hoped Nero was vain enough to respond to the flattery she’d sprinkled all through her letter. Her hair is so golden and curly, like her illustrious father’s!

  “Please, Niko. Take the letter to the port for me and pay a courier.”

  He set aside the stylus and the writing tablet he and Lucia had been using and picked up her letter. She’d folded the thin sheets, wrapping them in linen, then in soft leather for protection, tying the letter securely with a thong and sealing it with wax and her own seal, protection against the hazards of the journey and prying eyes.

  Cold air, heavy as a blanket with the smell of earth and wet grass, flowed into the room when he opened the door. She shivered. A memory from childhood swept over her – warm rain spattering the hillside, her youngest brother, Titus, stomping through puddles, herself torn between the urge to join him and wanting to be the serious older sister, her next oldest brother, Valentinus, laughing at them both. She’d been eight years old at the time. What wouldn’t she give to go back to those days?

  * * *

  Lucia filled her mouth with the overflowing spoon, a small one that the Regni cook indicated once belonged to Tiberius’s sons. Antonia had never thought much about her husband having children of his own, though she vaguely remembered seeing a boy on the dock the night they’d arrived.

  Lucia was always hungry. Growing fast, Niko said. She couldn’t remember much about how fast or slow she’d grown in her own childhood. After the events that followed the ill-fated chariot races and banquet in Pyrgi, there’d been no more time for such childish concerns. She’d scarcely begun her monthly bleeding when she’d conceived the child; she’d had to grow into an adult almost overnight.

  It was dark again – The days were so short this far north – and she had the house to herself. The centurion had taken Tiberius with them yesterday, and Gallus – who didn’t like her – went up to Noviomagus every day. Niko would probably use the excuse of his errand to wander around the port. The Greek liked to learn things; he made a good tutor for Lucia.

  The cook – she’d learned everybody called her Old Nev – slopped more porridge into the bowl. Antonia watched her work for a while. The kitchen, though primitive by Roman standards, was well-stocked. Partridges and hares were hung to cure in an attached cool room, with a wheel of cheese – a local variety and surprisingly tasty once she was used to the sharp flavor, and eggs also, baskets of rosy apples, freshly picked and stored for the coming winter. A young boy brought fish and oysters and mushrooms every morning. Olive oil imported from Gaul and malt vinegar made in the nearby village, onions and garlic, bunches of herbs hanging from the rafters – thyme and marjoram, sage, a clutch of laurel. She didn’t lack for food here in the outpost of the empire, though the preparation was uninspired and she must teach the servants to do better. Maybe the young girl Tiberius had employed to come every day to help Old Nev would be easier to teach than the cook herself.

  She should find something to occupy her mind while she waited for the emperor to summon her back home. Niko was right; it might take a long time before that happened. She could teach the Regni servants to cook properly, but that wouldn’t be enough to take up the hours. There was plenty of open land around the house; she could organize a garden, grow her own herbs and vegetables. Would olives grow here? Or grapes?

  She stood by the door, looking over the dark garden. Night here was so different from night at home where it was always warm, full of comforting sounds of nightbirds. She missed the cicadas’ clicking song in the vineyard.

  Old Nev straightened from the table, wiping her hands on her coarse-woven skirt. How old was the woman? She found it hard to read barbarian faces. There was no silver in the woman’s hair yet, but her expression was bitter; she stared at Antonia, her mouth pulled into a thin line. She spoke a few words in what passed for language among the Britanni, then gestured with her hands, indicating the cooking hearth, mimed sweeping the kitchen, frowned at Antonia, willing her to understand.

  “Old Nev says what do you want her to do?” Lucia said, porridge dribbling out of her mouth as she spoke.

  Astonished, she stared at her child. “How do you know that?”

  Lucia busied herself with the bowl that was already scraped clean. “I don’t know how, Ma. I just do.”

  Old Nev said something else to Lucia, and the child nodded, slipped down from her place at table and went out of the kitchen.

  Niko would’ve hauled her back and made her ask her mother’s permission. For a moment, she saw the changes living in this wild place would bring to all of them.

  It was a frightening vision.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A heavy drift of leaves muffled the horses’ hooves as they passed under a stand of mixed beech and young oaks. The full moon drifted in and out of the racing clouds and their breath trailed behind them. They rode fast, the centurion and his tribune hardly speaking. Togidubnus still didn’t know where they were headed. They followed the Roman road west out of Noviomagus, and for a moment he feared they were going to the island in the marsh where Breca’s family lived.

  He thought of the old Druid’s prophecy. So many hazards in his path to hold the chieftainship for his oldest son; so many ways for it not to happen.

  As they reached the ford where he’d waited for the tide to turn a few days ago, they veered off the road and took a narrow track that headed up to the Downs, the chalk hills that rose behind Noviomagus. An owl hooted in darkness above his head.

  “I sent men on ahead,” Marcus Favonius said sud
denly, slowing so his horse was abreast of Stormfellow. The horses cantered together, breath steaming. “Mars willing, there won’t be Roman blood spilled tonight.”

  He sensed he was being drawn into some kind of trap where there would be no right action. Even a minor uprising, a beer fueled argument started by fools that inconvenienced the Roman settlers was potentially dangerous for a man with a foot in both camps. The vision he’d taken to Rome, weeks ago, of the tribes of Britannia thriving in peace under Roman rule was like the idle dreams of a callow youth.

  Favonius pulled ahead again, kicking his horse to go faster, heading north and west. Far away, a wolf howled and was answered by another.

  Stormfellow’s sides heaved, making heavy going of the way that rose beneath them; the old warhorse was no longer capable of such extended exertion. His nose filled with the smell of the horse and the wet earth under its hooves. After a while, he could see the ridge of a hill outlined against the unsteady moonlight. There was no settlement that he knew of up here on this part of the Downs. A shepherd’s hut, maybe, or a tumbledown stone pigsty long abandoned. Or the smooth, turf-covered mounds that marked the funeral barrows of the Ancient Ones, older than his own people.

  Above him in the crowded winter sky, Cernunnos blazed, the horned hunter of his people’s tradition. When he was a young man first paying court to Breca, Arto had told him Cernunnos was his patron. Though he’d outgrown his childhood allegiance to the Celtic pantheon, no Roman god had ever been able to quite vanquish the hunter in his affection

  His heart lurched. Somewhere up here on the hilltops there was a place the Druids held sacred, a grove of old oaks. And Yule was fast approaching with its own ceremonies and observances. The gods forbid Favonius was heading for the sacred grove! The Romans tolerated Celtic religious practice in their empire, mostly, he’d decided, because they didn’t take their own gods seriously. But he knew how fine the line that practitioners of the old ways walked in this occupied Britannia.

  They were very close to the boundary of his territory. Over the ridge lay the land of the Belgae, a tribe no bigger than his own, but no friend either, only an uneasy ally. One that had sided with the Iceni and the Trinovantes and lost when the Second Augusta crushed Boudicca’s revolt.

  The sacred grove lay somewhere ahead. Now he smelled wood smoke and saw the pale yellow flicker of flames ahead on the ridge. And men, clumped around it, huddling in their cloaks. Coming closer, he saw it was just an ordinary cookfire. Beyond it, a small ruined hut. Firelight struck a gleam from an unsheathed gladius. The men were legionaries, not Druids. Relieved he let out breath in a whuff.

  The men looked up as their centurion rode into the circle of the firelight.

  Just out of the firelight’s reach, Togidubnus saw a man slumped against a tree trunk to which he’d been tied. The tribune, Didius, dismounted and strode over. Drawing his gladius, he lifted the man’s chin with its tip so the light revealed his features.

  “Do you know this man?” Favonius asked. He leaned in the saddle to watch Togidubnus’s face.

  He nudged Stormfellow forward. The prisoner was filthy, bedraggled as though he’d crawled through mud, his tunic torn and one shoe lost.

  “Name yourself, Spy!” the tribune said.

  The man looked up his expression sullen. “Ask him!” He tipped his head toward Togidubnus.

  He shook his head. Not Regni. “I don’t know him.”

  “Tarvos!” the man said. “Son of Hamesus.”

  Memory blossomed at the sound of the man’s voice. The great queen – sorely mistreated. His own ancestors had come from the same land. A distant relative. Yes. But Boudicca had become an outlaw. Like his father and grandfather, he understood the wisdom of not opposing Rome. He remembered the clash and thunder of battle, the smell of horse sweat and horse shit, spilled blood, vomit – bodies of Roman and Iceni alike ground into the mud under the war-chariots’ wheels. And he saw in memory this man’s face, on the wrong side in the battle.

  “How did you get away?”

  “Not like a traitor, in triumph with our Roman masters!”

  The tribune struck the prisoner hard across the mouth. Blood flowed.

  He turned to the centurion. “What’s the charge against this man?”

  “We received word he was gathering a band of malcontents here to plan an assault on the garrison in Noviomagus.”

  “He’s yours. Take him in.”

  “He’s a Celt. I’m giving him over to you,” the centurion said. “Examine the matter further and deal with him as you find just.”

  Planning to attack the garrison was treason. If he dealt leniently with the prisoner, he’d betray the Romans. If he dealt Roman justice on the man, he’d make mortal enemies out of the Belgae and probably his own tribe, too. The legion held the power; Favonius didn’t need to demonstrate it. The centurion had arranged for him to walk into a trap.

  “It’s a Roman matter. You don’t need me.”

  “The prisoner’s a Belgae princeling,” the centurion said. “You’re the local power that should be taking care of stability in the region.”

  Why would Favonius do this? He remembered a warning his father had given him long ago, No friendships survive a Roman agenda.

  The centurion smiled. “The emperor made you king, after all.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “This letter came for you,” Niko said, holding out the thin tablet.

  Antonia shook her hair free of the band she’d used to contain it while she surveyed the garden – such as it was. Yesterday’s cold rain had beaten down the few plants she recognized, the ones whose late blooms she’d hoped to bring inside to enjoy. She held her hand out for the letter. Far too soon for an answer from Rome. Who would’ve written to her?

  “The messenger brought it down from Noviomagus,” Niko added.

  She opened it. The handwriting was spidery, hesitant, as if its maker was not used to the work of putting ideas down on a tablet. Not a male hand. She tasted disappointment and relief together that the letter had not come from the centurion. That would be a dangerous game and she didn’t know if she was ready to play it.

  And not a pretty cursive, either, so not written by someone’s household scribe. The spiky smell of the carbon mixed with gum arabic in the ink prickled her nose. She took the letter over to the couch and sat down. The message was brief.

  To my dear friend Antonia Plautina, from an admiring and solicitous Gracila Favonia. Do visit this afternoon! Bring the child. We shall indulge ourselves in talk enjoyable to women!

  The centurion’s woman. Would he be there? The possibility made her heart race.

  Tiberius had come home in the middle of the night after being gone a whole day. The clatter of horse hooves on the gravel path and harsh voices raised outside had roused her from sleep. He was either still sleeping or he’d gone away again. In any case, she didn’t need his permission to go to Noviomagus.

  “See to it that Lucia wears a clean tunic.” She rose from the couch.

  Niko looked at her steadily but didn’t move. One of these days she’d have to find a nurse for her daughter. The Greek grew rebellious in the role, ever since she’d berated him for allowing the child to go out alone and nearly drown herself. But the native women didn’t seem to want to work in Tiberius’s house any more. They were more stubborn about it than the men. She suspected it had to do with the wife who’d been displaced. That was unfair, because it wasn’t her doing. She’d have been content if the woman had remained, a kind of older relative, or even friend. It would be pleasant to have a friend.

  “Oh, I’ll do it myself!”

  “Your daughter is hurting too,” he said. “You should think about that.”

  * * *

  Lucia was excited at the prospect of riding in front of her mother on Tiberius’s sturdy little mare, Snowmark. For once, she didn’t fidget as Antonia dressed her and combed her hair.

  Unable to deal with Niko’s stubborn refusal to continue in the r
ole she’d assigned him, Antonia had found a young Regni boy cleaning the stable to accompany them. No Roman woman would go into town unaccompanied! The servant situation bothered her; it was almost as bad as the last days at the family estate in Pyrgi when everyone had been freed or let go.

  Niko came back from the stable, leading the mare. He was frowning about something.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a door beside the main one into the stable. I think it leads to a storage chamber for hay or oats. It usually stands wide open. Today it’s closed and heavily barred on the outside.”

  “What’s that to me?”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps we have a guest?”

  “Fine way to treat a guest!” She allowed him to boost her up onto the mare.

  She didn’t want to be any more involved in the intrigues and strategies of her husband’s life than she was forced to be. He handed Lucia up to her, and she kicked the mare lightly to move her forward. The Regni youth walked beside them.

  A strong breeze blew in from the southwest today, carrying the sharp scent of the sea. The sky was mostly blue with patches of cloud, yet the air carried a deep wintry chill. She was glad for the good cloaks of Britanni wool Niko had purchased in Noviomagus.

  She glanced at the fields stretching away from the house, seeing mud-speckled shapes of cattle, a lone Britanni, his own red-checked cloak billowing in the wind, minding the herd. They owned cows, Tiberius said, and apple and pear orchards, as well as many fields, fallow now, that would be planted with crops again in the spring. So they were her cattle too. She hoped no one would ever expect her to know what to do about them. Her father had bred horses, nothing as lowly as cows.

  “That way, Mater,” Lucia said. “Go that way. See the dolphins.”

  “Not today. We’re making a visit.”

  “I want to see the dolphins.”

  “Hush! Maybe there’ll be other children for you to play with.”