Marina nodded to a quern stone, set up in the corner of the room. “We need flour. I’ll bake some bread later. Do you know how to use the stone? …”
And so Regina, under Marina’s instructions, sat on the floor and began to grind wheat. The familiar, eternal smells and sounds of the kitchen soon immersed her, and as she worked at the stone, her muscles tingling with the unaccustomed effort, she felt her obsessive thoughts dissolve.
She hardly noticed when the tears started.
Marina did, though. The servant came to embrace her, patting her back, making sure she didn’t make a mess of the few gritty handfuls of flour she had managed to produce.
The next day Carausias took Regina for a walk through the town. They were to go shopping in the Forum.
They set off in bright midmorning — it was a cold, clear, crisp October day — but Carausias warned Regina she had to be alert. “You were protected in your villa, and even on the Wall. But in the town it’s different. People don’t behave very nicely. There are plenty who’ll slit your purse — or slit your throat for their trouble …”
Regina listened. But she had found her way around the Thin Town, and had endured similar warnings from Aetius since the age of seven.
The town, surrounded by its walls, was shaped like a lozenge. It was crisscrossed by a grid pattern of streets, dominated by the road from the north that passed through the town toward Londinium in the south. A great arch spanned the Londinium road. Regina stared at this monument of carved marble, more ornate than any single structure she had seen in her young life. But ivy and lichen clung to its face, obliterating the inscription on the lintel, and a bored-looking crow hopped about on its guano-streaked carapace.
Near the arch the road passed close by a very strange building. It was an open space bounded by a semicircular wall several times her height, with steps leading up to its parapet. It was, said Carausias, the theater. When she asked if she could climb the steps, he agreed, smiling indulgently.
The steps were wooden, and were old and broken. At the parapet she found herself looking down into a bowl. Sloping terraces were covered by semicircular rows of wooden seats, now broken and stained. At the front was a stage like a little temple, fronted by four slim columns. The only performers on the stage right now were mice, a pair of which scuttled from pillar to pillar.
Carausias followed, wheezing a little with the exertion. “You could seat four hundred people in here. And the plays — some of them went over my head, but I liked the fabula togata, the comedies, like The Accusation and What You Will. And then there were the farces — my late wife was especially fond of The Vine Gatherers — how we laughed at that one, where the fellow with the grape basket falls over, and …”
None of this meant much to Regina. She only knew what a play was through her readings with her grandfather. The theater was full of rubbish, a compost of rotting food waste and rubble and smashed pottery and even what looked like the bloated corpse of a donkey, all littered by the dead leaves of autumn. The garbage was rising like a slow tide up the bank of seats, and when the wind turned, a stench of rot hit her.
Carausias sighed, plucked her sleeve, and led her down the stairs.
They cut down a side street, heading for the Forum. This street was lined with shops. They were long, narrow buildings, set very close together, with workshops and dwellings in the rear sections. Peering inside, Regina recognized a butcher’s store, a carpenter, and a metalworker; the butcher’s was doing the briskest business. But several of the shops were closed up.
Carausias said regretfully, “Here, only a few years back, you could buy the finest pottery — imported if you want, even Samian, but the stuff from the west country and the north was just as good and a lot more affordable. Now you can’t get new pots no matter what you pay; we just have to make do and mend, until the Emperor sorts himself out.” He eyed her. “What about you, Regina? Have you thought how you’d like to occupy yourself when you’re older? Perhaps you could learn pottery. I bet this shop could be bought for a song …”
Regina had no idea how pottery was made, but imagined it must involve sticky messes of clay and a lot of hard work. She said politely, “I don’t think I’d be enough of an artist for that, Carausias.”
They reached the Forum. It was an open square, crowded with stalls of canvas and wood. People thronged, buying and selling, immersed in a cloudy stink of spices, meat, vegetables, and animal dung. Chickens ran clucking, chased by grimy-faced children.
But around this melee the Forum was surrounded on three sides by small temples and colonnaded walkways. And on the fourth side was a great hall, constructed of brick, flint, and mortar, and roofed with red tile. It loomed over the rest of the town. Regina gaped. Aside from the Wall itself she had never seen anything built on such a scale.
Carausias gently tucked his finger under her chin and closed her mouth. “Now, you must be careful, for if the villains see you are distracted—”
“Is it a temple?”
“No — although the Basilica does host a shrine to the Aedes, the tribal god, as well as shrines to the Christ and the Emperor. Look — can you read the inscription up there?”
She squinted, trying to make out the chipped Latin markings: “TO THE EMPEROR TITUS CAESAR VESPASIAN, SON OF THE DEIFIED VESPASIAN…”
“This is the Basilica. It is here that the town council meets, that the court settles disputes, that offices of tax and census operate — there are schoolrooms, too.”
Under the imperial administration, the towns had been the center of local government. Nowadays, though the tax system had pretty much imploded after the rebellion during Constantius’s reign, the local landowners kept up the court system and were discussing ways to raise levies to keep up the town’s amenities, like the sewers, the baths, and the Basilica itself, which were slowly falling into disrepair. These would all be temporary measures, of course, Carausias continued to insist, until the Emperor resolved his difficulties.
“But people ought to show a little more civic responsibility,” he complained. “Nowadays people will sink endless amounts of money into their villas or town houses, while they let the sewers of Verulamium go to ruin. There has always been a tension in your Roman between civic responsibility and a veneration of the family, living and dead. In times of hardship he retreats to the family, you see. But how does he think the soldiers who protect him will be paid, if not for taxes, and how will taxes be collected, if not for the towns? Eh, eh? And that’s why I pay for keeping up sewers and water pipes and all the rest. I know where my interests lie …”
Regina wasn’t much interested in this.
Carausias and Regina moved through the Forum, checking the stalls. They were particularly seeking spices, olive oil, and above all pottery. But they found little but local produce. Much of the commerce was conducted in kind — meat for vegetables, a bit of secondhand pottery for some shoe nails — though some people, including Carausias, used handwritten scrips.
The fruits and vegetables on display looked poor to Regina. She fingered a bunch of spindly, discolored carrots. Carausias said dismissively, “You get folk from the town moving out into fields not tilled since their great-grandfathers were alive. They haven’t the first idea. And this is the result …” Regina put down the carrots guiltily. They had come from a stall manned by a thin woman with sallow, dirty skin, and protruding teeth. A swollen-bellied child clung to her leg.