Pina smiled. “Why should we care, Daniel Stannard? Have you a habit of bothering girls in the park?”

“No — no. It’s just—” He turned to Lucia. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

Pina laughed. “That’s your best line?”

Lucia said, “Hush, Pina.”

Daniel said, “I mean it. At the Pantheon — about a week ago, I think. I remember seeing you — I’m sure it was you — in the colonnade …”

“I was there,” Lucia said.

Daniel hesitated. “I kept wondering if I’d see you again.” He turned to Pina defiantly. “Yes, I know it’s corny, but it’s the truth.”

Pina tried to stay stern, but she laughed. She muffled it with her hand.

Tentatively Daniel sat on the bench, next to Lucia. “So — you’re sisters, right?”

“We’re related, yes,” said Pina.

“The lady you were with last week — who was that, your mother?”

“An aunt,” said Pina.

“Kind of,” Lucia said, and she was rewarded with a glare from Pina.

Pina said, “And you say you’re a student?”

“Of politics, yes. My father’s a diplomat here, with the American embassy. He’s been stationed here for six years. He brought over the family to continue our schooling. I arrived age eleven …”

And so you are seventeen, Lucia thought. “Your language is good,” she said.

“Thank you … My school was international, but most of the classes were in Italian. What do you do?”

“She’s still at school,” Pina snapped. “After that, the family business.”

He shrugged. “Which is?”

“Genealogy. Record keeping. It’s complicated.”

Complicated, yes, thought Lucia. Complicated like a web in which I’m tangled. And even the little you have just been told about me isn’t true. For I am lined up for a new destiny — not genealogy or record keeping — something dark and heavy.

She looked at Daniel. He had large, slightly watery blue eyes and a small upturned mouth that looked full of laughter. He has already become at ease in two separate countries, she thought, while I have spent my life in a hole in the ground. She had never thought of it that way before, but it was true. Suddenly she longed to have this boy’s freedom.

In a silent moment of communication, she felt her inchoate emotions, of confusion and frustration, pulse through her body, and surely into her face, her eyes. Help me, she thought. Help me.

His blue eyes widened with surprise and dismay.

“We have to go,” Pina said hurriedly. She got to her feet and grabbed Lucia’s arm, pulling her upright. Before she knew what was happening Lucia was marched off along the circular path around the lake, toward one of the roads that cut through the park. As she walked Pina started texting urgently.

Daniel, startled, grabbed his books and clambered to his feet. “Your sister is kind of ferocious,” he said, stumbling after Lucia.

“She’s not my sister.”

“Let me see you again.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just to talk.”

“I can’t.”

“The Piazza Navona,” he said. “Tomorrow at three.” Pina’s pace had picked up almost to a run, and Daniel stopped chasing them.

Lucia looked back.

“I’ll be there every day,” he called. “At three, every day. Come when you can.”

When they reached the Piazza le Flaminio, outside the park, a car was waiting for them.

Pina bundled Lucia inside. “Lucia, what were you thinking? He’s a contadino. What did you want with him?”

“Something. Nothing,” said Lucia defiantly. “I just wanted to talk to him. Aren’t I supposed to be learning about outsiders?”

Pina leaned toward her. “You aren’t,” she said heavily, “supposed to be inviting them into your knickers.”

“But I wasn’t — I didn’t mean—”

“Then what did you mean?”

“I don’t know.” Lucia buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Pina, I’m confused. Don’t tell, Pina. Don’t tell!”

Chapter 22

Early the next spring Artorius traveled to Londinium. He asked Regina to travel with him. She in turn insisted that Brica accompany her.

At first Brica resisted the trip, even daring to refuse bluntly, for Regina’s opposition to her liaison with Galba was now obvious. With patience and pressure Regina won her over. But the journey to the east along the old roads, with the two of them riding side by side in an open chariot just behind Artorius and his party, was silent and sullen.

The party approached a gateway, near a fort in the northwestern corner of the city’s wall. The wall remained intact, though here and there it had undergone hasty repairs with great blocks of stone, no doubt scavenged from abandoned buildings. The fortress itself was manned, though not by troops answerable to the Emperor. Remarkably, many of the soldiers were Saxon mercenaries. According to Artorius, Saxon defectors from the Londinium garrison had played a big part in sparking the unrest and revolt among the wider Saxon population, once Vortigern had allowed them their toeholds in the east.

With the payment of a nominal toll, the party passed through the gate, and they were granted their first views of the city itself.

North of the dock area by the river, the center was a place of monumental buildings, many of which would have put Verulamium’s best to shame. There were temples, bathhouses, triumphal arches, and great statues of copper and bronze set on columns. Once, it was said, the center had been dominated by a basilica greater than any of these survivors, but that had been long demolished. Regina’s eye was drawn by stranger buildings, like nothing in Verulamium: blocks of tenements, some three or four stories high, in which the less splendid inhabitants of the city had once lived, each in a small cubicle. They looked oddly like ships, stranded on the hillsides of Londinium.

Brica, child of a hillside farm to whom the dunon of Caml was a metropolis, was subdued to wide-eyed silence.

But as they made their way through the city, Regina saw that most of the public buildings showed signs of neglect. The amphitheater, a bowl of rubble, had been turned into a market. One bathhouse had been systematically demolished, robbed of its stone: a child in a colorless smock clambered over the rubble, and Regina wondered if she had any idea what this strange, alien ruin had once been for. Most of the big tenement blocks had been abandoned, too. Evidently only a fraction of the number of people who had once dwelled in the city remained, and there was no need for them to cram themselves into the little cubicles anymore. Away from the central area, indeed, the city seemed depopulated. The buildings had been demolished or collapsed, and large areas were given over to pasture, even within the walls.

Still, Regina heard the muttering of Artorius’s men as they peered up at the great buildings, and compared them with the huddled farmers who now raised their cattle in their shade. The city was the work of giants, they said, who must have passed away a hundred generations ago.

And there was still prosperity here. Among the ruins were town houses of recent construction, well maintained and brightly painted, their red-tiled roofs gleaming in the sunlight. Perhaps these belonged to negotiatores — traders and brokers. The more crowded streets close to the Forum were full of men and women in Roman garb, tunics and cloaks, and Regina stared at these reminders of her own vanished past. But most wore the trousers and woolen cloaks of the Celtae, or had the flowing hair and long mustaches of Germans.

As the imperial writ had declined over the rest of the diocese, Londinium had drawn in on itself, sheltering like a hedgehog behind its defensive walls. So far it had weathered the Saxon catastrophe that was overwhelming the rest of the country. Even now wealth still flowed through its harbors from trade with the continent; even now you could get rich here. Decayed it may be from its greatest days, but Londinium was still busy, prosperous, bustling, powerful — an arena for the ambitious. And that was why Artorius was here.