“In relationships. In reproduction. I’m talking about the demands of survival, Lucia. Do you think the Order would have lasted so long if it had allowed its members to follow the random dictates of love ?”
Lucia didn’t understand any of this, but she felt a deep horror creep over her.
Pina, too, looked shocked. “You shouldn’t be saying this, Rosa,” she said in a small voice.
Rosa sat back. “It’s the last time I will allow you out of the Crypt. The last time, do you hear? If I have to bell you like a cat …”
Lucia, released, turned away.
If she tried hard she could imagine the warmth of his hand on hers. When she thought about that she could feel heat in her lips and eyes, and a hot tautness across her breasts, and her skin tingled under her clothes, and there was a deep burning at the pit of her belly. In the dismal, silent interior of this car, despite the cold severity of Rosa beside her, she had never felt more alive. Rosa hadn’t won.
And she still had Daniel’s card in her bag.
Chapter 24
As their long sea journey drew to a close, despite the tension between them, Regina and Brica crowded together at the prow of the small ship, hungry for their first glimpse of Italy.
The early-morning air was already hot and dense, and the salt smell of the sea was exotic. The crew called coarsely to each other as they pursued their bewildering tasks, adjusting the ship’s green sails as it approached the shore. This was just a small cargo craft dedicated to transporting jewelry, fine pottery, and other expensive and low-bulk wares, and the ship creaked as it rolled. But to the women, now veterans of an ocean crossing from Britain, the tideless rolling of the Mediterranean was as nothing.
It was Brica who saw the lighthouse first. “Ah, look …” It loomed over the horizon long before the land itself was visible, a fist of concrete and masonry thrusting defiantly into the misty air. Soon afterward a great concrete barrier came into view, cutting across the horizon. This was the wall of the harbor, one of two huge jutting moles. The ship was steered easily toward the break between the moles, and sailed past the lighthouse.
The lighthouse was centuries old. It had been constructed, like the port itself, by the Emperor Claudius, who had conquered Britain. But though its concrete fascia was weathered and cracked, it surely stood as solid and intimidating as the day it was constructed. As she passed, Regina could see how it was founded on a sunken ship, whose outlines were dimly visible through the murky, litter-strewn water. The story was that this great vessel had been built to transport an obelisk from Egypt, and then filled with concrete and deliberately sunk. The huge old lighthouse loomed over the ship, utterly dwarfing it. But the crew seemed oblivious to its presence, and Regina tried not to cower.
Inside the harbor, the water was a little calmer — but this harbor was so vast it was itself like an enclosed sea. Ships of all sizes cut across its surface. Most of them were wallowing cargo ships, decorated with the dark green of the imperial navy: grain transporters, scores arriving here every day from Italy and Africa. The seamanship required to maneuver these huge ships in such cramped and crowded conditions impressed Regina, and there was much mocking rivalry between the crews as they hailed each other across the narrow strips of water between their vessels.
Regina’s ship passed through this crowd and approached another concrete-walled entrance at the far end of the harbor. When they passed through, Regina found herself in yet another harbor, much smaller, a landlocked inner basin. It was octagonal in form and was lined with wharves and jetties, where ships nuzzled to unload their cargo. This harbor within a harbor had been constructed by the emperors to provide a port close to Rome capable of taking large oceangoing ships in all conditions. A canal had been cut from here to the Tiber, and grain and other goods were carried on smaller freshwater vessels to Rome itself. The engineering was mighty. This inner harbor alone could have swallowed the whole of Verulamium or Durnovaria, and the port complex would probably have drowned Londinium. But it was necessary; the flow of grain into the city could not be allowed to fail, no matter what the weather.
As the ship nuzzled toward a jetty, Regina tried to ignore the fluttering in her stomach. Already, long before reaching Rome itself, she was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all. Here in this bright, liquid Italian air, Britain seemed a remote, murky, underpopulated, undeveloped place, and everything she knew, all she had built, seemed petty indeed.
But she did not have time to be overwhelmed. She had a tablet on which was scrawled an address: that of Amator, the rogue son of Carausias, the last legacy of that stubborn old man. That address was where she would begin her Roman adventure — and where, she thought coldly, Amator would begin to pay back the debt he owed her.
Standing at the prow of the ship she raised herself to a fuller height. As Artorius had said, once this great city had been overwhelmed by the Celtae, her people. And indeed, only decades before, it had suffered its first sacking at barbarian hands in eight centuries. I have nothing to fear of Rome, she thought. Let Rome fear me.
They landed safely, and their few scraps of luggage were briskly off-loaded. Regina’s first steps were unsteady. After so many days at sea, it felt odd to walk on a surface that did not swell under her. The land behind the wharves was crowded with warehouses and manufactories. Great machines, powered by slave muscles, were used to off-load the grain into giant granaries. Spanish oil, Campanian wine, and many other goods came in amphorae, carried by dockworkers who filed back and forth from ship to shore like laboring ants. The bustle, noise, and sense of industry was overwhelming.
There were plenty of negotiatores to be found at the quaysides. It did not take Regina long to secure a carriage that would take them to Rome itself.
The road to Rome cut across marshy farmland, studded with olive groves and red-tiled roofs of villas. The road was crowded with pedestrians: great files of people plodded to and from the port, their heads and shoulders and backs laden with crates and sacks. Carriages, chariots, and horseback riders picked their way through the crowds. They passed strings of way stations, and vendors competed to sell food, water, footwear, and clothing to the passing traffic.
Regina checked the contents of her purse. “That’s nearly the last of Ceawlin’s money.”
Brica peered down glumly at the throng. “I hope you thought it was worth it,” she said coldly.
“Yes, it was worth it,” Regina said. “It was worth it because we had no choice. Listen to me, Brica. I’m not sure what waits for us in Rome. It will surely be another challenge — as great as I faced on the hill farm when you were born, or when we were taken to Artorius’s dunon. We will overcome it. But we must support each other. And we must lance this festering sore between us. Remember how I saved you from the Saxon. I risked my life—”
“Yes, you saved me from the Saxon. But that was long ago, far away. I don’t know what’s happened to you since then, Mother. I don’t know what you have become.”
“Brica—”
“I am your daughter, your only child,” Brica said tonelessly. “I am the future, for you. I am everything. That’s how it should be. Perhaps that was once true. But you, you have destroyed my life, bit by bit. You took me away from Bran, and then from Galba, who made me happy, and with whom I wanted to have children of my own. And then you sold me to that pig of a negotiatore.”