Regina grimaced. She had never told her daughter how she, too, had been used by Ceawlin. “I had no choice.”
“There is always a choice. I think your mind has died, or your heart—”
Regina grabbed her by the chin and forced her head around. “Enough. Look at me. ”
Brica resisted, but she had never had her mother’s physical strength. Her head turned, and her eyes, smoky gray like Regina’s, met her mother’s.
Regina said, “Do you think you are the only one who has made sacrifices? You are precious to me — so precious. If I could save you from harm I would. But there is something more precious still, and that is the family. If we had stayed in Britain while Artorius got himself killed posturing on the battlefields of Europe, we would not have survived him for long. And if you had married Galba, your children would have been farmers, their minds dissolving in the dirt, and within two generations, three, they would have remembered nothing of what they once were—”
“But they would exist,” Brica snapped. “ My children. Mother, it was my choice, not yours.” She pulled her face away. “And now you’re looking for your own mother, who abandoned you all those years ago. Whether or not she lives, you are selfish and morbid. Your relationship with your mother no longer matters. You do not matter. All that matters is me, for my womb is not yet dry, like yours. The future is mine—”
“No. The future is the family.” And even you, my beautiful child, Regina thought sadly, are only a conduit to that future.
Regina’s determination was strong, clear, untroubled. She was dismayed, she admitted to herself, by the iron coldness she saw in Brica. It was as if the recent events had crushed the life and warmth out of her — and thoroughly wrecked her relationship with her mother. Well, a lifelong battle with Brica would be hard, but Regina was used to hardships, and to overcoming them.
And it wasn’t as if Brica could get away. Ironically the narrowness of her upbringing on the farmstead and the dunon, against which Regina had always railed, now left her stranded and baffled away from her home ground; Brica couldn’t leave Regina’s side no matter how much she wanted to.
Now they were both distracted, for they approached the city itself.
Ahead, the air was striped with a thick layer of orange-yellow: the cumulative smoke from thousands of fires and lanterns, not yet dispersed in the morning light. On the horizon Regina glimpsed aqueducts, immense structures that strode across the landscape, imposing straight-line geometries of astonishing lengths. There were ten of them, she knew, ten artificial rivers to water a city of more than a million souls. As they neared the city, gaudy mausoleums sprouted beside the roadway. Citizens were allowed to inter bodies only outside the city walls, so routes out of the city became lined with sarcophagi. And around the cemeteries of the rich crowded the remains of the poor, the ashes of cremations stored in amphorae stuck in the ground, only their necks protruding into the air.
“The scale of it, even of their dead, is astounding,” Regina murmured.
Their driver turned to grin at her. He must have been more than sixty years old, and a single tooth stood like a stump in his mouth. He spoke a coarse country Latin she found it hard to make out.
Brica said, “What was that?”
“He welcomed us to the caput mundi. To the head of the world …”
They fell silent, each locked into her own thoughts, as the carriage wound its way along the crowded road.
Rome was dominated by mud brick and red tiles. But at its heart were the Capitoline and Palatine Hills with their great palaces and temples, like a floating island of gleaming marble. Regina thought she glimpsed the curving wall of the Flavian Amphitheater, astoundingly huge, like a house for giants.
But as the carriage approached the center of the city it entered a maze of streets, and the wider view was lost. The closer they got to the center the more crowded the buildings were, and the taller they seemed to grow; they were rickety heaps of wattle, daub, and crimson-red tiles, two, three, four stories high, like unhealthy plants competing for light. In some places these insulae, islands, were so closely packed together that their balconies touched, shutting out the sky altogether. The stink was overwhelming, of rotting sewage, cooking food. And the noise of the city seemed to engulf Regina, a constant clamorous racket. It was the noise of a million people, she thought, a million voices joining into one great unending roar, and as they penetrated deeper into this crowded, unplanned maze, Regina felt as if she were becoming lost in a great formless sea of people.
Brica grew even quieter, receding into herself. Probably, Regina thought, in the last hour her daughter had seen more strangers’ faces than she had seen before in her entire life.
On the driver’s recommendation they were brought to a restaurant. The owner, who happened to be the driver’s brother-in-law, also owned some of the apartments in the block above the restaurant, and the driver had promised he would rent the women a room.
Set on a street crowded with shops, the restaurant occupied the block’s ground floor. It was a low-roofed, well-lit place: people sat on benches at the front, eating snacks and drinking wine as they watched the bustle of the street. Regina glimpsed marble counters on which samples of dishes were displayed, and behind them was a green-lit central atrium, set with more tables.
From the outside the insula actually had an attractive appearance, with its roof of terra-cotta tiles, its stucco facade decorated with tiles and small mosaic images. Balconies of wood and brick projected from each story, and potted plants were set on each one. But the apartments were small and cramped, and got steadily worse as you climbed the stairs. And Regina’s and Brica’s, on the topmost floor, must have been the worst of all.
The windows were covered with sheets of bark. The only furniture was two beds fixed to the wall, some shelving and cupboards, and a few stools and low tables. There was a brazier for heating and an open stove for cooking, appliances Regina immediately vowed she would use sparingly, for she was convinced that they would set the insula and the whole district on fire, and would be the death of them both. Even in this cramped setting their few belongings, homemade at the dunon, looked pathetic and provincial. But Regina unpacked the three matres and set up an improvised lararium in one corner of the room.
Even up here the smells from the restaurant reached them, and soon they were both very hungry. Regina ventured back down the stairs. The menu food was predominantly cooked meat, highly spiced with pepper and fish sauce and garlic — but she didn’t have the money to spare. She went out to the street stalls and bought a little bread and salted meat, and a small pitcher of wine.
While she was gone Brica waited for her, curled up on her couch with her knees tucked into her chest. When Regina returned, Brica didn’t seem to have moved at all.
In their cramped room they ate their bread, trying to ignore the enticing smells from below. Regina left a little of their poor bread and wine for the goddesses of the family, who sat squat in their corner of this strange, unpleasant little room.
In the days that followed, they tried to settle in.
The restaurant had connections to the water supply from the aquifers and to the main sewers. The apartments above did not. Every day you had to fetch your water from a fountain a couple of streets away, where there was always a queue. And every morning you had to carry down your buckets to a cesspit in the insula ’s basement — that was, if you could be troubled to. Some of the insula ’s less sociable inhabitants would store up their waste for days without removing it, until protests from their neighbors about the smell forced them to. And others, lazier still, just threw it out the window, with a cry to warn any hapless passersby below.