Becomes a god? That means when he dies, I realised. But you did not speak of the Emperor’s death in public. People would think you were wishing him dead – perhaps that you were even plotting his death.
“Who was that meant to be?” I asked, to change the subject. I pointed at a man’s figure that stood near to the Emperor. He was also carved in a toga, the folds of stone flowing down. But his head had been sheared off, as if by an axe blow.
My father sounded uncomfortable for the first time.
“Oh. . . that was Plautianus. He was a childhood friend of the Emperor, too.”
“Did you know him? It’s a pity his statue has been damaged. Will it be fixed?”
“I doubt it,” said my father. Then, as if wanting to speak of something different, he said: “How do you think the stones of the arch stay up?”
I had never wondered that before. Now I found myself worrying, because I couldn’t see how they were supported.
“Some sort of wire inside. . .?” I suggested, though I could not imagine what wire could be strong enough to hold up stone. Some of my mother’s jewellery was made of gold wire but it was easy to crumple even just with clumsy fingers.
He shook his head.
I looked and looked. I felt as if there must be a secret in plain view.
After a moment, he told me the secret. “They hold each other up. Do you see? The force of each one holds its neighbours up.”
“So if one were to be taken out. . .”
“The whole arch would fall down.”
As we walked away I craned my neck to look back at the arch. I think my father meant me to be impressed at the skill of the engineers and I was, but I was now more worried that one day, one of the stones would be removed.
My mother was not a fan of the new Leptis Magna.
“I liked it better before,” she grumbled quietly, when I came home with stories of how magnificent our new city was.
“I love it right now!” I said proudly. “Soon we will be just like Rome.”
“Daddy’s girl,” said my father, and ruffled my hair.
It was true, I was a Daddy’s girl. I read the books he told me to: Virgil and Cicero and Marcus Aurelius the philosopher-emperor, and even some books that my mother wasn’t to know about, like Galen, the famous doctor. My lyre playing was best not spoken of (or heard), but my geometry was getting better and I was proud of knowing Latin and Greek as well as Punic.
“Now,” my mother would say, if I ever sounded a bit too pleased with myself, “you have nothing left to do but find a husband who will put up with all this learning.”
That always stopped my mouth quickly, because I could never imagine wanting to marry – even though, on the day the news came, I was already fourteen years old.
That day, I had just finished my morning lessons. My tutor – a Greek who taught me and a few other girls together, for a discounted rate – was putting away his writing materials, and my friend Livia and I were playing with the kittens that had been born that spring. They were just old enough to play now with strings and a little ball, chasing it, patting and padding it, and sometimes they would try to catch the fish that swam in the small pool in the impluvium where the rainwater collected in the spring. My mother was out shopping, and my father was giving a public demonstration of surgery in front of the house. We could hear his voice droning on, like bees around flowers. It was sunny, and the ground was warm under our bare feet. Now I often wake up dreaming of that sunshine, crying for it. I hunger for it the way I hunger for my mother’s touch.
My old nurse was keeping an eye on us, and carding wool, combing and cleaning it as she sat in the shade, her wide lap holding the wool that still smelled of sheep. My mother would later spin the yarn to make clothes for my father and me. Nurse was from the tribe of the Garamantes, the ones who know where the wells and the secret gardens are and how to ride a camel from one side of the waterless desert to the other with only the stars to guide you. She had been enslaved when she was only a girl – not by us, we bought her from a neighbour – and she did not have the faded blue lines that mapped the faces of the other Garamantes women. She would watch them when they were in the market as if she was watching marvellous dreams she longed to enter. Now that she was old, past forty, and I was no longer a child, she wasn’t my nurse any more. Still, I loved her more than my own mother. My mother was not unkind, but she only spoke to me to give me annoying advice or tell me what I was doing wrong. The long hours spent spinning or weaving or doing some other dutiful household task with my mother made me so bored I could have torn my own hair out. With Nurse, I could be sure of someone who would listen and smile no matter what I babbled about. Today, as so often, I was babbling about my mother and how annoying she was.
“My mother is so nervous these days,” I was saying to Livia. “It’s as if she is expecting bad news.”
“Perhaps she is.”
“Well, whether she is or not, she shouldn’t let it show.” Remembering something my father often said, I added, feeling rather smug, “Marcus Aurelius said that we should treat bad news and good news exactly the same—”
“Now, miss, don’t speak ill of your mother, whatever
