ribs. His mind conjured up conflicting visions of his coming meeting with Maeve and he found he could barely remember her face, which placed an icy orb of fear in his belly, yet her eyes were as familiar to him as his own mother’s. How would she be dressed? He remembered the slim form walking away from the temple. Perhaps not so slim; a narrow waist, but her hips and… His mouth went suddenly dry, and he licked his lips and forced the seductive memory from his head. Why did he feel more nervous now than when he had been about to lead the attack on the British hill fort? Was nervous even the correct word? No, it was more than that. He was afraid. Not afraid of dying, or failing, but of disappointing, or of being disappointed. Yet the fear was just as real. It didn’t matter that he had cast eyes on the British girl only once. All that mattered was that he should see her again.
He was not inexperienced with women, but that experience had tended to be with a certain type, or, more correctly, types. There had been servant girls, of course, perhaps prompted by his father — surely not his mother? — who had led him along the delicate path towards maturity. And when he had donned the toga virilis of adulthood his father had taken him into Rome on the obligatory visit to a brothel of the better class, where he had been introduced to delights that made his rough fumblings behind the kitchens somehow inconsequential. Then there had been the army and the soldiers’ women, many of them, readily available but only fleeting erotic experiences untouched by passion or tenderness. For the first time he realized he had never known love.
Lucullus stood smiling in the courtyard in front of the villa, along with a groom who took Valerius’s horse and led it towards the stables. ‘Welcome to my humble house,’ the little Celt said formally, but Valerius could see he was almost dancing with excitement, the way his father had sometimes been when some particularly auspicious guest was about to arrive.
‘You were very kind to invite me to dine with your family,’ he replied, with equal formality. ‘You have a fine estate, Master Lucullus.’
Lucullus waved dismissively, but his smile said he appreciated the compliment. ‘This? This is nothing. The best land is beyond the hill, land my ancestors have cultivated for generations — the gods thank them — and beyond it are my hunting grounds. You are sure you do not hunt? I must tempt you. A fine stag? Or a boar? Surely a boar would be a worthy adversary for a soldier?’
Valerius shook his head, and Lucullus laughed and led him towards the house, chattering about the animals he had hunted and killed. They entered through an arched doorway which led into a hall, where a slave surprised Valerius by ushering him to a bench so that he could remove his sandals and have them replaced by a pair of soft slippers. It was something he would have expected only in the most fashionable houses in Rome and seemed out of place in this rough provincial outpost. He looked up to find Lucullus watching him, seeking his approval, and he smiled his thanks. Suitably shod, he followed his host into a sumptuously furnished room lit by perfumed oil lamps. The room measured around thirty paces by ten and the plastered walls were painted a dramatic deep ochre made more striking by the broad gold horizontal stripe which divided them, and the colourful scenes that took up most of each end of the room. The floor was basic opus signum covered in rugs, apart from the centrepiece, a patterned mosaic of blue, red and white, with the familiar figure of Bacchus at its centre, surrounded by grapevines. Again, Valerius was impressed; clearly Lucullus took his culture seriously enough to lavish considerable expense upon it. Two men and a woman stood talking in front of a marble bust and he felt a sting of disappointment when he realized the woman was not Maeve.
Lucullus introduced them. ‘My cousin Cearan, and his wife Aenid. They are of our northern neighbours, the Iceni.’ Valerius bowed politely. Cearan and Aenid were one of the most striking couples he had ever seen, with looks so similar they might have been brother and sister. Cearan’s features had the perfectly balanced symmetry Valerius remembered from statues of Greek gods, only with a sharper edge. His golden hair fell to his shoulders and his eyes were a startling, delicate blue. Aenid was blessed with her husband’s high cheekbones and full mouth, but she wore her hair long, cascading to the middle of her back. Their clothing somehow managed to bridge the cultural divide between Roman and Briton without offending either; Cearon was in a plain cream tunic and braccae, with a thin gold torc at his throat, while Aenid wore a long dress of pale blue that covered her neck and arms. It took a second glance to realize that they were older than they appeared, probably only a few years younger than their host.
Valerius was still staring at them when Lucullus introduced the second man. ‘Marcus Numidius Secundus,’ he said. ‘Numidius constructed the Temple of Claudius.’ His eyes twinkled as if to say, See, I recognized your interest and this is my gift to you. It seemed that everything with Lucullus came at some sort of price.
Numidius nodded, and Valerius noted that, although he was standing beside Cearan and Aenid, he couldn’t be said to be with them. He held a silver cup in both hands with his arms tight to his sides as if to avoid any inadvertent contact with the two Britons. Dark, watchful eyes peered myopically from a thin, almost malnourished face, but they lit up, indeed almost caught fire, when the engineer realized he had found a fellow Roman citizen. He marched across the room and took Valerius’s right arm like a drowning man grasping at a piece of passing flotsam. ‘Come, Lucullus tells me we have a common passion. You must sit by me.’
He steered Valerius towards a low table at the far end of the room surrounded by comfortable padded benches. Lucullus’s face took on the same fixed smile it had assumed when Petronius mentioned the Brittunculi. ‘Yes, it is time to dine. Cearan, Aenid?’ He ushered the Iceni couple towards the benches, which Valerius noted with a flutter in his stomach numbered six. Lucullus placed Valerius and Numidius on one side of the table, opposite Cearan and Aenid on the other. He took his place to Numidius’s right, leaving the couch next to Valerius vacant.
When they were settled, he called out something in his own language and Valerius though the caught the word Maeve amongst the burst of unintelligible syllables. He looked up, hoping to see the British girl, but Numidius tugged at the sleeve of his tunic.
‘Lucullus tells me you are interested in the temple?’
‘I am interested in all architecture,’ Valerius admitted. ‘I think the Temple of Claudius is a fine example. The workmanship, if not the scale, stands comparison with anything in Rome.’
‘Anything in the Empire,’ the engineer said complacently. ‘I worked to the instructions of the architect Peregrinus, who was sent from Rome by Claudius himself to oversee the construction. We had previously completed the temple in Nemausus together, but this was an altogether different task.’
Valerius nodded politely, torn between genuine interest and hope that Maeve was about to walk into the room and take the seat next to him.
‘It was the foundations, you see,’ Numidius explained in a voice as dry as an empty amphora. ‘The site chosen was entirely inadequate, but they insisted because a shrine to one of the heathen Celtic gods once stood there. Peregrinus did not think it could be done, but I discovered the answer. Foundations so strong they could bear the Capitoline Hill itself. It took two hundred slaves to dig the pits and we had to face them with timber or they would have collapsed on the men working in them. When they were completed we poured mortar by the ton into them, then more in a thick layer over the area between them, so that when the material hardened we had created four huge earth-filled vaults of astonishing strength. Even then, Peregrinus had his doubts until the priests sacrificed a fine bull to Jupiter and predicted the temple would stand for a thousand years.’
Finally.
Today, she wore white, and from the chestnut-brown hair swept into a fashionable pile on her head to the handmade shoes that cradled her delicate, manicured feet she looked every inch a Roman. Her dress was long, the diaphanous material clinging to her body, its folds full of shadows and promises, but it left her shoulders bare and her pale skin shone in the yellow light of the lamps. Valerius noted that she had used powder to turn the healthy glow that flushed her cheeks to a subtle pink, and today her lips were the colour of ripe strawberries. He wondered how old she was and a voice inside his head answered. Eighteen.
XI
Maeve walked into the room at the head of a line of servants and only when they had placed the dishes they carried to her satisfaction did she take her place opposite her father and to Valerius’s left side. He must have eaten, but he would swear he neither saw nor tasted anything placed before him. The murmur of conversation continued, but if a single word was addressed directly to him he did not hear it. She lay so close that his head swam with the scent of the perfumed oils she wore, but frustratingly her face was hidden from him. If he moved his eyes to the left
