of his time with male friends. This soon involved dicing and drinking, though in keeping with his character, he was restrained and wary, which at least saved him losing too much money. Lucilla heard herself say, ‘Well, if it keeps him happy…’ As she said it, she knew everything was all up with her.

Lucilla was following the traditional wives’ habit of slipping the leash, though hardly in the traditional way. While Nemurus thought she was following his prescriptive curriculum, which involved intense study of many, many books of the historian Livy, Lucilla had discovered the erotic love poems of Catullus. These she read all the more joyously because she knew Nemurus would be annoyed.

When she finally defied him and openly refused to read any more Livy, Nemurus let her try Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Lucilla had become a tricky student. ‘That Apollo — what a hunk! Now I’d really like to do his hair!’

‘Be serious.’

‘I am, dear.’ They called one another ‘dear’, instead of risking the intimacy of names. ‘For instance, I know that when a lecher, man or demigod, chases after a girl intending to rape her, she does not get conveniently turned into a tree. She will be raped.’

‘Is that your critical appreciation of Ovid?’

‘I think it’s my appreciation of all poets.’

And people who teach poetry.

You cannot mean that, dear.

‘Anyway,’ snarled Lucilla. ‘Who wants to be a laurel bush?’

Julia died.

She had been ill for a short time, but the situation had been covered up at court, with the usual whispers, hastily closed doors, hurrying feet, and sudden unexplained visits, sometimes at night, from medical practitioners. Even so, her death came unexpectedly. She was twenty-five, little older than Lucilla. Those who had attended her, especially her women, wept and were stricken. Though Lucilla knew Julia only tangentially, she was bonded in her colleagues’ heartbreak.

Domitian was away at the time, either in Germany or Pannonia; there were dark fears how he was going to take this.

Juvenal came nagging, ‘Was it an abortion that went wrong?’

Lucilla was furious.

After Julia’s funeral she withdrew into herself. When Lucilla and Nemurus were in Rome rather than at Alba, officially they lived with his parents. His mother inevitably thought Lucilla too common; she believed Nemurus had an exceptional talent, an opinion he encouraged. The good thing about coming from slave stock was that you had an endless facility for silent insubordination. Lachne had taught Lucilla how to put up with anything and to appear meek, while being insidiously mutinous. But it was no way to live.

Now, citing the needs of her business, Lucilla returned most days to Plum Street, which had always been her refuge. Her husband never came. He liked the fact she had her own money; it saved her making demands on his. He generally enjoyed her connection with the imperial family, which he saw as potentially a useful connection for him. Otherwise, he took absolutely no interest in her work.

The couple remained married, because it was convenient. But increasingly they were leading separate lives.

Nemurus did not accept his fate meekly. As soon as he sensed Lucilla’s growing independence, he had recourse to the Roman husband’s most hackneyed weapon: he accused her of intending to commit adultery. Like many a Roman wife, Lucilla played the wounded innocent. While she dramatically bemoaned her husband’s injustice, she never confessed the truth: that her entire marriage felt to her, and had always felt, like a betrayal of her feelings for the lost Gaius Vinius.

17

It had rained all day and now there was snow again. ‘Crapping caryatids!’ groaned Gaius Vinius. ‘I have had enough of this.’

Vinius, not dead. Vinius, utterly depressed and irritable.

His head hurt. The ache was at last diminishing slightly, so he thought he would escape brain damage, although when he first regained consciousness he had self-diagnosed, in the absence of any medical aid, that he had suffered concussion and permanent harm was possible. More likely, he would simply go mad trying to endure life as a captive. The boredom and claustrophobia were dire.

What in the world could be worse than to be stuck in an isolated mountain-girt, barbarian land on the wrong side of the frontier, a thousand miles from home, never knowing if or when they might be released, or whether anybody of their own even knew they were there?

They thought nobody did know.

The prisoners taken at Tapae, a mere handful of Roman survivors, had been picked up and transferred in crude carts to a half-deserted citadel whose name they were not told. They were dumped in a dilapidated compound on a small hillside terrace, over twenty men crammed into space once built for one family. Their shelter comprised a couple of clay-floored rotten wattle huts that were too grim even to be pigsties, though their stink was distinctly animal. This was to be their home indefinitely.

If the men had realised how many years it would be, how many years before any chance of rescue, they would have given up. All that kept them going was that the Dacians neither killed them nor made slaves of them. Dark stories were told of Dacians sacrificing defeated enemies to their warrior gods and hanging up armour as trophies in trees; these Romans had lost their weapons and valuables but were spared. It had to mean they were hostages, and for hostages there must always be a glimmering mirage, that thin possibility which they must never see as false: belief in returning to safety one day.

Some died. There would be no return for them.

They were all going to die, of dirt, disease and dismal despair, unless someone made an effort to preserve their health and sanity. Vinius had realised this in the first weeks, around the time he slowly ceased feeling nothing but distraught over losing his centurion and the battle, the time when he knew he would have to start fighting for his own survival, which at least was what Gracilis would have done and what he would want Vinius to do.

The prisoners were an assortment from several legions. Numbers were few, though as time passed, Vinius picked up signals from occasional Dacians who did communicate; he suspected there were others held elsewhere. None in his group were officers. Vinius was the only Praetorian; moreover, he had been a centurion’s beneficarius. So, once he hauled himself out of his initial misery, he tried to pull everyone together. Vinius had to assume leadership. He must do what Gracilis would have done, what the mystic voice of Gracilis was even now instructing: rally them, keep up their spirits, drag them through this ordeal however long it lasted, find a way to co-exist with their captors, look for ways to escape but never try anything stupid.

They agreed. None had the energy to resent him; none wanted to take charge themselves. Anyway, he was a Guard — so they may as well let Vinius do it. If there was any trouble, he could take the blame.

‘Right. We have to take care of ourselves. Scrupulous hygiene, as far as we can manage — ’ There were mountain streams and they were allowed to collect water. ‘Anything we can do to keep mentally alert. Just don’t ask me to tell you bedtime stories. Daily exercise.’ They did press-ups and lunges, and after some months acquired an extremely old, unwanted horse, too far gone even for eating, which they all learned to ride. The Dacians let them keep the horse because, as Vinius remarked, there was no way twenty-three of them were going to escape on him. It was like some horrible team-bonding task in the new recruits’ manual, something the old general Corbulo might have come up with: get out of Dacia without being killed in the mountains, using only one arthritic horse, four billycans with holes in them and a set of panpipes… The panpipes were whittled by Vinius; once he had finished, the others made it plain that, officer or not, he should refrain from playing them.

He knew how to make himself even more unpopular: ‘I expect you to be clean-living.’

‘What, no singing “The Girl I Kissed at Clusium” while we’re having a wank?’

‘That’s up to you. I meant no humming of “The Boy I Kissed at Colonia Agrippinensis” while you’re buggering your tent-mate for the ninety-fifth time.’

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