“My old nurse gave it to me. She was from the tribe of the Garamantes.”
“The desert people,” Julia Domna said. “Did she come with you to Rome?”
“I think she died of grief rather than leave her home,” I said quietly.
It was the first time I had ever admitted my thoughts, even to myself. You hide things from yourself because they are too painful to see. Nurse had been the only mother I had really known, closer than my own mother. But she was enslaved. She had become my wet nurse because she had breasts full of milk, for a baby who was not me. Who did she secretly think of when she fed me? Was there a small grave that she did not want to leave behind her? Every so often, in Leptis Magna as well as in other cities, the bodies of those too old and weak and poor to live were pulled from the sea. An old woman, penniless and hunted by the law, could only disappear into death.
Julia Domna looked at me, her head on one side. I wondered what she hid from herself. I thought of Caracalla and Geta, twitching their tails and muttering curses like rival tomcats.
“A brave woman then,” she said. “Who died with honour despite being a slave.”
She must have made up her mind on that carriage ride, because when we stepped out at the palace, she announced it as a fact.
“Your daughter is too young to marry,” she said to my mother. “She can come to Britain with us, and when we return to Rome I will arrange a husband for her. She can do better than Publius.”
My mother opened her mouth, then closed it again. There was nothing she could say. It was not a question, it was a statement by the most powerful woman in the world.
“You are favoured,” she said to me when we were alone. “The Empress herself takes an interest in you.”
Yes, I thought, as the eagle takes an interest in the chicken!
I told my father the truth about what had happened.
“You did the right thing,” he said with a frown. “I am disappointed in Publius.”
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” I begged him. “They would kill him – and Christians don’t eat human flesh. He said they don’t, and I believe him!”
He smiled sadly. “No, they don’t eat human flesh. But they are required to believe through faith, not through the arguments of philosophy. And that is a dangerous path, which leads far from Rome.”
That night, I went to my apartments and removed my rich clothes and my jewels. I undid my tight, uncomfortable hairstyle. Outside my window, I could see one of the many pools filled with fish, flicking their tails, swimming back and forth, without ever being able to find a way out of their prison. Water and light rippled on white marble.
When I had changed into simpler clothes, I sat down at the window. In the light of the setting sun, I took off Nurse’s amulet. I had only ever taken it off to change the string before. The prayer itself was contained inside a hollow reed, sealed with red wax.
I dug my nail into the wax. The reed cracked open. There was no going back now, although my chest felt tight and painful. I broke open the reed and a thin scrap of papyrus came curling out. There was faded writing on it. I hadn’t been sure I would understand it, for the priests of Isis used strange symbols sometimes, but I was lucky: this prayer was written in Greek. I read it carefully.
It was what Nurse had said it was – a prayer to keep a baby safe from harm. But it was not a prayer for me.
It was not my name written on the papyrus. It was a stranger’s.
Now I knew the truth. It had never been meant for me at all. I was second-best. All my life, I had been wearing a good-luck charm that Nurse had bought not for me but for her own baby, who had died just before I was born. The dead child had left me an inheritance of her mother’s milk – and this amulet.
We must treat bad news and good news exactly the same, I said to myself silently. I looked up and out of the window at the sun setting over the Palatine Hill. Tears pricked behind my eyes, but I thought of all the Stoic philosophers I had ever read. What would Marcus Aurelius say? After all, we are all going to die soon, so what is the sense of weeping? It helped, in that it made everything seem so miserable that I couldn’t decide what to cry about first, so in the end I didn’t cry at all. Instead, I watched blankly through the window as a slave came out of the shadows, carrying a long net, which he dipped unhurriedly into the gilded water to snare a fish for the Emperor’s dinner.
11.
Figs in Winter
The wind rustles the long grass and a distant lonely bird calls. It’s cold and quiet and so, so far from Rome.
I’ve talked myself into the past, and it seems strange to me to think that Britain has been my home for twenty years and more now. People I love have been born here; people I love have died here. Is that what makes a place a home? Or will home always be the place I grew up in, the city I will never go back to – Leptis Magna?
I could do it. If I really wanted to, I could go back. Just a few weeks and I would be standing on the quay at Leptis Magna, the sun warming my body through to the bone. I would be looking up at the lighthouse’s trail of smoke, listening to the old familiar accents
