“When will it be summer?”
My father and Marcus gaped at me.
“This is summer,” said Marcus.
Then they both burst out laughing. I was right. It had made me sound stupid, and my heart sank at the thought that the sun was never coming back. This might be summer for Britain, I thought, but it was winter for me. Without the sun it could never be anything but winter. But I laughed along with them anyway, because it was good to see my father smiling, even if it was only out of surprise, for the first time since we lost my mother.
We went to a stonemason who worked in a street by the river. He sold tombstones that were already carved with the right portraits: for women, for men and for children. I found myself staring at one that was carved with a whole family group: mother, father and two children. The stonemason followed my gaze.
“Cheaper than having one each,” he explained cheerfully. “You buy it for the first of you to go, and pop the others under the same stone when it’s their time.”
The stone was local stuff and my father worried about it. Was British stone good enough for my mother? Would it last?
“Don’t worry about it,” the stonemason told him. “Fifty years I’ve been doing this work. I’ve never had a memorial fall down yet. This limestone will outlast the Empire!” And he gave it a hefty blow with his dusty hand, as if to prove it.
We took his word for it. We had to, after all. We bought a ready-made tombstone for a woman, and my father dictated a short inscription that the stonemason’s apprentice chiselled onto it.
Dis Manibus: to the spirits of the departed.
Marcia Numidia, who lived 39 years, seven
months and six days. Neptune took her.
She was a good wife and a good mother.
It didn’t seem enough to me, but what else was there to say? The stonemason charged for each letter. I didn’t like the fact that it could be any woman on the stone, but again, we had no choice. Our orders were to accompany the Emperor to Eboracum the very next day. There was no time to get the perfect memorial stone. Nothing was happening the way I had expected it to.
The stone was set up just outside the city walls, and my father poured a libation in front of it and we said a prayer.
I closed my eyes and prayed before the memorial in the cold wind of a strange land that still felt unsteady beneath my feet. Please, gods, be kind to her spirit.
“Camilla! Camilla!”
Mother was calling me, her voice high and urgent. She stood by a spring, which gushed water over bare, cold, grassy British hills. But the water was frozen and there was ice on the rocks.
“Ma!”
She stretched out her arms to me, and I ran towards her. But as soon as I threw my arms around her, she vanished like smoke or mist. I fell forwards – and woke with a start.
The light was all wrong; dreary and damp. Was I still dreaming? I rolled upright from the bed, and the hollow, sick feeling in my stomach was there before I realised why it was there: it was a dream – my mother was dead. I was in a room in the mansio, the inn of the port where all the weary travellers first went to collapse when they landed from the river. My father had told me to rest while he went out to the market to get medicines.
And yet I still ran downstairs in case somehow, somehow. . . because dreams come from the gods, after all.
I came out into the courtyard, blinking and confused. By the looks of things it was late in the day, but although the sun was hidden behind thick veils of clouds the light still stayed around, like a guest that wouldn’t leave. I noticed I was not the only one who was slinking around, glancing at the heavy grey sky mistrustfully as if, like the Gauls, they feared it would one day fall on their heads. I was expecting everything to be different, but the voices and the houses and the shops around me were the same, like Rome. What was different were the things I wasn’t expecting to change. The light. And my mother. She was not there, though her voice had sounded so real.
I still couldn’t quite believe she was really gone. Already the storm felt like a bad dream. I kept expecting her to come around the corner, just a little delayed, breathless, anxious and saying: “Now you are soon to be married. . .” But she was not there.
Instead, I spotted Marcus striding across the courtyard and ran after him.
“Where is my father?” I said in a voice that was practically a panicked shriek.
He looked at me startled. At once, I felt embarrassed for throwing myself in his path like this. He already had plenty of work to do, after all – how could he also be expected to look after a lost, confused girl?
“With the Emperor, long may he live. We are setting out today for Eboracum.”
I nodded, though I had no idea where or what Eboracum was. As long as I was with my father, I was sure everything would be all right.
“What should I do?” I asked, hoping to sound more sensible.
“I should gather your possessions together and make ready to leave, miss.” He was looking over my shoulder. A moment later, he was gone, striding away to handle another emergency or crisis.
I rushed back to my
