My father’s razor, his togas and books, all went into the box. I hesitated over his wax writing tablet: should I touch that? Was it private? I put it in, trying not to look at it in case there was some writing showing on the wax. Then I closed up his medicine box and sat on his trunk, my heart beating hard. He will come back for his things, I thought. He wouldn’t be able to leave me behind.
A few moments later, my father raced in. He stopped and stared at me in confusion.
“I am ready,” I told him.
“So I see!” He shook his head. “Very well, go to the Empress. She has kindly said you may travel in her carriage.”
I was not sure how I felt about that, but I did as I was told. The Empress had never been anything but kind to me, but she was also terrifying. The most powerful woman in the world could not avoid being terrifying, but Julia Domna was more than just the Emperor’s wife. She gave the impression that she could have run the Empire quite well on her own.
But when I timidly joined the imperial group, Julia Domna smiled indulgently at me. She did not look as if she had been on a long sea voyage. Her stola was as perfectly draped as that of a statue’s, and not a hair was out of place.
“My poor child, you have lost your mother. Now I will be a mother to you,” she announced. There was sympathetic murmuring from some of her attendants, curious and resentful glances from others. All were much older than me, except for a couple of the slave girls who were really just there to pour perfume and scatter rose petals at the right moment. Feeling awkward, I bowed my head and murmured something grateful. As I stepped into the carriage, the air was heavy with the perfume of her hair, arranged like a gladiator’s helmet.
With a shout and a crack of the whip, the heavy carriage rattled and rolled into movement. We were leaving London. We went through the streets and out through the great gates, turning onto the road that led north. From now on, every mile took us further from safety, deeper into the land of barbarians.
Julia Domna opened a small wooden box and offered it to me. I could not believe what I saw inside, nestling in the straw.
“Fresh figs!” I exclaimed. My father’s words – let us not wish for figs in winter – came back to me. If you were an empress, it seemed, you could wish for anything you liked. You could carry summer with you in a box.
“A taste of home,” Julia Domna said with a smile.
The fig was not as sweet as it would have tasted in Leptis Magna. In fact, I thought it tasted salty, like seawater. The memory of the shipwreck rushed back to me and I had to force myself to swallow the fruit. A moment of panic gripped me as I thought: We’re leaving my mother behind.
I turned to the window to try to find one last glimpse of the river. Above Londinium, the clouds were a deep grey like an iron sword, and a rainbow hung in the air.
“Beautiful,” I whispered. And yet, I missed the sun so much.
I must have looked about to leap from the carriage because Julia Domna leaned forward and gripped my wrist. Her hand was gentle, but powerful. She looked into my eyes, serene and mysterious as one of the Fates.
“Poor child,” she said again. But this time it sounded like a warning.
12.
Among the Barbarians
We travelled up to Eboracum on the bad, British roads. They weren’t paved like the ones everywhere else. Instead they were covered in a layer of gravel, which flung chips and dust up and stung the horses’ legs. But a Roman road is never a dull place, and there was plenty to break up the boredom and the discomfort, though sometimes I felt so jolted that I thought my head would shake loose from my body and tumble to the ground like a stone.
There were carts full of clucking chickens and barrels of wine all the way from Lugdunum in Gaul; there were oxen hauling timber and grit, driven by sweating, swearing men up the hills. There were Northern barbarians with hair the colour of flame. There were pedlars and beggars and every so often, a speedy rider carrying official business, their horses’ hooves thundering up the dust. There were sheep and pigs and slaves and goats on their way to market.
The Emperor was carried in a litter all the way. I barely saw it, for it was surrounded at all times by the Praetorian Guard, his personal guard: a wall of scarlet and gold and steel. Not all of these were Roman. Some were barbarians. My father said that he had a much bigger guard than previous emperors had had.
“The Emperor doesn’t care where men come from as long as they are good soldiers,” Marcus told us. “The army love him. He has made us rich and given us freedom and honours. I can marry my wife now, and not fear leaving her penniless when I die.”
Of course he had to say that, but it seemed true – the Emperor was greeted with great cheers whenever we entered an army town or garrison. And Britain seemed full of army towns and garrisons, as we went further and further north. A grey, bleak land, I thought, full of hard stones and hard faces. But wherever the Emperor stopped, he made things appear. As if he
