My father forced the door open. A gust of wind took it and slammed it off its hinges, and a wave crashed down the steps and into the cabin. As I stepped out of the cabin, something heavy slammed into my wrist, and my mother’s hand suddenly slipped from mine. I was left clinging to my father on the flooded deck.
“Ma!” I screamed. I turned back, but I could not see her anywhere. There was just broken wood, tossed on the water, and lightning-lit waves crashing down on us. I realised our ship was not just sinking – it had already sunk, the deck was below the water, and the waves were tearing it apart like a wild beast tearing at a hunk of meat.
“Ma!” I tried to scream again, but this time I choked on a mouthful of water. Then I was in the sea, and my feet were kicking water, not wooden boards. In the lightning flashes, I could see other ships, rearing up like monsters around us.
I knew how to swim. My father had insisted that I learn, that my mother take me to the baths in the morning and let me work out how to paddle myself along. But a warm bath in Leptis Magna was not a freezing cold storm in the Mare Britannicum. I kicked out towards the ships and sank straight down, my dress tangled around my legs like hateful seaweed.
Stay alive, I told myself as I sank into cold, roaring green water with no bottom to it. Stay alive. Alive. Alive.
That is all I remember.
Later, my father told me that we were picked up by a ship from the Classis Britannica, the troop-carriers that ferry soldiers across from Gaul. Those of us who escaped the wreck huddled shivering, caked with salt, on the deck of the ship that had rescued us. The Emperor’s ship had survived the storm and sailed on to Londinium ahead of us. We were ordered to follow.
After the storm, pieces of our lives were laid out across the calm sea. They floated gently, bobbing up and down, silent survivors. It was as if the gods had fought like squabbling toddlers, snatched what they wanted, then tossed the unwanted toys away. We rescued a crate of drowned chickens, a barrel of fresh water. We pulled shoes and sailcloth from the sea. We pulled bodies from the sea too, bodies who had been people: Callirhoe, the freedwoman whose sharp tongue everyone on board had feared; the twin slave boys who used to bicker all the time and would now be silent forever; Fortuna, a jolly old woman, who had been making her first sea journey, to join her daughter’s family in Londinium. And those were just the ones I recognised.
We wrapped them all in sailcloth and said prayers over them and tried to comfort their families. Those of us who had survived swapped stories of the horror and the miracles: the Emperor’s chef, from Gaul, with a waistline fattened on wild boar, had survived by clinging to a barrel of his favourite Falernian wine.
We never found my mother. That blow that separated her hand from mine was the last we ever knew of her.
“It was the will of the gods,” my father said to me as the mouth of the river drew into sight. In just a few days he had grown a grizzled beard, and his face was all shadows and hollows. “If Aeneas can bear it, so can we.”
He fell silent. Aeneas, the founder of Rome, escaped from the destruction of Troy but lost his wife, Creusa, on the way through the burning city. Every Roman child knew this story off by heart. I knew it as well as anyone. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, wakes to find that the Greeks have tricked their way into his city and are burning it down around him. He tries to get his family – his wife, Creusa, his old father and his baby son – to safety. But on the way out, he realises Creusa is no longer following him. He turns back to look for her. He desperately searches the city, and finds Creusa – but only her ghost, which slips through his arms when he tries to hug her.
That story, too, starts with a storm at sea.
I never told my father, but I used to imagine that Creusa had really escaped and lived on, hidden somewhere from the Greeks. There were hardly any girls or women in the story of Aeneas, after all. But there was no way my mother could have survived the shipwreck. I knew I had to be a brave Roman woman and accept the will of the gods, but within, I felt as hollow as a bronze statue.
Just before we entered the mouth of the river to sail up to Londinium, a sailor spotted a chest floating on the water. When we hauled it up, it was dripping and already growing barnacles. It turned out to be ours. Inside was my mother’s best blue silk stola. She had bought it just before we went to Rome. We had never seen a dress made of cloth as thin and fine as this. It was like touching a dream. The saleswoman who brought it to our house was full of stories of how it had taken four years to bring it over land and sea from another empire at the far end of the world. When she finally mentioned the price, my mother dropped it as if it were hot, but my father said, “We are going to Rome now, you must dress like a woman of quality,” and he bought it for her. I think she was more pleased than she liked to show.
The stola was almost all ruined
