Their driver turned to grin at her. He must have been more than sixty years old, and a single tooth stood like a stump in his mouth. He spoke a coarse country Latin she found it hard to make out.
Brica said, “What was that?”
“He welcomed us to the caput mundi. To the head of the world …”
They fell silent, each locked into her own thoughts, as the carriage wound its way along the crowded road.
Rome was dominated by mud brick and red tiles. But at its heart were the Capitoline and Palatine Hills with their great palaces and temples, like a floating island of gleaming marble. Regina thought she glimpsed the curving wall of the Flavian Amphitheater, astoundingly huge, like a house for giants.
But as the carriage approached the center of the city it entered a maze of streets, and the wider view was lost. The closer they got to the center the more crowded the buildings were, and the taller they seemed to grow; they were rickety heaps of wattle, daub, and crimson-red tiles, two, three, four stories high, like unhealthy plants competing for light. In some places these insulae, islands, were so closely packed together that their balconies touched, shutting out the sky altogether. The stink was overwhelming, of rotting sewage, cooking food. And the noise of the city seemed to engulf Regina, a constant clamorous racket. It was the noise of a million people, she thought, a million voices joining into one great unending roar, and as they penetrated deeper into this crowded, unplanned maze, Regina felt as if she were becoming lost in a great formless sea of people.
Brica grew even quieter, receding into herself. Probably, Regina thought, in the last hour her daughter had seen more strangers’ faces than she had seen before in her entire life.
On the driver’s recommendation they were brought to a restaurant. The owner, who happened to be the driver’s brother-in-law, also owned some of the apartments in the block above the restaurant, and the driver had promised he would rent the women a room.
Set on a street crowded with shops, the restaurant occupied the block’s ground floor. It was a low-roofed, well-lit place: people sat on benches at the front, eating snacks and drinking wine as they watched the bustle of the street. Regina glimpsed marble counters on which samples of dishes were displayed, and behind them was a green-lit central atrium, set with more tables.
From the outside the insula actually had an attractive appearance, with its roof of terra-cotta tiles, its stucco facade decorated with tiles and small mosaic images. Balconies of wood and brick projected from each story, and potted plants were set on each one. But the apartments were small and cramped, and got steadily worse as you climbed the stairs. And Regina’s and Brica’s, on the topmost floor, must have been the worst of all.
The windows were covered with sheets of bark. The only furniture was two beds fixed to the wall, some shelving and cupboards, and a few stools and low tables. There was a brazier for heating and an open stove for cooking, appliances Regina immediately vowed she would use sparingly, for she was convinced that they would set the insula and the whole district on fire, and would be the death of them both. Even in this cramped setting their few belongings, homemade at the dunon, looked pathetic and provincial. But Regina unpacked the three matres and set up an improvised lararium in one corner of the room.
Even up here the smells from the restaurant reached them, and soon they were both very hungry. Regina ventured back down the stairs. The menu food was predominantly cooked meat, highly spiced with pepper and fish sauce and garlic — but she didn’t have the money to spare. She went out to the street stalls and bought a little bread and salted meat, and a small pitcher of wine.
While she was gone Brica waited for her, curled up on her couch with her knees tucked into her chest. When Regina returned, Brica didn’t seem to have moved at all.
In their cramped room they ate their bread, trying to ignore the enticing smells from below. Regina left a little of their poor bread and wine for the goddesses of the family, who sat squat in their corner of this strange, unpleasant little room.
In the days that followed, they tried to settle in.
The restaurant had connections to the water supply from the aquifers and to the main sewers. The apartments above did not. Every day you had to fetch your water from a fountain a couple of streets away, where there was always a queue. And every morning you had to carry down your buckets to a cesspit in the insula ’s basement — that was, if you could be troubled to. Some of the insula ’s less sociable inhabitants would store up their waste for days without removing it, until protests from their neighbors about the smell forced them to. And others, lazier still, just threw it out the window, with a cry to warn any hapless passersby below.
As an alternative to the pots in their room, there was a public latrine a block away. The latrine turned out to be a long, dark building with two walls lined with scores of people squatting over holes that fed directly into the sewer system. The stink was astonishing. Though she had scarcely been used to privacy — there was no separate latrine in a roundhouse — Regina found it difficult to let her bowels move in front of so many strangers, all talking and laughing, walking and shouting, and the children, who ran around half naked at the feet of the adults, were even more off-putting. But it was an oddly jolly place, she thought, full of gossip and laughter: obviously a center of the community, a palace of shit and piss.
Rome, Regina quickly learned, was all about divisions. There were rigid barriers among social classes, from the ancient senatorial families down to the slaves. And the gulf between rich and poor was vast.
There were rich and poor everywhere, of course; even in Artorius’s dunon that had been true. But here in Rome there were families that had spent a thousand years accruing wealth. It was said that at one time just two thousand individuals had owned almost all the cultivated land in the western Empire, from Italy to Britain. Though Rome sprawled over a vast area within its curtain of walls, there were so many public basilicas, circuses, temples, gardens, baths and theaters, and so many privately owned estates from the Emperor’s palaces and gardens on down, that it was really no wonder that most people were forced to live in these tottering apartment blocks, crammed into whatever space was available.
Rome was never quiet, even during the darkest hours. There were always the shouts of drovers and wagoners, the uproarious noise of the taverns, some of which never closed, and the gull-like cries of the night watchmen. And too soon would come the morning, when her neighbors would start their days with clattering and banging, laughter and shouts and even noisy lovemaking that carried easily through the thin walls. One man in the apartment below had a particularly stentorian way of calling into the street, calling up water carriers first thing in the morning.
The Romans had a saying — It costs money to sleep here. They were right.
On their first afternoon, Regina sent a boy to take a message to Amator’s home. There was no reply to her note that day, or the second, and Regina began to fret. She had never forgotten how she had waited for Amator’s call after that night in the Verulamium baths, a message that had never come; and she hated to be put in the same position again. Besides, it had taken all but a few bronze scraps of coin from Ceawlin’s money to buy them the room for a few nights. They couldn’t afford to wait long.