She emerged into daylight, and a wash of color and noise.
She found herself in a small concrete box lined with wooden benches. There was nobody else here; she sat down tentatively, on the end of a bench. She was surprised to find herself here, for she knew that these boxes were reserved for the Emperor’s family, and for senators, magistrates, priests, and other notables.
She was in one of a series of boxes set just above the level of the wooden floor itself. Around her, the arena was a tremendous elliptical bowl. Behind her, rows of wooden seats rose up in four great terraces. The seats were quickly filling up, and the faces of the people receded to mere dots in the shadows of the upper tiers.
She saw workmen on the perimeter of the stadium’s huge open roof. They hauled huge sheets of cloth over a spiderweb of ropes suspended over the gaping roof itself: this awning would shelter the spectators from the sun. It was said that the workers were sailors from the docks, a thousand of them brought here for their skills in working rigging and sails.
And when she looked across the floor to the far side of the arena, the people in those distant seats merged into a sea of movement, color, and flesh, a mob ordered by the amphitheater’s vast geometry. In one glance she could take in twenty thousand people — perhaps four times the population of old Verulamium, as if whole cities had been picked up and shaken until their human inhabitants had tumbled out into this gigantic dish of marble and brick.
On the arena floor the spectacle had already started. To the blaring music of trumpets and an immense hydraulic organ, a parade of chariots raced around the floor, each bearing a gladiator dressed in a purple or gold cloak. They were chased by slaves carrying shields, helmets, and weapons. The crowd began to roar for their favorites. Though the arena was not yet full the noise was already powerful — exhilarating, terrifying — and the air was full of the scent of wood chips, blood, and sweat, making Regina shiver.
More performers appeared in the middle of the arena floor. They rose from trapdoors, but so cunning was the effect that it looked as if they had erupted from nowhere. They put on boxing matches, women fencers, and a series of clownish acts — like a race between two enormously fat slaves, driven by the spear tips of soldiers, which finished with both slaves left flat out and panting on the ground. The crowd appeared to enjoy it all.
Then the acrobats, jugglers, and clowns were cleared away, and a squadron of workers emerged to litter the arena floor with shrubbery and rocks. The traps sprung open again, and out poured a host of animals: leopards, bears, lions, giraffes, ostriches, even an elephant. These animals, startling and strange to Regina’s eyes, wandered aimlessly, suddenly thrust into this great bowl of noise and sunlight, clearly terrified. Even the great predator cats were unable to take advantage of the confusion and closeness of their prey. Warriors ran on armed with spears, swords, nets, and shields, and they began to goad the bewildered beasts.
As the creatures began to die the noise of the crowd rose to a crescendo.
“So I am in time for the animal show.” Regina could feel a warm breath on her cheek, smell a subtle scent of incense. The sudden voice, speaking a stilted Latin, was a woman’s, soft in Regina’s ear, with the husky growl of age. Regina couldn’t see the arena anymore. “Once, you know, these games had religious significance. They were called offerings. But now we live in coarsened times, and the games are merely spectacles to placate the crowds of Rome, whom even the emperors fear. That is why the morning show, which still delivers authentic deaths, even if only of animals and criminals, is so popular …”
She had planned for this moment, tried to anticipate it. But now that it was here she felt frozen solid, like one of the hapless statues on the arena walls.
She turned.
The woman beside her wore a simple white stola and a cloak of fine wool. She was upright, slim, gray- haired, her face still handsome despite the wrinkles at her eyes and mouth, and the tightening of her skin by years of Italian light. But the smoke-gray eyes were clear and unchanged, and, in her sixties, she was still beautiful.
“Mother.”
“Yes, child.”
They embraced. But it was almost formal. Her mother’s muscles were stiff, as stiff as her own. It was always going to be like this, Regina thought. For Julia to have survived in Rome she must have found a core of steel. It was a meeting of two strong women; it was not a gushing reunion.
Before them, disregarded, the professional beast slayers continued their taunting of the animals, whipping the beasts to a fury to satisfy the passions of the baying, jostling crowd.
They exchanged information. Facts, not feelings.
Julia seemed uninterested in Regina’s brief account of her life since the night her father had died. To Julia, it seemed, Britain was a cold and dismal place far away and best forgotten. Or perhaps there was some morsel of guilt, Regina thought, even now uncomfortably lodged in her heart, trivial but irritating, like a seed between her teeth.
Julia was scarcely more animated as she quietly told her own story. “I came to Rome to be with my sister. Your aunt—”
Regina rummaged in her memory. “Helena.”
“Helena, yes …” Helena, some ten years older than Julia herself, was, it turned out, still alive — one of the few seventy-year-olds in all of Rome. “But then,” Julia said dryly, “we have always been a long- lived family.”
Julia had needed help from her sister. Contrary to what Regina had always believed, Julia had left Britain with little in the way of the family fortune. Before his death Marcus — always nervous, always overcautious — had taken to burying his money in hoards, in and around the villa. “And there, so far as I know, the family’s money lies still, rotting in the earth. Unless it has been purloined by Saxons, bacaudae, or other undesirables.” She seemed not to care very much.
Sister Helena, it turned out, had maneuvered herself into a very influential position in Rome, for she had been one of the chief attendants to the Vestal Virgins.
The Virgins were a relic of Rome’s earliest days. It was said the order had been founded by Numa Pompilius, the first king to follow Romulus himself, who had designated acolytes to attend to the sacred flame of Vesta, goddess of hearth and fireside. Novices were handed over between the ages of six and ten to the Pontifex Maximus, Rome’s chief priest, and were required to remain pure for thirty years. The order had become central to the purity and strength of Rome, and the sacred fire had not been extinguished for centuries.
“But the flame burns no more,” murmured Julia. “When Constantine began to build his Christian churches, everything changed.”
There were many who believed that the extinguishing of the flame symbolized the decline of Rome itself, for the city had been sacked just sixteen years later. But some of the Virgins and their attendants, including a younger Helena, had not been without worldly wisdom as well as divine. Plenty of money had been salted away for just such a catastrophe.
“A faction of the Virgins found a way to survive,” Julia said. “We still serve a god, still dedicate the purity of our young to her service. But she is a different god. We call ourselves the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins. And we still report to the Pontifex Maximus — but now he is the pope of the Christians.”