Forcing himself to relax back into the cart, he fixed his eyes on the street at the end of the market place – a wide, spacious area lined with fruit trees and full of stalls and the cries of traders. The narrower thoroughfare sloped gently away in the direction, Rufinus was pretty sure, of Rome, high insulae towering over both sides and providing a deep shade that was a welcome respite from the sun that had beat down mercilessly in the marketplace all morning.
The cart reached the edge of the paved market and turned into the street, the servant, having clearly done this a hundred times, expertly guiding the vehicle and its two horses toward the middle, angling the heavy wooden braking-pole into the groove that ran down the centre of the hill. The wooden bar hit the stonework with a crack and then proceeded to issue a blood-curdling tortured shriek as it fought the momentum the cart was beginning to pick up. Rufinus winced at the noise and squinted into the shade ahead, watching as a carved monumental gate approached, where the street levelled out for a time before angling off to the left.
‘What a bloody awful noise.’
Snake leaned back.
‘You’ve heard nothing yet. This is a gentle slope. Wait till we get outside the walls!’
Rufinus clenched his teeth against the shrieking of the wooden brake and watched as the gate, more reminiscent of the great triumphal arches of the capital than a portal in a city wall, loomed and then passed quickly overhead.
Testament yet again to the servant’s skill at guiding the horse and cart, he hardly slowed as the cart approached the turn, one wheel leaving the ground for a heart-stopping moment before coming back down with a jolting thud. As Rufinus, eyes wide, grasped the cart’s side, his knuckles whitening, he noted with a rising sense of panic that the route ahead was now horrifyingly visible.
Unlike Rome or most of the cities Rufinus was used to, the built-up area of Tibur appeared to end precisely at its walls, perhaps due to the strictures of the landscape and the precipitous nature of the slope outside them. The road they faced snaked back and forth down the incline with a number of hair-pin bends, passing drum-shaped mausolea and huge square tombs and columbaria, looping around a large temple complex, and then swinging wildly to a drop he could just make out as being quite steep before it hit the plains below and levelled out, seemingly a thousand feet down.
‘Oh shit.’
The fang-toothed beast opposite gave him a very unpleasant grin and Fastus, the other new recruit, shared Rufinus’ wide-eyed panic as he too gripped tight. ‘You lot must be pissing insane!’
The driver appeared to have let go of the brake entirely now and was letting the cart run down the long, straight slope, the horses sounding a little panicked, attached to what was, to all intents and purposes, a runaway vehicle. The cart hit an errant loose cobble a third of the way down the stretch and lurched and bounced, throwing the occupants into the air. The brutal giant hurriedly grasped an amphora of wine that had come loose and held it down, tightly but gently as though it were his child. Fastus was noisily sick over the side of the cart until the bouncing board hit him in the chin and smacked his teeth painfully together.
Rufinus watched with rising horror as the first sharp bend approached at break-neck speed. He was beginning to wonder whether he had been over-kind about the driver’s talent and thought perhaps the man had simply been lucky early on, and was now just trying his best to descend the hill in the shortest time possible.
Just as Rufinus thought nothing more could be done and they were doomed, at the point where he had a foot extricated ready to leap from the runaway vehicle, the driver hauled on the reins and jammed the heavy wooden pole into the rut, here more of a hastily-carved trench than a carefully constructed channel.
The cart slewed and lurched sickeningly as it flew into the bend, horses shrieking as they tried desperately to keep control. Fastus was sick again, this time directly onto his feet in the centre of the cart, much to the amusement of the needle-toothed giant.
As soon as the heart-stopping turn began it was over, the wheel thumping back down to the road with a bone-jarring smack, the driver laughing gaily as he urged the beasts on down the next straight.
And so the descent went, past towering tombs and tall cypress and the low perimeter walls of estates, somewhere a little over halfway down the hillside, a large complex of porticoes and temples with what appeared to be a theatre in the middle. Each corner was precisely the same: death-defying and painful, taken at speeds that would make charioteers blanch. Each straight was the same: the driver trying to make up for the speed he lost in the turns by driving the vehicle at breakneck speeds as it jolted and bounced, shaking the organs out of its occupants.
Rufinus was beginning to think he’d pulled a muscle in his neck through the constant bouncing of his head, as they made the last turn, Fastus noisily testing to see whether he was completely empty yet.
The final bend brought them out onto a long, straight road, marching off to the west between fields and groves of olive trees, copses and thickets of vegetation. A milestone whizzed past in a blur, and the only thing he caught was the large XIX on the side, a number he assumed referred to the distance of Rome.
‘Cheer up sicky,’ the driver shouted back into the cart, grinning at the pale green face of the other new hireling. ‘Only a mile to go now.’
Fastus gave the driver a grimace and then turned to Rufinus, perhaps hoping for a little sympathy from a man in a similar situation. Rufinus gave him none. In his position it was important to stay as insular and tight-lipped as possible until he had a better understanding of the lay of the land in the villa.
‘What happens when we arrive?’ Rufinus asked Snake.
The man turned and smiled his oily smile. ‘You get signed in by the clerk, make your mark on the documents, get assigned a room and then, after the noon rest, you get shown around the grounds so you can get your bearings.’
Rufinus nodded, keeping his teeth clenched against the battering they were receiving from the bumps in the road and the insane speed of the servant driving the cart.
Without any warning or attempt at slowing, the driver hauled on the reins and the cart slewed to the left off the road and onto a drive, surprisingly of better quality. Metalled and constructed of flat flags, this access road to the former Imperial villa had been constructed a mere fifty or sixty years ago and had borne the brunt of only private traffic, as opposed to the centuries old and well-travelled main road behind them.
Rufinus glanced over the side of the cart at a small stream running alongside, followed its course ahead, and found himself looking up at a small city. His eyes widened.
‘Jupiter, Juno and Minerva!’
‘It’s a sizeable complex’ the Snake man replied over his shoulder. ‘I’m told that Hadrianus used to keep a full imperial court here permanently. It’s not the same these days, of course. The lady’s court only occupies maybe a third of the place. And even then that’s far more space than they really need.’
Rising from behind an arcade of decorative cypress trees, trimmed into perfect cones, Rufinus was surprised to see the high, fine and delicate arches of a theatre. The arcade of trees split not far from the structure, one branch running off out of sight along the hill among beautiful white buildings and red roofs, the other striding off to intersect with the road along which they travelled.
‘The place has a theatre?’ he asked in astonishment.
The driver peered over his shoulder and snorted. ‘Two. One at each end of the complex, in case you desperately need to see a play and you can’t be arsed to walk far. And there’s a stadium and an amphitheatre.’