Regina shrugged. “Let him worry. He should have told me about the bleeding.”
Carta snorted. “I think he’d rather face a thousand blue-faced Picts than that.”
“Anyway he saw which way I came. If he’s worried he’ll come after me.”
Carta sipped her tea. “He doesn’t often come here, to the shadow of the Wall.”
“Why not?”
“He doesn’t fit. For one thing he’s older than anybody here.”
“What? That can’t be true.”
“Think about it,” Carta said, eyeing her. “You know a good few people here. You’re popular here, as you are everywhere! How many men over forty do you know? How many women over thirty-five?”
None, Regina thought, shocked — even though, she was sure, much older people had been commonplace in her parents’ circle of friends, with wrinkles and white hair, the badges of age.
“Why is it like this?”
Carta laughed. “Because we don’t live in villas. We don’t have servants and slaves to clean our teeth. We have to work hard, all the time. It’s the way it is, little Regina. Only the rich grow old.”
Regina frowned. Even now, she resented being spoken to like that by a slave — even a former slave — even Carta. “There was no shame in the way we lived,” she said hotly. “Our family was civilized, in the Roman way.”
To her surprise Cartumandua gazed at Regina coldly. She said, “ ‘The allurements of degeneracy: assembly rooms, baths, and smart dinner parties. In their naпvetй the British called it civilization, when it was really all part of their servitude.’ “
“What’s that?”
“Tacitus. You’re not the only one who’s learning to read, Regina.” She got up and walked to her cauldron, and poked at the haunch of meat with a long iron skewer.
It was evening, a few days after Regina’s humiliation on the Wall. By flickering candlelight, she was reading, in halting Latin, from the historian Tacitus. “ ‘Good fortune and discipline have gone hand in hand over the last eight hundred years to build the Roman state, which destroyed will bring down all together …’ “ She had asked for Tacitus after Carta’s mild reprimand. This was a speech said to have been given three centuries earlier to rebelling tribes in Gaul by Petillius Cerialis, soon to be governor of Britain.
She was in Aetius’s chalet, one of a row in this little community in the lee of the Wall. It wasn’t grand, just a hut of four rooms built of wattle and daub to the rectangular Roman plan. But it had a tiled floor and a deep hearth, and was cozy and warm. It had been erected when long-stay soldiers had first been allowed to marry and raise families. It was here, during an earlier tour of duty with the border troops, that Aetius had brought his bride Brica, and here that Julia, Regina’s mother, had been born.
Its centerpiece was the lararium, the family shrine that Aetius and Regina had built together after their flight from the villa. The three crudely carved matres in their hooded cloaks sat at the center of a little circle of gifts of wine and food. But this was a soldier’s shrine, and there were also tokens to such abstract entities as Roma, Victoria, and Disciplina, as well as a coin bearing the head of the latest Emperor anybody had heard of, Honorius.
And it was in his chalet that, at Aetius’s insistence, Regina had continued her education. He expected her to become fluent in both her native language and in Latin — and to know the difference; Aetius despised what he called the “muddle,” the patois of Latin-flavored British much favored by the ordinary people of the behind-the-Wall community. He had her read Tacitus and Caesar, historians and emperors and playwrights, from his store of fragile, ancient papyrus scrolls. She learned to write with styli on tablets of wax on wood, and with ink made of soot and a pen of metal. Later, he promised, he would train her in the art of rhetoric. But he believed in combining the best of the British and Roman traditions, and he also had her memorize long sagas of heroes and monsters in the old British style.
“ ‘At present, victor and vanquished enjoy peace and the imperial civilization under the same law on an equal footing. Let your experience of the alternatives prevent you from preferring the ruin that will follow on revolt to the safety that is conferred by obedience …’ “
There was some disturbance outside. Shouting, what sounded like singing. No doubt the soldiers were getting drunk again. But Aetius didn’t react, and Regina knew she was safe with him.
Aetius sat in his favorite basket chair, sipping beer. “Yes, yes … the same law on an equal footing. The law is above all of us — the landowners, the senators, even the Emperor himself, whoever that is right now. That is the genius of the old system, you see. It doesn’t matter who is in charge. It is the system itself that has spread so far and sustained itself, even though we have had soldiers and administrators and even emperors chosen from among those who would once have been called barbarians. The system persists, while we come and go.”
Standing there, holding the fragile papyrus in her hand, she said, “Like an anthill. The Empire is like an anthill, and we are all just ants, running around.”
He slammed his wooden tankard down on the arm of his chair. “Ants? Ants? What are you talking about, girl?”
“But an anthill organizes itself without anybody telling it what to do. And even when one ant dies another takes her place — even the queen. That’s what the Greeks say, and they studied such things. Isn’t your Empire just like that?”
“Rome is not an anthill, you foolish child! …”
So they argued on, both aware of and enjoying their roles, she mischievously provoking, he spluttering and snapping —
The door was thrown open with a crash.
In the doorway, framed by darkness, stood a soldier. He staggered into the room, visibly drunk. When he saw Regina he grinned.
Aetius seemed as shocked as Regina. But he took a step forward. “Septimius,” he said, his voice like thunder. “You’re drunk. And you should be on watch.”
Septimius just laughed, a single bark. “Nobody’s on watch, you old fool. What does it matter? I haven’t been paid. You haven’t been paid. Nobody cares anymore.” He took a lurching step into the room. He was still staring at Regina, and she could smell the drink on his breath. He was, she remembered, the soldier who had exposed himself to her when she bled on the Wall.
She backed away, but she found herself pressed against the table and, in the confines of this little chalet, couldn’t retreat any farther.
Aetius took a measured step forward. “Septimius, get out of here before you make things much worse for yourself.”
“I don’t think I will be taking any more floggings from you, old man.” He turned to Regina. “You know what I want, don’t you, miss? You’re just ripe for the plucking—” He reached for her. Regina flinched away, but Septimius grabbed her small breast and pinched it hard.
Aetius barreled into him, shoulder-first. Septimius was slammed against a wall, and the whole chalet shook with the impact. Aetius staggered upright. “You keep away from her, you piece of filth—” He hurled his fist, his mighty fist like a boulder.
But Septimius, drunk as he was, ducked underneath the punch. And as he rose, Regina saw a flash of steel.