And then there was Amator to distract her.
One day, as she was trying to study in her room, Amator came wandering in. “Study, study, study,” he teased her. “All you ever do. You’re so boring.”
“And you are a lazy clod with nothing better to do than annoy people,” she shot back, repeating one of his father’s taunts.
He strolled to Marina’s bed. Grinning at her, he got to his knees and felt about in the space beneath the pallet. “Aha!” he proclaimed in triumph, and he pulled out a bit of bloody rag. It was one of the loincloths Marina used to pad herself during her periods. He sniffed the dried blood and rubbed it against his cheek. “Ah, the scent of a woman …”
Regina was laughing, and outraged. She put down her papyrus and came after him. “That’s disgusting! Give it back—”
But he wouldn’t, and they chased around the room for a while. They had developed a way of chasing without touching, of coming close but not quite into contact, a game with subtle, unspoken rules.
At length he yielded, threw himself down on Marina’s bed, and tucked the bloody little relic back where it had come from.
“She’ll know,” said Regina.
“So what if she does? It’s only Marina.” He got up again and walked to her lararium, in one corner. “I’ve never taken a proper look at this before.” He picked up one of the matres. “By Cybele’s left nipple, how ugly.”
“Put it down.”
“And how cheap—”
“Put it down.”
He looked up, startled at her tone. “All right, all right.” He put down the little statuette — not in the right place; she promised herself she would fix it later. He said, “So every day you waste good food and wine on these bits of nonsense …” He eyed her. “But have you ever seen a real god?”
“What do you mean?”
For answer he beckoned her, and tiptoed out of the room. Of course, she followed.
Amator had his own chores to complete. Carausias was trying to train him to run the villa, the cause of much conflict between the two of them. But he always seemed to have plenty of spare time, and he seemed happy to spend a lot of it with Regina. When he discovered she liked “soldiers” he proclaimed himself an expert, dug out an old set from some corner of the house, and set it up in the courtyard where they would play. Or he would play ball-catching games with her, or simply chase her through the colonnades, or in the open spaces beyond the town walls. Gradually, almost tentatively, a relationship had built up between them.
But there was an edge to Amator. At eighteen he was so much older than she was. Perhaps she enjoyed the undercurrent of danger that she sensed about him, a boy who knew so much more than she did, had surely done so much more, and yet was so inexplicably interested in her. Amator was mysterious, disturbing, somehow enchanting — but above all he was fun, and he always seemed to dress with color and style, unlike the drab townsfolk.
Cartumandua maintained a frosty silence about all this.
They walked around the courtyard until they came to the head of the stone stairs that led to Carausias’s shrine.
She stepped back. “No. I mustn’t go down there. Carausias wouldn’t like it.”
“Well, Carausias doesn’t like being bald and fat and old, but he’s got to live with it. Come on — unless you’re scared.” He set foot on one step, then another, and was suddenly trotting down and out of sight.
After a heartbeat’s hesitation, she followed.
The shrine was just a pit in the ground. She could hear Amator scratching, and then he held up a candle. His face seemed to hover in the dark.
In the uncertain light she could see that above the stonework of this little underground shrine there was a layer of darker earth. When she probed at it, it crumbled, and left black on her fingers, like soot. Later she would discover that twice during its short history Verulamium had been burned to the ground, and these burned ash layers were relics of those catastrophes.
An arched hollow had been cut into the wall. In it stood a little statuette, apparently bronze, of a man riding a horse. His outsized head bore a crested helmet. Small offerings had been laid out before him, perhaps fragments of food.
“Behold,” said Amator mock-sepulchrally. “Mars Toutatis, the warrior god of the Catuvellauni. Held to be the Mars of Rome, while that was politically convenient. What now — do you think he will become the Christ? Will we have to carve a chi-rho above his head?”
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” she whispered.
“Or what? Is his horse going to piss down my leg?”
“We shouldn’t be down here.”
“I daresay you’re right. But nobody is going to know.” He bent forward and blew out the flame. The darkness was complete, save only for the faintest of diffuse daylight glows from the stairwell. She could sense his heavy warmth, less than a hand’s breadth from her, and his breath was hot on her cheek.
He backed away, his tunic rustling softly. “Now we share a secret.” He laughed, and his feet clattered on the stairs. She followed him into the daylight, but when she reached the ground, he had gone.
Chapter 10
Miami Airport was a thoroughly unpleasant place. The queues of grimy adults and unhappy kids before the immigration barriers were as long and slow moving as I could remember in any American airport.
I’d taken many trips to the States over the years, for work, vacations — and in pursuit of my sister. After going to work in America some fifteen years before, Gina had come home only a handful of times, most recently, and even then grudgingly, for our father’s funeral. Her two boys were the only kids in the family — that I knew of, I reminded myself, thinking of Rosa. They had quickly become precious to me, no doubt through some mixture of sentiment and genetic longing. But to get to see them, every time I had to endure these red-eye flights and the ferocity of U.S. immigration controllers.
Outside the terminal, the weather seemed unseasonably humid and hot for October. Nobody was there to greet me, of course. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel in Miami Beach. I was only maybe twenty miles from my sister. But taking a hotel room was my habit. I’d long learned not to put unnecessary pressure on Gina by actually having her put me up, despite my having flown around the world to see her.
I generally stayed at Best Westerns, but for this trip I’d decided to spend a little money, and had used the Internet to find a room at a big spa hotel on the coast. The hotel’s air-conditioning was merciless, of course, and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees as I stepped through the sliding doors to reception. But I was pleased with the plush, sweeping interior, the atrium done out in tiles of chrome and purple, the huge sunken bar, the glimpses of chlorine-blue pools beyond wide glass doors. Meeting rooms in bays clustered around the atrium; evidently the hotel relied a lot on corporate business, and I wondered if Gina got much work here.
My room was on the twelfth floor. I turned on the TV and briskly unpacked. The room was big, expansive, with a balcony that gave a view of the sea — at least it did if you crowded right up against the rail, and peered past the flank of the building and across a busy highway. It was late afternoon, but as always after a transatlantic flight it was eerie to see the sun still stranded so high above the horizon. I’ve always found flying tough.
I knew I should shower, have a drink, sleep as long as possible. But I felt restless, vaguely disturbed; right now my life seemed to be too complicated to let me relax.