This hilltop village was still small and, in its rough unplanned clutter, hardly a Roman community. But pilgrims came from afar to visit Alban’s martyrium, bringing their wealth with them. Even today, listening to this dry stuff about the nature of sin, there might have been forty people — a big gathering for Verulamium nowadays — and many of them were brightly dressed for the occasion, in jauntily dyed tunics and cloaks. People had brought their children, who played at their feet. There was even a seller of roast meat working the crowd, adding to the odd carnival atmosphere.
She looked back down the hill to the old town itself. From here she could easily trace the lines of its walls, the lozenge shape sketched on the plain by the river, and she could make out the neat gridwork of the street layout, connected up to the roads that marched away to north, south, and west. There was plenty of activity, carts and pedestrians passing along the main roads and through the gates, and a bustle of activity around the stalls in the Forum. But she could see how stretches of the wall had been broken down, and how, even in the six years she had been here, the green had risen like a tide, encroaching the center of the town and flooding the broken-down shells of abandoned buildings.
Carausias complained of how the community around the shrine was drawing the last blood out of the old town. But Regina cared nothing for that. Why should she bother about the upkeep of public buildings, or the problems of paying soldiers, or keeping bacaudae out of the town? She was seventeen years old. All she wanted was to have fun. And the fact was, such excitement as there was to be had was up here on the Christians’ hill.
“… Who would ever have thought that my little Regina would grow up to be a student of theology?”
It was Amator. At the sound of his voice Regina whirled.
He stood close, not a hand’s breadth away. He was dressed in a bright tunic of yellow and green, and he wore an elaborate scarf of what looked like silk, pinned at his throat by a small brooch. His thick black hair, brushed back from his tanned face, was heavy with powder and oil. At his side was a man she did not recognize: perhaps about the same age, he was a thickset fellow wearing a tunic in the barbarian style, made of leather and wool and studded with a big, crudely constructed silver brooch.
Regina had not seen Amator for three years, not since he had left for Gaul — to “make his fortune,” as he had said. And yet his gaze had the same searching intensity it had always had, and she couldn’t help but respond with a surge in her belly, a flush she could feel spreading to her cheeks. But at seventeen she wasn’t a child anymore. And by now he wasn’t the only man who had ever looked at her that way.
She lifted her head and looked him in the eye. “You made me jump.”
“I bet I did. And have you missed me, little chicken?”
“Oh, have you been away?” Regina lifted her finger and drew it down Amator’s cheek. His eyes widened; he almost flinched at her touch. “The sun has changed you.”
“It shines more strongly on southern Gaul.”
“It has turned your face to old leather. Shame — you were so much better looking in the old days.”
Amator glowered.
The friend laughed. “She has the measure of you, Amator.” His accent was thick, almost indecipherable. “You have run your sword through him, madam; every morning he spends an enormous time plastering his cheeks with cream and powder to restore his pale color.” This other turned out to be called Athaulf; he bowed and kissed her hand, his gaudy barbarian jewelry glinting. “A pretty face and a sharp tongue,” he said.
Amator said, “But you, Regina — you have become still more beautiful — but perhaps I shouldn’t have left you alone so long, if this dry-as-dust theology is the highlight of your life.”
She sighed. “Life has been a little duller since you left, Amator,” she admitted. Duller, and lacking the edge, the sparkle, the frisson of danger that she had always associated with Amator.
“Well, now I’m back …”
“Back to work,” Athaulf reminded him. “Hard though it is to drag myself away from this young lady, aren’t we due to meet those landowners?”
“So we are, so we are. I’m a man of business now, Regina. Business, property, wealth, great concerns beyond the ocean. And so I must deal with old corpses like my father, when I would much rather be flirting with you.”
“But your business won’t take all day,” she said, as coolly as she could.
“Indeed it won’t.” He glanced at Athaulf. “Tell you what. Why don’t we have a party?”
She clapped her hands, though she was aware she must look childish. “Oh, wonderful! I will tell Carausias and Cartumandua and Marina — we will prepare the courtyard—”
“Oh, no, no,” he said gently. “We don’t want to be depressed by that gloomy lot. Let’s make a party of our own. Come to the bathhouse. Shall we say a little after sunset?”
“The bathhouse — but nobody goes there anymore. There’s no roof!”
“All the better, all the better; nothing like a little faded grandeur to make the blood flow. After sunset, then.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Unless you need to catch up on your theology.”
“I’ll be there,” she said evenly. “Have a good day, Amator. And you, sir.” With that she turned and walked away, letting her hips sway, aware of their silence as they watched her.
But once out of their sight she ran down the hill, all the way home.
Even in the few years she had lived here it had gotten a lot harder to make her way through the streets of Verulamium.
Some of the abandoned houses, roofless and gutted by fire, had begun to crumble seriously. Serious looting for tiles and building stone had advanced that decay, although that had tapered off as most new buildings were wattle and daub, and nobody had much use for stone. There were plants sprouting on top of walls and ledges. What had once been gardens and orchards were choked with weeds: dandelions, daisies, rose bay willow herbs. On some, longer abandoned, the shrubs and saplings grew waist-high, or higher. As the population of the town had continued to fall, nobody even used these bits of wasteland for pasture. The few new buildings, just wattle and daub with crudely thatched roofs, had mostly been built on the surface of the old streets, where the risk of falling masonry was least. So you had to step off the road and dodge around the houses, clambering over piles of rubble, and passing by broken drains and clogged sewers that nobody ever got around to fixing, and trying to avoid the children and chickens and mice that ran everywhere.
In one place she walked past a grave, crudely dug into the raw earth and marked with a wooden slab. Strictly speaking burial inside the town walls was still against the law, just as under the rule of Rome. But the magistrates rarely met, or if they did nobody listened to their pronouncements.
Even the great Basilica was affected by the general decay. Its walls still stood, but after its final abandonment by the landowners and their councils, its roof had collapsed, and birds nested in the glass- free frames of its gaping windows. But the building still had its uses. Even without the roof, the great walls provided some shelter from the weather — and a miniature village had grown up in there, on the floor of the great hall itself, with roof posts and beams driven into the walls to support small wooden lean-to shacks. It was an extraordinary sight. If you wanted proof of the Emperor’s gross dereliction of his duty to sort things out, Regina thought, it was in this single image of lean-tos huddling timidly in the lee of the mighty walls. When things got back to normal there would be an awful lot of work to do to put all this back together again.