Sometimes, when they stopped for the night at the public mansiones spaced every twenty-five miles, she caught him eyeing her from a distance. Just why was unclear. She was used to having men look at her, and Galba occasionally let his gaze linger enough to reassure her that he wasn't immune to her beauty. Yet his look was more complicated than that. It was as if he hadn't yet made up his mind about her. She'd become confident she could read the mind of the boys she'd flirted with in Rome, outguessing their strategies and manipulating their longings. But she couldn't tell if this grizzled, powerful man was intrigued by her or annoyed, impressed by her rank or dismissive of her gender and youth.
"That's just the way of him," the soldier Titus told her. "He looks at everyone with the glint of a hawk and the guile of a merchant. He's the kind with little he needs saying and less need of what others say. Don't be insulted; he's that way with everybody."
"The silences make him more formidable, somehow."
"Don't think he doesn't know it, lady."
"But is he really as fearsome as he seems?"
"Have you seen the rings on his belt?"
She smiled. "I can always hear him coming, like little bells!"
"Those are trophies from the men he's killed."
She was shocked. "You're joking!"
"Forty of them. If you want to understand Galba, look at his waist."
The original Celtic tapestry of meandering pathways and undulating fields had been drawn by a culture with no need for highways or towns, its patchwork a dazzling green. Pastures and grain fields were interspersed with small orchards, vegetable gardens, and wooded coppices of alder and birch. Larger woodlots filled hollows and crowned hills. At the junction of fieldstone walls were Celtic farmsteads, a cluster of oval or rectangular stone corrals enclosing two or three round houses with peaked thatch roofs. Here lived patriarch and matron, children and grandchildren, uncles and cousins, maids and midwives, all coexisting with pigs, goats, a milk cow, dogs, chickens, geese, and rodents in a trampled world of straw, manure, and planted flowers. The grays and greens of their world were punctuated by bright banners at the doors and hoisted weavings on the rooftops, adding blossom to the breeze. Sometimes the Britons themselves donned rainbow colors like Roman entertainers, as if to combat their country's gloom. From a distance they reminded Valeria of butterflies flitting on a velvet meadow, the reds, blues, and yellows quickening her heart.
These free farmers occupied just part of the countryside, however. Debt, sickness, conquest, or opportunism had put other Britons under the thrall of larger landowners, producing plantations of up to a hundred slaves and tenant farmers that were governed by a Roman villa. The result was an archipelago of Italian order in a sea of Celtic primitivism, or so Clodius saw the pattern.
"What amazes me is that the advantages of Roman life haven't been more widely copied," he opined as they rode along. "It's one thing to know no better. Quite another to live next to a superior way of life and fail to improve yourself."
He might as well have been talking to his horse, for all the attention the other soldiers paid him, but Valeria was bored. "Improve how, dear Clodius? By losing your farm to a Roman estate?"
"By adopting modern comforts. A leakproof tile roof. Heat. Glass windows."
"And a barracks of troublesome slaves. Steep debt. Ceaseless taxes. Long days and worried nights."
"You're no doubt describing our next host, Valeria, and yet you'll enjoy his comforts."
"I will, but I'll not pass judgment on his Briton neighbors until I've met some of them, and learned their lives, and understood their contentment."
He snorted. "What you'll meet are mud and fleas."
"Better to scratch than have a closed mind."
He laughed. "You're a rare woman to have such wit!"
"And you're a rare man to listen to it," she gave him, which seemed to please the youth. At least he paid her attention. The other men kept careful distance, giving deference but never presuming familiarity. She was to be protected but not approached.
Clodius was isolated as well. The young tribune had been pegged by the soldiers as an aristocrat posted for seasoning, and thus an officer who'd yet to prove himself. The highborn Roman thought them crude, and they thought him priggish. So the aristocrat found himself befriending the dangerously disreputable Cassius.
The gladiator refused to be admired. "Don't flatter me, tribune. I entertained the mob, and they despised me for it. There's no glory in the arena, just blood, sand, and, if you're lucky like me, another form of slavery."
"Still," Clodius insisted, "you're an expert at fighting. What advice can you give?"
Cassius grunted. "Pain and fear are allies if you enlist them on your side. Strike first, without mercy, and you strike at the other man's will."
"Doesn't fairness demand that I give an opponent time to ready himself?"
"The graveyards are full of fair men."
As the party clipped north, the young woman counted the mile-posts in boredom and studied the countryside with genuine curiosity. Rome did not just govern, it transformed, the power of its ideas enforced not just with the sword but with engineering, architecture, and agronomy. As traditional as Celtic homesteads remained, there were also rectangular and ordered farms, trim Roman towns of white stucco and red tile roofs, walled army garrisons with a gate precisely positioned in each of the four directions, counting houses, signal towers, post stations, pottery factories, stone quarries, and iron forges. Smoke from Roman industry rose into a scrubbed blue sky, and horizontal waterwheels turned tirelessly in the spring freshets. This was the world her future husband had come to defend.
It was late afternoon of the third day when they gratefully turned from the main road to enjoy the hospitality of Quintus Maxus. At last, the comforts of a proper villa! They passed through a break in a dike and proceeded down a poplar-lined lane through a series of orderly fenced enclosures, each field, orchard, and granary a testament to their host's accumulated wealth and epicurean taste.
A stucco wall surrounded the villa proper, and when its gate swung wide, the garden drew a sigh of recognition from Valeria. Here were the familiar enclosing wings of a U-shaped house with garden and courtyard pool, roses and lilies, herbs and hedges, statues and stone benches. Under a shaded colonnade waited a somewhat portly Quintus, his head already reddened by the spring sun. Next to him was a regal and kindly looking woman who must be Calpurnia, Quintus's wife. "Come, shed your dust!" Quintus called jovially. "Fill your stomachs! Our home is yours, weary travelers!" The soldiers would have good beds this night, and all would use Quintus's baths, the women taking their turn after the men.
"It's Rome, even here at the edge of the empire," Valeria whispered to Savia.
"If the world is Roman, Rome is the world," came the proverbial reply.
"They have the taste of Italians!"
"Or at least their money."
The supper began at dusk. Quintus and his neighbor Glidas, a transplanted Gaul with dealings in both provinces, invited Clodius and Galba to join them on the dining couches. The matron Calpurnia and Valeria sat upright in chairs to one side as custom dictated, Calpurnia's sharp eye directing her slaves and the women entering and retreating from male conversation as was proper. The two ladies had become instant friends, Calpurnia eagerly dissecting the intricate braidwork of Valeria's hair because it mimicked the latest style of the empress, Valeria plying her hostess with countless questions about maintaining a household in Britannia. What foods did the province excel at? How best to keep warm through the seasons? How easy was it to import luxuries? What was the proper relationship between Roman master and Briton native? Did babes sicken unnaturally in the damp? How did highborn women keep in touch?