“Yes. Yes, of course you are. But the risk was there, after all. A fifty-fifty chance is the way it seemed to us then. It was a touchy moment. And the High Command thought, let’s send a few legions over there, just to keep them in line. Before your time, I suppose.”
I’m still holding my goblet of wine, still untasted. Now, nervously, I take a deep draught.
Against all propriety I feel impelled to defend my race. With preposterous stiffness I say, “Let me assure you, general, that I am not as young as you may think, and I can tell you that there was never the slightest possibility that Britannia would have gone over to the rebels. None.”
A flicker of—amusement?—annoyance?—in those terrible eyes, now.
“In hindsight, yes, certainly. But it looked quite otherwise to us, for a while, there at the very beginning. Just how old were you when the war broke out, my lad?”
I hate being patronized. I let him see my anger.
“Seventeen, sir. I served in the Twelfth Britannic Legion, under Aelius Titianus Rigisamus. Saw action in Gallia and Lusitania. The Balloon Corps.”
“Ah.” He isn’t expecting that. “Well, then. I’ve misjudged you.”
“My entire nation, I would say. Whatever rumors of British disloyalty you may have heard in that very confused time were nothing but enemy fabrications.”
“Ah, indeed,” says the general. “Indeed.” His tone is benign, but his eyes are brighter and stonier than ever and his jaws barely move as he says the words.
Adriana Frontina, looking horrified at the growing heat of our exchanges, is frantically signaling me with her eyes to get off the subject. Her red-haired friend Lucilla, though, merely seems amused by the little altercation. Marcellus Frontinus has turned aside, probably not coincidentally, and is calling instructions to some servants about getting the banquet under way.
I plunge recklessly onward, nonetheless. “Sir, we Britons are just as Roman as anyone in the Empire. Or do you think we still nurse private national grievances going back to the time of Claudius?”
Cassius Frontinus is silent a moment, studying me with some care.
“Yes,” he says, finally. “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. But that’s beside the point. Everybody who got swept up into the Empire once upon a time and never was able to find their way out again has old grievances buried somewhere, no matter how Roman they claim to be now. The Teutons, the Britons, the Hispaniards, the Frogs, everyone. That’s why we’ve had two nasty breakups of the system in less than a century, wouldn’t you say? But no, boy, I didn’t mean to impugn the loyalty of your people, not in the slightest. This has all been highly unfortunate. A thousand pardons, my friend.”
He glances at my goblet, which I have somehow drained without noticing.
“You need another drink, is that not so? And so do I.” He snaps his fingers at a passing servitor. “Boy! Boy! More wine, over here!”
I have a certain sense that my conversation with the great war hero Cassius Lucius Frontinus has not been a success, and that this might be a good moment to withdraw. I shoot a helpless glance at Adriana, who understands at once and says, “But Cymbelin has taken enough of your time, Uncle. And look, the praefectus urbi has arrived: we really must introduce our guest to him.”
Yes. They really must, before I make a worse botch of things. I bow again and excuse myself, and Adriana takes me by one arm and Lucilla seizes the other, and they sweep me away off to the opposite side of the great hall.
“Was I very horrid?” I ask.
“Uncle likes men who show some spirit,” Adriana says. “In the army nobody dares talk back to him at all.”
“But to be so rude—he the great man that he is, and I just a visitor from the provinces—”
“He was the one that was rude,” says Lucilla hotly. “Calling your people traitors to the Empire! How could he have said any such thing!” And then, in a lower voice, purring directly into my ear: “I’ll take you to Pompeii tomorrow. It won’t be nearly so boring for you there.”
She calls for me at the hotel after breakfast, riding in an extraordinarily grand quadriga, mahogany-trimmed and silk-tasseled and gilded all over, drawn by two magnificent white horses and two gigantic duns. It makes the one that Marcellus Frontinus sent for me the night before seem almost shabby. I had compared that one to the chariot of an Emperor; but no, I was altogether wrong: surely this is closer to the real thing.
“Is this what you traveled down in from Roma?” I ask her.
“Oh, no, I came by train. I borrowed the chariot from Druso Tiberio. He goes in for things of this sort.”
At the party I had had only the briefest of encounters with young Frontinus and was highly unimpressed with him: a soft young man, pomaded and perfumed, three or four golden rings on each hand, languid movements and delicate yawns, distinctly a prince. Shamelessly exchanging melting glances all evening long with his handsome friend Ezio, who seemed as stupid as a gladiator and probably once was one.
“What can a quadriga like this cost?” I ask. “Five million sesterces? Ten million?”
“Very likely even more.”
“And he simply lends it to you for the day?”
“Oh, it’s only his second best one, wouldn’t you know? Druso’s a rich man’s son, after all, very spoiled. Marcello doesn’t deny him a thing. I think it’s terrible, of course.”
“Yes,” I say. “Dreadful.”
If Lucilla picks up the irony in my voice, she gives no sign of it.
“And yet, if he’s willing to lend one of his pretty chariots to his sister’s friend for a day or two—”
“Why not take it, eh?”
“Why not indeed.”
And so off we go down the coast road together, this lovely voluptuous red-haired stranger from Roma and I, riding toward Pompeii in a quadriga that would have brought a blush to the cheek of a Caesar. Traffic parts for us on the highway as though it is the chariot of a Caesar, and the horses streak eastward and then southward with the swiftness of the steeds of Apollo, clipclopping along the wide, beautifully paved road at a startling pace.
Lucilla and I sit chastely far apart, like the well-bred young people that we are, chatting pleasantly but impersonally about the party.
“What was all that about,” she says, “the quarrel that you and Adriana’s uncle were having last night?”
“It wasn’t a quarrel. It was—an unpleasantness.”
“Whatever. Something about the Roman army invading Britannia to make sure you people stayed on our side in the war. I know so little about these things. You weren’t really going to secede, were you?”
We have been speaking Roman, but if we are going to have this discussion I must use a language in which I feel more at home. So I switch to Latin and say, “Actually, I think it was a pretty close thing, though it was cruel of him to say so. Or simply boorish.”
“Military men. They have no manners.”
“It surprised me all the same. To fling it in my face like that—!”
“So it was true?”
“I was only a boy when it was happening, you understand. But yes, I know there was a substantial anti-Imperial faction in Londin fifteen or twenty years ago.”
“Who wanted to restore the Republic, you mean?”
“Who wanted to pull out of the Empire,” I say. “And elect a king of our own blood. If such a thing as our own blood can be said still to exist in any significant way among Britons, after eighteen hundred years as Roman citizens.”
“I see. So they wanted an independent Britannia.”
“They saw a chance for it. This was only about twenty years after the Empire had finished cleaning up the effects of the first collapse, you know. And then suddenly a second civil war seemed likely to begin.”