‘What do you want?’ Castus said curtly.
‘I want a man!’ the eunuch declared. ‘Seems I’ve found one. Follow me, please.’
‘I’m on duty. I don’t have time to help you…’
‘A whisper of time is all I need, dominus. Come – come, you won’t be missed, and it would oblige my mistress greatly.’
He had already set off around the portico, turning to gesture briskly over his shoulder. His slippers made no sound on the mosaic floor – felt-soled, Castus guessed. He frowned, irritated, and rubbed the back of his neck; he was not accustomed to taking instructions from slaves, even ones wearing silver collars. After his meeting with the nervous man in the atrium he felt wary. But he was curious too, and nothing in the eunuch’s manner suggested danger. A swift glance back around the portico – nobody in sight – then he straightened his shoulders and marched after the eunuch as he slipped away though an open doorway.
‘This had better be quick,’ he said, but the eunuch gave no sign of hearing him. He led Castus through another courtyard, half in shadow, down a paved alleyway between high brick walls, through another door and then along a narrow passage whose ceiling rose into gloom. There was a scent in the air, something soft that Castus did not recognise. He realised that they were entering the part of the palace called the Domus Faustae, the apartments set aside for the emperor’s wife and her retinue.
He had seen the nobilissima femina Valeria Maxima Fausta several times, at public ceremonies. Sometimes too she passed, hedged about with slaves and eunuchs, through the halls of the palace in her stiffly embroidered tunica and mantle, wearing half a city’s ransom in gemstones and pearls. She was very young, and her face still had the rounded softness of childhood, but her eyes were large and dark and her mouth plumply petulant. She had come from Rome with her father about eighteen months before, bringing a train of noble Roman ladies to form her household, and gave the strong impression that she disliked Treveris greatly, and everywhere north of the Alps too. Castus felt for her – as the daughter of one emperor, wife of a second and sister of a third, the girl surely had little say in the direction of her life. He had overheard some of the senior men of the court laughing sourly about her – the ‘gilded piglet’, they called her – and had pretended not to hear.
The corridor made a sharp turn, then the eunuch led Castus out into a courtyard surrounded by colonnades and set with flowering bushes in large painted urns. There he stepped aside, and made a sweeping gesture towards Castus, like a merchant showing off his latest wares.
‘Oh, yes,’ a woman said. ‘He’ll do very well.’
Castus stood still, rocking back on his heels, and hooked his thumbs into his belt as he took in the scene. For a moment it seemed there were flowers everywhere. Then it seemed there were women everywhere. The flowers were heaped in profusion on the tiled floor, and strung between the pillars of the colonnades. There were three couches set in the shade, and on each a woman reclined; the other figures around them were slaves, plainly dressed.
‘Bring him over here, Serapion,’ one of the reclining women said. Her round face was heavily whitened, and she wore a tunica and gown of rose-pink. All three women wore their hair elaborately curled and waved, the waves gathering into glistening plaits coiled above the nape of the neck: the imperial style. They were ladies of Fausta’s household, Castus realised.
‘Step forward, please, into the light,’ the eunuch Serapion told him.
‘What is this?’ Castus growled at him from the corner of his mouth.
‘It will only take a moment, dominus… The dominae wish to, ah… compare their wreaths…’
‘They wish what…?’
‘The eunuch hasn’t told him!’ the second woman declared, laughing. She was slim, small-featured and languid, dressed in a patterned green stola. Leaning back on the couch, she lifted her wine cup for a slave to refill it. ‘We’re making flower wreaths to present to our emperor Constantine Augustus at the Floralia,’ she said, addressing a point just above Castus’s head. ‘We need to know which looks best on a man, that’s all.’
‘Wreaths,’ Castus said. He winged his shoulder slightly.
The eunuch leaned close. ‘If I might hazard a comment, dominus,’ he said, ‘you do somewhat resemble our Sacred Augustus. More heavily built, of course, and facially… well. But I think you too are from Illyricum, yes?’
‘Pannonia,’ Castus said, speaking only to the eunuch. ‘But this is none of my concern. You could use a slave…’
‘A slave!’ Serapion exclaimed. ‘Surely not – to have a slave stand in for our emperor would be close to sacrilege… But, ah-’ he lowered his voice, leaning closer still ‘-please, just humour the noble dominae. It will take but a moment, and would, ah… greatly help matters here…’
Already the maids were bringing the first floral wreath, the ladies on the couches sitting up to admire the effect. Castus stood straight, his jaw tightening and heat flushing his face and neck. The humiliation twisted his gut, and he was on the verge of turning and marching back the way he had come. But these were ladies of the imperial household, intimates of the emperor’s wife – was he somehow required to obey their bizarre commands? Was this part of his duty, to be exhibited like this, made fun of like this? Even the slave maids were trying not to smile.
‘No, no, not that one, Plautiana. He looks like a garlanded ox being led to the sacrificial altar! Try the one with the roses and marigolds…’
Castus had little experience of the ways of aristocrats; those few that served with the army did not associate with the common soldiers or centurions. He had seen them from a distance, in the retinues of the emperors on campaign, but their ways were alien to him and he felt no great connection to them.
Neither had he very much experience of the ways of women. His mother had died when he was born, and his father had only the harshest of things to say about her. But since childhood Castus had associated women with kindness; his father would often beat him so hard that he could barely stand, and throw him out of the house for some supposed failing, and it was always the women of the neighbourhood who would take pity on him and tend to his wounds, protecting him until his father’s rage had abated.
Since joining the legions he had known few women, and with the exception of two – the Pictish chieftainess Cunomagla, and Marcellina the envoy’s daughter in Britain – all of them had been prostitutes. There was a brothel in the city frequented by the palace staff, and Castus had been there a few times in recent months with Brinno and Sallustius, but he had formed no bond with any of the women there. In his heart he still felt tied to Afrodisia, his girl in Eboracum, although he knew he would never see her again. Floralia, he remembered, was a festival observed particularly by prostitutes…
But none of those working women resembled the trio on the couches before him now, with their sheen of luxurious living, their pearls and jewellery, their sly mocking smiles and laughter. These women resembled none he had ever met; they were more like fabulous birds from a wall painting.
‘Yes, now that one… Crescentilla, I really think that one looks quite special!’
Soft blooms pressed his forehead, and Castus felt petals itching down the back of his neck, sticking to the sweat. The smell of the flowers was sickening. A muscle was twitching in his cheek, and he tried to ease the aching grimace from his jaws. Hot shame rose through him, a keen sense of disgrace. Then anger – what did these women know of the world? What did they know of the violence and slaughter that allowed them to sit here in such amused ease: the burning villages out on the frontier, the men crippled in battles of which they had never even heard?
One of the laughing women, the lady in pink, glanced up and caught the look on his face. Her expression shifted and her fingers went to her throat as her laughter died.