“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.”
“That was in the East, wasn’t it?”
I wonder how much she really knows about these matters. More than she is letting on, I suspect. But I have come down from Cantabrigia with honors in history, after all, and I suppose she is trying to give me a chance to be impressive.
“In Syria and Persia, yes, and the back end of India. Just a little frontier rebellion, not even white people that were stirring up the fuss: ten legions could have put the whole thing down. But the Emperor Laureolus was already old and sick—senile, in fact—and no one in the administration was paying attention to the outer provinces, and the legions weren’t sent in until it was too late. So there was a real mess to deal with, all of a sudden. And right in the middle of that, Hispania and Gallia and even silly little Lusitania decided to secede from the Empire again, too. So it was 2563 all over again, a second collapse even more serious than the first one.”
“And Britannia was going to pull out also, this time.”
“That was what the rabble was urging, at any rate. There were some noisy demonstrations in Londin, and posters went up outside the proconsul’s palace telling him to go back to Roma, things like that: ‘Britannia for the Britons!’ Throw the Romans out and bring back the old Celtic monarchy, is what people were yelling. Well, of course, we couldn’t have that, and we shut them up very quickly indeed, and when the war began and our moment came, we fought as bravely as any Romans anywhere.”
“‘We?’” she says.
“The decent people of Britannia. The intelligent people.”
“The propertied people, you mean?”
“Well, of course. We understood how much there was to lose—not just for us, for everyone in Britannia—if the Empire should fall. What’s our best market? Italia! And if Britannia, Gallia, Hispania, and Lusitania managed to secede, Italia would lose its access to the sea. It would be locked up in the middle of Europa with one set of enemies blocking the land route to the east and the other set closing off the ocean to the west. The heart of the Empire would wither. We Britons would have no one to sell our goods to, unless we started shipping them westward to Nova Roma and trying to peddle them to the redskins. The breakup of the Empire would cause a worldwide depression—famine, civil strife, absolute horror everywhere. The worst of the suffering would have fallen on the people who were yelling loudest for secession.”
She gives me an odd look.
“Your own family claims royal Celtic blood, and you have a fancy Celtic name. So it would seem that your people like to look back nostalgically to the golden days of British freedom before the Roman conquest. But even so you helped to put down the secessionist movement in your province.”
Is she mocking me too? I am so little at ease among these Romans.
A trifle woodenly I say, “Not I, personally. I was still only a boy when the anti-Imperial demonstrations were going on. But yes, for all his love of Celtic lore my father has always believed that we had to put the interests of Roman civilization in general ahead of our petty little nationalistic pride. When the war did reach us, Britannia was on the Loyalist side, thanks in good measure to him. And as soon as I was old enough, I joined the legions and did my part for the Empire.”
“You love the Emperor, then?”
“I love the Empire. I believe the Empire is a necessity. As for this particular Emperor that we have now—” I hesitate. I should be careful here. “We have had more capable ones, I suppose.”
Lucilla laughs. “My father thinks that Maxentius is an utter idiot!”