The guests loudly admired Julia’s latest decor. In the main hall the plaster walls were painted with blocks of purple or gray veined with blue, and the dado was an elegant design of small rectangles outlined in green. Regina had learned that the old design—nature-themed, with imitation marbling, garlands, and candelabra all adorned with ears of yellow barley—was now seriously out of fashion on the continent. Her father had complained loud and long about the expense of repainting the walls, and the difficulty of finding workmen these days. Her grandfather had just raised his thick eyebrows and said something about how absurd it was to paint one half of a villa when the other half had burned down and you couldn’t afford to fix it . . .

But to Regina’s young eyes, the new design looked much better than the old, and that was all that mattered.

The entertainment started soon after the first guests arrived. Julia had hired a storyteller, an old man—perhaps as old as fifty—with a great ferocious gray-black beard. He told a long and complicated story, entirely from memory, about how the hero Culhwch had sought the hand of the daughter of the giant Ysbadden. It was an ancestral tale of the olden days before the coming of the Caesars. Few people listened to him—even Regina was too excited to stay for long, though she knew it was a good story—but the old man would patiently tell and retell his stories all night, and as the party wore on, and as the drink had its effect, his deep voice would attract more attention. At the start of the evening, though, the musicians were more popular. They played a mixture of instruments from Britain and the Continent, bone flutes and panpipes, harps and citharas and tibias, and their bright music drifted like smoke on the still air.

Julia’s father, Regina’s grandfather, was here. Aetius was a towering soldier who, after adventures abroad, was now stationed at a mysterious, magic-sounding, faraway place called the Wall. And having traveled the length of the diocese of Britain for his only daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday party, he stomped around the villa and grumbled loudly at all the expense—“It’s as if the Rhine never froze over,” he would say mysteriously.

Marcus, Regina’s father, was a thin, clumsy man with severely cut dark hair and a drawn, anxious-looking face. He was dressed in his toga. This formal garment took skill to wear, for it was very heavy and you had to walk correctly to make the drapery fall easily, and Marcus wasn’t used to it. So he walked about slowly and ponderously, as if he were wearing a great suit of lead. No matter how carefully he took each step—and he didn’t dare sit down—the precious toga dragged on the floor, or folded and flapped awkwardly, or fell open to reveal his white tunic underneath.