The Romans had a saying—It costs money to sleep here. They were right.

On their first afternoon, Regina sent a boy to take a message to Amator’s home. There was no reply to her note that day, or the second, and Regina began to fret. She had never forgotten how she had waited for Amator’s call after that night in the Verulamium baths, a message that had never come; and she hated to be put in the same position again. Besides, it had taken all but a few bronze scraps of coin from Ceawlin’s money to buy them the room for a few nights. They couldn’t afford to wait long.

But on the third day a retainer called, and said that Amator was prepared to meet her.

And so that afternoon she and Brica walked across the city. Regina stepped out boldly, but Brica walked with eyes downcast and a fine cloth mask over her face.

It was a long and difficult trek. The streets were so crowded they could barely pass. The lower sections of the apartment blocks were given over to shops, taverns, and warehouses, and from stalls set up in the street itself everything from clothing to wine to cooked meats was on sale. Then there were the street entertainers—jugglers, snake charmers, acrobats. In one place a barber stoically shaved the jowls of a large, prosperous-looking gentleman; he held a spiderweb soaked in vinegar to stanch the bleeding from the frequent cuts he made. All this enterprise made the ways even narrower, and they were crowded with carriages, carts, baggage animals, sedan chairs borne by slaves, horseback riders. The road surface was filthy, littered with garbage and sewage. In the larger streets open trenches bore away the sewage toward deep-buried conduits, ultimately feeding the patient Tiber. And meanwhile dirty children ran around the wheels of the passing carriages, and dogs sniffed at the debris that piled up in any convenient corner.

But people pressed cheerfully through the crush, babbling away in their fluent, rapid Latin—although there was a surprising peppering of other tongues. Regina had thought these must be barbarian languages, but she learned that amid this torrent she could hear the tongues of some of the founding peoples of Rome, the Etruscans and the Sabines, relics of days long past.

Amator’s home turned out to be located in a grand complex called Trajan’s Forum.