“There’s been a battle,” her father said vaguely, his pale hair gray with stone dust after a day in his studio. “Somewhere around Bedriacum, they’re saying.”

“Really?” Diana said, wondering without much interest where Bedriacum was, and skipped upstairs to count her bruises. She looked in her polished mirror and didn’t see the silken Cornelia Quarta of the Cornelii, courted by half of Rome. She saw a girl in an old woolen tunic hacked off at the knee, hair bundled into a careless horse tail down her back, freckles across her nose and bruises up and down her arms. A girl who longed not for a husband but for the grudging praise of a rebel chief turned tamer of horses. She looked in the mirror, and she saw a charioteer.

Eleven

Eleven

FORTY thousand dead.

However many times Marcella began her account of the battle of Bedriacum, it started with those words. Forty thousand dead. Later she learned that the number was nowhere near so high—perhaps ten thousand, but not forty. No one knew for sure. But forty thousand was the number that resounded in her mind, the number that the gasping messenger brought to Emperor Otho.

Forty thousand dead.

She sat quiet in a storm of shouting voices and shrill laughter, reviewing her notes.

Vitellius was not present with his army, still some distance behind with reinforcements. His commanders launched a daybreak attack upon Placentia, where Emperor Otho’s commander was camped with three cohorts of Praetorian Guards. The Praetorians fought like madmen and the attack was repulsed.

Like madmen—florid words, not fit for a cool and sober history. But Marcella had seen the Praetorians come like gods of war from the field to report to their Emperor in Bedriacum some miles away. A trio of officers had made the report, giddy and triumphant. One of them was Centurion Drusus Densus.

“The Vitellians are running, Caesar,” the chief centurion had crowed. “We sent them off with their tails between their legs—”

“Ha!” Otho slapped the arm of his chair in delight. He had not traveled light on this campaign; in a rude soldier’s tent he sat ensconced in his own gilded chair from the Domus Aurea, a silver flagon of his favorite wine to hand, his own barber to shave him twice a day, and his own musicians to provide entertainment. The musicians were silent, fingers twitching on their lyre strings, eager as the rest of Otho’s considerable entourage to hear the rest of the Praetorian report. Marcella stood at the back with the few other women who had wheedled their husbands or lovers into taking them along, craning her neck for a better view.