Karus led his guests through the shop and to a staircase at the back. It turned out that Karus owned the space on top of the shop, which was, to Brigonius’s surprise, like a second house piled up on top of the first. The space up here, small to begin with, was sliced up into smaller rooms by inner partitions. Karus went around lighting wall-mounted oil lamps and candles. The rooms had tiny windows with panes of bluish glass, but it was dark inside the apartment, even on so bright a morning, for the building was in the shadow of others.

Severa and Lepidina made slight noises of appreciation as Karus showed them around. ‘It isn’t terribly large,’ Karus said apologetically. ‘But it’s all a poor lawyer can afford. You wouldn’t believe how expensive land has become close to the town centre.’

Severa said, ‘Oh, it’s the same everywhere. You should see the apartment blocks in Rome. Some of them are piled so high I swear they would fall over if they didn’t lean against each other. But you’ve made good use of the space, Karus.’

One small corner room was a shrine. The guests inspected Karus’s idols and tokens, most of them dedicated to his own household gods. But Brigonius recognised a statue of Fors Fortuna.

Severa said, ‘A soldier’s god.’

‘I’m no soldier,’ Karus said, patting his broad belly. ‘But most of my clients are. This is still a soldiers’ town, Severa. It does no harm to seek the blessing of their goddess.’ He led his guests onward.

Brigonius touched the wall. The surface was plastered and painted white, but in places the plaster had chipped away to reveal plaited wood stuffed with mud and straw. He felt increasingly cramped in this small, dark space. It was even worse than the stone-walled forts he had to visit when dealing with the army in the north. Here the thin walls didn’t block out the noise from the busy alley outside, or the food smells from the restaurant down below. Not only that, this was Karus’s territory, and the fat lawyer seemed to fill the narrow rooms with his talk.

Lepidina took his arm. ‘Are you all right? You’re like a bear in a cage.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said stiffly.

‘No, you’re not.’

‘It’s just—look, it’s so different for me.’ He waved a hand, trying to find words. ‘It’s the way all the walls are flat, the edges straight, the corners square. And the space is sliced up for different purposes. You sleep over there, you work over here.’

Severa was interested. ‘And is that different from how you live?’

He tried to describe the house he had grown up in and where he still lived, its open round space a map of the cycles of time.