“What’s she doing?” Paulinus asked, and realized he was whispering.

“Meditating.” His guide closed the door. “When not occupied by our duties, we reflect upon the mysteries. Now if you’ll follow me—this is where we eat.”

Another bare room, empty except for a long carved table. Another Vestal sat before a plate of rough-grained bread and figs, eating without greed. She glanced over with tranquil eyes, then looked away.

“The schoolrooms.” His guide stood back from another door, and he looked in to see two little shaven-headed girls bent gravely over scrolls. They wore white robes and coarse sandals: miniature copies of their elders.

“Why cut their hair?” Paulinus watched the girls confer over a tablet. With their clear young faces and shaved heads, they looked neither female nor male but something in between, something . . . not entirely human. Already they had the still movements and passionless eyes of the older Vestals.

“They shed their hair as they shed all other worldly possessions. When they become Vestals in full, it is allowed to grow back.”

He wondered what color his guide’s hair was under her veil. “They’re very young.”

“They come between the ages of six and ten, and spend ten years training.” She shut the schoolroom door and set off down another hall. “Then they enter into ten years of service. After that, ten years of training the young in turn.”

“What are your duties?”

“We prepare the flour that is used for all city sacrifices. We gather water from the sacred spring in our temple grove. Above all, we tend Vesta’s fire—in a sense it is Rome’s hearth.” She smiled as they turned back into the central atrium with its double lane of white marble statues. “There are other duties, but I’m afraid I may not tell you about them.”

“Fair enough.” He studied the row of statues as he passed—former Vestals, he assumed. Young and old in their marble-carved forms; short and tall, fat and thin, but somehow they all looked alike. The carved Vestals gazing over the atrium with their serene marble eyes seemed no different from the living ones who passed below in their goddess’s duties. His guide could have climbed up on a plinth, settled her white robes, and become indistinguishable from her dead sisters.

“Would you like to see the Temple?” she asked.

“Yes.”

A round and simple room, nothing more. There was a discreet curtained area where wills and other important documents were stored—the Emperor’s among them, Paulinus knew. But there were no mosaics, no ornamentation, no bloodstains from elaborate sacrifices. Just an undraped altar in the round temple’s center, and a flame burning in a bronze bowl.

“The flame of Vesta.” His guide’s voice echoed quietly around the room. “The eternal flame. If it goes out, we are subject to charges of negligence.” She walked to the altar and reverenced the flame with a curiously liquid movement. Paulinus stood silent. How many men were privileged enough to catch a glimpse of this silent female place?