THE Vestal Virgins gathered up the bloodied veil and laid it on their altar.

PART FIVE

JULIA

In the last temple

It is a small tomb, this place beneath the earth. Small enough to touch all four walls without stirring from my stool. There is a candle, guttering low because candles need air to breathe as much as people, and the air in this earth chamber is growing short.

I sit in the flickering dark, and smile.

Vesta, I thank you. For so many things, I thank you. I thank you for allowing me to serve you. I thank you for the man who loved me. I thank you for the courage to save my sister. I thank you for the gift you gave her son.

I thank you for a life that has not been wasted.

I stretch forward, and blow out the candle.

Vesta, goddess of hearth and home . . .

Is that You?

I did not know You would be so beautiful.

Thirty

LEPIDA

MARVELOUS,” I said lazily. “What is it?” “The juice from some flower or other,” said my Imperial lover. He took the goblet from my limp hand, excitement coming in blank flickers across his eyes.

Who would have thought that a flower crushed into old Falernian could produce this delightful torpor? I closed my eyes, letting the Emperor labor over my passive body. He had rather peculiar tastes, but nothing one couldn’t get used to. Nothing one couldn’t even grow to be excited by.

To be the mistress of the Emperor . . . that was exciting enough!

Oh, these last three months were everything I had ever dreamed of. The applause. The power. People bowing when I paraded past. People begging me to drop just one word in the Emperor’s ear. Power a thousand times magnified. I was the mistress of Rome now!

As for Domitian himself . . . well, I didn’t see what all the dark rumors were about. He was a man. Odd-tempered, mercurial, but still a man. I’d known how to handle men since I was fourteen. Emperor or no, I never let him be too sure of me. Sometimes when the Imperial freedman knocked on my door I told him I was “out.” Sometimes I hinted at rendezvous with unnamed men. Sometimes I threw myself adoringly at his feet, sometimes I just smiled remotely. Just to keep him interested.

“Cover yourself.” Finishing, he pulled away. “You look like a whore.”

He was already reaching for his folders, his tablets and slates. I lifted a languid arm and draped my body with a fold of silk. “By the way”—casually—“you really must do something about that astrologer of yours. He’s abominably rude. Three times I’ve asked him to draw up my horoscope, and he ignores me.”

“He sees the future as clearly as the rest of us see the past.” My Imperial lover never looked up from his work. “Eyes like that are worth all the gold in Egypt.”