Black cinders floated in the air around the two men, borne aloft by unseen currents. Pompey shivered in the breeze, feeling old. He was not ready to retire from public life, if Caesar would even have let him. He had been forced to this place by a man who cared nothing for the city. Caesar would find out there was a price to pay for ruling Rome. She had claws, and the people who cheered you and threw flowers at your feet could forget it all in just a season.

“I would not change a single year of my life, Suetonius. If I had them again, I would spend them as fast, even if they left me here, with a ship waiting to take me away.”

He saw Suetonius’s confusion and chuckled.

“But it is not over yet. Come, we must be at sea before the tide changes.”

Servilia looked at her reflection in a mirror of polished bronze. Three slaves fussed around her, working on her hair and eyes as they had been for three hours before dawn. Today would be special, she knew. Everyone who entered the city said Caesar was coming, and she wanted him to see her at her best.

She rose to stand naked before the mirror, raising her arms for the slave girl to add a subtle dust of rouge to her nipples. The light tickle of the brush made them stiffen and she smiled, before sighing. The mirror could not be fooled. Lightly, she touched her stomach with the palm of a hand. She had escaped the sagging belly of the Roman matron with a host of births, but age had loosened the skin, so that she could press it and see it wrinkle like thin cloth, as if nothing held it to her. Soft dresses that had once been used to reveal, now covered what she did not want seen. She knew she was still elegant and riding kept her fit, but there was only one youth to be had and hers was a memory. Without dye, her hair was an iron gray, and each year she tortured herself with the thought that it was time to let her age show before her paints and oils were nothing but a tawdry covering, a humiliation.

She had seen women who would not admit they had grown old and hated the thought of joining those pathetic, wigged creatures. Better to have dignity than to be ridiculed, but today Caesar was coming, and she would use all her art.

When she stood still, her skin shone with oil from the massage table and she could believe she retained a trace of her old beauty. Then she would move and the fine web would appear in her reflection, mocking her efforts. It was a tragedy that there were so few years when the skin glowed, before pigments and oils had to do the job in their place.