“I doubt any experienced vintner would fall from a poplar tree unless he had sampled too much of last year’s wine,” Julia remarks, making Pliny laugh.

“Back that way is Surrentum,” he continues. “You should be able to see the promontory of Minerva, over there, look, where the Sirens once lived.”

“The Sirens were here, on the Italian coast?” Amara asks.

“Well, if you believe the legends,” Pliny replies, amused.

The hours of their journey across the Bay of Naples are some of the swiftest moving in Amara’s life. She listens with rapt attention as Pliny describes not only the physical features of the landscape, the hot springs, the towns, the rivers, but also the legends behind them, the animals that live in each region, even the plants and their properties. Occasionally, Amara catches Julia looking at her, unable to hide her mirth at the picture of wide-eyed adoration she is presenting to the admiral. Even Pliny, whose interest in Amara has never been obviously sexual, does not seem entirely immune to the compliment.

The ship starts to lose speed as they approach Misenum, and Pliny excuses himself to join his crew. “He does love an audience,” Julia murmurs affectionately, as she watches him speaking to the captain at the prow of the ship. “No wonder he made you his freedwoman.”

“It’s astonishing,” Amara says. “He must remember everything he’s ever read. There cannot be another man like him, anywhere in the world!”

“Amara, please,” Julia says, as Livia snorts with laughter. “I have to insist you don’t treat Pliny like a god for the next few days—you’ll make him quite insufferable.”

The quadrireme slows on the approach into Misenum, and as it turns, Amara sees the inner harbor clearly for the first time. A floating forest lies in the basin, its thicket of masts as dense as the trees she has just seen crowding along stretches of the coastline. Men are working on many of the decks, cleaning and repairing the ships, some hanging on ropes off the sides, close to the water. Their own vessel, which is larger than many of those moored, edges past the rows of warships to dock by the naval barracks, a process that takes some time.

It is Secundus who helps Amara onto land, and she clutches his arm, still unsteady even though the ground is no longer moving under their feet. Pliny does not come ashore, and as Secundus leads them away, Amara realizes with disappointment that he must still have business with the fleet. They head in the opposite direction to the town—a distant jumble of colorful buildings clinging like mollusks to the edge of the harbor—and cross a wooden bridge that spans a wide canal. Looking along it, Amara sees that it leads to an even bigger enclosed harbor. The huge thicket of masts she saw on her arrival is only a fraction of the fleet.