They stop to buy their one meal of the day at a roadside stall outside town. Victoria chooses, picking out bread, olives and anchovies, the dried fish stiff with brine. After walking a little further downhill, they reach the water. It is even busier here, merchants are unloading, there’s the yell of sailors and the scrape of cargo, and the constant slap of the waves against the stone walls. A little way off from the busy docks, a colonnade stretches round in a semicircle. From its roof, statues of the gods look out at incoming ships, while in the water itself, at the center of the harbor, is a giant marble column. Venus Pompeiiana stands naked at the top. She gazes out over the vast expanse of blue, the guardian of her town.

The she-wolves find a sunny patch on the colonnade, dangling their legs over the side. They eat their food quickly to avoid the gulls that swoop overhead. Victoria watches a troop of oar slaves walk up onto the docks for a brief respite. They stand bent and blinking in the light. “What a miserable life that would be.” Victoria says. She stretches back, palms resting on the warm stone, her face to the sun. “Who is luckier than us in Pompeii right now? All this time to enjoy ourselves, no back-breaking loads to carry.” She swings her legs up. “I shouldn’t even be alive. You know I was a rubbish-heap baby? Left out to die in the shit and the fish guts. But here I am. Here we all are.”

“Here we all are,” Amara says. “Four penniless slaves, sucking off idiots for bread and olives. What a life.”

Victoria laughs. “So bitter! You can’t still be mad about Felix,” she says. “That was ages ago.”

“Not just Felix,” Amara replies, looking at one of the larger merchant ships navigating its way into dock. She thinks about her own voyage over from Greece. The cold nights out on deck under the stars, rammed together with other slaves. The smell of vomit, the weeping, the terror of what awaited should they survive the journey. “You started life on a rubbish heap,” Amara says, “but I had a home. I was a doctor’s daughter. I had a life.” She has never told anyone in Pompeii—except Dido—about her past.

“Your father was a doctor?” Beronice asks in surprise. “What are you doing in a brothel?”