Free Conspiracies of Rome by Richard Blake

bastards.
        ‘Welcome to the Empire of the Greeks,’ said Maximin, fully himself again and without any hint now of exhaustion. He nodded to the soldier, who went back to his work of sponging. He continued in English: ‘I don’t think we shall go beyond mentioning the relic.’

9
    I was lucky in my first view of Rome. It was on a Monday and, according to the modern style, was the twenty-first day of April in the year 609. The spell of drizzle that had been with us for the last few days of our journey on the road was now lifted. Before riding on ahead into the city, one of the soldiers who’d accompanied us told me that spring was now here with no chance of a relapse.
        We entered through the Pancratian Gate and, the great wall of Aurelian behind, we rested our horses atop the Janiculum Hill. We dismounted and ate a little breakfast of bread and cheese. From here, in the morning sun, we could see the Seven Hills and appreciate the city as a whole.
        I had never seen anything so gigantic or magnificent. Within the immense circuit of its walls, Rome spread out for miles across in all directions. There was still a mist in the lower parts, and this prevented a full view. But I could clearly trace the circuit of those walls, and I knew that everything inside was Rome. It was so vast, you could have dropped in the whole area of Canterbury and Richborough together, and had room to do it dozens of times over.
        As long as I could remember, I’d been hearing about Rome. I’d heard about it from Auxilius, who’d never been here. I’d read about it in the mission library. I’d heard about it from the missionaries. I’d heard much from Maximin, who’d been here so often he nearly counted as a native. But nothing had prepared me for anything so terrifyingly wonderful.
        One of the ancient emperors – one from long before the seat of Empire was transferred to Constantinople – could find no better way to apprehend the size of his capital than to have all the cobwebs gathered from every building and heaped before him. It is often only in the accumulation of the individually small that you can make sense of the inconceivably vast.
        No one did any such for me. Instead, I just stood there, gawping at the unimagined size of it all, and trying not to let Maximin see how overwhelmed I was.
        ‘Big, isn’t it?’ he said with a half-suppressed pride, shaking out his napkin for the little birds that twittered round and reaching for his bridle.
        ‘It is big,’ I agreed, trying to sound nonchalant. I wanted to put something into my voice that would say I too had seen big cities – Genoa, for example, and Pisa – and that Rome was just a larger version of these. But my voice trailed off as I looked again over the whole. In and around the central district, I saw clusters of buildings so huge I could barely conceive how they had been designed and constructed. Standing out most clearly in the general vastness were the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill and the baths built by Diocletian far over to the left. These dominated the city, dwarfing everything around them in height and sheer mass. Largely obscured by the palace was another mountainous building that I later found out was the great Colosseum – a stone amphitheatre so large that eighty thousand people at a time could watch the games that used to be held there.
        But even as we rode in, and I strained to look up at the buildings on either side of the road, I could see that Rome, like everywhere else in my world, had seen better days.
        This had, indeed, been apparent even before we reached the gate. There was a time when Rome was served by eleven aqueducts – long arched structures carrying in three hundred million gallons of water every day. These fed the baths, the fountains, and many private houses. They poured into fishponds and even great artificial lakes. But in the sieges of Rome that had attended the War of