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her hut when she could have been out training the army.
    “I cannot remember being more cheery,” she replied.
    Maggot winked. “You did well. Squeezed him out good and quick with minimum fuss. I’ve seen a lot of babies and he’s a beauty, too. Any idea what you’ll call him?”
    “I have a name in mind,” she said.

Chapter 5
    R agnall walked through the crowds on the Sacred Road, gawping up at temples and the painted statues looking down at him from their roofs. There was a bounce in his step. “Nobody in Rome looks up any more, and they’re all missing out,” someone had said to him at Clodia Metelli’s house a few nights before, so now he looked up whenever he remembered, and he was glad for it. There was a great deal more ornamentation on the buildings than he’d realised, stretching up to the highest roofs, and that ornamentation was amazing. The more basic sculpture on the least showy building was more impressive than any artwork he’d seen in Britain. The most ornate and humungous designs – crowd scenes of gods and men and mythical animals all entwined – made him stop and blink and forget to breathe.
    Rome filled him with happiness. He’d lived in Britain for his first twenty years, but this city was his natural home. The moment he arrived it felt like his soul was lowering itself into the warmest bath and sighing with pleasure. It felt right, it was right. The sooner the rest of the world learnt Roman ways, the better for everyone. There were bound to be people who’d say that they didn’t want to live like the Romans, but they were the sort of thick, older people who didn’t like any change. “Shall I take that half-decayed squirrel off your face for you?” you might say to one of them. “No, thanks very much, I like things just the way they are,” they’d reply.
    He scooted around a woman with a hairstyle like a precarious pile of powdered peacocks and jinked his way through a crowd of fashionably bearded young men, effortfully casual togas roped with loose belts in emulation of their hero Caesar. Ever since the city had been flooded with loot and been granted a twenty-day holiday in celebration of his successes in Gaul, Julius Caesar’s name was on everybody’s lips and his distinctive belt style was on all the young men’s hips.
    “Oi, Ragnall! Wan-kar! ” The good-natured insult was hurled by a knot of legionaries who Ragnall knew from Gaul, men who’d been shipped into town by Caesar to help ensure that his cronies Pompey and Crassus won that year’s consular election. The soldiers would vote for the candidates themselves and anybody else who didn’t could be sure of a beating.
    Their attention pleased Ragnall. Out in the field of Gaul, soldiers wouldn’t bother to shout a greeting at a clerk like him. Back home, however, campaign camaraderie bubbled out like water from squeezed sponges and men were the best of mates simply because they’d once marched to the same place at the same time.
    “You’re looking insufferably cheerful. I’d say denarius for your thoughts if I didn’t disdain clichés,” said a mellifluous voice behind him. Ragnall turned. It was Marcus Tullius Cicero, known to all as plain Cicero. Ragnall had met him with Drustan on the night that Drustan had been killed. Cicero had been one of the two ruling consuls a few years before, he was Rome’s leading lawyer and was often cited as the most intelligent man in the empire. Since Ragnall had met him he’d been exiled, called home, then fallen out and back in again with Caesar. Ragnall knew all this because they often talked about Cicero in Clodia’s house, where Ragnall had been welcomed back with opened arms (opened everything, in fact). Clodia was somewhat in awe of Cicero, despite the fact that, or perhaps because, Cicero had unsuccessfully persecuted her brother Clodius for incest with her. It was Clodius who’d had Cicero exiled, as revenge.
    “I’m happy to be back in Rome,” said