As tired as he was, Cadmus hardly slept for the second night in a row. The girl snored like a bear and seemed to speak more when she was asleep than when she was awake. Sometimes in Greek, sometimes in her own language. He stared at the ceiling and tried to piece together everything that had happened. Images rose and fell before his blind eyes: the giant’s vividly coloured face and clothes; the ruin of Silvanus’s library; the distraught Drusilla; the mystery of Epaphroditus’s box. In the dark their strangeness only became more vivid. When he wasn’t thinking of these, he was looking at the wax tablet again, tracing the inscribed letters with his fingers. There had to be more to it than just Silvanus’s reply to Tullus’s invitation. Some other meaning lurked behind its simplicity. And why the request about cleaning the tables? Some kind of in-joke?
He’d snatched a couple of hours of uneasy sleep when he was woken by the patter of feet outside the room. The other slaves were up. Dawn, maybe later. They were talking in low voices near the front door, and had obviously discovered the evidence of the break-in.
Below him, the girl rolled over heavily and muttered something in her native tongue, the words seeming to resonate through the floor and into his mattress. He watched the vague outline of her back rising and falling as she breathed. Now that the dust of the previous evening had settled, he knew in his tired bones that letting her stay had been a bad idea. He knew nothing about her. What had he been thinking?
She suddenly sat upright and yelled something into the darkness, more foreign sounds that Cadmus didn’t understand. They poured from her lips, terrified and terrifying.
‘What? What is it?’ hissed Cadmus.
She didn’t even realize he was there. Her hands thrashed and groped in front of her face. Cadmus scrambled from his bed and on to the floor, cupping a hand over her mouth. He tried to grab both her wrists, then just one of them, but even using all his strength and all his bodyweight she swatted him back against the bed frame. Eventually he pinched her neck hard, and that seemed to wake her up. Her mouth closed and her shoulders slumped.
She turned slowly where she sat. ‘What are you doing?’
‘What am I doing? Your screaming’s going to bring the whole house in here!’
‘Screaming?’ She looked into her lap. ‘Hmmm. Sorry. Bad dream.’
The curtain behind them twitched. Cadmus could see two pairs of bare feet shuffling in the gap at the bottom. He got up off the floor and threw it open, to find both of the slave girls loitering guiltily outside. Charis looked over his shoulder and raised her eyebrows.
‘Don’t start with your gossiping,’ he said, relieved that he hadn’t been caught by someone else. ‘This is none of your business. Go and find something useful to do.’
‘You sound like Bufo.’ She tutted, barely able to conceal her delight. ‘He’s not going to be happy when he finds out you broke the door down just so you could bring your girlfriend in.’
‘She’s not my—’
‘Don’t worry, we won’t tell him, unless you give us a reason to.’
‘Are you blackmailing me? You’re the one who sounds like Bufo now.’
At that, the girl got to her feet. Cadmus watched Charis’s and the other slave’s eyes widen as they fully appreciated her size.
‘Maybe I will tell him, after all,’ Charis said. ‘She looks like she’d put up a bit of fight. The old toad won’t know what to do with himself.’ She looked the girl up and down and shook her head as if in wonder. ‘I’ll tell you what, Cadmus, you’ve got strange taste in women.’
‘I told you, she’s not my—’
But before he could finish protesting, Charis and her friend had scampered away laughing. When he turned around, the girl was less amused.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
‘Embarrassed by me, are you?’
Cadmus blinked. ‘No. Not at all. If anything I’m rather proud of you.’
‘Oh, right. Proud of me. Proud to show me off.’ The girl’s displeasure was all the more unsettling for the fact that she hadn’t moved her face, or raised her voice, since she started speaking.
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘Don’t lie to me. I know when I’m being made fun of. I’ve been up for auction twice. You don’t know what it’s like.’
‘You don’t know how it feels to be the youngest slave in the line-up, but also the tallest. To have hundreds of men gasping and pointing and laughing at you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and he meant it. He was ashamed.
The girl humphed, and fiddled with the metal collar around her neck. She’d broken off the tag, he saw, but the collar itself was locked shut.
‘How shall I introduce you in future?’ Cadmus asked. ‘Do you have a name?’
‘I have a few,’ she said quietly. ‘They gave me nicknames after they captured me.’
‘Such as?’
‘Everyone in the camp just called me Ursa.’
The bear. Cadmus imagined the slave dealer who’d given her the moniker, thought of his grinning face. He didn’t find it funny.
‘Well, that won’t do,’ he said. ‘What’s your real name?’
She sighed. ‘I can tell you, but you won’t be able to pronounce it. No one can.’
‘Try me.’
She opened her mouth, and out fell a jumble of syllables. They sounded like the noises she’d been making in her sleep.
‘I told you,’ she said. Then she spoke very slowly.
Her tongue seemed to be working incredibly hard as she enunciated the name again: ‘Tog-o-dum-na.’
‘Togidubina.’
‘Close enough.’
‘Maybe I’ll just call you Tog.’
She shrugged. ‘Fine. That’s more effort than most people go to. And your name is . . . ?’
‘Cadmus.’
‘Is that your real name?’
‘I suppose it is now. I can’t remember what I was called when I was born.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. There are plenty more like me, plenty more like you. Can’t be sorry for everyone. There’s not enough sorrow to go around.’
They shook hands, Cadmus’s slim fingers disappearing completely within hers.
‘Right,’ he said decisively. ‘Seeing as Charis is now probably spreading the secret through the house, there’s not much point in hiding in here any more. Let’s get something to eat, then I want to ask you more about this tablet, and about what happened in Athens. I want to know everything.’
They stepped out into the atrium, which was now deserted, Cadmus taking the tablet with him. From there he led Tog into the garden. The sun was beginning to coax the dew from the grasses; flowers in terracotta pots were opening themselves to the day, their petals warm like flesh. Thrushes hopped from branches to bathe in the fountain. The edges of everything seemed softened.
He’d nearly reached the kitchen before he realized that she’d stopped following him. She was standing next to the fountain, her eyes closed, breathing deeply. In the sunlight he saw how pale Tog’s hair was – like silver and gold thread, in a ponytail that reached her shoulder blades. He rarely saw anything like it in Rome.
He was still staring when she finally turned and blinked at him. She smiled briefly and came over to where he stood in the shade of the peristyle.
‘I can’t remember the last time I could just stand and listen to the birds,’ she said.
Inside the kitchen, it soon became clear why Bufo hadn’t heard them breaking into the house the night before. He was slumped in the corner, cradling an amphora of wine, sleeping off a hangover. It was well known that he liked to drink on the job, but the absence of Tullus had obviously encouraged him to really push the boat out.
Cadmus put a finger to his lips, laid the tablet down next to the stove, and began to gather fruit and bread from the shelves.
‘Oh, hello!’ said Tog in a voice that wasn’t even close to a whisper.
Bufo gurgled like a baby, then went back to whatever wine-drenched dream he was having. Cadmus turned around. Tog had her finger in the bars of a tiny cage resting on a work surface, in which a dozen or so small furry bodies were wriggling.
‘What are they doing here?’ she asked, still too loud, her face a mask of concern. ‘Poor things.’
‘Dormice,’ Cadmus whispered, in an attempt to encourage her to lower her volume. ‘For dinner.’
‘For dinner?’
Bufo stirred again.
Cadmus pointed at the door. ‘Go!’ he mouthed, a bag of provisions in one hand, the tablet in another.
‘You mean, you eat them?’ She wasn’t even trying to keep her voice down any more.
‘Can we discuss this some other time?’ he hissed, and made to leave.
Tog didn’t move. She looked so sad all of a sudden. ‘The poor things.’
‘They’re just mice.’
‘What do you mean, just mice?’ she said loudly.
Bufo’s eyes opened. For a moment he seemed unsure of where he was. He frowned and slurped at the saliva pooling around his lips. He looked at Cadmus, then at Tog, then at Cadmus again. Then at the food he’d pilfered. The toad’s face and neck swelled.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he slurred. ‘Who’s she? And who let you in?’
He spoke to them in Latin, and Tog frowned in incomprehension.
‘Calm down, Bufo,’ said Cadmus. He could hear a quiver in his voice. Perhaps this wouldn’t be as entertaining as he’d hoped. The old slave was unpredictable when he was drunk. Tog, meanwhile, seemed unconcerned by the whole situation, and was still trying to find a way to open the cage.
‘I’ll have you whipped!’ he said. ‘When the master comes back, he’ll beat you black and blue! Thieves!’
‘He’s not coming back,’ said Cadmus, feeling like the soles of his feet had melted and stuck him to the spot. ‘I told you that. But she might be able to help us find out what’s happened to him.’
Bufo laughed and got unsteadily to his feet. Cadmus watched his cheeks and forehead turn the colour of raw meat. ‘Well, if you’re so sure Tullus has gone, I suppose I’ll have to discipline you myself . . .’
He seized a rolling pin from the bench next to the stove, and lurched forward. At exactly the same time, Tog opened the cage.
The dormice scattered in all directions in twos and threes. Tog smiled, her face transformed again. Bufo tried to stop himself mid-lunge, but he already had too much drunken momentum. His legs buckled and he fell to his hands and knees, swiping wildly at the grey smudges as they raced away to freedom. He was far too slow. In the space of two heartbeats, all of the mice had disappeared.
Tog clapped and muttered a word of triumph in her own language. She turned to follow Cadmus out of the door, but hadn’t noticed Bufo groping for the rolling pin again and picking himself off the floor. He was growling like an animal.
‘You useless . . .’
‘Look out!’ Cadmus yelled, but it was too late. The old toad staggered into her and brought his club down heavily, clumsily, on the back of her neck. Cadmus’s feet still didn’t want to move.
Tog didn’t go down, though. Instead, she turned, as though someone had tapped her on the shoulder. Bufo tried to swing the rolling pin again, but she caught his hand in hers, and squeezed. He dropped the weapon.
‘Go back to sleep,’ she said in that calm, deep, undulating voice.
Bufo winced, his face now almost the same shade as the wine he was pickled in. Cadmus remembered, with some satisfaction, when he’d been in the same position as Bufo, his hand crushed, after the old slave had caught him eavesdropping.
‘Who are you, monster?’ Bufo snarled, creased in pain.
‘What’s he saying?’ Tog asked.
‘He wants to know who you are.’
‘Then tell him. I am Togodumna, daughter of Caradog, granddaughter of Cunobeline, King of the Catuvellauni. And I am asking him nicely to go back to sleep.’
Cadmus saw her knuckles flex, and Bufo made a wet-sounding cry. Then she released him and he tottered backwards, holding one hand in the other.
‘You’ll pay for this! Both of you!’
She left him whimpering, pushed past Cadmus, who was still standing frozen on the threshold, and returned to the atrium. When Cadmus finally tore himself away from the scene, he found Charis, Clitus, the other slave girl and two of the other cooks peering into the kitchen. He couldn’t decide whether their expressions were of admiration, or disapproval, or fear, or some mixture of the three. He didn’t waste time trying to explain. He turned, smiled weakly, and followed Tog – although, as she’d just revealed, she was so much more than just Tog – back into the house.
When he reached the atrium, the front door was wide open, and she was standing in the white sunlight with her hands on her hips.
He stepped through after her.
‘It’s probably not wise for us to stay here,’ he said. He chewed on his lower lip. Masterless, now homeless.
‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the food, though, haven’t you?’
‘A little, yes.’
‘We should look for your master.’
‘Yes.’
An awkward pause. One of Tullus’s wealthy neighbours bobbed past them in a litter, carried by two slaves. She leant out of the window and ogled them. Halfway down the hill, she was still craning her neck.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Cadmus said at last. ‘About who you were?’
‘You didn’t think to ask,’ Tog said.