One of the traders, a thick-bodied man with skin like boiled leather, would dock his ship at Durovernum twice a year and spin tales of the cities he’d seen and the people he’d traded with. I would perch on the bales of merchandise stacked on the docks and listen to his stories of far-off lands. That was where I had first heard of the great middle sea, whose waves washed the shores of many different lands, lands like Greece and Rome and Aegypt. The trader had told me that Mare Nostrum meant “Our Sea” in Latin, and I had marveled at the arrogance of Rome, which would dare to lay claim to the very elements of the earth. The goddess must have laughed at them, I’d thought. I certainly had.
But I wasn’t laughing now as I finally saw with my own eyes the things the trader had spoken of. The stone walls of Massilia gleamed so brightly in the sun that I had to squint to look at them, rising up against the backdrop of a sea the color of the deepest sapphires and nestled among green and brown hills cloaked with olive trees. The road we were on had widened steadily over the last day’s traveling until it was broad enough to let four ox carts go side by side down toward the great north gate. Our own caravan joined the multitude of foot and cart traffic that streamed toward the bustling city that, as far as I could tell, held more people within its walls than I had thought were alive in the whole world.
My mouth kept dropping open, and I would choke on road dust as the city loomed ever closer. When I glanced over at Elka, she was in the same state—wide-eyed and torn between fear and wonderment. Everything seemed like something out of legend. In the shadow of the soaring walls, the city became less of an imposing majestic place and more a heaped, jumbled gathering of wealth and squalor existing side by side. Heady perfumes and the stink of offal wrapped around each other, woven into an overwhelming tapestry by the ocean breeze. Wicker cages full of fowl and small game swung from carts, squawking and chittering excitedly, filling the air with a haze of fur and feathers. Tens and tens of incomprehensible languages rang in my ears. Houses and temples and other buildings made of stone—structures that made my father’s great hall seem like a sheepherder’s hut—rose above the street, level upon level.
All of it—the sights and sounds and smells—tangled together into an assault on my senses that made me want to clap my hands over my ears and hide my head. But there was no escaping the chaos as our cart plunged on, heading right toward the very heart of Massilia. With only the bars of my cage between me and the pushing, shoving, singing, shouting crowd, I’d never felt so vulnerable.
But the people on the road paid us little heed—we were, after all, just one more load of trade goods to be sold in the marketplace in Rome—and by the time we’d passed beneath the massive arch of the city gate, my panic had mostly given way to curiosity as Charon’s drivers shouted and cursed, bullying their way toward Massilia’s famed docks. Eventually, we came to a stop beside a ship with the same maroon-and-blue-striped sail as the slave galley that had taken me away from my home.
Charon appeared, swinging himself down from the back of his covered wagon, and hailed the ship’s master. I watched the two men clasp wrists in greeting, and I could tell that the ship captain was agitated. He gestured with impatient swipes back toward the ship. I glanced over and saw that the ship’s rails were lined with Roman legionnaires. Dozens of them. They bristled with weapons and armor, and beneath the brims of their helmets, their faces looked like statues carved by the same sculptor, equally stern, hard, uncaring.
The sight of them made my blood run cold.
These men, I thought, are not warriors. They are soldiers.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the tribes of Prydain—for the men and women of the Cantii and the Catuvellauni—to face those soldiers. How had it been for Virico or Sorcha? How had it been for Arviragus and his doomed coalition of tribes in Alesia? These were stone-cold men trained to kill—not with heart and fire and fury, not with the joy of glorious battle, but as a single, unthinking whole, like drones in a beehive.
Eventually, one of the soldiers—one of some sort of rank, I guessed, judging from the helmet plume and his immaculate cloak—strode forward to speak to Charon, and the slave master waved away the captain.
“Caius Antonius Varro!” Charon held out his hand and greeted the legionnaire with cheer. “Well met, Decurion.”
The two men clasped wrists in greeting.
“What are you doing in Massilia?” Charon continued. “Official business?”
“The port authorites made a request of Caesar to lend the services of my detachment,” the legionnaire replied. “So that we may escort cargo ships safely to Rome. I’ll be traveling with you on the last leg of your journey.”
Charon raised an eyebrow. “This would be in regards to the ‘pirates’ my captain tells me of? He thinks the authorities are imagining things, Decurion. Or exaggerating.”
The Decurion shrugged. “They can think whatever they like. My father’s trading partners lost three ships to bandits in the last month alone,” he said.