Jack Whyte - The Skystone

"Come, Publius, " she said after I had admired the scene. "You have some idea now of the layout of the place. Now we can look more closely. " That was when the humbling process began. I may have thought, as I listened to her talk about the plan of the villa, that I was getting some idea of what it was like, but I was wrong. The reality beggared description. The ground floor of the family quarters, for example, was palatial, and every room was differently floored. The floors in the main rooms were mosaic, in a multitude of colours, showing scenes of Greek myth and legend: I saw depictions of Europa and the Bull, Leda and the Swan, and Theseus and the Minotaur. The lesser rooms on that floor were merely tessellated, laid out in geometric shapes and patterns that dazzled the eyes with their brightness and colours.

The triclinium, the great dining room, held an open-sided arrangement of matched oaken dining tables that would seat upwards of sixty guests in comfort, and the walls were panelled in sheets of lustrous green and yellow marble so highly polished that I could see myself reflected in them. Against the walls, ranked side by side, were deep-shelved cabinets — some open-fronted, some with doors — that held the family's wealth of plate and dinnerware: platters and bowls and serving dishes and knives and utensils of gold and silver and copper and tin and bronze; exquisite Samian pottery, richly glazed and decorated; cups and beakers and vases of polished glass; and two enormous drinking cups of aurochs horn, polished and worn, glossy with age and ornamented with mounts of finely crafted gold.

The family slept on the upper floor, which was reached by a double flight of spacious, marble steps. Up there, I found real cause for astonishment. The floors were all of wood, for one thing, but such wood as I had never seen before. I asked Luceiia about them and she told me they were of pine, imported to Britain by her great-grandfather years before, and planed and then polished to a deep, reflective glaze by more than a hundred years of care and cleaning.

The most amazing thing of all, however, was that each of the ten sleeping-chambers on that upper floor had a window, and was therefore filled with light. The windows were small, and covered with wooden shutters fitted with louvered slats that could be closed completely, or angled to permit light and air to enter. I had heard of such things, and had even seen a few, but I had never seen them used so lavishly before. Normal Roman sleeping chambers were precisely that: tiny, lightless cubicles containing a bed, and perhaps a table. Because of the profusion of light, however, each of the ten chambers was decorated in a different colour, the walls and draped windows and the carpets on the floors blending their hues to give each room a character quite different from any other. My own room, which was separated from Caius's by a short, lateral corridor with a window at the eastern end and a chamber door on each side, was decorated in pale gold, while his was a spacious chamber of cool greens. Luceiia's own chamber was white and silver, with pale blue carpets and window drapes, and a bed covering of blue and silver silk the value of which must have been incalculable, made as it was in the distant lands far beyond Constantinople to the east.

The temperature throughout the entire house was uniform, thanks to the heated air carried to the various rooms by the hypocausts, hot-air ducts fed by the furnace that burned constantly beneath the bath house and was refuelled twice each day by the household servants. Luceiia led me from the upper floor to the family bath house by means of a stairway that descended to the inner courtyard from the passageway that ran along the outside of the upper floor.

Once again I was impressed beyond my expectations. The family bath house lacked none of the facilities one would expect to find in a major public bathing house. There was a spacious undressing room, divided by rod-hung curtains for privacy, and lined with niches for holding clothing. Directly outside this room were three pool rooms laid out in sequence —

cold, tepid, and hot — and beyond those, closed off by heavy, waterproofed curtains, was the sudarium, or steam room, which held a number of stone plinths and was looked after by an attendant skilled in massage and depilation.

We did not linger in the bath house, but I asked her about the glazed tiles that lined the walls and the pools, and she told me that they, too, had been imported from beyond the seas.

It was a relief to emerge again into the scented coolness of the inner courtyard where, even this late in the year, the air was redolent of green and growing things. This inner courtyard was split into four quarters by intersecting pathways. The two plots closest to the living quarters were ornamental, lined with privet hedge and planted with a profusion of red poppies, some of which still bloomed. The far plots were given completely to vegetables and fruits. I could tell from the pride with which she described the plants that this garden was Luceiia's special concern. She pointed out two plum trees, a cherry tree and two apple trees, all pruned severely and healthy-looking.

At the intersection of the two pathways, she turned right and led me to the kitchens and the bakery, pointing out that most of the household servants lived above these places. Both facilities were enormous, spotlessly clean and well enough equipped to serve two hundred people on the shortest notice.

At the far end of this side of the courtyard, furthest from the furnaces that heated the house, Caius had placed the room in which he kept his wines. I felt my eyes grow large as Luceiia began to show me the treasures this room contained. It was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves, separated by walkways just wide enough to permit the installation and removal of the very largest of the amphorae, barrels, casks and jars of all shapes and sizes that lined the shelves. Each separate container was clearly labelled and numbered, and their contents ranged from the thick, rich, sweetened wines of Greece to the dark, red, tangy wine made from the grapes grown on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. There were amphorae of the succulent wine of Aminea and a wide selection of the various wines of Gaul, including the light, sweet wine of the south that is neither red nor white but a mixture of both.

There was one whole section of shelves that held different wines, all in small jugs that a man could hoist easily to his mouth on a bent elbow, and one of these Luceiia broke open and passed to me. It was ambrosia! Cool and nectar-sweet, imported, she told me, from the lands of the Germanic tribes I had fought against myself, years before. Had I known they could produce wines as superb as this, I would have stayed there longer, non-combatant.

We crossed the courtyard again to the northern wall, me still carrying my open jug, and she showed me the laundries and the dry storage rooms that occupied that wing, as well as the cool room, again furthest from the furnaces. This was the only other room in the whole building that, like the wine room, had no hypocausts. It was separated from the rooms on either side of it by thick stone walls, plastered on the inside with thickly strawed mud and painted white. The floor, I noticed, was of concrete and was channelled for drainage. During the summer months, this room was packed with ice and salt and straw to keep it cool, and carcasses of oxen, sheep, pigs, deer and other game hung on iron hooks suspended from beams in the ceiling. There were no cobwebs in the corners, and no speck of dirt on the walls or on the floor.

By the time we had completed our tour of the entire villa, the day was almost gone, and I was speechless. We ended our tour in a large and spacious smithy, having been over every square foot of the Villa Britannicus, and I was looking around me at the empty forges and braziers and at the tools that hung ranged in neat rows everywhere I looked.