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tenderness.
    I sat and dipped my injured foot into the basin, wincing as I began to clean the damaged toe.
    Aurelius knelt. “Here, let me.”
    I stared at him as if he were mad: a man of the aristocratic class offering to wash the feet of a
    peasant girl? But I was too tired to object. Now that I was safe, I was trembling from the terror
    and exhaustion.
    I watched mesmerized as he took my small foot in his hands and wiped it with the soft cloth.
    He was awkward, but careful, gentle and surprisingly thorough. He rubbed one spot at a time, in
    little circles, until my foot was warmed by a tingling feeling that began to travel up my leg.
    “You know, in the Christian Bible, it says that Christ did this: washed his disciples’ feet,” he
    said, watching his own hands at work. Everything was a lesson with him, always.
    I didn’t respond. He was washing my ankle now, his strong hands circling it and moving up
    and down from my calf to my heel. I shivered, although the room was warm.
    Gently, he set my injured foot on the mosaic floor, and lifted the other into the warm water.
    He pressed his thumb against my instep. I shivered again, and he looked up at me. His eyes
    burned with something that made my heart flutter, and I couldn’t look away from him.
    I pulled my foot away. “I have to get Peter home to Miriam,” I said.
    “Don’t be foolish. You and Peter can spend the night here and go home tomorrow when it’s
    safe.” The spell of what I’d seen in his eyes was broken.
    I shook my head. “Miriam will be frantic.”
    “We can send a slave to let her know Peter is safe. Please. Stay. You need something to eat
    and a good rest, and the streets will be safer tomorrow.”
    “How do you know it will be safer tomorrow?”
    “The legionnaires will make sure.”
    I thought of my brother with a needle of worry.
    “Please stay,” he said again. “I promise we’ll send someone to let Miriam know you’re both
    safe.”
    I knew he was right, and I looked around myself in curiosity for the first time since we’d
    arrived. I would like to spend a night in this palace, I thought, and eat what food Urbanus ate.
    “All right,” I agreed.

    Peter was put to bed, a slave dispatched to Miriam, and Aurelius and I went in to dinner with
    Urbanus.
    Until now, I had seen only his gardens, which were beautiful enough. To enter his dining
    salon was like seeing for the first time after a lifetime of blindness. The table top was a mosaic of
    small tiles set in a pattern depicting Sol Invictus, the Roman sun god, with his horses and his
    radiating diadem. The mosaic top rested on a set of immense bronze legs, fashioned into thick
    vines, studded here and there with colorful jewels and ending in clawed lion’s feet. Twenty could
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    easily have been seated on the couches that surrounded this table. The couches themselves, also
    ornately legged in bronze, were covered with thick silk cushions of various colors and patterns.
    A mural on one wall depicted a scene of satyrs and naked, full-hipped young women frolicking
    at the seashore. Three slaves stood silent around the table.
    What left me even more speechless was the array and quantity of food on the table. I didn’t
    know what some of it was, and began to worry that I would embarrass myself. Surely he was
    expecting more guests, to consume such a quantity. But who would come out on such a wild
    evening?
    I hesitated before entering the room, taking it all in, and Aurelius had to nudge my back a
    little.
    “It seems you made it just in time,” Urbanus greeted us. “Storms of all kinds are about to
    break.”
    As if he had the power to cue the heavens, a clap of thunder broke the afternoon, and then
    came the drumming of rain on the. Urbanus grinned and pointed upward as if he had, indeed,
    cued the spectacle just for our entertainment. “Lie down and eat,” he urged.
    I was unused to lying on a couch to eat, although I knew this was the custom of the Roman
    nobility. My