The same passage the recording covers. It stops where the first scene does.
Prologue · January, 44 BC
By the sixth day Marcellus had lost the feeling in his feet, and decided this was a kind of luck. A man who could not feel his feet could not be troubled by them. He said as much to the soldiers, and the big one with the broken nose told him it was the stupidest talk he'd heard all winter — which, from a soldier, was very nearly love.
He did not mind the cold, or the mud, or the long grey miles north. He minded almost nothing, which was perhaps why they had sent him. He walked in the middle of the little column with his cloak pulled close and his breath going up white in front of him, and he kept his thoughts where he liked them, which was at home.
The bundle rode against his back, lashed crosswise under the cloak. By now it had worn a raw, warm line along his spine, and he had stopped thinking of it as separate from himself. He could feel one smooth curve of it through the wrappings, a single bend, like the long neck of a swan folded down to sleep. He did not know what it was. He had been told, plainly, that he was not to know, and that suited him well enough. He had spent his life around what belonged to the gods, and the gods kept their secrets.
What he knew was enough. It was sacred. It was Caesar's. And he — a freedman who swept a temple floor, who owned one good cloak and half of another — had been chosen to carry it.
He still could not believe it. Chosen. By Caesar. A steward had come to the temple — not the great man himself, of course; men like Marcellus did not stand in rooms with men like Caesar — but a steward, with a steward's voice, who had looked him up and down and said the work came from the dictator, and that Marcellus was the man for it. And then he had shown him the purse.
It had taken two hands to lift. Gold — real gold, more than Marcellus had ever held or thought to. It would be his, the steward said, when he came home. The steward had let him look at it for as long as it takes a poor man to fall in love, and then taken it away again, and Marcellus had carried the weight of it in his palms the whole road north.
He knew exactly what it was for, though he had not said so aloud, not even to Tertia, for fear the gods would hear how badly he wanted it. A house. Not a grand one. A small one on the Aventine, on the slope where, if you knew the angle, you could see the river between the roofs. He had found that angle once, on an errand, and stood there far longer than the errand allowed. A house with a door — a door that was theirs, that locked, with no landlord above letting the beams dry to tinder, and no man waiting at the foot of the stairs on the first of the month, soft-voiced, with his little tablet of what was owed. That was the whole of his ambition. A door, and behind it no one to be afraid of.
Tertia did not know about the purse. She knew only that he'd been sent north and would come home with something to show for it. She had pressed her mouth flat and made him take the warmer cloak, and stood in the doorway as he went. He thought about her hands. They would smell of wool and of flour and of the cold water she hauled up the stairs each morning, and he was going to put an end to the stairs. He had been practicing how to tell her for six days. He would not begin with the gold. He would begin with the door.
He was smiling at the muddy road, thinking of all this, when Paulus caught him at it.
"What's the joke?" Paulus walked at the back of the column, where the second man walks. He was quieter than the rest, and missed less. "Share it. It's cold enough to die out here and you're grinning like a fool."
"My wife," Marcellus said.
"That's worse," said Paulus, and a soldier ahead of them laughed.
—
