The same passage the recording covers. It stops where the first scene does. The book is still being written, so this text may change.
Prologue · January, 44 BC
The trick, Titus's teacher said, was to let the hand decide before the eye could interfere. So Titus stood at the long shelf in the back room of the Regia, in the Forum at Rome, with his eyes shut and his palms turned up, and his teacher put the bronzes of the College of Pontiffs into them.
"Knife," Titus said.
"Which knife?" said his teacher.
The knife was bronze, a short heavy blade, the leather on the grip worn thin, and it sat low in his hand and pulled toward the point. "The one for the spring offering. The old one. It wants to fall forward."
"Good. Give it back. No — the way I showed you."
Titus turned the knife and offered the grip first, and felt the weight lifted away. He was sixteen, and he'd served in the Regia since he was small, long enough to break a lamp, a jar of oil and a clay figure of a god nobody could name. His hands reached for whatever stood on a shelf before he'd decided anything. Quick hands weren't a fault, exactly, his teacher said, but they'd need governing.
"Dish."
Wide, shallow, light in the middle and heavy at the rim. "The plain one. The one with the dent."
"There's no dent."
"There's a dent. You can feel it with your thumb on the underside. You told me not to touch the inside."
A small sound, which from his teacher was laughter. "Open your eyes."
The back room smelled of lamp oil and old bronze. The shelf ran the length of the wall, and on it stood the bronzes the College used at the city's sacrifices, knives and dishes and jugs, the sprinkler for the water, the long-handled ladles for the wine. His teacher knew them by their weight and their sound and how they gave back lamplight, and from the doorway in the evening he could tell whether a dish or a knife had been moved a finger's width.
Tonight five of them were gone.
The dust at the far end of the shelf showed five clean places, and Titus had waited through the lesson to be allowed to ask about them. Men from Caesar's house next door had come that afternoon while he was down at the river with the water jars. Caesar was Pontifex, head of the College, and the men were his, so they took what they'd come for. A steward with a quiet voice had read from a list while Titus's teacher stood aside and watched the men wrap the bronzes in wool and carry the bundles out. Hermes the porter had told Titus so at the door, and his teacher's supper had gone cold on the table.
The clean places had kept their shapes. A long narrow one for the knife with the garnet in its pommel. A curved one for the lituus, the bent staff. A round one for the best of the dishes, which was so much heavier than it looked that it took both hands. A squarer one for the jug with no handle. And at the end, a small round mark with a long tail, for the little ladle.
The little one had been the first bronze his teacher ever put into Titus's hands. Small and frightened, he had nearly let it fall, and his teacher had caught it in the air and said: By the handle. Never the bowl. The bowl is for the god.
"Where did they go?" Titus said.
His teacher was oiling the plain dish with a scrap of wool, along the lines the old polishing had left in the bronze, and he went on oiling.
"Magister. Where did they take the little one?"
"Hold this." The oil flask went into Titus's hands, and his teacher went down to the far end of the shelf and stood at the five clean places with his arms hanging.
"Should I dust there?"
"No," his teacher said. "Leave the dust."
He stayed at the far end and blew out the lamp himself, a job that was always Titus's, and they went to bed.
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