Chapter One

My name is Calpurnia. Actually, it isn’t. That’s just the name given to me by the man in Rome who first bought me. My mother named me Astarte, after one of our goddesses, and I was born in Parthia, unfortunately in that part which was nearest to the Romans. There was always a threat of invasion, and one day the legions came, surrounding the whole town. It was a day of horror. All the men were marched out to an old silver mine and thrown down the mineshaft. Whether the Romans cut their throats first I don’t know. Usually they did. They killed all the children too. When the soldiers came I was working in the fields; my mother was at home. I feared that she too had been killed, but there was one chance. Sometimes the Romans took older women to work as cooks and washerwomen for the soldiers. Perhaps she was lucky enough to be spared, but I never discovered her fate.

The older girls, including me, were rounded up and chained together, then we set off. None of us were in any doubt what our fate would be, if we survived that long. We were on the road for two weeks, a cruel time. They beat us with sticks to make us move faster. At night several of the girls were taken away and we would hear sounds of distress. When they returned they were reluctant to tell us what had happened; it was too shameful, but we knew anyway. I felt sorry for those girls. I think they were selected because they were not the prettiest, not the ones who were going to fetch the highest prices. One of the guards, who spoke a little of my language, told me I was lucky to be a good-looker. He justified what was happening by saying that you could hardly expect a group of rough, venal men to abstain from the merchandise they were transporting. But, he said by way of defence, all the girls would be kept alive; all had some value.

Nevertheless, by the time we got near to the coast, the girls who were used by the slave-drivers each night were in a bad way. There were only three or four of them, and they were passed round among a score of guards. And the men were rough; often the girls had bruises in the morning. I suppose I was lucky, as the man said, though it didn’t really feel that way. Only once was I abused, by a guard I knew had been looking at me since my first day of captivity. He was an ill-favoured man, with a patch over one eye, which was evidently missing, and a scar across his cheek.

It was clear that the guards were under strict instructions from the slave-master to leave most of us alone; presumably he did not want our looks damaged before we were sold. And the slave-master had ascertained before we left that I was a virgin. He had picked out several of us and taken us into a squalid little hut where there was an old woman, clad mostly in rags. Each of us was brought in front of her and made to lie on a bench. She put her hand roughly between our legs, then inserted her grubby fingers into our most secret and intimate place. When she did this to me I could feel her fingers moving around inside me, and it was quite painful because I had never previously been penetrated at all. I do not say that I was innocent of any sexual acts, because even girls like me who were brought up to avoid men and their doings were inclined to explore their bodies and discover certain things which were never to be mentioned but which were sources of pleasure. Anyway, the old woman spoke to the slave-master in terms which I did not understand, but evidently I had been pronounced a virgin, which indeed I was, and so of higher value that those girls who were not. The slave-master thereafter watched me carefully, as one of his most precious investments.

But he could not watch all of us all of the time, and one night the one-eyed man managed to separate me from the other girls behind some rocks (w