Chapter One
Rome: 71 B.C.
She hated the city and hated it most in August. The streets burst with filthy
life; rats and flies and the sneering, diseased poor of the Empire. Carts piled
with everything from sausages to silks poured through the gates, choked the
narrow alleyways, jammed into the forums. Exotic crowds from the edges of the
world shoved and brawled and stole in every corner. Over it all a blue haze of
smoke from countless sausage-stands and bakeries hung like dead fog. Rome was
drowning in humanity: naked slaves, nobility preceded by lictors and followed
by streams of clients, soldiers in creaking leather and clanging brass,
aristocratic ladies held above the mass on litters, all surging around the
gaudily painted temples of government, religion and wealth.
She drove her chariot like a centurion. Two slaves walked ahead of the horse
and chariot with whips to force the crowd aside — she didn't give a damn how it
made her look, she had no time for the effete ministrations of lictors with
their delicate rods. She was in a hurry and Rome was just going to have to
move.
As she proceeded along the Nova Via toward the Appian Way the crowds thinned
somewhat; nobody was going out the Capenian Gate today ... read full excerpt from The Hunger ebook
