Born and bred in the Palace, Caenis could have no country and no relations of her own; she was one of "Caesar's family," but that title just made her imperial property. In some ways it had been good luck. It had spared her the indignity of standing naked in the marketplace shackled among Africans, Syrians, and Gauls, with notes of her good character and health hung around her neck while casual eyes derided her and rough hands pinched her breasts or forced between her thighs. She had escaped long-term insecurity, real filth, savage cruelty, regular sexual abuse. She understood that; she was grateful up to a point.

Of her father she knew nothing; of her mother only that she must have been a slave too. Caenis had presumably stayed with her mother while she was very small; sometimes a smear of memory would catch her on that threshold between waking and shallow sleep. Before she was committed to the nursery where bright brats were taught to write, her mother had pierced her ears, even though all she had to hang there were pebbles on rags of string. She must have supposed her daughter was then ready to receive orbs of gold from susceptible men. There was always that foolish presumption that a slavegirl must look pretty. Caenis never had been; she knew her cleverness was the better bargain, but it made her sad all the same.

She had been clever from the start. As a child frighteningly so. She learned to disguise it, to escape spite in the children's dormitory, then later to use it so a usefully vibrant girl like Veronica would want to be her friend. Though a solitary child, she understood that she needed other people. As she grew older her resentments had dulled, so she neither tormented herself nor worried the overseers by appearing rebellious. But she possessed a keen drive to achieve the best she could.