Pimples! How disgusting and mundane. Well, beginning tomorrow she would make enquiries among the physicians and herbalists and whether he liked it or not, he was going to the Campus Martius every day for proper exercise and tutoring in the martial skills he would need when he turned seventeen and had to enrol in Rome's legions. As a contubernalis, of course, not as a mere ranker soldier; he would be a cadet on the personal staff of some consular commander who would ask for him by name. His birth and status assured it. The steward let them out into the narrow Palatine street; Servilia turned toward the Forum and began to walk briskly, her son hurrying to keep up. "Where are we going?" he asked, still chafing because she had dragged him away from epitomizing Thucydides. "To Aurelia's." Had his mind not been wrestling with the problem of how to pack a mine of information into a single sentence and had the day been more clement his heart would have leaped joyously; instead he groaned. "Oh, not up into the slums today!" "Yes." "It's such a long way, and such a dismal address!" "The address may be dismal, my son, but the lady herself is impeccably connected. Everyone will be there." She paused, her eyes sliding slyly sideways. "Everyone, Brutus, everyone." To which he answered not a word. Her progress rendered easier by two ushering slaves, Servilia clattered down the Kingmakers' Steps into the pandemonium of the Forum Romanum, where all the world adored to gather, listen, watch, wander, rub shoulders with the Mighty. Neither Senate nor one of the Assemblies was meeting today and the courts were on a short vacation, but some of the Mighty were out and about nonetheless, distinguished by the bobbing red thonged bundles of rods their lictors carried shoulder high to proclaim their imperium.