Fanina, Child of Rome

by Pierre Sabbagh

  Fanina drew quickly back. She had not been mistaken. The dwarf had never stopped following her since she left the tomb in the Field of Evil-doers. He was indeed the cripple who had pursued Vindex and herself all the way into the cul-de-sac where they had taken refuge from the pursuing watchmen. He had overheard Fanina telling her lover where they should meet again in Rome and, having failed to catch up with her, he had gone ahead to Janus Street.

  And what about Caius Vindex? He would surely step out from one of the side-streets at any moment now, and rush headlong at the mysterious figure, who would not hesitate to strike him down as he had done at least one of the three watchmen killed in Black Fig Alley.

  Fanina gazed desperately about her, trying to pierce the darkness, trying to catch the sound of Vindex’s approaching footsteps....

  She shuddered; she could hear footsteps. Was it Vindex? It was one pair of feet, now two, now ten.... Once again the night was filled with the sound of heavy footfalls and shouting. Lights shone in the distance, and she could hear horses’ hooves ringing on the cobbles and the menacing tread of approaching troops.

  She should have realized that Rome could not allow the murder of three of its watchmen, who had died in the performance of their duty, to go unpunished. The entire police force of the city must have been mobilized to seek out and punish the murderers of its servants, even the fearsome Praetorian Guard which alone included a cavalry unit.

  Under the yoke the dwarf had drawn back into the shadows, and Fanina instinctively did likewise. Six horsemen, torch in hand, galloped out of an adjacent street and came on in her direction.

  Fanina was standing in the hollow of a doorway and, leaning against the door, she felt it open silently under the pressure of her shoulder. She slipped nimbly into the dark passageway and shut the door behind her.

  The sound of hooves grew louder. The Praetorian Guard was drawing nearer; they reached the end of Janus Street, and were now only a few paces from where Fanina stood. The yellow light from their torches filtered through the keyhole. Suddenly they came to a halt.

  ‘We might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack,’ said one of the soldiers in a gruff voice.

  ‘I wish I knew why they’ve landed us with this job,’ growled another. ‘It’s up to the watchmen to take revenge themselves for their losses.’

  ‘Go and tell that to the Prefect, and you’ll see what sort of an answer you get.’

  ‘The one I’d like to get my hands on is the woman,’ sniggered a third soldier. ‘She’s a sweety apparently and has what it takes to keep a man happy.’

  ‘Small, slim, good figure, very long hair; there are thousands of pretty girls in Rome who answer to that description.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re forgetting one detail. The guard who had hold of her couldn’t see her, but he could smell her hair, and it was perfumed with costus; that’s not the sort of perfume the kind of girl you’re thinking of can afford.’

  ‘My guess is that she’s one of those girls from top families who roam the streets picking up casual lovers.’

  Fanina choked back a scream of terror. She was not alone in the dark corridor; there was someone near her. She could hear the sound of rapid, repressed breathing, which now enveloped her face. She did not have time to react, to squirm and escape, for a hand had already run the length of her body and seized her round the waist, while another, cold and clammy, grasped her neck.

  Vindex, where was Vindex? She wanted to shout his name, but she could not. Unless she wanted to be heard by the Praetorian Guard close by she was forced to let herself go in the arms of this tall, strong man, who stood there half naked in spite of the cold and drew her to him and embraced her with irresistible vigour.

  His breath came in quick gasps as he leaned over her. His soft, wet mouth sought out Fanina’s as she frantically twisted her head this way and that to avoid the sickening contact.

  ‘It’s you the soldiers are talking about, isn’t it?’ the man panted. ‘I recognize the perfume. Come on, my dear, let me have what I want, or I’ll call them.’

  He had a coarse, vulgar way of talking. He was very fat and his skin was as cold as a reptile’s. He laid his heavy hand on the very spots that Caius’s hand had fondled. This could not, must not be; she could not give way like this, she belonged to Caius, to Caius alone. Trembling with disgust, Fanina tried to tear herself away by thrusting at the man with her knee.

  ‘I’ve been watching you for some time now without your knowing it,’ he murmured in a hoarse voice as he drew her close. ‘I fancy you. I want you. You’ve no choice....’

  Something burst inside Fanina’s head. Caius was no longer there and she was alone, all alone. In silence, with clenched teeth, she hammered frantically with her fists in the man’s face and stamped on his feet. For a moment he laughed softly, as if Fanina’s vain resistance amused him, then, suddenly, he exploded in anger:

  ‘By Attis, you shall be mine!’ he swore furiously, without raising his voice. ‘You shall be mine, and afterwards I’ll turn you over to the soldiers!’

  The soldiers. . . . Fanina could hear the sound of their horses’ hooves as they crossed back and forth over the intersection, and she heard the horses pawing the ground as they came and went.

  ‘There’s nothing suspicious here,’ one of the Praetorians said at last. ‘Let’s go down Janus Street.’

  And they moved off at a trot....

  ‘That’s not going to make the slightest difference,’ bellowed the man hitching up Fanina’s pallium.

  His cold skin pressed against her flesh. In an effort of despair, Fanina grew taut, tearing at the hand round her throat with her nails. It was then that her fingers encountered the bronze pennant lying in the hood of her cape, the pennant given to her in the name of the Emperor by the Supreme Vestal, the sacred pennant forged from the metal of the plough blade that had traced the first boundaries of Rome....

  The man was throttling her, he was tearing her apart. There was a roaring sound in her ears, and a terrible pain searing through her groin. She was going under....

  Clutching wildly at her improvised weapon, she struck blow after blow with all her strength at the man beneath whose weight she was yielding. Vindex! Where was Vindex? Why didn’t he come to her rescue?

  It was for Vindex that she was hitting the man. Every blow she struck reverberated down the whole length of her arm to all her limbs, shaking her to the very core.

  At first the man did not react. For a moment he seemed to increase the pressure on her, then he gave a long, plaintive groan that echoed down the dark passageway as if it were a deep well. And still Fanina went on striking him, harder and harder, faster and faster. Something had snapped inside her head and she had become an arm, nothing more, with a fist clenched around a bronze pennant with which she struck blow after blow with frenzied ardour. Something hot was running over her fingers. The man groaned louder and louder, and still she struck him. Then suddenly he hurled her brutally against the door, which her head struck with a dull thud.

  Panting for breath, bathed in sweat, faint with horror and loathing, Fanina heard the man stumble against the walls, staggering and moaning.

  Like one demented, she opened the door and dashed out into the street, pursued by the shrill moans of the man who had wanted to defile her, and was now lying collapsed on the tiled floor of the passageway, like a beast immolated by the sacrificial knife.

  ‘Halt!’

  ‘Halt, there!’

  Summoned to the spot by the man’s shrieks, the Praetorian Guard, torch in hand, were galloping back up Janus Street.

  Paralysed, her arms dangling at her sides, only half conscious, Fanina saw the pale shapes of their horses as they approached, saw the glint of their corselets and their gilded helmets, and their huge dark cloaks streaming behind them as they rode. Shutters clattered open above her, for folk had been wakened and were coming to the windows. With a less sordid setting this time, it was the Black Fig Alley nightmare all over again
.

  The Praetorian Guards were now only fifty paces off and were about to pass beneath the yoke of the Janus-Curiatius shrine, when Fanina, still petrified, thought she saw a huge spider fall from the sky on to the first of the horsemen, who tumbled to the ground. The dwarf! It was the dwarf with the russet leather cloak, attacking the Praetorian Guard. To escape their search, he must have clambered right to the top of the shrine, and was now standing there amongst the rearing horses, a terrifying figure with arms that seemed to go on flailing. He was everywhere, grabbing at a cloak, a leg, a wrist. Two of the soldiers were already on the ground, while a third, coming towards him with raised sword, crumpled with a groan.

  A thought flashed through Fanina’s head: she would never see Vindex again. For the place where they had planned to meet was now forbidden to them. Whatever the outcome of the weird, incomprehensible battle that was being waged before her eyes, every soldier in the neighbourhood would soon be on the spot.

  The gods had cut her off for ever from the man she loved.

  Chapter Three

  A furtive figure, quick to slip into the shadows at the slightest sound, Fanina walked on and on without pausing, tormented by the thought that had given her back all her strength when, alerted by the shouts of the Praetorian Guards who had been set upon by the dwarf in the russet leather cloak, the watchmen and the soldiers on patrol in neighbouring streets were converging at the double on the shrine of Janus-Curiatius: if she tuere caught, Vindex would give himself up so that he could share her fate and perish with her.

  Where was Vindex now? Perhaps he had got lost in the dark maze of streets of the city which he hardly knew. Perhaps he had been caught already....

  Superstitiously Fanina dispelled this grim thought from her mind. Vindex was free. He had to be free. It seemed to Fanina that, had any misfortune befallen her lover, she would have sensed it. Since they had given themselves, soul and body, to each other, she and he were but one person, and no blow could be struck against Vindex without her feeling it as well.

  Caius was alive and at liberty, she told herself over and over again. He was alive. He would fight to preserve his life and liberty for as long as he cherished the hope of finding her again. And that was why, no matter how weary she felt, she must get away.

  Where would she go? To her parents’ house, for they believed her dead, and she both wanted to set their minds at rest and to put herself under their protection. They alone in all Rome would be exempt from persecution should she be discovered beneath their roof, for not a single magistrate in the whole Empire would dare to reproach them for having wanted to save the life of their child.

  She pressed on in spite of the weariness that weighed down her legs. So far the gods had protected her. They had guided her through the meshes of the tight net cast around her by the entire police force of Rome.

  Instinctively, as an animal tracked by bloodhounds avoids leading them to its cover, she made a wide detour, picking her way by guesswork through the new Mount Esquiline district, before hastening by the shortest route to the cosy home on the Palatine hill, where her father and mother would defend her from the machinations of her enemies and possibly help her to find Caius again.

  Suddenly Fanina stopped. Without warning the roads she had been following had grown narrower and the houses along them older, and more dilapidated, some of them positively squalid. Until then she had only occasionally glimpsed anyone, and she had slipped out of sight before they had noticed her presence, but now the night seemed to have become full of people. She could hear the shrill cries of women and men calling out, and the sound of a drunk singing incoherently.

  Fanina crept stealthily forward to the corner of a street she immediately recognized. It was Subura Street, a street she had never been down, but whose hideous rows of leprous houses she had so often glimpsed quite recently when, riding in one of the sumptuous ivory and gold chariots used by the vestals, she had been to the sacred spring of the Camenae to fetch water for purifying the temple of Vesta. Subura Street, infamous throughout the whole of the Empire, whose very name caused the older priestesses to lower their eyes when they uttered it, was, at this late hour of the night, alive with a myriad confused sounds.

  Hundreds of many-coloured lanterns shed their dim light through the open windows of the ground-floor rooms, and Fanina’s eyes, accustomed to the darkness, could make out every detail.

  ‘Psst. Come into my place, darling!’

  An extremely scraggy, very dark woman, heavily made up, her limp bosom almost entirely uncovered, was leaning out of her window, calling to a tall man, who was lurching from one side of the street to the other looking as if he was going to go sprawling on the cobbles with every step he took.

  ‘Your place? ... You’re far too ugly for me!’

  ‘Too ugly, eh?’

  Fanina hesitated. She dared not retrace her steps, for fear of encountering the patrols again or running into a road-block. To get to the Palatine Hill she therefore had to walk down Subura Street or cross it and go down one of the near-by alleyways, whose reputation was at least as daunting as that of the main street of the sordid Subura district.

  Meanwhile, the dispute triggered off by the drunk’s ungallant rejoinder was growing more heated. The prostitute, seething with rage, was abusing the man in the filthiest language that Fanina had ever heard, while he, quite delighted, greeted each new item with a roar of mirth.

  A swarm of other women, of every conceivable race, some young, some old, some pleasant, some hideous to behold, who were sitting on high stools outside their houses, or leaning out of their windows or against their doors, joined in as well.

  In spite of the cold, most of them were dressed, rather than clothed, in togas of fine Cos gauze which left no detail of their anatomy to the imagination. A few of the prettiest, completely naked, their skin blue with cold, were vigorously rubbing their numb limbs and shouting louder than the others to get themselves warm.

  Deafened by the uproar, Fanina had no time to weigh her decision. The drunk had caught sight of her. Abandoning the shrews who were heaping their sarcasms and imprecations on him, he swayed and staggered towards her with outstretched arms, roaring in stentorian tones that drowned the women’s howls:

  ‘You’re the one I want, even if it costs me the shirt off my back!’

  Fanina went to dash back the way she had come, but she was not given time. All the women of Subura were already around her.

  ‘Where’d she spring from?’ shrieked a great strapping Cappadocian wench.

  ‘She’s not from this street!’ thundered a Cantabrian woman.

  By now they were all shouting at once:

  ‘She’s another of those sluts hanging around our territory to pinch our customers.’

  ‘Especially tonight when all the men have gone off to the festival, leaving us stuck here after forbidding us to move off the street!’

  ‘I’ve not worked, not even once, since last night!’

  ‘Nor me neither!’

  Frozen with terror, her eyes starting from her head, Fanina gazed from one to another of the women who surrounded her in the half-light, like so many harpies, their faces twisted with spite, their sharp nails flying just a few inches from her face. Every shout went through her poor head like a stab of fire. Their stench, the cheap perfumes with which they doused their bodies and their hair, enveloped her, invaded her lungs and almost made her faint.

  ‘Let’s give her a good hiding!’

  ‘Let’s shave her hair off!’

  ‘Tear her eyes out!’

  For a brief moment the drunk, who had brought this misfortune on her, tried half-heartedly to take her under his totally inadequate protection, but he was roughly handled, then thrust out of the circle by a dozen hands of frenzied and aggressive women; and no doubt forgetting in his drunken stupor why he had rushed towards Fanina, he wandered off still laughing and humming to himself.

  ‘But I know her!’ a woman suddenly exclaimed.

 
Wild-eyed, her heart gripped by a terrible fear, Fanina looked into the face of the woman who was staring at her, a face crudely daubed with ceruse, vermilion and saffron dye.

  ‘I know her!’ the woman repeated. ‘I saw her not long ago!’

  She must have been one of the prostitutes that Brazen-beard had mustered two days before to parade in front of the House of Vestals, demanding in the name of public morality that she should be tried by the College of Pontiffs.

  ‘Me too,’ squeaked an old woman. ‘I think I’ve seen her somewhere too!’

  ‘So’ve I!’

  The prostitutes leaned towards her and scanned her face with cruel eyes. At any moment now they would fall upon their quarry and tear her limb from limb, as often happened among the dregs of the city’s populace.

  ‘Let me go!’ begged Fanina, panting for breath.

  ‘You don’t imagine you’re going to get out of it like that, do you?’

  ‘Just so that you can go and start your little game over again in the next street!’

  How many of them were there now? A hundred? Two hundred? Possibly even more. Those closest to her were scrutinizing her ferociously, while the others, standing on tiptoe so that they could see better, were grinning nastily at her and offering suggestions for a thousand tortures of such refined cruelty that they would deter any woman on the prowl who might be foolish enough to venture to poach on the prostitutes’ preserve.

  At last a Numidian woman with heavy blue eyelids shouted, ‘That’s enough talk!’ and grabbed Fanina by the collar of her cloak.

  The woman had laid hands on her! She had dared to lay hands on her! Fanina’s hand shot out and landed with incredible force on the tart’s face, making a noise like the crack of a whip. The woman reeled, stunned by the blow.

  A gasp of stupefaction went up from the assembled women.

  Fanina faced them, her nerves stretched to breaking point.

  She would defend herself; she had been through too much; she could not go on for ever being a prey to the craven and the spiteful. Her back to the wall, she had reached the end of her tether and was ready to do anything in order to burst her way through the horde of women.