The Londinium File

by Gavin Chappell

  Smiling she stretched out a slender arm that jingled with bangles and twitched open the curtain. Outside was the Forum. The eastern portico of the Julian Basilica towered over them. People were passing nearby, although they were partly out of sight behind a pillar. There was no sign of the nondescript man who had been tailing Flaminius in the Circus Maximus: Rhoda’s Gauls must have left him far behind. He thanked Rhoda, and jumped out.

  Without giving the two Gauls a second glance he marched off. The street between the Julian Basilica and the Temple of Castor and Pollux led almost due south round the side of the Palatine Hill. They were round the far side from the Circus Maximus now. The litter bearers must have taken them up the way he had come. To the left a street led along the bottom of the hill, and he followed it, taking a right turn and following a path cut out of the rock that wound back on itself before leading up to the House of Tiberius. He marched purposefully.

  His toga identified him as a Roman citizen of the middle classes, which of course he was. But his military bearing and cast of features suggested a Praetorian, in civilian garb as was customary within the sacred precincts of Rome. One thing was lacking, the obligatory sword concealed under the folds of his toga. But this disguise wouldn’t last longer than it took to infiltrate the palace. And a slave would not carry a sword, that much was certain.

  Two men in togas, their hair cropped in a military style, barred his way as he mounted the steps. Behind them stood the gates that would take him inside this section of the imperial palace. The gates were open, and within was a marble walled antechamber that looked gloomy after the afternoon sunlight.

  ‘The password, sir?’ one Praetorian asked respectfully. Both men’s hands hovered around the folds of their togas, ready to draw steel at the slightest provocation.

  ‘Ganymede,’ said Flaminius nonchalantly, without breaking step, and the two Praetorians drew back to let him enter.

  ‘Pass, friend,’ said the other.

  The password was changed daily at the imperial palace, and the tribune responsible was only supposed to reveal it to those in the know. How Rhoda—or rather, Probus—had got a hold of it was something Flaminius would prefer not to know. If such a security breach had ever occurred on his watch, he’d have had the man responsible flogged. But it wasn’t his problem.

  Beyond the antechamber, passageways and peristyle gardens led deeper into the palace complex. Flaminius marched through the echoing corridors, keeping an eye out for somewhere he could change. In the end he ducked behind an abandoned gardener’s hut in one corner of a garden and hastily unwound his toga, then thrust it behind a statue of the Three Graces. Stepping out in the dowdy dress of a slave, he began his search for the library.

  As he went, he formulated his cover story.

  ‘S-sir?’ He addressed the librarian who sat at the desk in the middle of the pillared room, his voice quavering with simulated nerves. ‘I’ve been sent from the Tabularium. They want me to check the grain requisition orders for the last quarter.’

  The librarian looked up from a catalogue he was annotating. He wore the soft felt cap of an imperial freedman, and his smooth olive face had all the sourness and hauteur Flaminius associated with such gentry.

  ‘Grain requisition?’ he asked as if his visitor was mad. ‘That dolt Marcus Fulvarius should have sent you to the Commissary archive.’

  Flaminius licked dry lips. ‘Master said that the Commissary archive has been moved to the House of Tiberius.’ He looked about himself uncertainly. ‘Have I come to the wrong place?’

  The librarian huffed. ‘By no means have you come to the wrong place, slave, but I’ve no notion of where you would find what you’re looking for. No one has told me about any Commissary archive being moved here. How am I supposed to implement an effective records management policy if the library is constantly used as a dumping ground for documents beyond my remit?

  ‘Here is the catalogue,’ he added, gesturing at the long papyrus scroll stretched out on the desk before him; ‘here are the stacks. You won’t find any Commissary information entered in the catalogue; you may perhaps find what you’re looking for in the stacks, but I couldn’t direct you.’

  Grumbling to himself, he hobbled away.

  Flaminius looked around the chamber. It was not half as grandiose as the famous Library of Alexandria that he had come to know so well during his time in Egypt, but it was still a sizeable space, comparable with a medium sized temple. A domed roof arched overhead, a skylight filtering in daylight to complement the lanterns that hung from chains anchored in the ceiling. Niches in the marble walls contained statues of Apollo, Mnemosyne, and the Nine Muses.

  Between each statue ran a long stack filled with shelves containing pigeon hole repositories for scrolls. A fusty silence hung over everything, although in the distance he could see other slaves quietly at work: searching the stacks for documents, scanning other documents, carrying baskets of documents back to the stacks. The stale smell of dust hung over everything, but also, from somewhere nearby another smell drifted, less pleasant. It reminded Flaminius of a badly maintained drain.

  He discounted the catalogue, and began to trail aimlessly up and down the rows. Choosing a scroll at random, he unrolled it enough to read the first few lines, and raised his eyebrows. While still emperor, Tiberius had gained himself quite a reputation, but really, that was going a bit far…! Intrigued, Flaminius read on. No! No, surely that wasn’t anatomically possible… He wondered if there was a copy of Hippocrates he could consult.

  He recollected himself, hastily rolled up the scroll, and inserted it in the relevant pigeon hole, feeling oddly grubby. This was clearly the literature section, and the scroll he had chosen at random offered a new interpretation of the notion of ‘erotic verse.’ Despite an enduring fondness for the literary oeuvre of Petronius Arbiter, he had no time for that kind of reading right now.

  Without a catalogue, this would take a long time. Perhaps it would be simpler to use the catalogue to determine where he should avoid. He trailed back to the main desk, now deserted. The imperial freedman was deep in conversation with a strikingly handsome youth; a Greek god to the life. Flaminius was tempted to look back to make sure Apollo hadn’t stepped down from his plinth. But no, this lad was too young to be Apollo. Adonis, perhaps, was nearer the mark.

  A set of keys lay abandoned on the desk and Flaminius slipped them inside his tunic, more out of the principle that they might prove useful than anything more concrete. Pursing his lips, he studied the catalogue again, looking up from time to time in an attempt to correlate it with the library shelves, occasionally taking a few quick trips to investigate them.

  They were numbered. These numbers related to numbers in the catalogue. Shelf numbers! That represented something of a breakthrough. His librarian friend Ozymandias had once defined a system to him as ‘something that only makes sense to the man who made it,’ and that was certainly the case here. It seemed to have been added to, expanded, and further complicated by generations of librarians and archivists since the days of Tiberius of Blessed Memory. But the numbers didn’t help Flaminius find what he was looking for. There was no correspondence with the code Probus had quoted. This was hopeless.

  Cold sweat broke out on his skin. If he was caught, if anyone suspected that he had no authority to be here, his life wouldn’t be worth a dribble of lantern oil. He had to leave the palace while Ganymede was still current; he had no hope of learning the next day’s password in the guise of a slave. He didn’t have time to waste. And yet here he was, wasting his time with this Jove cursed catalogue. He had it worked out now; it covered everything in this library, comprehensively if by no means coherently. But where was the Commissary archive? Where was Junius Italicus’ report?

  It struck him like one of Jove’s lightning bolts. He was tempted to slap his brow in amazement.

  He wasn’t looking for a book or document amongst these shelves. The object of his search wouldn’t be in the library catalogue—of course,
he’d known that all along. It was a secret archive. And it was under the library, not in it.

  He sniffed. That rank, lingering smell. Probus had said that the secret archive was near the main palace drain, which joined the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s Great Sewer that led south from the Forum to empty into the Tiber. It was a definite clue. Theseus had had nothing so definite to go on when he threaded his way through the Cretan Labyrinth.

  Flaminius followed his nose.

  It led him across the library to the north wall, where a long window let in the last of the daylight and provided a view of the Forum. Directly below stood the House of the Vestals. Flaminius glimpsed a couple of dignified robed figures trotting primly across a torch-lit garden, and grinned to himself. Had Tiberius stood here, ogling the virgin keepers of the flame? Maybe not. The old goat had preferred plump buttocked youths, by all the lurid accounts.

  To the left of the window, between two stacks, a flight of steps led downwards. They must have been cut into the bedrock of the Palatine Hill. Flaminius was getting somewhere. He glanced around hastily. No one seemed to be in the vicinity. He padded down the steps.

  The incongruous odour of sewage was getting stronger. He reached an ironbound door. It was cold, and drops of moisture had collected on its surface. He found a keyhole, and took out the keys he had found on the desk. The third one slid sweetly into the keyhole. Flaminius turned it, feeling the tumblers move.

  The door rumbled, and he felt a blast of chill air. In the light that fell from the nearby window, he saw another door on the far side. But between him and the second door gaped a chasm, too wide and deep to leap over. From below echoed the rushing of water, and a stink of sewage. He realised it wasn’t a door on the far side, it was a small drawbridge like the kind used in siege towers and for storming enemy ships at sea. It would fall across the gap, bridging it, and he could cross over into the secret archive. But where was the lever to operate the mechanism? He searched the wall beside him.

  ‘What in Minerva’s name are you doing down there?’

  Flaminius spun round.

  — 5—

  ‘Well?’

  It was the sour faced librarian. He stood at the top of the steps, a dark silhouette against the light from the window, arms folded in peevish disapproval.

  ‘You can’t go in there!’ he added, clattering down the steps. Snatching the keys from Flaminius’ hand, he slammed the door and locked it. ‘Where did you find these?’ He shook them in his face. He was substantially shorter than Flaminius, but his belligerent air of absolute authority left the imperial agent feeling oddly ashamed, as if he truly was a slave gone wrong.

  ‘I-I took them from your desk,’ Flaminius stammered, not meeting the librarian’s eyes.

  ‘Did you indeed, by Isis!’ said the librarian. Huffing, he turned round and tramped back up the steps, pausing only once to beckon this unruly slave with a curt gesture. Unwillingly, Flaminius followed.

  At the top, the librarian halted to clip the keys to his belt. He glared at Flaminius. ‘That vault is not even accessible to me!’ he said, as if this fact might be unthinkable. ‘Only the emperor’s most trusted men are allowed to go in. I’m not even permitted to know what is stored in there, and I’m a freedman. No mere slave has the right to enter…’ He broke off, and a look of fleeting comprehension flitted across his face. ‘Did you think that was where you would find your… grain requisition reports, or whatever it was that you were sent for?’ His expression softened a little.

  Playing up to him, Flaminius hung his head and scraped at the marble floor with one sandaled foot. Nodding sullenly he muttered something indistinct.

  ‘You won’t find them in there,’ said the librarian pityingly. ‘That is a top secret archive. Wherever your documents might be, they won’t be in there.’ He indicated the locked door with an emphatic jerk of the head. ‘Security matters, I understand, from all the secrecy. You’ll have to look elsewhere…’ He broke off again. Flaminius heard the pad of footsteps.

  ‘What’s all this commotion about?’ oozed a soft, youthful voice. The voice of a boy. But there was something in its tone that hinted at knowledge beyond a mere boy’s age.

  ‘My apologies if I have disturbed your studies, sir,’ said the librarian oleaginously. ‘I realise now that I was… raising my voice. You must understand that I was disciplining this slave, who has been attempting to access the secret archive.’

  ‘Oh, is that so?’

  The owner of the voice hove into sight, and Flaminius recognised him as the young Greek god he had seen talking with the librarian earlier. In his arms the youth carried a bundle of scrolls, as if with Herculean effort. His eyes, a deep emerald green, glided from the librarian to Flaminius, appraising the latter, impersonally taking him in from top to toe. ‘This slave?’ he added. For all his Grecian good looks he was little more than a boy.

  Nervously, the librarian fluttered his hands around. ‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘Not one of my own staff, sir, I assure you! He was sent by the Tabularium, I understand.’

  The youth looked Flaminius up and down again. He reached out and felt Flaminius’ biceps as if he was an ox in the market. ‘What muscles he’s got!’ he commented, admiringly. ‘Statuesque! Working for the Tabularium, you say? He’d be better off as a sculptor’s model. Or driving a chariot. Or even fighting in the arena! He’s destined for better things than working in public records. What’s your name, boy?’

  Flaminius choked back a laugh. That this still-wet-between-the-ears lad should call him, a grown man, boy!

  ‘Ganymede,’ he replied, speaking at random. It was the first name that sprang to mind—it was the password, of course—but Flaminius instantly regretted it.

  ‘Ganymede, eh?’ the youth purred silkily, stepping closer, brushing Flaminius’ thigh with his own. ‘We’re two of a kind, then, you and I. I’ve got a little job for you, Ganymede. Carry these scrolls with me to my private apartments.’

  Thrusting them into Flaminius’ arms, he turned and walked across the library with a cat-like grace in every step. Flaminius stared after him in confusion, the scrolls piled in his arms. The librarian turned, eyes urgent.

  ‘Go!’ He flapped his hands. ‘Do as he says! That’s Antinous, the emperor’s protégé! But you would be well advised to call him… master.’

  Antinous was waiting impatiently outside.

  ‘Hurry up, Ganymede,’ he snapped, as Flaminius appeared, struggling to keep control of the higgledy-piggledy pile of scrolls. ‘I’m not used to being kept waiting by a slave.’

  They trotted through a labyrinth of passages and gardens, heading in the direction of that part of the palace complex that Flaminius knew best, the House of Augustus.

  ‘I am learning about Plato,’ Antinous confided in Flaminius as they walked. ‘He wants me to learn all about those ancient Greeks.’ Flaminius realised that ‘he’ referred to the emperor Hadrian himself. ‘My pedagogue has given me a syllabus that, with his help, will transform me into the ideal man, he says. Well, I wasn’t very well educated back in Bithynia, don’t you know. But now he wants me to be as clever as he is. And he’s awfully clever, you know.’

  Antinous looked at Flaminius. ‘But a lot of it is very boring,’ he whined. ‘I much prefer hunting. And there’s no hunting here in Rome, except if you want to watch the venators in the arena. Tell me, you’ve not always been a public records slave, have you, boy?’

  Flaminius shook his head. ‘No, master,’ he said. ‘This is a new job to me. I’ve got to access the grain requisition orders for the last quarter. They’re very difficult to find. I…’

  Antinous patted him kindly on the arm. ‘Well, now you’ve got easier work to do,’ he said in a soothing voice. ‘You can put those muscles to better use doing what I want.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, master,’ Flaminius said, ‘but…’

  He broke off. Slaves did not say “but.” He had to stay in character. Maybe he could turn this chance meeting to his own be
nefit somehow. Antinous was an imperial protégé, after all, even if he was still attending school. He wondered if it was the school on the Palatine the boy attended, just by the House of Flavius through which they were now passing. Or was it the one on the Caelian Hill, not far from the Peregrine Camp…?

  Praetorians marched along the corridors, two abreast, strangely anonymous in their citizen’s togas, identifiable only by military haircuts and suspicious bulges under their right arms. Antinous told him in hushed tones that he had seen one guard’s sword hilt the other day, peeking through the top of his toga.

  ‘They have to carry swords, you know,’ he told his captive audience, face bright with excited awe, in tones that suggested he was divulging a mystery unknown to the uninitiated, ‘because they have to guard him. Even though it’s against the law. He explained about it last night.’

  They ascended a broad flight of steps, turned left and hurried along a corridor whose walls were daubed with bright frescoes depicting the adventures of Hercules. Finally they reached a door which Antinous pushed open, leading his reluctant Ganymede into a large apartment with an unrivalled view of the Circus Maximus and the roofs of Rome, stained red with the last rays of the setting sun.

  A plush, scarlet upholstered couch stood in the middle of the marble floor, a small table beside it. Dour looking statues and busts gazed down, all of them philosophers, Flaminius noticed. Socrates, Pythagoras, the aforementioned Plato, Aristotle…

  Antinous flung himself down on the couch. Noticing where Flaminius’ gaze had gone, ‘Shocking bores, all of them,’ he said with a dramatic sigh, and a flourish of his hands. ‘He chooses all my furnishings. I’d prefer a few famous gladiators or charioteers. Oh, put those scrolls down here.’ He patted the marble topped table and Flaminius hastened to obey.