by Q V Hunter
‘A simple messenger. Thank you for the snack.’
I bowed to Eusebius and left his office, allowing myself no more chance of falling for his delaying tactics. His reference to the Augusta had reminded me of my duties. I ran from corridor to stairs out the palace entrance to archway, racing against the clock to pass Constantia’s letter to our service rider. Breathless, I reached our cubicle through which the palace traffic passed and found the rider pitching saddlebags of court paperwork bound for Mediolanum and Roma out of a pushcart and onto his horse.
‘Numidianus? Someone’s asking for you,’ the rider said, stuffing the Augusta’s letter into his chest satchel and gesturing in Catena’s direction. We ran through the mail register one last time, I initialed it, and he was ready to go.
‘Oh, sorry, I nearly forgot. Here’s a message for you collected at the Brigantium station.’
‘Thanks.’ I took my letter and turned with a sigh of relief at a delicate task finally off my hands. I immediately bumped into the hairy bulk of Paulus Catena.
‘You enjoyed the hunt, Gaiso tells me.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘Congratulations for your kill—and discretion in letting others take the credit.’
‘I only finished it off. I’m relieved to see Gaiso back on his feet.’ I examined the Hispaniard’s piercing gaze and his day’s growth of black stubble.
‘Last night the Emperor asked me who you were.’
‘I’m honored.’
‘Really? Don’t be.’ Catena’s black eyebrows were level with my own but tall as I am, his bulk outweighed mine by an easy twenty pounds of brawn. If Constantia acted like the exposed, bruised heart of the Constans court and Eusebius its heartless brains, I might have just met its muscles.
‘You saw too much in the forest, I hear. But perhaps a Roman slave-boy thinks nothing of such pastimes? Had a bit of the rough yourself, I imagine.’
I didn’t answer him. He slugged me on the back like a soldier in camp. ‘Nothing for a southerner like you to mention, surely? Only provincial rubes would be caught telling tales.’
‘You insinuate too much—Catena, isn’t it? I carry messages. I don’t write them.’ I cinched the heavy sack of documents that had just arrived a little tighter and slung it over my back. ‘You’re a notary? Get busy and bring on the paperwork,’ I joked.
‘Oh, come on, it’s pretty juicy stuff, isn’t it . . . but of course, of course, you’re not shocked. You’re a good-looking man. Perhaps you yourself were someone’s delicatus back in Roma? How could you avoid it? Roma’s more decadent than ever, I hear. Still so pagan, so corrupt.’
I laughed along but kept walking toward the Palace. He wasn’t satisfied.
‘No wonder nobody visits Roma anymore. Not even emperors bother with the place. There’s nothing there but arrogant old senators making speeches to themselves while we defend them. They disgust any decent official.’
‘So, don’t go to Roma.’ I kept walking.
‘Isn’t that where everything is rotten?’ he taunted me.
‘Not entirely,’ I said, stopping to face him. ‘I was raised in a patrician Roman household. I know their old-fashioned ways, good and bad. But I also know that customs of affection between an adult citizen and his favored youth have very well defined limits. Certain indignities are restricted to slaves. The rule in a good family is that a citizen youth grows up and moves on to women, experienced but . . . intact. Even as a slave, I was never used in that way.’
‘Sure, sure. Just presses and caresses for the toffs.’ He adjusted the heavy green wool cloak that protected him from the chill. He wore armor with leather padding over a woolen tunic and northern trousers. There were hobs on his thick boot soles that left dents in the fine courtyard gravel. I hated to think what they did to the mosaic tiles indoors.
‘Only slaves have no choice but to endure that—’ Catena pointed to the boar, run through from ass to mouth by the spit. ‘Take the cut meat inside now for saucing,’ he shouted at the cooks, then turned back to me. ‘So the male getting a spike up his ass must be a slave by definition, not a master, right?’
‘By tradition, but it’s none of my business. Maybe customs change.’
‘You’re about to find out. Yesterday, you earned yourself a rich opportunity, messenger-boy. And you’re not even blond. Constans invites you to join his happy band of prisoners.’
‘Even the Emperor has to clear it with my schola in Roma to have me transferred upstairs, Catena, And now I’ve got mail to deliver.’ I switched the sack of dispatches from one shoulder to the other, missing his jumbled face by an inch or less.
The ingratiating little grin disappeared. ‘Maybe you don’t appreciate your new duties. Maybe your tastes run the other way. I hear stories about you and the Augusta,’ he said, marching right alongside of me.
‘Not true,’ I barked back, retreating towards the back entrance of the palace. He lunged and grabbed my arm in a vice.
‘Not true now.’ He shook his head, ‘but the stories Paulus Catena hears have a way of coming true, sooner or later.’
‘What do you want from me?’ I rounded on him, fed up.
‘Your tongue on a spit, if you talk.’
He gave up when I turned the far corner of the main palace. I dropped the mail sack and heaved a sigh of relief. No one took notice of me as I crouched on my haunches to catch my breath. I thought of the cripple Dax, a former ‘friend’ of Constantia’s and now perceived the hand of Catena at work. Then I remembered that I carried one particular piece of paper that couldn’t wait. It might contain news of my child or his mother, the Lady Kahina. It might be a note of encouragement from Dr Ari, the Greek slave who doctored the Legio Augusta III back in Numidia Militaris.
What I didn’t expect was to find nothing more than an unbleached scrap of paper. It had been ripped off the corner of a much-used page defaced by many erasures and now scrawled only with the image of a small mouse—an apodemus.
It was a code that meant I was to leave at once for our headquarters in Roma. Either I was in a little trouble with Apodemius or I was in big trouble, but I didn’t care.
Either way, I was escaping Treverorum just in time.
Chapter 4, The Homecoming
—The Tavern at the Porta Aurelia—
‘They finished St Peter’s when I was six, so why did I spot a construction scaffolding over the roof as I rode into town?’ I joked to Verus.
The old steward of the Manlius House had come out to the northwestern city gates where I waited for my formal clearance to enter the ancient capital. This security check was a bore for any agens, but the city’s regulations imposed on our schola gave me a chance to enjoy a good drink—or three—with my trusted old friend. He arrived at the Tavern of the Seven Sages with a bowed swagger, hands weathered by age, but eyes still sharp enough to spot me in the crowd.
‘Building companies!’ he said, winking. ‘Remember when the Senator tried to put in a private bath for the Lady Laetitia during her illness? Those workers always promise to finish your project during one consulship, but before you know it, you’re hailing two new men rising to the top, but the scaffolding around your extension shows no sign of coming down.’ Verus polished off his third cup. ‘I needed that, boy. Is there time for another?’
I wanted to know everything I could about Kahina and the child, and if there was any news of the Commander Gregorius, reposted from North Africa to the Legio VI Herculiani, originally based in Pannonia, but now patrolling eastern Gallia.
But I hid my curiosity from Verus who had been the stern-faced dispensator of the townhouse in its bustling heyday. He had terrified the staff when I was a boy, but mellowed into an affable doyen of back alley gossip. I noticed today that his conversation flapped, like a rag snagged on a branch in a high wind, unable to detach itself from his favorite irritant—Clodius.
Clodius was the son of Lady Letitia’s sister, moved into the Manlius house for official adoption as the Senator’s heir. Yet the adoption had never go
ne through and Clodius still hungered for legal instatement with an avidity that embarrassed any onlooker.
‘He got Lady Kahina to sell off half the staff for “budgetary reasons” and now I’m supposed to answer the gate! Me! Demoted to ostiarius!’
‘Where did the profits from the sales go?’
‘Oh, she keeps a tight fist on most of that, though she didn’t like to see some of the good maids and the under-cook go to the dealer.’
‘It must be hard for the Lady Kahina to hold down management of the house when Clodius has been in place for so long.’
‘And now, he’s going on and on about the deed box, as if there was any call for him to know about deeds,’ Verus scoffed. ‘Look in the cellar, Verus, find me the archive boxes, Verus, search the Senator’s library while he’s at his bath, Verus. Find the deeds? Find the key to the deed box?’
Verus popped half a hard-boiled egg with anchovies into his mouth and went on, ‘Marcus, I ain’t no intrigant behind the Lady Kahina’s back! I tell’im, if you want to see the deeds to the oyster beds or the honey farms or them herds up in Gallia, you just ask the Senator for’em.’
‘And why doesn’t he?
‘Clodius doesn’t dare, but I know that boy is counting on selling off the Via dei Vigili apartment in Ostia behind the old man’s back sooner or later to pay off his gambling debts. Already, Roma’s plastered with that slimy creep’s IOU’s.’
‘A little respect, Verus, just a little. This tavern has very small cups, but very big ears.’ The fact that I had to shout this caution into the old servant’s hairy ear to be heard over the taberna’s midday uproar made my admonition less than convincing.
‘I.O.U.’s! Signed Manlius, all over town! It’s a disgrace! He has no right to sign that name!’
‘I heard you. Does Clodius ever read to the Senator? He could put the old man in a good mood and ask him then.’ Reading the Greats of Latin and Greek literature out loud been my job, as well as my pleasure, my escape. In the end, it also gave me my treasured education as a young slave assigned to the blind elder sheltered in his back room, a tablinum squeezed under the eaves and lined with books.
‘Read, to the old man? All Clodius reads is the betting sheets from the Circus and the odds on gladiators. The rest is Greek to him, ha!’
‘The mistress?’
‘Ah, she’s a lovely girl, she is, but her tutor tells me she ain’t no scholar—at least not yet.’
I smiled. I hadn’t loved Kahina, briefly but passionately, for her erudition. ‘What does the Senator say?’
‘He invites Clodius up to his rooms, but Clodius is always “out on business”.’
‘Gambling?’
‘At least that would be halfway honest. No, the latest game for wastrels like his lot, you see, is to haunt the courtyards of old men, sucking up in case one of ’em pops it and puts you in his will. It’s practically the municipal sport these days.’
‘Clodius should enlist in the army and win over Gregorius with a little real time in the field.’
‘Well, the army certainly made a man out a scrawny bookworm like you. But Clodius? Oh, no, he’d rather gussy up every morning to hang on the coattails of that childless widower, the ex-Consul Picenus. Clodius claims,’ Verus watered his garrulous tongue a little, ‘claims, mind you, that Consul Picenus favors him for a legacy. I caught that sneak decanting some of the Senator’s best vintage into a jug to haul over to that Consul’s salon as a festival gift. I reported it to the lady. She and I changed the locks on the wine cellar the next day. So Clodius takes candies to sweeten the gossip he imports from the street, but Picenus should be mighty careful. I wouldn’t bet that those candies ain’t poisoned.’
‘The lady’s well?’ I kept my eyes trained on a flirtatious cook scraping scales off a fish ordered for someone’s lunch. Verus could be as canny as a slum concierge on commission.
‘She’s fine, fine. Now, tell me. What’s it like up in the Land of the Treveri? Subdued the hairy barbarians, have we? Got any trophies for your old friend Verus? A moustache comb? A golden fibula?’
‘You’re still living in the last century, old man. Treverorum has more baths, libraries, amphitheaters and fancy villas than you could count. It’s cleaner than Roma, that’s for sure, and their white wine is better than this piss.’
Somebody cleared his throat next to our table and his spit just missed my boot.
‘But it’s cold up there, right? And no real history, like us? No place is like good ol’ Roma, is it?’ The old man actually hugged his barnacled self for reassurance. ‘And you won’t catch me calling that new town out East the “New Roma,” no matter what ol’ Constantine built hisself out there.’
A gatekeeper signaled me from the crowded doorway. My clearance paper travelled overhead from hand to hand to our table. I dared one last casual question, shouted while paying my tab, as if it were only a courteous afterthought. ‘Is the little boy walking yet?’
Verus shrugged. ‘Not that I’ve heard, but how would I know? He’s down in Setia with his wet nurse, Lavinia. Got a bit of a chest thing last spring and couldn’t throw it off. The Commander panicked when he heard and ordered him out of the city. Only son, last chance for the Manlius line, well, you can imagine the fuss over just a little cough. Smiley little runt. Got his mother’s skin, glossy as honey, he is.’
A little runt, sickly, tended by a strange nurse? My whole future, exiled out to the overgrown and neglected Manlius vines, even as autumn set in?
But Verus didn’t catch the shadow that crossed my face. ‘Right, off we go, Marcus. What was the Lady Laetty always gabbing about with her Christian girlfriends? Some Prodigal Son, that’s you all right, the prodigal slave all tarted up now, a real freedman, you are . . .’
We entered ‘good ol Roma’ . . . so fetid with sewage and the crush of people, I covered my nostrils as I followed Verus. Despite his age, he was hopping along the narrow sidewalk raised out of the muck for pedestrians, dodging awnings in which the jobless slept off their morning drink, and fending off stray dogs with his walking stick like the native he was. But on all sides, I noticed the refuse of Roma’s dominions—idle, garrulous, fractious immigrants of all kinds living on the welfare state—a testament in color and costume to the width and breadth of an impossibly large empire.
Roma the city was nothing more than a teeming leftover now, hardly even a ceremonial capital, long-abandoned by emperors for the brisk and modern Mediolanum. Fifty years ago, Emperor Diocletian had fled the place in horror, cutting his visit to his ‘licentious’ Roman subjects insultingly short by weeks.
But still the foreigners flooded in, layer upon layer of hungry mouths and empty hopes. This discarded metropolis, overflowing with beggars, rubbish, clogged alleys, sparkling fountains, imposing statues, crowded insulae and crumbling monuments, was my home. The old townhouse that greeted me now as I marched up the lane on the Esquiline hill beckoned the child slave inside with remembered love. Huge fig branches rounded both corners of our front walls, like the arms of a defiant Roman mother facing off some Celtic invaders of old. Soggy fig leaves blanketed the stones under a sky of heavy clouds threatening more rain. I had once swung from those branches until Verus scolded me to come down and do my chores. An imposing and ancient tree was an object of veneration in a Roman neighborhood, not a child’s gymnasium.
We went through the gates and entered the dank fauces. The storeroom was locked up and the fountain in the atrium silent.
‘The house is so dark, Verus.’
‘That’s the mistress, saving on oil. She keeps a tight little book, that missus.’
‘If I didn’t know my way by heart, I’d stumble.’
‘Come into my room, boy, and I’ll light a lamp or two and we’ll scavenge up some snack before—’
‘Ah, the slave-boy hero!’
Through the dim lights, I saw my old playmate and rival, the near-heir, leaning against stained columns in the rear of the peristyle garden beyond.
> ‘Hello, Clodius. How are you?’
‘Don’t you mean, Clodius Domine? Oh, that’s right. You’re a freedman now, thanks to some secret mission in the African desert . . . suicide martyrs . . . heretical priests of death. Ooooo,’ he waved his manicured hand and gave a mock shiver. ‘I heard all about it, over and over, whenever Uncle Gregorius reached the bottom of the wine bottle. Congrats.’ He extended his hand for the first time in two decades to me, although we’d roughhoused and kicked each other enough in the alley off the kitchen door.
‘Who wouldn’t have tried? I speak the dialect and it was a few weeks’ worth of discomfort for a lifetime’s liberation. That doesn’t make me a hero.’
‘I heard you had the shit whipped off your back so you could pretend you were a runaway. Can I see the scars?’
‘Later, Clodius,’ Verus piped up, ‘Hero or not, he’s hungry now. I’m taking him into the kitchen for a cold sausage or two.’
‘Go ahead to the kitchen, Verus, and dig out your sausages. First, I want a word with Marcus, here. That’s a good old fart. Listen . . .’ Clodius threw one arm over my shoulder and turned me in the direction of the reception rooms. We entered the familiar winter dining room, now covered in protective sheets. How many years had I stood at attendance in this triclinium? How many evenings had I gamboled and preened as a child-jester for my master and his military mates on winter leave?
Now it was obvious that, with the master of the house serving in Gallia, Kahina did no regular entertaining on her own.
‘Marcus, I wanted to ask you an awkward question.’
‘Awkward? What could be awkward between two men who used to have pissing contests all over the vegetable garden?’