by Q V Hunter
‘I always won,’ Clodius chuckled.
I lifted an ironic brow.
‘You let me win?’
‘I was a slave. I also had to let you beat me and blame me for every broken vase or stolen cake in the house. Want a piss-off now?’
‘Ha! No, listen.’ Clodius lowered his voice. I noticed his shaving was sloppy and his bath scent stale. ‘When you were a little brat, did you ever see the deeds? You know, the property files and rent receipts on the farms and apartments?’
‘There’s a problem? A lawsuit?’
‘No, no, more a matter of accounting.’ His shifting eyes avoided my inquiring look.
‘Aren’t the rents and foodstuffs coming in?’
‘Yes, though I suspect the managers are taking too big a cut. Obviously the new matron hasn’t a clue. We need to get a handle on what’s happening with the estate overall. You don’t know where they might be?’
I was thinking by the way Clodius lowered his voice that Kahina must be somewhere in the house right now. What would she say, what would she do, when she saw me? After so many years, did any of that one night’s passion remain in her soft breast now?
Clodius fingered the tight curls his barber had set, row over row, around his high forehead. For an instant, he resembled his late Aunt Laetty. Her memory aroused sympathy in me. He might feel humiliated to be asking me about Manlius family business but I cared more than he imagined. He had no idea that for the sake of my child, the deeds’ whereabouts were now my business too.
In fact, I was more Manlius that he. I suddenly stood straighter, reminding myself again that I carried a thin strain of old Roman blood, even if it was mixed with my Numidian mother’s stock and a Gallic dilution via the Commander’s mother, the Senator’s second, noble provincial wife.
The deeds’ disappearance would be no joke for my son if he reached manhood only to find them traded away by Clodius. They had to be found—and protected.
‘They’re locked up somewhere, I suppose. Why don’t you ask the Senator?’
‘Well, I would, old pal, but I’m afraid you’ll find him a bit . . . lost in time?’ Clodius wiggled his fingers into the dusty afternoon shadows. ‘Here and then, not here—if you know what I mean.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ This news worried me indeed, as the Senator was not only the head of the house, but its moral conscience, its dynastic memory and its practical safeguard against the spendthrift Clodius. The Senator had been a sharp judge of character in his prime, whether castigating a corrupt official on the floor of the Senate or raising a disapproving eyebrow as he passed the nursery. There were no doubt good reasons he had always dragged his feet at making Clodius’ adoption official.
‘Almost gaga,’ Clodius said. ‘So you see, it’s really up to me, Marcus, the responsibilities for all this estate—caretaking, rent collecting, equipment upkeep, harvest hiring . . . Uncle Atticus is never here, gallivanting from border to border with his army pals. Come on, you must have seen them. Or maybe your poor mum? Sewing and scrubbing away every day? Under some bed? Behind a storage chest?’
‘Well, I do recall a metal box, bound in iron bands, with a small padlock—’
‘That’s the baby! Locked with an ancient ring-key that Laetitia said was too small for even her finger, so she wore it on her belt. Then she got sick and mislaid it.’
‘Did she? All I remember are the jeweled crucifixes she wore after she converted. Anyway, the Senator must have had a copy of the key.’
He sighed and was about to let me go to supper. I’d had enough of his perfumed anxiety.
‘Wait, Marcus.’
‘Hm?’
‘You know the old man’s library, or you used to. Full of first editions, is it?’
I smiled. ‘Nothing but. However, even an elderly blind man can guard his own study, Clodius. And the Manlius name is inscribed on each scroll and codex. As long as he’s alive, those books will have to stay upstairs—just in case you were thinking of taking up . . . reading.’
I had my snack of cheap wine, salad and liver sausage with Verus, all the while my ears cocked for the sound of Kahina’s light footsteps passing the servant’s quarters or kitchen. I had no right to announce myself to her without the attendance of a maid or some other concession to her privacy and reputation, what with the Commander so far away. I wondered what her social standing really was. She was installed in the venerable bosom of such a famous clan, but short on the training and education her predecessor had enjoyed as the social queen of our aristocratic neighborhood.
And the house itself now occupied my thoughts. The old cook had retired early. A sullen teenage slave fumbled and banged the bowls and ladles with a comment to Verus that she’d already cleaned up the main meal. My mother’s narrow sleeping pallet was gone and our tiny room off the kitchen now housed old cushions and summer garden fixtures.
‘I’ll go up and say hello to the Senator now.’
Verus nodded. His sad expression echoed the troubling warning from Clodius.
When I reached the top of the stairs, I hesitated outside his door, overcome as always by memories. Every morning of my childhood, it had been my job to first sweep these steps and then knock promptly to begin reading to him. When I was ten or so, he had still enjoyed partial sight. He could see the walls stroked with sunlight but couldn’t make out the motes of dust dancing through the air. He could keep an eye on the small slave on a long hard bench built right into the side of the wall, cushioned only by a worn rug. He would stretch a large text across my bony brown knees and remind me where to pick up from where we’d left off the previous day.
The Senator’s great frustration had been that as soon as he tried to find the letters right under his nose, they disappeared. Sometimes he worked his way along the shelves, his head tilted to one side to read by the margins of his sight, but by the time I was thirteen and could select the books myself, he’d lost even that much vision.
‘Senator?’ I knocked three times.
‘Who’s there? Why are you growling, Kahina?’
‘It’s Marcus, Senator. Home from Treverorum.’
‘Marcus? What’s a child doing up in the wilds of Belgica?’
I entered and found him still lying on his couch, finishing a nap. He turned his whitened eyes towards the door. ‘Come here, boy, and let me lay my hands on you.’
I knelt beside the moldy old couch, smelling of camphor, wine and old-man-mildew. His toenails needed clipping. He’d lost a lot of weight. The tentative fingers tapping along my forehead and face could have been drifting feathers.
‘But you’re not Marcus!’ he cried. ‘Marcus is my slave boy, not old enough to shave.’
I pulled back and choked out, ‘I am Marcus, that same boy, now over twenty-two and freed by special service under the Commander’s command. I’ve been stationed at the new capital on the Mosella River as an agens.’
He struggled to rise from his couch and flailed around for a bell on his table to call for help. He seemed frightened by this intruder in his private sanctum.
‘I’ve come to pay respects to you and your new daughter-in-law.’
He cast his gaze to the left and right, as if hoping someone else in the room would correct me or upbraid me for insolence. ‘My boy Marcus? Where’s he?’
‘He’s here, Senator. I am he.’
‘I don’t know your voice. Clodius must be playing some damned trick. I heard his footsteps downstairs. I know he’s in the house. Send him up here at once.’
I let out a frustrated sigh. ‘Clodius will come up, Senator, if you insist, but only to empty your shelves and cart your whole library off to Soren, the Book Dealer.’
He grinned a wily, almost toothless agreement. ‘Oh, Soren would love to get hold of my collection. He’s just waiting for me to—did you say Clodius frequents Soren?’
‘Yes, Senator, but as a potential seller, not a buyer.’
‘I would die to protect my library.’ He pounded a bony fist o
n his couch and a pouf of dust hit my nose. ‘But what use are all my books anyway, when there’s no one to read to me?’
‘The Lady Kahina?’
‘Oh, she tries. Her pronunciation is coming along but . . . I’m not complaining, mind you! The virtue of that girl speaks for itself. Roman women are so frivolous these days, so immoral. You know, Tacitus was right when he praised the virtue of German tribal women. I took a noble Gallo-Roman for a second wife and I’m not sorry my son found a good Numidian bride.’
‘Yes, she is virtuous, Senator.’
‘Of course, I would have liked a grandson by Laetty. Laetty was a true Roman aristocrat, a good girl—perhaps a little too good when she joined that Christian cult?’ He chuckled, ‘But this one’s given us a legal heir at last! That Clodius can go to the dogs!’
His laugh turned little odd, but the smile seemed genuine. ‘But reading, young man, we were talking about reading, weren’t we? It’s the Greek I miss. My Homer . . . You see, there was a little boy here, clever little tyke he was, who held a special place in the house. Very special . . . This was his bench, right here.’ The old man stumbled to the side of his study and patted the low bench from which I read every day. ‘He was my slave and I taught him to read. He had a good pair of eyes and a wonderful memory.’
‘Senator Manlius, I am that boy.’ My voice cracked with frustration.
‘No, no, no.’ He chuckled. ‘Our Marcus was very skinny and shy. His little voice had hardly changed when he joined my son in the field. They came back, though, once, but my poor Atticus was mutilated. You know, sometimes, I’m thankful I can’t see.’
‘I carried the Commander to safety myself.’
‘So you met our young Marcus, too, in the field?’
I sat back on my haunches, defeated. I moved over to the wall and rested, sitting on that narrow platform plastered right along with the walls, which were covered with fading murals. It was still covered with a worn-out rug. This had been my perch, when I too still too short in the legs to take a real chair. Now my knees were around my ears.
I laid my face in my hands and sighed, ‘Would you like some wine, Senator?’
‘Yes, but not too strong.’
I helped the Senator off the couch to the chair where he had once listened to my lines and guided his hand to the cup.
‘Homer?’ I took down the familiar volume and found a favorite verse where the Trojan hero Aeneas is outmatched by Achilles, yet is fated to survive their deadly bout and thrive as the founder of Roma:
‘But come, let us ourselves get him away from death, for fear the son of Kronos may be angered if now Achilles kills this man. It is destined that he shall be the survivor, that the generation of Dardanos shall not die . . .’
I had read for some five minutes before I stopped to quench my own thirst. I poured some water and then turned back to the Senator, fearing he’d fallen sound asleep without warning, the way the old sometimes do.
Instead, I saw his sightless eyes streaming with tears.
‘Don’t stop, please. It is you, child,’ he said with a sob. ‘You’ve come back to us. Thank God. Oh, Marcus, I’ve become such an old fool.’ He pulled his worn old tunic across his face in shame at his tears.
‘Here, Senator. Put your fingers around this and know me for the boy I was.’ I reached for his hand and placed it under my collar around the superstitious talisman, the clump of ill-wrought bronze-dipped pottery on a cord that he’d once begged me never to lose or discard.
‘It’s come through battle and danger. A boy’s thing, but even as a man, I wear it always for protection and loyalty to this house.’
‘Never lose it,’ he whispered. ‘Tradition is the key to everything.’ To him, name, family and tradition formed the bedrock of life, even in this crumbling house of dust, smothered kitchen fires and dried-up fountains.
‘You’re back now.’ He cocked his head and listened for a minute. In the distance we heard a vendor’s evening sales cry echoing down in the alley off the kitchen door, but otherwise, I wondered why he looked so wary. ‘I have to talk to you, Marcus. Is there someone on the stairs?’
‘I don’t think so, Senator.’
‘Listen, there’s something I must tell you. It’s hard to explain so late, but you’re old enough to know—’
Did the Senator know, too, that I was the bastard child of his son and the sorrowful Numidian servant who had languished unloved in the back room for so long?
He was interrupted by a short knock on the door. Someone had climbed the stairs, but very softly. ‘Senator? Are you awake? May I enter?’
Kahina’s accent—that little whistling ‘s,’ and the funny way we Numidians pronounced the ‘l’—hit me like a desert breeze off the Aurès Mountains. It was the sound of my mother’s accent. Kahina’s ‘Shenator?’ betrayed her as the North African-born servant girl she’d once been.
She looked at the Senator and then saw me leaning against the wall. The door swung open the rest of the way by itself as she scowled at the surprise.
‘I see you have a visitor, Father, Marcus Gregorianus Numidianus.’
‘Oh, no fancy titles for my young friend here, Kahina. I knew this young man when he was the cleaning lady’s whelp, the slave Marcus, and nothing more, right?’ The frail man pulled on my arm to steady himself and then leaned on his neglected reading table. He stared at the air in her direction. For my part, my gaze was as intense as the beam of the Alexandria lighthouse.
How she’d changed!
Motherhood had robbed her of that vulnerable slim figure, once so light that suicide cultists had borne her on their shoulders as if she’d been no heavier than a sacrificial lamb.
Now she wore fine-gauge layers of linen and soft wool against Roma’s November winds. I knew how Africans suffered north of the Central Sea. The wintry rains and humid fevers had finally killed off my sad mother. Kahina’s usual belt, which I remembered as a sort of rope back in the Circumcellions’ camp, had been replaced by an item in the latest Germanic fashion—gold filigree studded with blue and amber stones. She gripped the ends of her dark blue stola as if that simple length of expensive weave could guard her from any renewals of my love.
I detested her new hairstyle—these tight cylinders of hair piled into a headdress that bobbed forward as she approached me. In Numidia, her long hair had hung loose and softly dusted by the desert. Now it looked shiny and lacquered into place.
Marriage to my natural father and former master had turned her into a Roman matron—statuesque, respectable, and dignified.
‘I’ve found the Senator in good health, Lady Kahina. We’ve been reading together.’
‘He will have enjoyed that, I’m sure. But he must be tired now. Your dinner will be sent up soon, Father. It’s stewed baby lamb with grapes.’
‘Soft enough to mash?’
‘If we cook it any softer, it’ll become soup.’
‘Thank you, child. I’ll have a rest now.’
He stepped, hand over hand, past the table and felt for his couch. Kahina and I stretched him out. I took care not to touch her but it was hard to be so close to her again.
We left the Senator and descended in pregnant silence down the few short steps to the atrium.
‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t ask you to stay with us, Marcus?’
‘You’re majestic, Kahina. Like something carved in marble—beautiful and smooth, but cold.’
‘It wouldn’t be appropriate, even if Clodius were dining in, which of course, he’s not.’
‘I’m so happy for the boy. And for you, of course. You look so noble dressed like that.’
‘My thoughts are more noble now, too. The Senator is very careful about my reputation, you see. He’s determined that all the nicest families receive me.’ She pulled her shawl tighter.
‘I’m sure they find you charming.’
‘I’ve been invited to salons by the ladies of all five princely clans—the Aemilii, Claudii, Cornelii, Fabii, and Val
erii and—’ she ticked them off her ringed fingers and I stopped her, grabbing her hand in mine.
‘I understand, Kahina. It’s all right. I’m bunking at the Castra Peregrina with the other agens in training. I’m not hounding you on purpose. I was summoned here. But I couldn’t come to my home city and not visit where I grew up.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Her stony expression relaxed one degree.
‘Kahina, it will be all right between us. We made our decision. I don’t regret it . . . do you?’
Her eyelids fluttered nervously. ‘Of course not. I have everything I hoped for, and something more, Marcus.’
I feared the truth, but had to hear it. I’d felt the change in her the moment her cool eyes and unsmiling lips faced me in the study.
‘Back in Numidia, that day you said you were leaving, I called the Commander a monster. I found his injuries fearful, even repellant. I hated my family for offering me up like that and I hated Leo for introducing my parents to the Commander. So I ran away. I had fallen in love with you in the Circumcellion camp. You were so young, handsome and . . . whole.’
‘We were both frightened. Those weeks among the Circumcellions were a strange time for both of us. We were surrounded by death so we grabbed at life. But in the end, we owe Leo a lot. He knew the Commander would give you a wonderful new life here and he knew that I would try to make a good agens.’
‘Yes, Leo was right in the end. The point I’m trying to make is that I’ve come to respect Atticus and . . . to love him, Marcus.’
‘Where is he now, exactly?’
‘Serving as best he can with the Herculiani. He’s away for months at a time. It’s not easy, but I imitate his fortitude. He loves me very much, Marcus. To him, the child is a miracle from Jove. But I’m afraid. Our honor and safety rest on the Senator.’
‘Not for much longer, I’m afraid.’
‘Marcus?’
‘Kahina, the boy’s future is everything to both of us. I can’t love you now as I did then, but I will protect you and—’ I broke off. I’m sure my expression was laughable.
‘What is it?’
‘I forgot to ask. What’s the sprog’s name?’