I was about to put my head down and hurry on when I had a thought. According to Solomon Daisy, the blue-eyed girl with the ivory knife had been buried in Southwark. Maybe by some fluke I had arrived on the very day of her funeral. I left the muddy road and made my way gingerly across the waste ground towards the little group of mourners. Were you allowed to gatecrash a funeral?
Apparently you were.
A few people looked at me but nobody objected.
There were ten adults and two kids standing around the grave. As I came to the grave edge, I peeped in and saw what looked like a mummy. Then I realised it was the body of a stocky woman wrapped in unbleached cloth.
I knew this from church; it was a shroud like the one they had wrapped Jesus in. Only this one wasn’t bound up in strips but a kind of bag laid out on a rectangle of pure white powder, like baby powder. There was a clay cup on one side of her head and half a roast chicken on the other. I guessed she was hoping to have some food in the underworld, though how you can eat if your face is covered by a shroud I do not know.
Then someone started crying out the word clementia, which I think means ‘mercy’.
The rest joined in. ‘Clementia!’ they shouted. ‘Clementia!’ Some stretched out their hands towards the body. That made me think Clementia might be the dead woman’s name. One woman beat her chest and cried, ‘Ai! Ai! Ai!’
This was too intense for me, and Clementia wasn’t my girl, so I backed away and returned to the path.
Up ahead, another road joined the one I was on and I saw more people with carts and pack animals.
The sun was up now, but still low in the sky. Its slanting rays made sheets of water on the marshy ground look like bronze, or maybe I should say ‘copper-alloy’. Over on drier ground near the fork in the road, a statue on a column stood between two strange-looking buildings. They were both square with white columns around all four sides and smaller upper storeys poking up from their red tile roofs. I had never seen pictures of any Roman buildings that looked like that.
After a few dozen metres, I came to a low wooden bridge. Was it London Bridge? No. I had glimpsed Londinium’s main bridge when I was swept out of the Walbrook. This was more like a causeway of split timbers than a proper bridge. Then I remembered Solomon Daisy telling me that some of the cemeteries were on islands surrounded by water.
I noticed that people were careful to step onto the bridge with their right foot first. Some of them lifted their hands to the sky. The man with the ox-cart tossed something into the water.
Our Latin-club teacher, Miss Forte, was always telling us that Romans believed evil spirits hung around borders and thresholds, and that if you didn’t step across properly they would get you, so I also stepped onto the wooden bridge with my right foot first. I needed all the luck I could get.
I saw a heron and more ducks and some people fishing from flat-boats.
By the time I reached the middle of the bridge, I could see a few houses emerging from the mist up ahead. They were the first proper Roman London houses I’d seen.
I was surprised to see that they looked even less Roman than the two strange buildings by the fork in the road. Their walls were dirty white plaster criss-crossed with dark beams. Some even had thatched roofs.
A sudden thought froze me on the wooden bridge.
Had Crazy Daisy sent me back to the wrong period in time?
23
Demonic Dancing
Had I been sent back to medieval London or even Shakespeare’s time by mistake?
The answer was revealed as the smoke thinned and I saw a very Roman-looking building.
It was made of brick and stone, and it had columns and a dome with smoke coming out. No, not smoke. Steam. It was the mansio, a type of Roman inn, marked on the map I had memorised.
I was being stupid. People around me were wearing tunics and hooded cloaks and they were mostly speaking Latin. Of course we were in Roman times.
I realised the strange square buildings must have been the so-called Romano-Celtic temples. I’d seen them marked on the map just before the inn and wondered what they’d look like.
‘Come on, Alex!’ I said to myself. ‘Use your brain!’
It’s just that it wasn’t at all what I had imagined.
In my head I had pictured white marble columns and toga-wearing men in chariots.
So far I had seen none of these.
Instead of elegant marble temples I saw crooked buildings covered with plaster and roofed with thatch. Instead of chariots I saw rickety wagons. Instead of statues lining the road were piles of rubbish, some small and some big. Coming off the bridge, I saw that a trench ran in front of the half-timbered buildings to my left. More fires burned in metal braziers and I could smell dung, smoke and sour thatch.
Maybe Londinium would look more Roman once I was in among the shops and houses.
A grubby hen clucked across my path, pursued by a naked boy.
Female faces peeped from the unglazed windows of upper rooms.
On my right a woman sat behind a crude wooden table covered with the skulls of small animals, rodents by the look of them. She was calling out to passers-by in a voice too shrill for me to make out her words. One of the little skulls dangled from a grubby string around her neck; I guessed she was selling them as lucky charms.
The road was now less mud and more gravel, which was bad news for me. I yelped as a sharp stone hurt my right foot.
I stopped and balanced on my left foot so I could see the damage. Luckily the piece of gravel hadn’t pierced the tender skin. A few other people were barefoot, but they had probably been doing it all their lives and had soles like leather.
I needed shoes.
And to get shoes I needed money.
As an ox-cart driver passed the skull-seller, she stretched out her hand and pleaded for him to buy one of her lucky skulls.
That gave me an idea.
I could beg.
I could simply sit down, hold out my hands and look pathetic. I’d seen enough of beggars in modern London to know it worked. Maybe I could even get a piece of charcoal and scribble a note on the paving stone before me: Need shoes. Please give a coin.
Only it would have to be in Latin. And people would have to know how to read.
I could see the awnings of market stalls up ahead, and hear the shouts of traders. Just like Northcote Road in Battersea, near where I lived.
That would be a good place to beg. I set off carefully along the side of the road near the ditch, where there was more mud and less gravel, but a sickly sweet smell made me recoil. The ditch was an open sewer. I tried to find a happy medium between the gravel road and the sewer, but had to watch out for mule pies and pig poo.
When I reached the market, I discovered that I was not the first person who had decided to beg there that morning.
Beggar Number One was a scrawny woman in a sleeveless tunic with disgusting red sores dotting her face and arms.
Beggar Number Two was a man in only a tattered loincloth, stretching out a withered hand.
Beggar Number Three was a cheerful dwarf in a pink tunic, a floppy woolly hat and multicoloured rags wrapped around his feet.
To compete with these three I would have to do something pretty impressive.
What could I do to attract people’s coins? What talents did I have? Back home in the twenty-first century I could kill more zombies on the latest zombie-killing console game than anyone else in my class … but that wouldn’t help me here.
I could juggle hacky-sacks and I could also play ‘Greensleeves’ on the recorder. But I had no hacky-sacks and no recorder.
I couldn’t even make a giant soap bubble out of two sticks and a loop of old rope, because the Romans did not have washing-up liquid.
Maybe I could sing?
Our school’s Christmas production had been The Jungle Book and I had been cast as Mowgli. But my favourite song was not Mowgli’s but King Louie’s. You know the one I mean; it’s everyone’s favour
ite.
I found an empty spot in front of a brick wall between Ragged Dwarf and a dried fish stall.
I started singing the monkey song, also known as King of the Swingers.
A few Roman Londoners stopped to watch and listen.
I sang it once and then started again, singing of how I wanted to be like them and stroll right into town.
A few seemed curious, most looked only blank.
Maybe it was because I was singing in English rather than Latin. If I had a day and a dictionary I might be able to translate it, but I had neither.
However I did know some jokes, the ones that every kid who learns Latin knows. So instead of singing the English words, I sang it with funny Latin ones.
‘Caesar adsum iam forte!’ I sang. ‘Brutus aderat! Caesar sic in omnibus et Brutus sic innat.’
It’s just a bunch of Latin words that make no sense in Latin, but if you say them a certain way it sounds like ‘Caesar had some jam for tea, Brutus had a rat. Caesar sick in omnibus and Brutus sick in hat.’ The rhyme fit the beat of the Disney song perfectly.
The other joke Miss Forte taught us was ‘Semper Ubi Sub Ubi’ which literally means ‘Always Where Under Where’ which sounds a bit like ‘Always Wear Underwear’!
OK, I admit it: Latin is not that funny.
But singing in Latin, even in nonsense Latin, seemed to be working. More people had stopped and were staring at me.
I needed more. In desperation, I started kicking my legs up.
‘Semper ubi sub ubi!’ I sang as I kicked my legs in time.
Two women squealed and a man in a short hooded cloak guffawed.
That was when I realised I should probably have taken heed of what I was singing: ‘Always wear underwear.’
Quickly I changed tack and tried a dance popular at my school, where you swing your hips one way and your stiff arms the other real quick. Some of the boys in my class do it at break time to make the girls laugh. It’s better when there are two or three of you but I was flying solo.
That dance didn’t work. It was too energetic and didn’t allow me to breathe, much less sing. People started to look puzzled rather than pleased.
So I tried another dance: the Carlton.
No, not the Charleston. The Carlton.
It’s the dance Carlton does in Fresh Prince of Bel Air. It was a popular one at Wandsworth Academy.
With a big grin on my face and Carlton-style jazz hands I sang it out with gusto.
Now people looked almost scared. They must have thought I was possessed by an evil spirit or something because about half of my audience were holding up their fists with the thumb between the first and second finger, which Miss Forte had told us was the Roman sign against evil.
Yup. It seemed my dancing was demonic.
24
Choir-Boy
Disney tunes, bad Latin puns and YouTube dances were not cutting it here on the mean streets of Roman London. I remembered Miss Forte saying they had a different sense of humour in ancient times.
Yeah. Like NO SENSE OF HUMOUR.
So I decided to play it straight rather than for laughs.
Did I mention that I have a nice sweet voice? At my primary school I was often given the solo part in Christmas carols, and, like I said, I was Mowgli in The Jungle Book.
As I tried to think of what Latin words I could sing, I suddenly had a brainwave.
I took a deep breath and started singing my memorised phrase to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’.
‘Puellam oculis caeruleis,’ I sang, ‘quaero et cultro eburneo …’
I had to squish some of the words together but managed to make them just about fit.
I needed a second verse so added, ‘Culter eius est panthera, panthera maculata.’
(The word panthera fit the rhythm better than leopardus.)
Then a slight variation. ‘Culter eius eburneus, id est dens elephanti.’
And then for the chorus, ‘O oculi caeruli! O culter eburneus!’ I sang. ‘O oculi caeruli! Ubi est haec puella?’
In case you don’t have Latin club at your school, that all means something like this:
A girl with blue eyes, with an ivory knife I seek.
Her knife is a panther, a spotted panther.
Her knife is ivory, the teeth of an elephant.
O blue eyes! O ivory knife!
O blue eyes! Where is this girl?
A woman with a basket full of onions and a blue cloak over her head tossed a coin to me.
Ping!
At last!
The coin was hardly bigger than my little fingernail and made of the cheapest metal: copper-alloy. But still, it was a coin!
Roman Londoners obviously liked Elizabethan ballads. I sang it out again, clear and bright and with more emotion. I even put my hands together like I was praying and looked up to heaven.
Little copper-alloy coins started pattering down, like the first drops of rain after a dry spell.
Should I stop and pick them up? Or carry on singing?
I didn’t want to break the flow, but when the beggar with the withered hand started to edge closer, I lunged to get the coins without stopping the song.
Where to put them?
The flipping Romans had no flipping pockets!
How do you go through life without pockets?
I dropped the little coins down the front of my tunic, hoping they would settle in the place where the cloth pouched over my belt.
It worked.
Thank goodness for my repurposed loincloth. In an age of no pockets, a belt was vital.
Now I had quite a big crowd, and one person even threw a coin the size of my thumbnail that might have been silver.
People were making a strange buzzing hum. But because they were smiling and even laughing I guessed this bee sound was their way of applauding.
Suddenly a skinny woman pushed through the crowd and made straight for me. I recognised the beggar woman from the sores on her skin and recoiled in horror. What if it was leprosy, like in the movie Ben Hur? It was contagious even if you barely touched someone.
To my astonishment she swung her fist at me.
I jumped back.
She swung her other fist.
I ran.
Behind me I heard the crowd groan with disappointment. Somebody shouted, ‘Mane!’ which I think means ‘Wait!’
But I did not wait.
With my coins jingling reassuringly in the pouch at the front of my tunic, I wove between market stalls, careful not to step in rotting veg or donkey droppings.
The stalls gave way to a covered boardwalk on either side of open doorways. The shingle overhang on wooden columns made it look more like a Wild West town than Roman London. Gratefully I left the muddy gravel-studded road and went up onto the boardwalk. As I hurried past the first few doorways on my left, I saw that they opened onto shops.
Behind me I heard shouts of, ‘O oculi caeruli!’ and realised a few fans were following me. Maybe the leper woman too. So I ducked into the next shop in the hope of escape.
This store sold lots of objects made out of copper-alloy. It was pretty dim inside, but a couple of hanging oil lamps showed me items like old-fashioned weighing pans like the one held by the statue of justice who stands over a courthouse. A wooden counter also displayed mirrors, chains and oil lamps.
Outside some people ran by shouting, ‘O oculi caeruli! O culter eburneus!’
I shrank back into the darkest corner and saw some bronze-handled knives!
I turned eagerly to the shopkeeper, a short bald man in a leather apron, who was looking at me with narrowed eyes.
‘Excuse me,’ I said in Latin, ‘are you Caecilius, seller of knives?’
The man looked as if I had made a bad smell and tipped his head back for no. ‘My name is Naso,’ he said curtly. ‘Not Caecilius.’
I tried one of the other phrases I had memorised. ‘Can you tell me where I might buy an ivory knife?’
Naso’s scowl deepened and
he pointed to his bronze knives and said something rapid that probably meant, ‘Why do you want an ivory one when I have many good knives right here?’
I sighed, then pointed at my feet. ‘Sandalia?’ I said, using the Greek word for sandals. Then I plugged it into my memorised phrase. ‘Can you tell me where I might buy sandals?’
At this his scowl relaxed a little and he dipped his head. I was beginning to get that tipping the head back meant no but inclining it forward meant yes, just like in Greece.
He gestured with his left hand and muttered something.
‘Quid?’ I said. ‘What?’
‘Sutorius! Sutorius!’ He came out from behind his counter, grabbed a fistful of my tunic and pulled me roughly to the open doorway of his shop. ‘Sutorius! Ibi!’ he said. And pointed.
Across the street I saw another row of shops, including one with a wooden shoe instead of a sign above the door, beneath the overhang.
‘Gratias ago,’ I said, and for some reason I put my hands together like my gran when she does namaste after yoga. I even gave a little bow.
I guess that was the right thing to do, because the man gave a gap-toothed smile.
Or maybe he was happy because he had just sent me to be robbed by his pal Sutorius.
25
Bogus Handshake
As I stepped out onto the wooden planks of the walkway I asked myself if I really needed shoes.
Then I saw a rusty nail poking up from one of the uneven planks and muttered to myself, ‘Yes, Alex, you need shoes.’
I glanced both ways to make sure the coast was clear, then stepped off the boardwalk and hurried across the gravel road, dancing with every painful step.
Heavy clouds had gathered overhead and it was even darker in the cobbler’s shop than it had been in the first shop. I heard tapping down below, and once my eyes adjusted I saw a man sitting on the floor in cobbler’s pose, hammering a wooden block between his feet. Behind him ran a low counter with pairs of leather shoes laid out on it. Of each pair, one shoe was right side up to show the top and the other upside down to display various patterns of hobnails on the sole.
The Time Travel Diaries Page 7