by Ruth Downie
This was starting to sound like the script of a bad comedy.
“Apparently the bartender chap was full of apologies. He’s had the slaves soundly beaten, of course. Though frankly, one sometimes wonders if it’s worth the effort.”
They broke step to avoid a scatter of dung in the street. Accius ordered his man into the nearest shop to threaten the owner with a fine if it wasn’t cleared up straightaway. “Street cleaning may not be much of a job,” Accius observed as they waited, “but I need to be seen doing things properly.”
“Yes, sir.”
“As do you. Balbus was concerned that it’s not in your interests to find Kleitos, but I told him you were a good man and you would want to help a colleague who’d supported you.”
Ruso cleared his throat. “Sir, as I said, it’s possible that being found is the last kind of help Kleitos wants.”
“Never mind what Kleitos wants! The man’s run off without a word to his patron. For all we know, he could have been kidnapped.”
“With all his furniture, sir?”
“Don’t be facetious, Ruso.” The sound of raised voices caused Accius to glance into the shop. “Gods above, why is it so difficult to get the simplest thing done around here? Are you going to find Kleitos, or do I need to look for somebody else?”
“I’ll do it, sir.”
The slave emerged from the shop, followed by a scowling woman clutching a bucket and a shovel. They set off down the street again. As they passed a sundial, Ruso was unable to resist a glance.
“The auctions won’t be finished yet,” Accius informed him tartly and snapped his fingers. The slave stepped forward and handed him a leather purse. “My clerk will have drawn up the loan documents while we’ve been out. Go down there, get it over with, and then concentrate on sorting this mess out for Horatius Balbus. I want him to know I’m a man who gets things done.”
20
Shopping was the province of women. The purchase of items beyond the scope of shops—important items such as property, livestock, and household members—was man’s work. Still, as Tilla had pointed out, they needed to choose a slave they could trust with Mara’s life, and did he want to take responsibility for that all on his own?
Thus Kleitos’s apartment was once again locked and deserted while its new occupants hurried across the city to catch the end of the auctions. One was clutching a baby. The other had Accius’s cash concealed under his tunic. Apparently, having pointed out why lending the money was a bad idea, Accius’s clerk had then warned his master that allowing Ruso to fall into the clutches of moneylenders would be even worse.
They arrived breathless after several wrong turns, rushing into an enclosed courtyard that smelled of stale bodies and fried food. Pigeons strutted about in the sunshine, pecking at scraps while the owners of the food stalls under the colonnades were already packing up. The remaining buyers clustered around the auction block were not as well dressed as the men already queueing at the payment tables and collection points. Ruso and his small family were joining the late bargain hunters, hoping to snap up the overlooked and underpriced.
At least, he hoped that was how it worked. Ruso had never actually purchased a slave at auction before. His father had owned a steward who dealt with all that, and later his brother had taken over the role along with managing the farm. His first marriage had been so brief that they were still relying on staff brought from their respective homes when it ended. Still, he had money, and he had common sense, and whoever he took home this afternoon would already have Tilla’s approval. There should be enough left over to buy a clean mattress where whoever-it-was could sleep next to Mara while he and his wife enjoyed some uninterrupted nocturnal privacy.
Whoever-it-was would not be the current slave standing on the block: A sullen young woman with spear-throwing shoulder muscles was not what a family man wanted to face every morning over breakfast. Ignoring the babble of the auctioneer, Ruso turned his attention to the figures lined up in chains behind the temporary barrier. He had arrived too late for the advance viewing, but he was used to assessing physical fitness. He would run through the same points he usually considered for military recruits, leaving out the parts that didn’t apply to women and letting Tilla deal with the extras that did. Physical fitness, however, was not all. How were they supposed to guess if someone would be a pleasure to live with or a scheming liar or a wet rag with no initiative? He had no idea. He was watching the young woman being led down from the block when someone cried, “Doctor!”
A portly figure he vaguely recognized was squeezing through a gap in the wooden barriers. “Simmias,” the man reminded him, transferring the pastry to his left hand and holding out the other, which was slightly sticky to the touch. “Doctor with the second night watch. We met the other day.”
“I remember.” Simmias was a lot friendlier now than when Ruso had visited the fire brigade’s headquarters last week on the hunt for work. He nodded toward the slaves as the auctioneer announced the next lot. “Are you buying?”
“Inspecting for a client,” the man explained. “They tell me you’re filling in for Kleitos. Glad to hear it.”
“I’ve been asked to cover for him till he gets back. You don’t happen to know how I can contact him, do you?”
Simmias shook his head before swallowing the last of the pastry. “Sorry. I hardly know him. Tell me, what’s all this about a body?”
So. It was not friendliness, but curiosity. Ruso glanced up at the block to make sure he was not missing a suitable baby-minder, then gave a brief summary of the story. He tried to make it as unexciting as a body in a barrel could possibly be made to sound, and to his relief Simmias restrained any urge to speculate.
Instead he said, “It must have been a nasty shock for your wife.”
“She didn’t sleep too well last night,” Ruso admitted.
“Not a good start for you, either.”
“Apparently there’s been some problem with debt collectors. I’m hoping people will realize it’s nothing to do with me.”
“Absolutely, brother.” Simmias reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s hope it’s soon forgotten. Anything I can do to help you settle in, let me know.”
“I’m very keen to track down Kleitos. If you hear anything—”
“I’ll be in touch.”
“And I’d welcome any recommendations about suppliers. I’ve got the basics, but I need to know about specialists.”
“Ah, now there I can help you.” But instead of offering names, Simmias broke off, his attention caught by something on the far side of the marketplace. A familiar female voice was calling out over the murmur of the crowd, demanding in a tongue that was wholly out of place at a Roman slave auction, “Is there anyone here of the Corionotatae?”
Tilla was standing on the high base of a column, clinging precariously to a marble pillar that was too broad to reach her arm around. With Mara clamped in the crook of the other arm, she was straining to see across the pen of unsold female slaves.
“Silly woman’s going to fall off there,” Simmias observed.
Ruso sighed. “That’s my wife.” It was hopeless to pretend otherwise.
“It’s no good her shouting in—what is it, Germanic?” said Simmias. “Tell her to try some Latin.”
“Anyone from the Brigantes?” Tilla cried, widening the net beyond her own obscure little tribe.
As Ruso shouldered his way through the crowd, someone who must have understood her shouted, “You’re a couple of years too late, love—we’ve sold ’em all!”
It struck him that they must be standing where the surviving British rebels had ended up after being marched away in chains. Some of them, he supposed, must still be serving in households here in the city. The rest would be long gone. He doubted any would ever see their homelands again.
“I am searching for women of the Brigantes!”
More and more heads were turning away from the auction block to watch the barbarian woman mak
ing a spectacle of herself. “Wait for me!” Ruso shouted, hoping to silence her. Inside the pen, any dealer who grasped what was going on would be busy checking his stock for women he could pass off as Brigante at inflated prices.
“Do you a nice Thracian, miss!” someone offered.
Ruso reached up and lifted Mara to safety before she slipped out of Tilla’s grasp and crashed onto the stone paving. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered just as a gangly youth yelled from beyond the fence, “I am Dumnonii! I speak your tongue!”
“Brigante!” cried another. “I am of your people, sister!”
Tilla grabbed Ruso’s shoulder for support and leapt down, almost overbalancing as she landed. “There is a man of the Brigantes over there!”
“We came for a baby-minder,” he reminded her.
“And a boy of the Dumnonii!”
“The boy must be a criminal to be shipped as a slave, wife. They’re a peaceful tribe.”
“They are my people!”
The Brigante might have been one of her people: The Dumnonii were a tribe from the far southwest where, as far as he knew, there was nothing but sheep and a few tin mines run by contractors. He doubted Tilla would have any ties there. But it seemed any part of Britannia could look like home from this distance.
Ruso felt as uncomfortable as he always did about the idea of human beings standing to be assessed for sale like animals while desperately hoping they would be taken to a kind home. It was not ideal, but it was hard to see how else slaves could be distributed. “We came for a baby-minder,” he reminded her. “Don’t get their hopes up. It’s not fair.”
The look she gave him was not even one of reproach. It was the look of a woman who knew what it was to be bought and sold. What she did not know, he reminded himself as he grasped her by the arm, was what it was like to be doing the buying.
The auction of a middle-aged weaver carried on above them while a smiling dealer stepped forward to bow to Tilla and offer her the two Britons at a special price. It would save her having to bid against some of those ruffians out there, who had no respect for decent people. He evidently did not expect her to be able to read the word RUNAWAY on the label tied around the neck of the skinny Brigante, nor to notice that the acne-sprinkled Dumnonii youth had the sullen expression of one not used to taking orders.
Ruso told the dealer they had come to buy a woman.
After more bowing and smiling, the Brigante woman they were promised turned out to be Catuvellauni. Tilla was not impressed. Evidently the solidarity of exiled Britons did not extend to the Catuvellauni. He could not remember why her tribe did not trust them, but it was bound to be a reason that went back generations and owed more to passion than logic.
“We don’t have to have a Briton,” he reminded her. “I’ll see if there’s a Greek. It would be good for Mara to learn another language.” A proper, useful language.
“The Briton is fertile, sir,” the dealer assured him. “And a hard worker.”
“We do not want one that is fertile,” Tilla told him. “We want one that is kind and knows her place and keeps her word. Who else do you have?”
The woman swayed slightly. Her face was pink from standing in the sun. Her hair had been dyed to make her look younger. For a moment the bloodshot gray eyes met Ruso’s own. Then she squared her shoulders and looked away.
The Catuvellauni were longstanding allies of Rome. Whatever personal disaster had led her here, he had no doubt the woman understood everything they were saying about her. “Open your mouth for me,” he urged, her obedience confirming her grasp of Latin. He checked her teeth and tongue and eyes and ears as he would any other recruit. “Now bend down and touch your toes.”
“Husband, we do not want—”
“Does she look healthy to you?”
“She’s in the prime of life, sir!”
“I wasn’t asking you,” he told the dealer. “Tilla?”
“She is Catuvellauni.”
“We can wait for a Greek if you prefer.” He turned to the slave and said in her own language, “Have you looked after small children?”
The woman brightened. “I cared for the farm manager’s children back in Britannia.”
“Can you cook?”
“I can cook, sir.”
“Of course she will say that!” put in Tilla, who had once told him the exact same lie herself.
It was the cue for the dealer’s practiced speech about his famous six-month guarantee.
“We’ll see,” said Ruso, taking his wife by the arm and leading her away. He was not going to buy the first slave they saw.
Half an hour later, the Catuvellauni woman became his legal property. Pointing out that the woman was nearer forty than the alleged twenty-five had got him a discount, and he had spent little more than half of the money Accius had lent him. He was hurrying across to collect the documents and pay the tax when Tilla said, “Nobody has bought the runaway Brigante. Or the Dumnonii boy.”
He pretended not to hear.
“The Brigante will go to the mines.”
He said, “He should have thought of that before he ran away.”
“I ran away,” she reminded him.
“That’s not the same thing at all.”
“Why?”
“We have the slave we want. We don’t need a man.”
“But they are my people!”
It was unfair. He drew her aside and hissed, “Wife, I have neither the time nor the money to buy every slave you feel sorry for! Even if I could, what will we feed them on? Where will they sleep?”
“If I might intervene,” murmured a voice, “it’s not advisable to have too many slaves from the same province under one roof. You never know what they’re—”
“Simmias!” exclaimed Ruso before Tilla could say anything. “Simmias, this is my wife, Tilla. A renowned healer back in her native Britannia. If you have any patients needing a midwife, Tilla will be happy to help. Wife, our new friend is going to recommend some useful contacts for buying specialist medicines.”
Perhaps seeing the expression on Tilla’s face, Simmias swiftly handed over a battered wax tablet on which he had scrawled several names, and retreated.
“All from one province is only bad if you do not speak their tongue,” Tilla insisted.
“We don’t need extra slaves. Especially ones who can chat to each other all day and can’t do anything useful. One of those is a runaway and the other one looks like a wet afternoon in winter. You have to think ahead when you buy people!”
“I am not talking about lots of extra slaves,” she pointed out. “I am only talking about two, and I will see to it that they work to pay you back.”
“Doing what?”
“They’re both keen workers, sir!”
Ruso turned to glare at the dealer. “It’s none of your business.”
But it was, of course, precisely that: his business. Unabashed, the man named a price which was close to the remaining money in the purse, and doubtless far more than he would have got from anyone else.
At the same moment as Ruso said, “No,” Tilla took him by the arm and said in a voice bright with innocence, “Oh, husband! Ask the nice man if he can take two hundred off, then you could afford them!”
The nice man gave Ruso a look that said he knew it was a game, and that he also knew he was much better at it than some newcomer who was fool enough to bring his wife to the slave auctions. Ruso gave him a deliberate stare of indifference. The dealer’s face cracked into a grin, leaving Ruso’s features stuck in the indifferent stare just a fraction longer than was appropriate. He had the distinct feeling that the man was laughing at them both.
“Just for you, mistress,” oozed the dealer, “I’ll go down to eight hundred.” He gave a dramatic sigh. “I never could resist a beautiful lady, sir. You’re very a lucky man.”
21
Tilla supposed she must have once looked like two of their new slaves did on the long trudge back to Kleitos’s lodgi
ngs. They were gazing up openmouthed at the gleaming temples and palaces that competing emperors had crammed into the center of the city. The Brigante was different. He shambled along, clutching his little bag of possessions with one of the new mattresses slung over his shoulder, and barely glanced up from his own bare feet. As if he had seen all of that marble splendor before and he did not care to see it again.
Tilla was not interested, either. It did not do to remind yourself all the time of how small you were and how little you mattered in this place, even if you were a citizen of Rome and a mother and an owner of three slaves when your husband had only wanted to buy one.
She swallowed. Three slaves. She would have felt terrible leaving these fellow Britons to their fate with the trader, but in truth Dumnonia was a very long way from her own people, and there might be a good reason why the boy had been sold. The woman was from a tribe that was not to be trusted, and now it turned out that the Brigante came from the other end of the territory and had never heard of anyone in her own family or even the name of the Corionotatae. She dared not look at her husband.
Buying the slaves had seemed the honorable thing to do. In their place, it was what she would have prayed for. She knew what it was to be a possession in someone else’s homeland, doing her best to shut her thoughts away and forcing her body to endure through the long dreary seasons when no rescue came.
She knew, also, how little could be kept secret from a slave. Even if they did not speak, they would watch and listen. Then they would talk among themselves, because that was what slaves did, and if they were not loyal—as many slaves were not—they would talk to other people too.
She had made her husband invite these strangers to share their small lodgings, and suddenly she did not want them there herself.
They trudged up the hill beside the bathhouse. Several times she turned to check that the woman, Narina, was carrying Mara properly, and fought down an urge to snatch her back. Then the sight of the men with the mattresses and a glimpse of a girl crossing the street with a wicker chair balanced on her head brought on another worry. What would happen if they were wrong about Doctor Kleitos and his troubles, and the family decided to move back home again? Her own household would be crammed back into some horrible lodging house with three extra mouths to feed.