‘So where does your sinister Arab fit in?’ Tranio demanded bluntly.
‘Musa?’ I acted surprised. ‘He’s our interpreter.’
‘Oh of course.’
‘Why,’ I asked with a light, incredulous laugh, ‘are people suggesting Musa saw the killer or something?’
Tranio smiled, answering in the same apparently friendly tone that I had used: ‘Did he?’
‘No,’ I said. For all useful purposes it was the truth.
As Grumio prodded the fire I too picked up a twisted branch and played with it among the sparks. ‘So are either of you going to tell me why Heliodorus was so stinkingly unpopular?’
It was still Tranio, the exponent of mercurial wit, who enjoyed himself making up answers: ‘We were all in his power.’ He twirled his wrist elegantly, pretending to philosophise. ‘Weak parts and dull speeches could finish us. That crude bastard knew it; he toyed with us. The choice was either to flatter him, which was unspeakable, or to bribe him, which was often impossible, or just to wait for somebody else to grab him by the balls and squeeze till he dropped. Before Petra no one had done it - but it was only a matter of time. I should have taken bets on who would get to him first.’
‘That seems extreme,’ I commented.
‘People whose livelihood depends on a writer exist under stress.’ As their new writer, I tried not to take it to heart. ‘To find his killer,’ Tranio advised me, ‘look for the despairing actor who had suffered one bad role too many.’
‘You, for instance?’
His eyes dropped, but if I had worried him he rallied. ‘Not me. I don’t need a set text. If he wrote me out, I improvised. He knew I would do it, so being spiteful lost its fun. Grumio was the same, of course.’ I glanced at Grumio, who might have been patronised by the afterthought, but his cheerful face remained neutral.
I grunted, sipping wine again. ‘And I thought the man had just borrowed somebody’s best silvered belt once too often!’
‘He was a pig,’ Grumio muttered, breaking his silence.
‘Well that’s simple! Tell me why.’
‘A bully. He beat the lower orders. People he dared not attack physically he terrorised in more subtle ways.’
‘Was he a womaniser?’
‘Better ask the women.’ Grumio was still the speaker-with what could have been a jealous glint. ‘There are one or two I’ll help you interrogate!’
While I was at it, I checked every possibility: ‘Or did he chase young men?’ They both shrugged offhandedly. In fact nobody in this company was young enough to appeal to the usual ogler of boys in bathhouses. If more mature relationships existed, I might as well look first for evidence here with the Twins; they lived closely enough. But Grumio seemed to have straightforward female interests; and Tranio had also grinned at his interrogation joke.
As before it was Tranio who wanted to elaborate: ‘Heliodorus could spot a hangover, or a pimple on a sensitive adolescent, or a disappointed lover at twenty paces. He knew what each of us wanted from life. He also knew how to make people feel that their weaknesses were enormous flaws, and their hopes beyond reach.’
I wondered what Tranio thought his own weakness was -and what hopes he had. Or might once have had.
‘A tyrant! But people here seem pretty strong-willed.’ Both Twins laughed easily. ‘So why’, I asked, ‘did you all put up with him?’
‘Chremes had known him a long time,’ suggested Grumio wearily.
‘We needed him. Only an idiot would do the job,’ said Tranio, insulting me with what I thought was unnecessary glee.
They were an odd pair. At first glance they had seemed closely bonded, but I decided they hung together only in the way of craftsmen who work together, which gave them some basic loyalty, though they might not meet socially from choice. Yet in this travelling company Tranio and Grumio had to live under one goat-hair roof with everyone presuming they formed one unit. Perhaps sustaining the fraud set up hidden strains.
I was fascinated. Some friendships are sounder for having one easygoing partner with one who seems more intense. I felt that this ought to have been the case here; that the stolid Grumio ought to have been grateful for the opportunity to pal up with Tranio, to whom frankly I warmed more. Apart from the fact that he kept refilling my winecup, he was a cynic and a satirist; exactly my kind of fellow.
I wondered if professional jealousy had come between them, though I saw no signs. There was scope on stage for both of them, as I knew from my reading. All the same, in Grumio, the quieter of the clowns, I sensed deliberate restraint. He looked pleasant and harmless. But to an informer that could easily mean he was hiding something dangerous.
The wineskin was empty. I watched Tranio shake out the very last drops, then he squashed the skin flat, clapping it under his elbow.
‘So, Falco!’ He seemed to be changing the subject. ‘You’re new to playwriting. How are you finding it?’
I told him my thoughts on New Comedy, dwelling with morose despair on its dreariest features.
‘Oh you’re reading the stuff? So you’ve been given the company play box?’ I nodded. Chremes had handed over a mighty trunk stuffed with an untidy mass of scrolls. Putting them together in sets to make whole plays had taken most of our journey to Bostra, even with help from Helena, who enjoyed that kind of puzzle. Tranio went on idly. ‘I might come and have a quick look sometime. Heliodorus borrowed something that wasn’t left among his personal things…’
‘Anytime,’ I offered, curious, though not in my present condition wanting to pay too much attention to some lost stylus knife or bath-oil flask. I swayed to my feet, suddenly anxious to stop torturing my liver and brain. I had been away from Helena for longer than I liked. I wanted my bed.
The sharp clown grinned, noticing how the wine had affected me. I was not alone, however. Grumio was lying on his back near the fire, eyes closed, mouth open, dead to the world. ‘I’ll come back to your tent now,’ laughed my new friend. ‘I’ll do it while I think of it.’
Since I could use an arm to steady me home, I made no protest but let him bring a light and come with me.
Chapter XVII
Helena appeared to be sound asleep, though I noticed a smell of snuffed lamp wick. She made a show of waking drowsily. ‘Do I hear the morning cockerel, or is that my stupefied darling rolling back to his tent before he drops?’
‘Me, stupefied…’ I never lied to Helena. She was too sharp to delude. I added quickly, ‘I’ve brought a friend - ‘ I thought she stifled a groan.
The light of Tranio’s flare wavered crazily up the back wall of our shelter. I gestured him to the trunk of plays while I folded up on a baggage roll as neatly as possible and let him get on with it. Helena glared at the clown, though I tried to persuade myself she looked more indulgently on me.
‘Something Heliodorus pinched,’ Tranio explained, diving into the depths of the scroll box unabashed. ‘I just want to dip into the box…’ After midnight, in the close domestic privacy of our bivouac, this explanation fell short of convincing. Theatricals seemed a tactless lot.
‘I know,’ I soothed Helena. ‘Little did you think when you found me in a black bog in Britannia and fell for my soft manners and sweet-natured charm that you’d end up having your sleep disturbed by a gang of drunkards in a desert khan-‘
‘You’re rambling, Falco,’ she snapped. ‘But how right. Little did I think!’
I smiled at her fondly. Helena closed her eyes. I told myself that was the only way she could resist either the smile or the frank affection in it.
Tranio was thorough in his search. He delved right to the bottom of the trunk, then replaced every scroll, taking the opportunity to look at each a second time.
‘If you tell me what you’re looking for—’ I offered blearily, longing to get rid of him.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. .It’s not here, anyway.’ He was still searching, however.
‘What is it? Your diary of five years as a sex slave in the temple of some E
astern goddess with an ecstatic cult? A rich widow’s will, leaving you a Lusitanian gold mine and a troupe of performing apes? Your birth certificate?’
‘Oh much worse!’ he laughed.
‘Looking for a scroll?’
‘No, no. Nothing like that.’
Helena watched him in a silence that may have passed for politeness to a stranger. I like more alluring entertainment. I watched her. Tranio finally banged down the lid and sat on the chest kicking his heels against its studded sides. The friendly fellow looked as if he intended to stay chatting until dawn.
‘No luck?’ I asked.
‘No, damn it!’
Helena yawned blatantly. Tranio gave a flourishing gesture of acquiescence, took the hint, and left.
My tired eyes met Helena’s for a moment. In the weak light of the flare Tranio had left us, hers looked darker than ever -and not devoid of challenge.
‘Sorry, fruit.’
‘Well, you have to do your work, Marcus.’ .. ‘I’m still sorry.’
‘Find anything out?’
‘Early days.’
Helena knew what that meant: I had found nothing. As I washed my face in cold water she told me, ‘Chremes dropped in to tell you he has found the rest of his people, and we’re performing here tomorrow.’ She could have announced this while we were waiting for Tranio to go, but Helena and I liked to exchange news more discreetly. Discussing things together in private meant a lot to us. ‘He wants you to write out the moneylender’s part Heliodorus used to play. You have to make sure that omitting the character doesn’t lose any vital lines. If.so-‘
‘I reallocate them to someone else. I can do that!’
‘All right.’
‘I could always go on stage as the moneylender myself.’
‘You have not been asked.’
‘Don’t see why not. I know what they’re like. Jove knows I’ve dealt with enough of the bastards.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Helena scoffed. ‘You’re a freeborn Aventine citizen; you’re much too proud to sink so low!’
‘Unlike you?’
‘Oh I could do it. I’m a senator’s offspring; disgracing myself is my heritage! Every family my mother gossips with has a disgruntled son no one talks about who ran off to scandalise his grandfather by acting in public. My parents will be disappointed if I don’t.’
‘Then they will have to be disappointed, so long as I’m in charge of you.’ Supervising Helena Justina was a rash claim; she laughed at me. ‘I promised your father I’d keep you respectable,’ I finished lamely.
‘You promised him nothing.’ True. He had more sense than to ask me to take on that impossible labour.
‘Feel free to carry on reading,’ I offered, fumbling with my boots.
Helena removed from under her pillow the scroll I guessed she had been peacefully perusing before I turned up like trouble. ‘How could you tell?’ she demanded.
‘Smut on your nose from the lamp.’ In any case, after living with her for a year I had deduced that if I left her anywhere near forty papyrus scrolls she would scoot through the lot in a week like a starved library beetle.
‘This is pretty grubby too,’ she remarked, gesturing to her bedtime read.
‘What is it?’
‘A very rude collection of anecdotes and funny tales. Too saucy for you, with your pure mind.’
‘I’m not in the mood for pornography.’ I took several chances in succession, aiming myself at the bed, inserting my body under the light cover, and winding myself around my lass. She allowed it. Perhaps she knew better than to argue with a hopeless drunk. Perhaps she liked being enveloped.
‘Could this be what Tranio was looking for?’ she asked.
Sick of Tranio, I pointed out that he had said quite decisively his lost item was not a scroll.
‘People do sometimes tell lies!’ Helena reminded me pedantically.
We too, like the Twins, had our tent divided up for privacy. Behind the makeshift curtain I could hear Musa snoring. The rest of the camp lay silent. It was one of our few moments of solitude, and I was not interested in a risque Greek novel, if that was what Helena had been studying. I managed to extract the scroll from her and tossed it aside. I let it be known what mood I was in.
‘You’re not capable,’ she grumbled. Not without reason, and perhaps not without regret.
With an effort that may have surprised her I wrenched myself sideways and up-ended the flare in a pitcher of water. Then, as it hissed into darkness, I turned back to Helena intent on proving her wrong.
Once she accepted that I was serious, and likely to stay awake long enough, she sighed. ‘Preparations, Marcus…’
‘Incomparable woman!’ I let her go, apart from annoying her with delaying caresses as she struggled over me on her way out of bed.
Helena and I were one, a lasting partnership. But due to her fears of childbirth and my fears of poverty, we had taken the decision not to add to our family yet. We shared the burden of defying the Fates. We had rejected wearing a hairy spider amulet, as practised by some of my sisters, mainly because its success seemed doubtful; my sisters had huge families. Anyway, Helena reckoned I was not sufficiently frightened of spiders to be driven off her by a mere amulet. Instead, I faced the deep embarrassment of bribing an apothecary to forget that controlling birth contravened the Augustan family laws; then she endured the humiliating, sticky procedure with the costly alum in wax. We both had to live with the fear of failing. We both knew if that happened we could never allow a child of ours to be killed in the womb by an abortionist, so our lives would take a serious turn. That had never stopped us giggling over the remedy.
Without a light, I heard Helena cursing and laughing as she rummaged for her soapstone box of thick cerate ointment that was supposed to keep us childless. After some muttering she hopped back to bed. ‘Quick, before it melts - ‘
Sometimes I thought the alum worked on the principle of making performance impossible. Instructed to be quick, as every man knows, the will to proceed is liable to collapse. Following too many winecups this seemed even more likely, though the wax at least helped provide a steady aim, after which maintaining a position, as my gymnasium trainer Glaucus would call it, did become more difficult.
Applying care to these problems, I made love to Helena as skilfully as a woman can expect from a man who has been made drunk by a couple of crass clowns in a tent. And since I always ignore instructions, I made sure that I did it very slowly, and for the longest possible time.
Hours later I thought I heard Helena murmur, ‘A Greek and a Roman and an elephant went into a brothel together; when they came out, only the elephant was smiling. Why?’
I must have been asleep. I must have dreamed it. It sounded like the sort of joke my tentmate Petronius Longus used to wake me up to howl over when we were wicked lads in the legions ten years before.
Senators’ nicely brought-up daughters are not even supposed to know that jokes like that exist.
Chapter XVIII
Bostra was our first performance. Certain aspects stick in the memory. Like an acrid sauce repeating after a cut-price dinner party given by a patron you had never liked.
The play was called The Pirate Brothers. Despite Chremes’ claim that his notable company only tackled the standard repertoire, this drama was the product of no known author. It appeared to have developed spontaneously over many years from any bits of business the actors had enjoyed in other plays, expounded in whatever lines from the classics they could remember on the night. Davos had whispered to me that it went best when they were down to their last few coppers and seriously hungry. It required tight ensemble playing, with despair to give it an edge. There were no pirates; that was a ploy to attract an audience. And even though I had read what purported to be the script, I had failed to identify the brothers of the title.
We offered up this dismal vehicle to a small crowd in a dark theatre. The audience on the creaking wooden seats was swelled by spare member
s of our company, well drilled in creating a vibrant mood with enthusiastic cheers. Any one of them could have earned a good living in the Roman Basilica egging on prosecuting barristers, but they were having a hard time breaking the morose Nabataean atmosphere.
At least we had an increased complement to give us confidence. Helena had nosed about the camp to see who the additions to our company were.
‘Cooks, slaves and flute girls,’ I informed her before she could tell me.
‘You’ve certainly done your reading!’ she replied, with admiring sarcasm. She was always annoyed at being forestalled.
‘How many are there?’
‘Quite a tribe! They’re musicians as well as extras. They all double up making costumes and scenery. Some take the money if the performance is ticketed.’
We had both learned already that the ideal ruse was to persuade a gullible local magistrate to subsidise our play, hoping to trade on the crowd’s goodwill next election time. He would pay us a lump sum for the night, after which we needn’t care if nobody bothered to come. Chremes had managed to swing this at towns in Syria, but in Nabataea they had not heard of the civilised Roman custom of politicians bribing the electorate. For us, playing to an empty arena would mean eating from empty bowls. So Congrio was sent out early to chalk up enticing notices for The Pirate Brothers on local houses, while we hoped he didn’t choose to annoy any householders who were keen theatregoers.
In fact, ‘keen’ was not an epithet that seemed to apply in Bostra. Since our play was ticketed, we knew in advance that there must be some rival attraction in town: a snail race with heavy side-bets, or two old men playing a very tense game of draughts.
It was drizzling. This is not supposed to happen in the wilderness, but as Bostra was a grain basket we knew they must get rain for their corn sometimes. Sometimes was tonight.
‘I gather the company will perform even if the theatre is being struck by lightning,’ Helena told me, scowling.
‘Oh stalwart chaps!’
We clung together under a cloak among a thin crowd trying to make out the action through the miserable mist.
Last Act In Palmyra Page 9