by Marilyn Todd
‘I was offering to help,’ he said, scanning the crocodiles and papyrus plants on the great Nile fresco which covered the east wall of the atrium.
Any second now, Leonides, Cypassis or one of a dozen lesser servants could come wandering out of the slave quarters and Claudia did not want eyebrows raised at the lies she would be required to tell. As Orbilio turned his attention to a yawning hippopotamus, she swept the vase of flowers on to the floor.
‘I don’t need your bloody patronage.’
His shoulders stiffened. ‘That’s entirely your prerogative,’ he said, and though the tone remained mild there was no laughter left in his eyes.
‘Damn right,’ she snapped. ‘Just because I gave some bloodsucking usurer the wrong house number doesn’t give you the right to come tramping in and out of my home whenever you’ve the odd hour to kill.’
‘You know, Claudia,’ Orbilio sighed and leaned down to collect a single rose-red tulip, ‘for once,’ he sniffed in vain for a scent, ‘you may be right.’
With a farewell salute, he tucked the flower into his bloodstained tunic and stepped over the debris to disappear into the night.
The atrium seemed bigger, suddenly. The ceiling higher, the columns colder, the galleries darker, and the finches and the warblers were no longer three-dimensional. Claudia hurled the libation jug at the Nile fresco and an ibis turned red with the wine. Bugger Egypt. Bugger Rome, come to that. And—she threw a votive cake at a po-faced sphinx—bugger you, too, Marcus Casual Liaisons. I hope you’ve got concussion.
‘Has he gone, then, the man in the frock?’
Jovi’s arrival made her jump. Well, so what if he’s gone? Who gives a shit?
‘Was there a fight in this room, was it the man in the frock?’
A miracle, thought Claudia, no one else heard the crash and came running.
‘Did he chase off some burglars, were they trying to kill you?’ Jovi held up the pies in his fists. ‘What’ll I do with these, can I eat them?’
‘Maybe one,’ she said absently.
‘I don’t think they’ll give me the burps, not like those honey cakes, so can I have both? Ple-ease?’
Claudia peered down at his scrubbed and eager face. ‘What are you? A gannet?’
Jovi fell on to his knees. ‘No, I’m a bear.’ He stuffed the last corner of the pie into his mouth and scampered round the floor. ‘A big, brown mountain bear—watch me. Grrr!’
But Claudia wasn’t watching. Her eyes remained fixed on the vestibule door, where the image of a man with still-damp tendrils round his forehead remained imprinted on her retina and whose sandalwood ungent lingered persistently. She heard again the gentle drop of the latch as he left, and the street sounds he’d momentarily admitted—the plod of an ox, the rumble of a barrel being unloaded echoed repeatedly inside her head.
Oh, sod it.
‘Call that a bear?’ she said, turning to Jovi. ‘I’ll show you bears.’ Looping up her arms, she made claws of her fingers and chased him round the fountain. ‘Arrrrr!’
I have a wine business, I have a house, I have a villa and vineyard in Etruria. What more, Claudia asked herself, diving round the pedestals and podiums, could I possibly want?
*
In a dingy garret boasting ill-fitting shutters and a damp patch on two walls, a stinking tallow burned low. There was no incense to sweeten the air here, no joyful frescoes, and the only window faced a blank wall. Because you had to really crane your neck to see the street below, it was easier to lift your eyes to the roofs all around you. You could see whose tiles were missing, who had sparrows under their eaves, who was superstitious enough to grow houseleeks to ward off Jupiter’s thunderbolts.
The man in the garret rarely looked out. The sounds rising upwards didn’t touch him—not the rattle of chariot wheels, nor the crank of the building cranes. Hunched in his creaky chair, he dipped the nib of his reed pen into the inkwell and wrote carefully.
He did not wish to blot.
Satisfied with his efforts, he paused and looked round his walls. In pride of place over his bed—where else—he had nailed the original. Every day he dusted it, lightly, with an ostrich feather stolen from the market, and every day he examined it for signs of deterioration. If the paper curled, he would push a small tack in, but already the edges were ragged; brown marks were creeping relentlessly. Not that there was anything wrong with the ink. Top quality, imported from India, it withstood the test of the elements. The words, and he knew them by heart, still stood out clear. But he could not take chances.
He had only received the one letter from Claudia Seferius. He had no intention of losing it to mishap.
Pursing his lips in concentration, he returned to his work and the only sound he heard was the scratching of the nib. He did not smell apples baking in the apartment below, he did not hear the giggles of the newly-weds next door, he did not feel the damp from the Tiber meet the damp from the low clouds and creep its way into his bedding.
Satisfied the copy was perfect, right down to the angle of the serifs, he sat back and admired it for several minutes then picked up his hammer and four nails. Where should he put it, this precious document? Here? Over here? What about—yes, what about over there, just above the door and to the left?
Next door the newly-weds laughed at their neighbour’s ritual. They had been married but a month, yet every night at precisely the same hour came the hammering of four solitary nails. Sometimes they listened out for it, a signal to blow out their own lantern and dive under the covers.
Once, she had met her neighbour on the stairs and asked him what it was he stuck on the walls every night, but the look he gave her shrivelled her to the spot and she averted her eyes whenever she saw him after that.
She would have moved house altogether, had she known that his walls were plastered with more than two hundred such reproductions of Claudia’s letter.
IV
Darkness in Rome did not signal an end to the working day; for some it was merely a beginning. Come dusk, wheeled traffic, which was not permitted during daylight hours because it clogged the narrow streets, began rumbling along, nose to tail. Low-sided wagons carrying everything from crated hippos to Phoenician cedars clanked along ruts made by centuries of ox-carts before them. There’d be salt brought in from the flat coastal plain, wool from Campania, hemp from the Rhone and Corsican pitch. By the light of a thousand flickering brands, carts would roll through the arches and up at the Collina Gate, the northernmost gap in the city walls. The thirtieth of March was a night like any other.
Now spring had arrived and the seas became navigable, luxury goods from the Adriatic ports travelled the Via Salaria and the guards marvelled at great tusks of ivory, peacocks from Samos and glittering sapphires but, since the road from the Sabine Hills also ended here, mostly it was the common stuff. Venison, boar meat and barrel upon barrel of thick olive oil, because everyone knew Sabine oil was the best, but my word, the price of it! Night after night you’d see them, two dray horses pulling a cart loaded with one large barrel, which sat right behind the driver, plus three smaller ones to even up the weight. The gatemen knew the drivers, the drivers knew the gatemen, the banter was as constant as it was cheerful.
On the far side of the Collina Gate, however, it was a different world. Snubbed by traffickers and guards, tired shanties with walls of mud supporting bowing thatches leaned against the greyish-yellow stonework for support. The folk who eked out their short existence in these rank and squalid hovels did not care that this was where the enemy Hannibal once had made his camp. What use was history? Today’s enemy was starvation and fever and snakebite and dysentery and, for all the good it did them, Sabine oil might as well be gold. Oil for lights? For cooking? Do me a favour! When we have to beg for alms, scavenge for our firewood, sell our bodies behind the tombs which line the roads to anyone who’ll give us the price of a loaf? The people here had sores, they had roundworm, they had night blindness, they had rickets.
They
also had babies.
‘Well, Captain, any luck?’ A cultured voice called across the plodding stream of wagons.
A thin, wiry individual with a horseshoe scar dodged past a muleteer and shook his head. ‘Not a bloody one, Dino. Not even a girl.’
Lately they’d taken to splitting up to search, this was the meeting spot. ‘Arbil won’t believe this,’ said the younger man, with a laugh in his voice. ‘He’ll think we spent the whole time rabble-rousing.’
‘Not with this pong clinging to us, he won’t,’ the Captain muttered. ‘Croesus only knows what caused that,’ he rubbed at a stiffening stain on his tunic, ‘but it stinks like shit.’
‘Probably is shit,’ sniggered the henchman Vibio, joining up from the east. ‘In which case, I ain’t sitting next to you in the cart home.’
‘Fuck off,’ said the Captain good-naturedly and turned to his well-groomed companion. ‘So then. Is that it for tonight, Dino?’
‘We’re wasting our time here, that’s for sure, and I can see little point in prolonging it.’ Dino rolled down his embroidered sleeves. ‘What’s the tally, Vibio? Just the two?’
‘One,’ replied Vibio, kicking aside a bundle of muddy rags. Too late he realized there was a small child inside, it whimpered as it scuttled into the night. ‘That second bairn was already dead, poor little sod.’
Around them came low moans of pain and the smell of green wood smoking. Somewhere an old woman cackled in mirthless laughter.
‘Save your pity, lad,’ said the Captain. ‘If it grows up here, it’ll have a bloody tough life, lucky to make it into its teens, and then it’ll probably have ulcerated lungs and a rather nasty sexual disease. Better off dead, if you ask me.’
‘Tell that to the boss’s face,’ the henchman retorted. ‘See if Arbil agrees.’
‘I blame Agrippa.’ Dino cut short any arguments. The tally was low, the job was unpleasant, tempers were short. ‘His death, plus those nine days of mourning, have completely buggered up the system.’
They nodded at what they thought Dino meant. That because babies were exposed only on market days—a silent signal for childless couples to search for human treasure—it seemed logical that tonight’s poor catch could be attributed to confusion in the minds of the slum girls following a national emergency.
But this was not what Dinocrates meant. Arbil the slave master had recognized in Dino a sharpness and intelligence from a very early age, and instead of being trained for trade or simply sold on unskilled, Arbil had lavished special care on Dino’s education. Elevated to a position of trust and authority in the organization, and now third in command, wealth and responsibility had not dimmed his native intuitiveness. What he meant—and what the others would not understand—was that the ripples radiating from Agrippa’s sudden and premature death went far beyond commerce and industry. The fragility of life had been rammed home in such a way that Dino believed that for many mothers, parting with their babies would be out of the question. The fight for survival would be stretched just that little bit further…
As they waited for the fourth member of the party to join up, Dino reflected on the Emperor’s reaction to the tragedy. He’d coped well, he thought, with the death of a man closer to him than a brother and his eulogy had left strong men weeping fountains. He had lit the pyre himself, declared public mourning, read Agrippa’s will aloud to the people and when he’d reached the part where his friend bequeathed his aqueduct slaves to Augustus, the Emperor once more proved his worth by turning these twelve score men over to the Senate as public servants. Furthermore, he had promised not only to continue Agrippa’s civil engineering programme, by the gods he would extend it, creating the brand new post of Water Commissioner for a start. Afterwards he had personally supervised the interring of the Great Man’s ashes in that tall, cylindrical structure faced with travertine down on the Field of Mars, the Emperor’s very own mausoleum. What a man!
For Arbil the Babylonian, and to a lesser extent, for Arbil’s son, Sargon, the death of Agrippa was purely nuisance value. A disruption of routine, a complete re-scheduling. No grief, no sadness. Dino often wondered what it must be like for them, so far from the motherland and with no loyalties to Rome, which invariably set him questioning his own identity. For an orphan from Chios who’d been raised under Babylonian law, why this strong pull towards Rome and the Romans? Dino was heartily glad when the fourth henchman arrived.
‘What sex is it?’ he enquired, as they pushed through the oncoming traffic towards the post house where they’d arranged to meet Sargon.
‘What?’
‘The child we picked up tonight.’
‘Male,’ confirmed Vibio.
‘That’s some consolation for Arbil,’ said the Captain. ‘It’s tough these days to offload the girls.’
Vibio’s brow furrowed. ‘Yeah?’
‘Regrettably so.’ Pulling his cloak tight round his shoulders, Dino answered for the Captain. ‘With the size of country estates on the increase, landowners need more and more muscle to dig over their fields, tread their grapes, pick their olives. There’s only so many manicurists required on the open market.’
‘I can think of a use for the girlies,’ leered Vibio, rounding the corner of the posting station. Horses snickered, wheelwrights hammered out repairs by the light of bright torches.
Dino spun round, grabbed the man by the scruff of his tunic and pressed him hard against the buckboard of a two-wheeled cart. In the glare from the yard, the lackey could see the young man’s features clearly. Darkly handsome, tanned, oiled and athletic, right now his face was twisted with menace.
‘Don’t you ever, not once, make that filthy suggestion again.’ Dinocrates released the tunic, but the flare in his eyes didn’t lessen. ‘What we do is both legal and honest, we train these children, give them a craft if they’re able, ensure they have a roof over their heads and a full belly for life, even if they only end up as labourers.’
‘I didn’t mean nothing by it, Dino—’ The midden hunter rubbed where the wood had dug into his backbone.
‘I don’t care whether you did or you didn’t, the fact is you thought it. Just remember one thing, my friend. These babies might grow up slaves, but they grow up respected. And think, before you open your big mouth again, where you came from.’
‘I—’ He was floundering, and he knew it. Sweat was breaking out on his forehead, because he didn’t understand what was happening. Dinocrates never lost his rag over something so trivial. ‘Honest, Dino, I didn’t mean—’
‘He rescued you, he rescued me, he rescued Tryphon here.’
The Captain looked up from where he was checking the infant in its tiny basket and nodded solemnly. It wasn’t often Dino referred to him by anything other than his nickname. ‘Right,’ he growled. ‘So remember where your allegiance lies, lad.’
‘I do, I swear.’ It had been meant as a throwaway quip, the sort of joke men always make when they’re together, like it’s expected or something.
‘Then you show the ladies respect,’ pressed Dinocrates. ‘Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good. Now let’s hope Sargon’s early so we can get moving. This bloody damp’s right in my bones.’
A man, this side of thirty, stepped from the shadows with a swirl of his long, flowing cloak. ‘Did somebody mention my name?’
‘By Janus, lad, you gave me a bloody fright.’ The Captain had nearly dropped his precious basket. ‘What the hell are you doing out in the yard?’
Post houses were primitive, by and large, but there was always a waiting room where a large, open fire would crackle and spit and keep a man of standing safe from the elements, and there was no mistaking Sargon for a beggar. Not with wool that fine, or gems like those in his rings.
The Babylonian grinned. ‘It wasn’t me they objected to, Tryphon. It was Silverstreak here.’
At the mention of its name, a rangy canine loped to his side, yawned then casually licked its chops. Tawny coloured
with a black tip to its long bushy tail, Silverstreak had acquired his name from the broad stripe of white fur which ran down his backbone. It was not that he was bad-tempered which people found so intimidating, it was more the fact that Silverstreak was a fully-grown wolf.
‘I trust you had a more successful evening than the rest of us,’ grumbled the Captain, although in all the years he’d worked the middens for Arbil, he still didn’t know what role Sargon played when they came into Rome and he envied Dinocrates for being privy to such secrets.
‘So-so.’ Sargon moved across to Dino and spoke so only the two of them could hear. ‘Remember the praetor’s wife, the one who’s right up the duff and her poor old husband stuck in Iberia this past twelvemonth?’
‘Indeed.’
‘The deal’s on. She’s due any time and when it’s born, we’re to relieve her of the brat and she’ll hand over the cash.’
It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. Wealthy wives paid fortunes to maintain the illusion of virtue, and so long as men and women found one another attractive, it would remain a profitable sideline.
‘You’ve got to hand it to her, Sargon, she’s hidden it well.’ The number of women who took to their beds with mysterious illnesses while their husbands were absent beggared belief.
The Babylonian laughed. ‘So did the censor’s wife, Dino, and remember how that one turned out?’
The poor cow had been mortified at finding herself pregnant, and at one stage wondered whether to pass the baby off as her husband’s. However, unable to remember who she had slept with, in the end she let prudence take precedence and handed the child over to Sargon.
‘No mistaking him for the censor’s,’ laughed Sargon. ‘That kid was as black as Nile mud!’
V
The last day of the month protected by Mars dawned (if that wasn’t too strong a description) dull and grey and drizzly. Roof tiles darkened to the colour of blood, hides across windows hung shiny like satin, doors swelled and got stuck. In the homes of the better-off, Spanish oil topped up lanterns lit more for comfort than necessity as a swarm of industrious hands took oiled cloths to metalwork to ward off the rust.