The Roman Mysteries Complete Collection

by Lawrence, Caroline

  ‘Jonathan,’ said a voice. ‘Go back. The children need you.’

  The blood-red sun had been extinguished by the sea and black night fell upon the camp. The swelling moon and stars were hidden by ash and cloud, but on the beach yellow fires burned, and hearths glowed red.

  The camp was full of restless noise. People still wailed and moaned, only a little less now that their bellies were full. Couples argued, children cried and babies whimpered. But as Nubia began to play her flute all these sounds faded.

  She played the Song of the Lost Kid. And as she played, she touched those she loved.

  Nubia had named each of the eight polished holes under her fingertips after a member of her family. The deepest note was father-note. Then came mother-note. Her mother’s voice had been low and rich, full of warmth and laughter. Then came the Taharqo-note, named after her eldest brother who at sixteen was the best musician in the clan. It was he who had taught her the Song of the Maiden and the Song of the Lost Kid. Then came Kashta-note. Kashta was her cousin. Although he was only thirteen, and had not yet undergone the ceremony, he already seemed to Nubia to be a man. If she still lived in the desert she knew she would soon be betrothed to him.

  Then came the higher notes. The Shabaqo and Shebitqo notes. They should have been the same, for Shabaqo and Shebitqo were twins, but Shebitqo had been born second and was a little smaller, so he was the higher of the two notes. Then she fingered the Nipur-note, named after her dog, and finally, the Seyala-note. Seyala had been Nubia’s little baby sister, so young she was not out of the sling.

  As Nubia played the flute, it was as if her finger tips caressed each one of those she loved, those whom she would never see again. Each note was a voice calling to her from the past begging her not to forget. Tears wet her cheeks, but when she played she touched her family, so she didn’t mind.

  As Nubia played, she heard Aristo first strum, then pluck the translucent strings of the lyre. Her music was sad, but his was full of hope. It filled her with hope, too, and her sad song became sweeter. Then Lupus found a beat somewhere and pattered it softly on his upturned wooden bowl.

  As the music took wings and bean to soar, a movement caught Flavia’s eye. The red cloak, which served as their tent door, had been pulled aside and a small girl stood in its opening.

  In the instant before Julia let the flap swing closed, Flavia saw dozens of people standing in the darkness outside the tent, as still as statues.

  Julia ran across the tent floor and sat heavily in Flavia’s lap. Then she leaned back against Flavia’s chest, put her thumb in her mouth and watched Nubia play her lotus-wood flute.

  Flavia saw Mordecai give Miriam the merest nod. Jonathan’s sister stood and unpinned the red cloak. It slipped to the ground, opening their tent to the west.

  A great crowd of refugees stood gazing in at the musicians. They were utterly silent. In the darkness of the night, with the thin ash swirling around them, they looked like ghosts from the underworld.

  As Nubia, Aristo and Lupus played on, Flavia saw glints of light and heard tiny thumps. Some of the refugees were tossing coins into the entrance of the tent.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Flavia heard Mordecai murmur. ‘These people barely have enough money for bread, yet they’re willing to spend their precious coins on music.’

  The music guided Jonathan back. The notes of the flute were cool and clear: silver, green and blue. The lyre was sweet and warm: honey, damson, and cherry. The drum wove the sounds of the two instruments together, into a carpet of many colours. This musical carpet slipped under him and supported him and lifted him with joy.

  Suddenly Jonathan was flying. Flying on the music.

  He was flying over silk. Wrinkled, indigo-blue silk. There were tiny dots on the blue fabric. He flew lower and saw that the dots were tiny boats and that the wrinkles on the silk were slowly moving.

  He was not flying over cloth.

  He was flying over water.

  The music helped him stay aloft. It supported and it guided him.

  Now he was flying over a ship with a red striped sail. He could see children running back and forth on the deck. He flew over a gold and green island with two peaks, then over the deep blue water again and along a rugged coast.

  As he rode upon the musical carpet, the coastline became greyer. Presently he slowed. Below him was a blue cove, a crescent beach, olive trees dusted with what seemed to be dirty snow, a few boats, tents, people, lots of people. People fishing, washing, cooking, talking. And among them . . . among them a thin, bearded man walking through the crowds and pushing aside the flap of a tent. His father.

  Inside the tent it was suddenly dark, starred with candle flames and the red glow of a coal fire. There were people here, some playing music, and his father sat beside a dark-haired boy on a low couch. The boy looked thin and pale.

  His father’s head was bent, the long grey hair pulled back at the neck. His father looked strange and vulnerable without his turban.

  Floating above this scene, Jonathan suddenly felt a clutch of horror. The boy he was looking down on was himself!

  He must go back into that thin, weak body.

  He didn’t want to.

  He loved flying over the sea and over the islands. He loved the strength and joy he had felt hunting in the garden. His father and the others would be with him soon. Then they would understand. They would not want to leave paradise either.

  The music stopped as the musicians put down their instruments for a moment.

  His sister’s voice in the dim tent: ‘Don’t stop playing the music. I think I saw him move! I think the music is bringing him back.’

  Then Flavia’s voice.

  ‘Don’t die, Jonathan. We miss you. Tigris misses you. Come back to us . . .’

  ‘Please, Lord, bring him back,’ prayed Jonathan’s father, and then: ‘Play a little more, please, Nubia.’

  Nubia raised the flute to her lips.

  But already, in his heart, Jonathan had whispered:

  ‘Yes.’

  Suddenly he was engulfed in dry pain. He felt unbearably hot, and his head throbbed. There was a strange taste in his mouth. They were all standing over him and around him. Too close. No space. Tigris’s wet tongue was cool on his hot cheek. He could smell doggy breath and he could feel someone’s hand gripping his so hard it hurt.

  Now the memory of flying and of paradise began to slip away, like water from a cracked cup. No, he cried out silently in his mind, don’t let me forget.

  Then he shuddered and gasped, and there was only a terrible all-consuming thirst.

  ‘He’s awake!’ squealed Flavia. ‘Jonathan’s awake!’

  Lupus uttered a whoop, Nubia dropped her flute and clapped her hands. Miriam burst into tears.

  ‘Praise God!’ whispered Mordecai, bending close. ‘How do you feel, my son?’

  Jonathan blinked, as if even the dim candlelight hurt his eyes. He tried to speak but his lips were cracked and swollen.

  ‘Water. He needs some water,’ said Mordecai. But Miriam was already at her brother’s side with a water gourd.

  Miriam wiped the tears from her cheeks and gently held her brother’s head. Then she put the gourd to his lips.

  Jonathan only drank a little water, then he laid his head back on a scorched silk pillow. He murmured something.

  ‘What?’ said Mordecai, ‘what did you say?’

  ‘Water. Tastes funny,’ croaked Jonathan weakly. ‘Tastes like fizzy eggs.’

  ‘This is an Etruscan spa town. Famous for its mineral waters,’ said Mordecai. ‘Miriam gave you the sulphur water. It’s good for you.’

  ‘Sulphur bad,’ whispered Jonathan. ‘Killed Pliny.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mordecai. ‘This region has many underground caves full of sulphur gas. Too much of it is deadly, but a little bit is good for you.’

  ‘You should try the iron water,’ said Flavia. ‘It turns your tongue red!’

  ‘And magnesium-num,’ attempted Nubi
a. ‘Tastes like dung of camel.’

  Jonathan frowned blearily at the African girl. ‘How do you know what –? No, don’t answer that . . .’

  They all laughed and Flavia said softly,

  ‘Welcome back, Jonathan.’

  Nubia went to sleep happy that night. Somehow Jonathan had woken from his deathlike sleep. The night was hot, but she was used to heat. And there was something comforting about sleeping in a tent on soft sand. It reminded her of home. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, she had terrible nightmares.

  She dreamt the slave-traders came again, wearing turbans which covered not just their heads but their faces, too, so that only their eyes were visible. In her dream they all had one evil dark eye and one white blind eye, like Venalicius the slave-dealer. The one-eyed men slashed at her tent with sharp dripping swords and then set it on fire.

  Nubia woke herself trying to scream.

  Stars. She must find the stars.

  Hugging her woollen cloak about her, Nubia rose, slipped out of the tent and lifted her eyes to the sky.

  When Venalicius had carried her far across the Land of Blue to the Land of Red, the only familiar thing had been the stars in the sky. At Flavia’s house she had slept in the inner garden with Scuto, comforted by his furry warmth and by the familiar constellations overhead. But tonight she could see no stars. Tonight there was nothing to remind her of home and who she had been.

  ‘You play very well.’ A low voice in the darkness made her start. ‘What clan are you from?’

  At first Nubia though she was still dreaming; the voice was speaking her native language!

  Then she saw the white gleam of his eyes and teeth.

  ‘I was listening in the shadows,’ he whispered. ‘Your music brought me down from the cave.’

  ‘Who are you?’ whispered Nubia.

  ‘My name is Kuanto of the Jackal Clan, but here they call me Fuscus.’

  ‘I haven’t seen you in the camp.’

  ‘Nor will you.’ His voice sounded just like her eldest brother’s. ‘I am the leader of a band of runaway slaves.’

  ‘A slave! But if they find you . . .’ She gave an involuntary shudder. Nubia knew that the Romans crucified runaway slaves. She was not sure what ‘crucified’ meant, only that it was something terrible.

  ‘But they will not find us,’ said Fuscus quietly. ‘Our masters are dead. Buried under the ash of the volcano, along with our past. This disaster has given us the perfect opportunity to start a new life.’

  Then he moved a little closer, so close that the warm breath from his mouth touched her ear and sent a shiver down the side of her neck.

  ‘I have come to ask you to join us,’ he whispered. ‘Run away with us, and be free again.’

  Years of sleeping in graveyards had taught Lupus to be a light sleeper. His ears were keen as a rabbit’s and his vision sharp as an owl’s, as if the gods had compensated him for the loss of his tongue.

  He crouched at the entrance of the tent and watched as the man gave Nubia something. Then he saw her remove one of her tiger’s-eye earrings and give it to him in return. Lupus could hear almost everything they said to one another. Unfortunately, he did not understand one word of the language they were speaking.

  When Nubia slipped back into the tent and lay down again beside Flavia, he was already back in his own sleeping place, pretending to be asleep.

  But long after Nubia’s breathing became low and steady, Lupus remained awake, staring into the darkness with open eyes, and thinking.

  Flavia was determined to solve the mystery of the missing children, but she and her friends were so relieved to have Jonathan back that for the whole morning they barely moved from the tent. They took it in turns to give him sips of water and chicken soup and tell him what had happened while he had been in the deep sleep which Mordecai called a coma.

  The last thing Jonathan remembered was the death of Pliny.

  ‘Well,’ said Flavia, ‘we left him there on the beach and went up to the road and walked and walked. We made it round the promontory and took shelter in the boathouses with lots of other people. The night seemed to last forever and we thought it was the end of the world.’

  ‘Then sun appears,’ said Nubia.

  Flavia nodded. ‘The next day Pliny’s sailors and slave went back to get his body. Tascius and Vulcan went with them. They wanted to go back to Herculaneum to try to find Clio and her sisters and her mother.’

  Lupus hung his head. He and Clio had become very close and Flavia knew he feared she was dead, so she hurried on.

  ‘The old cook Frustilla died of breathing sulphur—’

  ‘Like the Pliny,’ interrupted Nubia, and added, ‘and almost you.’

  ‘The funeral pyre on the beach has been lit every day.’ Flavia shuddered.

  ‘Many bodies wash up onto the naked shore,’ said Nubia quietly.

  Lupus held up both hands, fingers spread.

  ‘And your father?’ Jonathan croaked. Flavia’s father was a sea captain who had set sail from Pompeii two weeks earlier.

  ‘He should be safe in Alexandria,’ she said with forced brightness. ‘He wasn’t planning to get back until the Ides of September.’

  Flavia took a deep breath.

  ‘Jonathan,’ she said. ‘You must get better quickly, because we have a new mystery to solve. Two boys are missing from the camp: one named Apollo and another named Rufus. Your father thinks someone may be kidnapping them to sell them as slaves. We’ve got to find out who’s doing it and rescue them before it’s too late.’

  Jonathan frowned.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘While I was asleep I think I dreamed. Something about saving the children. I can’t remember exactly. But I know it was important.’

  Lupus slipped from tent to tent, listening hard. Jonathan was sleeping and Flavia had asked him to start collecting information while she and Nubia finished their chores. He knew how to make himself look extremely ordinary, so that most people hardly noticed him. To them he was just an eight-year-old boy in a grubby tunic, playing in the sand.

  At first there had been over two thousand people in the refugee camp. Most thought they were going to die and spent most of their days praying to the gods to spare them or take them quickly. But gradually as the falling ash began to thin, they realised it might not be the end of the world. Some families set off north to see if they could rebuild their lives. Others headed south to stay with relatives and friends.

  In the past two days almost three hundred people had packed up and left.

  Lupus sat on the shore near a fishing boat. He pretended to be engaged in a private game of knucklebones. On the other side of the boat two fishermen were mending their nets and chatting quietly. He couldn’t see them but he could hear them perfectly. And he could see most of the camp. He was watching one family in particular. They had dismantled their makeshift tent of blankets and were preparing to leave.

  The father was a stocky, dark-haired man. He carried most of their belongings on his back. The mother was short, with frizzy hair. She was wearing black, as if she’d been in mourning even before the eruption. There were three girls, the youngest of whom was about Lupus’s age.

  ‘Melissa!’ the father was shouting. ‘Melissa!’ The girls were calling out, too: ‘Melissa, we’re going!’ They had been calling for some time now, their voices growing louder and more urgent.

  ‘By Jupiter!’ scowled the father. ‘Where is that girl? I told her not to go far!’ He angrily shrugged his bulky pack of blankets to the sand and stalked off towards the water. The mother wrung her black shawl distractedly and the girls looked miserable.

  Then Lupus heard something which puzzled him. One of the fishermen on the other side of the boat said under his breath, ‘Looks like Felix just got luckier.’

  ‘Poor little minnow,’ replied his friend.

  ‘Best to forget you even heard it,’ said the first, and they continued mending their nets.

  It was just past
noon when Miriam pulled aside the cloak doorway and the dim light in the tent brightened. Nubia put her finger to her lips and Flavia whispered a greeting. Jonathan was still asleep. The girls had been filling water jars and gourds from the water spouts outside the baths. They had just brought the last one in.

  Nubia could see that Miriam was exhausted from helping her father in the surgery all morning.

  ‘We just delivered a baby,’ whispered Miriam, her violet eyes shining. ‘It’s so wonderful to see new life after all the death around us.’

  She sat on some of the scorched cushions they had taken from Tascius’s villa and carefully untied the blue scarf around her head.

  On the night of the eruption, a fragment of burning pumice had set Miriam’s dark curls on fire. Some of her hair had gone up in flames and part of her scalp had been burnt. As she gingerly uncovered it, Nubia could see that the burn was still ugly and red. The hair over her right ear would probably never grow back.

  Miriam reached wearily for a small clay jar of balm and removed the cork with her elegant fingers. Everything about Miriam had seemed perfect to Nubia, especially her beauty. But now that perfect beauty was marred.

  Nubia rose from Jonathan’s side and went to Miriam.

  ‘Here, let me,’ she said, and took the ceramic jar. She dipped her finger in the balm and stroked it very gently onto the ugly red burn.

  ‘Oh, that feels wonderful,’ sighed Miriam, and closed her eyes. ‘Thank you, Nubia.’ After a moment she said, eyes still closed, ‘Are you going to try to find the missing children?’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Flavia, ‘Lupus was just here. He wrote us a message: a girl named Melissa has gone missing.’

  Miriam opened her eyes and frowned.

  ‘Lupus managed to get a piece of her clothing,’ continued Flavia. ‘He’s gone back out with Scuto and the puppies to see if they can track the scent. We’re just about to go, too.’

  ‘Poor little creature!’ sighed Miriam, and closed her eyes again. She looked as if she were in pain. When Nubia had finished smoothing the ointment onto her burn, Miriam lay back against the cushions. Almost immediately her breathing became slow and steady and the frown on her smooth forehead relaxed.