“Hmm.” She made a show of reconsidering the practical disadvantages. “I’ll have to stop the little ones tumbling into deep trenches while you have fun solving the project problems.”
“Organize however you like, fruit. You can audit the project, and I’ll play with the infants, if you like.”
So while Aelianus seethed in silence, thinking of his outdoor lodging in the rain and cold, his sister and I made our arrangements to live in luxury with the King.
XVII
WHILE CAMILLUS AELIANUS was being toughened up on the open road, his little brother had been enjoying life. I was keeping Justinus under wraps in Noviomagus, in case I found a role for him where he must look unconnected with me. He was finding life dull at the Procurator’s town house.
“I’m bored, Falco.”
“Tell yourself it could be worse. Aulus can’t have washed for a week. He has a filthy horse as a pillow, while in his dreams he tries to puzzle out how to fix a drive-wheel up an iron dove’s arse. Want to swap?”
“He gets all the pleasure!” Justinus whined satirically.
My sister sniggered. I was glad to see Maia cheer up, if only briefly. She continued to mourn the absence of her children, and to resent all of us. I had not warned her yet that the King’s man Verovolcus was just looking for a sophisticated Roman widow on whom he could practice Latin.
I sent Justinus out to find somebody who would hire us a luggage cart. He looked hopeful. “So I’m coming with you to this palace?”
“No.”
“Are you staying in town?” he then asked Maia. They seemed to be getting on well.
“She comes with us!” I snapped. The idea that Helena’s brother might start mooning over my sister—and that she might allow it—filled me with irritation.
While Helena fed our screaming baby in private and our eldest hurled her toys about, I had told Hyspale to start repacking. “But I have only just unpacked everything!” she wailed.
I gazed at her. She was a small chubby woman, who thought herself attractive. Which she was, if you liked eyebrows plucked so heavily they were little more than snail trails on her white-leaded face. Where my idea of beauty involved at least a hint of responsiveness, hers stopped short of intelligence. Talking to her was as monotonous as threading a mile-long string of identical beads. She was a self-centered, snobbish little property. If she had been good with our children, I might have forgiven her.
She could have been good with children. We would never know. Julia and Favonia failed to arouse her interest.
I folded my arms. I was still staring at the freedwoman. This dough-faced treasure had been given to us by Helena’s mother. Julia Justa was an astute, efficient woman; had she wanted to pass on a household trial to us? She knew Helena and I would tackle anything.
Helena normally dealt with Hyspale because of the family connection. I tended to hold back—but had we been in Rome, I would be sending Hyspale straight home to the Camilli without apology. Broaching that delicate issue must wait. Best not even discuss it now. I was tough—yet not so harsh that I could ditch a pampered, unmarried female in the wilds of a brutal new province. Still, my grim face should be telling her: the contract for her services had an end date.
Hyspale failed to take my point. I was a working informer. She was the favored freedwoman of a senatorial family. Equestrian status and an imperial commission would never be enough to impress her.
“Stuff everything back in the bags,” I said quietly.
“Oh, Marcus Didius. I can’t face all that again straight away—”
My jaw set off-line. My daughter Julia, more sensitive to atmosphere than the freedwoman, looked up at me anxiously, then threw back her little curly head and started crying loudly. I waited for Hyspale to comfort the child. It did not occur to her.
With a swift glance at me, Maia scooped up Julia and carried her off elsewhere. On the whole, Maia was refusing to involve herself with my children on this trip, as punishment for being wrenched away from her own. She pretended that mine could scream themselves unconscious and all I could expect from her was a complaint about the racket. But when she was on her own with them, she let herself be the perfect aunt.
Hyspale enraged her. Maia, leaving, ordered her angrily: “Do what you are told, you halfhearted, slapdash scut!”
Perfect. It was the first time Maia and I had shared an opinion since we left Rome.
Justinus arranged our transport, then returned to the house and hung about looking dissatisfied again.
“You’re bored. That’s good,” I said.
“Oh thanks.”
“I want you really bored.”
“I hear and obey, Caesar!”
“Try making it more obvious.” He thought the remark was sarcastic. “I have a job for you. Don’t mention Helena Justina; don’t mention me. If you meet Aulus or his companion, Sextius, you can speak to them, but don’t show that Aulus is your brother. Otherwise, you can play this in character. You’re the bored nephew of an official, trapped in Noviomagus Regnensis when you’d rather be out hunting. In fact, you want to be anywhere except where you’ve been dumped. But you have no horses, no slaves, and very little money.”
“I can certainly act that.”
“You’re on your own in a dead-end British town, looking for some harmless thrills.”
“With no money?” Justinus jibed.
“It won’t get stolen off you that way”
“The thrills in Noviomagus Regnensis had best come very cheap.”
“You can’t afford their sleazy women, that’s for sure. So I can face your beloved Claudia with a clear conscience.”
He made no comment on his beloved Claudia. “So what am I after, Marcus?”
“Find out what’s here. I heard they have the usual canabae—bound to be dire, but unlike your brother, you can at least come home to a clean bed. Watch yourself. They use knives.”
He gulped. Justinus had plenty of bravery, though he rationed it. On his own, he would never venture into bad situations. I had been out with him in Germany, in his patch as a tribune in the First Adiutrix legion; he had stuck to the approved military drinking dens, which he left discreetly when the gamblers and guzzlers started roughing people up. He knew how to cope in worse places too; I had taken him to a few of those. “Am I looking for Gloccus and Cotta?”
“We all are, all the time. In between, I want to discover the story on a dead Gaul called Dubnus. He was stabbed in a drunken fight recently. And look out for people going out the back of bars to buy pinched materials from the building site. Or bent subcontractors who might be offering stolen goods to the site managers. I also want to identify any disaffected workmen.”
“You know such people may exist?”
“Apart from Dubnus, it’s guesswork. Mind you, I’ve seen the amicable atmosphere on-site! Most of them dislike each other, and they all loathe the project manager. And I was briefed in Rome that the scheme is rife with corrupt practices.”
Justinus bit his thumb. He was probably excited at his task. Cocky about it, even. But those deep brown eyes, whose warm promise had lured Claudia Rufina from Aelianus almost without either brother noticing what was on her mind, were now pondering how to approach this. He would be planning his wardrobe and rehearsing his script as a disaffected young aristocrat far from home. He was weighing risks too. Wondering whether he dared take a weapon—and if so, where to hide it. He realized that once he wandered into the local canabae on a gloomy British evening, there would be no simple escape route and no handy officials he could call upon for help.
As I sat alone with him now—especially without his bickering brother—I was remembering how secure I always felt when I worked with Justinus. He had excellent qualities. Quiet good sense, for one thing.
He needed that. What I had just asked of him was no idle game. Time was, if anyone had to infiltrate the dark hovels of a native cantonment, there would be no option: I would go myself Sending a lad in my place would never
have occurred to me.
Perhaps he could see my thoughts. “I will take care.”
“If in doubt, retreat.”
“That’s your motto, is it?” A smile flashed easily.
There was one good reason for sending him instead of me. I was middle-aged nowadays, with the air of a well-married man. Justinus was about twenty-four; he carried his wedded status lightly. He might not think of himself as handsome, but he was tall, dark, slim, and very slightly self-deprecating. He struck strangers as easygoing; women found him sensitive. He could talk himself into anyone’s confidence. There would be naive teenage barmaids queuing up to talk to him. I knew, and I was certain he remembered, that the golden-haired women of the northern world would readily let themselves be persuaded that this grave young Roman was wonderful.
How my conscience would square that next time I saw his Claudia (a shy brunette, incidentally) could be dealt with in due course.
Much more difficult was how I would handle Helena if anything should happen to her favorite brother.
XVIII
WHEN I STUCK my head around the door of his site hut, the mosaicist looked up from his steaming mug of mulsum and immediately rapped out, “Sorry. We’re not taking anybody on.” He must think I wanted work.
He was a white-haired man with a trimmed white beard and face whiskers, who had been talking quietly to a younger fellow Both wore similar warmly layered tunics, belted in and with long sleeves; presumably, they could grow shivery as they spent hours crouched at their meticulous work.
“I’m not looking for employment. I have enough intricate puzzles of my own.”
The chief mosaicist, who had seen me earlier at the site meeting, started to remember me. He and his assistant were each leaning their elbows on a table, holding hot mugs between their hands. The same look of detached wariness occupied both faces. It seemed to be routine, not caused by me especially.
“Falco,” I explained myself to the assistant, inviting myself in. “Agent from Rome. Troublemaker, obviously!” Nobody laughed.
I found a place on the opposite bench. Between us lay sketches of Greek keys and elaborate knots. I could smell the low-grade mulled wine, its vinegar base mildly spiced with aromatics; none was offered to me. The two men were waiting for me to take the initiative. It was like facing a pair of wall plaques.
We were in a fenced-off area of site offices, outside the main plot, in the northwest corner near the new service buildings. Today I was tackling decor. The mosaicists neatly inhabited one of a double set of temporary hutments, the other of which was the chaotic province of the fresco painters. Here they could all work on drawings, store materials, try out samples, and—while they waited for the builders to give them rooms to decorate—they could sup beverages and think about life. Or whatever interior designers fill their brains with when the rest of us would be forgetting work and dreaming of home makeovers.
In the other hut, the painters had been having a loud argument as I passed. I might have barged in, hoping this was evidence of problems on the site, but I could hear it was all about chariot racing. I left the raucous painters for later. I was feeling limp after the effort of moving my family here at short notice yesterday. Halfway through unpacking last night, Verovolcus had dropped in on us; he was aiming to inspect my women, but they knew how to vanish and leave me to entertain him. Now I was nursing a headache, just from weariness. Well, that was my story.
Inside here, the mosaicists’ quiet refuge, all the wall space was hung with drawings, some overlapping haphazardly. Most were mosaic designs in black and white. Some showed complete layouts with their interwoven borders and tiled entrance mats. Some were small trial motifs. They went from the simplicity of plain corridors with straight-line double edgings to numerous geometric patterns composed of repeated squares, cubes, stars, and diamonds, often forming boxes within boxes. It looked simple, but there were elaborate crenellations, interlinked ladders, and latticework such as I had never seen before. The profusion of choice argued huge talent and imagination.
The plan was for every room in the palace to be different, although there would be an overall style. Two large floor designs stood out as special, prominently nailed up in clear wall space. Among the few in color, a preliminary mock-up had a fabulous complex guilloche of intertwining threads, which formed a center roundel. That was currently blank. No doubt some handsome medallion was planned—with the King’s choice of mythological subject still to be supplied. Within the twined border ran a ring of rich, autumn-tinted foliage, eight-petaled rosettes, and elegant tendrils of leaf predominantly in browns and golds. Outside, the corners were infilled with alternate vases and, for some reason, fish.
“North wing,” said the chief mosaicist. Bleating so expressively almost finished him. He did not explain the marine life. I was left to theorize that it was to decorate a room for fish suppers.
The other grand design was fully worked out. This was black and white, a stunning carpet of dramatic squares and crosses, some of its patterns devised from arrowheads, compass rosettes, and fleurs-de-lis. The images had been put together so the effect was three-dimensional, but I realized that irregularities made the patterns seem to shift. As I moved position, the perspective changed elusively.
“His ‘flickering floor,’ “ said the assistant proudly.
“North wing,” grunted the chief mosaicist again. Well, skilled repetition was his art.
“People will love it.” I flattered them. “If you run out of work here, you can come to my house!” Being slow men, whose lives ran at the restrained pace of their work, they did not quip back the obvious retort. I said it for them: “I don’t suppose I can afford you.”
Nothing gave.
I tried again: “Not a lot for you to do around here at present.”
“We’ll be ready when they are.” The chief spoke dourly.
“I can see you’re a cut above the average. This client won’t be fobbed off with apprentice work and a few preformed panels, cut in at the last moment.” Again, he did not deign to comment.
“Your most important activity takes place before you’re even on-site,” I mused. “Creating the design. Choosing the stones—I assume it’s to be mostly stone here, none of those glass fragments or sparkly gold and silver particles?”
He shook his head. “I like stone.”
“Me too. Solid. Cut well, there will be plenty of light reflected back. You can achieve a gleam without gaudiness. Do you make the tesserae yourself?”
“When I have to.”
“Done it in your time?”
“I use a team now.”
“Your own? You trained them?”
“Only way to get good color matches and consistent sizing.”
“Do you lay your own screeds?”
He scoffed. “Not anymore! Those days are behind us.”
He had put down his beaker. His hands dipped automatically into the baskets of tesserae that littered his table, running the matte miniature tiles through his fingers like embroidery beads. He didn’t know he was doing it. Some of these samples were minute, at least ten to the inch. Setting them would take forever. He had a trial block in front of him, with a band of tight interwoven borders in four colors—white, black, red, and yellow—executed exquisitely.
“Audience chamber.”
This was a fellow who saved himself. He let time pass by calmly; he would live long—yet his joints would go, despite the use of padded kneelers, and his eyes must be doomed.
The younger man must be his son. He had the same body weight, face shape, and manner. These were archetypal craftsmen. They passed their skills from generation to generation, developing their art to suit the times. Their world had a tight circle. Theirs was solitary work. Limited by a man’s private concentration, constrained by the reach of his arm.
These were workers who, in the course of their daily life, rarely looked up at what was going on nearby. Apparently they lacked curiosity. They had an air of ancient, honest sim
plicity. But I already knew from my study of this oversized building scheme, the mosaic workers were a bugbear. They wasted time, kept no proper records of supplies, and overcharged the Treasury more relentlessly than any other trade. The chief knew I was on to it. He defied me silently.
I, too, examined a bunch of black stones. I let them clatter slowly back into their basket. “Everyone else I have interviewed so far told me who they hate. So who annoys you?”
“We keep to ourselves.”
“You come along at the end of the job, the last finishing trade—and you know nobody?”
“Nor want to,” he said complacently.
Loud guffaws sounded through the thin walls from the volatile fresco painters. I was starting to think they would be more fun. “How do you get on with them next door?”
“We work it out.”
“Tell me—when a room has an elaborate floor, something like your ‘flicker’ design, then it needs quiet walls. You want people to admire it without distraction. And vice versa: when there is a flamboyant painting—or the occupants plan on using a lot of furniture—the floor needs to be restrained, in the background. So who chooses the primary design concept each time?”
“The architect. And the client, I suppose.”
“You get on with Pomponius?”
“Well enough.” If Pomponius had kicked him in the privates and stolen his lunch basket, this buttonmouth would never get excited about it to me.
“When they pick a style, do you have any input?”
“I show them layouts. They choose one, or a general idea.”
“And is there conflict?”
“No,” he lied.
If he completed his floors to the fine standard in his artwork, he was a high achiever. That did not alter the fact, this man was as surly as they come.
“Have you come across anyone called Gloccus or Cotta?”
He thought about it, taking his time. “Sounds familiar …” He shook his head, however. “No.”
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