by Tom Holt
The mystery voice laughed. 'That's right,' he said. 'And if anyone ever catches me selling to the government for a fair price, may the crows pick the sinews off my bleached bones. Twelve drachmas, take it or leave it.'
Actually, I'm surprised that the patience of those troopers held out as long as it did. Soldiers aren't exactly known for their long-suffering forbearance, especially your northern auxiliaries. I don't know what the troop sergeant said, because he said it in Gaulish, but you didn't have to be a linguist to figure it out. A moment or so later we heard the mystery voice shouting, 'Right, I warned you,' at which point, I guess, he must've chucked the rope over the cliff.
I'm sorry I missed the next bit, because if there's one thing I enjoy, it's a good fight — provided I'm watching, of course, not taking part. Judging from the outcome, that must've been the fight of a lifetime, because the next thing we heard was the mystery voice saying, 'All right, that'll do. Leave them alone, and let's see to this cart,' and it wasn't long before we could feel the cart moving. In the right direction, I hasten to add, or I wouldn't be here telling you this.
I had my eyes firmly shut all the time, of course. It's a sort of superstitious thing with me in moments of great danger, all my life I've had this unnatural fear of seeing my own death happening. Anyhow, when I opened them again, the first thing I saw was this amazingly shiny bald brown head gleaming in the sunlight over the side of the cart.
'Now then, you lot,' he said — his was the mystery voice — 'let's be having you.
It's your lucky day'
So we stood up — took some of us several goes, because cramp and blind desperate terror combined really screw up your knees —and we finally got a look at what had been going on.
My guess is that it was the dozen or so men standing behind the bald-headed character who'd done the actual fighting, because several of them were bleeding and all of them were dusty from rolling about on the ground, whereas the bald-headed man was still as clean and freshly laundered as a page boy. The soldiers were lying on the ground, and they had that flattened out, slightly comical look that tells you they won't be getting up again (there were two of the Greek's men lying the same way, so it hadn't been entirely one-sided). How the troopers got that way was explained by what the Greek's men were holding in their hands: mattocks and picks and chunky oak mallets, heavy-duty farm tools that just happen to make first-class weapons (after all, if you can use them to gouge a living out of a goddess like Mother Earth, it stands to reason they're more than up to the task of sorting out a few mortal soldiers).
'What happened here,' the Greek was saying, 'is like this. Your cart lost a wheel.' The sound of a big mallet scrunching spokes showed the Greek's admirable attention to detail. 'You villainous lot of desperadoes took advantage of this to escape, pausing only to massacre these brave, loyal soldiers. My boys and I tried to stop you, public-spirited types that we are, but you just swept us aside, stealing a valuable sledgehammer and cold chisel as you went. Well, that's how I'm going to tell it when I make my report and put in my claim for damages — two premium-grade field hands killed, damage to clothing and property, not forgetting the hammer and chisel, which you'll find in the box of tools at the back of the wagon. If any of you worthless bastards get caught, it'd be nice if you did me the courtesy of telling it my way, though no bugger's going to take your word over mine if you don't. In the meanwhile, enjoy the rest of your lives.'
I'll say this for Lucius Domitius: he was as strong as a carter's ox. Give him a sledgehammer and point him at a length of chain, and he'd get the job done. He'd just freed the last of our travelling companions and was leaning on his hammer having a well-deserved blow when the Greek called to him, or rather us (I'd been holding the chisel). 'Here he said, 'you two.'
About half a dozen of us looked round, with that gormless who-me? expression on our faces.
'Yes, you two. The little rat-faced type, and the bruiser. Don't I know you two from somewhere?'
Now he said it in Greek, but if he'd been talking Latin, if he'd had any sense he'd have used the grammatical form unique to that language, the Question Expecting The Answer No.
'What, us?' I said. 'Don't think so, sir.'
He scowled. He was one of those solid, chunky-faced types who manage to look jolly even when they're scowling, but I didn't let that fool me. 'Balls,' he said. 'I'm sure I've seen you before. Faces as ugly as yours, I don't tend to forget.' His frown got deeper, then he burst out laughing. 'Sure I know who you are. You're the pair of toerags who tried to con my cousin Thrasyllus in the fish market. I helped catch you bastards.'
Lucius Domitius gave him a look. 'Oh,' he said. 'Really'
'That's right,' the Greek said, grinning all over his face (and he had a lot of face to grin all over, as I think I mentioned). 'Damn straight that's who you are. Bloody hell.' He shook his head. I don't suppose he'd had so much fun in his whole life, outside of public executions. 'Comical do that was, when those idiot soldiers ran straight past where you were hiding behind that barrel. If I hadn't told 'em where to look, they'd never have seen you.
'Fancy,' said Lucius Domitius.
The Greek started roaring again, like a bull with the bellyache. 'Oh, this is too good for words. Here,' he went on, pulling a purse the size of Hercules' scrotum out of his belt and throwing it at us, 'take it, you've earned it, and thanks for the laugh. You've made my day'
Lucius Domitius looked like he wanted to pull the Greek's head off and play handball with it, but there's a time and a place for everything. 'Thank you,' I said quickly, and I darted out and scooped up the purse before he could change his mind. 'Time we were going,' I hissed to Lucius Domitius, grabbing him by a handful of his hair, and —just as well for all concerned — he took the hint and followed me.
Once we were out of sight we started running, down the road and up a miserable stony little goat track that wound up into the rocks. We kept going until Lucius Domitius tripped over a rock and went splat on his face.
'All right,' I said, looking round, 'this'll do for a moment. Well, now,' I added, dropping onto the ground like a sack of onions, 'didn't I tell you it was going to be all right?'
Lucius Domitius called me a rude name, which was quite uncalled for. I wasn't bothered, though, because I'd pulled open the Greek's purse. It'd been a long time since I'd seen that much money all in one country, let alone snuggling in the palm of my hand.
'You see,' I went on, 'isn't that exactly what I've been telling you, about philosophy and all that shit? You look after the attitude, and Destiny'll take care of the rest.'
Lucius Domitius shook his head. 'I don't see that at all,' he said. 'Your attitude was pitiful. You just stood there in that dock looking like a badly stuffed olive.'
'I was being calm and dignified,' I told him. 'What did you think I was going to do, stand up and make a speech? Anyway, you can't talk. You were whimpering.'
'I was not.'
'You bloody were. I was so ashamed, I didn't know where to look. Really, if you're the stuff those fine old Roman families are made of, it beats me why we aren't all speaking Carthaginian.'
He made an impossible suggestion involving my head and other bits of me, and I left him to get on with his sulk. When you've been around with someone as long as I'd been with him, you get so you don't even notice stuff like that. Water off a duck's back, as the saying goes.
The crazy thing was — and I'm telling you the truth, straight up —I'd known all along that we weren't for it that time. I knew for a fact that we'd get out of it somehow or other, just so long as we played it cool and waited for God to yank our nuts out of the fire. Now it could be your Stoic philosophy, or maybe I'm prophetic like the crazy old women who work in oracles, or maybe some god appeared to me in a dream and told me the whole story of my life, and for some reason it'd slipped my mind. Maybe it's none of those things. Maybe it's just instinct. But I knew, sure as the runs after eating too many plums. I always know Like I knew that time in Italy , when Ca
llistus died —Well, yes. Maybe I ought to tell you about that. I mean, now's as good a time as any, if there can be a good time for something like that. Truth is, I've been putting it off, because even thinking about it depresses me, let alone putting it into words. But I suppose you've got to know, sooner or later.
Bet you anything you've been wondering how in hell a scruff like me and the former emperor of the Romans came to be traipsing round together cheating honest men of their hard-earned money.
For one thing, you're asking, what could two such different men possibly have in common?
Well, that's easy We both loved the same person, namely my poor brother Callistus, rest his soul.
As far as Lucius Domitius was concerned, the whole thing started more or less as a game. Back then, I have to say, he was a very different man in all sorts of ways. Creature of his environment, as the philosophers would say, because up till then his whole life was sort of creased down the middle: everything on the left-hand side being work, everything on the right being fun, and never the twain shall meet. Work entailed ruling the world, or at least trying to look like he ruled the world while Seneca and that ox-necked thug Burrus actually did the job, when, that is, they could spare the time from playing high politics and pass the hemlock soufflé with Lucius Domitius' ghastly mother. So work was a real pain in the bum: audiences and meetings and state receptions and trying to stay awake through all those mind-numbing religious services and smiling sweetly at ambassadors from the King of the Snake People and freezing your nuts off at trooping the colours in the cold light of a February dawn on the Field of Mars. Well, yes, it beats digging ditches or scraping out poultry sheds, but unless you happen to be a real old Roman with dried laurel leaves where your brains should be, it's hardly a barrel of laughs. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, there's fun, and not just fun as in playing knucklebones or getting completely honked at the chariot races. When you're the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, heir to the likes of Tiberius and Caius Caligula, you're pretty well obliged to measure up to a fairly high standard of debauchery. It's expected of you, like wearing the toga and being able to recite your Homer. When they bring on the Libyan eunuchs on all fours dressed in goatskins, you can't turn round and say, No, thanks, I'd rather read a book.
Not that Lucius Domitius would rather have read a book — written one, possibly, but that's another tale. I'm certainly not trying to imply that he was in any sense backwards when it came to dunking his sausage in the gravy. But, as the old saying goes, if you get served up nightingales' livers in truffle sauce every meal for twenty years, you can be forgiven for daydreaming about a boiled egg and a stick of celery. Lucius Domitius told me once that after months and years of evenings spent at home with two dozen hand-picked Cappadocian virgins and characters with nicknames like Mylon the Human Flagpole, and always getting told when he asked whose idea it was, Well, that's how it was done in your uncle Caligula's time, and he was following on from your great-great-uncle Tiberius, it's tradition — well, he said, he reached the point where the dividing line between pleasure and duty was getting more than a little blurred. When you get to the stage where you can only tell one kind of ritual from another by whether or not the people taking part have got their clothes on, it's time to find yourself another hobby.
Now you don't need me to tell you what Lucius Domitius' hobby was, and of course he chose it precisely because it was the most shocking thing he could think of.
Duty, you see: the Claudian family's always prided itself on being as outrageously offensive as possible, right back into the mists of prehistory, and the one thing a Roman aristocrat can never do is let the side down. So Lucius Domitius took up playing music and singing and writing poetry, like a slave or a Greek, and when people had sort of got used to that, he started doing it in public. Only, that was where he went that one step too far that makes all the difference. He was young, of course, still just a snot-nosed kid, so he can't really be blamed for it. Nevertheless, once he'd started down that track, there was no way he could ever go back.
In case you're wondering what was such a big deal — sure, noble Romans are expected to behave like wild animals in their free time, just like they're supposed to be absolutely prim and proper when they're on duty. But the whole point is, they're supposed to keep the private stuff private. Everybody knows what they get up to, there'd be no bloody point in doing it if they didn't. But what's not allowed, under any circumstances, is to do it in the road where the many-headed and the smelly-footed can see you. And as for standing up in the theatre or the circus and making a public exhibition of yourself— let's put it this way Nobody really gave a second-hand breakfast about what Caligula got up to with his sisters behind closed doors. But when Lucius Domitius announced his first public concert, you'd have thought the world had come to an end.
Well, yes. That's Romans for you, and if every last one of them suddenly got eaten by giant killer ants, I'm not saying the world wouldn't be a much nicer place to live in. But they've been around a fair old while and there doesn't seem much chance of getting shot of them in the immediate future, so the sensible thing is to get to know how their bizarre little minds work. Besides, we Greeks aren't all that much better in some respects, though don't tell anybody I said so.
Anyway. When Lucius Domitius first set eyes on my brother Callistus and noticed the striking resemblance, it struck him as a splendidly Julio-Claudian sort of notion to have a boyfriend who was the spitting image of himself. All sorts of possibilities, as you don't need me to tell you. I expect he could almost picture the ghosts of his uncles and his great-great-uncles sagely nodding their approval and saying he was a chip off the old block. Trouble was —once again, typically Lucius Domitius took the thing one step too far, and screwed up everything. He fell in love.
Mind you, if you're going to go around falling in love with people, Callistus was a logical choice. I'm biased, of course. But ever since I can remember, I'd always somehow known that our kid was something special, like he was a different species or something: the improved model, the perfected strain, what people would be like if we lived in Plato's Republic instead of the septic tank of the nations we call the Roman Empire . It wasn't just that he was tall and well-built and muscular and all that shit, he was also all those things you'd expect would make someone a serious pain in the arse, like good and kind and brave and wise and generous and unselfish, except that you couldn't help liking him. When we were kids together, of course, I hated his guts. But I always loved him, better than anybody ever.
He was like that.
So there you are, that's what the Emperor Nero and I had in common, and for some reason I can't begin to fathom (I loved Callistus, but I never ever understood him), he loved both of us, completely and straight from the heart, no mucking about. I couldn't even feel jealous, though I did my level best. Also, if we're going to be honest, when you go from starving in the gutter all night and running away from the guard all day to living in the palace and eating white bread off silver dishes, you're inclined to think nice thoughts about whoever is responsible for your change in lifestyle. So, as far as I was concerned, Lucius Domitius was all right, and if he was in love with my brother Callistus, it only went to show what good taste he'd got.
So there we were, Callistus, Lucius Domitius and me, all living in the palace along with several hundred other people, and generally speaking, things could've been a whole lot worse. Don't ask me how long I was living in the palace, because that kind of life does funny things to your sense of time. It was years, certainly: five or maybe even six. Funny thing. Either the time was whizzing by because I was living in the lap of luxury and everything was fine, or else it was dragging by like a lame snail because I had nothing to do all day and I was bored out of my skull. Whatever, it was a long time, and I'd got pretty well settled in when things suddenly started to go wrong.
Living in a palace, you haven't got a clue what's going on in the real world.
Actually, in the real r
eal world, where you and I and all the rest of the little people have to live, things weren't too bad at all. True, there were Romans all over the place, governing everything that couldn't get out of the way quick enough, but since Lucius Domitius had been sitting in the big chair, taxes had gone down, or at least they hadn't gone up; he didn't start any wars, so the countryside wasn't swarming with recruiting sergeants poised to swoop on the unwary; and for once there were half-competent people in charge of the grain supply, so people weren't starving in the streets. Pretty cushy all round, unless you happened to be a noble Roman. Unfortunately, noble Romans are the only ones who matter worth a damn, and they weren't having a nice time. Lower taxes meant they couldn't cruise round the provinces ripping off the locals and taking their slice off the top. No wars was a total disaster, of course, since if you don't have wars it's very hard for ambitious second lieutenants to earn medals. Worst of all, though, as far as they were concerned, was an emperor who stood up in front of twenty thousand dock workers, cheesemongers and professional layabouts in the theatre and sang songs about the fall of Troy , with harp accompaniment. Given a choice between that and an invasion by a million plague-infected Germans, they'd have taken the Germans so fast it'd have made your head spin.
Oddly enough, the conspiracy that had us all scared shitless was about the only one that didn't come to anything. That was the plot to give the throne to Julius Vindex, the governor of the province of Gaul . I have no idea why anybody thought Vindex would make a good emperor; in fact, I don't know anything at all about the man, other than his name and the job he did. But we were so busy worrying about him that we hardly noticed the Spanish governor, Sulpicius Galba, until his soldiers were inside a long spit of the city. Silly mistake to make — on a level with being so fussed over a missing roof tile that you fail to notice that the house is on fire.