A Song For Nero

by Tom Holt

  And then, mercifully, they buggered off. I waited till they were out of sight, then I nodded to Lucius Domitius and we sort of strolled across the courtyard like we were taking the air after a nice meal. Only goes to show — if you look like you're doing something you're not supposed to be doing, every man and his dog'll jump on you. Make it seem like you're going about your business, all normal and boring, and they don't even see you.

  I'd like to pretend that finding the stores was all part of my original plan, and that I figured out where it was likely to be from first principles and made a beeline for it like a dog after a weasel. After all, you weren't there, so you'd never know I was lying. But then, I'm not like the people who write history; I tell it like it was, not like it ought to have been. Truth is, I heard a lot of soldiers coming up behind us, so I pushed open the first door I came to, and got lucky.

  Weird place, the stores in a barracks. I don't suppose there's anywhere in the world where you'll see so many things that look exactly the same. There were stacks of identical blankets, rows of identical shovels, piles of identical boots, and a whole wall covered in shelves loaded with identical helmets, swords, breastplates, belts (all rolled up, like an army of giant snails), tent pegs, pot hooks, shield covers, bow cases, every bloody thing you can think of and a bunch of stuff you'd never recognise— ('What the hell are those?' I asked, pointing at a rack of polished iron bits.

  'Spare ratchet mechanisms for catapults,' Lucius Domitius replied. How he knew that, I have no idea.)

  —everything exactly the same as the one next to it, from palisade stakes to spoons, all neatly arranged, everything straight and tidy and ready so the quartermaster's clerk could lay his hand on it without having to look. Forget your aqueducts and your triumphal arches and your gilded chariots drawn by four milk-white horses. Whenever I think about what the empire actually means, that's the picture I see in my head: every single thing you could ever think of, and hundreds and hundreds of each of them.

  'Don't just stand there gawping,' Lucius Domitius said. 'Let's get what we need and get out of here.'

  I'd thought we had the place to ourselves, but no such luck; a huge bloke came out of the back room and scowled at us. 'Well?' he said.

  That wasn't good, but I gave it my best shot. 'This man needs a full set of kit,' I said. 'Everything, the works.'

  The big bloke looked at me as if I was mad. 'So?' he said.

  Wasn't expecting that. 'Well, then,' I said. 'This is the stores, right?'

  'Yes, this is the stores. Where's your requisition?'

  Decision time. He was a big bloke, but Lucius Domitius and I could probably have handled him. He wasn't expecting trouble and that's half the battle. So yes, we could have thumped him, grabbed the stuff and made a run for it, but somehow I didn't want to push my luck that far. That just left talking to the bastard. 'No time for any of that bull,' I said sharply 'You can take it up with the captain later.'

  'Crap,' he said. 'You know the rules. No requisition, no stuff.' He looked at me. 'Can't say I've seen you before,' he added. 'What's your unit?'

  I could feel Lucius Domitius getting tense, but we'd gone past the point where bashing the bloke was a viable business proposition. He was looking at us a bit sideways, and we wouldn't have the element of surprise. I didn't know enough army stuff to kid my way out, and of course they'd relieved us of our ill-gotten gains, so offering him money wasn't on the board. Turning and running out of the building was tempting, but luckily I had more sense. Beyond those options, I couldn't think of anything.

  Luckily, I didn't have to, because suddenly Lucius Domitius barked out, 'Name and rank,' in his best Roman voice.

  The bloke told us his name: Marcus something, buggered if I can remember, rank: quartermaster sergeant. I noticed he'd stood to attention without even thinking about it. Anyway, Lucius Domitius was scowling. He took a step closer to the bloke. 'Do you know who I am?' he said quietly The bloke looked at him. Poor bastard, he was obviously scared rigid. 'No, sir,' he said.

  'Better that way,' Lucius Domitius said. 'Who do you report to?'

  He muttered some name.

  'Right,' Lucius Domitius said. 'I'll see to it that he gets the necessary dockets. Now listen to me, soldier,' he went on. 'I haven't got time to explain and you don't want to hear what I've got to say, so we'll skip all that. One set of kit, and do try and get it as close to my size as possible. I've got enough to contend with without hobbling round Sicily in boots two sizes too small for me. Understood?'

  The sergeant's eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head any moment, and his hands were twitching, but he shook his head. 'Sorry, sir,' he mumbled, 'but I got to see a docket. Otherwise—'

  Lucius Domitius punched him on the nose, and he fell straight backwards, like a chopped-down tree. Then we helped ourselves to what we were after: armour and helmet and stuff for him, a new pair of boots each, that sort of thing.

  'Marvellous,' Lucius Domitius sighed, as he did up his boots. 'Now we've added robbery with violence to the collection. And this time we're actually guilty, though I guess that by now it doesn't matter a damn.'

  I was in no mood to listen to that. 'You're crazy,' I said. 'Stark staring nuts.

  I can't believe what you just did.'

  He looked surprised. 'What, belting the sergeant? Seems to me we didn't have much choice.'

  'No, not that,' I replied angrily 'What you said back there. “Do you know who I am,” for crying out loud. And you're the one who's always petrified of being recognised.'

  He shrugged. 'Maybe. But I don't think he got wise. He was too busy wondering what had gotten into you. Actually, I'd be interested to know what you thought you were playing at.'

  We left the stores and walked across the yard. Of course it was anyone's guess which way the main doors were, leading out into the town. Pretty soon the soldiers would catch on, or the magistrate'd get tired of waiting and send some men to hurry us up, or the quartermaster would wake up and start yelling the place down. The way I saw it, we'd used up an entire lifetime's worth of luck, along with all the unused good fortune I must've inherited from my ancestors, and pretty soon it was all going to fall apart round our ears. On the other hand, they hadn't got us yet.

  Bugger me if the main doors weren't straight across the courtyard. Of course, they were shut, and there was a brace of sentries in front of them, looking dead miserable, the way sentries generally do, but what the hell, I thought, I'm game if they are.

  We doubled back and walked round three sides of the yard so they wouldn't see us. Then we broke into a run as we came up to them, yelling, 'Quick! Open up.

  'Hold on, mate, where's the fire?' one of them said.

  'Get those fucking gates open!' Lucius Domitius shouted. 'Couple of prisoners've escaped. Got into the tower and shinned down the wall on a rope. If they get away, we're all going to be in the shit.'

  He may have been useless at pretty much everything else, but when it came to telling the tale, Lucius Domitius had the knack. The guards looked at each other, then they started shooting the bolts back.

  'Get a move on, will you? They're getting away,' Lucius Domitius bawled, and they did as they were told. They believed him. Hell, I believed him. Mind you, he was telling the truth, because a few moments later, the prisoners had got away, and if anybody in the whole province of Sicily was more surprised about that than they were, I'll buy him a drink, with pleasure.

  'The depressing thing,' Lucius Domitius said, as we jogged round the corner and darted down an alleyway, 'is that that was probably the easy bit.'

  He was being miserable again, but I could see his point. 'One step at a time,' I told him. 'Let's get out of this horrible bloody town, and then we can see about getting off this horrible bloody island.'

  One good thing about living under the iron heel of a cruel and ruthless oppressor is that people don't think twice about seeing soldiers on the street.

  Better still, they do their best not to look at t
hem; instead, as soon as they're aware of them, they tend to shuffle past as quick as they can, looking the other way Naturally, that suited us just fine; and we found that the more we stomped along, making ourselves as conspicuous as we possibly could, the more invisible we became. By the time we reached the outskirts of town, people were darting out of our way like we were a couple of runaway carts and we practically had the roads to ourselves.

  'These people must have guilty consciences,' Lucius Domitius muttered, 'or else why are they so scared of us?'

  I didn't answer that. It was one of those things where, if you need to be told, you're never going to understand.

  Once we were back in open country it didn't take us long to click back into the old routine. After all, we still had to eat, and that meant practising the only trade we had, namely kidding. Dressing up as a soldier is an old scam and pretty reliable, though the take is always poor. You can bluster free food, booze and lodgings out of innkeepers, and that's about it. It's a living, but I wouldn't call it a career. One good thing about it, as far as we were concerned: it meant we had no trouble finding out what was going on. We'd prance into an inn or a farmhouse and do our have-you-seen-two-men routine, and we'd get the latest news, or the latest rumours, at any rate, about how the hunt for us was going.

  It didn't take long for the word to get out that we'd busted out of the guardhouse. It was bloody alarming to hear that we'd been credited with killing at least two soldiers, and in some cases as many as five. But we were pleased to find that, apparently nobody had twigged that we might be togged out as soldiers. On the other hand, they had put two and two together and figured out that the two hooligans who tried to tickle the bathhouse had to be the same ones who robbed the governor's son, which also meant that they had to be two of the cons who escaped from the quarry gang. To Lucius Domitius' delight, we didn't hear the name Nero anywhere, and he started to get a bit more cheerful as we put more and more distance between ourselves and that town.

  On the negative side, we hadn't got a clue where we were or in which direction we were headed. I figured we were heading west, towards Camarina. Lucius Domitius was certain sure we were going south, in which case we'd be walking into the sea at any moment (which we didn't). All he had to do was look up at the sun and he'd have known I was right, but Lucius Domitius was never one to let a few poxy facts choke him off a nice juicy opinion.

  It was only after we'd been on the road for four days, bludging off innkeepers and farmers and sleeping in barns, that I started to wonder where Camarina had got to. It was bloody annoying, like being stood up for a date with your best girl. We'd walk and walk, and still the wretched city wasn't there. Eventually it dawned on me what had happened. We'd gone right past it, above it to the north.

  'Right,' I said. 'You're the one who went to school. What's in this direction?'

  Lucius Domitius looked at me. 'How should I know?' he said.

  'Don't give me that,' I told him. 'I'll bet that somewhere in the palace there was this huge great bronze map of the empire with all the places marked on it, and you must've seen it hundreds of times. You must know the principal towns in Sicily'

  He shrugged. 'Not me,' he said. 'And it's the first I've ever heard about any map. Whereabouts in the palace would that have been, then?'

  'I don't know, do I? I was just a house guest, I didn't own the place. You sure there wasn't any map?'

  'There could have been, I suppose,' he said. 'It was a big palace. There were loads of rooms I never went into. But nobody ever mentioned anything like that.'

  'Oh.' I was shocked, for some reason. I mean, you'd have thought it was the sensible thing to do. Think about it: some messenger blows in, says there's trouble brewing in Cyanopolis. Nobody's ever heard of Cyanopolis, it's just some border fort, so it stands to reason, there'd be a big map, and everybody, all the advisers and general staff and what not, they'd troop off and take a look at it, and then they'd know Otherwise, you'd have a major crisis on your hands, decisive action needing to be taken straight away, and nobody'd know whether it was in Cilicia or Upper Moesia. What the hell kind of a way to run an empire would that be?

  'I think,' he went on, 'that if we've overshot Camarina, we should be headed straight for Gela. Only, if that was the case, we should be following the course of the river Anapus, and if we are, I haven't seen any sign of it.'

  I looked round. No river.

  'If we're north of the Anapus,' he went on, 'any moment now we're going to run into some horrible great mountains. But if that's where we're headed, we should be right up close to them by now, unless we're following one of the lower river valleys that feed down off the central block. But I don't think we are, because there'd still be damn great big mountains on either side of us, and there aren't.'

  'Right,' I said. 'What you're saying is, you haven't got a clue where we are.

  'I never said I did. Look, it's been years and years since I learned all this stuff in school, and I wasn't paying attention then. I was too busy looking out of the window or making up tunes m my head. Of course,' he went on, 'it's possible that that big road we were following for a while back there was the military road across the mountains — only I'd have thought it'd have been bigger and wider — in which case, we should have spent last night in Hybla, though it's just possible that we left the road a mile or so short of there. In which case, this ought to be the flat plain that runs down off the mountains to the sea, halfway between Camarina and Gela. But I wouldn't bank on that, because everything's in the wrong place for that.'

  'Thank you,' I said. 'I wish I hadn't asked now But he was right, amazingly enough, because early the next day we found ourselves back on his military road, and sure enough it wound up at the sea. We got off it before that, of course, since we didn't want to be on the main road where there were likely to be people about. Anyhow, the long and the short of it was, we fetched up at the seaside, our toes practically in the water, looking out towards (if I'm not mistaken) Tripolis, on the African coast.

  'It's at times like this,' I said, 'I really wish I was a seagull. Then we'd be in Sirtis by nightfall.'

  'I don't think that'd be such a good idea. They eat seagulls in Tripolis.'

  'You know what I mean,' I said. 'All right, now what? We've got a choice. Left or right. What do you reckon?'

  He shrugged. 'I'd toss a coin for it, if we had any money 'No,' I said, 'I want a sensible, reasoned decision. If it was blind guessing, I'd do it myself. Which do you think, Camarmna or Gela?'

  'Broad as it's long, as far as I know,' Lucius Domitius replied. 'Seeing as how both of us know fuck all about either of them. Well,' he added, 'that's not strictly true. I seem to remember that in Gela, every summer solstice, they have a big crab-eating competition down on the sea front. They pile up all these crabs, and each contestant's got a pair of tweezers and a little brass hammer, and the first one-

  'What's that got to do with us?'

  'Search me. I'm just telling you because it's the only thing I know about Gela.

  Unless,' he added, 'I'm thinking of the other Gela, the one in southern Macedonia.'

  I changed my mind about the map. If he'd had a chance to study a map, instead of just piecing it together from what he remembered, he could've bored me right off my feet and straight into the grave. 'Gela, then,' I said.

  'All right. Why not?'

  'Right.'

  So that was that. We'd made up our minds to head for Gela. It only goes to show, really, how pointless it can be, making big decisions, because we hadn't been on the road more than an hour when we saw a ship.

  It was close in to the shore, quietly bobbing along, one of the big grain freighters that make the run from Sicily to Italy, final destination Rome. I'd seen enough of them at anchor at Ostia. Seen from a distance, they look like a floating city, scores of them all tied up in a row along the specially built dock, and as soon as one gets emptied it pulls out and another one slots neatly into its place. It's a hell of a business, feeding a
place the size of Rome, and to do them credit, they've got it figured out pretty well. Mind you, it's one of the few things they really care about, because a grain shortage can turn Rome from the hub of the civilised world into a wall-to-wall hunger riot in about three days.

  Anyhow, there was this ship. Lucius Domitius, who knew a thing or two about the grain trade for obvious reasons, reckoned it had loaded up at Camarina and was working its way round the east coast on its way home. (The big freighters don't like crossing any more open sea than they have to, but they don't like having to shove their way through the straits of Rhegium, either. They'd rather take another day and a half over the trip, even though time is money, than risk pranging the ship on a rock. Most of the freighters on the grain run are on the elderly side, and you only have to sneeze in the wrong place and they start shipping water in seven places.) He pointed out how low she was riding in the water, which backed up his theory that she was full and making for home. That seemed like a reasonable conclusion to draw, from my limited knowledge of such things (and what I know about ships and international trade you could carve on a toenail).

  'Well,' I said, 'what do you reckon?'

  'What do I reckon about what?'

  'The ship, dummy Us getting on it and getting the hell out of Sicily What do you reckon?'

  He frowned. 'Well,' he said, 'it'd be nice if we could manage it. But I don't see how'

  'Bloody hell,' I said. 'And you're supposed to be the educated one.

  'All right, he said. 'You tell me, how do we go about hitching a ride on a grain ship?'

  'Easy,' I said.

  And yes, I was pretty confident that it would be, or at least, it'd be a damn sight easier than staying alive and free in Sicily with the whole island after us. True, when I said that to him, I hadn't actually got a plan or anything like that, but figuring out each last painful detail before I make a decision isn't my style.

  'Easy?'

  'You bet,' I said. 'What we need is a small boat.'

  He looked at me. 'What do we want a small boat for?' he asked.