by Tom Holt
But on I went, and no village or farmhouse, just more and more fields, not even a cowshed or a linhay Obviously I was missing something. So I decided to ask someone.
The first man I saw was leaning on a two-tine hoe, having a blow. He could've been my next-door neighbour from Phyle, the type was that familiar — long, stringy bloke with big nubbly hands and a faraway look in his eyes. 'Morning,' I called out.
He turned his head and looked at me. 'Mphm,' he said, or something like that.
'Nice day,' I said. It doesn't do to rush things when you're talking to country people.
'Mm.' He looked at me without blinking, like I was a nasty case of leaf rot.
'Good rap you've done there,' I said, waving my hand at five neatly spitted rows of turned earth.
'Mm.' He frowned slightly, but I wasn't worried. It's like with horses or cats, you've got to earn their trust first.
'Well,' I said. 'This your place, then?'
He didn't move for a while. Then he shook his head.
'I see,' I said. 'Tenant, then?'
He shook his head again. That's Italians for you, they aren't as forthcoming as us Greeks. Still, salt of the earth.
'I'm only asking,' I went on, 'because I'm in the way of looking for a bit of work. Any going up your place, do you know?'
He thought about it for a long, long time. 'Mphm,' he said, and then, just as I was about to ask him if that was mphm-yes or mphm-no, he added, 'Reckon so.
What's your game, then?'
I shrugged. 'Oh, I'll turn my hand to anything, me. So, where should I go?'
Salt of the earth, Italians, but as thick as shit. 'Who should I go and see?' I explained. 'The steward, or the foreman, or whatever.'
He jerked his head sideways at nothing in particular. 'Try the house,' he said.
'Right, I'll do that, thanks.' I hesitated, just in case he was about to say something helpful. No chance. 'So, where's the house, then?'
'Up over,' he replied, with another sideways jerk.
'Pardon.?'
He frowned. 'Up over,' he repeated. 'Then down along. Big house, can't miss it.'
I had no trouble at all finding the big house, mostly because it was the only house I'd seen since I left Ostia. House is maybe not the right word. It was bigger than a lot of villages I've seen, and what it reminded me of most was an army camp. Bloody great big barracks, for one thing, right next to the barns and sheds; also its own watermill and a damn great big smithy The house itself was one of the smaller buildings on the site. It had an odd look about it, old-fashioned and brand spanking new at the same time.
One good thing was, there were loads of people about. I stopped a bloke who was pottering along prodding a mule in the ribs with a bit of stick, and asked him where the foreman might be. He shrugged.
'Dunno,' he said. 'But your best bet'd be to go up the long barn and ask there.'
A bloke in the long barn said, try the presshouse. A bloke in the presshouse thought he might be in the stables. A little skinny bloke in the stables reckoned he'd just seen him leaving the mill-house, probably headed for the tool store. The two blokes in the tool store just looked at me. On my way back across the yard, someone yelled at me from behind and I turned round to see who it was.
'You,' he said. 'I don't know you. What're you prowling round for?'
He was a short bloke, wide as he was tall, no neck, shoulders like two pigs side by side. Ex-sergeant; you can always spot them 'Sorry,' I said. 'I was looking for the foreman.'
'I'm the foreman. What d'you want?'
Well, I'd got off to a good start, hadn't I? 'I was looking for a job.'
'You?' He made it sound like I'd made a bad joke. 'You're not from round here, are you?'
'No,' I admitted.
'Thought not. So, where are you from? You look Greek to me.'
'That's right,' I said. 'I'm from Naples originally, spent some time in Asia—'
He scowled at me, and I got the impression he didn't want to hear my life story, which saved me the trouble of making one up. 'What're you doing in these parts, then?'
That was an easy one. 'Looking for work,' I said.
'Ex—slave?'
'Freeborn,' I replied smartly 'Raised on a farm,' I added, 'not much I can't do around the place.'
'Really.' His scowl got deeper, till it nearly met in the middle. 'Well, normally we don't hire in from off the road.'
Normally was good; suggested that this might be an exception. I kept my face shut and let him talk.
'But,' he said, just so happens we could use a few more hands, what with—' He stopped and lifted his head, Greek style. 'All right, go on. Get yourself down the barracks, ask for Syrus, he's the lead hand. He'll tell you what to do.'
So that was all right, I was in. Now, I could tell that something was up, because of that what with he hadn't finished, and a general twitchiness about his manner. Also, I wasn't too keen on a barracks for the hands, and a lead hand called Syrus was either an ex-slave or a slave — Syrus is just a name Romans give to someone from Syria, because they can't pronounce his regular name. Can't say I blame them for that. Syrian names sound like someone blowing his nose in a handful of wet grass.
So I went and asked for Syrus, and a bloke with one eye missing said he wasn't there, what did I want him for, and I explained, and he said, more fool you, but get a blanket from the pile in the corner, soup's in the big pot. Soup sounded good, because I hadn't had anything to eat since I got off the ship, unless you counted the meal I had out of the kind man's denarius; and I seemed to remember parting company with most of that somewhere between the last tavern and the temple steps. But the soup turned out not to be so good after all. In fact, it was very bad, mostly water with a thick skin of grease floating on top. Still, it was better than nothing, so I slurped down as much as I could bear, got a blanket (old and frayed round the edges) and sat down in a corner to see what'd happen.
I'd been there a while — long enough to lose track of time, can't be more specific than that when I saw an old bloke coming towards me. He can't have been as ancient as he looked, or he'd have croaked from old age shortly before the Trojan war; he was crooked and bent, the way very tall people get when their spines wilt, and he had a completely bald head, little bleary eyes and maybe one and a half teeth. His skin was all mottled and blotchy, but there was enough colour in it to show he wasn't Italian; some kind of Easterner, I guessed.
'You there,' he said.
'What, me?'
'You. New man. I am Syrus.'
Wonderful, I thought, this is the lead hand. 'Hello,' I said, because it never hurts to be polite.
'Overseer is telling me, new man arriving.' He blinked at a patch of wall behind me, to my left. 'You with me, please.'
So I got up, and he carried on looking at the patch of wall. 'Be following, please,' he said, then he turned round and started tottering off the way he'd just come.
'This very good place,' he said, without looking round. 'This very good place to be working. I am working here sixty-seven years, since I am being fetched here from my family's home in Apamea. I am lead hand here thirty-one years. Boots you will be finding in bin next to window.'
From the look of the boots, they'd been there longer than he had. I found two that looked like they might be distant cousins; they were scruffy, but they had to be better than what I had on my feet. Besides, they were free.
'I am serving master,' Syrus droned on, 'and master's father, and his father before him. Very good family, very glorious and honourable, very fair and kind to hard worker. When first I am arriving, crying, crying all the time, but soon finding out this is very good place. Tunics in box in corner, all sizes, very good.'
'Thanks,' I said, pulling out a few specimens and putting them back. 'So,' I said. 'What's the food like, and what's the pay?'
'Working in fields very hard,' Syrus went on, 'soil very good, not like Syria , where is no water, very dry. Growing good vine, good fig, good olive, doing eve
rything best way, like it says in book. This is new master's way, very good way, all is in book, very wise. You be following, please.'
'Sure,' I said. 'About the wages, do we get paid by the day or the month, or what? Only, if it's possible, I was wondering, a little sub up front would be really helpful—'
'Master is very good man,' said Syrus, like I wasn't even there. 'Much learning, much understanding in books. Always reading, reading, very good.'
We crossed the yard — for someone who could only take little teeny steps, he covered the ground damn quick — and he led the way into the tool shed. 'Here is tools,' he said, 'very fine, all made here on farm. You be taking from stack in corner double-tine hoe.'
I groaned. I hate those bloody things. 'Look,' I said, 'I don't suppose the foreman mentioned it, but actually I'm better suited to working with animals — you know, leading the team, or maybe a job in the stables. Anything to do with horses, I'm your man.
'From stack in corner,' he said. 'Stack in corner.
I got the impression that unless I picked up a hoe, he'd have to stand there all day repeating stack in corner for fear of losing his place and having to start all over again from the beginning. I picked up a hoe just to shut him up, and then he was off again like a polecat down a drainpipe. No kidding, I had to walk a damn sight faster than I'd have liked just to keep up with him.
He may have been blind as a bat, but he obviously knew his way around the place.
After we'd been walking for maybe half an hour, he stopped dead in the middle of a huge ploughed field, and announced. 'Is here.'
I was afraid he'd say something like that. Stretched out across the field in a long line were maybe three dozen blokes, all with double-tine hoes, all doggedly bashing away at the clods of dirt turned over by the plough. My least favourite job in the whole world: clod-busting (and guess what I spent most of my childhood doing).
I looked round to tell him I'd got this terrible shooting pain in my right shoulder, but he'd gone; I caught sight of him scuttling back towards the house, still nattering away about something or other. Then some bloke who looked like Management caught my eye and gave me a look like fresh mustard; so I sighed, got a firm grip on my hoe, and started swinging.
Never let it be said I'm shy of pulling my weight; an honest day's work for a fair day's pay, that's all I've ever asked out of life. But there's all sorts of honest work that don't involve stooping down all the damn time, and I particularly despise stooping down. I have a delicate back, the slightest thing can set it off sometimes, and once it goes sort of 'click', that's it for the rest of the day, I'm in agony. Anyhow, I've always found that when you're in excruciating pain you quickly lose track of time, so I don't know how long we were out there bashing clods. It felt like twenty years, but it was probably just a few hours. Then everybody suddenly stopped and looked up, so I did the same. Straightening up was no fun at all, but I wanted to see what was going on.
There was this bloke sitting on a big horse, watching us. He was a sight to see all right. Try and picture a little kid who's died and been pickled in brine, like the Egyptians do, so he's all wrinkly and blanched. Top the mess off with a mop of fluffy grey hair, and there you go.
The overseer yelled out, 'Who said you could stop working?' and everybody snapped back down, like those water cranes they have out East. But I was curious to know who the bloke on the horse was, so I kept glancing up at him whenever I could, and of course I kept my ears open, because he was muttering something under his breath. I couldn't make out the actual words, but it sounded a lot like poetry.
Then he stopped muttering, because the overseer bloke was talking to him. 'I was thinking, boss,' he was saying, 'time's getting on, how'd it be if, instead of going over all this lot by hand, we got the harrow out and just—'
But the bloke on the horse interrupted him. His voice was very high and shrill, and he sounded extremely pissed off. 'No, no, no, he said. 'How many times do I have to tell you people?
But when thy fluttering hand hath sown the seed, Breaking the soil becomes thy greatest need;
By delving deep strive to appease the gods, And with the ponderous hoe assault the clods.
Ponderous hoe,' he continued. 'The book specifically states, the ponderous hoe.
Or do you presume to know better than the poet?'
Short silence. 'Well,' said the overseer slowly, 'that's as may be, but where I come from—'
There are some sounds you can identify straight off without needing to look, and the noise a riding whip makes when it hits a man's face is one of them. Of course, I sneaked a look. The overseer was staggering back, with his hands up round his mouth. The bloke on the horse had a whip in his hand, and was carefully rolling it up again. 'Remember,' he was saying, 'the ponderous hoe.
Not the harrow Really, is it too much to ask for you people to do as you're told?'
Well, I got my head down bloody quick, because one thing I've learned in life is not to draw attention to yourself when things start getting stroppy. Next time I dared look up, the bloke on the horse had gone and the overseer was standing there mopping blood off a nasty long cut across his cheek from his lip to his eyebrow Marvellous, I thought, I've really landed on my feet here.
Finally, after a couple of lifetimes with time added for bad behaviour, we reached the headland and the overseer called time for the day. On the way back to the barracks, I asked one of the blokes what all that had been about.
He looked at me. 'You're new here, aren't you?' he said.
'Yes, it's my first day Who was the nutso on the horse, and why did he belt the overseer?'
The bloke laughed. 'Him on the horse,' he said, 'that's Marcus Ventidius Gnatho, and it's him as owns this lot. And a whole lot besides, but this is where he lives, most of the time.'
'Ah,' I said. 'Well, that's handy to know But what made him go beating up on the overseer? And what was that poetry he was spouting?'
The bloke grinned. 'Ah, well,' he said, 'our Marcus Ventidius, he's a bit of a scholar, see. Always got his head in a book, or else he's making up his own books, poetry and stuff. Well, about five years back, his old man dies and Marcus inherits, and he gets the notion of running the farm like it says in this big long poem, by one of them writer chaps from the city. Seems like they've got nothing better to do with their time up there than sit around making up these poems all about how you're supposed to do things, like farming or sailing or doctoring the sick, any damn thing that comes into their heads. Course, they don't know bugger all about it, they just copy it all out of some other book and pretty it up so it scans and all, but our Marcus, he gets hold of this damned old poem, that he calls On Farming, by Publius Virgilius Maro, and the long and the short of it is, we got to do everything like it says in his book, whether it's the right way or not. Now this overseer, Cleitus his name is, Spanish chap, he's not been here very long — they don't hardly seem to stay here any time, overseers — so he don't know any better than to go telling master how his book's all wrong; and Marcus, he don't like that at all, like you just saw Course, we could've warned him, but then, where's the fun in that?'
I thought for a moment. Now, you probably wouldn't put me down as a literary type, and you'd be right enough at that, but you couldn't hang round the palace any time back in the old days without overhearing people banging on about this poet and that poet —bored me half to death, of course, and mostly it went in one ear and straight out the other side, but bits of it couldn't help sticking — and I particularly remembered Virgilius Maro because Lucius Domitius couldn't stand his stuff, not even for ready money, and he was always reciting bits in silly voices and generally taking the piss. So when the bloke said the name, I nodded and muttered, 'Oh, him,' or words to that effect. Not that I'd recognise the works of Virgilius Maro if you painted them blue and stuck them up my bum with a forked stick, but there you go.
'So,' I said, 'that's not the first time he's done something like that, then?'
The bloke grinned.
'Overseer before last, he tried to tell old Marcus you can't go pruning in September, you'll kill the vines dead — well, stands to reason, everybody knows that. But master, he flies into a right old temper, smacks overseer round the face with the back edge of a billhook, busts his jaw for him, tells him it says in his book, start pruning when Arcturus is rising, and if he won't do what he's told, he'd better clear off out of it. Well, overseer's gone the next day, and we do the pruning like he says, and all the vines on the north slope, dead as boot nails inside of a week. The heat, see. Laugh? We nearly shat ourselves.'
I nodded. Actually, I could see what'd happened there, because they do start their pruning when Arcturus rises in Ionia, which is where a lot of the old Greek poets came from, and it must've been one of their books Virgilius Maro was copying out of. I thought about trying to explain this to the bloke, but I decided not to bother.
'Well,' I said, 'no skin off your nose, I guess.
The bloke shook his head. 'Master blamed us for the vines dying,' he said.
'Picked out three blokes, had 'em flogged till they damn near died. Still, you can't go telling these fine gentlemen what to do, they always reckon they know best. Lords of all creation, that's what they think they are, and if something goes wrong it's always got to be some other bugger's fault. But you can't complain, can you? I mean, that's the way things are.
The food turned out to be rubbish, and nobody said anything about wages, or if they did, I didn't hear them. But I was too knackered after a long day with the ponderous hoe to be bothered about that. I found a corner of the barracks that nobody wanted for anything, curled up in my blanket and went to sleep.
Next day we were booted awake at daybreak and marched out for another spell of ponderous hoeing. By midday I'd just about had enough, but the overseer was in a filthy mood and skiving didn't strike me as a sensible idea, so I gritted my teeth and got on with it. Come knocking-off time, all I wanted to do was crawl under a stone and die. The next day was pretty much the same, and the day after that. I'd hoped that after a day or so I'd have got back into the swing of field work and the aches and pains would start to ease off, but I was kidding myself.