by Tom Holt
Lucius Domitius made a show of adjusting the lie of a vine prop. 'Maybe,' he said. 'I don't know, maybe he's a lawyer and he's looking for you because your long-lost uncle just died and left you a half share in a silver mine. Although,' he added, 'I can think of other explanations.' He scratched his chin, for all the world like he was trying to decide which evening cloak to wear, the dark green or the blue and white stripe. 'So what do you think we ought to do?' he said.
I scowled, thinking hard. 'I don't know,' I said. 'You're right, running for it may well be as good as nailing a tablet to the barn door with “We're the ones you're after” on it in big bronze letters. Or we could go back to the barracks and find we've strolled right into a trap. It's a tricky one, this.'
Just then the overseer called out, 'Time,' and everybody in the line started picking up their tools, ready for going home. That was, of course, just what I hadn't wanted to hear, since it meant we'd run out of time for making a decision.
'Well?' said Lucius Domitius.
Sometimes you've just got to trust your instincts. I hate times like that, because my instincts are about as reliable as the men who come up to you in the marketplace and ask if you're interested in buying cheap silver tableware.
Still.
'We hop it,' I said. 'We walk back with the rest of 'em as far as the little copse of olive trees, then we hang back like we're diving in the bushes for a quick shit, double back, strike out for the main road and run like buggery.'
He frowned. 'The main road, are you sure? Isn't that exactly where they'll head for?'
'No,' I replied, 'because they know we aren't dumb enough to do a stupid thing like that. Besides, if we get a move on, we'll be on the military road before they realise they've missed us.'
That line of reasoning seemed to convince him, which was odd, since I thought it stank. 'Then what?' he said. 'Which way, Rome or Ostia?'
Good question. Ostia — stow away on a boat that's just about to leave, non-stop across the open sea to Greece or Spain, and we'd be laughing. Or we'd get there and find the weather had closed in and nothing was getting out for a week. Rome, on the other hand —very big place, crowded, nobody knows anybody else. What chance would anybody have trying to find two people out of a million?
'Let's go to Rome,' I said. 'Looks like you're getting your wish after all.'
SEVEN
It's a fair old bike from Ostia to Rome , especially if you happen to be wearing someone else's boots. If the boots are older than you are, and were made for someone who had talons for feet, it's a very long walk indeed.
'It's your own silly fault,' Lucius Domitius told me, more than once. 'When we left Sicily , you had a perfectly good pair of boots, but no, you had to go and trade them in for those miserable objects, just because you thought you were getting something for nothing. That's the trouble with you. You keep grasping at opportunities that turn out to be complete disasters.'
He was always at his most annoying when he was right. 'Well, what about you?' I said. 'You did exactly the same thing.'
'Yes. And have you seen me limping? No. That's because I traded my clapped-out old boots for a decent pair of new ones, which fit.'
'Exactly,' I said. 'You were born lucky, and I wasn't. Unfair, or what?'
He frowned. 'You make your own luck in this life,' he said, 'good and bad. I've made more than my fair share of both kinds, so I know what I'm talking about.'
Well, I was going to say more or less the same thing, only probably not as neatly as that (but then, I never had a classical education). That's another annoying thing he used to do. How can you insult somebody when he's forever beating you to it?
'Well, anyway,' I said. 'The point is ...' I shut up. I couldn't remember what the point was going to be. 'We must be nearly there by now,' I went on. 'What I was thinking was, our best plan would be to hang about till dark and slip in along with all the carts. That way, if there's anybody watching the roads for us— 'Oh, smart idea,' Lucius Domitius interrupted. 'The first thing we do in Rome is break the curfew. On the other hand, we could just stroll in, packed in the middle of a crowd at the gate, and nobody would be able to pick us out, even if there is anybody watching. I figure the best time would be an hour before the gates close. There's always the most terrific squash at the gates at that time.
Even if they saw us and identified us, they'd never be able to get to us through all the people.'
Well, yes, he had a point there. 'Fine,' I said, 'we'll do it your way Just don't blame me if we walk straight into a trap.'
'Don't worry about it,' he replied, 'it'll be fine. Back in the old days I was always wandering about the city incognito. I learned a thing or two about not being seen.'
God, I thought, that old stuff again. Over the years we'd been going round together, he'd boasted about how he used to roam the taverns after dark and nobody recognised him, time and again. He was so proud of this master-of-disguise thing that I'd never had the heart to tell him that he never fooled anybody, mostly because of the platoon of plain-clothes guardsmen that Colonel Burrus had trailing him wherever he went. Your average Roman street person can smell the guard a hundred yards away with their eyes closed, which may account for the fact that Lucius Domitius and his cronies never got their teeth smashed in when they were out making nuisances of themselves. I met a bloke once who used to do guided tour parties: two denarii a head, and you could follow round with the guards watching the emperor making an arse of himself in public. Quite a profitable line, while it lasted.
'Well,' I said, 'you're the expert. Though I still reckon we ought to take a detour and go in at the Appian gate. If they're expecting us, the Ostian gate's where they'll have put their watchers.'
He shrugged. 'If you like,' he said. 'Or we could be really clever and hike round to the Asinaria. Save a lot of walking uphill, too.'
Made no odds to me. As far as I was concerned, the longer we put off strolling into the city, the happier I'd be. 'Anyhow,' I said, anxious to change the subject. 'Since we're basically on a sightseeing trip, what do you want to go and look at first?'
He smiled. 'I was just thinking about that,' he said. 'Well, first stop, the palace, naturally No, really,' he said, when I pulled a face. 'It's been, what, ten years. They might have got round to finishing it by now'
Fair enough, I thought. After all, he'd always been ridiculously proud of the palace architecture, a lot of which he'd designed himself— well, not the actual drawing lines on a piece of paper, he had Greeks who did that. His input consisted more of waving his arms in the air when they showed him the drawings and saying, 'Can't you make it a bit more sensuous?' and crap like that. 'All right,' I said. 'What next, after the palace?'
He furrowed his brows, like this was some really important decision. 'I'd like to go and see my bridge,' he said. 'And then we can cross the river and take a look at my racetrack. And we can stop off and see my baths on the way.'
'Sure,' I said. 'Good itinerary. Is there anything else you want to see, apart from the ones you built?'
He grinned. 'Not really,' he said. 'Oh, don't pull faces at me. I'm here trying to make some kind of sense of my life. At least I can stand next to a really cute building, something that'll still be standing and looking good a thousand years from now, and say, I built that.'
'Fine,' I said, 'so long as you say it quietly.'
He nodded. 'Yes, well. Oh, and if we take a dog-leg up Scaurus' promenade, we can see my arches, too.'
'Of course we can,' I muttered. 'And when we're through gawping at your immortal legacy, have you thought where we're going to doss down for the night, with no money?'
He shrugged. 'There's always a doorway in the Subura,' he replied. 'Isn't that the regular place for down—and—outs?'
'Not if you want to be still wearing your boots when you wake up,' I said. 'It's a pretty rough neighbourhood, in case you didn't know. Full of thieves and muggers and other undesirables.'
'We should fit in pretty well, then.'
He smiled patronisingly. 'Oh, that's easy,' he said. 'We sit down outside a temple and look pathetic, and people will give us money It's called begging. Actually, it'd be a smart plan to wrap a bit of old cloth round your leg, pretend you lost it on active service. You wouldn't believe how soft-hearted Romans are where veterans are concerned.'
'For pity's sake,' I said, 'you really haven't got a clue, have you? Do you really think that anybody can sit down with a hat on any street corner that happens to be free?'
He looked puzzled. 'Well,' he said, 'the guards are supposed to move them on, but—'
'But they don't,' I told him, 'because they're organised, almost like a trade guild or something, and the members of the guild pay their dues, and the guild pays off the guard. Which is why bad things tend to happen to offcomers who try to set up on an empty pitch without joining the guild or handing over a fifth of their take. We wouldn't last a day; they'd be fishing our bodies out of the river by nightfall.'
'I had no idea,' Lucius Domitius said. 'But hang on, can't we just join up, like everyone else? I happen to think trade guilds are a pretty good idea. I mean, someone's got to look after the working man...
I laughed. 'There are lots of good ideas in the world,' I said. 'Ever so many of them; and you look at any really shitty situation, anything that's gone so badly wrong it can never be put right, and somewhere in the background you'll see the mangled remains of the good idea that caused the whole mess in the first place. Like wars,' I went on. 'Eight hundred years your people have been fighting wars, and every single one of 'em started because the Romans were afraid of somebody, some bunch of woolly-backed savages who were bound to come raping and pillaging throughout the empire unless they were smacked down first.
Eight centuries of pre-emptive strikes, millions of people dead and mutilated, because you Romans reckon peace is a good idea. Or take your governments,' I went on — I've got no idea why I suddenly felt like I had to preach a sermon, but it was as if something had been building up inside me for a long time, and it was suddenly bursting out, like a volcano. 'Everything that's wrong with the world is because of some idiot's good idea. Like, five hundred years ago, you Romans thought it was a good idea to get rid of your kings and be a republic, and what did you get? The most corrupt regime the world's ever seen, run as a private business by a load of aristocratic thieves and swindlers. So what happens? A hundred years ago, your great-great-great-uncle or whatever he was, Julius Caesar, thought it'd be a good idea to get rid of all that shit and have good government, in the hands of one good man. And what did we get? We got Tiberius, and Caligula, and that murderous buffoon Claudius—'
'And Nero,' he muttered. 'Don't forget him.'
'Well, quite,' I said, 'my point exactly A whole lot of people said, let's get rid of Nero, that'd be a good idea. And the result? Four civil wars in the space of a year. Don't give me your good ideas, they suck. For crying out loud, you should know that better than anybody You thought, let's stop wasting all our money on killing savages, let's spend it on cute buildings and teaching people to appreciate art and music and shit. And here you are.
He laughed. 'Yes,' he said, 'but that was a bad idea. And besides, I may be reduced to wandering the streets with the likes of you, but the buildings are still there. And it may be a bad idea to try and run a farm according to a book of poetry, but the poetry still survives, and always will. And you know how that came about? Because my ancestor Augustus was a patron of the arts, and as long as people read Virgilius Maro, they'll remember Augustus. So maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all. Mind you,' he added, 'personally I think Virgilius Maro is completely overrated, but that's just my opinion, and who am I to argue with history?' He lifted his head. 'Besides,' he went on, 'who's to say that if my ancestors hadn't conquered the Gauls and the Carthaginians and the Teutones, that they wouldn't have smashed through our defences and burned down the city?
But as it is, the city and the empire will last for ever.'
'You say that like it's a good thing,' I grumbled.
'Well, of course it is. Maybe not for you and me, personally, but for the benefit of the whole human race. Just imagine what the world would be like if the Empire were to fall and the Germans or the Persians were to get control.
We'd sink from being humans to being animals in the space of a few generations.
You know what?' he went on. 'It's one of the few things that keeps me going, the thought of what the empire means. Like the story of the Spartan candidate.'
I frowned. 'Is that the one with the farmer's daughter and the goat?'
'There was once a Spartan,' said Lucius Domitius. 'He belonged to one of the great ruling families, and all his life it'd been his ambition to be picked as one of the three hundred royal bodyguards, the best and bravest men in the land. So, every day of his life he trained at sports and combat practice till he was as fit and good at fighting as it's possible to get, and the day came when he went to the palace for his interview, to see if he'd be accepted. That evening, his wife and children were waiting for him at the front door, and they saw him coming down the street with a huge happy grin on his face. So they asked, Did you pass? And he beamed at them and said, No. Well, they couldn't understand why he was so happy, and they asked him, So what are you grinning for, you failed? And he said, Yes, but isn't it wonderful to know there are three hundred better men than me in Sparta?'
I thought about that for a moment. 'On balance,' I said, 'I prefer the one with the farmer's daughter and the goat. And besides, I don't see the point.'
'Don't you? How odd. The point is,' said Lucius Domitius, with a soupy expression on his face, 'I don't mind that they stopped me being emperor, not really Because, well, the empire's still here, bigger and stronger than ever.
I'm glad that there was someone better at the job than me, and that he eventually got to do it.'
I shook my head. 'You know,' I said, 'it must be really nice to be an idiot, like you. It must be really great to look at the world and honestly believe it makes sense. I wish I could, but I'm not an idiot, so I can't. Great pity, but there it is.'
He smiled. 'Nobody's perfect,' he said.
I wasn't going to let it go on a cheap one-liner. 'Seriously, though,' I said, 'you don't honestly believe all that crap, do you? About the empire and Rome and it's all worthwhile because of the future of the human race?'
'Well, yes,' he said.
'Really? After everything you've seen these past ten years, going around with me?'
He shrugged. 'True, going around with you for ten years does make me apprehensive about whether the human race has a future.'
At this point I pulled a face, ha-ha-very-funny 'If you mean, has it made me cynical, well, yes. I've seen that most public officials are corrupt or incompetent. I've seen that law-enforcement officers all across the empire are so pathetic they couldn't even catch us, which would stop me sleeping at night if I was an honest citizen. But it hasn't changed my mind about what Rome means, not a bit, quite the opposite. You see, with you I've had a peek under the flat stone, I've seen what human beings are like, the sort of things they can do if they aren't stopped. I tell you what; if I got my throne back tomorrow, after what I've seen, I'd be the best bloody emperor they've ever had.'
I changed the subject after that, because it was starting to get a little bit scary; it was the first time in ten years he'd talked about being emperor again, even in a joke. I'd always reckoned that he never even thought about that stuff, the same way as a man who's saved from the cross at the last minute — like me, for instance —doesn't go around saying, Next time they get me up on one of those things, I'll put on a better show for the crowd.
Like I said, Lucius Domitius wasn't just an idiot, he was a colossal idiot, he was an idiot the way an elephant is an animal. My old m
other used to say, everybody is the best at something. I guess Lucius Domitius was the best idiot in the whole wide world.
Rome sucks.
Not for everyone, maybe. For your fat-cat, purple-striped senator breezing into town in his gilded ivory litter carried on the shoulders of two brace of thoroughbred Germans, I can see where Rome is the best place on Earth, what the Elysian Fields could have been if only the gods had had a bit more taste and vision. For your sharp-nosed Tyrian entrepreneur, bouncing into town on the box of a cart laden down with the finest in exclusive fabrics for the discerning society hostess, Rome is the only place to be. For the down-and-out Italian-trash peasant (assuming he hasn't got a price on his head, of course), Rome's the place where you can earn a living just standing in a line outside a rich man's house, waiting for your little goody-basket of bread, wine and figs.
If you're a Spanish nouveau riche after a spot of instant dinner-party credibility, or a Calabrian artichoke magnate who wants top dollar for his wagonload of wilted greens, or a sailor off a stone barge looking for neat wine, broad-minded women and the latest cutting-edge developments in social diseases (in which case, check out the Grand Circus district, or so my sources tell me), or a Greek hairdresser or a Syrian doctor or a Thracian masseur or a Batavian flute player or a newly fledged lawyer in a hurry to make his first million before he's thirty, the Seven Hills are where it's at. No question. Just walk right in and help yourself.
Far as I'm concerned, though, you can stuff it. I don't like the noise, or the fact that you have to wade ankle-deep in the contents of other people's chamber pots (no kidding; especially when it rains and the cart ruts fill up). I don't like the crowds — everybody's tense and wary all the time, like deer in open country, and if you happen to stumble and fall they'll trample you into the mud so deep nobody'll ever know you're down there — or the darkness at noon in the narrow alleys between the tenement blocks, which are so high that a newly minted turd slung out of a top-storey window will smash your skull with the force of a fifteen-pound sledgehammer if you're unlucky enough to be walking underneath. I don't like the way the ground shakes at night as the timber-wagons and brick-wagons lumber through the streets, so close that the lead ox has his nose squashed right up against the tailgate of the cart in front. I don't like having to flatten myself against the wall every time a half-platoon of rat-arsed city guards swaggers past after a day of bludging free drinks in bars, hoping they won't trip over my toe and then beat me to a bloody pulp for obstructing police officers in the execution of their duty. I don't like the pace of life, the attitude, the priorities or the mindset. And I really really don't like the smell.