A Song For Nero

by Tom Holt

  'Tell us where he is,' Alexander said, 'or we'll pull your head off.'

  You know, we all say stuff like that — I'll tear your head off, I'll smash your teeth down your neck, I'll kick your spine up out the back of your neck — and all we really mean is, I might possibly hurt you, or then again I might not. But when Alexander said that, it was rather obvious that he was just telling it straight, no melodrama. He'd nod his head, and Julianus would squeeze hard, snap her spine and give her neck a twist and a yank, and off her head would come, like a stopper out of a jar. It made me feel sick, but that's what I get for having a top-of-the-range imagination.

  Anyhow, she got the message. 'No, listen,' she said, with rather less attitude, 'I'd tell you if I knew, but I don't. Really I don't. I mean, why would he bother telling me? I don't need to know; and it stands to reason, in this line of work, the fewer people know something, the better. Strymon may be dumb, but he's smart enough for that.'

  It sounded like she was telling the truth, but it wasn't what I wanted to hear.

  'She's lying,' I said. 'Of course she knows, she's the sort who wants to know everything, all the details, just in case there's something'll give her an edge.

  Squeeze her a bit more and she'll tell us, trust me.' Pony-tail looked doubtful, but he shrugged and tightened his grip; and for a moment I was afraid he'd overdone it, because her eyes started bulging out of her face and she made a revolting gurgling noise and twitched all over. 'All right,' she said, 'all right. Let go, for God's sake.'

  I nodded —just think of it, me giving orders like a general — and Pony-tail eased off a bit, so she could breathe. 'Now, then,' I said.

  'I'm just guessing,' Blandinia gasped, 'but Strymon's got a place on Long Lane, just past the tanner's yard. That's all I can think of.'

  Pony-tail frowned. 'Which tanner's yard?' he asked. 'There's two.

  'What?' She struggled to drag air down her bruised throat. 'I don't know, I've never been there, just heard other people talking about it. A place on Long Lane, just past the tanner's yard, that's all I know Really'

  I nearly burst out laughing. 'That's the best you can do, is it?' I asked.

  'Please, let go. Make him let go, I can't breathe.'

  She was going a funny colour, and I decided that she'd have to be cooler than the Alps in winter to keep up a good lie when she was that close to dying. 'Let her go,' I said, 'she's telling the truth. It's bloody useless, but that's all she knows.'

  Alexander scowled, and nodded at Pony-tail (where did the chain of command suddenly appear from, I wondered in passing), and he relaxed his vast blood-sausage fingers by a certain carefully-regulated amount. 'Well,' I said, 'so what do we do with her?'

  Pretty obvious I wasn't going to get any sensible suggestions out of those two.

  Born followers, the both of them. It was up to me to come up with a brilliant idea. I hate that.

  'We'll have to take her with us,' I said.

  Alexander looked dubious about that. 'What if she squeals and makes a racket?' he said. 'People'll stare; we don't want any trouble.'

  And then Apollo shot me with a stroke of genius. 'Well, that's simple,' I said.

  'You know what to do.' And I rubbed the back of my head, like it still hurt.

  They weren't as slow on the uptake as all that. Alexander closed his fist and clubbed her on the base of the skull, and she went out like a snuffed lamp. Fast asleep in Pony-tail's arms, like a girl flaked out after a night's partying.

  Sweet, really 'Brilliant,' Pony-tail moaned. 'Have I got to lug her all the way to Long Lane?'

  'The sedan chair,' I said. 'The one I was fetched here in. It's still about the place, isn't it?'

  Confession time. I love riding in sedan chairs. Bloody stupid, really I guess it's because sedan chairs are the all-time essential rich bastard thing. I mean, you see them swaying through the streets on the shoulders of a couple of enormous Germans or Libyans, up so high they're clipping the ears of the poor people as they jostle by —it's everything that being a rich bastard is about, if you follow me. Now I don't much care for rich people, but that's never stopped me getting a real thrill out of being one, just for a little while, peeking out through the curtains of a closed chair at the bald patches on the little folks' heads. And, well, if ever I get taken rich, which is about as likely as my old mother getting swept up to heaven and put among the stars as the constellation of the Drunk Old Bag, first thing I'll buy myself is a really swish sedan chair and six porters, all Thracians or Lusitanians, a matched set. And of course, when I ride through the streets in my chair, there'll be a beautiful young girl reclining at my side, because if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing right, only, in this daydream of mine, the beautiful young girl won't be fast asleep, and we won't be on our way to rescue Lucius Domitius from the meanest street gang in the world, always assuming we can find their hideout. It's little things like that that fuck up a nice bit of wish-fulfilment.

  Finding a tanner's yard in Long Lane wasn't hard at all. All that took was going to Long Lane and breathing in. Beats me why they allowed something that smelt that bad in a posh neighbourhood, but that's Rome for you: the grand houses stand up out of the slums and the trash like a man standing in a gutter. Anyhow, we found a tannery, and there were houses on either side that looked like they could be a gang's hideout, not that any of us had a clue what a gang's hideout looks like.

  'So what do we do now?' I heard Alexander say, down below on street level.

  'Start knocking on doors?'

  I tweaked the curtain aside. 'All right,' I said. 'Now let's find the other one.'

  Beats me why they'd decided to take orders from me, but they did. The other tannery was down the other end of the lane, and it had almost identical houses up and down the street. I was just about to give up, when I saw someone I recognised.

  Very handy knack, a gift for faces. Of course, it's something you have to pick up if you're going to last more than a month in the scamming trade: you've got to be able to recognise a face immediately, out of the corner of your eye at fifty paces, and remember that that bloke was in the crowd when you pulled such and such a scam at such and such a place, which means it'd be a very bad idea to try the same scam again where he'd be likely to see it. Anyway, I saw this face, just for a split second, and I knew where I'd seen it before — namely, in the inn where Amyntas had taken me, and the bloke had been one of the Sicilian's boys.

  'Stop,' I called down, 'we're here.'

  I pinched back the curtain and watched where the bloke was headed. I saw him cross the street to the gate of a big old house, pause for a moment to look round, then knock on the door four times, rat-at-at-TAT. The door opened, he ducked inside, the door swung shut again; all over in the time you'd take to eat a grape. There's lucky, I said to myself.

  'What about Blandinia?' Pony-tail said, once I'd got down from my floating eagle's nest and explained what I'd seen. 'We can't just park her in the chair.

  What if she wakes up?'

  I sighed. 'Can't you bash her again?' I said.

  'Not really,' Alexander replied, sounding like an expensive doctor. 'It's not, what's the word, cumulative, bashing people; I mean, you can't sort of top up a bash with a smart tap every two hours to keep it fresh.'

  So I thought; and what I came up with was pretty thin, but let's see you do better on the fly, when most of your brainpower's taken up with being very scared.

  Imagine you're the porter, right? You're sat in your little cubby hole, thinking about whatever porters think about, and there's this frantic banging on your door. You wake up, snap, and pull back the little slide; who's making that fucking awful row, you ask.

  Through your little hole in the door, you can see this pointy-faced Greek bloke, and behind him there's two uglies, holding up a girl who doesn't look too chipper. In fact, she's slumping, and the two bruisers are holding her up.

  'Open the goddamn door,' hisses the pointy-faced type. 'Come on, people are staring.'


  You feel a bit panicky, because of the urgency in his voice, but there's such a thing as standing orders, including, Don't let anybody in unless you know them, or they've got a pass. 'Who're you, then?' you ask nervously Pointy-face spits a string of Greek names at you. They don't mean spit as far as you're concerned. You don't know what to do for the best. A porter can get the skin flayed off his back for letting strangers in, and the same for keeping important visitors standing out in the street. 'Who's she, then?' you ask.

  One of the thugs in the background is asking what in hell the hold-up is; he doesn't sound happy The Greek looks at you and says, None of your damn business, now open the bloody door. Of course, this is turning into a porter's worst nightmare — buggered if you do or buggered if you don't, and no way of knowing which. You start to say you're sorry, but— 'You bloody well will be sorry in a minute,' says Pointy-face, 'if you don't open the damn gate. You'll be off to the farm, with your hoe in your moist little hand, if our Strymon hears you made his little honey-apple stand out in the street, running a fever so bad she's fit to fall over.'

  At that point, the girl groans pitifully (you aren't to know it's the first helpful thing she's done in her whole life, and she's only doing it because she's fast asleep on her feet and hasn't got the foggiest idea what's going on), and a helpful little voice says to you, Come on, they've got to be on the level;

  I mean, who'd be crazy enough to try and kid their way into our house, of all places? So you shoot back the bolts as fast as you can and haul the gate open, and soon as you do, one of the uglies shoves the droopy girl in your arms and says, Catch hold of this a moment, will you? And you grab her to stop her falling over, and then the back of your head hurts, and next thing you know — well, you don't want to imagine that, it'd give you nightmares. Anyway, you get the idea. Corny as Egypt and crazy as a tubful of polecats, but who gives a shit? More by luck than judgement, sure, but it worked.

  So there we were: inside the walls all right, but feeling very conspicuous and terribly terribly lonely You've heard of the Seven against Thebes , I expect.

  Well, we were the Two against Strymon (I'm not counting me, for obvious reasons) and the odds on the Seven had to be better. Also, didn't all the Seven get killed? I don't know, I wasn't paying attention when our mother told us the story.

  Just as well one of us had his wits about him. Say what you like about Alexander, he was like the hedgehog in the saying — you know, how the fox knows many tricks, but the hedgehog knows one good one. He only knew one scheme for situations like this, but he gave it a go. 'FIRE!' he started yelling — and he could yell, believe me; I was nearly blown over — and to make it a bit more convincing, he picked up the porter's brazier in one hand and pitched it across the yard. Pure fluke it happened to land on a stack of jars lined up against the wall. Even flukier that they happened to be full of lamp-oil. Fool's luck, you could call it, only if there is such a thing, how come I never get any?

  If there hadn't been a fire before, there was a honey of one now, in fact, I remember thinking as I stood there watching the whole yard blossom into orange flames, looks like Alexander may have overdone the diversionary tactics this time. Not entirely his fault, mind you, because a sensible bloke wouldn't have stacked the month's supply of oil up against the stables, with all that hay and straw inside.

  That's another thing I don't like about Rome . Bloody place is a fire trap.

  I guess there was a sort of wonderfully stupid irony about the whole situation.

  A fire starts. Thanks to a stiff breeze which scoops up fistfuls of glowing embers and scatters them over the neighbouring rooftops like a man sowing barley in the time it takes to eat an apple the entire block is up in flames, with people running around yelling and pushing and shoving and panicking, the way people do, some poor fools trying to be sensible and organise bucket chains, others running screaming in the wrong direction, or struggling to get back inside the burning buildings to get children or crippled relatives, not to mention the looters. When there's a fire, you get a wonderful display of pretty well everything that's right and wrong with human nature: courage and cowardice and greed and cool common sense under stress and a hundred subtly different strains of stupidity — the pity of it is, it all happens so fast right in front of your nose, with three or four absolutely fascinating exhibitions going on at the same time; doesn't matter how observant you are, you're bound to miss a gem or two, an inspiring display of selfless bravery or a collector's item in the way of sheer unparalleled selfishness. It's as good as the theatre for distilling what mortal humans are all about down into a ninety-nine-parts-pure essence. Pity about all the smoke and shit, but I guess you need that for ambience.

  Well, there was this incredible show going on right under my nose — Rome Burns, a tragi-comic extravaganza in twelve simultaneous acts — and I wasn't paying attention, as bloody usual. No, I wasn't even thinking of myself as a member of the audience; nothing would do me but I had to clamber up on stage, so to speak, and gatecrash my way into the play. Thinking about it with the fabulous alchemy of hindsight, I can see now why the true-blood Roman gentry get so uptight about respectable people getting mixed up in theatricals and performing on a stage. Here's Rome burning, say, a tragedy of catastrophic proportions, ruining the lives of dozens, hundreds of miserable bastards, rich and poor; and here's me, an insignificant little Greek, who's so up himself he's got to use this terrible thing as the background to his own trivial drama, his own worthless private subplot. Worse still, in this case, because I'd gone one step further. I'd caused the damn fire, by bringing on as a plot device the moron Alexander, with his penchant for setting light to the scenery every time he runs into a minor difficulty in his work. You know how lots of people are firmly convinced that Lucius Domitius Nero Caesar started the Great Fire just so he could have a truly spectacular backdrop for his Fall of Troy, with harp accompaniment? Well, that happens not to be true; but it's a stone-cold fact that Galen the Athenian, an artiste in a wholly different genre of make-believe and performance arts, deliberately started the Long Lane Fire as a mise en scène (I think that's the right term) for his ballet for three idiots and a stunned girl, The Rescue of Lucius Domitius. No harp accompaniment, I'm afraid, but what do you expect if you engage a bunch of cheapskates?

  I'm not quite sure what I'm trying to say here. I mean, there's a point to this, and your Senecas and Petronius Arbiters and Caius Juvenalises'd be on it like a snake, but instead you've got me. Maybe you can figure it out for yourselves — in which case, maybe you'd drop me a line and let me know what it is. Assuming I'm still alive when you read this, and you can find me.

  Anyhow, there I was, standing in a courtyard with burning buildings all round me, people running hither and yon, bashing into me and treading on my feet, and there's Alexander and Pony-tail, not to mention the poisonous bitch Blandinia, who's sleeping through the whole show like your elderly aunt when you've been to great pains to fight your way to the front rows and get seats so she'll be able to see the sword fighting and hear the screams. And I was thinking, Shit.

  Well, wouldn't you have done? Because we were there to save Lucius Domitius' life, and he was somewhere in that big house, moments away from burning to death. Not smart. Could do better.

  'Don't just stand there,' I screamed at them. 'Do something.'

  They looked at me like I was the captain of a ship becalmed in the middle of the sea, and I'd pointed straight up in the air and said, 'That way' Well, they had a point, it wasn't the most helpful suggestion I'd ever made. But I couldn't think what to do, I was too bewildered by how fast it had all happened, not to mention the sheer unspeakable scale of the fuck-up I'd just perpetrated. I mean, it's not every day a provincial farm boy like me sets fire to the biggest city in the world. Call it stage fright, if you like.

  Then a little bit of burning cinder lit on Blandinia's forehead, and she woke up with a shriek. She got up; stumbled forwards, staggered like a vaudeville drunk, found her feet, looked round a
nd said something very unladylike.

  'You idiots,' she said, proving she was plenty quick on the uptake. 'What've you done?'

  Seemed to me she'd got it all plumb right at the first guess; woman's intuition, they call it. Anyhow, we weren't in the mood to explain, so we didn't say anything.

  'Right,' she said, and you could almost hear her brain snapping into place, like one of those great big Molossian padlocks when you turn the key 'Five gets you ten he's in the dining room, which ought to be there.' She pointed at a door vaguely opposite; it was outlined in fire, like on a wall painting, and rather graceful plumes of smoke were feathering up under it.

  'You sure?' I asked.

  'You can take it to the bank,' she said. 'Go on, move.' So we moved, for no reason I can see other than that she was telling us to, and she sounded like she was in charge. I guess it's like soldiers are trained to obey the words of command without thinking. Anyway, Alexander's side-of-beef shoulder crashed into that door, and the poor wooden bugger never stood a chance. It exploded into a mess of splinters and we were through, into a cloud of smoke so thick you could've spread it on bread with a knife.

  I didn't get much further than that, because I tripped over something and went down on my nose, crack on the mosaic floor, ouch.

  Turned out what I'd tripped on was a dead body and I wish I knew who he was, because he saved my life, though I don't suppose he did it on purpose. Alexander and Pony-tail sprinted past me into the smoke, and a moment later there was a horrible crash as something fell in, a wall or a ceiling, something like that.

  Something heavy any rate, and instantly fatal.

  And that was the last I saw of them. One moment there they were, two enormous bouncy dangerous idiots but all right, fundamentally because they were on my side, even if they did go around setting light to cities. The next moment, they were gone; and whether the falling masonry and roof-timbers got them clean, or they were pinned down and suffocated in the smoke, or whether they were still awake when the flames got to them, I'm sorry but I simply don't know. They charged out of my life as abruptly as they'd burst into it, and that was the end of them.