by Tom Holt
Also, there was Lucius Domitius, who as far as he was concerned was his property, not to mention a good ship's cook, kneeling there drooling blood and spit; and if anybody was entitled to knock Lucius Domitius around, he'd have said to himself, it's me, and not some snot-faced civilian. So he'd made up his mind, I reckon, that he didn't like Amyntas much; and if he'd been going to be helpful and cooperative, for example by letting on he'd seen us before, stuff like that, he was now firmly resolved that he was buggered if he'd tell Amyntas anything unless he was asked a straight question, and maybe not even then. Just goes to prove what I always say: it doesn't pay to beat up on the little people; one day you'll be sorry. Actually, of course, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand you can kick shit out of the little people and nobody'll give a damn, but it's a saying I'm fond of, nevertheless.
Anyhow The captain sort of looked sideways at Amyntas and said that if he wasn't mistaken, the temple was somewhere this way, and if they all cared to follow him, he'd see if he couldn't find it. So Scamandrius grabbed a handful of Lucius Domitius' hair and pulled him to his feet; I trotted up eagerly like a good dog, no need to kick me, look, I'm even carrying my lead in my mouth. Myrrhine brought up the rear, still bending down now and again to pick a flower or two, and off we went.
Turned out we weren't more than ten minutes' fast walk from that temple, or what was left of it. Hadn't been much to begin with, I dare say; not a proper temple, like the ones in Rome or back home in Athens . More like a biggish barn, only it was built out of rather boring-looking grey stone blocks, with a couple of straight pillars out front. At least half of it was just plain missing — you'd have found the stones in the walls of the local farmhouses, I guess, if you could've been bothered to look — and the rest of it was slumped sideways, like a man who's come home with a skinful and stands there in the doorway, leaning on the frame because he knows he'll fall over if he tries to move. Don't suppose any of our gods and goddesses would've been seen dead in a place like that, but I guess the old Carthaginian gods weren't so fussy 'That's it, is it?' Amyntas said doubtfully The captain shrugged. 'That's it,' he replied, 'pretty much where it was when I saw it last.'
'Fine' Amyntas said. 'Right, you go back to the ship and wait for us. Don't go wandering off or tell anybody where we've gone. Understood?'
The captain nodded, once; I could tell he was getting more and more uptight, but either Amyntas didn't notice or he didn't care.
Anyhow, the captain strolled off back the way we'd just come. Amyntas waited till he was out of sight, then led the way up a zigzaggy old sheep track to the temple.
'You're absolutely sure this is it?' he barked at Lucius Domitius. Of course he wasn't, but he had the wit to reply, 'Well, it certainly fits the description,' or some such thing. 'In a cave under the temple, that's what the knight told me.'
'Fine,' Amyntas said, as we walked in through where the doorway would have been if it hadn't fallen in years ago and been carted off to make pig sheds. 'How do we get into the cave from here?'
Bloody stupid question, of course. 'I suppose there must be some sort of trapdoor,' Lucius Domitius said, 'though it can't be too obvious. People must've been coming up here poking about for centuries. If it was plain to see, they'd have found the treasure.'
'Oh.' Amyntas obviously hadn't thought of that, which goes to show how stressed out he was. Normally I expect he'd have been way ahead, figuring out stuff like that well in advance, without needing to be told. 'Then I guess we'll just have to spread out and search for it.'
Here's something else he'd got wrong. He hadn't brought any of his button men with him, presumably because he wasn't prepared to trust them if there did turn out to be a whole bunch of buried treasure. Sensible, knowing the sort of people he had to work with, but dumb in another sense, since it left him short-handed for searching for the trapdoor. Of course, he could've told Scamandrius to leave us be and help him look, but that'd have been an even bigger cock-up, since we'd have been out of there like rats up a conduit. So he and Myrrhine had to do the spreading out and searching, while Lucius Domitius and I stood there and watched, with Scamandrius right behind us, digging us in the back with a knife.
Did me good to see them scrabbling down there in the dirt and finding nothing but spiders and a few rats' bones. Trouble was, Amyntas soon got it into his head that either Lucius Domitius was holding out on him, or he'd deliberately brought him to the wrong place. 'I'll give you a count of fifty,' he yelled, grabbing Lucius Domitius by the ear like he was a naughty kid, and pushing him down on the ground. 'If you haven't found it by then, your mate here gets it.'
That meant me, of course, and quite suddenly my attitude changed somewhat. Now I started wondering if maybe Lucius Domitius knew more than he was letting on, and he was keeping it to himself so he wouldn't have to let Amyntas take the treasure, and to hell with whether I got my neck broken. Bastard, I thought, the treasure means more to him than I do; and then I thought, well, what do you expect? Rat-faced little Greeks you can get anywhere, but a fortune in gold is something else. That was just me panicking, of course, because I knew perfectly well that Lucius Domitius didn't have a clue where the trapdoor was, if there was one at all. Truth is, I don't suppose he ever really believed the knight's story about Dido's treasure; and if he did, he was planning on sending someone else to go fetch it, not looking for it himself. So if the knight did tell him how to find the cave (assuming the knight actually knew), I don't suppose Lucius Domitius paid any attention to the details.
Actually, it was me that found the cave, and I wasn't even trying. I was more interested in what Amyntas had just said, about me getting hurt, and I'd started to edge backwards, since Scamandrius happened to be prodding Lucius Domitius with his stupid knife at that moment. Anyhow, I took a step back and found I'd just put my weight on something that wasn't really there. Bloody stupid you feel, when you do that; and all your instincts tell you to wave your arms around, which is supposed to help you get your balance, though I don't see how. But I couldn't even do that, because my arms were tied up with ropes and all I could do was wiggle my fingers, which doesn't count, apparently Whatever; a heartbeat or so later I wasn't standing on anything at all, and I sure as hell wasn't flying.
Turned out I'd stepped back onto a rotten old floorboard or something — maybe it was a trapdoor after all, I'm not actually interested — and it'd given way under my weight. If that makes me sound like I was a bit of a porkchop back in those days, forget it, I've always been the scraggy, wiry sort; it must've been a very rotten floorboard. Anyhow, I fell through it, landed badly, felt something go twang in my leg, and flumped down on my bum, only to find I was sat on something unpleasantly sharp. I howled, the way you do. Scamandrius was kneeling down beside the hole trying to slash me with his knife. I guess he thought I'd found some cunning way to escape. What with trying to get off the sharp thing and keep out of the way of Scamandrius' knife, and all this with a buggered ankle, I wasn't doing too well. Then Amyntas came over with the lamp; he peered down the hole at me, and then started swearing.
Myrrhine joined him a moment later, and looked over his shoulder. 'Told you so,' she said.
FIFTEEN
Course, I hadn't the faintest idea what they were on about; not till my good foot slipped on something hard and round, and I crashed over on my elbow. That hurt like buggery, so it was a moment or so before I could be bothered to look up, see what I'd fallen on.
Tableware. Gold tableware: cups and dishes and jugs and goblets and God knows what all, glowing amber in the light from Amyntas' poxy little lamp. I'm not talking about a few pesky little trinkets here, think of how a cornfield looks, just before they start cutting, and the orange-yellow blaze stretches so far in every direction it makes your eyes go funny. Or think of what it's like when you get a word in your head and catch yourself saying it over and over again, till it doesn't make sense or mean anything any more. That's how I felt, staring at all that stuff, it couldn't all be gold, be
cause there wasn't that much gold in the whole world. Stood to reason; gold's only valuable because it's scarce, and there was so much of it down there, you could have roofed over every house in Attica with the stuff and still had enough left over to make a dozen large cisterns.
'See?' Myrrhine was saying. 'I said it'd be worth going out of our way for, but nobody ever listens to me. Well, Dad always used to say...
She was right about one thing: nobody was listening to her, except me, of course, and I don't suppose I count. Scamandrius had stopped trying to scalp me with his baby cleaver and was squatting on the edge of the hole with his mouth wide open. Lucius Domitius was standing behind him, looking like the gorgon had just winked at him. Only goes to show he was a born idiot, because he could have snuck out of there and been a mile away before anybody noticed he was gone.
Anyway, long silence; everybody gawping like idiots, and me sitting on more wealth than the average senator spends in a week. Amazing. Then Amyntas sort of shook himself, and said, 'How the bloody hell are we going to get this lot out of here?'
Well, good question. Furthermore, it gave me an idea, but I hustled it away into the back of my mind, for fear it'd show on my face. Then Myrrhine said; 'Well, we can't shift it all ourselves, that's for sure. We'll have to get the captain and his men in here.'
Amyntas didn't like the thought of that. Funny thing: the more money there is at stake, the less people are inclined to share it. I mean, if there's a group of you and you find a drachma in the road, you don't have to think twice about it; off you all go to the nearest tavern, drinks all round in the name of Our Lady of Good Fortune. Find a hundred million sesterces, and the first thought that crosses your mind is, How do I get rid of the others so they won't want their share? You'd think that the more there was to go round, the less you'd be worried about keeping it all for yourself; apparently not.
But facts are facts. It'd have taken one man on his own a month of hard slog just to haul all that stuff out of the hole and stack it on the temple floor.
'We'll have to give them a cut,' he said. 'Can't expect them to lift this lot on day-labourers' wages.
Myrrhine and Scamandrius looked very sad, but they nodded their heads. 'Unless'
Myrrhine piped up, 'we leave it here, go back and fetch some of our people. I mean, it's been here this long without anybody finding it...'
You could tell from her tone of voice she didn't like the idea; and her brothers pulled faces like they'd just bitten into something rotten. 'Even if we did that,' Scamandrius said, 'we'd have to share with our lot, they're only human. I say if we've got to do a deal with somebody, it might just as well be these sailors as anyone else. If you ask me, we've got a wolf by the ears here.'
Well, quite. Instead of making them happy, all that treasure had really ruined their day. That's people for you.
'All right,' Amyntas said slowly 'Here's what we'll do. You two, stay here and make a start shifting the stuff. I'll go back to the ship and negotiate. It's still going to take a long time, even with the sailors, so the sooner we start, the sooner we'll be done.'
Scamandrius' idea of making a start was grabbing hold of Lucius Domitius and putting his knife across his throat. 'You,' he said to me, 'get up and start shifting the gold, or your friend here gets cut. And don't even think about playing me up. You too,' he added, nodding at Myrrhine, 'get weaving, there's a lot to do.'
Myrrhine pulled a face. 'You give me the knife and I'll guard the fat boy,' she said. 'You can shift a lot more than me.'
He lifted his head. 'Do as you're told, for once,' he said, 'and don't argue.'
So Myrrhine had to get down in the hole with me and do some actual work, which didn't please her very much. There wasn't a lot of room, and standing on a pile of gold crockery wasn't easy; both of us kept slipping and sliding about, at least till we'd cleared a space to stand on. Myrrhine was sulking and didn't say anything, which was fine by me; I'd had enough of her to last me a long time.
I don't know what took Amyntas so long; it was hours before he came back with the sailors. But they brought lamps and torches and ropes and lumber and all sorts of useful stuff, and once they got started we were able to make some serious progress. Did they ever work, those sailors. You could tell by the look on their faces, they couldn't believe what they were seeing. Of course, they all recognised Lucius Domitius and me, but they couldn't figure out whether they were supposed to say anything, so they just looked at us all bewildered and kept their faces shut.
One thing we didn't have was anything in the way of a cart; not even a wheelbarrow. That was bad news, because it meant that we were going to have to carry every single bit of gold from the temple back to the ship. If getting it up out of the cave was a big job, lugging it from the cave to the ship — well, it didn't bear thinking about. So the captain told the ship's carpenter to take a couple of men and go find some timber and fix something up; didn't have to be fancy, he said, just so long as it worked. That pissed Amyntas off straight away; he was giving the orders round here, he said, and he hadn't said anybody could go wandering off while there was all this stuff to shift. The captain stayed calm, which just seemed to rile Amyntas up even more; he pointed out that carrying a load like that on our backs was just plain foolishness, whereas we could spare three men out of twenty-five for a few hours, if it meant saving three or four days' hard slog. For one thing, he said, there was the little matter of food and water; what he had on board for the journey wasn't going to last more than a week, and we still had the return journey to make. So, one thing we were short on was time, whatever way you looked at it. He was all in favour of sending some men off to the nearest town to buy three or four big wagons and some horses or oxen, along with food and wine and a load of tools and stuff he reckoned we'd need. Amyntas wasn't having that. Nobody was going out of his sight, he said. Or else what, was the obvious question; after all, there were only two of them and twenty of the sailors. The captain didn't press the issue, but none of them were stupid, they all had the same idea, though nobody said it out loud. Amyntas started to look very thoughtful indeed, like he'd realised that he was probably in more trouble than he'd ever been in before in his whole life.
Anyhow, the captain got his way over building a makeshift cart, and Amyntas left him and his people alone, keeping out of their way as much as possible, though that wasn't easy in such a tiny space with so many people working. What with that, and trying to keep an eye on everybody all the time, I guess it didn't take him long to reach the end of his rope. Each time I saw him he was looking sicker and sicker; which suited me just fine, of course.
I think the captain was as keen to have a private word with me as I was with him. It wasn't easy, with Amyntas watching him like a hawk, but eventually we got our chance, when Amyntas went off to see what the carpentry detail was up to. Scamandrius and Myrrhine both took the opportunity to skive off and sit down for a breather — they weren't used to hard work, obviously, and Amyntas had been keeping them at it. The captain made sure they weren't watching, then came across and grinned at me.
'I'm not going to ask,' he said. 'You can tell me later how you two fit into all this. But I've got to say, I don't like your friend much.'
'Amyntas? He's no friend of mine,' I said.
'Really?' The captain nodded. 'I'm glad about that, because when he comes back I'm going to kill him. That all right with you?'
'Fine,' I replied. 'And the other two, while you're at it.'
'The girl, too?' He looked at me.
'Sure, why not? She'll only make trouble if you don't. I mean to say, all this gold and stuff, it's the chance of a lifetime. If I was you, I wouldn't take any risks whatsoever.'
He looked at me funny 'There's a case for saying you and your mate are a risk,' he said, 'especially since you're neither of you exactly reliable. Do you think we ought to kill you as well?'
I thought about that for a moment. 'Oh, I wouldn't think so,' I said. 'Me and Lucius Domitius, we're no bother to anybody.
I mean, we're practically members of the crew'
He was still and quiet for a moment, then he nodded. 'That's the way I see it, too,' he said. 'Right, leave the unpleasant stuff to me and my boys. That's unless you—'
I lifted my head. 'No, that's fine,' I said, 'you crack on, it's not our line of work anyhow Not that I'm suggesting it's yours either,' I added, so as not to sound rude, 'but I'm sure you'll figure out what needs to be done. Don't mind us, is what I'm saying.'
He nodded and turned to go; then he hesitated and looked back at me. 'One thing,' he said. 'Just to settle a bet between me and some of the lads. Your mate there,' and he nodded towards Lucius Domitius.
'What about him?' I said.
'He's Nero Caesar, isn't he?'
You could've nailed wheels to my ankles and used me for a trolley 'That's right,' I said. 'But how did you—?'
He grinned. 'Do me a favour,' he said. 'I'm not blind, and neither are the lads. Seen his face often enough on the backs of the money, not to mention all the statues of him there used to be everywhere, in the old days.'
'Yes, but...' I didn't know what to say 'Don't worry about it,' the captain said. 'Doesn't bother us, we're not fussy who we go around with. We were just curious, that's all. Once this is all over, maybe you two can tell us the story. I expect it's worth hearing, at that.'
I shrugged. 'It's nothing much,' I said. 'But yes, by all means, if you're interested.'
'Thanks.' He smiled. 'Well, fancy that, Nero Caesar. And my old dad said I'd never amount to anything.'
He looked over his shoulder, then moved away; and I saw him talking quietly to the first mate, and then moving on round the rest of his people, nice and relaxed and unobtrusive. I guess you have to be a lot of things in order to manage a ship; you need to be smart and practical, good with people, calm and sensible, good at getting things done without a lot of fuss and argument. I guess you have to be the sort of person who can take a decision like that — these three people, two men I've only just met, who may not be the nicest people in the world but they never did me any harm, these two men and a pretty girl are in our way and they've got to die. You've got to be the sort of person who makes that decision straight off, no messing, and when you've done that you've got to look round at your crew, the nineteen people you spend most of your life with, and you've got to choose which five of them are going to be the killing squad, while the other fourteen get on with the job in hand. Then, when you've made that decision, you've got to figure out the quickest and safest way to do the killing, with the least risk of them getting away or doing any harm to your people. You've got to be the sort of person who can make all those choices in the time it'd take you and me to eat a dried fig, and all your choices have got to be right, and the way you've chosen has got to be the best, most efficient way, and you've got to know how to tell the five men you've chosen what they've got to do quietly and without drawing attention to yourself, and you've got to be able to make them do what they've been told at once, no questions, no mucking about. If you aren't that sort of person, I guess you aren't fit to skipper a ship, or run a farm, or rule an empire. Our captain took it all in his stride, like he was telling the helmsman to come about on such and such a course, because the wind was getting up and he didn't like the look of those clouds. All life and death stuff, you see; the greatest good of the greatest number, the main issue always being to get your boys home safe and get the cargo from here to there unspoilt and on time. I could never do that job; neither could Lucius Domitius, goes without saying. Show me one man in ten thousand who could. Odd, isn't it, how we choose the people who steer the ship of state? (I know, it makes me want to puke too; but every time a Roman senator gets up on his hind legs and makes a speech, you'll hear all about there may be storms ahead, but with a firm hand on the tiller we can cast our eyes on the safe harbour ahead.