by Tom Holt
Which I was, apparently; and as I walked home, I was asking myself, Well, how in God's name did that happen? I hadn't really noticed at the time — the belt was there, I stole it, it was sheer instinct, like scratching an itch. From that moment on, though, it appears I stopped being low-life, scum of the earth, and suddenly transformed into a splendid, godlike person who it was a pleasure to have dealings with, someone who gets given Falerian and has stools fetched for him, just for doing a spot of business. I hadn't felt terribly splendid or godlike when I was bobbing about in the sea, mind you, or when I was alone and naked on the beach. But then I suddenly understood, and it all made sense to me — the kind and generous Scherians, their lavish hospitality, everything going right for once, even the gods sending the floating coffin to see me safe to shore. All that good fortune had started only after I'd pinched the belt; and once I'd done that, of course, I was rich. It was clear as mountain water after I'd figured that out. Once I'd become rich, it goes without saying everything would be different. Of course the gods would take care of me and send floating coffins for me and arrange for me to be taken straight home on a private yacht.
Only goes to show how thick I am that I hadn't figured that out at the time.
Well, I took on a dozen gold pieces and some silver, just for walking-around money, and left the rest of it safe in the hands of Gnaeus Laberius and partners. First thing I did after that was to stroll down to the horsefair and buy a nice little mare, complete with harness, so I wouldn't have to walk home up that bastard hill. Hardly seemed to take any time getting back to Phyle with my four-footed pal doing all the work. I parked her in the stable at the inn for the grooms to take care of, and lit out for the farm. I thought, no time like the present, while I'm in this firm, confident, heroic-Achilles frame of mind.
Long story short: I found my landlord's old army buddy asleep under the pear tree out the back with a jar next to him. I prodded him awake with my toe and came straight out with it: would he consider selling the farm? He blinked at me, like I was the leftovers of some really weird dream he'd been having, and I said it again, only more slowly — was he interested in selling the farm? I'd give him what he paid for it, I went on, and a quarter again on top for luck and goodwill, provided he could be out inside the month.
He looked at me like I had snakes growing out of my nose, and said, 'Yes.'
'Good,' I replied; and then we sorted out the details, dates and terms and what he'd be taking with him and what had to stay, live and dead stock, felled timber and standing crops, all that stuff; and then I said thank you, all gracious like a gentleman, and walked away Simple as that, all very pleasant and no shouting or bad feeling or blood spilt in the dust, and I remember thinking, old Ulysses, instead of all that business of drawing the great bow that only he could draw and shooting down a hundred men in cold blood — all he needed to do was haul out the big fat purse of gold coins he got off the Scherians and buy the old place back, and everybody would've been happy as lambs, nobody dead, and no great deeds to make a song and dance over. All I could think of was, he'd been poor and on the hog so long he'd forgotten he was rich and didn't need to do all that heroic striving and suffering. Silly bugger.
Then I went back to the inn and ordered a big meal, with good wine; actually managed to make it sound like I meant it, instead of it being me playing at being a rich bastard, as part of some scam. Well, I thought, if Lucius Domitius could learn to be a toerag like me, I could learn to be a rich bastard, it comes with practice in the end, like playing the harp or singing.
Well, I've been poor, and I've been rich; and I'm here to tell you, rich is better. Rich is waking up in the morning and wondering what you're going to have for breakfast, rather than whether there's any chance of you getting a meal today Rich is standing in your porch looking up at the sky when it's burning hot or freezing cold, and saying to yourself, Screw it, I'm not going to go to work today, let the hired men do it all. Rich is not having to patch the patches in your cloak, it's being able to ride rather than walk, it's having choices, being able to do what you want and not do what you don't want. Compared with rich, poor sucks.
Now I don't want you thinking I was throwing money around like two drunk sailors on shore leave. You can't just paint over the habits of forty years; and besides, it didn't take long to find out that lots of rich food gave me heartburn and set me off farting all day long, or that more than a couple of cups of wine in the middle of the day left me useless for anything. I had a woman in the village make me up three tunics and two cloaks out of decent quality wool cloth, and I bought two pairs of good boots from a shoemaker in the city. Soon as I was moved in to the farm, I hired a carpenter to build me a proper bed and a table for the house, and I took on a couple of lads to help me get the place back in order, mending the barn roof and refitting the house door so it shut. I rode into town and bought two slaves. I chose middle-aged men, Syrians, who turned out to be quiet, hard-working types, who knew what had to be done around a farm and could be left to get on with it. I gave them the small barn to live in, let them do it up in their off time so they'd be reasonably comfortable. Ptolemy and Smicro, their names were, and I never had any trouble with either of them.
Needless to say, Grandad's little farm wasn't going to be enough to keep me and two hands in the style I was hoping to become accustomed to, but that was all right. It's a wonderful thing, the Roman army Not only do they keep us safe from all the hordes of savage Germans and Parthians (not that they've ever done me any harm, especially compared to, say, the Romans), and they do a bang-up job of patrolling the streets and chasing unscrupulous thieves and conmen down narrow alleys; best of all, the army lures gullible young men away from the farm and either kills them or gives them money to settle down in a distant land when they've done their time. The upshot of this is, the small farmers end up with nobody to leave the old place to when they go on, and more and more land comes up for sale every year. This mostly benefits the Roman senators and their kind, who buy it up and put in slaves and stewards to run it; but it also means that someone like me, if he happens to come into money unexpectedly, can gradually build up a good-sized holding without having to find a huge fortune all in one hit. In this case, it all worked out just fine. One of my neighbours, old Polycleides (who was amazed to find I was still alive, and maybe not best pleased) had lost both his sons to the legion; last heard of, they were colour-sergeants on the Eastern frontier, having far too much fun boozing and chasing skirt ever to want to come home to small-town Attica. So I offered him a good price for his six-acre patch that separated my two biggest parcels, and he nearly took my hand off at the wrist. Mygdon, who never had managed to find a husband for his daughter (though he'd set the dogs on me when I was fifteen and came round with a basket of apples; fair enough, desperate's one thing, but a father's got to draw the line somewhere), sold me four acres of good olives on the southern slopes. Maybe I paid over the odds for the three acres of flat I got off Icarius' family, but I'd always liked the old boy back in the old days, and I couldn't be fussed to strike a hard bargain. In any event, I made up for that by more or less stealing eight acres of hillside from Eurymedon; I paid him the going rate for scrub and stones, but a blind man in the dark could see that all it needed was terracing and it'd be as good as any ground in Phyle. All told, I tripled the size of the farm, bought in vinestocks, seedcorn and olive saplings, treated myself to a new plough, five good oxen and two mules, and I still had over half of the belt money safe in Laberius' bank. Amazing transformation, like one of those fairy tales where the gods turn people into trees or animals: a few months and a handful of shiny round metal discs turned me from the scum of the earth into one of the biggest landed proprietors in Phyle. When all the formalities had been sorted out, the boundary stones earthed in, all that kind of thing, I sat down at my handsome new table with a wax tablet and a potful of dried beans for counters, and figured out my likely annual income; it came to a whisker over or under the magical five hundred measure
s of produce, wet and dry, which used to be the qualification for belonging to the ruling class back in the days of the old Republic, before anybody'd ever heard of the Romans. By the standards of your senators and knights, of course, I was just another dirt-scratching peasant. My little empire wouldn't have been enough to grow the grain it took to feed a senator's tame peacocks. As if I cared. One of the really nice things about being a country gent in Phyle, as far as I was concerned, was that there was no earthly reason why I should ever have to talk to another Roman again as long as I lived. That alone made the whole thing worthwhile, in my opinion.
About the only bad thing about my new life was the company I tried to persuade her she'd be happier living in town where she'd have all her friends about her, but she pointed out the undeniable fact that she didn't have any friends; practically nobody had said a civil word to her for forty-odd years. I reminded her that the farmhouse was a poky little dump of a place, hardly more than a shack compared with her nice, well-appointed house in town, but she replied that she didn't mind that, and anyway, it'd be no bother to build on a couple more rooms. I even offered to buy her the inn; I could tell she was tempted, but she didn't go for it, worse luck. No, she said, her place was by my side. She hadn't been much of a mother to me in the old days, but now at last she'd got a chance to make it up to me, and that's what she was going to spend her last few years this side of the River doing, whether I liked it or not. So she rented out her house in the village (never a chopped obol did I see of any rent money, mind) and moved in with me; her, a big cedarwood chest of clothes, her mangy old polecat (called Galen, for some unaccountable reason) and the goddess Thirst, who'd been her constant companion for fifty years and couldn't bear to be parted from her.
Well, she was good for agriculture, because with her in the house, I found I'd much rather be outdoors, triple-ploughing the fallow or earthing up vines with the ponderous bloody hoe. It worked out that if I stayed in the fields till sundown, by the time I got home she'd have drunk herself into a coma and wouldn't bother me except in small ways, like suddenly yelling in her sleep or throwing up noisily in the fireplace (unforgettable smell, evaporating puke).
My neighbours were terribly impressed by the way I was always up and on my way to the fields with my hoe on my shoulder just before dawn, and you couldn't find a weed or an unbusted clod on my property, though I say it myself as shouldn't.
Even so, there were occasions when I didn't quite time it right, and came home while she was still more or less conscious. Those were the days I really missed Lucius Domitius, because if he'd been there he could have explained to me exactly how they built that clever self-scuttling ship, the one he had made for his old mum. Not that Phyle's all that close to the sea, but I'm a resourceful bloke, I'd have thought of something.
It was on one of our jolly evenings together, me mending a broken shovel-handle with rawhide and her slumped over the table with a winecup the size of your head gripped in her claws, that she said it was a shame and a scandal, the mother of a rich bastard like me having to make shift for herself, when every carpenter's and smith's mother had a lady's maid to do the housework. I looked round at the pigheap I'd been living in since she'd come to stay and thought, if shift's what she makes, I really don't want it; but I didn't say anything, and next day I got on my horse and rode down to the city.
Usually, Athens is a good place to buy people. With all our free-spending Roman visitors there's plenty of money about, and all the ships from the Islands stop at Piraeus before dragging on round the coast, including everything going to and from Delos , which is still the biggest human cattle market on earth. Just my luck, though. Oh, I could've had my pick of field hands, factory hands, craftsmen, teachers, houseboys, you name it. But the only female slaves on offer, apart from the usual flute girls (obviously a staple commodity in a good-time town like Athens), were some scraggy old boilers advertised as laundry and general household, who'd probably have dropped dead from exhaustion halfway up the hill to home, and a few specialist embroiderers, not what was needed and way out of my price bracket in any case.
I wasn't quite sure what to do. There'd be a new consignment along in a day or so, no doubt about it. But that meant going home empty-handed and getting moaned at, and then having to traipse back into town again, and the whole wretched job to do again. I'll be honest with you, I don't go much on slave-shopping. It only goes to show what a disreputable, dodgy life I've led, one step ahead of the watch if I was lucky; but every time I see a line of slaves up on the boards with an auctioneer prancing up and down pointing at them with a little stick, I can't help but reflect that, but for a couple of lucky throws of the dice, it'd have been me up there, and quite probably that was where I rightfully belonged.
So screw it, I thought, I'll get it over and done with, and that'll be that.
So I went to the bank and got a letter for their office on Delos ; sent a runner back to the farm to let them know I'd be away for a few days, stabled my horse and wandered down to Piraeus , where I had my choice of ships leaving for Delos on the afternoon tide. It was funny being back on a ship again. I had to keep telling myself, The Islands are a long way away from Africa and Sicily , and it'd take a real bitch of a freak storm to drive us off course and land us there. I spent most of the journey curled up in a sorry heap up the shard end of the boat — one of the few times I've ever been seasick; amazing I could do it so well with so little practice — so I didn't see much of Andros, Tenos or southern Euboea. Didn't bother me; I was just delighted when they yelled out ' Delos ', and I was able to get off the ship and onto something that didn't buck and weave under my feet all the damn time.
If I'd known what Delos was going to be like, I'd have stayed home. Oh, it's a pleasant enough place, if you like scenery and stuff, and of course there's the world-famous Temple of Apollo, which you can just about see through all the stalls and booths selling little pottery statues and piss-thin bean and leek soup and surefire cures for blindness. I didn't bother with sightseeing; the ship I'd come in on was stopping only one night before going back to Piraeus , and I was determined to be on it, unless I could find something leaving earlier.
Even including Rome , I don't suppose there's any spot on earth that's got more people per square yard than Delos . Also even including Rome , I'm absolutely certain there's nowhere with more pain, suffering and misery per square yard, either. You couldn't call me the soft-hearted type, compassion's a luxury for people who don't have any great call to go feeling sorry for themselves. But I didn't like Delos . It made me jumpy as a cat. Any moment I expected to feel a bloody great big hand on my shoulder, or hear someone yell out, There he is, grab him before he gets away; and then I'd be up on one of those platforms, collar round my neck, holes punched in my earlobes, and that'd be that. Guilty conscience? I don't think so. Call it twenty-four years' accumulated twitch, the instinct you get when you've spent a lifetime on the hog, that tells you this is the sort of place where your sort of people come to harm. And, no doubt about it, there were plenty of my sort of people there, and none of them were buying.
Far as the eye could see, there were these wooden platforms, like little stages or boxing rings, and on each one, a little gaggle of people, all different shapes and sizes and colours and ages, the only thing they had in common being the obtrusive wrought iron jewellery. Running Delos must be a logistical nightmare, just making sure there's enough grain in the bins to feed them all, even on slaves' rations. The noise gets to you, and the smell, and the tiny gaps between people's shoulders that you've got to squeeze through to move about.
There must be over a thousand auctioneers in the market any day of the year, and of course they all have loud, carrying auctioneers' voices, like professional singers singing ballads with numbers instead of words, and they're all going at it at the same time. It's like you're on an anvil, and the voices are like hammers, when half a dozen strikers are working the same piece. If it hadn't been for the fact that I'd spent several really unco
mfortable days getting there, I'd have turned tail and gone straight back to the ship.
But I didn't. I wandered round from stage to stage, trying to take an intelligent interest. But I ask you, what's a good-quality, value-for-money lady's maid supposed to look like, anyhow? Do you want something middle-aged, nice and quiet and steady, or are you after young and strong, that won't wear out after six months' use; short or tall, round or square, Greek or German, or doesn't it matter a toss? And are you allowed to notice that they're people, or would that screw up the whole system — and that'd be a disaster for the whole Empire, I know that, but surely it wouldn't hurt too desperately much, if I promised not to tell anyone.
In other words, I felt like I was completely out of my depth there. Dumb, I know It says in Aristotle or somewhere that some people are born to be slaves, and some people are born to be masters. Stands to reason. But where it seems to me the system breaks down is when a bloke like me — no prizes for guessing which category I fall in — finds himself plonked down on the wrong side of the platform. Then it stops making sense, and once it stops it's like a cart on a steep hill: a bugger of a job to get it started again.
Anyhow, there I was, walking up and down between the stands, painfully aware that I hadn't got a clue what I was supposed to be doing and thinking how nice it'd be to be home in Phyle, beating the shit out of clods of dirt with the ponderous hoe, when quite suddenly I saw a face I recognised.