by John James
Then one morning, while everyone else, muleteers and all, were sleeping off the last and most outrageous party, Marco and Cicva and I took horses and rode off to Bonnonia.
Chapter Three
We moved in on our agent in Bonnonia. He was even more embarrassed to see us than Macrinus had been. He was expecting an important Greek businessman, somebody used to dealing in millions and bargaining with the Governors of Provinces, and that of course he got. But he didn’t expect me, with a variety of false eyes to suit my moods and hair all over – I had let it grow, beard and all, on the way up from Rome. And he got Marco, who had a scar across his face that turned his eye outwards, so that the milder he was feeling the more brutal he looked. Cicva was the most respectable of the three of us, to look at. I’d given her some money to get dressed up with in Lugdunum, and you know what Lugdunum fashions are. Then she’d had them altered to her own taste in Lutetia, and we all know the Parisii have no sense of how to dress. She ended up looking like an only moderately successful whore.
Marco was quite happy. He was anchor man, which suited him. He was to see that everyone was contented in Bonnonia after I left. He knew perfectly his place in my plan. The only trouble was that I hadn’t got a plan. I had a vague idea that nothing would come right till I had a ship. I had to go and find one.
On the second night in Bonnonia I took out of my baggage an old grey cloak with a hood. I put it on, and went out. Marco followed me. He kept a few yards behind me, and when I went into a tavern he would stand by the door, just inside, making it clear that I wasn’t alone.
The first tavern I went into – I was choosing the less reputable ones, the ones down by the quay, where the clientele would be sailors, and not the most respectable sailors either – well, the first one I went into, I called for drinks all round. While everybody was drinking my health – and after the long journey, and the nights in Lutetia, I needed some attention to my health – I stood by the bar counter, and I drew idly in the sawdust of the floor with my toe. I drew a face, at least a circle with eyes and a mouth, and eight lines sticking out of it like arms, and to each arm I gave a hand holding some kind of weapon, an axe or a sword. Nobody took the slightest notice. I finished my beer and moved on.
I did precisely the same in the next tavern I came to. Again nobody seemed to take the slightest notice, except for the man next to me. He dipped his finger in a puddle of beer and drew a fish on the bar counter. He looked at me meaningly, which was difficult with the squint he had, and then quickly rubbed it out again. I didn’t know anything about that, so I just said:
‘And mackerel to you, brother,’ in Gaulish, and moved on to the next tavern.
But when I got into the third tavern, I only had time to draw the circle, when someone took me by the elbow, and drew me away. I looked at him. He seemed familiar, somehow. Perhaps he had been in the other taverns and had run on in front of me. Perhaps I had met him before, sometime, on the Amber Road. He was a big man and yellow-haired, his face smeared with pig fat against the salt wind. He steered me across to a booth at the back of the room. Marco stayed by the door and watched.
The men at the back of the room were all sailors, and all dressed as Friesians. I turned back the edge of my hood, and let them see the patch over my eye. Nobody said anything. They put a big horn of beer in front of me, the kind of vessel you use in drinking matches. The beer was strong, dark and sweetish. I drained it at one long, slow draught. It nearly killed me. I was out of practice. Then one of the sailors asked in the Germans’ tongue – he must have been a Dane from his dialect:
‘You are looking for Starkadder Eightarms?’
‘And if I were?’ I lifted the eyepatch and let him have the full benefit of the emerald I was wearing in the empty socket. I had it carved by a man I know in the Piraeus. I will give you his name if you like. It showed, tiny but clear, the wolves dancing around a tree, a tree with a man in it. I listened to his reply.
‘Then I would tell you, that he is at the other end of the Shallow Sea, harrying the Fenni.’
‘And Alfhilda Vikarsdaughter, his wife?’
‘With him. Where else should she be but with him?’
‘And Caw? Where is Caw?’
‘Gone, long gone. Who knows where?’
‘Smuggling lead,’ I told them. ‘Let’s have some more beer, and no half measures this time.’
And we did. Everybody got quite talkative in a secretive way. They were all painting ludicrous pictures of Caw swimming the Channel to Britain with a pig of lead under each arm in case he sank, and the whole atmosphere of the tavern became a good deal easier. We drank a good deal more. More Germans came in: soon there were about a score of them. By the time we started singing ‘Sweyn, the Bastard King of Scania’, the few respectable customers left. The landlord didn’t object: he was singing too.
The Germans were all sorts. About half of them were Friesians or Batavians, but the rest were Saxons and Thuringians by their accents, and Goths, and even a Lombard. This last was rather stupid. He couldn’t understand the subtleties of travelling incognito as quickly as the others, and once he called me ‘All father’ quite openly, and all the others shushed him. But every man was a sailor, just the kind you would expect with Starkadder.
I got into a corner with a few of the most prominent. The others were trying to make Marco drunk, and I could have told them they had little chance of succeeding. I asked the leader, who had first taken my arm, his name. He did his best to play the Friesian, but if his accent was anything to go by, he was a Goth. He said:
‘Call me Bert.’
I asked the next man.
‘I’m Bert too.’
‘Just the same as him?’
‘Just the same. We’re all Bert, just call us Bert.’
Well, perhaps it’s better not to have a name anyone can tell you by if you’re in their trade. None of them asked my real name. They thought they knew it. Why should I know theirs? They only wanted to know my business that night, and whether it was the same as theirs was every night.
I was right. They were some of Starkadder’s men, who had brought a prize down from the Shallow Sea, and now they were waiting for Starkadder to come back for them. Meanwhile, they were willing to try anything which would turn a profit and not make Roman ports too dangerous for them. After all, Starkadder had to have somewhere safe to winter in, and refit, and sell what he stole in the North. This was what I was looking for.
‘There’s a man coming here soon,’ I told them. ‘I want him—’
‘Dead?’ interrupted Lombard Bert, hopefully.
‘No!’ I answered, a little crossly. ‘He wants to go to Britain. I want him to go to Britain – but on my ship. And with me in it. And I want him to have a nice quiet game of dice or something on the way. But I haven’t got a ship.’
‘Anybody we know?’ asked Goth Bert.
‘A man called Gwawl.’
‘Oh, him,’ said Lombard Bert: I said he was rather stupid, and his talents, though considerable in their way, were limited in their scope. ‘I can kill him easy. I haven’t killed anybody for weeks.’
‘If you don’t keep quiet,’ Goth Bert grumbled at him, ‘I’ll take that flaming axe of yours and throw it in the dock.’ He turned back to me. ‘So you want a ship?’
‘And a crew I can rely on.’
‘And one that Gwawl can’t rely on.’ Goth Bert followed my drift perfectly. A Batavian Bert came in with the crucial question:
‘How much are you offering?’
‘How much do you want? What’s the regular rate around here?’
After that, it was only a matter of haggling. Hard cash for the crew; for the ship, I guaranteed a cargo both ways at four times the usual rates, wine out and hides back. That was to Londinium, but of course, I myself would leave the vessel when she cleared the customs at Rutupiae.
The Berts had two ships, prizes they’d not yet sold, and I went to look at them next day. One was very fine, a Gothship, sleek and beau
tiful and fast, twenty rowers a side. And the finish, wonderful! It made you open your eyes at the very thought of the kind of craftsmen they had up there in the North, doing everything, as I knew, with axe and adze and no other tools, no saws or chisels for them. I’d always wanted to have one of those ships under me. I didn’t take her, quite unsuitable.
The other was a Friesian, comfortable and roomy, as broad as she was long, or at least she looked it. She was decked, and under the poop where there was enough headroom for a man to stand she had quite a cosy cabin. She set the one big square sail, and there were sweeps for the times when there was no wind, and that was rare enough up in the North. I took her, but that was the next day.
That first night, we had a real party. We had lots of singing and embracing and rubbing of cuts-together to mix blood, and I got Marco to join in that. One of the hardest things I had to do was to keep Marco feeling happy, since he couldn’t understand a thing I said to the Germans. And then before the feast got too unruly, I bawled out:
‘I’ll give ten gold pieces for a sword!’
‘Not on shore,’ said Goth Bert. ‘It’s a hanging matter here to carry a sword, unless you have a licence, and I’ve never met a man yet who has.’
‘Well I have,’ I told him. ‘A general licence, from the Emperor’s Chancery, to carry a sword anywhere in the Empire, in defence of my goods.’ And that’s what a bit of influence does for you, that and a name for quite fair dealing all across the Mediterranean Sea.
‘Even so,’ went on Goth Bert, ‘they’re strict here. The Port Captain, he winks at what we’ve got in the ships, but we mustn’t bring any weapons ashore. If you wait till we get aboard, I dare say we can fit you out.’
‘I doubt it,’ I told him. ‘I want a Sax, a good one, well shaped, curved no more than the bow of a ship. A back edge thick as my thumb, the bone-breaker. The fore edge like a razor, the mailsplitter. Point like a needle, the heart-piecer. And I want an Ingelri.’
For Ingelri was the greatest swordsmith of all Germany, and his blades were like no others. They were all silent for a few moments, and one murmured, a fat man he was, that ten gold pieces wouldn’t do it, no, nor twenty either, seeing it meant going across the Rhine. But in seven days he himself came to me with a Sax, a splendid one, but for one thing – he couldn’t get an Ingelri in the time, he had had to make do with an Elfbert. Of course, to those who know their iron, this was almost as good, for Elfbert was Ingelri’s apprentice, and if his swords had a fault it was that he tended to make them a little heavier towards the point than need be.
There was no hilt to this sword, of course, just the blade and the tang with the iron pommel at the end. We took it to a swordsmith in the town, who did a lot of work for Officers of the Garrison. First he had to be satisfied I had a right to own the weapon, and then he looked at the quality of the iron, and his eyes glistened. He asked me if I had any preference in the form of the hilt. I said no, provided he made a showy job of it. And if he knew of a goldsmith, then he could melt down these coins, and set in it – and I took them out of my wallet – these stones, garnets and emeralds and a blue sapphire, and a here was a big ball of crystal.
It took him some days. He beat out the tang into ridges in the shape of an X, and instead of beechwood or horn, as is usual, he made the grip of walrus ivory, carved and weighted to fit my hand. Then, with the Gold, he ornamented the arms of the X to look like a man, spreadeagled, and the gems set in to point off his clothes, and the great ball of crystal where the head should be. A sword it was now fit for any of the great Kings of ancient Gaul, for Vercingetorix or for Dumnorix, or for Brennus himself to throw in a balance and make the insolent Romans pay.
But as for a scabbard, he told me to keep it in the plain wooden sheath, covered in leather, that Fat Bert brought it to me in. He insisted that he was the finest hilt-maker in the world – but his equal in the company of scabbard-makers lived in Londinium, and even if I were not going there, it would be worth the journey to have a scabbard made to match the hilt. He gave me the name.
I put the bill in to the family. So far this chase had cost about eleven thousand sestertia, what with buying Cicva (because I couldn’t let Philebus pay for that, after all), the journey up, hiring the ship and crew, and all the expense of making sure that when Gwawl arrived in Bonnonia he would find no ship but mine willing to take him. This wasn’t so expensive as you might think, because he had been in the town before, and everybody he had met on that occasion seemed to bear him a hearty dislike, though why I could not find out. Still, all this was a little cheaper than the two hundred thousand Gwawl had asked for in the first place. Or it would be, if I could catch him.
I asked Goth Bert where people usually went to ask about Channel passages, and he told me about a tavern called the Capricorn. We went there and arranged to take the whole place over the night Gwawl arrived in Bonnonia. At least, we told the landlord we were taking it over.
‘And if you object,’ Lombard Bert told him, ‘I’ll bash your bloody head in with my axe. I haven’t killed anybody for days.’ Even he had his moments of usefulness. The landlord agreed.
I spent a long time letting Cicva know exactly what she had to do.
‘When he gets here, I want you to be ready and dressed up in the Capricorn. You’ll want some of those clothes I bought you in Lutetia, that’s just the right touch, ornate and flashy but a year or two behind the fashion. Now with your hair piled up on top and dyed yellow … No? All right, then, dress as you please as long as you think he won’t know you. The most favourable thing is that he won’t expect to see you. Are you quite sure, then, that you can handle Gwawl?’
‘Yes, as long as I don’t have to sleep with him. I don’t have to sleep with him, do I?’
‘That’s up to you, dear. If you can manage without, so much the better. Don’t let him have any profit or pleasure out of this that we can avoid.’
‘I don’t want to. I don’t like him. I mean, as well as hating him. I don’t like him either. I like you, Photinus. Why don’t you try to sleep with me?’
‘Because I don’t do that sort of thing with every pretty girl I get hold of.’
‘What will you do when you finish the hyena hair?’ And that was a clever question. As you know, all you need do if you are a rake and worried about it is to take some hair of a hyena, and burn it to ash, and mix the ash with grease to form an ointment. Then you rub it in … that is … you rub it well in, anyway, and immediately your whole conduct changes. You stop running after women, you work harder, and get awfully staid, and everybody says what a reliable and respectable citizen you are now. Well, it may be good for trade, but who wants to live like that? And besides, the smell of the ointment – no wonder you can’t get anyone to sleep with you in that state. So I said to Cicva:
‘And why should I sleep with a pretty girl like you, with a wife and a baby at home?’
And that was more like the truth of it, that and my determination not to sleep with any more barbarian women, or even to speak to them more than was absolutely necessary, not like the last time I was in the North. It only gets you into the most appalling trouble.
Phryne was enough for me, I thought. I had come home from the Amber Road to find that my grandmother had arranged it all. I must admit she was not very exciting in her mild, submissive, Mediterranean way. And she had no mind at all, really, almost illiterate, and not the slightest inkling of what was going on anywhere outside her own kitchen. It made no difference to her whether I said I was off to Rhodes or to Gades or to Ultima Thule, they were all just the same to her, all vaguely somewhere ‘away’. Still, she let me hold the little girl sometimes, and that was more than anyone had let me do before. And now there was another child on the way, in the early autumn, and this ought to be a boy – I had done all the right things, sprinkled the bed with the pollen of the male date flower, and turned it with the head to the North, and made Phryne eat parsnips and myself gorged on orchid roots till we were both sick.
&
nbsp; Besides, though I flattered Cicva, she was not really very attractive to me, except in the face, for she was short, and heavy hipped. I like women that are tall and slender.
Anyway, I thought then, I ought to be back home by the autumn. The summer ought to see me into Ireland, to arrange terms of trade with whatever king controlled the Gold mines, and then at once back through Gaul to Ostia and a ship back home to the Old City. That’s what I thought then. But first of all, I had to get the Deed of Monopoly back from Gwawl, and pass it on to the family’s agent in Londinium.
Settling with Gwawl was all worked out in my mind now. It’s fascinating how these problems solve themselves once you start to think about what resources you have and how they can be used. Now we had covered every possible variant. We knew how to deal with Gwawl loitering, Gwawl in a hurry, Gwawl early, Gwawl late, Gwawl drunk, Gwawl sober, Gwawl angry, Gwawl pleased. Marco and Goth Bert and I planned and planned, while Cicva looked for hours at a time into a mirror and tried on her wigs and painted her face in a thousand different ways. It kept us all happy while we waited for the draft to arrive.
One of Marco’s Spaniards came into Bonnonia two hours ahead of Gwawl. There was another man following him, in case he changed his mind and went to another port. The legionaries had gone into a camp outside the town and cooled their feet a while. The mule-drivers cooled their throats, scorched raw by the language they had been using all the way from Rome on their treacherous beasts. But Gwawl came on into the town. You could spot him a mile off in his black and white shirt, striped from neck to hem. It was a Gaulish shirt. They like bright colours, and the more colours, and the more complex the pattern of stripes and checks, the better. And the Brits wear their shirts the same way, hanging down over their trousers loose to the buttocks, not down to the knees as a civilised man wears his tunic over his bare legs, or tucked short into the trousers at the waist as all the Germans do.