by John James
‘Now for shoes like these, what would you say was a fair price? What do I say? Twenty-five silver denarii a pair? would that not be fair? But am I asking twenty-five denarii for a pair? I, who only came here to benefit my kinsmen? I who only came here to make you remember, and remember kindly, your brethren in Galatia?
‘Shall I ask you for twenty denarii a pair, then? Shall I even ask for ten denarii a pair? No!! I have come to invite you to share in my own good fortune, because I walk in such shoes every day of my life. Shall I ask for five denarii a pair, that would hardly cover the cost of the leather and the dye, and leave nothing over to reward us for our labour? No!!! All I need here is enough money in my hand to pay for the night’s lodgings for myself and my friend, and for a handful of musty hay for our horses, who are religious and given to fasting. All I ask is two denarii, just two little horses, for a pair of the most durable, the most comfortable, the most distinctive shoes you will ever wear.’
They sold like water in a city under siege. Long before noon we had sold almost all our stock, and I was already beginning to reckon up my profit – I estimated that I had made three pairs for less than one denarius. All kinds of people had come to buy, first the market people themselves, and then farmers and their wives, and our greatest sale had, as always, been among the local lads buying what they hoped would get their girls into the long grass with them. But then as I looked at my last pair, a different customer arrived. There was a sudden thinning out of the crowd in front of me, leaving a space, and as I looked it was covered with a swarm of sparrows, hopping about and quarrelling for the crumbs and the grains of oats they found in the horse-droppings. And as I looked down, there appeared among the birds the feet of a Lady. It was feet and shoes I was looking at that day, and by the shoes this was a great Lady, the litter trade if ever I saw it. They were fine and dainty feet, and that was real Spanish leather that covered them, and dyed it was in a dye that would stand up to all the weather of the world. Dressed she was like a woman of the country. Not like the women of Pontes, who wanted to show how sophisticated they were and walked Roman fashion in tunics with a pallium to throw over their shoulders if the weather required it, which it always does up there.
I saw beneath her skirt of wool, fine wool, all woven in a check of light blue and dark blue and grey, there were a dozen petticoats. Each one was of a different colour. I raised my eyes to her apron, of fine linen, white, and embroidered with the flowers of the flax. This linen I knew, it had come from Egypt. About her waist was her belt, and this if not the belt of a queen was the belt of a queen’s daughter or of a queen to be, for it was of a dozen strands of chain, alternate links of Gold and silver, and at the front it was dastened by a buckle of silver, the size of both my palms, studded with garnets. I looked farther up, to the full bosom hidden, half hidden, by a blouse of silk, white silk, but embroidered in its turn with blue silk in a Pictish pattern of whorls and spirals. I looked up to her shawl, and this was of cotton, white again, and tasselled, and it was woven through and across with golden wire, and the wire ran out to stiffen the tassels. And under the shawl I saw hair of a light lively red, and it framed a face well known, well known indeed.
There she stood like a rich and splendid trireme, beating back from a voyage to the Seres, all laden with silk and Gold and pearls and diamonds. Rich enough she was to buy up all the ocean, strong enough to beat off all attack. She stood before me with her flags and banners flying, her birds sang about her like a cloud of sail full drawing. And she spoke, in a voice that I surely had heard singing:
‘How much for shoes, Mannanan?’
At the sound of that voice, all my bones turned to water. Somewhere deep down inside me the merchant said, ‘Go on, tell her the tale, how they are dyed by a secret recipe known only to the ancients of Galatia, and how they would be cheap at a hundred denarii, and how you will reduce them for her, special for her, to a mere twenty-five.’ But I could not do it. I looked at that oval face, the straight nose and the firm lips, and I looked down to where it looked back at me from my own shoes, and all I could say was:
‘For you, my Lady, there is no charge. They are a gift. Take them as an offering to your beauty from your brethren in Galatia.’
She stood still for a moment. Then she called over her shoulder:
‘Pay him, Hueil.’
A man came forward from the crowd behind, and I saw that he was wearing trousers in the same blue and grey check as her skirt, and more, that he was one of a group, four or five. He came to me, and picked up the last pair of shoes, then shook his head and threw them back on the ground. Then he stooped to where I squatted cross-legged, and in one swift movement whipped the shoes off my feet, the shoes on which I had painted Aphrodite, and stuffed them into his bag. He tossed me, contemptuously, a coin, and followed his mistress into the crowd. I went livid, I felt it, and for a moment I almost threw the coin back after him, but the basic sanity that is the salvation of every merchant prevailed, and I bit it. It was Gold, all right, not lead. I looked at it more closely. This was not the head of any Emperor. Wafer thin, the coin was about the size of my thumbnail. On one side was a horse, with a human head. On the other was a name, in crude Greek lettering – the coiner, however well he could draw a horse on the face of the die, certainly could not read. With difficulty I read it: Niros of the Treveri. Here, on a quarter of an ounce of Gold, this long-dead King of the Gauls still lived. But the coin, minted how many years, how many hundreds of years ago, was still new, and unclipped, and unworn. The outlines and the letters were as crisp as on the day when they were stamped out. This gold piece had never been carried in a purse to jostle its fellows and wear itself into dust. It was almost as if it had been carefully put aside against a day – against today.
The sight of the gold, Hueil’s action, paralysed me for as long as a man might take to count to twenty. Then I sprang up, seizing Pryderi by the arm. All through my conversation with the Lady he had sat there, his back to us, huddled up, as if trying not to be noticed.
‘Come on!’ I cried to him. ‘Follow the Lady! Find her!’
He looked up at me.
‘Mad you are, Mannanan, I always said you were mad. There’s no following her, not for a sane man.’
‘Why? Do you know her? Who is she?’
‘Know her? Of course I do, and so does every Briton who sees her go by. My own first cousin she is, daughter of my mother’s sister, and named after my mother. Rhiannon of the Brigantes, she is, and a great Princess, and a wealthy one, because it is the Brigantes that have made their peace with Rome, and they get all kind of favours. But I would not have you talk with her, for that very reason.’
‘Making your peace with the Emperor seems to be profitable,’ I observed, holding out the gold coin.
‘Ach-y-fi!’ he said, which is the Brits’ expression of disgust. ‘And would I be touching that, knowing where it has come from?’
I thought this was a trifle extreme a way of showing that he was not on good terms with his cousin. I said as firmly as I could:
‘Well, whoever she is, I must find her.’
I stood and I was about to make off into the crowd, where I could still see Hueil pushing along, when there was an interruption. Pryderi was gathering up the knives and needles and last and the rest of the shoemaker’s tools, when two fat and scarlet men came puffing up to us like a pair of roosters in the spring.
‘Look here,’ said the redder and fatter of the two. ‘And what do you think you’ve been doing?’
‘And who do you think you are, when you have stood still long enough for your manners to catch up with you, and running hard they must be because they are so far behind.’ Pryderi could be insolent when he chose, and I decided that as it was his language the men were speaking, I would leave him to carry on the conversation, which promised to become a little acrimonious.
‘This is a formal complaint. We are the co-equal Chairmen of the Shoemakers’ Guild of Pontes. We have been told, and informed, and wa
rned, that you have been making shoes within the boundaries of the unincorporated Municipality of Pontes, contrary to the Charter agreed between the Guilds of the Town, and amended by, in particular, the by-law of the Fourth Year of Domitian, Chap Six, Clause Four, Para Two.’
‘We were not making shoes. It was slippers we were making.’
‘It is the same thing.’
‘It is not at all the same thing.’ By the light in Pryderi’s eyes, it was clear that there was nothing he would like more than an argument at the end of his long silent day sitting at my feet in the market, his mouth full of waxed thread and needles, and if necessary, I could see, he would keep an argument of the type of ‘You did’ – ‘I didn’t’ going for hours. The two men could see it too. The spokesman avoided the trap. He merely said:
‘The terms “shoes” is general, and subsumes under it all slippers, boots and other footwear.’
‘It does not,’ Pryderi snapped back. ‘Slippers are most clearly defined and distinguished and differentiated from shoes by a Law of Lud Son of Heli that was King of Londinium in the years before the Conquest. And it is known to every thinking man that it is precisely these laws treating of the definition of terms that are by the laws of the Empire and by the grace of the Caesars deemed to be the basis and the foundation and the substratum of all local municipalities and corporations, especially of unincorporated federations of Guilds.’
‘Careful, you. It is our town you are in, unincorporated or not, and you will do what we say.’
‘Force is it now? You can always tell if a man has a bad case that he would not argue in a court of law, when he begins to talk in terms of numbers and of possessions.’
‘Another word, and you will be in front of the Magistrate, and there is little chance you will have in front of him, being as he is my brother-in-law, and treasurer of the Potters’ Guild as well. Hand it over, we want every penny you have made by cheating this afternoon.’
‘And there is not a single denarius we have made by cheating. That is defamatory, and it is before the Magistrate we will be arguing that, I tell you. I rely on the help of my friend here, who is familiar with the law and the Rescripts of the Empire covering this very point, and has the more important of them by heart, seeing he is a Citizen – of Rome, I mean, not of any little hamlet like Londinium or Pontes.’
There was a short pause. There is an advantage in having the kind of influence being a Citizen gives you out in the more distant provinces of the Empire, where Citizens born are rare outside the Army. The second of the co-equal Chairmen, seeing his chance, muttered something about ‘never sue a Citizen, they’ve always got some pull somewhere,’ which is true enough. The two officials of the Guild muttered more furiously after that, but so quietly they could only be heard by each other, and when Pryderi tried to put his head in between theirs they cursed him so roundly that even he stood back. At last the first Chairman said:
‘All right, then. Keep what you’ve got, but clear out of town now. I mean now, straight away, this instant.’
Pryderi began to look fierce, but just in time the second co-equal Chairman said himself:
‘No, not this afternoon, but tomorrow morning. We want to send a man ahead to warn all the other Shoemakers’ Guilds ahead as far as Glevum.’
We didn’t object to that. I was tired of making shoes. But the interlude had done the damage. The Lady had vanished, and try as I would, walking about the town, I could not find her again. I was able to do a little shopping, against the next town, investing the proceeds of the morning’s work, the silver, that is. Not the Gold: I kept that.
It was dusk when I got back to the inn. Pryderi was in the main room, drinking cider with a rather motley set of companions. I joined them.
‘I think there’s a story here you would like to hear,’ was Pryderi’s greeting. ‘It’s about Gold. You buy old Blino a mug of cider, and you shall hear it.’
I obeyed. It was a very old man who sat there, very old indeed. As soon as he was satisfied that I really was going to buy him cider, he drew me into the darkest corner of the taproom.
‘Not everybody I would show this to, you understand,’ he whispered, suffocating me with the foul wind from his decaying teeth. ‘But since you are a friend of him, then I will.’
He fumbled in his pouch and brought out a twist of black and yellow cloth. He untwisted it, and showed a ring, a Golden ring. It was made of Gold wire, fine as a hair, twined into a sixteen-fold strand like rope, big enough to go on his now shrunken little finger.
‘That’s Irish Gold,’ he told me.
‘How do you know?’
‘Why, that’s where I got it.’
‘From Ireland?’
‘No! nobody alive goes to Ireland. I got it out of a grave. Dug it out with an iron spade, I did, so I was safe enough. They won’t never come back from Ireland to find me that way.’
‘Who won’t?’
‘The dead, of course. That’s where the dead go, to Ireland. I’m keeping this, like they did, to pay my passage, where every labouring man is paid in Gold, where there is neither hunger nor thirst nor pain, nor cold nor the bitter sadness of defeat, where age rusts not away the spring of youth, where men and women are for ever young, far in the Golden Island of the Blessed.’
His voice died away. I wondered how the rest of the poem had gone. He was past asking now. Cider and age had done their sleepy work. I raised my eyes from the Gold in his hand, and I looked over his shoulder into the face of a man with a squint. He made the Sign of the Four, as the Druids do, on face and chest, and was gone in the flickering light. I put the ring back in the pouch, and the pouch firmly into the old man’s hand. If he had nothing now, why should he not have his youth again?
Chapter Seven
Next morning we took the road again. Pryderi looked suspiciously at the big packages I loaded on my horses and on his, big and awkward, but light as a feather. However, he said nothing, probably thinking that anything I told him would only spoil his peace of mind, if he had any left.
The road from Pontes to Calleva soon leaves the river valley, and goes up on to higher ground, a long belt of barren sandy soil, sour and good for nothing but growing timber for charcoal. Where the country was more open it was covered with gorse and heather. Sometimes the sun shone, and then I felt at home. It was good adder country if ever I saw it.
Calleva we reached at sunset. It is quite a pleasant town, in a provincial way. The only trouble with it is that there is no reason at all why it should exist. Usually a city has some reason for being where it is. Either there is a bridge, or a ford, or two roads cross, or there is a good site to build a fort. But there Calleva stands in the middle of an oak forest, on the edge of that adder country, with not so much as a little stream close by to give it an excuse for being.
Why was it there? Well, there had been the day, back in old Claudius’s time, when the Legion had first pounded along into the wilderness, laying down the road as it went. Now it so happened that in that month the King of the Atrebates was spending the time eating up his rents in that particular dirty shabby little village, as he had spent the month before in another shabby little village, and as he would move on to a third when the country around Calleva was eaten bare. If you have no roads, and your wealth is in food and cloth, then it is much easier to go where your wealth is to consume it than to have it brought to you. So with the great decisiveness an Empire expects from its commanders, the legate of the legion decided that this must be the capital of the Atrebates, and that the country of the Atrebates must be governed from a great city here on this spot.
The kingdom, therefore, became the country, and the King became the hereditary chairman of a local senate, and his nobles became hereditary senators. Nothing else was changed at first, only the names. But the country had to pay a corn tax, and in wheat, too, which up to now they only grew to make a kind of beer out of.
Then there came the development. Under the pressure of the Procurator and his staff,
the local notables marked out wide boundaries for the new capital they hadn’t realised they wanted. They built walls, of earth first, with a stake fence on top, and they put a gate in each of the four walls, just like a legionary camp. Then they laid out two straight roads across the town, from gate to gate, just as in a camp, and where the Praetorium of a camp should be they built a basilica to serve as a senate chamber and as a court. It was a mud-and-wattle hall at first, but when I came to Calleva they had just rebuilt it in stone, and they were very proud of their marble barn.
Now, if the nobles were going to sit in the local senate they would have to live in their capital for some months of the year, and so each one built himself a house in the town. Of course, each one thought he would not settle there, but he would still live most of the time in his own farm-house in the country, which gave him his income. But the nobles reckoned without their ladies. You know how women are when they get together. They soon find out the pleasures of gossiping, and they object when their husbands begin to suggest that it is now time to return to the country. That is an end to the free and lonely life. So now the nobles live in the town all the year round, and their stewards bring them in their rents by the fine new road. Nowadays the nobles never see their farms at all, and their people who would once have followed them into battle even against the legions forgot what they looked like or even who they were. Only in a few wild regions, where the kings had refused to submit to Rome, or to live in towns, did the people still follow their ancient lords. But kingdoms were one thing. Clans were another, and even if a man forgot who was his king, he would remember who were his ancestors, and accept his relations, even to seventeen generations. And that, I thought, was why Pryderi was so careful about choosing his inns, and why he was so calm about leaving our property unguarded.