The Ghosts of Glevum

by Rosemary Rowe

  Fatbeard must have sensed the way my thoughts had run. He gave a nasty smile and inched me back into the alleyway, prodding me roughly in the stomach with his makeshift club. It was a large and ugly piece of wood, big enough to support half a roof, but he handled it as if it were a twig. It was enough to ensure that I did not resist.

  ‘Well?’ he said again, when we were safely out of sight of passers-by.

  I could not have answered coherently if I’d tried. I wondered faintly whether a beating from that club would be better or worse than a systematic questioning by Bullface’s men. On any logical reckoning, Bullface won. There was just a chance my rank of Roman citizen would help me if I were officially arrested. Here, a claim of rank was only likely to make matters worse: and if Fatbeard did thrash a confession out of me, he would presumably march me triumphantly away, hand me over and pocket the reward, in which case Bullface’s men would get me anyway.

  But instinct won. Something told me that Fatbeard did not love authority, and that being on the run from men in uniform might just be an advantage in his company. It was worth a try. I gave a helpless nod. ‘I was trying to hide from those men, it’s true. They’ve just got here from Gaul. They’re not the regular garrison.’ I don’t know why I added that – it didn’t help.

  Fatbeard looked singularly unimpressed. ‘If they come from Gaul, what do they want you for? And don’t lie to me!’ He gave me a warning clout around the shoulder blades, not quite hard enough to knock me down.

  I wondered how long it would take to die, and how long it would take the news of my fate to reach Gwellia. What would become of her, if I was conveniently set upon and killed here in the street, thereby relieving the civic authorities of the necessity?

  Perhaps it was the thought of that which helped me find my tongue enough to say, ‘Listen – I am a poor pavement-maker by trade . . .’

  Fatbeard interrupted with a sneer. ‘A pavement-maker, is it? What about that toga, fancy-feet?’

  I hesitated, fearing that the truth would shatter any fragile hopes I had. ‘That slave you saw me with – I know him well. It is his master’s robe – he’s taking it to the fuller’s to be cleaned – and he helped me to use it to disguise myself.’ All of which was perfectly true, I told myself. I simply hadn’t mentioned that the slave and toga were my own. ‘I am a mosaic-maker, as I said. I have a little workshop on the northern edge of town. I try to ply my trade and mind my own business, in the ordinary way, but the commander of the force from Gaul is dead, and one of my customers – my patron – is accused of it. He was arrested last night by those men you saw – they were the dead man’s bodyguard – and now they’re after me. I found them on guard outside my workshop this afternoon. I didn’t stop to ask questions – I just ran away.’

  Fatbeard spat. ‘You expect me to believe all this?’

  ‘Ask anyone who was in the Street of the Tannery today. Or at the citadel last night. Ask anyone at all. I’m sure the story will be all round the streets by now.’ I was safe in that. The forum wits say that a rich man cannot belch in Glevum without everyone’s hearing of it within an hour or two, and for once I was glad of the rumour-whisperers. The story of Marcus’s arrest must be the subject of the whole town’s gossip now.

  My questioner looked scornful. ‘I shall ask people, fancy-feet, make no mistake. And if what you are telling me is lies, I’ll make you sorry you were ever born. In the meantime, you come along with me, until I decide what’s to be done with you.’ He had me backed up against the wall, but now he stepped back and gave me a sharp prod with his club, urging me to walk in front of him.

  I was still battered from my fall and from the guard’s kick, so I could do nothing but shuffle on ahead. I lacked the strength or speed now to run away again, and there was no chance of giving Fatbeard the slip. Whenever I glanced backwards he was watching me – his little glittering eyes fixed on me as if attached with fish-head glue. In fact I soon learned not to glance at all. Each time I turned my head he jabbed hard at my spine with his piece of jagged wood.

  We walked in silence down the muddy path. I was cold and I was hungry – I had eaten and drunk nothing since I left the roundhouse shortly after dawn – and with my bleeding face and bruised limbs I felt like misery itself. By now it was becoming dark, and though the rain had ceased a dank river-mist was rising. However, from what loomed up through the gloom, it was evident that we were going back the way I’d come, and I expected at any minute to find myself back at the rags-and-rubbish pile. But before we had arrived at it my captor stopped and pushed me roughly to one side, and through a gap where a portion of the wall had fallen in.

  ‘You get in there,’ he said, and thrust me forward into a kind of hut: a rough stone shed with no windows in the wall. It had the remnants of a roof, and from the general smell that rose from the earth floor it might once have been a shelter for a pig. The door, such as it was, hung lopsidedly, but even as he pushed me inside the hut I saw that Fatbeard was moving into place a huge flat stone to wedge the door, securing me inside more effectively than with any Roman barrel-lock and key.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, as if I had a choice. ‘I’m going to talk to a friend or two of mine, and then we’ll decide what’s to become of you. I think that you’re probably worth something, handed in alive – but whether they’ll think it’s worth the risk, I’m not so sure. We aren’t so very keen on soldiers and the law round here.’ He was still heaving at the heavy wedge to close the door.

  I tried to interpose my foot into the last thumb’s-breadth or two of gap, but he was stronger than I was and I had to draw it back before he crushed my bones. ‘Then we are of one mind,’ I said. ‘By all the gods, I swear . . .’

  ‘Forget the gods,’ he said. ‘I’ve got my sources – ears and eyes across the town. We’ll soon see if you’re telling me the truth or not.’ The last words were muffled as the door fell to and he let the huge rock topple into place.

  ‘You can’t . . .’ I began, but it was too late. He had. I fancied I could hear his footsteps squelch back to the path. Then there was silence.

  I tried to strain my ears for any noise, but if there was human life nearby, all evidence was swallowed by the thickening mist.

  I have a horror of small places in the dark – born of a time when I was captured as a slave and kept chained and bound for days in a heaving stinking hold, seasick and desperate. To allay my rising panic I attempted to explore the inside of the hut, but it was already much too dark to see. Only the faintest sliver of grey light crept in through the crack above the door, and there was another lighter patch which resolved itself – when I became accustomed to the gloom – into a small hole in the collapsing roof. I stood beneath it, gulping in the air, and discovered that the hole also admitted water in a steady dismal drip, although the rain had ceased some time before.

  I reached out a hand. Nothing but the cold, damp stone and an uneven muddy floor. Even if I had been young and fit, I could not have scaled those walls – and I was hurt and feeling every moment of my age.

  There was nothing for it but to wait. The realisation left me almost paralysed with misery. Tired almost to exhaustion, too, but there was nowhere I could rest – any contact with the walls or floor was bone-searchingly damp, and the thin tunic was all the covering I had.

  In the end I settled uncomfortably on my haunches and wrapped my arms round myself for warmth, occasionally catching the drips to moisten my parched tongue. What a contrast with the night before! Then I had been a guest in an expensive house, warmed with all the best food and drink a wealthy man could buy. Amazing to think it was such a short time ago.

  I tried to beguile the endless wait by mentally running through events again. Praxus, one moment eating and drinking with the rest of us, the next staggering off into the ante-room to die. Face down in the vomitorium, but too big by far to push there unless he was already weak – even that red weal round his neck could not have been inflicted if he’d had his health and strength.
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  Try as I would I could see nothing that would explain all this unless there was something in his food or drink: and that had been supplied by Marcus from the start, cooked in Marcus’s kitchen and served by Marcus’s slaves. So had someone else got in and tampered with the food? It seemed impossible – Praxus’s own bodyguard was at the gate, as well as the normal doorkeeper. And how could anyone make sure that Praxus alone would eat the poisoned dish?

  Furthermore, I realised with increasing chill, when Praxus had not very soon returned, Marcus himself had gone out after him. Marcus, who would not reach out a hand to lift a glass if there was a slave nearby to hand it to him. There were no witnesses to what happened next. Even Golbo the little bucket-boy had been conveniently sent away, and he had told me himself that the instruction had come from Marcus personally, via a trusted slave. Then when – according to his own version of events – Marcus came upon the corpse of his most senior guest, far from raising a general alarm, he had sent for me.

  The more I reasoned through all this, the more sinister it looked. Marcus thought Praxus was a violent and intemperate boor, and – in the temporary absence of the provincial governor – one who had been about to assume a great deal more power than was good for him in the running of the Republica Glevensis. I could imagine that, for the good of the colonia, my patron might feel the man was better dead, especially since he had designs on Julia as well. What I could not believe was that Marcus would perpetrate a deed like this and then permit his servants to be tortured ten by ten. He was a patrician, so a confession would not be extorted from him, at least until he came to Rome, but surely he was too humane . . .

  I stopped. Supposing he had, after all, confessed? That might explain why everyone was after me, when I had been permitted to leave the garrison unchallenged so short a time before.

  I shook my head. That was not an explanation, after all; if the authorities had his free confession there was no point in their arresting me. Unless they had decided, for reasons of their own, that I was somehow implicated too. I shivered. A Roman jail is not a pleasant place.

  Though few things, I thought, could be worse than this. Apart from my throbbing bruises I was damp, and as cold and hungry as I’d been for years. I was getting stiffer by the moment, too. I struggled to my feet, and slapped my arms about to bring some warmth into my limbs, then sank into a huddle once again.

  It seemed to me that I was there for hours, shifting my weight from haunch to painful haunch, listening for the tiny plash of that persistent drip, and watching the tiny strip of grey light above the door fade into darkness as the night closed in.

  X

  The first hint that I was about to be released was a faint illumination in the sky, following by a scuffling at the door and the smell of burning tallow in the air. Someone with a smoky torch was obviously moving back the stone.

  I braced myself against the inner wall, ready for Fatbeard and his makeshift club, but when – with a final grunt and heave – the rock was moved away and the door tumbled sideways on its hinges once again, there was no sign of his massive frame. Nor of Bullface and his men, which was my second thought. Indeed, for an instant I thought that nobody was there.

  Then from somewhere behind the pile of stones someone raised the torch, if it deserved that name: it was obviously a simple branch of wood dipped into tallow fat and set alight. It was a poor enough thing, but the flame seemed so bright as it approached after the darkness of the hut that at first I stood blinking in the light, unable to make sense of what I saw. I focused my eyes a little lower down, and saw two forms outlined against the misty dark.

  Nightmare figures. Small, distorted and grotesque, like something conjured from a drunken dream.

  The one who held the light, I now saw, was thin – the arm which held the torch aloft seemed to be thinner than the torch itself, and the face was no more than a wild-eyed skull under a mane of straggling white hair. Yet the bony hand which suddenly shot out and pulled me from the hut moved with the strength and speed of youth. He did not speak. There was something dreadful in this sinewed ghost.

  He was no giant, but the second figure – though adult – was smaller still: barely more than half my height. I recognised the man. It was a club-footed beggar, known as Sosso, who sometimes haunted the tombs outside the gates. A successful beggar, too, largely because he terrified the passers-by. Apart from that misshapen foot, he had a twisted frame, and moved lopsided, like an animal. Though so extremely short he had shoulders like an ox, but no discernible forehead or neck, all of which gave him a general air of ugly malevolence. He was known to lurch up to lone people at the tombs, holding out his hand with threatening grunts. People with business in the area even equipped themselves with amulets sometimes to keep his dwarfish, loping form at bay.

  I’d thrown him a brass coin myself once or twice – less out of pity for his undoubted plight than from a selfish instinct for self-preservation. He had shrewd and calculating eyes, and always looked like the sort of beggar who might remember one, and creep up one dark night to take revenge.

  Now it looked as if that night had come.

  Sosso was wielding a sort of knife, a piece of broken blade lashed to a stick and painstakingly polished and sharpened to a point. In his hands it seemed a more unpleasant weapon than any expensive dagger could have been.

  ‘Come!’ he grunted. Sosso, as I was to learn, could speak but he was not a man of many words.

  I shuffled forward painfully. My fall, combined with that long chilly wait, had stiffened all my joints. ‘Come where?’ I said.

  ‘You’ll see soon enough,’ the skinny one replied. His voice was unexpectedly low-pitched and resonant, as if an oracle had spoken in a cave. He looked as if a breeze would blow him down but the vice-like grip on my arm had dreadful strength. The wraith had sinews like a vine. That, with his ghastly appearance, made him sinister.

  ‘But . . .’ I began, and was rewarded by the point of Sosso’s blade against my ribs. ‘Walk!’ Sosso told me, and I silently obeyed.

  The path, which had been difficult by day, was doubly treacherous in the dark. Apart from the threat of unseen obstacles, the night was close to freezing, and the mud sucked at my feet with ghastly tentacles of cold.

  Our destination was not far away, I found.

  First there was the acrid smell of smoke, then a reddish glow appeared through the gloom, and we found ourselves back at the rubbish pile which I had pulled over at Fatbeard’s feet earlier that day. It had been assembled once again and, by some means, set alight and coaxed into a sullen fire. It now smoked and spat and sizzled intermittently but still gave off a faint reluctant heat.

  Around it, crouched and huddled in the smoke, was the most wretched collection of humanity that I had ever seen. A haggard mother with a scabrous infant; a wretched, limping, pock-marked girl, perhaps fifteen years of age, from whom all bloom of youth had fled; a crone; a one-legged man; a man with half a hand; and another whom again I recognised. His whole face and body was a scar where – as I knew from his begging in the streets – he’d fallen in a boiling vat before his master turned him on the street. And behind all these, lurking in the shadows even here, a thin, sharp-faced man with tattered clothes and a youth with glittering and disturbing eyes.

  I remembered what Fatbeard had said earlier: ‘If you want a fire, you pay for it, like anybody else,’ and wondered what the pathetic ‘owners’ of this fire could possibly possess that might be considered payment for the privilege. Perhaps they simply stole, or, in the women’s case, frequented the darker passages behind the docks and sold the only commodity they had. If so, I thought suddenly, I began to understand. In circumstances like theirs ‘possession’ of a fire might mean the difference between life and death.

  I saw for the first time what it was to be really poor. The misty damp seeped through my tunic-cloth, and I was shivering. Lack of food gnawed at my entrails, but compared to these people I was like a king. I have known what it is to be a slave, to
sleep in draughty sheds with not enough to eat, and to possess nothing of my own, but – even when I was legally a mere thing myself – I had never faced this kind of cold and want. Even in the very worst of times, it is in a master’s interests to see that his possessions have sufficient warmth and food to keep them strong enough to work. I had never been as these people were, without the prospect of a meal or even a proper shelter for the night.

  Not until now, that is.

  It was one thing, however, for me to feel some sympathy for them: there was clearly little sympathy for me. Sosso prodded me forward with his blade, while his companion kept a firm hold on my arm, but as I made my way towards the blaze I was aware of mutterings and discontent as I was forced to come between people and the fire.

  The wraith aimed a kick at the ragged woman with the child. ‘Stop that grumbling, or this’ll be the last time you get food and fire from us. This is the runaway man we were told of. Grossus said that we’re to take look at him, and decide what’s to be done. Now, mind your feet and let us get him to the fire, where we can see him better in the light.’

  The woman cursed, but she moved her feet a bit – poor bleeding bundles wrapped in bits of sack – and we stepped over them into the dim glow given out by the fire. My skinny captor raised his tallow torch again, and held it so that they could see my face.

  ‘Well’ – clearly he had appointed himself spokesman for the group – ‘you’ve heard what Grossus said. Found him lurking in a toga, spying on our pile – then picked him up a moment later, running from the guard. He claims to be a tradesman whose patron is in jail. What do we think about it, Grossus wants to know.’

  There was some whispering at this, as some of them raised apathetic heads to look. The woman who’d been forced to move her feet gathered her ragged cloak around her child and spat. ‘Why don’t we just knock him on the head, and throw his body in the river? That tunic would fit any one of us, and there’s good leather in those shoes and belt. They would fetch something in the market place.’