by Mike Ashley
He sighed, and then was silent for a while, staring down into the pool at his feet. Suddenly he spoke again, and more briskly:
“There is something that I want you to do for me, Lucius.”
“What is that, Sollius?” asked Lucius, and his eyes brightened.
“I want you to mingle with the slaves in the money-changers’ quarters. Find out from gossip whether any jewels have been pledged for security yesterday or to-day, or sold for any large sum, or – any gossip about a sudden appearance of jewels in unusual places.”
“I can do that, Sollius,” replied Lucius eagerly.
“Meanwhile I shall see that Prætorian,” mused Sollius. “But I doubt – I really doubt – if I shall learn much from him.”
He shook his head dubiously, and led the way back to the kitchen quarters.
“Go on your errand at once,” he whispered. “I will make it right with Tuphus – or our master will, if I fail. Is not the Emperor behind it?”
Lucius grinned, and sped away.
Early, as promised, Sollius hastened to the palace next morning, and asked for Alexias. He was taken to a small, bare room, somewhat away from the imperial apartments, and lit only by a pale, dusty light that filtered through a grating. It was like a guardroom, except that its appointments were domestic rather than military. He was left there alone for quite a long time, and was beginning to feel impatient, and even a little angry, when Alexias hurried in with a scared face.
“He has disappeared!” he whispered hollowly. “I went for him myself, but he was not in his quarters. He has disappeared,” he repeated, “just as if he were a deserter. Nobody can understand it. Nobody!”
“Has the Emperor been told?” asked Sollius, plucking at his lips.
“It is not a nice report to make,” answered Alexias, and gestured impotently.
Then his face brightened as he produced a scroll from somewhere about him.
“But I have the list of the missing jewels,” he said.
Sollius brushed it aside, and the Emperor’s freedman stared.
“But you asked for it?” he stammered.
“I know,” said Sollius. “I may need it – or may not. But the disappearance of this Prætorian changes the order of my plans. The sooner he is found, whether alive or dead – ”
“Dead?” cried Alexias in horror. “Do you think that?”
“I fear it,” replied Sollius. “Have you seen the man’s centurion?”
“He knows nothing.”
“You mean that he says he knows nothing,” answered Sollius. “Bring him here,” he ordered abruptly.
The freedman drew himself up, but meeting Sollius’s eye, he shrugged his shoulders.
“As you will,” he said stiffly. “We have the Emperor’s command to obey you.”
He turned quickly, and left the slave once again alone. Sollius stood perfectly still, and closed his eyes. He did not open them until he heard the rustle of metal as the centurion was brought in by Alexias. Then he fixed the man with a deep stare.
“Your name?” he asked.
“Decius,” answered the centurion sullenly.
He seemed to have come unwillingly and to resent any interrogation by a slave. He stood rigidly, one hand on the brazen hilt of his short stabbing-sword.
“What is the name of this missing soldier?” pursued Sollius.
“Constans.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Last night – in a tavern.”
“Was he drunk?”
“Constans had a strong head,” answered Decius, and would have laughed if he had not remembered that his questioner was a slave. He stood more rigidly than ever.
“Did you leave him in the tavern, or did he come away with you?”
“I said I saw him last in a tavern – not going to it, nor coming from it,” replied Decius.
“You did not part from him at the tavern door – in the street?”
“I left him with a girl on his knee,” said Decius gruffly.
“Which tavern was it?”
“The Two Cranes, in the Subura,” answered the centurion without hesitation.
Sollius rubbed his chin while he thought briefly.
“And you have no idea at all what has happened to him?” he asked.
“I know less about it than about the Emperor’s philosophy,” replied the still sullen centurion, yet with a fugitive touch of contemptuous humour, nevertheless, for he was beginning to thaw a little under the slave’s quiet and assured manner.
“Has anybody been sent to that tavern to make enquiries?” asked Sollius.
“The tribune sent,” was the answer.
“With no result?”
“With no result!”
“Did nobody there remember his leaving?”
“Nobody,” answered Decius. “At least,” he added, a little less surlily, “nobody was willing to admit to remembering anything.”
“Ah-h!” breathed Sollius. “Has this tavern a good reputation?”
“It is in the Subura,” answered the centurion with a meaning shrug.
“Even the worst district of Rome,” said the slave, “can have one decent tavern in it!”
“Then your experience is different from mine,” replied Decius, and this time he laughed outright.
He had a clear-cut, honest face, thought Sollius, looking at him with a newly probing gaze. Suddenly he made up his mind.
“Come, centurion, we will go there now, you and I, together.”
“Softly, slave!” cried Decius. “Who are you to give me orders? I have answered your questions because Alexias told me to answer ’em, and Alexias is the Emperor’s own servant. But this is another matter. What’ll my tribune say? A soldier – and a Prætorian, mind you! – can only take orders from his own officers.”
“That is all right,” said Sollius quietly. “Alexias will tell you that in this matter my orders are as good as the Emperor’s own.”
“What, slave!” burst out Decius.
“Quietly,” said Alexias, and touched the centurion’s arm. “It is as he says. He has the Emperor’s authority for what he is doing. Go with him. I will explain to your tribune.”
“Castor and Pollux flay me!” cried Decius. “This is a pretty thing: a centurion of the Prætorians to take orders from a slave!”
Nevertheless, in spite of his bluster, for once it was so, and he and Sollius presently departed on their errand side by side, the upright, marching Prætorian, and the fattish, shuffling slave making a comical enough sight for those who passed by them in the narrow, tortuous and crowded streets.
The thoroughfares of Rome were inordinately dirty and noisy, and those who walked had a bad time of it, being continually pushed to the walls by the litters of the important or the wealthy, borne by running slaves, generally of huge stature, negroes or Cappadocians being the favourites for that kind of work. All Rome was dirty, tortuous, unsavoury and crowded, but no quarter was as bad in all those respects as the infamous Subura, the haunt and kennel of the worst elements of the population. Sollius knew it well, but he never entered it without the utmost distaste. The inns and hovels were little better than thieves’ dens, and worse; every kind of rascality and vice was at home; it stank both physically and morally.
The centurion led the way down an evil-smelling byway between high walls that leant crookedly towards one another like two drunken men seeking to hold each other up, yet never managing to make actual contact in their swaying towards one another for support. Though the day itself was bright, the byway was so dark that Sollius frequently stumbled over the uneven cobbles, slippery with all kinds of nauseous garbage.
The two had uttered no word during their journey. But it would have been difficult to have conversed amid such constant jostling and noise; and now, in that quieter spot, the centurion cleared his throat, spat and spoke:
“We are nearly there, O slave. The open doorway at the end, see?”
It was more like the entrance t
o a dark cave than the door of a supposedly inviting tavern, and was no advertisement of its pleasures. Indeed, thought Sollius, it needed courage to enter at all. At night it would be even more daunting to a timid man, though, no doubt, there would be a torch in the iron sconce at the side of the entrance.
“I’ll see you come to no harm,” grunted the centurion through the side of his mouth as if he had read his companion’s thoughts.
He plunged into the darkest recesses of the alley with the familiarity of frequent experience, and was about to enter into the black mouth of the doorway when a man, rushing out as in a violent hurry, thrust him against the wall, and was gone before either he or Sollius could catch at him and hold him. They could hear his sandals slapping against the cobbles as he sped away down other thoroughfares, and then the noise was swallowed up in the greater noises round and about.
The centurion grunted angrily, and then entered the tavern without further hindrance. Sollius followed at his heels. It was lighter inside than the slave had expected, for two or three clay lamps were diffusing a pale light in an inner room. But the immediate entrance, a smaller room like a vestibule, was both dark and empty. The whole place smelt of rancid oil, sour wine, stale vegetables and fetid odours of every conceivable variety of dirt and corruption. Sollius sniffed audibly.
“You’re too dainty!” muttered Decius as he led the way through towards the inner room.
But Sollius had not been savouring the unpleasant layers of dead air about him, but was trying to remember where he had smelt before the perfume which had come from the garments of the man who had rushed out past them. And then he knew. It had been in the bedchamber of the Empress. His mind suddenly grew wary. They should have stopped that running man!
He gave a swift glance about him as they entered the inner room. It had benches about the walls; winecasks at one end, in a kind of bricked, recessed tunnel, too small to be termed a cellar, yet serving something of the same purpose; and stools, some still lying where they had fallen the previous night, and others disposed about conveniently for those drinking. At the moment, however, only two occupants faced the centurion and Sollius as they entered, the tavern-keeper himself and a flute-boy, the latter very pale, puffed under the eyes, and drowsy. A flight of shallow stone steps led to an upper floor. They were festooned with cobwebs and covered with dust and dirt. The whole place seemed never to have been swept or cleaned since it had been built, perhaps over a hundred years before.
“What d’ye want?” asked the tavern-keeper, glowering through the dim light.
“You’re to answer some questions,” replied the centurion brusquely, “and mind you tell us no lies.”
“I’ve been badgered with questions for hours,” growled the other. “I know nothing. Your comrade strode out o’ that doorway as well as he entered through it – or nearly as well,” he added with a truculent leer. “I won’t say as he wasn’t drunk.”
“Who helped him out?” asked Sollius.
“And who are you to be asking that or any other question?” demanded the tavern-keeper.
“I am his uncle,” answered Sollius, lying glibly, “and his mother, my sister, lies dying. He must be fetched home. Cannot you help us at all?”
His voice was pitched just in the right key, neither wheedling nor exacting, but anxiously pleading. The centurion stared sidelong at him with a new appreciation of his parts.
“If I had nothing to tell a Prætorian officer,” grunted the tavern-keeper, “am I like to have anything to tell a fat rascal like you who couldn’t even pay me for a blind man’s wink?”
“Even a blind man’s wink,” laughed Sollius, “might tell me what he had heard with his ears!”
“I heard nothing; I saw nothing; I know nothing,” said the other, and his tone had finality. “D’ye think I’m such a fool as not to be able to sell any kind o’ knowledge to a good bidder? Or not to save my skin if I had knowledge when a Prætorian officer came sniffing around with a meddling nose? I heard nothing; I saw nothing; I know nothing,” he repeated, and spat without caring where.
“There was no brawl?” went on Sollius doggedly.
“There’s always a brawl!” leered the other. “That’s life: drink and brawling. Men are men in the Subura.”
“There was a girl – ” suggested Sollius.
“He had no money,” answered the tavern-keeper shortly. “She wasn’t on his knee long, I can tell you that. I don’t allow it – when there’s no money. But why this fuss over a missing soldier?” he asked with lowered brows, suspiciously. “What’s he been doing? Threatening the life of the Emperor? Or teaching young Commodus evil manners? But any teacher o’ such ’ud soon end by being the pupil o’ that young lad, prince as he may be, and dainty brought up! I wonder his father lets him out of his eye. I’d keep him well watched, I would – or send him to one o’ the frontiers to learn war.”
“Peace, rascal!” cried the centurion. “D’ye want a whipping after I’ve made my report?”
“I’m only saying what everybody is saying,” growled the tavern-keeper, and made a lewd gesture. “The Emperor is too good for such dogs. Good men don’t see all as they ought to see, and there’s a lot in Rome that needs looking at – though I hope it won’t be in my time,” he added with a salacious grin. “I’ve my living to get!”
Sollius could bear the fetid atmosphere no longer, and he was convinced by now that the tavern-keeper really knew nothing. He turned.
“Come,” he said brusquely over his shoulder to the centurion. “There is nothing to learn here.”
He stumbled out through the dark outer room and so to the alley outside. As soon as they were a little distance down this, he laid a hand on the centurion’s arm, and whispered urgently:
“Go back, and fetch out that fluteboy!”
Decius stared, but seeing the expression on Sollius’s face, he bit back the sarcastic retort which he had intended to make, turned smartly on his heel and re-entered the tavern. He was out again with the flute-boy before Sollius had reached the corner where the alley debouched into the crowded and wider way. The fluteboy appeared terrified. The centurion held him firmly by an arm.
“Come with us,” said Sollius, and his voice was kindly. “We mean you no harm.”
“What do you want?” stammered the boy. “I have done nothing. I’m a good boy. Everybody round here will give me a good name.”
“Nobody round here could give anybody a good name!” answered Sollius a little primly. “Don’t let go of him, centurion.”
“Where are you taking me?” whimpered the boy.
“We can’t talk in this noisy bustle,” replied the slave, and he led the way, with the centurion still grasping the flute-boy by the arm, at his heels.
He did not lead them to the imperial palace, but to the house of Titius Sabinus, his master. There he took them to the same walled enclosure behind the chariot-house where he had talked with Lucius.
“We can be private here,” he said.
It was certainly very quiet, there by the carp-pool.
“Tell me,” Sollius began, “who it was that hurriedly left as we entered the tavern where you play your flute.”
The boy was shaking with fear, and could hardly stammer out:
“He had b-been there all n-night.”
“You have seen him in the tavern before?”
“Once or twice – lately. What are you w-wanting of me?”
“Only true answers to my questions,” replied Sollius softly, “and then you can go back as quickly as you can run. Do you know his name?”
The flute-boy shook his head.
“He is a rich young man,” he said, “but no one mentions his name.”
“Have you seen him close – under the lamp? Does he wear a great deal of jewellery: rings and gold chains and so on?”
“He wouldn’t in the Subura!” muttered the centurion. “Or not for long!”
“Answer me, flute-boy!”
“Not that I have seen.
Myrtis says – ”
“Who is Myrtis?”
“One of the girls in the house. I play for their dances.”
“Go on.”
“Myrtis says he is a gladiator. But – ”
“Go on.”
“I don’t suppose she really knows. She is always telling lies.”
At that moment Lucius joined them.
“I heard you had returned, Sollius,” he said, “and Tuphus said you had come this way.”
Sollius took his arm, and they walked to the other side of the carp-pool out of hearing of the others.
“What have you found out?” he asked in a lowered voice.
“Nothing, Sollius. No jewels in any quantity have been sold or pledged just lately.”
“Not by – the Empress’s son?”
Lucius started, and then looked scared.
“I did hear something about him,” he whispered. “He is in great debt and seeking a loan.”
Sollius rubbed his chin.
“Then no jewels have been – ahem! – abstracted for his benefit,” he muttered in a muse, “so everything hangs upon finding that lost Prætorian. Ah, you won’t have heard about that,” he added, and gave a brief account of his own researches that morning. “The flute-boy, after all, knows nothing. I am disappointed. I had expected more from him. I think it very likely that the man who brushed past us was a gladiator, as Myrtis says. Even his scentedness is a confirmation.”
“A scented gladiator?” exclaimed Lucius. “But they are such tough men – they have to be!”
“Many of them,” answered Sollius dryly, “are ladies’ favourites. But that is a different matter.”