Counting the Stars

by Helen Dunmore

  The boy has let himself be possessed by that woman. He looks like his mother: he has her eyes. But she belonged to herself; she would never have let herself be captured.

  The Metelli creature’s talons seem to be losing their grip. The boy put his whole heart into the discussion of the parchments. He’s coming back to himself. This is his true home: a warm room, yellow pools of lamplight, companionship, poetry –

  ‘Lucius,’ says Catullus, looking down into the lees of the wine, ‘I need to go to the Street of the Master Tanners tomorrow morning, at first light.’

  Lucius’ throat tightens.

  ‘The Street of the Master Tanners,’ he repeats, to gain time. ‘What can you want there? It’s no place for you. There’s a mugger on every street corner in that part of the Subura.’

  ‘That’s why I’ll need two slaves to go with me. How about Niko and Antonius? Can they be spared?’

  ‘Of course they can be spared. You are the master in this house,’ says Lucius bitingly. He knows immediately that this must be Clodia business. Nothing else puts that hot, distracted look into Catullus’ eyes. The Street of the Master Tanners! It’s come to something when one of the Metelli drags a great name in the dirt down there. But she’s like that. Everybody says so. Greedy for the gutter. She doesn’t love his boy. A woman like that is incapable of love, and wants only to degrade him as she has already degraded herself. The boy can’t see it, because he is obsessed with her. And now she’s set up a rendez-vous among stinking courtyards full of tanning vats.

  ‘I’ll ask Niko to cut bunches of mint for you,’ he says.

  Catullus looks at him without understanding.

  ‘You’ve never been there,’ says Lucius. ‘The smell in that quarter is enough to make you vomit. The vapours rise to your brain, and do harm. Hold the mint in front of your face, and breathe that.’

  ‘I see. So, big sticks for Niko and Antonius, and bunches of mint all round. Is that everything we need for protection?’

  ‘It is better not to go at all,’ says Lucius sombrely, ‘but there’s no stopping you, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s not what you think. I’m going to meet a lady –’

  ‘I know that –’

  ‘Excuse me, Lucius, you don’t know anything at all. I’ve never set eyes on her before. She has some expertise in medicine, and I want to consult her.’

  There are a few lady doctors in Rome. They call themselves specialists in women’s problems – another name for upmarket abortionists, thinks Lucius. But what doctor would choose to practise there in the tannery quarter? And what patient would go there for a consultation?

  Suddenly he doesn’t want to know. There’s no stopping Catullus now. Childhood is far away. Those two boys who scrambled on to Lucius’ shoulders for rides don’t exist any more. His mother’s eyes are clouded with obsession. Best to accept it, and do what he can to save the boy from himself.

  If he were still a boy, how easy it would be. The brothers had looked to Lucius as wolf cubs look to their pack leader, long ago. The master was a good enough man in his way, but difficult. Not the kind who knew how to value what he had. A critical man who never shone a light inwards to judge himself. How surprised he’d been that his wife had hidden her illness from him.

  ‘I don’t want him to know, Lucius,’ she’d said, when he came on her in a fit of coughing that went on and on until the veins bulged in her forehead. ‘He’ll only fuss me with more doctors.’

  She’d already seen a doctor, secretly. She was taking medicines, but they didn’t seem to be working. Lucius had helped her to her room. By some miracle none of the slaves was about. She leaned on him. He smelled her body, spent and sweating. It was the only time he ever touched her.

  ‘Thank you, Lucius,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you were there.’

  She was soft on others, but hard on herself. She even tried to draw back from her boys, so that they wouldn’t miss her as much when she was gone. It didn’t work, of course. There they were, those two little boys, huddling together after their mother’s death. Their father let them grieve for as long as was proper, but then he began to get angry with them. In fact it was obvious that he couldn’t stand the sight of their unhappiness. Soon he decided that he had to go out to Bithynia – which was true enough in its way, given the extent of the family’s interests there – but there was another truth in it, too. He had to be away from the children.

  Lucius could see it from his point of view, to some extent. As head of the family he had fought down his own grief. And he felt genuine grief, you couldn’t deny it. He had put duty first, and he didn’t want to be surrounded by whey-faced, miserable children.

  That summer, Lucius showed the boys how to begin to be men. Marcus was ready for it, and the little one tried to copy him. Every night he’d curl up in Lucius’ lap and listen to stories, and take comfort. Soon they were both bold and noisy again all day long. He taught them about danger, and how to get out of it. They rowed with him on the calm waters of the lake, and he taught them what to do when a sudden fury of wind blew down over the mountains. He taught them to skin rabbits, to make fires in the open that would stay burning all night long, and how to defend themselves. Even the little one needed to learn that the world was a rough place that wouldn’t let him sit in its lap. But a child doesn’t learn through bullying, Lucius was sure of that. They got enough floggings at school.

  All his teaching is of no use now. His boy wants that woman as a drunkard wants his wine, and the more he tastes her the worse his thirst becomes. Only the gods know what crimes that woman has committed. It will never be spoken of in this house, or even alluded to, because if you bring evil into the open, it grows stronger. But in the market and in the bathhouse, Lucius hears everything.

  Why is it that the boy seems to want this madness? It’s not a happy thing. It’s nothing to which Lucius would give the name of love. He looks at the careful rolls of papyrus, and the taste of disappointment floods his mouth.

  ‘You’ll be better going with four slaves,’ he says. ‘There are too many street gangs roaming around the Subura these days.’

  ‘And there will be, as long as there are thugs like Pretty Boy Clodius to keep them in business,’ says Catullus harshly.

  Lucius says nothing. Old, deeply ingrained slave habit sits on his tongue, the habit a freedman never quite manages to scour away. You don’t talk politics, even when people try to talk politics to you. But the real reason he doesn’t speak is that the words he’d say would come between them for ever.

  You’re right, that woman’s brother is the worst of them. Corrupting decent men, working up his pack of criminal scum until they’re ready to murder anyone to fulfil his ambitions. Starting riots in the streets. He’s her brother, you poor innocent, don’t you realize that they are vipers from the same nest?

  It’s night now, and Catullus is alone. He can’t sleep. He thinks of Sappho, sleepless too, hundreds of years ago, lying awake until the moon set and even the stars disappeared. She was alone. Her life was passing like the night. Youth had gone. But it was a speaking loneliness. He knows it; he has inherited it.

  He gets up and lights the lamp. The room feels safe and familiar. He wishes he had been nicer to Lucius. Lucius sat drinking that spiced wine with the light of happiness in him, and then it was snuffed out.

  She will be awake, too. Suddenly he is sure of it. Awake and alone, without her sparrow and without her husband. Her daughter may still be there, but she’s almost a stranger to her mother. More likely, Clodia has already sent the girl back to the country.

  He’s glad that Clodia is alone. He would like her to suffer, as he has so often suffered. The thought rises, and then sinks back. He can’t want to hurt her, no matter what she does. He wants her here, now.

  What became of all Sappho’s girls? No one knows. They’re alive in the poems, and nowhere else. Lovely Cleis, the daughter who was like a golden flower; Timas, who died young and far from home. Her age-mates cut the soft cu
rls of their hair in mourning. Only Timas’ ashes made the long voyage home to her family, instead of their living daughter. There was Anactoria, making wreaths of violets in the woods; and Sappho’s island itself, Lesbos, with its chirring crickets, its girls weaving at their looms, its bare-legged goat herds; its glossy, galloping horses.

  The poem is beginning to rise. His poem. Tomorrow he will meet the poisoner who has the same name of one of Sappho’s girls. Tonight, he’ll write. His own island, the almost-island of Sirmio, begins to show its back above the waves.

  Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque

  ocelle –

  But something stands in the way of the poem. The Street of the Master Tanners. He’ll be there in a few hours now. Poison is a cruel way to kill a man. He wants to write his poem but the face of Metellus Celer rears up in his mind. Such puttyish contorted features. All that’s left of a handsome man.

  Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque

  ocelle –

  Of almost-islands, Sirmio, and of all islands

  the apple of my eye –

  It’s no good. Leave it, Catullus. The Muses are already halfway up the street, making their getaway. It’s stupid to feel so abandoned. All you’ve written are five words, for heaven’s sake! Yes, you had the sound of the lines in your head, but you lost it. It’ll come back one day, maybe, when you’re not looking for it.

  Sometimes a poem isn’t ready to be written. Sirmio will always be waiting for him, half-island, nearly-island, almost-island…

  But his father is there too. He looks bleakly at his son, the difficult one, the disappointing one. Poems are all very well, says his father’s face, but our ancestors expect more.

  Beautiful Sirmio is growing small. Soon it will have shrunk into a dot and he won’t be able to see it. All he can see now is the face of his father, which keeps dissolving into the face of Metellus Celer. He must roll himself up in a blanket and think of nothing, and perhaps, if he’s lucky, sleep will come.

  Fifteen

  The slaves don’t like coming to this part of the Subura. The streets are narrow and twisting, and you can’t see what’s around the next corner. Or who. You feel as if you’re being watched. Streets like these are where Pretty Boy Clodius recruits his thugs. They’ve got nothing to lose and they’ll do anything the boss tells them to do. Ambush a man, set fire to buildings, murder a stranger or knock down someone’s house.

  Antonius, Niko and the lads keep close to their master, thinking that he looks much too soft and gentry-like, peering round this way and that way as if he’s having a day out at a beauty spot. The gentry don’t come down here. They’ve no call to, and besides it’s dangerous even during the day. You can get your throat slit for a purse with a few pence in it. Walking around on your own in a good-quality woollen tunic and cloak is asking for it. As for a toga, that’s tantamount to suicide. But then, no one could call their master streetwise.

  Antonius has had a discreet confabulation with Lucius, to ensure that Catullus will be wearing a plain brown cloak and a pair of old boots. If he came down here dressed as usual he might as well be carrying a placard that says ‘Cash over here, come and get it!’

  Lucius put it well to the master. ‘The streets will be running with filth. You don’t want to ruin a decent cloak. As for boots, you’ll only have to throw them away afterwards. Better wear these old ones.’

  But there’s no disguising the milk-fed look of a man who’s been brought up knowing there’s a solid wall of money at the back of him. It’s there in the quick, bright, fearless way he faces the world, like a lucky child instead of a grown man who’s had enough blows to teach him what’s what. He looks as if the world belongs to him. Which I suppose it does, thinks Antonius, or as much of the world as anyone has need of. How that might feel, he can’t begin to imagine.

  ‘A proper rat’s nest this is,’ says Niko with disgust, stepping over a heap of stinking fish heads. There’s rubble blocking the next corner, where part of a building has collapsed. No wonder, given the way they throw up these tenements.

  Thousands and thousands of lives are stewing here. The buildings are warrens, four or five storeys high and blocking out the light. They pass a burned-out block with staring, blackened holes where its shutters were. Lucky the whole street didn’t go up in flames. These places are death traps. Fire jumps from building to building and you can’t get out in time, once the narrow stairways fill with smoke. Your best chance is to throw the children out into the street and pray they land in a pile of horse-shit.

  The streets are filthy. The sun can’t squeeze its way down to cleanse them with its ferocious summer blaze, and no one seems to cart away the rubbish on a regular basis. Every so often people must shovel out the cesspits, Antonius supposes.

  They make their way over heaps of rotting food waste, the carcass of a chicken gnawed by rats, a pile of building wood guarded by a dog with yellow eyes that runs at them until it is yanked back by its chain. It’s just after dawn. People are swarming out of the tenements. Dirty barefoot shrilling children clutch the heel of a loaf, men with work to go to make for a pie-shop to break their fast, men with none slouch down the streets, red-eyed from the night before.

  They pass a tavern where a thin, tired girl is sweeping winesodden sawdust out of the entrance into the street. Vomit spatters the ground outside, and someone has smashed the pot of daisies set beside the doorway. The roots are dry and the flowers have wilted. The girl stoops to gather them up, holds them in her hands for a moment as if wondering whether it’s worth trying to plant them again, then drops the daisies back into the dirt and sweeps them away with the shards of the pot. But not very far away. They join the sawdust in the middle of the street.

  Catullus wonders if she planted those daisies.

  ‘Hi! Get out the way!’ A woman on an upper floor swings a pot over the balcony rail. Yellow liquid shoots past Catullus, spreading out in the air like a flag as it falls. He jumps back, and the woman cackles. It would have been so easy to tip the pot straight on to their heads, without warning, just for a laugh. But she’s in a good mood this morning. She shoulders her pot, and goes back inside.

  There’s washing everywhere, flapping from balconies, pinned to lines that zigzag across the street. Wherever a line can hang high enough that mud won’t splash it and thieves can’t reach it, there’s washing. Although who would want to steal such a lineful of rags, he can’t imagine.

  ‘According to my reckoning, we’re about two streets away from where the tanning yards start. And then it was the master tanners you wanted. I’ll have to ask, I don’t know this patch,’ says Antonius.

  The other two boys jostle each other as they stare back at the tavern.

  ‘I reckon we could just be sitting down to a nice game of dice,’ one of them whispers to the other.

  ‘You ’member old Varro, he could really roll ’em.’

  ‘Get a move on!’ Antonius orders them. They’re big, rawhanded lads, fresh down from Sirmio, home-bred slaves. Strong enough, but pig-ignorant. To them, a sawdust tavern in the Subura is the bright lights.

  They stop to buy bunches of mint from a market stall. The leaves have the dull look of winter, but Catullus crushes one between his fingers and the sharp, clean smell of mint rises strongly. The tanning yards are close now. Their acrid smell hanging over the surrounding streets gets into his throat and clings there, in spite of the mint. Antonius has got directions from the stallholder and he leads them confidently left, then right, and through a narrow street with openings off it that lead into tanning yards. Workers are moving around on the raised edges of the stone tanning vats. They have poles in their hands to press the hides deep into the tanning solution. They are young, no more than twelve. You’d have to be young, to be so quick and sure-footed on the narrow stone edges.

  ‘It’s not this entrance, it’s the next one,’ says Antonius, and barks, ‘Keep up now, what do you think you’re here for?’ to the boys who have forgotten their duty to p
rotect their master and are gaping at the tanning vats. They couldn’t look more like bumpkins if they let their mouths hang open and stuck straw behind their ears, thinks Antonius with annoyance. They show up the whole party. Niko, as usual, is letting it all wash over him. He lives in the present, that one. Does what he’s meant to do, and seems not to think beyond the day. If he gets a spare moment he whittles out little wooden figures that he calls by name. Says it’s what all the boys did back home, round the fire. Niko comes from a Greek mountainy tribe. He’s a captive, must have been ten or eleven when the master bought him. He whistles while he works away with that little knife in his hands.

  Maybe it’s the best way to be. Niko doesn’t look as if he has this file rasping away inside his mind –

  ‘Here we are.’

  The entrance to the Street of the Master Tanners is just wide enough for a donkey cart to pass through. The stink is abominable. They raise their bunches of mint in front of their faces and breathe through the leaves. Even so, it is fetid. You would take this smell home with you. You’d never wash it out of your clothes. Maybe that’s why the boys around the vats are naked but for loincloths. The tanning vats are open to the sky, breathing out their acids. Not good to fall in there.

  The master leatherworkers’ stalls must be behind these streets somewhere, Antonius decides. Now that would be worth seeing. He’d like to spend a day watching a first-class saddle-maker at work, or a man who knows how to turn a belt into a jewel without putting a single stone in it. Just to study a craftsman at work is a pleasure. It makes you feel different: lifted up. What if you were a skilled man, with a trade: now that would be a life. But no, all they’ll see are the stinking old tanneries.