Clash of Iron (8 page)

The man finished urinating, dropped his toga carelessly and turned to Ragnall. Like most Romans, he was short – a good foot and a half shorter than Ragnall. Small dark eyes peered from his smoothly fat, melon-shaped face.

It seemed that a reply was required, although there’d been no question.

“Sounds … god-like,” said Ragnall, and he meant it. Rebuilding a mountain for nothing but display and entertainment, surely, was something that only capricious, wasteful gods would do. In Britain, he’d thought it was stupid when eccentrics gave the best bits of meat to pet dogs, but remoulding a mountain to house pet fish was another level. Were the fish even pets, he wondered, or more like farm animals? Romans didn’t piss on their pets, surely? Or their farm animals for that matter … “They won’t eat these fish, will they,” Ragnall asked, “after everybody’s—”

“Pissed in their water? Depends how drunk the chefs get, what!”

Ragnall chuckled hesitantly.

“But probably not, no,” the man continued, “they’ll all die this evening of piss poisoning and be thrown into the main drain.”

“Seems a waste.”

“A waste?” The Roman’s face creased into such a look of disgust that Ragnall took a step back. “A waste? A few fish? You’re not some bloody actor making me part of a clever new play are you? You’re meant to be taking a piss, not taking the piss! Ha!”

“No, I’m from—”

“The provinces? Yes, you do have a touch of the barbarian brush, don’t you? That would explain it. Sorry for calling you an actor, old fellow. Waste! A few fish! Ha ha! Just the other day Caesar had a villa built – in Campania, I think it was – then he had it knocked down – razed completely – without ever seeing it.”

“Why?” Ragnall asked.

“Why?” The man snorted a laugh. “Why? By Jove, you really are very provincial.”

He walked away, leaving Ragnall next to the fish-churned piss pond.

He washed his hands in a water-filled giant clam shell held by a topless, dark-skinned woman with sparkling black eyes, a shaved head and very pronounced cheekbones, which he took particular notice of while endeavouring not to look at her chest. She didn’t acknowledge him in any way. Her eyes seemed to be focused on an entirely different reality. The whole toilet experience had made Ragnall feel very uncomfortable. The sooner he found Drustan, the better. If the rest of the party was anything like its loos, he’d be better off at the side of his unflappable mentor.

Drustan had used some magical persuasion and a good deal of charm to get them into the birthday party of Julius Caesar, the man whom nearly everyone Ragnall had met was talking about. He shouldn’t have left Drustan so soon, but he’d been bursting. He’d been drinking a lot of water, partially because it was always as hot in Rome as the very hottest days in Britain, and partially because man-made rivers supported on arches – aqueducts – carried the most delicious cool mountain water right into the middle of the city where anyone could drink it for free.

Magical persuasion was something he couldn’t do, thought Ragnall, as he dried his hands on a wondrously soft animal fur, baby goat perhaps, held by yet another topless, oiled slave, this time a male one who was alternately tensing each pectoral muscle of his shaved chest.

He would never be able to persuade anyone to do anything with magic. He was magically barren. On the voyage from Britain he’d failed again and again to light a fire with his mind until eventually Drustan had confessed that he’d cheated that first time, and lit the fire that Ragnall had thought he’d lit. His tutor had done it to encourage him, he’d said, since he’d thought he might be the powerful saviour druid that had been foretold. Instead, Spring was the druidical messiah and Ragnall had no magic at all.

He didn’t blame Drustan and he couldn’t miss something he’d never had. In fact, it was something of a relief, since it meant that he hadn’t used magic to make Lowa have sex with him, so he could in no way be accused of having raped her. She’d dropped Dug and shagged him purely because she was selfish and unkind.

A while later, it had come up in conversation that Drustan had told Lowa about Ragnall having no magical ability, well before he’d confronted her in her hut. So she’d known it wasn’t rape! But she’d persuaded him that he had raped her, and used that to make him forgive her for killing his family, and to go to Rome. She was more than unkind, he thought. She was evil. He wasn’t sure yet what he was going to do with all these revelations. He had lots of ideas. Returning to Britain and reporting to Lowa as if nothing had happened was not one of them.

He shook his head as he walked out into Caesar’s garden and the noise of a hundred conversations. To cheer himself up and clear Lowa from his mind, he reminded himself how he’d amazed Drustan by learning to speak Latin in the couple of weeks it had taken their ship to reach Ostia, Rome’s port. Apparently people spent years studying to be as good as he was. Indeed, a week after their arrival he was already more fluent than Drustan, who’d been speaking Latin since he was a boy. So he may not be some weirdo magic maker, but he was a great deal cleverer than most.

And better looking, he added to himself, as a glamorous older woman peeled away from the throng of partygoers, grabbed his arm and spoke very close to his ear.

“Wotcha,” she said “I’m Clodia. Clodia Metelli. What’s your ’andle?”

Her rough accent was a surprise. She wore precisely applied make-up, a blue tunic that shimmered expensively in the breeze, a golden necklace of knuckle-sized precious stones and a heady perfume that wafted an aroma of young flowers and wealth, but she spoke like the street-wretches and rag traders from the Aventine Hill, the poorest quarter of Rome where he and Drustan had found the cheapest lodging.

“My…?”

“’Andle. Handle. Name.”

“Oh sorry, I’m Ragnall Sheeplord.”

“What a name. From Britain?”

“Yes! How did you—”

“Got some British slaves. You sound the same. Come with us then, Ragnall, I wanna hear why you’re talking to me and not carrying a tray of drinks. Talking of drinks—”

Clodia whipped two golden glasses from a passing slave’s tray, beckoned with a tilt of her head for Ragnall to follow and walked away through the crowd. Her flowing tunic clung to her rear, which swung mesmerisingly below a narrow waist. Ragnall had a quick look about for Drustan and didn’t spot him. He shrugged and hurried after Clodia.

They passed a group of older, sensible-haired, clean-shaven men in red leather shoes and finely made togas with broad purple stripes. They were looking with undisguised distaste at a gang of young men dressed in transparent, loosely belted tunics. The more youthful fellows all had similar goatee beards. They were looking back at the older men, talking under their breath to each other, all scratching their heads with one finger as if it was a secret sign, then giggling. One of them pointed out Clodia and Ragnall and they giggled all the more.

The women, mostly standing in small clutches separate from the men, wore brighter, full-length variations of Clodia’s dress, though few of their clothes, if any, looked as finely woven as hers. They’d adorned their necks, ears and fingers with coloured stones and while Clodia’s locks hung down in simple tresses, many of the other women’s hair was piled high in elaborately curled, twisted and knotted towers.

Gliding deferentially through the clumps of men and women were more dark-skinned, oiled, lithe slaves, carrying drinks and platters of what was apparently food.

“Truffle-stuffed mare’s vulva?” asked a slave girl with an impish smile and a coquettish shake of her hips, proffering a plate of glistening brown lumps at him.

“No thanks,” he replied.

These slaves weren’t as dark-skinned as Atlas and the towel holder by the fish pond, more a paler bronzy-brown like Zadar’s former bodyguard Chamanca, so Ragnall assumed that they were Iberians like her. The party, after all, was to celebrate Julius Caesar’s recent military successes in Iberia, as well as his fortieth birthday.

They passed a pair of enormous yellow and brown animals with bizarrely long necks that Ragnall took to be giant deer from some far-off land, and reached a quieter area that was draped in fruits and vegetables so preposterously ripe-looking and unblemished that they might all have been made of polished wood. Ragnall stuck a fingernail in an apple to see if it was real. It was.

Clodia sat down on a rough wooden bench that looked out of place next to all the newly cut stone. A split in her dress fell open, revealing a tanned thigh. She crossed one leg over the other and patted the bench next to her.

Ragnall sat down.

“So. What brings you to Rome?”

“I’ve come with my tutor. We’ve heard so much about your city that we wanted to visit and see if the stories were true.”

“Your Latin’s brilliant.”

“Thanks. So’s yours.”

Clodia smiled. “I’d heard Britain was, like, all hairy barbarians dressed in smelly skins and that, too stupid to scratch their own arses?”

“I thought you had British slaves?”

“They’d been broken in and trained when I got ’em. So, are the British grunting hirsute idiots, got up in stinking rags, or not?”

Ragnall looked down at his toga. He’d become completely accustomed to it in a very short time. He wondered how he’d ever felt happy wearing anything else.

“Actually that’s not far off.”

“Who are your slaves in Britain? Is there some island further north that’s got even stupider, hairier people?”

Ragnall thought of Dug. “People from the north of our island are less intelligent, and there are islands further north that I’ve heard of, but I’ve never met anyone from them. We don’t have slaves. We just sell them to Rome – well, some of us do.”

“Fuck!” Clodia’s eyes widened. She had unusually large eyes, set high up on a broad-cheeked face below a narrow forehead. She wasn’t a typical beauty – she looked nothing like the ubiquitous statues which were presumably considered the peak of female attractiveness in Rome, but something – the challenge in her gaze perhaps – blasted away any attempt to appraise her looks rationally and made Ragnall’s throat constrict with lust.

“Who does all the shit work?” she continued.

“Shit work?”

“That awful messy business of agriculture. Washing pots and pans. Clearing up other people’s stink. Things that decent people shouldn’t have to do.”

Her accent, Ragnall noticed, had swung from a market-trader drawl to a well-bred staccato that better suited her looks and outfit. “I suppose we all do those things. Well, I don’t, but—”

“So ’ow come you’re different?” And her accent was back in the gutter. Odd, he thought.

“I…” Why was he different? He thought of his family, about the people of Maidun, of the druids and other children on the Island of Angels, and he looked around the crowd of increasingly drunk, braying Romans. These people didn’t look better than his people, but they’d certainly created something much better. They’d been in Rome almost a moon and still he found it hard to walk around with his mouth closed. The massive buildings were minutely and intricately decorated. Mosaic floors were so skilfully made and beautiful that he could have spent a whole day looking at each of them. The painted statues were exquisitely lifelike. Overarching all was a fiercely vibrant hum of activity; people scurrying hither and thither, merchants shouting their wares, politicians shouting their ideas and the relentless demolition and construction of buildings. And there was the size of the place. A million people lived in Rome, they said. A thousand thousand people all in one tight space, yet somehow they managed to gather everything they needed every day and take out everything they discarded. How, by Danu, did they do it? The systems that must have been involved were so vast and complex that it made him feel dizzy to consider them.

What was more, even though the city was more spectacular, luxurious and shinier than he’d ever imagined even the halls the gods might be, it felt strangely safe. More than safe, he felt comfortable. It was paradoxical. It could not have been more foreign, yet he felt more at home here than he ever had in the excrement-stinking circles of dilapidated huts that passed for settlements in his homeland.

“I think I’m just different from the rest of the British,” he said, turning to look at Clodia. Her eyelashes raised questioningly. “Perhaps I’m a Roman soul born in a foreign body? I certainly couldn’t ever be a slave.”

“No. Slaves are born, not made.”

“There are so many. Why don’t they—”

“Rebel?” Her coarse accent had vaporised again. “They do. But they don’t rebel against the idea of slavery as you might think, they rebel against the fact that they themselves are slaves. Every time they rebel successfully, they make others their slaves. But they always end up slaves again – because that it is what they are. There was one exception to that, one who nearly did make a difference, a wonderful Thracian named Spartacus. But he…” She sighed sadly, “He made the mistake of taking on Rome. He did better than most, and it did look for a while like he might free all the slaves. But, if my romantic side is a little in love with him, the practical part is glad he didn’t succeed. I rather like my slaves. I never have to do anything mundane and they remind me that I’m free … But I’d like to learn something about you. Tell me, what has struck you most about Rome since your arrival?”

“The buildings are colossal, and there are so many. I walked from—”

“Yawn.”

She wanted a clever answer, Ragnall thought. Well, let’s see how she likes this: “All right. Here’s a big difference. In Britain, the women rule as much as the men do. They fight in the army. In the household, men and women share the work. Men are not in charge of women, and women are not in charge of men. Yet I’ve heard that Roman women, even rich ones like you who say they are free, are actually no freer than slaves. I’ve heard you have no power. I heard a man say that women were decorations and not much more. Is there any truth in that?”

Clodia pursed her lips and wrinkled her large nose. “Some truth. We are not men’s equals in Rome’s eyes. Immigrants distort the picture so it’s not particularly obvious, but there actually are far fewer Roman women than men because so many baby girls do not pass infancy.”