Enemies of the Empire (4 page)

But, I asked myself, how could she know anything of the kind? I was to all outward appearances simply a humble Celtic traveller, with the traces of a cauterised slave-brand on my back. Was it the presence of Promptillius, perhaps? He had made himself conspicuous in the marketplace. But I had come directly from there: surely there was no time for gossip to have got here first?

She must have interpreted my bewildered pause to mean that I’d accepted what she said, because the persuasive smile appeared again and her distinctive odour wafted over me as she leaned close and murmured, in what she doubtless hoped was a seductive tone, ‘You are the only stranger hereabouts. We don’t get many handsome visitors in this part of town. Obviously I’m interested in you, and whether you want to come and see my girls.’

Flattery now! With my grizzled grey hair and weathered cheeks I’m no youthful Hercules! Whatever did she hope to gain by it? Perhaps she wanted money to tell me what she knew. As soon as I had thought of that, I wondered why it had not occurred to me before. ‘How much do you want?’ I said.

She misinterpreted again. ‘Depends on what you have. Three
sesterces
for a basic girl – virgins are extra . . .’ The smile was broader now and she began to count off the price-list on her fingertips.

I interrupted her. ‘To tell me where Plautus went, and how I get to him.’

‘Plautus?’ She sounded mystified. ‘Who’s Plautus?’ And then, ‘He’s not—’ She stopped abruptly. ‘You mean your friend. The man in the green tunic you were speaking of?’

This was getting more baffling by the moment. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Gaius Flaminius Plautus. At least, he was called Plautus when I saw him last. Do you know him by some other name?’

She had turned pink again. ‘Of course not, traveller. I don’t know him by any name at all. In fact, I told you, I’ve no idea what man you’re speaking of.’ She paused. ‘So you’re not even tempted by what we’re offering? Most passing traders are. If it isn’t armour that they’re looking for, it’s girls. Well, that’s your affair. If you don’t want my girls, I’ll go and find somebody who does. But you don’t know what you’re missing. I’ve got the best girls in Venta. You ask anyone.’ She turned and began to walk away.

Suddenly I was loath to let her go. A man whom I had thought dead and buried was walking round this town alive, and I was sure that this woman knew more about him than she was telling me. ‘Wait!’ I called after her.

She turned.

‘What is your name?’ I asked. ‘And where can I find you?’ Then, realising that she was unlikely to answer that, I added feebly, ‘In case I change my mind. About your services.’

She looked unconvinced. For a moment she seemed to hesitate, as if she was weighing caution against commerce. Commerce won. ‘My name is Lyra,’ she confessed at last. ‘You’ll find me in the street of the oil-lamp sellers, at the further end. Ask anyone, or just walk down until you see the sign.’

I nodded. I knew what the sign would be. A crudely carved phallus etched into the paving of the road – many towns had something similar.

‘Ask for me by name, and I’ll see that you get a special rate,’ she said. And having offered that final inducement, she walked off down the street. She must have been twenty-five at least, well past her prime, but she still moved with that special and provocative wiggle of the hips which ladies of her profession always seem to learn. That, perhaps, is why I watched her until she was out of sight.

Or almost out of sight. Just before she turned the corner opposite and vanished from my view, I saw her stoop and mutter a few words to a ragged child who was squatting on the street outside a butcher’s shop. She paused so briefly before straightening up and walking on again that if I had not been following her so closely with my eyes, I might not have noticed that she’d stopped at all.

The child waited for a moment till she’d gone. Then he glanced in my direction, scrambled to his feet and disappeared round the counter into the interior of the butcher’s stall. A moment later, he was back, sitting exactly where he’d been before and looking anywhere except at me, with an expression of bored disinterest on his face. Shortly afterwards two older boys came out into the street.

They were good. I had to give them that. So good that, if I had not been already on my guard, I should never have suspected them at all. Certainly I had no qualms at first. They behaved like any other boys, tumbling and chattering and arguing about a cup-ball on a string. The larger of the two, a tallish youth with gangling limbs and a mop of auburn curls, gave the smaller one a playful push and ran away, still dangling the cup-ball in his hand, and making derisive gestures as he went.

His companion – smaller and leaner but otherwise very similar – shrugged with pretended unconcern and turned away, to go and lean against a wall not very far from me – the very embodiment of sulking youth. It was only when I turned and met his eyes that I realised, from the startled speed with which he glanced away, that he had positioned himself there on purpose, and was watching me.

It was disquieting.

I tested my theory by the simple method of walking a little further down the street, and stopping to admire the armour on the stall. Sure enough, when I glanced round, the boy was there again, apparently engrossed in shying small stones at a lame dog that was limping down the street.

I declined the offer of a dagger with a dented blade, ‘dragged from a dying Roman soldier in the field, not very far away’, for twice the price that a new one would have cost in Glevum any day and sauntered a little further. I was tempted to cross the roadway and follow Lyra round the corner to my left, but a moment’s consideration suggested something else. If this lad – who was still hovering at my heels – was really following me, it was possible that his gangly companion, who’d gone running off like that, had also been no idle bystander. The most likely explanation was that he’d been sent to take Lyra’s news as fast as possible to someone else, and I could think of only one person in this town to whom such a message could possibly be sent. Plautus, the dead man who was no longer dead.

Of course the ‘messenger’, if that was what he was, had long since disappeared, but I had seen him go and that gave me at least a direction I could take towards some explanation of this mystery. Accordingly, I set off the way I knew he’d gone, though I dawdled at many of the stalls and took good care not to glance behind. If I was correct in my suspicions, I did not want my little follower to realise that I knew that he was there. We must have presented a merry spectacle, both pretending to be absorbed in something else and each affecting to be unconcerned about the other’s presence. I took a side-street, then another one, still feigning to examine all the wares displayed. But when I hovered beside a busy copper stall, and picked up a cooking-pot as if to buy, I could see the boy, not very far behind, reflected in the burnished surface of the pan.

We had reached the limit of the shops by now, and the street had dwindled to a murky lane of taverns, wine stores and
thermopolia
– the hot-food stalls which serve cheap drink and questionable soup. It was beginning to get dark, besides, and some of the stall-holders were folding up. Taverns were lighting lamps or setting flaming torches in the holders at their doors. I hovered at the counter of one thermopolium, as if contemplating the purchase of some soup, then hurried round the corner into another of Venta’s very narrow alleyways.

It was darker there, as I’d expected, and I stood back hard against the wall, hoping to be lost among the shadows. A moment afterwards, the boy appeared and, with an air of innocence, stood at the corner and glanced down the lane. I hoped that he would venture after me, but he did not – simply stood at the entrance peering down into the dark, evidently bemused at losing sight of me – so, after waiting for what seemed an age, I stepped forward briskly, seized his arm and dragged him into the alley after me.

‘Now,’ I said, shaking him none too gently. ‘What’s all this about? Why are you following me?’

He began to protest that he was doing nothing of the kind, but that was so evidently absurd that the words died on his lips and he lapsed into silence once again.

‘Well?’ I prompted, with another shake.

He shook his head. ‘You can’t frighten me. I won’t tell you anything. Even if you torture me it won’t do any good.’ He raised his head and added with a certain pride, ‘I took an oath.’

The answer was so absurdly innocent that I almost smiled. I have seen the Roman torturers and the torments they inflict, and I knew what their instruments could do to tender flesh. It was obvious the boy had no idea. I wondered how long he would endure before he broke down in abject tears and told everything he knew, begging for the agony to cease.

I asked, ‘How old are you?’

It was clearly not the question he had been expecting, and he blurted, ‘Eight summers,’ in a startled voice, before he thought better of it and added, ‘Though that won’t help you. I haven’t given anything away.’

I had the measure of my captive now. The boy was terrified, though trying to be brave, and it was easy to startle information out of him. I was eager to exploit this fact as much as possible. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘I know who you and your brother are working for. I saw him in the alleyway today, before your friend Lyra delayed me in my tracks. I know she sent that child to fetch you from the shop.’

The boy had gone so rigid in my grasp that I knew I was right, even before he muttered, in a strangled voice, ‘Who told you that? It wasn’t me.’

‘I know a great deal more than you suppose,’ I said. ‘You are Rufinus, aren’t you?’ I picked the name at random, but not without some thought. It means ‘red-headed one’ and is a common appellation amongst the Silures. Since this lad and his brother both had auburn curls, ‘Rufinus’ seemed a fairly likely guess.

I was lucky ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ the lad said hotly. ‘Rufinus is my brother. I’m Paulinus.’

I nodded judiciousy. ‘Then it seems that I was slightly misinformed. I wonder what other errors have been made? You are the sons of the man who owns that fresh-meat and offal stall I saw you coming from . . .’ I paused expectantly.

‘I’m not saying anything,’ Paulinus said, thereby confirming what I’d merely guessed.

‘And you and Lyra share the same concerns,’ I went on. The boy said nothing, so I tried again. ‘I think you work for Plautus’ – no reaction there – ‘or at any rate run messages for him.’

‘Plautus?’ There it was again, that note of genuine bewilderment with which Lyra had repeated the name. ‘I’ve never heard of any Plautus. Who is he?’

He was so clearly puzzled that I paused to think, and in doing so must have somehow dropped my guard, and momentarily loosened my grip upon his arm. I was still considering what tactic to use next when Paulinus twisted round, tore himself free and made a dash for it. By the time I had recovered enough to lumber to the corner after him, he had nipped past the thermopolium and was halfway down the street where deepening shadows swallowed him at once

A moment later the only trace of him was the sound of running sandals on the paving stones, ringing like mocking laughter in the dark.

‘Well, stranger, are you planning to buy some soup, or not?’ The owner of the thermopolium, a bearded giant of a man with shoulders like a bull and an expression of no great intelligence or pleasure on his face, had shambled from the shadows of the stall and was standing in front of me, his heavy ladle in his hand.

Nothing had been further from my mind, but one glance at this hairy colossus was enough to convince me of where wisdom lay, and I reached into my tunic for my purse. ‘A small helping, please.’ And then, since he was watching, I was obliged to force it down – a greasy broth of cabbage leaves and what looked like bits of goat: eyeballs, hoof-parts, ears and other things I didn’t even try to recognise.

Still, it was warm, and after money had changed hands the monster with the ladle seemed more amicably inclined, though he still wore an expression of distrust. ‘You a stranger in this part of town?’ he said, scooping a floating piece of turnip-end from the cooking-vat and adding it tenderly to my plate as though he were offering me a special treat. ‘We don’t get many visitors down here. Not unless they are looking for something particular.’

It was a question really, and something about his manner suggested that it would be imprudent not to offer a reply. For a moment I almost contemplated telling him the truth, that I was following a man I thought was dead, and how Paulinus had been tracking me, but – looking at those brawny shoulders and distrustful eyes – I was suddenly aware of how unlikely that would sound. I searched my mind for some more plausible account.

I found it. ‘I was given an address. The street of the oil-lamp sellers.’ I paused. He was still looking suspiciously at me and I took the final plunge. ‘A woman named Lyra keeps a house there, I believe.’

The mistrustful manner vanished, and a leering smile spread across his face. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Is that it! I wondered what you looked so furtive about. Well, don’t worry, friend. You’re in Venta now. No one will think the less of you for having human urges – quite the contrary. At least the men won’t.’ He glanced behind him, and then moved closer before adding confidentially, ‘Have you got a wife?’

I nodded. I was about to say ‘In Glevum’, but before the words were out, he was already rushing on.

‘I thought as much. My wife is just the same! Picked up with this peculiar new cult – you know, the one whose god was crucified, if you ever heard anything so ridiculous – and now she seems to think my simplest pleasures are wicked and depraved. She prays all over me if I have too much to drink, let alone visit Lyra and her girls.’ He poured out two battered beakers of cheap over-watered wine from an amphora leaning on the wall, and pushed one in my direction. ‘She won’t even make sacrifices to the Emperor on public holidays. She’ll get herself in trouble over it one day – and me too, I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve had to forbid her to go to meetings and lock her up indoors.’ He downed his drink in one gigantic gulp. ‘Women! Who needs them, eh? Except in the way you’re looking for, of course.’ He gave me a nudge which almost spilt my drink.