The Ghosts of Glevum (22 page)

But was it simpler than that? Were they acting on their own account, determined to avenge their master’s death, either for themselves or for someone else? That was the most unnerving possibility of all – a small marauding private unit, under Bullface’s command, subject to no official scruples or restraint and operating outside the law. Did that explain why ‘soldiers’ had set fire to my hut – and why I had escaped the garrison in town, only to find Praxus’s guard awaiting me?

I was still lost in this disturbing line of thought when Lercius interrupted me. He was examining the contents of the hut with an expression of ill-disguised dismay. ‘What happened to our chicken stew?’ he blurted suddenly. It seemed a callous question, in the circumstances, but I was ashamed to realise that I had some sympathy. I had not eaten since my share of roasted eel the night before, and already I was feeling hunger-pangs.

‘The soldiers poured it all away. Most of the liquid seeped into the ground,’ the woman said, picking up the battered cooking pot. ‘But obviously I’ve rescued what I could.’ To my amazement she whipped off the lid, and revealed a little pile of broken chicken flesh. ‘Some of it got quite muddy, I’m afraid, and although I tried to clean it in the spring, until I get another water bowl I have no way to do it properly. But if you don’t mind . . .’

Mind? I’d have eaten through more mud than that to get at sustenance! Lercius clearly felt the same: he had already plunged a hand into the pot and was chewing greedily on a piece of thigh. Even Sosso abandoned his prowling round the hut and came over to join us at our feast.

We ate with our fingers, since there were no bowls – apart from Sosso who still had his knife, and used it to spear the choicest morsels for himself. It tasted wonderful despite the flecks of dirt – as things do to a starving man – and we made short work of it. Even the woman had a piece or two. I was just considering the empty pot, and wondering what Molendinarius would say when he returned to find that we had eaten all the food, when I looked up and saw him toiling up the track.

He was pushing his handcart, by the look of it, now piled high with something and covered by a dingy green-brown cloth. Behind him were two other figures whom I did not recognise at first, but as they drew closer I realised that it was Cornovacus and the pock-marked girl. At the same time I was aware of an unpleasant odour in the air, as if someone had been rolling in the drains.

‘Ah,’ Sosso grunted, wiping his ugly face on the hem of what had been my tunic. ‘They’ve come. Time for you to go.’

‘Go where?’ I asked, trying to forget the puzzle of the smell. I was beginning to trust that Sosso had a plan, since he’d plotted everything successfully till now. A plan was needed, too. It was already clear to me that it was no longer safe for me to stay here in the hut – and clearly the roundhouse and my workshop were equally dangerous. Bullface and his men would not give up. They would certainly be back to search for me again, and I had few illusions now about what I could expect if they once managed to lay hands on me. ‘Go where?’ I said again.

Sosso grinned. ‘Villa. Naturally. Need the money, don’t we?’

I gaped. ‘But I can’t . . .’ I made a despairing gesture. I tried for a moment to envisage myself shimmying up trees and leaping down from branches, as Lercius had done. I failed.

Sosso gave that throaty, mirthless laugh. ‘Don’t worry, citizen. No climbing walls. You get in through the gates.’ He gestured towards the firewood-seller’s cart. ‘See, there.’

Molendinarius swept off the cloth in a dramatic gesture, and the full stench of what it had covered reached my nostrils. It was unmistakable – rotten meat and decaying vegetables, with a fair admixture of human excreta too, I guessed. It was so powerful it almost made me reel.

Cornovacus nodded cheerfully. ‘Got it from the middens just outside the town,’ he said proudly. ‘Got all the members of our group on to it, worked them like a slavemaster, and – by Pluto and all the powers of Dis – they managed to get this together in an afternoon.’ He looked at me as if expecting to be complimented on this unlikely achievement.

‘What’s it for?’ I said guardedly.

‘It’s for the farm, of course,’ Molendinarius explained impatiently. ‘Buy this sort of thing, landowners do. Always a bit of money to be made, if you can get your hands on it and you’ve got a handcart you can move it on. Only, you tend to have to fight for it – everybody’s got the same idea.’

The idea of coming to blows over the contents of cesspits and rubbish heaps was new to me, but I was beginning to learn how the really poor and desperate could scratch a living from the most unexpected sources. Besides, I had other, more pressing, questions on my mind.

‘And how is this going to get me through the gates?’ If Sosso supposed that I would lie down on the cart and have that noisome mess spread over me, he would have to come up with some other plan. A man would choke to death in minutes from the smell.

Sosso bared his ugly tooth-stumps in a grin. ‘Push it.’

This time I fairly gaped. ‘Me? But I’ll be recognised.’

He chuckled; it was not a pleasant sound. ‘I doubt it,
citizen
.’

The pock-marked girl, who had been standing by, seemed to take courage at Sosso’s mirth, and ventured timidly, ‘Citizen, they’re not expecting you and if they were they wouldn’t know you now. No one ever looks at dungheapmen, in any case – they keep as far away as possible. Have you seen yourself?’

I had not, of course – there was nothing in the hut, not even a pail of clear water, that one could see one’s reflection in – but I realised instantly that she must be right. Not only was I wrapped in makeshift clothes and sacks, but I knew my hair was matted and my face unshaved, and parts of me still bore faint streaks of mud. Also, there was a cut above my eye, and I could feel that it was swollen and my cheek was bruised. No one who knew the old Libertus would glance twice at me.

‘Besides,’ the girl went on, ‘I shall be there to help.’

I was on the point of asking what help she would be, when Sosso said suddenly, ‘Enough! Come on!’ and there was nothing for it but to go.

We trooped in silence down the little path back towards the lane. I had a hundred questions, but I was wheeling the lopsided cart and that took all of my concentration until we reached the wider track, and it was not a great deal easier even then. I am accustomed to handcarts – I have one of my own – but this one had a damaged wheel and the resultant lurch made manoeuvring it a misery. The stinking contents shifted at every bump and fissure in the road, and threatened to fall off and shower me. I marvelled how the one-handed miller had managed it. The smell was perfectly atrocious, too.

Nor did my companions offer any help. The old woman had remained behind, still collecting up the strewn possessions from the hut, and Parva had forged ahead of us somewhere. As soon as we reached the public road the other men withdrew into the trees, leaving me to wheel the thing alone.

I turned towards them to protest but they were gone. I was horrified. Suppose I was walking into a trap? Sosso had not fully explained his plan to me, or told me what I was supposed to do. It would have been very easy for Cornovacus to have called into the garrison and offered to betray me for a price. I did not like this feeling of being in other people’s hands – especially a band of vagabonds and thieves.

I gave the handcart a bad-tempered push, with the result that it lurched into a deepish rut and stopped with a jerk that almost lost the load.

I thought unkind thoughts about the Fates and stooped to extricate the wheel from the hole. When I looked up there was a soldier on the road in front of me, stationed so that he would block my path. The Fates, I thought, had evidently heard. For a moment I contemplated abandoning the cart and bolting for the trees myself, but I had just sufficient self-restraint to see the idiocy of that.

If Sosso’s plan was going to work at all, I could expect to meet a soldier at some stage. This encounter was the test of it. I was supposed to be delivering fertiliser to the villa from the town, and this was an appropriate route for doing it – not the main military road where a poor man would be obliged to take to the verges on the way, but this steep and bumpy lane where at least I could occupy the track until it joined up with the wide and gravelled road which led to the main entrance of the villa. Of course I could hardly turn up there like a visitor, but beside the front gate was another track that led round to the farm and to the inner gateway at the back. If the perimeter of the villa was patrolled, I would have to get used to passing the guards.

I ruffled my thinning hair as far as possible across my face, hunched my shoulders and lurched off towards the soldier down the lane.

It was the same man that we’d seen earlier, but this time there was no sign of an alarm. He didn’t even draw his sword. He simply nodded at me as I approached, and asked me brusquely what my business was.

‘Fertiliser from the streets,’ I said, lifting up a corner of the cloth so that he could see, and also obtain the full benefit of the smell. ‘They take it at the villa, to put round the plants.’

I had taken pains to disguise my voice as much as possible, and my heart was thudding so loudly that I thought he had to hear, but he didn’t give me a second glance. ‘Well go on then, get on with it.’ He averted his head fastidiously. ‘What a stench! Worse than a gladiator’s armpit! Get it out of here!’ And he actually stood back to let me pass.

My route took me past my roundhouse gate, but there were soldiers on the lane and in my present role I dared not stop to look. However, it seemed to be as Molendinarius had said. Only a pile of charred remains showed where the sleeping house had been, but the dye-house and the rest of the enclosure seemed more or less intact. That was all I could determine before I was challenged by another guard. My throat went dry and my heart thumped painfully but, again, once I showed him the nature of my load he lost interest in me and waved me through.

I was stopped once more before I reached the track to the farm, and had to pass a sentry at the outer gate. Every time the outcome was the same. I was beginning to feel a bit more confident.

Things were not so simple when I reached the inner gate. In place of Marcus’s usual gatekeeper, who was elderly and always half asleep, there were two armed soldiers posted in the gatehouse there, and they were very much awake. From the way the younger one swaggered out and blocked my way, I was convinced that my whole lurching ordeal had been in vain.

‘Well?’ His tone was bullying. ‘What do you want? You can’t come in here.’

I went into my fertiliser speech again, but this time it did not have the same effect. He shook his head. ‘No one is to come in or out, by order of the garrison. I have my instructions. Now go away. Go on, beat it, before I take my baton to you.’ His colleague, who had been standing at the doorway of the gatekeeper’s post, took a step towards me as if to prove the point.

‘The other soldiers let me past,’ I protested, but there is no point in arguing with a guard. I began to turn the cart round. That was far more difficult than simply pushing it.

They watched me struggling.

‘Oh, come on!’ Parva unexpectedly appeared from the little room, a sort of stone hut set into the wall. ‘Make up your mind, you two. Who’s interested in this stupid beggar and his cart of muck? You heard what he said. Let him in and let’s get on with it. A quadrans each – I haven’t got all day.’

The younger soldier still looked hesitant, but the other winked at him. ‘She’s right. Vital supplies, that is. You know our orders. We aren’t to interfere with vital farm supplies and profitable trade. You know what the authorities are like. When this estate is taken into Imperial hands, they want it as lucrative as possible.’ He jerked a thumb at me. ‘Go on then. In there beside the inner wall. You dump it there, and mind you keep in sight, where we can keep an eye on you. No funny business either or I’ll have both your ears.’

I straightened the cart before he changed his mind, and suddenly there I was inside the gates. It was so familiar – the piles of heaped wood for the furnaces, the beds of winter greens, the fruit trees neatly planted up against the wall – that it was hard to believe how much my life had changed. There was even a land slave sweeping up the leaves. It all looked strikingly peaceful and affluent after the wretched hovels where I’d spent the last two days.

However, there was no time to stand and stare about. The younger soldier was still scowling after me. His companion had already disappeared. Having no shovel or real idea of what was appropriate, I lifted the cloth and began to scrabble the muck on to the floor with my hands. The soldier grunted something which I could not hear, but he seemed satisfied, and after a moment he too turned in the direction of Parva and her raddled charms.

The land slave was less amenable. He put down his brush of bundled twigs and hurried across to me, his face a picture of incredulity.

‘What are you doing, you old fool? You can’t offload that here. Get out before I call my mistress. She will have you whipped.’ His voice was so loud that I feared the guard had heard, but there was no sound from the gatehouse. Presumably they were otherwise engaged.

‘Hush,’ I murmured as soon as he was near enough to hear. I realised that I knew him slightly, had even spoken to him once or twice, but there was not a flicker of recognition on his face. ‘Your mistress is expecting me, I think.’ I certainly hoped that this was true. I guessed that when Lercius had gone across the wall, this was the message he had been told to give – though nobody had said as much to me. ‘Tell her the ordure she required has come.’ I dropped my voice. ‘Tell her a pavement-maker has delivered it. Quickly, before those guards come back. Now, if you wish to save your master’s life.’

He gave me a startled little nod, and darted through the door which led in the direction of the house. I went on shovelling with my hands, taking as long as I dared. It would take him some time to cross the inner garden and the court and find his mistress in the further wing. But I dared not stop altogether. The older of the guards had wandered back by now, adjusting his tunic, and was standing by the gate again, watching me in a desultory way.