The King's Cavalry (6 page)

IX
- Rome

The sight of Rome had Candless and Potius gaping in awe.

Their troop had come over the central spine of Italy
, along the worn stones of the Flaminian Way, named for the consul who built it to serve the settlers he’d placed in eastern Italia. The travelers had their first view of the Tiber’s green-grey waters at the ancient Milvian Bridge. This structure alone deeply impressed the weary travelers, a fine, six-arched, humped stone bridge that was defended at the south end by a square, Travertine tiled bastion with double arches and stout oak and iron gates. Its suggestion of power and purpose subdued the group’s spirits as they clattered through, but even this was not yet Rome.

Their first sight of the city proper came two miles later, as they rode into view of the Aurelian Walls, and then their jaws really dropped. This construction of concrete, tile, brick and mortar finished only 37 years before lay as an impregnable-seeming bulwark that enclosed all seven hills of the ancient city as well as the vast Fields of Mars and a Tiber-side residential district.

The walls were overwhelmingly imposing. They stood five times the height of a tall man, were twice as thick as the length of the same man lying down and 12 miles in circumference. The emperors Aurelian and Probus had ordered them built to keep out the invading Germanic barbarians and the walls were reinforced with a square tower at every 30 paces: 383 great towers in all to hold the wall’s defenders, and 18 main gates to allow legitimate passage.

This construction marvel had been hurled up in a scant five years, partly as
a defence against the Germanic threat, partly as a demonstration of Roman power and partly as a message of defiant Roman loyalty. They seemed to say: “Rome will never be conquered. You may reach the gates, but they will not open to you.” Here and there existing buildings had been incorporated into the defences: the Castrense Ampitheatre, Cestius’ Pyramid, a part of the aqueduct that stuttering Claudius had built to bring sweet water to Rome, but nowhere did the walls offer weakness.

The Via Flaminia itself pierced the walls at one of the five postern gates, cunningly built to allow defenders to sally out unobserved. There, a brutal-faced centurion accosted Candless. “Your business?” he demanded.

“I have come from Britannia to see the emperor,” said Candless loftily, although he was uncomfortably aware that his dust-covered and travel-stained robes and self were hardly likely to impress.

“You say that, but you could have come from anywhere,” said the centurion rudely. He glanced to one side, to a sentry passage just inside the wall where, discreetly out of view, a
contubemium
of eight spearmen stood rigid, awaiting orders. Candless realised that his own armed guard made a threatening sight and the centurion was assessing the risk and perhaps the need to call out reinforcements. The bishop coughed to gain a moment and gather his thoughts but before he could speak, Potius had kicked his mount alongside.

“Mervio!” he called. “That you, Mervio?”

The centurion turned at his name and his weathered slab of a face split in a grin. “You dog, Potius! What are you doing here?” Candless relaxed, and sat patiently listening as the two old sweats exchanged news of what they had done since they served together on the Danube. Finally, Candless was able to wave his small procession onwards to clop through the vast arch between the flanking towers and enter the walls, admiring as they did the reliefs to Publius Aelius Calpurnianus whose consular road ended at this spot.

Candless, as ordered by the slab-faced centurion, sent his men to pitch their tents in the military camp inside the wall while he and his personal servants headed on foot for the residence of Bishop Militades, the recently-elected pontiff. The guide supplied by the gate guard led them through the city unerringly, although it was a place of more than a million people, a swarming beehive labyrinthe of narrow streets and crowded, towering tenement buildings, some of them four and five teetering storeys high.

At street level were the porticoed shop fronts and taverns with their heavy shutters that opened directly onto the cess-stinking streets. There were butchers’ shops with piled shambles of offal outside where lean, yellow dogs snarled and fought over unspeakable entrails; shoemakers who sat in their door holes tapping and stitching as clients waited, idly chatting, for repairs to be made to their footwear. Here was a barber scraping a client’s cheek as it was stretched smooth over a small apple; there a baker piling floury bran loaves on shelves; over there a dyer’s shop where jars of soapwort, tartar salt, saffron, nut-gall and madder were arrayed, ingredients to create the brilliantly-coloured silks and linens sought by fashionable ladies. Every street and dingy, dark alleyway presented a living tableau of traders and services on offer.

Patrolling the alleys and streets were dozens of food vendors who hawked cooked chicken and sausages, olives, cheeses and fruit to the throngs of pedestrians. They competed for attention with the jugglers,
beggars and scribes who also made their livings on the streets, just as did the fishmongers who wheeled water carts full of live fish brought from the huge aquaria on the fifth floor of Trajan’s Market.

Above street level, the big-bayed tiers of the apartment blocks presented a standard appearance, the first level of their stone stairways chopped through the line of shops before vanishing inside the structures. The buildings’ layer after layer of brick, rubble, and timber rose above the street in a climbing series of balconies and loggias that reminded the Pict of the seabird colonies on the cliffs of his homeland. There was a difference, he noted grimly. The towering blocks of the rookery-like
insulae
, that housed nine of every ten of Rome’s million-plus inhabitants, looked to be of the most dangerous, tottering construction, and here and there was the proof – a tumbled, burned-out tenement that had spilled into the street.

Some of the rookeries collapsed from hugely-inferior building techniques when level after shaky level was piled up on an inadequate footprint, others were destroyed when the massive timbers needed to support the weight of the upper storeys caught fire, for none of the insulae had chimneys. People cooked on open fires and heated their rooms with primitive braziers. It was inevitable that there were several house fires in the city every day. If the building was not set afire accidentally, there was a good chance it would collapse of its own poor construction and be consumed as the cooking fires were spilled.

Candless called the guide to him and questioned the man. “There are laws, Lord,” said the guide, “but people ignore them. The buildings are not supposed to be more than 60 feet tall, with outside walls of up to a foot and a half, but many are much taller, the walls are very thin and the floors, for economy, are pathetically fragile. It just takes a bribe or two to the city inspectors, that’s enough to get it all overlooked. They look good, though, don’t they?”

The man referred to the appearance of the outside masonry, which often had a façade of marble or coloured tile, or pebbled patterns set in the brick and concrete skin, and to the flowerpot-adorned balconies and climbing plant-wrapped pillars of the loggias that stretched over their heads. “Looks solid, doesn’t it,” he said, nodding to an especially handsome structure that stretched high over their heads. “But it’s probably propped up with bed slats and straw.”

Candless would learn that almost all of Rome’s citizens lived in about 50,000 apartment blocks, and that only a few, the very wealthy, occupied the 2,000 or so single-storey houses. “You can get hundreds of people in one insula, “ said the guide casually. “But if you don’t live at ground level, there’s no water for you unless you carry it up yourself from the fountains. There’s no toilets, and no fireplaces in there either, just open stoves or braziers. People suffocate from the smoke all the time in the winter, when they close the rooms up against the cold.” Candless shuddered. Even the most primitive Pict hut had its homely fire and usually, a closeness to a water source. And this was great Rome!

The million-person mass of humanity might be crammed inside the vast walls of Aurelius, but the same fortifications that ringed them also contained much green space: half a hundred parks, gardens and public open spaces, plus large swathes of land dedicated to the gods that were virtually empty of humans.

Additionally, in among the human rookeries were the oases of the wealthy: private homes whose outside showed blank walls to the world, but whose interiors opened onto verdant gardens with fountains, fruit trees and private courtyards far removed from the city bustle and stink outside their protective fronts.

The bishop was familiar with stink and crowds, for he had known the streets of Londinium before it was destroyed, and he knew towns like the bustling seaport citadel of Bononia, but those places did not compare with the sensory overload he was experiencing here. Every street, plaza and circus offered a bewildering abundance of temples, basilicas, docks, baths, taverns, public administration buildings, theatres, monuments and statuary, all crowded between the teetering insulae that swarmed with humanity.

He knew that no waggons were allowed inside the walls during daylight hours, and that many streets were designated for vehicle travel in one direction only, for they were far too narrow to allow wheeled vehicles to pass each other. Only two viae in all of the city, the Via Sacra and the Via Nova, were wide enough for two carts to pass. The
acti
were rated wide enough for a single cart, the
itinera
made a tangled zig-zagging net of pedestrians-only thoroughfares, and Candless could see the sense of allowing only horsemen, pedestrians and chairmen-carried litters on the streets between dawn and dusk.

He knew that at night the city was locked up and dark. The rich might venture out with their torchbearers and guards, and wag
goners with their necessary guards had no choice but to rumble around making their deliveries at night, but Rome after dark was the province of murderers, footpads and burglars and the ordinary citizen stayed safe in his tenement tower insula.

Another thing surprised the bishop. In this place of marble and polished limestone, of golden statuary and the opulence of an empire, he was shocked to see how the streets ran with filth, and he mentioned it to the guide.

“Well, yes, there are cess trenches, but there are some fine sewers under the streets, too,” said the man with a touch of indignation. “Some are big enough to drive a hay wain through. The sewers collect the waste from the insulae, but I suppose really only from the ground floor apartments. But they also serve the public latrines, and they are quite splendid places.”

The group had halted as an altercation broke out ahead between two well-dressed women. One was clutching a naked baby, the other seemed to want to take it from her. “It happens,” said the guide. “Unwanted babies can legally be exposed by the cess trenches, but quite often wives eager for a baby will snatch them up. These two seem to have both wanted the same child. The loser will just wait and watch for another woman putting out a child, usually after dark. I think they should let them be collected at the public toilets, as a service.”

Candless said: ”Toilets, eh? Well, let’s try one. I could use a natural break.” Minutes later, they halted outside a
forica
. Entry to it cost a small coin, but the interior of the cedar-ceilinged building was impressive. This particular forica was circular, with marble seats lined all around the walls. The seats were supported by brackets formed in the shape of dolphins, which acted also as separators between clients. Water flowed in channels under the seats, more channels provided water to wash the citizens’ personal sponges, a fountain played in the room’s centre and niches above the lines of seats contained small statues of the gods and a fine altar to Fortuna. Citizens about their business sat and chatted with their neighbours and the whole place had an air of social ease and a total lack of embarrassment.

“What do the poor do, if they cannot afford to pay even an
as
to enter one of these places?” Candless asked as he and the guide settled into adjoining seats. “Well, they can use their own chamber pots, which they empty at the ground floor of their insula. There’s usually a vat placed under the staircase; or they can dump it on the local dungheap, to be taken away by a manure merchant. They can even donate their urine into one of the row of shaped pots the fullers put outside their shops, because they need the ammonia for bleaching.”

The guide paused, and added: ”Then there are the people who are too lazy or too feeble to go downstairs to empty their chamber pots, and they’ll just pitch it out of the window onto the street. It’s a common court case brought by someone injured or fouled by a shit pot’s contents, if the plaintiff can track down who did it.”

The bishop and his party regrouped outside to continue on their way to the house of Bishop Militades, who lived among Rome’s wealthy on the Caelian Hill, close to the huge baths of Caracalla. Candless’ talkative guide was eager to point out the sights along the way. “Rome has seven hills, but two of them aren’t really much,” he said, as they skirted the Viminal. “This all used to be marsh in the old days, and the different gens lived on the hills around it until it was drained. It was like living on islands, they say. That’s the Esquiline ahead of us. Old Nero built his Golden House on the cemetery and dump there, and the Temple of Claudius and Trajan’s baths are the big attraction now. They’re leveling the Vatican hillock, going to build something there.”