‘Those men at the stake will be crucified?’
The old centurion caught the tone, and as he replied, his voice echoed off the buildings that lined the narrow street. ‘You’re not squeamish, boy, are you? Don’t fret for a dead slave, lad. It makes the others work harder.’
The town was busier than any place Aquila had ever seen. As they approached the centre, an open space dominated by a large wattle and daub temple, the crowd increased so that forward movement became a struggle and Flaccus, to little effect, lashed out at those who blocked his path; they could not move out of his way because of the overall crush. Aquila could see the packed steps of the temple, full of people trading. In one shaded corner a teacher addressed a group of young men, his arms waving as he declaimed; in another moneylenders transacted their business, with a great deal of shouting and slapping of foreheads. Stalls lined the spaces between the tall columns, each with its own yelling vendor. Exceedingly colourful, little of what he saw really registered; he could not put aside the look of hate that had filled that single eye, the look of a man who feels betrayed.
Flaccus turned away from the temple and headed down the incline towards the harbour, still struggling to make any headway. Once out of the square the crush eased, though it was still difficult for a mounted man to move with any speed until they emerged onto the wharves, full of carts laden with grain, each one with a trail of exhausted-looking men filling their baskets at the tail. Flaccus asked one of the sutlers for directions; the man took in the freshly tended gash on the horse’s flank, before pointing to a large warehouse.
The front was clear of carts, the slaves, instead, trudging in and out of the open warehouse doors. Armed men lined their route, with the occasional crack of a bullwhip or a vine sapling striking on a bare back, accompanying the loud exhortations that they should move faster. Down by the edge of the wharf a group of carpenters were working with great lengths of timber, which they had erected to form a triangle, now being threaded with ropes. Both dismounted and hitched their animals to the rail, and Flaccus stood for a moment watching the steady procession of labour: all men, all dull-eyed and every one looking undernourished. He nodded slowly, as if in approval, before walking into the shaded interior of the warehouse.
One rotund fellow, with a leather apron over his white smock, and a wax tablet in his hand, stood by a large set of scales. As each basket was filled from the grain store it was put on the scales. He then noted its weight before indicating that it should be removed. Nodding to Flaccus, and without interrupting his work, he pointed to the rear of the building with his wooden stylus. The air was full of fine golden dust, which covered everyone and everything, giving the slaves, with their bare ribcages sticking out, the appearance of skeletons rather than human beings.
Aquila followed Flaccus up a narrow staircase, through dampened screens, carefully placed to contain the dust. The top floor of the warehouse held the cargo that the ships had fetched in from Ostia: bales of cloth, large ampoules of wine, weapons and a whole stack of hardwood tree trunks, grown specially so that one branch at each end formed the point of a plough. At the front, overlooking the wharf, a table had been set up, laden with food and wine, with bales arranged to provide seating, so that the overseers of the various properties could take their ease and feed themselves, all the while able to watch the fruits of their farms being loaded onto the ships. One of them, a fat fellow with a bald white head, was talking loudly and Aquila had a vague feeling of recognition, without being able to place why. Better dressed than his companions, he had the proprietary bearing of a man who owned the place and he was busy explaining to the others his plans for the future.
‘Every time you shift grain you lose a bit. Some ends up on the ground when you’re loading your carts, more when they’re bucketing along some of the interior roads. Now, that’s our money dribbling out. Remember we get paid on the weight that arrives in Ostia, not the weight of what we grow.’
He turned to greet Flaccus and the boy could see that for all his well-fed, carefully barbered look, the round face was hard, the eyes calculating rather than friendly. He greeted them effusively, ran his eyes up and down Aquila, before he bade Flaccus to eat and take his ease. The ex-centurion returned the greeting, acknowledged the others present, then filled a platter for the boy, gave him a cup full of wine and sent him to sit on a bale well away from the table, before looking to his own needs. Aquila accepted with glum ill-grace, his mind still on the sight outside the gates, which earned him an enquiring stare from Flaccus. The look the large fat fellow gave him was different; more to do with his lithe young body than his mood. Aquila ignored him and he turned back to the table, eager to expound his theories. Flaccus, caught between two thoughts, had no time to enquire of the boy what was amiss.
‘And every one of you complains to me about the weight I record, since it never tallies with your own.’ Heads nodded at that, and despite the friendly tone of the meeting, many a black look was aimed in his direction. ‘I lose too, friends. Just cast your eyes over that trail of grain between the warehouse door and the ship. That’s mine, every bit of it. There’s a trail just like it at the unloading, with half the folk of Ostia fetching their chickens down to the wharves to feed for free, and it all adds up to a pretty denarius at the end of the day.’
He stopped to top up the goblets of those nearest him, turning as he did so to look at Aquila again. The boy, slouched across a bale, did not notice; he was looking at the sun, coming in through the open doors, turning the stream of poured wine bright red, which made him think of Clodius. He had seen that very effect as his adopted father had held the wine gourd above his head on a hot day, expertly aiming the contents into his open throat, and the sight further served to take him back to a world he thought lost forever.
‘You have something in mind to solve this, Cassius Barbinus?’
That wiped any thoughts of Clodius and his past from his mind as a flash of hate coursed through his body, because suddenly he knew where he had seen the fat man before. It had been the day the supposedly tame leopards had attacked Gadoric’s sheep. The animals had been intended as a gift for some important visitor, one of them, a scented prick of a boy his own age, who had been just as responsible as Cassius Barbinus for the fact that the leopards had been let loose within sniffing distance of the set of prey animals he was shepherding. The results were all too predictable, though Gadoric had pointed out, when Aquila told him of what had happened, the sheep belonged to Barbinus. If he wanted to feed them to a pair of big cats that was his right.
The man who had trained those leopards from cubs was furious; so was Aquila and there were many reasons why. He sat bolt upright and looked hard at Barbinus, but the object of his attention had turned to face his questioner. Was this really the rich senator whose woods he had raided for game, the man who owned the farm where he had last seen Gadoric, before encountering him tied to the stake today? He had, according to his overseer, Nicos, brutally raped the slave girl, Sosia, forcing from her throat a scream so plaintive that Aquila had mistaken it for the cry of a distressed fox, then sent her away, adding to the woes of that unforgettable day. The thought that anything he might have done these last months could have profited Cassius Barbinus nearly made him throw the platter in his hand at the man’s head. Barbinus, unaware of the effect his name was having on the boy, looked around his assembled bailiffs and provided his answer. ‘Indeed I do have a solution, my friends. If you look outside you will see I’m building a hoist. Once it’s complete, each one of you will be given a plan to make one of your own.’