I too was sitting up by then. Part of me already knew what must have happened, because Camillus Justinus was a senator's son so he had been brought up to be nobly undemonstrative. Even if a vintner's cart drove over his toe, Justinus was supposed to ignore his bones cracking but to wear his toga in neat folds like his ancestors, then to speak nicely as he requested the driver to please move along. Yelling at the sky like that could only mean disaster.
It was quite simple. As the star-filled desert night faded to dawn, while we two still dozed like oblivious logs, a group of nomads must have wandered past. They had taken one of our horses (either despising mine, or else leaving us the means to escape alive out of quaint old desert courtesy), and they had stolen all our money. They had robbed us of our flagon, though like us they rejected the biscuit.
Then their flocks of half-starved sheep or goats had devoured the surrounding vegetation. Taking offense at our silphium, before they meandered off on their age-old journey to nowhere, the nomads had yanked out any remaining shreds of our plant.
Our chance of a fortune had gone. There was almost nothing left.
While we stared in dismay, one lone brown goat skipped down from a rock and chewed up the last sunbaked threads of root.
Forty-seven
TO GREEKS, CYRENE was a blessed hole in the heavens that had dropped to earth for them to colonize. A foundation at least as old as Rome, the high ridge where the city stands looks so much like Greece itself that the drought-ridden Therans who had been sent forth by the Oracle of Delphi and who were led here by helpful Libyans must have thought they had nodded off and somehow sailed back home again. From the scrubby gray hills where quails abound, there is a stunning vista over the far plain below to the gleaming sea and the ever-thriving port of Apollonia. The deep wooded valleys of the high jebel are as peaceful and mysterious as Delphi itself. And everywhere is filled with the perfumes of wild thyme, dill, lavender, laurel, and small-leaved mint.
This highly aromatic place was not, to be frank, a good place for two dispirited lads who had just failed in their hunt for a lost herb.
Justinus and I had climbed slowly and gloomily up towards the city one sunlit, pine-scented morning, arriving on the Way of the Tombs; it brought us through a haunting necropolis of ancient gray burial houses, some of them freestanding against the hillside, some carved deep into the native rock; some still tended, but a few long deserted so their rectangular entrances with worn architectural features now stood agape and offered homes to deadly, poisonous, horned vipers who liked lurking in the dark.
We paused.
"The choice is, either to keep searching or-"
"Or to be sensible," Justinus agreed sadly. We both had to think about that. Good sense beckoned like a one-eyed whore in a tosspots' dive, while we tried to look away primly.
"The choice element only applies to you. I must consider Helena and our child."
"And you already have a career in Rome."
"Call it a trade. Being an informer lacks the glorious attributes of a ‘career': glamor, prospects, security, reputation-cash rewards."
"Did you earn money working for the Censors?"
"Not as much as I was promised, though more than I had been used to."
"Enough?"
"Enough to get addicted to it."
"So will you stay in partnership with Anacrites?"
"Not if I can replace him with somebody I like more."
"What is he doing now?"
"Wondering where I vanished to, presumably."
"You didn't tell him you were coming here?"
"He didn't ask," I grinned.
"But you will continue as a private informer after you go home?"
"It's traditional to say, ‘that's the only life I know.' I also know it stinks, of course, but being a fool is a talent informers revel in. Anyway, I need to work. When I met your sister I set myself the quaint goal of becoming respectable."
"I understood that you already had the money to qualify for the middle rank. Didn't your father give it to you?"
I surveyed Helena's brother thoughtfully. I had assumed this would be a discussion of his future, yet I was the one being grilled. "He loaned it. When I was turned down for social promotion by Domitian, I handed the gold back."
"Did your father ask you for it?"
"No."
"Would he lend it again?"
"I won't ask him."
"There's trouble between you?"
"For one thing, giving the money back when he wanted to look magnanimous caused even more strife than asking for help in the first place."
It was Justinus' turn to grin. "So you didn't tell your father that you were coming out here either?"
"You're getting the hang of the merry relationships between the fighting Didii."
"You rub along though, don't you?" As I choked on the suggestion, Justinus gazed across the valley below us, to the far plain and the faint haze where the land met the sea. He was ready for his own family confrontations: "I ought to go home and explain myself. What do you reckon my relationship with my own father will be like nowadays?"
"That may depend on whether your mother is sitting in the room at the time."
"And it certainly alters if Aelianus is listening in?"
"Right. The senator loves you-as I am sure your mother does. But your elder brother hates your guts, and who can blame him? Your parents can't ignore his plight."
"So I'm for punishment?"
"Well, even though dear Aelianus may suggest it, I don't suppose that you'll be sold into slavery! Some administrative posting to a dull place where the climate is dank and the women have bad breath will no doubt be found for you. What are those three blotty dits on the map where nothing ever happens? Oh yes: the tiny triple provinces of the Maritime Alps! Just a couple of snowed-in valleys each, and one very old tribal chief whom they hand around on a rota-"
Justinus growled. I let him brew for a moment. It was clear from his expression and the way he had broached the subject that he had been thinking hard in private.
"How about this?" he suggested diffidently. A big question must be coming. "If you think it might be suitable: I could come home and work for you until next spring?"
I had half expected it, including the qualifier. Next spring, he would be planning to return here to look for more silphium; maybe that fond dream would evaporate eventually, though I could see it haunting Justinus for years, along with his lost forest prophetess. "Work for me? As a partner?"
"As a runner, I should think. I have too much to learn, I know that."
"I like your modesty." He could bring himself down to street level if he had to. It was too much to hope he could live that low forever, though, and I was now looking for permanence. "Within limits, it's an appealing idea."
"May I ask what the limits are?"
"What do you think?"
He faced the truth with customary bluntness: "That I don't know how to live rough. I can't talk to the right sort of people. I have no experience to judge situations, no authority-in fact, no hope."
"Start at the bottom!" I laughed.
"But I do have talents to offer," he joked in return. "As you know, I can read a drawing even if it's inaccurate, speak Punic, and blow a military trumpet when required."
" Clean, mild-mannered lad with sense of humor seeks position in established firm… I can't offer you houseroom. But can you face a bachelor apartment of the crudest, most inconvenient kind? I should think that by the time we return home my old friend Petronius is bound to have set up with some new woman, so you could be slotted in at Fountain Court."