Satisfied the copy was perfect, right down to the angle of the serifs, he sat back and admired it for several minutes then picked up his hammer and four nails. Where should he put it, this precious document? Here? Over here? What about-yes, what about over there, just above the door and to the left?
Next door the newly-weds laughed at their neighbour’s ritual. They had been married but a month, yet every night at precisely the same hour came the hammering of four solitary nails. Sometimes they listened out for it, a signal to blow out their own lantern and dive under the covers.
Once, she had met her neighbour on the stairs and asked him what it was he stuck on the walls every night, but the look he gave her shrivelled her to the spot and she averted her eyes whenever she saw him after that.
She would have moved house altogether, had she known that his walls were plastered with more than two hundred such reproductions of Claudia’s letter.
IV
Darkness in Rome did not signal an end to the working day; for some it was merely a beginning. Come dusk, wheeled traffic, which was not permitted during daylight hours because it clogged the narrow streets, began rumbling along, nose to tail. Low-sided wagons carrying everything from crated hippos to Phoenician cedars clanked along ruts made by centuries of ox-carts before them. There’d be salt brought in from the flat coastal plain, wool from Campania, hemp from the Rhone and Corsican pitch. By the light of a thousand flickering brands, carts would roll through the arches and up at the Collina Gate, the northernmost gap in the city walls. The thirtieth of March was a night like any other.
Now spring had arrived and the seas became navigable, luxury goods from the Adriatic ports travelled the Via Salaria and the guards marvelled at great tusks of ivory, peacocks from Samos and glittering sapphires but, since the road from the Sabine Hills also ended here, mostly it was the common stuff. Venison, boar meat and barrel upon barrel of thick olive oil, because everyone knew Sabine oil was the best, but my word, the price of it! Night after night you’d see them, two dray horses pulling a cart loaded with one large barrel, which sat right behind the driver, plus three smaller ones to even up the weight. The gatemen knew the drivers, the drivers knew the gatemen, the banter was as constant as it was cheerful.
On the far side of the Collina Gate, however, it was a different world. Snubbed by traffickers and guards, tired shanties with walls of mud supporting bowing thatches leaned against the greyish-yellow stonework for support. The folk who eked out their short existence in these rank and squalid hovels did not care that this was where the enemy Hannibal once had made his camp. What use was history? Today’s enemy was starvation and fever and snakebite and dysentery and, for all the good it did them, Sabine oil might as well be gold. Oil for lights? For cooking? Do me a favour! When we have to beg for alms, scavenge for our firewood, sell our bodies behind the tombs which line the roads to anyone who’ll give us the price of a loaf? The people here had sores, they had roundworm, they had night blindness, they had rickets.
They also had babies.
‘Well, Captain, any luck?’ A cultured voice called across the plodding stream of wagons.
A thin, wiry individual with a horseshoe scar dodged past a muleteer and shook his head. ‘Not a bloody one, Dino. Not even a girl.’
Lately they’d taken to splitting up to search, this was the meeting spot. ‘Arbil won’t believe this,’ said the younger man, with a laugh in his voice. ‘He’ll think we spent the whole time rabble-rousing.’
‘Not with this pong clinging to us, he won’t,’ the Captain muttered. ‘Croesus only knows what caused that,’ he rubbed at a stiffening stain on his tunic, ‘but it stinks like shit.’
‘Probably is shit,’ sniggered the henchman Vibio, joining up from the east. ‘In which case, I ain’t sitting next to you in the cart home.’
‘Fuck off,’ said the Captain good-naturedly and turned to his well-groomed companion. ‘So then. Is that it for tonight, Dino?’
‘We’re wasting our time here, that’s for sure, and I can see little point in prolonging it.’ Dino rolled down his embroidered sleeves. ‘What’s the tally, Vibio? Just the two?’
‘One,’ replied Vibio, kicking aside a bundle of muddy rags. Too late he realized there was a small child inside, it whimpered as it scuttled into the night. ‘That second bairn was already dead, poor little sod.’
Around them came low moans of pain and the smell of green wood smoking. Somewhere an old woman cackled in mirthless laughter.
‘Save your pity, lad,’ said the Captain. ‘If it grows up here, it’ll have a bloody tough life, lucky to make it into its teens, and then it’ll probably have ulcerated lungs and a rather nasty sexual disease. Better off dead, if you ask me.’
‘Tell that to the boss’s face,’ the henchman retorted. ‘See if Arbil agrees.’
‘I blame Agrippa.’ Dino cut short any arguments. The tally was low, the job was unpleasant, tempers were short. ‘His death, plus those nine days of mourning, have completely buggered up the system.’
They nodded at what they thought Dino meant. That because babies were exposed only on market days-a silent signal for childless couples to search for human treasure-it seemed logical that tonight’s poor catch could be attributed to confusion in the minds of the slum girls following a national emergency.
But this was not what Dinocrates meant. Arbil the slave master had recognized in Dino a sharpness and intelligence from a very early age, and instead of being trained for trade or simply sold on unskilled, Arbil had lavished special care on Dino’s education. Elevated to a position of trust and authority in the organization, and now third in command, wealth and responsibility had not dimmed his native intuitiveness. What he meant-and what the others would not understand-was that the ripples radiating from Agrippa’s sudden and premature death went far beyond commerce and industry. The fragility of life had been rammed home in such a way that Dino believed that for many mothers, parting with their babies would be out of the question. The fight for survival would be stretched just that little bit further…
As they waited for the fourth member of the party to join up, Dino reflected on the Emperor’s reaction to the tragedy. He’d coped well, he thought, with the death of a man closer to him than a brother and his eulogy had left strong men weeping fountains. He had lit the pyre himself, declared public mourning, read Agrippa’s will aloud to the people and when he’d reached the part where his friend bequeathed his aqueduct slaves to Augustus, the Emperor once more proved his worth by turning these twelve score men over to the Senate as public servants. Furthermore, he had promised not only to continue Agrippa’s civil engineering programme, by the gods he would extend it, creating the brand new post of Water Commissioner for a start. Afterwards he had personally supervised the interring of the Great Man’s ashes in that tall, cylindrical structure faced with travertine down on the Field of Mars, the Emperor’s very own mausoleum. What a man!
For Arbil the Babylonian, and to a lesser extent, for Arbil’s son, Sargon, the death of Agrippa was purely nuisance value. A disruption of routine, a complete re-scheduling. No grief, no sadness. Dino often wondered what it must be like for them, so far from the motherland and with no loyalties to Rome, which invariably set him questioning his own identity. For an orphan from Chios who’d been raised under Babylonian law, why this strong pull towards Rome and the Romans? Dino was heartily glad when the fourth henchman arrived.
‘What sex is it?’ he enquired, as they pushed through the oncoming traffic towards the post house where they’d arranged to meet Sargon.
‘What?’
‘The child we picked up tonight.’
‘Male,’ confirmed Vibio.
‘That’s some consolation for Arbil,’ said the Captain. ‘It’s tough these days to offload the girls.’