London (11 page)

All was quiet. Five hundred yards away, beside the amphitheatre, a sleepy grunt came from one of the lions brought there from overseas. Tomorrow the games would be held – a big affair. There would be gladiators, a giraffe from Africa, and fights with bears from the mountains of Wales, as well as local boars. Most of the population of Londinium would crowd into the great arena to see this splendid spectacle. Even the fat girl would waddle in there.

At the street corner it was very warm. The fat girl felt the hot sun and lazily pulled her dress to cover her breasts. There was only one fig left now. She took it out, placed it in her mouth, bit it so that the juice appeared on her chin, wiped the chin with the back of her fleshy hand, dropped the fig skin on to the ground where it joined the others, and then put the empty cloth bag over her head to shield it from the sun.

Then she sat and stared at the whitewashed wall opposite. She had nothing more to eat; it was getting very boring. The glare of the wall made her want to shut her eyes. No one at all came by. Most people were having their siesta.

Just for a moment she closed her eyes. The bag rested, limply, on her large head. By and by, the bag began to rise and fall rhythmically.

The soldiers came swiftly through the streets. There were five of them, accompanied by a centurion. The centurion was a big, corpulent man with grizzled hair; in the peaceful province he had seen little real action in his career, but a knife wound from a brawl years ago had left a scar from the top to the bottom of his right cheek that gave him the look of a veteran, and commanded a certain respect and fear in his men.

Their rapid march made little sound on the dusty street, but the gentle clinking of their short swords against the metal studs on their tunics gave warning of their presence.

It was Julius’s fault. If someone knocked him down in a boxing match, he got up cheerfully enough to fight again. It did not occur to him to hold a grudge. It was his weakness that because meanness was not in his own nature, he failed to see its presence in others. And so he had never noticed the look in the eyes of the fellow he had defeated ten days before. Nor would it have occurred to him that his opponent might open the purse he had carelessly put down that day and take note of a particular silver coin it contained.

Julius, the son of Rufus, who works in the port, has a silver denarius. How did he get it? His friend is Sextus the carpenter.

That was the anonymous note the authorities had received. It might, of course, mean nothing. But they were coming to find out.

Julius grinned to himself. If there was one thing he needed in his young life, it was money. His pay at the docks was meagre; by getting friends to place bets on him when he boxed, he could often make some extra. But at this moment, he and Sextus were making money in the simplest way possible.

They were forging it.

The gentle art of forging coins was simple, but required great care. Official coins were struck. A blank metal disc was placed between two dies – one for the top face, the other for the underside. The dies were engraved and their impression stamped – that is, struck – on the disc. Julius had heard of forgers who could actually copy this process to produce counterfeits of the highest quality, but for that you had to be able to engrave the dies yourself, which was far beyond the skill of Sextus and himself.

Consequently, most forgers did something a little less convincing but very much easier. They would take existing coins – which might be new or old – and by pressing each side of the coin into damp clay they would make two half-moulds. These were then fitted together with a little hole in the side so that when the clay was dry and hard, molten metal could be poured through it into the mould. Break open the mould after cooling, and there was quite a passable counterfeit coin.

“Except, of course, you don’t just make one at a time,” Sextus had explained. “You do it like this.” Taking three moulds, he had placed them together in a triangle, the holes in the three moulds all facing the gap in the middle. “Then you add another layer of three on top, like this,” he demonstrated. “Then another.” And he showed Julius how to stack the moulds up to form a tall, triangular column. “All you need to do then,” he said, “is to pack clay round the whole thing, and pour the molten metal down the middle so that it flows into all the moulds.”

When Sextus first proposed this illicit business to his young friend, Julius had been doubtful. “Isn’t it a bit risky?” he had demanded. But Sextus had only stared at him from under the ledge of his brow. “Lots of people do it. You know why?” He had grinned. “Not enough coins.”

This was only too true. For more than a century, the entire Roman Empire had experienced an ever-increasing rate of inflation. As a result, there were not enough coins to go round. Since people needed coins, there were many forgers. The private minting of cheap, bronze coinage was not technically an offence; however, forging high-value gold and silver was a serious crime. Yet even that did not deter the illicit trade and as a result nearly half the silver coins in circulation at this date were probably counterfeit.

Sextus obtained and melted the metal; Julius made the moulds and poured the molten ore into them. Although Sextus had showed him how to do this, the older man was not in fact very good at these operations. He was always making mistakes: either the ore failed to flow into the moulds properly, or he could not break his moulds off cleanly afterwards. Several times he had mixed up the two halves of the moulds when he put them together so that coins would come out with an obverse that did not match the face. Despite his webbed hands, Julius did the work neatly and precisely and thanks to him the quality of the coins had improved dramatically.

“But how do we make them really look and feel like silver?” That had been Julius’s second question when they began. At this, the rocky terrain of his friend’s face had seemed almost to crumble as he chuckled: “They don’t need to. There’s little enough silver in the real ones.”

For in trying to supply even part of the coinage needed, the imperial mints had run so short of precious metal that they had debased their own currency. The valuable silver denarius nowadays contained as little as 4 per cent of actual silver. “I use a mixture of copper, tin and zinc,” Sextus had told him. “It looks fine.” But the exact proportions he would never divulge.

On the table before them now lay a pile of coins, each silver denarius representing a small fortune to the young man who unloaded boats for a living. Up to now, being cautious, they had made mostly bronze coins and a few silver, since any show of sudden wealth might look suspicious. But there would be a huge amount of betting and gambling at the games tomorrow, and the possession of a few silver coins could be more easily explained. Today, therefore, they were acting boldly. His one-third share would be enough, Julius reckoned, to set him up in a small business of some kind.

There was only one problem. How would he explain the money to his parents? Already they were both suspicious of Sextus. “You stay away from that one. He’s up to something,” his mother had said, having taken a special dislike to his friend.

Well, that was a problem to be solved later. Julius at this moment knew only one thing. The very next morning, before the games began, he was going to buy the girl a gold bracelet with his new-found wealth.

And then? It was up to the girl. She had had his letter.

There was, besides, one further consideration of a more serious kind. It had come from his father, Rufus.

For some months, that cheerful man had secretly been concerned about Julius. At first, he had hoped the boy would be a legionary, as he had been. It was still the best and most secure employment in the Roman Empire. You retired young with a good position and some stake money to start a business. But when Julius had failed to show any interest, he had not pushed him. “He’ll pick up bad company, like that Sextus,” his wife had warned, but she was a congenital pessimist. “He’s not ready to settle down and he can’t come to much harm here,” he had replied. All the same, he had started to have pangs of conscience. It was time he did something for the boy. He wondered what.

Rufus was a gregarious fellow, a member of several associations. Just the day before he had heard of an interesting opportunity for a young man. “There are two men I know,” he had eagerly told his son, “who might be able to put you in the way of a useful little business. They’d stake you too.” He had arranged for Julius to meet them that very night.

So by morning, Julius considered, he’d have his share of the money they were forging now, and maybe a business opportunity as well. I might not even need Sextus so much, he thought. It was another argument for going after the girl.

All in all, it seemed to him, things were going rather well.

The soldiers arrived suddenly and without any warning. There was a crash, a sudden cry from outside, and then pounding on the door.

They seemed to be everywhere. He saw the flash of a helmet through the window. Not waiting for a response, they were already battering on the door with their swords. The wood was beginning to split. Julius jumped up; then, for the first time in his life, he panicked.

It was not what he had expected. He had always thought that when people panicked they ran about in a sort of frenzy, but on the contrary, he simply found that he was unable to move. He could not speak properly; his voice was hoarse. He stood helplessly, staring. This lasted for perhaps five seconds; to Julius it seemed like half a day.

Sextus, however, was moving with a speed that was astonishing. Leaping to his feet, he snatched a bag from the workbench and, with a single movement, swept the entire contents of the table into it – coins, moulds, everything. Racing to the cupboard in the corner, he threw it open and cleared the shelves of more moulds, nuggets of metal, and a collection of coins Julius did not even know he had.

And then suddenly Sextus had him by the arm. Propelling his stunned friend into the kitchen behind, he glanced out into the little yard. They were in luck. The legionaries sent to cover the rear of the house had made a mistake and blundered into the yard of the workshop next door. They could be heard knocking over a pile of tiles and cursing. Sextus shoved the bag into Julius’s hands and pushed him outside. “Go! Run!” he hissed. “And hide the stuff.” Julius, snapping out of his panic as abruptly as he had fallen into it, found himself leaping up over a wall, dropping into the yard on the far side, and slipping into the little maze of alleyways that ran behind the houses. The bag, stuffed in his tunic, made him look pregnant.

Before he had even started along the alley, the soldiers had broken down the door and burst into the house, where they found Sextus the carpenter, apparently just awoken from an afternoon nap, blinking at them in amazement. There was no sign of any forging. But the centurion was not deceived. He made for the back of the house.

It was then that Julius made his dangerous mistake. He was about a hundred yards down the alley when he heard a deep-throated bellow. Glancing back, he could see the big centurion, who, despite his weight, had clambered with agility on to the top of the wall and was scanning the alleys. Catching sight of Julius scurrying along, he had shouted. Now, as Julius turned, he saw the centurion calling to the legionaries below him: “That’s him. That way. At the double.” The centurion’s scarred face, which Julius could see clearly, made it even more terrifying. He fled.

It was not difficult to lose the legionaries in the alleys. Even with his burden, he was faster than they were. Only some time later, as he walked down an empty street, did it occur to him to ask why he had looked back. “If I saw him,” he muttered, “then he could have seen me.” The patch of white hair on his head was a certain giveaway. The centurion had been shouting to the legionaries when Julius had looked at him, but had then turned.

“So the question is,” he murmured sadly, “how much did he see?”

Martina stood by the southern end of the bridge. The summer day was drawing towards its end. The glare on the whitewashed houses of the city opposite had faded, leaving only a pleasant glow. In the west, purple clouds gathered along an amber horizon. The breeze touched her cheek softly.

She held the letter in her hand. A boy had brought it to her. It was written on paper, which was expensive. The handwriting was as neat as Julius could make it. It was written in Latin. She had to admit, she was excited.

Not that such communications, even between humble folk, were unusual. In the Roman city of Londinium, literacy was the norm. Though they usually spoke in Celtic, most townspeople knew Latin and could write it. Merchants wrote contracts, shopkeepers labelled goods, servants received written instructions and walls carried Latin graffiti. All the same, this was a love letter of sorts, and as Martina read it again she felt a little tremble go down her body.

If you come to the bridge at noon tomorrow, during the games, I have a present for you.

I think of you night and day. J.

Though he had not signed his full name – a sensible precaution should the letter go astray – she knew who the author must be. The young boxer. She nodded thoughtfully, and wondered: What was she going to do?

Time passed. Bathed in the evening glow, the city’s red-tiled roofs, pale walls and stone columns presented a cheerful aspect. Why should Martina feel a touch of melancholy? Perhaps it was the bridge. Stoutly built of wood on high, heavy piles, this fine piece of Roman engineering stretched two-thirds of a mile over the water. Now, as the river turned wine-red in the sunset, the bridge’s long, dark form reminded Martina of her own lonely journey through life. For she had been alone in the world when she met the mariner in Gaul. Her parents were dead; he had offered her a new life, a home and security. She had been grateful; in a way she still was.

How proudly the mariner had shown her the city. She had especially admired the long line of wooden quays built out into the river. “They’re all made of oak,” he had informed her. “There are so many oak trees in Britain that they just cut a huge beam from each tree and throw the rest away.” They had walked up the broad street from the bridge to the forum. She had found the square impressive, but what really astounded her was the single, huge building that ran across the entire north side. This was the basilica – the vast hall and office complex where the city council and judges met. As she gazed, awestruck, at the five-hundred-foot nave, her husband had told her: “It’s the biggest in northern Europe.” There was so much to see: the courtyards and fountains of the governor’s mansion; the several public baths; the many temples; and the great amphitheatre. It was thrilling to feel herself part of such a metropolis. “Rome is called the eternal city,” the mariner remarked, “but Londinium, too, is part of Rome.”