Tales of Ancient Rome (6 page)

His nose itched, but that would go away in its own time. An itchy nose was a sign of something, he remembered hearing tell. Was it that he was coming into money? Hopefully, it would take him that inch closer to his dream of actually rolling in golden coins. He smiled.

Rubus had been the main cutback. Not the only one, but the main one. The middle-aged Gaul had begun as a slave on the farm, freed by his grandfather toward the end of his life and installed as the overseer for the estate. His grandfather and father both had prized the Gaul for his knowledge and efficiency, but they had paid him a small fortune for his work.

Stupid, given that they were both present permanently at the villa and knew damn well how to run things themselves. What a waste of money. Totting up how much money he’d saved in the five years since he drove Rubus from the estate made his palm tingle. Enough to buy a new caravan of wagons, or to perhaps put down a payment on a barge; all things that would expand the growing empire of Pacutus.

Personal attention had changed everything. The money had started to pile up so rapidly he couldn’t have spent it if he’d tried. He didn’t, of course. He was too busy making the money to spend any of it.

Of course, there were days when the work was harder than others, such as today. Some days the slaves were especially lazy and stupid and he had to expend precious energy with the whip, or even use his own, soft, white hands to labour on the estate. After all, it was better to do some things oneself than to rely on unreliable wasters like the Numidian carpenter or the other slaves that had been given the task of building the arbour across the patio outside the villa.

It would be lovely when complete. The beautiful, decorative patio claimed an unrivalled view of the estate with its rolling slopes, and of the majestic peaks that towered over it. He smiled as he took it in once again. It was nice now, but when he could look at it from this very spot shaded by the timber structure with vines growing across it, laden with succulent grapes.

He would have to start thinking about a wife soon. He would need a son, of course, to pass the estate to. It certainly wasn’t going to that soft, podgy cousin of his that talked endlessly of the new Jewish religion that Nero had forbidden and urged him at every social engagement to free his slaves and hire free workers. The moron.

No. A son it would have to be. Then his son could sit on this very patio under the arbour, surrounded by the finest grapes in central Italia and watching his slaves work.

No sign of the slaves now, though, as the sun began to descend. His arms ached, but then they would, after such a day. He sighed as he scanned the vineyards once more from the patio viewpoint.

He wondered whether he’d spent more of the afternoon beating the damn wastrels or hammering the nails himself? Probably beating. He did seem to have beaten them a lot today; more than usual, and he would be the first to admit that he beat them a lot anyway.

But they were slaves. More slaves could always be found cheaply. They didn’t have to be clever or powerful to dig a hole or pick grapes. Slaves were worth less than the soil they worked. Beating them was natural; the very order of things.

That, of course, was why it had come as such a shock when they had turned on him. The Judean girl had been the first to use the whip. He’d been so surprised at the turn of events while the two Numidians held him down, that he’d barely noticed the pain as they flayed the skin from his back with the barbed lash. He’d not screamed. Why would he? They were only slaves.

He really wished he could scratch his nose, but his arms were tied fast to the crossbar of the hastily manufactured crucifix. There had been some intelligent irony among them, in the end. They’d crucified him using the very timber and nails he’d been beating them for misusing.

A raven cawed in a nearby tree, watching him with anticipation. He could swear it was almost drooling as it watched its meal start to sag and fade.

Marcus Aelius Pacutus looked out over his latifundium with a professional, practiced eye and nodded to himself.

Time was up.

A Reading

Spurius Bulba took a deep breath and swallowed nervously. Glancing up surreptitiously he eyed the waiting folk. The handsome, chiselled features of the central figure, master of this grand palace and employer of unfortunate wretches, watched expectantly, his advisors gripping their togas in anticipation. Spurius swallowed again.

It had not been an easy morning.

The very first thing he had seen when he opened his eyes was the image of Castus the moneylender, his face a mixture of violent anger and hungry amusement. He’d been meaning to pay Castus back all month but, as was always the case, whatever money came into his hands seemed to evaporate whenever he passed by one of the thermopolia where men gathered to play dice. The dice didn’t like him, and his few satisfied customers had joked that he was safe anyway, since his entire being was anathema to chance itself.

Castus had been surprisingly accommodating. The Syrian thug with him broke the fourth and fifth fingers on Spurius’ left hand, which is the most excruciating way to wake up, but also allowed him an extra week to pay. It could have been worse, for sure.

Donning his tunic and quickly splashing water over his face and his ever-unruly hair with the bald patch that allowed the shining dome of his intellect to rise through like the Capitol, he quickly rifled around his table. The only furniture in his small room apart from the rickety bed and the washstand, the table was a permanent dumping ground for anything and everything. Broken wine pots mingled with unwashed underwear and the lead curse tablets he kept just in case. He’d been tempted to use one on Castus, but had relented, as they were costly, and it seemed like throwing good money after bad. Somewhere on the table, amid the chaos, a former meal had gone mouldy as the general reek announced, but he wasn’t over-keen to excavate and locate the errant fungus.

The search turned up, along with unspeakable things, seven copper asses. Seven asses! It wouldn’t even buy a morning snack. Grasping the coins as though they might flee and reaching for his work bag, Spurius had left his room, hurried down the grubby, badly-maintained stairwell and out of the insula into the street.

Jerusalem. Not the nicest city in the world, but one of the few that would have him. In the past eight years since he had left Rome via Ostia at high speed with bruisers chasing him intent on extracting blood, he had spent brief times in almost every great city of the empire.

Narbo had been nice for a while until the debts mounted up and he’d had just enough left to take ship, the moneylenders baying after him like hounds. Tarraco had been more civilized still, but he’d soon been found out and exiled by men of import. He’d tried Syracuse for a time, but the moneylenders there were shrewd and shunned him. Epirus had made him shudder. Everyone had been far too clever and pleasant. He’d felt like a turd in a bathhouse his entire stay, and it remained unique as the only city he had ever left voluntarily.

Athens had been pretty nice, despite the fact that a notorious lover of boys had taken a liking to him and followed him around, trying to get into his breeches. Still, a heavy bet on the track races there had seen him fleeing north on a stolen donkey with no possessions but the tunic he wore and the tools of his ‘trade’. Byzantium had been next and, unfortunately, a very similar story to Athens, though without the constant danger of rape. Tarsus had been brief but dangerous, with knife-wielding maniacs, the usual blood-hungry moneylenders and customers, and an almost fatal bout of something that caused the world to fall out of his bottom.

And so he’d ended up in Jerusalem at the arse end of the empire, where rebellious Jews spent their entire time badgering, corrupting, knifing and denouncing the occupying Roman forces. After the first week he’d even given up bothering to comment when they spat on his feet. It wasn’t as though he was going to get any dirtier, after all.

The street opened up before him that morning with its usual commotion, smells and noise. It was as though someone had ripped the roof off the Cloaca Maxima and filled it with people and stalls. Uniformly horrible. He rubbed his hands in anticipation, wincing as the two broken fingers, bound together with a torn strip of tunic, moved painfully. When this morning was over, he would have enough money to either pay Castus off, or buy a horse with plenty of change and get the hell out of this shit hole. Not both. The latter was starting to sound good, though. Alexandria might make a nice change.

Strolling down the street, he smiled. The initial bad start to the morning was clearly just that. His luck was changing. One of the stalls at the roadside was busy packing away after the morning rush. The proprietor was head-down in his bags, packing the remnants away, but had left a loaf of bread hanging from the hook at the stall’s corner. Spurius leaned to his left as he walked and picked up speed. As he reached the stall, he lunged out with his hand, unseen by the stall’s owner, and grasped for the bread.

The owner’s son, a tall boy with a sour face, swiped the bread out from under him, glaring, and Spurius found suddenly that his balance was off. Momentum carried his hand into open air where the bread had been, his feet seemed to do some complicated dance and moments later he was face down in the straw and horse shit by the side of the road with two bakers laughing at him.

Hurriedly he picked himself up, dusting off the worst of the crud, and gathered his bag in his arms, clutching it tight. A quick glance up failed to improve his mood.

As a haruspex, a diviner of truths in the entrails of beasts, Spurius was expected to be staid, sombre, sober, and above all, accurate. However, since he had ‘learned’ his craft, such as it was, from a drunken lunatic with a tendency to dribble, a beard that things lived in and the most curious smells, skin afflictions and twitches, all for the price of a place to stay for a month, he was not entirely convinced of his pedigree. The man had claimed to be an Etruscan of age-old lineage. What, in fact, he appeared to be was a drunk, a fraud, and quite possibly a carrier of disease.

Certainly Spurius had learned a few things from the old man. While he may have had all the talents of prognostication of a jar of fish sauce, he knew the jargon and the basic principals and it was astounding in the past decade just how often Spurius had made accurate predictions based partially on the signs around him and partially on a one in two chance of being right.

Above, three blackbirds flew in formation. Spurius knew that this could be interpreted in numerous ways, and the most positive (the one you always told clients) was that it represented the Capitoline Triad and that Jupiter, Juno and Minerva were watching over them with a kindly eye. It was how Spurius took it for himself this morning, which made it all the more poignant and irritating when a great bird of prey hurtled out of the blue and snatched one away, scattering the other two. Clearly not a good omen in anybody’s book, let alone that of the Etruscan mystics.

Grumbling to himself, Spurius strode on. The one thing he was sure of was there was no more lucrative place in the Empire to practice haruspicy. The diviners of omens so favoured by the Roman masters were shunned and loathed by the Jews, and most reputable haruspices would go nowhere near the place for fear of their lives. That meant that the noble Romans of Judea would pay highly for the talents of even the lowest pond-life if they knew how to open a goat.

His appointment at the palace was at the hour before noon and he’d planned on spending the morning begging for coins in front of the great temple so that he could afford to have his robe washed and perhaps a bath and a shave. Instead, he had woken late and rudely to broken fingers, dung and ill omens. Still, he would be at the palace on time and it was not a neat, pristine white augur the client was paying for; it was a reading.

The best things came in shabby packages, as he regularly failed to convince people.

Turning a corner, he made for the animal trader. His employer had informed him yesterday that Lebbeus had put a sheep aside for him and the cost would be deducted from his fee. Bah!

He’d tried to persuade the client that all that was really required was an egg. Divination was just as easy with an egg. And so much easier to fake, too. Who the hell knew what the future held by looking into the way the yolk separates from the white. Oh he’d tried to actually make sense of what he’d been told many times, but the thing was: the liver of a goat was a powerful looking item, and people could believe in it as a symbol. Crack an egg, however, and people just stared at you. Not Etruscans, of course, ‘cause they would know the truth of it. But to a Roman, and to Spurius particularly, an egg was an egg was an egg. And an egg was cheap.

But the sheep had been a requirement and the trader had the unfortunate animal penned carefully aside to keep it pure.

Spurius rolled his eyes. As though the future was ever going to be clearer because of what the sheep had been doing the night before. Ridiculous. But then if the rituals were to be followed to the letter, he himself should be bathed, shaved, sober, of respectful attitude and, above all, not a charlatan with a three day hangover and halitosis that would help anaesthetise the sheep. He was also supposed to have fasted last evening instead of eating the greasy food of Bothus the Syrian and drinking cheap wine.

Grumbling, he strode into the emporium and marked the trader’s ledger, collecting the sheep on the way out. Master Lebbeus looked at him the whole time as though he might have just crawled out of a sewer, but Spurius didn’t really care. Grasping the leash of the sheep, he all-but dragged it from the place, swearing as it took the time to carefully manure on his foot.