No. No, better not to think such things, that fate is not provoked: there might be other reasons, commonplaces that will quite explain these glowerings. Tomorrow, with the light, I may ride up that way and judge things for myself. Why, here I am as good as ordering the crosses built before a single shard of evidence is in my hands. I can imagine Quintus Claudius there in Londinium, his office at the treasury, how he would cluck his tongue with disapproval.
‘First the tests,’ he’d say, ‘the scales, and the coticula of basenite. If there are further proofs required, employ the furnace and a white-hot shovel. Then, and only then, announce the guil
ty and bring out the nails.’
Above the tumulus the grey lights shift and writhe. At last I turn away to trudge and trip across the rutted earth, back through the long, unbroken dark towards the settlement, the listing wooden alleyways with tiny, crooked windows squinting.
I have been here for some several weeks now, and the tavern is no longer plunged in hostile silence when I enter. For the most part they ignore me as I pick my way across the straw-tossed floor between the pools of vomit and the copulations, making for the stairs. Tonight at least, they’ve better entertainments, with a buck’s night celebration in full throe.
The groom, a youth of thirteen years or so, is climbing drunkenly to stand upon a stool that lists and tilts, abetted by his friends and uncles. All around the tavern’s lower room the hulking, copper-headed creatures whoop and clap their hands together in a fearful unison, a rhythm that grows faster as the young man wobbles there upon his stool and beams, befuddled, down upon his audience.
Now they throw a rope across one of the black and sticky-looking beams, with one end fashioned in a noose. A horrid intrigue seizes me and at the bottom of the stairway leading to my room I pause and turn to watch. Jeering and sputtering, their faces pink and bright with perspiration, they are settling the loop of rope about the bridegroom’s throat, yet still that foolish grin across his face. One of the brutes, a great fat creature with his skull shaved bare save for a top-knot, presses something that I cannot see into the young man’s hand, then turns towards the audience, his tattooed belly glistening as he stills the pounding handclaps with a string of slurred vulgarities. He belches, and is met with waves of laughter. In the bridegroom’s hand, I see it now, a short bronze knife. With his other hand he waves happily down to a dark-haired girl at the front of the pressing crowd, barely aware of where he is through the clouds in his eyes.
The fat man kicks the stool away.
The rope jerks taut against the dangling, kicking weight and now the clapping starts again, its mounting pace set off against the slower, burdened creakings of the beam. How can it be that I am witness to such things? The young man twisting there between the floor and ceiling smiles no longer, and his eyes bulge terribly. His thin legs, swimming, tread air. From out of the crowd now, as one man, a kind of grunting is commenced, as that of animals in rut.
The nature of the game is now made clear to me as suddenly the strangling boy remembers that he holds a knife there in his hand. Reaching above his head, his darkening face suffused with horrid concentration, he begins his desperate sawing at the rope. Clenched in his trembling fist, the short blade plunges back and forth, this motion echoing grotesquely that of solitary pleasure. Quite as if responding to the lurid and familiar movements of the hand, although remote, a bulge is raised that strains against the young man’s britches, and the dark girl points to this and laughs. From broken, scattered comments overheard amidst the din I understand that if the youth survives this game the dark girl shall be his, a final whore before he’s wed.
The young man twirls, and jigs, and rasps the knife’s edge back and forth against the rope, face purpling, and fearful throttled noise leaking from him now. If Rome falls, all will be as this. All of the world.
Unable to bear more, I turn away and stumble up the stairs, the tread worn thin there at the centre and the worm-shot risers dusted green with age.
Safe in my room beneath the low-slung eaves, the door pushed shut behind me, from below there comes the muffled thud of body hitting floor with cheering in its wake, so that, despite myself, I am relieved. I dare say that his windpipe will be crushed and bruised, and he’ll be helped home in no state to claim the proffered prize for his ordeal. No doubt the same friends who encouraged him to mount the stool will see that any favours paid for in advance do not go wasted.
In the corner, stained grey bedding. Morbid spiders curled about themselves, translucent, hang from rafters in dust-coloured shrouds of their own making. The girl who used this room before me moved into a chamber downstairs at the rear when I arrived, but every day I find some piece of her: a chipped shell comb, the scraps of clothing halfway through their journey into rags, blue beads strung on a hair of rusted wire. Sometimes I smell her ghost upon the blankets and the boards.
When I came to Londinium a half-year since, I thought it hunched and squalid, breeding ugly humours, pestilences in amongst the jetties and the narrow yards, pooled urine yellowing there where the cobbles dip. The locals, hulking Trinovante fishermen or shifty Cantiaci traders, had a pleasing insularity, despite their sullenness. They kept amongst their own kind and made little fuss, yet fresh from home I thought the city Hades; they its fiends and chimaera. One of a team of treasury investigators sent from Rome at the request of Quintus Claudius, I spent my weeks there with my fellows quaffing vinegary wine, awaiting our assignments complaining each new inconvenience, each fresh indignity.
I work one thumb and forefinger inside my mouth and gently test the teeth to see how many move, loose in the blue and shrunken gums. I fear that it is all of them, and wish that I were in Londinium again, for it would seem a paradise now in my eyes.
Sent here into the middle-lands two months since with reports of forgery, I was a child with nothing to prepare me for this place, these Coritani, reeling drunk through short and bloody lives they take for granted; for their unconsidered, unrelenting violence; for the coloured scars, the curls of ink that craze their brows and backs, as terrible and queer as painted dogs. When I arrived here, I was yet so delicate of sensibility that I might blanch to hear some lurid passage from a drama told in verse, and now I watch them hang their young for sport, and scarcely think of it.
I light the lamp and sit upon the crumpled bedding to remove my army-issue boots. Downstairs, a woman starts to hiss and snort, as rhythmic as a bath-house pump, thus signalling that someone has received the hanged boy’s prize. The women here discomfit me. They are so big and filthy, smell so foul, yet not an hour goes by save that I think of them, the red hair lacquered by their perspiration coiling into tiny sickles underneath their arms, their cow’s-milk haunches swinging under prickly skirts. I have not had a woman for a year, not since the dyer’s eldest daughter back in Rome. How long before I take a whore? Their flat white faces, and their speckled breasts. I must not think of it.
Naked now in the chill November room, I pull on the night-shirt I have taken, folded, from my army bag, that has the stencilled crest. There’s few signs of the Empire to be seen out here, a scattering of villas where retired generals struggle to afford their mistresses. Some small way north beyond this settlement one Marcus Julius, a veteran of the Emperor Aurelian’s campaign against the Gallic Empire still maintains a modest farm. I was told to visit should I find myself close by. It was excruciating. On discovering I was not long from Rome, he seemed capable of making only one enquiry: ‘Well? How fare the Blues?’ I told him I took little interest in the chariot races, whereupon his disposition to me cooled, so that I left not much thereafter.
I fancy it was him who let the cog-name by which I am known be bandied back and forth amongst the village folk, so that they do not call me Caius Sextus now but taunt me with ‘Romilius’: ‘Hello there, Little Roman! How d’you like this woman on my arm? I’ll bring a stool that you may kiss on her above the waist!’ All of them hate me, all the women, all the men, though to be just, it is not without cause. They know why I am here, and further know the punishment for forgery. How shall they be the friend of one who’s come to see them crucified?
I burrow deep into my bed, such as it is. Downstairs, the woman barks this people’s word for copulation, over and again. If Rome should fall . . .
Put that aside. The day will never come while we are still producing Emperors of Diocletian’s mettle, men of scale who single-handedly vindicate their times. Those bold reforms to stem the plots and murderous feuds that threaten our stability, dividing up his office so that Maximian is become Augustus in the West with Diocletian as Augustus in th
e East. The weavers and the brewers carp, complain that he has fixed the price of rugs or beer, and yet inflation is contained. Our currency is strong. Without that strength the wilderness would have us all.
And yet my teeth hurt. Mine and my fellows’ teeth alike. Why, on the boat across there were some ten of us, investigators to the man, all with the same blue and receded gums, the headaches and the lethargies, the lapsing concentration, lapsing memory. One of the youngest said he felt as if already dead and crumbling away, stupid with maggots, though for my part it is not so bad. It’s just the teeth. No one can fix this ailment with a name, nor yet determine any cause. We speak about it as ‘the sickness’, if we speak of it at all.
Perhaps we are so much a part of Rome that we grow sick as she does; some peculiar bond, some sympathy of flesh and land. The bangled, ragged kings are at our gates and we appease them, grant them settlements and territories in the lands surrounding Rome until it is as if the vagrant tribes sit patient all about a sumptuous table at some beggars’ feast, with Rome the centre-piece. They sit politely for the moment, but their stomachs growl. If they commenced to dine the world should all be gone. The dark that gusts above the chill fields at the village edge would swallow us entire; the bright towns guttering, extinguished, all across the globe.
Sprawled on my side beneath the coverings, I notice that the quality of lamplight in my room has changed, and glancing up I realize with a dull uncertainty that all along the girl who had this room before me has been sitting there against the furthest wall, cross-legged, watching silently. She stands and walks without a sound across the cracked, uneven boards towards a doorway set behind my bed. Rising to follow her, I notice as she passes through the door that it is inlaid all about the frame with black and tarnished coins. I wonder that I never noticed it before.
Beyond the door I follow her by tallow-light through winding passageways between great piles of nameless oddities. She rounds a bend ahead and, as the half-light catches on her features, I begin to feel disturbed. They are more small and pinched than I recall, so that she seems a different girl. I would not know her save she wears her necklace of blue beads, the wire that threads them burnished to a brazen sheen.
Now we are at the centre of the labyrinth, where painted skins are hung. About a low red fire peculiar figures gather in a ring, and wait, and do not speak. There is a boy that I at first mistake for the young man I saw hanged, but this one’s younger, still a child, and on his throat the wounding mark is not a rope-burn but an ugly gash. Beside him sits a beggar, barely conscious, vomit matted in his beard and mumbling to himself. A crone with one foot gone. A black-faced man with twigs tied in his hair. An awful stork-limbed creature, half as tall again as any man, stands agitated, shifting now from one foot to the other, shoulders hunched beneath the ceiling, coughing now and then. The girl and I step up and join the circle; gaze like them into the dying coals. Outside, there is a fearful barking, growing closer by the moment, and I feel a monstrous loss, a crushing sadness unlike any I have felt in life, and I am weeping. Next to me, the boy whose throat is slashed steps close and takes my hand. He makes great show of giving me a pebble that’s been carved into the likeness of a tiny man. I put it in my mouth. The sound of dogs is deafening.
I wake up with the mare’s-tail grey of morning in my room.
There’s something rattling in my mouth.