A dying light in Corduba

XXV

Later that day, after a few enquiries, I left by the northwestern gate. Annaeus Maximus owned a lovely home outside the town walls, where he could plot the next elections with his cronies and his wife could run her salon for other elegant socially prominent women, while their children all went to the bad. Beyond the cemetery lining the route out of town lay a small group of large houses. An enclave of peace for the rich – disturbed only by the yapping of their hunting dogs, the snorting of their horses, the rioting of their children, the quarrelling of their slaves and the carousing of their visitors. As town houses go, the Annaeus spread was more of a pavilion in a park. I found it easy to identify – lit throughout, including the long carriage drive and surrounding garden terraces. Fair enough. If a man happens to be an olive oil tycoon, he can afford a lot of lamps.

The clique we had seen at the theatre were now assembling for a dinner party at this well-lit house with garlanded porticos and smoking torches in every acanthus bed. Men on splendid horses were turning up every few minutes, alongside gilded carriages which contained their over-indulged wives. I recognised many of the faces from the front rows at the theatre. Amidst the coming and going I also met the shepherds from the parilia parade; they may indeed have been here for ritual purification rites in the stables, though I thought it more likely they were actors who had come to be paid for their day's work in town. There were a few shepherdesses among them, including one with hugely knowing dark brown eyes. Once I would have tried to put a light of my own into eyes like that. But I was a responsible father-to-be now. Besides, I could never take to women with straw in their hair.

I made myself known to an usher. Baetican hospitality is legendary. He asked me to wait while he informed his master I was here, and as the whole house was pervaded by delicious cooking smells I promised myself I might be offered a piquant dish or two. There was bound to be plenty. Excess breathed off the frescoed walls. However, I soon learned that the Cordubans were as sophisticated as Romans. They knew how to treat an informer – even when he described himself as a 'state official and associate of your neighbour Camillus'. 'Associates' received short commons in Corduba – not so much as a drink of water. What's more, I had to wait a damned long time before I got noticed at all.

It was evening. I had set out from town in the light, but the fitst stars were winking over the distant Mariana mountains when I was led outside to meet Annaeus Maximus. He had been mingling with his guests on one of the terraces, where they were soon to hold an outdoor feast, as is traditional at the Parilia. The supposed shepherds had really been setting fire to sulphur, rosemary, firwood and incense in at least one of the many stables so the smoke would purify the rafters. Now heaps of hay and straw were being burned on the well-scythed lawns, so that a few by now extremely tired sheep could be compelled to run through the fires. It's hard work being a ceremonial flock. The poor beasts had been on their trotters all day, and now they had to endure being ritually lustrated while humans stood around being sprinkled with scented water and sipping bowls of milk. Most of the men had one eye out for the wine amphorae, while the women kept flapping their hands about, in the vain hope of preventing their fabulous gowns being imbued with lustral smoke.

I was kept well back in a colonnade, and it wasn't to protect me from the sparks. The invited guests began to seat themselves for the feast out amongst the regimented topiary, then Annaeus stomped up to deal with me. He looked annoyed. Somehow I have that effect.

'What's this about?'

'My name is Didius Falco. I have been sent from Rome.'

'You say you're a relative of Camillus?'

'I have a connection -' Among snobs, and in a foreign country, I had no qualms about acquiring a respectable patina by shameless usage of my girlfriend's family. In Rome I would have been more circumspect.

'I don't know the man,' Annaeus snapped. 'He's never ventured out to Baetica. But we met the son, of course. Knew my three boys.'

The reference to Aelianus sounded gruff, though that could be the man's normal manner. I said I hoped Helena's brother had not made himself a nuisance – though I wished he had, and that I was about to hear details I could use against him later. But Annaeus Maximus merely growled, 'High spirits! There's a daughter who's got herself in trouble, I heard?' News flies round!

'The noble Helena Justina,' I said calmly, 'should be described as high-minded rather than high-spirited.'

He stared at me closely. 'Are you the man involved?'

I folded my arms. I was still wearing my toga, as I had been all day. Nobody else here was bothering with such formality; provincial life has some benefits. Instead of feeling civilised, being overdressed made me hot and slightly seedy. The fact that my toga had an indelible stain on its long edge and several moth-holes did not help.

Annaeus Maximus was viewing me like a tradesman who had called with a reckoning at an inconvenient time. 'I have guests waiting. Tell me what you want.'

'You and I have met, sir.' I pretended to stare at the bats swooping into the torchlight above the laughing diners' heads. I was really watching him. Maybe he realised. He appeared to be intelligent. He ought to be. The Annaei were not country bumpkins.

'Yes?'

'In view of your reputation and your position I'll talk straight. I saw you recently in Rome, at the Palace of the Caesars, where you were a guest of a private club who call themselves the Society of Olive Oil Producers of Baetica.

Most neither own olives nor produce oil. Few come from this province. However, it is believed that among your own group the oil industry in Hispania was the topic under discussion, and that the reason is an unhealthy one.'

'That is an atrocious suggestion!'

'It's realistic. Every province has its own cartel. That doesn't mean rigging the price of olive oil is something Rome can tolerate. You know how it would affect the Empire's economy.'

'Disastrous,' he agreed. 'It will not happen.'

'You are a prominent man, Annaeus. Your family produced both Senecas and the poet Lucan. Then Nero left you with two enforced suicides because Seneca had been too outspoken and Lucan allegedly dabbled in plots – Tell me, sir, as a result of what happened to your relatives, do you hate Rome?'

'There is more to Rome than Nero,' he said, not disputing my assessment of his family's reduced position.

'You could be in the Senate; your financial position entitles you.'

'I prefer not to move to Rome.'

'Some would say it was your civic duty.'

'My family have never shirked our duty. Corduba is our home.'

'But Rome's the place!'

'I prefer to live modestly in my own city, applying myself to business.' If Seneca, Nero's tutor, was renowned for his dry Stoicism and wit, his descendant had failed to inherit this. Maximus became merely pompous: 'The oil producers of Baetica have always done business fairly. Suggesting otherwise is scandalous.'

I laughed quietly, unmoved by the feeble threat. 'If there is a cartel, I'm here to expose the perpetrators. As a duovir – and a legitimate trader – I assume I can count on your support?'

'Obviously,' stated the host of the feast, making it plain he was now returning to the singed meats at his open-air barbecue.

'One more thing – there was a dancer at that dinner; she came from this area. Do you know her?'

'I do not.' He did look surprised at the question, though of course he would deny a connection if he knew what she had done.

'I'm glad to hear it,' I said coldly. 'She's wanted for murder now. And tell me, why did you leave Rome so abruptly?'

'Family troubles,' he shrugged.

I gave up, without obvious results, but feeling I had been touching nerves. He had remained too calm. If he was innocent I had insulted him more than he had shown. If he was truly ignorant of any conspiracy, he ought to have been excited to discover that one existed. He ought to be shocked. He ought to be outraged that maybe some of the well-clad guests at his own table tonight had betrayed the high standards he had just proclaimed for Baetican commerce. He ought to be afraid that they had offended Rome.

Without doubt, he knew a cartel was being brokered. If Annaeus did not himself belong to it, then he knew who did.

As I was leaving I saw what his family troubles must be. While their elders were only just sitting down to their banquet, the younger generation were rushing off to places unknown and habits unseemly. If the three Annaeus sons had been friends of Aelianus, he must have enjoyed a jolly time in Baetica. They were various ages, but of a similar mentality: as they set off riding out from the stables when 1 began my own slow walk to the front of the house, they galloped either side of me, coming closer than I found comfortable, while they whooped and whistled and chided each other loudly for not flattening me properly.

A young woman who might be their sister was also leaving the house as they raced off down the drive. She was a self-assured piece in her mid-twenties, wrapped in a furred stole. She was wearing more pearls and sapphires than I had ever seen layered on a single bosom – too many, in fact, to let you see what kind of bosom it was (though it looked promising). She was waiting to enter a carriage from which emerged the head of a man about the same age as her. He was indeceutly handsome. He was cheering a younger male, very drunk already, who had rushed out from the carriage to be violently ill on the mansion's immaculate steps. Corduba at festival time was the place to be.

I might have asked for a lift in the carriage, but I did not fancy being thrown up on. To her credit, as I passed her the daughter did warn me to watch where I stepped.

Unfed, unwatered, and unlustrated, I turned away and set off wearily back towards Corduba. There was no chance of returning to the Camillus estate tonight. I needed to find myself a lodging where the owner was still sober and had a bed to offer despite the festival crowds. Before that I would have to flog through the dark countryside that lay beyond the Annaeus property, back to the even darker streets of the town, passing the cemetery on the way. I am not afraid of ghosts – but I don't care for the hideous real-life characters who lurk among the tombs of a necropolis at night.

I walked steadily. I folded my toga, as well as you an fold a cumbersome ellipse, then slung it over one shoulder. I had gone beyond the reach of the torches, though I had pulled one up and stolen it. I was finding my way along the track back to town, concentrating on my thoughts about the day. I did not hear anyone following, even though I stayed alert to the possibility. But I certainly felt the sharp stone that flew out of nowhere and smacked into the back of my neck.