Enemies at Home

58

The end of an inquiry was often depressing for me. I tended to uncover spite, sexual betrayal, dishonesty or greed; this case had all of them.

Today my heart felt particularly heavy. I wrote my report for the aedile. It came easily, as written work does if you have been thinking about it for a long time. I kept my statement short and factual. I lacked energy for more. Besides, he might not be the only person reading it. Ultimately, this was aimed at the administrators of the Temple of Ceres.

I signed off formally, then found wax and sealed the report. I hoped Faustus recognised my seal: a worn old coin on a finger ring that showed a British tribal king in unkempt dreadlocks who looked as if someone had just told him a rather dirty joke. The wax was such high quality I was tempted to liberate some to take home. I thought better of it. After all I had lived through in a difficult life, it would be senseless to be caught removing stationery from an aedile’s office. Besides, if I sent sealed reports to Faustus, he might recognise it.

I wanted to say that if he needed to discuss details we could meet and talk. Better not. He was a magistrate. I was an informer he had favoured with work. That was all. I had done as he asked and he would pay me. Knowing him, he would send the fee without a reminder.

I knew in advance what would happen to those slaves. The temple would accept the legal judgement produced by the Camilli; the authorities would withdraw the right of asylum with no public comment, as if no one had ever believed such a right existed. Amaranta, Daphnus and Melander, discreetly reprieved, would vanish into society. It would not surprise me if in the end Melander did best, since he was quiet and had no expectations. Daphnus and Amaranta thought a lot of themselves but, together or apart, I could see them coming to bad ends.

The other slaves would be dealt with according to their crimes. I was sure Titianus would capture the boy Cosmus, because not even Titianus was a total incompetent. Cosmus, a slave who had murdered, would be executed. The boy was going to the beasts in the arena, his final unhappiness.

Amethystus and Diomedes, those sturdy toughs who had helped set upon Nicostratus, might be sent to the mines as punishment. Phaedrus, the tall good-looking blond, might well find himself gladiating, where he would probably become a heartthrob. With his aggression, he could even survive enough fights to be freed. He had murdered a slave, but who cared about that? Only the slave’s master, and he was dead as well. I had few hopes for the philosopher; philosophers were seen as dangerous subversives in Rome. If Chrysodorus was wise, he would will himself into dying — maybe starve himself to death — before the physical cruelty he dreaded could be imposed on him. Libycus? Of them all, I suspected Libycus might escape. Friends like Myrinus and Secundus would help and hide him. He could disappear among the foreigners in the Transtiberina, maybe find his way back to Africa. Or he had skills. He could find a new master, if he went about it right; offer himself to an old centurion, someone fastidious about his person but who didn’t care a toss about a servant’s past background.

I yearned to believe they would spare Olympe, who only wanted to be happy and play music. But a fifteen-year-old virgin offered too much sport for amphitheatre crowds. And she was pretty. Olympe, who had probably had no real idea what that night at the apartment was all about, stood no chance now.

As for me, when my client failed to show that afternoon, I left.

I could not bear the thought of carrying my luggage. Dromo had gone home, but I asked to have the bundle taken to Fountain Court tomorrow. I seemed to have no strength.

Leaving, I could hardly drag my weary feet along the pavement. I had rarely felt so drained of spirit and energy. Everything seemed to have changed from when I came back from the Esquiline and felt so much at home. People knocked into me, then muttered curses with unnecessary hostility. The Vicus Loretti Minor and Vicus Armilustrium, my streets, were full of hard faces.

When I finally reached the end of our alley and could see my building, I stood still and thought I would never walk any further. What was wrong with me? A case never normally whacked all the vim out of me like this. I had solved it. My client would be pleased with me and happy for his own prospects, because the Temple of Ceres would be pleased with him. I had not left a message saying, see you for breakfast some time — because I knew if I went to the Stargazer tomorrow, Manlius Faustus would happen along. He ate breakfast, and like any good city man he often went out for it.

Suddenly I was very anxious. Fountain Court loomed ahead, a dismal enough prospect, yet it was my home. I had often cursed the ghastly place, but coming back to the Eagle Building rarely made me feel so groggy, lonely and upset. I forced myself to move, reaching the dank entrance where the porter, Rodan, ought to be snoozing on a stool. He was missing.

There was a climb to my apartment on the second floor. Two flights of steep stone steps among the odours of piss and old meatballs that characterised our tenement daunted me completely.

I had another room, slightly closer. I was the landlord’s daughter, so I could live anywhere I wanted here, rent free. On the first floor, at the end of the Mythembal apartment, I kept a bolthole nobody knew about. In my line of work this was useful because it provided a secret access to my real apartment.

My head was splitting as I struggled one floor up. Something odd was happening to me. Mythembal’s wife, the dark-skinned woman with several multi-coloured children, was out for once. She would not know I had come home.

It was lucky that she lived in an apartment without sanitation and had those small children, because among her meagre possessions she owned a robust chamberpot. I grabbed it from the corridor as I staggered through the dismal series of rooms she occupied; I fell into my own place. The heavy door closed behind me of its own accord.

Barely was I in my room when, without warning, I disgraced myself with an uncontrollable eruption from every part of me that could erupt.

After that I was helpless. I would not have thought the human body could be so wrung out. After several painful episodes, I managed to strip off my tunic. Then I lay on the floor, curled up and occasionally crying, naked and despairing, lost.

I had a big old couch here, but I could not reach it. There was a door to a walkway over the courtyard, where I could have called for help, but getting there was impossible.

In a moment of lucidity, I knew what caused this. The well. The well with the poisoned water. I had not been so stupid as to drink from it, but I did splash that water all over my hot face; I had drunk from a silver goblet that had been in the well water, not washing the cup, as far as I could remember. No, not washing it, because yesterday the apartment had run out of clean water.

For almost a couple of decades, the disease that lurked in the well had been waiting for another victim. Maybe there was unhealthy leakage, a hidden cracked sewer seeping into the groundwater. Then I came along. The family who were here before all died of dysentery. About five of them …

I was in no doubt what was happening now. I had that and I was dying too.

This was the penalty for owning no slaves. What an irony.

Nobody knew that I was here. Nobody would miss me. I had caught a catastrophic, virulent infection. Alone and unable to move, even to summon help, there was no hope. I was glad in one way. Lying in this soiled room, soiled myself and disgusted, I would hate anyone I knew to see me. There was absolutely nothing that I could do about it. I would end up as one of the inhabitants of this sour building who died unnoticed, only to be found weeks later, reeking, putrefactious or mummified.

I lay there all evening and overnight. Throughout that time, I kept being ill. I reached the most dangerous condition; I knew my internal organs were so wrenched with disease they were bleeding.

At times I could hear muffled noises from the Mythembals, but the door to my room was deliberately heavy. They never came in here. That was our bargain; I arranged for her to live almost rent-free; in return, this room at the end of the corridor stayed shut, was mine, was never even acknowledged as existing. We were on pleasant terms if we happened to meet but she spoke little Latin, even though she had been in Rome for years, and I had no Punic. Mythembal was hypothetical; he may have died or gone back overseas. I never saw her entertain other men, but from time to time she would produce another baby, each one different from its siblings.

Either she had not missed her chamberpot or she thought thieves had walked in and stolen it.

I was growing worse. It would not be long now. I had passed through raging fever and violent shivering chills. Racked with spasms and dehydrated, my whole inside was one great ache. I drifted in and out of consciousness, simply waiting for the end.

After a long period of relative quiet, that I took to be night time, I sensed a new day starting. I knew I could not last another. This would be the day when I would die.

Time passed.

More time passed.

There were intermittent sounds sometimes. I thought I heard a man’s voice in the Mythembal apartment. I even dreamed I heard heavy footsteps, in a hurry, someone upstairs in my own rooms. An intruder? Once I would have gone up there with a weapon; now I could not and did not even care.

I was slipping away. Although I was a fighter, there was no more I could do here.

And then I heard the door to this room being thrust open.

I let out a sob of intense relief. Of all those it could have been, this was Tiberius. As I looked up at him, somehow his arrival was no surprise.

‘Help me.’

The grey-eyed man was already crouching down to me. Oddly, what he said was, ‘It’s all right. I am here now.’