Jupiter Myth

VII

First I tried the centurion.

I thought I would pick him up at the fort. Easier said than done. First I had to find it. I remembered a wood-and-turf enclosure, hurriedly thrown up after the Rebellion, just east of the forum. We had used it to protect survivors as much as anything. When I had found the site, it had clearly been abandoned years before.

There had never been legions permanently stationed in the capital: they were always needed forward, to guard the frontiers. Thirty years after its conquest by Rome, Britain still kept four active legions-more than any other province. It was out of proportion and stupidly expensive. It showed Rome's fears, after our near-overthrow by Boudicca.

If there were five hundred soldiers in Londinium, that was pushing it, but they ought to be decent quality. The legions took turns to send men back to the capital on detached duty. In a frontier province even the walking wounded and duffers who had annoyed their legate should be capable of guarding the governor and his staff, impressing visitors, flashing swords in the forum, and patrolling the docks. They had to live somewhere. Information from a passerby took me right to the other side of the forum, across the stream that divided the town, and down the Decumanus, the main street. I ended up on some remote thoroughfare, way out by the amphitheater, a tedious hike. There I found a mess. The western hill had been taken over by whatever units were stationed here to guard the governor, and since the governor rarely stopped in the capital long, they lived in chaos. It was worse than a marching camp-no proper defenses and individual groups of barrack blocks all over the show.

I found my man. He was annoyed at being rooted out but agreed to come and play. I took him for a drink. He could pretend to his mates that I needed specialist advice in private. And in private, I might seduce him into revealing more than he should.

He insisted on taking me to a bar the soldiers liked. By the time we arrived I knew his name was Silvanus. I offered wine, but he preferred beer."That Celtic muck is fermenting in your belly, Silvanus!" I joshed. Pretending to be friends with a man I despised was a strain. "You'll end up like some fat pink Celt."

"I can handle it." They always say that. He would never look pink, in fact. My banqueting guest was a swart southerner; he had arms clothed in dark hairs like a goatskin rug and was so coarsely stubbled he could have removed paint from woodwork with his chin.

"I've drawn the short straw on that barrel killing," I said gloomily. That made him laugh, the lazy bastard. It meant he would not have to bestir himself; he liked seeing me suffer too. The laugh was openly unpleasant. I was glad I did not have to work with him.

I kept the beer flowing his way. I stuck with wine, surreptitiously diluting it with extra water when Silvanus wasn't looking.

It took half a bucketful of beer to soften him up enough to start talking, then another half to slow him down on how he hated the climate, the remoteness, the women, the men, and the piss-poor gladiatorial games.

"So Londinium's acquired it's own dinky amphitheater? If I may say so, it's a bit cut off out here-and aren't any arenas usually near the fort? Mind you, I wouldn't say you had anything that I would call a fort!"

"There's to be a new fort, to stop fraternizing."

"As if anyone would! So how do the lads like the arena?"

"It's rubbish, Falco. We get puppy fights and pretty girls in armor."

"Saucy stuff! Sex and swords… How lucky you are!" We drank. "Tell me what the mood is around here nowadays."

"What mood?"

"Well, I was last in Londinium when Boudicca had done her worst."

"Fine old times!" Silvanus gloated. What a moron. He could not have been here then. Even a man as dense as this would have had sorrow etched into his soul.

If he asked me what legion I served in, I would lie. I could not face it if this lightweight learned I had been in the Second Augusta. My tragic legion, led at the time by a criminal idiot, had abandoned their colleagues to face the tribal onslaught. Best not to think what a currently serving centurion would make of that.

Nor was I intending to ask Silvanus which outfit he graced. The Twentieth or Ninth, perhaps; both did fight Boudicca, and neither would be friends of mine. These days Britain also had one of the patched-together new Flavian units, the Second Adiutrix. I ruled it out. Silvanus did not strike me as a man from a new legion; he had old lag written all over him from his scuffed boots to his scabbard, which he had customized with tassels that looked like bits of dead rat. At least I knew he did not belong to the dire, gloating Fourteenth Gemina. They had been relocated to Germany to reform their habits, were that possible. I had met them there-still pushing people around and pointlessly bragging.

"This place should never have been rebuilt." Silvanus wanted to carp about the town; it stopped me brooding about the army, anyway.

"Disaster has that effect, man. Volcanoes, floods, avalanches-bloody massacres. They bury the dead, then rush to reconstruct in the danger area… Londinium never had any character."

"Traders," Silvanus grumbled. "Wine, hides, grain, slaves. Bloody traders. Ruin a place."

"Can't expect high art and culture." I spoke slowly and slurred my words like him. It was coming quite easily. "This is just a road junction. A huddle of industries on the south bank, a couple of cranky ferries coming across. North side, a few low-rise stinking warehouses… Everything about it tells you it's nothing."

"The end of the road!" exclaimed Silvanus. Slurred by a drunken centurion, it sounded even more unappealing than when Petronius had complained.

"Does that give you problems?"

"It's a bugger to police."

"Why's that? The natives seem docile."

"When not dropping each other down wells?" His voice cracked with mirth and I felt my hackles rise. I had known Verovolcus, even if I had not liked him. Silvanus failed to notice my expression. He was enlarging his theories. I told myself that was what I wanted. "This place is a draw to scum, Falco."

"How come?"

"Every chancer who has lost himself or wants to find himself."

"Surely it's too remote for dreamy-eyed tourists?"

"Not for inadequates. Every tosspot with a warped personality. When they've tried all the other dead-end provinces, they sniff the wind and waft up here. No money, no likelihood of work, no sense."

"It's cold and inhospitable-drifters surely don't like that?"

"Oh, sun and seduction are not for losers. They yearn for empty open spaces, they want to endure hardship, they believe suffering in a wilderness will expand their lives."

"So they seek out the mist on the edge of the world, among the legendary woad-painted men? And now you have a wild-eyed population of ragged people in shanties-feckless, rootless characters who may go off pop"

"Right. They don't fit."

"Are any running from the law?"

"Some."

"That's fun."

"Joyous."

"So here they are-looking for a new start."

"Butting up against the innocent British who only want to sell shale trays to visitors. All the British want to see arriving here are importers of dodgy wine that's passing itself off as Falernian. And now," exclaimed Silvanus, who was close to passing out, which in theory was what I needed, "we are starting to get the others."

"Who are those?" I murmured.

"Oh, these people know exactly what they're doing," he burbled.

"These are the ones to watch, are they?"

"You get it, Falco."

"And who are they, Silvanus?" I asked patiently.

"The ones who come to prey on the rest," he said. Then he lay down, closed his bleary eyes, and started snoring.

I had made him drunk. Now I had to sober him up again. That's because the theory is wrong. When you bring a witness to the point of passing out, he does not know he is supposed to tell you all before he quits-he just goes ahead and drifts into oblivion.

This drinking hole was a colorless, chilly, hygienic establishment, provided for the soldiers. Britons, Germans, Gauls don't naturally have a street life with open-air foodshops and wine bars. So this bar was Rome's big gift to a new province. We were teaching the barbarians to eat out. When the soldiers arrived in new territory, the army would at once send someone to arrange recuperation areas. "I want a good clean room, with benches that don't tip over, and a working dunny in the yard…" No doubt the local commander still came along every month to taste the drink and check the waitresses for disease.

It had the usual bleak facilities. Bare boards, scrubbed whitewood tables from which vomit could be easily cleaned, and a three-seat latrine out the back, where constipated inebriates could sit for hours, being maudlin about home. It stood near enough to their barracks for them to scuttle home easily once they were rat-arsed. It was years since I had glugged poison in a bar like this, and I had not missed the experience.

The landlord was polite. I hate that.

When I asked him for a bucket of water, I was led to the well. We were on much higher ground than at the Shower of Gold, and must have been some way above the water table. The landlord confirmed that there were no springs in this part of town. This time the wellhead was an evil pile of stones, green with decades-old algae. Wriggly things dimpled the surface of the water and mosquitoes flitted among the stones. If Verovolcus had been upended here, he would have suffered nothing more than a sinister hairwash. We trailed a bucket sideways and managed to get it half full.

"This is the best you can do?" I had had a bad experience with a well last year in Rome. I was sweating slightly.

"We don't get much call for water in the bar. I fetch it from the baths when I have to." He did not offer to do so now.

"So where do the baths obtain their supply?"

"They invested in a deep shaft."

"I see that wouldn't be economical for you-how are your lats swilled out?"

"Oh, washing water trickles along there eventually. It's fine except when they have a big celebration for a centurion's birthday…"

I refrained from imagining the effects on his latrine of thirty big legionaries who had eaten bowls of hot pork stew, all with extra fish-pickle sauce, after eighteen beakers of Celtic beer apiece and a fig-eating contest…

I threw the water over Silvanus.

Several buckets more and we reached a cursing stage. I was cursing. He was just lolling weakly, still in truculent silence. Some informers will boast about their efficient use of the "getting-them-drunk-so-they-tell-you-stuff" technique. It's a lie. As I said, witnesses pass out too soon. Often it's not even the witness who becomes incapable, it's the informer.

"Silvanus!" Shouting was the only way to get through. "Wake up, you bundle of jelly. I want to know, have you had regular trouble around the Shower of Gold?"

"Stuff you, Falco."

"Offer appreciated. Answer the question."

"Give me a drink. I want a drink."

"You've had a drink. I'll give you another when you answer me. What's going on behind the wharves, Silvanus?"

"Stuff you, Falco…" This routine continued for some time.

I paid the bill.

"Leaving?" inquired the landlord. "But he hasn't told you anything." He was never going to. "It will keep," I answered breezily.

"What's this about then?" He was nosy. It was worth giving him a moment.

I eyed him up. He was a bald smarmer in a very blue tunic with an unnecessarily wide belt. I tried to maintain a steady stare. By that time I was so bleary myself I could not have intimidated a shy scroll-mite. "Trouble at another bar." I hiccuped.

"Serious?"

"A visitor from out of town was killed."

"That's nasty! Who copped it?"

"Oh-a businessman."

"Trying to muscle in on a racket," suggested the landlord knowingly.

"In Britain?" At first I thought he was joking. The landlord looked offended at the insult to his chosen locale. I modified my disbelief by whistling. "Whew! That's a turnup. What are you suggesting? Protection? Gambling? Vice?"

"Oh, I don't really know anything about it." He clammed up and began wiping tables. He moved around Silvanus fastidiously, not touching him.

"Do you get problems up here?" I asked.

"Not us!" Well, they wouldn't. Not at a semi-military bar.

"I see." I pretend to drop it. "You from these parts?"

He winced. "Do I look like it?" He looked like a pain in the posterior. I had thought so even before I was drunk. "No, I came across to run this bar."

"Across? From Gaul?" So he was part of the great swarm of hangers-on that moves in the shadow of the army. It worked to mutual advantage, when it worked well. The lads were entertained and provided for; native people found livelihoods in supply and catering, livelihoods that would have been impossible without Rome. Once, this man would have lived all his years in a clump of round huts; now he was able to travel, and to assume an air of sophistication. He was earning cash too. "Thanks anyway."

I could have provided a larger tip for him, but he annoyed me so I didn't. Anyway, I hoped I would not have to come back.

I propped Silvanus up against a wall and this time I did leave.