Enemies of the Empire

Chapter Two

Not merely a dead man, but the very one I was commissioned to create a memorial pavement for.

In any other circumstances, I might have thought I was mistaken and made no more of it. Gaius Flaminius Plautus was a common enough type: short, stocky and muscular with greying reddish hair and a round and equally reddish face. Scores of men look very much like that, especially in this tribal area, and this individual was dressed in a cloak and tunic of a dingy browny-green — the commonest and cheapest of all dyes. But Plautus had one identifying mark, a jagged, livid scar across his face, the result of some childhood accident. The face I saw now was disfigured by the selfsame scar.

Besides, it was clear that the man had recognised me too, and was as shocked as I was at the encounter. I have never seen such a picture of dismay. He turned deathly pale, then quickly pulled up his hood as if to hide his face and, averting that identifying scar, turned on his heel and scurried off into an alleyway nearby.

I stood for a moment, debating what to do. I almost wondered for an instant if I had seen a ghost. For how could there be doubt that Plautus had been dead? I had attended his funeral myself.

I had seen him buried — or what was left of him after he was cremated on a pyre — in an elaborate marble house-tomb prominently positioned by the road outside the North Gate of Glevum. I had personally admired his funeral chest (marble and intricately carved) and the piles of grave goods which were incinerated with his bones. It was all done properly, as befitted a rich man who had made a fortune importing olive oil — no question of omitting any ritual, so that the soul was restless afterwards. I watched as one of his fingers was chopped off and buried separately (making the token burial in the earth); listened to his eldest son Maximus give an impassioned speech; comforted his widow as she sobbed becomingly behind her veil; and even tipped the sorrowing slaves who had accompanied the funeral litter to the pyre. There had been a splendid feast, provided by his will, together with a day of commemorative games. The whole town talked about it for a week. It was the kind of send-off any Roman citizen would want.

And Plautus was very much a Roman citizen — it was the thing about him I remembered most. Not that he was born that way, of course: like me, he was a Celt who had come to that distinction late in life. But he’d embraced things Roman with a greedy glee. Indeed, it was a joke among the forum wits that Plautus was more Roman than most visitors from Rome, all of whom, when possible, he sought out and entertained.

I thought about the man I had known. The very picture of respectability. So socially conventional that he was slightly dull. He cultivated Roman habits, ate only Roman dishes and drank Roman wine, spoke Latin with more polish than any other Celt I ever met, and dressed in a formal toga at all times.

So ostentatiously Roman were his habits that he’d been something of a legend in the town. Indeed, the man seated next to me at that elaborate funeral feast was full of little witticisms at the dead man’s expense: how he very seldom laughed, unless the joke was patiently explained; and how Plautus’s town-house was exactly like his wife — built on the Roman pattern, tall, substantial, over-ornamented and expensive to maintain.

‘Of course, our Plautus gained his citizenship the expensive way, by honourable service to the Empire,’ I remembered my informant saying, with a laugh — meaning that our dead host had used a portion of his wealth either to grant favours to the Emperor direct, or to grease some consul’s greedy senatorial palm. ‘The same way he got himself elected to the ordo afterwards. Well, I hope he enjoyed the honour while he lived. He paid enough for it. Now, where’s that slave-boy? I want a bit more of that splendid wine.’

There’d been some justice in that, I thought, remembering his words. Plautus had made a reputation for himself on the municipal council by saying very little and spending quite a lot — a vote-winning combination, since every councillor is expected to fund public works out of his private purse. Plautus had funded a good many public works.

He must have had considerable wealth. Even after his unfortunate demise — or what had seemed at the time to be his demise — crushed by falling masonry while inspecting the progress of his own new colonnade, he had still left a substantial sum, both to his widow and to the town. The words ‘A much-mourned benefactor of Glevum’ had been inscribed upon his monument at his own expense, and there was even talk of the wine-importers setting up a statue in his memory. A life of boredom and unexceptional success.

Not at all the sort of man you would expect to find scuttling down alleyways in Venta, dressed in a shabby tunic — even when alive.

I must have imagined it, I told myself. It had been a long day and I was tired. It was impossible that Plautus should be here. It is said that vengeful spirits return to walk the earth, so perhaps they do, but I could see no reason why his shade should come to haunt me, in particular. He owed me no ill-will. Of course, I had done some work for him before, a little pavement in his country house, but he had been very pleased with that — so pleased that his family had chosen me to design that memorial mosaic at the baths. I shook my head. Too much of the mansio’s watered wine, perhaps, although I had been careful not to over-indulge.

I looked back to the silver stall, resolving to conclude my purchase and then collect Promptillius and go back to the inn — but, as I turned, there was Plautus again, peeping at me round the corner of a wall. He drew back sharply, but I had seen his face. There could be no doubt now. No phantom has to turn and scuttle off like that. This was Plautus and he was very much alive.

I should have known better. I am getting old and I have run into enough difficulties in the past, investigating matters at my patron’s instigation, without setting myself unnecessary problems of my own. But I can never resist a puzzle and anyway, I told myself, this was a matter of professional concern. I could not build a memorial pavement for a man who wasn’t dead.

I dropped the dress-clasp that I’d been haggling for — leaving the stall-holder gaping like a fish — and set off across the forum in pursuit. I skirted nimbly round the stalls and down the street, until I reached the alleyway where I’d seen Plautus go.

Even then, I might have left it there. The alley was a very long and narrow one and my quarry had already vanished out of sight. But then there was a movement in a doorway halfway down and there was the man again, or at least his head. Then, obviously realising that he had been seen, he dashed out of the aperture and down towards a narrow opening at the far end of the alley.

I set off after him again, with a growing feeling of having been misused. If Plautus was not dead, what was he doing here? And — it suddenly occurred to me — if he was alive, whom had we been so mournfully burying at his funeral? Of course, the corpse was wrapped from head to foot, in deference to that crushing accident, but somebody had been the centre of all those rituals. I knew that from the cremation pyre if nothing else. Burning human flesh has a distinctive smell.

With all this in my mind, I hurried after him, down to the opening which I’d observed before, and was just in time to see him hastening along it, almost at the other end by now. ‘Plautus?’ I shouted. ‘Wait! I want to talk to you.’

He did not look back, just pulled his cloak about him and began to run even faster.

From what I had seen of Venta Silurum to this point, even the main streets are barely wide enough to take a laden cart. So you can imagine that the alleyways were small. The one along which Plautus had now disappeared was so very narrow that it was difficult to get down it at all — it seemed to be merely a gutter for the eavesdrip from the overhanging roofs, and a rubbish dump for kitchen waste from premises nearby.

From the smell, I guessed that rainwater was not the only thing that ran along the drain. Even in fine cities like Glevum households and businesses often use adjoining alleyways to empty piss-pots in, so it was not really a surprise to find that the same thing happened here in Venta too. This alley was particularly odorous, perhaps because it ran alongside what was obviously a fuller’s shop, where clothes were cleaned and dyed. Such businesses use human urine in their trade, for treatment of the cloth, and will sometimes set up collection pots in public places for the purpose, or have a contract with larger householders. This fuller, by the smell of it, was doing very well. Never mind, I told myself, the shop would be a landmark later on, when I wanted to retrace my steps.

I picked my way along the path — if I can call it that — and found myself in a narrow street of shops, set in small blocks of two or three, with several floors of wooden dwelling-space above. Much town building in Britannia is on this kind of plan, but here the blocks (or insulae) were smaller and more crowded than I was accustomed to, and the upper floors proportionately meaner and more crammed. Even from where I was standing on the corner of the lane, I could see slaves beating mats and shaking dusting cloths from windows in the favoured first floor apartments; while on the upper storeys, where the poorer people lived, scraps of ragged clothing dangled from openings to dry, and black, curling, acrid smoke spoke of hazardous cooking on open braziers in little airless rooms. People swarmed at the doorways that opened to the street, and on the narrow staircases that I could glimpse within. Most of them looked suspiciously at me. Obviously strangers didn’t often come this way.

The shops were clearly busy, though. It was almost evening now, but tradesmen still sat behind their counters and their barriers, selling everything from pots and pans to wine. Buckets of live eels squirmed outside the fishmonger’s, a butcher in a bloodstained apron further up the street hacked pieces from a carcass hanging from a hook — skin, tail, lolling head and all — while other vendors offered salt, carved bone, sandals made to measure on the spot, eye ointments, or memorial monuments. Pie sellers went by with trays of greasy wares, and plodding donkeys carried panniers of turnips, wood, or wool. There was a stall directly opposite piled high with armour, as the optio had said — not only Roman helmets, but dented shields, leather jerkins, cheek-pieces, even entire mailed tunics and protective greaves — some of them of foreign, strange design. One decorative, flat-backed arm-piece had a Celtic look — an exquisite serpent swallowing its tail — while others I recognised as work from Gaul.

The stall-holder saw me looking and came out to stare at me. He was a small, hunched, shrewd-faced man with a decided leer and such a cunning, conspiratorial air that I half expected him to come sidling up and begin hissing in my ear, ‘You seeking something special, friend? A dagger? Javelin? Sword? You got money — you come round the back. There’s lots more things inside.’

But he said nothing and when I made no move he spat contemptuously on the pavement and went back into the living quarters at the rear, obviously deciding that I was not a customer. I wondered if he really did have weapons hidden somewhere in the shop, and, if so, who his clientele might be. It is still a capital offence for civilians like myself to carry arms in public places. Yet there was another stall of battered armour further up the street. It was disquieting. You could buy almost anything in this part of Venta, by the look of it, if you knew where to go and whom to ask.

Of Plautus, however, there was by now no sign.