Jail Bait

XVI

Dead to the world, drunks sprawled under horse troughs as a thief relieved them of their bootlaces and sparrows squabbled over piecrusts. The Forum was deserted in the throbbing midday heat and amid the smashed pots and mussel shells, dogs snarled over meat bones and the glassy-eyed mother swaying with a baby on her shoulder to music inside her head did not see six well-built men slip down the side street, wielding clubs and staves and axes.

The leader, a hard-faced thug with one empty eye socket, paused to check his bearings before signalling the group to turn right at the basilica. The street began to narrow. They passed gaily painted apartment blocks, smart but not posh, so these would be for the scribes and the clerks and their families. The tenements became smaller, packed closer together, homes for freed slaves or tradesmen on the first rung of the ladder, then the buildings ran out altogether and soon the men were trudging down a stony path towards the lake.

The grass was dry and crisp and yellow, lined with firethorns and fig trees. They passed a small but unattended olive grove, an umbrella pine with newly shorn sheep and their lambs nestling down in its shadow. One bleated softly, but the men paid no heed. At a signal from One Eye, they checked their weapons, then nodded brusquely to one another before approaching the wooden shack which stood on its own. Blue smoke coiled from the roof, and a buzzard mewed in the distance as the thugs circled the building.

‘Right,’ growled the leader, grasping his club in his hand as he kicked open the door.

A woman screamed, a man jumped up from his pallet. ‘You!’ One Eye snarled, pointing to the woman as he raised his weapon high above his head. ‘Shut it!’

The woman, seeing the vicious nails which protruded from the head of the club, merely screamed louder.

‘I mean it, you bitch!’ He grabbed her by the scruff of her tunic and stuck his dead eye into hers. ‘One more squeak and Loverboy ends up like me.’

The woman, swelling with her second child, gulped back her hysteria and forced her head to nod up and down. So far, her man had not moved.

‘You were warned,’ One Eye growled, ‘what would happen if you didn’t pay.’

‘I have paid,’ the young man retorted. His face was white, but his voice was steady and clear. ‘On the Ides of every month, I’ve handed over forty bronze pieces and I’ve never been late.’

‘The price went up, remember? To fifty sesterces.’

‘By the gods, man, I can’t afford that! We barely scrape by as it is.’

‘So you’re refusing?’ A sly smile twitched at the thug’s mouth.

The young man spread his hands in helplessness. ‘We can’t afford more than forty,’ he protested. ‘I cure fish for a living, you can see how it is-’

From a cradle in the corner, a baby began to bawl, setting off a dog out the back.

‘Shut that brat up,’ the thug shouted to its mother.

The woman stumbled over to the cot, but the child was not comforted and as it cried harder, so the dog’s barking increased.

‘Silence that fucking mutt!’ One Eye yelled through the open doorway. For maybe twenty seconds the dog snarled and thrashed on its chain, then, with a pitiful whimper, fell quiet. The woman collapsed, sobbing convulsively into her infant bundle and muffling the sound of its screams. The leader of the gang glanced up the path to check no one had been alerted to the racket, then turned back to the man.

‘You had fair warning,’ he said.

‘For gods’ sakes,’ there was a rising note of panic in the youth’s voice, ‘we’re barely surviving as it is.’ He wiped his hand with his face. ‘It started off at ten a month, then twenty, thirty, forty-where will it end? I’m only a smoker of fish, have some pity!’

‘I’m not paid for pity,’ and for a moment the woman thought she detected a note of sympathy in the thug’s voice, but she was mistaken, because she knew without looking again into that single, cold eye that he had been born without warmth or compassion. And when he said, ‘Right, boys, you know what to do,’ she hugged her daughter tight to her chest and buried her face in the silky, soft hair, crooning to the child to block out the splintering and crashing around her.

The smoke-house door was the first casualty. Then rack upon rack of hanging fish were hurled on to the grass to be pulped with staves as the bullies kicked over fires, drenched the wood piles with water and trashed the living quarters, even grinding the baby’s clay rattle under a heel, and she heard her man spit ‘Bastard!’ at the leader of the gang.

‘Well,’ One Eye brushed his hands together and wiped them down his tunic, ‘we all have some trade we’re good at.’ He laughed. ‘And I’m damned good at being a bastard, right, lads?’

The others guffawed at the joke, then One Eye pulled at his ear lobe.

‘You’re still in arrears,’ he said, shrewdly surveying the mess, ‘by fifty sesterces, don’t forget.’

‘You’ve destroyed my stock, my equipment, my shed,’ the fish smoker whispered. ‘You’ve left me with nothing, not even our baby’s birthday dinner.’

The woman looked round, to see jars of beans smashed and trampled, oil jars kicked over, even the bread that she’d baked bore a footprint. Her daughter was one year old today and even her honey cake had been scoffed by the thugs. Then without warning her own face was pinched in the thug’s hand and she screamed.

‘Pretty piece,’ he leered. ‘Can’t be more than seventeen. I’m sure you’ll find ways of settling the debt.’

‘Leave her alone,’ her man yelled. ‘Take your filthy hands off her, you hear!’

‘Me?’ sneered One Eye, brushing him off. ‘I’ve no use for a pregnant sow, but I tell you, boy, there’s men who likes ’em like that.’

‘You dirty bastard-’

‘Now, now,’ the thug laughed, crunching over the debris and deaf to the young woman’s whimpers, ‘I’m merely opening your mind as to different ways of raising the cash you owe. Don’t be too hasty to dismiss the idea.’

And with that, he and his gang strode back up the path towards Spesium as silently as they came. The young man staggered outside to inspect the damage.

The smoke house had gaping holes in the wall. They could be patched.

The doors were smashed, their hinges thrown in the lake. New could be bought.

The dog had been clubbed, but it was a mastiff with a head like a stone. It would recover.

Slowly, he nodded to himself. He’d worked hard to establish a reputation for plump, juicy smokies and for that reason he hadn’t minded handing over a small part of his income to nameless individuals for what was known as ‘protection’. In time he hoped to sell to Atlantis, so he didn’t complain, even when the price for protection crept up. So what, if it meant postponing building a proper house for a while? Life was sweet. He wore no man’s shackles, ran his own business, had the love of a good woman, one child and a second on the way, this time maybe a son? It would happen, he felt, in good time, the house and cart and the smallholding.

But not at fifty sesterces a month. That was over half his income.

The bastards were bleeding him dry.

He was not alone, of course. The baker-they put weevils in his flour, killed his donkey until in the end he found it easier to succumb. Now he received chicken-feed to manage the very business he’d set up, his own profits siphoned off. The wheelwright, too-his solution was to take his boys out of school to earn the extra money, and the fish curer knew there were more, many more. Shops changing hands for a pittance, families weeping as they packed up and left town…

Well, humble fish smoker or not, he would not be driven away like the others. He was not a fighting man, but if that’s what he had to do, so be it, he would learn to use a bow and swing a sword. His woman, child and unborn son were worth fighting for and when he found the bastard who was masterminding this, he’d kill him. So help him, he would gut him like a mullet and smoke him for days over oakwood.

‘We must leave.’ Her whisper was so faint that at first he did not catch the words. ‘Did you hear me? We must leave now.’

‘Never,’ he said firmly, kicking at the mangled fish with his bare toe. ‘We’re young, we can rebuild and I swear on the life of my daughter you won’t be driven to prostitution to pay off this so-called protection. But I must make a stand.’

‘I’ve put our clothes in a bundle, let’s go.’ She tugged like a mouse at his sleeve, and forcing a smile, he turned to put his arm round her and draw her towards him.

Instead his arm froze.

‘What is it?’ he rasped. Her face was grey, she looked thirty years older, and something had died in her eyes. Involuntarily he shivered.

‘Come,’ she said, and he saw she was clutching an old towel rolled into a ball and a beaker whose handle had just been smashed off.

A thousand leeches sucked at his blood, draining every single drop. ‘Where is she?’ The words became snagged on his lip. ‘Where’s the baby?’

Skidding in his panic, he raced back into the tiny hovel, where feathers from the ripped bolster floated in the smoke-filled air as his feet crunched over the shattered furniture. In her cot, sleeping, lay his baby daughter, one white feather on her chest, and the young man scolded himself for being so jumpy. Gently he leaned over the cradle, inhaling the milky soft smell of her and smiling at the pink, button nose.

‘It’s all right, pumpkin,’ he crooned. ‘Daddy’s here, it’s all right.’

But it was not all right.

As he lifted his child, the tiny blonde head lolled backwards and her little arms fell limp-and he knew, then, what he had known the second he had looked at his woman.

His baby was dead.

Suffocated in her mother’s terrified embrace.

For several long seconds, he stared at his child, before laying her back in the cot and tenderly tucking her in. After several long minutes, he leaned over and kissed her rosebud lips.

When the revellers in Spesium finally stumbled back to consciousness, they awoke to an animal howl from the lake end of town.