Last Act In Palmyra

Chapter XVII

Helena appeared to be sound asleep, though I noticed a smell of snuffed lamp wick. She made a show of waking drowsily. 'Do I hear the morning cockerel, or is that my stupefied darling rolling back to his tent before he drops?'

'Me, stupefied…' I never lied to Helena. She was too sharp to delude. I added quickly, 'I've brought a friend – ' I thought she stifled a groan.

The light of Tranio's flare wavered crazily up the back wall of our shelter. I gestured him to the trunk of plays while I folded up on a baggage roll as neatly as possible and let him get on with it. Helena glared at the clown, though I tried to persuade myself she looked more indulgently on me.

'Something Heliodorus pinched,' Tranio explained, diving into the depths of the scroll box unabashed. 'I just want to dip into the box…' After midnight, in the close domestic privacy of our bivouac, this explanation fell short of convincing. Theatricals seemed a tactless lot.

'I know,' I soothed Helena. 'Little did you think when you found me in a black bog in Britannia and fell for my soft manners and sweet-natured charm that you'd end up having your sleep disturbed by a gang of drunkards in a desert khan-'

'You're rambling, Falco,' she snapped. 'But how right. Little did I think!'

I smiled at her fondly. Helena closed her eyes. I told myself that was the only way she could resist either the smile or the frank affection in it.

Tranio was thorough in his search. He delved right to the bottom of the trunk, then replaced every scroll, taking the opportunity to look at each a second time.

'If you tell me what you're looking for-' I offered blearily, longing to get rid of him.

'Oh, it's nothing.. It's not here, anyway.' He was still searching, however.

'What is it? Your diary of five years as a sex slave in the temple of some Eastern goddess with an ecstatic cult? A rich widow's will, leaving you a Lusitanian gold mine and a troupe of performing apes? Your birth certificate?'

'Oh much worse!' he laughed.

'Looking for a scroll?'

'No, no. Nothing like that.'

Helena watched him in a silence that may have passed for politeness to a stranger. I like more alluring entertainment. I watched her. Tranio finally banged down the lid and sat on the chest kicking his heels against its studded sides. The friendly fellow looked as if he intended to stay chatting until dawn.

'No luck?' I asked.

'No, damn it!'

Helena yawned blatantly. Tranio gave a flourishing gesture of acquiescence, took the hint, and left.

My tired eyes met Helena's for a moment. In the weak light of the flare Tranio had left us, hers looked darker than ever -and not devoid of challenge.

'Sorry, fruit.'

'Well, you have to do your work, Marcus.'.. 'I'm still sorry.'

'Find anything out?'

'Early days.'

Helena knew what that meant: I had found nothing. As I washed my face in cold water she told me, 'Chremes dropped in to tell you he has found the rest of his people, and we're performing here tomorrow.' She could have announced this while we were waiting for Tranio to go, but Helena and I liked to exchange news more discreetly. Discussing things together in private meant a lot to us. 'He wants you to write out the moneylender's part Heliodorus used to play. You have to make sure that omitting the character doesn't lose any vital lines. If. so-'

'I reallocate them to someone else. I can do that!'

'All right.'

'I could always go on stage as the moneylender myself.'

'You have not been asked.'

'Don't see why not. I know what they're like. Jove knows I've dealt with enough of the bastards.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Helena scoffed. 'You're a free-born Aventine citizen; you're much too proud to sink so low!'

'Unlike you?'

'Oh I could do it. I'm a senator's offspring; disgracing myself is my heritage! Every family my mother gossips with has a disgruntled son no one talks about who ran off to scandalise his grandfather by acting in public. My parents will be disappointed if I don't.'

'Then they will have to be disappointed, so long as I'm in charge of you.' Supervising Helena Justina was a rash claim; she laughed at me. 'I promised your father I'd keep you respectable,' I finished lamely.

'You promised him nothing.' True. He had more sense than to ask me to take on that impossible labour.

'Feel free to carry on reading,' I offered, fumbling with my boots.

Helena removed from under her pillow the scroll I guessed she had been peacefully perusing before I turned up like trouble. 'How could you tell?' she demanded.

'Smut on your nose from the lamp.' In any case, after living with her for a year I had deduced that if I left her anywhere near forty papyrus scrolls she would scoot through the lot in a week like a starved library beetle.

'This is pretty grubby too,' she remarked, gesturing to her bedtime read.

'What is it?'

'A very rude collection of anecdotes and funny tales. Too saucy for you, with your pure mind.'

'I'm not in the mood for pornography.' I took several chances in succession, aiming myself at the bed, inserting my body under the light cover, and winding myself around my lass. She allowed it. Perhaps she knew better than to argue with a hopeless drunk. Perhaps she liked being enveloped.

'Could this be what Tranio was looking for?' she asked.

Sick of Tranio, I pointed out that he had said quite decisively his lost item was not a scroll.

'People do sometimes tell lies!' Helena reminded me pedantically.

We too, like the Twins, had our tent divided up for privacy. Behind the makeshift curtain I could hear Musa snoring. The rest of the camp lay silent. It was one of our few moments of solitude, and I was not interested in a risque Greek novel, if that was what Helena had been studying. I managed to extract the scroll from her and tossed it aside. I let it be known what mood I was in.

'You're not capable,' she grumbled. Not without reason, and perhaps not without regret.

With an effort that may have surprised her I wrenched myself sideways and up-ended the flare in a pitcher of water. Then, as it hissed into darkness, I turned back to Helena intent on proving her wrong.

Once she accepted that I was serious, and likely to stay awake long enough, she sighed. 'Preparations, Marcus…'

'Incomparable woman!' I let her go, apart from annoying her with delaying caresses as she struggled over me on her way out of bed.

Helena and I were one, a lasting partnership. But due to her fears of childbirth and my fears of poverty, we had taken the decision not to add to our family yet. We shared the burden of defying the Fates. We had rejected wearing a hairy spider amulet, as practised by some of my sisters, mainly because its success seemed doubtful; my sisters had huge families. Anyway, Helena reckoned I was not sufficiently frightened of spiders to be driven off her by a mere amulet. Instead, I faced the deep embarrassment of bribing an apothecary to forget that controlling birth contravened the Augustan family laws; then she endured the humiliating, sticky procedure with the costly alum in wax. We both had to live with the fear of failing. We both knew if that happened we could never allow a child of ours to be killed in the womb by an abortionist, so our lives would take a serious turn. That had never stopped us giggling over the remedy.

Without a light, I heard Helena cursing and laughing as she rummaged for her soapstone box of thick cerate ointment that was supposed to keep us childless. After some muttering she hopped back to bed. 'Quick, before it melts – '

Sometimes I thought the alum worked on the principle of making performance impossible. Instructed to be quick, as every man knows, the will to proceed is liable to collapse. Following too many winecups this seemed even more likely, though the wax at least helped provide a steady aim, after which maintaining a position, as my gymnasium trainer Glaucus would call it, did become more difficult.

Applying care to these problems, I made love to Helena as skilfully as a woman can expect from a man who has been made drunk by a couple of crass clowns in a tent. And since I always ignore instructions, I made sure that I did it very slowly, and for the longest possible time.

Hours later I thought I heard Helena murmur, 'A Greek and a Roman and an elephant went into a brothel together; when they came out, only the elephant was smiling. Why?'

I must have been asleep. I must have dreamed it. It sounded like the sort of joke my tentmate Petronius Longus used to wake me up to howl over when we were wicked lads in the legions ten years before.

Senators' nicely brought-up daughters are not even supposed to know that jokes like that exist.