Man Eater

VII

As a statesman, Quintilian did not feel he set much of an example. As a picture of misery and decrepitude, he was brilliant. Shoulders bent, he plodded up the Capitol, succoured by the knowledge that the Senate was in recess until the end of next month. Ample time to peruse laws and initiatives at leisure and concentrate on private business.

Stopping by the Temple of Jupiter, not so much to admire the view as to let the jarring subside, Quintilian looked down on the Theatre of Marcellus in all its travertine glory, then beyond, to the island that divided the Tiber’s strong current. Had he been lower-born, he could have crossed that stone bridge and spent the night in the temple. Rumour had it, Aesculapius himself came to sick pilgrims in the form of a snake and cured them while they slept. Senators, alas, were required to find more dignified alternatives.

He groaned, remembering the time when he just had the toothache.

Gingerly he moved his tongue round his mouth until it found a hole where a walnut could fit comfortably and where the teeth either side felt like wagon wheels. So badly had the abscess nagged him that, when the dentist said the tooth had to be pulled, Quintilian jumped at the chance for relief. Only when he was strapped in that bloodstained chair did he begin to have misgivings. It is not a pleasant experience, he reflected miserably, to have an ulcerated gum scraped away from a tooth, which then gets shaken until it’s loose enough for the forceps. He had never known such pain. And the blood!

‘Don’t worry, old chap,’ the dentist had said, cheerfully pocketing his five sesterces. ‘The swelling will go down in a day or two, and the bruising should fade in a week.’

‘Ung.’

‘What’s that? Worried the bone underneath broke?’

‘Ung, ung.’ It never occurred to him.

‘Well, if you like, we can pop the old probe in,’ the dentist flexed some ghastly bronze apparatus between his reddened fingers, ‘see what’s where,’ he swabbed his patient’s bleeding mouth with a towel, ‘and fish any loose bits out with this.’

At the sight of the second instrument, long and thin and pronged and grooved, Quintilian was out of the shop and up the street faster than you could say here’s-your-change-and now the pain was even more excruciating.

‘Ridiculous, going out in your state,’ his wife had barked. ‘What are you trying to prove?’

Since his wife was always calling his abilities into question, he pretended not to hear.

‘Well, don’t come crawling to me when infection sets in,’ she shouted after him. ‘Oh, and the Consul’s coming to dinner.’

Next to the Emperor, consuls were Rome’s most influential citizens and his wife lived for the day Quintilian stepped into office, except disappointment was to be her destiny. He didn’t want a bloody consulship. He was lucky, he supposed, gazing across the Tiber to where another great granary was going up, that women can’t vote or she’d be lobbying direct. He grunted with satisfaction at the granary’s progress, it was one of his pet projects. At the last count, twelve million bushels of wheat were being shipped in each summer, and the figure was set to rise.

Leaving Jupiter to his immortal chores, Quintilian pressed on to do what he came for, to make his devotions at the shrines of Honour and Virtue and Fidelity as he had done every year since his first wife had died. It wasn’t the most successful of marriages, but at least she wasn’t a harridan. Or a snob. Owing to his current wife’s obsession with status, Quintilian’s fortune was dwindling fast, he’d be bankrupt by the time he reached sixty unless urgent steps were taken.

‘We must bring the villa up to scratch,’ she had argued. ‘Only then can we hope to entertain the Princeps.’

Silly, vain cow. Augustus was a family man, who rejoiced in simplicity and spurned affectation. Pausing in the shade of the Public Record Office, Quintilian watched a white-robed priest bless an offering from a well-known goldsmith who lived on the Esquiline. Assuming he would ever accept such an invitation to Umbria, the Emperor would find greater solace watching the swallows dip over the lake-the lake that he, incidentally, was draining to provide more land for wheat-and discussing administration. Should the treasury fund more of the imperial thrust into Germany? Should an extra legion be despatched, now Pannonia was annexed? Where should the next aqueduct run, since the Virgo, Agrippa’s underground masterpiece, was already proving inadequate for the increased consumption?

Too late! Quintilian’s wife had already ordered marble and stone and magnificent statues, organized work gangs, architects, gardeners. The watercourses alone cost 100,000 sesterces.

Puffed from his descent of the Capitol, he leaned against the side of the Rostra and thought of the great men who had addressed the populace from here. This was where the murdered corpse of the Divine Julius was shown to the people, where the hands of Cicero had been nailed by Mark Antony. Never before had Quintilian felt so distant from his illustrious senatorial predecessors. The bones in his face throbbed and throbbed. His cheek, his jaw, even his eye sockets, and the skin were stiff from the swelling. Sweat ran down his neck in rivulets to soak into his toga, making it even heavier than usual. He stumbled, scuffing the toe of his black senatorial boot, and when he tried to stand upright again, it was as though he was carrying a dead cow on his shoulders. Bloody quacks!

Being the third day of the Festival of Mars, the Forum was packed to capacity. Butchers’ cleavers splintered their blocks, mongrels plundered the scrap bins. Shouts of ‘stop thief’ or ‘make way for the chariot’ mingled with smells of pies and poultry, pickles and pancakes. A spice-seller skidded on a fish head, and a thousand exotic scents exploded into the air. Cinnamon and nutmeg and cumin clung to Quintilian as he bumbled his way through the shoppers and the charlatans. You could buy anything here today, from pastry-cutters to ivory plaques, cucumbers to scribes.

And the sun beat mercilessly on it all, pounding his head like a pestle.

Had it not been for that bloody wife of mine, he thought bitterly, I could be tucked up in bed with a poppy draught. And all for a paltry plot in Etruria. Yet the thought of the Seferius woman lifted his spirits and strangely the aches receded. By Jupiter, she could warm a man’s bedsheets, she could. Sly little bitch, mind-but he’d got her. This time he’d bloody well got her! Third time lucky, but lucky was just how Quintilian felt.

Maybe when the dust has settled and you realize women and business don’t mix, we could come to a different arrangement, eh? The Emperor was firm on the subject of single women. Within two years of bereavement they must wed again. Quintilian had never been sure about the legislation, although he saw no personal gain in opposing it, but, as with most laws, there was a loophole. Suppose a respected aristocrat (him for instance) became this woman’s guardian?

Despite his swollen face and raging jawache, he felt a stirring in his loins. Here? In the middle of the Forum? So outrageous was it, that his desire, so to speak, swelled and the prospect of making Claudia Seferius his mistress became even more attractive. No woman had ever had such a dramatic effect on him, not even in his youth, and Venus knows how active he was in the old days. Edging his way past a shoemaker, bent double under a roll of hides, he began to fantasize about love trysts whereby she would be waiting, naked, oiled, eager to show her gratitude at being spared a loveless marriage…

It was the loveless marriage bit that brought Quintilian back from the Elysian Fields. Thanks to his wife, his vines and his olives had been ripped out and replaced with bloody watercourses. The former had made him a fortune, the latter had cost him one.

He treated himself to a goblet of chilled wine from a street vendor. In theory senators were not allowed to dabble in trade, having to content themselves with their magisterial posts and, if that proved too dull, their estates. Few, though, walked within those lines and a blind eye was turned to surplus sold for profit, to the odd quarry managed through a middleman, to property bought and sold through an agent. He didn’t know what all the fuss was about. She’d run up debts and, to pay for her gambling, she’d put one of Seferius’ tenements on the market. Quintilian had bought it fair and square, yet the silly bitch went ape.

It was a hovel, for gods’ sake! He’d told her straight. Much better to throw the scum out, do the place up, give it a bit of class. You should know about class, m’dear, you’ve got it coming out of your ears.

My word, did you ever hear such language from a prettier mouth? Class my arse, she’d said, all you wanted was an income the size of your fat belly. He’d humoured her, reminding her that if she was such a philanthropist, why sell the building in the first place, but all the while she was shouting and wagging her finger (such a suggestive little finger, too), he could think about nothing else but straddling her. Perhaps, if he asked nicely, she’d use language like that in his bed?

Now that his wife had buggered up his Umbrian estate, he’d had to find land further afield and what started out as a straightforward deal escalated into a game of move and counter-move as once again he found himself pitted against the formidable Claudia Seferius. Could she have done what she did out of spite? Gazumped him to teach him a lesson? Who knows, but no sooner had she bought that bloody piece in Campania, she sold it again-and made a sodding great profit. That was the point when Quintilian decided to take action. The Campania Campaign might have been simple retaliation, but he could not afford to take chances.

He acquired himself a spy under her immaculately tiled roof.

Quintilian’s original intention was to discredit her. Remus, the very notion of women in trade was repellent enough, not only to himself but to every decent-minded merchant in Rome, but far from indulging in wild orgies or torrid lesbian affairs (as he’d very much hoped), her sole vice appeared to be gambling. In less than a week, she’d squandered the whole of the Campanian profit.

Several students were clotted round the golden milestone, virtually obliterating it in their efforts to hear their master’s rhetoric, even though this wasn’t a school day. That’s because the master was Pera, and Quintilian intended that his sons, when they were old enough, should also learn from Pera. He was truly inspirational, that man.

Unfortunately, although gambling wasn’t strictly legal, the senator was not prepared to pee in waters where his own friends swam. He had waited, patiently paying his spy and biding his time. When not at the races or the games, Claudia Seferius had spent a very dull winter poring over her accounts and when, divinely inspired, he put in an offer for the whole wine business (via a middleman, of course) he was incensed to his gills that she rejected it out of hand.

I’ll teach you, you arrogant, long-legged bitch, not to dabble in matters outside your sphere.

To that end he had sacrificed a pig to Mercury, well renowned for his chicanery in the world of commerce, and, exactly ten days later, Quintilian’s spy reported Claudia Seferius intended extending her estates in Etruria.

Hundreds of other plots were going begging up and down the country, but masculine pride was at stake. Quintilian could not afford to lose this round, and he made his enquiries. With the Seferius bint, it boiled down to a straight choice between Hunter’s Grove and Vixen Hill, both neglected by their peasant owners for reasons stretching back to the civil wars, when conscription took men away for months at a time. With permanent peace came the disbanding of a staggering sixty percent of the army, leaving Augustus acutely vulnerable over his responsibility to his veterans, which he also had to balance against a huge number of prisoners-of-war and the problem of feeding an ever-swelling populace. Not for nothing was this man called a genius.

Many peasants, too poor, too weary, too battle-scarred to start over from scratch, leapt at his Land Purchase Scheme and happily upped sticks to Rome, where they could be housed and fed by the State and where someone else’s back broke under the plough. For others, like the owners of Hunter’s Grove and Vixen Hill, it was more of a gravitational pull, but the Land Purchase Scheme kept on rolling, the answers to everybody’s prayers. So what if the rich got richer? So what if estates grew to obscene proportions? We’ve got slaves from the wars, haven’t we? Let them work my lands, I’ve deserved this break.

Ripe for selling, trilled the agents. Ripe for commission, thought Quintilian. Few were beyond a spot of doctoring-transplanting olive trees, piling the outhouses with grain and vegetables and jars of wine-when in reality the olives would be dead by the time you arrived, the borrowed stores returned to their rightful owners. A good surveyor-correction, an experienced and honest surveyor-could name his own price in cases like this, and this is where the Seferius chit came in.

Quintilian turned down a side street, then turned left again to where the buildings closed in.

Claudia had hired such a man to assess the two sites and make an expert recommendation. To the senator’s astonishment and admiration, she had done so with great secrecy, and it was only because of his spy that he found out.

The door that he stopped at abutted the aqueduct and was bolted.

‘Who is it?’ The voice was a boy’s in the process of breaking.

‘Ung.’

‘Eh? Oh, it’s you.’

Quintilian sidled through the small gap that appeared and followed the lad up the wooden steps to an attic stinking of tallow, cabbages and cat pee. In a corner, a short, squat cove with dirty fingernails and chapped lips prised himself off his pallet. Quintilian thought he saw something black scuttle under the bolster and turned his head.

‘Ung!’

An imperial flick of the fingers dismissed the boy and he waited until his footsteps had rattled down the stairs.

‘Nasty swelling you have there, master.’

Quintilian made an impatient gesture and pointed towards a pile of scrolls on a chest beside the doorway. ‘Ung-ung?’

‘No, master. No problems at all. My lad here, he slipped in while our friend was asleep, as we agreed he would, then sneaked back before our friend woke.’ He gave an unctuous smile. ‘Although I will have to charge you extra for the seal.’

The price agreed had been all-inclusive, but this odious individual had him by the balls and the longer he hung around this cesspit, the stronger his chances of the wound infecting.

‘One extra denarius, master, if you please.’

Quintilian pointedly counted six pieces of silver from his purse and flipped them on the chest.

‘Seven, didn’t we agree?’ The man’s eyes glinted horribly. ‘One for the boy, no?’ Realizing he’d pushed too far, he began an oily apology. ‘Quite, quite, I am thinking of another client.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘Always a pleasure to do business with-’

But his visitor, along with the sixth denarius, had vanished.

Later, in the comfort of his own home, tucked up in bed with a poppy draught inside him and a turnip poultice warm against his cheek, Quintilian chuckled quietly. You should not play with the boys, Claudia. I warned you once before you were out of your depth.

Slowly, Quintilian drifted off to sleep, imagining himself moulding Claudia’s firm breasts between his fingers and teaching her, as he turned her on to all fours, that there are dozens of suitable positions for women. And none of ’em in trade.