Ovid

2

‘Consider it done’. Yeah, well, I found out how stupid that particular promise was next day.

The palace is something else, bureaucracy run mad. For a start, it’s huge. You can get lost, physically lost, if you’re not careful. They find skeletons in there regularly, and guys who’ve waddled in fat as butter stagger out days later blinking like owls and thin as hay rakes. The place is full of clerks who spend most of their working day bouncing the punters between them like they were playing handball; and the worst of it is that you don’t realise you’re getting nowhere until it’s going home time and the bastards drop you.

A typical bureaucracy, in other words.

Sure, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. And don’t imagine that just because I’ve got four names that getting something done is any easier, Especially something involving the emperor. The Wart’s got better things to do (don’t ask what) than sit at a desk all day scratching his boils and waiting for Rome’s brightest and best to bring him their troubles. We purple-stripers have to stand in line like everyone else.

Oh, sure, if it’d been my Uncle Cotta or my father things would’ve been easy. Guys like that have got clout; and clout, at the palace, is everything. My father was an ex-consul and former provincial governor, which tells you something about the half-arsed way we choose our magistrates. Although Uncle Cotta hadn’t made it that high yet, he was on the ladder; but with not so much as an assistant-deputy-clerkship under my belt I’d as much weight of my own to swing as the slave who mucked out the privies.

By rights my best course of action would’ve been to make big eyes at one of my father’s friends, look helpless, and be ever so terribly grateful when the guy condescended to take me under his privileged wing. That, of course, was out, even if I could’ve stomached it. I hadn’t seen my father for months, and I wouldn’t have touched most of his pals with a six-foot pole. Not that they’d’ve fallen over themselves to help if I had asked. My father and I weren’t exactly estranged (only the marriage tie is so simply severed in pukkah families like ours), but that didn’t mean to say our lives had to cross. And the last thing I wanted was to owe the bastard any favours.

So there I was, three hours down the line and making progress you couldn’t’ve measured by the scruple. My feet hurt, my back hurt, and I’d’ve committed any crime short of sodomy for a cup of neat Setinian. The Sixth Assistant Secretary to the Sixth Undersecretary’s Assistant had just promised me that he’d see what he could do if I would kindly wait a few months when Cornelius Lentulus hove into view.

Yeah, hove. ‘Hove’ is a good word to use of Lentulus. He had the build of a merchant ship: big, round-bellied, and inclined to wallow in anything but a flat calm. You could describe him as a friend of my father’s, I suppose, but he was as far from that sharp-eyed crew as it’s possible to get and stay in sight. In other words, he was human, or close enough to it to make no difference. And the old guy had clout by the barrow-load.

‘Hey, young fellah-me-lad!’ he shouted when he saw me. (Yeah again; I never said Lentulus didn’t have his faults. In my view Augustus didn’t go far enough when he purged the Senate). ‘Not often we see you slumming it, eh?’

I explained, and Lentulus nearly popped his clogs right there in the corridor.

‘By the gods, I’ll nail the bastards’ foreskins to their rectums!’ Oh, whoopee. Sterling stuff. ‘A grandson of my old friend Messalla Corvinus left to kick his heels in the waiting-room like a commoner? Don’t you worry, boy. I’ll fix things for you. You just leave it to me!’

So, of course, I did. Willingly, and with suitable awe. Within ten minutes we’d reached the Holy of Holies itself, the imperial anteroom where even the flies are vetted. At which point, having introduced me to one of the secretaries as something only slightly less sacred than the Palatine Shield of Mars, Lentulus buggered off.

‘You must excuse me, young fellah,’ he grunted, patting my arm. ‘You’ll be all right now, Callicrates here’ll look after you. Good lad, Callicrates. I’ve got an early dinner engagement. Nubian girls and tame pythons. Old Gaius Sempronius always does you proud if you’ve got the stamina, Eh, boy? Eh?’

And, with a final elbow in the ribs, he was gone before I could thank him. A pity. I’d’ve liked to ask about the Nubians and the pythons. Good tasteful after-dinner entertainment’s hard to come by, even in Rome.

The imperial secretary was all teeth and hair-oil.

‘And now, sir,’ he said. ‘How may I help you?’

‘A client’s father has just died abroad.’ I leaned on the desk, giving the guy the full benefit of my patrician nostrils. ‘He was exiled under the Divine Augustus, and the client and her mother need imperial permission for his ashes to be brought back to Rome.’

The secretary smiled and reached for his pen and wax tablet. ‘No problem there, sir,’ he said. ‘Not if the gentleman in question is dead. I don’t think we need even bother the emperor.’

‘Hey, that’s great!’ I said, and I meant it. Perilla would be grateful the thing had been settled so quickly; and a grateful Perilla, given Uncle Cotta’s PS, might be interesting.

‘Now, if I may just have a few details?’ The secretary held his pen poised. ‘Your client’s name?’

‘Rufia Perilla.’

The tip of the pen moved over the wax. ‘And the deceased is presumably one Rufius?’

‘Actually, no. He was the lady’s stepfather. His name was Naso. Publius Ovidius Naso.’

The guy stopped writing like he’d been stung.

‘Ovid the poet?’ he said sharply. ‘The…gentleman who was exiled to Tomi?’ The smarmy look was gone like it’d been wiped off his face with a sponge. I felt the first little prickle of unease.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said. ‘He died last winter.’

The secretary laid the tablet down carefully. ‘Excuse me a moment, sir.’

‘Sure.’ I was speaking to his back. He’d already disappeared through the curtained archway behind the desk.

I turned round and tried to look more at ease than I felt. The room wasn’t exactly full, but there were several people waiting behind me; two or three antediluvian senators and a clutch of fat businessmen sitting on benches or chatting in groups.

Or rather they had been chatting. Not any longer. It was so quiet now you could’ve heard a mouse fart, and the way no one was looking in my direction was positively miraculous. The prickle of unease became a full-blown itch. I leaned backwards against the secretary’s desk and began to whistle through my teeth. One of the senators — he must’ve been eighty, at least, with the physique of a rat-chewed Egyptian mummy — suddenly swallowed his spittle the wrong way and choked. I watched with interest as his friends — mummies all, and only slightly less decrepit — pounded him senseless. I was laying private bets with myself which bit of him would fall off first when someone else coughed behind me, and the secretary was back.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘but it is felt that your client’s request cannot be at present acceded to.’

‘You mean you won’t do it?’

‘Precisely, sir.’

There was something not right here. The guy was sweating. And imperial secretaries never sweat.

‘Hey what is this?’ I said. ‘You said there’d be no problem.’ When in doubt go for the jugular.

Not a muscle of his face moved. ‘I was mistaken, sir. I’m sorry, but it simply isn’t possible.’

‘Look.’ I was beginning to get annoyed. ‘The guy’s dead and burned. All I want is his ashes.’

‘I know that, sir, but my instructions are — ’

‘Screw your instructions. I demand to see the emperor.’

I expected that to produce a result, if anything did. I had the right to a personal interview, of course: Tiberius might be a morose antisocial bugger, but he knew the power of the aristocracy. You don’t mess with the cream unless you’re really anxious for trouble. You can find yourself standing alone in a corner at parties, for starters.

‘I don’t think an interview with the First Citizen would be very productive, sir,’ the secretary said smoothly. ‘I assure you that — ’

‘Listen, sunshine.’ I’d had enough of this. I wound my fingers into the neck of the man’s tunic and pulled him gently towards me. ‘I’m not asking your advice or your opinion. I’m telling you. My name’s Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, I’m a full-blown twenty-one-carat noble with a pedigree four times the length of your dick, and if you don’t make the appointment forthwith I’ll lop your balls off and watch you juggle them.’

He went very pale and his eyes made frantic signalling motions over my shoulder. I turned round. The two Praetorians on the door were up and running towards us as slow as they could make it without being too obvious. Shit. I let the guy go, and his sandals went thunk on the marble floor behind the desk.

He was sweating like a pig now and the small muscle at the side of his mouth had gone into spasm. ‘Believe me, sir,’ he said. ‘I really don’t think that an interview would be either possible or advisable. Your request has already, regrettably, been turned down at the highest possible level. Please regard this decision as final.’ Taking a deep breath, he brushed at the nap of his tunic where my fingers had crushed it. ‘Now unless you agree to leave quietly…’

The rest was left hanging, but what my old grammar teacher would’ve called the minatory apodosis was pretty obvious. I glanced over my shoulder to confirm it. Sure enough, the guards were hovering just within lunging distance, two six-foot three-hundred-pound musclebound gorillas in gleaming armour trying their hardest to blend in with the furniture. Sure, they probably wouldn’t’ve dared to throw me out physically, but you don’t mess with these guys.

‘Okay.’ I held my hands up, palm out. I don’t think I’d ever been so angry, or so calm. ‘Okay, I’m going, sunshine. But don’t think you’ve heard the last of this.’

I turned and walked between the two frozen-faced guards. Beyond them the senators and businessmen formed an embarrassed, grisly tableau, like a Greek chorus waiting for their cue. Even the coughing senator had shut up. He looked dead to me, but then he always had.

A thought struck me. I stopped and turned back.

‘What did he do, anyway?’ I said.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’ The secretary looked blank.

‘Ovid. What did he do to deserve exile in the first place?’

The guy’s face did a good impression of cement setting. ‘I really couldn’t say, sir.’

‘Whatever it was, it must’ve been something pretty big, right? When they won’t even allow the bastard home in a box.’

The concrete lips never stirred. The concrete eyes remained unfocused.

I wasn’t taking crap like that. Not from anybody.

‘Don’t you worry, sunshine,’ I said. ‘I’ll get him. I’ll bring him back, one way or another. You tell your bosses that from me.’

And so saying I left, with my patrician nose held high. The family — well, some of them, anyway — would’ve been proud of me. It’s times like this that good breeding tells.

It took me an hour to find the exit.