Parthian Shot

20

The spice market was on the east side of the Velabrum, near the end of Tuscan Street and facing the slopes of the Palatine. Not all that far, in other words, and I had a fair slice of the afternoon left. There was no time like the present.

I’m no traveller, me: boats make me sick, give me Roman cooking any day, and as for sightseeing you can drop it down a very deep hole and forget it. All the same, a walk through the spice market can send even my pulse racing. Rome’s a pretty olfactory city, in places too olfactory: some bits down by the Tiber, near the big meat market where the slaughterhouses and tanneries are, or in the fullers’ quarter you breathe through your mouth because using your nose is a bad, bad idea. The spice market’s the opposite. You walk through it with both nostrils wide open, taking in as much as you can get and begging for more. I didn’t recognise many of the scents — you’d need a culinary nut like Meton for that — but even I picked out the hot, peppery tang of ginger and the rich aromatic smell of cinnamon. For most people, mind, a sniff’s about as close as they come. Spices — any spices — are seriously pricey, some literally worth their weight in gold. Even the spiced-honey pastries you can buy from the hawkers at the market’s edge cost as much as a cookshop takeaway.

I stopped at a likely-looking stall run by an old girl wrapped to the eyeballs and clanking with enough gold bangles to fit out a cat-house. That’s another thing about the spice trade; a lot of the people involved in it, including the stallholders themselves, are foreigners. Real foreigners, I mean, from outwith the Roman borders. This example with her brown-henna’d palms and dark, unfathomable brooding-vulture eyes could’ve been pure desert Arab from the empty quarter beyond Egypt where — so they say — the phoenix lives.

‘Excuse me, Grandma,’ I said. ‘You happen to know where I can find a man by the name of Gaius Praxa?’

‘End of Five Godlets Alley,’ she snapped in an accent that was pure tenement-Aventine balcony-hanger. ‘And watch who you’re calling grandma, pal. My eldest’s just turned six.’

So much for the mysteries of the East. Shit. Well, how was I supposed to tell under that lot? ‘Right. Right,’ I said. ‘Sorry, lady. Ah…where would Five Godlets Alley be?’

‘Carry on past the litter-rank and the urinal. It’s on your left before the cookshop. You can’t miss it, even with your eyesight.’

‘Thanks.’ I beat a hasty retreat.

She was right, though. The small wayside shrine that gave the alley its name was unmistakable. Who the godlets were, and why there were five of them, I didn’t know — they weren’t Roman, anyway — but from the little offerings of flowers, fruit and scraps of cloth they must’ve been pretty popular. I gave them a nod in passing and turned into the alleyway.

There wasn’t a sign, but the place at the end was obviously what I was looking for: a fair-sized warehouse on a stone-built platform, currently open along its length but with heavy shutters folded back against the central and side pillars and stacked along the inside walls with linen bags, rushwork baskets and a few wooden chests. An elderly bearded man was sitting in a high-backed chair beside a set of bronze scales, engrossed in an open book-roll.

‘Gaius Praxa?’ I said.

He looked up and smiled. ‘That’s my name. What can I do for you?’

Strong accent — it reminded me of Nicanor’s — but an educated voice.

‘I was told to ask you about pepper.’

Yeah, well, it did sound pretty silly, like one of these secret cabbalistic greetings that sad buggers like the Fellowship of the Golden Ox-Goad exchange, especially when they know some poor bloody non-initiate is listening. If Praxa was surprised, though, he didn’t show it. Carefully, he rolled up the book — I noticed it wasn’t written in Latin script — and stowed it away in its cylinder-case.

‘What kind of pepper?’ he said.

‘There’s more than one kind?’

‘Oh, yes. The simplest and crudest is long pepper. Such as is in that basket over there.’ He nodded towards the rushwork basket to my left which was full of what looked like dried bean-pods. ‘Then there’s black and white pepper. Both are made from long pepper but their natures are different. Black pepper is stronger-tasting, more pungent, as well as being the most common. The white variety is milder.’

‘That so, now?’

He got to his feet. He was taller than I’d expected, and stooped, with bushy eyebrows and washed-out grey eyes. ‘You asked. I’ve answered,’ he said. ‘Now. At least I should know your name.’

‘Corvinus. Valerius Corvinus.’

‘So.’ He nodded gravely. ‘And you’re interested in pepper, Valerius Corvinus.’

‘Yeah. So it seems.’

‘For any particular reason?’

‘Uh-uh.’ I grinned. ‘Not that I know of at the moment.’

If he thought the answer was a bit odd — and I wouldn’t’ve blamed him — he didn’t show it. He just grunted. ‘Fair enough. Perhaps a reason will suggest itself. If not — well, I wasn’t doing anything particularly vital at present anyway, and I’m not a stickler for reasons myself. Interest will suffice. Up you come and have a look round.’

I climbed the shallow steps to the platform. The scents from the open spice-bags caught at my throat.

‘Pepper comes from India, or from the south-facing slopes of the Caucasus. The pods grow on trees rather like myrtles but taller, and the corns inside resemble myrtle berries. In fact, before it started to be imported myrtle was the nearest equivalent. People have tried to grow pepper trees in Italy but the quality’s very poor and it has never really caught on. Long pepper is simply the pod itself, dried whole.’ He reached into a bag and brought out a handful of small, wrinkled seeds. ‘This, now, is black pepper. To make it, the corns are taken from the pod and dried in the sun or over fires, while for white pepper they’re soaked in water before drying to remove the outer husk. Then the pepper is loaded into sacks and transported along the trade route through Mesopotamia into Syria, or round to the north through Armenia. There is a sea-route from Arabia to the Indus, but that takes much longer and it’s expensive.’ He smiled. ‘Now. Have I bored you enough or is there anything else you’d like to know?’

I was examining the other bags. One of them was full of what looked like huge salt crystals. ‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘A curiosity. It doesn’t have a Latin name that I know of; we simply call it reed honey. It’s from India too. Taste it. Go ahead, it’s quite pleasant.’ I did. The thing was sweet, like honey but with a different flavour. ‘It’s a form of dried sap. Not culinary; I’m no doctor, so I don’t know its uses exactly, but we sometimes sell it to the medical profession.’

I moved on to a wooden chest full of thin rolls of flaky brown bark. This I knew: Meton put it into hot spiced wine. ‘Cinnamon, right?’ I said.

‘Indeed.’

‘That from India as well?’

‘From Ethiopia. Or beyond, rather, because the Ethiopians buy it from the cave-dwellers who live to the south.’ Praxa picked up a broken segment and rubbed it between his palms, scenting the air between us. ‘People used to believe the sticks were twigs from harvested phoenix nests, but that isn’t true. The cave-dwellers bring them from much further still on rafts without sails or oars or rudders.’

‘Yeah? How do they do that?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not a seaman, either. I don’t know. But the round trip can take as long as five years and cost the lives of half the crews. The sun is so close to the earth that it chars them, the air is full of poisonous vapours and the forests along the coast are inhabited by dwarfs who kill with needles blown through hollow canes. Or so my traders tell me.’

‘All for a bit of scented bark, right?’ I said. Bugger; no wonder the stuff was so pricey. Back to business. I turned away from the sacks. ‘You mentioned two possible land routes. For the India trade.’

‘Through Mesopotamia and Armenia. Yes. The spice road splits at Bisutun in Media, east of the Tigris. One branch goes north to Nisibis into Armenia and then crosses the Syrian border at Zeugma, the other carries on through Parthia to Palmyra and over the Syrian desert.’

Well, I’d take his word for it. ‘That’s all there are? Just these two?’

‘Apart from the sea route I mentioned, but as I said that’s seasonal, time-consuming and more expensive, besides being more dangerous. In the event that a war with Parthia closed the Syrian borders then it might be relevant, yes, but not otherwise. Even then it couldn’t carry a quarter of the traffic the market needs.’

Uh-huh; I was beginning to see why Crispus had pointed me in Praxa’s direction. I still didn’t know where all this was leading us, but the guy certainly knew his stuff. ‘Let me just get this clear, pal,’ I said. ‘What you’re telling me is that the Parthians have almost total control over the empire’s eastern spice imports, right?’

He was looking at me like I’d just asked him to confirm that I only had one head. ‘But of course they do. They always have.’

‘And the trade would be pretty profitable, would it?’

He laughed. ‘Oh, yes. I don’t know the exact figures but the overall profit for the luxury trade must be in the region of a hundred million a year. And spices — including pepper — account for a considerable slice of that.’

I almost choked. Holy immortal gods! A hundred million a year profit? That was more than the tax levy on a fair-sized province brought in, and even that was gross, not net. The back of my neck was beginning to itch. ‘So any merchant who controlled the trade at both entry points into Syria — the Armenian and the Mesopotamian — would clean up?’

‘If he controlled both, yes. It would have to be both. In practice that would be impossible because the situation could never arise. There are too many individual merchants, and too many vested interests, to produce that sort of monopoly. He would need two kings in his pocket, for a start: the Great King himself, or his Mesopotamian governor at least, and the king of Armenia. Not to mention a blind eye on the part of the Syrian authorities on the Roman side.’

Forget the itch; my brain had gone numb. Oh, shit. Impossible or not, it was too much of a coincidence to ignore: Anacus the spice merchant; Tiridates the Parthian prince and — if anything happened to Phraates — Rome’s candidate for the Great Kingship; Tiridates’s bosom buddy Mithradates, ditto for Armenia; and finally Lucius Vitellius who, unless I missed my guess, as a result of his Parthian duties would be next in line for the all-important Syrian governorship…

Coincidences happen, sure, but not that calibre of coincidence. It all fitted. How it fitted, and what the practicalities would be, I didn’t know, but the whole thing smelled like a cartload of month-old fish.

‘That’s…ah…fascinating,’ I said.

‘Indeed?’ Praxa was watching me closely. ‘You seem to have found a reason for your interest, Corvinus.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I have.’ Gods! What was I into here? No wonder Crispus had preferred to keep his mouth shut. A business scam like that, massive as it was, wasn’t technically illegal, sure, especially since any monopoly would only apply outside Roman jurisdiction so Vitellius wouldn’t be breaking any laws, but still -

I skidded to a mental halt. Hang on, Corvinus, hang on! Mithradates, fine, no problem: he was the current choice for Armenian king nem. con. Vitellius — well, he was Rome’s chief dickerer with the Parthians, any subsequent dealings with them would almost certainly involve him and so the Syrian governorship was practically a cert. But Tiridates wasn’t in the running for Great King at all, was he? Unless, of course, Phraates died leaving him the only other candidate…

Damon. Phraates’s son. He couldn’t ever be Great King himself, and his father had made it clear that he couldn’t expect any sort of position with him in charge. On the other hand, he was definitely persona grata with Tiridates, and if he were to take the kingship by stepping over Phraates’s corpse there might be a key Parthian governorship — such as Mesopotamia, for example — up for grabs. Especially if Damon had helped arrange for him to be the only living candidate…

That fitted, too. Oh, shit. Make that two cartloads of month-old fish.

Praxa was waiting politely. ‘You ever come across a guy by the name of Anacus?’ I asked.

‘Yes, of course. I buy from him regularly. His family have been merchants and shippers in Antioch for generations. Is Anacus another interest of yours?’

‘Yeah. You mind?’

‘Should I?’

‘It’s a big company?’

‘Very. One of the biggest in Syria.’

‘What’s he like? Anacus?’

‘As a person? An excellent businessman. In fact, I might say business is his life.’

‘Straight?’

‘Certainly. I wouldn’t deal with him if he weren’t. He drives a good bargain, but his spices are top quality. He does his own shipping, as well, and that’s as important for spices as it is for wine. Now I really must ask you, Corvinus. Natural curiosity is one thing, but we seem to have moved off pepper and on to areas a great deal more personal. Why do you want to know about Anacus?’

‘He’s pretty well-off, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Although as I say business is his life and the money aspect is secondary. I don’t wish to seem impolite, but I’ll ask you again: what’s your interest in Titus Anacus?’

‘No particular reason. I know his son, that’s all.’

‘Nicanor?’ Praxa frowned. ‘A disappointment, that lad. Good business brain, as he would have coming from that family. But no interest, I’m afraid. Also, relations between him and his father are somewhat strained.’

‘Because of his sister’s death?’

‘Perhaps. Because of that, and for other reasons. I don’t know the details, nor do I wish to. They are none of my business. Nor, I would suggest, are they of yours.’

‘Right. Right. I’m sorry.’ Jupiter! I felt like crowing. Crispus had come up trumps after all. Now I needed space to think. ‘Thanks for your help, friend. I’ve learned a lot.’

‘About pepper?’ The old man’s tone was as dry as one of his peppercorns, and his grey eyes rested on me in a considering way. ‘Don’t mention it, Valerius Corvinus. I hope — whatever the reason for your interest may be — that I’ve managed to satisfy it.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said. ‘Absolutely.’

That was putting it mildly; the old guy had given me cause to be grateful in spades. If hauling the top off an unexpected can of worms was a reason for gratitude.

I left. The sun was pretty far over now. It had been a long, long day and I should be heading back to the Caelian. Perhaps a chat with Perilla was in order.