Saturnalia

XXXV

Anacrites' pathetic brain must be churning like a waterwheel after a thunderstorm. His first jump on the night of the fire was obvious: it did not take him long to work out that any scam involving the vigiles must relate to me and my friend Petronius. Faster than we expected, he tracked down the Fourth Cohort's party, which by then was riotous. Marcus Rubella had somehow remained sober enough to curb his antagonistic instincts when Anacrites turned up, supported by some Praetorian Guards. After all, Rubella's known ambition was to join the Guards himself Though by now unable to speak, Rubella gravely waved them in to search the place as best they could. This would not be easy. Many of the Fourth Cohort were lying on the ground for a rest; some were upright but flopping over in all directions like weeds in the sun, others were standing rigid in their boots and offering to fight their own shadows. The Praetorians were impressed by these wild scenes; they soon forgot their orders and joined in the conviviality. I tipped Junia the wink to give them whatever they wanted.

'Anything but my body!' she giggled. I shivered at this fantastical thought.

Anacrites marched around on his own, staring at faces. Among the intoxicated this is not best practice. Several vigiles offered to floor him, furious at his attitude. Everyone he asked swore that Petronius and I had been there all night. He soon stopped asking; he was not stupid.

The atmosphere had deteriorated, to the bemusement of my brother-in-law Gaius Baebius, who never had any sense and who had turned up with his three-year-old son, aiming to wait around eating free pies until Junia needed an escort home. She had other ideas, insofar as her thinking processes still worked. Although Junia always claimed she never drank, she had reached a happy point where she saw no reason ever to leave the party (a situation Gaius may have foreseen, if he knew her better than I thought). I wanted her to leave. She was showing signs of becoming more belligerent than any of the woozy men around her, and it took the form of shouting out remarks about Anacrites and our mother which the Spy would consider slanderous. Ma would not be too pleased either. She was the important one. I wondered if killing your forty-year-old daughter would still count as infanticide.

Meanwhile some of the green boughs in the roof had been set on fire by the strings of lights. Little Marcus Baebius, who could hear none of the tumult so he was less frightened than he might have been, sat gazing around at the magical scene, and was the first to raise the alarm, delightedly pointing out to his father the flames in the dry pine boughs.

'I say!' exclaimed Gaius loudly. The vigiles' response was sillier than their fire-fighting manual orders. Of those who noticed, most took the traditional public service view that any action was the responsibility of somebody else. Some raised wine cups and cheered. 'A little child is in danger!' Junia screamed, wobbling on her feet. This only elicited guffaws of 'How many vigiles does it take to put out a fire?' To which the standard answer is: four hundred and ninety nine to give the orders and one to piss on the blaze. Then a spark landed on Rubella, so he finally weighed in. He rounded up a group to drag out the burning branches to the street where they would only bum down houses, not the warehouse that had been so expensively hired with cash from the entertainment kitty.

When people rushed outside to watch the bonfire, a space cleared and Anacrites stumbled upon Petronius and me. He squeezed his expensive tunic through a tightly knotted group that included the man dressed as a turnip, whose friends were holding him down and pouring cups of wine into him (through his topknot of leaves) as if it was some kind of dangerous dare. Barely aware of what they were up to, the furious Spy elbowed them aside. 'I'm looking for you two!' He got no sense out of us. We were far too drunk, sitting on a platform, with our arms around each other's necks, singing meaningless hymns, while Apollonius the waiter hopelessly begged us to go home.

Anacrites was then nearly knocked face down by the man dressed as a turnip. This crackpot was bumping the Spy from behind while his companions feebly tried to restrain him. His costume was sewn on a frame of heavy wooden hoops. The Spy was picking up bruises every time he got belted. We saw that Anacrites was about to remonstrate. 'We in the Fourth Cohort know how to give a turnip a good time!' burbled Petro, with an infectious burp; he collapsed into giggles. Safely distracted, the Spy turned back, furious with us now. I raised my arm as if to make a declaration, forgot what I had intended, then lay down and pretended I'd passed out cold.

Anacrites let out a hiss of disgust. Fortunately the fighting turnip had been dragged away by friends. Doing his best to assemble the Praetorians he came with, Anacrites made a censorious exit. Reviving, we watched his departure with cold eyes. We now knew that where most people spend their evenings with a bowl of nuts while warming their feet on the dog, or at least warming their feet on the wife, he went into a secret room alone and gloated over a statue of a naked hermaphrodite displaying its wares as if fascinated by its own array of mixed organs. The disconcerting bisexual in his private cabinet was surrounded by shelves of vases; they were painted with scenes of group sex – thrusting lovers in action, piled up in triples and quadruples like limpets, while sinister bystanders watched these antics salaciously through half-open doors.

Anacrites also owned the biggest statue group of the ripe god Pan copulating with a goat on heat that I had ever seen. And I am the son of an antique-dealer. We transferred Camillus Justinus to a safe house as soon as it was safe. Petronius had let him come to the party first because there wasn't time to secure him while we were dodging Anacrites; it let us read him a stem lecture on playing dead before we installed him in our secret apartment. Justinus hated Anacrites; he promised to behave. Good behaviour had become a fluid concept. It was no joke getting the silly beggar up six flights of stairs to his hideaway, and there were difficult scenes when we reached the top. Only those who have tried putting to bed a man-sized, extremely drunken turnip will appreciate what Petro and I went through.

Afterwards, we two sat out on the balcony together for a while, calming down and contemplating Rome. The night was still and very cold but we had been heated by manipulating Quintus upstairs. A few faint stars appeared and disappeared through fast-moving clouds. The breeze was chilly on our faces as we breathed hard and let our hearts slow after our exertions. We shared an old stone bench and absorbed the night sounds.

From streets below came the last bursts of Saturnalia revelry, but most homes were dark and silent now. A few carts were making late night deliveries, though all commerce had slacked off for the festival period, when schools and the courts were in recess and most trades closed down. When wheels did trundle along a street, the sounds carried the more clearly because the normal background racket was absent tonight. Closer to hand, dry leaves scratched on pantiles as they bowled across surrounding roofs. Other noises came to us from far across the city. Mule hooves and dog barks. The lazy tonkle-tonk of rigging equipment on ships moored beside the Emporium. A gust of cheering from a fight under the arches. The occasional scream of a raucous woman pretending to resist sexual advances, amidst cackles of encouragement from her ribald friends.

Petro and I were without wine for once. There had been plenty of times when we carried on carousing on this balcony all night, but we were grown up now. Or so we said, and so Maia and Helena hoped. I thought there was a still a chance we might end up picking the locks at Petro's apartment as we used to do back in the old days, when his wife, Arria Silvia, had locked him out and I had to help him gain admittance in search of a bed. That was on nights when we didn't just fall over and lie in the street… Somewhere in the city below must be Veleda. Did she sleep, tossing and moaning in fever? Or in the city of her enemies was she plagued by wakefulness, dreading the moment when her gods or ours would reveal her destiny? She had come from the endless forests, where a self-sufficient loner could ride for days without human contact, to this teeming place where nobody was ever more than ten feet away from other people, even if a wall stood in between. Here in Rome, whether a hovel or a palace was sheltering her, both luxury and poverty would be her close neighbours. Even outside the mad period of Saturnalia, noise and contention dominated. Some people had everything; many had not enough to live as they wanted; a few simply had nothing. Their struggles to live created what we who were born here called our city's character. We were all either grappling for improvement or striving to hold on, lest what we had – and with it any chance of happiness – should slip away. It was hard work and involved failure and despair for far too many, but to us, this was civilisation.

Veleda had once tried to destroy it. Maybe if the old German guards had managed to find her and control her as a figurehead, she could have tried again. Maybe she did not need them, but would try to defeat us by herself.

'What would we do, Lucius, if the barbarians really were at the gates?' 'They will be.' Lucius Petronius Longus had a morose streak. 'Not in our day, not in our children's day, but they will come.' 'And then?' 'Either run away or fight. Alternatively,' suggested Petro, sounding like a lad again, and interested in any dangerous concept: 'you become one of the barbarians!' I thought about that. 'You wouldn't like it. You're too staid.' 'Speak for yourself, Falco.' We remained there a while longer, with our arms crossed against the cold, listening and watching. Around us our city slumbered, except where desperate souls slunk through its shadows on unspeakable errands, or the last few fearless party-goers were making their way home shrieking – if they could only remember where home was. Petronius, who had lost two of his children to fatal disease, seemed despondent; I knew he never forgot them but Saturnalia, the damned family festival, was when he remembered Silvana and Tadia most keenly. December is never my favourite month either, but I was riding it out. It comes; if you manage to endure it without killing yourself, January follows.

Petronius and I knew how to pace ourselves, and not only with wine. Endeavour and action also have moments of high energy and recovery. We took some rest, here on the balcony of a decrepit apartment which held so many memories. This was a lonely place, a sordid place, a noisy, half-derelict, heartbreaking location – several blocks of filthy tenements around a clutch of cheating neighbourhood shops, a place where free men learned that freedom only counts if you have money, and where people who saw that they would never become citizens totally lost hope. But in this backstreet byway a man who lay low could be ignored by the world. That was our hope for Justinus. We had stashed our treasure as discreetly as we could. I stood up, working my spine stiffiy. It was time to go. Petronius stretched his long legs, kicking against the baluster with the great hard toes of his heavy boots. Since I paid the rent on this bolthole, I stood aside with a host's polite gesture to let him leave first through the wonky folding doors that led to the dreary interior. On his feet, Petronius had a last awkward stretch of his shoulders, then persuaded his tired limbs to move.

I stopped him. A sound had caught my attention, somewhere in the tangle of filthy alleys that twisted together like drab wool skeins in an old basket, six storeys beneath us.

Petronius thought I was a time-waster. Then he heard it too. Someone down there in the darkness played a few lonesome notes on a flute.