Shadows in Bronze

XV

The sea captain Laesus was a wonderful find; though it has to be said that having rescued me, he took me to an eating house that made me horrendously ill.

I found my way back to the mansio, awash with saffron pottage, though not for long. There must have been a bad oyster in my soup. Luckily I have a finicky stomach; as my family often joke, when they decide they have waited long enough for their legacies, poisoning me is the last solution they will try.

While my fellow travellers were gnawing at the landlord's unspeakable boiled belly pork, I lay on my bed groaning privately; later I had a slow scrape in the bathhouse, then sat out in the garden with something to read.

About the time the meal ended, other guests straggled out to enjoy jugs of wine in the last light of day. I just had a beaker of cold water to aid my recovery.

There were plenty of tables in the recreation area; it saved the landlord, who was the usual idle scamp, from filling the spaces with flowerbeds that would require his attention. Most of these tables were empty. No one needed to invade my privacy, so when people did head towards me I froze into the character of a man who would rather give himself eyestrain over his holiday reading than look up and let strangers insist on making friends.

This had little success.

There were two of them. One was a bad dream on legs – the legs were like elm trunks, below a mass of well-organized muscle with no visible neck; his sidekick was a whiskery shrimp with a mean look and rickety build. Everyone else in the garden hid their noses in their wine beakers; I nuzzled my scroll short-sightedly, though without much hope. The new arrivals glanced around, then fixed on me.

The two of them sat at my table. They both had that bowing, expectant air which means the worst. An informer needs to be gregarious, but I tread warily with locals who seem so sure of themselves. The other customers studied their drinks; no one offered to help.

It is quite common in the south for tricksters to smile their way into a mansio, settle round some quiet group, then bully them out for an evening in the town. The travellers get off lightly if they escape with just a headache, a beating, the loss of their money, a night in a jail cell, and a sordid disease they pass on to their wives. A man on his own feels safer; but not much. I looked scholarly; I looked reserved; I tried hard to project the impression that the pouch on my belt was too empty to cope with a long night drinking sour red wine while a swarthy maiden with a tambourine danced at me.

Thanks to the market pickpocket, the empty pouch was true. Fortunately it was my decoy purse again; I kept my serious funds with my passport, round my neck. So far I still had them. But Vespasian's retainer was too puny to tantalize a tambourinist with grand ideas.

I stuck things out long enough to make a feeble point, then laid a piece of dried grass in my scroll to keep my place and tucked its baton under my chin while I rerolled what I had read.

Both my new cronies wore white tunics with green binding; it looked like household livery, and from their confident expressions must have been the livery of some minor town councillor who thought himself big in the neighbourhood. The large one was surveying me like a farmer who had turned up something slimy on his spade.

'I'd better warn you,' I tried frankly, 'I know when a stranger comes to town men of enterprise plunder his file savings in the high spots while sinful women tickle his chastity in low dives -

There was more hope of extracting a flicker of expression from a pair of archaic statues in a deserted tomb.

I drank my water thoughtfully, and let events take their course.

'We're trying to find a priest,' the large one growled.

'You don't strike me as devoted types'

Taking my advice from Laesus about changing my appearance, I had snugged into an old dark-blue tunic after my bath. With my open-backed felt slippers, this indigo disaster completed a comfortable ensemble for a night staying in for a good read. I probably looked like a sloppy philosophy student who was thrilling himself silly with a collection of racy legends. Actually I was dipping into Caesar on the Celts, and any interruption was good news for my sore gut because the lofty Julius was beginning to enrage me; he could write, but his sense of self-importance was reminding me why my crusty ancestors so distrusted his high-handed politics.

It seemed unlikely these visitors wanted to discuss Julius Caesar's politics.

'Who's this priest you're after?' I offered.

'Some fool of a foreigner,' the big terrorist shrugged. 'Caused a commotion in the marketplace.' His small friend sniggered.

'I heard about that,' I admitted. 'Used a naughty word for liquorice. Can't imagine how. Liquorice is a Greek word anyway.'

'Very careless!' the strong man groused. He made it sound as if being casual with language was a crucifixion crime. That's one opinion though not mine and not, I thought, a debating point this monster himself chewed over by a roaring country fire on long winternights. 'You've been asking for someone we know; what do you want with Gordianus?'

'What is it to you?'

'I'm Milo,' he told me proudly. 'His steward.'

Milo stood up. I decided Gordianus must have something to hide: his household steward was built like the door porter of an extremely shady gambling hall.

Croton is famous for its athletes, and the most famous of all had been called Milo. The Gordianus steward could easily have modelled for the souvenir statuettes I had resisted in the market. When Croton captured Sybaris (the original sin city, further round the Tarentine Bay), that Milo had celebrated by sprinting through the stadium with a bull across his shoulders, killing the beast with one blow of his fist, then eating it raw for lunch…

'Let's go inside,' this Milo told me, looking at me as if he quite fancied half hundred weight of uncooked sirloin.

I smiled like a man who was pretending he could handle the situation, then let myself be led indoors.