The Germanicus Mosaic

Chapter One

As soon as I heard the voice, I knew there would be trouble.

‘Libertus? Libertus, the pavement maker? Are you there old friend?’ There was no mistaking those patrician Roman tones. Marcus Aurelius Septimus was here, come to my dingy workshop in person.

I was kneeling on the floor cutting pieces of tile for a mosaic at the time, but I clambered to my feet instantly. ‘Old friend’ I might be, but nobody — least of all a mere freedman — kept the provincial governor’s personal representative waiting, at least not if he was wise. Inwardly, though, I was cursing. I should have made a better sacrifice at the festival of Mars yesterday. It was only the third hour of the morning and already things were not looking good.

The arrival of Marcus worried me. Usually if he wants anyone he simply summons them to him. This is not a part of Glevum where wealthy Romans normally come calling — no sign here of the neat paved streets and fine buildings of the colonia, the retirement colony for veterans. This workshop is in the teeming, undisciplined outskirts, beyond the original walls, in one of the straggling, ramshackle streets which have sprung up around the town in the last hundred years. Even the name ‘workshop’ dignifies the place — the back half of a poky room screened off from the open shop-front by a rough wooden partition, and shared with the fire, the cooking bench and the rickety staircase to the living quarters above — though the word impresses the customers. And doubtless increases the rent.

So I didn’t have to be a rune reader to know that this visit spelt trouble. My own fault, I thought wryly, as I stripped off my leather apron and shook the marble chips from my hair and eyebrows. I had been tempting the Fates: humming to myself, permitting myself to be happy, or as happy as a middle-aged ex-slave has any right to be. There was food in the cupboard, oil in the lamps, and as soon as this mosaic border was finished (it shouldn’t take more than a day or two) there would be money in my pouch. I was already making plans. I would indulge myself and take the time to walk the twenty-odd miles to Corinium: if one kept to the military road there was usually someone about, marching troops or army supply carts, so even a lone traveller was relatively safe from brigands and bears. I was looking for my wife. I wanted to trace a slavegirl called Gwellia who, I learned, had been sold at the slave market there a year or two before. Gwellia had been my wife’s name. It was a faint hope, after twenty years of searching, but enough to bring a tune to my lips, especially when the day was fine and warm, and autumnal sunshine was slanting through the window-space, turning the dust-filled air to gold. So, I was humming.

But the gods had other plans. Here was Marcus calling me. Calling me ‘old friend’ too, which was a dangerous sign. That meant he wanted something.

‘Old’ friend was right, I thought, glancing at myself in the beaten copper of a pan. My knees creaked, the lines were etched in my face, and my hair was grey enough, even without the sprinkling of marble dust. Would Gwellia recognise me even if I found her, I wondered. Or I her? She was a mere girl when they snatched her from me. She would be thirty-eight now, and I was ten years older. Already older than most men in Glevum.

But my visitor was waiting, and I could hardly go out to greet him covered in dust. I picked up the amphora from the table and poured water over my head and hands to rinse them — a waste of good clean drinking water, but it couldn’t be helped. I rubbed my hands hastily through my hair and straightened my tunic. Showing a decent respect for men like Marcus Aurelius Septimus is one of the more obvious secrets of long life.

‘Master, hurry up. Here’s Marcus come to see you.’ That was Junio, my servant-cum-shopboy, scurrying around the partition from the front shop.

‘I know.’ I felt unreasonably irritated. ‘Fetch him a seat.’

Junio grinned. ‘You think I’d leave the imperial buttocks standing?’ Marcus is rumoured to be related — distantly — to the emperor himself. There is probably no truth in it; Aurelius is one of the commonest clan names in the empire. Why should a cousin of Commodus consent to kick his heels in rain-sodden Britannia so far from the intrigues and comforts of Rome? But Marcus did come to this province with the governor and he has never denied the rumour. So, remembering that two previous legates to Britain have ended up as emperors in the past, I see that this household always treats him as if he were of imperial blood. One can never be too careful.

‘I’ve put out the folding chair for him,’ Junio said, keeping his voice low. We were speaking Latin, as we always did: Junio had been bred in captivity and, like me, found that the language of his masters came more easily to his lips than his native tongue. Now, however, he didn’t want Marcus to overhear. ‘And a stool for you. A lower one, of course. Now, should I bring some wine? It’s the amphora he gave you himself, at Janus feast, so he can’t complain of the quality.’

The boy was impudent, but I found myself grinning back. ‘Do that. And mind you don’t sample it on the way.’ I aimed a playful cuff at his ear, and went out to the front of the shop. The shop-front was open to the street and the sudden light made me blink.

Marcus certainly looked imperial enough, sitting there with his jewellery and his dazzling white patrician toga, with its deep purple stripe; conspicuously affluent among the dusty piled stone-heaps of my shop-front and the noise and smells of the street. He looked so out of place there, between the tannery on the one side and the tallow makers on the other, that the passers-by, market women and street urchins and pie sellers, nudged each other and stared as they jostled past, and one man, leading a donkey weighed down with hides for the tanner’s, was so busy gazing at Marcus that he missed his footing and sat down heavily in the mire.

Marcus, too, was surreptitiously examining the soles of his fine soft leather shoes. Stained and wet, I noticed, from the filth of the muddy gutters. That would not please him. Marcus was a fastidious dresser.

He looked up when he saw me and, managing a wan smile, extended a ringed hand. I knelt ostentatiously to press it, wishing devoutly that he had summoned me to him, as usual, not only for his sake, but so that I could make my obeisance on the comfort of Roman paving instead of having to kneel here among the stone chips.

‘Libertus!’ he said warmly, after a painful interval. ‘Longinus Flavius Libertus, it is good to see you.’ I rose thankfully to my feet, and sat on the stool as he indicated, but I was warier than ever. Using all my three names, the badge of Roman citizenship I had acquired with my manumission, was to accord me a most unaccustomed dignity. Longinus was my slave-name, I had adopted Flavius for my dear master, but I was glad enough to be called by my new cognomen, Libertus, ‘the freedman’. My own name I had lost, years ago, with my freedom and my wife. But here was Marcus giving me my full legal title. Whatever he wanted, it was even more serious than I’d thought. What mischief were the Fates planning for me now?

‘Excellence?’ It wasn’t my place to say more. Marcus would come to the subject in his own good time.

He was working up to it, one could see, fidgeting with his brooch and buckle and the seals on his finger; a good-looking boy, with his short, fairish curls, intelligent, hooded blue eyes and thin, ascetic face.

‘So then, my friend, how goes the pavement?’

‘Well, thank you, excellence.’ I looked at him in surprise. Ordinarily conversation with Marcus began with a chronicle of his doings, or detailed exploits of the Fourteenth Legion, in which he had a cousin, and in which it was necessary to show the liveliest interest. Or, at the very least, the gossip from the Glevum guard-barracks: who had been promoted, who flogged, who found outside of the curfew hours cavorting with a girl — or boy. But a question about my pavement? Was this a delicate way of reminding me that I owed the Didio commission to his patronage? I said carefully, ‘It is almost finished, and I believe Caius Flavius Didio is pleased with it.’

Marcus nodded. ‘He is delighted. I saw him at the bathhouse yesterday and he was telling me of it. The finest paved courtyard in the Insula Britannica he says. He will pay you well.’

‘Thanks to you, excellence.’

Marcus fiddled with his seals. ‘But, Libertus, I have need of your advice. You remember Crassus?’

‘Crassus? Crassus Claudius Germanicus?’ That was a foolish question. What other Crassus could it possibly be? Another recent commission which Marcus had secured for me. ‘Is he satisfied with the pavement in his new. . librarium?’ I hesitated deliberately over the word, and glanced at Marcus.

It was rather daring of me. Crassus was a Roman citizen and a wealthy one too. As a retired centurion from an auxiliary regiment he had earned his citizenship on retirement, as all conscript officers did after twenty-five years. He was looked down on, of course, by the ‘old blood’ but having acquired a thick skin along with his considerable fortune, he had bought up a tract of land near Glevum and built himself a villa to equal that of any patrician ex-legionary. A boor and a bully he might be, but the man had money and status and it was not for me to question it if he chose to call that tiny cell a ‘librarium’ simply because he had acquired half-a-dozen manuscripts in pots. Marcus heartily disliked the man, but my irony risked a rebuke.

I was safe. Marcus was laughing. He said, ‘It was absurd. Crassus paid such a price for those manuscripts, but if one had given him laundry lists for the fullers, copied out on vellum, he would have been just as pleased with them. I presume the man went to school, like everyone else, but I am sure he never learned to read more than the company orders, and never opened a scroll for pleasure in his life. But he was very determined on his librarium pavement, I seem to recall.’

I nodded. Marcus wasn’t really asking me, he had been present himself when the mosaic was ordered.

‘Wanted it in a hurry, too,’ Marcus went on, ‘before his brother should visit. Did you manage to finish it in time?’

‘I did. I finished it a fortnight ago. He professed himself very satisfied.’ I did not add that I was never more pleased to finish a pavement in my life. I had scarcely seen my employer, of course, one rarely did on these commissions, but the whole household lived in terror of their master, and the once or twice I had glimpsed him myself had certainly sufficed. Crassus Claudius Germanicus was a singularly unpleasant man.

‘Ah.’ Junio had appeared with the tray, and Marcus took a goblet absently, and waited without glancing at the boy until it was filled. He sipped it appreciatively. ‘A fair wine. Roman, is it? You didn’t buy this from the market sellers.’

‘Your gift, excellence.’

I took my goblet in turn, and sipped at it, though I had never learned to like the sour taste of wine. I preferred mead, or the honest ale or apple-beer of my youth. I waited, but Marcus said nothing more until Junio had disappeared. I was surprised. Marcus — brought up with a household of slaves — usually ignored the presence of servants.

Not on this occasion. Marcus watched him go. ‘That slave of yours,’ he said coolly, ‘can you trust him?’

‘Implicitly,’ I said. ‘I would trust him with my life.’ That was true. I have done so, in fact, on several occasions.

‘Because,’ Marcus went on, as if I had not spoken, ‘it may be necessary for you to be absent for a day or two, and people may be asking for you. Friends, clients, acquaintances. .’

I sighed inwardly. Not for my friends; a native nobleman who has been captured as a slave and been cut off from his family does not acquire many friends. But I had ‘advised’ Marcus before, and I was aware that his ‘day or two’ was more likely to be at least a week. That was the price one paid for having a wealthy patron. So much for Corinium, I thought, and there was still that pavement of Didio’s to be completed.

I managed a tight smile. ‘There may be customers, certainly.’

‘Well, you know what Glevum is, Libertus. Rumours everywhere, and this is one occasion when I would prefer that your movements were not the subject of public gossip. Perhaps your slave could tell callers that you are away. . have left town, on urgent business perhaps.’

My mind was racing. I did indeed know Glevum. Garrison for the local guard-force, and the chosen retirement place for every wealthy ex-legionary in the business. A model of Roman local government, and therefore, naturally, a hotbed of political and social undercurrents of all kinds.

I looked at Marcus warily. ‘That could be arranged. And Caius Didio? He will be anxious about his mosaic.’ I meant that I was anxious about it myself.

‘Leave him to me,’ Marcus said.

I nodded. I could guess now why Marcus had come to see me, and I did not like what I guessed. I did not like it at all. I had first met Marcus after the death of a wealthy landowner nearby, a politically sensitive matter, which I investigated for him, and since then Marcus had always turned to me when he discovered some ‘accident’ or fraud which appeared to compromise the dignity of Rome. My help in these matters, he always says, first earned me his protection and patronage, and my refusal to ask for money won his respect. I had an uncomfortable feeling, now, that I was about to be given another opportunity to win his respect.

‘There is trouble, excellence?’ I prompted, hoping that my dismay was not written in my face.

If so, Marcus was too preoccupied to read it. ‘Trouble, yes. You are perceptive. It concerns Crassus. The aediles have been to see me.’

‘The aediles? The junior magistrates?’ For a moment, I turned cold. The aediles were concerned with commercial matters, and they could be ruthless. Marcus had many enemies amongst the market informers. They would enjoy making ‘an example’ of his protégé. I swallowed the rest of my wine in one gulp, before I could trust my voice to say, ‘Has Crassus complained of me?’

I had reason to be wary. That pavement which Crassus had wanted laid with such indecent speed had not been of my own design nor even worked from a pattern book. I had been encouraging Junio to learn the art of pavement-making, and this was a small mosaic of his: a rather crude Cave Canem mounted on linen backing, a sort of apprentice-piece. When Crassus Germanicus had wanted an almost-instant pavement, it was that mosaic — with the lettering quickly altered from Beware of the Dog to Art is Long — which I had hastily cemented into place in his librarium.

‘Has he complained of me?’ I asked again. It had seemed amusingly ironic at the time, that ravening dog gracing the floor of the so-called reading-room; Crassus even seemed particularly pleased with it. But suddenly it seemed much less funny. ‘It was pre-patterned work, but it was the only way to manage it in such a short time. He wanted the floor finished and ready in weeks.’ I was gabbling in self-defence. ‘It took me almost the whole time to flatten and prepare the place. The slaves had dug it over roughly and brought in a fresh layer of clean soil — it had been the slavegirls’ room, you remember, and the floor was just trodden earth — but the floor was still hopelessly uneven. I had only enough time to roll out the mosaic and make it fit by adding an extra border at one end.’

Marcus inclined his head. ‘No, he has not complained. On the contrary, he was bragging about it in the marketplace. You did well to finish it at all, especially with an additional border. I don’t know how you managed.’

By using a template for the border pattern, was the answer — cutting the shape in wood and tiling up to it, and then filling in the space — but I wasn’t going to tell him that. It had taken me a long time to work out a usable system, and it was a secret I guarded jealously. One day, perhaps, I would tell Junio. But not yet. In the meantime I was content to allow myself to breathe out. I had been holding my breath ever since Marcus mentioned the aediles.

‘Why he wanted a librarium out there, off the back courtyard, and didn’t include one in the public rooms in the first place, I can’t imagine.’ Marcus drained his wine. ‘But then, I suppose, his brother came, and it was important to impress him. Anyway, he was satisfied. Has he paid you?’

‘No.’

Marcus said, ‘Ah!’

My heart sank. That was it then — not a complaint against me by Crassus, but a complaint against Crassus by his creditors. That was a blow. That commission had been worth many sesterces. But why all this talk of secrecy and discretion? I made a bold guess. ‘So what do you want of me, excellence? Has Crassus Germanicus disappeared?’

Marcus looked at me, the hooded eyes very shrewd. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or no. He attended the festival of Mars yesterday. .’

I nodded. ‘I went out to see the procession myself.’ Musicians, priests, sacrificial animals. The whole regional garrison, rank after rank, and following them, less firm of step but prouder than ever, the veterans: first the men of the Second Augusta, the Glevum ‘colony’, and then the retired officers from other legions and auxiliary regiments. And all of them, the whole procession from first to last, wearing the hammered mask of Mars. Even for a non-Roman like me it was a stirring sight: the breastplates and standards glinting in the sunshine, the plumes bobbing, and the heavy-soled hobnailed sandals ringing in unison on the paving stones. ‘Quite a spectacle.’ That was an understatement. I had felt like a child again, tiptoe amidst the jostling crowds — even the slaves had been given a holiday — eating hot pies from the street sellers with Junio, and pastries so sweet that the warm honey oozed out between our fingers as we ate.

‘I saw Crassus myself,’ Marcus said, ‘leading a contingent.’

I too had seen the stocky, bull-necked figure striding out among the column of veterans. I said so.

‘And that,’ Marcus said dramatically, ‘is the last time anyone saw him, it seems. He did not return to the villa after the procession. The servants were not unduly worried at first. You know how much feasting there is after the parade, and Crassus loved a feast.’

I nodded. ‘A man of expansive appetites.’ Germanicus was likely to have drunk himself stupid in some Glevum wineshop, and rolled into bed with a convenient ‘barmaid’. I added hopefully, thinking of the money he owed me, ‘Perhaps he will turn up, after all.’

‘He did not appear this morning,’ Marcus said. ‘Nor for lunch. In the end they sent out to find him. All his usual haunts — the bars, the baths, the market — but without success. No one had seen him since the procession. Or his personal slave either. They both seemed to have disappeared.’

Something in his tone caught me. ‘Seemed? Why the past tense, Marcus?’

‘An hour ago the slaves went to stoke the boiler — the underfloor heating had been allowed to burn down over the holiday. They found a body in the hypocaust. That is what the aediles came to tell me. It will be a matter for the governor’s court, of course, not the local ones. Crassus was a Roman citizen. But it is a delicate business. My spies tell me that Crassus Germanicus may have been. . shall we say. . a supporter of the army.’

This time, I groaned aloud. I knew what that meant. Commodus was not the most popular of emperors, and though he had taken the title ‘Britannicus’ most of the army here was in ferment against him, and had imperial candidates of their own, ready to step in when the time was right. The last thing I wanted was to be investigating that kind of political intrigue. If Marcus got me involved in this, I could give up worrying about getting to Corinium next week. Ask the wrong questions here and I might never get to Corinium at all — or anywhere else either. And I had no desire to visit the netherworld.

‘Excellence,’ I pleaded, ‘this is a question for the law officer.’

Marcus ignored me. ‘I am on my way to the villa now. And I want you to accompany me. You see things which other men do not, Libertus. I need your pattern-maker’s mind.’ He favoured me with his most winning smile.

I said nothing.

‘I sent word to expect us,’ Marcus went on, as though there had never been the remotest likelihood of my refusing — as I suppose there wasn’t. Marcus was a powerful man.

‘Perhaps there is no mystery to solve,’ I said, without conviction. ‘Crassus Germanicus is a man of brutal temper. He has killed a man, and then run away. That seems the logical conclusion.’

‘I said so myself,’ Marcus replied, ‘but the aediles thought otherwise. Still, we shall go and see. My driver awaits us. Fetch your cloak, and your strigil if you need one, and give your slave some story about being called away. A private commission for me, perhaps. That should put a stop to any rumours.’

A strigil, I thought. To use in the bathhouse so that I could wash and shave. Marcus did not expect me to return home in a hurry. I got to my feet.

‘I will fetch my things.’

As I tied them into a cloth, I told Junio exactly where I was going and what I was doing. It was the only defiance I could think of. Besides, I felt easier that way. Then I went back to Marcus.

‘All right, excellence,’ I said, wearily. ‘Let’s go and find this body.’