The Ghosts of Glevum

XIII

For a moment my whole life flashed before my eyes, and I floundered, spluttering. But I did not drown. For all my frenzied splashing, I had merely fallen into the shallows and the water was no higher than my thighs. Feeling rather foolish, I struggled to my feet, but the ground was slippery and I slithered in again. Strong arms seized my makeshift tunic, as I came up for the second time, and Sosso and Lercius hoisted me upright and dragged me up on to the bank.

Even in the misty moonlight I was a sorry sight, soaked and streaked with mud from head to foot. One of my ungainly boots had fallen off and sunk. It hardly mattered: I was so tired and cold and shaken that I could not stand. I could do nothing but lie exhausted and shuddering on a pile of sodden leaves underneath the tree, convinced that I was going to die. In fact, I decided I would welcome it, as a sort of numb warmth spread slowly over me.

Sosso’s voice seemed very faint. ‘Great Jove! He’s drifting. Quickly! To that hut we saw!’

They must have lifted me and carried me for miles, but I have no real memory of that. I found I was sliding into shivering sleep. I dreamed.

In my dream my father had me on his back and was running with me to the stone-built roundhouse that was my childhood home. I wanted him to run. It would be warm there by the central fire, and my mother would sing songs to me while I curled up on my bed of furs and slept. Then I seemed to be hanging upside down, suspended by my arms and legs, like a rabbit hung to cook above the fire. Then even that faint sensation dimmed and I surrendered entirely to unconsciousness.

I swam up into a half-waking world.

‘You will be all right here,’ my father said, and his voice was very odd and deep. My mother rubbed my aching limbs with balm and lifted a bowl of hot broth to my lips.

‘Drink this,’ she crooned.

The brew was hot and bitter. I felt the warmth course through me like a flood. I forced my eyelids open, expecting to gaze into my mother’s eyes, but the beloved features melted and dissolved and I was looking instead at a wrinkled, toothless face surrounded by wispy tufts of thin grey hair.

Yet I knew I’d seen the face before. And some of my imaginings were true. There was the fire, and I was lying on a bed, though not my own. It was dark, except for the firelight, but there were some things I could discern. I was lying on a simple pile of reeds with a patchwork coverlet made of pieces of fur skin — they might have been from weasels — draped over me. I did not recognise the tiny room in which I lay. I gave up trying to make sense of it and shut my eyes again.

More liquid was forced between my lips. ‘Citizen Libertus, you must stay awake.’

I opened my eyes stupidly. The wizened face pressed very close to mine. ‘Don’t you recognise me, citizen? I knew you at once, despite that dreadful sack they’d draped you in.’

‘Sack?’ Fragments of memory were drifting back. I moved my hand beneath the covering of skins to find the sack, but under the furs I was as naked as the day I was born. Then my fingers, moving on my chest, touched something sticky, thick and warm. Blood? I snatched my hand out and gazed at it, though the flickering fire was all the light there was.

The old woman laughed. ‘Goose-grease,’ she said. ‘Plenty of it too. Best thing there is for warding off the cold and for preventing tightness of the chest — though you’ll be lucky to escape that altogether, chilled and soaked through as you were. Still, that hot remedy of mine should help. I sent the same thing to your patron once, when he had a fever and a nasty chill. Now, Citizen Libertus, drink the rest of this.’

This time, I recognised my name and I realised who and where I was. I was an old man on the run and this. . ‘You’re the firewood-seller’s wife,’ I said. ‘I am in your hut.’

She nodded. ‘Lucky for you, citizen, that your friends brought you here. Another hour of that wet and cold, and I doubt if even I could have helped you.’

‘My friends?’ Apart from Junio — and Marcus, I suppose — I had no one to whom I could apply the term. A tradesman who has been first a nobleman and then a slave is not in a position to acquire ‘friends’.

‘The men who brought you here,’ the woman said. She gestured to the door. There was a shadowy figure sitting there, which I recognised as Cornovacus. He seemed to be asleep, propped up against the wall, his knees drawn up underneath his chin and his head resting on his folded arms.

I stared. ‘Where are the other two?’

‘Gone to your roundhouse, to see what they can find. I told them the way.’ She peered into my face, and added, ‘I hope I did right. I thought you’d wish it, since they saved your life. In any case, I had little choice. They had a knife.’

This mention of my house made me struggle up. ‘My wife. .’

‘You needn’t worry, citizen. Your wife and slaves are safe.’

I sank back. ‘Jupiter be praised!’

‘My husband saw them on the road. They’d gone long before the soldiers came.’

‘Soldiers! So Junio was right. They came.’ Once more I tried to sit upright, but this time she pushed me gently down again.

‘Lie back. There is nothing you can do tonight. Perhaps in a day or two, if you are strong enough. .’

‘But I have chickens, possessions, grain. Gwellia cannot have taken all of them. There will be beggars, thieves. .’

‘Citizen, try not to distress yourself. If there is anything of value there, no doubt Sosso will bring it back to us. He’s gone to have a look.’ She turned away and busied herself with something on the fire. ‘For now, try to get some rest.’

To see if there was anything to loot, no doubt, but by now I was too worn to care. Gwellia and Junio were safe, and so was I. That was the most important thing. The rest would have to wait until the dawn.

All the same I found I couldn’t rest. A hundred questions tumbled through my brain. I wondered where the firewood-seller was now, since it was long past the middle of the night. He must have visited his home since he saw Gwellia, since he had managed to tell his wife all this. Where had Tullio and his boat gone, and what had happened to Sosso and Lercius? Where could I find the money to pay Sosso now? Above all, was Marcus innocent or guilty — and how, in the present situation, was I ever to find out?

That last thought vexed my tired brain, and I veered away from it. I seized on another little mystery instead.

‘Sosso!’ I said suddenly, as if this were the most pressing matter in the world. ‘You called him by his name. You knew him before? Or did he tell you tonight what he was called?’

She was unhooking an iron pot from the fire, and mixing something into it from a clay bowl which she had nearby. She looked at me sharply, but — as if she was content with what she saw — she answered gently enough. ‘Both. I had heard of him, and when he came I recognised the man. It is hardly a description you’d mistake. I said, “Are you Sosso?” and he said, “I am.” I’m not ashamed to tell you, citizen, my husband has talked once or twice, when times have been particularly hard, of going to the tombs and joining him ourselves.’

‘Joining him?’ I made no sense of this.

‘Sosso has a little band of men — and women — in the town. The Ghosts of Glevum, folks call them. You have heard of them?’ She did not wait for a reply. ‘They would starve without him. He has some arrangement with a slave who works in a hot-soup kitchen near the docks.’

‘A big fat fellow with a beard?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know exactly. All I know is that the owner of the thermopolium has a wife who is a member of that peculiar sect. You know the one. Believe in all sorts of peculiar things — only one god and that crucified Jew who was supposed to have come back from the dead. Anyway, you know what they’re like.’

I nodded. I’d had dealings with Christians before. They weren’t popular with the Emperor, of course, since they refused to sacrifice to him, but they weren’t dangerous to know — the sect wasn’t forbidden, like the Druids. Generally, in fact, they were not disliked; they tended to be sincere and generous, even if their beliefs were rather odd. ‘All prayer and penitence and giving to the poor,’ I said.

She looked up from mixing her brew, which was beginning to smell dreadful as it warmed. ‘Exactly. So when the shop closes for the night, she sends her slave out with the scrapings of the soup vat to give to the poor, and a bit of the makings for a fire. Of course, he’s got more sense than to distribute it for free — he’s looking to buy his freedom by and by — and Sosso’s come to some arrangement with him. His group always get the soup, and the slave gets a cut of anything they make.’

‘I see.’ That was close to what I’d worked out for myself. I said, ‘I understand that members of the group do little jobs for the slave as well?’

‘Spying mostly, from what I understand. Collecting information, and that sort of thing. Which councillor is taking bribes, who’s standing for election, and who is visiting whose wife — anything he can turn to money in the end. It’s amazing how indiscreet some people are, when they think nobody’s about — but who takes any notice of a beggar in the street?’

I shook my head. ‘You thought of joining this pathetic crew?’ It was still an effort to say anything and I realised how exhausted I’d become. I ached in every inch, but I could not relax. My future, if I had one, lay in Sosso’s hands, and I wanted to know everything she had to tell.

She looked at me. ‘Citizen, you don’t know what it is to be desperate. These people stick together and they share what they have. They would perish individually, together they survive. Believe me, citizen, if you have no money and you cannot work — whether you are freeborn and sick, or injured in some way, or even if you are a slave who’s been turned out on the streets because you are no further use — you go to Sosso, if you don’t want to starve. All the unfortunates round here know that. Sosso will look after you, if he takes you on. He’s shrewd and he’s handy with a knife.’

This was a new view of the underworld: Grossus as a sort of Marcus of the poor — patron and protector of his own brand of clientes, and Sosso as perhaps the chief of these, the inferior with brains whom Grossus relied upon. I had formed a grudging admiration for the ugly little man, but now I saw a parallel with my own position too. I didn’t care for the comparison. ‘He welcomes thieves and runaways as well,’ I muttered ungraciously.

She stopped stirring and poured some of the liquid back into the bowl. ‘All right, so there are some thieves and vagabonds as well, but this isn’t a market centre like Corinium. People like that aren’t drawn to Glevum as a rule; there are too many soldiers here. And as for runaways, Sosso was a runaway himself. Originally freeborn, they say, but very poor. His parents would have sold him for a slave, but he was a freak and no one wanted him. They left him on the streets, but he was picked up by a trader who put him in a cage and took him round the markets as a show. Charged an as to see him, till he got too big and cost too much to feed, and then he arranged to have him given to the beasts as comic entertainment at the Games.’

I nodded. Such freak-shows were not unknown in Glevum, at the Games, although most children born with less than perfect limbs were simply left to die. I felt some sympathy for Sosso, all the same. ‘But he got away?’ I said.

‘He had worked out how to undo the cage, and the night before they came to get take him off, he ran away. He walked for days and days until he found himself here among the tombs. Now, citizen, I made this for you.’ She handed me the evil-smelling bowl. ‘Drink this; it will help you sleep.’

It occurred to me that she needed sleep herself. I took the bowl and sipped. It tasted as dreadful as it smelled. ‘And so he came to Glevum in the end. How long ago was this?’

‘Not so many questions, citizen.’ Cornovacus was awake again. ‘And you, you toothless crone, keep your confounded gossip to yourself — if you don’t want Lercius to cut out your tongue.’ The interruption startled both of us. I wondered how much he’d overheard. ‘Now shut up, the pair of you, and go to sleep before I lose my patience with you both.’

The poor woman cowered. She had been good to me. I decided I had nothing left to lose. ‘I’ve been taken captive and locked into a shed and then obliged to promise money to escape. I think I am entitled to know who I am dealing with.’ It is hard to be dignified when one is lying on the floor, covered in goose-grease and weasel-skins and not much else, but I did my best.

Cornovacus’s answer soon put paid to that. ‘As matters stand you are entitled to exactly nothing, friend.’

And that, I thought wearily, precisely summed it up. I did as I’d been told. I drank up my disgusting draught, shut up, lay down and allowed my eyes to close. The old woman’s brew was an effective one. In spite of everything, I drifted almost instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep.