The Ides of April

VIII

The Armilustrium was the shared name of a festival and a sanctuary. The place was an old walled enclosure, sacred to Mars, the Roman god of war. From time immemorial, it had been where weapons were ritually purified in March and October, the start and end of the fighting season. After each ceremony there would be a big parade down to the Circus Maximus: all noise and triumpha-lism. Romans love to make a racket.

Since the enclosure served as a parade ground during the spring and autumn ceremonies, it was kept mainly bare, although there was a shrine at one end, a permanent stone altar in the centre and a couple of benches for the benefit of old ladies. In one corner was alleged to be the ancient tomb of Titus Tatius, a Sabine king who had ruled jointly with Romulus for a period, thousands of years ago. As a foreigner, he had been buried here on what was then the outsiders' hill; an oak tree shaded his resting place. It must have been renewed. Even oaks don't last that long.

In between festivals, the Armilustrium often lay deserted. I liked to come into the enclosure and sit out here. It was better than a public park where you were constantly irritated by lovers and rampaging schoolboys, beggars and mad people pretending to be lost as an excuse to engage strangers in conversation. There was hardly any litter here because the populace never wandered about with food in their hands, and nor was there that worrying smell of old dog dirt that tends to waft over even the most formal gardens if people are allowed to exercise their pets.

Don't misunderstand me. I like dogs. At one terrible time of my young life, I had lived on the streets of the town I was born in, scavenging with the feral dogs; they were kinder to me than most humans. I became as wild as they were. Maybe at heart I still was. If ever I paused quietly to consider my origins and character, the fear of having an unRoman nature unsettled me. It positively scared other people. Men, particularly. Not that I minded upsetting men.

The ideal Roman matron was supposed to be docile, but I had noticed how few of them were. It seemed to me, Roman men had devised their prescriptive regime for their women precisely because the women really held domestic power. We let them think they were in charge. But in many homes they were wrong.

I liked the Armilustrium because even without dog dirt it did harbour a smell, a musky odour near any undergrowth, a rank scent of wildlife that deterred many people: foxes frequented the area. When sitting still and silent I had often seen them. To me, since I had never kept ducks or chickens, foxes were a wilder, more intriguing kind of dog.

The Aventine foxes were currently causing me anxiety. It was April. In the middle of the month would come one of the numerous festivals that cluttered the Roman calendar, this one dedicated to Ceres, the Cerialia. Like the Armilustrium, it always had several days of public events down in the Circus, but with one extra feature that I found loathsome. On the first night, live foxes would be driven down the hill, with lit torches tied to their tails. Whooping celebrants would herd them into the Circus, where they died in agony.

Some years I went away. My family owned a villa on the coast.

This year there was a big auction in which Father was involved, so the others were not going to the sea until later, and they wanted me to stay in Rome too. Ever since I was widowed, it had been understood I would be with them at this time. Our family had almost as many ritual days as the city had festivals, and the Ides of April was a compulsory engagement for me. In an unstated way, they had made it conditional on their allowing me to be independent the rest of the time. The thirteenth day of April, during the Cerialia, was my birthday. On the Ides, I had to be with them.

Oh let's get this out of the way.

Nobody really knows when I was born, nor who my parents were. No one will ever know. Being an informer now, in a family of investigators, made no difference. I could never find out. Even I had accepted years ago that a search would be a waste of time. I would never go back to Britain. There was nothing for me there. Not even the truth.

I was discovered as a crying baby in the streets of Londinium, that ramshackle shanty town at the mist-covered end of the world. I had been abandoned, or perhaps hidden for safety, when the Boudiccan tribes attacked and burned the Roman settlement. There were few important officials in Britannia in Nero's day; it was a new, very remote, province. I was unlikely to be an official's baby or my loss would have been noted. There were soldiers, but soldiers were not supposed to have families and in a rebellious frontier province that rule tended to be enforced. The most likely possibility is that I was a trader's child, which meant I could be of any nationality, or half and half, with my mother possibly British though just as likely not.

Orphaned babies plucked from horror tend to be hailed as miracles. They give hope at a time of chaos and grief. People fostered me. My childhood was spent among shopkeepers. These slipshod, uneducated people, emigrants from mainland Europe, were decent to me, until caring for an extra infant and feeding an extra mouth became burdensome. I began to sense they had ideas of selling me into one kind of slavery or another, so I ran away. I was a skinny, bitter, unwanted street-child who slept in chilly colonnades, handed as many blows as curses.

Finally, more compassionate people saw me there and saved me.

Didius Falco and Helena Justina, my new, cultured, adventurous, warm-hearted and eccentric parents, certainly did not object to a challenge; by then I was undomesticated, vermin-ridden and although we never talked about it afterwards, I had been targeted by a brothel-owner and raped. I was aggressive and angry, too-moods I never really lost. But I also yearned for survival. I recognised a chance. Never stupid, I took it.

I came to Rome. A diploma of Roman citizenship had been arranged for me. I agreed to be formally adopted (my rescuers had principles; they gave me the choice). Birthdays are important in Roman families and I was encouraged to choose a date we could call my own. Since the Boudiccan Rebellion had happened in the autumn, and by then I had survived without a mother, spring seemed a likely time for me to have been born. Father's birthday was in March; I selected a date three weeks after his, time for us to recover from one family party and arrange the next. I chose the Ides of April before ever I knew anything about the foxes.

They came in from the country, following the great highways, sneaking at dusk up through the roadside ditches along the Via Latina, the Via Appia and the Via Ostiensis. They came to raid rubbish piles and detritus in gutters. They knew the places in the city where poultry was kept in cages, ready for butchers' shops or market stalls: ducks, hens, pheasants, geese, even occasional exotics like peacocks or flamingos. They ate mice. Occasionally they snatched puppies or kittens, or tame doves; certainly they carried off the corpses of dead pets, and also rats and pigeons. Perhaps sometimes they would scoop a fancy lamprey from a garden pond. They licked fish skins and skeletons; picked through rabbit bones; ran off, weighed down lopsidedly with meat carcasses in their mouths; skulked around butchers' stalls, licking the blood on the streets; snatched the remains of religious offerings from outdoor altars. After a night's foraging, most probably scampered back to their dens on the open Campagna, the agricultural plain surrounding Rome. Others stayed. I knew that because I recognised at least one animal at the Armilustrium. I had seen him a few times; I knew the size and shape of him, and his regular habits. The time of evening when he visited the walled enclosure. How he paused, ears up, to check for safety. How he slipped along in shadow, almost impossible to see unless your eyes were keenly used to the darkness and spotted slight movements. He must have made a lair somewhere. I called him Robigo. It's the name for wheat rust.

Some nights I slipped out to the Armilustrium with a bowl of scraps and fed him. He had learned that I would come. If I stayed long enough, I might see him. I had learned to look for his ears, pricked up as he crouched on the top of the enclosure wall, waiting and watching until he felt secure. Then he slid down the full height of the wall, tail at full stretch, vanishing into shadow. I had to strain my eyes to find his movements. Keeping close to the wall, he would approach the bowl, with his neat tread and constant hesitation. He sniffed, he ate. The way he took food was surprisingly dainty. He made domestic dogs look like untidy gluttons.

Any slight sound would send him silently melting back into cover. But soon he would creep out again, returning until the whole bowl of food was eaten.

He liked pies, with gravy, or other broths. He thought dry grains were an insult. In many ways his appetite was the same as mine.

Once, a piece of fish I put out for him must have been dangerously rotten. Robigo lifted it out delicately and laid it on the grass a stride away, before returning to the bowl and finishing the other scraps.

He never acknowledged my presence. I knew I was communing with Nature, while Nature remained aloof.

Maybe the fact that I had been nearly burned alive myself in the firestorm that destroyed Londinium made me so angry about the torches and terror that the devotees of Ceres perpetrated on the Aventine foxes. The foxes were like me. Private, ruthless and self-sufficient. Intelligent and untameable, yet capable of strong loyalty. Loners who could socialise, joyously and playfully, but afterwards slip back into being reclusive.

We all lived within the city community, yet surreptitiously. We were never truly part of it.