The Silver Pigs

XXV

Flavius Hilaris made arrangements to have me taken west, which I thought decent of him until I grasped what his arrangements were. He sent me round by sea. He owned a town house in the middle of the south coast and an estate with a private summer villa even further west; for passing to and fro between his properties he had acquired a clinker-built Celtic ketch which he jovially called his yacht. This old and robust barnacled hulk was not exactly fit for dreaming in the August sun on Lake Volsinii. It probably seemed a good idea to him, but I made my own arrangements after that.

I was dropped off at Isca. Eighty Roman miles from the mines, but that was good: no point arriving straight off the procurator's boat, virtually with a standard-bearer proclaiming "procurator's spy'. I knew Isca. It's my superstition that it helps to dive into a whirlpool from a rock where your feet feel at home.

There had been military regrouping since my time ten years before. Of the four original British legions, the Fourteenth Gemina were currently held in Europe pending Vespasian's decision on their future: they had been active in the civil war on the wrong side. The Ninth Hispana were in mid-transfer north to Eboracum, the Twentieth Valeria had plunged out towards the western mountains, while my old unit the Second Augusta advanced to Glevum, astride the upper reaches of the great Sabrina Estuary. Their present task was pegging down the dark Siluran tribesmen, preparing for the next push west as soon as they felt confident.

Isca without the Second was a ghost town to me. It seemed odd to see our fort again, but odder still to find all the gates open and the granaries stripped, with higgledy-piggledy workshops cluttering the crossroads, and a native magistrate lording over the commander's house. Behind the fort, as I expected, once the lean-to cabins and shops thinned out there were the small holdings of those veterans who retired while the Second was still there. Hard luck to take your land grant in order to live near your mates, then watch them march out to a new fort a hundred miles away. Still, intermarriage with the natives would be holding some of them. In this disgusting province, I ruled out any idea that they stayed because they liked the climate or the scenery.

I was relying on the veterans. Relying on the fact they would be here beside the Second's fort and the fact that the Second had gone. It seemed likely that if I came offering adventure now, I might find myself a crony with itchy feet.

Rufrius Vitalis was an ex-centurion who lived in a small stone-corridored house on a red-soiled farm huddled below the sullen threat of the moors. All his neighbours were grizzled specimens farming in similar style. I spotted him in the town, bumped into him on purpose, than claimed to know him better than I actually did. He was so desperate for news from Rome we were instant old pals.

He was a fit, sturdy, impatiently capable man with alert eyes and a grey-bristled chin in a leather face. He came from farming stock on the Campagna. Even in Britain he worked outdoors bare-armed; he was so full of energy he could ignore the cold. Before retirement he had put in thirty years five more than he needed, but after the Revolt experienced men in Britain were offered extra time at privilege rates. It never ceases to amaze me what folk will do for double pay.

We spent some time in a wine shop, gossiping. When he took me home I was not surprised to find he lived with a native woman considerably younger than himself. Veterans usually do. Her name was Truforna. She was shapeless and colourless, just a floury dumpling with pale grey eyes, but I could see how in a hovel beyond the ocean a man might convince himself Truforna was both shapely and colourful. He ignored her; she moved about the little place watching him.

At his house Rufrius Vitalis and I talked some more. We used an unexcited tone, so Truforna would not be alarmed. He asked why I had come. I mentioned theft. I touched on the political slant, though without saying what; nor did he ask. Any ranker who gets made up to centurion before he retires has too much experience to be excited by politics. He wanted to know my strategy.

"Get in, investigate what happens, get out." He looked at me in disbelief. That's not facetious. That's all I have."

"Can't the procurator get you in?"

"What worries me is getting out!"

He looked at me again. We shared deep misgivings about the administrative class. He understood why I wanted my own scheme, someone I trusted to haul up my rope when I called.

"Need a partner, Falco?"

"Yes, but who can I ask?"

"Me?"

"What about your farm?"

He shrugged. That was up to him. He asked the real question: "We get you in, we get you out. What happens afterwards?"

"Sunshine, I whip straight back to Rome!"

My hook was through his throat. We had talked about Rome until his heart strove against his ribs. He asked if there would be scope for anyone else to tag along, so I offered to sign him up as Helena Justina's baggage master. Our eyes, with veiled lids, covered Truforna.

"What about her?" I murmured delicately.

"She won't have to know," Vitalis declared, with too much confidence. I thought: O centurion! Still, that too was up to him.

He knew the district. I let him work out the plan.

A week later we arrived at the Vebiodunum silver mines, Vitalis astride a pony in the leather and furs of a bounty hunter, me running behind in the rags of a slave. He told the contractor's foreman he was working through the limestone gorges, rounding up runaways from the caves. He extracted the names of the owners they had eluded, then handed back his wretched contraband for reward. I had refused to say where I belonged, so after three weeks of feeding me Vitalis was losing patience and wanted to restore my memory with a spell of hard labour in the mines.

Rufrius Vitalis outrageously embroidered on the story we agreed, not least once I was safely shackled by hitting me so hard he split open my cheek, then hurling me in some toothless villager's pile of pig manure. My sullen look on delivery was as genuine as my smell. At Vebiodunum, Vitalis claimed there must be a good chance I had murdered my master if I would not admit who I was. This extra certificate of good character was a luxury I could have managed without.

"I call him Chirpy," he said, "because he isn't. Don't let him escape. I'll be back when I can, to see if he wants a little chat."

The foreman always called me Chirpy. I never was.