Requiem for a Slave Read online

  ‘Let’s just hope that Lucius does not come and interrupt you,’ Junio went on. ‘It won’t impress Quintus if the pie-seller is here, imploring you to take the greasy remnants from his tray. And I won’t be here to help you get rid of him. Get Minimus to guard the door and send the man away.’

  I nodded. Minimus was my private slave, one of a so-called ‘matching pair’ on loan from Marcus while he was away, and though he showed no aptitude for pavement work at all – more hindrance than help when I tried him out at it – he was good at turning people politely but firmly from the door. He would not be swayed by sentiment for one-eyed pie-sellers. I smiled grimly. ‘That’s just what I intend.’

  But now the time was here, and so was Lucius, it seemed. It looked as though even Minimus had not been firm enough, and I would have to go and shoo him off myself. Suppose that Quintus Severus arrived and found him in my shop!

  I confess I was annoyed. I was already flustered. I had been busy in the workshop until well past noon, fixing the remaining tiles on a mosaic plaque which Junio and I had been working on for days. It was a tricky commission, a half-circle piece with the Greek name ‘Apollos’ worked across the top. It was intended for a garden shrine in a country villa several miles away, but I had elected to assemble it at home, gluing the tesserae to a linen back, on which I’d sketched the pattern in reverse, so that I could instal it in a piece and soak the cloth off when the mortar set. (Inscriptions are always tricky and round letters most of all, and I didn’t want my rather capricious client watching me and deciding that he wanted something different after all.)

  So when I received a sudden summons from the customer – via a rather flustered little garden slave of his – I did not have much option but to go. Normally, I might have sent Junio to deal with this, but he was not available and it was no good sending anybody else. It was inconvenient: I’d hoped to have the piece finished and the workshop cleared and swept in time for Quintus’s visit, but I hastened off – to find, when I got there, that the man was not at home. (No doubt he thought my arrival was unduly slow, although I’d downed tools instantly and hurried all the way.) Such things were not unusual, but today it was especially tiresome. From the angle of the sun above the rooftops now, I calculated that the errand had taken me two hours. I was lucky that Quintus was not already here.

  But there was no one waiting in the front part of the shop, where the chair was kept for important visitors. In fact, the place looked unattended. I frowned impatiently. I’d left Minimus in charge. He was supposed to stay at the counter in case of customers. But there was no sign of him. Inside, sampling the greasy pies, no doubt! And then there was the tray! Leaning on my most fragile and expensive pile of stock as well – the lapis viridis, a rare imported green.

  So I was not in the best of tempers as I reached the outer shop, skirted the counter and pushed open the door into the dusty gloom of the partitioned area at the back which was my working space.

  ‘Minimus! Where are you? What do you mean by this?’

  No answer. In fact, no sound of any kind. No sign of anyone. It was more than usually dark in there. I had put the shutters quickly in the window space myself – lest cats or sudden gusts of wind should get into the room and disturb my careful work – but there was no taper lit and I realized that Minimus had let the fire go out. That was worse than careless – it was unforgivable. He knew we were out of the dried fungus tinder for the making of a fire. I would have strong words with that young scoundrel when I got hold of him. We would have to go out and buy or beg embers from the tanning shop next door before we had the means of any heat and light.

  I tutted audibly. The darkness made it difficult to move about. I could distinguish the outline of the workbench well enough, but the floor was littered with little heaps of stone that I’d been working with – the painstakingly shaped and sorted tesserae – visible only as darker shadows in the gloom. One careless foot and they’d be scattered everywhere.

  ‘Minimus!’

  Where was he anyway? Obviously off with Lucius somewhere, eating pies, I thought. But where? There was no back entrance to the workshop space. I had fully expected to find them both in here, since it appeared that Lucius had talked his way inside. Offered a bribe to Minimus, perhaps? One of his wares, no doubt, since he had little else. So where had they got to? It was a mystery.

  Had Minimus been taken ill from sampling a pie? If that was the case, I thought, it served him right. I would make him finish it as a punishment. Then I glimpsed the trapdoor to the sleeping space above. That gave me an idea. They could have climbed up to the attic room – it had been damaged by fire a long time ago and was now used only as a store, but Minimus had been up there many times and it would make a good hiding place for illicit feasts.

  I groped towards the ladder, calling, ‘Minim—’

  I broke off in dismay, for the first time feeling seriously alarmed. My foot had nudged against something on the floor. Something strangely heavy and horribly inert. I knew at once that it was not a heap of tiles. I bent over, peering. There was a suspicion of a sour, familiar smell, and I could just make out a shape I thought I recognized.

  I no longer cared about where I put my feet or keeping my heaps of sorted tiles apart. I rushed to the window space and took the shutter down, letting the light in, hoping I was wrong.

  But there was no mistake. I had found Lucius, and he was very dead.

  Two

  He was lying face downward on a heap of tiles, and I turned him over gently. In the dusty daylight, it was clear how he had died.

  He had not simply fallen, as I had first supposed – tripped on the stone piles and hit his head against the bench – or perished from eating his own disgusting wares. There was a savage dark-red line of bruise around his throat. Around the burn-scars his face was swollen purple now, his tongue bulged from his lips and his one eye protruded horribly. His dead hands were still clawing at his throat, where they had dug bloody channels as he fought for breath. Someone had pulled a cord around his neck and throttled him. I could see the dark smudge behind the ear where the cruel knot had been. This looked like murder.

  And it hadn’t happened very long ago, I realized, when my shocked mind recovered sufficiently to think, because although the corpse was cooling, it was not yet actually stiff. As I had turned the body gently on its back, one arm had slid limply down on to the floor. Just to be certain, I raised the limb once more: it was unresisting, but heavy – like a roll of sodden wool – and in a sudden horror I let it go again. It fell grotesquely, like a stuffed thing, and hit the bench leg with a hollow thud. I rather wished that I had not made the grim experiment, but it confirmed the obvious: that Lucius had been killed quite recently, while I had been out of the shop this afternoon.

  Not necessarily in this room, of course. He was not likely to have come into the back workshop without an invitation, especially when I wasn’t here. Unless for some extraordinary reason Minimus had lured him inside? I thrust that theory instantly away. Minimus would never have murdered anyone. I was quite ashamed for having thought of it.

  Besides, when I looked more closely, I could see two faint grooves running in the stone dust from the doorway to the pile, and Lucius’s toes and sandals were abraded at the front as if he’d been hauled ignominiously along with them dragging on the floor. It suggested that he had been murdered outside of the shop, then half lifted up, dragged in by the armpits and flung face down on the tiles.

  That observation gave me some relief. It would have needed a stronger man than Minimus to accomplish that. My slave was scarcely more than a child, and Lucius, though there was little flesh upon his bones, was quite a solid corpse. He was at least as tall as I am, and – as I was now uncomfortably aware – was very heavy, dead. Only a full-grown adult could have dumped him here. Or more than one, of course.

  But who would want to murder a man like Lucius? I gazed down at his face. Lucius had been an ugly man in life and he was uglier in death, but he was a
harmless soul. True, his wares were terrible, but he was surely not a person to have serious enemies? Then I saw his belt. The loops that held his money-purse had been cut through and the leather ends now dangled uselessly. The purse itself was gone. Not that there was ever very much in it. Was that why he had died, for the sake of the few asses that he’d earned from his pies? It was more than usually possible, in fact.

  There had been rumours of rebel bandits in the forests again: a band of straggling Silurians and Ordovices from the wild lands to the west, who, unlike the vast majority of those now-peaceful tribes, had never accepted Caractacus’s defeat. Their targets were mainly military, of course, though anything Roman – such as a toga – might find itself attacked, and they sometimes ambushed travellers to steal money and supplies. At one time Marcus had nearly stamped the problem out, but in his absence it was getting worse, and once or twice the brigands had made forays into town.

  Was that, I wondered, what had happened here? Had Lucius been loitering for me outside the door when he had been ambushed by robbers from the woods? They always killed their victims, so that they could not testify (the punishment for banditry was crucifixion still), and realizing that there was no one in the shop, they could well have dragged the body in and left it out of sight. Perhaps – supposing that the workshop was his own – they also doused the fire and snuffed the tapers out, to make the place look closed, so that discovery of the corpse would take as long as possible and thus delay pursuit. It seemed the likeliest explanation of implausible events.

  It also suggested a disturbing thought. In his new tunic – grimed with stone dust now – Lucius did not look the pauper that he generally did. It was darned and mended, but that suggested care, and casual marauders would not have known his twisted face and recognized him as simply a wretched pie-seller. They might easily suppose that the coin-purse at his belt held gold and silver rather than a handful of the smallest of brass coins.

  Poor Lucius! It seemed my well-intentioned gift had brought him only grief. Besides, I was certain that he’d come to the workshop to see me – and if he had not come here, he would not have died. If only Minimus had been here to send him home again!

  Which raised another question. What had happened to my slave? Finding the body had driven that problem from my mind. For one mad moment I gazed around the room, half fearing that I’d find another corpse among the stones, but there was nothing. I even looked in the attic space upstairs, but there were no signs of footprints in the dust, and everything looked just as usual. I came quickly down again. I was really anxious now. When I came to think about things soberly, it was not like Minimus to have left his post. He was young and over-eager, but he was obedient to a fault.

  So had he been taken away against his will? By the same bandits, perhaps? It was not a pleasant possibility. The best I could hope, in that case, was that he’d been seized to sell: there was always a market at the docks for young, good-looking slaves – overseas traders took them, and no questions asked – though what their ultimate fate might be was quite another thing. But there was a much more likely reason for abducting him. He had belonged to Marcus, one of the most important Romans in the world, and no doubt had useful information he could be forced to give, in ways too unpleasant to think about.

  I went outside and looked rather wildly around. Minimus’s knuckle-bones were spread out on the counter top – I had left him sitting on the stool ready to deal with any customers, and it was clear he’d been playing with them while I was away. He would not have dared to do so if I’d been about. This proof of childish mischief brought a constriction to my throat.

  And there was the pie-tray, leaning on the stones.

  I sighed, thinking of the owners of those two simple things: Lucius, with his one eye and his awful pies, who had sought my protection and was lying dead, and my little red-haired scatterbrain of a slave, for whom I was, naturally, entirely responsible. A fine protector I had proved to be!

  I turned away and thumped my fist against the wall next door, then buried my head against my arm. I was aware of a shameful prickling behind my eyes.

  ‘Hyperius, you can go ahead and let them know I’m here.’ A voice behind me cut across my thoughts. I recognized the imperious tones of Quintus Severus. Dear Jupiter, I had forgotten about him and I was not prepared – I hadn’t changed into a toga, my hands were dark with grime, and my face was smudged with most unroman tears. He would doubtless see all this as dreadful disrespect. And I could not even ask him to come inside my shop. What was the chief town councillor going to say to that?

  I composed myself with an effort and turned to see the man himself. He was descending from a private litter in the centre of the street, assisted by a supercilious-looking slave. Quintus was always an imposing figure, tall and gaunt in his magisterial robes, and he looked every inch the civil dignitary now: completely out of place in this area of the town. Over his toga he wore a dark-red cloak, edged with expensive gold embroidery – causing a passing turnip-seller to turn and stare at him – and he carried a leather switch in one ringed hand. He wore his brown hair fashionably cropped, accentuating his huge brows and long, patrician nose, and his deep-set eyes were gazing around with evident dismay.

  The source of his concern was evident. He was wearing an expensive pair of soft red-leather shoes, and there is no fancy paving in this suburb of the town (which has grown up, haphazardly, just outside the northern walls), merely a muddy road with a stone causeway either side.

  I hastened forward, making the deepest obeisance my ageing knees could bear. ‘Honoured citizen!’ I stammered in dismay. ‘I must apologize . . .’

  He looked at me, and I saw the dawning consternation and horror on his face. I realized what a spectacle I must currently present, and devoutly wished that I had not agreed to meet him at the shop.

  ‘Libertus? Pavement-maker? Is that really you? What are you doing there?’ He seemed to recollect that I was a citizen, and he made a visible effort to control himself. ‘I’m sorry, citizen, I did not expect to find you on the street. Hyperius, you dolt!’ he added to the slave, who had obediently walked towards the shop and was now standing hesitating, goggling at me. ‘Come back here at once. Can’t you see I need you to help me cross all this?’ He flicked his switch in the direction of the mire.

  The attendant, a stolid man of middle years, whose scarlet tunic was almost as gorgeous as his owner’s, turned a sullen red and hurried back to proffer a supporting hand. Quintus Severus took it and picked his way fastidiously across the mud and grime.

  ‘Decurion,’ I burbled, dropping another bow. ‘A thousand pardons, distinguished citizen. I regret that I am not dressed to welcome you. Furthermore, I fear that I’m unable to invite you to my shop. But—’

  He gestured me to silence and gazed at me, rather as a slave-master might assess substandard wares. ‘Unable to invite me? What exactly is going on?’ He took a deep, exasperated breath. ‘I understood I was expected here?’

  ‘Of course you were, distinguished citizen,’ I said, still gabbling with dismay. ‘But, you see, there’s been an accident.’

  ‘An accident?’ That clearly shocked him, and you could see a kind of light dawn in the cold blue eyes. ‘What sort of accident?’ He frowned, contriving to convey that accidents were unacceptable, and that this one was evidence of my bad management. He looked me up and down. ‘An accident to you?’

  ‘Not to me, decurion. To Lucius,’ I explained.

  ‘Lucius?’ The intonation suggested that this was even more absurd than permitting accidents. ‘And who is Lucius?’

  ‘A street-vendor,’ I murmured. ‘A pie-seller, in fact. I found him in my workshop just before you came.’ I took a deep breath and made a plunge for it. ‘I am afraid he’s dead – murdered. Someone’s throttled him.’

  ‘A pie-seller?’ Quintus echoed again, disbelievingly. He made it sound as if he thought that this was somehow all my fault and had been deliberately arranged to inconvenience him. ‘M
urdered in your workshop? What was he doing there?’ When I was expected, his tone of voice implied.

  ‘I don’t believe that he was killed there, citizen. More likely set on in the street and robbed, and dumped there afterwards. I fear it may be bandits . . .’ I outlined my reasoning.

  ‘I see.’ Quintus abruptly seemed to have lost interest in this. ‘Spare me all the explanation, citizen. I know that you are skilled at solving mysteries – Marcus was always boasting of your skill – but the death of a pie-seller is hardly my concern.’

  ‘But you understand that I can hardly ask you in the shop and show you patterns with him lying there.’

  He cut me off with a dismissive gesture of his hand. ‘Naturally not. It seems I’ve had a wasted journey here this afternoon. Unfortunate, but I concede that it is unavoidable. One cannot conduct business in the presence of a corpse. It would be inauspicious to a remarkable degree. What will you do with the body, anyway? I don’t imagine that the pie-seller belonged to any guild?’

  This was a problem that I hadn’t thought about – I had been too shocked at finding Lucius dead. But, of course, he would require some sort of burial. There were special societies, even among slaves, to which people paid a small sum every month to ensure they received a proper funeral and were not condemned to walk the earth as ghosts, but, as Quintus had remarked, it was unlikely that Lucius had ever joined such a guild. Seriously poor freemen very rarely did – money was needed for more pressing purposes. I said, ‘He has a mother – no doubt she would know.’