A Pattern of Blood Read online

  It was not difficult to see what I was looking at. Here, among the butcher’s stalls, rickety workshops, bedraggled donkeys and second-hand clothes sellers, that smart, gold-bordered tunic and scarlet cloak stood out like a centurion in a slave market.

  ‘A messenger?’ Junio rubbed a dusty hand through his tousled curls. ‘I thought I heard voices. Good news, then, master?’

  I realised that I was smirking inanely, and I adopted a more dignified expression. ‘An invitation from my patron, Marcus. I am to dine with him tomorrow, at his new villa. Alone.’ I tried to keep the self-satisfaction from my voice.

  Junio whistled. ‘A private dinner with the regional governor’s personal representative, eh? I wonder what he wants.’

  I frowned. He was right. Junio was only a boy still, but he understood the world. He was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, I could not be sure. When I found him, half-starved and shivering in a slave market eight years ago, they didn’t know his age. He was simply a tearful, terrified child and I had tossed the slaver a few coins and taken him home. And now here he was, taller than I am, and showing more sense than I had done. Taking infernal liberties, too, by telling me so.

  I put on my sternest face. ‘You are impertinent. Kindly do not speak of Marcus Aurelius Septimus so.’

  ‘Oh, come, master,’ Junio persisted, selecting his piece of marble from the heap. ‘How long has His Excellence been your patron? Two years? Three? When has he ever sought you out, unless he wanted something? And it must be something important. I know how highly he values your intelligence, but he wouldn’t invite a simple tradesman to dinner just for the pleasure of his company. Not even you.’

  I glowered at him. He was right, again. Wealthy and influential Romans like Marcus do not usually invite mere pavement-makers to dine with them privately in their country villas. Obviously Marcus wanted something. And it was clearly something significant. Generally, if Marcus wanted me to do something, he simply sent for me and ordered me to do it.

  ‘I imagine,’ I said loftily, ‘that it concerns the librarium mosaic at his new country house. It needs repairing, and I assume that he is about to offer me the commission. After all, I was responsible for his getting the villa in the first place.’

  ‘And for seeing that he needed a new pavement to go into it,’ Junio reminded me cheerfully. ‘Perhaps you are right. No doubt he thinks you owe him another. After all, it was you who ordered the new floor to be dug up.’

  ‘Only in order to solve a murder!’

  Junio grinned. ‘True. Though you know what His Excellence is like. He probably thinks a dinner invitation is better than payment.’

  He had a point there, too. The problem in dealing with Marcus is that he affects to regard me – at least for payment purposes – as a valued artist and thinker, to whom mere money would be an insult. In fact, such insults would be very welcome, if only to buy food and candles and to pay the rent, all of which are getting more expensive by the year. There are mutterings everywhere that the Emperor himself will have to ‘do something’ soon, though I doubt, myself, that the boorish, addle-pated Commodus will ever bestir his imperial self sufficiently to introduce a double denarius or to restrict the price of wheat. In the meantime, a poor tradesman has to count every sestertius. I was not, however, about to admit that to Junio.

  ‘Marcus knows everyone of importance in the whole of Glevum,’ I said, with some justice. ‘He has already put a number of valuable contracts my way. If his pavement is admired, I shall have wealthy clients clamouring at my door.’

  ‘That would be a sight, indeed!’ Junio agreed. I could see his eyes dancing at the mental picture of those ‘wealthy clients’ coming to my shop in person. My workshop is outside the colonia walls, down on the marshy lands beside the river where the rents are cheap, away from the fine Roman paving and lofty buildings of Glevum proper, with its forum, fountains and fine open spaces. Rich citizens rarely come here. I could imagine them, pot-bellied and self-important, wrinkling their fastidious noses at the mingling smells from the tannery and tallow-maker’s, and trying vainly not to trail their togas in the mire. Despite my anxiety, I found myself suppressing a smile.

  Junio was thinking of togas too. ‘I suppose you will be wanting to wear your formal dress for the occasion?’

  I groaned aloud. I had not worn it to Corinium, but this dinner with Marcus was a different matter. ‘I’ll have to wear it, I suppose. Poor unbleached woollen thing that it is.’

  Marcus himself would undoubtedly be sporting a dazzling white linen affair imported from Rome, with a broad stripe of deep imperial purple round the edge – a reminder, if anyone doubted it, that he is of patrician blood. Marcus’s family name is Aurelius, and though that is a very common name, he is widely whispered to be related to the Emperor. He has never confirmed this rumour, but he hasn’t denied it, either. Personally, I don’t question the truth of it – at least, not when Marcus is listening.

  ‘You will want your toga cleaned, then, master.’

  I had forgotten that. My toga still had an unofficial stripe of its own – a rim of grime around the bottom from the last time I’d worn it, visiting an important customer up a narrow lane in muddy weather. Junio had wanted to take it to the fuller’s earlier, but I had demurred because we had got so behind in the shop.

  I looked at Junio in dismay. ‘What am I to do? There isn’t time to send it to the fuller’s and have it bleached before tomorrow night.’

  Junio shook his head, grinning. ‘Well, this is a chance to try that famous Celtic “washing mixture” you brought back from Corinium. We’ll see if it’s as good as you claim.’

  I hadn’t brought it from Corinium, in fact. I’d got it from a Dubonnai farm I knew, which I had visited on the way home to arrange to buy their distinctive red stone for tiles. I was made welcome, as usual, in the cheerful smokiness of the roundhouse, and I struck a bargain for the tiles over a pitcher of honeyed mead with the owner, sitting around the central fire, attended by dogs and chickens, toothless women and bold-eyed girls. The Dubonnai (or ‘Dobunni’ as the Romans call them) had been making soap, and hearing that I remembered it from my youth, with typical Celtic generosity they insisted that I take some home in a pottery jar. It was not identical to ours – I was seized into slavery from the south-west of the island – but it was very similar.

  Junio was intrigued when I showed him. He had never heard of soap. He was half-Celt himself, but had been raised by Roman owners who preferred more civilised cleaning methods.

  I waxed eloquent about it, extolling its virtues and reminiscing about my own roundhouse and how my young wife and my grandmother used to save goose grease to soften their hands, or to boil up with lye from the wood ashes into a washing mixture. I remembered it vividly – a strong, sticky substance vigorously applied by my grandmother to clothes, cooking implements and even, occasionally, to people.

  Junio had been fascinated. He usually was when I started talking about my younger days. He had been born in servitude, and couldn’t remember his own family. Or he affected to be fascinated – perhaps he was only humouring his master.

  Whatever the truth, I was not hugely enthusiastic about having this untried substance used inexpertly upon my only toga, but there was little else to do, and after my paeans of praise for it, I could hardly back down now. So we set to work with the soap.

  It was smelly and caustic and irritated the skin, but it was fairly effective, rubbed into the hems, though we used a whole amphora of fresh drinking water to rinse them off. How Gwellia and my grandmother would have laughed at our efforts! I remembered my wife standing knee-deep in the river, skirt looped up to her waist, rinsing her small-clothes in the running stream. How beautiful she had been, with her plaited hair and laughing eyes, her bronzed thighs glistening with wet. But it did not do to think of that. I dragged my attention back to the toga.

  I wore it next evening to Marcus’s villa. It was not altogether dry, since there was too much stone dust in the b
ack workshop to dry the thing off properly in front of the cooking fire, and we had been reduced to stretching it out to air in front of the window space upstairs.

  Marcus had sent a cart for us, because the villa was some miles from Glevum, so we rode like rich men. I had been to the house before, when it was owned by a retired centurion, but I was struck again by how imposing it looked in the twilight, with the lanterns at the gatehouse, the surrounding farm and the villa itself glimmering with candles, a long, low building with lofty rooms. Of course, it had been built to impress. The visitor was intended to marvel at its opulence and realise that no expense had been spared. I realised.

  I felt more than usually at a disadvantage, though, as I was shown into the echoing marble atrium to wait, in a toga that was still slightly moist at the edges and which gave off a warm, steamy smell in the heat of the braziers and the underfloor hypocaust heating. If I had known what was in store for me, I would have felt more doubtful still.

  The slave at the inner door looked at my damp hems with disdain, but a toga is still a toga. He announced me with a flourish – all three Roman names, as befitted a citizen. ‘Longinus Flavius Libertus has arrived, master.’ He gave me that look again. ‘The mosaic-maker.’ That was to put me in my place. Important citizens do not have trades, they live on the income from their lands and ‘managed’ businesses. He didn’t mention Junio, of course, who was following me to take my cloak, any more than he would have mentioned a pet dog if I had happened to bring one with me.

  ‘Libertus, my old friend! Welcome, welcome.’ Marcus came bustling to greet me, his toga even more pristine and elegant than I had feared. Its dazzling whiteness was set off to perfection by the glint of the heavy gold brooch on his slim shoulder and the equally heavy seal ring on his outstretched hand. They could parade him around the forum, I thought, as an advertisement for the fuller’s – except for that imperial border. In fact, with his short-cropped fair hair, hooded eyes, patrician nose and fine features, he looked every inch an Aurelian. He was still a young man, but he had an effortless air of command. Perhaps the rumours about his ancestry were true.

  All this effort at elegance was making me increasingly uneasy. What did he want with me? It was in any case an awkward moment. Normally, I would have made a formal obeisance, on my knees, but I was supposed to be his dinner guest. I compromised by bowing deeply over his hand and bending my knees slightly. ‘Excellence! I am honoured by your gracious invitation.’

  It seemed to do the trick. Marcus smiled. ‘Nonsense! I wished to reward you, old friend, for your help.’ He made the slightest of gestures and two slaves came running, with a folding chair for him and a stool for me. Dates, figs and honeyed fruit, I noticed, were already set out for us on a magnificent inlaid table nearby, together with two cups and a jug of something which I took to be cooled wine. He waved a hand at them. ‘A little something to while away the time before dinner? A mere trifle.’

  My heart sank further. I am not in a general way a lover of dried dates and figs – like many Roman appetisers they are too sweet for my taste – but since every item on that table, from the food and wine to the fine goblets with ‘Don’t be thirsty’ worked into the glass, had been especially imported from somewhere else, one didn’t have to be a tax collector to work out that this entertainment of Marcus’s was a very expensive ‘trifle’ indeed.

  Junio – who had relieved me of my mantle and was now being led away to wait for me in the slave quarters, as the custom was – caught my eye and gave me an expressive look. Whatever my host wanted, his face said, it wasn’t a bread-and-apples matter.

  I couldn’t ask Marcus what it was, of course. That would have been a breach of etiquette. Instead, I was obliged to perch on the stool and eat with a determined appearance of enjoyment and gratitude, while Marcus gossiped about his twin passions, pleasure and politics, and boasted about the exploits of his contacts in the army.

  At last, however, he worked around to it, although by such a circuitous route that even then I didn’t see it coming.

  ‘My cousin, now,’ he said, ‘been made a doublarius already, and on the governor’s staff. Twice the pay – and at his age, too. He’ll go far. He was the one who sent me the wine. You like it?’

  I made an inspired guess. ‘Rhenish?’ Wine is not my preferred drink, and my judgement is limited to an estimation of how much it looks like weak blood and how much it tastes like strong vinegar. However, I knew that Rhenish wine was much esteemed this year, and, since Marcus clearly expected me to say something, it seemed like a sensible guess. Even if I was wrong, I reasoned, I had paid him a compliment.

  Marcus gave a nod of approval. ‘Not quite, not quite. But a good guess. Even better than Rhenish, in fact. It’s Falernian. From the vineyards south of Rome. Best wine in the world. That young scoundrel knows a good vintage when he samples it. They looted a cellar, apparently belonging to that rebellious legion in the north-west. You heard about that?’ He signalled to the slave, and I found myself contemplating another glassful of whatever it was. All I knew, I thought glumly, was that it wasn’t ale.

  I shook my head. I had heard vague rumours, of course, but there are always rumours in Glevum, often incredible and usually contradictory. This legion or that has won a skirmish, or lost it. The governor is dead, is married, is coming to Glevum, has been visited by Jupiter himself in the shape of a butterfly. Even the truth tends to be so modified when passed on by word of mouth from traveller to traveller that I had come to pay little attention to rumour. If there was any serious trouble one would learn of it soon enough.

  But obviously there had been truth in this. Marcus was still smiling, toying with his goblet, but there was no smile in his voice. ‘Oh, yes, quite a serious affair. Set on the governor and murdered his bodyguard. Left him for dead, I hear.’

  I hadn’t heard that story. I put down my glass and gulped – not at the wine. ‘Left the governor for dead? You mean Pertinax? Your friend? The Governor of Britain?’ My mind was racing, trying to organise my thoughts as well as I could through the filter of Falernian wine. My patron derived his authority from the governor directly. If Pertinax fell, then Marcus fell with him, and any political assassin might strike at Marcus too. ‘That governor?’

  Marcus regarded me with that affectionate intensity people reserve for the seriously stupid. ‘That governor.’

  ‘Oh.’ There seemed to be nothing else to say. Suddenly everything, the invitation, the wine, the exotic fruits – the whole expensive and uncalled-for occasion – seemed depressingly ominous. Marcus had used me before now to get to the bottom of various unpleasant incidents, such as the death of an ex-centurion or the theft of a quantity of gold, which seemed to him to threaten the dignity of Rome. He valued my discretion, he said. Now, I realised, he was about to ask me to be discreet again, but on a grander scale. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it a bit. Meddling in that kind of murky politics is a certain short cut to an early grave – often by interestingly agonising routes.

  I was considering the feasibility of pleading some unavoidable appointment – my own funeral, perhaps – when Marcus went on. ‘Of course, Pertinax has already ordered the punishment of the guilty legion. It will be severe, naturally. Part of the reason he was sent here was to instil discipline into the ranks.’

  I breathed out again. If Pertinax had identified his attackers, perhaps my discretion would not be needed after all.

  I had exhaled too soon. Marcus bit delicately into a particularly bilious-looking fig. ‘But something else has arisen from this. Something nearer home.’

  I almost choked on my non-Rhenish wine.

  Marcus regarded me benevolently. ‘Do I remember hearing that you visited Corinium about the last full moon? Something to do with trying to trace that wife of yours?’

  I nodded, my mouth suddenly dry.

  ‘You didn’t, by any chance, hear anything about a stabbing? An acquaintance of mine, a fellow named Quintus Ulpius Decianus. He is one of the councillors
there, a decurion. I have received word to say that he was attacked walking home from watching a chariot race. His slave was killed and he was wounded.’

  I gulped. I am obliged by custom to attend upon my patron regularly. I had informed him of my visit to Corinium, but – apart from telling Junio – I had kept carefully discreet about the robbery. Now, it seemed, I was about to pay for that discretion.

  ‘Street robbers, wasn’t it?’ I enquired.

  Marcus shook his head. ‘That seemed likely, at first. But there is something else. A friend had attended him to the races, and saw the end of the attack. Only the end, because he stopped to speak to a soothsayer. It was dark, of course, and he didn’t see the attackers properly, but as he came around the corner he saw someone standing over Quintus with a dagger. He shouted and gave chase, but he is not as young as he was, and by that time it was too late. Quintus was lying wounded on the chariot grooves, and his lantern-bearer was dead. One might have suspected the friend of staging the robbery, except that he saved Quintus’s life.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I happened to see some of it myself.’ Marcus looked about to expostulate, so I added quickly, ‘It was just as well the friend was there. He is a doctor, I believe? Without his care the man might have died of his wounds. He seemed to be carrying an army medical pack.’

  Marcus nodded. ‘He always does, apparently. He is a retired army surgeon. Quintus is recovering well, though he can remember little of the attack. But the surgeon – Sollers, his name is – seems to think that their real aim was not robbery. Their first action was to attack Quintus, he says. It wasn’t until Sollers shouted that the thief cut the purse free, and ran. He has warned Quintus to be on his guard.’

  I nodded. ‘I was impressed with him. He deserves his name, obviously.’ ‘Sollers’ is a cognomen meaning ‘clever’ or ‘capable’. A man doesn’t earn a name like that for nothing. ‘What has this to do with Pertinax? You think this was somehow political? Or aimed at Quintus personally?’ It was possible. There were, after all, other rich men among the racegoers, but only Quintus had been attacked. Perhaps it had been pre-arranged. I was liking this less and less. ‘Did Quintus Ulpius have particular enemies?’ I suggested hopefully. ‘Some individual that he punished or did not recommend for preferment?’