The Germanicus Mosaic Read online

  I had reason to be wary. That pavement which Crassus had wanted laid with such indecent speed had not been of my own design nor even worked from a pattern book. I had been encouraging Junio to learn the art of pavement-making, and this was a small mosaic of his: a rather crude Cave Canem mounted on linen backing, a sort of apprentice-piece. When Crassus Germanicus had wanted an almost-instant pavement, it was that mosaic – with the lettering quickly altered from Beware of the Dog to Art is Long – which I had hastily cemented into place in his librarium.

  ‘Has he complained of me?’ I asked again. It had seemed amusingly ironic at the time, that ravening dog gracing the floor of the so-called reading-room; Crassus even seemed particularly pleased with it. But suddenly it seemed much less funny. ‘It was pre-patterned work, but it was the only way to manage it in such a short time. He wanted the floor finished and ready in weeks.’ I was gabbling in self-defence. ‘It took me almost the whole time to flatten and prepare the place. The slaves had dug it over roughly and brought in a fresh layer of clean soil – it had been the slavegirls’ room, you remember, and the floor was just trodden earth – but the floor was still hopelessly uneven. I had only enough time to roll out the mosaic and make it fit by adding an extra border at one end.’

  Marcus inclined his head. ‘No, he has not complained. On the contrary, he was bragging about it in the marketplace. You did well to finish it at all, especially with an additional border. I don’t know how you managed.’

  By using a template for the border pattern, was the answer – cutting the shape in wood and tiling up to it, and then filling in the space – but I wasn’t going to tell him that. It had taken me a long time to work out a usable system, and it was a secret I guarded jealously. One day, perhaps, I would tell Junio. But not yet. In the meantime I was content to allow myself to breathe out. I had been holding my breath ever since Marcus mentioned the aediles.

  ‘Why he wanted a librarium out there, off the back courtyard, and didn’t include one in the public rooms in the first place, I can’t imagine.’ Marcus drained his wine. ‘But then, I suppose, his brother came, and it was important to impress him. Anyway, he was satisfied. Has he paid you?’

  ‘No.’

  Marcus said, ‘Ah!’

  My heart sank. That was it then – not a complaint against me by Crassus, but a complaint against Crassus by his creditors. That was a blow. That commission had been worth many sesterces. But why all this talk of secrecy and discretion? I made a bold guess. ‘So what do you want of me, excellence? Has Crassus Germanicus disappeared?’

  Marcus looked at me, the hooded eyes very shrewd. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or no. He attended the festival of Mars yesterday . . .’

  I nodded. ‘I went out to see the procession myself.’ Musicians, priests, sacrificial animals. The whole regional garrison, rank after rank, and following them, less firm of step but prouder than ever, the veterans: first the men of the Second Augusta, the Glevum ‘colony’, and then the retired officers from other legions and auxiliary regiments. And all of them, the whole procession from first to last, wearing the hammered mask of Mars. Even for a non-Roman like me it was a stirring sight: the breastplates and standards glinting in the sunshine, the plumes bobbing, and the heavy-soled hobnailed sandals ringing in unison on the paving stones. ‘Quite a spectacle.’ That was an understatement. I had felt like a child again, tiptoe amidst the jostling crowds – even the slaves had been given a holiday – eating hot pies from the street sellers with Junio, and pastries so sweet that the warm honey oozed out between our fingers as we ate.

  ‘I saw Crassus myself,’ Marcus said, ‘leading a contingent.’

  I too had seen the stocky, bull-necked figure striding out among the column of veterans. I said so.

  ‘And that,’ Marcus said dramatically, ‘is the last time anyone saw him, it seems. He did not return to the villa after the procession. The servants were not unduly worried at first. You know how much feasting there is after the parade, and Crassus loved a feast.’

  I nodded. ‘A man of expansive appetites.’ Germanicus was likely to have drunk himself stupid in some Glevum wineshop, and rolled into bed with a convenient ‘barmaid’. I added hopefully, thinking of the money he owed me, ‘Perhaps he will turn up, after all.’

  ‘He did not appear this morning,’ Marcus said. ‘Nor for lunch. In the end they sent out to find him. All his usual haunts – the bars, the baths, the market – but without success. No one had seen him since the procession. Or his personal slave either. They both seemed to have disappeared.’

  Something in his tone caught me. ‘Seemed? Why the past tense, Marcus?’

  ‘An hour ago the slaves went to stoke the boiler – the underfloor heating had been allowed to burn down over the holiday. They found a body in the hypocaust. That is what the aediles came to tell me. It will be a matter for the governor’s court, of course, not the local ones. Crassus was a Roman citizen. But it is a delicate business. My spies tell me that Crassus Germanicus may have been . . . shall we say . . . a supporter of the army.’

  This time, I groaned aloud. I knew what that meant. Commodus was not the most popular of emperors, and though he had taken the title ‘Britannicus’ most of the army here was in ferment against him, and had imperial candidates of their own, ready to step in when the time was right. The last thing I wanted was to be investigating that kind of political intrigue. If Marcus got me involved in this, I could give up worrying about getting to Corinium next week. Ask the wrong questions here and I might never get to Corinium at all – or anywhere else either. And I had no desire to visit the netherworld.

  ‘Excellence,’ I pleaded, ‘this is a question for the law officer.’

  Marcus ignored me. ‘I am on my way to the villa now. And I want you to accompany me. You see things which other men do not, Libertus. I need your pattern-maker’s mind.’ He favoured me with his most winning smile.

  I said nothing.

  ‘I sent word to expect us,’ Marcus went on, as though there had never been the remotest likelihood of my refusing – as I suppose there wasn’t. Marcus was a powerful man.

  ‘Perhaps there is no mystery to solve,’ I said, without conviction. ‘Crassus Germanicus is a man of brutal temper. He has killed a man, and then run away. That seems the logical conclusion.’

  ‘I said so myself,’ Marcus replied, ‘but the aediles thought otherwise. Still, we shall go and see. My driver awaits us. Fetch your cloak, and your strigil if you need one, and give your slave some story about being called away. A private commission for me, perhaps. That should put a stop to any rumours.’

  A strigil, I thought. To use in the bathhouse so that I could wash and shave. Marcus did not expect me to return home in a hurry. I got to my feet.

  ‘I will fetch my things.’

  As I tied them into a cloth, I told Junio exactly where I was going and what I was doing. It was the only defiance I could think of. Besides, I felt easier that way. Then I went back to Marcus.

  ‘All right, excellence,’ I said, wearily. ‘Let’s go and find this body.’

  Chapter Two

  I had donned a toga, of course, as the strict letter of the law demanded. All male Roman citizens throughout the empire are supposed to wear one ‘in public’, but often I didn’t bother. The edict is not much enforced, and a man in my position is more likely to be stopped and questioned on suspicion of unlawfully wearing the badge of citizenship, than for failing to wear it. Besides, frankly, I dislike the things: tricky to put on, hard to clean, and impossible to work in, because (as you will know if you have ever worn one) they force on the wearer that measured, upright gait which is the hallmark of Romans everywhere, otherwise the whole thing undrapes itself. But I do have one, for formal occasions – useful for impressing Roman clients – and today I was accompanying Marcus. Occasions do not come much more formal than that.

  There were advantages, too, of a kind. The milling throngs in the street stood back deferentially to let us pass and the
tanner’s man – who saw me every day in my simple tunic and cloak – goggled openly. Only a plain unbleached white-wool toga, of course, none of Marcus’ patrician stripes, but transformation enough. I sighed. Next time they wanted a contribution to maintain the neighbourhood fire-watch (one of the delights of living between a tannery and a candlemaker’s was the constant interesting possibility of conflagration) they would expect an extra few denarii from me.

  When we got to our transport, though, I was glad of my warm garment. Marcus had brought along a courier gig, light and fast, but desperately draughty compared to the covered imperial carriage I had been expecting. The driver was standing beside it, holding the horse, looking bored and perished to the bone in his thin tunic. I followed Marcus into the gig, as gracefully as my toga would allow, and gave the lad a sympathetic smile. It is one of the less recognised miseries of being a slave, that everlasting waiting.

  The driver seemed to take my smile as an encouragement and we set off at a clip which set the gig bouncing. We took the shortest route, back through the town, and I appreciated once again the advantages of rank. No humble mortal like myself could bring wheeled transport inside the walls in daylight, or blithely propose to take precedence on the military roads. But with Marcus anything was possible.

  Out of the East Gate, skirting the narrow tenements of the straggling northern suburb, away from the river marshes and up towards the high road that runs along the escarpment. Towards Corinium, I thought with a pang. It is a good road, kept up by local taxes for the imperial post – the military messengers – and, like all Roman roads, paved and straight. We made good progress, out past the burial sites which line the roadside these days (the Romans have made it illegal to bury the dead within the city), and were soon into open country.

  We had seen nothing on the road, beyond a lumbering farm cart and a lone cloaked messenger galloping hell-for-leather towards Glevum, but presently there was a distant glint of bobbing metal ahead. I saw Marcus grimace. A cohort of soldiers on the march; auxiliaries recently relieved from Isca, probably. They would keep up a good pace, but they filled the road, and with their supply carts and camp followers up ahead (wives were not allowed, but many soldiers had families all the same) the whole procession could straggle for miles.

  ‘There is a back way to Crassus’ estate,’ I said doubtfully. ‘I learned it when I was staying at the villa. It is shorter, but the road is poor.’

  That was an understatement. The road is villainous, one of the narrow, winding, unsurfaced tracks which used to serve as local thoroughfares before the Romans came. As a pedestrian, struggling to and from the villa with my mosaic pieces on a handcart, I had rather enjoyed its melancholy charm. There was even a ruined roundhouse halfway along it, presumably the homestead of the original native farmer from whom Crassus had ‘acquired’ the land.

  In a fast gig, the journey promised to be exacting rather than melancholy.

  Marcus had no such qualms. ‘We’ll take it,’ he said, and I instructed the driver where to turn.

  It was exacting – more exacting than a Roman tax-collector. We lurched perilously down the rocky track, the gig threatening to overset at every turn and with overhanging branches clawing at our faces, until we shuddered down a final hill and joined up with Crassus’ wide and gravelled farm lane. We forked through the left-hand gate, round to the back of the estate into the farm and farmyard. Unchallenged. The usual gatekeeper was not at his post, and there were no land-slaves tending the animals or working the estate. Only a tethered goat looked up at us in surprise.

  It was almost eerie.

  We took the gig right to the inner gateway, and left the driver to wait (again). The gate was open, and we walked straight in, past the heaped woodpiles for the furnaces and the fruit trees neatly planted against the wall. We had almost reached the door to the inner garden before someone came scurrying to greet us: a big raw-boned man, wringing his hands like a soothsayer prophesying doom. I recognised him at once, as much from the fluttering hands as from the blue tunic: I had met him when I was laying the librarium pavement. Andretha, the foreman of the slaves.

  He was breathless with self-justification. ‘I have rounded everyone up, excellence. In the inner courtyard. The aediles left a guard.’

  He led the way. They were all there. Not just the household, but anyone who had happened to be passing by when the discovery was made; all waiting, trembling with cold, fear and the bitter draught which always blew through the colonnades. I remembered it vividly. The librarium was in a tiny room leading off that courtyard.

  Why is it that retired officers, especially foreign ones, insist on building country villas like this, on the Roman style? Lofty columns and courtyard gardens fed by the rain from the high sloping roofs might be very welcome and cool in the heat of Rome. Here, in the wet, cold winters of the Insula Britannica, despite all the paintings on the surrounding walls and the statues in little arbours, the effect was damp, draughty and dank. No wonder Crassus had arranged to have a private hypocaust and bathhouse installed. It wasn’t just a sign of status; the underfloor heating made the front of the house – the owner’s quarters – tolerably habitable.

  ‘They are all here, all the household!’ Andretha bowed and bobbed his obeisance like a twig in a whirlpool. ‘And anyone passing by the gate. I had them stopped and brought here for you, most respected excellence. One can’t be too careful.’

  I glanced at the huddled group. The outsiders first. Two turnip sellers, fuming at losing a day’s trade at the market. A pedlar. A beggar. A soothsayer. Even, incongruously, a travelling merchant and his plump wife, conspicuous in British embroidered wool.

  Behind them, the household. I recognised some of them slightly. Land-slaves in hessian aprons, rough tunics and with leather ‘boots’ roughly shaped and bound around their feet with strings; cleanshaven house-slaves in neat blue tunics; ageing slavewomen in shapeless sacks; and, in the corner, the two short-skirted, perfumed slavegirls with haunted faces and braided hair. The guards smirked, obviously imagining only too clearly what duties those two performed for gross, ugly Germanicus.

  ‘They are all waiting, excellence,’ Andretha was saying, over and over like a Vestal chant.

  ‘I will speak to them later,’ Marcus said. ‘First, let us see this body.’

  I could have shown Marcus to the spot myself. Out of the courtyard and round to the side of the house where the boiler room lay. Another large guard with a stave was standing at the entrance to the stoke room.

  Marcus gestured him aside and we went in. It was dark and stuffy. The air was heavy with the nauseous, unmistakable smell of death, and still oppressively warm, although the fire had been allowed to die more than a day ago. The room was empty: nothing there but the great heaps of fuel and the open entrance to the furnace, its white embers still faintly glowing.

  Nothing, that is, except for the body of a man. He was dressed in centurion’s uniform – leather-skirted doublet, breast-armour, groin protector, greaves and sandals. A sword and dagger still hung at the belt and there were torcs of office around his neck. A beaten brass mask of Mars leaned drunkenly against the wall, and one dead arm still trailed against the crested helmet as if in some final gesture of farewell. The other hand, and the head, or what remained of them, were thrust into the open furnace. The effect was obscene.

  ‘Examine it, Libertus.’ Marcus seemed unable to bring himself to look too closely at that charred skull, the blackened, fleshless bones which had once been fingers and hand.

  I bent forward and lowered the lifeless trunk gently to the floor. The legs and arms had been shaved, recently by the look of it, but the torso was short, stocky and disconcertingly hairy. The features had been consumed by the flame, but there was no mistaking the ring on the charred finger. Crassus’ seal. I had seen it many times. Marcus, too.

  There was one obvious conclusion to be drawn. Marcus drew it.

  ‘By Mithras,’ he exclaimed, ‘the aediles were right! It is Germanicu
s! No wonder they couldn’t find him. So! All we have to do now is find someone who wanted him dead.’ He grinned at me as he spoke – that description probably encompassed almost everyone in Glevum. ‘All right, let’s go and see what these people have to tell us. We’ll see them in the triclinium. I’m sure there will be a brazier in there, and if this looks like taking too long we can have some food served in comfort.’

  ‘Naturally, excellence.’ Andretha led the way. It wouldn’t occur to Marcus that there might be difficulties for anyone in these arrangements. With the other servants under guard, Andretha would have to light the brazier and organise the food himself, to say nothing of the problems of the waiting passers-by who would have families concerned for their safety.

  The dining room was a fine room. I had seen it before – painted plaster walls and a mosaic floor in a geometric pattern (not one of mine, but I recognised good workmanship). Marcus reclined on one of the gilded couches, and I perched on a bronze stool nearby.

  The questioning began. The ‘outsiders’ were easily disposed of. The merchant and his wife had never visited Glevum before and had lodged at a nearby inn the night before. There would be a dozen witnesses who could swear to their movements. They had left their lodgings only an hour earlier, and it would have needed that time to get here. It was the same with the turnip growers; it was impossible for them to have been at the villa before the body was discovered.

  The pedlar and the beggar were no more helpful. Marcus had them flogged, on the off-chance, but it did nothing to refresh their memories and in the end he let them go. The soothsayer did claim that he had important information from the omens, but when this turned out to be that ‘the dead man was possessed of secret enemies’ Marcus was so infuriated that he ordered him marched to Glevum and locked up for a week, though not in any expectation of learning anything more to the purpose.