Requiem for a Slave Read online

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  I looked him up and down. The man was swarthy, crop-haired and stocky, with a self-important air, though the chain-mail tunic and the sweat-stained leather underskirt marked him as an auxiliary officer at best – one of the many from the southern provinces, perhaps, lured by the promise of citizenship when he retired. In that case, I outranked him – in one respect at least.

  ‘I am the citizen Longinus Flavius Libertus, certainly, and this is my workshop,’ I said evenly, stressing my title and my full three Roman names – a signal that I was already a citizen myself.

  He must have got the point, although he showed no outward sign. His voice, however, became less peremptory. ‘I was sent here on the orders of the chief decurion. Said there was a body of a pauper to collect.’ He leaned a little closer as he spoke. He smelt of sweat and horses and cheap watered wine. ‘Seems to think your slave has robbed and murdered him.’

  I looked at him coldly. ‘Decurions can be wrong.’

  That seemed to strike a chord. He used a sharp elbow to dig me in the ribs. ‘I don’t think he can believe it much himself – about the murdering at least. If he wanted to bring a charge against the slave, he’d want to produce the dead body, wouldn’t he – not have it disposed of quickly in the pit?’

  I looked at him sharply. I had not thought of that, although perhaps I should have done. I’m not entirely familiar with the details of the law.

  He gave me another nudge. ‘Though we’ve been told to hold the boy if he turns up. Says that he will haul him to the courts and have him charged with robbery and with attempting to run away. He claims the boy belongs to Marcus Septimus – not to you at all – and in the owner’s absence he will act for him and make the formal accusation that the law requires.’

  I tried to keep my voice completely unconcerned. ‘The boy was lent to me, however, and I make no such charge. Quintus Severus is wrong about the theft as well. Whoever killed the pauper stole his purse and took my servant too – which I hope to prove by producing both of them. But the decurion is right about the corpse. You’ll find it in my workshop, lying on the floor.’

  Scowler furrowed his low brow a little more. ‘What’s it doing there? And why, in that case, have they called on us?’

  ‘As to what he’s doing in my workshop, I don’t know. Someone dragged him there when he was dead – and if you are going to ask me why, I don’t know the answer to that either, I’m afraid. And I did not call you; the decurion did.’

  He gave me an understanding look which said that one could not argue with officialdom. His frown relaxed a little, but he shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t touch it really, when it isn’t in the street. Criminals and vagrants, and dead travellers whose bodies cannot be identified, that’s what me and my fatigue party are supposed to gather up.’ He scratched his cropped head with his baton-end and seemed to be thinking. Then he looked triumphantly at me. ‘Suppose I told you to dispose of him yourself? He was murdered in your workshop after all.’

  ‘I doubt that the chief decurion would approve,’ I countered. ‘Anyway, I’ve told you: the body didn’t die here – it was dragged here afterwards. I have proof of that. You would have had to take it if it had been left out in the street.’

  He looked perplexed again. The mention of Quintus had clearly worried him. ‘Well, since you put it that way . . .’ He turned back to his men who were still waiting with the cart. ‘Come on, you idle scum. Do what you were sent for. Take a look in there!’

  They were ruthlessly efficient; I’ll say that for them. It seemed no time at all before they brought Lucius out, suspended between them by his arms and legs. They swung him up and tossed him on the cart, on top of another body already lying there – it might have been a leper or a beggar with one leg. The soldiers didn’t even pull a blanket over them. I was glad that Lucius had the bandage on his face, and that his mother wasn’t there to see.

  Scowler was supervising all this with disdain. He hadn’t moved an inch. When they had finished, he turned to me again. ‘Well, that’s it, citizen. We’ll leave you to it now. There’s a couple more corpses that we have to fetch. A pair of brigands who have been put to death – we’ve got to pick their bodies up before we put these in the pit.’ He jammed his helmet on and turned back to his men. ‘Don’t just stand there lounging, you useless sons of whores! We’ve got more work to do. Get that horse down to a place where you can turn the cart around.’ And he went swaggering off.

  I watched them inching down the street, then went back to the shop, blew out the tapers – which had been thrust aside, though fortunately not where they would start a fire – and put the outside shutter for the doorway up. I was going to go to the bake-house to find Lucius’s mother now. Everything else would simply have to wait.

  With a chill feeling, I picked up the greasy tray, which was still lying on the stones outside my shop. What would happen to the poor woman without her son? Who would bring her remnants from the market now? I considered for a moment, then went back and picked up the turnips too.

  Seven

  It did not take me very long to reach the place where Lucius had lived. I even half-recalled the route, although it was a long time since I’d visited this ramshackle area of the town, which was constantly flooded when the Sabrina rose.

  The dwelling was every bit as squalid as I had remembered it, a broken-down hovel amongst the ruins of what had once been a house, now with only a piece of tattered cloth across the front to form a door, and – in place of what had been handsome tiles – woven reeds as a rough sort of thatch. Behind this stood a fire-blackened conical stone building which was the oven, or so-called baking-house. A well-worn path ran in between the two, among a mass of tangled weeds and fallen masonry, interspersed with the usual litter of a public street: bits and pieces of broken pot, rusty nails, and fish and chicken bones.

  I saw the old woman as soon as I approached. She was small and wizened, and even thinner than her son had been in life, but she was impressively energetic for her age. When I arrived, she was by the baking-house, hacking ferociously at a piece of tree, apparently in order to make it fit the oven fire. She had obviously been out earlier collecting fuel for it, because there was a carefully created pile lying close nearby – dried grasses, fir cones, branches, birds’ nests, even bits of rag. She clearly made the most of anything that would burn.

  She lowered the hatchet as she saw me arrive (I wondered if it was the same one that she used to chop ingredients) and stood up to greet me, pressing one hand into her crooked back as if to ease the ache. She looked at me with shrewd, glittering green-grey eyes. ‘If you are wanting pies at this hour, mister, then you’re unlucky, I’m afraid. There’s none of last night’s left. My good-for-nothing son has taken them to sell, and I shan’t be starting baking any more till he comes home with the supplies – and even then it will be hours before they’re cooked enough to eat.’ She gave me a brief, well-practised smile, showing a surprisingly handsome set of teeth – large but not discoloured and remarkably complete. ‘Come back tomorrow and I’ll set one aside for you.’ She turned back to her work.

  I shook my head. This was going to be even more difficult than I had supposed: she was so unsuspecting of what lay in store! I went up, removed the hatchet gently from her grasp and made to take her arm, ready to lead her in the direction of the hut. ‘I think that you should come and sit down in the house. What I have to tell you is distressing news. It concerns your son.’

  She snatched her arm away and stood confronting me. ‘He hasn’t gone and got us into debt a second time? I suppose he’s been gambling on the chariot races again? Well, as I told the other man your masters sent around, Lucius cannot pay you with what he hasn’t got.’ She wiped a bedraggled sleeve across her face. ‘And it is no good coming here and threatening me for it. I haven’t got a quadrans, as you can clearly see. I didn’t know he’d got caught up again. I thought he’d given up betting after what you did to him. But my son is single-minde
d when he decides to be.’

  Rather like his mother, I thought inwardly, but all I said was, ‘So he’d been in debt before?’ It was not at all what I had planned to say, but this was a very unexpected piece of news. I hadn’t envisaged Lucius as a chariot devotee.

  There was no reason why he shouldn’t be – apart from poverty. There is no permanent chariot circus in the neighbourhood – the arena in the amphitheatre, where gladiatorial games take place and where criminals were sometimes thrown to the beasts, is too confined to stage a proper race – but there is a site where a temporary structure can be set up for the day, complete with turning posts, dolphin-shaped devices to indicate the laps, and viewing stands where all but the more exclusive seats are free. The lack of facilities ensures there are no full-time local teams, but there are chariot-racing festivals from time to time, sometimes with famous visiting drivers on display, funded by some local dignitary as a part of a campaign to win favour with the populace. All the same, poor working freemen like Lucius did not usually attend, still less did they ever bet money on a race. They simply did not have the time and cash to spare, and anyway, since they did not have the vote, the entertainment was not aimed at them. But Lucius, it seemed, had placed a bet or two – no doubt on borrowed money, as he had none of his own.

  So I wondered if I’d stumbled on a motive for his death. The men who run the betting syndicates are famous (or infamous) for their ruthlessness. It would not have been the first time they’d made a cash advance on the promise of repayment if the team came home and then exacted a terrible revenge on someone who had failed to pay them what was owed.

  In that case, the killer would be hard to catch, I thought. Victims are reluctant to identify the men behind these gambling rings. Assaults and murders are not reported to the authorities, partly because people fear reprisals if they do, and also because betting on the chariots is, itself, a technical offence. (There has been too much corruption and race-fixing in the past, my patron told me once, sometimes resulting in riots in the street.) Yet it remains absurdly easy to find someone who will take your stake – agents approach you as you wait outside – and even the law which forbids gambling booths at the course is, very often, effectively ignored.

  So, ‘Lucius was gambling on the chariots?’ I said again.

  She looked suspiciously at me. ‘You didn’t know that? So you didn’t come from them? And you don’t want a pie?’ Her voice was sharper now. ‘Then, what have you come for? You said it was bad news.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid it’s Lucius.’

  She made a tutting sound. ‘It almost always is. What is it this time? Accosting travellers to buy his pies and having them complain? If you are an aedile from the market police—’ She broke off and stared at me. ‘But, of course, you aren’t. You wouldn’t be wearing that tunic if you were. But this must be serious. I see you’ve brought his tray. Have they arrested him?’

  I nodded and laid it carefully against the oven wall. ‘It’s serious, but not for the reasons that you think. And there’s no kind way to tell you. Lucius is dead. Got himself murdered somewhere in the street.’

  ‘Murdered?’ I had expected her to cry or shriek or groan, or give some other indication of her grief, but she said the word quite softly. ‘Well, that’s the end of that. Not much of a life he ever led, poor lad.’ Her face was calm but all the light had gone out of her eyes. ‘Did you see him dead? Do you think he suffered? Tell me it was quick!’

  I found a way to answer that at least. ‘He was set on from behind. He could scarcely have realized what was happening.’ It was almost true. There was no point in telling her about the clawing hands and bulging eyes. But there was one thing I had to be quite certain of. ‘They’ve taken him for a pauper’s burial. He wasn’t a member of a funeral guild?’

  She shook her head – to my infinite relief – then turned away and fiddled with the branch she had been cutting up. ‘You don’t know who killed him?’

  I shook my head. ‘I only wish I did. Do you know if he had enemies?’ It struck me that she had seemed somehow unsurprised, and a name might lead me to Minimus, of course.

  She made a little uninterested face. ‘Not that I know of, mister. He was a gentle man – unless it was a matter of a gambling debt: they gave him a dreadful beating once before. And there was another day he was attacked – that time was because he’d given somebody false coin. He didn’t mean to; he’d been given fake silver and simply passed it on – never bothered to test it with his teeth, though I have shown him how to do it at least a dozen times. Of course, the man he passed it on to didn’t wait to hear all that, simply sent his slaves around to “teach the ugly cheat a lesson”, as they said.’ She broke off again. ‘But what gives you an interest in my unhappy son?’

  I said, very simply, ‘He was murdered near my workshop, and whoever killed him has also made off with my slave, it seems – and, I’m afraid, with Lucius’s purse as well.’

  She snapped a brittle twig between her hands. ‘So the money is all gone? And you discovered this?’ She did not meet my eyes.

  It occurred to me that she might think I’d taken it. ‘Your son was on his way to see me, I believe, hoping that I’d buy another of his pies. I’d given him a tunic not very long ago.’

  She did look at me then. ‘So you are the pavement-maker that he told me of? And that lovely tunic. What’s happened to it now? I suppose the army will have taken him away?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It would have fetched something in the marketplace,’ she said in a defeated tone. I was secretly a little bit appalled by this turn of things – as if a few asses were more important than what happened to her son – but I reflected that perhaps if one has nothing in the world, a few copper coins may be life or death. But she shamed me for my thoughts. ‘I cannot even buy a taper to light before the gods.’

  ‘I did light candles at his head and feet, and called his name three times,’ I said, as though that made a difference.

  It seemed it did. She gazed at me and said with obvious sincerity, ‘You are a good man, mister. I could have done no more myself. Thank you for treating him with some respect in death, and for being so kind to him in life.’ She reached out her wrinkled hands and grasped my own. ‘And thank you also for coming all this way to tell me of his death.’

  I was embarrassed by this display of gratitude. ‘It was really nothing,’ I muttered, recognizing with guilt that this was true.

  She pressed my fingers. ‘But you looked after Lucius. I will not forget. You come this way any time, pavement-maker, and you shall have a pie – gratis. That is, supposing that I ever bake again. Jove alone knows how I’ll manage for ingredients.’

  I gave her the turnips. It was the least that I could do. This time it did bring tears into her eyes.

  ‘Bless you, mister . . . or should I say “citizen”? Didn’t Lucius tell me that you held that rank?’

  I nodded. Of course, I wasn’t wearing my toga at the time.

  ‘And to think that a proper citizen should have done all this for us! Jove bless you, citizen, a hundred times.’ She hugged the bag of turnips to her chest. ‘If there is ever anything that I can do for you – anything at all – I am at your service.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘Provided I survive. I don’t think I care. Now Lucius has gone, I have lost the last thing that I had to live for in the world. I lost my husband and my business in the fire years ago. I think it was only worry about Lucius that kept me going.’

  She was about to cry. I rather hoped she would – pent-up grief is worse than any tears – but I also hoped that she would wait till I had gone, or we should both be made embarrassed. ‘There is one thing that you can do for me,’ I said, in a weak attempt to deflect her from her tears. ‘I’d like to have the bag I brought the turnips in.’

  It didn’t make her smile. ‘Of course. One moment, citizen.’ She rummaged behind her frowsty curtain and produced an iron pot – with one of its three legs missing, I noticed,
and no handle on the top. ‘Lucius brought this home for me the other day – one of his customers made him a gift of it. I’ll put them in here, and you can have the bag. It is a good one and must be worth an as at least. I should have thought of it.’ She emptied the three turnips into the damaged cauldron as she spoke. I wished I’d never mentioned getting back the bag.

  ‘If you make turnip pies, I’ll buy one of them,’ I said. It didn’t sound a very appetizing meal, but it would be a more wholesome filling than had often been the case. ‘Or were you intending to make a meal of those yourself?’

  She shook her head. ‘I hadn’t thought what I would do with them.’

  Of course she hadn’t. Poor woman, she hadn’t thought of anything at all. But I had to press her. I said gently, ‘I want to find his murderer on my own account, you know. I think he has my slave. If anything occurs to you which might shed light on this, please come and let me know, for both our sakes.’

  ‘You asked if Lucius had any enemies – if I think of anything, I’ll come and find you at the shop. But unless he was gambling on the chariots again, honestly I can’t think of anyone at all.’ She stared down at the turnips as if she might find inspiration in the pot. ‘Yet I can’t believe that he’d gone back to it, after last time and what they did to him.’

  ‘And what was that? Took him to an alley and beat him to a pulp?’

  She looked at me wryly. ‘Exactly, citizen. I nursed him for a week. And even that was not enough: they threatened him with worse if he did not contrive to pay the money back within a moon.’

  ‘And did he?’ I saw her face. ‘Or rather you did it for him, I suppose.’

  She looked away. ‘Of course, I was a great deal younger in those days. I had to go and let them shave my head and offer my hair to a fancy wigmaker, as well as sell my only pair of shoes – and do other things I’d rather not admit – so we could pay them back. They’d have killed him otherwise.’ She shook her head. ‘Lucius never forgave himself when he found out what I’d done. I can’t believe he’d get involved with gambling again, however excited he was about his team.’