The Boat of Fate (9 page)
One morning, just at dawn, Marcus called me from the tent. I crawled under the flap, rubbing my eyes, and caught my breath at what I saw. Around us, above and below, the mountain walls glowed with an incredible hue; a burning pink, like the colour seen at the heart of a rose. As the sun climbed so they blushed and darkened; till the first beams, striking the great rift in which we stood, turned the high rock to silver. We watched without speaking or moving, for maybe half an hour; when we finally turned to the mundane affairs of breaking our fast and striking camp I was filled with a strange sense of peace. It seemed Calgaca’s soul, could it have wandered so far, might finally have rested in such a place as this.
The weather worsened through the day, so that when we pitched camp again flurries of snow and sleet drove against the tent. The sleet froze on the road surface, coating it with ice. Next day we led the horses; one false step could have plunged them and us over the lip of rock at our right, into the depths. At midday we came up with a line of heavy waggons, also headed east. There was no question of passing them; they were skidding and sliding, sometimes to within a hand’s breadth of the brink. The muleteers levered at the wheels with balks of timber, shouting anxiously to each other; the animals were finally unyoked and led to the rear while the drivers lashed the carts together into one great train. We were over the highest point of our route now; but the descent was if anything more frightening than the climb. Animals and men strained at the ropes, letting the waggons down an inch at a time; we lent our weight to the rest, struggling till nightfall. We pitched camp in the lee of the biggest of the carts, and were glad enough to share the muleteers’ fire and supper. Next day we made better progress. The road descended steeply, seeming anxious to be done with the hills. We cantered ahead, reaching at last the gentler plains that fringe the sea.
By this time I was beginning to think of myself as a seasoned traveller. The fleas and lice that had become an inescapable part of my life no longer tortured me; I had acquired some skill in the preparation of food, the porridge on which we mainly lived, and could pick out from the miserable array of taverns those in which we would stand least chance of being knocked over the head for the gold in Marcus’ belt. Yet Rome seemed as far away as ever. I was beginning to appreciate emotionally what before I had merely learned from books: the sheer vastness of the Empire. As I rode, so my wonder grew; it seemed impossible that any one man, even my great Hadrian, could ever have controlled it, shaped the course of its history.
We stayed overnight at Genua before joining the Via Aurelia that would take us to our destination. Now there was only one direction. The road flowed south; along it, borne irresistibly, moved what were surely half the people in the world.
For several days we once more skirted the sea. We swung inland finally, through gently rolling hills; and there came a morning when I first set eyes on my goal.
I rode yawning, not long from my bed. Beside me Marcus paced stolidly, impassive as ever, while rain wept from a winter-grey sky. For an hour or more the clustering of buildings round about had been becoming more pronounced. Now they coalesced into a sea of roofs and walls, stately villas set about with gardens, trees and fields; above them, swooping and branching, loomed the aqueducts that fed the greatest city in the world. It was some moments before I realised what I was looking at. Ahead, climbing to meet us, was the pale ribbon of the Aurelian Wall; beyond it the Tiber; beyond again, Rome. She could have stood on seven hills, or seventy; the buildings rose rank on rank, roofs and columns and porticoes, lost themselves in distance under the blowing tides of rain.
It was just as well one of us kept his wits about him, for I certainly lost mine. I charged down the slope of the Janiculum, and would have ridden under the gate had not Marcus called to me curtly to turn aside. Nothing but pedestrian traffic is admitted to the city during the hours of daylight; we lodged our horses at a livery stables instead, and walked back to the Aurelian Gate. Here were real soldiers at last, dressed in the full panoply of the Empire. They stood at ease or lounged chatting to each other, watching the streams of traffic indifferently. We passed through the wall unmolested to the broad suburb that stretches down to the Tiber.
To understand the city in which we found ourselves you must imagine two rings of concentric fortification, the smaller enclosing the ancient heart, the greater an area twelve miles or more round and packed with temples and churches, baths, shops, amphitheatres, tenements, barracks, warehouses, gardens, libraries; everything the mind can conceive. As he plunges into this confused and confusing mass the traveller from any direction finds the road, that has not varied its width by a handspan for a hundred or maybe a thousand miles, finally begins to narrow and wind. It is jostled on either side by taller and taller buildings, as he is jostled by an ever-increasing throng. Here are people from every nation on earth, rich and poor, freedman and slave, black man and yellow and white and every shade between. Barbers and snake-charmers ply their crafts on the pavements; sellers of pies and sausages, sweetmeats, pastry, old shoes, rugs, clothes, yell their wares; moneychangers haggle, clinking their piles of coins, lawyers tout for trade. Gangs of roisterers swagger and strut, din rises from building sites, escaped animals career between the feet of passers-by; till the endless babble and noise assault the mind like the sound of a massive sea.
The Rome of my dreams had been stately, white and calm; nothing I had imagined had remotely prepared me for this. For the grimy, streaming buildings, the gutters choked with offal and mud; for the uproar, and the cursing, and the stink. We crossed the Tiber by the Aemilian Bridge. The river raced broad and sullen, its surface pitted by the rain. To either side, dimly visible through the downpour, rose gaunt warehouses; beside them barges, up from Port of Rome, discharged their cargoes on to line after line of wharves. Across the river, beyond the curtain of the second great wall, lay the Forum Boarium, the vast meat market that in those days supplied half Latium. Steam and lowing rose from where cattle, waiting the butchers’ axes, milled in their pens. Above, the colossal buildings of Palatine humped and lumbered at the sky; while blood from the slaughterhouses flowed through open channels to the river, an unheeded and unending menstruum. Beyond the Servian Wall the shops began again, their hanging signs lining the streets. Vintners and poulterers, blacksmiths, cutlers, booksellers and corn merchants, vendors of glass and scent, pottery and shoes; I ignored them all, pushing ahead in a species of desperation. There was the Tomb of Augustus, there the Column of Marcus Aurelius; beyond it towered the vaster monument of Trajan. At its foot clustered the Fora; for Rome boasts not one Forum but several, linked in a complicated group on the slopes of the Capitoline. There one can find the Rostra, adorned once with the captured beaks of ships, deserted now by famous men; and beside it the Golden Milestone, set to mark the middle of the world.
I ran to it, breathless from my rush into the city, clapped my hands on its pitted, discoloured surface. At my side, Marcus waited sardonically. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘what are you going to do now?’
I stared at him open-mouthed. I hadn’t the remotest idea.
Finding the offices of Lucullus Paullus was far from easy. All I positively knew about my uncle was that he was an architect, and that he had premises somewhere in the old City. In my thoughtless way I had presumed he would be famous, or at least well known; but the first dozen people we accosted shook their heads in blank indifference and scurried on. It’s an odd characteristic of Romans that they never know a thing about their own great town; they might have lived all their lives in the same sprawling precinct but they can’t or won’t direct a stranger from one street to the next. Also they are invariably in a hurry. This rushing and scurrying assumes in the end the proportions of a disease. It matters very little to a Roman whether his errand is urgent or not. He will jostle and shove, cursing his fellows and being cursed in his turn; to falter, or break one’s stride, is a cardinal sin. We were reduced eventually to jogtrotting beside our victims, shouting our questions into their indifferent ears; some time passed in this way before a fat slave, puffing under a load of cauliflowers, turnips and bread, slowed long enough to favour us with a broad grin.
‘I’ve never heard of Lucullus Paullus,’ he said, chuckling. ‘And I don’t suppose many others have either. But I’ve a fancy you might mean old Cubicularis. Try just off the Argiletum; between a blacksmith’s and a scythemaker’s with a big metal sign. I expect it’s him you’re after.’ And he was gone, weaving his way into the crowd.
Marcus and I exchanged puzzled stares. However, we were obviously going to get no more information. We set about finding the place the man had described.
The Argiletum is the street of the booksellers; most of the wealthy publishers have their premises there. The fronts of the buildings on either side are plastered ten feet high with posters and inscriptions advertising the newest works; senators, poets, philosophers, students, folk of all classes, creeds and nationalities, stroll there, stand arguing in the doorways or haggling over the price of manuscripts. The newly rich, anxious to air their culture, get carried there in their chairs; scribes wait patiently by the hour on the offchance of being hired; there too one can usually find prostitutes, Syrian girls in bright, short robes, wrists and ankles flashing with jewels. The street runs from the Imperial Fora; at its far end it dips into Subura, the poor quarter of Rome, loses itself in a maze of tenements, slums, tiny crowded markets. The police avoid it, not without good cause; but I was to come to know it extremely well.
We walked the length of the Argiletum twice without seeing the shops our informant had described. Eventually I spotted them. Between their open fronts a narrow doorway disclosed a flight of rickety wooden stairs. A placard, nailed to the stained wall, proclaimed the premises of L. Sergius Paullus, Architect and Engineer. Below, in smaller characters, was the legend BEDMAKER TO EMPERORS. I glanced at Marcus again, and shrugged. That at least explained the nickname.
We mounted the stairs. As we ascended, a confused uproar, manifested itself, became steadily more oppressive. It seemed compounded of many elements; shouting, the thud and patter of feet, thumps and crashes as though bulky objects were being hauled from place to place. I frowned in the near-darkness. There was a second door; I found the latch, shoved. The din enveloped us.
It was like staring into some obscure Hell. The gloom in which the place was wrapped aided the impression. I saw a long, wide chamber, its walls lined with benches littered with wood shavings and tools. Between them, stacked against the walls, piled in confused heaps on the floor, were beds, tables, chairs; furniture of every shape and kind, in every stage of dilapidation and repair. Upwards of a dozen men were scurrying about as if demented, hauling at some stacks, shoving at others, while dust rose in thick, choking clouds.
The editor, it seemed, of this strange pageant stood at one end of the place on a little dais; a stocky, florid-faced man in a dishevelled, once-white tunic, his head adorned by an abominable ginger wig. He was waving his arms as if demented, and shouting in a shrill, nasal voice. ‘Citron wood,’ he bellowed. ‘Citron; nothing but citron, inlaid with ivory. No, gold ... Abinnaeus . . .’ His beady eyes fixed suddenly on the pair of us, still standing transfixed in the doorway. He came bobbing and twitching towards us, weaving his big head from side to side. He reminded me of a boxer in the arena, perpetually ducking and weaving to escape the mailed fist of his opponent.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘you’re a useful-looking pair. Get down to the Forum Cuppedinis this instant, with Abinnaeus. I want--no, Abinnaeus has got the list. Abinnaeus ...’ He delved in his tunic. ‘Gold piece if y’re back inside the hour--no!’ Marcus, nothing loth, had reached for the coin; he snatched it back, quick as a snake. ‘See my housekeeper after--square meal for both of you.
Abinnaeus ...!
’
The pace at which he spoke, coupled with an odd, stumbling impediment, made it hard to understand what he said at all, but something in his speech and manner had a bizarre familiarity. The dreadful truth dawned. I said, ‘Uncle Lucullus ...’ He shrieked, ‘Are you both half-wits as well?’ Then he leaped, as if I’d stuck a stilus into him; and the tic became positively alarming. ‘What?’ he said.
‘What? What did you say?’
He interviewed us in a diminutive, equally ill-lit office. Bills, receipts, ledgers, scrolls of paper, overflowed from the shelves that lined it; tables and the seats of chairs were similarly piled. Dust lay thickly everywhere. It looked as if the place hadn’t been cleaned or tidied for twenty years, a fact I afterwards found to be true. My uncle read the letter I handed him, twitching and squinting, holding the parchment close to the one dim lamp the place possessed. ‘What’s Gnaeus thinking of?’ he burst out finally. ‘Does he imagine I’ve got nothing better to do than find food and shelter for every waster off the streets who can’t turn a penny for himself? And at a time like this.
Fortune and Fever ...!
’
His manner changed, startlingly. ‘This is a critical period for me,’ he said. ‘A critical period. The next days, the next hours, will decide. I stand at the pinnacle of a distinguished career. But they don’t understand. Nobody understands....’ He rocked miserably, face in his hands. I had thought earlier the ginger wig looked odd, now I realised why. It was so old that much of the hair had come away in its turn, revealing large patches of the leather base on which it was formed. Indeed he had, as Marcus later observed, a well-shod head.
My uncle controlled himself with a visible effort. ‘You will doubtless have heard,’ he said in a portentous voice, ‘the rumours current in the city of an impending visit? By very important personages?’
So fascinated was I by his variations of character that I omitted to answer him.