Two For The Lions (21 page)

Then I thought I heard Claudia Rufina mutter to herself; "Oh Juno--another one!"

XLI

Things were getting worse. Ptolemais was even breezier and even more Greek. Whereas Tocra just butted out into the Mediterranean, Ptolemais actually had the sea lapping on two sides. Although its harbour was more sheltered, furious waves coursed at an angle in the open water, while flying sand stung us as we hacked into town from the west.

Our journey had taken us two days, even though I had pressed on as hard as possible. The coast road was dismal.

We found no way-station, and were forced to sleep rough overnight. I noticed that Claudia hunched her shoulders and said nothing, as though she had experienced this before.

By now the rolling green and brown hillocks of the Jebel came down almost to the city. Squeezed between the sea and the mountains, this was an offshoot of Cyrene, still further east. There were historic connections with the Egyptian Ptolomies (hence the name) and the neighbourhood was still used as a cattle-ranching area, fattening flocks for rich Egyptians who lacked pastures of their own.

It was a dry old place to have chosen to build; an aqueduct brought in a vital water supply, which was stored in huge cisterns under the forum. Yet again the meticulous Justinus had left word, so once we had struggled into the city centre, and found the right temple, and dug out the under-priest who was in charge of messages from foreigners, it only took us another hour or so to persuade the disinterested Greek-speaking burghers to give us directions to where he was staying. Needless to say, this was not among the well-appointed homes of the local wool and honey magnates, but in a district that smelt of fish-pickle, where the alleys were so narrow the tormenting wind whistled through your teeth as you battled around every corner. Also needless to say, even when we found his billet, Justinus was out.

We left a note ourselves, then waited for the hero to come to us. To cheer us up, I spent more of Helena's father's money on a slap-up fish supper. It was eaten in a subdued mood by tired, dispirited people. I had now acquired the traditional party-leader's role of irritating everyone and pleasing none, whatever I tried to organise. "So, Claudia, did you ever see the gorgeous Gardens of the Hesperides?"

"No," said Claudia.

Helena attempted to take a hand. "Why; what went wrong?"

"We couldn't find them."

"I thought they were near Berenice?"

"Apparently."

Claudia's permanent pose of neutrality had slipped for a moment, and we could hear honest rancour growling through. Helena openly tackled the girl: "You seem rather low. Is anything wrong?"

"Not at all," said Claudia, putting down the uneaten half of her grilled red mullet for my dog, Nux. Dear gods, I do hate mimsy girls who pick at their food--especially when I have paid through the nose for it. I was never partial to women who seem unable to enjoy themselves; what was more, to have caused a scandal and then to be so unhappy about it seemed an atrocious waste.

Well, we only had to stick it out in snobbish Ptolemies for ten days before a message came from Justinus to Claudia saying he was now living in Cyrene, so there was yet another haughty Greek city waiting to despise us if we cared to trek that way.

This time it did seem as if it ought just be worth bothering to pack up and transfer ourselves: Famia became very excited because he thought Cyrene was a good source of horses, Helena and I wanted to see the runaways together so we could try to work out what had gone wrong with them, and besides, Justinus' note had a coded tailpiece which we deciphered as, "I may have found what I was looking for!"

We had a satirical discussion about whether he had become so intellectual that he meant the secrets of the universe, but--not knowing that I had already arrived in the province--he had also instructed Claudia, "send for Falco urgently! Since everyone else agreed my presence was hardly necessary at a philosophical symposium, they reckoned I was needed to formally identify a sprig of silphium.

XLII

Meeting Camillus Justinus came as a huge relief: He at least looked the same as always: a tall, spare figure with neat, short hair, dark eyes, and a striking grin. He managed to combine an apparently unassuming air with a hint of inner strength. I knew he was confident, a linguist, a man manager, courageous and inventive in crises. At twenty-two he should have been setting out on adult responsibilities in Rome: marriage, children, consolidating the patrician career that had once looked so promising. Instead, here he was at the back of beyond on a mad mission, his hopes dashed by snaring his brother's wench, offending his family, her family, and the Emperor--and all, we were beginning to suspect, for nothing.

The depth of Claudia's unhappiness became most fully apparent once we saw them together. Helena and I had taken a small house at Apollonia down on the coast. When the fabled Justinus eventually joined us, his greeting for his sister and me was far more joyous than the restrained smile with which he favoured Claudia.

Before we arrived they had been alone together for four months; inevitably they shared a visible domestic routine, enough to have fooled some people. She knew his favourite food, he teased her; they often muttered together in a private undertone. There was no resistance when Helena put them sharing a bedroom--yet when she poked her head around the door nosily she came back to whisper that they had made up two different beds. They seemed just about friends--but by no means in love.

Claudia remained expressionless. She ate with us, went to the baths, came to the theatre, played with the baby, all as if she lived in a world of her own. She made no complaint, but she was holding her tongue in a way that condemned all of us'

I took Justinus aside. "Io! I gather you have made a terrible blunder? If so, we can face it, and deal with it, Quintus. In fact, we must do so----"

He looked at me as if what I said was hard to understand. Then he said curtly tl1at he would prefer other people not to interfere in his life. Helena had been receiving much the same reaction when she tried to probe Claudia.

We cracked it almost by accident. Famia, who was still loosely attached to us, had gone into the interior hunting for horses as he was supposed to, so that had relieved us of one strain. He could drink as he pleased so long as there was no direct pressure on me to keep him sober for the sake of my sister and her young family.

I was starting to understand what life back at home must be like for Maia: Famia preferring to be almost always absent, and tiresome when he did appear; Famia constantly raiding the household budget for wine money; Famia proclaiming loud social jollily at unsuitable moments; Famia forcing other people either to share in his relentless habit, or else making them seem tight-arsed if they tried to save him from himself: Maia would be much better off without him--but he was the father of her children, and really too far gone to abandon.

My nephew Gaius had disappeared for a walk on his own. He had always been a free spirit, and although being part of a group like this generally did him good, he scowled with hostility if he was too closely supervised. Helena thought he needed mothering; Gaius was a tyke who had decided otherwise. I preferred not to tether him too tightly. We were settled in Apollonia; he knew his way around and he would come home when he was ready. He had left Julia with us. The baby was happily playing with a stool she had learned to push around the floor, crashing it into the other furniture.

At last, in private, it seemed an occasion to talk about silphium. The prospects of a fortune were vast if Justinus really had rediscovered the plant, and we brought the subject up indirectly, a delicate acknowledgement of the enormous dreams that might be about to be realised for all of us. As usual in families, being indirect only led to a row about something quite different.

Helena and I, Claudia and Justinus, had been partaking of a fairly basic lunch. Somehow the conversation touched on our first landing at Berenice, and although Helena and I carefully avoided any mention of Claudia's thwarted yearning to visit the Gardens of the Hesperides, in discussing our own sea trip a question was asked about how the other pair had endured their sailing from Oea. That was when Justinus came out with his astonishing remark: "Oh we didn't sail; we came by land."

It took a moment to sink in. His sister must have been harbouring suspicions already; while I wiped chickpeas off my chin with a napkin, Helena addressed the issue rather tersely: "You don't mean all the way?"

"Oh yes." He pretended to be surprised that she had asked.

I glanced at his fellow traveller. Claudia Rufina was pulling grapes individually from a bunch; she ate each one very carefully, then removed the pips from between her front teeth with exquisite good manners, laying them around the rim of a plate in a neat border, equally spaced. She might have been fortune-telling lovers--only her lover was supposed to be the young man sitting here.

"Tell us about it," I suggested.

Justinus had the grace to grin. "We had run out of money, for one thing, Marcus Didius. I shrugged, accepting his slight rebuke that I could have been more generous with financial help. Like a true patrician, he had no real idea how tight my budget was. "It was my idea--I wanted to emulate Cato."

"Cato?" enquired Helena, in a frosty tone. I wondered if this was the Cato who always came home from the Senate in time to see his baby bathed. Or perhaps it was the baby, when he was grown up. At any rate, my darling had stopped approving of him as a model.

"You know--in the wars between Caesar and Pompey he brought his arn1Y all around the Bay of the Sines and surprised the enemy." Justinus was showing off his education; I refused to be impressed. Education is not as good as common sense"

"Amazing," I said. "They must have been flabbergasted when he first appeared" It's desert all the way, I believe and am I right, there is no proper road along most of the coast?"

"Afraid not!" conceded Justinus, impossibly cheerful. "It took Cato thirty days on foot--we had a couple of donkeys, but we needed longer. It was quite a trip."

"I should think so."

"Obviously there is a coastal track that the locals use and we knew it must go all the way, because Cato had marched through successfully. I thought it would be a grand adventure for us to do the same. Well, in the opposite direction of course."

"Of course."

"It must have been hard?" suggested Helena, dangerously quietly.

"Not easy," her younger brother confessed. "It took absolute dedication and army-style methods." Well, he had those. Claudia was a delicately reared young lady from a pampered home. Basic training for an heiress consists only of assaults on Greek novels and a gruelling small talk course. Still fired with enthusiasm, Justinus carried on, "It was five hundred miles of utterly tedious, seemingly endless desert--all dead flat, for week after week."

"Places to stay?" I asked neutrally.

"Not always' We always had to carry water for several days; sometimes there were cisterns or wells, but we could never be sure in advance. We often camped out. The sn1all settlements were a long way apart."

"Bandits?"

"We were not sure. They never attacked us."

"What a relief!"

"Yes. We just had to flog on, expecting the worst. Nothing but a distant glimpse of the blue ribbon of the sea on the left hand side, and the horizon on the right. Bare dry sand, with tufts of scrub. After Marcomades, the land started to roll a bit, but the desert still went on for ever. Sometimes the road meandered inland a little way, but I knew that so long as we sometimes caught a glimmer of the sea on our left, we were still going in the right direction. . . We saw a salt flat once."

"That must have been very exciting!" Helena said crisply. Claudia ate another grape, with no shadow of a smile. The salt flat must be a hideous memory, but she was blotting out the pain. "I am trying to imagine," said Helena to her brother, "what a catastrophe this must have been for Claudia. Expecting only a shipboard romance and starlit happiness. Finding herself instead cast into an endless desert, in fear of her life. A thousand miles from a hairdresser, and in entirely the wrong shoes!"

A brief silence fell. Helena and I were stunned by what the crazy lad had revealed. Perhaps Justinus finally sensed a critical atmosphere. He polished his plate with a piece of bread.

"How long did it take you?" I ventured, still in a neutral tone.

He cleared his throat. "Over two months!"

"And Claudia Rufina endured all this with you, Quintus?"

"Claudia has been very intrepid."

Claudia said nothing.

He was off again: "As you travel east, there tend to be a few datepalms. Eventually there are flocks--goats, sheep, occasionally cows, horses or camel. . . then towards Berenice, the terrain starts rolling. I'll never forget the experience. The sea and the sky, the way the desert changes colour to a harsher grey as dusk starts falling--"

Very poetic. Claudia still looked ominously unmoved.

The dead weight of her silence spoke of utter misery. I could work out just how much Justinus was omitting of discomfort, thirst, heat, the threat of marauders, the dread of the unknown. Not to mention their personal relationship rapidly falling apart.

"We did it, that's the main thing." For him, that was, clearly true. For Claudia, her life must have been blighted forever. "As I said, we could not afford a ship. Had I not driven us on relentlessly, we would be out there still somewhere--probably dead."

Claudia Rufina stood up suddenly and left the room; in fact, she left the house. We heard the door slam. Upstairs a shutter rattled so hard its catch fell off Justinus winced, but did not move; I suppose he had already heard plenty from her about how she felt. Unwilling to let a young woman of my party wander a strange city alone in distress, I hauled myself to my feet and followed the girl.

I left Helena Justina starting to explain to her once favourite brother how most people would regard him as guilty of outright cruel stupidity, not to mention unspeakable selfishness.