Vita Brevis (4 page)

Ruso swallowed. “Horatius Balbus?”

“Ah, yes, of course. I forgot: He let you have one of his apartments. Have you met?”

“No, sir.” Although Ruso had spent some time planning what he would say if they ever did.

“Well, you should. I’ll let you know when we can call.” Accius glanced over his shoulder at his clerk. “Have the next chap sent in, will you? Sorry, Ruso. No time to chat. Another bloody meeting. You’d think it would be a simple enough business keeping the streets clean: Just send a few slaves out with brooms. But no. Let me know how you get on. Meanwhile, don’t let me down.”

Acknowledging the doorman’s bow as he left, Ruso had to admit to himself that the slave had never been disrespectful. The condescension had been in Ruso’s own mind. And now what should have been in his mind was unadulterated joy and relief. Except that the end of Kleitos’s note, which he had not read out to Accius, was less encouraging than the beginning.

He waited until he was around the corner, out of sight of the doorman and the bored shopkeeper next door, before pausing by a fountain to roll the note open again.

The Greek at the top—the business about cold limbs and death—was almost certainly from some sort of medical text. Kleitos was just reusing old writing materials. But the Greek at the bottom was in the same fresh ink as the message, and it said,

Be careful who you trust.

Tilla had changed her mind about bathhouses. Now, at last, she understood why a woman might spend a whole morning dawdling in the changing rooms and meandering around the warm halls, listening to the babble of many tongues echoing from the high ceilings, and chatting idly about babies to other mothers with their hair wrapped in towels. It was better than fighting your way around the shops when you had no money or pacing stone streets till your feet ached or strolling through the public gardens at the mercy of strange men who thought you might want company. It was certainly better than sitting in a dingy tenement room, picking the remains of breakfast out of Mara’s hair. But now Mara had the restlessness of a baby who was too distracted to sleep. She needed her bed.

Tilla scooped the baby up against her and the halfhearted wailing stopped. One of the other mothers helped to tie the shawl so that it held Mara in place, and she wished Tilla luck.

“Kick him where it hurts,” suggested one of the new friends, helping herself to another of the raisin cakes they were sharing from the snack stall.

“I will,” Tilla promised, pulling the linen stole up over her head
like a respectable Roman wife and remembering the days when she would have advised exactly the same thing.

Reminding herself to turn left by the bakery, she wondered where her courage had gone. It seemed to have slipped overboard, unnoticed, somewhere on the long sea voyage from Britannia.

She paused again by a fish seller’s stall, looking up between the high buildings to check her bearings, and preparing to follow the stone legs that held up the snake of the aqueduct. It would lead her back to the place she was never going to think of as
home
.

As if to echo her mood, Mara began to wail again. “You are not the only one who is hot and tired,” Tilla assured her in British. She had never realized what a precious thing sleep was until she came to this terrible place.

She was a midwife. She was used to delivering babies in the night, and she had expected Mara to wake at all hours. On the journey here, Accius’s horrible housekeeper had taken great pleasure in trapping her in some corner of the ship and warning her about the traffic rattling through the streets of Rome after dark and the late partygoers and the clumping boots of the night watch. Naturally in a busy lodging house there would always be someone coughing or crying or arguing. Sometimes giving birth, although Tilla’s help was never needed. All this she could have grown used to. But when she settled down to rest, the cockroaches came out.

Cockroaches were even worse than mice. She had tried sleeping with a light burning, and then lain awake, worrying that the place would catch fire and the night watch’s ladders would not reach the fourth floor. She had tried calming doses of poppy, but there was always the worry that she would not wake if there was a crisis. She had tried taking Mara into the bed and pulling the sheet tight over both their heads in the dark, but after a while it was difficult to breathe, and besides, who knew what was scuttling over the bedding? Meanwhile, her husband had slept beside them like a dead man.

Sometimes she wondered if he was only pretending, and that secretly he too was lying awake, wondering how they could raise their daughter in this place. Surely everyone knew that a healthy child needed somewhere to run and jump and roll in the grass. How would Mara learn that not all wild birds were pigeons or that a dog could be your best friend or that you could make a hand-fed
lamb’s tail wiggle by stroking its neck? Here the neighbors grumbled if you fed the birds, and you could not even tie a simple pot of lettuce seedlings onto the windowsill without the people below complaining every time you watered it.

As if she might find it reassuring, her husband had told her that there were people who cooked up the insides of cockroaches to treat earaches. When she pointed out that none of them had an earache and he had hardly any patients, he did something more useful and went to see the caretaker. The caretaker promised to come up and inspect the room later.

Of course he waited until he had seen her husband go out first. Tilla had watched from the safety of the doorway as the man’s hairy hands turned over their possessions and groped the bed in a way that made her want to boil the sheets afterward.

Then, with a smile that displayed the yellow scum coating his teeth, he told her she had nothing to worry about. There were cockroaches everywhere in the city, and most places were a lot worse. She would soon get used to it.

She dared not complain again for fear of another visit. Nor did she dare to tell her husband about the way the caretaker spoke to her. It was no business of anyone else’s if she was a natural blond, even if she did sometimes forget to cover her head. Her name was not Curly, and it wasn’t Blondie either, and if the caretaker was stupid enough to believe the things he claimed to have heard about British women, she was not going to waste her breath trying to correct him. Still, she hoped her husband would not find out, because if he did there would be trouble, and then they might be thrown out, and what if most other places really were a lot worse?

Her new friends at the baths had assured her that not every apartment block was running with cockroaches, but then someone else had added, “But lots of them are,” and someone else had told everyone about a friend of a friend who had woken to find a huge one nibbling the eyelashes of her sleeping baby. It was the sort of story that still made her shudder even though she told herself it probably wasn’t true.

Kick him where it hurts.

Tilla glanced around to make sure nobody was looking, then paused in the street and tried lifting one leg. As she had thought, with a baby strapped to her chest it would be hard to kick anyone
anywhere without falling over. Besides, the man would deny that he had done wrong. He would show his scummy teeth and say he hadn’t meant any harm. She was just a foreigner who didn’t understand a Roman joke.

There he was. Hanging around with some other men on the pavement outside the tenement steps. As she watched, an African in a work tunic emerged carrying a box, and squatted to place it next to a pile of luggage against the wall. Somebody must be moving out.

She glanced left down a narrow street. If she made her way around the back of the block she could enter from the other side and not have to pass them.

Tilla let out an “Oh!” of exasperation, as much at her own cowardice as from seeing the man who had forced her to confront it. “This is foolish!” she murmured to Mara. She was even letting that man take control of where she walked now. “I am ashamed.” She slid two fingers inside her purse and stroked the little wooden horse her brother had carved. Then she squared her shoulders and went forward.

“Blondie!” The caretaker stepped into her path and gave her a cheery display of dental scum. “Where have you been? The boys have been waiting for you.”

She was about to stride past without speaking when it struck her that there was something familiar about that box. She felt her courage flood back as she surveyed the rest of the items on the pavement. “Those are our things!”

The oldest of the “boys” fingered the writing stylus propped behind his ear. “We’ll have to charge extra for the packing, missus.”

She turned to the caretaker. “Our rent is paid!”

Instead of answering, he leaned closer and patted Mara’s head with a hairy hand. “It’s been a pleasure having your lovely mother here, little miss.”

She stepped back to get her baby away from him, then twisted ’round to snatch at the case that held her husband’s expensive medical instruments. “Give me that!”

But the African had a firm grip on it.

“Steady on, Blondie!” said the caretaker.

Someone picked up the box of crockery that had been a wedding present from her husband’s family, and then placed her own bag of
healer’s necessities on top. Another two seized the rope handles at either end of the box that held her husband’s kit from the Legion: the kit Tilla had come to treasure in the hope that he might find some way to put it on again and march them away from here.

She stood with her back to the wall, wrapped her arms around Mara and said, “If you do not give me my things right now, I will report you to Tribune Publius Accius as thieves.”

The men seemed more puzzled than impressed. Perhaps she should have said that her husband would report them.

“Miss.” The man with the stylus behind his ear spoke slowly and evenly, as if he were trying to calm an animal that might bite him. “Your husband sent us to help you move house.”

Tilla blinked. “My husband?”

“What did I tell you?” the caretaker said to him. “British, see? They can’t help it.” He leaned closer and said in a stage whisper, as if he was afraid it might enrage her further,
“Highly strung
.”

What Mara wanted was what usually happened at this time of day: a quiet doze. Instead, she was being bounced around as Tilla tried not to trip on the uneven paving, dodging passing pedestrians and veering ’round the bearers of fancy chairs that took up half the street.

Mara began to cry.

Tilla was perspiring inside her tunic of good British wool, and the wretched stole kept sliding off the back of her head. She could not stop to adjust it because she had no idea where the porters were taking them through the airless maze of buildings.

Mara’s protests grew louder. None of Tilla’s caresses, pleas, or promises of being nearly there made any difference. She sidestepped to scoop cool water from a street fountain and splash it over her own head and Mara’s, then hurried to catch up. Finally she was close enough to call, “Where are we going?”

The last man swivelled around, and she gasped as he nearly lost his grip on the box of crockery. “The other side of Trajan’s baths, miss. Vicus Sabuci.”

She had no idea where that was, but she thanked him anyway, and resolved not to distract him from the crockery again.

The porters strode on, sweat making dark stains down the backs of their tunics. Tilla began to wonder if they were lost. All these streets lined with shadowy shops and bars looked the same. Had she not seen that display of brass pans before? Those bright bolts of cloth hanging from poles? She was sure she recognized the wilting wreath on that shrine. She had seen that slave with the basket of fruit on her head several minutes ago.

Finally Mara gave up crying and filled her cloths before dropping off to sleep. Tilla was wondering if she could persuade the men to stop by a latrine so she could change the cloths, when they came to a halt under the shade of an arcade. They were standing outside a closed and shuttered shop front with a snake on a stick painted on the wall.

While the head porter was banging on the door, Tilla sank down to rest on a barrel that had been left outside. She had no idea why her husband was not here to greet her, but she would worry about that later. She was going no farther.

The porters hurried away, already late for another job. Tilla was on her own in this unknown place, guarding an assortment of possessions and a smelly baby. There was a scribe’s shop on the other side of the concrete steps to the next floor, but the man inside did not even glance up from his writing when he told her he had no idea when the doctor would be back. The woman at the bar on the corner seemed annoyed with her for asking.

Drinkers came and went at the bar tables. Beyond them, the entrance hall of Trajan’s baths was so big that the figures passing underneath looked as though they were creeping into the house of a giant. Tilla kept looking up and down the arcade, hopes rising every time a figure came into sight, and falling when it was not him.

She began to wonder if the porters had taken her to the wrong doctor. What if her husband was expecting her somewhere else? She could not leave the luggage piled up out here beside the barrel for thieves to help themselves. Somehow, she would have to send word to Publius Accius’s house, and ask the horrible housekeeper for help.

Across the road, people trotted up and down a set of steps to an opening with
PORTICUS LIVIAE
engraved on the wall. Livia, whoever she was, must be very generous to allow all those people to wander about in the shade of her portico.

A couple of women arrived and asked where the doctor was. When she said she did not know, but she was a healer and could she help, they went away again. The scribe shut up his shop and left. The shadows of the arcade’s columns had moved across the paving stones. There was no sign of her husband.

A worse thought struck her. What if the caretaker and the porters had played a trick on her because of her complaint about the cockroaches? Even if her husband found her before nightfall, they would have nowhere to sleep, and it was all her own fault. She fingered the little wooden horse in her purse and tried not to think about being trapped in this hard stone city a very long way from home.