Last Act in Palmyra (13 page)

‘Looking for a scroll?'

‘No, no. Nothing like that.'

Helena watched him in a silence that may have passed for politeness to a stranger. I like more alluring entertainment. I watched her. Tranio finally banged down the lid and sat on the chest kicking his heels against its studded sides. The friendly fellow looked as if he intended to stay chatting until dawn.

‘No luck?' I asked.

‘No, damn it!'

Helena yawned blatantly. Tranio gave a flourishing gesture of acquiescence, took the hint, and left.

*   *   *

My tired eyes met Helena's for a moment. In the weak light of the flare Tranio had left us, hers looked darker than ever – and not devoid of challenge.

‘Sorry, fruit.'

‘Well, you have to do your work, Marcus.'

‘I'm still sorry.'

‘Find anything out?'

‘Early days.'

Helena knew what that meant: I had found nothing. As I washed my face in cold water she told me, ‘Chremes dropped in to tell you he has found the rest of his people, and we're performing here tomorrow.' She could have announced this while we were waiting for Tranio to go, but Helena and I liked to exchange news more discreetly. Discussing things together in private meant a lot to us. ‘He wants you to write out the moneylender's part Heliodorus used to play. You have to make sure that omitting the character doesn't lose any vital lines. If so –'

‘I reallocate them to someone else. I can do that!'

‘All right.'

‘I could always go on stage as the moneylender myself.'

‘You have not been asked.'

‘Don't see why not. I know what they're like. Jove knows I've dealt with enough of the bastards.'

‘Don't be ridiculous,' Helena scoffed. ‘You're a free-born Aventine citizen; you're much too proud to sink so low!'

‘Unlike you?'

‘Oh I could do it. I'm a senator's offspring; disgracing myself is my heritage! Every family my mother gossips with has a disgruntled son no one talks about who ran off to scandalise his grandfather by acting in public. My parents will be disappointed if I
don't.
'

‘Then they will have to be disappointed, so long as I'm in charge of you.' Supervising Helena Justina was a rash claim; she laughed at me. ‘I promised your father I'd keep you respectable,' I finished lamely.

‘You promised him nothing.' True. He had more sense than to ask me to take on that impossible labour.

‘Feel free to carry on reading,' I offered, fumbling with my boots.

Helena removed from under her pillow the scroll I guessed she had been peacefully perusing before I turned up like trouble. ‘How could you tell?' she demanded.

‘Smut on your nose from the lamp.' In any case, after living with her for a year I had deduced that if I left her anywhere near forty papyrus scrolls she would scoot through the lot in a week like a starved library beetle.

‘This is pretty grubby too,' she remarked, gesturing to her bedtime read.

‘What is it?'

‘A very rude collection of anecdotes and funny tales. Too saucy for you, with your pure mind.'

‘I'm not in the mood for pornography.' I took several chances in succession, aiming myself at the bed, inserting my body under the light cover, and winding myself around my lass. She allowed it. Perhaps she knew better than to argue with a hopeless drunk. Perhaps she liked being enveloped.

‘Could this be what Tranio was looking for?' she asked. Sick of Tranio, I pointed out that he had said quite decisively his lost item was not a scroll.

‘People do sometimes tell lies!' Helena reminded me pedantically.

*   *   *

We too, like the Twins, had our tent divided up for privacy. Behind the makeshift curtain I could hear Musa snoring. The rest of the camp lay silent. It was one of our few moments of solitude, and I was not interested in a risqué Greek novel, if that was what Helena had been studying. I managed to extract the scroll from her and tossed it aside. I let it be known what mood I was in.

‘You're not capable,' she grumbled. Not without reason, and perhaps not without regret.

With an effort that may have surprised her I wrenched myself sideways and up-ended the flare in a pitcher of water. Then, as it hissed into darkness, I turned back to Helena intent on proving her wrong.

Once she accepted that I was serious, and likely to stay awake long enough, she sighed. ‘Preparations, Marcus…'

‘Incomparable woman!' I let her go, apart from annoying her with delaying caresses as she struggled over me on her way out of bed.

Helena and I were one, a lasting partnership. But due to her fears of childbirth and my fears of poverty, we had taken the decision not to add to our family yet. We shared the burden of defying the Fates. We had rejected wearing a hairy spider amulet, as practised by some of my sisters, mainly because its success seemed doubtful; my sisters had huge families. Anyway, Helena reckoned I was not sufficiently frightened of spiders to be driven off her by a mere amulet. Instead, I faced the deep embarrassment of bribing an apothecary to forget that controlling birth contravened the Augustan family laws; then she endured the humiliating, sticky procedure with the costly alum in wax. We both had to live with the fear of failing. We both knew if that happened we could never allow a child of ours to be killed in the womb by an abortionist, so our lives would take a serious turn. That had never stopped us giggling over the remedy.

Without a light, I heard Helena cursing and laughing as she rummaged for her soapstone box of thick cerate ointment that was supposed to keep us childless. After some muttering she hopped back to bed. ‘Quick, before it melts –'

Sometimes I thought the alum worked on the principle of making performance impossible. Instructed to be quick, as every man knows, the will to proceed is liable to collapse. Following too many winecups this seemed even more likely, though the wax at least helped provide a steady aim, after which maintaining a position, as my gymnasium trainer Glaucus would call it, did become more difficult.

Applying care to these problems, I made love to Helena as skilfully as a woman can expect from a man who has been made drunk by a couple of crass clowns in a tent. And since I always ignore instructions, I made sure that I did it very slowly, and for the longest possible time.

Hours later I thought I heard Helena murmur, ‘A Greek and a Roman and an elephant went into a brothel together; when they came out, only the elephant was smiling. Why?'

I must have been asleep. I must have dreamed it. It sounded like the sort of joke my tentmate Petronius Longus used to wake me up to howl over when we were wicked lads in the legions ten years before.

Senators' nicely brought-up daughters are not even supposed to know that jokes like that exist.

XVIII

Bostra was our first performance. Certain aspects stick in the memory. Like an acrid sauce repeating after a cut-price dinner party given by a patron you had never liked.

The play was called
The Pirate Brothers.
Despite Chremes' claim that his notable company only tackled the standard repertoire, this drama was the product of no known author. It appeared to have developed spontaneously over many years from any bits of business the actors had enjoyed in other plays, expounded in whatever lines from the classics they could remember on the night. Davos had whispered to me that it went best when they were down to their last few coppers and seriously hungry. It required tight ensemble playing, with despair to give it an edge. There were no pirates; that was a ploy to attract an audience. And even though I had read what purported to be the script, I had failed to identify the brothers of the title.

We offered up this dismal vehicle to a small crowd in a dark theatre. The audience on the creaking wooden seats was swelled by spare members of our company, well drilled in creating a vibrant mood with enthusiastic cheers. Any one of them could have earned a good living in the Roman Basilica egging on prosecuting barristers, but they were having a hard time breaking the morose Nabataean atmosphere.

At least we had an increased complement to give us confidence. Helena had nosed about the camp to see who the additions to our company were.

‘Cooks, slaves and flute girls,' I informed her before she could tell me.

‘You've certainly done your reading!' she replied, with admiring sarcasm. She was always annoyed at being forestalled.

‘How many are there?'

‘Quite a tribe! They're musicians as well as extras. They all double up making costumes and scenery. Some take the money if the performance is ticketed.'

We had both learned already that the ideal ruse was to persuade a gullible local magistrate to subsidise our play, hoping to trade on the crowd's goodwill next election time. He would pay us a lump sum for the night, after which we needn't care if nobody bothered to come. Chremes had managed to swing this at towns in Syria, but in Nabataea they had not heard of the civilised Roman custom of politicians bribing the electorate. For us, playing to an empty arena would mean eating from empty bowls. So Congrio was sent out early to chalk up enticing notices for
The Pirate Brothers
on local houses, while we hoped he didn't choose to annoy any householders who were keen theatregoers.

In fact, ‘keen' was not an epithet that seemed to apply in Bostra. Since our play was ticketed, we knew in advance that there must be some rival attraction in town: a snail race with heavy side-bets, or two old men playing a very tense game of draughts.

It was drizzling. This is not supposed to happen in the wilderness, but as Bostra was a grain basket we knew they must get rain for their corn sometimes. Sometimes was tonight.

‘I gather the company will perform even if the theatre is being struck by lightning,' Helena told me, scowling.

‘Oh stalwart chaps!'

We clung together under a cloak among a thin crowd trying to make out the action through the miserable mist.

I was expecting to be hailed as a hero after the play. I had taken a great deal of trouble with my adaptation and had spent all morning perfecting new lines, or tinkering with tired old ones as much as time allowed. I had proudly presented the revisions to Chremes at lunch, though he brushed aside my eager offer to attend the afternoon rehearsal and point out significant changes. They called it a rehearsal, but when I stationed myself on a back row at the theatre, trying to overhear how things were going, I was dismayed. Everyone spent most of their time discussing a flute girl's pregnancy and whether Chremes' costume would last in one piece another night.

The actual performance bore out my disquiet. My laborious redraft had been tossed aside. All the actors ignored it. As the action evolved they repeatedly referred to the missing moneylender, even though he would never appear, then in the last act they improvised a few haphazard speeches to get around the problem. The plot, which I had so wittily resurrected, dwindled into ludicrous tosh. For me, the most bitter insult was that the audience swallowed the gibberish. The sombre Nabataeans actually applauded. They stood up politely, clapping their hands above their heads. Somebody even threw what looked like a flower, though it may have been an unpaid laundry bill.

‘You're upset!' Helena observed, as we fought our way to the exit. We barged past Philocrates, who was hanging around the gateway, showing off his profile to admiring women. I steered Helena through a smaller group of men with entranced expressions who were waiting for the beauteous Byrria; she had taken herself off promptly, however, so they were looking over anything else in a long skirt. Having my nobly reared girlfriend mistaken for a flute girl was now my worst nightmare. ‘Oh, don't let it worry you, Marcus my love…' She was still talking about the play.

I explained to Helena succinctly that I didn't give a damn what a group of illogical, illiterate, impossible thespians did on stage or off it, and that I would see her in a while. Then I strode off to find somewhere I could kick rocks in decent solitude.

XIX

It came on to rain more heavily. When you're down, Fortune loves stamping on your head.

Tearing off ahead of everyone else, I reached the centre of our encampment. That was where the heavier waggons were drawn up in the hope that our encircling tents would deter sneak-thieves. Hopping over the nearest tailboard I took shelter under the ragged leather roof that protected our stage properties from the weather. It was my first chance to inspect this battered treasure trove. After I had finished swearing about the performance, I devised a ferocious speech of resignation that ought to leave Chremes whimpering. Then I fetched out my tinderbox, wasted half an hour with it, but eventually lit the large lantern that was carried on stage in scenes of night-time conspiracy.

As the pale flame wandered around dangerously in its ironwork container, I found myself crouching up against a small shrine (large enough to hide behind for overhearing secrets). Stacked opposite were several painted doorways, meant to distinguish the neighbouring houses that featured in so much of the New Comedy. These had not been used in tonight's
Pirate Brothers
in order to save them from the wet. Instead the scene, which was originally ‘A Street in Samothrace', had been redesignated ‘A Rocky Coast' and ‘The Road to Miletus'; Chremes had simply played Chorus and announced these arbitrary locations to his hapless audience.

I struggled to settle more comfortably. Under my elbow was an old wooden log with a greying shawl nailed to it (the ‘baby'). Sticking out above my head was a gigantic sword of curved design. I assumed it was blunt – then cut my finger on the edge while testing out my assumption. So much for scientific experiment. Wicker baskets mostly overflowed with costumes, shoes and masks. One basket had toppled over, showing itself nearly empty apart from a long set of rattly chains, a large ring with a big red glass stone (for recognition of long-lost offspring), some parcels of shopping, and a brown jar containing a few pistachio shells (the ever-present Pot of Gold). Behind it were a stuffed sheep (for sacrifice) and a wooden pig on wheels that could be towed across the stage by Tranio in his role as a merrily wittering Clever Cook who cracked thousand-year-old jokes about preparations for the Wedding Feast.