Of Merchants & Heros (5 page)

I grew taciturn, and solitary in my pursuits. When I came across my old friends in the town I thought them soft and aimless; and they, no doubt, found me strange and withdrawn. But I served the god. We had made a pact. When they asked me why I was so much alone, I gave them vague excuses about work on the farm. They did not believe me, and soon ceased to ask. But I knew they would not understand.

One late afternoon, I was sitting on the grass terrace outside the house, sharpening my hunting knife on a whetstone, when my mother came to me.

‘You were singing,’ she said with a smile.

I shrugged and smiled back. ‘I had a good day. I caught a hare.’

She sat down on the stone bench and asked about the work on the farm. I answered, sharpening my knife blade as I talked, telling her how the corn in the lower fields was growing good and strong, and the livestock was thriving, and how I was pleased with the new draining ditches I had dug in the vineyard. I had been laughing, recounting some nonsense of how our old bad-tempered goat in the yard had butted the swineherd into the water-trough; but now, all of a sudden, like an unexpected chill on a warm day, it came to me that there was something she had not yet come to, something she was waiting to say. I called to mind that she never came looking for me just to make conversation, and breaking off I looked up at her and said, ‘Mother, tell me what has happened.’

I had guessed right. At this the brightness faded from her face and she made a small sad dismissive gesture. Immediately I cast aside the sharpening-stone and leapt up. Only then, when I was standing, did I see she was clutching a letter in her hand.

‘Your uncle Caecilius has written,’ she said, raising up the letter with its broken seal. ‘Let us go inside, Marcus. There are things we need to speak of.’

We went to my father’s old study. I had scarcely entered here since my return, and now I glanced round in surprise. His book- scrolls with their carefully written labels were stacked neatly on the shelves, just as he had left them, but on the desk, among the coloured stone paperweights he liked to collect, his papers lay open and strewn about. It looked as if someone had been going over the accounts.

But that could wait. My mother had closed the door, something she seldom did.

I said, ‘What does
he
want?’ I spoke more sharply than I intended. I was remembering Kerkyra. I had not given a thought to my uncle Caecilius until now.

She crossed the floor and sat down in the old cross-backed pearwood chair beside the window before she answered. The letter was still in her hand. For a moment, before she stilled it on her lap, I thought I saw it shaking. She sighed and looked at me. It was not like her to put off what needed to be said.

‘You may as well hear it now as any time. Your uncle Caecilius intends to marry me.’

I jumped back as if something had bitten me. ‘
Marry
you?’ I cried. ‘What is he talking about? Has he lost his mind?’

‘Listen to me, Marcus, and stop gaping like some peasant at market—’

‘But Mother, you know nothing of him, nor he you . . . You would not like him . . . I know you wouldn’t.’

‘Liking does not come into it,’ she said flatly.

‘But Mother!’ I cried, pleading now. ‘You do not know what you do. What madness is this? What has he told you?’

As I was speaking she had crossed to my father’s desk. She pushed at the papers there. ‘Did your father tell you why he was going to Kerkyra?’

This caught me by surprise and I broke off. ‘No,’ I said, narrowing my eyes. ‘What of it?’

‘No. Well he would not have troubled you with such things; that was his way. Your father was a good man, Marcus; but he was not a man of business. He was content to let the farm run just as it always had. Why should he make changes, he used to say, when all was as he liked? But the world has changed. We cannot go on as we were.’

I looked at her face, trying to work out what it was that stirred my memory. And then, with a surge of anger, I knew. These were not her words I was hearing. They were Caecilius’s.

‘Let the world change!’ I cried at her. ‘We have the farm. We can manage, you and I.’ I began to talk about the coming harvest, which showed promise; and the olives; and the vines. She let me go on for a while, but then I saw her gently shake her head. ‘What then, Mother?’ I said, gesturing angrily. ‘Is it not enough?’

She gave a thin, sad smile. ‘If it were a case of hard work, we should be wealthy beyond measure. Do you think I have not seen you? But all this comes from long ago, when Hannibal’s army was ravaging Italy. Times were hard then; your father fell into difficulties, and Caecilius gave us help. He was generous when no one else would be, and now he is calling in his debt.’

I stared at her. ‘His
debt
?’ I cried. ‘And what are you? The payment? By all the gods, what does he take you for?’

‘That is enough!’ she said sharply. She walked to the window and looked out. Without turning she said, ‘I will not lose the farm. That is what matters.’

It was no use. I sat down heavily in my father’s chair and pushed my hands through my hair. My mind burned with anger. I drew my breath to rage against her, and against cruel Fate that had brought us to this. But then the words she had spoken pierced my consciousness, like light through stormclouds, and I nearly cried out with the pain of it. I stared at the papers strewn on the desk in front of me. The accounts. She must have been through them many times before she came to me. What was I doing except making it worse? She would not lose the farm. That was what she had said. Caecilius had made a request – a demand – and she was doing this to keep our home . . . and I, for all my effort, was no more than a useless child who could not help her.

My anger drained from me, replaced by something worse. I looked up. She was still looking out through the window. Her back was straight, her face fixed and grave and full of pain. But for a moment I saw what she kept hidden best of all: her weakness, and my eyes stung with tears of impotent rage. She was like some great noble bird – a mighty she-eagle – old at last, broken by time, but proud to the end.

I swallowed and blinked down at the floor. It was all I could do not to weep out loud, for the great injustice of the world. But I knew what she would have said: Tears do not stop the sun from rising, or make rivers run uphill. So I set my mouth firm as hers, and peered at the accounts spread out upon the desk, as if they meant something to me, and after a moment I said, ‘Whatever you do, Mother, you will always have my love.’

An older man – or a wiser one – would have spared her such words at such a time. But I was young, and thought that feelings were all. I heard her catch her breath and saw her clutch at the window frame.

‘My dear, only son,’ she said, in a voice that cracked my heart.

Later we talked of details, as, after a death, the members of a family might talk of arrangements for the funeral, concerning themselves with invitations and what to eat, while the body lies in the next room unmentioned.

Caecilius was still in Rome, where his business, he said, had taken some months to complete. If his offer was acceptable, he had written that he would make the journey to Praeneste. She showed me the letter. I did not tell her it was not even in his own hand. He had got a secretary to write it.

When all had been said, I went off into the hillside forest, up through the firs and stone-pines to a place I knew, a bare rock ledge that jutted out over the valley, where I could be alone.

For a long time I stood, listening to the shifting wind stirring the branches, and the echoing cries of the mountain birds. I do not know what I had intended, other than to be away from people, and away from the house. But now, seized by rage, I punched my fist into the nearest tree trunk, and cried out long and loud, calling on Mars the Avenger to see me and remember.

My lone voice echoed down the valley. The startled birds scrambled from the trees. And then the only sound was my breathing, and the beating of my heart.

Caecilius arrived half a month later, in a lavish painted carriage with curtains of scarlet-dyed leather, drawn by two Gaulish mares with decorated harnesses, attended by liveried outriders.

I waited outside the house to greet him, as my mother had asked, and beside me stood the assembled house-slaves and the farmhands, washed and got up in their best, standing primly with their hands folded in front of them, as they did at the shrine on the festival days when my father offered something to the gods. We had had plenty of time to arrange ourselves there, having seen an hour before the gaudy vehicle lumbering up the steep winding track from the plain.

It might have been suitable for the easy roads close to Rome. It did not suit Praeneste.

But in time the carriage drew up, and my uncle clambered out.

He was wearing an expensive fine-combed woollen tunic, cream- white, bordered with leaping stags picked out in red; and on his feet new calfskin boots. He had put on weight, and his hair was blacker than I remembered, stark against his puffy white face, like a blackbird’s wing against marble.

He looked along the line of waiting farmhands, passing over me until I remembered to step up and speak the formal words of greeting.

He peered at me. I had pulled on a clean tunic, but otherwise I looked no different from the slaves and farmhands. But then he seemed to know me.

‘Why, Marcus,’ he cried in a booming voice, ‘look at you. Brown as a nut, and surely you have grown. I was expecting the same timid child, not a handsome youth.’ He laughed and glanced around. ‘But where is your mother?’

I told him she was in the house, waiting to greet him.

‘Then let us go inside,’ he said. He snapped his fingers at one of the liveried outriders and said, ‘See to my things,’ and then, as we took the short path to the house, ‘I have done much useful business in Rome, and soon I hope—’ He broke off with a curse and swatted a dragonfly aside with an irritated swipe. From the corner of my eye I saw one of the young farmhands suppress a smile. Even they could see my uncle did not belong in the country. ‘Well,’ he continued, looking warily to where the hovering insect had relocated itself, ‘we can talk of all that in due course. And,’ he added, taking me confidentially by the elbow and pulling me to him, ‘you must learn to start calling me father now, not uncle.’

I do not know what decency dictated, or what passed for right behaviour in Rome. I had assumed he was only paying a short visit, for the sake of form. But next day wagons loaded with his possessions came labouring up the hill-track: caskets, chests of clothing, even ornaments and furniture. I realized he had come to stay.

The marriage took place before month end. There was a brief ceremony. No guests came. I was glad of that, for in my mind it was no marriage, just a contract, and a sordid one at that.

That night I lay in bed and pictured him with my mother. I drove the thoughts away, fearing madness. I rose before dawn, and went climbing on the hillside. I sat on the rock ledge, and watched the sun rise over the mountains.

The formal adoption happened soon after. The words were spoken, and I became, as far as the law was concerned, Caecilius’s son and he gained the power of a father over me.

How true it is, that one perceives what one has only by losing it.

At once he began to make changes. The little festivals and banquets we held for the farmhands and their families to signify the motions of the seasons and to honour the local gods – the field-spirits, the guardians of the boundaries, the nymphs and dryads and gods of the spring – he cancelled, saying, when I asked him, that too much time was spent on superstitious foolery when there was a farm to run. He employed the men to work; if they would not, he would find others.

I listened as he discoursed on such things and said nothing, not out of fear of him, for I felt none, but because I knew no words of mine would sway him, and because the farmhands, whatever he said, would no more ignore the gods of the place than they would cease to breathe the air. The sacred spirits were as real to them as the trees and streams.

Quickly enough I began to understand that to Caecilius everything was merely a question of good or bad business. He talked of it with reverence, as a philosopher might talk of truth. He had a conception in his head, and expected the world to conform to it. Yet I never quite understood what it was that he did. When I asked him, he told me he traded; or, at other times, that he bought and later sold, and knowing how and when and where was the key. He was fortunate, he said, for he had a nose for a good deal. This was a favourite saying of his, and he would tap his nose with his finger, and peer at me with his small eyes as if he were imparting to me something of great significance.

Despite his vagueness, I soon came to understand, though, that he had profited, in ways he never quite explained, from the war against Carthage, which at that time was nearing its end. I had lived with the war since my first breath. But now, little by little, town by town, our great general Scipio was at last driving Hannibal out of Italy. I think Caecilius was the only person who spoke of the war’s end with regret.

Though my father had distrusted the city, he had always talked of sending me to Rome when I was old enough, to be educated by one of the new professors from Greece, who were setting up schools in the city. At the time I did not like the idea of leaving home, and had asked him, if he did not care for the city, why he wanted to send me there. To this he had answered that the city was one thing, and knowledge was another. It was not for him to withhold knowledge from me, without which there could be no wisdom. I must make my own choices, and to do that I must know something of the world and what wise men said about it. Besides, he had said, it did a man good to know the life of the city, even if he later rejected it.

But Caecilius had no time for such things. ‘What is it you want to know?’ he would say, and when I could not answer he would wag his fat finger and say, ‘There! If you cannot tell me, then you have no need of it. Better to learn business than waste your time – and my money – on those talking heads in Rome.’