Two For The Lions (25 page)

"Identified with Diana," said Helena, who had also noticed where Scilla went.

"Moonshine?"

"Goddess of hunting was more what I had in mind."

Helena and I stood beside that lighter haven of culture, the altar of Apollo. There was a faint scent of charred meat which made me hanker for my dinner. "Well? What do you think?"

A frown creased Helena's broad forehead. "Something is not quite right."

"I'm glad you said it." I had disliked Scilla intensely: too self-assured.

"It may be straightforward," Helena suggested in her fair way. "scilla has been thwarted when she approached the vigiles and the Emperor. She feels there has been an injustice--but what remedy exists? People who lose someone in a tragedy become very angry and flail around looking for a way to relieve their helplessness."

"That's fine--if they come and employ me."

"Are you sure you want to do this?"

"I'm sure."

When Scilla discussed the night that her lover planned to impress her with the show, I had remembered the dead lion, and later the dead gladiator whose murder was never even halfway solved. It stirred up feelings I had left behind when I came out on this sun-bleached holiday interlude. Devoting myself to Justinus--his wild chase after a fortune and his sad troubles with his love life--had taken me far from those winter days of auditing amongst the menageries. Yet the disturbing problem never left me. Now here we were, in ancient Greek Cyrene, facing the same dark undercurrents.

"So," Helena said, giving me an odd look. "You are going to Tripolitania."

"That I am. You need not come."

"Oh I'll be there!" She spoke rather warmly. "I have not forgotten, Marcus Didius, that when we first met you were renowned for spending time with notoriously flexible Tripolitanian acrobats."

I laughed. It was the wrong reaction.

What a girl she was. Four years had passed since I first knew Helena Justina, and in all that time I had never given a thought to the sinuous young rope dancer I had dallied with before her. I could not even recall the dancer's name. But Helena, who had never even met the girl, was still harboring jealousies.

I kissed her. That too was the wrong thing to do, but anything else would have been worse. "You had better be there to fight them off," I said gently. Helena's chin came up in defiance, so then I winked at her. I hadn't done that for a long time. It was one of those cheeky rituals of courtship that get forgotten when you feel sure of someone.

Too sure, perhaps. Helena could still give me the feeling that she was keeping her options open in case she decided I was a bad risk.

I walked with her across the formal temple area to a dramatic feature where water from the Spring of Apollo had been diverted from the upper level down into a formal fountain. A nude male torso--rather small--leaned at an odd angle on the plinth of a slender obelisk; that was set above a layered basin down which sheets of springwater flowed. Helena looked askance at the solitary column, whose significance she seemed to view suspiciously.

"Some sculptor representing his dreams," she scoffed. "I bet it makes his girlfriend laugh."

Below the obelisk ran a fine semicircular podium, terminated by two grand stone lions. In-turned and grimacing fiercely, the lions were long in the body if rather solid in the trunk and legs, with broad heads, attractive whiskers, and meticulously carved curly manes.

For some time I stood looking up at the guardian beasts, thinking about Leonidas.

Part Three

Tripolitania: May A.D. 74

L

TRIPOLITANIA

Among all the bumptious provinces in the Empire, Tripolitania led by a long head. The Three Towns have a history of independence that is positively shocking. The only thing remotely in their favor, in my view, was the fact that they were not Greek.

They were never through and through Carthaginian either. This accounts for their self-willed attitude; when Carthage foundered, they were laughing. First established by Phoenicians, sure enough, and possibly recolonized on later occasions from Carthage itself, nonetheless the three great seashore cities had consistently retained their independent status. When Rome smashed the power of Carthage they could claim to be sufficiently separate to avoid punishment. While Carthage was torn down, its populace enslaved, its religion banned, its fields sewn with salt, and its aristocracy fined into oblivion, the Three Towns pleaded innocent and claimed immunity. Tripolitania had never had to surrender formally. It had never been made a military zone. It was not colonized by Roman military veterans. Although there were legal circuit visits, it did not even have a regular administrative presence from the office of the governor of Proconsular Africa, under whose jurisdiction this region fell in theory.

Tripolitania was now Punic, going on Roman. With every appearance of sincerity its people were giving themselves Roman town planning, Roman inscriptions, and what passed for Roman names. The Three Towns were collectively known as the Emporia, and that summed them up: an international trade center. It follows that they were all crammed with well-dressed, thriving ethnic millionaires.

My party was clean and civilized, but when we landed at Sabratha we felt like ragged tinkers with no business to be there.

Two points need to be mentioned. First point: Sabratha is the One Town without a harbor. When I say "landed" I mean our ship beached itself on the strand unexpectedly and very violently with a horrid rending noise. The captain, who had become a close friend of my brother-in-law Famia, was--we discovered after the abrupt landing--nowhere near sober at the time.

Second point: Although we landed at Sabratha, I had given the captain very precise orders to sail somewhere else.

It seemed clear enough to me; it ought to be my decision. I was in charge of our group. What's more, I had found the vessel at Apollonia, I haggled and commissioned her, then I arranged the loading of the splendid Libyan stock Famia had somehow managed to buy for the Greens. Given that I supported the Blues, this was pretty magnanimous. It is true that Famia had actually paid for the ship. In the end, in the crucial matter of winning the captain's confidence, Famia's amphorae were what carried weight. By bargaining hard for the horses he had managed to leave enough Green funds over for a substantial number of amphorae.

Famia wanted to go to Sabratha because he thought horses were brought there from the interior oases by the desert tribes. He had emptied Cyrenaica, but was still buying. The Greens had always been profligate. And the more horses he bought, the more banker's orders he could cash, releasing more cash for wine.

The significant tribe from the interior was that of the Garamantes, those whose thrashing by the Roman commander Valerius Festus had already been discussed by Justinus and me when we thought they might have captured us. In view of their very recent defeat it was likely that they had ceased trading, at least temporarily. However, from the great oasis of Cydame caravans still wound their way to Sabratha bearing gold, carbuncles, ivory, cloth, leather, dye stuffs, marble, rare woods, and slaves, not to mention exotic animals. The town's commercial emblem was an elephant.

I was after men who traded in wild beasts, but elephants did not come into it, thank the gods.

"Famia," I had said back in Apollonia, speaking slowly and pleasantly, lest I offend or confuse the drunken bastard, "I need to go to Oea and I need to go to Lepcis. Either will do to start with, though we shall reach Lepcis first. Sabratha is the one place we can leave out."

"All right, Marcus," Famia had replied, smiling in that aggravating way all drunks do when they are about to forget everything you have said. As soon as my back was turned the slippery deviant must have begun palling up with the captain, a swine who turned out to be just as bad as Famia.

When I felt the jolt as we scraped up the rocks and sand at Sabratha, I emerged from below where I had been paralyzed with seasickness; I had to grip my hands to keep them from squeezing my brother-in-law's throat. Now I knew why the journey had seemed endless. It ought to have been over days before.

It was absolutely pointless trying to remonstrate. I had now realized Famia floated in a state of incurable inebriation, never totally sobering up. His daily intake propelled him into wilder moods or duller troughs, but he never let himself hit the real world. If I belted him into oblivion as I wanted to do, when we returned to Rome he would moan to my sister and then Maia would hate me.

I felt helpless. I had lost some of my natural supporters too. As Justinus had requested, we had left him behind at Berenice. When we put him off, everything between him and Claudia had still seemed set for tragedy. Then, when he had unloaded his meager luggage and bade farewell to the rest of us on the quayside, he had marched up to the young lady.

"You had better kiss me good-bye then," we had heard him say to her quietly. Claudia thought twice, then pecked him on the cheek, bouncing off again rapidly.

Army-trained for speedy reactions, Camillus Justinus seized the advantage and got one arm around her. "No, I meant properly--"

His steadiness pressurized her so Claudia had to do it. He made the kiss last a long time, holding her about as close as possible without actually committing an impropriety. He had the sense to hang on until she gave up resisting and burst into tears. Consoling her as she wept on his shoulder, Justinus signaled that he intended to keep her with him and for us to collect Claudia's belongings. Then he started talking to her in a low voice.

"Jupiter, I've seen what happens when Quintus has a chat with a girl who secretly thinks he's wonderful!"

Helena paused on the way to pack Claudia's luggage for her. She gave me a piercing look. On reflection, I could not remember if I had ever told Helena about her brother disappearing up the tower in the German forest with the prophetess who subsequently left him lovelorn. I saw him come down from the tower later, visibly altered--and it had been easy to guess why. "Perhaps he's apologizing," Helena suggested caustically.

Claudia, far from passive even when she was crying her heart out, interrupted Justinus with a long, fierce argument, the gist of which I could not catch. He answered, then she tried to hold off from him, striking aggravated blows on his chest with the palms of her hands until he was forced to step back by degrees almost to the edge of the harbor. She could not bring herself to shove him into the water, and they both knew it.

Justinus let Claudia rant at him until she fell silent. He asked a question. She nodded. Still balanced rather precariously on the edge of the quay, they put their arms around each other. I noticed his face was white, as if he knew he was condemning himself to trouble, but perhaps he thought the trouble he already knew about was better than any other sort.

I myself suppressed a grin, thinking about the fortune Justinus had just corralled. My nephew Gaius mimed being violently sick into the harbor at the soppy scene he had just witnessed. Helena went and sat by herself in the prow of the ship, stricken by seeing her younger brother adopt a life of his own.

The rest of us reboarded. We cast off. Justinus called out that they would try to catch us up before we left Lepcis.

I still thought they were doomed. But people had said that about Helena and me. It had given us a good reason to stick it out. Good omens let you down. Bad ones give you something to fight against.

"Sabratha seems a very attractive city," Helena tried to mollify me as I absorbed the mistake Famia had then landed on us. That was before she found out there was a Sanctuary of Tanit, causing her to take a tighter grip on both the baby and my nephew Gaius.

"I'm sure the rumors of child sacrifice are simply designed to give Tanit a notorious aura and increase her authority."

"Oh yes," scoffed Helena. Rumors of revolting religious rites can appall the most sensible girls.

"No doubt the reason for all those tiny sarcophagi is that those who revere the Punic gods also love little children dearly."

"And have the bad luck to lose a lot of them at a very similar age . . . What are we going to do, Marcus?"

Helena was losing her courage. Travelers always hit low moments. Enduring a long journey, only to find at the very moment you expect to arrive that you are actually two hundred miles away from your destination (and have to go backwards) can reduce the bravest soul to despair.

"Let's hope Scilla won't mind me turning up a week late." Scilla had insisted on making her own way to Lepcis Magna--an example of the wayward attitude that made me suspicious of her as a client. "We can either try to persuade Famia to sail back again--or leave him looking at horses' teeth, hope one of them bites him, and book another ship ourselves. While we're here let's look around like tourists," I offered. It was my responsibility to make available to my family the Empire's rich variety of cultural experience.

"Oh not another lousy foreign forum!" muttered Gaius. "And I can do without any more funny foreign temples, thanks a lot."

Like a decent paterfamilias I ignored the boy. His parents dealt with arguments by swiping him: I wished to set him an example of benign tolerance. Gaius had yet to be impressed by that, but I was a patient man.

Like most cities in the narrow hinterland of North Africa, Sabratha had a superb setting right on the waterfront, where there was a strong smell of fish. Houses, shops, and baths almost merged with the deep, deep blue ocean. The cheapest of them were built of unclad local stone, which was a reddish limestone of the most porous kind, readily pocketed with holes. The civic center also played to the sea views. The spacious, airy forum was not only foreign in tinge as Gaius feared, but its main temple--to Liber Pater, a Punic deity he definitely viewed askance--had partly tumbled down in a recent earthquake and was not yet rebuilt. We tried not to think about earthquakes. We had enough problems.

We prowled about like lost souls. At one end of the forum were the Curia, Capitolium, and a Temple of Serapis.

"Ooh look, Gaius--another funny foreign shrine." We climbed its base and sat there, all tired and dispirited.

Gaius amused himself making a rude noise. "Uncle Marcus, you're not going to be thwarted by that fat bastard Famia?"

"Of course not," I lied, wondering where I could buy a spicy meat rissole and whether in this new town it would give me any new kinds of bellyache. I spotted a stall, and fetched fishcakes for all of us. We ate them like disreputable tourists, an experience which left me covered with oil.

"When you eat you get more food on you than Nux," Helena commented. I wiped my mouth very carefully before I kissed her--a politeness which always reduced her to giggles. She leaned against me wearily. "I suppose you are just sitting here waiting for a scantily dressed female acrobat to come along."

"If it's one of my old Tripolitanian girlfriends she'll be a hundred and on crutches by now."

"That sounds like a good old Tripolitanian lie . . . There is one thing that you could do," Helena suggested.

"What--gaze around at this splendid, salt-tanged city with its jostling merchants and shippers and landowners, all totally disinterested in me or my problems, then cut my throat?"

Helena patted my knee. "Hanno comes from Sabratha. Since we are here, why not find out where he lives?"

"Hanno isn't part of my mission for the new client," I said.

So we all jumped up and made enquiries straightaway.