Bodies Politic Read online

  ‘Ah...that’s okay, Cass, if you don’t mind,’ I said quickly. ‘Not just now.’ Absolutely no way was I crossing that threshold, not if the kids were on a high: they were bad enough at the best of times, and from the sound of things I’d probably be torn apart before I got the length of the living room, even with Cass there to provide the supporting muscle. ‘It’s business, and pretty pressing. A commission. In fact, two commissions.’ There was a loud crash and another scream from beyond the door, followed by what sounded like a war-to-the-knife squabble between two blood-crazed maenads. I felt the sweat break out on my forehead, but Cass didn’t even blink. ‘For young Larcius Paullus.’

  ‘Polyxene’s boy?’ She bounced Sprog Number Seven in the crook of her arm and the gnome burped. ‘Two commissions? Marcus, that is wonderful! He’ll be absolutely delighted! He’s got a real talent.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’ There was another crash. Shit; time I was leaving. Past time. They’d be out here with us in a minute and it’d be Cannae all over again. ‘Uh...where can I find him?’

  ‘He works from home. One of the old houses beyond the seaside gate. I could send Tertia to show you, but you’d be better dropping in on Agron at the yard. It’s practically next door.’

  ‘Fine. Don’t disturb Tertia. I’ll just, ah, head on over there now.’

  She laughed. ‘Coward. Tell him dinner’s two hours after noon, or it will be today now you’re here. That’ll give you plenty of time to see Paullus and have a cup of wine together. But don’t be late, and come back sober or I’ll skin the both of you.’

  ‘Got you.’ I had: the inevitable presence of homicidal sprogs or not, one of Cass’s meals was not to be missed. She wasn’t kidding about not being late, either: turn up when the sun was an inch past the mark and you were toast. ‘Oh, by the way, you may as well have this now. It’ll only get broken.’ I handed her one of the two packages I’d brought carefully from Rome across the mare’s crupper, a pistachio and almond-cream pastry the size of a paving slab. If Cass has one weakness - and it shows in her sideways spread - it’s pastries. The other package was a Sarsina cheese. I hadn’t had time to scour the cheese-market for a fresh Lesuran or a Gabalican, but Meton had come up trumps, and it was absolutely top grade. Cheese is Agron’s thing. I’d give him that myself.

  I left her sorting out whatever domestic crisis had been going on behind her back, beat a hasty retreat to the mare and headed towards the centre of town.

  Ostia’s an easy place to find your way around in; at least, easy compared with Rome. It’s based around the old Republican fort, and although that’s long gone the streets are laid out on the army’s grid plan, parallel with the original ditches. The seaside gate’s to the south-west, and beyond it the town straggles out along the shoreline, mostly warehousing and boat-builders’ yards. Or what used to be the shoreline: the tidal changes that’ve been responsible for the silting up of the harbour are adding shallows and new land every year, and a lot of the builders’ yards’ve been left high and dry. Agron’s was one of these. He - or his father-in-law before him, rather - hadn’t handled the big stuff, just small coastal fishing boats, but even so the old man had needed to dredge a channel and keep it clear to get them to and from the stocks. Since the changeover, though, Agron hadn’t bothered. The cradles and pits had disappeared in favour of three or four large sheds. The place was certainly busy, with a dozen slaves working all out. Noisy, too, with sawing and hammering, but that sort of noise I could take.

  I tied the mare to a handy cart and went inside. ‘The boss around?’ I asked the nearest slave.

  ‘Corvinus! What the hell brings you here?’ The man himself, coming over and wiping his hands on a rag. A bit older, like the rest of us, greying now at the temples, but he still looked like he could bend iron bars without breaking sweat. Which he could.

  We shook.

  ‘Business,’ I said. ‘You got half an hour?’

  ‘Sure. More, if you want it.’ He raised his voice. ‘Decimus!’ He did a mime-show of pointing at me and drinking. One of the slaves raised his hand in salute and grinned. ‘We’ll go to Vetus’s place. He’s got a decent Privernan in.’

  ‘Maybe later. I was hoping you’d take me to your nephew Paullus.’

  ‘What, Polyxene’s Paullus? What do you want with him?’

  ‘Commission from Mother of a couple of portrait busts for Marilla and Clarus. And something for me. Not another bust, just an idea.’

  ‘No problem. And it’s in the same direction.’ He strode off towards the yard gates, and I followed. ‘So how are you? Busy with the wedding?’

  I laughed. ‘Yeah. You could say that. Oh, and by the way, in case I forget Cass says to tell you dinner today’s two hours after noon.’

  ‘Fine. That’ll give you plenty of time to get back to Rome. Unless you want to bunk down for the night in the living room, of course. We can manage that, easy.’

  ‘Ah...no. Thanks anyway, pal, but I’ll stick to the round trip.’

  He grinned. ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘And I brought you a cheese. Only Sarsinan, but it’s a good one.’ I handed the package over. ‘I had to prise it out of Meton with a crow-bar.’

  He stopped, unwrapped it and took a sniff. ‘Beautiful! We’ll have it with the Privernan. Vetus doesn’t know a good cheese from old socks.’ We carried on, back the way I’d come, towards the town proper. ‘So. A couple of portrait busts, eh? Real upmarket stuff. Paullus’ll be thrilled, and he could do with the work. He’s a paint-on-wood guy, really, that’s all people about here can afford, but he can handle a chisel with the best of them. Learned it from his great-uncle, and the old man really knew his marble. That’s Vetus’s, incidentally’ - he pointed at a neat little wineshop with a trellised vine, that I’d noticed on my way out - ‘and Polyxene’s place is just down this alley. Couldn’t be nearer. She lives alone now, apart from Paullus, since Larcius died a couple of years back.’

  Like Cass had said, it was one of the old houses; probably it’d been a fisherman’s cottage a hundred years or so back, when the coast was closer and Ostia hadn’t spread out this far. There was a lean-to beside it, where the original fisherman would’ve hung his nets to dry and stored his gear.

  ‘Hey, Polyxene!’ Agron shouted. ‘It’s me! Anyone around?’

  A tall, lanky kid came out of the lean-to, holding a paintbrush.

  ‘Hi, Uncle Agron,’ he said. ‘Mum’s gone to the market.’

  ‘No problem. It was you I wanted to see.’ Agron jerked his thumb at me. ‘My friend Marcus Corvinus here’s got a job for you. Two portrait busts.’

  ‘Two?’ The kid’s eyes lit up. ‘Wow! Great!’ Despite his Latin name he was pure Greek, with tight-curled black hair, an oval face and olive skin.

  ‘You did one for a friend of my stepfather’s a few months ago,’ I said. ‘He was impressed.’

  ‘That’d be Septimius Gallus,’ Paullus said. ‘Yeah, I was pleased with that myself. Luna marble.’ He was examining my face. ‘You want Luna as well, sir? Or something different? Black, maybe. Black’s more unusual.’

  ‘Luna’d be perfect. But they’re not for me.’ I explained, and quoted the price Mother had cleared with the terminally-flattened Archimenides. Paullus’s eyes widened, and his jaw dropped.

  ‘You’ve got it,’ he said simply. ‘Jupiter, have you got it! I’ll have to go over to Castrimoenium and make a few sketches, naturally. That be okay?’

  ‘Any time you like,’ I said. ‘We have a deal?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ We shook. Thrilled was right.

  Well, that part of it was done. ‘Actually, speaking of sketches,’ I said, ‘I’ve a job for you myself. Whether it’s possible I don’t know, but tell me what you think.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘There’s this guy I want to find. I don’t know his name, but I’ve met him and I could describe what he looks like. I thought maybe we could build up a sketch together.’

  He looked blank. Then he snappe
d his fingers. ‘Marcus Corvinus. You’re the purple-striper that got me to draw these men visiting a house in Rome. Years ago.’

  ‘That’s me,’ I said.

  ‘Corvinus, what is this?’ Agron was frowning.

  ‘Just a bit of a problem I’m having at the moment, pal,’ I said. ‘I thought Paullus here might be able to help.’ I looked at the kid. ‘Possible?’

  ‘We can try. Just let me get my stuff from inside. The light’s better out here.’

  And he disappeared into the lean-to.

  ‘You in trouble?’ Agron said quietly.

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Because if you are, and you need some heavy back-up, you know where to come.’

  I thought of the guy in the wineshop. Well, it was comforting to know, even if I did have Gaius’s reassurance. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll remember.’

  Paullus reappeared with a folding table, some sheets of paper and a charcoal stick. He set the table up.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘He was early forties, Asian Greek, maybe Syrian.’

  Paullus shook his head. ‘No. You’ll need to be more detailed than that. Start with the shape of his face. Long and narrow? Rounder, more moon-shaped? Square-cut?’

  ‘Right. Sorry.’ I closed my eyes for a moment and concentrated on my memory of Dion. ‘Long. But jowly, a fair amount of padding over the bones.’

  Paullus’s hand with the charcoal stick moved over the paper, leaving a thin outline. ‘Like this?’

  ‘Broader in the forehead. No, a bit less than that. Rounder in the chin.’ I watched as he changed the line. ‘Yeah, that’s about right. It’ll do, anyway.’

  ‘Eyes?’

  ‘Sunk in over full cheekbones. Piggy; I said, he was fat. Heavy eyelids. The left one drooped a bit. Thin eyebrows, well apart.’ The picture followed the words. Gods, the kid was good! His hand almost blurred, sketching the details in lightly as I gave them to him.

  ‘Hairline?’

  ‘High up. Receding. The guy was practically bald, and he was wearing a freedman’s cap. Just the occasional strand of hair coming out from underneath.’

  ‘Nose?’

  ‘Big. Fleshy. And there was a mole at the side. A big one, with hairs sprouting.’

  ‘Great! Which side?’

  ‘The left. Low down, in the crease.’

  Bit by bit, trial and error, we built up Dion’s face. Finally, half an hour later, the man himself stared at me out of the page.

  ‘Brilliant!’ I said. I meant it, too. The kid was a genius.

  ‘No problem. If you can wait a few minutes I’ll do you a proper clean sketch without the rubbings-out and the faulty lines.’

  ‘Can you do copies?’

  ‘Sure. How many do you want?’

  I did a quick calculation. ‘Five. No, better make it six.’

  ‘Give me an hour?’

  I glanced at Agron. ‘Vetus’s?’

  ‘Vetus’s it is,’ he said.

  ‘Great. Thanks, Paullus.’

  The kid smiled. ‘No bother. Thank you. What I get for your two busts’ll keep us for the next six months, easy. And I’ll enjoy doing them, too.’

  We headed for the wineshop.

  ‘And meanwhile, you close-mouthed bastard,’ Agron said as we went, ‘you can tell me what’s going on.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I paid Paullus three gold pieces for the copies, which I reckoned was a bargain on my side, plus a down-payment on the busts, then went back with Agron to Sprogs’ Castle for dinner. I was starving: I’d skipped breakfast in favour of an early start, and Agron had wolfed most of the cheese, which was fair enough since I’d accounted for most of the Privernan. Not a wine man, Agron, and it had nothing to do with Cass’s threat: I suspected that had been directed more at me. Still, I managed to roll in sober and respectable. Or reasonably sober and not disreputable.

  But there were no sprogs in evidence, barring Septima quietly asleep in her cradle, and I breathed a sigh of relief. That I’d been dreading.

  ‘I fed them early and sent them outside,’ Cass said as Agron kissed her and the sleeping gnome. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Corvinus. I know how much you like children.’

  I grinned. ‘Yeah.’ They were probably even now spreading terror, havoc and despair for blocks around, and call me selfish if you like but I didn’t mind. Ostia would survive it. Probably. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Fish soup and oyster dumplings.’ Hey, great! ‘Did you see Paullus?’

  ‘Yeah. All settled.’ I’d told Agron about the Macro problem, but we’d agreed it was no business of Cass’s. Mind you, she’d probably get most of the details after I’d gone anyway: the big Illyrian wasn’t good at keeping secrets from his wife, and besides I’d arranged to hire half a dozen kids from among his collateral family and their friends for the next stage in the plan, so word would get back to her eventually.

  ‘Sit down and I’ll bring it through,’ Cass said. ‘Agron, would you cut the bread, please?’

  Like I said, the flat wasn’t your typical tenement’s: there was a kitchen with a charcoal range, small, sure, but it was there, and a dining room with a big table and benches. The table was ready-laid with earthenware bowls and iron spoons, plus - I was glad to see - winecups.

  ‘Wine’s over there on the dresser, Marcus,’ Agron said as he divided up the poppy-seed loaf. ‘Help yourself. Just you, Cass and I’ll stick to water.’

  I poured, sipped - it was Spanish mass-market, but not bad; Cass must’ve got it for me special that morning - and sat down while she brought in the soup pot and ladled out soup and dumplings.

  ‘How’re the wedding preparations going?’ she said.

  ‘Painfully.’ I picked up my spoon. Cass’s fish soup and dumplings were legendary. Mind you, I’d yet to have anything she cooked that wouldn’t’ve got even our Meton’s grudging approval. ‘We’ve got a priest who might just turn up in his underwear, Marilla wants to invite the dog, the sheep and the donkey, and Perilla’s tearing Rome apart for bridesmaids’ dress material. Otherwise everything’s fine.’

  Agron laughed, sat down and passed me a piece of the bread. ‘Perilla can’t find dress material in Rome?’

  ‘Not to suit.’ I took a spoonful of soup. Delicious. ‘Don’t ask, pal, just don’t ask. I don’t know why not either.’

  ‘Oh, Marcus!’ Cass said.

  ‘Tell her to try Alexandria.’ Agron bit into a dumpling, still chuckling.

  I set down my spoon. ‘Now don’t you start! And if you see Perilla in the near future don’t you even mention the place. I’m serious.’

  ‘Come on, boy! Joke!’

  ‘You’ve never had a wife who was shopping for a wedding. They’re not logical. Me, I think something snaps in the brain.’

  ‘Eat your soup and shut up, Corvinus,’ Cass said.

  ‘Mind you,’ Agron chewed on the dumpling, ‘you get stuff there from the east that never gets this far. It makes sense. Second biggest city in the empire, huge sophisticated market and half of it’s women. I mean, why bother to take the risk of shipping the goods any further when you can unload it at a decent profit there?’

  ‘You shut up too, please, dear.’

  Agron grinned. ‘Yes, love.’

  We ate in silence. Not that it was a hardship. The dumplings were beautiful.

  ‘Besides,’ Cass said after a bit, ‘Alexandria isn’t a place to visit at present.’

  I looked up from my bowl. ‘You heard something from Mika?’ Mika was another of Cass’s huge family of siblings, although she’d reversed the trend, married another Alexandrian Greek, and moved back to the old country. Her husband ran a barge.

  ‘We had a letter just a few days ago,’ Agron said. ‘Mika’s getting worried.’

  ‘About what?’ I scooped up a dumpling.

  ‘What else? Trouble again between us and the damn Jews.’

  Uh-oh. I held the dumpling poised. That had been Cass. I
noticed the ‘us’. And the ‘damn’.

  We’d hit serious cultural shoals here, or at least as close to them as the normally easy-going Cass - easy-going in that sense, anyway - ever went. To any reasonable person in the empire - certainly to any Roman - the Jews’re a joke: they believe in and worship only one monomaniacally-bad-tempered god, they have dietary rules that make no practical sense, and they flatly refuse to burn incense to the Divine Augustus and the Spirit of Rome, which to any non-Jew is just plain bad manners. Still, as far as Rome herself’s concerned if they choose to be stiff-necked, uncivilised, antisocial bastards then that’s their business; so long as they don’t get political and mess with the pax romana they can do whatever the hell they like, and we’ll defend their right to do it against anyone who wants to object. Just like we would for the other guys, if the situation was reversed. That’s what the pax romana means: you’ve the right to live as you like, believe what you want, so long as you keep the peace and don’t meddle with the social and political status quo. Do that - even think of doing it - and Rome’ll be on top of you like Archimenides’s marble block, because the downside of all this is that you play the game by her rules or not at all.

  Which was just the problem in Alexandria. Or potentially at least. And it had been simmering on for years. Greeks and Jews are cat and dog; put them together en masse in the one city and you’ve got a recipe for trouble that’s inevitable. Two out of five of Alexandria’s population - and we’re talking six hundred thousand here, more than half the size of Rome - are Jews; and that’s a sizeable minority. Trouble is, with the exception of a handful of individuals from the oldest and richest families, they aren’t citizens. Only the Greeks are. And the Jews don’t like it. And the Greeks don’t like the fact that the Jews don’t like it.

  The other important factor is that Rome rules Alexandria, not the Greeks who live there. We have done since Augustus beat Cleopatra and Antony at Actium sixty years back, and what we say goes, nem. con. The Greeks don’t like that, either. And sixty years, in a Greek city whose history goes back almost three hundred to Alexander himself, is nothing.