Cast Not the Day (11 page)

But elsewhere, away from the sycophancy and adulation, people quietly said the old gods had heeded the prayers of the people. They reminded one another that the stormy winter sea had stayed calm while Constans crossed with his bulky troop-carriers, and the sun shone during Gratian’s campaign.

The Christians condemned such talk, calling it superstition and devilry. They had a new champion – the emperor himself – who was one of them. And yet, for all the emperor’s show of public piety, it was whispered (I heard it from Ambitus) that when it came to deciding upon war or peace, or considering the propitious time for a sea-crossing, it was the astrologers and diviners he turned to, not the Christian priests. These ancient seers would study the motions of the planets, and inspect the dissected livers of beasts, and see in them the answers that he sought.

Gratian soon finished his campaign, then Constans toured the province to receive the praise of the grateful citizens. The coastal fort at Richborough was repaired, and he ordered new ones to be built, in an impregnable line all along the eastern coast known as the Saxon Shore. In future the Saxons would have to take the forts before they could move inland; and the forts, it was said, could not be taken.

The Council commissioned a statue of Constans to stand in London’s forum, upon a plinth of polished red granite, in a place of honour outside the basilica, with an inscription proclaiming that he had saved the province. I should not mention this statue – they are common enough, after all – except that it never arrived. It was carved in Gaul, from finest Carrara marble. But the vessel appointed to ship it to Britain was caught in a storm and sank, a detail – or an omen – his advisers prudently kept from the superstitious emperor.

Meanwhile, at the home of Balbus, there was prosperity: he had negotiated a supply contract for the army. Lucretia bought herself a new dress – a cerise gossamer robe embroidered with bees and flowers – and invited her friends to a banquet.

One day during this time, returning with Ambitus from my uncle’s shop in the forum, we caught sight of the bishop, passing grandly along the far colonnade with his train of pale-faced acolytes. Lately he was everywhere, publicly calling himself a friend of the emperor.

‘See there,’ said Ambitus, following him with his eyes, ‘just like a fat goose with her chicks . . . you know where
he
was during the siege, don’t you?’

‘In hiding,’ I replied. ‘Everyone knows it.’

‘That’s not what he says now. He says he was praying night and day for the salvation of the city, and it is thanks to him and his god that the Saxons are gone.’

I laughed. ‘And who believes
that
?’

‘Constans, for one. Have you been to that side of town lately? He’s pulling down what’s left of the temple of Diana. You’d better take a last look; it’ll be gone before month’s end.’

‘So he’s got his cathedral at last.’

‘Well, so far he’s got a wasteland and a few broken columns; but all the Christians are crowing about it. I’m surprised your cousin didn’t tell you . . . isn’t that him there, behind the bishop?’

I glanced round. I had not noticed Albinus before, for he was dressed in coarse homespun, like a pauper, and his hood was pulled up. But I should have known his gangling walk anywhere.

We watched him pass along the colonnade, distaste showing on both our faces. Lately Albinus had become even harder to stomach than usual. While the Saxons had sat outside the walls, fear had cowed him. Now all his old traits had returned, made worse by his promotion in the bishop’s staff.

Ambitus turned to me. With sudden vehemence he cried, ‘I tell you, Drusus, I have had enough of this place! I want to find somewhere without Saxons, and there I shall become a rich man.’

I laughed. He was always so sure. With a grin I said, ‘Well, the Saxons are gone for good, so Balbus says.’

At this he threw up his eyes. ‘Oh, Balbus! He always thinks endless summer has come – until the next winter takes him by surprise. But the barbarians are like wolves around the camp fire, waiting in the shadows till the flame burns weak, and the guard nods off. Will he never see it?’

In late January the fine weather that had lasted all winter finally came to an end. The wind swung round to the north-east, and brought with it a biting cold.

With the destruction wrought by the Saxons, and the requisitions of Constans’s army, the supply of charcoal became scarce, for there is little woodland around the city. Balbus was better supplied than most; but even we went short, and what there was my aunt Lucretia kept for the house furnace, and the little embossed brazier in her room, which she always kept as warm as summer. Sericus caught a chill; a small matter, he said, and nothing to fuss over.

During February it went to his chest. By the time the first flower buds appeared on the damson tree outside my window, and the crocuses showed like a snowfall in the fields, he had taken to his bed.

I was asleep when he died. Claritas the housemaid shook me awake and led me by lamplight to where he lay, quiet at last. A learned man, he had spent his last years among people who despised him, and treated him like a common slave.

He was sixty-four.

With Sericus’s death my final link with home was broken. A terrible emptiness came over me. When I was not working, I idled away my time watching the game players under the arches by the theatre, or wandering among the market stalls and expensive shops in the forum colonnade. I went to the hippodrome to watch the chariot races, or walked out alone beyond the city walls.

I was like a man who has lost his path, but keeps on walking. The drunks, the gamblers, the street pedlars and old retired courtesans who hung about the taverns by the theatre started to know my face, and when I came they greeted me as one of their own. They were hard folk who found a living where they could, who could fall no further, except into death, if that was worse. They were a comfort to me.

At home I grew closed and taciturn, and for the first time there was justice in Lucretia’s words when she called me sullen and aggressive. I fell into street-fights. I came home scratched and bruised. Yet there was a yearning in my soul, for what I could not tell.

What preserved me – though I did not see it at the time – were the habits I had been bred to, which little by little had become part of my nature. I rose at cocklight still, and I exercised my body. I pored over Sericus’s old books; I clung to life.

Constans sailed away in triumph, conferring the title of count upon Gratian and leaving him behind to order the province.

With peace restored, people dug up the special places in their cellars, or lifted secret flagstones beneath the kitchen pots, or opened bricked-up niches in their walls, and took out the caskets and urns where they had hidden their savings. The smart shops in the forum grew busy; tools sounded from the workshops; the taverns and wineshops filled, and the whores around the dock bought themselves bright dresses for the summer.

One day Ambitus, emerging from an interview with Balbus, drew me aside and said with a grin, ‘Wish me well. I am away, at last.’

Gratian, he explained, had engaged my uncle to send one of his trading ships to Carthage, to collect the personal effects he had left at his house there. Ambitus was being sent as agent, to supervise this lucrative commission.

I congratulated him. It was what he had worked for.

When, a few days later, I arrived at the dock to see him off, I saw a shrunken old woman clutching at his hand. He pulled away embarrassed; but in a voice invested with more tenderness than I had ever heard from him he said, ‘Drusus, this is my mother.’

I greeted her civilly. She was shy and soft-spoken, full of emotion at the departure of her son, and reluctant to look at me, lest I see the moisture in her eyes. She was wearing a pretty new dress, with a necklace of coloured glass. The clothes did not suit her, being made for a younger figure; but I could tell she delighted in them.

Soon the pilot shouted orders to cast off. I stood with her on the quayside, waving to Ambitus.

I missed him when he was gone, though I scarcely admitted it, having persuaded myself I had no need of friends. So I busied myself with my own desultory affairs, and revelled in my solitude.

All about the city were unknown faces: soldiers from the new garrison; pompous imperial clerks in their coloured liveries; architects and surveyors from Italy and southern Gaul; officials of the civil service; staff of Count Gratian; and the slaves and retinue of all of these.

Gangs of the city poor were put to work clearing the moss and rampant ivy from the neglected walls; masons repointed the crumbling mortar; and Gratian added a new wing to the long-empty governor’s palace, where he had taken up residence.

One early morning, a few weeks after Ambitus had sailed, I made my way up to the great precinct in front of the temple of Diana, and watched with a few others – Christians, judging from their cheers – as the last of the mighty granite columns were torn down. The cheers were ugly; the columns had been built to last, and cost the demolishers some effort. Somehow, I was glad of that.

Already, all about the precinct, work had begun on the foundations of the bishop’s new cathedral. It would stand, so the triumphant Christians put about, for a thousand years.

Though she disapproved of the baths and the gymnasium, calling them sinful, Lucretia had allowed me to visit them so long as I took Sericus as chaperon. Now that he was dead I went alone, full of anger, defying her to forbid me.

We used to go to the fashionable bath-complex behind the forum, with its high vaulted ceilings and inlaid floors and long ornamental walkways. It was close to home, and considered respectable.

But, during my solitary wanderings, I had discovered another place, in the old part of the city, in the poor neighbourhood between the bishop’s residence and the fort, small and run-down, set back from the street under a squat red-painted porch.

It was a place that suited my grim mood. The only patrons were old men who had gone there since they were young, when the neighbourhood had been better. Now they went through habit, and to be with their friends. They sat in twos and threes in the old portico behind, or in the warm room where the heat was gentle, taking no notice of me.

As everyone knows, a youth at the baths can be the object of attention, much of it unwelcome; but here I could exercise in the quiet sand-court beneath the plane trees, undisturbed by anyone.

Until, that is, one afternoon in late spring.

I had arrived at my usual time. I paid the old attendant who sat in his cubby-hole in the vestibule. I stripped, and made my way barefoot over the tiles through to the sand-court at the back.

The old men were in their usual corner under the portico, their stools pulled up, bending over a game of dice. I greeted them, and they muttered back. Then, from behind, I heard the sound of cries and laughter.

I turned to look, and saw what I had come to regard as my private domain occupied by a group of young men, stripped down for exercise, wrestling and tumbling one another, darting and running between the trees of the surrounding gardens.

I glanced back at the old men.

‘From the fort,’ said one, raising his eyes with a look that said, ‘Something else to disturb our peace.’

Frowning I took up my hand-weights and went off to a sandy corner beside the wall, and soon, going through my movements, I had ceased to think of the strangers. It was a day of sun and passing showers. As I was finishing the rain came on. I was just about to go inside and clean off when I sensed movement behind me, and caught the rank smell of sweat in my nostrils. I swung round, and found myself staring into a gap-toothed ugly, grinning face. He must have crept up at me through the gardens.

The man turned to his friends with a harsh laugh, amused that he had startled me. He was thickset, like a wrestler. His chest and legs were shaggy with black sand-caked hair.

I glanced to the portico, but the dice-players had gone. Looking at him I said slowly, ‘You’re standing in my light.’

At this the grin dropped from his face. He took a deliberate step forward, blocking me.

‘Is that better?’ His Latin had the broad accent of Spain.

I ought to have left then. I was no weakling, but I was no match for such a brute. He was broad as an ox. His arms and thighs were knit with great coils of ugly muscle.

But my anger had risen. And so, instead, I locked my eyes on his and said, ‘Were you born stupid, my friend, or did the wet-nurse drop you on your head?’

I do not know where I got this from; I daresay I had picked it up from the drunks around the theatre. Somewhere behind I heard his friends slapping their thighs and guffawing. But the Spaniard did not laugh. He flinched as if he had been struck. His black eyes bulged and he jutted his jaw into my face. ‘Hey, pretty boy, didn’t your mother warn you not to come alone to places like this?’

‘Who said I’m alone?’ I answered. It was a cheap trick, but maybe he would believe me. I was starting to realize – too late – what I was getting into.

Up above, a sudden breeze shook the branches, scattering drops of cold water. My sweat was drying on me and I shivered. I thought: ‘Well Drusus, you have brought this on yourself, will you run now like a coward, or will you take a beating?’ Yet even as I thought, already I knew the answer, and there was a kind of rage and self-destructiveness in it.