Ellis Peters - George Felse 12 - City Of Gold and Shadows (4 page)

The boy gave an amused flick of his head, swung round unhurriedly—yet not too slowly, either—and sauntered away with a laugh, his admirers tittering after him. Distant across the grass, the young teacher, with opportunist alacrity, chose that moment to call: ‘That’s better, Boden! Come on, now, quickly, you’re holding up the whole party.’

‘The secret of success with performing fleas,’ said Charlotte’s self-constituted guide startlingly, diverted even from his Roman passion, ‘is to synchronise your orders with their hops. Our unfortunate young friend seems to know the principle, whether he can make it work or not.’

The gardener stood a moment to make sure that his antagonist was really retiring, then turned back to complete his work. His eye met Charlotte’s, and his face flashed into a sudden brief, almost reluctant smile. ‘Flipping kids!’ he said in a broad, deep country voice, with a hint of the singing eloquence of Wales.

‘They give you much trouble normally?’ asked the young man.

‘What you’d expect. Not that much,’ he allowed tolerantly. ‘But that one’s a case.’

‘You know him?’ the young man asked sympathetically.

‘Never seen him before. I know his sort, though, on sight.’

‘Oh, I don’t know… he’s just flexing his muscles.’ He looked over his shoulder, to where the youthful shepherd was fretfully hustling his flock from the forum into the skeleton entrance of the baths. ‘He’s got a teacher bossing him around who’s about four years older than he is, if that, and a lot less self-confident, but holding all the aces. Not that he plays them all that well,’ he admitted, thoughtfully watching the harried youngster trying to be as tall as his tallest and most formidable charge. ‘And of course,’ he said aside to Charlotte, with a devastating smile, ‘having a girl like you around doesn’t make their problem any easier for either of them.’

‘I could go away,’ Charlotte offered, between offence and gratification.

‘Don’t do that!’ he said hastily. ‘Each of them would blame the other. And you haven’t seen half what’s here to be seen yet.’ He turned back to the gardener. ‘When did this slip happen?’

‘This morning. Water’s been right up over the path two days or more, I reckon it’s loosened part o’ the foundations under here.’ He stood at the edge of the slope, looking down the line of his cordon and into the turgid water. ‘Who’d get the blame, I ask you, if some young big-head like him got larking about in that lot, and the whole thing caved in and buried him alive? I don’t reckon they’d allow as a rope and three notices was enough. It’d be me for it, me and Mr Paviour and his lordship—ah, and in that order! But they expect us to keep the place open for ’em. We got stated hours, nobody lets us off because the Comer floods.’

His deep, warm western voice had risen into plangent eloquence, indignant and rapt. And Charlotte was suddenly aware of him as a person, and by no means an unintelligent person, either; but above all a vital presence, to be ignored only at the general peril. He was built rather heavily even for his height, a monumental creature admirably suited to these classic and heroic surroundings; and his face was a mask of antique beauty, but crudely cut out of a local stone. She could see him as a prototype for the border entrepreneur trapped here in the decline and fall of this precarious city, the market-stallholder, the baths attendant, the potter, the vegetable grower, any one of the native opportunists who had rallied to serve and exploit this hothouse community of time-expired settlers and pay-happy leave-men. He had a forehead and nose any Greek might have acknowledged with pride, and long, grey-blue eyes like slivers of self-illuminating stone, somewhere between lapis-lazuli and granite. His fairness inclined ever so slightly towards the Celtic red of parts of Wales, an alien colouring in both countries. He had a full, passionate, childlike mouth, generously shaped but brutally finished; and his cleanshaven cheeks and jaw were powerful and fleshless, pure, massive bone under the fine, fair skin. It was easy to see that his roots went down fathoms deep in this soil, and transplanting would have destroyed everything in him that was of quality. There was nowhere else he belonged.

Charlotte said, on an impulse she only partially understood: ‘Don’t worry about him. In an hour they’ll be gone.’ And just as impulsively she turned to check on the movements of that incalculable swarm of half-grown children who were causing him this natural anxiety. The boys and their uneasy pastor were moving tidily enough into the first green enclosure which must be the frigidarium of the baths, emerging in little, bulbous groups from between the broken walls of the entrance. She saw the stragglers gather, none too enthusiastically, but not unwillingly, either, and waited for the last-comers. Something was missing there. It took her a few minutes to realise what it was. The teacher, selfconsciously gathering his chicks about him, was now the tallest person in sight. Where had the odious senior, Boden, gone, somewhere among those broken, enfolding walls? And how had he shed his train? The numbers there looked more or less complete. He was a natural stray, of course. He needed the minimum of cover to drop out of sight, whenever it suited him. But at least he was well away from here. No doubt something else had diverted his attention, and afforded him another cue to spread confusion everywhere around him.

‘There’s always closing-time,’ said the gardener-handyman philosophically. He lifted one narrowed glance of blue-grey eyes, slanting from Charlotte to her escort and sharing a fleeting smile between them as recognised allies. He was gone, withdrawing rather like a mountain on the move, downriver where the water most encroached. He walked like a mountain should walk, too, striding without upheaval, drawing his roots with him.

‘Come down to the path,’ said the enthusiast, abruptly returning to his passion as soon as the distractions withdrew, ‘and I’ll show you something. Round this way it’s not so steep. Here, let me go first.’ He took possession of her hand with almost too much confidence, drawing her with him down the slippery slope of wet grass towards the waterside. Her smooth-soled court shoes glissaded in the glazed turf, and he stood solidly, large feet planted, and let her slide bodily against him. He looked willowy enough, but he felt like a rock. They blinked at each other for a moment at close quarters, wide-eyed and brow to brow.

‘I ought to have introduced myself,’ said the young man, as though prompted by this accidental intimacy, and gave her a dazzled smile. ‘My name’s Hambro—Augustus, of all the dirty tricks. My friends call me Gus.’

‘I suspect,’ she said, shifting a little to recover firmer standing, ‘that should be Professor Hambro? And F.S.A. after it? At least!’ But she did not respond with her own name. She was not yet ready to commit herself so far. And after all, this could be only a very passing encounter.

‘Just an amateur,’ he said modestly, evading questioning as adroitly as she. ‘Hold tight… the gravel breaks through here, there’s a better grip. Now, look what the river did to one bit of the baths.’

They stood on the landward edge of the riverside path, very close to the lipping water. Before them the bevelled slope, fifteen feet high, cut off from them the whole upper expanse of Aurae Phiala, with all its flower-beds and stone walls; and all its visitors had vanished with it. They were alone with the silently hurtling river and the great, gross wound it had made in this bank, curls of dark-red soil peeled back and rolling downhill, and a tangle of uprooted broom bushes. At a level slightly higher than their heads, and several yards within the cordon, this raw soil fell away from a dark hole like the mouth of a deep, narrow cave, large enough, perhaps, to admit a small child. The top of it was arched, and looked like brickwork, the pale amber brick of Aurae Phiala. Bushes sagged loosely beneath it; and the masonry at the crown of the arch showed paler than on either curve, as though it had been exposed to the air longer, perhaps concealed by the sheltering broom.

‘You know,’ said Gus, as proudly as if he had discovered it himself, ‘what that is? It’s the extreme corner of what must be one hell of a huge hypocaust.’

‘Really?’ she said cautiously, still not quite convinced that he was not shooting a shameless line in exploitation of her supposed ignorance. ‘What’s a hypocaust?’

‘It’s the system of brick flues that runs under the entire floor of the caldarium—the hot room of the baths—to circulate the hot air from the furnace. That’s how they heated the place. Narrow passages like that one, built in a network right from here to about where the school party was standing a few minutes ago. They’d just come in, as it were, from the street, through the palaestra, the games courts and exercise ground, and into the cold room. The chaps who wanted the cold plunge would undress and leave their things in lockers there, and there were two small cold basins to swim in—two here, anyhow—one on either side. The sybarites who wanted the hot water bath or the hot air bath would pass through into the slightly heated room one stage farther in, and undress there, then go on in to whichever they fancied. The hypocaust ran under both. If you were fond of hot water, you wallowed in a sunken basin. If you favoured sweating it out, you sat around on tiered benches and chatted with your friends until you started dissolving into steam, and then got yourself scraped down by a slave with a sort of sickle thing called a strigil, and massaged, and oiled and perfumed, or if you were a real fanatic you probably went straight from the hot room to take a cold plunge, like sauna addicts rolling in the snow. And then you were considered in a fit state to go and eat your dinner.’

‘By then,’ she said demurely, ‘I should think you’d want it.’

He eyed her with a suspicious but quite unabashed smile. ‘You know all this, don’t you? You’ve been reading this place up.’

‘I could hardly read up this bit, could I? It only came to light today.’ She strained her eyes into the broken circle of darkness, and a breath of ancient tension and fear seemed to issue chillingly from the hole the river had torn in history. ‘But they’re quite big, those flues, if that’s their width. A man could creep through them.’

‘They had to be cleaned periodically. These aren’t unusual. But the size of the whole complex is, if I’m right about this.’

She let him help her back up the slope, round the other side of the danger area, and demonstrate by the skeletal walls where the various rooms of the baths lay, and their impressive extent.

She had no idea why she suddenly looked back, as they set off across the level turf that stretched above that mysterious underworld of brick-built labyrinths. The newness of the scar, the crudity of the glimpse it afforded into long-past prosperities and distresses, the very fact that no one, since this city was abandoned overnight, had threaded the maze below—a matter of fifteen centuries or more—drew her imagination almost against her will, and she turned her head in involuntary salute and promise, knowing she would come back again and again. Thus she saw, with surprise and disquiet, the young, dark head cautiously hoisted out of cover to peer after them. How could he be there? And why should he want to? The incalculable Boden had somehow worked his way round once again into forbidden territory, had been lurking somewhere in the bushes, waiting for them to leave. The twentieth century, inquisitive, irreverent, quite without feeling for the past, homed in upon this ambiguous danger-zone with its life in its hand.

She clutched at her companion’s arm, halting him in mid-spate and bringing his head round in respectful enquiry.

‘That boy! He’s there again—but inside the rope now! Why do they
have
to go where it says: Danger?’

Gus Hambro wheeled about with unexpectedly authoritative aplomb, just in time to see the well-groomed young head duck out of sight. He dropped Charlotte’s hand, took three large strides back towards the crest, and launched a bellow of disapproval at least ten times as effective as the hapless teacher’s appeals:

‘Get out of that! Yes,
you
! Want me to come and fetch you?
And stay out
!’

He noted the rapid, undignified scramble by which the culprit extricated himself from the ropes on the river path, followed by ominous little trickles of loose earth; and the exaggerated dignity with which he compensated as soon as he was clear, his slender back turned upon the voice that blasted him out of danger, his crest self-consciously reared in affected disregard of sounds which could not possibly be directed at him.

‘Those notices,’ announced Gus clearly to the general air, but not so loudly as to reach unauthorised ears, ‘mean exactly what they say. Anybody we have to dig out of there we’re going to skin alive afterwards. So watch it!’

It was at that point that Charlotte began seriously to like her guide, and to respect his judgement. ‘That’s it,’ he said, tolerantly watching the Boden boy’s swaggering retreat towards the curator’s house. ‘He’ll lay off now. His own shower weren’t around to hear that, he’ll be glad to get back to where he rates as a hero.’

She was not quite so sure, for some reason, but she didn’t say so. The tall, straight young back that sauntered away down-river, to come about in a wide circuit via the fence of the curator’s garden, and the box hedge that continued its line, maintained too secure an assurance, and too secret a satisfaction of its own, in spite of the dexterity with which it had removed itself from censure. This Boden observed other people’s taboos just so far as was necessary, but he went his own way, sure that no values were valid but his own. Still, he removed himself, if only as a gesture. That was something.

‘You did that very nicely,’ she said, surprising herself.

‘I try my best,’ he said, unsurprised. ‘After all, I’ve been sixteen myself. I know it’s some time ago, but I do remember, vaguely. And I’m not sure it isn’t all your fault.’

She felt sure by then that it was not; she was completely irrelevant. But she did not say so. She was beginning to think that this Gus Hambro was a good deal more ingenuous than he supposed; but if so, it was an engaging disability in him.

‘I was going to show you the laconicum,’ he said, and he turned and snuffed like a hound across the green, open bowl, and set out on a selected trail, nose to scent, heading obliquely for the complex of standing walls where several rooms of the ancient baths converged. The amber brickwork and rosy layers of tile soared here into the complicated pattern of masonry against the pale azure sky.