The Silver Branch [book II] (13 page)

She had both hands to her enormous bosom, and she was wheezing half under her breath as she came. ‘Is it—is it yourself then, my Flavius, my dearie?’

Flavius said softly, ‘Don’t tell me anyone else has ever called you in just that way, Volumnia.’

‘Nay—I knew it must be you the moment I heard it. Many’s the time you’ve called to me like that, and you out when you should have been in your bed, and wishful to be let in quiet like. But oh, my honey, what are you doing here behind the wood-stack when we thought you was on the Wall? And you so ragged, and so lean as any wolf in a famine winter—and this other with you—and—’

‘Volumnia dear,’ Flavius cut her short, ‘we want to speak with Aunt Honoria; can you get her for us? And Volumnia, we don’t want anyone else to know.’

Volumnia sat down on a pile of logs and clasped her bosom as though it was trying to escape. ‘Oh my dear, is it as bad as that?’

Flavius grinned at her. ‘It isn’t bad in the way you mean, at all. We haven’t been stealing apples. But we do need to speak with my aunt—can you contrive it?’

‘Why, as to the Lady Honoria, that’s easily done. Do you go down to the arbour and wait there till I send her to you. But my dearie dear what
is
all this? Can’t you tell your own Volumnia as used to bake you pastry-men, and saved you many and many a smacking when you was little?’

‘Not now,’ Flavius said. ‘There isn’t time. If you bide much longer round here we shall have one of the others coming to see that you haven’t been carried off by the Sea Wolves. Aunt Honoria will tell you, I don’t doubt. And Volumnia’—he laughed, and slid an arm round where her waist would have been if she had had one, and gave her a kiss—‘that is for the pastry-men, and all those smackings that you saved me.’

‘Get along with you,’ wheezed Volumnia. She surged to her feet and stood an instant looking down at him and pulling her veil about her head. ‘You’re a bad boy, and you always were!’ she said, ‘and the gods alone know what you are up to this time. But I’ll send My Lady down to the arbour to you.’

Justin, who had stood silent against the brushwood pile throughout, watched her waddle away, and heard her voice upraised distressfully from the house a few moments later. ‘Something did ought to be done about those rats! There was one round by the woodpile just now; I heard it scuffling, and when I went to look, there it was—a big grey one, and sat up and stared at me so bold as a wolf—with all its teeth and whiskers—’

‘We had one of that sort,’ he said softly. ‘My mother’s old nurse. She was the best thing in my childhood, but she’s d-dead now.’

A little later, working their way down through the dark tangle of privet and juniper that divided the garden from its neighbour, they had reached the arbour and settled themselves again to wait, seated very coldly on the grey marble bench within.

But they had not long to wait before they heard someone coming, and Flavius, peering through the screening ivy, said softly, ‘It is her.’

Justin, doing the same, saw a woman muffled close in a mantle so deeply and brilliantly crimson that its colour seemed to warm the whole grey morning, coming across the grass from the house.

She came slowly, turning aside to look at this and that, as though she had no particular aim, only a stroll in the garden. And then she was round the tangle of bushes, shielded from sight of the house, and they rose to their feet as she appeared in the opening of the arbour.

A thin old woman with a proud beak of a nose and very bright eyes, brown and wrinkled as a walnut and painted like a dancing-girl—save that no dancing-girl would have put the paint on so badly. Yet even with the stibium smeared along her eyelids, and a valiant slash of mouth-paint sliding up toward one ear, she seemed to him more worth looking at than any other woman he had ever met, because her face was so much more alive.

She was looking from Flavius to him and back again, with her thin brows raised a little. ‘I greet you, Great-Nephew Flavius.—And this? who is this with you?’ Her voice was husky, but clear-cut as a gem, and there was no surprise in it. Justin thought suddenly that she would never waste time in being surprised, whatever the emergency.

‘Aunt Honoria, I salute you,’ Flavius said. ‘I think he’s another great-nephew of yours—Justin. Tiberius Lucius Justinianus. I told you about him when I wrote you from Rutupiae.’

‘Ah yes, I know.’ Great-Aunt Honoria turned to Justin, holding out a hand that felt dry and light in his when he took and bent over it. ‘Yes, you have good manners, I am glad to see. I should intensely dislike to have an ill-mannered great-nephew.’ She looked at him appraisingly. ‘You must be Flavia’s grandson. She married an extremely plain man, I remember.’

It was so obvious that she meant, though she did not say, ‘That accounts for it,’ that Justin felt himself reddening to the tips of his unfortunate ears. ‘Yes, I—I am afraid she d-did,’ he said ruefully, and became aware of the understanding and the glint of laughter in his great-aunt’s eyes.

‘Yes, that of course was very rude of me,’ said Aunt Honoria. ‘It’s I who should be blushing, not you.’ She turned back to Flavius, saying abruptly, ‘Now what is it that brings you here when we all thought you were on the Wall?’

Flavius hesitated; Justin saw him hesitate, wondering just how much to tell her. Then, very briefly, he told her the whole story.

Half way through it Aunt Honoria seated herself composedly on the grey marble bench, setting down beside her something folded in a napkin that she had been carrying under her mantle; otherwise she made neither sound nor movement from beginning to end. When it was finished, she gave a small decisive nod. ‘So. I wondered whether it had to do with this most sudden change of Emperors. It is an ill story, all of it a very ill story … And now you would make your way overseas to join the Caesar Constantius.’

‘There’ll be a good few following that road in the next few months, I’m thinking,’ Flavius said.

‘So I suppose. These are evil days, and it is in my mind that they will grow more evil.’ She looked up at him swiftly. ‘And to join the Caesar Constantius you will need money, and so you come to me.’

Flavius grinned. ‘We do need money. Also—once we get across the seas we may be gone a long time, therefore I come to take my leave, Aunt Honoria.’

Her face flashed up in a smile. ‘I am honoured, my dear Flavius. We will deal with the money question first. Now see—it was in my mind, when Volumnia came to me a while since, that if you were in trouble you would need money; but I have not much ready money in the house.
So
—’ She laid a small silken purse on top of the napkin-covered bundle, ‘I bring you what I can for your immediate needs, and also, I have dressed for the occasion.’

As she spoke she unclasped first one and then the other of a pair of bracelets from her thin brown wrists, and held them out to Flavius; narrow golden bracelets set with opals in which the fires came and went, rose and green and peacock blue in the wintry light.

Flavius took them into his own hands, and stood looking down at her. ‘Aunt Honoria, you’re wonderful,’ he said. ‘We’ll give you another pair one day.’

‘No,’ said Aunt Honoria. ‘They are not a loan, they are a gift.’ She rose to her feet and stood looking at them. ‘If I were a man, and a young man, I should be taking your road. As it is, my trinkets must serve instead.’

Flavius made her a little unconscious bow. ‘Thank you for your gift then, Aunt Honoria.’

Aunt Honoria made a swift gesture with her hands, as though to dismiss the whole thing. ‘Now—Volumnia is heart-stricken that we cannot bring you in and feast you; but short of that we have done what we can.’ She touched the bundle in the napkin. ‘Take it with you and eat on the road.’

‘We will,’ Flavius said. ‘We will indeed; for we’re both of us as empty as wine-skins after Saturnalia.’

‘So. I think that is all that needs to be said; and now you must go. And in these ill and uncertain days, who shall say when you will come back—though indeed I believe with you that the Caesar Constantius will come one day. And so—the gods be with you, my nephew Flavius … and you—’ She turned to Justin and most unexpectedly put up her hands and took his face between them, and looked at him again. ‘You are not at all like your grandfather—I never liked him over much. You’re a surgeon, Flavius tells me, and, I
think
, a good one. The gods be with you, too, my silent other nephew Justin.’

She dropped her hands, and drawing the glowing folds of her mantle once more close about her, turned and walked away.

The two lean and ragged young men stood in silence a moment, looking after her. Then Justin said, ‘You never told me she was like that.’

‘I think I had forgotten myself until just now. Or maybe I didn’t know,’ Flavius said.

They walked out of Calleva by the South Gate, broke their fast on the edge of the forest, and took the road South through the forest and over the downs to Venta. And the second day had scarcely turned toward evening when they trudged into Portus Adurni, and saw the massive grey ramparts of just such another fortress as Rutupiae standing four square among the marshes and the vast maze of winding water that made up Portus Magnus, the Great Harbour.

But it was not under the fortress walls that they were likely to find their transport across to Gaul; and they turned their steps toward the poorer part of the town, where mean wine-shops mingled with fish-drying sheds, and the hovels of seafaring folk straggled out along the low shore, and the craft drawn up along the tide-line were of all kinds from small trading-vessels to native dug-out canoes.

That evening they got into conversation with several owners of small, hopeful-looking vessels on the pretext of looking for a kinsman who they thought was in the wine trade in those parts. But everybody seemed either to have just laid up for the winter or to be just going to do so, while one little slim sea-captain with a blue faience drop in one ear showed signs of knowing someone of the name that Flavius had invented for the kinsman, which might have been awkward if Flavius had not thought to ask what colour the man’s hair was, and on being told red, said that in that case it could not be the same one because his kinsman was as bald as an egg. And they were no further forward with their plans when, in the winter dusk, cold, tired, and hungry, and both of them feeling rather more desperate than they dared to admit, they found themselves close by a wine-shop on the foreshore. It was a wine-shop like any other—and there were many in Portus Adurni—but daubed on a rough piece of board over the doorway was something green, with an arched back and a round rolling eye at sight of which Flavius said with a spurt of weary laughter, ‘Look, it’s the family dolphin! This is the place for us!’

The wind was rising, swinging the lantern before the doorway to and fro so that the painted dolphin seemed to dive and leap, and the shadows about the threshold ran like wild things. And in the confusion of wind and dusk and lantern-light, neither of them saw the little man with the blue faience ear-drop strolling by, who turned after they had gone in, and slipped away into the deepening shadows.

They found themselves in a place that would be a small open courtyard in summer, roofed in now with what looked like an old striped sail or ship’s awning spread above the bare vine-trellis. A charcoal brazier glowed red at either end of the place, and though it was yet early, a good many men were gathered about them or lounging at the small tables round the walls, eating, drinking, or dicing. The babel of voices and the beat of the wind in the striped awning, the warmth of the braziers and the smell of broiling meat and crowding humanity made the whole place seem so bulging full that Justin thought the walls must be straining apart at the seams, like a garment too tight for the person inside it.

They found a corner well out of the way, gave their order for supper to a big man with the stamp of the legions clear upon him—half the wine-shops in the Empire, Justin thought, were kept by ex-legionaries—and settled down, stretching out their weary legs and slackening their belts.

Looking about them as they waited, Justin saw that the customers were for the most part seafarers of some sort, and a few traders, while about the nearest brazier a knot of Marines from the Fleet were playing dice. Then the master of the place dumped a bowl of steaming stew between Justin and Flavius, with a platter of little loaves and a jug of watered wine. And for a while they were too busy eating to spend much more attention on their surroundings.

But they had got over their first hunger when a newcomer ambled in through the foreshore doorway.

There had been a good deal of coming and going all the while, but this man was of a different kind from the others, and after one casual glance Justin put him down as a government clerk or maybe a small tax-gatherer. He hesitated, glancing about the crowded place, then came drifting in their direction; and a few moments later was standing beside them in their corner. ‘The Dolphin is very full tonight. Will you allow me to join you? It seems that there is—ahem—nowhere else.’

‘Sit, and welcome,’ Justin said, and moved to make room on the narrow horseshoe bench, and the man seated himself with a grunt of satisfaction, crooking a finger for the shopkeeper.

He was a small man, not fat exactly, but flabby, running to paunch, as though he ate too much and too quickly and didn’t take enough exercise. ‘My usual cup of wine—your best wine,’ he said to the shopkeeper; and then, as the man went to fetch it, turned to the other two with a smile. ‘The best wine here is very good indeed. That is why I come. It is—ahem—scarcely the kind of place I should frequent otherwise.’ The smile puckered his plump, clean-shaven face rather pleasantly, and Justin saw with sudden liking that he had the eyes of a small, contented child.

‘You come here often?’ Flavius asked, clearly trying to shake off his depression and be friendly.

‘No, no, just sometimes, when I am in Portus Adurni. My—ahem—my work takes me about a good deal.’

Flavius pointed to the wrought-iron pen-case and ink-horn that hung at the man’s girdle. ‘And your work is—that?’