The Silver Pigs (9 page)

XXIII

I felt gloomy enough, without a confrontation with this angry witch Helena Justina. She would have a long trek home, across barbarian territory, so I understood why the senator was so keen to provide her with some sort of professional escort although after the disaster of my involvement with Sosia Camillina, it seemed ludicrous that he had selected me. I wanted to be helpful to him, but now I had seen her, the prospect of close contact with his bad-tempered offspring started to loom depressingly. Once, winning her over might have been a challenge. Now I was in too much pain from Sosia's death to raise the energy. Only the fact that I liked Decimus Camillus Verus gave me patience to deal with this situation at all.

The night we met, Helena Justina's finer qualities if she had any were lost on me. For reasons I could not begin to imagine, she held me in contempt. I could tolerate rudeness, but she even seemed insubordinate to her uncle and aunt.

She was not gone long. I suspected she could not bear to miss the chance of finding more to despise in me. When she barged back I ignored her. With hardened types it is the best way.

All the same, I was curious. Just because you give up women does not mean you give up looking. She had a brutal nature but a bonny figure, and I quite liked the way she twisted up her hair. I noticed the little Flavian girl ran back to her at once; not everyone can charm a child like that. So here she was: my lost soul's famous cousin.

Their fathers were brothers but they were not at all alike. Helena Justina was by then twenty-something, yet she appeared completely self-possessed. She burned with a strong, calm flame beside which the immature Sosia would have seemed positively foolish. She was everything that Sosia had promised to be and could never now become. I hated her for that, and she knew I hated her. She bitterly resented me.

When I end up at strange houses I try to fit in. Although exhausted, I sat tight. After a while, Aelia Camilla excused herself and left the room, taking both the baby and her little girl. I saw my host follow his wife with his eyes, then soon he went out too. Helena Justina and I stayed there alone.

To say our eyes met would imply too much. What happened was that I looked at her, because when a man is left alone with a woman in a quiet room it is the natural thing for him to do. She stared back at me. I had no idea why she was doing that.

I refused to speak; the senator's termagant daughter taunted me. "Didius Falco! Isn't this journey a pointless exercise?"

Still on my stool, I leaned my elbows on my knees and waited for her to explain. My obstinate interrogator ignored my curiosity.

"It may be," I said finally. I stared at the floor. Then added, as the confrontation continued in silence, "Look, ladyship, I shall not ask whatever is the matter with you because frankly I don't care. Unpleasant females are a hazard of my work. I have come to a place I hate on a dangerous errand because it is the only throw your father or I can attempt"

"That would be a good speech if it came from an honest man!"

Then it's a good speech."

"Lies, Falco!"

"You'll have to elaborate. You think me useless. I can't help that; I am doing my best."

"I should like to know," sneered the senator's daughter in her unlovely way, "whether you are dragging out your contract for mere profit, or whether this is deliberate sabotage. Are you a traitor, Falco, or only wasting time?"

Either I was dense, or she was crazy.

"Just explain, will you?" I instructed her.

"Sosia Camillina saw one of the men who abducted her go into a house she knew. She wrote and told me though not whose house it was. She said she had told you."

"No!" I said.

"Yes."

"No!" I was horrified. "She may have intended to tell me"

"No, she said she had."

We both stopped talking.

Something must have gone wrong. Sosia was skittish and excitable, but despite her inexperience she was bright as Scythian gold. She would not overlook anything so important; she was too proud of her discoveries, too eager for me to know.

My mind raced. She could have written another note, but if so where was it? Two unused tablets of her pocket-book were with her when she was found, she had left another one in my room, and we had no reason to suppose the fourth had been used for anything more serious than a shopping list at home. Something had gone wrong. "No. Lady, you will have to take my word." "Why should I take your word?" Helena Justina scoffed. "Because I only lie when there is something to gain." Her face cracked into pain. "Did you lie to her? Oh my poor cousin!" I shot her a look that stopped her for a moment, though it was like trying to calm a runaway ox by holding out a handful of hay. "She was only sixteen!" exclaimed the senator's daughter, as if that said everything.

Well, it told me what she imagined I had done, and why she held me in such formidable contempt.

With an exasperated explosion, Helena Justina sprang to her feet. She seemed to enjoy rushing out of rooms. She swept past with a curt goodnight. It surprised me to receive even that.

I stayed on my stool for a while, listening warily to this unfamiliar house. Though I tried not to think about Sosia, simply because I was so tired I could not bear it, I felt burdened with troubles, desperately lonely, and a very long way from home.

I had been right: nothing in Britain had substantially changed.

XXIV

Flavius Hilaris explained his plan next day.

Unsettled in a strange house, I had heaved awake as soon as people began to stir. I put on four layers of tunics and edged cautiously downstairs. A slave with a raw cough pointed out the dining room, where a murmur of serious voices stopped immediately I appeared. Aelia Camilla greeted me with her flooding smile.

"Here he is! You emerge early for a man who arrived so late!" She was on her feet ready to go about her household tasks, but first set a breakfast plate for me herself. The informality in this official house was tipping me off balance.

Hilaris himself, with his napkin under his chin, passed me a bread basket. The crab-faced young woman Helena was there. I half expected her to withdraw demurely with her aunt, but she stayed, glowering, with her hands locked round a beaker. Hardly a demure flower.

"Having been stationed here," her uncle began at once, being the single-minded type who burrowed into business as soon as he trapped an audience, "I expect you've kept abreast of recent events."

I adopted the pious expression of a man who keeps abreast of events.

Fortunately, the procurator was accustomed to starting meetings with a local resume. He could hardly approach his dinner table without calling for an up-to-date price list of in season vegetables. He brought me abreast himself:

"Precious metals were the main reason for investing in Britain, as you know. We have ironworks in the Southeast forests, organized by the navy in their rag taggle way." Ever at heart an army man, I grinned. There is gold in the far western mountains, and some lead in the central Peak District, though its silver yield is low the prize mines are in the southwest. The Second Augusta once ran them direct, but we ended that in the process of encouraging self-government by the tribes. We keep fortresses at all the mines to give us an overview, but lease out their day-to-day management to local contractors." I was trying not to wriggle with mirth at the procurator's evident enjoyment of his work. No wonder the establishment never took him seriously! "In the Mendips, an entrepreneur called Claudius Triferus holds the franchise now, creams off his percentage, then ships the balance to the Treasury. A British native. I shall have him apprehended once I know how the ingots are lifted and shipped."

I finished eating, so to aid digestion sat up cross-legged on my couch. Flavius Hilaris did the same. He had the pinched look of a man with stones, who from anxiety or embarrassment never found time to let his doctor examine him.

"Your job will be to investigate the theft, Falco. I want to plant you in the mines, establish you among the work force"

"I had my eye on a management post!"

He let out a disparaging laugh. "All filled up with senators' dim nephews out here for the boar hunting sorry, Helena!"

As a senator's daughter she might well have objected, yet she forced a cranky smile. I meanwhile became a mite preoccupied.

My new job demanded stamina. Mines are worked by the grimmest types of criminal. Slave gangs labour there from sunrise to sunset, it's heavy work, and although the lead seams in the Mendips lie fairly near the surface, what those mines lack in physical danger they make up for in the utter desolation of the spot.

"Falco?" asked Flavius. "Pondering your good luck?"

"Frankly, I'd prefer to sit in full formal dress without a sun umbrella, in some blazing hot amphitheatre where the gatekeepers ban wine jars and the musicians are on strike, watching five hours of an inaudible Greek play! To whom," I enquired fastidiously, "do I owe this bracing winter holiday?"

Hilaris folded his napkin. "I believe Helena Justina first had the idea."

I had to smile.

"May the gods protect your ladyship! I trust you'll explain to my little grey-haired mother when my back's broken and they bury me in a bog? Do you answer to the Furies, madam, for wreaking this hard vengeance on me?"

She stared into her beaker and did not reply.

I caught her uncle's quizzical eye.

"Helena Justina answers to herself," he said briefly.

It seemed to me that was her problem. To say so achieved nothing, and I had no wish to criticize her father Decimus. No man can ever be entirely to blame for the women in his house. That was something I knew long before I possessed women in my own.

XXV

Flavius Hilaris made arrangements to have me taken west, which I thought decent of him until I grasped what his arrangements were. He sent me round by sea. He owned a town house in the middle of the south coast and an estate with a private summer villa even further west; for passing to and fro between his properties he had acquired a clinker-built Celtic ketch which he jovially called his yacht. This old and robust barnacled hulk was not exactly fit for dreaming in the August sun on Lake Volsinii. It probably seemed a good idea to him, but I made my own arrangements after that.

I was dropped off at Isca. Eighty Roman miles from the mines, but that was good: no point arriving straight off the procurator's boat, virtually with a standard-bearer proclaiming "procurator's spy'. I knew Isca. It's my superstition that it helps to dive into a whirlpool from a rock where your feet feel at home.

There had been military regrouping since my time ten years before. Of the four original British legions, the Fourteenth Gemina were currently held in Europe pending Vespasian's decision on their future: they had been active in the civil war on the wrong side. The Ninth Hispana were in mid-transfer north to Eboracum, the Twentieth Valeria had plunged out towards the western mountains, while my old unit the Second Augusta advanced to Glevum, astride the upper reaches of the great Sabrina Estuary. Their present task was pegging down the dark Siluran tribesmen, preparing for the next push west as soon as they felt confident.

Isca without the Second was a ghost town to me. It seemed odd to see our fort again, but odder still to find all the gates open and the granaries stripped, with higgledy-piggledy workshops cluttering the crossroads, and a native magistrate lording over the commander's house. Behind the fort, as I expected, once the lean-to cabins and shops thinned out there were the small holdings of those veterans who retired while the Second was still there. Hard luck to take your land grant in order to live near your mates, then watch them march out to a new fort a hundred miles away. Still, intermarriage with the natives would be holding some of them. In this disgusting province, I ruled out any idea that they stayed because they liked the climate or the scenery.

I was relying on the veterans. Relying on the fact they would be here beside the Second's fort and the fact that the Second had gone. It seemed likely that if I came offering adventure now, I might find myself a crony with itchy feet.

Rufrius Vitalis was an ex-centurion who lived in a small stone-corridored house on a red-soiled farm huddled below the sullen threat of the moors. All his neighbours were grizzled specimens farming in similar style. I spotted him in the town, bumped into him on purpose, than claimed to know him better than I actually did. He was so desperate for news from Rome we were instant old pals.

He was a fit, sturdy, impatiently capable man with alert eyes and a grey-bristled chin in a leather face. He came from farming stock on the Campagna. Even in Britain he worked outdoors bare-armed; he was so full of energy he could ignore the cold. Before retirement he had put in thirty years five more than he needed, but after the Revolt experienced men in Britain were offered extra time at privilege rates. It never ceases to amaze me what folk will do for double pay.

We spent some time in a wine shop, gossiping. When he took me home I was not surprised to find he lived with a native woman considerably younger than himself. Veterans usually do. Her name was Truforna. She was shapeless and colourless, just a floury dumpling with pale grey eyes, but I could see how in a hovel beyond the ocean a man might convince himself Truforna was both shapely and colourful. He ignored her; she moved about the little place watching him.

At his house Rufrius Vitalis and I talked some more. We used an unexcited tone, so Truforna would not be alarmed. He asked why I had come. I mentioned theft. I touched on the political slant, though without saying what; nor did he ask. Any ranker who gets made up to centurion before he retires has too much experience to be excited by politics. He wanted to know my strategy.

"Get in, investigate what happens, get out." He looked at me in disbelief. That's not facetious. That's all I have."

"Can't the procurator get you in?"

"What worries me is getting out!"

He looked at me again. We shared deep misgivings about the administrative class. He understood why I wanted my own scheme, someone I trusted to haul up my rope when I called.

"Need a partner, Falco?"

"Yes, but who can I ask?"

"Me?"

"What about your farm?"

He shrugged. That was up to him. He asked the real question: "We get you in, we get you out. What happens afterwards?"

"Sunshine, I whip straight back to Rome!"

My hook was through his throat. We had talked about Rome until his heart strove against his ribs. He asked if there would be scope for anyone else to tag along, so I offered to sign him up as Helena Justina's baggage master. Our eyes, with veiled lids, covered Truforna.

"What about her?" I murmured delicately.

"She won't have to know," Vitalis declared, with too much confidence. I thought: O centurion! Still, that too was up to him.

He knew the district. I let him work out the plan.

A week later we arrived at the Vebiodunum silver mines, Vitalis astride a pony in the leather and furs of a bounty hunter, me running behind in the rags of a slave. He told the contractor's foreman he was working through the limestone gorges, rounding up runaways from the caves. He extracted the names of the owners they had eluded, then handed back his wretched contraband for reward. I had refused to say where I belonged, so after three weeks of feeding me Vitalis was losing patience and wanted to restore my memory with a spell of hard labour in the mines.

Rufrius Vitalis outrageously embroidered on the story we agreed, not least once I was safely shackled by hitting me so hard he split open my cheek, then hurling me in some toothless villager's pile of pig manure. My sullen look on delivery was as genuine as my smell. At Vebiodunum, Vitalis claimed there must be a good chance I had murdered my master if I would not admit who I was. This extra certificate of good character was a luxury I could have managed without.

"I call him Chirpy," he said, "because he isn't. Don't let him escape. I'll be back when I can, to see if he wants a little chat."

The foreman always called me Chirpy. I never was.