Luicus went nearer.
‘You come one step closer and I’ll put a blade in your guts!’
‘Spare a crust for a poor, starving citizen,’ croaked Lucius. Even in his own ears his voice sounded cracked and terrible.
‘You heard. Now shove off.’
‘A little bread or some horse-flesh?’
The guard ignored him.
The beggar stood a little taller and the guard eyed him warily but curiously.
‘How much are you paid, soldier?’
The soldier looked defensive. ‘You know the answer. We haven’t been paid for six months. But at least we still-’
‘And you have a wife and children?’
‘One of each. And maybe even that’s an extravagance these days.’
‘Are they not hungry, too?’
‘Now look, I’ve told you before, I’m not standing here arguing with-’
‘How much would you get for a plump grey mare in your stables, sold for horse-flesh? A plump grey mare with her belly fat on rich summer grasses, her satin flanks gleaming in the sunshine?’ The beggar now stood up fully. ‘Answer me, soldier.’
The guard frowned. ‘You know what I’d get. Anything I bloody well wanted, and more. But how-’
‘And how much did you get for my horse?’ The beggar let the filthy sheet fall from his shoulders and tore the rag from his head, and the guard recognised him at last. ‘How much did you get for Tugha Ban?’
Lucius was unarmed, but he stepped forward menacingly, and the guard stepped back in reply. He slipped inside the gateway and drew the barred gate across.
‘You bastard,’ said Lucius softly. ‘You treacherous bastard. May all the gold you gained bring you nothing but grief.’
He turned and made his way down the grand street of the Via Palatina, moonlit, deserted, starved, already haunted by the ghosts of its former greatness.
He had not gone more than a hundred yards when he heard a cry from the gatehouse. He hesitated, wondering whether to turn round. When he did, he saw a figure standing at the top of the street, a grey mare beside him, saddled and bridled, her reins in his hand. The mare tossed her head and whinnied softly. Lucius felt a profound shudder of emotion – several emotions – run through him. Then he walked back up the street and she settled her muzzle in his cupped hand. Her ears flicked with happiness.
Lucius looked at the guard. ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘You could have got a year’s pay in gold for her.’
The guard shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ He looked at the ground. ‘A year of gold for a lifetime of bad sleep.’
Lucius clutched the man’s arm, then let it drop. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with such urgency that the guard flinched. ‘Thank you.’
Then he stepped up on the stone mounting-block beneath the wall, seized the low pommel and cantle of the military saddle, and hauled himself carefully up onto Tugha Ban’s broad back. He nodded once more to the guard and then rode on down the street.
Not everyone is false; not everything is fallen. Though great Rome herself may fall, not everything will fall.
‘You look out for yourself, now,’ the guard on the gate called after him. ‘We live in funny old times.’
So we do, thought Lucius. So we do.
He rode out of the west gate of the city, and through the encircling camp of the Goths by moonlight, riding and looking so steadily straight ahead that those who challenged him did not pursue their challenge in the face of his silence. Some said that he was a ghost. None would stay his flight with sword or spear.
He rode along the banks of the widening Tiber and saw the well-fed water bats skimming the surface of the river, hawking at gnats in the darkness, and he wondered that bats should be better fed than men. Surely Rome was being punished by the gods. He rode on down to the port of Ostia. At dawn he stopped to bathe in the river, only to remount and ride on still sweat-stained and travel-weary. How could you wash yourself clean in a river where starved and skeletal bodies floated by?
The sun rose over the great stone warehouses and mighty wharves of Ostia, but many of them lay in ruins now, stricken and blackened at the hands of the Gothic invaders. In the harbour, the smashed masts and the sunken wrecks of the great African grain-ships still showed above the flat, calm waters where they lay. There were very few people about, and those he encountered looked warily at him and said nothing. Where before, for centuries, sunrise in summer would have seen thousands of workmen arriving or waking here for their day’s work, now there were only a handful. The shipwrights and chandlers, caulkers, sailmakers and netmenders were gone. And the merchants and traders, too, who had come here from all over the Mediterranean, bringing precious marble and porphyry from the east for the buildings and monuments of Rome, and Egyptian cotton and linen, and all the fruits and spices of the Levant – there were none. Where were the hundred different languages of the known world, haggling over prices, rising into the early morning air in a babel of polyglot voices? Where were the lightermen and stevedores, pushing their wooden hand-barrows, unloading ship after ship of its treasure-store of silks and linen, sacks of grain, ingots of silver and tin? And hefty, roped bundles of furs, and barrels of precious Baltic amber, slaves from Britain, and huge, rangy hunting dogs from Caledonia, straining on their studded leather collars: deer-killers and wolf-slayers, all ivory teeth and eyes like Baltic amber.
All that great hubbub was gone. Ostia lay under the warm and constant sun, a ghost of her former self. The great quayside cranes with their granite tackle-blocks and their huge oak crossbeams stood silent, blackened with fire, some still smoking gently like mournful, extinguished dragons. Only the occasional cry of a lone yellow-legged gull broke the silence.
On the far side of one of the smaller harbours, Lucius could see a small, broad-beamed cargo ship, a square-rigger with a red sail faded by salt and sun. He rode round the cobbled harbour wall and found three men lading her with corked amphorae and crates of fruit. Evidently the Goths had no taste for dried apricots. But everything else that had lain in the warehouses they had destroyed or looted, loaded into their great wheeled wagons, and taken away.
‘Where are you bound for?’ he called out to the three dogged sailors. They ignored him. He called out again, more strongly.
One of them set down his amphora in its wooden stall. ‘No place you’d want to go,’ he said.
‘Tell me.’
‘Gaul,’ he said. ‘Port of Gessoriacum.’
‘Take me. Take me north, to the coast of Britain, and sail me into port at Dubris, or Portus Lemanis. Or Noviomagnus, even better.’
‘You got money?’
‘Not a fig.’
The man grinned at one of his fellows: the cheek of it. Then he shook his head. ‘Out of our way. We’ve got a load more lading to do before we sail, and we’ve no desire to cross Biscay in September storms.’
Lucius dismounted. Before they could stop him, he had lifted a heavy wine amphora onto his right shoulder and was walking across the wooden gangway on board. It cost him more in pain than the sailors ever knew, the still unhealed wounds across his back cracking and oozing afresh over his straining muscles. But he made not a sound, gave not a sign. He set the amphora down in the rack, and went back to get another.
The sailors eyed each other and shrugged.
They’d reckoned the lading would take all morning. It was done by the fifth hour, thanks to the stranger’s willingness and heft.
The captain, the one who had spoken to him, leant against the gunwale of his ship. ‘So you want to go to Gaul?’
‘No, you want to go to Gaul. I want to be set down at Noviomagnus.’
‘“Set down?” You know what it’s like sailing into British coastal waters these days?’
Lucius shook his head. ‘No, I’ve no idea. That’s your job. But when you set me down at Noviomagnus-’
‘If.’
‘When. Then I’ll find you payment of five silver pieces before you sail for Gaul.’