‘What sort of somebody?’ Surprise and anxiety made me sound as sharp as my companions had, and I saw the poor lad flinch instinctively. I softened my voice, and added, ‘Can you remember that?’
He was terrified, you could see it in his face, but he shook his head. ‘I wasn’t paying much attention at the time. My master beats me if I take too long. He’ll beat me now, when I get in again.’
‘Nothing to what we’ll do, if you can’t tell us more than that.’ Cupidus was scornful. ‘Show him your dagger, Laxus.’ Laxus waved it, dangerously close. ‘Does that refresh your memory at all?’
The poor lad was almost blubbering by now, and the board slipped entirely from his hands and clattered to the ground. ‘A boy, I think. A big boy — that’s right — he had a cup and ball. That’s all I know. I remember looking at it and wishing that I had one like that.’
‘Huh! Not good enough. .’ Cupidus began, and motioned Laxus forward with his blade. What would have happened to the little lad I cannot guess, but my startled exclamation interrupted them.
‘Rufinus! Lyra’s messenger!’ I said. ‘You’re sure about the toy?’ I turned towards the child-slave, who had dropped to his knees and was trying feverishly to scoop up the scattered ashes with pathetic, trembling hands. He glanced up at me with a tearstained face.
‘I didn’t really look at anything but that,’ he managed, between sobs. ‘I’m sorry, sirs. I didn’t think it mattered. It’s all I can remember — honestly. I swear by all the gods. .’ He went back to scrabbling at his hopeless task again. It was clear that he feared a thrashing from his master over it.
His plight touched me, so that for a moment I forgot my own potential danger and, ignoring Laxus and his knife, went over and squatted on my haunches next to him. ‘Of course you were looking at the cup and ball. Because you longed to have one of your own?’
The child looked up at me. ‘I never had a toy. I had a sort of cart-thing once my father carved for me, but when he sold me to the pastry-cook. .’
My turn to nod. I too had been a slave, but only as an adult. My childhood had been a very happy one, full of dogs and horses and gambols on the cliffs and in the streams, with playthings and playfellows aplenty. What this child’s miserable existence must have been, I could only half imagine.
‘He was amazing,’ the boy added, with tearful eagerness, as if sharing a special confidence. ‘He kept the ball up all the time and never dropped it once. I got a thrashing when I got inside for watching him so long. I’m sorry if I should have noticed more.’
‘You did very well,’ I said, and he looked so grateful that it touched my heart. Praise was as rare as toys in his young life. ‘Here.’ I put a hand into my purse and pressed a sestertius into his hand. He looked incredulous. It would be taken from him, like as not, but I felt that some reward was due. ‘Tell your master you have been delayed by helping a Roman citizen to find a missing slave, and that I will be here in the morning to buy some honey cakes. Tell him to put half a dozen on one side for me. Here’s half a denarius to pay for them.’ With any luck, I reasoned, a lucrative order from a customer would be enough to soothe his master’s wrath.
He flashed me an uncertain smile, and hurried round the corner with the coins and what little ash he’d succeeded in collecting up again. The others made no move to stop him going.
‘Very pretty,’ Cupidus jeered. ‘And you expect us to believe that the boy is not in your employ? Or in the pay of your bath-side friends? Well, let me tell you, this is my father’s area. He won’t take kindly to your bribing servants here to tell their confounded little lies for you.’ He shouldered up to me, more belligerent than ever, and made to seize me by the neck again.
Aurissimus restrained him. ‘Cupidus, don’t be more stupid than you have to be. All right, you can’t recognise a cheating net man when you see one, but can’t you take in what’s right before your eyes?’ He turned to me. ‘You said the youth who came was Lyra’s messenger. Who’s Lyra?’
I was about to protest that surely he must know who Lyra was, and then of course I realised that he did and he was testing me. I remembered the reaction to her name from the keeper of the thermopolium, and I said hastily, ‘I was in the town, looking for a silver cloak clasp for my wife. Lyra approached me and offered me her girls. She gave me an address — the street of the oil-lamp sellers — although I didn’t go there at the time.’ If the spy system in this part of town was half as good as that in the bath-house area, I knew that my movements could easily be checked. I didn’t mention Plautus. I was certain that part of the story would never be believed.
Big-ears was looking at me with amused contempt. ‘But you went there later, did you? After dark.’
I was reluctant to say anything which might be proved false. I compromised. ‘I never found it,’ I said truthfully.
He laughed. ‘So you got lost and wandered round the bath-house area? Lyra’s wolf-house isn’t over there — it’s on this side of Venta, where all the soldiers go. No wonder you were followed. A thief, most likely, hoping for your purse. It’s a marvel someone didn’t cut your throat. They don’t like strangers in that part of town.’ He turned to his companions. ‘I don’t believe the man’s a spy at all. He’s just an idiot who can’t control what hangs between his legs. That’s why he wasn’t present at the games. Made some excuse and sneaked off in the dark, looking for the wolf-house. It all makes sense. That’s why the poor fool left his slave behind. I’ll bet he’s got a wife at home, as well, and didn’t want her finding out where he had been.’ He gave another hoot of mocking mirth. ‘And then he didn’t find it after all. It’s true. He can’t have done. He gave money to that slave. Lyra wouldn’t leave a customer with silver in his purse. If he didn’t spend it willingly, the girls would get it from his clothes while he was occupied with something else.’
‘But surely she can’t steal from them?’ I was startled into speech. ‘The penalties. .’
He swept my words aside. ‘You may come from a big city, stranger, but you’re strangely innocent. Of course she’d have your purse. It often happens. Very few complain — not when they’ve been busy with one of Lyra’s specialists. If it came to court, they’d be a laughing-stock.’
I resisted the temptation to retort that he clearly knew all about the brothel and its ways. It was obvious that Big-ears was the self-appointed thinker of the group and saw himself as the voice of reason. I suspected that this was less the product of intelligence than the result of his being the most nervous of the three, but since he was arguing for my release I held my tongue. Neither did I voice the sudden thought which I had almost blurted out a moment earlier: why had Lyra sent Rufinus to find my slave? How had she known that I possessed one, come to that? I’d assumed the boy had been sent to warn Plautus, but it seemed that I was wrong.
In fact, it was a mystery which I found troubling. I had parted company with Promptillius long before I spotted Plautus and went after him, so when Lyra had approached me it was in an altogether different part of town. So how had anyone identified Promptillius as mine? And what was the message that Rufinus passed on to him?
For there had been some sort of message, I was sure of that, and probably ostensibly from me. It was the only thing I could imagine that would have persuaded the stolid Promptillius to desert his post. I said quickly, before Big-ears had time to think this through himself, ‘Well, if you gentlemen are satisfied, I should be getting back. My party will be concerned for me by now, and sending out a search, I shouldn’t be surprised.’
Cupidus was lurching into thought. ‘So, where’s your slave gone now?’
It was a question I had asked myself and failed to find a convincing answer for, but I said — with what I hoped was confidence — ‘Gone back to the mansio, I should think. Do you want to come there with me and see? You can check out my story with the guard.’