Everywhere had a wild beauty. The sun burned bright, its effects tempered by coastal breezes. Seabirds and marsh birds cried incessantly. Clouds of butterflies roamed fitfully, seeking out aromatic mints and oregano. Crickets jumped ahead of us. As we expected, there was a mass of insect life. Black bugs and tiny midge-like flies swarmed in clouds everywhere we stopped for a breather, along with worrying bright red things that looked as if they had already dined on blood. I reckoned there must be snakes too.
We were crossing great tracts of scrubland. We did see small fields, planted with grain or fast-growing crops to take advantage of the short summer period when the land at least partly dried out. Everything that grew, grew with astonishing vigour; the soil was both well watered and enriched with silt from all the rivers and tributaries that poured off the Lepini mountains. We never saw anyone tending the fields.
Where there had been grazing to keep down the foliage, the ground was covered with maquis – - small, very tough bushes, some of which were broad-leaved, though more were of the vicious, prickly kind. If you stepped too far off the track, you were likely to find yourself sinking suddenly up to the ankle in swamp water. Its suck would be ominous. Once you managed to pull out your foot safely, your heart would be pattering.
Where there had been no attempt at agriculture, larger vegetation had grown. There were wild olives and figs, which could have been reassuring as domesticated trees, though left to nature they had become enormous rampaging monsters, forming impenetrable thickets. Rectus broke his silence to say happily that the forests would be even thicker, the further across the marsh we went.
Sometimes in the distance we glimpsed cattle, generally where the levels remained flooded. They probably belonged to someone, but were not visibly herded. We did not risk approaching them. Trampling the edges of dark saltponds and stagnant pools where fallen vegetation putrefied, these beasts in their lonely location gave me a grim shiver. Once in Germania, I had had an encounter with a wild aurochs; I glanced at Camillus Justinus and knew he too was remembering our narrow escape from that huge bovine throwback.
Supposedly, the threat here was human. The Pontine Marshes had a sinister reputation as a place where brigands and highwaymen holed up. They must be brigands who could endure being bitten, stung, afflicted with foot-rot and driven crazy by isolation. We were gathering an idea of what to expect if we ever found the people we had come to interview.
We knew that the Claudii deliberately lived far enough from habitation to make visits inconvenient. We were fit men, equipped for this, but by afternoon we felt exhausted. We were despondent too, thinking we might never track down our quarries. Rectus assured us we were not lost. That depended how much faith we put in him.
'I wish I was one of those herons and could just flap up and fly out of here. I bet this is a place where you could wander in endless circles!' chattered Lentullus when we paused for rest. He must be twenty-five now, but he wittered like a mindless child. Justinus and I had known him since he was an army recruit with a fervent imagination and a knack for getting into trouble. We reminded him that we got him safely back to civilisation last time; he looked unconvinced.
'Stay on the track,' Justinus warned his bright-eyed batman. 'If you get stuck in a deep sinkhole I'm not pulling you out, in case it brings a boggle-eyed sprite swirling to the surface.' Now who was using too much imagination?
We all had the creeps. Long periods of silence descended on us. The invigorating effect of fresh air turned into sun-glaze and skin-burn. Eyes were dry. We started to itch, but when we slapped at imagined insects, they were never there.
Something about wild places brings misery to the surface. I began to be afflicted by griefs and guilts I thought I had left behind in Rome. Now that I had mastered the endless tasks involved in Pa's estate, my brain found space to heal itself- which it did as spitefully as possible, by way of reliving moments of misery. Over and over, I went through again that long day of Helena's labour and how we lost our baby son; over and over, I daydreamed that I was back at my father's villa, while his gaggle of slaves informed me he had gone.
Avoiding the others, I lolled in the cart, thinking about life and death. Death, mostly.
When it was too late to get back to Satricum the same day and while we all tried to avoid raising the unwelcome subject of having to camp out for the night on this sodden ground, we came upon something.
We had been travelling an intermittently raised track through shoulder-high brushwood. Occasional clearings widened out in a ragged fashion. Somebody must use this route. In one part they had actually laid wicker hurdles where the track had sunk, though the hurdles had then been half submerged too. Quite suddenly we broached a bigger space. A tilting heap of trash grew out of the ground amongst a fungoid clutter that was definitely human in origin. It looked abandoned. It looked like the windblown rubbish that piles against bushes in forests. Not so, though. Someone had carefully collected this detritus, over a long period. There was a lopsided shack at the heart of the mess which appeared to be roofed and lived in.
'This is it, boys!' declared Rectus, as if he had knowingly led us to it.
'Ooh, I don't like it!' crooned Lentullus, like someone listening to a ghost story around a winter fire.
We stood and looked. Nero the ox lowered his head and nuzzled around in clumps of reedy grass. His tail flicked manically, as he was tormented by flies. We were too tired and dispirited to advance on the hovel immediately. If a will-o'-the-wisp had wafted out in a swirl of mist and cried 'Boo!' we would have turned tail obediently.
One end of the building had a squashed look and slumped low, as if it was in the process of being swallowed by the swamp. This was a lean-to with nothing to lean against. At times over various decades, attempts had been made to patch up rotten parts. Items of hardware that may have been stolen from other people's porticoes or looted from stationary vehicles on market day were attached like trophies: a Medusa-faced tile end, a metal knocker solidified with its own verdigris, half of a baker's giant stone flour grinder. Around the shack were piles of old building materials, large-scale food containers that dribbled rancid waste, cartwheels, broken pieces of armour and incomplete fishing equipment. There was a table groaning under masses of machinery parts – - rusty bits off pulleys, cranes and ploughs – - ugly metalwork the purpose of which had been long forgotten and which would never be identified and reused. It all looked shabby. Most totters would have rejected it.
Parked between what must have been the door and a window that had been boarded-up was a row of heavy-duty spears and javelins. They were cruder than army issue, gross objects made for intimidation. No one in Rome could have such a vile armoury displayed against his house; decent folk just had a lantern they forgot to light most evenings and a tile saying cave canem to act as a cheap watchdog. Weapons were illegal in the city. In the country, anything was permissible. Out here in the wild, the hunting excuse let any small-time character who wanted to look big decorate his home with this all too obvious panoply. It didn't mean he was able to use it properly, though even an amateur who wielded one of those wicked beasts would be capable of inflicting harm.
Petronius Longus reached into the ox cart and quietly buckled on his sword.
I would have followed suit, but just then a man appeared in the tumbledown abode. Above three snaggled wooden entrance steps, with rotten treads, it had a two-part stable door. Without warning, he looked out through the top; Perhaps he had heard us coming. Obviously he had seen us now.
Petronius and I at once strode forward to speak to him. Wild barking announced that a vile-tempered dog was behind the lower section of the door, desperate to attack us. The man wore a filthy sleeveless tunic, a week-old beard and a scowl. No chance of a civilised traveller-host relationship here: he wasn't going to ask us in for pastries in a mock-marble peristyle. When Petro said we had come from Rome – - a pedigree that must have been obvious – - without a word, the rude householder swung back the lower door so that a powerful, ragged mastiff came bounding down the steps in a slather of rabid froth and sheer blind rage.