He had noticed the direction of my glance. ‘Weasel, otter, stoat and seal,’ he said proudly, pointing each one out. ‘And that one there’s a wolf. The army like them for their signifers and pay a hefty price. This way, then, citizen.’
I ducked around a deer hide and followed him inside.
The tannery room occupied the whole front half of his house, which had been specially adapted to accommodate the trade. The entry door was situated oddly halfway down, and the front part of the space — which we had just walked past outside — was partitioned off from the rest by a low internal wall, and the area thus created was busier than a hive. A series of round vat-pits had been dug into the floor, and a large number of men were hard at work. Some were pushing the hides into the tanning mix with long wooden poles; others were actually standing in the pits with their tunics tucked up above their knees and — supporting their weight on ropes set in the walls — treading the hides into the evil-smelling brew with brown-stained legs and feet. I wondered for a moment how they got in and out, until I realized that the steep sides of the vats were lined with plaster and that there was a series of toe-holes in every one of them.
Between the pits, an army of small children scuttled to and fro with jugs of tanning mix, filling the clay vessels which were set into the floor and which seemed to feed the liquid to the adjoining vats along a deep channel with a glazed pipe in it. The smell, if anything, was even worse in here.
‘You certainly demand good concentration from your slaves,’ I said, surprised to notice that most of the workers didn’t raise their eyes at our approach.
He laughed. ‘It isn’t anything that I do, citizen. It’s simple common sense. One false step and you fall into the vat. It isn’t so much drowning — though that’s always possible — but the mixture doesn’t do you any good, especially if it goes into your mouth and eyes. I lose a couple of people that way every year. You get off lightly if it only stains you brown and makes you smell disgusting for a week or two.’
I nodded. I could see that the whole floor was a series of traps for careless feet. I had to pay attention to where I put my own.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘these are not all slaves. I couldn’t afford the workforce to do all of this. The treaders are mostly my property, of course, but most of the other hands are freemen who are glad to have the work — there’ve been some dreadful harvests and winters recently — or lads whose parents have bound them to the shop. I get a fee for having them while they learn the trade. Some of the work requires a lot of skill and it takes time to train them properly. Through here, then!’ He gestured to the other side of the partition wall, towards the other, smaller section at the back, where he clearly intended we should go.
There was a solid floor there, to my relief, though it was fully occupied by two lines of trestle tables flanked by high three-legged stools on which the workers perched. There must have been a dozen older lads and men: each had a partly treated hide pegged, stretched out, on a rack in front of him, and was either painstakingly scraping it with strangely shaped bronze tools, or, once that was completed, plucking any recalcitrant last hairs out by hand. This time the men did glance up to look at us, overtly curious, as my guide led me down the narrow zigzag space between the rows.
‘The tannage room is through here,’ he said, gesturing to a doorway to the rear. ‘Come in and we will see what we can do about your coals.’
He led the way into a second room, which clearly gave access to the private living area beyond. This area had the benefit of a stone hearth and a window space, and thus served for the preparation of the tannage mix.
It was clearly brewing now. A copper vat was slung on chains above the fire, and something most unpleasant was bubbling inside, filling the area with clouds of acrid steam which the window space did very little to dispel. The boiling was being supervised by an ancient slave, dressed only in a loincloth, a pair of tattered boots and a heavy metal slave-ring of linked chain around his throat, reaching from his skinny shoulders almost to his ears — the sort of thing one sometimes sees on female Nubian slaves and which it requires a skilled blacksmith to remove. As we came into the room, he was being chivvied by a stout woman in a stained tunic and torn shawl, whose grey hair and skin had been dyed brown by smoke. She held a long wooden cooking-paddle in her hand — I suspected that the slave had felt the blade of it.
‘Get a shovel, wife, and fetch us some embers from the fire,’ the tanner said. ‘The citizen pavement-maker has a need of them. And fetch a taper while you’re at it, and light his oil lamp too.’
The woman looked resentfully at him. ‘Fetch a shovel, is it? Just like that? You know it’s kept outside. And who’s to look after my tannage while I’m gone? Neither you nor your smart visitor could do that, I suppose. And don’t tell me that old Glypto will keep an eye on it — the old fool’s so stupid that he’d fall into it. He takes more looking after than the brew itself. Don’t you, eh, Glypto?’ She poked at the old man with the paddle as she spoke. He smiled, a patient foolish little smile.
The tanner turned to me. ‘Glypto came to me many years ago, as part of my wife’s wedding portion,’ he explained. ‘I’m not sure that he was not the better part of the bargain, too.’
His wife flashed him a look that would have tanned skins on its own, then turned to me. ‘Glypto has got old and deaf and foolish with the fumes, but I can’t get rid of him. My husband keeps him just to taunt me, I believe. Says nobody would buy him, but that we cannot simply turn him out on to the street — though he’s good for nothing these days except stoking up the fire and taking rubbish to the midden now and again.’
Poor fellow! I knew the midden-pile she meant. There was a narrow gap between the tanner’s shop and mine — hardly wide enough to be called an alleyway — which had once led through to a coal store behind the tanner’s house and to the lane beyond, but the tanner had moved the coal heap and the path was now disused and blocked by stinking refuse from the houses round about. From time to time, some enterprising fellow with a handcart came to sort it through and sell the rotting contents to the farmers for their fields, but otherwise the rubbish simply lay there mouldering until the river flooded and washed it all away. It was not a place where people chose to go.
Glypto gave another of his feeble smiles. ‘You want me to take the rubbish to the midden now? But, mistress, I took some just an hour ago?’
She made an infuriated sound and tossed her head. ‘You see what I have to suffer, citizen?’ She rounded on Glypto and raised her voice at him. She said very loudly and distinctly, ‘Listen, you old fool, I want you to stay here while I go and fetch a shovel. My husband wants me to supply some coals to this stranger, though I don’t know who he is or what he wants them for. But like you, Glypto, I must do as I am told.’ Then, with a last long hostile look at me, she disappeared into the living quarters at the back, leaving the old slave to glare at me suspiciously.
‘This is the pavement-maker from the shop next door,’ his master told him with a patient sigh. ‘He needs some hot embers because his fire’s gone out.’
Glypto looked appraisingly at me, and then a look of illumination crossed his face. ‘That’s right, master. All gone out next door. I heard the green man say so when I took the rubbish to the pile.’
I stared at him. I have seen men whom one might describe as ‘blue’, when they were painted from head to foot in woad, but. . ‘The green man?’ I echoed.
The tanner raised his eyebrow at me to signal what he thought. ‘Ignore him, citizen. He’s apt to give these fanciful reports. I think he gets strange visions from the fumes.’