“Here. Take a left here. No, not here, past this junction. Here.”
I sighed and turned the wheel. The car bumped off the road and onto a narrow track between two fields. The track was muddy from the passage of many vehicles and the recent rain, and it was dotted with potholes full of water. I felt the car’s suspension bottom a couple of times, and thought I heard the exhaust scrape a groove in the ground.
We were just outside a village called Stafford Bishop, about ten miles east and north of Gloucester, not far from the part of the Cotswold Hills which had once been dubbed the ‘Haute Cotswolds’ because of its wealthy inhabitants. Where we were was not haute anything. It was a big muddy field surrounded by scrappy hedges and the occasional tree. The ruts in the track fought the steering wheel and it was hard to keep the car from bumping off into the field. Not that it mattered, particularly. It looked as if the farmer to whom the field belonged had been growing mainly weeds and grass. Maybe there was an EU weeds and grass subsidy you could claim.
Rowland was getting excited, leaning forward against his seatbelt and looking out through the windscreen. “He’s here,’’ he kept saying. “I can feel him. He’s here.”
At the end of the track was a little collection of caravans and mobile homes belonging to Bristol University and a couple of West Country archaeological groups. I parked us beside one of the caravans and we got out and stood beside the car. The air smelled wet and fresh and earthy. I lit a cigarette and rubbed my face and wondered how my life had managed to come so far off its tracks as to deliver me here today.
Half the field had been dug up. A little yellow excavator sat on its caterpillar tracks off to one side, next to a huge pile of earth. Beyond it was an enormous shallow pit, crisscrossed with duckboards and dotted with markers, in which dozens of people were moving slowly and with great purpose, scraping away at the dirt exposed by the bucket of the excavator. One of the figures in the excavation, noticing our arrival, had climbed out of the pit and was coming towards us. My heart began to sink all over again.
Lew King had been a year below me at the University, a rotund little Yorkshireman already starting to go bald. Where I had been galvanised by Rowland’s vision of alien cultures buried beneath our feet, Lew had bought into it entirely. He worshipped Rowland. He had picked up Rowland’s torch when Rowland retired five years ago, although in all the important respects Rowland had never retired at all.
“Professor Gibson,” Lew said as he approached us, hand outstretched. “Welcome. Such a great day.”
“Doctor King,” Rowland said solemnly, shaking his hand. He turned and indicated me. “You’ll remember Jim.”
Lew looked at me and I looked at Lew. No hearty handshakes for Lew and me. We regarded each other the way two attack dogs might regard each other. For a long time I had been Rowland’s spear-carrier, in spite of my disillusionment about the fieldwork. When I had betrayed the faith, Lew had picked up the spear, had become the New Improved Jim. I was conscious of looking at a faster, more streamlined version of myself, the tool which Rowland had shaped to use as the front end of his obsession, the person who actually dug things up. The digging life had slimmed Lew down; he was whiplash thin now, and his skin was tanned like old leather from his years spent out in the wind and the rain and the sun as Rowland’s avatar. His hair was gone completely, and he was wearing a huge pair of wire-framed John Lennon spectacles. His clothes were saturated with mud and dirt, and he was holding a filthy baseball cap in one hand.
“Lewis,” I said.
“James,” he said.
“Keeping busy?” he asked.
“Keeping busy,” I agreed. “How’s Fiona?”
“She’s fine. How’s Christina?”
“If it wasn’t for alimony, I wouldn’t know what to do with my time,” I said.
Lew blinked at me.
“My life’s a train-wreck,” I told him. “How’s yours?”
He blinked at me again. Lew, bless him, had always been an unsophisticated organism. Dig and record, that was all he did. The news of his marriage had come as something of a surprise. The news of his divorce had been something less than a surprise. Although possibly more of a surprise than my own divorce.
Rowland was watching us the way an owner might watch two dangerous animals he had grown rather tired of. “Gentlemen,” he muttered. “Might we save this for another time, please?”
“If I’m lucky, there might not be another time,” I told him, but I backed off a fraction and Lew backed off a fraction and Rowland shook his head.
“Doctor King,” he said. “I understand you have something to show me.”
I watched Lew put me to the back of his mind. “It’s over here,” he told Rowland, gesturing across the field. “You were right all along, of course. It’s a marvellous thing.”
He led us out across the field towards the excavation, and as we walked I spotted people I knew working around the site, people who had been in my year at university, or a year above or below me. All of them Rowland’s former students. It was possible that the only two other organisations as adept at placing moles and sleepers in useful positions were the CIA and the East German foreign intelligence service. Rowland didn’t actually have to be physically present at a dig any more; wherever a spade went into the soil anywhere in Britain there would be someone who reported directly or indirectly back to him. I thought about that for a moment, while we walked beside Lew, and thought it was more than a little scary.
Lew had been rehearsing; you could see it in his body language. He walked us to the edge of the dig and he stopped, and he swept his arm across the thing that he and his team had uncovered, and he said, “Professor Gibson, may I present the home of Lucius Claudius Setibogius.”
We looked. “Oh, fucking hell,” I said.
Lucius was a Second Century spiv. Rowland said that we weren’t supposed to think of the people of antiquity in modern terms, but I’d found that I couldn’t think of Lucius in any other way. We had never managed to find out what he looked like, but I always imagined that he was like the Flash Harry character George Cole played in those old St Trinians movies. Pencil moustache, hair slicked back with Brylcreem, long overcoat with the collar turned up, trilby tilted down over his eyes, that strange stiff rapid walk, that was Lucius. If he was alive today he’d be making his living hawking dodgy postcards around the harbour in Naples, asking likely-looking tourists if they wanted to meet his sister.
He was actually a Romano-Brit, and a Roman citizen to boot. We never established how he managed to get his name, but I had my theories. In those days it was fairly common practice when a non-Roman was granted citizenship for him to pick a first name more or less at random, take as his middle name the name of the person to whom he owed his citizenship — often a local governor or a general — and keep his original native name as a surname. I thought Lucius got his citizenship, and his name, because he had done a favour for someone called Claudius. Lucius was good at favours. They had made him colossally wealthy.
They do say that you never forget your first love, and Lucius was Rowland’s. Rowland had first come across him when he was an undergraduate, going through some documents at the British Museum which nobody had looked at since they had been dug up in Rome in the late 1800s. Rowland, for all his faults, had an infallible eye. He spotted Lucius immediately, the way he’d spotted me, knowing that he’d struck gold. Lucius popped up periodically out of the documentation, doing deals, sending letters, being rude to contractors, refusing to pay bills to merchants because he claimed their goods were substandard. He’d lived in Rome for a while, and there was a letter from a fish merchant which mentioned that complete bastard Lucius Claudius Setibogius. Lucius had never conquered a country or won a famous legal case, but he was extraordinary. Lucius was nouveau-riche, he was fast-track, he was a man of the future. His descendants were probably still here, doing deals, fucking somebody over for a percentage, driving the latest model car, living in rancho-style homes in Chigwell with permatanned wives and daughters with belly-button jewellery and big hair.