The temple was jammed in between residential blocks and stores on the slope of the hill to the north of the harbour, by necessity. Rather than choose a lofty perch like the three great edifices that lorded it over the city, the Asklepion had been located where a natural ‘healing’ spring gurgled from the rock. About that spring had been constructed a modest sacred bath complex, with a small connecting courtyard and precinct, at the heart of which stood the temple itself. He had been greeted at the entrance by a young boy wearing far too much kohl around his eyes so that he looked faintly demonic. The boy had waffled on at him in Greek until Fronto had given him a coin to shut up, and had then escorted him into the temple, where an old man waited – an asklepiad – with a white robe, a staff wound round with a carved serpent and a beard he could have lost a young bear in. The ageing priest had listened earnestly to Fronto’s problem and given him a list of appropriate devotions, offerings and libations. Another empty purse, a jar of good wine, a small stack of gold coins and a rather unfortunate chicken later, the bad dreams were still there, and Fronto had crossed another god from his diminishing list of deities to give a flying fornication about.
And so, weeks on and a small fortune lighter, this sallow ghoul stared back from the mirror.
Enough was enough. He’d not mentioned as much to Lucilia, but Fronto personally knew what was at the heart of his troubles: he was missing his lucky charms. Nemesis had been broken and Fortuna had gone with Cavarinos of the Arverni. He could only hope that the luck that he himself was sadly lacking was bearing up his Gallic friend. His troubles had started almost immediately following the absence of Fortuna and Nemesis, and until he replaced the figurines around his neck with appropriate quality work, he would not sleep well.
It was too disheartening to lay the blame for the nightmares upon the multitude of deaths he had left in his wake. He was a soldier born and tried, and to think like that would be to deny all that he was.
Of course, he was no longer a soldier. He was a wine merchant now, even if not a particularly successful one.
He would take the blow on the chin and, without a word to his wife, go to the best artisans in town and commission a replacement for each charm in the best materials and at the highest quality. He would have done so months ago, had the money been available. It still wasn’t, of course, but he would work it out somehow. He couldn’t go on like this.
Of course, the financial side of the business was probably almost as much to blame for his state of exhaustion as the nightmares. He had come to Massilia with grand plans. There were a few Greek wine merchants in town already, of course, but no one with good access to the heart of Roman viticulture down in Campania. And quite apart from the Romans in Gaul who, he knew from years of watching Cita complaining over his stores, created an almost insatiable demand for wine, there was a growing sector of the upper Gaulish society that was starting to turn from their own beer to good southern wine. The trade should be lucrative. He’d felt that it would be. Even Balbus, who had been initially sceptical and rather disapproving of a Roman noble involving himself too closely in commerce, had nodded his agreement of the workability of the scheme. He would use those local merchant vessels who shipped Gallic goods to Neapolis and came back largely empty. He would fill them with wine from the estates of friends and connections in Campania, which he would be able to acquire considerably cheaper than most others could, and would then sell it on to either local Greek merchants, Gallic traders heading into tribal lands, or to the Roman supply system that fed the army in the north.
He hadn’t been able to tell his mother or sister, of course. His letters to them at Puteoli were carefully worded to avoid all mercantile mention, despite being conveyed there by the same factors who were organising his deliveries. His mother would implode from a hefty dose of patrician-ness if she thought her son had become a common salesman, and his sister would be scathing to say the least. After all, even Lucilia and Balbus had been fairly disapproving, but had lived with his decision because at least it had brought him home from the army.
But not telling the family had added the complication of not being able to rely on family finances. He had not touched the vaults of the Falerii and had funded the initial concern entirely from his own capital following his resignation of commission from Caesar’s army. Every last denarius he could lay his hands on had gone into acquiring the warehouse in the city, the cart and two oxen, a small staff, and the first stock of wine from Campania. Then he had realised that he could hardly afford to pay the ship captains to transport it, let alone the many sundry expenses that seemed to mount daily.
By the week before Saturnalia he had pored over the figures and gloomily labelled himself more or less bankrupt. He still had the assets, of course – the warehouse and a consignment of Falernian on the dock at Puteoli, but he was unable to pay the staff, animal feed, and shipping. In the most humbling moment of his entire life, he had gone to visit Balbus without his wife knowing, and had begged for a hand-out. The old man had been generous to a fault, which had made the need for begging in the first place all the more embarrassing, but at least now he had enough of a float to see him through hopefully ‘til spring. Yet unless business picked up, he would be in trouble again by Aprilis.
His former singulares were helping out. Despite being signed on as household security, they had willingly stepped in to fill roles in the business, but to be honest, they were often more trouble than help. Aurelius had set profits back one evening when he had encountered a bat in the warehouse and dropped a very brittle amphora of very expensive wine as he ran screaming.
The three locals he’d hired were considerably more competent at the actual work – when such work was forthcoming, at least – and yet even they were troubling in their own right. The brothers, Pamphilus with the beak nose and close-set eyes and Clearchus with the tic in one eye and the unsettlingly white hair, were good enough at lifting and carrying and driving the cart. But after weeks in their company there was no escaping the conclusion that they were as thick as two short planks and could be mentally outmanoeuvred by a bowl of beef broth. And they seemed to be dangerously impulsive, too. A horrible combination, but at least a reasonably cheap one. Aurelius hated the pair, and tried to keep away from them, having told Fronto that there was a distinct possibility that he would flatten that beak nose someday. When the brothers had almost run him down in the yard with a cart-load of jars and barrels, Aurelius had had to be dragged away from them screaming imprecations.
And the other hireling… well, Glykon seemed perfectly friendly and helpful and excellently competent at his work. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him, other than the fact that Fronto could feel in his bones that there was something wrong with the man, even if he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.