A merchant was in the habit of putting in to the island. Achilles not only deigned to appear, but had entertained him with food and drink. When all was convivial between them, Achilles asked the merchant a favour. The next time he visited Ilion, would he buy him a particular girl who was owned by a certain man? Astonished at the request, and emboldened by wine, the merchant wondered why the hero needed a Trojan slave. Because, my guest, Achilles said, she was born of the lineage from which Hector came, and she is what remains of the blood of the descendants of Priam and Dardanos. Thinking the hero was in love, the merchant carried out the task. The next time he came to the island, Achilles praised him, and asked him to guard the girl overnight on his ship. The island was inaccessible to women. That afternoon Achilles feasted the merchant royally and gave him many of the things such men are unable to resist. The next morning the merchant put the girl ashore, and cast off. He had not gone much more than a hundred yards when he heard the screams of the girl. There on the beach Achilles was pulling her apart, tearing her limb from limb.
Ballista sat in the pool in the hot room of the thermae. They were the only public baths functioning in the town of Olbia. The water was not as hot as it should have been. Despite that, the sweat was lashing off him. It was to be expected when a man stopped after drinking for two or three days.
Through the gloom of the caldarium, Ballista looked at the wall painting by the door. It was a dwarf with a hunchback. From under its ridiculously short tunic poked an erormous erection. The artist had lavished care on the bulbous head, tinting it purple. Causing Ballista a certain disquiet, it brought Calgacus to mind. The memories remained vague shapes below the surface. Ballista’s head hurt and his chest was tight.
Ballista had seen many similar grotesques across the imperium: dozens of the deformed in mosaics and paintings, often negroes, with huge penises and testicles. Their very abnormality was intended to provoke laughter, and it was common knowledge that laughter scared away daemons. So the misshapen often performed their apotropaic function in doorways and in bathhouses. It was not just against daemons the Romans thought they needed protection. There was the danger of invidia, or phthonos as the Greeks called it, the very human malign envy that directs its ill will at others. Those who possessed the Evil Eye were said somehow to be able to penetrate their victims with invisible particles of grudging malice, causing illness, madness, even death.
It was hard to imagine there was much to envy here, certainly nothing about either the looks or characters of Ballista’s three companions. They were all naked in the pool. The scar where the end of Maximus’s nose should have been gleamed white through the steam. His small eyes were screwed shut against the pain of his hangover. If anything stirred behind them, most likely it involved some unfeasible combination of women, alcohol, cannabis and extreme violence. Castricius moved an arm now and then, but the lined, pointed features of his face remained in repose. The little Roman was not one to be afraid of supernatural threats. He never tired of recounting the power of the daemon that always accompanied him; the very daemons of death were terrified of the two of them. His looks were equally unprepossessing, but Tarchon the Suanian was a different case. Thermae were still strange to him. Perhaps it was some perception of threat — physical or mental, human or daemonic — or merely the unaccustomed proximity of naked men, but there was no relaxation in the tribesman from the Caucasus. He shifted this way and that, trying not to brush his legs against those of the others. Continually, he peered around into the shadows. Ballista felt a surge of affection for all three, even as the loss of Calgacus pierced him yet again.
Following Tarchon’s gaze, Ballista doubted the thermae themselves could induce much envy. An old-style moralist who inveighed against the luxuries of contemporary bathing would find little for complaint. The hot room was small, dark and dingy. There appeared to be mould on the ceiling. Apart from the caldarium, there was only a changing room. A cold plunge pool had been wedged in a corner of the apodyterium. The four of them were the only bathers, yet it was still cramped. It was as well they had not brought a single slave with them. The baths in Ballista’s home in Sicily were bigger and better equipped.
In his tired and weakened state, the thought of home threatened to overwhelm him. He wanted nothing more than to be with his boys, with Julia. He loved the villa high on the cliffs of Tauromenium, loved sitting in the shaded garden looking down at sun shining on the Bay of Naxos. But was it really home? The villa had come with Julia as part of her dowry. It had been in her family for generations. Ballista had added his own touches to it; some trophies and weapons hanging on walls, an expanded library, the odd work of art. But it was not his in the way it was Julia’s, in the way it was his sons’. They had always known it. For him it was a brief sunlit interlude. It had been years since he had been there. The place had assumed a mythical status, like Alfheim or the Islands of the Blessed.
The sweat was stinging his eyes. He rubbed it away, along with his maudlin thoughts. There was no point in dwelling on Tauromenium now. He was bound for the far north, Angeln, his original home, and there were no bathhouses there. A line of Tacitus came into his mind. The Britons rushing to embrace togas and baths; mistaking those signs of servitude for humanitas. In which case, his journey should be a flight from slavery into freedom. Somehow he doubted it.
A man moved quietly past the dwarf into the room. There was no sound of clogs protecting his feet from the heated floor. In his hand there was a gleam of metal. The water erupted as Tarchon surged up out of the pool. Ballista slipped and struggled to his feet. Maximus and Castricius were up, knives magicked out of their towels.
The newcomer screamed as Tarchon slammed him against the wall. A bucket rolled away and a strigil scraped across the tiles. Tarchon had his hands around the man’s throat.
‘No!’ Ballista shouted. ‘Leave him. It is just a bath attendant.’
The slave fled when Tarchon let him go.
Ballista smiled at the Suanian. ‘You were quick, but more killings would not be good. We still have the two dead sailors from the waterside hanging over us.’
The drinking had to stop, the guilt reined in, discipline reasserted. Ballista knew he and his familia were a danger to themselves as well as any who crossed their path. This had to stop.
IV
Olbia
Aulus Voconius Zeno, Vir Perfectissimus, special envoy to the far north of the Augustus Gallienus, Pius, Fortunate and Invincible, sat in the seat of honour, such as it was, in the council house of the city of Olbia. Light came from the open door and windows. There was no glass in the windows. Obviously, the building, high on the acropolis, had once been the praetorium of a Roman army unit. The Boule must have moved into the officer’s quarters when, after the disaster at Abritus thirteen years before, the new emperor Gallus had withdrawn the troops from the north of the Euxine. By the look of it, the council had spent nothing on repairs or decorations since.