"There must be some mistake," decided Justinus, losing heart. "I was expecting ambrosia."
"Then you're a romantic. According to Ma, when silphium is cooked the bad taste vanishes-virtually. And your breath afterwards is-more or less-acceptable. But she reckoned it causes unavoidable wind."
He recovered himself. "People who will be able to afford this treat, Marcus Didius, won't need to care where they fart."
"Quite. The rich make their own social rules."
We farted ourselves, on principle. As Romans we had been granted this privilege by the kindhearted, conscientious Emperor Claudius. And we were in the open air. Anyway, we were going to be rich. From now on, we could behave objectionably whenever and wherever we liked. Freedom to expel flatulence without comment had always struck me as the main benefit of wealth.
"This plant of ours is flowering," observed Justinus. His record as an army tribune was impeccable. His approach to logistical problems never failed to be incisive. He could come up with a reasonable order of the day, even when ecstatic and slightly drunk. "It's April. So when will there be any seeds?"
"I don't know. We may have to sit this out for a few months before they form and ripen. If you see any bees passing, try to entice them over and speed the stripy fellows onto the flowers. Tomorrow when it's light we'll go for a stroll around the jebel and look for a feather. Then I can try tickling up our big boy by hand." Real horticultural spoiling lay in store for this baby of ours.
"Anything you say, Marcus Didius."
We rolled ourselves into our blankets and settled down for one last nightcap under the stars. This time I made a toast to Helena. I was missing her. I wanted her to see this plant of ours, growing so sturdily in its natural habitat. I wanted her to know that we had not failed her, and that soon she would be able to enjoy all the comforts she deserved. I even wanted to hear her caustic comments on the coarse green brute that was supposed to make her lover and her little brother rich.
I was still waiting for Justinus to honor Claudia with similar politeness, when I grew tired of keeping my eyes open and drifted off to sleep.
XLVI
The tinkle-tonkle of retreating goatbells must have woken me.
It was a wonderful morning. We both slept late, even on the bare ground. Well, we had had a hundred-mile ride, a long night of heavy festivities with a wealthy hunting party, great excitement here in secret, and too much to drink again. Besides, with the prospect of an enormous income, all the troubles of our lives were solved.
Perhaps we should have eaten some of our hard rations last night, while we sat up dreaming of the palatial villas we would own one day, our fleets of ships, the glittering jewels with which we would adorn our adoring womenfolk, and the huge inheritances we could leave to our expensively educated children (so long as they groveled enough as we declined into our well-kept old age)…
My head ached as if I had a troop of dancing elephants restyling my haircut. Justinus looked gray. Once I had glimpsed the glaring sunlight as it bounced off the rocks, I preferred to keep horizontal, with my eyes closed. He was the poor devil who sat up and looked around.
He let out a tortured groan. Then he yelled. After that he must have jumped up and thrown back his head, as he howled at the top of his voice.
I too was sitting up by then. Part of me already knew what must have happened, because Camillus Justinus was a senator's son so he had been brought up to be nobly undemonstrative. Even if a vintner's cart drove over his toe, Justinus was supposed to ignore his bones cracking but to wear his toga in neat folds like his ancestors, then to speak nicely as he requested the driver to please move along. Yelling at the sky like that could only mean disaster.
It was quite simple. As the star-filled desert night faded to dawn, while we two still dozed like oblivious logs, a group of nomads must have wandered past. They had taken one of our horses (either despising mine, or else leaving us the means to escape alive out of quaint old desert courtesy), and they had stolen all our money. They had robbed us of our flagon, though like us they rejected the biscuit.
Then their flocks of half-starved sheep or goats had devoured the surrounding vegetation. Taking offense at our silphium, before they meandered off on their age-old journey to nowhere, the nomads had yanked out any remaining shreds of our plant.
Our chance of a fortune had gone. There was almost nothing left.
While we stared in dismay, one lone brown goat skipped down from a rock and chewed up the last sunbaked threads of root.
XLVII
To Greeks, Cyrene was a blessed hole in the heavens that had dropped to earth for them to colonize. A foundation at least as old as Rome, the high ridge where the city stands looks so much like Greece itself that the drought-ridden Therans who had been sent forth by the Oracle of Delphi and who were led here by helpful Libyans must have thought they had nodded off and somehow sailed back home again. From the scrubby gray hills where quails abound, there is a stunning vista over the far plain below to the gleaming sea and the ever-thriving port of Apollonia. The deep wooded valleys of the high jebel are as peaceful and mysterious as Delphi itself. And everywhere is filled with the perfumes of wild thyme, dill, lavender, laurel, and small-leaved mint.
This highly aromatic place was not, to be frank, a good place for two dispirited lads who had just failed in their hunt for a lost herb.
Justinus and I had climbed slowly and gloomily up towards the city one sunlit, pine-scented morning, arriving on the Way of the Tombs; it brought us through a haunting necropolis of ancient gray burial houses, some of them freestanding against the hillside, some carved deep into the native rock; some still tended, but a few long deserted so their rectangular entrances with worn architectural features now stood agape and offered homes to deadly, poisonous, horned vipers who liked lurking in the dark.
We paused.
"The choice is, either to keep searching or-"
"Or to be sensible," Justinus agreed sadly. We both had to think about that. Good sense beckoned like a one-eyed whore in a tosspots' dive, while we tried to look away primly.
"The choice element only applies to you. I must consider Helena and our child."
"And you already have a career in Rome."
"Call it a trade. Being an informer lacks the glorious attributes of a "career": glamour, prospects, security, reputation-cash rewards."
"Did you earn money working for the Censors?"
"Not as much as I was promised, though more than I had been used to."
"Enough?"
"Enough to get addicted to it."
"So will you stay in partnership with Anacrites?"
"Not if I can replace him with somebody I like more."
"What is he doing now?"
"Wondering where I vanished to, presumably."
"You didn't tell him you were coming here?"
"He didn't ask," I grinned.
"But you will continue as a private informer after you go home?"
"It's traditional to say, "That's the only life I know." I also know it stinks, of course, but being a fool is a talent informers revel in. Anyway, I need to work. When I met your sister I set myself the quaint goal of becoming respectable."
"I understood that you already had the money to qualify for the middle rank. Didn't your father give it to you?"
I surveyed Helena's brother thoughtfully. I had assumed this would be a discussion of his future, yet I was the one being grilled. "He loaned it. When I was turned down for social promotion by Domitian, I handed the gold back."