Then he stepped up on the stone mounting-block beneath the wall, seized the low pommel and cantle of the military saddle, and hauled himself carefully up onto Tugha Ban’s broad back. He nodded once more to the guard and then rode on down the street.
Not everyone is false; not everything is fallen. Though great Rome herself may fall, not everything will fall.
‘You look out for yourself, now,’ the guard on the gate called after him. ‘We live in funny old times.’
So we do, thought Lucius. So we do.
He rode out of the west gate of the city, and through the encircling camp of the Goths by moonlight, riding and looking so steadily straight ahead that those who challenged him did not pursue their challenge in the face of his silence. Some said that he was a ghost. None would stay his flight with sword or spear.
He rode along the banks of the widening Tiber and saw the well-fed water bats skimming the surface of the river, hawking at gnats in the darkness, and he wondered that bats should be better fed than men. Surely Rome was being punished by the gods. He rode on down to the port of Ostia. At dawn he stopped to bathe in the river, only to remount and ride on still sweat-stained and travel-weary. How could you wash yourself clean in a river where starved and skeletal bodies floated by?
The sun rose over the great stone warehouses and mighty wharves of Ostia, but many of them lay in ruins now, stricken and blackened at the hands of the Gothic invaders. In the harbour, the smashed masts and the sunken wrecks of the great African grain-ships still showed above the flat, calm waters where they lay. There were very few people about, and those he encountered looked warily at him and said nothing. Where before, for centuries, sunrise in summer would have seen thousands of workmen arriving or waking here for their day’s work, now there were only a handful. The shipwrights and chandlers, caulkers, sailmakers and netmenders were gone. And the merchants and traders, too, who had come here from all over the Mediterranean, bringing precious marble and porphyry from the east for the buildings and monuments of Rome, and Egyptian cotton and linen, and all the fruits and spices of the Levant – there were none. Where were the hundred different languages of the known world, haggling over prices, rising into the early morning air in a babel of polyglot voices? Where were the lightermen and stevedores, pushing their wooden hand-barrows, unloading ship after ship of its treasure-store of silks and linen, sacks of grain, ingots of silver and tin? And hefty, roped bundles of furs, and barrels of precious Baltic amber, slaves from Britain, and huge, rangy hunting dogs from Caledonia, straining on their studded leather collars: deer-killers and wolf-slayers, all ivory teeth and eyes like Baltic amber.
All that great hubbub was gone. Ostia lay under the warm and constant sun, a ghost of her former self. The great quayside cranes with their granite tackle-blocks and their huge oak crossbeams stood silent, blackened with fire, some still smoking gently like mournful, extinguished dragons. Only the occasional cry of a lone yellow-legged gull broke the silence.
On the far side of one of the smaller harbours, Lucius could see a small, broad-beamed cargo ship, a square- rigger with a red sail faded by salt and sun. He rode round the cobbled harbour wall and found three men lading her with corked amphorae and crates of fruit. Evidently the Goths had no taste for dried apricots. But everything else that had lain in the warehouses they had destroyed or looted, loaded into their great wheeled wagons, and taken away.
‘Where are you bound for?’ he called out to the three dogged sailors. They ignored him. He called out again, more strongly.
One of them set down his amphora in its wooden stall. ‘No place you’d want to go,’ he said.
‘Tell me.’
‘Gaul,’ he said. ‘Port of Gessoriacum.’
‘Take me. Take me north, to the coast of Britain, and sail me into port at Dubris, or Portus Lemanis. Or Noviomagnus, even better.’
‘You got money?’
‘Not a fig.’
The man grinned at one of his fellows: the cheek of it. Then he shook his head. ‘Out of our way. We’ve got a load more lading to do before we sail, and we’ve no desire to cross Biscay in September storms.’
Lucius dismounted. Before they could stop him, he had lifted a heavy wine amphora onto his right shoulder and was walking across the wooden gangway on board. It cost him more in pain than the sailors ever knew, the still unhealed wounds across his back cracking and oozing afresh over his straining muscles. But he made not a sound, gave not a sign. He set the amphora down in the rack, and went back to get another.
The sailors eyed each other and shrugged.
They’d reckoned the lading would take all morning. It was done by the fifth hour, thanks to the stranger’s willingness and heft.
The captain, the one who had spoken to him, leant against the gunwale of his ship. ‘So you want to go to Gaul?’
‘No, you want to go to Gaul. I want to be set down at Noviomagnus.’
‘“Set down?” You know what it’s like sailing into British coastal waters these days?’
Lucius shook his head. ‘No, I’ve no idea. That’s your job. But when you set me down at Noviomagnus-’
‘If.’
‘When. Then I’ll find you payment of five silver pieces before you sail for Gaul.’
The captain debated democratically and in muffled tones with his two crew-members for a moment. Then he grunted, ‘You’re on. Only go and get what you can for the horse first. Try the customs office over there. What you get will serve for now as down-payment.’
Lucius shook his head. ‘Where I go, she goes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘Look, sunshine, I’m the captain of this ship, and a captain on his ship is a little emperor at sea. What he says is law. No one even farts on this leaky old bucket without my permission, see? And the one thing I won’t have on my ship is horses.’
‘Or cats,’ said a crewman.
‘Or women in their courses,’ said the second.
‘Or anything made of lindenwood,’ said the first.
‘Or-’
‘All right, all right, you twittering idiots, we all have our funny little superstitions. Yours is cats and bleeding wenches, and mine is horses.’ He looked back at Lucius. ‘And my superstition tells me that ships, weather and horses go together like wine, women and chastity. One hint of a storm, or Jove gets irate and starts hurling bolts at us, and horses start stampeding all over the hold. Nothing but a bloody nuisance, horses is. So if you want to keep your horse, then it stays with you.’
‘You don’t know Tugha Ban,’ said Lucius, patting her on the withers.
‘How very true that is. And you know what? I have no wish to make the lovely lady’s acquaintance, neither. Now bugger off and-’
Lucius stepped up onto the ramp, leading Tugha Ban behind him.
‘If she causes you any trouble on the voyage,’ he said with quiet determination, ‘I will cut her throat and roll her overboard myself. You have my word.’
The captain scrutinised the strange, grey-eyed horseman. And he saw that he was, indisputably, a man whose word meant something. ‘Ten silver pieces,’ he grunted. ‘You’re aboard.’
‘Ten silver pieces,’ agreed Lucius. ‘When you set us down at Noviomagnus.’
The late summer seas were calm and the voyage was uneventful, but for one incident when they anchored at Gades to take on more fresh water. The two crewmen came back staggering under huge amphorae.
When they had set them down, and swiped the perspiration from their faces, one said, ‘Rome’s fallen. The gates were opened to the Goths by some bleeding-heart old matron who couldn’t bear seeing all the people starving like that. Like the Goths was going to come trooping in and open a bloody soup kitchen. So in they march and sack the city top to bottom.’
Neither Lucius nor the captain said a word. It was written.
‘Then Alaric their king went off south and died of poisoning, they say. Dirty work, maybe.’
Lucius looked up.
