You’ll get us both killed if you aren’t careful. I saw Fat Silas boasting yesterday about those coins you gave him. Next I knew, he was dead in the gutter. You be careful.’
‘But I already know about the column,’ I lied. ‘Because he can’t trust the regular service, the emperor has set up his own personal security service. It’s operating here in Rome.
‘What do you know about a man with one eye?’
The old man got up. His face had closed on me like a town gate at dusk. ‘We’ve spoken quite long enough now about matters that don’t concern the likes of us, young Aelric,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want to end like poor Silas – or your friend, the Saint – you’ll stop asking these questions now.’
As he walked away, he turned and said, still in English: ‘Within the next year, there will be a new order of things in the East. When that happens, this column will amount to nothing. Until then, regard it as an armed and dangerous conspiracy of the Greeks against the peace. Its spies are everywhere. It won’t rest until the exarch of Africa and his boys are dead, or until they have defeated the emperor.
‘I warn you, Aelric, stick to your books. Stick to the price of tin. Make money. Educate your people. Keep your nose out of politics. You may end by losing that and much more besides.’ He walked off back to the Exchange.
What had I learnt from the conversation? Not much new, I supposed. But much had been confirmed. Phocas was up to something in Rome. The only question remaining was what it could be. Lucius was right: those letters really were the key to our locked door.
And that gold seemed to be cursed. I aside, everyone who’d owned to touching the stuff was dead – those two bandits on the road, the other ten, Maximin, and now Silas. And I was being watched and had been attacked.
A superstitious man might have considered giving the gold to the Church. I took a comforting grip on the pommel of that nice sword Lucius had given me.
38
I nearly bumped into Martin as I passed one of the Syrian churches in the square. We were in a crowd of dealers and professional men. He didn’t see me at all. He was smiling absently when I saw him.
‘Hello, Martin,’ I said patting him on the shoulder. ‘On a mission for the dispensator?’
Of course, he wasn’t. He’d been with his woman and unborn child. Where could they be staying? This must have been an expensive area for renting.
He blushed a bright pink. ‘Yes, sir,’ he lied very badly. Then he remembered his place. He set his features into the required expression of cringing respect.
I smiled and clapped him harder on the shoulder. Martin was a rotten liar – most unlike the others of his race. But what was it to me if he had a woman? I hadn’t believed Lucius in his wider claim. Yes, slaves might need a harsh discipline to keep them in line. But that was because, fundamentally, they were human beings, with the same desire for personal freedom and autonomy as the rest of us. Martin wasn’t my slave. He was on loan from the Church. So long as he oversaw that copying, that was the limit of what I wanted from him. I had no complaint about the copying. So what if he ran off now and again to be with his woman?
I suddenly thought that Edwina would now be heavy with child. I felt a pang of remembrance for what I had lost. And I felt a degree of sympathy for Martin.
We walked on in the bright sunshine. Dealers and vendors and other men of business hurried around us. There was the occasional litter carrying one of their ladies. We passed through the financial district and across the bridge, back into the semi-ruined main areas of Rome, where the quality of those around us dropped correspondingly. Across the river, we turned right towards the Lateran.
We began a conversation about the sound of Greek and Latin in their better ages. You need a pretty uncritical nature not to realise that the sound of Latin has changed between ancient times and the present. Nowadays, there are more letters than sounds, and there has been a softening of sounds that once were hard. The question is, what was the ancient pronunciation? And, of course, is it really important to appreciating the writings of the ancients if the sounds have changed? Martin’s father was convinced he had answered the technical part of the question for Greek, and was convinced that the correct pronunciation was necessary to appreciate the ancients.
I pushed and pushed with Martin to know more of what his father had told him. We spoke. We argued. We gave illustrations of our points as we walked on past the ruined Forum towards the Lateran, where our project of saving these arguments for another generation to settle was going smoothly ahead. But underneath, I was feeling increasingly troubled. I could sense a vague darkness in my mind.
‘Martin,’ I asked in as normal a tone as I could command, ‘you said at our big meeting in Marcella’s house that you had been with the dispensator on the day that Maximin vanished. Yet I spoke to the dispensator, and he said he hadn’t seen you since attaching you to the copying mission.’
I didn’t have my notes with me, and I’m willing to grant I was misunderstanding what both had said to me. Martin hadn’t actually said he was with the dispensator, only that he had not heard from him about the summons that Maximin had received. As for the dispensator, all he had said was that he’d found himself in need of Martin after his attachment.
If Martin had turned and told me that he had met the dispensator, but was not at liberty to reveal the nature of their conversation, I’d have gone straight back to the question I was forming about the use of the dual cases in Greek. If he’d flushed red again and muttered something nonsensical, I’d have concluded he was with his woman again – though had he ever been gone long enough to get all the way to and back from the financial district? I wasn’t sure at the time about the number and duration of his absences on that day. Instead, he stopped in the street, his face suddenly grey and sweating.
That vague darkness firmed in shape and colour.
‘Martin,’ I asked, now with a harder tone, ‘whoever visited Father Maximin that last afternoon first stopped him from going to the dispensator, and then called him out as night was falling. Yet only four other people knew he had been summoned. There was the dispensator. There was Brother Ambrose. There was me. There was you. One of these leaked that information. Was that person you?’
This was embarrassing. I liked and respected Martin, and I was questioning him like this with the greatest reluctance. I wanted him to stop me. I wanted him to show impatience and even offence. My line of questioning could have been stopped dead by some kind of reply, however feeble it might have sounded in a regular investigation. How could I be sure no one else had known about the summons? I wanted not so much answers as reassurance.
Instead, Martin was babbling about his ‘great regard for the reverend father’, and almost having to support himself against a broken pedestal.
I pressed on, the dark shadow in my mind spreading. I asked where he got the money to buy fine clothes and support a woman and her unborn child in an expensive area. Instead of owning to the standard bribes that all clerical slaves take from petitioners, he nearly puked into the gutter.
Every response raised another question. Every question arranged more of the facts into an internally consistent pattern. I began myself to feel sick.
I took firm hold of his arm. ‘What do you know about Maximin’s death?’ I demanded. ‘What was your part in his murder? You knew he was dead when I offered you your freedom. I well recall how white your face went. You knew he was dead when you told me he wasn’t in the convent. You finished cleaning the words off that parchment letter. It still carried recognisable text when the old woman handed it to you. It was you who scraped it and went over it with vinegar.
‘I want to know what happened. Did you kill Maximin?’
‘No… no, sir,’ he gasped. ‘Surely, I was with you when he was killed. I couldn’t have killed him.’
A wretched answer. It only confirmed that I had been with him when the body was found. I had no idea where he was before I got late back to Marcella’s. I looked at his feet. Were they the same size as those bloody prints? Lucius had taken the measurements. It would be easy to check.
‘I want the truth out of you, Martin,’ I said, tightening my grip on his arm until he winced.
‘Please, sir… please,’ he babbled. ‘I don’t know anything.’
‘So tell me where you went on Maximin’s last afternoon.’ I fought to keep my voice from rising too loud.
