He and his now-empty litter had to leave the track to make way for a cart, laden with vegetables, the mule being pulled along by a bent old crone, with dirty white hair, spiked and unkempt, her face burnt near black by years spent in the sun. Cholon took the opportunity to check his directions, though he took care not to get downwind of her. The old woman stopped at his bidding, and in the way of country folk seemed to chew upon the question.
‘My he’s getting popular,’ she wheezed, grinning and exposing her toothless gums. ‘He had a whole lot of visitors the other day. Not that he had cause to welcome them.’ She laughed then, though the sound was more of a cackle, her bony frame shaking with the effort. ‘Happen he won’t welcome you after what they did.’
‘The fellow I’m looking for is dead,’ said Cholon, ignoring the logicality of that remark. ‘He has a son of the same name, I assume?’ She did not reply, her eyes narrowing suspiciously, while her bony hand reached into a pouch on her side. Cholon felt that this old woman could close up, for country folk did not like authority and with his decorated litter and his fine clothes he might look very much like some authoritarian figure. ‘I assure you that his family will welcome me. I bear a bequest coming to them from a very famous man, a reward for his service in the legions.’
If he thought she had been amused before, it was as nothing to the state she was reduced to following that remark. Her eyes opened wide, a great gush of fetid air escaped from her open mouth, and the sound she made, a single screech, seemed to echo off the surrounding hills. Another followed and the mule, frightened, shied away, but the halter was firmly held and the animal received a mighty slap. Then she bent double, her hands clutching her sides, gasping for breath through her gums, her spiky hair flopping about as she tried to get some air and she kept repeating the words he had used each time she stopped laughing enough to draw breath:
‘Service…legions…bequest…’
Cholon looked round at his bearers to see if they could offer any enlightenment but they looked equally bemused, so there was nothing to do but wait for the crone to recover. Eventually her breathing grew more regular, her hand rubbing her aching ribs as she slowly returned to normality, until finally she looked Cholon in the eye.
‘Turds float, friend, an’ if you ever doubted it, you’ll stand convinced when you meet your man. All used to laugh at him, sayin’ that he would be a knight an’ all. Happen they was wrong.’
Cholon was still confused. ‘You’ve yet to furnish me with proper directions.’
The old woman pulled out a handful of bones and threw them at the ground. What she saw there made her quiver and she fixed him with a beady eye, which suddenly seemed full of anger and hate. ‘You can’t miss it, man. Keep on this track till you see a new villa going up, three sided and a portico, like a proper gent’s. That’s Dabo’s place.’ He stood aside to let her pass and she started laughing again, though softly this time, repeating the same litany. ‘Service…legions…bequest. I’ll wait here for you, Greek. Be sure and come to me on your way back. Me and my bones have a message for you.’
Cholon pushed past angrily, barely giving the bones spread out on the track a second’s glance. They were clearly an attempt to solicit a payment for some specious form of rustic fortune telling. He was near the farm, too late to turn back and ask, before it struck him: he was dressed as a Roman nobleman and had spoken in proper Latin. How had the old creature known he was Greek?
‘What does that look like to you?’ asked Mellio, from his vantage point on Dabo’s roof, one hand pointing into the distance.
Balbus stood upright, a red tile still in his hand, shaded his eyes and followed Mellio’s pointed finger, examining the litter as it approached, then he turned his attention to Cholon, walking alongside, holding, very obviously, a rolled scroll.
‘Tax-gatherer,’ he snapped, dropping the tile, which slid noisily down the roof and flipped over the edge onto the dust below.
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Mellio, looking anxiously at his mate.
Dabo shouted up angrily from the courtyard. He had been watching the two men, wondering how he could get them to speed up the work, which had slowed considerably since Aquila’s departure. ‘Careful of those tiles, you lout. They cost money.’
Balbus ignored him and spoke softly to Mellio. ‘We don’t want to meet any tax-gatherers do we?’
‘No we don’t!’
Balbus made for the ladder. ‘Best quit for today, says I.’
‘Where’re you going?’ Dabo yelled at them as he scurried across the yard. Again they ignored him, climbing down to ground level as he strode into the courtyard to confront them. ‘I’ve been watching you two all morning, and I want to tell you I’m not satisfied.’
Balbus turned his back to him. ‘Hide the tools, Mellio. We don’t have time to get them away.’
‘What do you mean hide the tools? You get back up on that roof, or you’ll not see a denarius from me.’
‘There’s someone coming to see you, mate, someone you won’t make welcome.’
Dabo’s face paled under his broad-brimmed hat, the image of Flaccus coming to mind, but his meanness overlaid that. ‘Get back to work. Now!’
They glared at each other for several seconds, the two workers weighing the cost of non-payment against the price that might fall on them if they were caught working as builders. They were officially classed as poor, entitled to free corn, and Balbus shrugged, bent down and picked up his hammer, before making his way back to the ladder. Mellio, following him, whispered urgently.
‘What you doin’?’
Balbus turned and spoke sourly. ‘Can you imagine what that tight-fisted bastard will do if he gets an excuse not to pay us?’
Mellio looked at their employer’s retreating back and shrugged in agreement. Dabo had turned and hurried to the open side of the compound, casting his eyes down the track. It did not take him long to reach the same conclusion as the builders and his heart nearly stopped with fright.
‘Nine years,’ he moaned to himself. ‘Nine years’ land tax. They’ll ruin me.’
He turned and made for the house, calling to his wife. His sons Annius and Rufurius were in the fields, so she would have to deal with this intrusion; after all, officially, he was dead. That made him stop moving and shouting; it was one thing being at home while someone else fought your war but he had never considered that Clodius would actually get himself killed. Silently, standing in the middle of the compound created by his new, half-built villa, he cursed the man; if he was officially dead, then everything around him belonged to Annius, his heir. Dabo fought to bring some order to his thoughts, regarding a son who disliked him nearly as much as he disliked Annius. If the boy ever found out about this he would probably boot him off the property. He could lose everything. Time to come clean. What he had done was illegal, but it was a regular if not a common occurrence, one to which the magistrates could turn a blind eye. As for the taxes, he could slip them a bribe that would be a lot less than he owed, with a grovelling apology for missing the census.
‘There’s no future in being dead,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Time for Dabo to return from Hades to the land of the living.’
Then he remembered he had been calling for his fat and lazy wife and she had yet to respond, so he stormed into the finished part of the house, glad to have someone on whom to take out his anger.
An odd feeling had come over Cholon as he approached the buildings; up till now the farms he had visited had been run-down, with untidy fields, places where he felt the money he offered would be insufficient compensation for the loss of the man needed to work the land. This was different; here was obvious prosperity, and a look around the place, fields well tilled and a full and thriving pigsty, revealed proper husbandry. The house itself was a mess, but that was because it was, as yet, unfinished. It required little imagination to see it as it would be, with a tiled courtyard, facing north, away from the heat of the sun. Did these people really qualify for a bequest from Aulus? The face that greeted him was full of the rural suspicion he had come to expect, a man of perhaps forty years dressed in a long smock, which reached below his knees, with a large straw hat on his head. He could not be the owner, since he looked nothing like the sort of person who would construct a place such as this. Indeed he smelt like a farm labourer who had just completed his most unpleasant task of the day.
Dabo, for his part, was wondering who he was about to greet, there being nothing official about his visitor’s accoutrements — no rods of office — nor the livery of his plainly clad, dust-covered attendants. His nose crinkled as he caught a whiff of the scented water that the man wore, his eyes taking in the braided band that Cholon wore around his head, something in which no true-born Roman would be seen dead, and the voice, with his light pitch, to
