26
“DOWN, NUXIE!”
For a moment there seemed a good chance my scruff would end up in custody for goose-worrying. A priest of the Temple of Juno Moneta peered out from the sanctum suspiciously. Casual visitors were discouraged up here; the Citadel was no place to walk your dog.
Juno Moneta had in ancient times assumed responsibility for the Mint and for the patronage of Roman commerce-an early instance of the female sex taking over the housekeeping purse. Jupiter might be the Best and Greatest, but his celestial wife had grabbed the cash I sympathised. Still, as Helena said so sensibly, it was useful for one person to control the home budget.
“Oh please, don't set them of!!” The custodian of Juno's sacred guard-birds seemed cheerful and relaxed. If Nux retrieved one of his charges for my cooking pot it would simply pose awkward problems of bureaucracy. “I have to call out the Praetorians if they decide to have a honk-not to mention filing an incident report as long as your arm. You're no marauding Gaul, I hope?”
“Certainly not. Even my dog has Roman citizenship.”
“What a relief.”
Ever since a monstrous army of Celts once raided Italy and actually sacked Rome, a permanent gaggle of geese had been given privileged status on the Arx, in honour of their feathered forebears who had raised the alarm and saved the Capitol. I had imagined that the big white birds led a pampered life. This lot looked a bit wormy, to tell the truth.
The geese were taking an aggressive interest in Nux. She barked once, then shrank back against my legs. I wasn't too confident I could save the little coward. As I bent to pat her reassuringly, I noticed I had stepped in some of the slimy green droppings that lay in wait all over the hillside at the top of the steps past the Mamertine.
Across the dip on the Capitol, the twin peak to the Arx, the restored Temple of Jupiter had begun to rise slowly. Destroyed by a catastrophic fire at the end of the civil war that brought Vespasian to power, the Temple was now being rebuilt in due magnificence as a sign of the Flavian Emperors' triumph over their rivals. Or as they would no doubt put it, as a gesture of piety and the renewal of Rome. Fine white dust drifted towards us on the misty rain, through which there was no diminution in the sound of stonemasons chipping at marble; they were, of course, secure in the knowledge that the Census property tax would be paying for their materials and labour at top rates.
Once they had built the new Temple of Capitoline Jove, they would be moving on profitably to the Flavian Amphitheatre, the new stage for the Theatre of Marcellus, restoring the Temple of the Divine Claudius, then creating the Forum of Vespasian, complete with two libraries and a Temple of Peace'
An area near Juno's outdoor altar had been turned into a tiny garden for the Sacred Geese. They had a fine view over the roof of the Mamertine prison to the Forum, though their enclosure was rather rocky and inhospitable.
The custodian was a slight, elderly public slave with a whispy beard and bandy legs, clearly not chosen for his love of winged creatures. Every time a goose wandered too close to him he jeered, “Foxes!”
“It's a terrible place for them,” he confirmed, noticing my polite concern. He sheltered in a hut under a stunted pine tree. For a man with easy access to goose egg omelettes, not to mention the occasional roast drumstick no doubt, he was oddly underweight. He matched his thin charges, though. “They ought to have a pond or a stream, with growing herbage to tear up. If I take my eyes off them, they wander off in search of better pasture. I go down and round them up with my stave-” He shook it in a listless manner. It was a splintered stick I wouldn't throw for the dog. “Sometimes they come home with a few feathers plucked, but normally nobody bothers them.”
“Out of respect for their sanctity?” “No. They can peck very nastily.”
I noticed that although there was loose corn sprinkled on a bare patch of ground, the geese were foraging in a heap of faded grass clippings. Interesting. I cleaned my boot on some of the greenery that had been supplied to the hissing guard-poultry' “I have to talk to you about your corn supply.”
The custodian groaned. “Nothing to do with me!”
“The weekly sacks of grain?”
“I keep telling them we don't want so much.”
“Who do you tell?”
“The drivers.”
“And what do they do with the surplus?”
“Take it back to the granary, I guess.”
“The geese don't eat corn?”
“Oh if I scatter some for them they toss it about a bit'
But they prefer greens.”
“Where do you get their green feed then?”
“The men at Caesar's Gardens; they bring me their clippings. It eases the load, given that they have to cart their rubbish outside the city. And some of the herbalists who have market stalls bring me unsold bundles when they're getting limp, rather than carry them home again.”
This was classic bureaucracy. Some clerk believed that the Sacred Geese required a large supply of grain because his predecessors had left him a brief saying so. Nobody ever asked the keeper of the poultry yard to confirm what was needed. He probably did complain to the drivers, but the drivers didn't want to know. No chance they would report back to the suppliers at the Granary of the Galbae. The suppliers were being paid by the Treasury so they kept on posting out the sacks. If you could find the original order clerk it could be put right; but nobody ever did find him.
“What's the rationale for the corn then?”
“If the poor can have a corn dole, so can Juno's geese. They saved Rome. The city shows its gratitude.“
“What; a hundred thousand skivers receive their vouchers for free corn-and one of the dockets is routinely made out to the Sacred Honkers? I suppose they get best white loaf wheat too?”
“No, no,” soothed their elderly gooseboy, who was slow to appreciate irony.
“This has been going on for five hundred years?”
“All my time,” nodded the custodian self-righteously.
“Is it possible,” I asked, wearily because my cold was getting the better of me now, “That the drivers take your rejects away and sell off the sacks cheap?”
“Oh gods, don't ask me,” scoffed the custodian. “I'm just stuck here talking to birds all day.”
I told him I did not want to worry him, but he really ought to think about it seriously since today's sacks must have been tampered with. He could have ended up in charge of a pile of pillow feathers. When I mentioned the dead ostrich, he did finally react.
“Ostriches!” It had brought forth real contempt. “Those bastards will eat anything, you know. They like to swallow stones.” He seemed fonder of his geese now, by comparison.
“The ostriches don't object to corn, and it looks as if they get it,” I said shortly. “Look, this is serious. First we had better collect up what you've put down today, and then don't give the geese any more unless you've tested that sack on some bird who's not sacred.”
It took a bit of persuasion, but the threat of losing his charges worked in the end' I tied Nux to a tree-where the geese came and pretended to mob her-then the custodian and I spent half an hour on our knees, carefully picking up every speck of corn we could see.
“So what's this about?” he asked me when we finally stood up and stretched our aching backs.
“It's part of a war to the death between the keepers of the wild beast menageries that supply the arena. If their stupidity has brought them too close to the Sacred Geese, it needs to be stopped right now. I have to find out how and when the sack that did for the ostrich found its way off the granary cart-”
“Oh I can tell you that.”
