“I'm glad you said it.” I had disliked Scilla intensely: too self-assured.
“It may be straightforward,” Helena suggested in her fair way. “scilla has been thwarted when she approached the vigiles and the Emperor. She feels there has been an injustice-but what remedy exists? People who lose someone in a tragedy become very angry and flail around looking for a way to relieve their helplessness.”
“That's fine-if they come and employ me.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I'm sure.”
When Scilla discussed the night that her lover planned to impress her with the show, I had remembered the dead lion, and later the dead gladiator whose murder was never even halfway solved. It stirred up feelings I had left behind when I came out on this sun-bleached holiday interlude. Devoting myself to Justinus-his wild chase after a fortune and his sad troubles with his love life-had taken me far from those winter days of auditing amongst the menageries. Yet the disturbing problem never left me. Now here we were, in ancient Greek Cyrene, facing the same dark undercurrents.
“So,” Helena said, giving me an odd look. “You are going to Tripolitania.”
“That I am. You need not come.”
“Oh I'll be there!” She spoke rather warmly. “I have not forgotten, Marcus Didius, that when we first met you were renowned for spending time with notoriously flexible Tripolitanian acrobats.”
I laughed. It was the wrong reaction.
What a girl she was. Four years had passed since I first knew Helena Justina, and in all that time I had never given a thought to the sinuous young rope dancer I had dallied with before her. I could not even recall the dancer's name. But Helena, who had never even met the girl, was still harboring jealousies.
I kissed her. That too was the wrong thing to do, but anything else would have been worse. “You had better be there to fight them off,” I said gently. Helena's chin came up in defiance, so then I winked at her. I hadn't done that for a long time. It was one of those cheeky rituals of courtship that get forgotten when you feel sure of someone.
Too sure, perhaps. Helena could still give me the feeling that she was keeping her options open in case she decided I was a bad risk.
I walked with her across the formal temple area to a dramatic feature where water from the Spring of Apollo had been diverted from the upper level down into a formal fountain. A nude male torso-rather small-leaned at an odd angle on the plinth of a slender obelisk; that was set above a layered basin down which sheets of springwater flowed. Helena looked askance at the solitary column, whose significance she seemed to view suspiciously.
“Some sculptor representing his dreams,” she scoffed. “I bet it makes his girlfriend laugh.”
Below the obelisk ran a fine semicircular podium, terminated by two grand stone lions. In-turned and grimacing fiercely, the lions were long in the body if rather solid in the trunk and legs, with broad heads, attractive whiskers, and meticulously carved curly manes.
For some time I stood looking up at the guardian beasts, thinking about Leonidas.
Part Three
Tripolitania: May A.D. 74
50
Among all the bumptious provinces in the Empire, Tripolitania led by a long head. The Three Towns have a history of independence that is positively shocking. The only thing remotely in their favor, in my view, was the fact that they were not Greek.
They were never through and through Carthaginian either. This accounts for their self-willed attitude; when Carthage foundered, they were laughing. First established by Phoenicians, sure enough, and possibly recolonized on later occasions from Carthage itself, nonetheless the three great seashore cities had consistently retained their independent status. When Rome smashed the power of Carthage they could claim to be sufficiently separate to avoid punishment. While Carthage was torn down, its populace enslaved, its religion banned, its fields sewn with salt, and its aristocracy fined into oblivion, the Three Towns pleaded innocent and claimed immunity. Tripolitania had never had to surrender formally. It had never been made a military zone. It was not colonized by Roman military veterans. Although there were legal circuit visits, it did not even have a regular administrative presence from the office of the governor of Proconsular Africa, under whose jurisdiction this region fell in theory.
Tripolitania was now Punic, going on Roman. With every appearance of sincerity its people were giving themselves Roman town planning, Roman inscriptions, and what passed for Roman names. The Three Towns were collectively known as the Emporia, and that summed them up: an international trade center. It follows that they were all crammed with well-dressed, thriving ethnic millionaires.
My party was clean and civilized, but when we landed at Sabratha we felt like ragged tinkers with no business to be there.
Two points need to be mentioned. First point: Sabratha is the One Town without a harbor. When I say “landed” I mean our ship beached itself on the strand unexpectedly and very violently with a horrid rending noise. The captain, who had become a close friend of my brother-in-law Famia, was-we discovered after the abrupt landing-nowhere near sober at the time.
Second point: Although we landed at Sabratha, I had given the captain very precise orders to sail somewhere else.
It seemed clear enough to me; it ought to be my decision. I was in charge of our group. What's more, I had found the vessel at Apollonia, I haggled and commissioned her, then I arranged the loading of the splendid Libyan stock Famia had somehow managed to buy for the Greens. Given that I supported the Blues, this was pretty magnanimous. It is true that Famia had actually paid for the ship. In the end, in the crucial matter of winning the captain's confidence, Famia's amphorae were what carried weight. By bargaining hard for the horses he had managed to leave enough Green funds over for a substantial number of amphorae.
Famia wanted to go to Sabratha because he thought horses were brought there from the interior oases by the desert tribes. He had emptied Cyrena?ca, but was still buying. The Greens had always been profligate. And the more horses he bought, the more banker's orders he could cash, releasing more cash for wine.
The significant tribe from the interior was that of the Garamantes, those whose thrashing by the Roman commander Valerius Festus had already been discussed by Justinus and me when we thought they might have captured us. In view of their very recent defeat it was likely that they had ceased trading, at least temporarily. However, from the great oasis of Cydame caravans still wound their way to Sabratha bearing gold, carbuncles, ivory, cloth, leather, dye stuffs, marble, rare woods, and slaves, not to mention exotic animals. The town's commercial emblem was an elephant.
I was after men who traded in wild beasts, but elephants did not come into it, thank the gods.
“Famia,” I had said back in Apollonia, speaking slowly and pleasantly, lest I offend or confuse the drunken bastard, “I need to go to Oea and I need to go to Lepcis. Either will do to start with, though we shall reach Lepcis first. Sabratha is the one place we can leave out.”
“All right, Marcus,” Famia had replied, smiling in that aggravating way all drunks do when they are about to forget everything you have said. As soon as my back was turned the slippery deviant must have begun palling up with the captain, a swine who turned out to be just as bad as Famia.
When I felt the jolt as we scraped up the rocks and sand at Sabratha, I emerged from below where I had been paralyzed with seasickness; I had to grip my hands to keep them from squeezing my brother-in-law's throat. Now I knew why the journey had seemed endless. It ought to have been over days before.
It was absolutely pointless trying to remonstrate. I had now realized Famia floated in a state of incurable inebriation, never totally sobering up. His daily intake propelled him into wilder moods or duller troughs, but he never let himself hit the real world. If I belted him into oblivion as I wanted to do, when we returned to Rome he would moan to my sister and then Maia would hate me.
