I felt helpless. I had lost some of my natural supporters too. As Justinus had requested, we had left him behind at Berenice. When we put him off, everything between him and Claudia had still seemed set for tragedy. Then, when he had unloaded his meager luggage and bade farewell to the rest of us on the quayside, he had marched up to the young lady.
“You had better kiss me good-bye then,” we had heard him say to her quietly. Claudia thought twice, then pecked him on the cheek, bouncing off again rapidly.
Army-trained for speedy reactions, Camillus Justinus seized the advantage and got one arm around her. “No, I meant properly-”
His steadiness pressurized her so Claudia had to do it. He made the kiss last a long time, holding her about as close as possible without actually committing an impropriety. He had the sense to hang on until she gave up resisting and burst into tears. Consoling her as she wept on his shoulder, Justinus signaled that he intended to keep her with him and for us to collect Claudia's belongings. Then he started talking to her in a low voice.
“Jupiter, I've seen what happens when Quintus has a chat with a girl who secretly thinks he's wonderful!”
Helena paused on the way to pack Claudia's luggage for her. She gave me a piercing look. On reflection, I could not remember if I had ever told Helena about her brother disappearing up the tower in the German forest with the prophetess who subsequently left him lovelorn. I saw him come down from the tower later, visibly altered-and it had been easy to guess why. “Perhaps he's apologizing,” Helena suggested caustically.
Claudia, far from passive even when she was crying her heart out, interrupted Justinus with a long, fierce argument, the gist of which I could not catch. He answered, then she tried to hold off from him, striking aggravated blows on his chest with the palms of her hands until he was forced to step back by degrees almost to the edge of the harbor. She could not bring herself to shove him into the water, and they both knew it.
Justinus let Claudia rant at him until she fell silent. He asked a question. She nodded. Still balanced rather precariously on the edge of the quay, they put their arms around each other. I noticed his face was white, as if he knew he was condemning himself to trouble, but perhaps he thought the trouble he already knew about was better than any other sort.
I myself suppressed a grin, thinking about the fortune Justinus had just corralled. My nephew Gaius mimed being violently sick into the harbor at the soppy scene he had just witnessed. Helena went and sat by herself in the prow of the ship, stricken by seeing her younger brother adopt a life of his own.
The rest of us reboarded. We cast off. Justinus called out that they would try to catch us up before we left Lepcis.
I still thought they were doomed. But people had said that about Helena and me. It had given us a good reason to stick it out. Good omens let you down. Bad ones give you something to fight against.
“Sabratha seems a very attractive city,” Helena tried to mollify me as I absorbed the mistake Famia had then landed on us. That was before she found out there was a Sanctuary of Tanit, causing her to take a tighter grip on both the baby and my nephew Gaius.
“I'm sure the rumors of child sacrifice are simply designed to give Tanit a notorious aura and increase her authority.”
“Oh yes,” scoffed Helena. Rumors of revolting religious rites can appall the most sensible girls.
“No doubt the reason for all those tiny sarcophagi is that those who revere the Punic gods also love little children dearly.”
“And have the bad luck to lose a lot of them at a very similar age… What are we going to do, Marcus?”
Helena was losing her courage. Travelers always hit low moments. Enduring a long journey, only to find at the very moment you expect to arrive that you are actually two hundred miles away from your destination (and have to go backwards) can reduce the bravest soul to despair.
“Let's hope Scilla won't mind me turning up a week late.” Scilla had insisted on making her own way to Lepcis Magna-an example of the wayward attitude that made me suspicious of her as a client. “We can either try to persuade Famia to sail back again-or leave him looking at horses' teeth, hope one of them bites him, and book another ship ourselves. While we're here let's look around like tourists,” I offered. It was my responsibility to make available to my family the Empire's rich variety of cultural experience.
“Oh not another lousy foreign forum!” muttered Gaius. “And I can do without any more funny foreign temples, thanks a lot.”
Like a decent paterfamilias I ignored the boy. His parents dealt with arguments by swiping him: I wished to set him an example of benign tolerance. Gaius had yet to be impressed by that, but I was a patient man.
Like most cities in the narrow hinterland of North Africa, Sabratha had a superb setting right on the waterfront, where there was a strong smell of fish. Houses, shops, and baths almost merged with the deep, deep blue ocean. The cheapest of them were built of unclad local stone, which was a reddish limestone of the most porous kind, readily pocketed with holes. The civic center also played to the sea views. The spacious, airy forum was not only foreign in tinge as Gaius feared, but its main temple-to Liber Pater, a Punic deity he definitely viewed askance-had partly tumbled down in a recent earthquake and was not yet rebuilt. We tried not to think about earthquakes. We had enough problems.
We prowled about like lost souls. At one end of the forum were the Curia, Capitolium, and a Temple of Serapis.
“Ooh look, Gaius-another funny foreign shrine.” We climbed its base and sat there, all tired and dispirited.
Gaius amused himself making a rude noise. “Uncle Marcus, you're not going to be thwarted by that fat bastard Famia?”
“Of course not,” I lied, wondering where I could buy a spicy meat rissole and whether in this new town it would give me any new kinds of bellyache. I spotted a stall, and fetched fishcakes for all of us. We ate them like disreputable tourists, an experience which left me covered with oil.
“When you eat you get more food on you than Nux,” Helena commented. I wiped my mouth very carefully before I kissed her-a politeness which always reduced her to giggles. She leaned against me wearily. “I suppose you are just sitting here waiting for a scantily dressed female acrobat to come along.”
“If it's one of my old Tripolitanian girlfriends she'll be a hundred and on crutches by now.”
“That sounds like a good old Tripolitanian lie… There is one thing that you could do,” Helena suggested.
“What-gaze around at this splendid, salt-tanged city with its jostling merchants and shippers and landowners, all totally disinterested in me or my problems, then cut my throat?”
Helena patted my knee. “Hanno comes from Sabratha. Since we are here, why not find out where he lives?”
“Hanno isn't part of my mission for the new client,” I said.
So we all jumped up and made enquiries straightaway.
51
UNLIKE THE GREEK stiffs of Cyrene, the easygoing millionaires of Sabratha looked to the western end of the Inner Sea for their profits, which were obviously magnificent. Their thoroughly modern trade was with Sicily, Spain, Gaul, and of course Italy; their prized commodities were not only the exotics brought in from the desert in caravans, but local olive oil, fish-pickle, and pottery. The streets of their fine city had become conduits for barter, crowded with shoving groups of many nationalities. It was clear that the old town on the seaboard would not long satisfy the wealthy, and those who were not already planning to expand into a more spacious area would be demanding smarter suburbs in the near future. It was the kind of town that within a couple of generations would become unrecognizable.
For the present, however, those who could afford the best lived east of the forum. In Sabratha the best was palatial. Hanno had a swank mansion with a Hellenistic ground plan but tip-top Roman decor. From the street door we passed through a small corridor to a courtyard surrounded by columns. A huge room spanned the far side of the yard, where plasterers on a trestle were remodeling a faded fresco of the Four Seasons into Our Master Courageously Hunting: Libyan lions, out-of-scale panthers, and a rather surprised spotty snake (with a dado of doves on a fountain and little bunny rabbits eating shrubs). Swags of deep-dyed curtaining brightened the
