‘Not as much as Capella.’
Vespasian opened his mouth and then realised that it was futile to argue; Magnus was right. He put a hand to his forehead, massaging it for a few moments. ‘He’s offered me the chance to have her, knowing that she’ll say no; his obligation to me is then discharged without costing him a copper coin. Brilliant!’
‘I’d say so.’
‘The clever bastard; and I can’t now go back on the agreement we made.’ Trying but failing to hide the embarrassment that he felt for being so duped, he strode off, leaving Magnus with an amused look on his face.
Walking briskly up the column as it entered the palm forest, Vespasian reflected upon his naivety. He had been carried away by his own self-importance in everything that he had done since meeting Flavia, thinking that he was acting in his own interests; whereas he now realised that it had been Capella, a man older and cannier than he, who had played him all along. Now Capella was to deny him the prize that he had used to tempt him: Flavia.
Capella had been right: he was here solely to impress her.
He remembered his last conversations with his grandmother, Tertulla, and knew that she would be horrified at his recent behaviour. He had not been following an instinct in his heart that he deemed to be right but had been acting upon a base desire, using his power in an immature and rash way solely for his own ends, and all those men had died because of his arrogance. He had forgotten the ideals that he had espoused when he had beheld Rome for the first time — back when he had felt it wrong even to take a bribe — and he was heartily ashamed.
‘Quaestor!’ a voice from the heart of the column called, bringing Vespasian out of his damning introspection.
Vespasian turned to see a man in his early thirties push his way towards him through the ex-captives. ‘What is it?’ he asked, pleased to turn his mind to other things.
‘Firstly I must thank you for saving us from a living death in the desert,’ the man said as he fell into step beside him.
‘You should thank the men who died in doing so; not me,’ Vespasian responded, looking side-on at the man; judging from his features and headdress Vespasian supposed him to be Jewish.
‘It is the mark of a compassionate man to give such an answer,’ the Jew replied. ‘However, you led them to our rescue when you could have just remained in Cyrene and left us to our fate.’
‘If only you knew the truth of the matter,’ Vespasian said, almost to himself.
‘Whatever the truth may be it cannot change the fact that you are responsible for our freedom, so all the people here are in your debt; I for one will never forget that.’
Vespasian grunted his acknowledgement. ‘And secondly?’
The Jew looked at him quizzically. ‘What?’
‘You said “firstly”, so I assume that there’ll be a “secondly”.’
The Jew carried on staring at him for a few paces as they walked along. ‘Forgive me for asking, quaestor, but you look very much like a man I met in Judaea, a good man: Titus Flavius Sabinus.’
‘He’s my elder brother,’ Vespasian confirmed, wiping the sweat from his brow as the sun and the temperature both rose higher.
‘Then I am doubly in your debt because he hastened the death of a kinsman of mine on the cross; he had his centurion finish him cleanly with a spear rather than break his legs and let him die in agony. He then returned the body to us.’
‘Why was this kinsman crucified?’
‘That is something that no one has ever really understood.’
‘He must have been found guilty of some crime.’
‘The priests wanted him stoned for blasphemy because he preached that we Jews should put aside our ten commandments and follow just one new one: love your neighbour as you love yourself.’
‘But if he was crucified he must have been judged according to Roman law.’
‘Yes, and yet no reason for the sentence was ever read out. But what is done cannot be undone. His teachings live on among my people, beyond his death, through those who were closest to him and admired his compassion, although we are now persecuted for doing so.’
‘We?’
‘Yes, I am one of those who preach his words.’
‘Then why aren’t you back in Judaea doing so?’
‘Because there’s no place in his vision of Judaism for the priests and they wish to hold onto their power, so they hound us relentlessly.’
‘And so you ran away.’
‘No, quaestor, I’m a merchant, I trade in tin; I have to earn a living as well as preach and so I preach to the Jewish communities in the ports that I pass through. I was on my way to the tin mines in southern Britannia, outside of the Empire, when the Marmaridae captured me and two companions as we filled our water caskets between Alexandria and Apollonia; which brings me to the “secondly”.’
‘Which is?’
‘After I was captured my ship must have sailed on to Apollonia to take on fresh supplies and to drop off a friend of mine who was returning to Cyrene; but after that I don’t know whether it carried on west or whether it turned back to Judaea because the crew were afraid of going on without me, as only I among them have made the voyage to Britannia before.’
‘So what do you want me to do about it?’
‘I need a small favour from you, quaestor, although I’m aware that I’m already heavily in your debt.’
Vespasian looked at the man; there was no guile in his eyes. ‘Name it.’
‘To know which way they went, so that I can follow them, I need you to look at the port aedile’s records; I assume that he sends you a copy every day.’
‘He does; come and see me when we get back to Cyrene.’
‘Thank you, quaestor,’ the man said, visibly pleased. ‘My name is Yosef; I’ll ask for you at the Governor’s Residence.’
‘I’ll make sure that you are expected, Yosef.’
The column arrived at the town shortly after midday and Vespasian slept for the remainder of the day and right through the night. It was his first decent period of sleep since arriving in Siwa and not even the constant hammering and sawing of carpenters constructing the sixty sleds that he had ordered could disturb his slumber.
‘You should wake up now, sir,’ Magnus said, shaking Vespasian’s shoulder. ‘It’s almost dawn and the column is forming up.’
Vespasian roused himself, feeling much rejuvenated and as ready as he would ever be to face the arduous three-hundred-mile return journey to Cyrene.
He tied on his army sandals, belted his tunic and then followed Magnus out into the torch-lit agora. The camels stood in three rows of twenty; each had a sled attached to it, piled high with full water-skins. These, Vespasian hoped, together with the skins loaded onto the camels’ backs, would provide them with sufficient water to make the crossing without having to rely on the Marmaridae’s wells. He planned to give these a wide berth, if at all possible, for fear of his ill-protected column falling prey to the slavers. The sleds would also carry the weak, whose numbers would grow during the long trek as the skins were emptied and discarded. Forty or so of the freed captives of Egyptian origin had elected to stay in Siwa to await the next caravan to Alexandria; the rest, just over eighty, were bound for Cyrene, knowing only too well the hazards of the journey.
With a harsh word to the headman of the town reminding him that those staying behind were his companions and therefore under Amun’s protection, Vespasian mounted one of the twelve horses that they had been able to exchange, in addition to the water-skins, food and sleds, for all the slaves and a few camels, and gave the order to move out. The first rays of the sun, now cresting the eastern horizon, cast long shadows before them as Vespasian led the slow-moving column from the town and ventured out once more into the unforgiving desert.
CHAPTER VI
