David Wishart - Parthian Shot

I stopped at a likely-looking stall run by an old girl wrapped to the eyeballs and clanking with enough gold bangles to fit out a cat-house. That’s another thing about the spice trade; a lot of the people involved in it, including the stallholders themselves, are foreigners. Real foreigners, I mean, from outwith the Roman borders. This example with her brown-henna’d palms and dark, unfathomable brooding-vulture eyes could’ve been pure desert Arab from the empty quarter beyond Egypt where — so they say — the phoenix lives.

‘Excuse me, Grandma,’ I said. ‘You happen to know where I can find a man by the name of Gaius Praxa?’

‘End of Five Godlets Alley,’ she snapped in an accent that was pure tenement-Aventine balcony-hanger. ‘And watch who you’re calling grandma, pal. My eldest’s just turned six.’

So much for the mysteries of the East. Shit. Well, how was I supposed to tell under that lot? ‘Right. Right,’ I said. ‘Sorry, lady. Ah…where would Five Godlets Alley be?’

‘Carry on past the litter-rank and the urinal. It’s on your left before the cookshop. You can’t miss it, even with your eyesight.’

‘Thanks.’ I beat a hasty retreat.

She was right, though. The small wayside shrine that gave the alley its name was unmistakable. Who the godlets were, and why there were five of them, I didn’t know — they weren’t Roman, anyway — but from the little offerings of flowers, fruit and scraps of cloth they must’ve been pretty popular. I gave them a nod in passing and turned into the alleyway.

There wasn’t a sign, but the place at the end was obviously what I was looking for: a fair-sized warehouse on a stone-built platform, currently open along its length but with heavy shutters folded back against the central and side pillars and stacked along the inside walls with linen bags, rushwork baskets and a few wooden chests. An elderly bearded man was sitting in a high-backed chair beside a set of bronze scales, engrossed in an open book-roll.

‘Gaius Praxa?’ I said.

He looked up and smiled. ‘That’s my name. What can I do for you?’

Strong accent — it reminded me of Nicanor’s — but an educated voice.

‘I was told to ask you about pepper.’

Yeah, well, it did sound pretty silly, like one of these secret cabbalistic greetings that sad buggers like the Fellowship of the Golden Ox-Goad exchange, especially when they know some poor bloody non-initiate is listening. If Praxa was surprised, though, he didn’t show it. Carefully, he rolled up the book — I noticed it wasn’t written in Latin script — and stowed it away in its cylinder-case.

‘What kind of pepper?’ he said.

‘There’s more than one kind?’

‘Oh, yes. The simplest and crudest is long pepper. Such as is in that basket over there.’ He nodded towards the rushwork basket to my left which was full of what looked like dried bean-pods. ‘Then there’s black and white pepper. Both are made from long pepper but their natures are different. Black pepper is stronger-tasting, more pungent, as well as being the most common. The white variety is milder.’

‘That so, now?’

He got to his feet. He was taller than I’d expected, and stooped, with bushy eyebrows and washed-out grey eyes. ‘You asked. I’ve answered,’ he said. ‘Now. At least I should know your name.’

‘Corvinus. Valerius Corvinus.’

‘So.’ He nodded gravely. ‘And you’re interested in pepper, Valerius Corvinus.’

‘Yeah. So it seems.’

‘For any particular reason?’

‘Uh-uh.’ I grinned. ‘Not that I know of at the moment.’

If he thought the answer was a bit odd — and I wouldn’t’ve blamed him — he didn’t show it. He just grunted. ‘Fair enough. Perhaps a reason will suggest itself. If not — well, I wasn’t doing anything particularly vital at present anyway, and I’m not a stickler for reasons myself. Interest will suffice. Up you come and have a look round.’

I climbed the shallow steps to the platform. The scents from the open spice-bags caught at my throat.

‘Pepper comes from India, or from the south-facing slopes of the Caucasus. The pods grow on trees rather like myrtles but taller, and the corns inside resemble myrtle berries. In fact, before it started to be imported myrtle was the nearest equivalent. People have tried to grow pepper trees in Italy but the quality’s very poor and it has never really caught on. Long pepper is simply the pod itself, dried whole.’ He reached into a bag and brought out a handful of small, wrinkled seeds. ‘This, now, is black pepper. To make it, the corns are taken from the pod and dried in the sun or over fires, while for white pepper they’re soaked in water before drying to remove the outer husk. Then the pepper is loaded into sacks and transported along the trade route through Mesopotamia into Syria, or round to the north through Armenia. There is a sea-route from Arabia to the Indus, but that takes much longer and it’s expensive.’ He smiled. ‘Now. Have I bored you enough or is there anything else you’d like to know?’

I was examining the other bags. One of them was full of what looked like huge salt crystals. ‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘A curiosity. It doesn’t have a Latin name that I know of; we simply call it reed honey. It’s from India too. Taste it. Go ahead, it’s quite pleasant.’ I did. The thing was sweet, like honey but with a different flavour. ‘It’s a form of dried sap. Not culinary; I’m no doctor, so I don’t know its uses exactly, but we sometimes sell it to the medical profession.’

I moved on to a wooden chest full of thin rolls of flaky brown bark. This I knew: Meton put it into hot spiced wine. ‘Cinnamon, right?’ I said.

‘Indeed.’

‘That from India as well?’

‘From Ethiopia. Or beyond, rather, because the Ethiopians buy it from the cave-dwellers who live to the south.’ Praxa picked up a broken segment and rubbed it between his palms, scenting the air between us. ‘People used to believe the sticks were twigs from harvested phoenix nests, but that isn’t true. The cave-dwellers bring them from much further still on rafts without sails or oars or rudders.’

‘Yeah? How do they do that?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not a seaman, either. I don’t know. But the round trip can take as long as five years and cost the lives of half the crews. The sun is so close to the earth that it chars them, the air is full of poisonous vapours and the forests along the coast are inhabited by dwarfs who kill with needles blown through hollow canes. Or so my traders tell me.’

‘All for a bit of scented bark, right?’ I said. Bugger; no wonder the stuff was so pricey. Back to business. I turned away from the sacks. ‘You mentioned two possible land routes. For the India trade.’

‘Through Mesopotamia and Armenia. Yes. The spice road splits at Bisutun in Media, east of the Tigris. One branch goes north to Nisibis into Armenia and then crosses the Syrian border at Zeugma, the other carries on through Parthia to Palmyra and over the Syrian desert.’

Well, I’d take his word for it. ‘That’s all there are? Just these two?’

‘Apart from the sea route I mentioned, but as I said that’s seasonal, time-consuming and more expensive, besides being more dangerous. In the event that a war with Parthia closed the Syrian borders then it might be relevant, yes, but not otherwise. Even then it couldn’t carry a quarter of the traffic the market needs.’

Uh-huh; I was beginning to see why Crispus had pointed me in Praxa’s direction. I still didn’t know where all this was leading us, but the guy certainly knew his stuff. ‘Let me just get this clear, pal,’ I said. ‘What you’re telling me is that the Parthians have almost total control over the empire’s eastern spice imports, right?’