Rosemary Rowe: Enemies of the Empire

From the smell, I guessed that rainwater was not the only thing that ran along the drain. Even in fine cities like Glevum households and businesses often use adjoining alleyways to empty piss-pots in, so it was not really a surprise to find that the same thing happened here in Venta too. This alley was particularly odorous, perhaps because it ran alongside what was obviously a fuller’s shop, where clothes were cleaned and dyed. Such businesses use human urine in their trade, for treatment of the cloth, and will sometimes set up collection pots in public places for the purpose, or have a contract with larger householders. This fuller, by the smell of it, was doing very well. Never mind, I told myself, the shop would be a landmark later on, when I wanted to retrace my steps.

I picked my way along the path — if I can call it that — and found myself in a narrow street of shops, set in small blocks of two or three, with several floors of wooden dwelling-space above. Much town building in Britannia is on this kind of plan, but here the blocks (or insulae ) were smaller and more crowded than I was accustomed to, and the upper floors proportionately meaner and more crammed. Even from where I was standing on the corner of the lane, I could see slaves beating mats and shaking dusting cloths from windows in the favoured first floor apartments; while on the upper storeys, where the poorer people lived, scraps of ragged clothing dangled from openings to dry, and black, curling, acrid smoke spoke of hazardous cooking on open braziers in little airless rooms. People swarmed at the doorways that opened to the street, and on the narrow staircases that I could glimpse within. Most of them looked suspiciously at me. Obviously strangers didn’t often come this way.

The shops were clearly busy, though. It was almost evening now, but tradesmen still sat behind their counters and their barriers, selling everything from pots and pans to wine. Buckets of live eels squirmed outside the fishmonger’s, a butcher in a bloodstained apron further up the street hacked pieces from a carcass hanging from a hook — skin, tail, lolling head and all — while other vendors offered salt, carved bone, sandals made to measure on the spot, eye ointments, or memorial monuments. Pie sellers went by with trays of greasy wares, and plodding donkeys carried panniers of turnips, wood, or wool. There was a stall directly opposite piled high with armour, as the optio had said — not only Roman helmets, but dented shields, leather jerkins, cheek-pieces, even entire mailed tunics and protective greaves — some of them of foreign, strange design. One decorative, flat-backed arm-piece had a Celtic look — an exquisite serpent swallowing its tail — while others I recognised as work from Gaul.

The stall-holder saw me looking and came out to stare at me. He was a small, hunched, shrewd-faced man with a decided leer and such a cunning, conspiratorial air that I half expected him to come sidling up and begin hissing in my ear, ‘You seeking something special, friend? A dagger? Javelin? Sword? You got money — you come round the back. There’s lots more things inside.’

But he said nothing and when I made no move he spat contemptuously on the pavement and went back into the living quarters at the rear, obviously deciding that I was not a customer. I wondered if he really did have weapons hidden somewhere in the shop, and, if so, who his clientele might be. It is still a capital offence for civilians like myself to carry arms in public places. Yet there was another stall of battered armour further up the street. It was disquieting. You could buy almost anything in this part of Venta, by the look of it, if you knew where to go and whom to ask.

Of Plautus, however, there was by now no sign.

‘Citizen?’ A voice behind me made me whirl round. There was a woman standing at my elbow — a woman with a pockmarked face and hennaed hair, dressed in a showy tunic which displayed her legs, and giving off an overpowering scent of onions, sweat and cheap perfume. One of the other things that you could buy here, evidently. She was smiling at me with discoloured teeth.

I breathed a sigh of undisguised relief. From her greeting I had feared that I’d been recognised, or at least that my Roman status had, and that — as I’d been warned — was dangerous. But women like this were likely to call everybody ‘citizen’, in the hope that flattery would earn them a slightly higher fee.

‘Looking for a companion, citizen?’ she persisted, coming very close and breathing onions and violets all over me. She spoke Latin in what I’d begun to recognise as the local style, fluent but strongly accented, with a lilt which was intended to entice. ‘Very cheap. Very clean. Black girls if you want them. Exotic dancing girls. Virgins for a fee — or, if you are really prepared to pay, I’ve got a girl who can. .’ She leaned forward and whispered something in my ear so astonishingly lewd that it made my jaw drop open and my eyes pop out. She grinned with satisfaction at my shocked surprise. ‘Two of them together, if you like.’

So she was not (as I’d supposed) a common prostitute, looking to earn a few coins on her own account, but manager of the local lupinarium with a whole bevy of licensed girls in her control, and hawking for business like the proprietor of any other establishment. I tried to drag my mind away from the astounding images her words had conjured up and was about to politely decline her services when a sudden thought occurred to me.

‘I am looking for somebody,’ I said. ‘Not, alas, one of your girls tonight. I saw a friend of mine come down this way just now, but I’ve lost sight of him. I wonder if you saw which way he went? A man of middle age, about my height, in a green tunic, with reddish hair going grey.’

She interrupted with a scornful laugh. ‘You look around you, traveller’ — now that I was no longer a potential customer the courtesy title had swiftly disappeared — ‘I don’t know where you come from, but you’ll find that many people look like that round here.’

She was right, of course. The Silures are famously stocky and red-haired, and green is one of the commonest of dyes. There must have been a dozen traders at the counters opposite who would have fitted my description perfectly.

‘This one has a jagged scar across his face,’ I said.

This time there was the faintest pause before she laughed again. ‘You think that I have time to examine everyone? Stranger, I’ve got customers to find. And so, if you’ll excuse me. .’ She would have turned away, but I prevented her. There was something in her manner which made me persist — a sort of triumph at having found an answer to my words.

I moved in front of her. ‘However, not so many people come down this alleyway. Perhaps, since you were standing there, you saw which way he went?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve got other things to do besides watch out for passers-by.’

‘On the contrary,’ I persisted. ‘That is exactly what you do. You watch out for passers-by, and when you see a possible client you accost him and tout for trade. Strictly speaking, it’s against the law,’ I added, in the hope of sparking a response, ‘but that is what you were doing all the same. Why else did you decide to speak to me?’

She was sulky now. ‘Only because you are a stranger to the town.’

‘How do you know that?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve not seen you before. Most people who come down this way, I recognise. Either they’re regulars, or they’ve got a stall, or else they live round here. And anyway-’

I cut her off. ‘Then the man in the green tunic was somebody you knew? Somebody who lives here in the town?’

Her face turned scarlet. ‘That wasn’t what I said. I don’t know him, in particular. It’s just that I vaguely recognised his face — while yours is one I haven’t seen before.’