Rosemary Rowe - The Chariots of Calyx

‘They’ve let go the ropes, master! We are off!’

Junio hardly had time to frame the words before the bargemaster barked a command and two rows of oars were lowered into the water, like so many long white teeth. They could row, those men. I would not have believed that anything so bulky could move with such apparent ease. Out we went, leaving the riverbank behind, and joined the traffic on the water.

It was a whole other world out on the river. Great ships from distant provinces, some of them sixty feet or more, filled the waterway, their huge square sails filled or furled. Small boats, punts and cockles wound their way between them, carrying everything from fish to hempen rope. A barge filled with horses rocked at anchor as we passed, and Londinium towered above us in the morning sunshine. And still we ploughed onwards. The oars splashed in time to the drummer’s beat, men strained and grunted, and once I swear I saw an eel slither through the depths beneath us. I was beginning to enjoy myself.

The bargemaster sidled up again. ‘You wish to see the corn stores, citizen? You will see the first one in a little while, on the right — the steer-board side.’ He grinned, showing a gap where his front teeth had once been, and indicated the slave manning the steering oar at the back. ‘Not that they will be expecting you at the granary. We travel faster than any messenger.’

I thought to myself that if I hoped to learn anything at all, the fact that nobody was expecting me might prove to be an advantage. I was about to say so to him, but by that time we had reached the bend in the river and I caught my first sight of one of the Londinium grain stores.

There are grain stores in Glevum, of course — any large city has a need for bread and flour — but nothing I had seen before prepared me for the scale of this. It was an enormous building, as of course it would have to be: the lands around Londinium are not suitable for growing corn, and every grain of it has to be imported and stored somewhere. The warehouse stood on its own wharf, where a contingent of slaves under the supervision of a bad-tempered soldier with a lash were struggling to move heavy sacks of grain on to a wide, flat-bottomed boat alongside. Further along, another lesser boat was being loaded with smaller sacks.

‘Army rations,’ the bargemaster said, with the air of one long familiar with the river and its ways. ‘One and a half thousand troops in the Londinium fort.’ He spat contemptuously into the water. ‘Most of them the governor’s personal guard. But there’s another section — town watch they call themselves — and they’ve got their beaks in everything, mostly on behalf of the army procurator , so naturally the best of the grain crop goes to them. Not like the likes of us. Won’t find them having to pay three times the proper price for a sack of corn, and then finding when they get it home it’s full of weevils, or so damp that it is half rotted before they open it.’

I looked at him questioningly. Bargemasters are famously experts on any subject you care to mention — even I had heard that — but this man seemed to speak with personal feeling.

‘Haven’t there been edicts to control the price of corn?’

‘Oh, there are supposed to be. But only up to a certain quantity. If you need more than that, you have to pay whatever they are asking. The official price is a waste of time — first sign of a wet season, and it goes shooting up like a ballista.’ He spat again. ‘My sister’s husband has a baker’s shop, a very up-to-date affair, with two ovens, three boys to help him and his own donkey-mill as well. In a good place too, just east of Government House — just where all the minor officials have their accommodation. You would suppose, wouldn’t you, that a man like that would do a splendid trade?’

He barely waited for my agreement.

‘My father thought so anyway, when he arranged the match for her. But with the price of grain — wheat, barley, rye, it’s all the same — the family has been close to starving more than once. Men will only pay so much for a loaf of bread, whatever the price of grain, and when half of that turns out to be useless, there’s no room for profit.’

He turned away and began barking orders to his men. As if by magic half the blades stopped beating and instead dropped, like a single wounded insect, into the water, the steering slave strained at his oar, and the barge moved smoothly up beside the wharf. The soldier with the lash came belligerently over, and then, seeing the governor’s pennant flying behind us, clearly thought better of it and hurried off to find somebody official to welcome us ashore.

The man who did so was a small, pale individual, thin as a blade of corn himself, with a fringe of faded sandy hair around his balding head. He was dressed in an amber-coloured tunic of fine wool, with a good cloak and leather leggings, and was clearly a man of some substance; possibly even a citizen, despite the dress. There was a pilleus , a freeman’s cap, tucked into his belt, and freeborn men in any substantial city these days earn the distinction of citizenship simply by being born within the walls. He came towards us bowing frantically and looked (as he must have been) astonished when he found that the only occupant of the imperial barge was an elderly Celt in a travel-stained toga.

He recovered hastily. ‘Citizen, to what do we owe the honour?’ He had a habit of pressing the ends of his long thin fingers together as he spoke, and bowing over them like a temple priest. ‘I am the chief clerk of stores and civil overseer for this granary. The governor has sent you here today? Is there some problem with the imperial stores? If so. .’ His pale eyes flickered nervously to the official pennant as he spoke.

‘Nothing of that kind at all,’ I murmured soothingly. ‘It is merely that I should like to see over the granary. There are one or two unresolved enquiries as a result of Caius Monnius’ death.’

I tried to keep my reply deliberately vague, while sounding as efficient as possible. If the truth were told, I had very little idea myself what I hoped to learn from this visit — except perhaps to understand the office of frumentarius a little better, and discover what kind of service Eppaticus might have provided, for Monnius to owe him five thousand denarii . Or, to put it another way, what kind of underhand activity it was that had sent him bolting like a startled carriage horse at the mere mention of Monnius’ murder.

If I had intended to reassure the overseer, I had not succeeded. The pale eyes were flickering like candles in a gale, and he pressed his thin fingers so hard together that the tips went white. Nonetheless he went through the motions of welcome. ‘Of course, of course. A terrible business, the death of Monnius. We were all most shocked to hear it. Now, Mightiness, if you wish to look over the granary. .?’ He waited while I made my way ashore, with the assistance of Junio and the bargemaster, and then added, ‘Where, exactly, would you care to begin?’

As I know rather less about Roman granaries than I know about boats, this was a difficult question to answer. At my oppidum when I was young, we simply dried the rye on wooden racks, threshed it, and kept the resultant grain in a pit, with prickled branches set around it to keep off the mice. I said, with as much authority as I could muster, ‘Let us start from the beginning. Show me where the corn comes in, and what you do with it.’

That seemed to worry him still more, but he began to gabble a description, leading the way as he did so. ‘This is the main quay — at harvest it is full of grain barges. They bring it down from some of the shallower rivers by canoe, and offload it into barges when they meet the main waterway. Cheaper than road transport, and besides, Caius Monnius arranged for drying houses to be built on the riverbank, so that even if the weather is bad or the corn is green it can be dried out and used.’