Rosemary Rowe - Requiem for a Slave

I muttered something indeterminate. The tanner loved to gossip and was enjoying this, but I did not wish to be lured into something indiscreet, which might reach the ears of Quintus Severus later on. I tried to change the subject, hoping that I might learn something about Minimus’s fate. ‘You didn’t see anyone else outside my shop, I suppose, talking to my slave this afternoon?’

He shook his head at me. ‘Too busy looking after my own affairs. But if it was a time-waster, I more than sympathize. I had just the same thing happen earlier today. Fellow came in here and asked to look at hides, and when I’d spent half an hour showing off my wares, he suddenly decided it was all too dear. Though judging by the jewelled cloak-clasp that he wore, he could have afforded anything I had.’

I listened with appropriate noises of concern, but inwardly I was impatient to get my embers and be off. I was about to offer money, but all at once he said, ‘Well, we humble tradesmen had better stick together, hadn’t we? You come this way and we’ll see what we can do. You’ll have to come right through to the workshop, I’m afraid.’

He led the way along the narrow path beside the house, to the large rear courtyard where hides which had been preliminarily soaked were hung out on racks to dry. ‘Come in to the tannage room and get the coals. You’ve timed it very well. I’m boiling up a batch of tanning agent now — alder bark and acorn cups with alum in the blend — the fire’s very hot. Mind that horse hide, it’s still full of stripping mix.’

I stepped back in time to miss the skin that he had gestured to, which was hanging dripping on a rack. It still looked disturbingly and recognizably like a horse, and as I looked about I could identify several sheep- and ox-skins drying off, and there was a group of smaller pelts as well, which I could not identify. The smell was terrible.

He had noticed the direction of my glance. ‘Weasel, otter, stoat and seal,’ he said proudly, pointing each one out. ‘And that one there’s a wolf. The army like them for their signifers and pay a hefty price. This way, then, citizen.’

I ducked around a deer hide and followed him inside.

The tannery room occupied the whole front half of his house, which had been specially adapted to accommodate the trade. The entry door was situated oddly halfway down, and the front part of the space — which we had just walked past outside — was partitioned off from the rest by a low internal wall, and the area thus created was busier than a hive. A series of round vat-pits had been dug into the floor, and a large number of men were hard at work. Some were pushing the hides into the tanning mix with long wooden poles; others were actually standing in the pits with their tunics tucked up above their knees and — supporting their weight on ropes set in the walls — treading the hides into the evil-smelling brew with brown-stained legs and feet. I wondered for a moment how they got in and out, until I realized that the steep sides of the vats were lined with plaster and that there was a series of toe-holes in every one of them.

Between the pits, an army of small children scuttled to and fro with jugs of tanning mix, filling the clay vessels which were set into the floor and which seemed to feed the liquid to the adjoining vats along a deep channel with a glazed pipe in it. The smell, if anything, was even worse in here.

‘You certainly demand good concentration from your slaves,’ I said, surprised to notice that most of the workers didn’t raise their eyes at our approach.

He laughed. ‘It isn’t anything that I do, citizen. It’s simple common sense. One false step and you fall into the vat. It isn’t so much drowning — though that’s always possible — but the mixture doesn’t do you any good, especially if it goes into your mouth and eyes. I lose a couple of people that way every year. You get off lightly if it only stains you brown and makes you smell disgusting for a week or two.’

I nodded. I could see that the whole floor was a series of traps for careless feet. I had to pay attention to where I put my own.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘these are not all slaves. I couldn’t afford the workforce to do all of this. The treaders are mostly my property, of course, but most of the other hands are freemen who are glad to have the work — there’ve been some dreadful harvests and winters recently — or lads whose parents have bound them to the shop. I get a fee for having them while they learn the trade. Some of the work requires a lot of skill and it takes time to train them properly. Through here, then!’ He gestured to the other side of the partition wall, towards the other, smaller section at the back, where he clearly intended we should go.

There was a solid floor there, to my relief, though it was fully occupied by two lines of trestle tables flanked by high three-legged stools on which the workers perched. There must have been a dozen older lads and men: each had a partly treated hide pegged, stretched out, on a rack in front of him, and was either painstakingly scraping it with strangely shaped bronze tools, or, once that was completed, plucking any recalcitrant last hairs out by hand. This time the men did glance up to look at us, overtly curious, as my guide led me down the narrow zigzag space between the rows.

‘The tannage room is through here,’ he said, gesturing to a doorway to the rear. ‘Come in and we will see what we can do about your coals.’

He led the way into a second room, which clearly gave access to the private living area beyond. This area had the benefit of a stone hearth and a window space, and thus served for the preparation of the tannage mix.

It was clearly brewing now. A copper vat was slung on chains above the fire, and something most unpleasant was bubbling inside, filling the area with clouds of acrid steam which the window space did very little to dispel. The boiling was being supervised by an ancient slave, dressed only in a loincloth, a pair of tattered boots and a heavy metal slave-ring of linked chain around his throat, reaching from his skinny shoulders almost to his ears — the sort of thing one sometimes sees on female Nubian slaves and which it requires a skilled blacksmith to remove. As we came into the room, he was being chivvied by a stout woman in a stained tunic and torn shawl, whose grey hair and skin had been dyed brown by smoke. She held a long wooden cooking-paddle in her hand — I suspected that the slave had felt the blade of it.

‘Get a shovel, wife, and fetch us some embers from the fire,’ the tanner said. ‘The citizen pavement-maker has a need of them. And fetch a taper while you’re at it, and light his oil lamp too.’

The woman looked resentfully at him. ‘Fetch a shovel, is it? Just like that? You know it’s kept outside. And who’s to look after my tannage while I’m gone? Neither you nor your smart visitor could do that, I suppose. And don’t tell me that old Glypto will keep an eye on it — the old fool’s so stupid that he’d fall into it. He takes more looking after than the brew itself. Don’t you, eh, Glypto?’ She poked at the old man with the paddle as she spoke. He smiled, a patient foolish little smile.

The tanner turned to me. ‘Glypto came to me many years ago, as part of my wife’s wedding portion,’ he explained. ‘I’m not sure that he was not the better part of the bargain, too.’

His wife flashed him a look that would have tanned skins on its own, then turned to me. ‘Glypto has got old and deaf and foolish with the fumes, but I can’t get rid of him. My husband keeps him just to taunt me, I believe. Says nobody would buy him, but that we cannot simply turn him out on to the street — though he’s good for nothing these days except stoking up the fire and taking rubbish to the midden now and again.’