Lindsey Davis - Last Act In Palmyra

'I'm doing a plodder's job,' I continued, leaning back with my whole weight as the ox tried to surge. 'I'm interested, did Heliodorus see it the way I do? Was it just piecework he flogged through? Did he reckon himself worthy of much better things?'

'He had a brain,' Tranio admitted. 'And the slimy creep knew it.'

'He used it, I reckon.'

'Not in his writing, Falco!'

'No. The scrolls I inherited in the play box prove that. His corrections are lousy and slapdash – when they are even legible.'

'Why are you so intrigued by Heliodorus and his glorious lack of talent?'

'Fellow feeling!' I smiled, not giving away the true reason. I wanted to explore why Ione had told me that the cause of the previous playwright's death had been purely professional.

Tranio laughed, perhaps uneasily. 'Oh come! Surely you're not telling me that underneath everything, Heliodorus was secretly a star comedian! It wasn't true. His creative powers were enormous when it came to manipulating people, but fictionally he was a complete dud. He knew that too, believe me!'

'You told him, I gather?' I asked rather drily. People were always keen to tell me too if they hated my work.

'Every time Chremes gave him some dusty old Greek master-piece and asked to have the jokes modernised, his dearth of intellectual equipment became pitifully evident. He couldn't raise a smile by tickling a baby. You've either got it or you haven't.'

'Or else you buy yourself a joke collection.' I was remembering something Congrio had said. 'Somebody told me they're still obtainable.'

Tranio spent a few moments swearing at his camel as it practised a war dance. Part of this involved skidding sideways into my cart. I joined in the bad language; Tranio got his leg trapped painfully against a cartwheel; my ox lowed hoarsely in protest; and the people travelling behind us shouted abuse.

When peace was restored, Tranio's camel was more interested than ever in nuzzling my cart. The clown did his best to jerk the beast away while I said thoughtfully, 'It would be nice to have access to some endless supply of good material. Something like Grumio talks about – an ancestral hoard of jests.'

'Don't live in the past, Falco.'

'What does that mean?'

'Grumio's obsessed – and he's wrong.' I seemed to have tapped some old professional disagreement he had had with Grumio. 'You can't bid at auction for humour. That's all gone. Oh maybe once there was a golden age of comedy when material was sacrosanct and a clown could earn a fortune raffling off his great-great-grandfather's precious scroll of antique pornography and musty puns. But nowadays you need a new script every day. Satire has to be as fresh as a barrel of winkles. Yesterday's tired quips won't get you a titter on today's cosmopolitan stage.'

'So if you inherited a collection of old jokes,' I put to him, 'you'd just toss it away?' Feeling I might be on to something, struggled to remember details of my earlier conversation with Grumio. 'Are you telling me I shouldn't believe all that wonderful rhetoric your tentmate exudes about the ancient hereditary trade of the jester? The professional laughter-man, valued according to his stock in trade? The old stories, which can be sold when in dire straits?'

'Crap!' Tranio cried.

'Not witty, but succinct.'

'Falco, what good have his family connections done him? Myself, I've had more success relying on a sharp brain and a five-year apprenticeship doing the warm-ups in Nero's Circus before gladiatorial shows.'

'You think you're better than him?'

'I know it, Falco. He could be as good as he wants, but he'll need to stop whining about the decline in stage standards, accept what's really wanted, and forget that his father and grandfather could survive on a few poor stories, a farmyard impression, and some trick juggling. Dear gods, all those terrible lines about funny foreigners: Why do Roman roads run perfectly straight?' Tranio quipped harshly, mimicking every stand-up comedian who had ever made me wince. 'To stop Thracian foodsellers setting up hot-and-cold foodstalls on the corners! And then the unsubtle innuendoes: What did the vestal virgin say to the eunuch?'

It sounded a good one, but he was cut short by the need to yank at his camel as it tried to dash off sideways across the road. I refrained from admitting my low taste by asking for the punch line.

Our route had been tilting slightly downhill, and now up ahead we could make out the abrupt break in the dry landscape that heralds Damascus, the oasis that hangs at the edge of the wilderness like a prosperous port on the rim of a vast infertile sea. On all sides we could see more traffic converging on this ancient honey-pot. Any moment now either Grumio would trot up to join his supposed friend or Tranio would be leaving me.

It was time to apply blatant leverage. 'Going back to Heliodorus. You thought he was an untalented stylus-pusher with less flair than an old pine log. So why were you and Grumio so thick with him that you let the bastard encumber you with horrific gambling debts?'

I had struck a nerve. The only problem was to deduce which nerve it was.

'Who told you that, Falco?' Tranio's face looked paler under the lank fall of hair that tumbled forwards over his clever, dark eyes. His voice was dark too, with a dangerous mood that was hard to interpret.

'Common knowledge.'

'Common lies!' From being pale he suddenly flushed a raw colour, like a man with desperate marsh fever. 'We hardly ever played with him for money. Dicing with Heliodorus was a fool's game!' It almost sounded as if the clowns knew that he had cheated. 'We gambled for trifles, casual forfeits, that's all.'

'Why are you losing your temper then?' I asked quietly.

He was so furious that at last he overcame his camel's perversity. Tearing at its mouth with a rough hand on the bridle, he forced the animal to turn and galloped off to the back of the caravan.

Damascus claimed to be the oldest inhabited city in the world. It would take somebody with a very long memory to disprove the claim. As Tranio said, who wants to live that long? Besides, the evidence was clear enough. Damascus had been working its wicked systems for centuries, and knew all the tricks. Its money-changers were notorious. It possessed more liars, embezzlers and thieves amongst the stone-framed market stalls that packed its colourful grid of streets than any city I had ever visited. It was outstandingly famous and prosperous. Its colourful citizens practised an astonishing variety of villainy. As a Roman I felt quite at home.

This was the last city on our route through the Decapolis, and it had to be the jewel of the collection. Like Canatha, its position was remote from the rest, though here the isolation was simply a matter of long distance rather than atmosphere. This was no huddled bastion facing acres of wilderness -even though there were deserts in several directions. Damascus simply throbbed with power, commerce and self-assurance.

It had the normal Decapolis features. Established in a flourishing oasis where the River Abana dashed out through a gorge in the long mountain range, the stout city walls and their protecting towers were themselves encircled for a wide area by water meadows. On the site of an ancient citadel within the city stood a modest Roman camp. An aqueduct brought water for both public baths and private homes. As the terminus of the old, jealously guarded Nabataean trade route from the Red Sea and also a major crossroads, it was well supplied with markets and caravanserai. As a Greek city it had town planning and democratic institutions. As a Roman acquisition it had a lavish civic building programme, which centred on a grandiose plan to convert the local cult precinct into a huge sanctuary of Jupiter that would be set in a grotesquely oversized enclosure overloaded with colonnades, arches and monumental gates.