Lindsey Davis - Last Act In Palmyra

'Where did you learn to race a camel?'

'Anyone who can do a twirl with a python can manage a ride, Falco!' Innuendo came swimming back with every stride we took. 'How's the poor girlie? Scorpion, wasn't it? As if one nasty creature with a wicked tail on him is not enough for her…'

I hardly dared ask, but brought out the question: 'How do you know about it?'

'Met that strange fellow – your gloomy priest.'

'Musa?'

'Riding towards me like a death's head in a cloud of dust. I asked if he'd seen you. He told me everything.'

I gave her a sharp look. 'Everything?'

Thalia grinned. 'Enough!'

'What have you done with him?'

'What I do with them all.'

'The poor lad! Bit tender for you, isn't he?'

'They all are by my standards! I'm still holding out for you, Falco.'

Ignoring this dangerous offer, I managed to extract more details. Thalia had decided that looking for Sophrona was a mission I might not manage. She had taken a whim to come east herself. After all, Syria was a good market for exotic animals; before the racing camel she had already bought a lion cub and several Indian parrots, not to mention a dangerous new snake. She had been earning her way by displays of her famous dance with the big python, Zeno, when she noticed my posters. 'So here I am, Falco, large as life, and twice as exciting!'

'At last. My chance to catch your act!'

'My act is not for faint hearts!'

'All right, I'll skulk out the back and mind Jason. So where's the snake you dance with?' I had never even seen this legendary reptile.

'The big fellow? Following on slowly. Zeno doesn't like disturbance. Jason's more versatile. Besides, when I tell him he's going to see you, he comes over all silly – '

We reached my tent, thank Jupiter.

At the sight of Helena I heard Thalia suck in her breath. 'I've brought you a present, sweetie, but don't get too excited; it's not a new man.' Thalia produced the little iron pot again. 'Small but incredibly powerful – '

'As the altar boy promised!' quipped Helena, perking up. She must have been reading her scroll of rude stories again.

Thalia had already lowered herself to one mighty knee and was unbandaging Helena's wounded arm as gently as if she were tending one of her own sick animals. 'Giblets! Some slapdash butcher made a mess with his cleaver here, sweetheart!'

'He did his best,' Helena murmured loyally.

'To mangle you!'

'Lay off, Thalia!' I protested. 'There's no need to make me out to be the sort of thug who'd knife his girl. Anyway, what's in your magic jar?' I felt obliged to show some caution before my lass was anointed with a strange medicament.

'Mithridatium.'

'Have I heard of that?'

'Have you heard of gold and frankincense? Compared with this they're as cheap as cushion dust. Falco, this potion contains thirty-three ingredients, each one expensive enough to bankrupt Croesus. It's an antidote for everything from snakebites to splitting fingernails.'

'Sounds good,' I conceded.

'It had better be,' growled Thalia, unscrewing the lid with relish, as if it were a potent aphrodisiac. 'I'll spread it all over your lady first – then I'll tell you what you owe me.'

I declared that if mithridatium would help Helena, Thalia could smooth on the stuff an inch thick with a mortar trowel.

'Listen to it!' marvelled Thalia confidentially to her patient. 'Isn't he ridiculous – and don't you just love his lies!'

Helena, who had always found that her spirits rose with any chance, of mocking me, was already chortling healthily.

When we drove on towards Palmyra I had Thalia alongside like a spectacular outrider, galloping away in wild loops from time to time to exercise the racing camel. Jason enjoyed a more leisurely journey in a basket in the back of my cart. The Syrian heat had proved almost too much for him. He lay virtually inert, and whenever we could spare any water he had to be bathed.

'My python's not the only reptile in your group,' Thalia muttered furtively. 'I see you've got that know-all comic Tranio!'

'Do you know him?'

'I've met him. Entertaining is a small world when you've been doing it as long as me, and in some funny places too. Tranio used to appear at the Vatican Circus. Quite witty, but thinks far too much of himself.'

'He does a good tug of war. Know his partner?'

'The one with the hair like a pie dish and the sneaky eyes?'

'Grumio.'

'Never seen him before. But that's not true of everybody here.'

'Why, who else do you know?'

'Not saying,' grinned Thalia. 'It's been a few years. Let's wait and see if I'm recognised.'

I was struck by an intriguing possibility.

Thalia's thrilling hints were still engaging Helena and me when our long ride reached its end. We had been driving at night, but dawn had now broken. With the stars long gone and the sun strengthening, our party was weary and longing to break the journey. The road had grown more winding, twisting upwards through more hilly country. The caravan trail finally emerged on to a level plain. We must now be at midpoint between the fertile coast far away on the Mediterranean and the even more remote reaches of the River Euphrates.

Low ranges of mountains ran to the north and behind us, serrated by long dry wadis. Ahead, disappearing into infinity, stretched flat tawny desert covered with rocky scree. To our left, in a stony valley, stood square towers that we later learned were multiple tombs for wealthy families. These kept their lonely vigil beside an ancient track overlooked by the sheltering hills. On the bare slopes, a shepherd on a donkey was herding a flock of black-faced sheep. Closer to, we began to perceive a shimmer of green. We sensed expectation among our nomad guides. I called to Helena. As we approached, the effect was magical. The haze rapidly acquired solidity. The moisture that rose off the saltpans and lakes quickly resolved into fields surrounding large swathes of date-palms and olive and pomegranate trees.

At the heart of the huge oasis, beside an energetic spring with supposedly therapeutic waters (like Thalia's dance, not for the faint-hearted), stood the famous old nomad village of Tadmor, once a mere camp in the wilderness, but now the fast-growing Romanised city of Palmyra.

If I say that in Palmyra the revenue officers take social precedence over members of the local government assembly, you will see their preoccupations. A welcoming city, in fact one that welcomed its visitors with a tariff of taxes on goods entering its territory, continued the happy greeting by relieving them of some hefty rates for watering their caravans, and completed the process by exacting a little something for the treasury for every camel, donkey, cart, container or slave that they wished to take back out of the city when they left. What with the salt tax and the prostitution tax, staying there was clear-cut too: the very staples of life were nobbled.

The Emperor Vespasian, a tax collector's grandson, was running Palmyra with a light hand. Vespasian liked to squeeze the fiscal sponge, but his treasury officials had grasped that they had little to teach the efficient Palmyrenes. Nowhere I had ever visited was so concerned to strip all comers of their spending money, or so adept at doing it.

Even so, long-distance traders were coming here with caravans the size of armies. Palmyra sat between Parthia in the east and Rome in the west, a semi-independent buffer zone that existed to enable commerce. Tariffs aside, the atmosphere was a pleasant one.

Historically Greek and governed now by Rome, it was packed with Aramaic and Arabian tribesmen who had only recently been nomads, yet it still remembered periods of Parthian rule and looked to the East for much of its character. The result was a mixed culture unlike anywhere else. Their public inscriptions were carved in Greek and a strange script of their own. There were a few massive limestone buildings, constructed on Syrian plans with Roman money by Greek craftsmen. Around these monuments were spread quite large suburbs of blank-walled mud-brick houses through which meandered narrow dirt lanes. The oasis still had the air of a massive native village, but with signs that sudden grandiosity was liable to break out all over the place.