Lindsey Davis - Alexandria

So here I was. Independent, self-employed, favoured with a job full of challenge yet leading a life of madness. Informing was only decent if you liked standing in a doorway for hours by yourself, while everyone with any sense was cosily at home, enjoying dinner and conversation, prior to sleep or love or both.

That could have been me. I could have learned to use an abacus or taught myself to be a seal-cutter; I could haul logs or run an apple stall. I could be a bakery owner's bread-oven-paddle-poker or a butcher's offal-bucket-toter. Right now, I could be sitting in a wicker chair, with a drink on a side table and a jolly good scroll to read.

Nothing appeared to be going on, but I was patient.

As far as I knew I was observing a fraud, nothing dangerous. I had on decent boots, a knife tucked in one of them and a belt I was fond of. The weather was fine. The night was young. I was clean and fed; I had trimmed fingernails, an empty bladder and money in my arm-purse. Nobody close to me knew where I was, but otherwise my situation was comparatively good.

As soon as I arrived, I noticed at the side of the building a discreetly parked, typical Alexandrian horse, between the shafts of a typical Alexandrian flat cart. It seemed unattended. The knock-kneed off-white horse was waiting with his head down as they generally do, his mouth halfway down his nosebag for comfort, though he was not bothering to eat. He was thin, yet not visibly abused. Perhaps people loved him. Perhaps at the end of a long day, plus half a night when his man was moonlighting, he went home to a tolerable stable where the water in his old bucket would be not too dirty and his manger hay was part-way decent. He was a work-horse. He would not be spoiled, though it was in no one's interest to make him suffer. He led the life his master led: hard work that he had always known and that would last until he collapsed and ceased existence.

Close by, in a shadowed doorway, a door stood ajar.

Eventually a man staggered out of the doorway, pulling behind him a loaded hand-barrow. He was moving backwards at first, in order to haul the barrow over a bumpy threshold. Then he turned around and pushed it to the back of the cart, where he began, slowly, to unload small bundles and lift them on to the cart. A second man soon followed him and even more slowly moved more bundles. They had to reach across the tailgate awkwardly Neither thought of climbing up and taking the items from his colleague so they could pack them more easily. Neither had bothered to let down the tailgate. They had no sacks to collect up the items they were shifting, but handled them two or three at a time. It was a tedious process.

Before they returned indoors for another load, they both went and patted the horse. He leaned his head towards them, so they could whisper in his flicking ears. You could call it endearing, though whoever was employing them would probably not say so. One of them started to eat a bread roll.

Typical. If Uncle Fulvius and Pa were involved in this, they had mixed themselves up with an outfit that lacked even basic efficiency. Trust my relatives.

I watched the two clowns saunter back inside, chatting together, then they came out again, having reloaded their barrows. Abruptly the scene changed. Our friend Pastous walked around a corner. He saw the open door, though perhaps did not take in the clowns with the cart. Before I could signal or call out, he rushed inside the building.

The men with the hand-barrows looked at each other apprehensively, then bolted after him.

Groaning, I wrenched myself from the security of my doorway, to follow all of them. My situation, previously so good, was now turning dirty.

Inside the building, I found one large room. It was murky but still dimly lit by the evening sun. Upon various work-tables and the floor stood piles of scrolls. These were what the two fellows had been transferring to the horse and cart. Their labours were being supervised by the unsmiling man called Diogenes. He might employ clowns, but he was better quality. Though neither tall nor agile, his thickset, pear-shaped body was strong; he looked like a man nobody should cross. In short sleeves today, he had an old scar from his shoulder to his elbow, and large hands. His tiny eyes seemed to notice everything. I put him at forty-five, grim-natured, and from the thick black eyebrows that met in the middle, I thought he probably came from the north side and eastern end of the Mediterranean.

When I walked in, Diogenes had knocked Pastous to the ground and was tying him up. He must have reacted extremely fast. He was using cord he must have brought to gather scrolls into manageable bundles.

He looked up.

'Evening,' I said. 'My name's Marcus – nephew to Fulvius. My word, I don't know what you were doing with the old fellows yesterday. They got your message, but they are all flaked out like a row of squashed slugs today. I've been sent instead.'

I made a show of looking at Pastous; I favoured him with a large wink, in the manner of a no-good, cheeky cabin boy. Ashamed of letting himself be captured, he said nothing.

Diogenes scrutinised me suspiciously while he tightened knots on Pastous. I stood and waited. I just hoped Fulvius and Pa had kept quiet about me. They could certainly be secretive.

Did Diogenes remember he had passed me on the stairs that night? Had he then asked Fulvius about me?

He grunted. 'You're from Fulvius?'

'And Geminus,' I answered meekly.

I passed his test, it seemed. Diogenes bent over Pastous, ripped off the hem of the assistant's tunic and gagged him with it. Before he was reduced to helpless gurgling, Pastous managed to come out with the old cliche. 'You won't get away with this!'

'Ah, but we will!' Diogenes told him with mock-sadness.

Silenced, Pastous glared. I reckoned this rather literal man now thought that I must have been working with the trader all along. His antagonism suited my act.

Diogenes seemed to accept that I could be trusted. He ordered me to set to and help the other men. So, in this strange fashion, I found myself unexpectedly working for relatives, as I could have done for the past twenty years if life had been different.

Before the room had been emptied, the cart was laden. Diogenes told his two men to wait there until a fresh cart came. He climbed up to drive, indicating that I was to go with him and unload the scrolls at the destination. Tracking the cargo suited me, so I obeyed. Only after we had left the Museion and were driving through many streets, heading westwards, did I ask casually, 'Where are we going?''

'The box-maker's. Weren't you told?' Diogenes glanced at me. I detected a sardonic note.

Now I was stuck with my role: the family idiot, the one to whom nobody ever bothered to give explanations. So I sat quiet, clinging on to the cart as if I was nervous I would fall off, while I let the trader take me wherever he was going.

If this went wrong, my adventure could have an unpleasant, very lonely outcome.

We travelled for ages, or so it seemed. Now I learned just how large a city Alexandria was. Journeys through unknown streets always seem interminable.

We kept going west, into what I knew must be the district called Rhakotis. This part, peopled by the native inhabitants, was an area Uncle Fulvius had warned me never to go to. This enclave had always been a bolthole for descendants of the original Egyptian fisherfolk Alexander displaced when he decided to build his city. They were at the bottom of the pecking order, almost invisible to the rest – Romans and Greeks, Jews, Christians and the multitude of other foreign immigrants. According to my uncle, these were also the descendants of the semi-pirates the Ptolemies had encouraged to pillage ships, looking for scrolls in all languages which they commandeered for the Great Library. According to Fulvius, they had never lost their ferocity or their lawlessness.