Dave Hutchinson - Sleeps With Angels

Archaeology never stands still. There’s always somebody digging something up somewhere. Fragments of letters, for instance, from an unidentified inhabitant of Lincoln to an unidentified inhabitant of Rome talking about money lent to Lucius Claudius Setibogius for a villa . A letter from one Caecilius, an apparently much sought-after mosaic artist, to his sister, bemoaning the fact that he had to travel all the way to Britain to work for someone called Luci Cl S (the rest of the name had faded away) and that his employer wanted to include much eye-witness detail in his work. Rowland looked at all this stuff, and he did wonder, oh yes he did.

And then, about six months ago, a farmer in the Cotswolds was given a metal detector for his birthday. He took it out into one of his fields, just to try it out, and it went berserk the moment he switched it on. He dug a hole in the field and came up with a dozen Roman coins, thirty assorted silver ornaments and a hundredweight of roof-tiles, and then he called the local archaeological society, who dug around a bit and called the nearest university, who dug around a bit and called Lew, who called Rowland. Who turned up on my doorstep.

And here we were, almost two thousand years after the death of Lucius Claudius Setibogius, standing in a muddy field in Gloucestershire, looking down from the edge of a huge hole at the mosaic floor of the largest Roman villa ever discovered in Britain.

Rowland’s first words were, I thought, marvellously restrained under the circumstances. He said, “Are you certain it’s him?”

“There’s no doubt,” Lew said smugly. “There are inscriptions praising him all over the site. His name’s everywhere.”

I couldn’t stop staring at the floor.

“You know,” Rowland said, looking around the site as if the idea had only just occurred to him, “do you think he might actually be buried around here somewhere?”

The floor was a wonder .

“There’s a cemetery just over there,” Lew said, pointing. “We’ve only just opened it up, but we’re turning up burials with extraordinary grave goods.”

I took a step forward.

“My god,” Rowland said quietly. Then he yelled, “What on Earth are you doing?”

I walked out across the floor, across the mosaic tiles in which Lucius had instructed Caecilius to record his life’s story. Caecilius was a genius; this was the best mosaic work I had ever seen. It must have cost Lucius a fortune to bring him out here from Rome. He had added representations of the gods and goddesses in various places, but really what I was standing on was a biography, a monument to the ego of one man. I walked with my head bent forward, looking at the pictures. Here was Lucius’s early life in what appeared to be a pretty standard British hovel circa the Second Century. Here he was driving a little herd of goats. Here he was selling the goats. Here he was buying some sheep. Here he was selling wool to somebody else…

I turned and looked at Rowland. “Caecilius was working from life,” I said. I pointed at the representations of Lucius beneath my feet. “This is what he looked like.”

Rowland had his mouth open ready to yell at me for walking on the floor. He closed his mouth with a little gulp and looked at all the figures.

I presumed that Caecilius was no fool; he’d idealised his patron, but even so Lucius looked disappointingly ordinary . He didn’t look like Flash Harry in a toga. He had a Roman haircut that had grown out a bit, and he had a mean little mouth and what looked like a bit of a beergut, but really he could have been anybody.

The winner always writes the history. Okay. So here was Lucius turning his little herd of sheep bit by bit into a mighty trading empire. He shook hands with clients. He didn’t cheat anyone or make shady deals. He married his wife, whose name we still didn’t know but Caecilius had given her a J-Lo arse and a penchant for playing stringed instruments. Later on there was a son, as cute as you could make a mosaic representation. I wandered back and forth across the floor, picking up details. Here he went to Rome. Here he visited the Colosseum. Here…

I stopped and looked at the figures beneath my feet.

“Rowland,” I said, “they’re red .”

Rowland’s most recent obsession was with a discovery made by archaeologists in Indonesia, of small primate skeletons which possibly represented a parallel branch of evolution. The media had dubbed them ‘Hobbits,’ but Rowland’s mind had gone back to the homunculi Lucius claimed to have seen in Rome. Could some of them, he wondered, have been captured in Indonesia and been passed westward, from owner to owner, until they arrived on the Black Sea coast, where they had been swept up by the Empire and brought to Rome, only to die in the arena? There were, apparently, local stories of the little primates surviving into historical times. It wasn’t impossible that they might have wound up in Rome. Vanishingly unlikely, but not impossible , and Rowland’s mind was deliriously at home in that tiny area labelled not impossible . Theories came and went about the nature of Homo floresiensis . Rowland ignored them all, snuggled himself up to not impossible , and came up with his own narrative.

Lucius was Rowland’s greatest prize, and fitting the villa and the information it contained into what he already knew would complete his life’s work. But he thought that once, nearly two millennia ago, Lucius had spoken with a cousin of the human race, and he thought that Lucius, with his enormous ego, would record it somehow at his home. He thought that it would prove not only that H. floresiensis had survived into the Second Century, but that it was capable of language and sophisticated thought. One of them had been taught Latin. Lucius had spoken with it. And then it had died in the Colosseum.

But.

We had all been taking that word homunculi a little bit too seriously. I looked down at the figures in the tiles. These were not H. floresiensis , or at least not H. floresiensis as they had been depicted by the people who do artists’ impressions for newspapers and television news organisations. They did not look like little hairy apes walking upright. They did not, in fact, look much like primates at all.

There were five of them, standing in line abreast, and behind them was a section of wall that looked as though it could have been part of the Colosseum. If the figures of gladiators standing a little over to the right, menacing them with swords and nets and tridents, were any guide, none of the homunculi was more than five feet tall. They were all bright red, as if they had been tandooried, and they were all wearing bits and pieces of clothing, some of it Roman, most of it not. One was wearing boots; another was wearing big padded-looking gloves.

I knelt down on the floor at the feet of the figures. I heard Rowland step down onto the mosaic and start walking towards me, and a moment later I heard Lew do the same. Lew was recovering quickly. “Yes, perhaps it was remiss of me not to mention them,” he was saying. “But surely they’re representations of household gods? Figures from myth? Deities Setibogius may have felt protected him?”

I tried to imagine Lucius dragging Caecilius all the way from Rome to do this. I thought of him standing over Caecilius, dictating every bit of the design like a mugging victim working with a police artist. I thought of Caecilius shaking his head as he tried to get the faces right, wondering what the hell his employer had been drinking.

They all had flat faces. Their eyes were narrow and tilted, their mouths parted in lipless slashes that exposed rows of needle-like teeth. They had the huge, flat noses of leaf-nosed bats, and enormous ears. They had horns. Great backward-curving horns.