‘Salve,’ said the cobbler in a nasal tone and I did a double take. He had a leather nose on a strap around his head. I did not want to know what was – or wasn’t – underneath.
‘Salve,’ I replied politely. ‘Cupio haec.’ I want these.
I pointed to a nice pair of sturdy-looking shoes. They were orange leather with matching leather laces. The hobnail pattern on the base formed an arrow. I reached down the front of my tunic and showed him some of the little coins people had tossed at me.
The cobbler laughed as if I had just told a very funny joke. Then he bent over, reached into a basket on the floor and held up a single leather shoelace. I guessed he was saying that was all my coins could buy.
I fished down my tunic again and found three more tiny coins.
He giggled and held up another shoelace.
Wait! Where was that little silver coin? I was pretty sure silver was worth more than copper-alloy.
I sucked in my stomach and pulled the plaited belt away from my waist.
A tiny ping! sounded as the coin struck the brick floor. I bent and managed to nab it before it rolled into the shadows.
I put the coin on the low counter and saw his eyes widen. That meant silver was good. Once again, I pointed at the shoes I wanted.
He lifted his chin for no and pointed to a pair of leather flip-flops.
I also tipped my head back and pointed to a shoe halfway between the flip-flops and the orange shoes. This one was essentially a single piece of leather with a thong that pulled it together over the top of your foot and was then long enough to be tied around your ankles. It had no nails for grip and it would leave part of the top of my foot exposed, but would be better than the flip-flops.
‘Carbatinas cupis?’ said the man, pointing at it. So that type of shoe was called a carbatina.
‘Ita,’ I replied. Yes.
The man looked at my bare feet, then reached behind the counter and pulled out a slightly smaller but similar pair and held them up.
‘Bene,’ I replied. Fine.
The noseless cobbler held up a finger as if to say, ‘One moment.’
He plucked a brush from a hook on the wall, knelt in front of me and started to brush the mud off my bare feet. It tickled and I couldn’t help laughing. The man started laughing too. When my right foot was relatively clean, he put on the shoe and tied it, then looked up at me. I smiled happily and held out my left foot. He brushed it too, and we laughed some more. When he had tied both shoes he stood up and tapped the brush on the door frame to clean it. Then he turned to face me.
‘Tibi placent?’ he said. Do they please you?
I almost nodded, but remembered just in time that a nod could mean no, so I answered in Latin, ‘Yes. They please me.’
The cobbler grinned broadly, revealing no front teeth. Then he held out his hand and said something back to me. I guessed it meant, ‘We have a deal.’
Remembering how to do an authentic Roman handshake, I reached for his forearm. But when my hand went past his he looked confused and took a step back.
I smiled and tried again, reaching for just below his elbow. ‘Quid agis?’ he cried. That I understood: What are you doing?
‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. I held out my hand and he shook it in the normal way.
So Hollywood had got it wrong.
And so had Martin.
I turned to exit the shop, then turned back. ‘Can you tell me where I might find a knife-seller named Caecilius?’
‘Caecilius?’ he repeated.
‘Yes, Caecilius.’
He gave this a good few moments of thought, then tipped his head back for no.
‘Bassus ferrarius?’ he suggested. I had no idea what this meant, but I repeated it a few times, thanked him and headed out of the shop in my new shoes.
The carbatinae were better than bare feet, but I could still feel the gravel of the road through the thin layer of leather. I suspected I had paid too much for them.
It had started to rain and people with hoods were putting them up.
By doing my humble namaste hands and asking several passers-by and shopkeepers ‘Bassus ferrarius?’ I gathered that ferrarius meant a blacksmith, and Bassus was the name of one. I finally found him standing on the muddy road outside his shop hammering a piece of red-hot metal. He was a shaggy man in a leather apron, with the worst case of pink-eye I had ever seen.
When he paused in his work I asked him where I could find an ivory-and-iron knife. He shrugged, which I guess meant the same thing then as now. He had never heard of Caecilius either.
So Martin had been wrong about that too. He had given me bad intel.
Really bad.
It was raining harder now and the blacksmith went inside his shop, but I stood where I was, feeling a growing sense of dread.
Martin hadn’t warned me that people’s Latin was almost unintelligible.
He hadn’t told me that the streets were like rivers of mud studded with gravel.
He hadn’t told me that Roman Londoners were riddled with disease.
He had described people wearing togas and driving chariots, but I had not seen one toga or a single chariot.
The information he had given me was wrong too. There was no Caecilius selling bone and iron knives here in Londinium. Or at least not at this time.
Then there was the bogus Roman handshake he had told me about.
The one in all the movies.
And in that moment I realised the truth:
Martin had got all his information from movies.
He hadn’t gone back in time at all.
26
Dead Bull
I was still standing outside the blacksmith’s workshop. It was now raining heavily, but I was too occupied by my thoughts to care.
If Martin hadn’t gone back, how had he lost his foot? And how did he know all that stuff about Mithras? About the masks and the clicking and grunting?
I thought of my advice to Dinu when I first discovered he’d followed me into the past. ‘Just stay here. Wait until I get back.’
Then I got it.
That’s what Martin had done. He had gone back in time. But he had been too scared to venture outside. He had stayed in the Mithraeum for three days without ever coming out.
That was how he knew so much about the rites of Mithras but nothing about Londinium in 260 AD.
Then I had another terrible thought.
If Martin had stayed hidden in the Mithraeum on both his trips, then he hadn’t interacted with any ancient Roman Londoners. He probably hadn’t even been seen by one. Which meant that Solomon Daisy’s theory about how we probably can’t affect our present world might be wrong.
Maybe we could change the future by interacting with people in the past.
Maybe I had already changed the future.
The rain was pelting down, but I was paralysed by dread.
Maybe when I went home my gran wouldn’t be living in the third-floor flat of 54 Victoria Gardens. Maybe when I went home I wouldn’t even be born. Maybe when I stepped back through the portal I would vanish in a puff of air.
Or maybe when I went home my parents would still be alive and I wouldn’t have to live in that tiny flat with my gran but could just visit her from time to time.
All I knew was that I had to abort my mission right away. Some random girl with an ivory knife wasn’t worth the risk of an altered future. I had to get home with as little interaction as possible. I had to get back to the time portal in the Mithraeum.
I had been standing in the rain for all this time and I was soaked. By the time I came to my senses, the rain had almost stopped.
Up ahead I saw a grey-haired man in a long tunic and burgundy cloak emerge from the shelter of a shop’s awning. I realised with a jolt that he was the first person with grey hair I had seen here. He had a walking stick as tall as himself and was followed by two slaves or maybe bodyguards in pale grey-green tunics.
I hurried through the mud to reach him.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, ‘where is the Mithraeum?’
He looked at me suspiciously and said, ‘Ain?’ which I knew from my Latin podcast meant, ‘Huh?’
‘Mithraeum!’ I repeated, wiping my rain-drenched face.
He still looked blank so I pulled my knife from my belt and made a downward stabbing motion. ‘Taurus mortus!’ I said. Dead bull.
At this he jumped back and brandished his walking stick like a ninja bo-staff. His two slaves cowered behind him. I guessed they weren’t bodyguards.
I quickly put my knife back into my belt and held up my hands. Then I tried to think of some other terms associated with Mithras. ‘Sol Invictus?’ I said.
‘Ah!’ He lowered his bo-staff and glanced around. Then he leaned forward and said in a low voice, ‘Antrum perseum?’
I had no idea what antrum was, but I knew Mithras wore a Persian cap and that one of the levels was Persis, the Persian.
Again I caught myself about to nod, but remembered just in time and said ‘Ita!’ Yes!
Bo-Staff pointed and said something else. I understood the words pons, dexter, sinister and recte – bridge, right, left and straight on – but not much else.
I thanked him – ‘Gratias ago’ – but he was already moving on, tapping his head with his forefinger and saying something to one of his slaves.
I followed at a discrete distance, because he was heading the same way as me.
‘Pons,’ I repeated to myself. And I tried out a phrase under my breath: ‘Where is the bridge?’
In fact we were coming up to a bridge now, but it was only another small one.
The rainstorm had passed and the sun peeped out from between clouds. It made everything look brighter and cleaner. Roman, even. It was almost a shame I had to go back now.
But if there was a risk of my changing the future, then the less interaction I had, the better.
Then I remembered Dinu and stopped in my muddy tracks. Behind me some girls bumped into me and started giggling, but I was too busy thinking about Dinu to take any notice.
If he had drowned, then his body would have floated out to sea, never to be found.
But what if he had managed to crawl ashore? In that case he would surely try to find his way back to the Mithraeum.
Hopefully without interacting with too many people.
I definitely had to get there.
The giggling girls were still behind me and now I felt a tap on my damp shoulder. I turned to see a girl a little older and a lot taller than me. She had a sapphire blue cloak with a hood. My jaw dropped as I gazed into the most amazing eyes I had ever seen in my life. They were the same colour as her cloak and stood out even more because of the smoky black eyeliner she had painted around them.
I was frozen. Like those people in the Greek myth who looked at Medusa and got turned to stone.
Suddenly she covered her mouth and giggled, and the spell was broken. For the first time I noticed another shorter girl behind her, staring at me wide-eyed.
‘What do you want?’ I said cautiously to the blue-eyed girl.
She said something that sounded like ‘Eros?’
Eros is the Greek god of love, but also a boy’s name. She must have mistaken me for someone else. Forgetting about gestures, I shook my head and turned to go, but she grabbed my hand. I was so surprised that I turned back. She said something else that I didn’t understand. Her cloak slipped off her head and I saw that she had honey blonde hair in complicated braids pinned to her head.
I put up my hand to show polite refusal.
‘I heard your song,’ she said in Latin. ‘What do YOU want from me?’
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about so I frowned. ‘Non comprehendo.’
That was when she pushed her cloak aside to show me something dangling from her belt by a short copper chain. It was a folding knife with an ivory handle carved in the shape of a leopard.
I looked back up into those eyes, then back down at the object dangling from her belt.
It was the blue-eyed girl with the ivory leopard knife.
I hadn’t found her.
She had found me.
27
Blue Eyes
As I stared open-mouthed at the blue-eyed girl with the ivory knife all the little hairs on my arms lifted up. The spots on the ivory leopard had been picked out in black and the blade was smooth not corroded, but it was definitely the same knife Solomon Daisy had shown me.
I pinched myself hard, and did not wake up.
She was still there, looking down at me with the bluest eyes I had ever seen and smelling oddly like a mixture of church and apple pie. That’s when it hit me.
She was real.
A high-pitched time-travel squeal filled my head. My stupid song had worked!
‘Veni,’ she said, and took my hand. I could feel her slender fingers trembling. She pulled me to the side of the road by some stables. The strong scent of mule dung and horse manure could not mask her strange perfume.
She said something to me about Cupid and good omens. But I missed some vital words and stared stupidly.
The blue-eyed girl turned to her friend and said ‘I don’t think he speaks Latin very well.’
I had understood her! I realised she had spoken in Greek.
‘You speak Greek?’ I said.
‘Yes!’ Her blue eyes opened wide. ‘Do you?’
Her accent was utterly bizarre, but I understood her.
‘Yes,’ I said hesitantly. ‘I speak Greek. But not well. I am from a faraway land.’
‘Oh!’ She giggled and covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Your accent is so strange!’
‘No.’ I felt a big smile spread across my face. ‘Your accent is strange.’
She giggled again and looked at me with those amazing eyes. The DNA report had stated they were ‘blue’. It should have said: ‘BLUE!’
‘What is your name?’ I asked, my heart thudding.
‘Lollia,’ she said. ‘My name is Lollia Honorata.’
‘Lollia,’ I repeated. ‘Lollia Honorata.’ It was one of the prettiest names I had ever heard. And not just because it was worth four million pounds to me.
She cocked her head. ‘What is your name?’
‘Alex,’ I said, and then quickly corrected myself. ‘Alexandros son of Philippos.’ I pronounced it the way Gran sometimes did, with the accent on the second syllable.
‘Alexandros,’ she repeated, in a way that made me shiver.
I managed to tear my gaze away and smiled at Lollia’s friend. She had brown hair and was exactly my height, so we were eye to eye. She had also outlined her eyes in smudgy black kohl, but they couldn’t compare to Lollia’s bewitching blue eyes.
‘What is your name?’ I asked the girl politely.
Lollia answered for the girl. ‘She’s just my slave. What does her name matter?’
But the slave-girl spoke anyway. ‘Plecta,’ she said. Her smile made her look almost pretty. ‘My name is Plecta.’
Lollia drew back her arm and slapped the girl’s cheek so hard that her hand left a red mark. Then she turned back to me.
‘Where are you from?’ she said brightly.
My jaw hung open as I looked from Lollia to her slave-girl. Had that really just happened? Had Lollia really just hit the girl? Plecta’s head was lowered in submission. I had totally lost my train of thought.
‘Excuse me?’ I said. ‘What did you ask?’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘Um, a faraway country. My boat sank and I came ashore with only this.’ I pointed to my tunic.
‘And a knife,’ she pointed out.
‘I got the knife from a woman who tried to rob me,’ I said.
The slave-girl Plecta gasped, but Lollia took no notice.
‘My knife is magic,’ she said, showing me the ivory knife with the leopard handle. ‘It keeps away evil and it brought you to me.’
Something made me shiver.
‘You’re soaking w
et,’ said Lollia. Without looking at her slave-girl, she snapped her fingers. ‘Plecta, give him your palla.’
Plecta immediately took off her brown cloak and held it out to me. I could see bruises on the pale skin of her arms.
‘No,’ I said, still speaking Greek. ‘It’s all right. The sun is out now. It will dry me. Please. Let her keep it.’
‘As you wish,’ said Lollia.
Plecta shot me a grateful look and hesitantly took back her cloak.
Standing at that crossroads in ancient Londinium, I realised that Lollia was just like some of the prettiest girls at my school. Beautiful but mean. I’d have bet some of them would happily slap their friends if they could get away with it.
If Lollia was a Mean Girl, then maybe Plecta was like one of their shy but adoring followers. Or maybe she had no choice. I wondered how she had got the bruises on her arms.
‘I told you it would happen this morning,’ said Lollia to Plecta. She turned to me to explain, ‘All the omens were good. This morning I had an even number of seeds on my roll and the smoke from the altar candle went towards Aphrodite, which almost never happens.’
Although I could understand her almost perfectly, her Greek sounded very strange. Her vowels were round and smooth; they somehow made me think of olives.
‘I can’t believe I found you,’ I said, trying to make my Greek sound more like hers.
She giggled. ‘Everyone in the neighbourhood is talking about you!’
Plecta’s head came up sharply. ‘I was the one who heard about him,’ she said, ‘when I went to the well for water!’
Lollia ignored her. ‘Pater was out – another good omen – so I told the door-slave I was going shopping. But really I came to find you.’
‘We really should go back, mistress,’ said Plecta. ‘You know your father doesn’t like you going outside.’
Lollia pinched some skin on her slave-girl’s arm and gave it a fierce twist. The girl gasped and once again hung her head in submission. That explained the bruises.
The Time Travel Diaries Page 8
