Graveyard of the Hesperides

by Lindsey Davis

  *

  In a desultory mood, I wandered back to the Hesperides. Tiberius and the men were frantically trying to make the water feature work. I sat and watched. First, no water appeared. A red-faced Sparsus conducted the traditional plumbing moves: he banged pipes loudly with a hammer. When the others cried “Steady on!” he threw down his tools and refused to do anything else.

  Larcius and Tiberius went down on their knees, heads together, taking over like men with more experience, men about to do something much more technical. Tiberius hit the pipe.

  “That’s never going to shift it.”

  “Shut it, Sparsus.”

  “Ow!” My loved one had mis-aimed the hammer; he whacked his thumb. “Ow, ow!” As he recoiled, in bringing the hammer up he hit his forehead too.

  Larcius took the tool; he struck an expert blow, at which water rushed out. “Jupiter, turn the stopcock, Serenus!” Water rapidly filled the feature channel. It was soon overflowing. “Adjust it, adjust it! Other way, you idiot!”

  They turned off the torrent. All sat down, panting. There were grins, with the endearing mix of sheepishness and triumph that workmen acquire after narrowly changing failure into success. Sparsus applied a filthy rag to Tiberius’ brow, where a large cut was now splashing blood. He was also sucking a blood blister on his battered thumb. I said, “Well done, all,” while going to his assistance. Now I would have a bridegroom who looked like a dying gladiator.

  “We should have put in an isolation valve, chief.”

  “The client’s in jail. Let him sort that one out for himself, another day.”

  “He’ll call us back.”

  “We’ll be too busy to come.”

  “Promise?”

  “Absolute promise!” Tiberius lolled against me as I pressed on his cut forehead. “We’ll clear up, hand him back his bloody bar—or lock up if he isn’t here—and get out forever tonight.”

  The others had finished their breather, so they jumped up and began floating little dishes down the canal. Most of them sank. I claimed I had always said it would happen. Serenus knocked Sparsus over, so he fell in the water, splashing everyone. We were all glad to be cooled down, because the afternoon had become stifling.

  When they settled again, they began tidying up and removing rubbish. All their tools and usable materials were put on handbarrows to wheel off to the yard at the Aventine. Everything superfluous was taken from the site and dumped in the back lane. Transport was supposed to come along that evening to take it; it had been ordered and would possibly even turn up. They conducted endless builders’ sweeping. Larcius arranged the beaten-up wooden furniture like a meticulous housewife. An oil lamp was placed at the exact center of each table. The struggling fig tree was carefully watered. The Oceanus mosaic had all its dust washed off so it ended up sparkling.

  That was it. Tiberius and I saw the men off. We would see them tomorrow, all in our celebration clothes. “With big thirsts on!” We two walked slowly to the hired room to pack. Dromo, who yearned for familiar routines, was so eager to go home, he piled everything on his handcart and straightaway went off; we heard him moaning about the weight. Tiberius had reminded the boy that tomorrow he could stuff himself with cake made by the fabulous elite chef, Genius.

  “Can he cook?”

  “No.”

  When he left, husband-to-be and I lay down on the appalling bed, intending to wait until the outdoor temperature cooled. Both of us were preoccupied, thinking too much about the lifelong enterprise on which we would embark tomorrow. With a marriage apiece behind us, and after a decade of waiting to risk a repeat, neither could afford this to go wrong. There was no need to talk about it. We were too subdued in any case.

  We fell asleep. When we awoke, it was already evening. People were expecting us for dinner; by the time we could reach the Aventine, it would probably be over. None who knew us would be much surprised. Any investigation made us unreliable timekeepers; they had yet to hear how this one had run itself into the ground, maddeningly incomplete.

  We left the room tidy, locked up, took back the key to the owner. We passed Menendra and a couple of her donkeys laden with grain sacks. They were delivering to the Four Limpets, outside which lolled a group of Macedonian prostitutes, bantering with a tambourine player in the absence of clients.

  *

  As we left the Ten Traders for the final time, we passed by the bar. In the course of that afternoon, it had somehow been made ready for business, so it was already open and operating.

  Just as it had been when I started this account, the Garden of the Hesperides was a large but otherwise typical eating house on a busy street corner, with two marble counters, five potholes for food jars, three shelves of cracked beakers, an unreadable price list on a flaking wall and a faded picture of nude women unsuccessfully guarding an apple tree. This bar had waiters who were very slow to serve anyone and pretty girls who did all the work. A room upstairs was used for assignations; you could bring your own or hire the staff.

  Little had changed. Only bodies had been dug up from the back garden and identified. Regulars would no doubt continue to harp on the old tragedy to strangers who might buy a round. I bet they still claimed one body put out there was a barmaid called Rufia.

  We could not see whether the new landlord had been released by Macer and was inside, setting about his chosen role of becoming a local character. We did spot the gangster enforcer, Gallo. Both the waiters, Nipius and Natalis, reverently shook his hand as if he were a man of consequence. He accepted their greetings like a lord, passing through the gap in the counters as he made his way indoors. Perhaps he was intending to enjoy a drink in the courtyard, under the pergola beside the water feature, gazing at the lopsided sea-god mosaic. He would probably not give a thought to the murdered waitress who had once been buried where he sat, or her five long-dead companions.

  In a strangely muted mood, Tiberius and I set off together for our long walk home. We would saunter down the Vicus Longus, past the White Chickens, ignoring the brothels; we would walk into the Argiletum, gazing at the famous Subura scroll-sellers, cobblers, false-teeth- and wig-makers, though not stopping to browse. We would avoid the Forum Transitorium, which was still partly a building site, but would sidle past the Fora of Augustus and Caesar, emerging into the main Forum close to the rostra. Around the Capitol at the north end, we would pass into the meat market, holding our noses. Thence a quick pass to the Trigeminal Gate, along its elegant porticus on the Marble Embankment, before we stopped short of the Emporium, below the cliffside of the Aventine, at my parents’ town house.

  Tiberius would leave me, going on to stay at his uncle’s.

  That evening, I was supposed to dedicate my locket to my father’s household gods (I had never had a locket; Falco never owned Lares). I should put away my childish things. Since I was already fourteen when they took me in, childish things never happened either.

  In the small, high-up bedroom I had had as a young girl, where I had once written lovelorn poetry and raged against the world’s injustice, I would spend this last night before marriage. Traditionally, I should dream of the day that was to follow.

  I, being thoroughly professional, merely cursed and brooded that I had not solved my case.

  31 August

  The day before the Kalends of September (pridie Kal. Sept.)

  The wedding day of Tiberius Manlius Faustus and Flavia Albia

  LIX

  Rain!

  Whoever thinks of weddings and imagines rain? I heard it first in the middle of the night, when a great storm cracked the skies apart. Rain poured down so heavily the whole house hummed with the pressure of water racing through its exterior gutterwork. It felt like some pointless engine in the workshop of Heron of Alexandria, the great inventor of mechanical curiosities. Rain must be filling the streets, cooling the air in a mighty gush, waking even me, a bride who had—let us be frank—drunk too many tiny tots of something strong with her mother that evening. Unless it stopped
, I would be getting married in a thunderstorm.

  This could be a disaster. Having enough to cope with, I went back to sleep.

  *

  Before dawn I was woken again. Urgent footsteps and whispers announced my bridesmaids, wanting to drag me out for my first task. A bride must rise in the dark to pick flowers from her parents’ garden. These she (not me, oh please!) had to weave into a garland to perch on her special hairstyle and hold down her veil. Garlands must be provided, too, for the bridegroom and any little flower girls who wanted to take part (many, I had been warned, mainly aged three, all famous for being sick with excitement). Also there had to be a bouquet of symbolic herbs: love, honor, joy, fidelity, devotion, long life, fertility and purity. Some powerful bouquets garnis! Quite a prescription for marriage.

  Since the parents’ house had no garden, I was shoved out alone onto the roof terrace, where the usual pots of roses had been supplemented specially by new containers of herbs.

  “We haven’t done her six ringlets!”

  “She’ll get soaked out there. We’ll fix the hair when we let her back in.”

  It was still raining steadily, so I had to go out with the snips and trug unaided. A gale howled across the terrace, water sheeting sandal-deep. The others just crowded in the doorway to the roof, urging me to hurry up because rain was blowing in on them. I hastily gathered slimy handfuls of what could be rosemary, marjoram, sage, lavender and myrtle—or any old twigs, since I, a city girl, was on my own with this job in the dark.

  Fortunately custom says a bride should be pampered with a bath to ward off the evil eye and make her smell nice. I could live with the evil eye, which I viewed as a soul sister, but soaking in fragranced warm water now seemed urgently needed. My mother, sisters, husband’s old aunt, plus curious slave women, watched me, gossiping.

  The hired beautician turned up in time. For the size of fee she was charging, that woman could not be deterred by driving rain. She dealt with me fast, since my needs were standard: six braided locks, formed with a comb like a spearhead, coiled up as if I were a Vestal Virgin, expertly tied with ribbons and pinned on top of my head. That part was painful. They had to stay in place all day. The pins were long and pushed in very firmly. Women who should know better told me tradition had to be suffered for. My reply was caustic.

  The ornatrix was keen on little tendrils curled around the face. I quarreled with her about that, so she huffed off to tend my impatiently waiting sisters and Aunt Valeria, who were all having elaborate court curls—a stupid front headdress of many tiny pin curls on a frame.

  Meanwhile I was dressed by my mother, who had quietly done her own hair. First, a long white tunic, supposedly woven seamlessly on an old-fashioned upright loom and unhemmed. Itchy, of course. Then Aunt Maia’s legendary flame-colored veil, with the droopy garland plonked on it. Moth holes dropped fabric dust like dandruff. The tunic reached the ground, so as Helena crouched to push on my saffron-dyed shoes, I was endlessly instructed to hold it up and not trip over. “Stop hunching; stand up straight. You’re not fourteen now.” Finally, a woolen sash, tied by my mother in a Hercules knot. Only my husband could untie it. Helena got the knot right; she didn’t need it, but Father had drawn a diagram.

  The saffron veil is intended to be a symbol of submission to your husband. We all guffawed.

  I was ordered to wear no jewelry. The only exception was supposed to be my engagement ring. Since my new husband had never supplied one, I wore the old wedding ring I had used as an informer to make me look like a respectable widow (Lentullus and I had never marked our marriage). I refused to go through a whole stressful day now uncheered by glitter.

  *

  They poked my wet bouquet into my hands. I was taken downstairs, where my sisters had spent hours decorating the entrance with Oriental carpets from the antiques warehouse, tree boughs, ivy and strands of wool. A slave boy was catching insects that crawled out of the ivy. Julia and Favonia both had an artistic touch. You could tell either this was the home of a madman or it was hosting a wedding.

  Tiberius arrived. Togated and barbered, he did look like a man worth marrying. Rather strained, but after a night trying to survive his family, he probably had a hangover. He turned up alone; everyone else thought they could skip the augury and would follow later. I gave him his garland, which he nervously put on. We shared a private glance. His aunt Valeria appeared from our kitchen with her gruel bowl.

  We had to seek approval from the gods, and the omens confirming divine favor must be taken before sunrise. What idiot invented that? It isn’t always done, but I had traditional planners.

  Now came an unfortunate clash. Nobody had told my uncle, the elderly master of pompousness Gaius Baebius, that he could not conduct the sacrifice. “So thoughtless!” muttered Aunt Valeria, finding fault with relish. “The poor man has even brought his own pig.” The runty thing had a weird look in its eye.

  Gaius Baebius decided to conduct a sacrifice anyway. His wife, Father’s starchy sister Junia, and their son Junillus had tagged along to supervise, so they had to watch as he placed a veil over his bald head and advanced on his animal, knife aloft, while trying to stop the veil falling off. His pig took one look and made a break for freedom just as other guests arrived; they pushed in through the front door in streaming wet cloaks, allowing the frantic porker to dash out.

  Next moment, Gaius Baebius was running after the escapee, scampering along the Marble Embankment, wielding his unused sacrificial cleaver and weeping with frustration. Even if he caught his pig, it was now defiled by its unwillingness. He would have to start all over again with another animal. The meat market was not open yet.

  Junia pretended Gaius Baebius was not her husband. Sweet Junillus hesitated, then obligingly ran out into the storm and chased down the road after his father.

  Everybody else stood in the hall and tried not to mention out loud how the escaping pig was a bad omen. Fortunately my professional victimarii turned up, tenderly leading Snowy, the sheep I had ordered. In a wreath and gold ribbons, she let herself be led in, very obediently, then gave us a cute bleat. They had brought their own portable altar upon which to send her to the gods.

  Tiberius and I slipped into a side room, prior to our official entry. Favonia put her head into the room. “Oh, shitty shit, Albia! You brilliant sister—they are so-o-o gorgeous!”

  The three gorgeous experts, barefoot, in long kilts wrapped with wide cummerbunds, and flashing their heavenly pectorals, carried out their duties without fault. I peeked to make sure I got value for money, while Tiberius loftily surveyed a shelf of Greek vases.

  They all looked perfect. Passus, my handsome victimarius, gently led the sheep, murmuring to keep it happy. Victor, my muscle-bound popa, whipped out his mallet and stunned it. Erastus, my cultrarius, had been in a brawl, as I remembered the Brown Toad transvestites telling me, but the damage must be cleverly covered up and didn’t show. He slit Snowy’s throat with one strong slash, enjoying his work; he deftly caught the blood in a special bronze bowl so none splashed on the hall’s mosaic, then opened the stomach for inspection.

  An old man who looked like a tramp had come with the hunks. I could see people thinking, That clown Falco is being kind-hearted again, taking in down-and-outs for a square meal at his daughter’s wedding. However, it was the augur. Staberius was a bunioned old has-been who smelled. He peered at the sheep’s bits intently, then quavered: “The gods approve this union. I see happiness in the home and the marriage bed!”

  Tiberius strode up behind me, moved me aside, stuck his head out: “And no cheek!” The old man nervously added the requested prophecy. We made our formal appearance to polite clapping.

  Julia Junilla was mistress of ceremonies, reading out from a list. “We call upon the gods to be present: Janus, for thresholds, openings and closings, Juno Pronuba for matrimony, Jupiter, the father god, Tellus, the earth mother, and Hymen Hymenaeus, god of marriage.” My mother quipped oh dear, we hadn’t bought in enough food for
so many. “Our bride will now be handed over by a matron who has only been married once and her husband is still living.”

  “There will be appropriate words of advice,” added Favonia, deceptively satirical.

  Helena approached me. Suddenly her brother, my uncle Camillus Justinus, cried loudly, “You’re ignoring the rules, Sis!” Well, that was Mother. “Stop the wedding! Helena Justina has been married twice! Doesn’t anyone remember—before Falco, she had that ass who plotted.”

  Mother glared at Justinus but stepped back. Someone hissed, “Don’t mention the plots!” Too late. Everyone who didn’t know was now asking.

  In our family we do not lack independent women. Claudia Rufina beat off all comers, volunteering herself as substitute. She was wife to Justinus, though their marriage was rocky; Claudia loved weddings, where she tended to lock herself in a room, weeping copiously, while Uncle Quintus pleaded in whispers at the door. “I am a one-man woman,” she declared. “We foreign brides must stick together, Albia!”

  Claudia Rufina then gave me away with such practiced panache I wondered whether she and my uncle had conspired. She seized us and joined our right hands, which the augur tied together with wool. This is how I know Staberius smelled. At least Claudia was shedding a fine mist of something aromatic, no doubt a gift after some furious quarrel with Justinus.

  Julia announced: “Tiberius Manlius and Flavia Albia have elected to give their promises in the ancient way of silence.” It was news to us, but had worked for my parents, so I gazed into his gray eyes, making certain secret promises, while he gazed back, seeming more serious, though I knew how to take that.

  Tiberius then said steadily: “By Jupiter, Juno and all the gods, I, Tiberius Manlius Faustus, declare that I do willingly consent to take this woman to be my wife.”