A Song For Nero

by Tom Holt

It's not like they'll go off or anything. And just think, if there really is anything there—'

  'It isn't just the time,' Amyntas said. 'They're slippery as eels, those two. I know they look like idiots, but they've been slithering out of trouble for ten years, somehow or other; and just look what they did to Strymon. Now you wouldn't call me the timid sort, but I won't feel easy in my mind till they're safely delivered and paid for and off our hands. Besides, they're a damned liability, with Strymon and the governor after them. I don't want to get my throat cut because His Excellency'd rather get 'em for free than pay money.

  'Hold on,' put in Scamandrius. 'He doesn't even know we've got them yet.'

  'Don't you believe it.' Amyntas again. 'We can't keep secrets in a set-up like ours. I mean, just look what happened to that clown Pollio. I expect he thought he was the only one who knew what he'd got hold of. And we know for a fact that Strymon's got his eyes and ears in our outfit, same as we've got ours in his — same as the Romans've got their spies on both our payrolls, come to that. I'll bet you a gold talent both of 'em know exactly what we're up to right now Which is why we can't afford to muck about chasing buried treasure along the way 'Oh, but that's the point, surely,' Myrrhine cut in, in that simpering little-girl voice of hers. 'You said it yourself. The governor knows we're bringing Nero Caesar to him. Strymon knows we're taking Nero Caesar to Sicily What's the riskiest thing we can possibly do right now? Go to Sicily , of course. No, what we ought to do is head somewhere they won't expect us to go.

  Like Africa .'

  Short pause; danger, brains at work. 'Yes,' Scamandrius said eventually, 'but we know Strymon believes in this treasure bullshit. Won't he be expecting us to try for it?'

  'Not if his spies have told him we're taking them to the governor,' Myrrhine said, sweetly patient. 'Think about it. If you're the governor, and you're planning to ambush us and take Nero Caesar without having to pay, where'd you do it? Here in Ostia , where you've got to explain what you're about if things go wrong? Or in your own province, where you can do anything you like?'

  'Fair enough,' Amyntas sighed; I got the impression this wasn't the first time he'd had to put up with his sister's good advice. 'But the opposite goes for Strymon. He'd want to ambush us here, on his own turf.'

  'So, the sooner we get out of here, the better,' Myrrhine said triumphantly 'Whichever way we go, there's no earthly point hanging around here a moment longer than we have to. We push off; Strymon gets here and finds we've gone, so he hires the fastest boat he can find and chases off after us, in the direction he'd be expecting us to go. But meanwhile, we've gone in the opposite direction, to Africa .'

  'You said it was practically on our way,' Scamandrius said, but I could tell his heart wasn't in it; he knew the debate had gone against him, and he was just going through the motions of a withdrawal in good order. Never had a sister myself; never had the plague, either, but I know what it can do to people.

  'I said it's only two or three days out of our way,' she replied calmly, for the benefit of any members of the class who hadn't been paying attention earlier.

  'Just long enough to throw both Strymon and the governor off the scent. Then — assuming we haven't found the treasure, of course — we dart across from Africa to Selinus or Lilybaeum, where they won't be watching for us, and take them by cart across the middle to Syracuse. Easy as anything.'

  'I don't know,' Amyntas said wearily 'God only knows what Dad'd say, if he knew we were trolling off on a jaunt hunting for fairy gold with the two most wanted men in the empire along for the ride. He'd kick our bums from here to Puteoli.'

  'No, he wouldn't,' Myrrhine chimed in promptly 'He'd say we were using a bit of savvy for a change, sending a bucket down the well instead of jumping down it ourselves. He wouldn't have turned his back on thousands of talents of clean money just for the sake of clipping a couple of days off a journeys 'Yes, but— Oh, screw it,' Amyntas said. 'You win, we'll do it your way I just wish the old fool'd had the sense to keep you out of the business. You always did have the knack of making us do things we don't want to do.'

  'Exactly' You could hear the smirk. 'And that's why he made you make me a partner. There's got to be someone in this firm with a bit of imagination.'

  I could almost have felt sorry for them. In a couple of hours' time, they'd be asking themselves, how the hell did she ever manage to talk us into this? And by then, of course, we'd be on our way to Africa . Just goes to show how important it is to keep women out of business; same reason you keep the cat out of the fish pond.

  Still. Their bad luck, our good luck. Not that I was getting my hopes up or anything, but three or four days more before we had to say hello nicely to the governor of Sicily had to be a good thing, surely Every extra day was another twenty-four chances of wriggling out of it (and of course, wriggling out of certain death was something Lucius Domitius and I knew a thing or two about; but even a master craftsman needs tools and materials). There were all sorts of possibilities, if the gods were minded to give us a break, everything from sneaking quietly over the side in the middle of the night to dodging off in some nice dark cave. The more I thought about it, the happier I felt about Amyntas' old man making the boys play nicely with their kid sister. If I'd thought about it much longer, I might even have considered taking back some of the things I'd said about her under my breath.

  Well, the debate broke up and we were left alone for a short while. Then a couple of hands showed up and started hauling us about like we were barrels of whitebait. The long and the short of it is, they dumped us in big sacks, like the ones you take piglets to market in, and that was all I saw of the proceedings. I had to work out what happened next by what I heard and felt and smelled, though it wouldn't have taken Archimedes to figure it out from first principles. Onto handcarts, up the ramp, and down into the hold. Not the way I'd choose to travel, I have to say Better than walking, and that's about as positive as I can manage to be about it.

  Well, I was the one who'd been dead keen to go to Africa . Good example of why you should be careful what you wish for, I guess. It raised a fine philosophical point in my mind, which I'd have been happy to discuss with Seneca himself, if he'd happened to be lying there beside me all bundled up in ropes and we'd somehow managed to spit the gags out of our mouths: is it worth it getting an extra three or four days of life, if you spend them in the dark, suffering agonies from hunger and cramp and seasickness, with rats nibbling the lobes of your ears? Is there anything about life that makes it worth hanging on to by your fingernails when you'd be far more comfortable dead, or is it just fear of the unknown, force of habit? Take it a bit further (I did, I had the time and piss-all else to do): suppose you were the luckiest, richest, most privileged man in the whole world, and the day came when either you could die, or you could go on living, but your life would be thoroughly miserable, trudging down dusty roads or hiding behind olive jars as the soldiers came looking for you. Or suppose you were the greatest hero ever, and you'd just plundered the wealthiest city in the world, and on your way home you're shipwrecked and washed up on a desert island, with nothing but the skin you were born with? As I lay there trying to scare off the rats by wiggling my ears (it didn't work), I made my imaginary friend Seneca reply, Yes, it's worth it, because you never know what's just around the corner. Your shipwrecked hero might find a great treasure buried on the island, and then get picked up by a passing ship. Your once-fortunate man might discover he's happier herding pigs or busking on street corners than he ever was in his fine house with his Chinese table-linen. And your poor sod tied up in the hold of a ship might wriggle free, or a rat might chew through the ropes thinking they were a particularly muscular ear, and he'd be able to jump off the ship and swim to shore. Yes, I told him, but I can't swim.

  That's not the point, replied my imaginary friend. Listen. When Pandora opened the jar, and all the evils flew out to plague mortal men, the gods took pity on them and put blind, shivering Hope in the very bottom of the jar, to keep
men from giving up and dying where they stood. Hope pulls us through, keeps us going when we're absolutely sure we're done for. The beating of the heart and the action of the lungs are a useful exercise in prevarication, keeping our options open.

  I asked my imaginary friend what prevarication meant. When he'd explained, I said, Yes, that's all very well, but let's go back to that Pandora story for a moment. Leaving the gods out of it for now, I said to him, haven't you ever stopped to wonder, if Hope's such a wonderful bloody thing, what was it doing in the jar in the first place, along with all the other evils? Oh sure, it popped up its little fuzzy head and told Pandora it was her friend, the gods had sent it to help make everything all right, but that's what you'd expect Hope to say, and it proves jack shit about what it was really up to. I reckon (I said) that it was in the jar from the very start, and it stayed behind to kid us poor bloody mortals into hanging around and suffering all the other evils, instead of legging it across the River to where it's quiet and safe and all our troubles would be over. I think, I told him, that we're going to roll around in this shitheap of a boat till we get to Africa , and either we'll die there or in Sicily , but sooner rather than later. And no great loss, either.

  Then my imaginary friend started getting snotty — typical, really, even people who aren't actually there lose their rag with me sooner or later. He said, Listen, Galen, while I tell you about death; because I've been dead a good few years now, and take it from me, you can stuff it. Oh, it's all right for you, you goddamned sightseer. You come here, to the very gates of the palace of death, and you look around, like you're some hick from the country hitting the big city for the first time, and you think you know, you think you understand.

  Like hell you do. This is what death is like. I used to be a Roman senator, adviser to the emperor, supreme power behind the throne, wisest and most respected man of my generation, loved and admired by everyone who read my books or heard me lecture. I'd rather be a fuller's slave, dragging round the streets from dawn to dusk collecting other people's shit and piss in a bucket, sleeping on a stone floor and eating stale bread with the blue mould all over it, than be the purple-gowned Caesar of all the glorious dead. Look round you, Galen; they've all come to see you, all the heroes and kings, the rich and the wise and the beautiful when they were alive. See how they're crowding round you — you, of all people, petty thief, son of a whore, bosom buddy of the most evil man who ever lived — and they're reaching out their hands, trying desperately to warm their chilled fingers over the little glow of your fading, guttering life. It's not much life, God knows, but down here among the dead it shines like the sun and blazes like Rome burning, and all these ghosts of your elders and betters would trade you all their glory and honour for one poxy little flicker of it. If you want to know about life, you're in the right place, here where there isn't any Now go back, to your week or your three days or your three hours or your three heartbeats, go back to your shining palace and your roaring hearth and leave us poor people in peace.

  Well, that was me told. Of course I wasn't convinced, but I had enough to put up with without getting yelled at by make-believe philosophers, so I quit thinking and tried to spook off the rats by banging my head on the deck. That didn't work either, but it did feel good when I stopped doing it.

  At some point, some bugger came round and fed us. Well, he yanked down the gag, stuffed a ladle of something in my face (cream of grease soup, I think it was), then stuffed the gag back in before I could throw up and went away again. I guess it was enough to keep me alive, and at any rate it was better than mother's home cooking. Still.

  So I guess we must've got to where we were supposed to be, because suddenly the hatch opened and this sharp painful stuff got in my eyes and made my head hurt (light, I seemed to remember it was called) and some bastard grabbed me and hauled me up out of my snug little nest into the salt air, where it didn't smell of pisssoaked sacking. And somewhere on the ship, someone called out to somebody else, 'Are you sure this is Africa ?', and whoever it was called back, 'Don't ask me, I've never been this far before.' And I thought, Well, here we are, this is as far as I get to go. Call it a pattern emerging, if you like.

  Short, timeless interlude on a boat, and then straight off the gangplank into the deep shit. Last time, if you remember, the late Licinius Porno gave me a denarius to get rat-arsed on. This time, no money and no booze, but otherwise not much difference, except that this time we were on our way back to Sicily I have to say, Africa 's not one of my favourite places. For one thing, it's too hot. We have hot back where I was raised, in Attica ; we have so much hot, we don't know what to do with it. But Attica hot's different; it makes you sweaty and itchy and bad-tempered, but it doesn't crackle up the skin on your face or make your eyeballs dry out. Also there's the sunlight. It's way too bright. It's so bright you can't see a damn thing, and what sort of service is that? There's other things I didn't like about Africa , but I'm just giving you those two as an example of what a complete dump the place was.

  They dug Lucius Domitius out of the hold and slapped him awake, and then they started asking him for directions. Naturally, he didn't have a clue where he was (and if you don't know where you are, how can you be expected to show anybody where anything else is?). Amyntas got all up tight when the treasure wasn't there on the beach waiting for him, all neatly packed up in jars with the necks sealed with red wax; he was stomping around muttering and asking his brother if he was sure this was the right place, though how Scamandrius was supposed to know that (since all he had to go on was what Lucius Domitius had told him, namely nothing), I have no idea. Myrrhine was the only calm one, and she was floating around like some kind of big-nosed woodnymph, smelling flowers and acting like she was on a picnic at the seaside. I'd have wet myself laughing, except I was about to die.

  'You said Africa ,' Scamandrius was saying, 'this is Africa , what more do you want? And don't go snarling at me. If you want directions, go ask Nero Caesar.

  That's why we brought him, isn't it?'

  So they asked Lucius Domitius; and he told them, without needing to be hit hardly at all, that to the best of his knowledge, the treasure was in a cave under a ruined Carthaginian temple at a place called Oudepopote, on the coast five miles due east of Utica, wherever Utica was. And then he spat out a tooth and added, 'If you want to know how far we are from Utica , why don't you ask the captain of your ship? If anybody knows where we are, it's probably him.'

  Well, Amyntas made a sort of Oh-for-God's-sake gesture and stormed off up the beach. He came back a few moments later, and the bloke he had with him was someone I knew, though I hadn't reckoned on seeing him again. It was the skipper of our grain freighter, the one that'd brought us from Sicily to Ostia . I was so surprised, I nearly fell over.

  Could've gone any bloody way, at that point. For a start, Lucius Domitius was his slave, properly speaking; I'd sold him to him, if you remember, to pay for our passage, and Lucius Domitius had jumped ship and swam to the shore, leaving the captain feeling distinctly pissed off and hard done by But at that moment, Lucius Domitius was on his knees in the sand with blood all over his face and Scamandrius standing behind him with a big wooden club. Me? I was standing very still, with my arms roped behind my back, looking as sorry for myself as I possibly could. Well, you never know. Most people are nicer than me, they go in for sympathy and compassion and stuff like that. I did manage to shake my head and mime shushing noises at him when he caught my eye, but I had no way of knowing if he got what I was trying to tell him, or whether he assumed I was just plain crazy 'Well,' Amyntas was saying, 'where the hell is this place?'

  The captain went all thoughtful, which seemed to annoy Amyntas even more. 'You said Africa,' the captain said, 'and then we'd be heading on to Sicily That's all you said, so I thought, best thing'd be to put in between Hippo and Utica, so we wouldn't have to bugger about rounding Fair Point, and we could just nip back across to Lilybaeum and carry on round the coast from there.'

  Amyntas
had been acting very antsy while the captain said his bit. 'Fine,' he said 'Are we east or west of Utica ?'

  'East,' the captain said, 'about five miles. I made for here because I know this little bay I got blown in here once when I was a lad, on my uncle's ship.

  There's an old fallen-down temple just round that headland, or was when I was here last. They may've bust it up and carted it away for stone, for all I know'

  Scamandrius looked up, and Myrrhine suddenly took an interest. 'This temple,'

  Amyntas said, 'you'd be able to find it again?'

  The captain shrugged. 'Don't see why not,' he said. 'My uncle knew it, said it was put there to mark the shortest distance between Africa and Sicily, back in the old days, by the Carthaginians. You know, Hannibal 's lot, the ones who beat the shit out of you Romans.'

  I don't know what ticked Amyntas off more: the captain's chattering on when he was in a hurry, or being accused of being a Roman. 'Actually, I'm Egyptian,' he said quietly, 'and you'd better find this temple, or I'll cut your liver out.

  Understood?'

  Now that was probably Amyntas' mistake, threatening the captain.

  Understandable, I guess. He was in a foul mood, because of being nagged into this jaunt by his sister, and then being told that they'd come all this way with nobody actually bothering to find out where they were meant to be headed (I suppose Amyntas assumed Scamandrius had sorted all that out, and Scamandrius had thought Amyntas was going to do it), then discovering that quite by chance they'd pitched up in more or less the right spot, but having to put up with the captain telling him his life story when he wanted to get cracking before nightfall. A bloke like Amyntas, a professional hard case with an image to keep up, I expect he was used to threatening people when he wanted something done, most likely did it out of habit, without thinking. But captains of ships are funny bastards, I've noticed. They think a lot of themselves, and they don't like having to deal with landlubbers who come all high and mighty with them just because they happen to own the boat or they're paying for the charter. You go around making threats, like you're talking to a slave or something, they can get very touchy indeed; and I guess this was what must've happened in this case.