A Song For Nero

by Tom Holt

  Well, if they can say that kind of stuff, why not me?) There was our captain, and I'd have voted for him for consul designate like a rat up a drain, but he could never stand, being a foreigner and common as pigshit. And there's Lucius Domitius, pitchforked onto the curule chair by his bitch mother, allowed to stay there a while because — well, basically because everybody else was dead and he was the only one left who hadn't been murdered or sentenced to life exile on a rock in the sea no bigger than our kitchen table. Crazy way of going about things, though I can't say as I've ever heard anybody suggest a better one.

  So the captain shuffled over and said a few words to some of the lads: Tityrus the helmsman, and Ofellinus the boatswain and Speusippus the forecastle-hand, and two blokes I recognised but I can't remember their names; and they nodded once, as if to say, Yes, skip, right away, and they picked up the stuff they were supposed to be carrying, big gold mixing bowls filled up with gold cups and plates and brooches and necklaces and vambraces and the gods only know what else, and they set off towards the door; but before they get there they stop and put their stuff down and quietly walk back, not making any fuss, and Tityrus grabs Amyntas from behind, palm of his left hand up sharp under his chin, right hand takes a firm grip on the shoulder, one smart twist and there's a crack like a charioteer's whip. Scamandrius looks round, wondering what's going on, not worried, because he doesn't realise there's anything to worry about, just curious, is all — and Ofellinus and one of the other two whose names escape me are suddenly there at his sides, taking a firm hold of his arms so he can't move them, and the other bloke whose name I've forgotten reaches down, twists the knife out of his hand and draws it across his throat, like he's carving cheese.

  Blood squirts out, splashes the bloke right in the face. Myrrhine hasn't turned round yet; she didn't hear the crack over the clanking of the goldware she's carrying. Speusippus nips in behind her, gets his long fingers round her slim neck, holds on tight like a carpenter holding two pieces together till the glue starts to take. She drops all the gold junk with a clatter and starts shaking and jerking and dancing, trying to kick backwards with her heels, thrashing with her arms like her hands are flails, arching her back and acting crazy, like a fish on a line when it's lifted out of the water, and then, quite suddenly she stops and just hangs there off Speusippus' hands; then he drops her and she flops on the deck, and the metalwork underneath her graunches and creaks. All very quick, very neat. Job done.

  (But that's the exception, not the rule. Mostly when people are murdered, something goes wrong or somebody screws up, you can bet your life. Like, when Lucius Domitius gave orders for his mother to be killed, it wasn't all swift and sure, crack-slash—crunch and no messing. Oh no. First they had to have a council of war, with all the trusted advisers and their people and their people's aides and their people's aides' hangers-on; and they sat around for hours what-iffing and how about if we did this or maybe we could try that; and they tried poison, but she was too ornery for that and ate it up like jam; and then some genius figured out a contraption that'd bring the ceiling of her bedroom down on top of her while she was asleep, but they installed it without bothering to test it first, and it didn't work; and then they called in a consulting engineer, who went away and came back with blueprints and sections and elevations for a collapsing ship, with a sliding panel in the bottom that opened up, operated by a brilliant system of weights and pulleys and counterbalances and cantilevers and gearwheels and bits of string, and the collapsing ship worked like a charm, went straight to the bottom of the Bay of Baiae with all hands, only Lucius Domitius' old mum happened to be a really good swimmer, and she doggy-paddled ashore and stormed off to her villa down the road, squelch-squelch in her fancy heels, cursing and swearing like a platoon of cavalry on latrine duty; and then I guess they must've said the hell with it, because they sent a soldier with a Spanish-pattern sword to sort her out, and he had the job done quick as farting, and back home to the barracks in time for evening roll-call. There's a nice story about how she told the soldier to plunge his sword into the breast that had suckled such a monster, but I don't credit that for a moment. I expect she looked round, said, 'Who the hell are you?' and next thing she knew about was the Ferryman, holding out his hand for his twopence halfpenny.)

  So that was that. The captain said the best thing to do would be to stick the bodies down the hole once we'd finished getting the gold out, stuff the hole full of bits of wood and stone and rubbish, and nobody'd ever know a thing about it, since nobody except us knew where they'd been headed, or even that they'd decided to stop off in Africa on the way to Sicily Neat as a key in a lock. But, like I was telling you just now, it takes a special sort of person; not me, and not Lucius Domitius. We couldn't organise a donkey race at a country fair.

  You're asking me, did I feel sorry for them, Amyntas and Scamandrius and Myrrhine? Well, yes, I suppose I did. Amyntas, mostly His mistake was, he never ever expected to find Dido's treasure, or so much as a plated drachma, so he didn't plan ahead, figure out what he'd do and what he'd need and then suddenly there it was, enough wealth to pay off the Roman national debt, just lying there like turnips waiting to be pulled. Then things started happening so fast, before he even knew he was in trouble it was all over with him, and it could only end one way I can sympathise with that, because my whole life's been like it; and when all's said and done, only a lunatic would think there'd be buried treasure where buried treasure's supposed to be. If you went around believing in tales like that, you'd fry your brain. I guess the gods had their fun with him, drowning him in honey, and you can't argue the toss with Heaven. Scamandrius; well, he was the younger brother and did as he was told, so you can't blame him really He saved the Romans the cost of two bits of lumber and three penny nails.

  Myrrhine well, I see her face in my sleep sometimes, all purple and bursting, with her eyes popping out; or I get this weird dream where we've been married for years, and I wake up one morning, sunlight streaming in through the window, birds singing, and she's there next to me dead, strangled, the bed sopping with piss where she wet herself as she died, and my hands are stiff and sore, and the joints of my fingers ache like hell. I generally wake up at that point.

  'Right,' the captain said, 'that's better. Now, what the hell are we going to do?'

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at him, waiting to hear the orders for the day; apart from Ofellinus' mate, the one whose name I can't remember, who was still wiping blood out of his eyes. Then I realised the captain was looking at me; and my insides sort of went all runny because after all, we were in the way too, in a sense.

  'You two,' the captain said, 'what's going on here? Who are you, and who the hell were those idiots?'

  Well, you don't even bother trying to lie to someone like that. Lucius Domitius was standing there like someone had flayed him and stretched the skin out over a statue, so I reckoned it was up to me. I tried to keep it short, figuring he didn't want all the fiddly details, just the basic facts. I said that my friend there was Nero Caesar, and him and me had been dodging around the place for the last ten years trying to make a living; but this Amyntas, who was a big gangster back in Rome, had got hold of us and was going to turn us in to the governor of Sicily, for good money; but then it turned out Myrrhine had heard about this treasure, which only we knew about, so they'd decided to stop off here just in case it really existed. As for the other time: we were desperate to get out of Sicily because the governor was after us, and his ship just happened to be passing. I said I was very sorry about conning him over Lucius Domitius being my slave, but we didn't have any money and if we didn't get off Sicily we were dead, and it was the first thing that came into my head; anyhow, I said, I hoped that all this gold and stuff would make up for that.

  The captain stared at me for a very long time; then he said, 'Well, bugger me,' and I could see him shoving it all to the back of his mind, because whether or not it was true, it didn't have any bearing on the job in hand, which
was getting a million tons of gold out of the temple and down to his ship. Was I ever relieved, because it meant that Lucius Domitius and me weren't going to go the same way as Amyntas, or at least not right away Doesn't take much to make my day Let me off being killed, and I'm as happy as a pig in shit.

  All right. So how would you have gone about it?

  And it's not a fair contest, either. You can sit there and think about it, take your time, maybe mull it over in your mind for a day or so, or draw little plans in the dust with a bit of stick. And you can say to yourself, sod this; so I can't figure out a way, so what? Quite; I'm never going to hear about it if you chicken out of my challenge, or give up in disgust, or can't be bothered to try The captain, now, he didn't have that luxury. He'd got to come up with an idea, one that'd work, using the stuff we had to hand and the people who happened to be there;, he had to do it fast, and he couldn't afford to screw up. That last bit was the most important. Probably you had to be there. I can't put over to you what the atmosphere was like: nineteen blokes who were suddenly looking at more wealth than you'll ever see in your whole life, and it was theirs, free and clear; they'd be richer than Roman senators or kings of Bithynia, them and their children for a hundred generations, all their troubles would be over — if only they could get the stuff out of there and onto the ship. And figuring out how to do it wasn't up to them, they had no say in the matter. It was the captain's job, his alone. Talk about a matter of life and death — their lives, his death (no question about that) if he didn't deliver. And he wasn't trained or qualified, he wasn't an architect or one of those blokes who makes his living shifting huge blocks of stone down rivers on rafts; he couldn't just send for a consulting engineer, like Lucius Domitius murdering his mother. There were nineteen people standing there, all dead quiet, holding their breath, waiting for him to say All right, this is what we're going to do. He had to say those words, or sooner or later they'd have ripped him into shreds and he'd have gone to the Ferryman in a scent bottle; but when he said them, he had to mean it.

  Bummer, don't you think? I'd like to see what sort of a fist Alexander the Great or Hannibal or Vespasian Caesar would've made of it (and they were great leaders of men, they reckon) our captain was the skipper of a grain transport, did all his figuring on his fingers, wiped his fingers in his hair when he blew his nose. Times like that, I'm glad I'm pond-life. Nobody's ever going to lay something like that on me.

  'All right,' the captain said. 'Here's what we're going to do.'

  It was really very simple. Forget about carts, or carrying the stuff down the winding cliff path on our backs, or any of that shit. Forget about cranes and lifts and ropes and blocks and tackle. The temple was perched on top of a cliff, right? Down the bottom was a nice flat sandy beach. No tides in the Mediterranean . So, bring the ship in as close as they could get it, and simply chuck the stuff off the edge of the cliff. Gold's heavy, it falls in a straight line. Chuck it off the cliff, go down the path, pick it up and load it onto the ship. Easy Crazy as a barrelful of angry polecats; but nobody argued. Wasn't up to us, see.

  We may have said to ourselves, This is bloody stupid, it'll never work, something's bound to go wrong; but that was his problem, not ours. All we had to do was what we'd been told. So we did.

  It may have been simple, but it wasn't easy, if you see what I mean. It was starting to get dark by then; we fired up all the lamps we'd got and made torches out of bits of old rag soaked in olive oil and wrapped round sticks, and got stuck in. Sleeping or stopping for a rest wasn't going to enter into it, we had work to do. Eight down in the cave, scooping the stuff up and pitching it up onto the temple floor. Nine blokes to carry it from the edge of the hole to the edge of the cliff. Five more to grab hold of it and throw it into the darkness, as far out as they could get it to go. Lucius Domitius got put on that job, along with Tityrus the helmsman and the three strongest men in the crew; the idea being that nobody wanted stuff getting snagged up on the side of the cliff.

  It had to go straight from the top to the bottom. I was put on getting stuff up out of the hole, because I'm small and suited to working in tight places. That didn't bother me. I don't think I could've done Lucius Domitius' job, standing on the edge of a cliff flinging armfuls of pure gold out into the night, not even being able to see where it went to. You'd have to be a nutcase to do that.

  It'd be like heaping up your whole inheritance, live and dead stock, furniture, clothes, tools and seed-corn, and setting fire to it. I wish Seneca could've seen it, because it'd have freaked him out; because he once told me, the only way to be truly wealthy is to be poor, the only way to truly own anything is to throw it away (otherwise it owns you, rather than the other way round; and the miser who's got a million but can't bring himself to spend fourpence is poorer than the man with just fourpence who buys himself fourpennyworth of bread when he's hungry. Whatever. Sounded better when he said it). I'd have liked to hear what he'd have made of that: twenty-odd blokes who could only get to keep this amazingly huge fortune by throwing it off a cliff.

  We kept it up all bloody night, and by the time dawn came, we were barely half done; but now at least, Lucius Domitius' crew could peer down at the beach below and tell the rest of us, Yes, it's still there, we can see it down below, shining in the sun. That made us feel a whole lot better, and we stopped feeling so tired we could've curled up and died, and kept up the pace. Not that it wasn't killing me, all that bending down and straightening up. It was even worse than smashing clods of baked dust with the ponderous hoe. Not quite the same, though; not when we had a dream of limitless riches hovering an inch from the tips of our noses, every moment of the time. That sort of thing keeps you going, the way a cup of water and a bowl of greasy soup doesn't.

  We worked at it all that day We were still at it when it got dark the second time, and the lamp oil had only just lasted us through the previous night; there was none left now, not if we offered to pay a pound of gold for a pint of it.

  But buggered if we were going to stop; no, we kept going in the dark, by feel, until our gang down in the cave were down on our knees groping in the dust with our fingertips for the last straggling bits and bobs. Came the moment, round about midnight , when we couldn't seem to find any more, and there was nothing for it but to stop. We didn't bother to shift, just lay down on our backs where we were. And could we sleep? Are you kidding? Couldn't sleep, didn't have anything to say to each other; we just lay there in the dark waiting for the dawn, like a young lad waiting for his girl to show up at the orchard gate, and she doesn't show and doesn't show, and time crawls past so slow you imagine you died and rotted and your bones crumbled into dust; and you glance up at the sundial, and it's not half an hour since you last looked.

  Have you ever lain there staring at a patch of dark sky, trying to see it turn from darkness into light? It changes so slowly you can't see it, but there's a point where it's still as black as ten yards down a wellshaft, and another point where it's a sort of middle blue, and then another where you can see things, just about; and you've been watching all the time, and never noticed it change.

  Well, soon as we were able to kid ourselves it was starting to get light, we were up on our feet — God, how my back hurt, and my arms and legs and thighs and shoulders, about the only bit of me that wasn't aching was the hair on my chest — and we were ready to go, poised like the chariots on the start line in the Grand Circus. Finally, the light seeped down into the cave, and we found — I think it was two small cups and a pair of earrings — and that was all we'd missed. The rest of it, that whole incredible treasure, was down the bottom of the cliff, where we'd slung it.

  At least, we bloody well hoped it was.