A Song For Nero

by Tom Holt

  But that's not how it happened, which just about wraps it up for that particular theory What's more, the sneaky bitch of a story did its best to make me believe it was over, to get me off my guard, by slipping into happy-ever-after (or at least, not miserable) mode for best part of six months, during which time I did my work in the fields and shared breakfast with Smicro and Ptolemy When it all started up again, I wasn't expecting it at all. Downright dishonest, if you ask me.

  I was pressing olives when I first heard, which is probably why it took a while for it to sink in. You know what it's like, working one of those contraptions.

  You've loaded all your bagged-up olives into the drum, and your men have filled the sack that hangs off the end of the beam with stones to act as the counterweight, then it's your job to grab hold of the beam, scramble up onto it with your arms and legs wrapped round it, and cling on like a monkey on a rope, edging your way down it so as to get the leverage. It's not a dignified position for a man of property. In fact, you feel like a clown, hanging in mid air off a long bit of wood while the press goes squelch, like an elephant farting. But you can't leave it to the help, it's too important, and besides, if you told one of the men to do it, they'd reckon you were chicken and lose respect. The one thing you've got to do is concentrate, or else you're going to end up on the deck with bruised bones, and most likely a busted beam. It's really not a good time for chatting, and only an idiot would stroll up and start a conversation with you while you're at it.

  Unfortunately, my neighbour Eurycleides was just that kind of idiot, particularly when it came to timing. No matter what you were doing — raising a roof tree, tempering a ploughshare, boiling tallow, having sex with someone else's wife under a thornbush, all the tricky things where you really don't want to be disturbed till you're done — if he saw you he'd stroll up and launch into some topic of conversation, usually starting in the middle so you didn't have a clue what he was going on about for quite some time; and taking no notice didn't work, because he'd just keep saying 'Well?' and 'So, what do you think?' until you answered him.

  'Hello there, Galen,' he called out. He had this knack of seeming to appear out of nowhere, like doves round a granary. 'I'm surprised at you, really I'd have thought there was enough needing doing round here for the both of you.'

  I was two-thirds of the way down the beam, hanging on by my toes and fingers.

  'What?' I said.

  'And it's not as if there's not enough in the place to support two men,' he went on. 'Nice little spread you've built up here, since you've been back, I'll say that for you.

  'Thanks,' I muttered, managing not to scream at the pain in my finger joints.

  'But it's a poor show,' he went on, 'and I don't care who hears me say it, when a man goes buying in foreigners to do the work, and leaves his own flesh and blood to go day-labouring. Sorry if you don't like it, but it's got to be said.'

  That went clean over my head, like a flock of starlings. 'Well,' I said, 'there you go.' The press was making that really gross squidging noise that means you're nearly done; all I had to do was hang on a little bit longer...

  'All right,' Eurycleides went on, 'it's not quite the same as grape-picking or coal-mining, but that's not the point. A man shouldn't have to go standing out in the market place looking for some stranger to give him work, when his own brother's got enough land for two men. I'll be straight with you, I thought more of you than that. Well, cheers for now'

  And the clown started to walk away, just about the moment when that phrase 'his own brother' bit me like a sledgehammer. 'Hang on,' I shouted, and tried to turn my neck. Bad move. I lost my grip with my left hand, and a heartbeat later I was lying in the dust groaning and rubbing my shoulder, where the busted end of the beam had smacked down on me. I was bloody lucky it didn't break a bone, at that.

  Well, what with the pain and the buggeration of having broken the press, and the Syrians fussing round asking if I could feel my arm (of course I could feel my arm, otherwise I wouldn't have been sobbing in agony), it clean slipped my mind, that stuff about my own brother. It was only next day, after we'd finally managed to lash up the beam with soaked rawhide and rope (it was a real botch job, and it bent like a twig, but it just about held together; and after all, they don't hand out prizes for Neatest Olive Press, so who gives a damn?), that I remembered; and, of course, nothing would do but I had to set off right away for Eurycleides' place to ask him what the hell he'd meant by it.

  He wasn't home. Oh no, he wasn't even in Phyle; he'd set off at dawn for the poxy little two-acre he had in the Mesogaia — not quite the other side of Attica , but near enough. So I went home and got out the horse — this was right in the middle of oil-making, of course, when I really couldn't spare the time to go prancing off on bloody stupid errands — and traipsed off down the city road, north-west around Hymettus, and on to the plain. Luckily I knew more or less where Eurycleides' place was — we'd been out there helping him with trellising one year, back when I was a kid — and since I was riding and he was on foot, I managed to get there shortly after he'd arrived.

  'Hello there, Galen,' he said. 'Nice day, though if this heat keeps up we'll be eating the seedcorn come vintage. What brings you out this way?'

  I didn't bother getting down off the horse. 'What you said, the other day,' I started. 'When you were up my place, and I fell off the beam.'

  He nodded. 'Doesn't look like you did any serious damage, though,' he said. 'I had an uncle, fell right out of a tree on his head—'

  'You said something about my brother.'

  He sighed. 'There,' he said, 'I knew I'd upset you, probably that's why you fell off the press. But it's always been my way, I speak my mind and that's all there is to it. No offence intended, but if the hat fits—'

  I waved my hands about. 'Listen,' I said. 'I'm not pissed off at you or anything, I just need to know what you meant. What's this about my brother doing day-labouring? Hadn't you heard, he's dead?'

  Eurycleides thought about that for a moment. 'No,' he said, 'you're wrong there, because I saw him myself. Never forget a face, me. I'm shocking with names, mind, but champion with faces. It was him all right. Your brother.. .' And he scowled, clicked his fingers. Like he'd said, he always was lousy at names.

  'Callistus,' I said. 'Is that who you mean?'

  'That's it.' He looked thoroughly relieved, like a constipated man wiping his bum. 'On the tip of my tongue, it was. Your brother Callistus. Good lad, I always liked him.'

  'He's dead,' I repeated. 'Been dead these ten years. I should know,' I added, and only just stopped myself in time from saying exactly why But Eurycleides lifted his head. 'Oh, it was him all right. And like I said to you, it's not like digging or picking, granted, there's some as calls it a profession rather than a trade, but I still reckon it's degrading, a grown man having to go around asking for work, even if it is indoors, and meals thrown m.

  'Eurycleides,' I yelled, 'what the fuck are you talking about?'

  Eventually, I got it out of him. About a month earlier he'd been in the city about some family lawsuit or other, and as he crossed the market square he'd happened to look across to the bunch of stalls where the jobbing cooks and caterers and musicians hang out, waiting for someone to hire them. He thought he saw a face he knew, so he stopped for a closer look; and he was positive that there, among the harp-players and flautists and people who pretend to swallow fire while doing double-back somersaults off a sawhorse, he saw my brother Callistus. He was late for his lawsuit so he didn't stop, but he was certain sure that's who he'd seen, because he never forgot a face (which was true, in actual fact; I could vouch for that), and so Callistus couldn't be dead, could he, not if he was stood in the market along with all the other long-hairs— He was still talking when I rode off. Trouble is, you can't really get up any speed on the Mesogaia—city road, not if you don't want a horse with a busted leg, so I didn't reach town till well after dark. I went straight to the market square, but of course it was no use. We
nt without saying, all the jobbing musicians would've got their gigs for the day while it was still light; if you're holding a dinner party you don't wait till the guests arrive and then send out in the hope of running into an all-night harpist. So I had to stay the night, and, since I'd come out without any money that meant knocking up somebody I knew in the city and asking for a bed for the night. Problem was, I knew only four people in Athens proper. Three of them were out on the piss (typical thoughtless behaviour) and the fourth was a dreary old git called Dexitheus, who was deaf as a post and didn't hear me knocking till I'd woken the whole block.

  I tried to get some sleep in Dexitheus' hayloft, but I might as well not have bothered; I just lay there, trying to make sense of it. Well before dawn, when only the charcoal-burners and the people who're on jury duty are up and about, I was in the market square, pacing up and down. I was still there when the farm carts came in, and then the fish, and the first wave of shoppers, and the bakers and the sausagemongers; all the trades of Athens reported for duty around me on every side, except the bone idle, good-for-nothing, the-hell-with-work-let's-have-a-lie-in hired musicians. They didn't deign to put in an appearance till practically mid-morning, and then only in dribs and drabs, like the stragglers from a defeated army I thought about grabbing a harpist at random and asking him if he'd seen anybody answering the description; but I didn't. Maybe I was afraid of hearing him say, No, never set eyes on anybody like that; or maybe I'm just shy So I mooched around a bit, so the market police wouldn't take me for a thief; I looked at some imported Egyptian honey, and some ivory-backed mirrors, and some cute bronze bath-scrapers with pornographic handles. I eavesdropped on the cooks (but they reminded me of Alexander and Pony-tail) and pretended I was interested in the price of two hundred jars of slightly spoiled wheat flour, f.o.b. a grain freighter due in the day after next from Syracuse, owners just gone bankrupt, a real opportunity for a man with the necessary nerve and vision. Come noon I was ready to go home (by way of Eurycleides' place, where there might just be bloodshed); there were enough journeymen musicians hanging round to man a full-strength legion, but nobody whose face seemed familiar.

  Then someone tapped me on the shoulder, and a voice I knew (I'm good at voices, like Eurycleides with faces) said, 'Galen?'

  There's this fairy tale, I'm sure you know it. Orpheus, the greatest musician who ever lived, goes down to Hell to fetch back his dead wife. King Pluto tells him to fuck off, the dead don't come back, it's the rules; but Orpheus stands there playing his harp, and the music's so utterly wonderful that finally Pluto says, All right, you can have her back, but on one condition. You set off walking back into the light, and I'll send her on, she'll be right behind you.

  But whatever you do, whatever you hear, don't look round at her till you're back topside, because if you do, that's it, she stays here for ever. So off he goes, and behind him he hears his wife's voice calling his name, Orpheus, Orpheus; but he knows the king of the dead doesn't muck about, he means what he says, so he doesn't look round, just keeps on going, one foot in front of the other. And still there's this voice behind him, calling out to him, Orpheus, is that you, look at me; and he knows it's her, the voice he's heard in his mind every day since she died and he left her, since she died and he went on living, since he swam to shore and the gods sent a floating coffin for him to save him from the reef— hang on, I'm getting my legends muddled here, that was someone else, Ulysses or one of those people. Anyhow, he's almost there. He can see the bank of the River and the Ferryman's boat, bobbing up and down on the water like a floating coffin, and beyond that he can see the light, and then the voice calls out to him, Orpheus; and without thinking he looks round and sees her face, and in that moment when he realises what he's done— I looked round. It was Lucius Domitius.

  NINETEEN

  'Galen?' he repeated. 'What the bloody hell are you doing here?'

  He said it in Greek, but didn't he ever sound Roman, like he'd come down to breakfast in the cloister of his villa and found some scruffy old tramp dossing down under the table. I thought, bloody cheek, he makes it sound like he owns the place (and then I thought; well, fair enough. Arguably, by rights, he does).

  Anyhow, I stared at him. 'I thought you were dead,' I told him.

  'What, me? No.' He was wearing a fairly new tunic, good stuff, quality Attic wool, and a pair of quite decent sandals — better than what I had on, at any rate; and there was a cute little lyre tucked under his arm, carved frame, with the grain still clean and open. He looked different, mind; not back to how he'd been in the old days, but noticeably plumper, without the bags under his eyes or the stringy muscle tone that comes from regular exercise and not quite enough to eat. His tan was starting to fade; it hadn't quite turned into the dead-fish pallor of your urban gentleman, but he'd never have passed for a grape-picker.

  And he was scowling at me like I was a bad oyster in his seafood salad. 'You seem to be all right,' he added, managing to make it sound like I'd done something wrong, probably out of spite.

  'I'm fine,' I said. 'Look, can we go somewhere and talk, instead of standing out here in the street?'

  'What? Oh, right, I suppose so. But I haven't got all day. There's supposed to be some people hiring for a big dinner party.'

  But before we could go anywhere, one of the other musicians came up and looked at me. 'Morning, Narcissus,' he said. 'Who's the farmer?'

  Narcissus, I guessed, must be the name he was going under these days. The farmer was, presumably, me.

  'Oh, just family,' Lucius Domitius replied awkwardly 'Look, I'm just nipping across the road for a moment, I won't be long. If the bloke turns up while I'm gone...'

  The other man nodded. He was tall, spare without being thin, long black beard, just this side of fifty, maybe. 'Don't worry I'll put in a good word. But hurry it up if you can, this promises to be a good job.'

  'Who was that?' I whispered, as we hurried across the square towards a wine shop.

  'Oh, a friend of mine.' He sounded defensive. 'We work together. He plays the flute.'

  Well, fine, I thought, that explains everything. I ordered a half-jar, two to one, and two cups. They took their own sweet time bringing them, but that's Athens for you.

  'You didn't answer my question,' he started up, before I could say a word.

  'What're you doing in Athens ?'

  I wasn't expecting anything like that. 'I live here,' I said.

  He frowned. 'What, here in the city?'

  'No, in Phyle, my grandad's old place. I own it.'

  His expression seemed to be telling me the other one had bells on it. 'But I thought your grandfather was dead,' he said.

  'That's right, he is.'

  'And he left the farm to your cousins. You didn't get anything.'

  'Absolutely But my cousins are dead, too. I bought the place.'

  He looked stunned. 'Bought?' he said. 'Where the hell did you get money from?'

  Not, how did you escape from the shipwreck, or anything like that. No, just, What's a dirtball like you doing with money? Charming.

  But I wasn't in the mood for starting a fight. 'From Queen Dido,' I told him.

  'What? You mean, you went back and got the treasure?'

  I grinned. 'No fear,' I said. 'I managed to sneak something while we were loading it. You won't believe some of the things that've happened to me since—'

  'But you're farming now, right? You're through with the thieving, for good?'

  I couldn't think of the right words for what I wanted to say, so I nodded.

  'And you were discreet about fencing this thing you stole? You didn't go splashing your money around, drawing attention to yourself?'

  'Of course not,' I said angrily 'I'm not stupid.'

  His face said he wasn't so sure about that. 'Well, anyway,' he said. 'Can't be helped now, I suppose. But what prompted you to come back here, of all places?

  Why couldn't you have just gone off somewhere else, where nobody'd know you?'

  I
could've said, What, you mean a place you and I haven't been chased out of by the law? Name three. But I didn't. 'Bloody hell, Lucius Domitius—' I started.

  'And don't call me that, for crying out loud. My name's Narcissus, got that?' He glanced over his shoulder as he said it. “Narcissus, son of Porphyrius, from Mitylene. You won't forget that, will you?'

  'Whatever,' I said despairingly That made him angry. 'For pity's sake, Galen,' he said. 'It's important.'

  'Oh,' I replied, 'I'm still allowed to be Galen, then?'

  He sighed. 'Not if it was up to me,' he said. 'Last thing I need is you parading around under your own name, in a place where someone's bound to recognise you.