"TIME TO DEPART" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Lindsey)

VI

PETRO AND I regained the quay later that morning. We had snatched a few hours snoring on a bench in a wine bar that was fractionally more friendly than our previous foray. While we were relaxing the scene had changed completely. It was light. The quays were full of people. After a long, nerve-racking night, the hubbub was a shock.

As we hunted for the Providentia, which had brought me home from Syria, we could now make out fully the great man-made harbour basin. This was Portus. Claudius had first enclosed the spectacular new mooring that had replaced the old silted-up basin two miles away at Ostia. Nowadays only shallow-draught barges could use the old port. Portus had taken several decades of construction since Claudius sank the first breakwater – a massive ship once used to carry an obelisk for Caligula. That was now the base of a two-hundred-foot mole holding back the weather and carrying the three-storeyed lighthouse whose constant beacon announced from the harbour mouth that this was the centre of world navigation: one hundred and sixty acres of quiet mooring, to which all the Empire's trade came, eager to cough up harbour tax. I had paid my tax like a good citizen, one whose brother-in-law was a customs officer who liked asking unwanted questions. I was now trying to reclaim my goods.

There was more noise than earlier. Workers were already pouring in from Ostia along the road through the market and flower gardens, or via the Claudian canal (which badly needed widening and dredging): clerks, customs inspectors, owners of vessels and goods, all jostling on the, jetties with passengers and porters. We were tired, and the scene was unfamilar. Somehow the waterfront turmoil stripped us of our normal authority. Petronius and I were battered and cursed along with every other stranger.

`Sorry for getting you into this,' I told him ruefully. He was taking it well, however. This was by no means the worst pickle we had been in. Balbinus had put us in a gloomy mood; we were glad to forget him. We applied ourselves to commerce like heroes on behalf of my auctioneer father.' He irritated all Hades out of me – but he had at least given us a chance to skive at the seaside for a time.

My father's general habit was to cause me trouble. From the day he had run away from home when I was still in the tunic of childhood I had despised pretty well everything he did. I never dealt with him if I could help it, but he had a way of winding himself into my life however hard I tried to avoid it.

He had known better than to ask me to help him make money from my trip to Syria. On hearing of our exotic destination he had commissioned Helena instead. Helena Justina, my girlfriend who had been brought up a senator's daughter, thought Pa was just a likeable scamp. She said I was too hard on him. She wanted us all to be friends; this gave Pa a chance to inveigle her into any devious scheme, especially if he could do it behind my back.

Though he claimed to be destitute (a piteous but fake complaint), my father had managed to dispatch Helena with instructions to get me to Tyre if she could – and with a two hundred thousand sesterces banker's draft. She had a free hand to spend this exorbitant sum. He must have trusted her taste. In thirty years he had never given me such leeway with his private funds.

We had naturally been investing for ourselves as well; no point travelling to one of the Empire's richest markets unless you buy cheap from the caravans. Using Helena's money mainly, plus my own meagre savings, we had laden ourselves with enough bales of silk to dress our entire families like Parthian dancing girls and still have some over to sell. Helena's ex-husband had imported peppers, so we shied off those, but that left plenty of other spices to bring home in casks that hummed with addictive scents. We had purchased Arabian incense and other perfumes. I had acquired a few extras at markets when Helena was not looking. Then finally, just when I believed we were coming home, Helena Justina had coerced me into buying glassware for Papa.

She had made me do the bargaining, though she herself handled a portable abacus with a verve that made the traders sweat. She chose the stock. Helena had a good eye for a flask. Grumbling aside, glass was the desirable commodity. My father knew what he was doing. There were bowls and bottles, jugs and beakers in delicate pinks, metallic greens, sulphurous blues; vases with snakes of molten glass trailing around' their elegant throats; tiny perfume flagons like little doves jugs with furled spouts and fine etching.There was cameo glass, at a price that rivalled the incense. There were even spectacular funeral jars.

All this glass was a serious burden. We had crept home, trembling for the safety of Pa's fragile water sets and dinner bowls. As far as I knew, it was all in one piece when we sailed into Portus on the Providentia. All I had to do now was transport it upriver to Rome. If I wanted to remain Helena's private demigod, I had to make sure I did not slip with the bales.

All our own packages had already been taken over to Ostia on mules. I had booked a passage up the Tiber on a barge that was leaving today. Now I was on edge about Pa's damned glass. I did not intend to endure the rest of his lifetime being derided as the son who smashed the equivalent of two hundred thousand pieces of silver. This had to be done right.

Petronius had some sympathy; he was a loyal friend. But he lacked the direct interest I had myself, and I didn't blame him for that. It was hard enough for me to interest myself in another man's profit margins. Only Helena's pride in her commission kept me going.

We were having trouble finding transport. We wanted to take the glass to the old harbour using the canal. Some idiot (me) had deemed this the best way. No one would hire us a boat, though. After a couple of hours of fruitless begging Petro left me on the jetty, saying I was to keep looking out for a skiff while he approached the harbour staff and mentioned his official position in a casual manner, hoping to get us fixed up with reliable rowers that way.

He was gone so long I reckoned he must have slipped off for breakfast without me. If I was lucky he might bring me back a squashed roll with a sliver of limp cheese and a quarter of an olive. More likely the rascal would saunter back whistling and say nothing. Great. The glass had been unloaded from the Providentia and left on the quay, so I had to stay with it.

I had had enough. I tried to sit on a bollard, but they're never designed to let a backside rest there. While seagulls squawked scornfully I cursed my father to Hades and back, and even muttered about Petronius. I was wasting time here when I had yet to spend a full day back in Rome. Petro's caper with the criminal had robbed Helena and me of a much-longed-for first night together in our own bed. Pa, lounging with his boots on a lamp table, had told me that he was `a bit too busy' to visit Ostia. So he had left me to reclaim his goods, which had already cost me enough trouble, and on which, if I knew him, he would deny Helena her agent's percentage. Assuming the daft girl had even thought of asking for a percentage in the first place.

I was all set to kick the glass into the harbour when Destiny took pity. A couple of men in a sturdy boat actually hailed me and asked if I wanted my goods ferrying. I was delighted, though after six years as an informer, I naturally viewed the offer with caution.

Adopting a suave manner, I made some enquiries. Luckily they had the right answers: they were members of the rowers' guild, and owned their own craft. They looked like lads who knew their business. Their names, which I insisted on knowing, were Gaius and Phlosis. We agreed a price, and they began loading my precious crates, taking all the care I asked for. There were a lot of crates. When they finished, they had to tell me apologetically that the boat could not take me as well. It did seem pretty low in the water.

Time was running out if I was to catch the barge. Gaius and Phlosis seemed so concerned that I might think they were stealing my collateral, I reluctantly agreed to let them row to Ostia without me while I took one of the regular hired carts. We would meet at the barge; they themselves suggested I didn't pay them until then. This evidence of their honesty clinched the deal.

Tired, and pleased to have sorted myself out without aid from Petro, who could be supercilious about commerce, I was ready to agree to anything sensible. I waved them off.

I was still on the quay, looking around for my friend, when I spotted another skiff. In It I could see Petro, who must have picked up his man Fusculus from somewhere. I waved impatiently. I would now have to explain to the second crew that their services were no longer needed – and if I knew the rules of the Ostian rowers' guild, they would probably demand a disappointment fee.

As I was tapping my toe, Petronius two rowers suddenly began shouting. Then Petro himself joined in. His boatmen began to row very fast towards Gaius and Phlosis. They tried to speed up. Then, to my amazement, my two handy lads jumped over the side, swam rapidly to the jetty some distance from me, and made off down the quay.

The realisation that I had been caught by a swindle fell on me like a cartload of wet sand.

Next moment I was screaming with anxiety over Pa's cargo of glass. Fortunately the inner harbour was sheltered, so there was rarely a swell, and no large ships were manoeuvring at that moment. The abandoned skiff had rocked wildly when Gaius and Phlosis dived over the gunnels, but it had stayed afloat. It was collected by Petronius, who had stepped across from his own boat, then held the two craft close together so that Fusculus could scramble across too. Petronius could row; he brought my goods slowly back to me while his own boatmen raced to shore. Still yelling, they jumped out and ran after Gaius and Phlosis.

I didn't care about those thieves; I just wanted Pa's treasure. Petronius threw a rope to me, while Fusculus shook his head over my narrow escape. `You were certainly conned there! A lovely example of the craft-rig,' he informed me knowingly.

`Oh yes?'

`They steal a boat, then prowl the wharves looking for a sucker who has just arrived at the harbour and needs some goods transferred somewhere. Luckily our own two honest fellows recognised the boat. It belongs to a friend of theirs, so they knew your heroes must have pinched it.'

I did not want to hear the depressing details, but I gave him a hand to jump back to dry land. `You're the expert on low tricks are you, Fusculus?'

`Fusculus is a fervent scholar of the underworld,' grinned Petro. Thankfully, he was too good a friend to jeer directly at my mistake.

`Balbinus used to run a gang who specialised in this dodge along

the wharves by the Emporium,' Fusculus said. `You'd be surprised, Falco, how easily tired travellers can be taken in.'

`I'm not surprised at all,' I growled.

The two rowers who had exposed the near-disaster came back, having failed to catch my lads. We unloaded half the glass from the first boat, then got hot and fractious transferring it to the second one so we could spread the weight between the two and hitch a ride ourselves. Petronius, Fusculus and I all stuck with the precious cargo right to the barge at Ostia. Not until I had seen every crate transferred did I feel able to relax again.

Exhausted by our adventurers, we lay on deck in the autumn sunlight as slowly the barge started to navigate the shoals, creeping up the muddy Tiber into Rome.