TO GREEKS, CYRENE was a blessed hole in the heavens that had dropped to earth for them to colonize. A foundation at least as old as Rome, the high ridge where the city stands looks so much like Greece itself that the drought-ridden Therans who had been sent forth by the Oracle of Delphi and who were led here by helpful Libyans must have thought they had nodded off and somehow sailed back home again. From the scrubby gray hills where quails abound, there is a stunning vista over the far plain below to the gleaming sea and the ever-thriving port of Apollonia. The deep wooded valleys of the high jebel are as peaceful and mysterious as Delphi itself. And everywhere is filled with the perfumes of wild thyme, dill, lavender, laurel, and small-leaved mint.
This highly aromatic place was not, to be frank, a good place for two dispirited lads who had just failed in their hunt for a lost herb.
Justinus and I had climbed slowly and gloomily up towards the city one sunlit, pine-scented morning, arriving on the Way of the Tombs; it brought us through a haunting necropolis of ancient gray burial houses, some of them freestanding against the hillside, some carved deep into the native rock; some still tended, but a few long deserted so their rectangular entrances with worn architectural features now stood agape and offered homes to deadly, poisonous, horned vipers who liked lurking in the dark.
We paused.
“The choice is, either to keep searching or-”
“Or to be sensible,” Justinus agreed sadly. We both had to think about that. Good sense beckoned like a one-eyed whore in a tosspots' dive, while we tried to look away primly.
“The choice element only applies to you. I must consider Helena and our child.”
“And you already have a career in Rome.”
“Call it a trade. Being an informer lacks the glorious attributes of a “career”: glamour, prospects, security, reputation-cash rewards.”
“Did you earn money working for the Censors?”
“Not as much as I was promised, though more than I had been used to.”
“Enough?”
“Enough to get addicted to it.”
“So will you stay in partnership with Anacrites?”
“Not if I can replace him with somebody I like more.”
“What is he doing now?”
“Wondering where I vanished to, presumably.”
“You didn't tell him you were coming here?”
“He didn't ask,” I grinned.
“But you will continue as a private informer after you go home?”
“It's traditional to say, “That's the only life I know.” I also know it stinks, of course, but being a fool is a talent informers revel in. Anyway, I need to work. When I met your sister I set myself the quaint goal of becoming respectable.”
“I understood that you already had the money to qualify for the middle rank. Didn't your father give it to you?”
I surveyed Helena's brother thoughtfully. I had assumed this would be a discussion of his future, yet I was the one being grilled. “He loaned it. When I was turned down for social promotion by Domitian, I handed the gold back.”
“Did your father ask you for it?”
“No.”
“Would he lend it again?”
“I won't ask him.”
“There's trouble between you?”
“For one thing, giving the money back when he wanted to look magnanimous caused even more strife than asking for help in the first place.”
It was Justinus' turn to grin. “So you didn't tell your father that you were coming out here either?”
“You're getting the hang of the merry relationships between the fighting Didii.”
“You rub along though, don't you?” As I choked on the suggestion, Justinus gazed across the valley below us, to the far plain and the faint haze where the land met the sea. He was ready for his own family confrontations: “I ought to go home and explain myself. What do you reckon my relationship with my own father will be like nowadays?”
“That may depend on whether your mother is sitting in the room at the time.”
“And it certainly alters if Aelianus is listening in?”
“Right. The senator loves you-as I am sure your mother does. But your elder brother hates your guts, and who can blame him? Your parents can't ignore his plight.”
“So I'm for punishment?”
“Well, even though dear Aelianus may suggest it, I don't suppose that you'll be sold into slavery! Some administrative posting to a dull place where the climate is dank and the women have bad breath will no doubt be found for you. What are those three blotty dits on the map where nothing ever happens? Oh yes: the tiny triple provinces of the Maritime Alps! Just a couple of snowed-in valleys each, and one very old tribal chief whom they hand around on a rota-”
Justinus growled. I let him brew for a moment. It was clear from his expression and the way he had broached the subject that he had been thinking hard in private.
“How about this?” he suggested diffidently. A big question must be coming. “If you think it might be suitable: I could come home and work for you until next spring?”
I had half expected it, including the qualifier. Next spring, he would be planning to return here to look for more silphium; maybe that fond dream would evaporate eventually, though I could see it haunting Justinus for years, along with his lost forest prophetess. “Work for me? As a partner?”
“As a runner, I should think. I have too much to learn, I know that.”
“I like your modesty.” He could bring himself down to street level if he had to. It was too much to hope he could live that low forever, though, and I was now looking for permanence. “Within limits, it's an appealing idea.”
“May I ask what the limits are?”
“What do you think?”
He faced the truth with customary bluntness: “That I don't know how to live rough. I can't talk to the right sort of people. I have no experience to judge situations, no authority-in fact, no hope.”
“Start at the bottom!” I laughed.
“But I do have talents to offer,” he joked in return. “As you know, I can read a drawing even if it's inaccurate, speak Punic, and blow a military trumpet when required.”
“Clean, mild-mannered lad with sense of humor seeks position in established firm… I can't offer you houseroom. But can you face a bachelor apartment of the crudest, most inconvenient kind? I should think that by the time we return home my old friend Petronius is bound to have set up with some new woman, so you could be slotted in at Fountain Court.”
“That's where you used to live?” Justinus did sound nervous. He must have heard just how bleak my old apartment was.
“Look, if you want to come in with me, you have to drop out of patrician society. I can't absorb some dandy whose idea of being my runner is scuttling home to his mother every five minutes for a clean tunic.”
“No. I see that.”
“Well, I'll say this: if you really want to live in squalor and work for nothing, with only the occasional beating-up for light relief, I would be prepared to take you on.”
“Thanks.”
“Right. If you want an audition, you can start here: my theory is that when you have a disaster to announce to your womenfolk, you should be plotting a real bummer to hold in reserve. While they start wailing about the lost silphium, they can hear about us going into partnership; then the first problem won't sound so bad…”
“So how are you going to tell Helena and Claudia about the silphium?”
“I'm not,” I said. “You are. You want to work for me, this is what happens: the junior goes in and makes them cry-then I come along looking manly and dependable, and mop up their tears.”
I was joking. I reckoned Helena and Claudia had both thought we were mad to attempt the search for silphium, and neither would be the least surprised if we came back empty-handed.
It took us a long time to find them. The gracious Greek city of Cyrene stretched over a large area, with three different central areas. In the northeast lay the Sanctuary of Apollo, where a sacred spring dashed over a rockface into a laurel-bordered basin; in the northwest stood a mighty Temple of Zeus; in the southeast was the acropolis and the agora plus other characteristics of a large Hellenistic spread, to which had been added all the attributes of a great Roman center too. This was a vast city with a great many pretensions, a few of them actually deserved.
We searched the civic center together. There was a large, square handsome forum, enclosed within a walled Doric colonnade, and at its center instead of the rather prim Augustan-style imperial monuments of modern Roman towns, a brazen temple of Bacchus (where the priests had no messages for us). None of the Greeks and native Libyans milling happily together at the basilica had heard of Helena and Claudia, for which I suppose we should have been grateful. We made our way out to the Street of Battus, named for the city's founding king, passed a very small Roman theater, paused to observe a pair of red-striped snails screwing each other into oblivion on the pavement, saw the Greek theater with its wide cold seats to accommodate the big bottoms of the sprawling elite.
We moved on to the agora. There we failed again to find our girls, though we had the chance to admire a naval monument composed of ships' prows and rather sweet dolphins, and towered over by Victory, game girl, in her traditional flying robes. Then on to a king's tomb with a particularly elaborate arrangement of basins and drains to catch the blood of the sacrifices killed outside in a smart circular portico. Among the shops were a whole row of perfumiers, scenting the air with the famous attar of Cyrenian roses. Fine: if you had a willing woman to buy it for. I was beginning to think the people we brought with us to Cyrena?ca had all bunked off home. Apart from Famia, no doubt, who would be lying drunk in a gutter somewhere.
The exotic aura was getting us down. The huge city was deeply Greek, with compressed, wide-bellied red Doric columns where we were accustomed to taller, straighter, grayer travertine in the Ionic or Corinthian mode, and with austere metopes and triglyphs below plain friezes where we would expect elaborate statuary. There were too many gymnasia and not enough baths. Its mixed, carefree population were all alien to us. There were even lingering traces of the Ptolemies, who once treated Cyrene as an outpost of Egypt. Everyone spoke Greek, which we could do if we had to, though it was a strain for weary travelers. All the inscriptions had Greek for their first, or only, language. The ancient influences made us feel like upstart New Men.
We needed to split up. Justinus would try the Sanctuary of Apollo in the lower town; I would march out to the Temple of Zeus.
I had picked the long straw for once. As I walked through the clear air of the pine woods to the eastern side of the high plateau on which the city had been founded, I had already cheered up. Soon I came upon the Temple. Amongst all the rich endowments in this city of overflowing coffers, the Temple of Zeus had been favored with an aloof, authoritative location and a most celebrated statue: a copy of the Phidias Zeus at Olympia. In case I never made it to the sanctuary at Olympia, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, I would have liked to take a squint at the Cyrenian replica. I knew the legendary forty-foot-high masterpiece showed sublime Zeus enthroned in cedarwood and black marble, himself in ivory with enameled robes, a solid gold beard, and solid gold hair-some sight. But here at Cyrene my attention was distracted by an even more winsome spectacle than a famous Phidias.
This was a drowsy spot (though beset with pernicious flies). Squat Doric columns supporting a massive architrave and frieze spoke of the Temple's immense age. Descending its front steps between the magisterial columns, perhaps after renewing a message she had left for me, was a tall young woman in a floating white outfit, who stopped looking superior and shrieked with excitement immediately she saw me.
Very nice. Ignoring protocol, she skipped down from the podium and I grabbed her. Excuse me, Zeus. Well, anyone who seduced that many women ought to understand.
Helena did not have to ask what had happened. That saved a long explanation, and stopped me feeling depressed.
She took me to the peaceful house she and Claudia were renting, sat me in a Greek chair with the baby in my arms, sent Gaius out to look for her brother, sent Claudia shopping, then brushed aside the heartbreaking story of our disaster, while she instead amused me with what I had missed.
“Famia is down in Apollonia, very restless now; he has purchased a good collection of horses-well, so he thinks-and he wants to sail home.”
“I'm ready.”
“He needs you to help commission a ship. We received some letters from Rome. I opened yours, in case there was a crisis-”
“You have my full confidence, beloved.”
“Yes, I decided that! Petronius has written. He is back working with the vigiles; his wife won't be reconciled; she has a boyfriend Petro disapproves of; she won't let him see the children. He says he's sorry he missed you reciting your poetry.”
“Sorry as Hades!”
“Lenia is threatening to kill you because you promised to help Smaractus obtain a contract at the new amphitheater opening-”
“That was so Smaractus would agree to her divorce.”
“He still has not signed the documents. Petro must have seen Maia; she's a lot happier without Famia there. Your mother is well, but annoyed at how you abandoned Anacrites; Anacrites had been hanging around looking for you, but Petro has not seen him for a while and there's a rumor he has left town-”
“Usual gossip.” Anacrites leave town? Where would he go? “I like going on holiday. I get far more of the news that way.”
“And Petronius says you keep being sent urgent messages from the Palatine Bureau of Beaks-”
I smiled lazily. My feet were on elegant black and white mosaics; a fountain splashed refreshingly in the cool, open atrium. Julia Junilla had remembered me well enough to smack me in the ear with a flailing hand, then scream to be put down so she could play with her pig rattle.
“The Sacred Geese again, eh?” Bugger that. I leaned my head back, smiling. “Anything else?” I had sensed there was more.
“Just a letter from the Emperor.” The old man? Well, that couldn't be important. I let Helena choose whether to tell me about it. Her dark eyes were gentle as she enjoyed herself: “Your fee has been reexamined, and you are to be paid what you asked.”
I sat up and whistled. “ Io!-In full?”
“The percentage you wanted.”
“Then I am a substantial citizen…” The implications were too great to consider all at once. “So what does he want?”
“There is a note in his own hand to say Vespasian invites you to a formal audience about what happened with the Capitol geese.”
I really would have to deal with that. I was getting bored with being nagged.
“I love you,” I murmured, pulling her close. The white dress she was wearing was extremely attractive, but the best thing about it was the way the sleeve buttons were loose enough to admit wandering hands. In fact, they slipped easily right out of their fastenings…
“You'll love me even more,” said Helena, smiling invitingly, “when I tell you that you even have a new client.”